by David Tully
Suffering from sensory overload, he numbly allowed the soft, putrid paws to press his hand repeatedly, even as he took in the hostile glares of skeletal, cadaverous families passing them on the grass and the sidewalk.
“You against hydrofracking, too, Matt?” one ghoul garbled through the bile that oozed down the chin rapidly detaching itself from his upper jaw. His white “Frack You!” T-shirt was streaked with the pus falling from the open sores that used to be his cheeks, as it dripped down his front and splashed at Matt’s feet.
Matt could only stare at the pus where it fell, then peer back at the guy’s hideous parody of a face. Normally, when somebody started sporting a complexion like this, Matt knew bad shit was just about to go down, if it hadn’t already.
But aside from looking like Freddy Krueger, the poor guy radiated a distinct aura of harmlessness. His monstrous lips were pulled taut in a grin that, had he not been rotting, would have been open, innocent, and charming. And Zoey’s other friends, assembling here at a card table that had been set up on one side of the green, were all the same—displaying an open, friendly, curious behavior, and a hellish appearance.
A handmade sign taped to the front of the table announced that “Foes of the Frack!” were assembling there, in anticipation of heading out to the place where the actual fracking operation was set up, farther up the mountain.
There were about twenty “Foes” there already, and they expected about twenty more, Zoey had told him. Which seemed a rather paltry force in the face of a town numbering several hundred, by the looks of it, and very much in favor of hydrofracking, by and large, as it was the first actual industry and employment possibility to come to that region in a good long time.
The outright hostility emanating from the citizens of Sundown might account for some of the rotting that plagued them just as much as their eco-activist foes—a desperate need for work, for money, for a way to feed their families, had driven people into the arms of evil before, after all.
But all of them? It seemed a stretch to imagine one man could be driven to absolute corruption of the soul, a corruption so pervasive and absolute that someone with Matt’s special…um…skill set could visibly perceive it. However, he’d seen it happen before.
Even he, however, refused to believe that a difference of opinion on the merits of hydrofracking could have caused the rot in that little four-year-old boy. The boy was chasing a ball across the green, and his tiny nose broke clean off when his ungainly trot sent him falling on his face in the long, soft grass.
There was a palpable tension in the air due to today’s demonstration, but as yet everyone was still behaving in a perfectly civilized fashion.
No. This wasn’t like the other times. Matt had come to the Village of the Rot-Faces, and there was no way as yet to explain how this plague had set in.
And while he’d been busy assessing the situation, a few awkward moments had passed as Zoey’s friend stood there, waiting for an answer to his question. Zoey finally jumped in to cover his ass.
“Nah,” she said. “Our boy Matt’s just a travelin’ man, Gus. Isn’t that right?” she asked Matt.
Matt swiveled his attention from Gus to Zoey but still wasn’t really seeing her. “Uh, right,” he finally got out. “Just…passing through.”
“So,” Gus asked, eager, young, and not too bright. “Wanna join us, then? We really gotta show these folks that what they’re doing isn’t right, that we have to heal the planet, not…”
“Why don’t you shut the fuck up and go back down to the city, faggot?” a voice boomed from behind them.
Gus, startled and suddenly frozen in place, peered over Matt’s shoulder and gulped. Matt turned to see what looked like a cross between a sumo wrestler and an exploded pizza lurching out the door of a diner directly across the street.
The sumo wrestler had the build of a, well, a sumo wrestler, and one with a penchant for fatty foods at that. He probably wouldn’t have been too easy on the eyes even if he hadn’t looked like he’d just crawled out of a long disused mausoleum. And apparently, he wasn’t heading over to the meeting point because he wanted to heal the planet.
He came menacingly close to Gus, the flesh stew that was his face stopping mere centimeters from Gus’s. Gus stared back, and as his eyes opened wider, one lid fell off, sliding down his cheek, leaving a trail in the soft gray flesh there.
“You aren’t from here,” Sumo began. “You don’t know what we need here. And you should just turn around and get the fuck out of here!”
