Vile Blood

by Max Wilde

  One by one he ate the slices of his mama’s heart, chewing through the rubbery flesh, not gagging once, chewing and ripping and biting and swallowing until it was gone.

  As the last mouthful slid down his throat he saw his mother a few years before in a fine restaurant in city of rare sophistication, heard her saying, “There’s something I need you to promise me, Junior.”

  “What Mama?”

  “If I go first, swear to me you’ll eat my heart so I’ll live on in you forever.”

  “I swear,” he’d said, so in love as he mooned at her through the candle flame. “And if I go first?”

  “Oh, I’ll do the same, darling boy,” she’d said, swallowing oysters with French champagne, laughing, eyes aglitter as they met his.

  He lay a while in the empty tub, allowing the strength of Mama to fill him, then he scrubbed away the pentagram and filled the tub with warm water and washed himself clean, polishing the blade of the knife until it shone.

  There was nothing for it but to wear the clothes from the day before. He dressed, left the room and caught the first bus out of town.

  And so began Junior Cotton’s solo pilgrimage, his youth an asset as he continued the work he had learned so well. A few years later—sensing that he needed to hide his tracks for a spell—he found Tincup and his flock and joined them, drifting south as the fake man of God was hounded from county to county, poured to the very bottom of the land and left among the dregs.

  Junior’s pilgrimage had ended right here, in sight of the flickering star that he saw when he sat up in the Chevrolet and pushed back the cap and removed his sunglasses.

  The girl turned the car off the road and bumped across the forecourt of the old gas station, the tires drumming on the cracks in the concrete.

  “I guess we’re here,” she said.

  Junior unfolded himself, inch by painful inch, and made his way to the trunk. Della opened it and shone the beam of the flashlight onto the boy curled up inside like a worm.

  “Can you carry him?” Junior asked.

  “Sure I can,” she said. “I’ve toted heavier than this.”

  And to prove it she reached into the trunk and hefted the unconscious child out, walking over to the pumps. Junior lit her way with the flashlight and she lowered the boy to the concrete beside the manhole cover.

  “You wait here now,” she said, taking the flashlight and heading into the gas station.

  Della returned with a wooden ladder which she slid down into the tank until the feet clanged against metal. She checked the ladder for stability, tested the first rung and found that it supported her weight, and disappeared downward like a submariner.

  Her voice came up to Junior, metallic, echoing. “Kinda snug down here.”

  She reappeared and lifted the boy over her shoulder and descended. Junior very slowly, very carefully, followed her, the flashlight gripped in his teeth.

  The tank was circular and he had to bend his knees, bracing his feet against the curve of the metal. The vat was empty but stank of gasoline and Junior’s eyes burned and his sneeze echoed like an explosion.

  “Well lookee here,” Della said.

  The child, lying on the floor, whimpered and his fingers clenched and his foot moved.

  “Daddy,” he said, wide eyes staring into Junior’s.

  “Oh, Daddy’s gonna come for you, dear heart,” Junior said, crouching down and ruffling the boy’s sandy locks. “Don’t you fret now.”

  The scalpel was in his hand and he laid the blade on the boy’s Adam’s apple, jabbing him just hard enough to bring pain to those blue eyes, almost surrendering to the urge to cut the child’s throat. Tempting. Very tempting. But slower would be oh so much sweeter.

  He hauled himself to his feet. “Tie it up,” he said and went back up the ladder like a broken thing.

  51

  Handcuffed to a chair in the interrogation room, Skye fought The Other harder than she’d ever fought it. Gene was in the room with her, his face hardened into that of a fanatic, the grooves on his forehead and round his mouth etched black by the fluorescent that hummed overhead.

  “Where is he, Skye? Where’s Timmy?”

  He asked the same question he’d been asking for the last half-hour, ever since he and his deputies had surrounded and gunpointed her (Bobby Heck shaking his head, sad as a bloodhound) as she walked down the main road of the town, coming right here to the sheriff’s office, to inquire about Timmy.

