“Maybe everybody’s in one place,” Leona offered. “Like at the auditorium, or City Hall or somewhere.”
Josh nodded. “There ought to be cars,” he decided. “Ought to be traffic lights working. I don’t see any.”
“Maybe they’re savin’ the ’lectricity. Maybe the wires aren’t too strong yet.”
“Maybe,” Josh replied, but there was something spooky about Matheson; why were there no lights in the windows, yet something at the center of Matheson ablaze with light? And everything was so still, so very still. He had the feeling that they should turn back, but the wind was cold and they had come so far; there had to be people here! Sure! They’re all in one place, like Leona had suggested. Maybe they’re having a town meeting or something! In any case, there was no turning back. He started pushing the wheelbarrow again. Swan followed him, and the horse that bore Leona followed Swan, and off to the left the terrier kept to the tall weeds and ran ahead.
Another roadside sign advertised the Matheson Motel—Swimming Pool! Cable TV!—and a third sign said the best coffee and steaks in town could be found at the Hightower Restaurant on Caviner Street. They followed the road between plowed fields and passed a dark softball diamond and a public pool where the lounge chairs and umbrellas were blown into a chain-link fence. A final roadside sign announced the July Firecracker Sale at the K-Mart on Billups Street, and then they entered Matheson.
It had been a pretty town, Josh thought as they walked along the center line. The buildings were either made of stones or logs, meant to resemble a frontier town. The houses were made of brick, most of them one story, nothing fancy, but nice enough. A statue of somebody on his knees, one hand covering what might’ve been a Bible and the other extended toward the sky, stood atop a pedestal in a district of small shops and stores that reminded Josh of that Mayberry show with Andy Griffith. A canopy flapped over a store with a barber pole in front of it, and the windows of the Matheson First Citizen’s Bank were broken out. Furniture had been dragged out of a furniture store, piled in a heap in the street and set afire. Nearby was an overturned police car, also burned to a hulk. Josh did not look inside. Thunder growled overhead, and lightning danced across the sky.
Further on, they found a used car lot. Trade at Uncle Roy’s! the sign urged. Under rows of flapping multicolored banners were six dusty cars. Josh began to check them all, one by one, as Swan and Leona waited behind and Mule grumbled uneasily. Two of them were sitting on flat tires, and a third’s windshield and windows were shattered. The other three—an Impala, a Ford Fairlane and a red pickup truck—seemed in pretty good shape. Josh walked to the small office building, found the door wide open, and with the light of the bull’s-eye lantern located the keys to all three vehicles on a pegboard. He took the keys out to the lot and methodically tried them. The Impala wouldn’t make a sound, the pickup truck was dead, and the Fairlane’s engine popped and stuttered, made a noise like a chain being dragged along gravel and then went silent. Josh opened the Fairlane’s hood and found that the engine had been attacked with what might’ve been an axe, the wiring, belts and cables hacked apart. “Damn it!” Josh swore, and then his lantern revealed something written in dried grease on the inside of the hood: ALL SHALL PRAISE LORD ALVIN.
He stared at the scrawled writing, remembering that he’d seen the same thing—though written in a different hand and in a different substance—at the Jaspin farmhouse the night before. He walked back to Swan and Leona, and he said, “Those cars are shot. I think somebody wrecked them on purpose.” He looked toward the light, which was much closer now. “Well,” he said finally, “I guess we go find out what that is, right?”
Leona glanced at him, then quickly away; she wasn’t sure that she hadn’t seen the skull again, but in this strange light she couldn’t tell. Her heart had begun to pump harder, and she didn’t know what to do or say.
Josh pushed the wheelbarrow forward. Off in the distance, they heard the terrier bark a few times, then silence. They continued along the main street, passing more stores with broken windows, more overturned and burned vehicles. The light pulled them onward, and though they all had their private concerns they were drawn to that light like moths to a candle.
On a corner was a small sign that pointed to the right and said Pathway Institute, 2 mi. Josh looked in that direction and saw nothing but darkness.
“That’s the asylum,” Leona said.
“The asylum?” The word lanced him. “What asylum?”
“The crazy house. You know, where they put folks who go off their rockers. That one’s famous all over the state. Full of people too crazy to go to prison.”