A loud round of applause erupted all around the small group at the table, and Matt turned to see that they were surrounded by infected nightmares, all smiling and cheering Sumo’s speech.
Shit, thought Matt. This place is a powder keg about to blow in every conceivable way.
Gus’s sole answer to this challenge was a frightened whinny—he was frozen. Sumo seemed to be considering what to do about Gus, and as he stood there, breathing hard, not letting Gus out of the tractor beam of his glare, Matt’s grip tightened on the strap of his bag.
Might need that ax sooner than I expected, he thought.
But Sumo, of all people, broke the mood. “See you at the quarry, shitface,” he purred, leaning close to Gus’s ear, and then walked away. With parting glances of pure hate, so did the rest of the assembled crowd.
Matt watched Sumo walk off, and then his gaze wandered back to the diner Sumo had just come from. And he realized he hadn’t eaten since yesterday.
He couldn’t think straight on an empty stomach, and he couldn’t think straight with these ugly mothers crowding him in.
He went over to Zoey’s car and opened the door to the backseat, reaching in for his bag. Taking it out, he turned to find her watching him.
“Thanks for the ride,” Matt said to her, waving as he went. “I’ll be seeing you.”
He could see the disappointment on her face as she waved a hand in limp farewell, but he meant what he said.
He had no intention of leaving her unprotected, not when she was the only person in this town untouched by a contagion that seemed not only unhealthy, but pure evil.
CHAPTER SIX
Matt entered a diner that had stepped right out of a fifties time warp, the kind of place they try to emulate in burger joints like Johnny Rockets but only wind up giving you a pale piece of plastic. This was the real thing, and it looked like it had gotten its last good cleaning when James Dean was still in the acting business.
Not that the generally run-down feel of the place hurt business—it was booming, filled with locals (rot-faces one and all, natch), who turned to regard Matt idly as he entered, then dismissed him and went back to the two main topics: the coming storm and the coming fracking showdown.
Slinging his bag over his shoulder, Matt angled around a rather rotund waitress, who swiveled a hag-like visage that looked like it should be hosting an old EC comic to regard him. Bone burst through right below an exquisitely maintained beehive hairdo, and he glanced away from the corpse-like appearance that threatened to kill the appetite he’d just noticed he had.
“Here for breakfast, hon?” she asked, drool sliding down the yellow bone of her chin.
Matt noticed her name tag read “Rose” and nodded yes, fixating on the tag.
“Shy one, huh?” she answered. “Shy and cute—just the way I like ’em.” She cackled, bending to look up into his face. Matt wanted to look away but knew it would only attract attention, so he forced a smile back, attempting charm.
Apparently, it worked, because the death’s-head grin stayed fixed on Rose’s face. “Corner booth just opened.” She pointed past him. “I reserve that for my favorites, so it’s all yours, stud. Just lemme take this order”—here she indicated another booth, bursting with clients Matt declined to examine—“and I’ll be right over.”
Rose came and chatted, decomposing the whole while, and when she finally left with his order, Matt eavesdropped on the people around him. They were, by and large, vi
rulently against all those who wanted to shut down the hydrofracking that promised to save the local economy, and they were angry enough to go out there today, storm or no storm, and do something about the bastards who were here to try to shut it down.
The door opened, and Zoey walked in with some of her friends. A hush fell on the room, and heads turned to stare, openly hostile. Zoey took in the response to her arrival with a nervous gulp, then headed for an empty stool at the counter, as did her companions.
As she approached the counter, she saw Matt in the corner and nearly halted for a second. He gave her a half smile and a small salute. She gave him a somewhat forced grin and a half wave back, then turned her full attention to the counter and sat down.
He pondered his next move and decided that if he could sit here and keep an eye on her, that was good enough for now.
Rose suddenly blocked his view of Zoey, slapping a steaming plate of cheese-covered fries with gravy down in front of him. “Chow down, sexy!” she cackled, and he forced a grin on her. He didn’t care if this was made by a decaying corpse newly dragged from its moldering grave: he was fucking starving.
