by James Newman
“Fuckin’ blowout,” George said.
“Sounded like all of them.”
“Yeah.”
David opened his door, but then quickly closed it again. He hesitated, peering out into the darkness, toward the church. “Was someone shooting at us?”
“I don’t think so,” George whispered. “But stay low, just in case.”
They exited the vehicle, crab-walked around it cautiously. One tire had survived, they saw now. The left rear. The other three straddled their rims, hanging half-on and half-off the wheels like giant leeches.
Both men peered out over the church’s parking lot at the cracked blacktop.
“I’ll be damned,” George said.
Everywhere they looked, the lot was littered with nails. Thousands, perhaps millions. Nails of every size and shape. A veritable sea of them, atop the asphalt.
“Looks like we’re not the only ones who came prepared,” George said. “Fuck it. Time’s wasting. Let’s move.”
They reached into the cab of the truck and pulled out the guns.
“You’ve got the Beretta, right?”
David swallowed loudly, held up his pistol. His hand shook as he gripped the M-9, yet he could not deny...it felt good. Damn good.
“Follow me,” George said. “Let’s gather ourselves.”
The old Marine walked to the rear of the Ranger, opened the tailgate. He laid the guns down and instructed David to do the same.
David shifted his weight nervously from one foot to the other as George inspected the guns one by one, giving David a short, impromptu lesson in each as he did so.
“This here’s an M-16. You may have heard of her. She’s my pride and joy. This baby’s got a thirty-round clip as well as a selector switch, giving you the options of single-shot, semi-automatic, and fully automatic. She’s goin’ full tonight.”
George strapped the M-16 over his shoulder, letting it dangle behind his back, then picked up another gun.
“AK-47. The best overall firearm, in my opinion, when it comes to situations such as this.” He handed it to David. “Use it wisely.”
“Mine?” said David.
“Use it wisely,” George said again.
David strapped it on, found that it did feel pretty good at his side. He was very aware of its presence, however, like a friend guarding his back who should only be partially trusted.
“All you gotta do is pull back the bolt and fire,” George said. “You’ve got a fifty-round clip in there, should be more than enough for what we have to do. Be careful...but not too careful, if you know what I mean.”
“Gotcha.”
A single gun remained on the Ranger’s tailgate. A shotgun. George picked it up and checked the chamber.
“Mossberg 500A. He’s big, he’s loud, he’s crude as hell, but in close quarters he’ll fill a crowd full of holes as fast as you can pull the trigger. I’ll hold on to this one, you don’t mind.”
“Be my guest,” David said. He started bouncing up and down on his heels without even realizing he was doing so, pumping himself up for the task at hand. Adrenaline flowed through his veins.
“You sure you can handle this stuff, David?” George asked.
“No.”
“At least you’re honest,” George said. “Don’t be scared of guns. Just respect them. Think of your kids.”
“I am. That’s the only thing keeping me from having a fucking heart attack right now.”
George offered his friend a weak smile. “Oh. I almost forgot.” The old man reached into his pants, dug around for something. He pulled out four foamy orange objects and handed a pair to David.
“Earplugs?”
George tilted his head, carefully inserted his own. He gestured for David to do the same. “You’ll thank me later, we live through this. Especially when Big Daddy Mossberg starts talkin’.”
David swallowed nervously again. If we live through this.
“Ready?”
“I’m ready,” David said.
“Let’s do this.”
George led the way toward the church, and as they walked they avoided the thousands of rusty nails decorating the parking lot like the sharp metal teeth of the property itself.
“Fuckers got the place locked up tight,” David said as they ascended the concrete steps leading up to the church’s front door. In shiny silver paint someone had spray-painted MOLOCH ARISE across the width of the doorway. Above the threshold: PANNDAMONUM. A fat silver padlock hung from the door handle, and twin candles, blood red and half-melted, burned on either side of the violet door.
