Vile Blood

by Max Wilde

  Table of Contents

  Vile Blood

  About the author

  Copyright

  Vile Blood

  A novel

  Roger Smith

  writing as

  Max Wilde

  “What does it matter if, by chance, a little vile blood be spilled?”

  Jean Racine

  “Each individual has manifold shadows, all of which resemble him,

  and from time to time have equal claim to be the man himself.”

  Søren Kierkegaard

  1

  The night the four men came to rape Skye it wasn’t them she feared, it was the dark thing deep inside herself. As their big old car with its uneven, rumbling engine—headlights poking yellow fingers through the dust—chased her down the empty road and out into the desert, she ran fighting for air knowing all the while it was hopeless, even before she tripped and fell to the sand.

  When they stood up out of the car the men threw long shadows on the dirt as they surrounded her and Skye knew what she had spent most of her seventeen years avoiding was here.

  She tried to talk herself into a calm space: these are just men, no matter what they do to you. But her heart raced like a crazy thing, hammering at her breastbone, and she felt her muscles and her limbs expand with a half-remembered and unwanted strength. And her fear turned to terror as something stirred and twitched low in her gut.

  It’s just your sympathetic nervous system kicking in, she told herself, sinking to her knees, flashing back to her tenth grade teacher, fat, fussy Mr. Andrews, squealing chalk across the blackboard, droning on about how the fight or flight mechanism had allowed humankind to survive when other species had disappeared.

  How nerve terminals in the heart tissue spewed noradrenaline (honest-to-god remembering this as the men encircled her) how the heart raced, pumping more oxygen, glucose and energy—Mr. Andrews’s chalk striking the blackboard like a bird tapping at a window pane—saying this operation was centered in the oldest part of our brain, the reptilian brain, beyond our conscious control.

  As they closed in, their man-stink of old sweat, cigarettes and something acrid and chemical filling her nostrils, The Other lurched and swelled, the twin that had lain sleeping for years, stirred and woken by this primitive self-protective reflex.

  One man grabbed at her hair and when she crouched lower, wrapping herself with her arms, he laughed in the foolish belief it was he who terrified her, when she was vainly trying to push the thing down, to contain it inside herself. Knowing that this human threat must be endured, that she must keep The Other quiet, the way she had these last fifteen years since that last, terrible event, living a life of near invisibility and self-deprivation, insulating herself from anything that could rouse the darkness within.

  Too late.

  She felt a rupture, a tearing, and a surge of power swept her fear away, swept away the timid, shy, wouldn’t-say-boo-to-a-goose Skye too, and something else took control. Her racing heart slowed to a steady, rhythmic drumming and she felt her skeleton shapeshift, her bones hardening, her muscles and tendons cording and coiling with power, the seams of her clothes stretched to tearing.

  When the short man, with his hair gelled and tousled like he was in a boy band, slapped Skye’s glasses from her face, her vision didn’t blur—it sharpened. The night was brighter and she could see the blackheads on his nose and the craters of acne scars under his cheekbones. Her other senses were more alert now, too, and when the man crushed her glasses under his pointy leather shoe, she heard each distinct crack of the plastic frame and crunch of broken glass and the whisper of the sand as it settled, like palms rubbed softly together.

  She heard the hearts of the men, heard their blood rushing through their veins, and she smelled it, her nostrils dilating as she drew in the scent, rich and metallic, coursing through the raw, red heat of their flesh.

  And then there was no more fear, just hunger as The Other rose from the sand, ready to feed.

  2

  When the beam of Chief Deputy Sheriff Gene Martindale’s flashlight traced the loop of large intestine dangling like strange fruit from the cottonwood, he understood that he was dealing with something altogether darker than the usual procession of drunken wife beaters, scofflaws and minor drug offenders that filled his days.