Twenty minutes later, Matt leaned back, sated and idly dragging a cheese-covered French fry through thick, lumpy, pale-brown gravy, noting how much that gravy looked like the flesh oozing off Rose’s arm as she refilled a coffee cup two booths down. Matt let the French fry fall back to the plate.
“Whatsamatter? Our food not good enough for you, Mister Fancy-Pants?”
Startled, Matt looked up and across the diner: leaning on the serving counter, garbed in a filthy white apron, a soiled chef’s hat tilted rakishly on his head, was Mr. Dark. Matt stared at him a moment, then took in the rest of the room—everyone else was oblivious to what was going on in the kitchen.
Dark flipped an egg onto a plate and pressed the bell to alert Rose. As she ran over to pick up her order, Matt noted the worm wriggling across the runny yolk as it oozed off mold-covered bread. Rose didn’t.
“You know, I was wrong to tell you to stay away, Matt. I love it here! Good-looking people here, tempers rising, a bunch of spoiled, overprivileged do-gooders about to be shut up right by decent folk who need work. This is gonna be fun!”
Matt let his gaze fall from Dark back to his plate, considering what Dark was saying. Again, for once, the bastard was right. The lines of good and evil weren’t clear-cut here: just desperate people trying to do the right thing.
Was that why they looked like they did? Was desperation enough to turn someone into this?
One or two maybe, but an entire town? And everyone visiting it? It didn’t make sense.
What was more, Matt had no clue what to do about it. He had no interest in taking sides on some social issue, had no interest in judging either side here.
Matt had come to Sundown to find this “Darkhunter”—to find a way to fight the evil haunting his life at its source, and take down that grinning shit behind the counter. But he’d found a bigger problem when he got here. And yes, he wanted to stop what was going on before anyone got hurt, but what was he supposed to do?
Kill an entire town?
As always, Mr. Dark prevented him from thinking straight, interrupting again with the static that had clouded his life since his death. “But I can share your concerns about the cuisine, Matt,” he was buzzing on. “The fries are not, I fear, free of trans fats. Me, I’m in the mood for red meat.”
Matt followed Dark’s leering stare out the window of the diner—to the red hair of Zoey, who stood across the street by her car, speaking to friends, a bag of takeout in one hand.
And in the other hand, she held a lollipop.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Throwing some cash on the table, Matt grabbed his duffel bag and ran out the door of the diner, causing a sea of rotting faces to turn and stare as he went. Dark was already gone as Matt passed the serving counter, leaving a faint echo of his laughter on the greasy air.
Outside, Zoey was already done speaking with the other protesters and was climbing into the dented Subaru. Matt roared her name as he crossed the street. A pickup screeched to a halt as he ran in front, and a blackened skull in a denim jacket and green John Deere cap hurled profane insults at Matt as he ran past. Matt didn’t notice.
His attention was on the maggot-covered lollipop Zoey held in her hand as she rummaged in her bag, looking for her keys.
It dangled near her open mouth as she looked up in surprise at Matt, who leaned on her hood, his eyes going from hers to the maggots as they fell from the lollipop, landing in her open bag.
Zoey’s surprised look was quickly replaced by a warm smile: “Matt! What’s up?”
He pointed at the lollipop, demanding, “Where did you get that?”
Perplexed, she looked at the lollipop, then back at him. “They were at the cash register. I took one when I paid.”
Matt stared at her a moment, seeing fresh maggots bursting from the hard candy shell even as she held it. “Can I have it?” he finally asked.
Zoey stared at him a moment, then regarded the lollipop—which, despite its maggot infestation, seemed to hold no horrors for her. Finally, she shrugged and handed it to him. “Sure. You could get your own back inside.”
“No. I want this one,” he answered, snatching it from her. He examined it a moment, then peered closely at her. “Did you lick it?” he asked.
