The Rabid (Book 1)
Page 28
Dad had sat with him on the swing for a long time talking. Duke just thought he was telling stories, scary stories to take his mind off the argument. Going on and on about old Indian legends and Duke’s responsibility, Dad had told him about things that sounded like ghosts but he said they were real, things that walked around but were still not really alive. It was our responsibility he said; the family’s responsibility to take care of these things and send them all back. He kept telling Duke he’d understand everything in just a few minutes, then he would know what to do when it was his time.
That was where memory faded into the shadows of stories that he had been told and that he himself had told to others. They were all jumbled up in his head, because his father had told him things and said to keep them secret. His mother told the sheriff something else and swore it was the truth. People around town said other things. None of it was good.
There was a rustle in the brush that came from around the northwest side of the house out towards the barn. Something clattered against the barn wall.
“Hey,” Duke called out, “over here.” He raised his voice without quite shouting and felt like he was inviting the inevitable.
Something answered, not by calling back, not with words, but with a long, low moan that sounded like Frankenstein making love to his new bride, kind of angry and sad at the same time. It flowed like cold air, heavy and close to the ground, picking through the burnt brown grass to climb up the porch steps and dance on Duke’s spine.
Sights, smells, and sounds are like little land mines of memory. Hiding just under our feet waiting for the right combination of time and place, they explode into moments of perfect connection to the past. That is how it was for Duke just then. This one sound took him beyond memory to make him eight years old again. Sitting on this same porch with his father as the low moaning that seemed to be choked from the throat of death itself crept closer. He felt the same creeping fear he felt then.
Twenty years ago, the sound came out of the south cornfield directly facing the porch.
“Hey, over here,” his father had called too.
The moaning grew louder, like it was drawn to the sound of his father’s voice. His dad just sat there with him on the swing, as if this was just some company he had been expecting. Dry corn stalks rattled sounding as they did when a pig got lose in the field.
Duke watched his father stand up from the swing and lean against the porch railing, lifting his shotgun and pointing its long barrel at some invisible point in the cornrow. That was when Grandpa came out of the barn carrying his own double-barreled shotgun.
“Dad, no!” Duke’s father had yelled.
Duke didn’t really see what happened directly, he watched it reflected on his father’s face as resolve faded to worry and worry crashed suddenly to fear. When Duke turned back toward his grandfather, the thing had already come out of the corn and was on him. The old man was too slow and the big old gun was too cumbersome for a real fight.
Whatever it was that had come from the cornfield wore clothes and walked like a man, but it attacked like an animal, tooth, nails, and hunger. It sunk its teeth into the old man’s throat and ripped a huge bloody chunk off in one vicious lunge.
Duke watched the bright red swath of arterial spray spreading upward from the wound and feathering out in front of the fading sun, and wondered for a moment if it would make a rainbow like those he had seen in the water from the garden hose.
His father stormed down the porch stairs yelling for his own father in a voice that Duke had never heard before. He followed his running father and watched him raise the shotgun again as he got too close to miss.
The animal man swallowed the last bit of bloody red meat torn from Grandpa’s neck and turned to face the father and son. His eyes were hard black beads, the whites gone gray tinged with brownish red streaks. The mouth was open and smeared with fresh blood, but the teeth looked white and hard.
It moved forward one quick step, unafraid of them or the gun, reaching out to take them just as it had Grandpa. Then its chest exploded in a dirty brown splash.
The concussion of the shotgun blast rumbled in Duke’s chest and he put a hand up to feel if he had been hit as well. The second shot tore through the thing’s neck, blasting away almost all of the flesh but leaving the yellowish-white column of bone holding up the head.
Duke could swear the thing smiled then, even as it kept coming. That was when the shotgun thundered again, shattering the head into nonexistence. The body fell in a slow cartoon tumble.
With no concern at all for the man-thing he had just killed, his father dropped the weapon and bent to take up the body of Grandpa. Duke stared at the headless body for a long time before turning to see both of the men of his family in the bloody grass. He had always vaguely wondered if his father and grandfather loved each other. They had never said it that he had heard and they always seemed to argue. He saw the truth of it for the first time as his dad cradled the body of his own dad and cried.
A moan that was other than memory came again, slipping around the corner of the barn. Duke’s past melted into the present and he blinked back the first tears he had ever shed for his father or grandfather. For twenty years, he had denied the events of that night, and written off his own father as mad for all his stories about the returning dead and admonishments about responsibility. Now, despite belief and common sense, he knew what he needed to do just as surely as he knew his own name. He looked down at the shotgun in his hands and realized that he had been ready since the first whisper of sound had come off the fields.
Raising the weapon to his shoulder, Duke took his bead on the jutting corner of the barn.
“Here I am,” he called, and then waited.
Waiting didn’t last long. A shambling, fat wad of a man rounded the corner, stepping into the barn’s shadow, his chest lining up with the sights of the shotgun. Looking hard through the dim light, Duke could just make out the dark outline of a tie over a white shirt. It was wearing a suit.
Raising his aim, Duke let the little day glow bead of the sight follow the tie up to the neck, from there to a pale drooping chin over the open mouth, and centered it between two deeply sunken eyes.
“Just come a little closer,” Duke said softly. Too softly, he thought, to be heard by the thing in his sights, but he was wrong. The eyes that had been dark, flared with new heat and burned right across the quiet yard to lock onto Duke.
It took a step, thick legs twitching in an awkward motion. Another step and the thing lurched forward, settling into a broken gait, moving straight toward Duke who watched only the eyes. No matter how unsteady the step, the gaze never wavered.
More than halfway across the yard, it reached the bumper of the truck, knocking against the pitted chrome without notice. It was in easy range now and the eyes beyond the sights of the shotgun showed themselves to be faded of color, lifeless, yet full of intent. They were the hard hungry eyes of a predator stalking.
Shoulders hunched and flexed forward to bring the stiff arms up in a clumsy motion. Filthy, scabrous hands clawed the air reaching for Duke. Some of the fingers of the hands were broken and hanging at angles. Two were just nubs of white bone. Dry, brown blood, was all over them, but nowhere were they bleeding.
Another staggering series of steps brought it beyond the old truck and within a few feet of the porch. Duke’s finger tightened slowly on his trigger just as the thing in his sights began to glow with a soft, amber light. He hesitated just long enough to register the growing engine noise and the grinding of tires on gravel. With the thing illuminated in the headlights of the oncoming truck, Duke took one last look into the hard eyes that were stalking him, then pulled the trigger.
At that range, the head exploded in a brutal wet shower that glistened more black than red in the approaching headlights. As brakes squealed and knobby tires dragged in the dirt of the drive, the body slumped silently down into the shadow of the derelict Chevy.
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Table of Contents
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Sample fo The Dead Ground