by Tim Curran
“Just stop it,” Tara Boyle said.
“and you can’t run, you can’t hide. You can only scream as it drops down out of the dark and winds around your throat, squeezing and sucking your brain out.”
His brother Kyle giggled. “Yeah, you can hear it sucking your brains out.”
“What is it?” Alicia Kroll wanted to know. “What does it look like?”
Cal laughed like a horror movie host: “Heh, heh, heh.” He was holding one of the flashlights under his chin so that his face was mired in shifting shadow. “It looks like a brain…a living, crawling brain with a spinal cord that’s like a tail. That’s what it wraps around your neck…that’s what holds you while it sucks the brain out of your skull…”
“Oh, gross,” Lacee Hendersen said.
“That’s stupid,” Chuck Bittner said, which was pretty much what he said about anything unless he came up with it.
Kyle looked at him. “You’re a fag just like your dad.”
“Shut up!”
“Homo.”
Bobby Luce held up his hands. “Okay, okay, everybody stop it!”
Kayla Summers began to whimper.
“Oh, boy,” Alicia Kroll said, “here we go again.”
Bobby Luce sighed. How was he supposed to reign in this bunch? True, Mr. Reed had placed him in charge of them while he went to look for help, but that didn’t exactly mean he wanted to be in charge. Mr. Reed had been gone for like two hours now and the natives were getting restless. Half of them wanted to leave the bus and find their own help and the other half wanted to stay. If it wasn’t Kyle and Cal Woltrip telling stories about psychopaths with chainsaws and brain-sucking monstrosities, then it was Chuck Bittner threatening them all with his father or Kayla Summers bursting into tears and Tara Boyle whining about everything. The others weren’t so bad, but they were all getting nervous and agitated and maybe more than a little scared.
And it was scary.
Bobby Luce, despite his eleven years, had inherited the practicality and rock-solid nerve of his parents. He did not scare easily. Even if something in a horror movie or horror comic occasionally freaked him out, he understood very well the dividing line between fantasy and reality. That line was very hard-etched in his mind. But even with his adult logic and common sense, this entire situation of being trapped in a bus in the pitch black in a flooded section of town…well, it was more than a little overwhelming.
The power had gone out now and Bethany was dark as a midnight cellar, that rain falling and falling. Sometimes light, sometimes very heavy, but always there. And like the others, all of it was getting on his nerves.
But what can I do? he wondered. I have to keep everyone here. Mr. Reed put me in charge and that means I’m responsible. I can’t let anyone leave and if they stay, I can’t let them claw each other’s eyes out.
It was a hell of a situation.
Sure, they were supposed to be a team, they were supposed to work together. Fairstreet Flyers, one for all and all for one. But that barely held water on the field during a game, let alone in the real world. Bobby wished Coach Costigan were there. She always seemed to have a pep talk for every eventuality and when that didn’t work, well, she had one hell of a temper, too.
Sighing, he shut off his flashlight.
They only had the two and they wouldn’t last forever. There were fifteen of them waiting in that bus and most were just sulking now, not saying a thing and Bobby wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. God, what was taking Mr. Reed so damn long?
“Cal,” Bobby said. “Turn that flashlight off. No sense wasting those batteries.”
“Okay, Chief.”
The light went off without an argument. Bobby was suspicious right away. Cal and Kyle weren’t as bad as some of the others, but they could be trouble. And Bobby was suspecting trouble when Cal didn’t even argue with him about the light.
“Probably a good idea,” Cal said. “You never know who might be out there.”
Oh, boy.
Kyle giggled as he always did. “Sure, out in the storm…you don’t know what’s out there. Some lunatic might see our lights and come to investigate.”
“He might have a knife,” Cal said.
“Or an axe,” his brother speculated.
“And he might be hungry. He might want something to eat,” Cal said, his voice dropping a few octaves into its horror host tone again. “I wonder who he is?”
