And it is heaving, he realizes with amazement. He watches her perfect, softball-sized breasts bulging above the sensible white business casual shirt, and he looks up to find he’s been caught yet again, and even more tellingly, her glazed, horny, sexually repressed expression has intensified. Jesus, he thinks. If this goes on any longer she’s either going to hurdle the desk and mount me or bolt screaming from the room.
But she does neither. She only asks, What will my duties be, Mr. Florence?
Flo, he tells her through the thickness in his throat and resists naming a dozen naughty duties he’d just love to bestow upon her, the first of which being to lift that skirt and let him—
“You okay, Flo?” a voice asks, startling the hell out of him. He glances up through the sludgy gloom and realizes it’s Mel herself soliciting his well-being. He stares hard at her and at once can see what she’s thinking: …doesn’t look well, but my goodness, who can blame him? The way his stupid wife is treating him, any man would be sick to death…
And holy crap, he thinks, it’s just like tuning into a radio station, and not one of those gauzy AM stations that sound like a man trapped in a well shouting up through a severe rainstorm, but an honest-to-goodness, big city FM rock station, playing all your favorite hits. The Steve Miller Band, AC/DC, The Rolling Stones, and Melanie Macomber’s Innermost Thoughts and Desires. What a trip! He considers setting aside the next half hour to do nothing but listen in on his companions—well, Melanie mostly, with a little of that newly minted slut Charly thrown in to keep him edgy. Bledsoe’s mind he has no interest in. He knows well enough what’s in there anyway: Fuck Charly, fuck Charly, fuck Charly. And oh yes…something else. Something about a dying mother and a foot rotting off. Eric hadn’t needed to do a thing, merely gazed at the wife-stealing cocksucker, and there it was, like his own personal drive-in movie theater, except there was no tinny speaker-on-the-window sound; it was all hi-def. Man, he could even smell that putrefying big toe, the fulsome stench of it boiling in the closed air of the hospital room like a Glade Plug-In from hell. He could almost gag remembering the smell, and how vivid was that? It had been a long-ago memory in someone else’s mind, yet it still resonated in Eric’s thoughts as though he himself had been sitting in Sam’s bedside chair.
“Flo?” a voice urges. “You okay, Flo?”
He tunes in and hears, You poor baby, someone who appreciates you is what you deserve. If Charly weren’t here I’d caress you and make you feel all better, all better …
And though Eric’s erection rages at this, her words are eerily close to those purple nightmare words from his childhood…
She’s your new babysitter, his mom tells him
Eric nods. He’s nine, what the hell does he know?
Patricia, this is my son. He’s a trifle small for his age, but he played up a level in AAU this spring.
Patricia looks at him, her frowsy clothes and her shoebox of a face and her tight brown curls and most of all those recessed beady eyes that remind him of a bespectacled weasel.
She takes a step forward and two warring scents close over him like a noose: baby powder and ketchup.
Patricia, his mom says, is second in her class at Shadeland High and is planning on becoming a surgeon.
Pediatrician, Patricia corrects, smiling all the time.
Won’t it be fun to have a regular sitter, honey? his mom coos. Patricia will be here every day.
Eric glances from the fleshy, shoebox-faced weasel to his mom and back to the weasel again. He doesn’t know a thing about class rank or pediatricians—hell, he doesn’t seem to recall his own name at the moment. The stink of ketchup with its airy, talc-scented counterpoint render him unable to breathe, much less form a coherent response.
Say something, his mom demands, her face tightening.
Eric feels small, like he always does, and he stares into those recessed eyes and wonders if they have a color.
Eric! his mom snaps.
He forces his mouth to open, makes his tongue move.
Hi, he says.
Hello, Pumpkin, Patricia says.
And the most hellish experience of Eric’s life begins.
“Coach Florence?” Mel asks, seriously worried now. “Are you feeling faint?” She whirls and shouts over her shoulder to the others. “Hold on, dang it! There’s something wrong with Flo!” Turns back to him and searches his face. “Tell me where it hurts, Flo. Tell Mel where it hurts.”