George stepped on one of the candles, snuffing out the flame and squashing the thing flat. David followed the old man’s lead, completed the ritual by doing the same to the candle on his side.
David stood back then, a defeated expression on his face. “How are we going to get in?”
George smirked at him, hefted the M-16 in one pale arm. His tattooed bicep rippled and flexed. “I’ve got my key right here.”
David nodded, brought forth his own AK-47. The thing looked so ominous as he stared at it, blacker than the night around it. He nervously cleared his throat, took a step back and pointed his weapon at the door.
“Shh.” George’s attention suddenly jerked toward the west wing of the church, at something behind David.
“What?”
“Company.”
David turned, following the old Marine’s gaze, just in time to see someone step out of the blackness at the side of the church. The AK-47 shook in his grip.
“Something we can do for you gentlemen?”
David’s eyes were still adjusting to the darkness, but he was able to identify the man walking toward them. It was Deputy Harwood, the skinny man with greasy salt-and-pepper hair who had booked them the night Becca was abducted. He was accompanied by another middle-aged man with very tan, leathery skin and a moustache that made David think of Hitler.
Both men were completely naked. Harwood’s shiny gold badge was pinned to his bare chest, just above his left nipple; a stream of dried blood ran in a straight line from that point all the way to his beltline.
“Where’s my daughter—” David started, but George shot him a look.
“We’d like to get inside,” said the ex-Marine.
“Too bad,” Harwood replied, and now they could see that both men held guns of their own—.38 Specials. They pointed their revolvers at George and David, and their bloodshot eyes glistened wetly in the moonlight.
“Whoa.” George gently pushed David out of the way. “Drop your guns, fellas.”
“You drop yours,” said the man with the hard leathery hide and the Nazi moustache.
“Don’t think so.”
Harwood cocked the hammer on his .38, aimed it at George Heatherly’s head. Fake Hitler followed suit.
The Mossberg swung from beside the ex-Marine’s leg in one fluid motion, so fast that before David knew what was happening the blast had ripped open the night and the men at the foot of the steps were suddenly not there.
The shotgun’s report echoed through the night as Al Harwood and his moustached friend lay dying on the ground.
“Jesus.” His face pale, David stared at the dark, crooked figures sprawled in the grass. At the steaming holes in their naked torsos. One of Deputy Harwood’s hairy legs flopped, like the milky-white fin of a dying fish.
“Let’s go,” George said. “We’ve wasted too much time already.” He brought the .44 Magnum out of his pants and pointed it at the massive padlock on the front door of the church. “Stand back.”
George pulled the trigger and the lock was suddenly gone.
He nodded toward David one last time, then reached out to push the door inward.
“You ready?”
“Y-yeah,” David said.
“You’d better be.” The old man took a deep breath. “‘Cause it’s time to fuck shit up.”
CHAPTER 71
For those first few minutes after they stormed in
to the church, George and David felt as if they had lost the ability to do anything. Their guns may as well have been harmless plastic toys hanging at their sides. Neither of the men could move. They stood there in the dark foyer of the church’s main floor, dumbfounded.
Nothing they had experienced thus far could have prepared them for this.
The interior of Morganville’s First Baptist Church resembled some vision straight from Hell, a representation of the netherworld as viewed through the eyes of Hieronymous Bosch. Or perhaps the Marquis De Sade.
Four words popped into David’s head: orgy of the damned. “Fucking insane,” he murmured.
Every wooden pew inside the church had been removed, leaving a round, open space in the center of this once holy building. Battered maroon hymnals were strewn about the room like dead bats the color of dried blood, and everywhere the men looked the walls were streaked with graffiti, silver-spraypainted occult symbols and words like MOLOCH, BLESSED BE and ARISE.
The crowd gathered inside the church was naked. Every last one of them.
Some of them David recognized, most he did not.
On the stage, near Reverend Rhodes’s cracked and splintered pulpit, a middle-aged lady in wire-rimmed spectacles mounted a hairy, overweight man at least twice her age. Her body glistened with sweat as she rode him, bucking and grinding violently like they were the last two people on earth with only seconds to procreate before their race was extinct. Her back was smeared with blood.