  Gene’s light skidded down the tree and across the sand, first overrunning, then backing up and finding the human head that lay in the red dirt near the ruins of the roadhouse. He probed the dark, revealing more body parts strewn across the gravel and the low brush: heads, arms, feet, viscera tumbled and uncontained. He did a quick tally and reckoned that reassembled these parts would constitute three men or more, trying to keep at bay a sudden dread that threatened to undo him.

  Gene was a lean, spare man, looking older than thirty. Ascetic. No flesh on his bones. The grooved lines in his face a mirror of the knife-edge creases in the uniform he awoke before dawn each day to iron.

  “You venture in any deeper than this?” he asked Deputy Bobby Heck, who had stumbled upon this unholy mess.

  “Nossir.” Heck sounded like he’d lost his dinner and was working on losing his desert.

  “Okay Bobby, tell it to me clear now.”

  “I came on from a domestic situation at Double Heart, old man Pruitt taken a whip again to his woman, and I saw that vehicle parked in the sand.” He pointed at the dusty muscle car pinned in the beams of his cruiser, V8 still idling low and ragged, exhaust rattling, both doors gaping. “When I went lookin’ I found all this.”

  “And you saw nobody on the road?”

  “Nobody and nothin’.”

  Gene walked over to the car. A Dodge Charger—’68 he reckoned—like the one that had chased Steve McQueen’s Mustang through San Francisco in that old movie.

  “You search this vehicle?”

  “Nossir. I thought I’d wait on you.”

  Gene grunted and handed his flashlight to Heck while he drew a pair of surgical gloves from his uniform pocket and rolled them on, flexing his fingers. He reclaimed his light and shone it at the driver’s seat of the Charger that was tipped forward, kissing the steering wheel. Men in front and in the rear. Three men. At least.

  “Okay, Bobby, get on back to your unit and call in the rest of the boys. I want the perimeter sealed until I can get the state police, the DEA and the whole goddam circus down here.”

  “Reckon this here’s drug related?”

  “What the hell else can it be?”

  Heck nodded and sloped off toward his cruiser. Gene shone his beam on the steering column of the Dodge, a single key in the ignition, a plastic death’s head dangling from a chain looped through the eye of the key. He killed the engine, careful not to smudge prints on the metal.

  He bent low and ran the light over the car interior. The ashtray filled to overflowing with cigarette butts. A half-empty bottle of Jack wedged between the front seats. A litter of junk food wrappers on the floor. Something in the rear winked in the beam, and he saw a meth pipe lying on the seat, a spill of ash on the leather.

  Gene probed between the front and rear and found a sawed-off shotgun halfway under the passenger seat. He lifted it by the trigger guard and sniffed the barrel. It hadn’t been fired recently. He set it down where he found it and backed out of the car, took the key from the ignition and went round to the trunk.

  Heck joined him. “The boys are comin’.”

  Gene nodded and slid the key into the lock of the trunk. He handed his flashlight to Heck, unclipped his holster and drew his Glock. He could hear the wash of Heck’s breath as he turned the key, felt it click, and slowly lifted the lid with his left hand, pointing his automatic with his right. The trunk contained a spare wheel, a carjack and cou
ple of tools, and a mess of empty booze bottles and food wrappers.

  Nothing ready to fly at his throat. And no sweating bricks of heroin or powder cocaine.

  It seemed unlikely that these men had been robbed of a cargo of narcotics, and when they’d stepped from the car they’d had no sense of peril, else they wouldn’t have left the sawed-off lying useless in the rear. So either they’d known their killers, or underestimated them.

  Or it.

  “Wait here,” Gene said.

  He walked a few paces, playing his flashlight over the litter of torn flesh strewn across the dirt and the brush and the agave. Atrocities like this may be commonplace in the lawless bi-national cities where the drug cartels enacted their dark bits of theater on both sides of the border, but it had no place here, in his remote and under-populated county.