And man, does he like this, the way she’s talking and looking at him now, and it’s as if a nimbus cloud has been bleached white by some divine meteorological providence, and the memory of Patricia and her man-hands and ketchup breath are gone, long gone, and so is her frowsy hair and her boxy face, and replacing them he sees nothing but Mel, sweet, delicious Mel, and she cannot see inside him, of course she can’t, he is as closed to her as he’s always been, perhaps more
(because she wasn’t touched)
and she thinks he’s merely caught a bug or something
(the nail didn’t harrow her flesh)
or is distraught over his son’s disappearance
(but yours, it did, it slashed you deep, all the way to your core)
and he’ll let her go on thinking it, if it gets him closer to possessing her.
(malignant to begin with, but repressed, God, so repressed)
He puts a hand over hers, cups it to his face.
(but no longer, he won’t hold it in any longer, by God)
“You feel so warm,” Mel says, her breath sweet and near in the darkness. “It’s like your skin’s on fire.”
(now it’s time to become)
“Mel,” he says softly. “I’ve never been better.”
Chapter Three
Jesse listened. The voice was distant. There was a raw edge to it that suggested the baby had been screaming unheeded for many hours.
Jesse asked, “How can you be sure it’s human? It could be one of the Children’s children. Though I don’t want to imagine it, I’m sure the Night Flyers have sex…”
“One got taken last night,” Red Elk said.
Jesse gazed at the man’s expressionless face. “What do you mean, one—”
“Debbie told me when she…” A bitterness rippled across the man’s face a moment, then he staunched it as quickly as it had appeared. “Debbie saw it on TV last night after she got done dancing.”
“Wait a minute. Debbie was a stripper?”
“That surprise you?”
Jesse thought of her firm, naked body tremoring from Red Elk’s thrusts. “I guess not.”
“The baby belonged to the ladies’ basketball coach up at the college.”
“I didn’t hear about it.”
“That’s because you were too busy watching Emma’s tight little can.”
“I notice her tight little can wasn’t lost on you either.”
“Oh I noticed, all right. Wouldn’t deny it, either. Girl has the kind of butt I’d like to eat off of. Spread a little whipped cream on those cheeks, stick a cherry in her crack—”
“I got it,” Jesse said.
Red Elk began rummaging through the gym bag.
“Can I ask you a question, Frank?” he asked.
Red Elk grunted, fished out a graying stick of beef jerky.
“Have you always been this interested in sex?”
“It doesn’t interest you?”
Jesse stuck his hands in his pockets, shrugged. “Sure it does, but it’s like you don’t think about anything else.”
“You never find your hand when you’re fantasizing about Emma?”
“Come on, we’re not—”
“You never wondered how it’d feel to have her gobble that little knob of yours?”
“Hey,” Jesse said. “Jeez, she might be dead for all we know.”
“She ain’t dead,” Red Elk said, coming up with the silver lighter.
Jesse opened his mouth to answer but decided to keep quiet. Better to believe Red Elk’s
assertion. Better to ignore the sinking feeling in the pit of his belly…
Without looking at him, Red Elk said, “You see me ride that Night Flyer?”
“Sure did. Reminded me of some movie where a kid gets to ride a dragon.”
“I was thinking that too,” Red Elk said, “but in pictures the kids don’t get as banged up as I did.”
Jesse studied his unseamed face. “You look fine to me.”
Red Elk gave him a wry look, reached back, and drew up his black Horror Drive-In T-shirt. Jesse fought off an urge to retch.
When the Night Flyer had dragged Red Elk along the cave wall, it had gotten its money’s worth. In addition to the innumerable lacerations and welts festooning the man’s back, there was a ragged trench that spanned from one shoulder to the other, ugly along its entire length, and in one gruesome patch flaying open the meat of his back to reveal a glistening glimpse of his scapula.
Half turning, Red Elk asked, “How’s it look?”