“Some guy that escaped from a mental hospital,” Kyle decided. “Sure, he’s wandering out in the storm. He can probably smell us. And when he smells us, he’s gonna get hungry.”
Cal nodded. “And when he gets hungry, he’s gonna remember that butcher knife in his pocket.”
“Or that bloody axe in his hand.”
“Yeah, and he’s gonna want some meat. Some meat to chop up, red and bloody meat that he can stuff in his mouth. He likes the taste of it. It reminds him of all those kids he ate before they put him away.”
Bobby said, “C’mon already, will you two quit it?”
“And when he’s done eating us, he’s gonna want some souvenirs. Maybe a heart or a skull or something he can stuff in his pocket and chew on”
“Stop it,” Bobby told the both of them.
Kayla Summers was crying again and a few other kids were fighting back sobs.
“Why don’t you two grow up already?” Lacee Henderson said, getting a little tired of talking Kayla down every time the Woltrip brothers got her all worked up again.
“He’s not coming back,” Tara Boyle said. “Mr. Reed.”
“Sure he is,” Bobby told her.
“But he’s not. If he was, then he would have been back by now.”
“That’s right,” Chuck Bittner said. “I think we should just walk out of here. It’s stupid to wait like this.”
And pretty soon they were all voicing their opinions and what was Bobby to do? He was bigger than the others, so he could probably physically stop a few of them, but not all of them. It just wasn’t possible.
As the other kids argued back and forth, Lacee and Alicia and Kayla were the only ones for staying put. Bobby squeezed his eyes shut and listened to the rain and felt the darkness closing in around them, imagining it to be some malefic fist that would crush the bus to a pulp. It was crazy thinking and not the sort that Bobby indulged in much, but the image presented itself and some morbid streak in his mind liked it, decided it was the perfect thing to torment him with. He tried to shake it out of his head, but it clung there as the worst things always seemed to. Maybe it was this waiting and maybe it was the Woltrip brothers with those terrible stories, but Bobby was frightened. He wasn’t sure of what exactly, but the fear was there: thick and unreasoning and complete.
C’mon, you idiot! You’re not afraid of the dark and the oogie-boogie man now are you?
But at that momentwhich, although he was not aware of it, was a defining moment in his young lifehe could not honestly say that he did not believe in spooks and spirits and creeping nightmares. God, it was so awfully dark in that bus, your mind just got carried away. Nothing but the sound of all those kids breathing or maybe not breathing at all, just holding their breath and waiting, waiting for something to happen…
And suddenly, with that in mind, Bobby became aware of the fact that nobody was talking.
It was dead silent in the bus.
The Woltrip brothers were not trying to scare the pants off anyone. Chuck Bittner was not bragging about his old man’s money. Tara Boyle was not whining. And, above all, Kayla Summers was not even crying.
There was a tenseness in the bus, an almost electric sense of foreboding like everyone was trying to keep quiet so that maybe if there was someone or something out there, they would not hear them, would not be able to zero in on them. Bobby swallowed. Then swallowed again. It wasn’t just him now. They were all feeling it. Like maybe they were not alone after all. That maybe something really was out there, something hungry and patient and incalculably
evil.
Stop it! he told himself.
But he couldn’t.
His guts were tangled in knots and there was sweat beading his brow. Something was happening or about to and he could feel it. Really feel it. A palpable sense of dread, of doom. Though the rain was coming down at a steady rate, he thought he could hear splashing sounds outside. He looked to the windows, but they were speckled with raindrops and beyond them, God, it was miserably dark, unfathomably dark like the inside of a buried coffin.
“I’m scared,” Tara Boyle said.
“Shut up,” Lacee told her. “Be quiet.”
Bobby was thinking weapons now. If there was someone or some thing out there, then how would they defend themselves? For he could feel it right from his balls up to his throat, that inexplicable sense of danger. And more than that, the unshakable feeling that there was someone out there, people maybe, gathering around the bus like jagged-toothed sharks gathering around a sinking ship or buzzards circling a dying man.