“You mean… the criminally insane?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Great,” Josh said. The sooner they were out of this town, the better! He didn’t like being even two miles from an asylum full of lunatic murderers. He peered off into the darkness where the Pathway Institute was, and he felt the flesh ripple all up and down his backbone.
And then they went through another area of silent houses, passing the dark Matheson Motel and the Hightower Restaurant, and they entered a huge paved parking lot.
Before them, every light illuminated and blazing, was a K-Mart and, next to it, a similarly lit Food Giant supermarket.
“God Almighty!” Josh breathed. “A shopping center!”
Swan and Leona just stared, as if they’d never seen such light or huge stores before. Dark-sensitive photon lamps cast a yellow glow over the parking lot, which held perhaps fifty or sixty cars, campers, and pickup trucks, all covered with Kansas dust. Josh was completely stunned and had to catch his balance before the wind knocked him over. It was running through his head that if the electricity was on, then the freezers in the supermarket would be operating, too, and inside would be steaks, ice cream, cold beer, eggs, bacon, ham, and God only knew what else. He looked at the brilliantly lit K-Mart, his brain reeling. What sort of treasures would be in there? Radios and batteries, flashlights and lanterns, guns, gloves, kerosene heaters, raincoats! He didn’t know whether to laugh or sob with joy, but he pushed the wheelbarrow aside and started walking toward the K-Mart as if in a delirious daze.
“Wait!” Leona called. She got down off Mule and hobbled after Josh. “Hold up a minute!”
Swan set her bag down but kept hold of Crybaby and followed Leona. Behind her, Mule plodded along. The terrier barked a couple of times, then slipped under an abandoned Volkswagen and stayed there, watching the humans moving across the parking lot.
“Wait!” Leona called again, but she couldn’t keep pace with him, and he was heading for the K-Mart like a steam engine. Swan said, “Josh! Wait for us!” and she hurried to catch him.
Some of the windows were broken out of the K-Mart, but Josh figured the wind had done that. He had no idea why the lights were on there and nowhere else. The K-Mart and the supermarket next to it were akin to waterholes in a burning desert. His heart was about to blast through his chest. Candy bars! he thought wildly. Cookies! Glazed doughnuts! He feared his legs would collapse before he reached the K-Mart, or that the entire vision would tremble and dissolve as he went through one of the front doors. But it didn’t, and he did, and there he stood inside the huge store with the treasures of the world on racks and displays before him, the magic phrases Snacks and Candy and Sporting Goods and Automotives and Housewares on wooden arrows pointing to various sections of the store.
“My God,” Josh said, half drunk with ecstasy. “Oh, my God!”
Swan came in, then Leona. As the door was swinging shut a blurred form darted in, and the terrier shot past Josh and vanished along the center aisle. Then the door shut, and they stood together in the glare while Mule whinnied and pawed the concrete outside.
Josh strode past a display of outdoor grills and bags of charcoal to a counter full of candy bars, his desire for chocolate fanned to a fever. He sucked three Milky Ways right out of their wrappers and started on a half-pound bag of M&Ms. Leona went to a tab
le piled with thick athletic socks. Swan wandered amid the counters, dazzled by the amount of merchandise and the brightness of the lights. His mouth crammed with gooey chocolate, Josh turned to a display of cigarettes, cigars and pipe tobacco; he chose a pack of Hav-A-Tampa Jewels, found some matches nearby, stuck one of the cigars between his teeth and lit it, inhaling deeply. He felt as if he’d stepped into paradise, and the pleasures of the supermarket were yet to be experienced. From far back in the store, the terrier yapped several times in rapid succession. Swan looked back along the aisle but couldn’t see the dog. She didn’t like the sound of that barking, though; it carried a warning, and as the terrier began to bark again she heard it yip as if it had been kicked. A barrage of barking followed.
“Josh?” Swan called. A cocoon of cigar smoke obscured his head.
He puffed on the stogie and chewed more candy bars. His mouth was so full he couldn’t even answer Swan; he just waved to her.
Swan walked slowly toward the back of the store as the terrier continued to bark. She came to three mannequins, all wearing suits. The one in the middle had on a blue baseball cap, and Swan thought it didn’t go at all with the suit, but it might be made to fit her own head. She reached up and plucked it off.
