Burrows

by Reavis Z. Wortham

  Two snakes lay belly up, obviously dead. Another weakly tried to crawl away. The rattler remained coiled, staring into the light with obsidian eyes.

  “This is going to be loud.”

  He shot the rattler first. The .45’s report was deafening. The snake separated two inches behind its triangular head. He shot at another, missed, then another. The reports hammered in the confined space as loud as grenades.

  The last snake almost slipped away, but Cody vaulted over the edge and stomped it to death. Keeping one eye on a closed door at the far end of the attic, he returned to the trap door and called down to his partner. “Can you make it up the steps now?”

  “All them snakes dead?”

  “Yep.”

  “Then I can make it.”

  John climbed up and stepped delicately on the dusty raw planks, watching for live snakes and keeping an eye on the dead ones. He methodically kicked the limp bodies through the opening. “How much time do you think I have?” His hand was already swelling.

  “That’s up to you. How you feelin’?”

  “I’m fine right now, except my thumb hurts where you chopped it open.”

  “It could have been worse.”

  “Prob’ly. Maybe it’ll take a while for me to start feeling the poison.”

  Cody shrugged and glanced back at the door. “We have to get out and the only way is through there.”

  John glanced at a makeshift door at the far end of the attic and back to Cody. “You do it. I’ll cover you.”

  A normal aisle led between furniture, trunks and bedsprings.

  “You’re going to shoot past me in this?”

  “No, but after this crazy feller shoots you and you drop, I’ll shoot him.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “Here I go.” Cody wiped his mouth. “Try to let him kill me, it’ll read better in the paper.” They knew that if George were in the attic, he would be ready. Cody cautiously approached the door.

  The whisper of quiet rustling came again from the other side. “There’s something back there,” Cody said more to himself than anything else, realizing he’d been hearing a soft background noise, like the hiss or static from a television. He glanced at the wooden shiplap overhead. “That’s sleet. We made it to the top.”

  “Well, we can’t reach the roof from here.”

  “No, but it’s angling down and I bet we can reach it once we get past this door.” The rustling grew louder.

  Bracing himself on one leg, he gave it a hard kick and drew back immediately. Deceptively easy, the door swung on well-oiled hinges. A crude guillotine of quarter inch steel plunged downward, then toppled inward.

  Beyond the opening was still another nightmare created by a demented mind. Cody shivered at the vision of Hell. Recoiling, he stumbled backward in revulsion, barely keeping his feet. “Son. Of. A. Bitch!”

  A large metal table sat in the middle of the room. Cody recognized it as an autopsy table by the drains around the edge. His head reeled at the sight of half-dried fluids, caked substances he dared not consider, and crusted galvanized buckets full of drying organs.

  An ancient medical cabinet filled one entire corner, along with sinister equipment unfamiliar to the men. Dusty medical glassware lined the perimeter of the attic. For once, aisles between stacked boxes provided clear avenues to walk.

  Looking down from the only vertical wall in a room full of angles, dozens of stuffed animal heads hung on mismatched boards, giving the impression of a mixed herd observing the scene with dry, dusty brown eyes.

  The rustling noise they’d been hearing became louder as hundreds of rats scrabbled from burrows and holes to skitter across the dusty wooden floor. The earlier gunshots and the crash of the sheet metal panicked a swarm of terrified rats that had been feeding on the remains.

  The rodent squeaks and scrabbling added to a much louder noise coming from the attic roof, now only a few feet overhead. With no insulation of any kind, the rattle of sleet was much, much louder.

  They poured through the attic in a fluid mass and rushed toward the only opening large enough for them all to escape at one time, the area around John who knelt beside the trap door in the floor.

  “Goddlemighty!” Cody jumped back and tripped. He landed hard and buried his face in his arms as the rats swarmed over him like a warm, hairy river.

  Not knowing what was going on, John saw a wave of vermin covering his partner before they swirled around his body like filthy water, tumbling through the opening by the hundreds.

