As surely as if a corpse had risen from the grave—or a ghost had walked through a tree—the two youths ran screaming in terror from the event, sure that the thing was some sort of ghoul coming to get them. But after racing nearly a quarter of a mile and discovering that nothing was in fact pursuing them, Ponzo, his curiosity getting the better of him, turned and started back. Chester followed reluctantly, being more afraid of being trapped alone out in these woods with their dog packs—and other things—than having to return to the sneezing corpse.
But if the puffed-up man lying in the dirt had any intentions of going after the two boys, he hadn’t tried too hard. In fact, he hadn’t moved an inch, Ponzo saw as he came back. The man and dog might be alive—but not for long. Ponzo bent down and examined the dog. Even though there were little burned holes right in its fur, oozing craters here and there where the high-rad rain had penetrated into the pelt, even though it was horribly messed up, he could see that the animal was, or at least had been, beautiful. He stroked the dog softly under the neck, and it opened one eye slightly, barely We to move even the eyelid. The disarmingly intelligent eyes of the pitbull caught the youth full in the face, and in a flash he felt the power of the animal and knew he couldn’t let these two die. People he could do without—but dogs he had always loved. There were four back at the farm, big strapping things that could make mincemeat out of this one. On the spot he decided to try to help them.
“Let’s strip him,” the fat boy said, rubbing his hands together and getting down on one knee as he reached into the man’s jacket, searching for booty.
“Get your damn hand outs there before I as it off,” the older boy said, slapping hard at the offending appendage with a small branch, like a schoolmarm slapping an errant student with a ruler. “You really are a pig, aren’t you? Jesus, Chester,” his brother said, shaking his head.
“Well, why not—we found ’em. It’s the scavenger’s law, you know—what you find you keep. It’s the law of the land, Ponzo.”
“You know what Dad, what Undertaker said,” Ponzo replied with disgust, herding the fat boy away from the body by whipping him quickly but not very hard on the shoulder like a cowboy heading a steer back into line.“You can strip the dead—but not the living. You go to hell for doing that Chester. Hell.”
“Well, how the hell we going to help them?” the fat boy asked, suddenly having a horrified image in his head of having to somehow carry the man on his back, which he knew would kill him long before they had gone the three or four miles back to the farmhouse.
“We’ll—we’ll—” Ponzo said, looking around. “There—the motorcycle—we’ll put them on that.”
“But you don’t know how to drive,” Chester said, taunting the boy, as it was a sore point with their father, who hadn’t permitted Ponzo to drive the family tractor yet, saying he was too irresponsible.
“So we’ll roll the stupid thing, you idiot,” Ponzo said, leaning over and slapping the boy on the back of the head to make him stop his whining.
Ten minutes later they had somehow righted the big Harley and lifted the two weak, groaning bodies onto the seat, draping them over the top like animal carcasses brought back from the hunt. Both boys were quite strong—even Chester, with his layers of fat from eating too much fresh farm cooking. But they had spent their lives working their asses off in the many chores of farm life and had muscles that ran deep. Walking along one on each side, holding tight onto the handlebars of the Harley, they wheeled the vehicle forward.
It was tough going at first, as Chester kept somehow losing the grip on his bar and the whole thing would shift to the right, threatening to topple over. But they went slowly and after several minutes got the hang of it. They didn’t exactly hit cruising speed, but the two were able to get up to a respectable five miles per hour or so as they headed up and down the fields of wildflowers, purple and red and white and blue in their resplendent brilliance. Going downhill was the easy part—uphill the had. Chester was particularly worried about the final rise just before the farm. And he was right to be, for they had hardly reached the top when he slipped in some hogshit along the side of a path and went down hard. The whole be tilted over, and the unconscious occupants were thrown to the ground where they rolled around a little and came to a stop.
