by Mark Tufo
“Mangy beast,” he said.
“Doctor, your pillow talk is almost as charming as your bedside manner,” Samantha said. She reached for the scalpel. “Here, let me.”
He handed it over. “If this is some kind of infectious outbreak, we better head it off at the pass or we’ll have a lot of sleepless nights.”
Samantha flensed the stomach into a gory mouth. “Hmm, what’s for dinner?”
She held it open and Lewis grabbed the long tweezers. The first thing he removed was a jagged chicken bone. He set it next to the intestines. The next was a half-digested rodent, probably a mouse that from the front looked like it might wake up and scurry away. Of course, its rear legs were no longer attached, so if it did reanimate, it wouldn’t be able to go very far.
Weird thoughts you’re having today, Doctor.
Then he lifted out a soggy lump.
“What the hell?”
“It sure ain’t Alpo,” Samantha said.
“I know why you’re making all these jokes,” he said as he set the lump down. “It’s okay to just admit this is kind of freaky. And not in the good way.”
He cut into the object. It flaked into soggy layers. It looked like a several-days old wad of dough. “Gives the phrase ‘doggie biscuit’ a whole new meaning,” he said.
She was all seriousness again. He shouldn’t have said anything. He should know better at this point. In marriage, it was best to just leave certain things alone. “I don’t see anything here that would cause illness, at least not without running a full set of diagnostics.”
“Well, let’s put Fidette here on ice until we notify the owner. If we get any more reports, we can send all this down to the state.”
Lewis dumped the scraps back into the dog’s open body cavity and Samantha spread a vinyl sheet over the corpse. She lingered near the dog’s head for a moment before covering it up. “Sweet dreams, puppy,” she said.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
It felt like it had taken half the damn day, but it hadn’t even taken an hour for Max and Robert to reach the Fraley farmhouse. Robert had kept his naive comments and childish questions to a minimum. Max’s Guccis, however, had not held up so well. Looked like they’d need a serious shine. First chance he had, he’d toss them and buy a new pair.
Better yet, donate the old pair to the thrift shop and get a nice tax deduction at full value.
Max glanced inside the rust-bucket sitting on almost-flat tires in the driveway. A double-barrel shotgun lay across the front seats. Goddamn backwoods hicks. Real power was wielded with a pen signing on the dotted line, not a gun firing little bits of metal.
A new Maxim: The pen is mightier than the gun.
The front door was open, and the rectangle of light was welcoming after the walk through the woods with the sun sinking. Max didn’t even knock, just walked right in. After all, the place was practically already his.
Max wasn’t even that surprised to see the place had been trashed. The stains on the wall were a bit over the top, but didn’t that just go to prove that this whole area needed to be razed and some semblance of the civilized world needed to take root here?
He turned his back on the farmhouse and stood looking out from the porch. “Old Man Fraley must have had a moonshine hoedown or something. This place is trashed. Damn hillbillies.”
Robert had been looking around outside, like he thought he was one of those detectives on TV. “Hey, look at this . . .”
He pointed to a bloody smear on the porch. Only, it wasn’t a simple smear. It was the crescent shape of a hoof print. They bent over the mark. Several others surrounded it, coming into focus like one of those dizzying pictures you had to stare at for hours to really see what was there.
“Damned if I—”
A heavy, thunderous sound came from around the side of the house. Max knew the sound a moment before the goat charged around the corner of the porch. His mind whirled with a barrage of expletives but not one came out when the goat galloped across the front lawn and headed for the porch steps.
“What in hell?” Robert yelled, equally stupified.
The goat’s eyes were wide, its narrow snout streaked with blood, and more blood drooled from its mouth. Its gums were flared back to reveal mangled teeth, like it had been chewing on metal. Or bone.
Head lowered, pointed horns leading the way, the goat unleashed a high-pitched baying cry.It’s insane, Max thought.The damned thing is rabid.
