16

Louis Shears stood there with the golf club in hand, looking at Macy Merchant. She was standing by the porch steps of her house, battered and terrified, her forehead gashed open. She was wearing baggy cargo shorts and an oversized T-shirt that she practically swam in. Both were streaked with dirt.

“Macy,” he said. “Macy…it’s okay, it’s me, Louis.”

But Macy was not buying his line. She looked around, wondering maybe if she could get away from him before that golf club came down. “Please,” she said. “Just go away…”

Louis lowered the golf club. She seemed all right. After his experience with the beaten kid, those cops, and then Lem Karnigan…well, he was a little on edge. He’d been standing there by the door, peering outside, waiting for he did not know what, that awful paranoia brewing inside him. When he saw Macy come running across the street, he knew he had to go to her. She was either crazy or just scared. And he had to prove to himself which it was for his own state of mind.

Thing was, she was looking at him as if maybe he was the crazy one.

“Macy, it’s okay, really it is. I’m not nuts.”

She sighed, but didn’t look convinced. She just kept staring.

Then Louis remembered the blood on him, how he must look. “I had a run in with a…with a crazy man,” he explained. “I haven’t changed my shirt yet.”

She sighed again and lowered herself to the steps. She buried her face in her hands and wept.

“Macy…what happened? Did somebody do something to you?”

Macy looked up at him, her face streaked with tears. Her shirt was torn, her arms and face bruised, crusted blood smeared on her forehead. She nodded, sniffed. “The Hack twins…I babysit them. They were throwing rocks at a car. I told them to stop and they pelted me…”

She told him it all, including what Mr. Chalmers had said. How they were not to kill her on his territory. Louis could just about imagine what was going through her mind. The unreality and disbelief of her own experience. He’d felt that way telling his story to the cops and then to Michelle on the phone.

When she was done, he just shook his head. He knew Mr. Chalmers and you couldn’t hope to meet a nicer guy. The image of him whipping out his business and showing the kids how to piss to mark your territory was not only ridiculous and disturbing, it was actually kind of funny in a mad sort of way. Had anyone told him this yesterday or even this morning, he supposed he would have laughed.

But he wasn’t laughing now.

And certainly not when Macy told him about Mr. Kenning and Libby.

Shit.

“There’s been weird things happening all over town, honey. I don’t know what’s going on.”

“At the school, too. A bunch of kids went nuts and killed a teacher. At least, that’s what I heard.”

It’s building, Louis thought. Whatever’s happening, is building now. It’s not even slowing down.

He wanted to get out of town with Michelle…but he’d had the TV on before and this crazy shit was happening everywhere. Did he dare tell Macy that the whole country was unraveling? No, he couldn’t freak out, not in front of the girl. She did not need that. He was an adult and he had to act like one. Give her some reassurance that the whole world had not just been shoved into the pit. That’s what he had to do.

“What’s going on?” she asked him. “It wasn’t like this this morning.”

“No, it doesn’t make sense. But a lot of people in this town have just went off the deep end.”

“I’ve been hearing sirens all the way home from school.”

“Yeah, I think we’ll be hearing them for awhile. Until this stops.”

Macy just nodded, staring down at her feet.

Louis wanted to say something to her that would make it better, make her not worry or be afraid. He figured that’s what adults were supposed to do with kids, but the problem was he couldn’t think of anything. He had been looking for something that would make himself feel better, too, but he hadn’t been able to find it. Maybe if he had been a parent, he could have. Maybe he’d be well-practiced in the art of clever, consoling bullshit. But he had no kids. Michelle couldn’t have any and he’d just accepted that, as she had. And as a result, he was simply no good at this.

Macy looked up at him. “What if this doesn’t stop?”

“Well, it has to.”

“Why?”

Well, there was a good one. The simple logic of it floored him. “Because…because it has to, that’s why. I mean, the entire town hasn’t gone crazy, just some people. I’m not nuts, though I probably look it, and you aren’t either. I don’t imagine everyone at school was or you wouldn’t be here. Am I right?”

She nodded. “I guess. But what about everywhere else?”

“Let’s just worry about Greenlawn for now.”

