One of Us

by Craig DiLouie

  “Your full name?”

  “Enoch Davis Bryant. They call me Dog.”

  Clack, clack.

  “Date of birth?”

  “I don’t know. We don’t have birthdays.”

  “1970?”

  “Yes, sir. I am fourteen years old.”

  Clack, clack.

  After that they fingerprinted him and hauled him in front of a camera mounted on a tripod. A deputy took off his handcuffs while the sheriff stood nearby with his hand on the grip of the big gun he wore at his side. Dog massaged his wrists. The deputy pushed him toward the wall and gave him a placard to hold up.

  Dog smiled as the flashbulb popped.

  The deputy told him to stand to the side and took another picture of his profile. “Now get them shorts off.”

  “But I’ll be naked.”

  “I ain’t asking twice, creeper.”

  Dog stood before the normals, ashamed of his nakedness. Pins and needles raged in his hands as they regained feeling, like they were being eaten by fire ants. The deputy took him into another room and told him to close his eyes and hold his breath. When he opened his eyes, his fur was white with delousing powder. The deputy handed him a white uniform with D.O.C. stenciled on the back of the shirt. He put it on and followed the deputy out.

  “How do you like your new pajamas?” the sheriff said.

  “Better than what we got at the Home.”

  “I’ll take it from here, Bobby.”

  Burton put him in a jail cell and slammed the heavy door shut. The grip of numerous desperate hands had worn the paint off the bars over the years. Dog’s gaze took in the bed, commode, and sink.

  All just for him. More luxury. Everything clean and no fleas and ticks. His own personal commode, the kind that flushed.

  The sheriff pulled up a chair and sat. “You’ll be staying here until we get things sorted.”

  “This is just fine,” Dog said.

  He lay on the bed and curled into a ball shivering from the pain that wouldn’t quit. The ribs on the right side had fused into a throbbing, angry tumor. He wasn’t bleeding anymore, but he still had metal pieces in there working their way deeper into his flesh with every breath.

  Burton pulled a pipe from the breast pocket of his uniform and tamped a big pinch of tobacco in it. He lit a match and puffed. The air filled with cherry smoke.

  “Your story don’t add up,” he said. “How about you tell me what really happened out in them woods.”

  “I thought I had a right to stay quiet,” Dog said.

  “This is a poor time to sass me, boy. I am the only friend you got right now.”

  “You ain’t my friend.”

  “You want to do this with a lawyer?”

  “No,” Dog said. “I want Brain.”

  The sheriff puffed. “And who would that be?”

  “George Hurst. We call him Brain.”

  “The gorilla boy with the smart mouth. I remember him.”

  “You’re right about that. He’s real smart. Smarter than you and me put together. Smarter than everybody. He’d figure all this out in about ten minutes.”

  “I’m sure he would,” the sheriff said. “A fourteen-year-old plague boy with a fourth-grade education. Naturally, he’d find you innocent.”

  “You mean because him and me are the same stock.”

  “Exactly what I mean.”

  “Well, a lawyer is the same as you. So what chance does that give me at justice?”

  “It don’t matter who represents you. The facts say you did it. So why don’t you just give me the truth.”

  “Brain was right about one thing,” Dog said.

  “What would that be?”

  “You hate us. The Home is built on it. This cage is built of it.”

  The policemen had hurt Dog’s body, but he hurt far worse inside. His friend was dead, and everybody was eager to point the finger at him. The look on Pa Albod’s face as he cursed him to God. The sheriff calling him a son of a bitch.

  All that fear and hate they had in their hearts. Like it had always been there ready to come out in a flood.

  “I didn’t want to believe what Brain was always telling me,” Dog said. “I hoped different. I hoped you normals could be my friends. I learned my lesson the hard way. I’m done with hoping.”

  “Is that why you did it? You think Sally hated you, is that it?”

  “Stop trying to trick me. I was just stating a fact.”

  “I just want to know why you did it,” the sheriff said.

  “Then ask the one who did and leave me alone, sir.”

