by Tim Curran
He saw a girl hiding under there, no more than seven or eight, stark naked, her eyes yellow and faintly luminous.
She made a low growling sound and dove out at him, scampering on all fours like a mad dog, snapping at his legs. He kicked her in the head and she yelped, rolling away.
At that precise moment, the one-eyed man lunged, swinging the cleaver wildly. It slashed within two, three inches of Lou’s face. It came again and he stepped under it. The blade slit open the booth, stuffing spilling out like the guts from a road killed hound.
The girl scampered forward again and Lou cracked her on top of the head with the broom handle. There was a hollow pop and she went still.
The one-eyed man threw his cleaver and it spun end over end, just missing the crown of Lou’s skull and shattering a tower of water glasses behind the counter.
“Listen, man,” Lou found himself saying. “I don’t know what the fuck this is about here. But you need help. You and the kid. I didn’t want to hurt her, but—”
The one-eyed man, hands hooked into claws, made a sharp barking noise and threw himself at Lou. Lou got around him, cracked him on the side of the face with the broom handle. His head snapped back and came around again.
Lou hit him two, three more times.
He did not got down.
Lou slammed the tip into his belly and the one-eyed man doubled over, crying out. Lou turned and bolted out the door.
His keys were in his hand and he couldn’t remember digging them out of his coat. His shoes made slapping sounds on the wet pavement. The Grand Am was open. He fell in behind the wheel, trembling fingers fumbling the keys, trying to get them in the ignition. Click. There. They slid in.
As he made to turn the car over, he suddenly realized he wasn’t alone.
Oh, God, the backseat, the backseat…
In the grainy darkness, he heard a high, muted giggling and felt cold fingers at the nape of his neck, hot and feverish breath that stunk of sick wards at his ear. Sweat running down his forehead, he ducked forward, brought his elbow back and felt it connect with a solid thud.
He threw open the door and launched himself into the street, an obscene growling rising up from the back seat. He saw huge yellow eyes, glistening teeth—both set in the narrow, hungry face of a young woman.
He found his feet and dashed up the street.
He made it maybe a block before his wind started to give out.
He slipped behind a van and went to his hands and knees, his lungs aching, gasping for breath, more out of sheer panic than exertion. Cautiously, he peered around the bumper.
The street was empty and wet. Bits of streetlight reflected from puddles.
But he was definitely alone.
Why hadn’t they come after him? What in the name of Christ was this all about? What had happened to these people? This town?
The reels of his brain were spinning crazily, but found no answers. A guy with one eye. A naked kid. A woman. All demented, savage. Not human anymore. Animals, monsters. All they wanted to do was kill.
And those eyes, Lou thought in terror, Jesus Christ, those eyes, not right, not right at all.
Down the street, he could see his Grand Am.
It looked harmless, door wide open.
He didn’t see anyone around it. But it was hard to know, the town washed in clutching shadows.
He crouched there, unable to move. Afraid to do anything and afraid not to. His throat was full of cotton, his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He needed a plan. Something. He kept trying to tell himself that those three…people were isolated cases, but if that was true, how come he hadn’t seen anyone else? Not a soul. Nothing.
Think! Goddammit, think!
All right, all right. Maybe the town had gone bad, maybe some weird pathogen or something had ravaged it. Okay. He would proceed with the assumption that they were all crazy. So, what he needed was a weapon, some way to defend himself.
And then a phone.
He would call the cops…
Oh, Jesus the fucking lines are down. This place is cut off.Even cells are useless here.
All right. No panicking. All he had to do was use his head.
He thought he’d been to Cut River maybe four, five years before. But that had been in broad daylight. Not at night and not with mental cases roaming the streets. Still, a town this size had to have some cops. What did the sign say back on the road? CUT RIVER, Pop. 2400. Yeah, there had to be a police force here, sheriff’s department, something. Somebody had to get his ass out of here. If all else failed, he’d steal a car or a truck.
But, dammit, he was getting out.
Steeling himself, he rose from his hiding place, wondering if any of those predatory, lupine eyes were even now tracking him, stalking him, waiting to get him somewhere where he could be easily brought down.
But he wouldn’t let himself think that.
He moved off in the waiting, sullen darkness.
He got up on the sidewalk, tried to press himself into the brick facade of shop fronts. He sought shadows, but none that were large enough to conceal any surprises. He decided the thing to do was to make for the end of the road, the end of Chestnut. That big, gothic-looking building at the end, squatting darkly on the hill. It had to be the town hall, probably the police station and fire hall as well. Maybe the courthouse, too. If there was any law in this town it would be there.
The shadows were everywhere, clawing and conspiring.
Lou had a nasty feeling this was his last night on earth.
3
The night was dark and wet.
Lisa Tabano climbed from her car, greeted the chill air with a shiver. She opened her purse, made sure her stash was still there and breathed a sigh of relief.
Yeah, okay. It was cool. Everything was in order.
