John stood up; at six-three he towered over the acne-cream poster child, who backed up two steps in response. John glanced around the dining area. Families and couples stared at their meals while surreptitiously watching him from the corners of their eyes. The idea of making a scene crossed his mind but then he’d probably end up arrested. Spending the night in the slammer was okay in the winter but in the summer the cells were hot as hell and stunk worse than his own ragged underwear. Besides, he didn’t want his other burger taken away from him.
“Fine.” He put his food back in the bag and made his way towards the door. Just before leaving, he spied the newspaper rack and grabbed a copy of the local rag. The penguin yelled something about the papers having to stay inside the building but John ignored him. Past experience had taught him that fast-food employees, even managers, wouldn’t escalate a small issue, not when losing a fifty-cent paper meant getting rid of a stinking bum.
Across the street was one of Rocky Point’s three town parks. John took his meal and paper to an empty bench under a shady tree. He planned on finishing his lunch and then catching a nap. The paper would protect his face from the sun and allow him to pretend no one was staring at him. Most of the time, the cops would let him sleep a few hours before rousting him.
His plans changed the minute he saw the front page.
‘Police Clueless in Murders’
The image of Pete Webster wacking Frank Adams with a shovel wavered into existence in John’s mind. I only saw one person get killed. Who else did they get?
He read further, catching up on the rash of murders and missing persons he’d been oblivious to over the past several days.
Conflicting thoughts fought each other in his brain.
It’s just like twenty years ago.
Don’t think about…them!
His lunch churned in his stomach, threatening to climb the ladder of his throat and make a messy escape. John swallowed back bile and special sauce, unwilling to part with his hard-earned food, wishing he had some Maalox or Rolaids. His stomach always bothered him when he thought about the Grays; many was the night when their images tortured him in his sleep as well. It was one of the reasons he preferred to drink himself to sleep. He was about to toss the paper away when something else caught his eye, something at the bottom of the article.
When questioned why they’d released their number one suspect, Chief Travers stated, “At this time we have insufficient evidence to hold Mr. Randolph and we’ve released him into the custody of his attorney, Mr. Cory Miles.”
Randolph? Todd Randolph? And Cory Miles?
Too many coincidences. John knew he could no longer deny the truth. Just like twenty years ago, people were dying.
And for the first time since that fateful summer, the members of the Cemetery Club were all in town.
Chapter 6
Deputies Buck Foster and Mack Harris knelt on the ground where Frank Adams’ head had been discovered. After Todd Randolph’s release, Chief Travers had sent them back to the original crime scene to see if they could turn up anything the first team had missed. A similar investigation was going on at Gus’s Bar and Grill.
“I don’t know what the Chief expects us to find, not after that rain the other night.” Foster stood up and wiped mud from his knees.
“Yeah, I know what you - wait, what’s that?” Harris pointed towards the front of the nearby mausoleum, where a splash of red peeked out from beneath one of the bushes lining the entrance.
“Beats me.” Foster crouched beside the brush. “I’ll be damned. It’s a woman’s shoe. What the hell’s it doing here?”
Harris came over with the digital camera and snapped two pictures. “More importantly, when did it get here? No way anyone could’ve missed this when they ran the scene the first time.”
“You think maybe someone hid in the mausoleum and came back out after the scene was cleared?”
Harris opened his notepad and flipped through the pages. “According to the report, the mausoleum door was closed and padlocked.”
Both men looked at the metal door. A gap of several inches showed between the edge and the frame.
Without speaking, Foster and Harris drew their guns and moved to either side of the opening. A dank, putrid smell wafted through the crack. Harris used his fingers to give a silent count to three and then pushed the door open with his foot. At the same time, Foster went down on one knee, gun aimed inside the crypt. After glancing in both directions, he stood and quickly stepped into the burial chamber, Harris right behind him. Doing his best to breathe through his mouth, Foster motioned Harris to the right. They circled the small room and made sure the lid on the coffin box was too heavy for one person to lift. Only then did they speak again.