There was a sudden thudding sound against the side of the bus and somebody let go with a strangled little cry.
“Who did that?” Bobby said.
But there were no answers. Just those faces barely visible in the gloom.
“Kyle? Cal?”
“No,” Cal said. “It wasn’t us. It came…it came from outside.”
And Bobby believed him, even though he wished it weren’t true. Maybe at any other time he would have been thinking that it was just Mr. Reed coming back with help, but he knew better. This was no help arriving, it was something else entirely.
There was another thud.
Bobby felt Lacee grab his arm and Alicia grab the other one. Something was rattling fiercely in his chest and it took him a moment to realize that it was his own heart. The girls’ hands on him were gripping him so tightly he thought they would snap his arms.
And then outside…a sliding, dragging sound like somebody was pulling themselves along the length of the bus. And on the other side, another thud…then a screeching sound like nails were being dragged along the outside panels.
Kayla Summers said, “It’s…it’s those brain-eating things.”
“Shut up,” Kyle told her. “That was just a movie…”
The tenseness held, was welded into place much as the bodies it came from. Finally, the Fairstreet Flyers were a team…one mind and one body. They were locked together, holding onto one another for dear life. They didn’t know why exactly, but they understood the sudden necessity of it.
Bobby wrenched himself free of the hands on him, knowing that somebody had to do something, somebody had to break this spell before everyone just lost it and started screaming. It was like being in a darkened movie theater, knowing something horrible was about to happen up on the screen. Or being in one of those carnival Halloween spookhouses, walking down a dim corridor and knowing that someone was about to reach out and grab you…
Bobby took hold of the flashlight, his hand shaking. He brought it up and turned it on. The beam of light was absolutely blinding and the moment his eyes adjusted to it, Bobby wished he’d left it off.
Maybe the dark was better.
Because in the dark you could not see those pallid faces peering in through the windows. Those starkly white faces set off by huge, glistening black eyes that were simply empty and dead.
Somebody screamed.
Bobby turned the light off.
There was a sudden knocking at the bifold door. At first just a gentle rapping, then a pounding and finally a hammering.
Whoever those people were, they wanted in.
Suddenly, a million hands were thudding against the outside of the bus, others beating against the door. Fingers scraping against the glass and faces pressed against those windows, hollow-eyed and pulpy.
The kids were crying out, screaming. Some were praying.
But Bobby heard none of it.
Because he was looking at the windshield up in the cab. There was something crawling up it he first took to be a giant, leggy spider. But as his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he could see what it was quite plainly.
A disembodied hand.
It was pale and bloated, the fingers pulling it up the windshield, leaving a slimy trail behind it.
Bobby didn’t hold off any longer: he screamed.
20
A few minutes after they entered the cemetery, Henry T. Oates came to the shocking realization that not only were they fucked here, but that in this particular violation, there would certainly be no flowers or soft kisses in the dark. Not so much as a heart-shaped box of candy. No, this definitely was of the grab-your-ankles-and- grit-your-teeth variety.
Neiderhauser, God bless him, was still whining. “Sarge…I’m serious here…this is crazy. To hell with Hopper and Torrio. Piss on ‘em, we need back up.”
“I’ll let you know when you need back up, sunshine,” Oates told him.
They were drifting through the black water of a cemetery that Neiderhauser said had to be All Saints. Which was all and fine in Oates way of thinking. Not that that pearl did them much good. When you went to meet your maker, didn’t matter whether it was a bayonet or a Russian knife that sent you there; you were going all the same. And right then, Oates figured it didn’t much matter the name of this particular boneyard, because the shit was about to get deep.
Neiderhauser had killed the engine so Oates could get his senses stoked up and hot, maybe tell him just what was going on here. Just after they got into the cemetery, trying to catch up with Hopper’s boat, there’d been a booming sound like an impact somewhere out there, which made Oates think that Hopper and his band of merry men had smacked into something and flipped over. Course, over the sound of the Johnson pump jet engine at full rev, it was hard to say.