  And she said what she’d been saying, over and over again: “I don’t know, Gene. I truly don’t know.”

  He turned away from her, his shirt wet with sweat that came from fear, not from heat. He ran a hand through his hair and as he faced her he swung a fist, taking her on the jaw, toppling the chair and Skye fell to the concrete floor, banging her head, dazed for a second.

  Long enough to lose her grip on The Other, felt it rising in her, and before she could rein it in she broke the handcuffs that held her hands behind the chair. She stopped in time before she snapped the shackles on her ankles.

  Since that flash of precognition in the bus, she’d seen nothing more of Timmy, no matter how hard she’d tried. Pretending to doze in the back of the pick-up truck that finally stopped for her, trying to sink deep into herself, trying to cross some invisible divide between Skye and not-Skye, she’d caught dim traces, like afterimages of the sun through closed eyelids, of the things she was able to divine when she was The Other.

  Teetering now in the no man’s land between herself and her twin, she was tempted to just let go and allow the change to come. Allow the powers that came with it.

  But fear stopped her. She was too inexperienced with this other thing. What was the guarantee that when she changed she would still remember that it was Timmy who she needed to find? That she wouldn’t be consumed by bloodlust?

  Even as she thought this her right hand, still hidden behind the chair, was reaching toward Gene’s boot as he walked to stand over her. Reaching for his boot knowing she would rip his leg off and feast on him.

  A knock on the door had Gene turning and he walked across, opened it and stepped out and locked it after him. She heard the mutter of voices and then footsteps receding. She gathered herself. Tasted blood on her lips. Grasped the chair and righted it, back to the wall, fingers clasped behind the chair in an impersonation of being cuffed.

  The pain in her mouth was nothing compared to the agony in her muscles, sinews, bones and nerves—her very cells—as she forced The Other down, staring through damp tendrils of hair as Gene came back into the room.

  He held a nightstick in his right hand and a wet towel in his left. As she watched he wrapped the nightstick in the towel and when he looked at her she saw that he, too, had crossed a divide.

  “This ain’t going to go well for you, Skye.”

  “Don’t do it, Gene. Please.”

  “Then talk. Tell me what you done with my boy.”

  “Nothing, Gene. I swear. It’s Junior Cotton, it has to be.”

  He laughed. “What, you see the news in some diner, using his escape as your cover story? Maybe you ain’t heard that he’s heading north?”

  “Gene, why would I have come right here if I took Timmy? Why?”

  “I don’t know, Skye. You tell me.”

  He swung the wrapped nightstick and hit her in the ribcage beneath her breast. It was all she could do not to scream, still Skye enough to feel the pain as the nightstick broke a rib. Then the pain was gone and her body spasmed on the chair as The Other took to her. Took her long enough for Skye’s T-shirt to rip at the armpits as her frame thickened, and the chains at her ankles to stretch taut.

  The room lightened and sharpened and she saw deep into Gene, into his eyes and beyond, into his desperation and his terror. Not fear of what she could do to him, fear of what had been done to his boy.

  And it was that, his love for his son, that saved his life, that got her back in control, that got her back to a place where the inhuman strength drai
ned from her, leaving her shaking and wet and crying.

  “Please, Gene. Don’t hit me again. I won’t be able to hold it back next time.”

  He stared at her, looked down at the wrapped nightstick, looked back at her, his jaws clenching and his eyes dark as pebbles. She could sense the command forming in his brain, ready to travel to his arm and she knew she wouldn’t be able to contain The Other.

  His cell phone, lying on the metal table, bleated. A single high chirp. Gene dropped the nightstick, picked up the phone and prodded at it and a light touched his face. His expression changed as Skye heard Timmy’s voice, tinny and distorted coming from the phone, saying, “Daddy. Help me. Daddy—”

  Then abrupt silence.

  When Gene looked back at her he was her brother again.

  “Let me see, Gene,” she said and brought her hands from behind the chair, the broken chains clanking.

