by S. T. Joshi
TODD
HE HAS TO KEEP GOING AND HE CAN’T SO MUCH AS FALTER. He knows what will happen.
You’re the one who does it, Julius.
Well.
Just go ahead on and do it.
I’m not afraid of Julius. Without me he’d miss the sign and we all know what’ll happen if the sign comes and we don’t act on it.
That gold light is all around—I can feel their greed blending in with his hatred in a cold, steady gush.
I pick the time.
He looks down at her. His eyes are in the shade.
I tear her frock open, baring her skinny chest. She doesn’t even cry out, just stares into her father’s face.
Any idiot can break a lock, Julius.
Lesser Demons
NORMAN PARTRIDGE
Norman Partridge is the author of the short story collections Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales (Roadkill Press, 1992), Bad Intentions (Subterranean Press, 1996), The Man with the Barbed Wire Fists (Night Shade Books, 2001), and the horror novels Slippin’ into Darkness (Cemetery Dance, 1994), Wildest Dreams (Subterranean Press, 1998), Wicked Prayer (HarperPrism, 2000), and Dark Harvest (Tor, 2007). He has also written the hardboiled detective novels Saguaro Riptide (Berkley, 1997) and The Ten-Ounce Siesta (Berkley, 1998) and has edited the horror anthology It Came from the Drive-In! (I Books, 2004).
OWN IN THE CEMETERY, THE CHILDREN WERE LAUGHING.
They had another box open.
They had their axes out. Their knives, too.
I sat in the sheriff’s department pickup, parked beneath a willow tree. Ropes of leaves hung before me like green curtains, but those curtains didn’t stop the laughter. It climbed the ridge from the hollow below, carrying other noises—shovels biting hard-packed earth, axe blades splitting coffinwood, knives scraping flesh from bone. But the laughter was the worst of it. It spilled over teeth sharpened with files, chewed its way up the ridge, and did its best to strip the hard bark off my spine.
I didn’t sit still. I grabbed a gas can from the back of the pickup. I jacked a full clip into my dead deputy’s .45, slipped a couple spares into one of the leather pockets on my gun belt, and buttoned it down. Then I fed shells into my shotgun and pumped one into the chamber.
I went for a little walk.
FIVE MONTHS BEFORE, I STOOD WITH MY DEPUTY, ROY Barnes, out on County Road 14. We weren’t alone. There were others present. Most of them were dead, or something close to it.
I held that same shotgun in my hand. The barrel was hot. The deputy clutched his .45, a ribbon of bitter smoke coiling from the business end. It wasn’t a stink you’d breathe if you had a choice, but we didn’t have one.
Barnes reloaded, and so did I. The June sun was dropping behind the trees, but the shafts of late-afternoon light slanting through the gaps were as bright as high noon. The light played through black smoke rising from a Chrysler sedan’s smoldering engine, and white smoke simmering from the hot asphalt piled in the road gang’s dump truck.
My gaze settled on the wrecked Chrysler. The deal must have started there. Fifteen or twenty minutes before, the big black car had piled into an old oak at a fork in the county road. Maybe the driver had nodded off, waking just in time to miss a flagman from the work gang. Over-corrected and hit the brakes too late. Said: Hello tree, goodbye heartbeat.
Maybe that was the way it happened. Maybe not. Barnes tried to piece it together later on, but in the end it really didn’t matter much. What mattered was that the sedan was driven by a man who looked like something dredged up from the bottom of a stagnant pond. What mattered was that something exploded from the Chrysler’s trunk after the accident. That thing was the size of a grizzly, but it wasn’t a bear. It didn’t look like a bear at all. Not unless you’d ever seen one turned inside out, it didn’t.
Whatever it was, that skinned monster could move. It unhinged its sizable jaws and swallowed a man who weighed two-hundred-and-change in one long ratcheting gulp, choking arms and legs and torso down a gullet lined with razor teeth. Sucked the guy into a blue-veined belly that hung from its ribs like a grave-robber’s sack and then dragged that belly along fresh asphalt as it chased down the other men, slapping them onto the scorching roadbed and spitting bloody hunks of dead flesh in their faces. Some it let go, slaughtering others like so many chickens tossed live and squawking onto a hot skillet.