“My God,” George whispered, pointing the couple out to David. “Do you know who that is?”
David shook his head.
“That’s Donna Evanson. Billy Dawson’s mother. And Ernest Crandell. He’s a deacon here, I think.”
David looked away, sickened.
No matter where he turned, however, similar scenes played out before him like some hardcore porno flick come to life. In one corner of the room, Deputy Hank Keenan lapped greedily between the legs of a woman at least seventy years old. She moaned, thrusting her hairy gray crotch into his face with an urgency David had never seen from any woman. Atop the electric organ behind the pulpit area, a skinny young man with green hair and multiple piercings all over his body pumped into a burly tattooed man from behind. David recognized the younger man as a busboy at the Denny’s on Patton Avenue, his obese companion as the owner of the ABC store on Eighth Street.
All about the church, like glowing fish in a sea of decadent madness, dozens of red and violet candles burned within small holes carved three or four feet apart from one another directly into the floor.
“Un-fucking-believable,” George said, watching the nude people writhe about before them in the candlelight. Their bodies seemed to merge into one crude entity, sweaty flesh undulating in a single liquid mass of sin. “I knew this thing was big, but I never thought...”
David stared wide-eyed as George pointed to a spot on the floor just a few yards away. A stocky, blue-haired senior citizen with the largest breasts David had ever seen was sitting on the face of a man wearing only a shiny red fireman’s hat.
“Mavis Ledbetter,” George said. “Guice’s dispatcher. Man between her legs is Frank ‘Beanpole’ Deon. He used to work for the Fire Department.”
“Christ.”
But it was the object in the middle of the room more than anything else that caused bitter bile to rise in the back of David’s throat. His stomach performed frantic somersaults, and it took every ounce of strength he possessed not to run screaming from the place.
No. He couldn’t do that. Becca and Christopher needed him.
“What have they done, David?” George said. “Good Lord, what have they done?”
In the center of the church stood a live reproduction of the pictures in George’s occult books. It was a slanted, asymmetrical effort, but there could be no mistaking the fact that the hodgepodge of scrap-metal there in the middle of the floor served as a jumbled reconstruction of Moloch’s sacrificial altar. Those who had fallen beneath the demon’s unholy influence had apparently melted down various metals—brass, gold, silver, copper anything they could find—in order to replicate the torso of the bull-god. In total area the thing could have measured no more than twenty or thirty square feet, but the inherent evil of the altar made it appear as large as the room itself. Jutting forth from the awkward angles of the monstrosity, David saw the partially formed remains of the items Moloch’s cult had used to build it. From one corner of its base poked half of a silver sconce, Christ’s head peeking out at His surroundings as if the Savior were sinking in a quicksand pit of molten metal. Various other items were half-buried in that silver-gold mass—chalices and half-melted crucifixes and folding chairs and even scavenged bits and pieces of long-dead junkyard vehicles. A crumpled car door. Several hood ornaments. The bent-and-folded side of a Quonset hut. Half of a grill from a Ford Fairlane. A hubcap from a ‘57 DeSoto. Sawblades. A grape-like cluster of rusty doorknobs. A glistening fender jutted forth from the base of the thing, still as shiny as the day it had rolled off the assembly line, though it was partially melted into the crossbars of a silver crucifix.
They had all been painstakingly molded together into a makeshift oven the size of a small gazebo.
The visage of Moloch himself, massive arms outstretched, stared down at David from atop the thing. His eyes were twin headlights, his horns crooked silver chalices, but his arms had been molded perfectly from what appeared to be pure gold, stretching down to just below his hollow stomach. The ragged dreadlock threads of an ancient soggy mop had been utilized to portray the demon’s long, stringy beard.
Inside the thing’s torso a small bonfire blazed. Shattered hunks of wood cut from the church’s ruined pews were its kindling, and as those flames grew ever higher embers danced in the air around it like so many worried fireflies.