  So it was good and right that he call in the state police, since the county sheriff’s department had none of the resources that a crime like this demanded. But something nagged at him: from what he’d seen, through the blood and gore, the victims were white, not the tattooed brown men who were the frequent victims of warring cartels. And they had been dismembered with a savagery that was almost bestial, a severed leg lying close to him, femur jutting through the skin, showed signs of having been gnawed on.

  Eugene Martindale had trained his mind away from wild imaginings—he’d had to—but the hell before him triggered unsought recollections.

  These musings were ended by the roar and buck of a Ford Expedition driven hard across the desert, with little regard for its suspension or his crime scene. It slid to a halt in curtain of dust, its spotlights blinding Gene and turning the killing ground to day.

  Gene stepped out of the path of the lights and watched Sheriff Dellbert Drum unfold himself from the Ford. A massive man, closer to seven foot than six, his uniform specially tailored to hold his frame.

  “Chief Deputy,” Drum said.

  “Sheriff.”

  “Got yourself one god-awful mess here, son.”

  Gene didn’t answer, turning his back on the giant. In the hard light he saw another head and revisited his original estimation. Four men, then, dismembered.

  “I’m right in saying it’s your mess, ain’t I? By the merest whisker?” Drum said, lighting a cheroot black as a stick of licorice.

  Gene nodded. The invisible boundary that separated his county from Drum’s lay just beyond this butchery. It was his mess, okay, due to century-old tampering with the county line.

  On a map it looked as if that line, traveling straight as a wire down from the north, had encountered an obstacle that sent it veering right where it corrected itself and looped back to continue its linear journey, and plumb in the middle of that little arc were the remains of the roadhouse built many years before the lines were drawn, and belonging by rights to the neighboring county—which sometime in the early twentieth century had fallen under the stewardship of men who favored the Bible over booze and loose women. No place, then, for the roadhouse, with its bathtub whiskey and dusky whores.

  Gene’s county, in those far off days, had taken a more lenient view of life, its elders more interested in coin than enforcing the law. So money had changed hands, the line had been shifted, and the roadhouse had found itself safe from the temperance league across the way.

  There had been a reversal over time and now it was Gene’s county, under the hand of Sheriff Milt Lavender—who had served more terms than many could remember and lay this moment on his death bed—that was a symbol of all that was righteous, while across the line, in his empire of dirt, Drum provided a haven for the venal and corrupt—but taxed them heavily for his indulgence.

  Gene was not a man to shirk his duty, but right here and now he would have gladly handed this unholy mess over to Dellbert Drum and turned his cruiser back toward town and tried to forget this and the toxic memories it was stirring up.

  “Reckon this here foot stumbled over the line,” Drum said, staring down into the dry creek that had once formed a natural boundary. He used his ostrich skin boot to edge a bare foot, severed above the ankle, across the imaginary line. “There now. It’ll be more content over here with its kin.”

  His housekeeping done, Drum came and stood beside Gene. “This remind you of anything, son?”

  “Only the news footage of the cartels.”

  “I was thinking of something a little closer to home.”

  Gene tilted his head and looked him in the eye, trying not to go back fifteen years to when he was just a boy, and Drum was a deputy in this county, working under Lavender, before he got ambitions. Tried not to see Drum and Lavender standing in the nightmare that was the living room of his parents’ house. His house now. Shut the memory down fast.

  “No,” Gene said, his voice even.

  Drum laughed, taking a long drag on his cheroot, blue smoke boiling around his head.

  “That a fact?”

  Gene walked away from Drum, his eyes on the crime scene, afraid that his face would betray him. He stood staring into the night, working hard at keeping his imagination from slipping its leash.

  “Now you remember me to your little sister, you hear?” Drum said as he climbed up into the Expedition.

  But Gene didn’t hear him, or hear the Ford grind into motion, or see the spotlights dim as the car swung back toward the road, he saw his foundling sister, or the thing that had possessed her, breaking open their father’s breastbone, her toddler’s face ancient and demonic as she fed on his heart.