It killed four men before we showed up, fresh from handling a fender-bender on the detour route a couple miles up the road. Thanks to my shotgun and Roy Barnes’s .45, all that remained of the thing was a red mess with a corpse spilling out of its gutshot belly. As for the men from the work crew, there wasn’t much you could say. They were either as dead as that poor bastard who’d ended his life in a monster’s stomach, or they were whimpering with blood on their faces, or they were running like hell and halfway back to town. But whatever they were doing didn’t make too much difference to me just then.
“What was it, Sheriff?” Barnes asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You sure it’s dead?”
“I don’t know that, either. All I know is we’d better stay away from it.”
We backed off. The only things that lingered were the afternoon light slanting through the trees, and the smoke from that hot asphalt, and the smoke from the wrecked Chrysler. The light cut swirls through that smoke as it pooled around the dead thing, settling low and misty, as if the something beneath it were trying to swallow a chunk of the world, roadbed and all.
“I feel kind of dizzy,” Barnes said.
“Hold on, Roy. You have to.”
I grabbed my deputy by the shoulder and spun him around. He was just a kid, really—before this deal, he’d never even had his gun out of its holster while on duty. I’d been doing the job for fifteen years, but I could have clocked a hundred and never seen anything like this. Still, we both knew it wasn’t over. We’d seen what we’d seen, we’d done what we’d done, and the only thing left to do was deal with whatever was coming next.
That meant checking out the Chrysler. I brought the shotgun barrel even with it, aiming at the driver’s side door as we advanced. The driver’s skull had slammed the steering wheel at the point of impact. Black blood smeared across his face, and filed teeth had slashed through his pale lips so that they hung from his gums like leavings you’d bury after gutting a fish. On top of that, words were carved on his face. Some were purpled over with scar tissue and others were still fresh scabs. None of them were words I’d seen before. I didn’t know what to make of them.
“Jesus,” Barnes said. “Will you look at that.”
“Check the back seat, Roy.”
Barnes did. There was other stuff there. Torn clothes. Several pairs of handcuffs. Ropes woven with fishhooks. A wrought-iron trident. And in the middle of all that was a cardboard box filled with books.
The deputy pulled one out. It was old. Leathery. As he opened it, the book started to come apart in his hands. Brittle pages fluttered across the road—
Something rustled in the open trunk. I pushed past Roy and fired point-blank before I even looked. The spare tire exploded. On the other side of the trunk, a clawed hand scrabbled up through a pile of shotgunned clothes. I fired again. Those claws clacked together, and the thing beneath them didn’t move again.
Using the shotgun barrel, I shifted the clothes to one side, uncovering a couple of dead kids in a nest of rags and blood. Both of them were handcuffed. The thing I’d killed had chewed its way out of one of their bellies. It had a grinning, wolfish muzzle and a tail like a dozen braided snakes. I slammed the trunk and chambered another shell. I stared down at the trunk, waiting for something else to happen, but nothing did.
Behind me...well, that was another story.
The men from the road gang were on the move.
Their boots scuffed over hot asphalt.
They gripped crow bars, and sledge hammers, and one of them even had a machete.
They came toward us with blood on t
heir faces, laughing like children.
THE CHILDREN IN THE CEMETERY WEREN’T LAUGHING anymore.
They were gathered around an open grave, eating.
As always, a couple seconds passed before they noticed me. Then their brains sparked their bodies into motion, and the first one started for me with an axe. I pulled the trigger, and the shotgun turned his spine to jelly, and he went down in sections. The next one I took at longer range, so the blast chewed her over some. Dark blood from a hundred small wounds peppered her dress. Shrieking, she turned tail and ran.
Which gave the third bloodface a chance to charge me. He was faster than I expected, dodging the first blast, quickly closing the distance. There was barely enough room between the two of us for me to get off another shot, but I managed the job. The blast took off his head. That was that.