  “They’ll send you to the state pen down in Reidsville for this. They don’t execute minors, but in your case they’ll make an exception. They’ll try you as an adult. You’ll get the electric chair for sure. Unless the inmates get you first.”

  Dog said nothing. He had nothing to say. Nothing the sheriff wanted to hear.

  “You gonna go out with this on your conscience, boy?”

  Nothing.

  Burton sighed and stood.

  “Sheriff,” Dog said.

  “What? I’m listening.”

  “Is Mr. Gaines gonna be okay?”

  “You scratched him up something awful, but I reckon he’ll survive.”

  “You tell him I’m real sorry.”

  “I might could tell him.”

  “Then tell him I’ll get him for killing Sally.”

  The sheriff frowned. “Doc Odom will be by later to take a look at that birdshot wound. You make any trouble for him, we’ll shoot you dead.”

  “In this life or the next,” said Dog. “I’ll wait. I’ll chase him to Hell if I have to.”

  Twenty-Seven

  Sheriff Burton left Enoch Bryant in the holding cells. Beth, the big no-nonsense woman he called the sheriff behind the sheriff, gave him the stink-eye as he entered the office. She hung up the phone, which started ringing again. Behind her, the switchboard was lit up.

  “Am I supposed to get it dinner and supper?” she said.

  “Yup,” Burton said.

  “What does it eat?”

  “He’s a he, not an it. And I reckon he eats what we eat, or he can go ahead and starve.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” she said. “The phone is ringing off the hook.”

  “Townsfolk pitchin’ a hissy fit, I reckon. Word must be getting around.”

  “The Augusta Chronicle called, too.”

  “Hell’s bells, that was fast. What you tell them?”

  “I told that man to call the mayor.”

  “Good girl,” the sheriff said.

  “Who by the way also called. And your wife.”

  “I’ll call her back later. The mayor, too. I’m heading over to the coroner.”

  “What about me?” Deputy Sikes said. “Half these calls are reports of feral kids in the woods. We don’t have the manpower to check out every one.”

  “They’re all hooey,” the sheriff said. “You might stick around until the doc shows up to look at the prisoner. I’ll be back by then, and we can figure out what’s next.”

  Burton plucked his hat from its hook and left the office. He got in his car and sat still for a while just thinking. None of it added up. He wondered if the kid was crazy. Sally Albod’s chest had been torn to ribbons. No birdshot did that.

  The kid did it with his claws.

  But to run back to the farm in a lather and make up a story like that? It beggared belief. If he tore up Sally, why stick around after? Why run and tell Albod that Gaines shot her, thinking it’d stick?

  Maybe the kid had delusions.

  It worried him. First Ray Bowie, now a week later a child gets murdered. Burton wondered if the plague kids suffered from a dual nature. One a normal human being, the other a thing that thought and acted like a beast. The two sides warring in their tragic souls. Maybe sometimes the beast won and took command.

  Or maybe the kids were fine. The Colonel’s discipline and the Home’s social co
nditioning kept their bestial natures in check. They were all well-behaved kids, while Enoch Bryant just happened to be touched in the head. A bad apple. He snapped and killed Sally and then convinced himself he hadn’t done it.

  Over the years, Burton had heard crime’s every excuse. If the human mind was capable of delusions, who knew what the monster mind could come up with. The plague children remained an unknown. That they were different on the outside was plain to see. How they might be different on the inside was anybody’s guess.

  The whole thing made him uneasy for a mess of reasons.

  Burton started the car and drove to the coroner’s office. He walked into the examination room as Dr. Rose Tipton unzipped the white bag to expose Sally Albod’s lifeless form on the steel slab.

  “Oh, dear Lord,” she said. “You poor little sweet thing.”

  Sally lay on the table, a lifeless effigy of a once-vibrant girl whose spirit had departed to Heaven. Her daddy had closed her eyes. Her mouth remained fixed in a soundless scream.

  “Hello, Rose,” Burton said. “Mind if I sit in?”

  “This is a job for the mortuary. I can certify her death, and I sure as hell can state it was an unlawful death. I’ll just write it up the way you want.”

