by Tim Curran
“Police’ll be here soon,” Tommy said. “Just take it easy.”
“I bet they’re not coming,” Yellow Baseball Cap said.
This guy was starting to get on Mitch’s nerves. They had some real problems here, they didn’t need this doom and gloom shit. Not now. But he did think about what Baseball Cap said. What if the cops weren’t coming? Jesus, what then? Course, they had to be coming. That dude with the ponytail went to call them on his CB.
Hubb had retreated back to the safety of his counter, joining his posse of Knucker and Hardy. They were trying to get a radio station in and getting nothing but static.
Mitch was getting that bad feeling he’d had earlier. You could put a lot of that down to the stress of the flooding and the mad bullshit with the kid here, but he was thinking there was more to it than that. Sometimes, sometimes you just knew in your guts when things were going south and his guts were wrapped tighter than a fat lady’s corset.
Maybe it was his imagination.
Then something thudded into the side of the store.
8
Everyone jumped.
It came again and sounded roughly like fists pounding out there, dozens of fists. Except it wasn’t at the walls, it was at the back door. The fists kept beating. And then, for no reason, they stopped and what came next was a scraping sound like several hands out there were trying to scratch their way in.
Hubb picked up a baseball bat. “Stay away from that fucking door,” he said.
No problem there. Nobody had moved an inch.
“Is that door locked?” Mitch asked.
“Damn straight it is.”
That scratching sound picked up intensity.
The kid let out a helpless giggle. “I think…I think they’re here.”
Mitch was staring at him, wanting to say things, but unable to find his voice. He looked from the kid to the door back there to where the car had opened up the wall. If, say, somebody was out there and they wanted in, well, it would be real tough to keep them out. He realized this as the cool, damp wind from outside sent a chill up his spine.
Just a dog out there maybe, he found himself thinking, grasping at straws that evaded his fingers. That’s all it is, just a goddamn dog. Why are we acting like this?
Then at the front of the store there was the sound of feet running, people shouting. Before anyone could so much as move, a few forms pushed their way in, bending aside the sheet metal flap Mitch had wrenched with the crowbar. Mitch didn’t know what he was expecting. Maybe people without faces or eyes, but what he got was almost comic relief.
Hot Tamale was back.
She’d brought her boyfriend or husband who was a skinny little guy in a powder-gray cowboy hat with silver cleats around the shaft. There was a stunned blankness to his features.
“What the hell gives here?” Hot Tamale said.
“Kid had a breakdown or something,” Yellow Hat said. “Drove his car right through the wall.”
The scratching at the rear door had stopped now and Mitch let out an audible sigh. A few others did, too.
Tommy and Mitch got up and went over to the flap Hot Tamale had pushed open. They pulled it back and looked out into the streets of Crandon. The rain was coming down harder than ever, drumming on the sheet metal shell of the Quonset. It fell in blowing curtains, pooling in the road, flowing off the smashed driver’s side quarter panel of Mitch’s Jeep like a river. It brought a dirty mist with it and between the two you could barely see the storefronts across the street.
“I guess…I guess we’ll wait until it blows over,” Tommy said. “Then we can get the law over here and you can get back to Lily.”
Mitch nodded automatically. Despite all that had happened, his mind kept coming back to Lily and Chrissy, hoping they were together even if they were pulling out each other’s hair. The thought of Lily alone without her beloved TV or radio or even the phone was scaring him. And what was maybe scaring him worse was the idea that Chrissy was out in the city somewhere. She was with two other girls, but…
They were about to turn away from the flap when Tommy said, “What’s that…that somebody out there?”
Mitch craned his head closer to get a look. The wind threw rain in his face, but he blinked it from his eyes and saw…saw a couple forms standing across the street. It was coming down pretty hard, but it looked like there were two people standing on the sidewalk across the street. Just standing there in the torrent, getting drenched, but not seeming to be bothered by it. They were facing towards Sadler Brothers and Mitch had the crazy idea that they were staring at him.
“Don’t know enough to get out of the rain,” Tommy said, but there was something lodged in his throat that made his voice sound squeaky, something he couldn’t seem to swallow down.
