“No need, Roy,” one of the men called out. “We don’t need your kind of atonement. We been fine all these years without it”
“That’s right,” several people added, and others nodded without uttering a word.
“No,” Roy said, pressing the flat of his hand against the air in front of him as if it were an invisible wall. “All these years I’ve squandered my life in service to others. I owe Sunland City an atonement.”
“You want us to crucify you, King?” Someone laughed.
Others chuckled more quietly.
“That is exactly what I want,” Roy Shadiak said. “Two atonements, two murders.”
A woman in the crowd shouted, ‘Two atonements for two murders!”
“Two atonements! Two murders!” others began chanting.
“Frankie Shadiak!” Roy shouted. “Kip Renner!”
“Two atonements! Two murders!” The crowd became familiar now. Roy saw Ellen Mawbry from tenth grade, Willy Potter from the corner store, the entire Forster clan, the Rogers family, the Blankenships, the Fowlers. As he chanted and as they chanted as the day loped forward, they all gathered—labor stopped, activity ceased, schools let out for a spontaneous holiday, until the town center of Sunland City was a sea of the familiar and the new. All turned out for the returning hero, their King, who passed among them to offer his life for their suffering.
“Two atonements!” they cried as if their voices would reach beyond that Florida sky.
It was what Roy expected from a town that God had turned his back on twenty three years before.
And then Helen Renner, her hair gone white, stepped out of the crowd toward him. She wiped her hands on her apron, as if she’d just finished baking, and went and stood at the foot of the milk crate.
Roy crouched down and took her face in his hands.
“Don’t do it,” she said. “Roy Shadiak, don’t you do it. Neither one of them was worth it. We all let it happen. We’re all responsible. It may not even fix anything, Roy. There’s no guarantee.”
His kissed her on her forehead. “I’ve got to. It’s something inside of me that needs room to grow, and I’ve been killing it all these years. I’ve been killing every one of you, too. Two atonements,” he repeated, “for two murders.”
4
Joe Fowler was a crackerjack carpenter. He and his assistant, Jasper, were at the Shadiak house within an hour of Roy’s leave-taking of the makeshift podium.
He stood on the porch in paint-spattered overalls, his khaki hat in his hands, looking through the screen door at Roy’s mother.
“We got some railroad ties from out the Yard,” he said. “They got pitch on ’em, but I think they gonna be just fine for the job.” His voice quavered. “We’d like to offer our services, Alice.”
Alice Shadiak stood like stone. “You and your kind can get off my porch. I don’t mean to lose two sons in this lifetime.”
Roy came up behind her, touching her gently on the shoulder. “Mama, it’s got to be done.”
“Where is it written? Where?”
“On my soul,” he said.
“Our kind has no soul,” she said, pulling away from him. “I don’t need God’s forgiveness on my house. I don’t want sweet Jesus’ tears.”
“It’s Jesus that keeps you here.”
“He doesn’t even look on us, Roy,” his mother said. “He doesn’t even come to our churches. What does it matter? Does anyone in Sunland really believe there’s a Jesus waiting to shine his light on us?”
“That’s because of me.”
“It’s because your brother and his sick little friend were unnatural and perverted, and God cared more for them than for decency or nature or for any of us. I don’t mind burning for that, Roy. I don’t mind that sacrifice.”
“I do,” Roy said. “I saw Jesus out in the fields up north, and in the alleys of the fallen. Nobody else did. And you know why? Because Jesus was laughing at me, he was showing me that he was not going to be mine. He was going to belong to every fool who walked this earth.”
Joe Fowler nudged the screen door open and stepped inside. “He’s right, Alice. We ain’t had Jesus or God for all this time, only those…things.” He shivered a little, as if remembering a nightmare. In a softer voice, he said, “I’m getting tired of this life.”
“I would advise you to get out of the light, Joe,” Alice Shadiak said, sounding like the retired schoolteacher that she was. “I heard about your little Nadine.”
All of them were silent for a moment, and Roy thought for a second he heard the cry of some hawk as it located its prey.
“Your boy knows what he’s doing,” Joe said, spreading his hands as if he could convince her with gestures. Still, he glanced briefly up at the empty sky. “We can’t keep on like this.” Then Joe grinned, but Roy could tell he was tense. “I’m prouder of you now, King, than I was when you won all those ribbons at the championship. Why don’t we get on with this business?”
“Yes,” Roy said, feeling an ache in his heart for Susie and the kids, but not wanting to retrace his steps. He glanced out on the porch, and beyond, to Joe’s truck. “That’s a sturdy piece of wood, Joe.”
“From the old Tuskegee route, before tracks got tore up. We’re going to have to balance them good. That’s why I brought Jasper here.” He nodded toward his assistant, who stood, mutely, on the porch. “We can get this going now, you like.”
“Why wait?” Roy shrugged.
His mother retreated into the shadowy parlor. She called to him, but Roy did not respond.
Jasper suddenly pointed to the sky and made a rasping sound in his throat.
Calmly, Joe Fowler said, “Come on in, Jasp, come on, it’s okay, you’ll make it.”