  He handed her the phone and she hit play and watched a little video of Timmy, bound and gagged, lying in a darkness undefined and infinite, his upper body lit by the uncertain beam of a flashlight, begging for help before the camera panned left, finding the face that she’d seen in her dream, the face of the velvet Jesus, smiling like a Halloween pumpkin.

  Something hit her behind her eyes, blinding her for a second, and when she could see again she wasn’t in the interrogation room she was out in the desert, in the night, smelling sagebrush and mesquite, seeing the stuttering flicker of a neon star, her vision clear and sharp as she turned her head and saw the old gas station.

  And she was walking toward the wrecked pumps and looking down at the cracked concrete and she could see far down, through the cracks, into a tank to where Timmy lay alone in the dark.

  “Skye? Skye?”

  As Gene shook her shoulder, her legs were filled with an enormous power that drove her up from the chair, side seams of her blue jeans tearing as her quads shifted and swelled, the shackles at her ankles snapping.

  “Get me out of here, Gene,” she said in a voice that wasn’t hers. “I know where Timmy is.”

  52

  Junior Cotton, lying in the dark on the rear seat of the parked Chevrolet, felt a slight shifting in the molecules around him, something as subtle and nearly imperceptible as the distant flutter of the wings of a moth.

  The bait had been taken. He just knew.

  Junior pulled himself upright and clicked off the dome light before he opened the car door. He sat a moment, feeling the still night air on his face, the smell of the dust in his nostrils.

  “Della?” Keeping his voice low.

  He heard the kiss of fabric on skin as she rose from where she sat with her back resting against the wall of the gas station.

  “I’m here,” she said.

  “It’s time.”

  “Okay.”

  Her sneakers crunched on broken glass as she walked over to him.

  “What do I do?” she asked, no trace of anxiety in her voice.

  “Kneel down,” he said, standing, supporting himself against the wall, the peeling plaster still warm beneath his palm.

  She knelt and he risked the flashlight, finding the least distressed section of the plaster to use as his canvas. He handed her the light.

  “Shine this on your left wrist.”

  She did as he said and he brought the scalpel from his pocket and used it to open the vein on her pulse, a rhythmic pumping of blood issuing forth.

  “Turn the beam onto the wall,” he said and she obeyed.

  He dipped a finger into the warm liquid and used it to paint the symbol, old whitewash crumbling at his touch, adhering like paste to his fingertip. The inverted pentagram appeared, spidery and crude but unmistakable.

  “Turn and lean your face to the wall,” he said, and her forehead met the plaster at the center of the pentagram. He took the flashlight from her and killed the beam, keeping his eyes closed until his night vision was restored.

  The voices came now from within him, speaking in tongues no longer understood, a multitude of voices, male, female, toddler and crone, snatches and fragments melting into one another, a Babel reaching back to a time primordial, to when life dragged itself from an alchemical soup of mud and blood and piss and shit and jism.

  The tempo and pitch of the voices increased, like the mad beating of wings on glass, and when they peaked he cut her throat and felt the blood flow, and he held her and sang her a bloodsong lullaby, and as whatever she’d been left her he saw in the periphery of his vision a momentary bloom and flicker that was quickly doused, and he opened his mouth and inhaled her essence, giving him fuel for the coming battle.

  He stood, the girl already forgotten, his heart beating a steady rhythm. Anticipating taking a much larger force into himself by the time the night was done, a force that would transport him from where he was, a creature still at the whim of his fragile body, still at the whim of age and decay, to a place at the feet of the fallen gods.

  Standing, staring south, the blackness broken by a rash of stars in the moonless sky, he allowed himself the luxury of a memory that he had carefully rationed. A memory of such power that if accessed undiluted and unmediated would have left the synapses of his brain quarterized.

  It was after midnight on the Day of The Dead and ten-year-old Junior was down across the border with his mama, in a filthy cantina where on a small stage a brown woman was mounted by a donkey while white men capered and cackled and sweated mescal and chemicals and lust.

