by Mark Tufo
Robert emerged onto the trail. He held one horseshoe in his hand, ready to throw, and three more were slung over his left forearm. He flung another and it banged against Pedro’s chin, scattering teeth in the sunlight.
“Ringer!” Robert shouted.
“Robert!” Jenny yelled.
“Like I said,” Delphus said to her, “just have a little faith.”
Robert and Jenny embraced as the three remaining mutant boys hung back near the forest, wary but their eyes still bright with lunatic hunger. He asked if she was okay. “Looks like they tore you up,” he said.
“You saved me twice,” she said.
“I’d save you a million times if I had to,” Robert said.
“You kids can smooch when we’re all safe and sound,” Delphus said. “But right now we got some unpleasant company.”
The boy-creatures moved in again, Boston pulling at the arrows in his chest. Eva Dean swung her broken branch at them stupidly. “We’re almost to the farmhouse,” she said. “We can hole up there if we can make it. Then regroup and go get help.”
They moved as fast as they could, limping, gasping, and cussing. Robert waved his horseshoe at the boys, taunting them.
One by one, the boys began to follow.
- - -
Samantha slowed the car when they’d passed the sheriff’s wrecked vehicle. Once they saw it was unoccupied, they decided to keep moving. One of the tires was flat, probably from a nail in one of the outhouse boards. But they kept churning.
“The sheriff probably called it in,” Lewis said. “But I wonder why this place isn’t buzzing with helicopters and sirens?”
“The Fraley place is up ahead,” Samantha said.
“I hate to tell him about Lucy.”
“I hate to tell him about anything.”
“We can tell exactly what we saw. Then it’s out of our hands.”
Lewis leaned against her. “No. Not if the animals are sick.”
“We’re vets,” she said. “We treat sick animals. Not ones that come back from the dead.”
“Come to think of it, I don’t recall the teachers covering that in vet school.”
- - -
Eva Dean, Delphus, Jenny, and Robert cut through the woods, well ahead of the loping boys still in pursuit, and emerged into the open pasture. The sun had risen enough that the dew glittered and the haze of the morning lifted away. It was a pastoral scene, the meadow dotted with autumn flowers, the barn in the distance, and beyond that the farmhouse. Delphus was glad to see the homestead where he’d been born and raised and had raised a daughter of his own.
Then the boy-creatures emerged from the woods.
“Look!” Delphus said. “Those bastards won’t stay down.”
“Teenage boys,” Eva Dean said. “They recover fast.”
“Too much information,” Jenny said.
“Hey, stick around,” Robert said with a grin. “It lasts into our twenties, too.”
“No comment,” Delphus said.
“You guys going to get out your rulers or should we maybe try to live through the morning?” Eva Dean said.
The boys were closer now. They grunted and chuckled and groaned.
“We can make it to the barn,” Delphus said.
“And do what?” Jenny asked. “Throw bales of hay at them?”
“Whose car is that?” Delphus asked and pointed toward the gate.
The boys moved in, and the question was forgotten.
- - -
A mutilated goat corpse was on the porch. Lewis and Samantha stepped over it. For a moment, she thought the thing had twitched. But it couldn’t be alive, could it? The damn thing looked hollowed out. She’d noticed a man’s dress shoe on the porch, too. It had been chewed up like a puppy’s toy.
“These guys play for keeps,” Lewis said.
“You and your goat fixation. Let’s see if the phone works.”
The goat twitched again. Lewis leaned toward the animal, intending to check its vital signs, but Samantha pulled him inside.
Although the goat was clearly dead, flies hovering around its wounds, the yellow teeth still snapped and clacked together.
Samantha shoved Lewis into the house and closed the door. “Take off your Superman cape. Right now we need a little Clark Kent.”
“Wouldn’t that be Underdog and Shoeshine Boy?”
“Pardon me if I don’t get my pop-cultural references straight. It was a long night.”