The entire waxen-fleshed head toppled from the mannequin’s shoulders, right out of the stiff white shirt collar, and fell to the floor at Swan’s feet with a sound like a hammer whacking a watermelon.
Swan stared, wide-eyed, the baseball cap in one hand and Crybaby in the other. The head had thinning gray hair and dark-socketed eyes that had rolled upward, and on its cheeks and chin was a stubble of gray whiskers. Now she could see the dried red matter and the yellow nub of bone where it had been hacked off the human neck.
She blinked and looked up at the other two mannequins. One of them had the head of a teenage boy, his mouth slack and tongue lolling, both eyeballs turned to the ceiling and a crust of blood at the nostrils. The third one’s head was that of an elderly man, his face heavily lined and the color of chalk.
Swan stepped back across the aisle—and hit a fourth and fifth mannequin, dressed in women’s clothes. The severed heads of a middle-aged woman and a little girl with red hair fell out of the collars and thumped to the floor on either side of her; the little girl’s face was directed up at Swan, the awful blood-drained mouth open in a soundless cry of terror.
Swan screamed. Screamed long and loud and couldn’t stop screaming. She backpedaled away from the human heads, still screaming, and as she spun around she saw another mannequin nearby, and another and another, some of the heads beaten and battered and the others painted and prettied with makeup to give them false and obscene smiles. She thought that if she couldn’t stop screaming her lungs would burst, and as she ran for Josh and Leona the scream died because all her air was gone. She pulled in breath and raced away from the grisly heads, and over Josh’s shouts she heard the terrier give a yipe-yipe-yipe of pain from the rear of the K-Mart.
“Swan!” Josh yelled, spitting out half-chewed candy. He saw her coming toward him, her face as yellow as the Kansas dust and tears streaming down her cheeks. “What is—”
“Blue Light Special!” a merry voice sang over the K-Mart’s intercom system. “Attention, shoppers! Blue Light Special! Three new arrivals at the front! Hurry for the best bargains!”
They heard the rough roar of a motorcycle’s engine firing. Josh scooped Swan up as a motorcycle hurtled at them along the center aisle, its driver dressed like a traffic cop except for his Indian headdress.
“Look out!” Leona shouted, and Josh leaped across a counter full of ice cube trays with Swan in his arms, the motorcycle skidding past them into a display of transistor radios. More figures were running toward them along the other aisles, and there was an ungodly whooping and hollering that drowned out the “Blue Light Special!” being repeated over the intercom.
Here came a mountainous, black-bearded man pushing a gnarled dwarf in a shopping cart, followed by other men of all ages and descriptions, wearing all kinds of clothing from suits to bathrobes, some of them with streaks of warpaint on their faces, others daubed white with powder. Josh realized—sickeningly—that most of them were carrying weapons: axes, picks, hoes, garden shears, pistols and rifles, knives and chains. The aisles were acrawl with them, and they jumped over the counters grinning and yelling. Josh, Swan and Leona were driven together and ringed by a shouting mob of forty or more men.
Protect the child! Josh thought, and as one of the men darted in to grab Swan’s arm Josh delivered a kick to his ribs that snapped bones and sent him flying back into the rabble. The move brought more gleeful cheers. The gnarled dwarf in the shopping cart, whose wrinkled face was decorated with orange lightning bolts, crowed, “Fresh meat! Fresh meat!”
The others took up the shout. An emaciated man plucked at Leona’s hair, and someone else grabbed her arm to pull her into the crowd. She became a wildcat, kicking and biting, driving her tormentors back. A heavy body landed on Josh’s shoulders, raking at his eyes, but he misted and flung the man off into the sea of leering faces. Swan struck out with Crybaby, hit one of those ugly faces in the nose and saw it pop open.
“Fresh meat!” the dwarf yelled. “Come get your fresh meat!” The black-bearded man began to clap his hands and dance.