As if too frightened to move, Jasper stood there, sweat shining on his face. He stared up at the sky, pointing and shaking.
“Jasper.” Joe opened the screen porch slightly, beckoning with his hand.
Roy shoved Joe out of the way and ran out to the porch. He grabbed the young man by his waist.
The cry grew louder as the great bird in the sky dropped, blackening out the sun for a moment.
5
The smell was the worst thing, because they got it on their talons sometimes, from an earlier victim, that sweet awful stink that overrode all other senses.
Roy hadn’t slept a night without remembering that smell. He couldn’t get it out of his head for the rest of the afternoon.
“Where do they take them?” Roy asked.
Joe, who was still jittery, helped himself to the vodka. “Down to the shore. There’s at least a hundred out there. And the rotting seaweed, too, and the flies, all the crawling things … it turned my stomach when I had to go down there to try and find Nadine.”
“That’s where it has to be.”
“No, King. No. I won’t go down there, no matter if it’s midnight or midday.”
“But how can you abandon her?”
Joe turned his face toward his glass. “She ain’t her. I saw her. I risked my sanity, and I saw her. It ain’t her. It’s a It, not a little girl. I told her not to go out between two and four. All of us know about the curfew. All of us know to stay inside. And you ,,,” Joe shook his head. He raised his glass as if to toast Roy. “You’re the luckiest son of a bitch alive, you can get out, and instead, you decide to come back. You fucked up once, King, you don’t need to keep on doing it.”
“How many are left?”
“First, have a drink.” Joe pushed the glass across the kitchen table.
Roy picked it up. Downed the remainder. Set the glass down. “How many?”
“Twenty-six, in one piece. The rest in as many as they leave us in. Some morning, you take a walk down there. Only, if any of them calls your name, you just run, you hear? You don’t want to know who it is, believe you me.”
Roy reached across the table and pressed his hand against Joe’s shoulder. “That’s where we need to do it.”
“I ain’t never going
down there again.”
“You’d rather all this continued?”
“Than go down there? You’re damned right.”
“I’ll find someone else, then.”
Joe stood up, pushing his chair back. He said nothing. He stomped out of the kitchen and went to sit with Jasper and Alice.
Roy drank some more vodka. He glanced out the bay window. On the roof, two houses over, three of them had a woman pressed against the curved Spanish tile. Their wings had folded against their bodies, and they were digging with their talons into the soft flesh of her stomach.
He was sure that one of them saw him spying, and grinned.
6
That night, he found the teenager working at Jack Thompson’s garage on the south corner of Hattatonquee Plaza.
“Billy?” Roy asked as he stood beneath a streetlamp.
The boy dropped the wrench he was using and bounded out to the sidewalk. “Hey, it’s the King. How you doin’?” He snapped his fingers several times, as if he was nervous.
“I’m doing just fine. And yourself?”
“Hey, any day you get through the afternoon here’s a good day. So I heard you’re going to try something.”
Roy nodded.
“Let’s go for a walk, Billy. Can you get off work?”
“Sure, let me just tell Mr. Thompson, okay?” Several minutes later, they were walking down along Hispaniola Street toward Upper Street. Roy had been doing all the talking, ending with, “And that’s where you come in. Joe’ll give me the ties, but I need someone to help.”
“I don’t know,” Billy said. “You ever see how big those suckers are?”
“Yep. But we won’t be out that late. We can do this at nine or ten in the morning. Hell, if you want, we can probably do it tonight.”
“I heard the beach is really a bad scene. My dad got taken down there. I heard this guy at school say that they’re like cracked eggs or they’re all ripped up, only not quite dead yet. If I think about it too much, I get sick.”
“It must be strange.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, you grew up in it. You never knew what the world was like before. You don’t know what the rest of the world is like.”
Billy stopped walking. “I thought it happened everywhere.”
Roy shook his head. “Only here. Because of what I did.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Other places, you can walk around anytime of the day or night and those things don’t attack. Honest. When I was the King here, I used to skip classes at two and take off with my friends to Edgewater to the McDonald’s. Didn’t anyone tell you? Not even your dad?”
Billy shook his head. “Well, if God did this, why didn’t he do it just to you?”
Roy shrugged. “Who knows? It may not even have been God. Maybe there’s just those creatures. The way I figured it, it’s not just because of me killing those boys. It’s because everybody here thought it was okay, no big deal. Nobody made a fuss.”
“You loved your brother?”
“I did, but I didn’t know it then. I wanted him and his friend to go to hell back then. I was the King back then. I thought I was God, I guess.”
They came to the end of the Upper Street, which stopped at the slight dune overlooking the stretch of flat beach.
The full moon shone across the glassy sea. The sand itself glowed an unearthly green from the diatoms that had burst from the waves.
On the sand, the shadow of slow, pained movement as a hundred or more mangled, half-eaten Sunlanders struggled to die in a corner of the earth where there was no death.
7
Billy said, “I saw one of them up close. When they got my dad. She had long hair, and her eyes were silver. She had the fur, and the claws and all, and her wings, like a pterodactyl. But there was something in her face that was almost human. Even when she tore my dad’s throat open, she looked kind of like a girl. Boy,” he shivered, “I’m sure glad I’m up here and not down there. Down there looks like hell.”