  3

  When Skye Martindale came back into herself she was standing on the oil-stained bricks outside the garage, right where Gene always parked his cruiser at the end of his shift. She had no recollection of what had happened and when she saw the blood on her arms and hands she guessed that she had been in an accident—a car wreck, maybe?—and was suffering from shock.

  She was astonished at how profuse the blood was, matting her hair, covering her face—caked thick around her mouth, and even bitter and muddy on her tongue—and molding her torn clothes to her body. The blood was drying, stretching on her skin as she moved her limbs. And then the first flashback came to her, and she understood that none of this blood was hers.

  Unbidden more flashbacks rocked Skye and threatened to take her knees from under her. A big car. Four men surrounding her. And then what happened when she was both herself and something else entirely.

  The flicker of the TV screen though the living room window caught her eye and she saw Maria, the babysitter, staring at her in slack-jawed horror. Then she realized that the woman was slumped low on the cushions of the sofa, her jaw unhinged by sleep.

  Move your ass, girl, Skye told herself, sneaking a reflex glance up at Timmy’s room. She thought she saw the twitch of a curtain. Just the wind picking up, she whispered, gathering to her what bits of torn reality she could find on the breeze coming in hot across the desert.

  The boy awoke hearing his mama call his name.

  “Timmy,” she said, “Tim-mee!”

  He opened his eyes and saw her pretty face and she was right there with him so he reached out his hand to her. Then he couldn’t see her face no more, she was just gone.

  Timmy felt tears and a choking in his throat and he said out loud, “You must be a big boy, now Timmy. For your daddy.”

  And he lay back and he heard the voices on the TV downstairs and guessed that was what woke him.

  He knew he had to go and make a pee now—not wet the bed like he had for the longest time after his mommy went away—and he got up and padded toward the door, but something drew him to the window and when he peeked through the gap in the curtain the Creepshow kicked in and what he saw made him jump back and cover his eyes, too scared to scream, feeling the warm pee run down his legs and puddle on the floor.

  He’d seen just a flash—it always began that way, the Creepshow, a quick bright flash, colors always kinda sickly and way too bright—of a monster standing in the yard, underneath the basketball hoop.
A monster with a falling-off face and arms too long.

  Timmy forced the Creepshow out of his head and peeked through the drapes a second time. It was only Skye standing there and what the red was on her Timmy couldn’t say. She looked up at the window and Timmy ducked down real quick. He didn’t want her to see him wetting himself like a little baby so he pulled off his pj pants and used them to wipe the pee from the floor.

  Then he made them into a ball and found a plastic bag filled with action heroes and dumped the figures and put his pants in the bag and shoved it deep under the bed. He got back beneath the covers, hiding his head with the comforter when he heard the front door open, real quiet, and click closed.

  Skye eased her way into the house, slipping off her Nikes so she didn’t track blood onto the rug. Maria didn’t waken, her face awash with the flicker of the tube. Skye snuck past her and up the stairs, risking a quick look into Timmy’s room, backing out when she saw his still form under the bedclothes.

  She went into the bathroom and locked the door. Stared at the brown tiles patterned with small pink blossoms before she found the courage to turn to her right, like a soldier on a parade ground, and look into the big mirror above the basin. It took all her willpower not to scream. She was a figure from a slasher flick, her hair, her face, her clothes stained red with gore.

  Skye crumpled to the tiles and got her face to the toilet just in time to empty the contents of her gut into the bowl. She was shaking, and the stink of the blood and the taste of it on her tongue—along with the rich, ripe tang of human flesh—got her gagging again.

  When she was done she stripped off her jeans and her torn T-shirt and shoved them up into a laundry bag. Her bra and panties were free of blood, but she was a lawman’s sister and she knew well enough that they, too, had to disappear. And her watch, also, with its stained and soiled strap. Through the splatters of blood dried on the watch glass, Skye saw it was after one in the morning. She had lost more than an hour.