“Someone was here, I feel it,” Harris whispered. In fact, he felt more than that; a sudden fear had sprouted inside him, causing his gun hand to quiver.
“They’re not here now. You think it was kids screwin’ around?”
“No. I recognize that stink. It’s like when you drive past a dead deer on the road. That’s rotten meat.” He moved to the center of the crypt and stood over the wide hole in the cement floor. “And it’s coming from down there.”
Foster knelt down and wiped at the jagged edges of the opening. “Looks like tool marks. Somebody busted the cement and dug this hole.”
A fresh wave of corrupt air wafted up and Foster backed away, gagging, wiping tears from his eyes. “Jesus, that’s fuckin’ rank. I...I think maybe we oughta get outta here and call for backup.”
“Don’t be a wuss. We can’t just report a hole in the floor. Gimme your flashlight.” Harris desperately wanted to leave too, but he wasn’t about to admit it. Instead, he took the light and aimed it down the dark opening. “Looks like a tunnel. I can barely see...wait a second, what’s that?” He took a deep breath and then lay down on his stomach, his arm and head in the hole.
“What is it?” Foster asked.
“Jesus Christ!” Harris scooted backwards, using his elbows and knees until he was far enough away from the hole to sit up. He took a deep breath. In the gray light inside the crypt, his face had gone winter pale.
“What the hell is it?” Foster had his gun out and aimed at the hole. A warm wetness ran down his leg, soaking his sock.
“There’s...there’s a body down there. Maybe more than one, I couldn’t tell. It’s all chewed up, like animals were eating it. But...”
“But what?”
“I don’t think it was animals. Some of those bite marks looked awfully big.”
Foster stared at his partner. “You think people did it? Like fucking cannibals?” His voice rose in pitch as he spoke.
Harris stood up and backed away from the hole. Dust motes created psychedelic designs as they passed through the shaft of afternoon sunlight entering through the small stained glass window high on one wall. “I’ll tell you what I think. I think we’ve got devil worshipers in town.”
“Devil worshipers? Fuck that shit. C’mon, let’s get out of here. It’s - look out!” He stopped and pointed at the opening.
Harris turned around in time to see the creature rise up from the darkness like a ghost. Its devilish red eyes, almond-shaped and slanted down towards where the nose should have been, took up half the thing’s face. The ovoid head was completely devoid of hair and smooth where the ears would normally have sat. A round, toothless opening served as a mouth.
The creature’s gray skin was several shades darker than the inside walls of the crypt, enough so to make it look like a shadow in the gloom. It hovered at the top of the hole, its head the same height as a man’s chest.
“Holy fuckin’ shit, it’s an alien,” Foster whispered. He tried to aim his gun at the creature, gripping it with both hands to control his trembling. “Don’t move another inch,” he said to it, putting as much authority into his voice as he could.
Without a sound, the creature raised a hand towards Foster, who pulled the trigger three times in quick succession, filli
ng the room with ear-shattering echoes and the metallic zing of ricocheting rounds.
Harris cried out, grabbing his arm, dropping the flashlight in the process. “Fuck! You shot me!”
Foster backed away, his hands shaking worse than before. “The bullets went right through it!”
As if unconcerned by Foster’s gun, the apparition turned towards Harris, who was leaning against the cement coffin box, one hand gripping his wounded arm. Hot blood, dark in the poorly-lit crypt, ran down his shirt and stained his uniform sleeve.
“Get away!” Harris shouted at the approaching figure.
The alien floated towards its target, its feet several inches above the floor. Foster followed it with the gun but didn’t dare pull the trigger, not even when the creature grasped Harris by the wrist of his injured arm and pressed its body against his. Harris screamed as the long fingers touched his skin and tightened like iron bands.
“Oh, God! Help me! It’s cold! So cold!”
Harris tried to bat the creature away with his good arm but it was like fighting smoke; his hands passed through unimpeded.