It cried again, like a declaration of attack, and charged up the porch steps.
Max ran inside the house and would have closed the door on Robert if the young man had been even a half-second slower. Robert pushed through the narrowing wedge and Max slammed the door shut. The goat crashed into it, the whole door shaking and a crack opening in the wooden veneer. The thing’s awful cry echoed into the house. What the hell had gotten into this thing?
Country living, Max thought.Even rots the animals’ minds.
Max locked the door and flipped the deadbolt. The goat hit again and the door shook but held. Max backed up and turned to Robert who was standing several feet away, eyes wide. Candy-ass.
“What the hell was that, huh?” Max said with a grin, buzzed from the narrow escape.
“I don’t know, but I have a bad feeling about this.”
If he couldn’t handle this, how was he going to handle real pressure when the boardroom was packed and all eyes were on him? Probably wet himself with fear.
Max glanced around at the trashed living room, the feces on the wall. “Hey, maybe the Fraleys are dead. That would solve some problems.”
Robert looked at him like Max was insane for thinking business at a time like this. The kid would soon learn that everything was a business opportunity. And when opportunity knocked, you opened the door.
Zing. Another Maxim.
“Always have a Plan B and a Plan C,” Max said as he stepped back a few more feet from the door. The goat’s stamping hooves clumped along the porch and it made strangled, grunting noises.
Robert came out of his shock as if freed from ice and grabbed a wooden chair. He wedged it under the doorknob, stared at it a moment, and then turned to the living room and began pulling the couch across the floor to block the door.
“Think positive,” Max said. “Always be looking for the edge.” That would make a good chapter title. He had to remember that one.
The goat hit the door again. The door rattled on its hinges and splintered along the inside edge, near the deadbolt. Robert quickly pushed the couch the rest of the way before the door. The feet scraped along the wooden flooring.
“There’s always an edge. Always a way to make some dough.”
“We’re under attack by a crazed goat and you’re worried about money.”
“Learn to turn it around. Don’t look at it as a goat. Look at it as a natural disaster that’s lowering property value.”
The goat hit the door with a huge, vibrating crash. The tip of a horn poked through a splintering crack in the door.
“Sorry,” Robert said in genuine fear, “It’s a goat no matter how you look at it.”
A rotary dial phone waited on a pedestal table. Looked like something that should be in a museum. Max tried, tapped the receiver button several times without any luck. He tugged on the cord and it pulled free immediately. The end was frayed. Like something had gnawed through it.
“Deader than a mule’s dick. Guess we’ll have to ride it out until the cavalry comes or the goat gets a headache.”
Robert stared at him.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
In the SUV, Hightower tried the handset. “This is the sheriff. I’ve got a 10-62 out on Meat Camp Road. I think I’m going to need a wrecker.”
“No wonder my damned property taxes is so high,” Old Man Fraley said outside the vehicle. He was on the opposite side of the car, but Hightower could smell him, all old sweat and farts.
Nothing came back. “Hello?” Hightower said. “10-10?”
What was it, lunch time?
Delphus opened the passenger door. “You can yell every number in the book, but it won’t do you no good.”
“Dead spots,” Eva Dean said over his shoulder. “Like I told you. The mountains block the signals.”
Hightower tried the radio again. “Test. In five minutes we bomb Russia.”
No response.
“How about Israel?”
Nothing. He tossed the handset down. “Looks like we’ll be walking to camp.”
A few moments later, the three were headed down the road, the SUV abandoned there against the tree.
- - -
What was once Jamal stepped from the edge of the trees onto the gravel road. He might still be called a boy but he moved with liquid jerkiness, hunkered low to the ground. Reddish drool seeped from his mouth, so he might more accurately be described as a creature.
Jamal had been a street kid, a decently adept street kid in Greensboro. He hung with a moderately tough crew and knew how to handle himself. Even barely a teenager, he knew how to act, who not to piss off, and who it was okay to mock. He learned all he needed about that from his father. If people pissed his father off, those people got a punch in the eye.
