by Mark Tufo
When he looked, however, the road was empty. Of course it was; that kid wasn’t tracking him. The kid had his hands full.
And his mouth.
He’d been out of his mind, rabid most likely.
Did rabid animals grin?
The tremors came on suddenly and crippled him down to his knees. He tensed his muscles and tried to quell the shaking, but they kept seizing him, like waves crashing upon the shore.
His stomach knotted and he thought of that flap of cheek dangling from the kid’s mouth.Like a piece of bologna in a dog’s mouth.
His vomit was milky white.
Eventually, he got control of himself again. He wondered if he had suffered a concussion when Amanda had struck him with the shovel. That might explain hallucinations.
He could get through this. He was a survivor. He would walk to the road and head back toward the city and eventually someone would stop to pick him up, a trucker most likely, and he could pay for a ride. He just had to get back on his feet and get walking.
He managed to stand and after a moment his legs stopped wobbling.
“I’m okay,” he said. “I can do this.”
Something groaned in response behind him.
As if turning too quickly would somehow make his fear true, Jose turned very slowly around.
The boy stood in the middle of the road. He swayed like he might fall but when he walked forward, he did so on surprisingly solid steps. Like he’d been invigorated.
More blood soaked his chest and smeared across his entire face.
Amanda’s blood.
“No,” he said.
The boy grunted.
“You didn’t follow me. There’s no way.”
He grunted again and, gradually, grinned red.
They stared at each other, tree shadows flickering across the road between them, sundown holding its breath. Then the boy started toward Jose in an awkward gait but quick, impossibly quick, and for a moment all Jose could do was watch in shock and surprise as this rabid zombie kid sprinted toward him.
Jose turned to run and the tremors clenched his legs and toppled him. He sprawled across the dirt road. Small pebbles sliced his palms. He tried to scramble forward, clawed at the ground. Even struggling for his life, he kept one fist tight around that cash.
The boy’s steps cascaded toward him.
His entire body wracked with tremors, Jose dared to peer over his shoulder.
“You’re not real,” he said.
Then the boy was on him and had Amanda been alive, she might have heard Jose’s squealing scream and thought a wild animal was dying somewhere.
Very soon his hand relaxed, and the bills rolled onto the pavement, sodden with fluids.
Losers weepers.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Eva Dean had pride in the home place, but sometimes it felt like a losing battle.
A large tractor with a set of rusting harrow disks hulked before the old farmhouse. Paint peeled from the sides of the two-story house in long lacerations, like the work of some giant cat using it as a scratching post. Daddy’s ’57 Chevy pickup was parked facing out in the drive. Like the tractor and the farmhouse, the Chevy had seen better days. She’d gone to rust around the rear wheels and the tires were so faded and thin a quick drive over rocky terrain might pop them all.
Daddy should have been prouder of it. Should have spent hours fixing it up, polishing it back to life. He should have been the type of guy who bragged that the ’57 Chevy was the one perfect example of great American vehicle design. He should have gloated about the rebuilt V8 engine with its 160 horsepower. Instead, it sat in the driveway and gradually decayed. The grill was rotting and little chunks crumbled free like rotted teeth.
Daddy wasn’t far off himself, especially in the rotting-teeth department.
Something scurried through the woods nearby. It was too dark for Eva Dean to catch a glimpse.
“Lucy?” Delphus called. “That you?”
“She’s probably off chasing possums,” Eva Dean said.
“Ought to be here guarding the house.”
“Don’t be such a coot. You’re starting to sound like—”
Dad stopped, pointed to the front door. A wedge of light spilled out from where the door stood ajar. “The door was locked,” Delphus said.
“You probably left it open when you went to the barn.” That was probably true, but even so, the sight of the slightly opened door sent a tremor through her.
“I never leave it open,” Delphus said. “Not since you started the camp.”
God, she hated when he used that insinuating tone. As if anything bad that happened was her fault, and all because she was trying to save this damn place. No matter what it was that had gone wrong, he’d find some way to blame it on the camp and its sketchy campers.
She pushed past him and headed up the porch to the front door. “They’re just kids, Daddy. No harm in them.”
She had to eat those words when she opened the door.
It looked like a bunch of drugged-up monkeys had been living in here. Cotton stuffing bled from jagged rips in the couch. The painting of a green-roofed farmhouse in a vast wheat field hung askew in fabric tatters. The end tables were overturned and smashed, the lamps shattered and the shades crumbled. The deer head trophy had been mauled, its eyes removed. Brown streaks smeared the walls. For a moment, Eva thought that stuff was brown paint but then the potent stink hit her and she knew it was diarrhea.
Her father entered behind her. He picked up a banjo. The neck had been snapped and the head popped. How fitting. Daddy looked like he was ready to do some neck-snapping himself. He burned with anger that smoothed some of the wrinkles from his face.
“No harm, huh? Looks like plenty of harm to me.”
“This couldn’t have been the kids,” she said, instinctively protective of her pet project.
“Who was it, then? The ghost of Tom Dooley?” Delphus set the banjo gently on a recliner and picked up the patchwork quilt. It hung in long, mutilated strings. “Good thing your momma wasn’t around to see this.”