Louis went and sat beside her.

He liked Macy. Everyone in the neighborhood liked Macy. Maybe part of it was Jillian, her mother, white trash if he’d ever seen white trash, but mostly it was just because Macy was, well, likeable. She wasn’t a stuck-up, eye-rolling, empty-headed, self-absorbed princess like a lot of girls her age. She was a good kid. She was smart and sincere, mature and very funny when you caught her off guard or she relaxed around you.

Louis just looked at her, smiling.

If he had a girl of his own, he’d want her to be Macy. She was small and thin, blatantly sexual around the mouth and eyes, almost hungry-looking. Although her curves were definitely making themselves known, she had not really blossomed completely yet, but judging from Jillian who pretty much had everything in the right place, when that happened Macy would be fighting off the boys with a sharp stick. Her eyes were huge and liquid brown, shimmering. They lit up her face. Why the boys weren’t after her now, Louis did not know. Maybe you had to be older to appreciate a calm, understated beauty like Macy had or to revel in her almost sensual schoolgirl charm…things she probably didn’t even know she possessed.

He found that he was staring at her and she was watching him do so, a slight blush blooming in her cheeks.

Oh Christ, he thought, did she know what I was thinking?

She turned away and he wondered what had gotten him on that train of thought.

Louis and Michelle had only lived on upper Rush Street for the past four years, but they knew all the local gossip. Macy’s father had died when she was very young and Jillian had just crashed and burned, becoming a drunk that played it pretty free and easy with men of any age, if you could believe all that was said. One thing that was true, though, was that Jillian had never recovered from her husband’s death and had retreated to her eighteenth year where she still was, an adult woman with a child who acted like a wild college girl out sowing her oats for the first time. It was too bad. Macy probably needed her mom to be a mom, but that just wasn’t going to happen. Around the neighborhood they said that Macy had raised herself. That she took care of the house and just about everything else, including her mother.

Louis did not doubt that part of it.

Every summer, Michelle and he threw a neighborhood bash. There was beer and pop, hamburgers and hot dogs. Just a social event where all the neighbors and their kids could spend some time together, get to know each other better. And Jillian always came, of course. Sometimes she just got drunk and sometimes she got really loaded and fell flat on her face. Sometimes she picked fights with the other women, but mostly she just pursued their husbands in ways that were practically indescribable. That first summer when Louis and Michelle had spread the word, Dick Starling, a heavy equipment operator that worked for Indian Central Railroad and lived across the street, had taken Louis aside and over a few beers, laid it all out for him.

“This is a pretty good neighborhood, but we got a few odd ducks here,” Starling said. “I think everyone will show for your party. Old man Onsala won’t. He’s a crazy old Finnlander. You can always tell the Finnlanders by the pile of firewood in their front yards. They like to hang gutted deer in the front yard come season. Onsala don’t like anyone, barely speaks anything but Finnish. Les Maub and his wife’ll come, but not if you invite the Soderbergs. Bonnie Maub and Leslie Soderberg have been fighting about something since 1963 and they still won’t talk to each other. They won’t show. On the other hand, Jillian Merchant will show and that’s not necessarily a good thing. But if there’s booze, she’ll be there. Oh yes, Lou, count on that. She’s not bad looking, you know? Long legs and nice set of jugs on her. You’ll get a look at her and you’ll be thinking what every man in this neighborhood has already thought: that you wouldn’t mind getting into that shit, having a little fun. But you won’t, buddy, you won’t dare because she’s nuts.”

That was Louis’ first introduction to Jillian Merchant.

The party that year came and Jillian came with it. She was actually quite attractive, like Dick Starling said, but her eyes were wild and hungry-looking. The more liquor she poured into herself, the hungrier those eyes became until she was scoping out the men at the party like a dog sizing up red meat, wondering which cut to take a bite out of first. She was wearing a black leather miniskirt which put her long, slender legs on fine display right up to the thigh. She completed the look with a tight tube top that barely contained her cleavage. She kept drinking and making the rounds and anytime she found a lone man, she hopped right on his lap and gave him a free bump and grind, whether his wife was present or not. Louis had managed to keep his distance as she moved around, flirting and running up to the men like a horny feline. But, finally, she cornered him. Right there by the keg of beer she was all over him, asking him to give her a private tour of his bedroom.