  His finger involuntarily twitched on the trigger. The materials around them did little to deaden the sound, and the concussion pounded John’s ears with more than enough force to momentarily deafen the deputy.

  The bullet plowed through several escaping rats before it hit a sealed tin full of long-stored body parts in formaldehyde. It exploded, spewing vile, reeking contents into the small hovel.

  Chapter Forty-two

  Cotton mattresses, boxes of cotton sacks, thousands of ’toe sacks, unimaginable mountains of torn, dirty, stained, unusable clothing…

  ***

  Cars, fire engines, and ambulances idled in the bitter cold, white exhaust boiling in clouds from hot exhaust pipes. With the heater going at full blast and waiting for James to make his way back to Chisum, Top and Pepper listened to the radio in the luxurious warmth of Ned’s car.

  Huddled in his yellow slicker against the sleet, Sergeant Blair broke away from a group of equally cold men. “Sheriff, we’ve got some more information on George and his son.”

  “OK what is it?” Griffin didn’t take his eyes off the building. Ned and O.C. stepped closer to listen.

  “George and his brother lost the funeral home nearly twenty years ago and moved here into the Exchange. Alvin hasn’t been seen for most of that time, but he did visit Dr. Townsend once or twice, who said his mind was about gone.”

  “We know that. Is there more?”

  “Well, George Hart was always a strange cat, and once they got out of the funeral business, and dodged going to jail, they stayed pretty much to themselves. Baker here has some more that he knows. Tell him.”

  Officer Baker had finally abandoned his own self-imposed dress code, loosened his tie and was wearing an oversize cloth coat. He pointed to a house beyond the railroad station. “I went over there and used those folks’ phone to talk with my old professor, who made a few calls to a doctor he knows that works at the sanitarium in Tulsa. He told me Kendal Bowden Hart was sent there when he was a kid because he almost killed George Hart one night while he was asleep, to pay him back for sexual mistreatment.”

  “I’ll be damned.” O.C. slapped the back of one hand into the other. “That explains a helluva lot. That’s what I couldn’t dig up, and here he makes one little phone call up to the Territories and finds out.”

  Unsure of what O.C. was talking about, Baker continued, keeping an eye on the old judge. “Well sir, the doctor wasn’t supposed to talk about this, but since Kendal got out and started killing folks, he figured we needed to know so we can catch him. Kendal’s mental disease is worse than we imagined, and it’s because, according to the doctor, for years George, and others, sexually mistreated Kendal. When Kendal tried to cut him up one night, screaming about human reanimation, George had him committed to the institution in Oklahoma.”

  Griffin turned his eyes to the deputy. “A crazy undertaker committing his crazy son? I guess Kendal came by it natural, but this gets nuttier by the minute.”

  Baffled by the professor’s conversation, Ned cleared his throat. “What’s human reanimation?”

  “You’ve read the book or seen the movie Frankenstein?”

  “Um hum. Saw that silly movie on television.”

  “The doctor said Kendal came at his daddy with a knife, saying he was going to cut him up and bring him back as a nice person. When he got to the hospital, Kendal told the doctors that others had mistreated him as well, and he intended to
kill them all for what they done. He kept saying they all wanted to look, whatever that means.”

  “How’d all this happen without us knowing about it?”

  “It’s easy when they have someone committed like that,” O.C. said. “George probably put him in the car and drove his crazy ass to Tulsa. Once the paperwork was done, and because Kendal was a minor, they sealed all the records and none of us could find anything about it, especially after Val Jackson got involved and knotted everything up with paperwork.”

  “What’n hell does he mean ‘look’?” Ned began, but was cut off by muffled gunfire coming from the Exchange.

  Dampened by the storm, the shots sounded as if they originated near the roof. They had no way of knowing it was Cody shooting at snakes. From the outside, in the midst of a sleet storm, the idea was ludicrous.