It took the boys another ten minutes to get the whole damn thing straightened out and their wards all loaded up again. This time they got the be to the top of the hill first. But from then on it was all downhill and easy sailing across the half mile to the main house. There were neighings and barks, slurpings and caws of countless domesticated animals. There were pens of pigs and chickens, and many dogs were running around the place. As the two teens got closer, they saw that there was a lot of activity in the main open yard in between two red silo-topped barns. At twenty people—from young children not older than four to old, wrinkled women in their eighties—all were sawing, sanding, pounding, and nailing pieces of wood together, making coffins.
“What the hell you got them?” a young face screamed out, looking up from the nail he was pounding into some jaggedly sawed pine planking. A dozen other faces also swung up and around, and for a few moments there was a sudden, complete cessation of sound as the entire crew stared at what the cats had dragged home. There was a certain similarity to many of the faces—a similar slant of brow, placing of eyes, shape of nose. Which was hardly surprising, as the gathering was basically one huge extended family—the Hanson family, run by the patriarch, grandfather, and sire of half those present—Bradley “Undertaker” Hanson, who stood over the coffin watching it Al with a stem eye.
“Found this bunch out by the gorge,” Ponzo yelled back, beaming with pride at his find, as was his brother, Chester, who knew that something like this would be worth a minimum of a few extra desserts—and the maximum of a knife or some object of value. Undertaker liked to run things like a general, rewarding those who were “clever” and punishing those who were “stupid.”
“Back to work, Al of you,” he shouted to the box makers. “Keep your eyes on the damn nails—there’s money to be made tonight. Five were killed this afternoon in town. Five…” His eyes lit up with a certain glee at the presence of the Grim Reaper. For it meant two dollars a box. Two times five equals ten. Ten bucks—that was two more horses for his stable. He patted himself on the back for the thousandth time for starting up the undertaking business as his second vocation—after he had seen many years before that farming alone wouldn’t support him. Not with his appetites, his virility, his progeny. With the additional good luck to live just a few miles from one of the bloodiest towns around—Cotopaxi—where they brought the bodies out of the bars and the whorehouses by the wheelbarrow full—he had it made.
In fact, “Others’ tragedies—our blessing,” was just one of the Undertaker’s many expressions, which he quoted sternly to the rest of them.
“They dead?” Undertaker asked, starting forward, his large girth rolling around him as he moved. The man was only about 5′8″ tail but must have weighed perhaps 400 pounds. The good life had been good to him, that was for damn sure. Where others had starved, he had prospered. His completely bald head and red-cheeked face, sitting atop the ovular body below, created nothing so much as the impression of two eggs atop one another—one immense, the other the size of a bowling ball, both of them sort of rotating around each other like two planets in orbit as he walked along.
“Hmm,” Undertaker said with interest as he saw the value of the motorcycle. He had an old one in the shed, but it was rusted, barely functional. This one, on the other hand, was in perfect order and had the added feature of weapons. He leaned down as his two sons—both like all the male children, bald as M&M’s—held the heavy be a little unsteadily. Chester, in particular, was exhausted from the afternoon’s exertions. Undertaker got down on one knee with a whoomph of expelled air and looked into Stone’s face, which was hanging down over one side of the leather seat. He couldn’t see any noticeable sign of breathing
but could see the horrendous red boils and bumps all over the man’s face and neck. Undertaker knew what it was instantly. His years of undertaking work, and the reading of a number of medical journals, had actually made him quite a competent doctor capable of treating his own family—more than one member of which he had saved by his diagnoses.
Radiation poisoning! The man had been exposed to some powerful radioactive source—perhaps the rains that had just missed the farm the night before. The patriarch reached out, grabbed hold of Stone’s now, and tweaked it hard. The figure let out a little sharp sound, and the head tried to stir, the eyes opening for a split second and then closing again as the fever-racked body let its head fall back to the metal side of the motorcycle.