- - -
Jenny had regained her strength, but Robert didn’t want to let her go. He held her against his shoulder as they crossed the pasture, one arm draped around her. She yielded, although it didn’t take long until she was supporting most of their weight. The battle with the kid had taken more out of Robert than he realized.
Delphus looked like he was going to be ill as well, but his bleeding had slowed. Maybe old people had less blood in them. The farmer’s veins seemed thin and blue, anyway, and he was so stringy it was a marvel the crazy mutants had found enough to sink their teeth into.
“We have to do something,” Jenny said. “We need real help.”
“This is the best we can do right now,” Eva Dean said.
The barn stood before them, the farmhouse behind it.
“No,” Robert said. “We have to do more.”
Eva Dean turned back to him, but whatever she was going to say fell away in a fresh wave of fear. The boys had closed in rapidly, getting whatever passed for “second wind” among the dead. Jenny tried to hurry them along but Robert stumbled. And Delphus picked a bad time to get annoyed and turn around to give the kids an earful about respecting private property.
“They can’t hear you, Daddy,” Eva Dean said, pulling on the back of his shirt.
“I know that, but it makes me feel better.”
Then the kids seemed to find an extra gear, as if their mutation was accelerating and driving their bodies into a frenzy. They closed the gap in seconds, moving impossibly fast.
Jenny didn’t even have time to notch an arrow before Shaun leaped at them. Jenny grabbed a horseshoe off Robert’s arm and hurled it at the boy-creatures. Her throw sailed wide. Robert staggered and regained his balance, grimacing with effort. He gripped a horseshoe in both hands and swung around to club Shaun across the face and in the arm. Bones snapped and inhuman fluids sprayed out.
The kid giggled.
“Run for the house,” Eva Dean shouted.
Delphus and Eva Dean broke into a sprint, although Delphus’s pace was barely more than a crippled gallop. The other three boy-creatures were right on their tail. Pedro jumped at Jenny, but she fended him off with a hard slap across his gory face. But he lunged back at her and clawed her wrist, breaking her skin. Robert clanged Pedro’s skull with a horseshoe—twank! The kid collapsed.
“Why did they leave us?” Jenny asked. The three kids were now between them and the house, meaning they were cut off. Jenny drew back her bow and aimed at the kids chasing Delphus and Eva Dean, but she didn’t trust her skill on a moving target moving at breakneck speed.
“The barn,” Robert said. He grabbed a gory, slick horseshoe from the ground. They hobbled and almost fell but they made it. They worked together to slide the door open, and hurried in. A pig squealed. The place smelled of hay and excrement and it was dark. Jenny slung her bow over her shoulder and pulled a pitchfork from the wall.
She held it out in front of her and before Robert could ask what she was doing, Pedro leaped through the door, skewering himself on the tines. Jenny yelled with all the energy she had left and slammed him backward, pinning him to the wall.
“Damn,” Robert said. “You get right to the point.”
“Stick a fork in him, he’s done,” she said.
A pickax hung on the wall. Robert grabbed it and tested its swing. Much better than a horseshoe.
Enough was enough. This was war, time to draw a line in the sand. He was aware how much that sounded like something Max Jenkins would say, but Robert d
idn’t care.
Max was probably luncheon meat by now, nothing more than a footnote in his own pathetic little self-help book.
- - -
Upstairs, Lewis looked out a bedroom window and saw Delphus and Eva Dean lurching toward the house. And he saw what was coming after them.
Lewis lifted the window. “Hey!” he yelled. “Look out behind you!”
- - -
Wheezing, Delphus mumbled, “Goddamned . . . trespassers . . . everywhere.”
Eva Dean looked up at the guy in the window—was that Lewis, the vet?—and screamed, “Hey, look out behind you, too!”
- - -
The thing that had once been a boy named Jose, who had taken a fire poker to the face as a reanimated corpse, stepped behind a fresh-smelling body that stood before an open window.
Jose didn’t remember killing one of his pals and slugging his girlfriend, didn’t recall being attacked by a feral mutant. His rage and his envy and his solitude meant nothing now. In some ways, he had become whole by being torn apart. His directionless existence had found focus.