Or at least I thought it was. Behind me, something whispered through long grass that hadn’t been cut in five months. I whirled, but the barefoot girl’s knife was already coming at me. The blade ripped through my coat in a silver blur, slashing my right forearm. A twist of her wrist and she tried to come back for another piece, but I was faster and bashed her forehead with the shotgun butt. Her skull split like a popped blister and she went down hard, cracking the back of her head on a tombstone.
That double-punched her ticket. I sucked a deep breath and held it. Blood reddened the sleeve of my coat as the knife-wound began to pump. A couple seconds later I began to think straight, and I got the idea going in my head that I should put down the shotgun and get my belt around my arm. I did that and tightened it good. Wounded, I’d have a walk to get back to the pickup. Then I’d have to find somewhere safe where I could take care of my arm. The pickup wasn’t far distance-wise, but it was a steep climb up to the ridgeline. My heart would be pounding double-time the whole way. If I didn’t watch it, I’d lose a lot of blood.
But first I had a job to finish. I grabbed the shotgun and moved toward the rifled grave. Even in the bright afternoon sun, the long grass was still damp with morning dew. I noticed that my boots were wet as I stepped over the dead girl. That bothered me, but the girl’s corpse didn’t. She couldn’t bother me now that she was dead.
I left her behind me in the long grass, her body a home for the scarred words she’d carved on her face with the same knife she’d used to butcher the dead and butcher me. All that remained of her was a barbed rictus grin and a pair of dead eyes staring up into the afternoon sun, as if staring at nothing at all. And that’s what she was to me—that’s what they all were now that they were dead. They were nothing, no matter what they’d done to themselves with knives and files, no matter what they’d done to the living they’d murdered or the dead they’d pried out of burying boxes. They were nothing at all, and I didn’t spare them another thought.
Because there were other things to worry about—things like the one that had infected the children with a mouthful of spit-up blood. Sometimes those things came out of graves. Other times they came out of car trunks or meat lockers or off slabs in a morgue. But wherever they came from they were always born of a corpse, and there were corpses here aplenty.
I didn’t see anything worrisome down in the open grave. Just stripped bones and tatters of red meat, but it was meat that wasn’t moving. That was good. So I took care of things. I rolled the dead bloodfaces into the grave. I walked back to the cottonwood thicket at the ridge side of the cemetery and grabbed the gas can I’d brought from the pickup. I emptied it into the hole, then tossed the can in, too. I wasn’t carrying it back to the truck with a sliced-up arm.
I lit a match and let it fall.
The gas thupped alive and the hole growled fire.
Fat sizzled as I turned my back on the grave. Already, other sounds were rising in the hollow. Thick, rasping roars. Branches breaking somewhere in the treeline behind the old funeral home. The sound of something big moving through the timber—something that heard my shotgun bark three times and wasn’t afraid of the sound.
Whatever that thing was, I didn’t want to see it just now.
I disappeared into the cottonwood thicket before it saw me.
BARNES HAD LIVED IN A CONVERTED HUNTING LODGE on the far side of the lake. There weren’t any other houses around it, and I hadn’t been near the place in months. I’d left some stuff there, including medical supplies we’d scavenged from the local emergency room. If I was lucky, they would still be there.
Thick weeds bristled over the dirt road that led down to Roy’s place. That meant no one had been around for a while. Of course, driving down the road would leave a trail, but I didn’t have much choice. I’d been cut and needed to do something about it fast. You take chances. Some are large and some are small. Usually, the worries attached to the small ones amount to nothing.
I turned off the pavement. The dirt road was rutted, and I took it easy. My arm ached every time the truck hit a pothole. Finally, I parked under the carport on the east side of the old lodge. Porch steps groaned as I made my way to the door, and I entered behind the squared-off barrel of Barnes’s .45.
Inside, nothing was much different than it had been a couple of months before. Barnes’s blood-spattered coat hung on a hook by the door. His reading glasses rested on the coffee table. Next to it, a layer of mold floated on top of a cup of coffee he’d never finished. But I didn’t care about any of that. I cared about the cabinet we’d stowed in the bathroom down the hall.
