by Tim Curran
Warren did not look for mercy and he did not get any. The others waded in with clubs and began beating him until his bones were heard to snap, until his ribs were staved in, and his lower jaw was shattered. Knobs of bloody bone thrusting through his ripped uniform pants, he inched on the ground like a slug, moaning and groaning.
The woman with the bow came over. A hot stench of blood and decay wafted from her. She was menstruating. Blood all over her legs. It dripped from her. While the others held him, she crouched over him and rubbed her moist red vulva over his face, marking him with a crude cross of menstrual blood.
“Now,” she said.
Marked for the reaping.
The other woman handed over her broomstick with the head on it. She gripped her long-handled axe with both hands. With a manic, shrieking cry of delight, she swung the axe and decapitated Warren quite cleanly. His broken body lurched, shook. The eyes in his head blinked a few times and then glazed over with a stark finality.
One of the hunters took his head and impaled it on a broomstick.
He raised it up to the darkening sky and let go with a screeching blood-maddened war cry…
49
Louis kept expecting the dead people in the cafe to move.
He kept expecting them to wink at him or to call him by name, perhaps take hold of him in their cold, sticky red fists and show him exactly what had gone through their minds when they pressed that serrated steel to their throats, demand that he do the same.
For it was better than the alternative and he knew it.
There was a rustle of cloth and he spun around, his eyes wide and his mouth hooked in a terrible grimace. One of the men at the counter slid from his seat and fell to the floor. The little girl at the table fell forward, striking the plate before her face-first. The fat lady trembled and rolled out of the booth, coming down hard, her bloody knife clattering across the floor and stopping at Louis’ feet.
For one split second, he did nothing. His mind was filled with a roaring, whooshing sound and he was certain that they were coming alive around him, waking up. That they would look upon him with dead, yellowing eyes and reach out for him with blood-encrusted hands. And then everything in him went loose and he almost fell down, then tightened up stiff as a plank. A scream came out of his mouth, but it was dry and scratchy and barely more than a hissing sound.
The dead were just dead.
But the idea of three of them coincidentally moving, falling over or sliding out of their seats, was just too much and Louis could not accept it. His heart hammering and his breath coming very fast, he forced himself to move. To step over the body of the fallen man. He expected them to move again, to reach out or whisper his name, but they were just dead. And to prove this to himself, he went right over to the state cop-avoiding the reflection of his grinning, staring face in the mirror- and pulled the gun from his holster. It was a 9mm. And soon as Louis pulled it out, the cop’s corpse fell over like a tree.
Louis stepped around him, the gun in his hand.
Outside, he heard something that made him go white: the high, joyous peals of laughing children. Just for a moment, but it had been there. Something passed before the window of the cafe and Louis turned, bringing up the gun and pulling the trigger. But nothing happened. His hands shaking so badly that he almost dropped the gun, he found the safety and clicked it off.
He heard running feet.
He ran to the window, the gun out before him. Out there, the streets were empty. Completely empty. His entire body shook and his bladder felt very full. His heart was pounding so hard he thought it would blow out of his chest. He could see his Dodge from where he was, see it very well.
And the doors were wide open.
Behind him, something moved…
50
They had the girl now.
They dragged her into the shadows while the man was in the cafe. He never even saw them or suspected they were near. That’s how the clan knew that he was not a hunter, that he was soft and weak, his senses still deadened by who and what he was. Nothing but prey. They could have charged in and taken him but the Huntress did not want that. She would call them to the hunt. She would select the prey. She would find the meat and show them how to bring it down.
She was strange.
She was careful.
But she was also very cunning, very dangerous, and she killed without warning. The others let out a cry of anger when they struck, but not the Huntress. She smiled, exuded a scent of calm, then slashed your eyes, your throat.
The hunters stared down at the girl in the grass.
The men sniffed her. The women pulled at her hair.
She was theirs now…
51
Louis turned, his heart pounding mercilessly.
He turned and found himself staring down the barrel of a double-ought shotgun. The woman clutching it had crazy eyes, messy blond hair. She was dirty, bruised, her shirt was ripped open in the front and he could see most of her left breast quite plainly. But it was those eyes that held him: they were blank, almost unfocused like the eyes of a sleeper.
In a voice that was too calm, too easy, she said, “You just set that pistol on the countertop, mister, and I won’t blow your fucking head off.”
She spoke clearly. Her speech was not garbled or filled with snarling glottals like the regressed ones. He thought she was still human. Yet…her eyes were scary. They made him feel weak, vulnerable, everything inside him running like tepid water.
“Easy,” he said, setting the 9mm down carefully. “I’m not like them. I’m not an animal. I’m still human.”
“No shit? Well, excuse me, fuckhead, if I don’t exactly believe that.”
Louis realized then that she wasn’t crazy, just scared, confused, and more than a little desperate. She would kill if she had to. But he saw that she did not really want to.
He kept his hands in the air. “I’m human and you know it. If you doubted it, you would have shot me. Have you ever seen one of them with a gun?”
She sighed. “I guess not.”
“It’s the regression,” he told her. “A return to the jungle, to the original man, the original woman. They are like our ancestors. They hunt. They kill in packs. They reject anything of our world. I think it might almost be a phobia with them.”