Jesse swallowed. “I’m not hungry anymore, if that tells you anything.”
“Figured,” Red Elk said and mercifully let the shirt fall. “Just as well. The Twinkies and granola bars were in the other bag.”
Jesse groaned, realizing the water was too.
“Well,” Red Elk said, stretching his arms. “Might as well get on with it.”
Jesse eyed the red tube of dynamite with alarm. “You’re going to do it now?”
“What, you wanna snuggle first?” Red Elk said.
Jesse threw a desperate glance back up the corridor to where the rockslide was. “Are you sure we shouldn’t…you know, try to move some of that away beforehand?”
“Don’t see the point,” Red Elk said. “That way isn’t getting any more blocked. If this doesn’t work, we can always try to unpile it later. For now, we may as well see if this does us any good.”
Crap, Jesse thought. His stomach clenched into a tight ball.
Red Elk took the dynamite fuse and straightened it with a thumb and forefinger. To Jesse, he looked like some mischievous dad getting ready to set off an illegal firework for his kids.
“Speaking of the pile,” Red Elk said, throwing a nod behind Jesse, “you better take refuge over there while this thing does its job.”
Jesse backpedaled. “How far will the blast reach?”
“Don’t know,” Red Elk said amiably. “Never messed with dynamite before.”
“If it kills us, we won’t be able to help the girls.”
“That what you reckon we’re gonna do?”
“It is, isn’t it? I mean, we can’t let them die.”
Red Elk pursed his lips and examined the fuse, which now poked straight up like a birthday candle. “I expect you’re right. We better go after them.”
“Then why’d you ask?”
A shrug. “Maybe I wanted to see if you were like Greeley.”
“You couldn’t tell the difference already? Thanks a hell of a lot, Frank.”
“I could tell,” Red Elk said. “But when you’re going to war, you like to know what your friends are made of.” He gestured toward the narrowed hole. “Whatever we find down there, it’s gonna be hairy. There might be a hell of a lot more of those Night Flyers where they took the girls, and I expect we’ll have to deal with more of those white bastards too.”
Jesse felt a chill course down his spine. “How are we going to save them with all those things around?”
“I don’t know,” Red Elk said, considering. “Surprise, I guess.”
“We’re going to surprise them.”
“Sure.”
“The exploding dynamite ought to help.”
Red Elk grinned crookedly. “I expect so.”
Jesse blew out tremulous breath. “Okay. Let’s blow up the cave.”
This time the detonation wasn’t as dramatic as it had been at the house. One moment Red Elk’s elongated shadow was crouching on the moist cave wall, the next the man himself was barreling around the corner with a demented smile on his face.
“Cover up!” he shouted.
Jesse had a moment to wonder what the hell he was supposed to cover up with, but by that time the gravelly roar was blotting out all thought. Jesse flung himself on the rock pile and clasped his hands in his hair the way he’d been taught during elementary school tornado drills. Somewhere in the middle of all the rending and popping, Red Elk had joined him, had even girdled his shoulders with one meaty arm. The gesture would have been touching if Jesse weren’t so terrified of having the cave fall on them. And for a long and torturous moment he was sure it would. The creaking groan bellowed louder, like some foghorn sounding from the bowels of the earth, and when Jesse cast a feverish glance up at the ceiling he saw that the rock face was chipping, large sheaves of the brown stuff crumbling off like plaster. A fissure scurried along the ceiling from the direction of the explosion, and as Jesse watched, a fascinated dread sweeping through him, the fissure broadened, became finger width, then he was screaming at Red Elk to run, they had to run, dammit, the whole mess was coming down on them. He yanked Red Elk away from the falling section of the ceiling. Powder sifted over them as they rushed toward the site of the explosion. There came a colossal groan followed by a crashing thud as the corridor behind them caved in. Jesse had a moment of confusion when they reached the place where the narrow area surely began. Yet the corridor no longer narrowed here—became, if anything, a good deal wider—and despite his coughing and the eye-watering dust choking the air, his helmet light indicated the blast had worked, they’d opened things up after all.