  “That’s awful kind of you, but I need an autopsy.”

  “What are you looking for? Somebody hacked this poor girl up, and from what I hear, you are holding the son of a bitch did it.”

  “I need it done for evidence. I appreciate you working on a Saturday.”

  She looked at the body and sighed. “Lord.”

  “Bowie was worse,” Burton said.

  “Bowie weren’t a little girl, Tom.”

  She shrugged off her white lab coat and hung it on a hook. He got a good view of her in her tight blouse and skirt. Her face was long and a bit on the horsey side but her youthful body boasted an hourglass shape and boobs big as zeppelins. He felt an old stirring of desire but had the good sense to put it aside. He’d strayed once in his life at a cop convention a long time ago, and he’d broken almost everything in his life and now lived with a cracked home and fractured marriage.

  Rose washed her hands at the shiny sink and gowned up. She pulled on gloves and set a plastic visor on her head, which she angled down to shield her face from splatter and bone dust. The scale sat ready to weigh the girl’s organs. She pulled a wheeled cart in front of the table. On it lay the tools of her grisly trade: bone saw, bread knife, scissors, hammer, scalpels, skull chisel, toothed forceps.

  “Lord,” she editorialized. “Oh, Lord.”

  She took a deep breath and turned on a small tape recorder. She narrated the wounds, a litany of damage and punctures. Rose kept talking while she picked up a scalpel and sliced Sally Albod from her shoulders to her breastbone then all the way down to her pubic bone. She pulled and folded the girl’s ruined chest over her face. Then she got the rib cutter. The rib cage came out.

  Back to the scalpel now. Snipping and removing organs.

  “Lord, Lord, Lord.”

  Burton leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. He didn’t need to see any more of this. He’d wait for Rose to tell him what she found. This poor little girl. Innocent and precious. She’d had her whole life ahead of her, and now she was just a lifeless husk. A slab of meat for butchering.

  Sally Albod was with Jesus now. He took some comfort in this but not as much as he would have liked.

  Something pinged on the floor. His eyes popped open. The coroner bent to pick up a tiny object with her bloody gloves. Burton stepped forward for a closer look. She held it in her hand and nudged it with her finger.

  “Piece of metal in her lung,” she said.

  “I’ll be damned.”

  “What does it mean?”

  Burton walked over to the exam room’s work desk. “Can I use your phone?”

  He was already dialing.

  Beth picked up. “Sheriff’s office.”

  “It’s the sheriff. Did the—”

  “I had to order out for dinner. The phones are going crazy—”

  “Never mind all that, Beth. Did the doc come yet?”

  “He’s in the holding cells with Bobby and the creeper.”

  “Be a dear and get him for me.”

  Burton pulled the phone away an inch as he heard Beth slam the receiver on her desk. High heels clicked the floor. Angry voices in the waiting area, good citizens come to voice their upset about the crime.

  “Should I keep going?” Rose said.

  “See if you can find any more of that metal in her, if you don’t mind.”

  The coroner shrugged and went back to work. Burton tried to visualize the crime in his head. The creeper mauled Sally before slashing at Dave Gaines. Gaines’s boy fired his twenty-gauge with a spray of pellets.

  At close range, there wouldn’t be much of a spread, but it wasn’t impossible a pellet found its way into Sally.

  That wasn’t what bothered him.

  A man cleared his throat in the phone’s receiver. “Sheriff, this is Dr. Odom.”

  “How’s the prisoner doing, Doc? He giving you any trouble?”

  Odom sniffed. “I don’t know why I had to leave Dave Gaines to attend to this. I’m not a veterinarian.”

  “And he ain’t a dog. He’s a plague boy looks like one.”

  “Boys don’t have claws.”

  “We didn’t have a chance to clip those yet. He scratch you?”

  “No, but that’s not the point.”

  “How’s Dave doing?” Burton said.

  “He’ll mend. He’ll have some scars to remember it by.”

  “That’s good to hear. That he’ll mend, I mean.”

  “As for your dog boy, I’m still patching him up.”

  “You pull any shot out of him?”