Good news. Nothing in the cabinet had been touched. I stripped to the waist, cleaned the knife wound with saline solution from an IV bag, then stopped the bleeding as best I could. The gash wasn’t as deep as it might have been. I sewed it up with a hooked surgical needle, bandaged it, and gobbled down twice as many antibiotics as any doctor would have prescribed. That done, I remembered my wet boots. Sitting there on the toilet, I laughed at myself a little bit, because given the circumstances it seemed like a silly thing to worry about. Still, I went to the first-floor bedroom I’d used during the summer and changed into a dry pair of Wolverines I’d left behind.
Next I went to the kitchen. I popped the top on a can of chili, found a spoon, and started toward the old dock down by the lake. There was a rusty swing set behind the lodge that had been put up by a previous owner; it shadowed a kid’s sandbox. Barnes hadn’t had use for either—he wasn’t even married—but he’d never bothered to change things around. Why would he? It would have been a lot of work for no good reason.
I stopped and stared at the shadows beneath the swing set, but I didn’t stare long. The dock was narrow and more than a little rickety, with a small boathouse bordering one side. I walked past the boathouse and sat on the end of the dock for a while. I ate cold chili. Cattails whispered beneath a rising breeze. A flock of geese passed overhead, heading south. The sun set, and twilight settled in.
It was quiet. I liked it that way. With Barnes, it was seldom quiet. I guess you’d say he had a curious mind. The deputy liked to talk about things, especially things he didn’t understand, like those monsters that crawled out of corpses. Barnes called them lesser demons. He’d read about them in one of those books we found in the wreck. He had ideas about them, too. Barnes talked about those ideas a lot over the summer, but I didn’t want to talk about any of it. Talking just made me edgy. So did Barnes’s ideas and explanations...all those maybes and what ifs. Barnes was big on those; he’d go on and on about them.
Me, I cared about simpler things. Things anyone could understand. Things you didn’t need to discuss, or debate. Like waking up before a razor-throated monster had a chance to swallow me whole. Or not running out of shotgun shells. Or making sure one of those things never spit a dead man’s blood in my face, so I wouldn’t take a file to my teeth or go digging in a graveyard for food. That’s what I’d cared about that summer, and I cared about the same things in the hours after a bloodfaced lunatic carved me up with a dirty knife.
I finished the chili. It was getting dark. Getting cold, too, because winter was coming on.
I tossed the empty can in the lake and turned back toward the house. The last purple smear of twilight silhouetted the place, and a pair of birds darted into the chimney as I walked up the dock. I wouldn’t have seen them if I hadn’t looked at that exact moment, and I shook my head. Birds building nests in October? It was just another sign of a world gone nuts.
Inside, I settled on the couch and thought about lighting a fire. I didn’t care about the birds—nesting in that chimney was their own bad luck. I’d got myself a chill out at the dock, and there was a cord of oak stacked under the carport. Twenty minutes and I could have a good blaze going. But I was tired, and my arm throbbed like it had grown its own heartbeat. I didn’t want to tear the stitches toting a bunch of wood. I just wanted to sleep.
I took some painkillers—more than I should have—and washed them down with Jack Daniel’s. After a while, the darkness pulled in close. The bedroom I’d used the summer before was on the ground floor. But I didn’t want to be downstairs in case anything came around during the night, especially with a cool liquid fog pumping through my veins. I knew I’d be safer upstairs.
There was only one room upstairs—a big room, kind of like a loft.
It was Barnes’s bedroom, and his blood was still on the wall.
I didn’t care. I grabbed my shotgun. I climbed the stairs.
Like I said: I was tired.
Besides, I couldn’t see Barnes’s blood in the dark.
AT FIRST, ROY AND I STUCK TO THE SHERIFF’S OFFICE, which was new enough to have pretty good security. When communication stopped and the whole world took a header, we decided that wasn’t a good idea anymore. We started moving around.
My place wasn’t an option. It was smack dab in the middle of town. You didn’t want to be in town. There were too many blind corners, and too many fences you couldn’t see over. Dig in there, and you’d never feel safe no how many bullets you had in your clip. So I burned down the house. It never meant much to me, anyway. It was just a house, and I burned it down mostly because it was mine and I didn’t want anyone else rooting around in the stuff I kept there. I never went back after that.