by Max Wilde
Skye dipped her head, fighting back some old squeamishness and took the thing in her mouth, clamping her jaws around it, and tore it free with one toss of her head. She sat up with it dangling like an eel from her teeth, a geyser of blood spewing high and thick from the gash between his legs.
She spat the bloody tube into her hand and forced Drum’s mouth open, removed the boxer shorts and stuffed his penis inside, holding his jawbone closed. He gagged and retched, and when he passed out Skye didn’t try to revive him.
She wanted to feed alone and unobserved.
39
Gene stood at his uncle’s deathbed staring down into the face of a stranger, regretting that he had come here. In the day since he’d last seen Milt Lavender the old man seemed to have edged closer to death. His sunken mouth gaped on a few remaining yellow molars, false teeth submerged in a glass beside his bed, the pink plastic gums and nicotine stained enamel magnified to cartoonish proportions by the water.
There was no rambling monologue now, just the ragged suck of tired lungs.
Lavender’s eyes were open but if they saw anything it was not Gene, who had brought the selfish hope of finding some solace when he should have taken his boy home and calmed him and told him the lies necessary to send him peacefully to sleep. Instead Timmy lay on a sofa in the parlor, restless, troubled by dreams, his muffled cries reaching Gene through the wall.
The black-clothed nurse haunted the doorway, as mute as before, her eyes willing Gene to go. As he turned to leave his cell phone warbled in his pocket. He was tempted send it to voice mail, fearful of hearing some barely coherent account of the carnage at Drum’s house. But he answered it, the woman clucking low in her throat as he edged past her into the passageway.
“Martindale.”
“Chief Deputy, this is Detective Vern Winslow from the state police.”
“Yes?”
“Am I correct in saying you had some trouble with a Junior Cotton round five years ago?”
“Some trouble, yes,” Gene said, a low dread taking hold of him.
“Be advised that Cotton has escaped from the facility where he was incarcerated and is, as yet, unapprehended.”
Gene found himself standing in the doorway to the parlor, staring at Timmy lying on the sofa beneath a lamp with an orange vellum shade.
“Chief Deputy?”
“I’m here,” Gene said, and forced himself to ask the obvious questions.
Heard about the murder of an orderly. The abduction of a nurse. Heard the cop voice an opinion that Cotton was heading north, out of state. An opinion unsupported by fact.
Gene thanked the detective, pocketed his phone and lifted Timmy from the sofa, carrying him out to the Jeep, trying to quell the premonition that Junior Cotton would not head north. That he would be traveling south.
Coming here.
40
Junior Cotton awoke disorientated, with no tally in his head of the lost years, months, days, minutes and seconds. And, for a disturbingly long while, with no idea where he was.
A rectangle of piss-yellow sunlight fell hard through a broken window and stretched across a flaking wall to warm the toes of his left foot that rested on the rim of a discolored tub, the enamel worn away in piebald patches.
He lay on his back in the tub, a pair of legs—female, judging by the varnished toenails—somehow entwined with his. If not for the blood, he would have been able to imagine a bathroom tryst right out of a one of the cheesy rom-coms he and his mama used to love, lying on a motel bed after a long day of slaying, chortling at these absurd mating rituals, so conventional and dull compared with what the two of them had shared.
It was only when Junior turned—feeling the waterbed undulation of viscera beneath his back—and stared into the bloodless face of the nurse, that the last day was returned to him in a frenetic montage: slicing Alfonso’s throat, abducting and killing the woman and bathing in her blood and entrails.
He sat up, the gore making kissy sounds. As he levered himself from the bathtub he was pleased to note that his strength was returning. The clothes he’d stolen from the washing line lay in the dust, but he couldn’t dress and leave looking like a refugee from some butcher’s theater.
Knowing it was useless, he opened one of the faucets, the top spinning in his hand. The pipes moaned and rattled but the spout remained dry.