  The tired deputies jumped at the sudden noise. From Sheriff Griffin’s right, a puff of smoke appeared from the ground near a police car. A tear gas grenade streaked toward a second floor window and crashed through the pane, lodging against the ancient paper window shade which immediately burst into flame. Fed by even more dry paper and wood, the blaze virtually exploded.

  “Who fired that round?” Ned snarled and waved his hands. “Hold your fire, goddamn it! We’ve still got people inside. Griffin, get aholt of your men and get some water on that winder now!”

  “Oh, lordy,” O.C. whispered and turned to the now flaming window.

  Griffin turned to his deputy. “Blair. Get those boys on the walkie talkie. Tell them the whole place is afire!”

  “Already tried. No answer sir.”

  Helpless, O.C. wished he knew what to do. “They’ve tangled with something awful bad in there.”

  “I know those boys.” Ned watched the firemen scramble in front of the brightly burning building. “Whatever it is, I’d hate to be on the business end of them pistols.”

  Chapter Forty-three

  Stacks of telephone directories, an upright piano, a nine foot grandfather clock, a child’s toy box, paper, wood, cedar chests, cloth material…all incredibly combustible…

  ***

  “God, oh god!” John screamed. “What is all that?”

  Cody lay on his back, gasping in horror. “I don’t know, I don’t know.” Suddenly he remembered their reason for being in the attic. With an effort he rolled over and surveyed the room, aiming the pale glow of his flashlight and pistol at every corner, but knowing full well if George were present they would already be dead.

  In the farthest corner of the attic, stacks of decaying medical books, files, and newspapers almost hid a stained mattress covered by bundles of rags.

  Evidence of George’s unstable mind rested on rough shelves lining the attic opposite the trophy heads; sealed glass jars full of human organs preserved in murky fluid.

  In stark contrast, five clean bell jars were lined neatly on the obscene embalming table. Each sparkling jar contained a recently collected head floating in crystal clear liquid.

  “What the hell?” Cody smelled the unmistakable odor of fresh moonshine whiskey that had been used as the preservative. Moving closer, the small bones of uncounted rats, picked clean of flesh, crunched under his boots.

  The covered jar on the left contained the wide-eyed face Cody recognized from wanted posters as Kevin Jennings, the owner of the body he and Ned had pulled out of the Red River only days before. The second trophy trailing a very fine tendril of blood in the clear liquid was Josh Brooks. Next was that of the missing person reported by his wife, Merle Clark, then Randal Wicker. The last, bearded and wrinkled beyond imagination from a lifetime of abuse and neglect, was George Hart.

  Cody stared at Hart’s dead, dull eyes. “What the hell have you started here?”

  In the center of the stained mattress Cody finally recognized the bundle of rags as George’s emaciated trunk. Lying at a contorted angle, he was dressed in ragged shorts, work brogans, and layers of shirts. A burlap sack resembling a shawl was pinned at the stump of his throat with a garish broach. The rats had been busy with George’s corpse, but Cody realized it wasn’t all there. Understanding dawned, and he knew the drying organs beside the filthy embalming table belonged to George.

  “Kendal did for you, didn’t he, Hart? But for what? What did you do to him?”

  “You talking to me?”

  Cody turned toward John and swallowed. “Naw, just talking to a dead man is all.”

  John panned his weak flashlight over the mounts ranging from whitetail deer, to elk and wild boar, to sable antelope and kudus. “I don’t know why you people always want to put trophies on the walls.”

  The observation made Cody grasp the clear explanation to the human heads floating in jars mere feet away. “Kendal’s daddy collected those kinds of trophies, and it looks to me like the son of a mortician was collecting his own. Now we partly know why he took those heads.”

  “You reckon that’s George?”

  Cody studied the grisly head for a long moment. “Yep, that’s him right there.” He paused with a stunned look on his face. “My god, John. I know what this is all about now. George did all this to keep Kendal out, not us. He’s crazy all right, but in his own way, because he spent all these years building his version of a fort. He did something to that boy and knew Kendal would eventually come after him, and this is how he intended to stay safe!”

