by Max Wilde
Junior shadowed the child—a round-shouldered stoop of a girl, maybe ten or eleven—as she dawdled toward the exit, her hands full of shopping bags, and when she turned he saw his mother in her face, the genetic imprint so clear that he was left breathless with sadness and longing.
“Skye! Skye!”
The man in uniform had to call twice to penetrate the dream fog that clouded the girl, and Junior had watched as she joined him and a very pregnant woman holding the hand of a small boy, and they had all climbed into a station wagon and driven away.
Skye.
Standing now in the desert, sniffing the night like a nocturnal animal, Junior felt a quiver of excitement at the coming reunion.
The reunion with his sister.
53
Timmy lay in the dark, bound at the wrists and ankles. The mean girl had tied him up, pulling the ropes so tight they bit into his flesh, and he couldn’t feel nothing now in his hands and feet.
“Trussed up like a turkey on Thanksgiving,” he said out loud, his voice booming and echoing.
Speaking to break the silence of the pitch black that pressed down on him and scared him so much he had to work real hard not to wet his pants again.
He had no idea where he was, but even though the metal around him was dry he could smell gasoline like he would smell it when he went with Daddy to fill up the Jeep and he guessed that he was at an old gas station somewhere far away where nobody would never find him till he was dead.
Pure terror took him by the heart and panic seized his body and he fought the ropes, cutting and burning his skin, leaving him sobbing, snot running unchecked from his nose into his mouth.
Then he saw Skye, clear as if she stood before him, speaking to him in a real quiet voice, like she did at night when she read him bedtime stories.
“Be a big boy, Timmy,” she said. “Be a brave boy. We’re coming, your daddy and me. We’re coming for you.”
Her voice calmed him, and he could feel his heart slow and some of the fear left him and he fought no more.
Then a flashlight beam skidded down across the tank and found him, and he blinked into the bright light. He heard the voice of the man, the one who scared him even more than the girl who looked like Skye.
“Hey, little fellow, how you doin’?”
Friendly words, but the voice was low and rough and nasty, and the man threw something that hit Timmy hard on the side of the head before it clanged to the metal.
Timmy felt blood in his mouth and things went blurry for a moment then the man was down with him, slapping him in the face.
“Wakey wakey, sonny boy. Wakey wake.”
The flashlight beam swung off Timmy, finding a big metal can. A jerrycan his daddy had called it, strapping one just like it onto the Jeep when they went on camping trips.
The man screwed the lid off the can and lifted it by the handle and poured a stream of gasoline onto Timmy, soaking his face and his body and his clothes, the man walking backward, leaving a trail all the way to the ladder.
The man threw the empty can aside and climbed up the ladder, moving all jerky like the old puppet movies Timmy saw on TV. The light went up with the man and Timmy heard him grunt as he hauled the ladder up too, and Timmy was left alone in the blackness again.
And the Creepshow started, dead people coming out the dark at him. Dead ladies and men and kids too, all of them torn and bleeding and screaming something awful, the puppet man moving among them stabbing and burning and eating at them, his teeth gone all red when he smiled at Timmy.
Timmy screamed the Creepshow away, but lying in the dark with his face and his clothes soaked in gasoline he knew he was making up the picture of Skye telling him she and Daddy were coming. Making it up like the stories he made up for Miss Marples at school.
Nobody was coming.
Nobody knew he was here but the mean girl and the puppet man.
And if Timmy cried and peed himself it didn’t matter none, ’cause nobody was never gonna see him again.
Not never.
54
Gene drove into the night, a dark mass of he knew not what caged in the back of his cruiser. He could smell it, the low funk of a beast coming to him and it was honest-to-God panting as it moved restlessly behind the mesh.
He understood that the wire screen would never hold it if it decided to attack. A raw, animal terror took him, a primitive dread that for an instant wiped away even his fear for his son’s life, and it was all he could do to keep driving, his hands clenched on the wheel, as if releasing his grip would have him stopping the car and running into the desert, fleeing the shadowy thing that prowled in his rearview.
What could kill it? A silver bullet? A stake through the heart? On the edge of hysteria, Gene took an inventory of all the horror movie tropes that had filled his teenage years, when he’d clumsily pawed and groped at girls while wolfmen and vampires loomed on the screen of the drive-in. The drive-in derelict now, the torn screen rising like a primitive god from the desert, worshipped by rows of rusted silver poles.
Back in the interrogation room, when she was still Skye enough to speak, she had told him that Timmy was being held captive in a storage tank at the old gas station near the Milky Way. Told him this with such force, such certainty, fighting to give voice to the words before the shift in her left her mute, that he hadn’t questioned the truth of the words. Or questioned how she knew what she knew.
He’d stared into the face that was less Skye by the second, until he’d had to look away, knowing he’d lose his nerve and keep her locked up and go into the night alone to finish this thing. But he needed her. Needed her power.
So he’d left the interrogation room and hurried through the sheriff’s office, empty but for half-blind Darlene sitting with her back to him behind a low partition, coordinating the search via radio.