“I wouldn’t go out there if I were you,” Hot Tamale said.
Of course, everyone was looking at her. Hubb and his posse. Mindy and the kid. Yellow Hat and a young couple who’d come in for battery lanterns, Jason and Gena Kramer, and stayed. Even Tommy and Mitch. Hot Tamale liked to be looked at, liked to be noticed. She liked to be the center of attention and here she was yet again, gathering the faithful around her like an old lady preparing to preach hellfire and damnation.
Mitch saw that cord twitching in Tommy’s neck. When Tommy started losing patience, he generally didn’t get angry; he got mouthy. He pulled off his cap, ran fingers through his sparse graying buzzcut. “Yeah? And why shouldn’t we go out there? C’mon, give us your wisdom, you nutty bitch.”
“Tommy…” Mitch muttered.
Hot Tamale turned on him, her lips pulling back to reveal very nice, very even teeth that were just as yellow as piss in a snowbank. Lots of coffee and cigarettes there. Her left eye narrowed and the right was wide like a shiny new quarter. “Listen, Mr. Mouth, if I want any shit out of you I’ll squeeze your head. So do us both a favor and shut the hell up.”
Tommy grinned. “And if I want any lip out of you, tubby, I’ll rattle my zipper. No, on second thought, I’d chew off my own dick before I’d let it near you. So why don’t you do all of us favor and quit preaching the death gospel. We got enough problems here. Shut your pisshole or I’ll shut it for you.”
Mitch almost burst out laughing.
Jesus, they were facing off now like a couple of kids on the playground. Hot Tamale’s face was redder than her outfit and she was sweating again. Tommy just smirked at her. She’d pegged him right, though. In school, Mitch remembered, he’d been called The Mouth. He was always smarting off and often to the wrong people. But you could never shut him up. You could kick his ass on Monday and on Tuesday he’d been telling you to go fuck your sister. Tommy was slow to anger, but if you pushed him into a corner, he’d come out swinging…sooner or later. Mitch had never known him to hit a woman, but he was guessing that Tommy had already decided Hot Tamale was not of that gender.
Maybe she saw that, too. She looked at her man, gave him a little shove. “Herb? Herb, are you going to let him talk to me like that?”
Herb jerked like he’d been slapped. His eyes were glassy and bovine under the brim of his hat. He looked senseless and numb like he’d just been shot up with Seconal. “Whahuh?” he said.
Mitch stepped in-between Tommy and Hot Tamale. “Okay, lady, tell us why we shouldn’t go out there.”
“Cops’ll be coming,” Hubb said. “That hippie with the ponytail went to get ‘em.”
Hot Tamale laughed, but it was a low, evil sort of laugh. “Oh really? Well, wake up and smell the coffee, people, because he didn’t make it very far. I just saw him. He’s laying out there next to his truck and something chewed half his face off.”
That landed and hit hard. Everyone seemed to suddenly be moving a little closer together like kids around a campfire that have just been told an especially unpleasant horror story. There was an almost communal dread slinking through them as it occurred to each and every one that maybe the cavalry wasn’t coming after all. That Hot Tamale had been ri
ght in the first place and they were on their own.
Even Tommy kept his mouth shut.
“You don’t believe me?” she said, vindicated now. “Then step out there and have a look. While you idiots were chatting it up in here, that guy was dying out there. Something got at him and I’m willing to bet that something had teeth.”
Yellow Hat had pulled in closer to her now. He was her kind of people and he went to her like a metal filing to a magnet, falling right into her orbit. Chances were, he would never break the gravitational pull of her big ass and bigger mouth. And probably didn’t want to. But that was fine, that was to be expected, Mitch figured. Yellow Hat was one of these guys who do not look for the silver lining behind clouds, they looked and expected to find misery and often did. And with that in mind, his despairing little brain was easily assimilated by that of Hot Tamale. They went together like dirty bellybuttons and lint.
“You’re talking bullshit,” Mitch said, knowing nobody else was going to.