No, Mama was dead. But where the hell was the dog when this happened?
“Lucy!” she yelled. “Here, girl!”
“She musta been laying down on the job,” Delphus said.
Eva Dean whistled for Lucy and called for her again. She started up the stairs, that first step creaking like it was going to give, and she saw Daddy going to the gun cabinet. The glass was busted, but the guns were all there, secured by chains.
Lucy was not upstairs.
More feces streaked the walls up here, especially on the bathroom door, as if that were some kind of defiant statement against toilets. One of the kids saying, “Makeme use an outhouse?” The dresser in the bedroom had been overturned and some sheets torn and a few more broken lamps lay strewn about. Except for the smeared feces, the place might have passed as the location of a real kicking college party. Not that she’d been to any such things in the last twenty years.
Dad yelled from downstairs: “Is the upstairs wrecked?”
“Not so bad.” No reason to piss him off even more. As it was, she was going to be hard pressed stopping him from killing a few of the campers.
Wonder if the insurance covers this, or if this counts as one of those “Acts of God”?
She stopped at the top of the stairs. Down at the far end of the hall, the door to the corner room was shut. That room had once been hers when she was a little girl, all done up in yellow flower-print wallpaper. When she left, Mama made it into a sewing room, and when Eva Dean moved back after Mama’s death, Eva took the room next to the bathroom and left the sewing room alone. Mama had spent so much time in there. It would have been wrong to change anything about it. The wallpaper had never been changed, only faded to a yellow so pale it could have passed for white.
“Lucy?” she said in a near-whisper.
The floor moaned beneath her steps as she approached. The stench mingled with the house’s usu
al musty smell and started to turn her stomach. She strained to hear something, anything, someone hiding in the corner, Lucy whimpering in a closet, but she heard only her father downstairs making a racket as he grabbed a gun from the cabinet and cursed when glass shards fell to the floor.
She stopped outside the door, leaned close. For a moment, there was breathing on the other side, low and steady, and her heart jumped into her throat, but then it passed. An auditory hallucination.
Maybe.
She turned the knob slowly and quickly pushed the door wide. The hinges whined.
The room had been completely undisturbed. The piles of plastic sewing boxes containing thousands of needles and spools of thread balanced precariously against a tower of folded fabric that sloped onto the elderly sewing machine. Probably couldn’t have knocked that thing over if they tried. Might weigh two hundred pounds. Squares of sunlight saturated the really faded patches of wallpaper and the flower print in those spots existed only in her memory.
She spent a lot of time in her memory, especially when it came to Mama. She had been such a good woman. She’d only wanted the best for Eva Dean. She’d been so happy when Eva Dean went off to college in Georgia and majored in communications. Delphus had scoffed. “Communications? Don’t you already know how to talk? Although I reckon you could use some help on the listening.” But that hadn’t lasted long. Mama had gotten sick, cancer, and she’d dropped out of college and come back home to help Daddy with the farm work.
It pained her mother quite a lot to see her daughter do that, but Eva Dean never regretted it. She wouldn’t dream of exchanging those years she’d had with her mother for some fascinating career in radio or television. She had imagined she would go back to college and finish her degree eventually, but eventually became never. She was a country farm girl through and through and that was okay. Actually it was better than okay. It was something to be proud of.
And that’s all Mama had wanted, had, in fact, been one of the last things she never said to Eva Dean while she edged closer and closer to death in the bed at the opposite end of the hall. “You’re my special girl,” she’d said, her face so thin and drained of color. “I’m so proud of you, and I want you to know that no matter what you do, I will always be proud of you.”
And the memory would have been bittersweet but mostly sweet if that’s all she’d said. Mama, however, liked her guilt. She didn’t heap it on like spaghetti on a plate; she sprinkled it like grated cheese and that subtlety made it worse, like a bad seasoning making every bite bitter. “Take care of your father, Eva Dean. He needs you. I’m so worried for him.”
She’d told her mother not to worry. “I’ll take care of him.” And here she was, Eva Dean, a college dropout almost twenty years after that even meant anything and still tending to her father.
With luck, she’d prevent him from committing murder, because he was cussing up a storm downstairs with each new discovery of damage.
The closet door was open a sliver. She stared at it and wondered if the sloping shadows in there were bags of fabric or someone hiding. She started to step into the room and from downstairs, she heard the distinctive sound of Daddy loading his shotgun and snapping it into ready position.
She paused, eyeing the closet. She wasn’t sure what frightened her the most—that there was a kid in the closet who might jump her or that Daddy would deliver a dose of buckshot and spend the rest of his remaining years in prison.
“Lucy?”
The stack of sewing supplies toppled to the floor with a plastic crash. One of the containers vomited a lava flow of needles. Eva Dean stumbled back as if slapped and bumped into the doorframe, which, for a horrible second, was a person who sneaked up on her and her heart tried scurrying up her throat and out her mouth.
She closed the door and stood in the hallway. If someone was in the closet, he might try coming out now. She backed up a few steps and glanced behind her. Someone stood there, a shadowy figure, hulking back, dangling arms, and then vanished back into her fleeting nightmares.