Naked, Junior went through to the kitchen, using the pimpled walls for support, crossed to the splintered back door and stared out past the little car at the flat brown nothingness. A shine caught his eye and he saw the broken blades of a windmill lying in the dust. The walls of the cement dam beneath the windmill had cracked and crumbled, nothing but weeds and sand where there once was water.
Turning, he searched the torn and dusty closets. A bloated tin of peaches. A slice of bread with a beard of mold. A dead rat cocooned by decomposition. Then, hidden beneath a sack of empty liquor bottles, he saw a jerrycan, rusted and dented. He shook it and liquid sloshed inside. Junior battled with the screw top, slumping with exhaustion by the time it finally broke free of a band of rust. He caught his breath and sniffed the contents, pulling his nose back. Water, okay, but so stagnant it stank like a swamp.
Scrounging beneath the sink he found a red plastic bucket with no handle. He tipped the jerrycan and filled the bucket, a meniscus of slime floating on top of the water like an oil slick.
Returning to the door he reached down past the broken step and scraped up a mound of dirt, carrying it back into the kitchen, where he released it in a little pyramid. He wet his hands in the bucket, took some of the grit as a scouring agent and proceeded to work at the blood on his skin. It hurt, but the pain was cleansing, clearing the fog from his mind. He scrubbed at his face, beard and hair, the bucket turning red.
He emptied the bloody water out the door and filled the bucket again. No need for the sand this time and within minutes his skin was pink and as clean as it was going to get. He stank like he’d been wrestling alligators, but there was nothing to be done about that.
Junior rested as until his hammering heart was stilled, then he dressed and went out to the car. The keys still dangled from the ignition and the woman’s purse lay on the rear seat. Rummaging through it he found a couple of ten dollar bills and some change. He took the money, tossed the purse and lowered himself into the car, exhausted again, his foot shaking as it felt for the gas pedal.
You can do this, Junior. You can do this.
He started the car, fed too much gas and stalled the engine. He started it again, willing his foot to obey him and pulled away slowly, bumping toward the fallen gates. He searched for tell-tale dust clouds but the gravel road was empty, pointing straight and true toward the city.
41
Skye rested her head against the window of the bus, the vibration lulling her into something close to sleep, the sand and rock passing in a featureless smear.
When she’d arrived at the bus station that morning she’d seen Gene’s cruiser parked across the road, the early sun firing off his sunglasses as he sat behind the wheel, unmoving, watching her as she loaded her single suitcase into the cargo hold of the coach.
She saw a waving hand and realized that Timmy sat beside Gene, thinking her brother had softened enough to bring the boy to say goodbye. But Gene had started the cruiser and driven away as the bus driver called the passengers to board, Skye waving at the retreating patrol car, fighting back tears.
Fighting tears again now, no longer armored by The Other as the bus rumbled along toward the city. Skye knew she couldn’t afford this, that she had to be strong. So she closed her eyes and folded her hands over her belly still filled with Dellbert Drum, and tried to take her mind into a place of emptiness.
No, not quiet empty.
Cautiously, she allowed a very old memory to rise, like a bubble breaking the surface of a dark, still pond. A memory clear as cut glass: the moment she killed the man she’d thought of as her father, her nails and teeth taking his head from hi
s shoulders. She relived exactly how it had felt to be that two-year-old, a mixture of child and something so old it was beyond calibration.
How when the awful power had leaked from her and she was left as just a small girl again, she’d erased all recollection of that night. Repeated to herself Gene’s story of the bad men appearing from the dark, grooving it into her mind so that it became truth.
But memories lying deep in her had stirred and swum through her unconscious when she slept, and her dreams were a fever of body parts and blood. Dreams so terrifying that she prayed sometimes to be released into death to escape them.
It wasn’t until she was thirteen, when she met the man named Leonard and saw the book that had made those dreams real, that she found some imperfect framework in which to place the mosaic of nightmare visions.