The alien floated up until its face was even with Harris’s and then it dove forward, twisting and shrinking as it entered Harris’s mouth and disappeared down his throat. Harris choked and gagged, clawing at his neck with both hands. Only when the alien was completely inside him did he fall to the ground, his eyes open, bulging out.
“Harris?” Foster hurried to his partner, aware that he’d committed a cardinal sin in law enforcement. He’d frozen while his partner needed him. He knelt and grabbed his friend by the shoulders, started shaking him. “Harris! Say something!”
Faster than Foster’s eyes could follow, Mack Harris grabbed the flashlight off the floor and smashed it against his partner’s head.
Buck Foster fell onto his back, his gun forgotten as he tried to make sense of what was happening. Through the swirling colors obscuring his vision, he saw his best friend since high school crawl towards him, flashlight raised like a club.
“Mack—” The word came out in a gasping croak. He never had time to finish the sentence.
Harris brought the flashlight down, striking Foster’s mouth and sending blood and teeth onto the floor. The next blow tore a flap of skin from Foster’s forehead and created a broken windshield pattern in the white bone.
On the third swing, the flashlight smashed through Foster’s skull, splattering his brains across the floor.
Harris continued to robotically swing the police-issue flashlight until Foster’s head was reduced to a flattened, pulpy mess. Only then did he drag his kill to the hole and drop it into the darkness, where the rest of the Horde attacked it, the sounds of their gorging eerily reminiscent of a lion pride devouring a gazelle.
Lowering himself down, after the lifeless meal, he elbowed a fat housewife out of the way and used his teeth to tear off Foster’s genitals, which he swallowed whole.
The feast continued until only a skeleton, its bones draped with a few ribbons of skin and muscle, remained.
* * *
At Angels of Mercy Hospital, Gus Mellonis woke from his nightmare and screamed at the darkness surrounding him. “Get away! Get away!” He tried to reach for his face but his hands refused to move. Fire filled his head, radiating outward from his eyes.
“Help!”
“Calm down, Mr. Mellonis.” Sue-Anne Davis, the shift nurse on duty, hurried to Gus’s side and injected a dose of morphine into his IV. “I’ve given you something for the pain. You’re in the hospital. You’re safe.”
Gus continued to thrash against the straps holding him down but his struggles gradually subsided as the morphine took effect. When he’d relaxed to the point where he lay still, Sue-Anne spoke to him again.
“Mr. Mellonis. Can you understand what I’m saying?”
Gus moaned and nodded his head.
“My name is Sue-Anne. I’m your nurse. I’m going to get Doctor Snyder.”
“No, don’t leave me!” Gus tried to reach for her. “They’re going to kill me. Why can’t I see anything? Why is everything so dark?”
Sue-Anne bit her lip. She knew she shouldn’t say anything; it was up to Dr. Snyder to explain to Gus that his eyes had been damaged beyond repair. But she felt she had to give him some kind of answer, just to calm him down.
“You have bandages on your face Mr. Mellonis. Doctor Snyder will explain. Who’s after you?”
“Them! The ones who did it, who killed everyone. Pete Webster and the other fellow. Oh God, my eyes!” His words trailed off into more moaning and Sue-Anne took the opportunity to leave. Snyder had left specific orders to be paged the minute Mellonis was conscious. As she hurried down the hall, she thought about what the old man had said.
Pete Webster? She knew the name from the papers. He was one of the missing men from the cemetery. Had he murdered those men in Gus’s bar?
In her mind she was already preparing her phone call to the newspaper.
* * *
“Chief, I’ve got reports of shots fired at Gates of Heaven Cemetery.”
Nick Travers approached the desk where Charlie Samuels, the evening shift desk sergeant, was entering the call into the system.
“What about Foster and Harris? They’re supposed to be over there.”
Samuels shrugged. “I tried them. No answer. Should I send over another car?”