“Listen,” she said, lowering the shotgun, “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. But I’m glad I found you. We might be the only two left. I’m Doris Bleer. You?”
“Louis Shears.” He crossed over to the window. Practically dark. “We don’t have time for this. There was a girl with me. In that car out there. I think she wandered off. I have to find her. She’s in shock.”
Doris shook her head. “She didn’t wander off, Louis. They took her. The crazy ones. I saw ‘em from the window in the back room where I was hiding.”
“Then I have to go after them,” he said, grabbing up the 9mm.
“Louis,” the woman said, looking very compassionate for the first time. “I’m sorry about your girl. But you’ll never see her again. Next time you do, she’ll either be dead or she’ll be one of them.”
“You’re fucking crazy,” he said, filled with emotional turmoil that turned within him like a steel screw.
“Wish I was. But I’m not. Neither are you.” She looked at him with those lost eyes. “They rushed in our house. They killed my husband. They…they cut him in two. They took my daughter. I escaped.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She shrugged, almost bulky beneath her defensive armor. Nothing could touch her. Not now. Not with what she’d seen. “An hour ago…before I hid out here…a pack of them chased me. My daughter was running with them. My own fucking daughter, Louis. She had a knife in each hand. She was hunting me. Do you understand? She was hunting her own mother!”
Louis bled for her, but there was only so much blood in him. Right now his blood was reserved for Macy and Michelle. “I’m going out. I’m going to get her back.�
��
Louis scrambled over to the door and something let out a sharp, piercing ring. His cellphone. He fumbled it from his pocket.
“Hello?” he said, his voice tinny and weak. “H-hello?”
There was breathing on the other end, deep and drawn-out.
“Who is this?” he said. “Who the fuck is this?”
There was a muted giggling on the other end and then a voice. “Hello, hello, hello.”
An echo.
Michelle.
But not Michelle.
This was an imitation of Michelle’s voice. Flat where it should have been bright; hollow where it should have been full; scraping where it should have been smooth and silky. Like a recording slowed down or sped up. A synthetic voice, a deranged voice. Some insane woman had borrowed Michelle’s voice and this was the blasphemy she was doing with it.
“Michelle?” he said. “Baby? Baby? Is that you?”
More breathing. The sound of a tongue licking lips. “Hello.”
“Michelle, please-”
The line went dead.
And Louis went dead with it…
52
They had her now and Macy knew it just as she knew that whatever came next, whatever unimaginable horror that might be, it would be the end of her. She was still gagged. She imagined she would always be. They had dragged her into a sporting goods store and threw her on the floor. Some of them left, but others stayed to guard her. A boy and girl who were probably grade school age, their eyes shining in the semi-darkness, and a woman who wore a red-checked hunting shirt, unbuttoned, naked beyond that.
They all had the same eyes…red-rimmed, almost translucent like those of wolves, just staring with a fixed blackness at their world.
The new world they would inherit.
A man came in, carrying a club with a nail driven in the end of it. He set it aside, and helped the kids drag Macy into the back room, some kind of storeroom behind the counter. She fought against them and they kicked her, hit her. She punched the girl in the face and the girl went berserk. She made a hissing sound like a mad dog and proceeded to slap the hell out of Macy, her arms windmilling, the slaps landing hard and hurting one after the other on Macy’s face until she stopped moving. The boy grabbed an arm and bit it. The girl did the same with her leg. Not just a nip like the boy, but biting down hard until Macy screamed behind her gag.
She could feel the blood running down her bare thigh.
The woman came in now. By the light of a nightlight-which they all seemed just absolutely fascinated by-she looked up into the woman’s face. It was shrunken like the face of a corpse, deep-cut by wrinkles that looked almost like scars. Gray hair hung in her face like moss. She bent down, sniffed Macy’s throat, then licked her cheek.
Her breath was like tombs.
Grunting in her throat, she rallied the two children who began to strip Macy under the watchful gaze of the man.
Good God, more than just savages, animals, but a family of them: mother, father, two children.
They tore off Macy’s shorts, her shirt, ripping them right off her. And when they wouldn’t come, they used their knives to cut them free, slicing her in the process. Naked now save for bra and panties, they rolled her face-down and tied her hands behind her back. She was trussed like a swine ready for the roasting pit.
She cried out, fighting against her bonds. The girl grabbed her hair and rolled her over. Macy tried to shout behind the gag. The girl slapped her again. Then something hot and wet, almost burning sprayed in her face: urine. The boy was standing there, pissing on her. The stink was rank, gagging. Not normal human urine at all…this was wild with a sharp-smelling musk to it.
Then, as the woman watched over her, the children joined the man.
She heard them wrestling with something, something heavy. They were grunting and puffing, making snarling sounds in their throats from time to time. She could hear the man straining. A pounding noise. Rap, rap, rap-rap-rap. Macy did not want to know what they were doing…but she craned her head and looked. Needing to see.
That scream again, held in check by the awful-tasting gag in her mouth.
By the glow of the nightlight and the fading illumination coming in from the street, she saw…oh dear God…she saw She saw a corpse hung by its feet.