  “Couple pieces of birdshot,” Odom said. “That’s about—”

  “Thank ye,” Burton said and hung up.

  Rose held up a piece of metal with a pair of tweezers. She plonked it in a metal bowl. “Got another one.”

  “Keep looking,” Burton said. “I need every pellet you can find.”

  “Why don’t you wait in my office? You look like you found a fly in your soup.”

  “It ain’t the body that’s bothering me.”

  Another pellet clinked in the bowl.

  “No?” she said.

  “Enoch Bryant got hit by birdshot,” he said. “That there in your bowl is buckshot.”

  They stared at each other.

  “And that means what?” she said.

  “I’ll let you get to it,” he said. “I got to get back to the office. Thank ye kindly, Rose.”

  She shrugged again and went back to her work.

  The sheriff returned to his car, put his hat on the seat, and slid behind the wheel wondering how buckshot got into Sally Albod’s chest. Another thing bothered him. During her initial survey of the body, Rose had called out a three-inch-deep puncture wound under the girl’s clavicle. A clean slit, not a tear. Not the kind of wound the dog boy’s claws would make.

  More like the kind your typical hunting knife would.

  The sheriff visualized the crime again, this time the way the kid told it.

  Gaines puts a load of buckshot into Sally Albod’s breastplate and pulls her out of the thickets. Dog boy shows up and goes wild. Archie shoots him, and he runs off to tell Albod. The girl is dead already. Gaines has a choice. He can take responsibility for what he did and maybe lose everything he loves, or go all the way. Frame the whole thing on a creeper nobody gives a damn about.

  It all added up, except maybe for one thing.

  Maybe she wasn’t already dead.

  “You son of a bitch,” Burton said aloud.

  He started the car and drove back to the office. Bedlam awaited him inside. The waiting area was jammed with shouting men and women. He glared at the invasion. They crowded him voicing their petitions.

  “I saw a creeper in the woods, Sheriff. What are you
gonna do about that?”

  “How about you hand over the creeper and let us handle it?”

  “What are you doing about the Home? Why are all those kids still running free?”

  “What are you gonna do about it, Sheriff?”

  Burton raised his hands. “Everybody calm down.”

  He still worried the plague kids might become a general threat to life and limb. Right now, though, he was more worried about the good people of Huntsville making a lynch mob.

  He’d put it all to rest right now by arresting Dave Gaines.

  A single voice cut through the bedlam: “Sheriff.”

  Linda Green. Something about her tone quieted the crowd to an angry murmur. A mother’s authority. She had something to say. She walked through the crowd holding hands with her daughter. Amy was crying. Her friend was dead.

  The girl looked up, her face puffed and wet with tears. “It was him.”

  “What do you mean it was him?” Burton said.

  “The plague boy who looks like a dog.”

  “The boy we caught.”

  “He’s the one who killed Ray Bowie,” she said.

  Twenty-Eight

  Amy put on an old black dress she used to wear to church and stood in front of the mirror looking for flaws. Mama crossed her arms and tapped her foot.

  “I see you’re fully recovered,” Mama said. “Spending an hour in the commode looking at yourself.”

  “How do I look? Do I look all right?”

  “Prettier than a summer day,” Mama said. “That dress is too small for you now, though. It were any smaller, every boy in town would be able to see Christmas.”

  Amy didn’t care. She looked good in it. She wanted everybody to know there was nothing wrong with her. That she was perfect.

  Especially Jake. She wanted to look perfect just for him.

  “What about you?” she said. “That dress were any tighter, I’d see your religion.”

  “I earned what I wear,” Mama said. “When you get to my age, you can flaunt all you want. At your age, boys drool they see you picking your nose.”

  “That’s gross.”

  “Finish it up here, sugar booger. We don’t want to be late.”

  Amy nodded, any interest she had in fighting sucked out of her. It was hard to imagine going to school without Sally. Passing commentary in the halls. Dinnertime bull sessions. Walking down to the Dairy Queen for ice cream. Picking up the phone and calling her on a bored evening to talk about the future.