The fireplace poker still protruded from his face and he could see through only one eye and not well. Vision, however, no longer mattered as much as it once did. He slobbered, drooled, and made grating noises with his throat. The body was leaning out the window.
Go. Attack. Eat.
- - -
The whole house stank, so Samantha walked around with one hand pinching her nostrils. Lewis had gone upstairs and now he was shouting outside. Samantha ran up the stairs to see what he was yelling about
She opened the door to the far bedroom.
A kid with a fire poker lodged through his head stood behind Lewis.
“Lewis!” she screamed.
He turned quickly, bumped his head on the sash, and lost his balance. Just as the dead kid reached for him, Lewis tumbled backward out the window.
Hope he has his Superman cape on.
- - -
Lewis bounced off the porch roof, then rolled to the ground. Something in his leg snapped and pain bloomed like a white star in his head. A boy who had been chasing Eva Dean and her father stopped and hurried toward Lewis instead.
Easy meat, Lewis thought. And Samantha’s not even here for me to make a joke.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The boy who had once been known as Shaun and who had been caught with five-hundred bucks worth of weed and agreed to a plea deal that sent him to a voluntary prison in the woods climbed a makeshift ladder leading to the barn hayloft.
Go. Attack.
- - -
Delphus and Eva Dean hesitated on the steps of the farmhouse. Delphus was cranky. His wounds throbbed and he was sure some kind of peculiar infection was spreading through his bloodstream. And worst of all, he felt like a stranger in his own home.
“There’s the door,” Delphus said to her.
“And he’s your vet,” she said.
Delphus sighed. “I guess mountain folk take care of their own,” he said.
Eva Dean nodded. “That’s the spirit.”
“You save him and I’ll get my gun.” Delphus started, paused, turned to her. “But he better give us a discount from now on.”
- - -
Upstairs in the farmhouse, the mutant boy turned toward Samantha. He gripped the fire poker and pulled it out of his face. It made a sickening wet, crunchy sound. She could dodge right and slip past him to get to the window. If she misjudged it . . .
The boy licked his own blood from the poker.
Charming.
- - -
Eva Dean ran to help Lewis while Delphus hobbled to his pickup truck. Someone had smashed his windows. Goddamn miscreants. He fumbled the key out of his pocket and tried to get it in the lock.
Wallace Jenkins jumped on the truck bed, screamed like a primal warrior, and catapulted toward him.
The key went home and Delphus yanked the door open as a barrier and Wallace flew into it. Delphus slammed it, sandwiching Wallace with aCRUNCH of bones. The kid flopped down.
“A candy ass, just like your daddy,” Delphus said.
Delphus kicked him out of the way and grabbed his shotgun from the seat.
CLACK. He pumped a round into the chamber and turned.
“All right, you little son-of-a-biscuit-eaters. Consider yourselves officially at risk.”
- - -
Samantha dodged the swinging poker and leaped on the bed. Now, the kid was blocking the door. Christ, why hadn’t she just retreated? Pride goeth before a fall.
“Easy, young man,” she said. “You don’t want to make this worse than it is.”
Worse? Here I am trying to reason with a dead guy.
The kid grinned at her and lunged. She tried to move but the sheets and blankets tangled around her legs. She fell forward onto all-fours.
The boy crawled onto her from behind, a mockery of sexual intercourse. She tried to buck him off and he chortled as if she were some kind of amusement park ride. The fire poker fell onto the bed, right near her hand. He grabbed her hair and yanked her head back.
Samantha grabbed the poker and angled it behind her to stab the kid in the head, maybe take out his other eye.
And he bit into her throat.
Samantha’s scream bubbled into a gurgle. The poker fell. The pain was immense and complete. It flushed through her but almost immediately she felt cold and almost numb. She’d been bitten by plenty of dogs and cats, but nothing had ever flooded her with such hot pain and disgust.