She did not know who it was and it was really too dim by that point to see, but it was the corpse of a woman. Oh, how meticulous and wicked were they. They had nailed the feet right to a beam overhead. That was the pounding she heard. As the man hoisted the woman up, the children nailed her feet by standing on crates. Her arms were still swinging back and forth from it. It was the corpse of a middle-aged woman, heavy in the breast, bunched with fat at the belly and hips. There was a glistening scar across her abdomen probably from an old C-section. Her flesh was impossibly white, almost luminous in the nightlight that buzzed on and on. The crown of her head and hair were clotted with blood that looked black.
There was a shattering noise out in the store like a case had been broken into and the man came back. He threw something on the floor: knives. He’d been in a knife case. Dozens of hunting knifes, blades sliver and razor-sharp gleaming on the floor.
They were going to slaughter her like a steer.
Like autumn’s first kill Taking a handful of the dead woman’s hair, he yanked her head up and stabbed a hunting knife with a seven-inch blade right into her throat, sawing and sawing as blood splashed down his arms and over his chest. It sounded like the noise of sawing the lid off a Halloween pumpkin: meaty, muscled. He sawed, then jerked her head to the side with cracking motion, then pulled it right off and tossed it.
He went down on his knees and drank from the flow. The children fought their way in, drinking, slurping, sucking at the stump. The woman knocked them aside and lapped at the stream of blood, smacking her lips appreciatively.
The boy untied the gag and pulled it from Macy’s mouth. She dared not scream. He studied her face. He snapped at her with his teeth and giggled when she jerked in fear.
Then the girl cupped her hands, filling them with blood.
She crouched by Macy, careful not to spill the nectar.
“Here,” she said in a grating voice. “Here, here, here…”
She opened her hands and let the blood splatter over Macy’s mouth, rubbing her bloody hands all over her face and lips so that she got a good taste of it. “Good,” the girl said. “Good.”
Macy screamed, her face red and glistening. She thrashed and screamed, turned her head and vomited.
The man used his knife, cutting shanks of meat free from the dead woman’s thighs and belly. The family fed upon them, chewing and snapping and tearing, eating it raw and bloody like tigers in the jungle. Cutting free a slab of meat from between the woman’s leg, probably her vagina, he handed it to the woman. She sniffed it, licked it, then she stuffed it into her mouth whole, chewing it slowly. She kept taking it out, working it with her fingers, then stuffing it back in and chewing it some more.
And in Macy’s mind a voice was screaming: she’s not eating it! She’s not eating it at all…she’s tenderizing it, chewing it to a soft fleshy mush.
And that’s exactly what she was doing.
She went down on her hands and knees, breathing hard, her face glossy with blood, the thin juice of what she had been chewing upon smeared on her lips. She spit it into her hand along with a snotty tangle of saliva. She held it out, shaking it at Macy, grunting deep in her throat with an almost bleating sort of sound. The others went down on all fours with her.
Then together, like beasts of the field lowing in the grass, they crept in closer, blood-drenched ghouls with huge black eyes, their teeth white and shining, drool falling from their mouths.
They moved in closer…and closer.
Macy screamed because she knew.
While the children and the man took hold of her, the woman forced her jaws open. She stuck the handle of a knife in her mouth and pried them open. Then she brought the thin
g she had been chewing on closer, forcing it into Macy’s shrieking mouth…
53
When Louis stepped out of Shelly’s Cafe, the streets were empty.
Oh, they were out there, somewhere, but he could not see them. He could feel them, though, gathered thickly in the spreading shadows like locusts in a farmer’s field. Just as destructive, just as lethal, just as patient. He thought he could even smell them-their sweaty bodies and sour breath and bloody hands, the ripe stink of death hovering over them.
As he stepped out into the fading sunlight, the precarious uneven illumination of twilight, he could certainly feel their eyes on him. It was very unsettling. Like being some beast of the field ringed in by the hungry eyes of predators. They were watching him, gauging him, seeing what kind of defense he could put up and how easy they could take him down. He felt like a suckling pig in a pen surrounded by ravenous wolves. He actually thought he could smell their hot breath and drool.
Doris was behind him and she felt it, too. She kept the shotgun in both fists. She would kill anything that moved. There was no doubt of it. “We better find somewhere safe. And fast. I don’t think we have much time.”
Louis was terrified.
There was no way around that.
He was utterly terrified and instinct told him to run, to get the hell out, but he wasn’t going to do that. He knew he was in terrible danger. But what worried him most was Macy. So he would not run. As he stepped out onto the sidewalk, the cop’s 9mm in his hand, he did everything he could to look calm and in charge, even if he was lights years beyond these things. He was a man and he was going to act like one. Maybe they’d kill him, but he wouldn’t make it easy. He wouldn’t give them the pleasure of his fear.
Confidence.
Just a word any other time, but suddenly Louis seemed to understand what it meant. How it was a tool you used. If you panicked and bolted, those people out there would come running and howling, smelling his fear like wild dogs and sensing an easy kill. But if he was confident, they’d be cautious. They were playing mind games on him and now he would play the same game.