Josh hit someone square in the mouth, and two teeth flew like dice in a crap game. “Get away!” he roared. “Get away from us!” But they were closing in now, and there were just too many. Three men were pulling Leona into the throng, and Josh caught a glimpse of her terrified face; a fist rose and fell, and Leona’s legs buckled. Damn it! Josh raged, kicking the nearest maniac in the kneecap. Protect the child! I’ve got to protect the—
A fist struck him in the kidneys. His legs were kicked out from under him, and he lost his grip on Swan as he fell. Fingers gouged at his eyes, a fist crashed into his jaw, shoes and boots pummeled his sides and back and the whole world seemed to be in violent motion. “Swan!” he shouted, trying to get up. Men clung to him like rats.
He looked up through a red haze of pain and saw a man with bulging, fishlike eyes standing over him, lifting an axe. He flung his arm up in an ineffectual gesture to ward it off, but he knew the axe was about to fall, and that would be the end of it. Oh, damn! he thought as blood trickled from his mouth. What a way to go! He braced for the blow, hoping that he could stand up with his last strength and knock the bastard’s brains out.
The axe reached its zenith, poised to fall.
And a booming voice shouted over the tumult: “Cease!”
The effect was like a bullwhip being cracked over the heads of wild animals. Almost to a man, they flinched and drew back. The fish-eyed man lowered the axe, and the others released Josh. He sat up, saw Swan a few feet away and drew her to him; she was still holding onto Crybaby, her eyes swimming with shock. Leona was on her knees nearby, blood oozing from a cut above her left eye and a purple swelling coming up on her cheekbone.
The mob backed away, opened to make passage for someone. A heavyset, fleshy, baldheaded man in overalls and cowboy boots, his chest bare and his muscular arms decorated with weird multicolored designs, walked into the circle. He was carrying an electric bullhorn, and he looked down at Josh with dark eyes beneath a protruding Neanderthal brow.
Oh, shit! Josh thought. The guy was at least as big as some of the heavyweight wrestlers he’d grappled. But then behind the baldheaded Neanderthal came two other men with painted faces, supporting a toilet between them, hoisted up on their shoulders. And on that toilet sat a man draped in a deep purple robe, his hair a blond, shoulder-length mane of loose curls. He had a downy beard of fine blond hair covering a gaunt, narrow face, and under thick blond brows his eyes were murky olive-green. The color reminded Josh of the water of a swimming hole near his childhood home where two young boys had drowned on a summer morning. It was said, he recalled, that monsters lay coiled in wait at the bottom of that cloudy green water.
The young man, who mig
ht have been anywhere from twenty to twenty-five, wore white gloves, blue jeans, Adidas sneakers and a red plaid shirt. On his forehead was a green dollar sign; on his left cheekbone was a red crucifix, and on his right was a black devil’s pitchfork.
The Neanderthal lifted the bullhorn to his mouth and roared, “All shall praise Lord Alvin!”
Forty
The sound of somebody being reborn
Macklin had heard the siren song of screaming in the night, and now he knew it was time.
He eased out of his sleeping bag, careful not to jostle Roland or Sheila; he didn’t want either of them to go with him. He was afraid of the pain, and he didn’t want them to see him weak.
Macklin walked out of the tent into the cold, sweeping wind. He began to head in the direction of the lake. Torches and campfires flickered all around him, and the wind tugged at the greenish-black bandages that trailed off the stump of Macklin’s right wrist. He could smell the sickly odor of his own infection, and for days the wound had been oozing gray fluid. He put his left palm over the handle of the knife in the waistband of his trousers. He was going to have to open the wound again and expose the flesh to the healing agony of the Great Salt Lake.
Behind him, Roland Croninger had sat up as soon as Macklin left the tent. The .45 was gripped in his hand. He always slept with it, even kept hold of it when Sheila Fontana let him do the dirty thing to her. He liked to watch, also, when Sheila took the King on. In turn, they fed Sheila and protected her from the other men. They were becoming a very close trio. But now he knew where the King was going, and why. The King’s wound had been smelling very bad lately. Soon there would be another scream in the night, like the others they heard when the encampment got quiet. He was a King’s Knight, and he thought he should be at the King’s side to help him, but this was something the King wanted to do alone. Roland lay back down, the pistol resting on his chest. Sheila muttered something and flinched in her sleep. Roland listened for the cry of the King’s rebirth.
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