Zoey burst into baffled laughter. “No, I didn’t. Not yet. So it’s perfectly clean, and all yours,” she replied.
Matt hurled it into a clump of bushes nearby, on the green. Zoey’s head swiveled to watch it go. “Hey!” she cried, in amused outrage.
“They’re bad for you,” Matt countered. “Too much sugar. Listen,” he went on before she could respond, “I’ve been thinking about what you said. And I think you’re right. Hydrofracking is wrong, and it shouldn’t happen here. I want to come with you and help stop it.”
Zoey looked at him a moment, her expression blank. “You’re a weird man, Matt Cahill,” she finally replied. “But for some reason, I also trust you. And judging by what these locals have been saying to me, I’d really trust those big muscles of yours hanging around me if they decide to get mean. Hop in.”
Smiling, Matt threw his bag in the backseat and got in on the passenger side. He didn’t know why Zoey hadn’t been corrupted yet—but if he could do nothing else in this godforsaken town, he was going to make sure Dark never touched her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“So welcome aboard. Have you ever involved yourself in any environmental causes before, Matt?” Zoey asked as she drove.
They were heading out of the town and farther up the mountain—the fracking site was at its very crest, deep in the woods that crowned the peak.
Matt shook his head, glancing at her to see if there were yet any traces of rot. No, she was still as gorgeous as ever.
“No, not that I’ve got any problem with it. Still, it always seemed a kind of conflict of interest with the whole lumberjack thing.”
“Well, you really should,” she said. “Hydrofracking is…” blah blah blah.
Matt tuned out the white noise coming from her mouth, concentrating instead on the long, thin, tanned, muscled legs stretching out of the very short denim cutoffs she was wearing.
He was sure she was right: hydrofracking was probably awful, probably raping the planet and mutating cattle and short-sheeting somebody’s bed. But Matt had other things to worry about right now. Like how to handle an entire town corrupted by evil, rotting and on the verge of doing…something…just as a major hurricane was about to blow through and destroy everything.
Somehow, that seemed a more pressing concern than some mining operation that might get America off its junkie-like dependency on Middle Eastern oil. But he didn’t want to be a jerk, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to leave Zoey unprotected in this place, so he tried to focus.
“The natural gas is under the shale, and they need to drill down and extract it,” she was continuin
g, her voice taking on the fervor of a preacher’s.
This kid is really into this, Matt thought. That’d always been his problem with activists—they tended to become fanatics. Ah, she’s young, he thought, dismissing his own aged cynicism. It was good to believe in something…something other than Mr. Dark. To try to see something better, rather than always seeing the rot under the surface of things. Matt realized he could stand to hang around someone like Zoey once in a while, to see things from a perspective like hers. Spend enough time alone on the road, chasing a bogeyman, maybe you wind up a bogeyman yourself.
“And that’s bad?” Matt asked, trying to invest himself in the conversation.
She nodded vigorously. “They need water and sand in the pipes to drill through the shale. After the water is used, it’s run off into ponds and streams. The animals that drink that water die.”
“That’s not good,” Matt replied, not sure what else to say.
Zoey glanced over at him, looking like she wondered whether he was making fun of her, but then seemed satisfied with what she saw there. She smiled, clearly sure she was enlisting a new convert to her cause. “Once you see what they’re doing to the beautiful landscape at the quarry, you’ll know how bad it is.”
They’d come to a red light at a T-shaped intersection in the road and slowed to a stop. As always in this region, steep mountain slopes reared up around the car.
As they idled, Matt glanced up the slope outside his car window, starting to speak: “Well, at the sawmill, we…”
He faltered, then did a double take.
Perched cross-legged on a boulder high above the road, a nearly naked man gazed down at him.
On closer inspection, he saw that the Native American’s features were chiseled on the man’s face, below a long mane of silver hair, and at least the guy was wearing a loincloth.
Matt stared at him. The old guy stared back.
“You what?” Zoey asked, eyes on the light.
It turned green and Zoey stepped on the gas, causing Matt to look over at her.