  He was led out of the cantina into the dark and thrown onto the back of a half-dead horse, his brain fogged and lagging from something in the drink he had been given and he puked down the scabbed and sore-ridden side of the animal, aware of his mama swinging herself up onto another mount, as graceful as an equestrian.

  A man on a third horse made a clucking sound and they rode through the stinking town into the night, Junior’s guts swaying with the motion of the animal beneath him, and he had no recollection of how much time passed before they came to a few huts flung together on the slope of a hill.

  They dismounted and the door of one of the huts opened, a guttering candle silhouetting a man in a cheap suit smoking a cigarette. Mama gave the man money and he took her arm and led her toward a tin outhouse, a gap between the bottom of the door and the raw earth.

  Junior saw movement in the gap, heard the clanking of chains and the grunts and moans of something not entirely human.

  The man in the suit opened the door and pushed Mama through, quickly closing and padlocking the privy. More noises, a muffled scream from his mother, then a slobbering and a moaning and the thudding rhythm of bodies slamming against the sides of the outhouse.

  When Junior tried to follow his mama the guide grabbed him and carried him into a hovel that stank of pig shit, where a fat woman with slit eyes keened over a cauldron, stirring liquid with globs of fat floating on the top. Despite Junior’s best efforts, he passed out.

  When he awoke his mother was in the hut with him. Her clothes were torn and her hair was muddied, there were scratches on her face and her lips were swollen and bruised, her eyes still full of something beyond her comprehension.

  Junior drifted in and out of sleep and each time he surfaced he saw his mother sitting with her back to the wall, not moving, her eyes glazed, her tongue nervously working at her teeth.

  At dawn they left on the horses, returning to the town that lay under a blanket of wood smoke. They found their car and drove north, crossed the border and checked into a motel where Mama spent a very long time in the bathroom with her unguents and her lotions and her hairdryer before she emerged smiling and perfectly groomed.

  Life continued very much as before, the two of them crisscrossing the heartlands, killing for sport. But his mother changed. First physically, as something swelled her belly and caused her to waddle with one hand supporting her lower back, and splay her feet like a duck when she sat down in a chair.

  She forced a laugh and said, “Your mama is in a state of grace, Junior
. A state of grace.”

  Her mood changed, too. Her lightness was gone and she was given to what she called the vapors. Dozing and retching, sending Junior for ice, instructing him to dip a cloth in the ice bucket and bathe her forehead.

  When she raised her sweater, she revealed a distended belly, the navel poking out like a nasty finger, the skin mottled and marbled with a filigree of dark streaks that resembled burn marks. She had Junior bathe the belly, and it had taken all his self control not to scream when he felt something seething beneath the skin that stretched and warped as the thing within shifted.

  One night she took them to a farm house in a far valley, where an old woman who seemed without speech spent hours with Mama, ministering to her as she screamed and writhed and finally expelled from her body a mess of blood and flesh that was connected to her by a tube snaking from the gaping mouth between her legs.

  The woman stitched Mama and cleaned her and they drove away with an infant that looked like any other. It never cried, never demanded their attention, but as it lay on the rear seat of the car in its little bassinette it silently dominated every moment of their day. And before his eyes Junior’s mama became unhinged and disheveled, reduced to drinking Thunderbird wine and sometimes she went days without washing, until her body smelled sour and unclean.

  Finally the day came, as they left behind some borderland hamlet, when Mama stopped the car and placed the infant in a cardboard box and instructed Junior to leave it at the side of the road just as a dust storm rushed at them from the desert. Driving away into the wall of brown, Junior looked back and saw the box and everything else disappear into the tempest.

  They had never spoken of the baby again and his mama was restored to him until the night of the wreck.

  Years later, drifting on the coattails of Tincup and his flock, Junior recognized the road where they’d dumped the box. And one day, in town for supplies, as he passed a blonde girl leaving Walmart, Junior felt his mother’s presence with such intensity that his nostrils were filled with her spice, a blend of cinnamon, Chanel No 5 and Burley tobacco, and he heard her laugh—a trilling sound like agitated wind chimes.