Way he was thinking, maybe she was right about a few things, but she’d have to prove it. She wanted to sling the shit? Okay, fine and dandy, but Mitch wanted to see what color it was and how bad it stank.
“Oh, am I? Why do you think we ran back in here, bright boy? You think we missed you and your brilliant conversation? We came back because we had to come back! Our car wouldn’t start two streets over and when that rain started hammering down, when it started to fall those things started coming out like goddamned earthworms. I saw ‘em. Herb saw ‘em. And they weren’t people. You hear what I’m saying to you? They weren’t people!” She was breathing real hard now and nobody dared interrupt and she liked that just fine. “You tell ‘em, Herb. You tell ‘em what we saw.”
Herb swallowed something. Maybe a wad of gum the way his throat bobbed. When he started to talk, he spoke in a very calm and controlled matter like he was just reading from a cue card. “The rain started coming down real hard. We got to our car and it wouldn’t start, wouldn’t turn over. And I was thinking, boy, now we’re never gonna get over to the Wal-Mart. And I wanted to go to the Wal-Mart because they had the Moundses bars on sale. You buy one pack of Moundses bars and you get the second pack free. But the car, she wouldn’t start and then I see the lady. The lady was standing right next to the car in the rain, just looking in the window at me. She was dripping wet, the water running off her. Her face was white like a clown and there were holes in it. She was smiling, too, and she had black teeth like them wax Halloween witch teeth. She was…she was real scary-looking, you know?”
Despite the droning narrative, Mitch was picturing it all and it made his flesh crawl. First the kid and his faceless people and now this. Now this. What the hell did it mean?
The rain is falling and the dead are rising.
That passed through his mind at almost hyper-light speed and he let it go, would not take hold of it and look at it, because he could not let himself think things like that.
“Tell ‘em what else, Herb,” Hot Tamale prompted. “Tell ‘em what else.”
Herb cleared his throat. “That lady…she slapped her hands against my window and they sort of splattered. When she pulled them away, there were strands of goo like snot stuck to the glass from her palms. It was like cheese, I thought, like hot pizza cheese hanging from her hands…except, well, I don’t think that stuff was cheese at all. Then, well, we got out the passenger side and we run back here where there was people.”
“Did…did that lady follow you?”
But Herb said he didn’t know. He never looked back.
Now this was the time where somebody would laugh in Tamale’s face, Mitch thought, but nobody was laughing. They had drawn even tighter together, it seemed. Herd reflex. Like a bunch of gazelles sensing a circling lion. They were all looking panicked except for Tommy who just looked irritated. Mitch almost expected them to bolt and run, but when they did, he figured they would do it together. In a herd.
Mindy was sobbing now and the kid-they still had no idea what his name was-was making a funny, almost choking sound in his throat like maybe there was a scream down there that wanted to come out. If you had to peg the atmosphere right then and there, you would have said it was one of confusion. Maybe some fear and uncertainty, too, but definitely confusion. Even Hubb didn’t look like he had the heart to start swearing about it all.
Tommy stepped away from the rest of them. “Well, I’m not listening to anymore of this bullshit. Halloween ain’t for over a month yet and I’m not in the mood for it. So leave me out of this crap, girls.”
“You think it’s that easy, Mr. Mouth? You think you can hide behind your big mouth?” Hot Tamale put to him and her words were sharp enough to amputate fingers. “Because that’s what you’re doing and we all know it! You’re scared yellow and you want to think we’re all crazy, eh? Well, we’re not crazy, you stupid moron, we’re not crazy at all! But, go ahead, be a big man and go out into that rain! Go ahead! I dare you! I dare you!”
“All right, that’s enough,” Mitch said before she double-dared him.
Tommy laughed. “If you don’t shut your fucking pisshole and shut it real soon, bitch, I’ll shut the fucker for you. You and that pussy boyfriend of yours.”
Mitch pulled Tommy away from the pack before things got ugly. The others stepped back farther into the store and they went over to the damaged wall. They stood there, asses up against the hood of the kid’s Intrepid. And for a long time they did not say anything.