“Back there,” Neiderhauser said. “Those things in the water…they were”
“Unfriendlies,” Oates said. “That’s what they were and that’s how we’ll log it.”
Nobody argued with him and that was a good thing, for he surely wasn’t in the mood for it. They’d lost the second boat back in the alley along with four boys. Now that wasn’t just bad, it flat out stank. And now maybe they’d lost Hopper and Torrio, too. Oates wasn’t liking this. This whole op wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was supposed to be a fairly simple search-and-rescue, nothing more.
But now it had become anything but.
Oates had seen those things in the alley, too. He had seen what they looked like and it had scared him as bad as the others. Those…individuals, how could you classify them? Not as men and women surely. They looked like they’d crawled out of a mass grave, were in search of a few spare body bags.
You can try and be cute and sassy about those things all you want, Oates told himself, but they were all dead, the walking dead, goddamn
“Zombies,” Neiderhauser said. “Zombies.”
“That’ll do,” Oates warned him, wiping a mist of rain from his face. “Keep your eyes peeled.”
Hinks hadn’t said a word since the incident in the alley. As if the very horror of all that had completely shut something down in him, had emptied him. He was just a shell with staring eyes. Maybe he was in shock and maybe he had lost his mind. Either way, Oates just didn’t have the time to babysit him. Not now.
Knowing procedure, Oates had radioed it all in. But the captain told him to stay and look for survivors and under no condition abandon his people out there. So that was that and now here they were.
But it was no easy bit.
Even without the fear that was worming up his asshole like an unfriendly finger, this was a mess. For maybe All Saints boneyard made some sort of sense when you were walking its roads and following its paths, but when there was a good six or seven feet of water covering it up, well it was a maze. All around them were treesthick boles like pillars, branches spreading out above in a nearly unbroken weave and stout limbs rising from the soup. And in-between, the tips of tall monuments and the peaked roofs of buria
l vaults jutting up. Yeah, it was a maze, all right. The water was turgid and oily, a foul steam rising from it, lots of things bobbing and drifting just under the surface.
It was positively claustrophobic.
It reminded Oates of a mangrove swamp he’d spent two days in down in Brazil as part of a survival exercise years back. It was dark like that swamp, stank like that swamp, and gave him that same feeling of vulnerability…the sense that there were terrible things out there, watching him, things he would never see until they jumped out of the darkness at him.
Neiderhauser was terrified.
His constant bitching and complaining had an edge to it now that made you think he was teetering, that if he fell all the way, all the King’s horses and all the King’s men would never put him back together again. Sure, fear. Ugly, simmering fear. It was in all of them now.
And there was nothing Oates could say to change it.
What they had seen back in that alley, well, it was not the sort of thing you could just turn away from. It was the sort of thing that got down inside your mind, crouched in the darkness there.
“All right,” Oates said, “let’s get this done. Grab those oars, you poo-nanny sonosofbitches, and take us around that stand of trees.”
Again, they did not argue. Hinks and Neiderhauser sets their weapons aside and took hold of the oars, pushed them forward. The branches of the trees rose up jagged and skeletal, looked sharp enough to impale a man.
They came around, skirted the oval top of an obelisk, and thudded right into something. It was a box, long and narrow and covered with leaves.
“A coffin,” Neiderhauser said.
And it was. It bumped past them and they all fell as silent as Hinks. The wan moonlight reflected off its tarnished brass handles, falling rain speckled its surface. Oates knew that when a graveyard was inundated for days upon days, sometimes the soil just dissolved into a muddy silt and what was under it tended to rise to the surface.
“There’s another one,” Neiderhauser said.
Oates was on the spotlight and he picked out two or three others, one of them completely rotted. More a collection of sticks than anything else. Rotted cerements trailed out into the water like confetti.