The cramped little bookstore had just appeared one day in a backstreet in town, the owner a gangly ageless man with the whitest skin Skye had ever seen. He’d stared at her blankly from behind the counter as she slouched in, his fingers tapping along in time to dirge-like electronic music
She learned later that Leonard was from the city, come back to bear witness to the last, agonizing months of his mother’s life. He ignored Skye each time she visited the shop, drawn by books on the occult and Aleister Crowley and the Freemasons. She bought none of them, standing by the shelves flicking through their dusty pages, looking for something she never quite managed to find.
Then one day Leonard reached beneath the counter and withdrew a large book of photographs.
“You may enjoy this,” he said in an almost foreign voice. “But don’t let your mommy and daddy see it.”
Skye looked at the price—fifteen dollars—and was handing it back when he said, “It’s a gift, little girl. Run along now.”
She put the book in her backpack and went home. She had the house to herself, Gene at work, Timmy at school. She sat on her bed and flipped open the book of photographs and gasped. Slammed the book shut. Closed her eyes. Felt something twitch and itch, so deep down in her that it almost wasn’t there.
She opened her eyes and risked another look. Beautiful black and white photographs the likes of which she had seen only in her dreams. She was looking at dismembered corpses with the body parts lovingly arranged in bizarre compositions with fruit and flowers. Tattered meat. Torn genitals. Grimacing heads atop torsos they didn’t match—torsos leaking organs from post-mortem incisions.
The book had been a portal to another realm for Skye. It had terrified her, but also reassured her. Some strange order and beauty emerging from the carnage and atrocity.
One day Gene was sitting waiting for her when she got back from school, his face set in hard lines, the book lying on the coffee table beside his chair.
“Where did you get this?” he asked, tapping the cover.
“I found it.”
“Found it where?”
“On a bus seat.”
His lawman’s eyes bounced her lies right back at her. “This is pornography,” he said.
“It’s art,” she said.
“It’s the work of a pervert. I see things like this everyday. Car wrecks. Homicides. Suicides. It’s my job to ensure that the dead are treated with respect and dignity, not made the subject of some freak show. You understand this man bribed morgue officials across the border to be allowed to do this sick thing?”
She nodded. She had read as much in the foreword.
“I will not have this in my house. Am I clear?”
“Yes,” she said.
He took the book and went out to his cruiser. A few days later when she passed Leonard’s bookstore it was shuttered and locked. She never saw Leonard again. The books disappeared and in time a dog parlor moved in.
She’d found the photographs, of course, and many more like them on the internet. Surfing at night when Gene was on duty or asleep, not daring to save the images to her hard drive lest her brother discover them. Sitting staring at the flickering monitor, absorbing the images of death, a soundtrack of Joy Division’s manic depressive anthems throbbing in her headphones. Reaching desperately for some understanding that always eluded her.
So, last night at Drum’s house, it hadn’t surprised Skye that she’d chosen to turn his death into a performance. That the part of her that had remained intact within The Other had needed the distancing properties of artifice to allow her to be present, participate in and—yes—to enjoy what she did.
And she had enjoyed it. She felt satisfied now, falling asleep on the gently rocking bus, no moral ambiguities clouding her mind. Drum had deserved what he’d got.
Timmy’s screams woke her and before her eyes were open she was standing, feeling the surge of power as The Other rose within her, her hands gripping the top of the seat in front, brushing the lacquered hair of a woman with a majestic black beehive.
She searched the bus, staring into the faces of weathered old-timers, fat women and their children, servicemen with shorn hair and unformed jaw lines.
Just a dream, Skye, just a dream.
She was about to lower herself to her seat, willing the heat of The Other from her blood, when she was struck by an image so vivid that it had her running down the aisle of the bus, shouting for the driver to stop.
She saw Timmy, gagged and bound, the velvet Jesus poised over him with a scalpel, his wavy hair brushing the boy’s bare skin as he brought the blade to Timmy’s throat.