Jamal had discovered that himself when he was six. His head had hurt for weeks and he’d cried and cried. His father told him that if he wanted to cry like a faggot, he should do it in private. Otherwise, he would get another crack in the head. His mother told him to toughen up. Dad told her to shut her “cunt of a mouth.” It was okay to mock Mom. When Jamal was older, he joined with Dad, calling Mom “a retard” and asking her why she was so stupid it seemed like she was brain dead. He felt bad—sometimes—saying these things, but Dad laughed, said, “Good one, boy,” and that helped ease the guilt.
But that Jamal, the old Jamal, was no longer in residence. The brain inside the boy-creature’s skull was a scrambled mess of fried synapses. It produced only the most primal thoughts. They were no more complex thanGo;Eat;Run;Attack. Its stomach grumbled incessantly and yet perpetually vomited out anything the boy-creature swallowed.
It should be dead, this strange, diseased thing.
Yet, it lived on.
Go.
The boy-creature approached the car, something his mind vaguely recognized and then dismissed. It didn’t matter what this thing was—it was the smell that brought him out of the woods.
He bent low to smell the trails of blood on the road. His nostrils flexed and twitched and his stomach gurgled with the sweet promise of meat. He moved to the bloody handkerchief, something he no longer recognized, and he tongued it. The blood was fresh.
Eat.
He scooped the rag into his mouth and chewed on that bloody taste. He grunted with pleasure, though he had no conscious sense of doing so. No conscious understanding of pleasure, either. He existed moment to moment. Something other than him guided his moves, something close to primal instinct, though more of a bastardization of such an instinct.
Up ahead, three figures were walking away from him. They fuzzed in and out of focus.
A flap of handkerchief dangled from his mouth, the boy-creature watched the figures walking down the road, and he grinned.
The smile was muscle-memory reflex and no indication of functional, complex thinking. Even so, it amounted to the same.
Go.
Attack.
Eat.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Jenny’s cabin was little more than a windowless shed. She had left the kerosene lamp on before going over to Mark’s, both bad decisions, but she was grateful for the weak amber light flickering inside the cabin beneath a gap in the door.
Tough girls can survive the dark. Her mother had never said that, but it sounded like something she might have said.
“I am a tough girl,” she said without much confidence.
Her cabin stood twenty yards ahead.
Something stirred in the woods. A branch snapped. She hurried her steps, feeling stupid as she did so. Mark just didn’t know when enough was enough. She’d known plenty of boys like Mark, tough guys who thought if they pushed her hard enough, she’d give in. The kind of boy who was actually, as inauthentically, sensitive and content to be with her without pressuring about sex was really rare.
Once boys got the rush of power and lust, they lost all sense of what was appropriate. After all, the human race was barely six thousand years off the tundra, so enlightenment was a little too much to expect. It was like they really became the cliché primitive man clubbing a woman and dragging her back to the cave.
Not all men were like that. She’d known a few good ones. Well, really just one, but he was off making a name for himself in business. Women were probably throwing themselves at him. And unlike Jenny, men didn’t need to say no.
Another branch snapped and she jogged the last few feet to the cabin.
Standing in the doorway, she turned to the trees. “You already tried that, you jerk. Don’t you watch horror movies? It’s never scary the second time.”
She went inside and slammed the door. After a moment, she locked the door and stepped back. God only knew what stupid crap Mark might try. As if he thought he could scare her pants off.
The handle twisted a little and shook.
She waited.
The door stood still.
“Better get used to yanking your own knob, Mark.”
She smiled. Not bad.
She felt better already, although not completely at ease.
- - -
To think Booger Hargrave might be something less than human was a forgivable assumption. He was sleeping on the dirty cot near the kitchen inside the cookhouse.