“Still ticking, huh, mister?” Undertaker said with a laugh, slapping the unconscious Stone on the shoulder. He turned to the left and did a similar test to the dog, which lay there equally limp. The now of a dog being the most sensitive spot by far on its body, the pitbull suddenly opened both eyes and somehow found the energy to snap up hard at whatever was fucking with its snout. Then it collapsed back again, as Undertaker Hanson nearly fell backward from the sudden “attack.”
“Damn thing has some spunk in it, I’ll tell you that, Undertaker said with a harsh laugh as he rose slowly to both feet and dusted himself off.
“Chester said we should strip ’em,” Ponzo said, looking over accusingly at his brother.
“Did not, did not,” Chester screamed back, nearly letting the be fall over in his anger.
“Oh, shut up, you moron,” Undertaker snapped, suddenly pulling a long piece of hickory from his sleeve and whop-ping the lad right on the top of his bald head. The youth’s eyes rolled around in his face like rotted fruits in a slot machine—and he shut up.
“I tol’ you once, I tol’ you a thousand times,” Undertaker said sternly. “If they’s dead, you can strip ’em. ’Cause the dead don’t need what they got. But if they’s living, then you gotta treat ’em like a man. Otherwise you’ll go to hell.”
“But how can you treat a dog like a man?” Chester asked dumbly, his lower jaw hanging open.
“How can one of my own kin have no brain at all?” Undertaker asked with an exasperated roar as he stared at the youngest of his sons—to his thinking the worst of the lot. “Now come on,” he said sharply. “Take ’em up to the attic, get Katie and LuAnn to get set up, and then get your damn asses down here, ’cause we got coffins to build—goddamn coffins to build. It’s honey time. It’s raining corpses.”
Chapter
Three
* * *
Martin Stone floated between life and death. It was a strange sensation, sort of like being a child floating in a bathtub, or on a rubber mattress at the beach—when there had been such things—bobbing up and down in the waves. He Boated between this world and something else. Something he couldn’t see clearly but could feel, feel pulling him with a magnetic intensity, as if it wanted him real bad.
When he floated back to this world—to the earth world, the world of solid things that lived and breathed—he felt pain, such intense pain as he had never experienced before. He didn’t know what was wrong with him. He had hardly enough rationality left in his fevered brain to think it all through. He was just an animal in this world, burning up with tongues of fire coursing through every cell. He had been hurt, whoever “he” was. Hurt real bad.
When he drifted back to the other world—through a tunnel of diamonds all rippling blue and white like they were made of star material—things were more insubstantial. There were beings there—strange beings, both frightening and beautiful-all of them hard to see, as if he were looking through an unfathomably deep, shadow-filled ocean. They floated in the luminescent haze that surrounded them. And they were calling to him. Calling for him to join them: “Stone, Martin Stone. Life is no longer for you. This is your new state. Come… come… come!
“Martin Stone, it is so beautiful here. Do not resist. Death is…love.”
Then there were other voices around him pulling him back from the insubstantial world. But these were not so angelic, and seductive. They were yelling at him. Harsh lights suddenly filled his eyes, and he felt his physical being being moved around, shifted, things poked into it and put on it. Though, again, just who or what that body was, was quite beyond him. His was a primal existence. He was a primitive being in a sea of pain who had intelligence but no past—and no future.
Then he felt himself leaving his body again and shooting through the ceiling of the room he was in. He seemed to turn to some kind of dust that could pass through solid material, could fly right into the heavens like something sucked up in a tornado. Then he was staring down at himself from far up. It was as if he were a hundred miles above his burned, blistered body. And when he saw the damaged flesh—and the canine lying on a bed next to it in similarly fucked-up fashion—suddenly he knew who he was, and that, in fact, although it would be nice to rest for the next billion, trillion years and hang out with the spirit mists that flew around him, he just had too much to do at this exact moment, though he would be glad to say hello to anyone’s relatives back on earth.
But the ethereal shapes of indeterminate species had other ideas. Cloaked in a gray mist, they reached for him with arms that rippled with smoke, fingers that clutched with currents of dark electricity, trying to bring him down, trying to drag him off into the goddamn clouds somewhere, like a fucking street mugging in heaven.