  John ran a shaky hand across his sweaty face. “Well it backfired and Kendal still got in and killed him for sure.”

  “There’s no telling what he did to Kendal to make him so afraid his own kid would come back to kill him. My god, undertakers are scary enough when they’re normal, but what’n hell did he do?”

  “My people heard stories, but they didn’t intend to spread nothin’ that wasn’t theirs to tell. White folks wouldn’t have listened no-how, but it don’t make no difference now, we need to get out of here so we don’t end up the same way.”

  “He’s done now that George is dead. Kendal sucked us into this nightmare after he finished his collection because we got too close to him on the outside. He’s gone.”

  Curious and light-headed, John breathed the fetid air through his open mouth. He knelt on the floor as the poison made him dizzy. “Lord have mercy.”

  Chapter Forty-four

  All or most of it combustible…

  ***

  The entire front of the structure virtually burst into flame as decades of loose paper ignited with ferocity no one outside would have predicted. Smoke and crackling flames sucked through the network of burrows, racing through the Exchange. The highly combustible refuse was flawlessly ventilated, creating the perfect bonfire.

  The result was nothing less than catastrophic.

  “Keep trying to get those boys on the radio!” Sheriff Griffin shouted. “Tell them to get out the back way!”

  The scene on the street was chaotic. More fire trucks screeched into position as firemen frantically unrolled hoses and turned streams of water into the billowing smoke. Smoke boiled from the windows and seeped in roiling clouds from under the eaves.

  Ned could already tell there was no way to contain the conflagration.

  A white curtain of sleet descended in a hissing rattle, bouncing off the firemen’s protective gear and gathering in drifts. Water that didn’t turn to steam ran down the façade and gathered in pools before draining into the gutters sluggish with ice. Vapor from the tailpipe of every vehicle in the area added to the misty scene.

  Anxious and frustrated that he could do nothing for the men inside the Exchange, Ned paced and talked to himself. O.C. desperately wanted to go to his old friend, but knew there was nothing he could do or say. For the moment, they felt powerless, forced to allow others to work while they simply stood by, and fidgeted, and watched.

  From inside, squeals and detonations disclosed the existence of containers exploding in the heat. Fire raced through the burrows, quickly reaching every floor.

  The crackling roar increased and glass
shattered.

  O.C. blamed himself for sending the young, untested constable to the Exchange.

  Sheriff Griffin blamed himself for not handling the situation better and wondered how badly the outcome would affect the next election.

  Chief Mayhew blamed himself for not taking a stronger role in the events leading up to the fire. “Back those cars up! Get them away from the fire.”

  Ned blamed himself for allowing John and Cody to enter the building. He watched the firemen direct another hose onto the flames. “Get that water up higher! That’s where they’ll come out if they can! They’ll head for the roof!”

  The fireman turned sad eyes toward the old constable. His look crushed all Ned’s hope. “We’re doing the best we know how, sir.”

  O.C. stepped up beside Ned. “Let ’em work, Ned.”

  “Them boys are still in there. They’ll burn.” Ned wiped tears with the heels of his hands.

  “The good Lord’ll get them out, that’s what Miss Becky would say, wouldn’t she?”

  “You’re right about that, but she’s always been stronger than me in that way.” His eyes dropped down to Andrews’ smoking legs. “My god, what’s next?”

  Slowly, reluctantly, they backed away from the increasing heat as the fire became a living thing, consuming all it touched.

  Chapter Forty-five

  Smoke from the fire filtered into the tunnels. Fresh air from George’s ingenious ventilation system fed the flames, turning the bizarre design into a giant, self-fed blowtorch.

  ***

  The shrieking mass of rats fleeing the smoke-filled tunnels below once again engulfed them, pouring back through dark unseen openings like water. The two horrified lawmen jumped to their feet, but John immediately fell back to his knees, struck with weakness from the poison circulating through his system.