“Soon as that rain lifts,” Tommy said, “I’m making like the sheep and getting the flock out of here.”
“I’m with you,” Mitch said.
Tommy pulled out his cigarettes and lit one. Hubb right away started reprimanding him about smoking in the store and Tommy popped him a bird. “You leave these monkeys alone long enough,” he said, blowing out a column of smoke, “and real scary shit’s going to start happening, Mitch. That pig in red hots, she’s the rotten apple in the barrel. She’ll have these stupid bastards looking for a witch to burn, you give her time.”
Mitch nodded. “I can’t wait here much longer. Lily’s probably out of her head as it is.”
“I’ll go with you when you leave. About time I stopped and said hello. Besides, your Jeep ain’t going anywhere.”
Mitch felt better. And not because he had a ride, but because maybe like the others, he wasn’t fancying the idea of being alone out there…not that he believed any of that hoodoo bullshit, of course.
Tommy pulled off his cigarette and yanked aside the flap. “There’s more…people out there, Mitch.”
Mitch saw them standing in the rain, those same gray and dire forms. Except more now, maybe five or six total. And though he did not honesty believe all that Stephen King bullshit he’d been hearing today, he knew looking at those people that there was something definitely off about them. They were standing funny, the rain running right over them, like mannequins somebody had left out in the storm. Too intense, too fixated on the store and the two men watching them. That kind of patience was disturbing.
Tommy said, “Shit.”
Those people, they were crossing the street now.
The waiting was over.
9
Mitch smelled them before they arrived.
Their odor seemed to flood the store in a vaporous stench: a weird, heady smell of rotting garbage and dank sewers, something maybe worse. Something secret and dark and vile.
“What the hell do they want?” Yellow Hat said.
“They want us,” Hot Tamale informed him.
And that was it. The floodgates of panic were opened, because even those that didn’t squeeze up to the sheet metal flap with Tommy and Mitch knew that what was about to happen was going to be really, really bad. Hardy started praying under his breath and Mindy let out a long, shrill scream. Yellow Hat ran to the back of the store and then ran right back. Hot Tamale stood there defiantly like she was enjoying it all and Herb stood there with her like he did not have a clue about
any of it.
Hubb, who had gotten most of his left knee shattered in the Korean War, seemed to realize that battle was about to be joined. “Those cockfuckers want to break up this party? Well, fucking peachy, let’s tan their hides.”
He wasn’t worrying about his merchandise now. He had his baseball bat and although he did not sell firearms, he had just about everything else and with the help of Tommy and Jason and Gena Kramer, weapons were passed out: axes and hatchets, machetes and British Army police billyclubs. Mindy took the kid over behind the counter because he and she were in no shape to do anything.
But the others, they stood their ground-Mitch and Tommy, Hubb and his two elderly chums, Hot Tamale and her boyfriend, Jason and Gena Kramer, even Yellow Hat. They stood in a loose half-circle like some kind of savage gauntlet, scared but cohesive, ready to kill anyone or anything that made it through the rupture in the store’s front wall.
Mitch waited at the flap, watched those people come on.
They moved with a slow and deadly intensity, drenched and ragged things with hair hanging in their faces. Like Tamale’s boyfriend said, those faces were bleached white like floaters pulled from rivers. Even their lips were colorless. But their eyes, dear God, they were just black and glistening like glass eyes dipped in India Ink. They did not blink. They were glaring and set and merciless. You could not reason with eyes like that or the fathomless murky brains which compelled them.
“You come in my motherfucking store and you’re dead!” Hubb called out to them, not seeing them from his position, but no doubt feeling their odious presence. “You better stay out there, you cocksucking hippies!”
Mitch felt a manic laughter bubble in his throat. Hippies. Now that was rich. You could buy the whole bank with that.
Mitch pulled away from the flap when they were only feet away.
He stood there with the others, amazed at how perfectly the Intrepid had penetrated the front of the store. The sheet metal had been pushed in, bent, but it had not been torn apart really. It had just conformed itself to the intrusion of the car. And except for the piece Mitch had bent to get the door open, you could not see outside unless you yanked that flap back.