This is partially your fault, Mama, she thought.I could have had a completely different life.
She went back downstairs.
“They must have heard us coming,” she said, sounding a little out of breath.
“They’ll hear us coming, all right.” Delphus brought the single-barrel shotgun up and braced the butt against his shoulder as if about to fire a hole through the living room wall.
“Let the sheriff handle it.”
“I know how the law handles things. A brat can get away with anything so long as he ain’t sixteen yet. Something like this, they’ll just send them to bed without supper and blame it on society.”
Delphus put down the shotgun and went to the gun rack again. He broke down the double-barrel shotgun and slid in two shells. He closed the chambers with a cold click. “Time for a double helpin’ of mountain justice.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Sheriff Wayne Hightower was thirty-six, lean, and well-groomed. It was the “well-groomed” part that had gotten him elected. That, and being a Republican. Even though North Carolina was as likely to swing blue as red in any presidential election, they liked their law enforcement conservative, and the crewcut went a long way to smooth over Hightower’s Northern origin.
Along with his Yankee accent, he stuck out around these parts as if he were the president traveling with his motorcade. The locals didn’t treat him like he was the president, however. He was lucky to get a moderate level of magnanimity from the locals, even when it came to hellos.
Hightower had been a Yankee cop, working in a smallish sort of city called Rocksburg, which was near Pittsburgh and, like a little brother, tried to copy Pittsburgh in every way. Everyone figured that city envy started even before the town got its name. Rocksburg had fewer than fifty thousand residents, but its crime rate was high and rising. Cops who proved themselves well on the streets of Rocksburg were granted transfers to the more meaningful patrol grounds in Pittsburgh or Philadelphia.
And some of those transfers ended up with bullets in their heads.Be good, but not too good, was the motto in Rocksburg City PD. If you were too good, you were liable to end up a grunt beat cop somewhere dangerous and die with your face in a puddle of blood.
There was another option, however, for those cops who wanted to avoid such a transfer. They fled. Hightower had no wife or any kids, so he’d started looking for a good escape pretty much the moment he hit the streets in Rocksburg. His parents lived there, but his familial obligations only stretched so far. He’d found lots of openings in other cities, had even ventured to Newburgh, New York, only to discover that little place was many times worse than the street life in Rocksburg.
Some of his buddies had said that with the experience you got working as a city cop, you could go to some roadmap dot down south or out west and get elected sheriff for life. It was a joke, sure, but it was a tantalizing one. And playing a little local politics had to be easier than the constant departmental politics of good cops trying to overcome the damage caused by crooked cops.
For a while, Hightower put the idea out of his head. Then a naked guy living in a shoddy tenement building where the walls shed crumbs like constant perspiration tried to bury an axe in Hightower’s head. They’d been knocking on a door of a suspected drug dealer, a whole crew of cops armed and ready to storm. Hightower was in the back of the crew, gun drawn. That was the first time he’d unholstered it on duty.
His friend Charles Rickman noticed how Hightower’s hand was shaking. “Don’t worry, buddy, the real cops will take care of business. You hang back.” Hightower hadn’t even been able to defend himself.
The cops broke down the door and charged, screaming commands at whomever they found in there. Hightower hesitated in the hallway. A woman was screaming in that apartment and now a man, too, their voices echoing down the hall. A door across the hall opened and there stood a bulky guy with a bulging gut. He was naked and he held an axe in both hands.
Squished into his doughy face, his eyes were wild, full of something like rage only without the attending emotion. “I need firewood,” the man said. “I need to chop it up.”
Hightower’s gun was pointed at the floor. He raised his other hand in alet’s-just-calm-down gesture. His heart thunked against his ribs. His shoes constricted his feet so much that they throbbed in pain. He swelled with heat.
“I need firewood,” the man said. He stepped into the hallway. His gut bobbed. “Got to chop.Chop-chop.”
“Sir, just relax and put down the—”
“Firewood don’t talk. It getschopped!”
The fat man raised the axe and came at Hightower. All Hightower had to do was raise his weapon and fire. Instead, Hightower retreated quickly, tripped over his swelling feet that felt like blocks, and hit the ground. The axe swooped down and he saw how the naked bulbs in the hallway reflected off the axe’s smooth silver head.That’s the last thing I’m ever going to see, he thought.
The axe swooped toward him but the fat man couldn’t control it and the blade missed Hightower’s face andthwackedinto the wall. The fat man growled, actually growled like he was some enraged beast. “Chop-chop-choppy!”
He pulled the axe from the wall, wobbled back a step, and raised the axe high over his head. Charles Rickman filled the doorway, started to ask what the hell was going on, and then raised his weapon, yelled “Freeze!” and fired. Half of the man’s face splattered against the wall, the other half onto Hightower. The axe fell with a thud.
Rickman looked down at Hightower with such disgust that Hightower felt like a little kid beat up on the playground. By the end of the day, everyone was making comments.Can’t blame the guy for trying to chop you when all you do is lay there like firewood; damn, man, heard what happened, lemme ask you: you ever think to use your fucking gun?
The nickname soon followed: Firewood. Even the captain used it.