Her heart rate slowed, her hands stopped trembling—or as much as they ever did these days—and something unknotted in her belly. And all this over the remote possibility that she was out. It was getting bad, she knew, but she wasn’t going to think about that. She needed a hot bath, a long sleep. Then tomorrow—
Then tomorrow, a voice told her, you’ll get up and start right away. Because, girl, you don’t have a choice any more. It’s not just social now, it’s chemical. You need it.
She went to the trunk, tried to get the key in the lock and scratched the shit out of the paint job when a wild, almost convulsive shudder passed through her. She got the trunk open, staring blankly at her suitcases, travel bags, and her guitar case.
The idea of lugging all that into a house she might not be welcome in anymore was fatiguing. It made her slump over.
God, she was tired.
I’ll compromise, she decided, I’ll take the guitar.
Like her head, she didn’t go anywhere without it.
She had other guitars—twelve other guitars as a matter of fact, everything from customized Strats to Flying-Vs—but it was this one she would not part from. An ultra-rare ’59 Gibson Les Paul Flametop. Mint condition. A beauty, a collector’s dream, worth mega-thousands.
It did not get out of her sight.
She left just about everything else at her apartment in LA—her custom leathers, her other guitars—but never the Flametop. She wouldn’t even let the roadies touch it. Sometimes, she even brought it in the can with her, slept with it nearby. Obsessed? Yes, she was and would happily admit it.
Taking the guitar in its hardshell case by the handle, she moved up the walk to the porch.
Surely they’d heard her pull up.
Surely they’d seen the lights.
She knew damn well they didn’t sleep that soundly; when she was sixteen coming home from some drunken binge, they’d always heard her.
But not now?
At the door, she hesitated, figuring this was probably a real colossal mistake. But what was she to do? She’d tried to call, but that goddamn storm knocked everything out. She’d lived in Cut River most of her life (before you went big-time,
she reminded herself) and if that experience taught her nothing else it was this: Cut River would be one of the last places to get their juice and phones back. It had no true factories anymore, no mills, no real industry to speak of. Places like that weren’t a priority.
The storm had really trashed the countryside.
They were saying on the radio that even a few twisters had touched down.
It didn’t look too bad.
When Lisa came into town, she drove by her old haunts—the school, Chestnut Street, the football field—and found nothing damaged very badly. Somehow, this was what she needed: to find her hometown unchanged. After the frenetic pace of the past three years, she needed that sense of sameness, of roots.
She was about to knockknockfor chrissake at her own door, except it wasn’t her door anymore and she knew itbut decided, on a whim, to try the doorknob.
It was unlocked.
She opened it, went in.
God, it smelled like home. Mom’s incense, dad’s cigars…but overpowering these was a strange, almost forbidden odor. Metallic, savage.
Smelling it, Lisa instantly tensed.
She stood there, just inside the door, feeling somehow naked and vulnerable, at risk. She tried the lights. They came on. She set her keys on the hallway table, but couldn’t bring herself to set down the guitar, her purse.
The house looked the same.
Dad’s chair, his pile of newspapers and magazines alongside it, his ashtray, TV Guide, remote controls. And over there, mom’s chair, a stack of paperback romances on the end table, a few cooking magazines, a bag of cashews.
Very normal, very ordinary.
Memories flooded her head. Above the fireplace mantel was what really caught her eye. There was a framed reproduction of the band’s first CD cover. It showed a blighted, saffron-colored field of stunted grasses and gnarled bushes. In the background were the crumbling ruins of a medieval castle. In the foreground, a svelte raven-haired woman, arms outstretched. She was flaking away into tatters, flames climbing up her black dress. ELECTRIC WITCH, it said in red Gothic print, and at the bottom, BURNING TIMES.
It brought a lump into Lisa’s throat.
Her father had raged at the idea of her being a musician, a guitarist in what he called an “acid-rock” band (though progressive Goth metal would have been more accurate). When Lisa had left home, journeyed to Chicago and formed up the band months later, he’d refused to speak to her. Even when Electric Witch landed a recording contract, a top ten single and video, he still looked on her in shame. It was only in the past few months that he began talking to her again on the phone, offering her a sort of begrudging respect.
But this…the CD album cover on the wall.
That was something.
It proved that he was proud of her.
Dad was old-fashioned; he ruled the roost like something from the 1950’s. Mom, though staunchly independent in her own way, was very submissive when it came to him. The dutiful little wifey of lore.
But one thing was for sure: if dad hadn’t wanted the album cover on the wall, it would not be there. The fact that it was displayed so prominently spoke volumes.
Proud of me, Lisa thought, close to tears, he is proud of me.
For reasons she didn’t completely understand this was very important.
As much as she denied or dismissed parental acceptance, she very much needed it. But the smile on her face suddenly began to dissipate. She wondered what dad would think of her habit, what it would do to him if they found her OD’d backstage or in some shitty motel room.
Not now, she told herself.
There were always rehab centers, methadone clinics. They worked…if you could stand the agony of going cold off junk. It took real balls to kick it, to willingly throw yourself into the arms of a nightmare.
“Mom?” she called out. “Dad?”
It was so silent she could hear herself breathing, hear the wind rattling the eaves outside. She swallowed down hard, chewed her lower lip. Maybe they were sleeping. But for some reason she didn’t think so…she only knew that she was definitely not alone.