He was dragging Red Elk ahead when he glimpsed something that froze his blood.
A figure approaching.
The gritty murk here was worse than any they’d yet encountered, but despite the swirling caul of a billion dust motes, Jesse could see well enough to know they were in trouble.
He fumbled for the cleaver, realized he’d lost it when the Night Flyer had dropped him. And the revolver? Either Red Elk had it, or it was lost. The emaciated figure drew nearer. They’d stumbled upon more of the Children, but this time there was no hope for them. They didn’t know how many they were up against. This could be one of the monsters, or it could be the whole damned hive.
Another shape was clarifying in the dust.
He coughed hard, his eyes watering badly now. But Red Elk strode past him with the Ruger extended like some zombified waiter hell-bent on distributing his tray of hors d'oeuvres. The figure immediately ahead of Red Elk froze, threw its arms up and the sound it made gave Jesse an odd feeling.
Then he realized why.
He’d begun to open his mouth to stop Red Elk before he did something catastrophic, but the Ruger expelled its flat, cracking noise, and the figure grunted. Then there was a flailing commotion ahead, the sounds of struggle.
He heard a woman shout, “Sam!”
His paralysis shattering, Jesse lurched forward.
Chapter Four
In the brown haze he made out a blonde woman, her face sweaty and fierce. She was cradling a man somewhere in his forties; it was difficult to tell in the swirl of dust motes and light. Red Elk was standing over them, the Ruger hanging limply, almost apologetically, at his side. A pretty brunette with freckles crouched beside the blonde girl and the unconscious guy. Another face loomed out of the shadows toward Jesse, and though the tall man’s complexion was an unsettling white, something about it reminded him of Ruth Cavanaugh.
“Who are you guys?” the tall man said, but there was something not quite right about his voice. He wasn’t incensed by the sudden shooting of one of his companions—if anything, the set of his mouth suggested it was all sort of a rush.
Jesse made himself answer, “We’re trying to find our friends.”
“Bet they took them too,” the tall man said in his strange, exhilarated way.
Yes, Jesse thought, it was the eyes that were spooking him, the glassy, staring eyes. If one peered deep enough, one might see terrible things in thos
e eyes, one might see
(abandoned him, your grandpa)
secrets laid bare, his worst mistakes replayed and exploited
(all he wanted was your time)
Jesse tried but could not detach his eyes from the unblinking doll’s eyes of the pale man, the green eyes
(coward)
“Jesse,” someone said.
Jesse turned his head, appalled at the hypnotic turmoil he’d just endured. Red Elk’s huge hand was squeezing his bicep, shaking him hard enough to clip his teeth together and command his full attention.
“What?” Jesse asked.
“Help them with the man I just shot.”
Still uneasy, Jesse obeyed.
As he kneeled close to the blonde woman—the gorgeous blonde woman, he now realized, despite the sweat matting her hair and the grime on her cheeks—he saw her stare fiercely up at Red Elk.
“And where the hell will you be?” she demanded. “Finding a doctor for Sam, I hope.”
“Sam?” Red Elk asked. “That isn’t Sam Bledsoe?”
“If he’s your friend,” the blonde woman said and visored her eyes, “you’ve got a horrible way of showing it.”
“We’re not friends,” Red Elk said.
The blonde glanced at Jesse. “Help me get him over to the wall.”
Jesse got hold of the man’s side while the blonde got under him and backpedaled. The freckled girl helped a little, but it was the blonde who did the lion’s share of the work. Strong lady, Jesse thought. He made a mental note not to piss her off the way Frank had.
Charly mopped sweat off Sam’s brow. He seemed to be breathing steadily, and the big, black-haired man who’d shot him had succeeded in staunching the flow of blood out of his left side. She wished she could say Sam had only been grazed, but the holes—one just over his hip, the exit wound even with it in the small of his back—were leaking too freely for her liking.
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