The burning sensation in Travers’ stomach grew stronger. He’d been popping antacids all day but eight cups of crappy police station coffee had beaten the medicine into submission, burying it in a deep grave. Having a serial killer running loose wasn’t exactly good for the digestion.
“Yeah. Send Cruz and Sullivan. Can you get a position on Foster and Harris’s car?” He said a silent prayer of thanks that the town hadn’t overruled his request last year for GPS systems in all the cars.
“I’ve got them. The car’s stationary. They’re...shit. According to this, they’re at the mall.” Samuels looked up, his brow furrowed in confusion. “What are they doing there?”
“How the fuck should I know? Send Coleman to get them,” Travers said, nodding towards the rookie who was currently typing a report. “And they better have a damn good explanation.”
But as he returned to his office, he had a feeling he wasn’t going to like what he heard.
Chapter 7
Todd smelled John Boyd before he saw him. Todd was returning to his cubicle, head down, eyes scanning the pages of the book he carried, when the stench of unwashed flesh and long-festering halitosis unexpectedly assaulted him. He looked up and saw a tall, skinny homeless man - what his mother used to call a soup-kitchen regular - standing in front of him, his bloodshot eyes wide with surprise.
“Todd Randolph?”
Todd felt his own eyebrows go up as he tried to figure out how a street denizen might know him and why the man’s unshaven face was so familiar. His first thought was that the stranger was a past resident of Wood Hill Sanitarium. Had they shared a group session together? Dined at the same table? Played checkers or cards while banal game and talk shows played endlessly in the game room to the drug-induced zombies?
Then it came to him.
“Holy...John Boyd? Is that you?”
The man gave a sheepish smile, exposing yellowish-brown teeth. Bits of food tumbled to the ground from his unkempt beard and mustache, dislodged by the movement of his lips. Boyd shifted the books he carried to one arm and held out his hand. “It’s me. Or what’s left of me anyway.”
Todd responded automatically to the gesture, grasping Boyd’s dirt-encrusted hand. He immediately regretted it, as each movement of John’s arm acted like a foul bellows, pumping more rancid odors into the air. Doing his best to take shallow breaths, Todd inched back two steps and said the first thing that came to his mind. “What brings you here?”
Something moved across John’s face, self-acknowledgment of his sad state of personal affairs. It made Todd sorry that he’d been unable to ignore the man’s hyg
ienically-challenged situation. No one, not even the homeless, enjoyed being reminded that they didn’t meet society’s arbitrary expectations.
Then John spoke and all other thoughts disappeared from Todd’s head.
“It’s happening again.”
Todd sat down at his mother’s kitchen table, sipped from a can of soda, and then held the cold, damp metal against his forehead as he tried to get his thoughts in order. In the few days since he’d been released from Wood Hills, his life had turned into a maelstrom of chaos and confusion. He’d thought the rest of his life would be relatively quiet; other than the animosity of the townspeople, he’d anticipated nothing worse than helping his mother get through her twilight.
Instead, he was currently a suspect in multiple murders, murders that were eerily similar to the ones from his childhood. And that wasn’t all. For the first time since that hot, steamy summer after junior year, all four members of the Cemetery Club were back in town. In fact, one of them was upstairs scrubbing years of accumulated filth and disease from his rancid body in the spare bath.
The other two were due for dinner in a few hours.
“Mister Todd?”
Todd opened his eyes to find Abigail Clinton, his mother’s home health aide, standing in the entranceway. Her dark, West Indian eyes were full of concern.
“Yes?”
“The Missus is almost out of the medicine. Only a few more days. You want I should get?”
“No, that’s all right. I’ll take care of it.” He held back a smile. Abigail was overcautious and prone to exaggeration. If she said it was going to storm, it meant they were going to get some showers. Two days ago she’d said her nephew was on his death bed and she might need to take time off; it turned out he had a stomach virus. So Todd knew that if she said his mother’s medicine would run out in a few days there was probably close to two weeks of pills left in the bottle. Still, he made a mental note to check the next time he was upstairs.
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