42
Junior Cotton, driving the little green car with Zen-like concentration, kept to the dirt roads skirting the city, the skyline a mirage through the heat of the desert. Junior felt not even a bead of moisture on his body despite the lack of A/C in the car. He was dehydrated and a sharp ache in his abdomen told him he needed food.
He’d drunk the nurse’s blood last night in the bathtub, but the years on semi-liquid swill at the facility had prevented him from cramming a good chunk of her flesh into his mouth and chewing through the gristle and fat and veins and arteries the way his mama had showed him.
“Oh we’re dining in style, Junior,” she would say, looking up at him with her teeth stained red as she ate her fill of one of their countless victims.
When she was done she would allow herself a ladylike belch—covering her mouth with a perfectly manicured hand—and then she would clean her face with a scented wet wipe and fix her lipstick.
Now Junior did feel moisture: a lone tear welled up in his left eye and trickled down his cheek. Before the water was lost in his beard he captured it on his forefinger and brought it to his mouth, the salinity sharp on his tongue.
He was parched and close to fainting with exhaustion and hunger.
When he lost sight of the city in the rearview mirror Junior saw an asphalt road running parallel to the gravel one he was traveling on. The old highway heading northward, toward the state line, the small towns strung on it like charms on a bracelet, left for dead by the interstate.
Junior came to a T-junction, made sure there was no traffic and turned onto the paved road, its surface a lunar landscape of potholes and cracks. Not far along the highway an anonymous beige car was parked on the shoulder, in the scant shade of a row of dusty cottonwoods. Both doors were flung wide—another poor fool without A/C—and he could see the shape of a person in the tipped-back passenger seat.
Instinct took over as Junior slowed the little car and brought it to a stop just beyond the brown sedan. He sat a while, watching the car in the mirror, but the shape in the passenger seat didn’t move.
Junior clicked off the nurse’s car and opened the door, something requiring enormous effort, leaving him panting. Getting out was almost beyond him and he clung to the griddle-hot roof until his hands were scalded and he had to let go.
He took a step forward, teetered. Took another step. Felt his teeth biting his lip. Somehow he covered the distance between the two cars, grabbing hold of the grille of the sedan—a Chevrolet, he saw—its metal shaded enough by the trees for him to lean and catch
his breath.
“Car wreck?”
The voice coming from inside the Chevrolet got Junior turning his head as a man popped up above the dashboard, the seat coming to its upright position.
“I beg your pardon, sir?” he said, falling back on the perfect manners his mother had demanded of him, feeling the scalpel up against his pulse.
“Young fellow like you ain’t likely to be the victim of a stroke, so I’m thinking an accident of some description.”
Junior nodded. “Twenty car pile-up on a highway out west. There was a crop fire and visibility was down to zero. I was one of the lucky ones.”
“Well, I applaud you, friend, getting back on the horse. Takes guts.”
The man was in his sixties, with dry graying hair and a florid face. He lifted himself from the car, groaning, gut straining at the buttons of his short-sleeved wash-and-wear shirt. He wore a dark tie and suit pants. Junior saw a jacket hanging from a hook in the rear of the car. A salesman, he was certain. Not a prosperous one.
“So friend, where you headed?”
“New Jericho,” Junior said. No place he’d ever heard of.
“Can’t say I know it.”
“Pity. I’m lost and I thought you could help me.”
“That little moon buggy don’t have no GPS?” The man was pointing at the green car and it took Junior a moment to understand.
“On the fritz,” Junior said, using one of the Eisenhower-era expressions his mother had delighted in.
“Now ain’t that the worst? Like my darned A/C.”
“I, wonder, sir, if—?” Junior said.
A pink hand was lifted palm out, halting his words. “Weed’s the name, son. Hoagland Weed.”
“Mr. Weed, I couldn’t trouble you for a drink of water could I?”
“My supplies don’t run to water, but I could let you have a Pepsi-Cola. How does that sound?”
“Like heaven.”