Stone had learned to kick ass on earth, and he was damned if he wasn’t going to go out without a good fight—even in heaven or hell. He started clawing and punching his way back through the crowds of the dead. And though it was slow going, he almost began making some headway when suddenly he saw a sight that froze him in his tracks, made his heart—what there was left of it—seem to harden like setting concrete in his chest.
His mother and father—only both were dead, the way they had been when he’d last seen them. His father, all blue in the face and his once crystal eyes flat and dead like balls of mud. His mother was horrible. She had been raped and mutilated in her last moments, and it was as if the crime had just happened and the blood still oozed from her ripped flesh, the hair tom from her skull in bloody clumps.
Both of them reached for him as if welcoming him home after a long vaction.
“Oh, Martin, Martin, you’ve come,” his dead mother said. She came toward him with bleeding fingers outstretched, scraping at him, while his father walked stiff-legged like something from a bad B movie. Stone stood mesmerized, not able to move an inch from the limbo zone he was in. Yet somehow he knew that if they touched him or grabbed him, he would be dead. Would be like them. And Martin Stone didn’t want to be dead. Didn’t want to be like that.
He pushed with all the willpower of his still living spirit, which dangled on the scales as Undertaker’s daughters gave Stone’s body this pill and that ointment, this antirad liquid, that rubdown with cold mud to bring down his body temperature, which rose to 108° at times. Somehow he broke through the ranks of the dead, sending dark spirits flying like rotting tenpins. He dove from the throbbing black cloud he was in—down, down—as if diving toward the bottom of a swimming pool where a precious jewel lay, the jewel of his body, of himself. The electric hands reached out for him with dark currents, and slime-coated ectoplasmic flesh. But they couldn’t reach. And he disappeared back down toward the living, the real, the substantial.
A screaming chorus of anger went up as he slipped from their fingers, as his soul escaped from their dark land. They reached after him, sending out wispy talons, but these merely evaporated in the air like smoke from a cigarette. For he was gone—heading down like a meteor, out of their grasp, their influence. For now.
Stone felt himself shooting through a tube. He was in the Bobsled at Coney Island. It was great. He twisted and turned as bands of light spun in concentric circles of Day-Glo color around him, as if he were inside a barber’s pole. And his father was sitting next to him. His f
ather, the Major, had brought little Martin to New York City—and the world-famous amusement park at Coney Island. And it was so much fun. But now Martin was going faster, too fast, and he reached out for support against the sides of the car. But there was nothing there—only air. And then he was falling terribly fast.
There were sounds above him, and he opened his eyes fractionally, which let in a fire of light that seemed to pierce every optic nerve. Huge, blubbery lips were moving above, but they were speaking in slow motion and he couldn’t understand a damn thing they were saying. Then he saw the fat face attached to the lips. Jowled and with shining bald head, Undertaker stared down at him. And Martin Stone knew without question that he had died and gone to hell. And that the devil had hair-loss problems too.
Chapter
Four
* * *
A tongue was in his eye. It was long and it was wet. And it stroked at his face over and over, like a piece of wet sandpaper trying to plane down his nose and cheeks to the bone. There was the overpowering scent of dog and alcohol and numerous or strong-smelling substances. He felt like he was drowning.
Martin Stone opened one eye to see an immense furred face about one inch from his own. Its right eye was focused intently on his own partially opened eyelids, and it let out a squeal that quickly grew to a shrill and deafening intensity. And Stone knew he was alive—if only because it hurt his ears so much. He reached out with one arm to swat the animal away and realized at the same instant that it was Excaliber, and that he couldn’t move a muscle. It felt like his hands were tied down. Stone knew something else, too—that his entire body felt like it had been through an oven, a meat-grinding and tenderizing session, used as a soccer ball in a grudge match and worse.
The Vile Village Page 2