“They made him,” David said. “Jesus, George, they made a fucking altar, just like in the books.”
“I see that.”
“Welcome to the conjuring,” someone said, and both David and George spun toward the source of that voice.
Fred Dawson, unlike everyone else in the place, was not naked. He still wore his filthy Santa Claus suit, now more black than its original crimson, and his matted, crumb-specked beard hung down to his belly. He stank of shit and semen. He came to them from the dark stairwell to their right that led up to the church’s balcony.
“Fuck you, Santa,” George said.
“Shh.” Fred Dawson quickly glanced in the direction of the bull-god’s altar, as if fearing that his precious deity might have overheard the old man’s sacrilege. “This is a house of God. Please, watch your language.”
“Where’s my wife?” David asked him. “And my children?”
“They are here, of course,” Fred Dawson replied. “Mrs. Little is waiting for the ceremony to begin, along with the rest of us.”
“And my kids?”
The man just smiled at David, steepled his fingers in front of his face as if preparing some deep, meaningful speech.
David took a step toward him, pulled the Beretta from his pants and stuck it in the Santa-imposter’s face.
“Godammit, what have you freaks done with my daughter? And my baby? God so help me, if you’ve hurt them—”
“They are unharmed,” Fred Dawson said. “For now.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“They are waiting.”
“Waiting for what?” David shouted.
“To pass through the fire. As Moloch has commanded.”
David lunged at the man and pressed the business end of his pistol against Dawson’s dirt-caked forehead. “Motherfucker, where are they?”
The man blinked at him, as if he knew he could not be harmed. “They are with Reverend Rhodes, of course.”
“Goddamn you—”
“Moloch,” said the man in the Santa suit.
George pushed David aside then, reared back and punched Fred Dawson in the face. Dawson crumpled to the flo
or, unconscious.
George wiped his hands on his pants. “That’ll take care of Kris Kringle for a while.”
David scowled down at the man on the floor for a minute or so, then joined George in the doorway of the church foyer once again. He stuck the Beretta back in his pants, hefted the AK-47 before him. They stared over the bizarre proceedings on the main floor, unsure of where to begin.
David swallowed, stayed close behind his friend as the ex-Marine took several steps forward into the church. The old man pointed toward an area where two men in their late twenties sat face-to-face in the candlelight, furiously masturbating one another as they hummed some unknown Gregorian-like tune. A few feet from that strange scene, four people rolled about licking and sucking and fucking one another like wild animals. Their sweaty bodies glistened in the orange light emanating from the bull-god’s belly, and they plunged in and out of one another so violently David thought he saw blood mixed in with all of their other bodily juices.
“Let’s get your kids,” George said then, as he aimed his M-16 into the gathered throng.
“Listen up, you sick fucks!” he shouted. His voice echoed through the church, carried through the place despite the deafening chorus of orgasmic grunts and groans that assaulted the two men on all sides.
“HEY!” George shouted, even louder.
At last the unholy congregation stopped what they were doing. Their rutting abated simultaneously, as if everyone in the place were guided by a single, unified mind. They stared up at George and David.
“We’ve come for the baby,” George said. “And the little girl.”
They started laughing. All of them. Sandpapery senior citizen chuckles, insane howls, drunken redneck chortling and childish giggles merged into a single chaotic cacophony directed toward those who would dare interrupt.
“Shut up!” David shouted, gnashing his teeth. His head throbbed, and his knees felt weak. “Shut the fuck up!”
“You,” George said, pointing his M-16 toward the two people closest to him. “Get up. Take us to the children. Now.”
Mavis Ledbetter lifted herself off of Frank Deon’s face, and even from where they stood George and David could see the shiny wet folds of her labia, could see her juices trickling onto Deon’s chest as she rose. David made a sick burping noise in the back of his throat, tightened his grip on the Beretta as he tensed for a fight.