Someone was banging around with the pots and pans and that finally got his eyes to open and his rotund body to roll over. The cot’s metal springs twanged and groaned. His sweat clung to the sheets, the autumn air moist despite the coolness of the night. Booger had worked army camps, Baptist conference centers, high school cafeterias, and plenty of waffle houses, but this was the first job where he actually slept on the clock—he was responsible for the entire mess hall, not just the food.
It took a great amount of effort to sit up. He was a man who enjoyed his work, and he enjoyed savoring the fruits of his labors. His fat slumped onto his lap and made it impossible to straighten his spine. His tank top stuck to the folds in his stomach as if his meaty creases were eating the fabric. His pale, clubby legs sagged beneath his soiled underwear. The rattling sound of someone, or something, screwing around in his kitchen came again. Booger sighed, scratched his balls, and got up.
The flashlight was on the floor. He almost toppled over picking it up. Sundown in the mountains was like swimming in a barrel of ink.
“Damned raccoons,” he said. At least it better be the raccoons. If one of those stupid kids was in there hoo-hahing around . . .
What? What would he do? Sneeze on them? He was pitiful in the army because he’d rather scramble eggs than scramble brains.
A canvas flap separated the sleeping area from the kitchen. He pushed the flap back and shined the flashlight in. The cramped kitchen was still. Pots teetered in precarious stacks near the sink where warped metal trays soaked. Should have done that job before hitting the sack. But why weren’t the campers doing that? Wasn’t this place supposed to be like a rehab-and-behavior alignment for degenerate punks?
He turned left and shone the light around the middle work station. A frying pan lay on the floor. It had not been cleaned, either, but it looked like a raccoon had done some cleaning for him. Damn scavengers.
Well, no one would ever know, and maybe he should start piling all the dishes on the floor. Save a little scrubbing.
A skillet fell off the stove behind him and clattered to the floor. He spun around and the spill of light caught a pale shape flitting out of sight to the other side of the work station. Had that been a kid? Had he been almost naked?
“You ought to be in bed,” he said. “I won’t be no tattletale but I
don’t won’t to get in trouble, either.”
But what if it wasn’t a kid? What if it was a thief? These were hard times, what with the government giving billions to bankers while the working folks starved. You could hardly blame a fellow for pinching a can of beans here and there. Mrs. Fraley was nice as far as bosses went, but she was also getting subsidies from the state. So in a way, you could call all this food “public property.”
Something rattled in the dining room. Booger didn’t trust a person who didn’t answer when spoken to. That made them suspicious. And he was jumpy enough just being out here in the backwoods.
“Get on now, before I report you,” he said. In high school, the auto-tech teacher had once caught Booger siphoning gasoline out of a fuel tank in the shop. Their eyes had locked, Booger kneeling there with a cut-off garden hose between his lips. The teacher had simply shaken his head in pity and walked on. Booger topped off his jug and left. Later that teacher had been busted for embezzling ten grand worth of tools from the shop.
He didn’t know the moral of that story, but right now he figured it was better to acknowledge a wrong than to explain later why he let it slide.
Booger opened a nearby drawer and removed a meat cleaver. He stepped toward the stove and hesitated. He angled the flashlight beam around the work station. A dirt-caked and bloody foot filled the light and then slipped out of sight.
Someone chuckled softly.
In boot camp, Booger’s drill instructor Sergeant Broussard had been a sadist who chuckled in just that same way whenever he ordered Booger to do fifty push-ups, knowing in his prime Booger could maybe pull fifteen. The push-ups weren’t the punishment—the humiliation was.
Booger adjusted his grip on the cleaver’s handle. “You boys better not be messing with my biscuits.”
There’d been a time when his biscuits had been award-winning. That was back when Mama was alive, back when it was her recipe, back when he didn’t spend weeks at a time living in a log cabin dining hall. That had been a long time ago. Cancer had taken Mama off and, he was embarrassed to admit, her quality biscuits seemed to have died off with her. He had her recipe, and all its variations, but his always came out a bit dry and flavorless.