No, she begged to whatever god might be listening, the same god that presumably allowed mutant kids to go on killing sprees, that couldn’t even claim its dead.Please don’t let me die like this. Please no.
The last thing she felt was her hot blood dousing her chest.
Death do us part.
- - -
The Shaun-thing peered down through a square hole in the hayloft. Two people stood below, watching the door. Two people with meat.
Go. Attack.
Shaun jumped with a shriek and tackled one of them to the ground. The pickax the meat had been holding flew away. Shaun bit and bit and bit. The flesh tasted so sweet. So wonderful.
The guy squealed in pain. A pig squealed in fear. And the other person squealed in rage.
“Hey, dollface . . .” the other person said.
Shaun looked up, lips dripping blood.
- - -
“Try eating this,” Jenny said.
She wheeled the slaughtering hook at him. It caught Shaun under the chin with a bony crunch and pulled him backwards. He wriggled and flopped like a hooked fish. He tried uselessly to grab at the hook, but it only drove the tip more deeply into the underside of his jaw.
She helped Robert up. Shaun had done quite a number on his shoulders. It was like he’d been skinned. “We can’t stay here,” she said. “There might be more of them.”
Someone chuckled in the dark. They both turned.
Mark stepped from the shadows. Jenny couldn’t tell if he was smiling or if the gash in his mouth made his lips curl upward.
- - -
Eva Dean grabbed Lewis and swung him in a fireman’s carry. She backed toward the porch, with Boston and Benny closing in. Delphus veered around the corner and leveled the shotgun.
“Sorry, fellas,” he said. “I’m all out of rock salt. Got nothing but lead.”
He fired. The blast was deafening. Boston shredded out in several directions. Delphus pumped again and fired: Benny wobbled and looked down at his ruined abdomen. He put a hand inside himself and drew out a clump of mutilated kidney. After a moment, he took a tentative bite.
“Just like the dog,” Lewis said as Eva Dean carried him onto the porch.
“Dog?” Delphus asked.
“We had a shepherd at the lab . . . came back to life.”
“Lucy!”
“But it’s dead. Sort of.”
Delphus stared at him a moment and kicked another shell into the chamber.
&n
bsp; “Daddy, we better get inside.”
“I got a score to settle. You can fuck with me plenty, but you don't fuck with my dog.”
Benny stepped toward Delphus and ate a rain of scalding lead.
- - -
The gunshot sounds did not distract Mark as he stepped out of shadows, eyes poached, body soaked with blood, arms out for Jenny.
“From the camp?” Robert asked, using his hands to stanch his own bleeding.
“Back like a bad rash,” Jenny said like a hotshot action hero.
“You know this guy?”
“We had a thing,” she said. “But he’s just another ex.”
She grabbed the pickax and stepped right before Mark. She pushed out her chest and cocked one hip. She flipped her hair and puckered her lips. He paused, staring at her. “Still want some of this?” she asked.
Mark gave a wet grunt, lips raking across his red-rimmed teeth. He went for her.
She drove the pickax hard right into Mark’s skull. Brains bubbled out the top of his head and oozed down his face. They were lumpy and black. He fell to his knees and flopped forward onto the ground.
“Damn, girl,” Robert said. “Remind me never to break up with you.”
- - -
Delphus prowled the yard with the shotgun while Eva Dean helped Lewis. Noises from the barn pulled Delphus in that direction. He passed the aging tractor with its rows of sharp discs.
The pig ran out of the shadows and past Delphus with a high-pitched squeal, nearly getting itself shot.
“Goddamn porker,” he mumbled.
Someone slammed into him from behind.
Delphus dropped the shotgun and bounced against the tractor. Something in his chest cracked. Damn old bones. He kicked Wallace Jenkins in the knee and the kid fell and rolled under the harrow discs connected to the tractor. Delphus reached out, paused just a moment to stare down at the kid’s face, and yanked a lever. The discs fell on Wallace, dicing him with a heavythunk.