Gene unlocked the door to the car park and went back to the interrogation room. The creature was naked now, the clothes torn from its body by the sheer strength of its muscles as it shapeshifted. Again, Gene’s courage almost failed him, then he saw Timmy on the screen of his phone and he beckoned what had once been his sister and set off toward the rear door, the thing following him, claws scuffing on the linoleum, the hairs on the back of his neck rising like antennae of dread.
He made sure the car park was empty and crossed and opened the rear door of the cruiser. The dark form had flowed from the doorway into the car, hunkering down as he’d started the engine and driven out into the main road.
Driving now, the flickering neon drawing ever closer, Gene reached for the microphone of his radio. Spoke to Darlene, telling her he’d had a call that Timmy was at an abandoned ranch north of the town, telling her to direct the deputies there.
Sending his men far away from the carnage and the terror that was to come.
She crouched in the dark, smelling Gene through the trellis of the cage, smelling his blood and flesh, but strangely unaroused by it. Too busy with a download, a torrent of memories which couldn’t come from her unconscious, they were too old, went too far back, to way before man in his primitive attempt to understand evil had invented a quaint fairy tale of God and the Devil and fallen angels.
Far back to a well from which true evil had drunk. And then the trail, too faint, too old, too difficult to track, disappeared, and the road they traveled on—invisible to her eyes as she crouched down, but visible to her other senses—fed her the image of the dust storm and the box and the boy that had been Gene and the little pink baby that had been her.
Then something hit her low in her liver, the memory coming as an actual blow, and she was no longer in the rear of the cruiser, she was in a place dark and fetid, at once inside and observing two bodies in rut, the makings of the thing that was her spewing from within a creature connected to that wellspring—a creature that had crawled from its ooze—the creature emptying its seed into womanflesh.
A searing flame, both the instant of creation and some precognitive flash sped lik
e a kundalini rush from the base of her spine into her brain, blasting her back into the here and now, and she understood a little of what she was and who awaited her.
55
There was to be no preamble. No running without lights. No attempt at ambush by approaching from the rear of the gas station. The cruiser sped up the road without siren and with no disco lights dancing on its roof, headlights reflecting in the trail of gasoline that led from the open manhole to where Junior crouched behind one of the gutted pumps.
He held a Zippo lighter in one hand and Della’s pistol in the other. When Gene Martindale stood up out of the car, his hands spread in an attitude of surrender, Junior fretted that he had come alone before he saw something move in the rear of the cruiser and his nutsack and anus tightened in anticipation.
He understood everything now. Why he and the woman whose name he could no longer recall had killed this lawman’s wife and unborn child. Why Junior had spent years in an empty, vacant limbo.
He’d been waiting. Waiting for the thing inside the girl to awaken.
And now it had.
“Cotton, just give me my boy,” the pocket edition John Wayne said. “Let him go and take me instead.”
“Throw down your weapon,” Junior said and the lawman obliged, the handgun skidding to a halt against one of the old pumps.
Junior—schooled by his mother in the art of marksmanship—shot Martindale in the leg, just below the knee, felling him, but taking him nowhere near the femoral. He would survive to watch the deaths of his son and the thing that was even now rising in the rear of the cruiser.
Caged in the car she sensed her brother behind the rusted pump, smelled him, smelled the death on him that no carbolic could cleanse, smelled the stain on his soul.
The stink, the closeness, the intimacy, the knowledge that she would soon be eating the flesh of her flesh sent a surge of desire through her greater than she had ever known, her sinews and her bones stretching to accommodate the rush of power from within and the great mass of her shoulders swelled up against the roof of the cruiser, her skin patterned by the mesh of the cage.
Her eyes, adjusted to the dark, burned as the door of the car opened and the dome light clicked on. Gene stepped out and she wanted to shout at him to stop, but her voice was a memory and only a low growl vibrated in her throat.
She grasped for a handle where there was none. Focused her strength and smashed against the car door. It bulged and screamed, the cruiser rocking on its springs, but the door stayed locked.
The gunshot that dropped Gene drove her once again at the door and she tore it free of its hinges, the warped metal landing near where he lay clutching at his leg.
“Go get Timmy,” Gene said, the pain in his voice mixed with terror as he looked up at her and then quickly away.
A shadow moved behind the pump and her brother stood revealed, the flickering souls of legions of the dead clothing him in a demonic suit of lights. She moved toward him, ready to kill and consume him, the desire almost uncontrollable, metronomes of drool swinging from her lips.
But his stench prompted another torrent of memories, and she knew that before she ate him she would get him to tell her about her mother.
And her father.
The thing was coming for Junior, a thing that both terrified and delighted him. As it crossed the headlamps he glimpsed his mother in the swarm of DNA that encoded this creature. Glimpsed his mother and something darker: the very being that he had worshipped in his primitive human way, his unknown and unknowable master, and he was so hypnotized by the majesty of this thing that the cigarette lighter and the gasoline were forgotten.