Footsteps.
She heard them coming up the hall, slow and stalking.
Not the way her mother or father walked at all.
Not unless they were trying to sneak up on her.
She turned quickly, the hairs at the back of her neck rising up, something thick and heavy stirring in her belly.
From the darkness of the hallway she could make out a vague shape moving stealthily in her direction, see eyes shining in the gloom like strobes. As it got closer she could see it was a woman. Lisa could hear her breathing, raspy and hollow like wind through bellows.
“Who…” Lisa started to say right before her throat seized up.
No, not her mother.
A stranger.
Some strange woman dressed in a business suit of all things, barefoot, her hands held out before her, the fingers trembling and slicked red with blood.
Lisa, a wave of raw fear washing through her, set down her guitar case, dropped her purse. She backed up slowly as the woman advanced, her face twisted up in an insane grimace that was more like the death rictus of a corpse than an actual smile.
Lisa kept backing up.
She reached down and took a poker from the brass sheath of fireplace tools.
“Listen,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper, “I don’t know who you are or what you want, but you can’t be here.”
The woman’s lips pulled away from her teeth. Foamy drool slid from the corners of her flaking lips. “What I want,” she hissed in awful congested voice like a backed-up drainpipe, “is you, is you, is youuuuu…”
Long before Lisa even had a chance to be locked-up with horror, before her nerve endings had a chance to seize-up with raw fear, the woman came at her. She didn’t move like a human being, but with a perverse see-sawing motion.
A predator sneaking up on its prey.
Lisa stood her ground and swung the poker.
It caught the crazy woman in the head, snapped her skull around and took her body with it. She landed bonelessly in Lisa’s mother’s chair. She struck the arm and tipped over with it. But her face came up immediately, eyes still burning, her forehead gashed open just below the hairline, blood running over her pale face in rivulets.
The fact that she could be knocked down, could be made to bleed, heartened Lisa.
She advanced on her and as she came up again, growling, Lisa brought the poker down.
But the woman was ready.
As the hook of the poker sunk into her shoulder—if she felt any pain there was no indication of it—she took hold of Lisa’s wrists, flung her sideways with a near-psychotic strength.
Lisa hit the hardwood floor and conked her head.
But she still had the poker.
As the madwoman came on again, Lisa rose to meet her, jabbing the pointed end of the poker into her belly. The woman howled with a bestial roar, stumbled back. The poker was stuck in her belly. She gripped it and pulled it out, about three inches of tempered steel that was glistening red and dripping. She flung it away.
But by then Lisa was on her feet.
She dove past the crazy woman to the fireplace, grabbed a two-foot birch log and when the woman rushed her yet again, she brought it down on her head with everything she had, screaming as she did so.
The woman shuddered, her eyes rolled shut, and she collapsed like she was made of Popsicle sticks. She lay on the floor, bleeding, but not dead. Unconscious and twitching, vile foam dribbling from her askew mouth. A pencil-thin line of it oozed from her left nostril.
Lisa stood there with the log in her hand.
Her body felt heavy, slack, and useless. She had a sudden need to vomit, to cry, to start shouting. But she did nothing but stand there. After a time, she dragged herself into the kitchen.
She didn’t find her parents there, either.
But she did find a lot of blood.
&
nbsp; 4
“What would really speed things along here,” Nancy Eklind said to her husband, “would be for you to just admit I’m right.”
Ben had a nasty urge to wrap his hands around her throat. Not that he was going to, mind you, he just had a nasty urge to. So he compromised: he said nothing. He kept his hands on the steering wheel and studied the dark road ahead, the minivan’s headlights splashing across it. Safer that way.
“What?” Nancy said.
He kept staring forward. “You say something?”
“I believe I said what,” she told him. “I said what in reference to my comment about you admitting I was right.”
He nodded, wouldn’t go there.
He looked in the rearview.
He could see Nancy’s brother Sam sitting in the back, looking everywhere but at what was going on in the front seat. Poor guy. Sixty days courtesy of the county and his first night out he gets a belly full of this. Dinner and a little gambling at the Chippewa casino, they’d told him. A few drinks. Help you relax.
Ben decided he looked anything but relaxed.
She’s your sister, buddy, he thought acidly, at least I’m only related to her by marriage.
Nancy snorted. “You know, Ben, maybe you’re not involved in this conversation. Maybe I’m having it all by myself. Would you like me to bring you up to speed on what we’re discussing?”
“No, Nancy.”
“All right, then. Feel free to jump in anytime.”
He mumbled something.
“Sorry? Couldn’t quite make that out. Jump in a little louder.”
He wanted to jump with both feet in her fucking face. “I said, no.” He scratched his beard.
“See?” Nancy turned and looked at her brother cowering in the backseat. “See what it’s like, Sam? It’s like this all the time. He can’t discuss anything. Doesn’t matter what it is, if it’s the least bit sensitive, just forget about it.”
Ben sighed, slowed the van, made a left onto a country road. “Let’s change the subject, okay? I think you’ve beaten this to death for one night.”