Roy said, “From down there, up here looks like hell, too. And it won’t just end by itself.”
Billy seemed to understand. “You swear you’re not lying about what everywhere else is like?”
“I swear.”
“Okay. Let’s go down there. But in the morning. After the sun’s up. I still can’t believe it,” Billy cocked his head to the side, looking from the moon to the sand to the sea to Roy. “I’m standing here with the King.”
“Is that enough for you?”
“I guess. I got laid once, and that was enough. Standing here with you, that’s enough.” Billy pointed out someone, perhaps a woman, trying to stand up by pushing herself against a mass of writhing bodies, but she fell each time she made the attempt. “When I was little, we used to come down here and throw stones at some of them. But it’s kind of sad, ain’t it? Some of the guys I used to throw stones with, they’re down there now. Someday, I’m going to be down there too, and if there are any girls left, they’ll have babies, and they’ll start throwing stones at me too. Where does it end?”
“Now,” Roy said. “In the morning. You and me and a couple of railroad ties.”
“There’s going to be lots of pain, though, huh?”
“There’s always pain. You either get it over with quick, or it takes a lifetime.”
Billy rubbed his hands over his eyes. “I’m not crying or nothing.”
“I know.”
“I just want to get my head straight for this. I mean, we’re both going to hurt, huh?”
“You don’t have to. I do. I can find someone else to help.”
“No. We’ll do it. Then I’ll be a legend too, huh? Maybe that’s enough. We just drag those ties down there and set it up. One way or another, we all end up on that beach anyway, huh?”
8
It was easier said than done, for they had to borrow Joe’s truck to get the railroad ties to the beach, which was the easy part.
Lugging those enormous sticks across the burning sand, sliding them across the bodies, the faces…
It made a mile on a Thursday morning at nine a.m. seem like forty or more.
By the time they’d arrived at a clearing, Billy was too exhausted to speak. When he finally did, he pointed back at Sunland.
“Look.”
Roy, whose body was soaked, his suit sticking to his skin, glanced up.
There, on the edge of Upper Street and Beach Boulevard was the entire town, lined up as if to watch some elegant ocean liner pass by.
The chanting began later.
At first the words were indistinct.
Gradually, the boy and the man could hear them clearly: two murders, two atonements.
“Roy?” Billy asked.
“Yes?”
“I’m scared. I’m really scared.”
“It’s okay. I’m here. I’ll go first.”
“No. I want to go first. I want you to do me first. I might run if I go last. I can’t do it right if I go last—I mean, I’ll fuck it up somehow.”
“All right.” Roy went over and put his arm across Billy’s shoulder. “Don’t be afraid, son. When this is over, it’ll all change again. Atonement works like that.”
“I wasn’t even born when you did it. Why shouldn’t one of them do it with you? Why me?”
“Now, Billy, don’t be afraid. If they could’ve done it before, they would’ve. I think Jesus brought you and me together for this.”
“I don’t even know Jesus.”
“You will. Come on,” Roy lifted up one of the smaller spikes and placed its end against Billy’s wrist “This one’ll fit. See? It’s not so bad. It’s just a nail. And all a nail can do is set something in place. It’s so you won’t fall. You don’t want to fall, do you?”
“Tell me again how you’ll do it?”
“Oh, well, I set this rope up around my hand so I can keep it up like this… and then I press the pointed part of the nail against my hand and pull o
n the rope. My hand goes back in place, see? Like this, only I have to push a little, too.”
“You won’t leave me, will you?”
“No, I won’t. I’m the King and you’re the Prince, remember? I won’t abandon you. Now, why don’t you just lie down on it like that and your hand, see? It’s going to pinch a little, but just pretend it’s one of those things with the claws. Just pretend you won’t scream, because you know they like it when someone screams. Okay? Billy, don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid…”
Roy spoke soothingly as he drove the spikes through Billy’s wrists.
9
By sometime past noon, they’d both gotten used to the pain of the crosses.
Roy tried to turn his head toward Billy to see how he was holding up, but his neck was too stiff and he could not manage the movement.
“When’s it going to happen?” Billy’s voice seemed weak.
“Soon, I guarantee it. I had a dream from God, Billy. Something inside of me knew what to do.”
Billy began weeping. “Just because of a couple of queers. What kind of God is that?”
“It’s the only God.”
“I don’t believe it,” Billy whimpered. “I don’t believe that God would punish everyone just because of what you did. I don’t believe that God would punish the unborn just because of what you did. It’s all a lie. We just did something stupid, building crosses and crucifying ourselves. Look at that, look up.”
Roy tried to look up, but he couldn’t.
What he could see was the endless sea, and the shimmering sky as the sun crisped the edges of the afternoon.
The smell was growing stronger from the bodies.
“I don’t believe in God!” Billy cried. “Somebody! Get me down! Get me down! He’s crazy! Somebody help me! Somebody get me down! Jesus!”
Halloween Chillers: A Box Set of Three Books of Horror & Suspense Page 46