As she neared Junior Cotton she saw his face in the beams of the cruiser, saw the resemblance to the girl she’d once been. Her brother stared up at her and he reached out a hand and touched her cheek, the feel of his fingers on her skin igniting a longing so intense that all thoughts of destroying him were washed from her mind, and when she placed the palm of her hand over his heart she was a baby again, warm and safe in the arms of her mother.
When Gene tried to stand his useless left leg buckled under him. He reached in through the door of the cruiser and gripped the steering wheel, pulling himself half onto the driver’s seat, stretching for the Remington in the rack beneath the dashboard. He freed it and fell from the car, dragging himself to where he had a clear shot, arcing the barrel toward Junior Cotton who stood close to what had once been Skye, both of them unmoving.
Gene cocked the shotgun and aimed at Junior Cotton’s head and he saw Marybeth and their dead baby and Timmy crying and his finger was tightening on the trigger before reason took hold and he tilted the weapon down the man’s legs, ready to wound him and get him to release his boy.
Then he’d blow him back to hell.
Standing there, touching this creature but seeing his mother’s face the way he had when they’d lain in bed together after their feasts, her warm breath washing him, her fingertips on his heart that beat with a mad love for her, Junior was seized by a seductive notion: he wouldn’t kill his sister, he would take her with him.
Take her south, across the border, to where it all began.
He was about to give voice to this when the pumping of a shotgun broke the spell and he raised the pistol in his free hand and fired at the sound.
As a round smashed the car window behind him, Gene squeezed the trigger of the Remington and knew he’d missed. Junior Cotton dropped behind one of the pumps and a flame flared and ignited a hellfire that raced across the concrete and into the storage tank, Timmy’s screams echoing from within its metal walls.
Junior Cotton threw the burning lighter into the gasoline and some ancient fear had her cowering from the fire for a moment, then Skye—for it was Skye again, suddenly in control—shifted her attention away from Junior and she ran at the blaze and leaped down into the furnace of the tank, Timmy’s screams bouncing and echoing in the hollow cylinder, cutting through the hunger of the flames.
When Timmy had heard the low rumble of a car engine he’d started shouting, trying to kick against the iron. He knew the sound of a gunshot—had been out with his daddy hunting antelope and rabbit—and that hard smack stilled him for a moment.
Then there was a crash, like a car in a wreck, followed by quiet and he was filling his lungs to yell again when there was more gunfire and everything got real bright and fire came pouring in through the hole and down the metal and along the floor toward him.
Timmy yelled for his father as he tried to squirm away, pistoning his legs, trying to escape the flames but it was no good and they were upon him and the gasoline on his clothes caught with a mighty whoosh and he felt heat like he’d never known, trying to roll, trying to kill the fire, but the ropes held him too tight.
Then something dropped down through the hole and rushed at him through the flames, something too big for the space, stooping as it seized him, and his fear of the blaze was replaced by a greater terror as he glimpsed animal teeth and slit eyes and claws.
But as the thing wrapped him up tight, smothering the flames on his body, pushing him up against the wall of the tank away from the fire, he smelled something else through the stink of rot and burning hair and flesh.
He smelled Skye.
Gene saw the creature diving into the inferno, engulfed by flames. He dropped the shotgun and pulled himself back to the car, grabbing for the microphone in the cruiser, praying the radio would have the range.
Heard Darlene’s voice through the hiss and crackle as he called for help, heard her say “copy that” and he let himself fall out of the car and, weak and dizzy with blood loss, he started crawling toward the hole, flames licking up into the night.
A car came bumping out from behind the ruined gas station and for a moment Gene thought Junior Cotton was going to run him down, but the Chevrolet drew up beside him and Cotton smiled at him and tipped him a little salute before speeding away onto the road, turning toward the border.
Gene crawled
on, yelling, “Timmy! Timmy!”
But all he heard was the rumble and hiss of the fire. He dragged himself forward until he could move no more, lying with his face against the torn concrete, and as the world went black he saw flames spitting from the manhole, embers dancing like fireflies against the night sky.
56
Gene awoke with that unmistakable hospital smell in his nostrils, a blend of disinfectant, medication and inedible food. He lay on his back, a drip feeding into his arm, his left leg encased in plaster from below the knee, bare toes emerging yellow from the dazzling white carapace.
The curtains were drawn around his bed and he flailed at them, the rings rattling on the metal rail, until he found a gap and threw them wide. The bed was near a door standing open onto a corridor tiled in a checkerboard of gray and white.
“Hey,” he yelled. “Hey!”
An overweight man in the uniform of a city police sergeant appeared in the doorway, his one hand on his service pistol, the other holding a half-eaten hot dog. When he saw Gene wasn’t under attack, he waved the hot dog, saying, “You take it easy now, hear? Nurse’ll be along presently.”
“Where’s my boy?” Gene asked.
Before the cop could answer the curtain on the other side of the bed shifted as a small shape ducked beneath it and Timmy, dressed in candy striped pajamas, said, “Daddy?”