Louis couldn’t believe it.

With Michelle there, too.

Jillian was just out of control and liked it that way, apparently. Later, playing cards with the boys at the picnic table, Jillian had zeroed in on him again. She kept hanging around and sticking her tits in his face while the other guys chuckled about it. Louis kept her away from him, but he did not realize the level of her determination until she went right up to Michelle and asked, “You mind if I give your husband a lap dance?”

Michelle claimed later she thought it was a joke, even though she should have known better by that point. “Um…no…yes…no, I don’t care,” Michelle had said.

The stage was set. Jillian jumped right on Louis’ lap, facing him yet, her tits pressed into his chest and her crotch right up against his own, her miniskirt practically pushed up to her hips. She went right at it, moving her ass and legs with almost professional zeal, grinding into him and making him first turn red, then start to sweat. He could feel the heat of what was between her legs just fine. He put a stop to it then and there, figuring he better before something embarrassing popped up in his pants. He pulled Jillian off of him, but she came right back, wrapping her arms around him and one of her long legs, trapping him, encircling him. Finally, all the boys laughing at him, he picked Jillian up to carry her back to her own seat and that was a mistake. For as he threw her over his shoulder, drunk himself, he saw the looks on everyone’s faces. What happened was, with Jillian over his shoulder, everyone saw that she had no underwear on. Her skirt had really hiked up to her hips and there was her fine, round ass on display along with her business.

The women were either laughing or angry; the men laughing, too, or just staring with delight at all Jillian had to offer which was considerable. Most of them had not seen such an offering since their high school days…at least not in such wonderful proportions. Dick Starling, being the smartass he was, snapped a shot of that embarrassing moment with his digital camera: Louis standing there looking surprised, Jillian over his shoulder, one tit popped out of her tube top, legs kicking, ass and privates on full display. He liked to bring that picture out and show it to Louis whenever he came over.

And, of course, Michelle never let him live it down.

But that was, essentially, Louis’ first taste of Macy’s mother and each summer since she put on a similar show at the backyard parties. The sad thing was that Jillian carried on like that right in front of her daughter, had absolutely no qualms about it. Louis was not a parent, but even he knew there were things you did in front of children and those you did not.

Macy sat there with him beside her for five or ten minutes before she spoke again. “But it’s all funny, isn’t it? Funny/scary? I mean, I can see a couple people losing it on the same day…but like this? Aren’t the odds against dozens of people going whacko on the same day, the same afternoon? Or thousands across the country?”

“Yeah, I guess they would be.”

“Insanity—if that’s what this is, Mr. Shears—isn’t catchy. It’s not a disease, a germ, a microbe, whatever. It does not pass from person to person.”

Well, he couldn’t argue with any of that.

It made him think of all those end-of-the-world movies he’d caught on the late show. There was always, ultimately, something to blame. An atomic bomb or a mutant germ or chemical warfare…something that made people change into monsters or crazies. There was always something. He could rule out radiation, he supposed, but the jury was still out on the biological or chemical agents. But if it was something like that, something in the soil or water or air, why hadn’t he been infected? That dying kid surely had it, whatever it was, and Louis had been in pretty goddamn close proximity with him.

Shouldn’t he have been contaminated?

But what if it’s nothing that simple, nothing that quantifiable, Louis. Not a germ or a chemical. Then that would make it even worse, wouldn’t it? The idea that what’s happening here and everywhere will keep happening until the streets are filled with bodies until there’s no bodies left?

Yeah, that was somehow worse.

That there was a force or influence that could change people into savage, brutal things. Yeah, that was terrifying. There would be no safeguard against it. Whatever it was, it was absolutely fucking dangerous. Equally as lethal, as far as the human race was concerned, as thermonuclear weapons or an unstoppable plague. Hadn’t Einstein said something to the effect that if the Third World War were fought with atomic bombs, that the Fourth would be fought with bow and arrow? Yes, civilization would be utterly destroyed. From the rocket age to the stone age in five minutes, as they said. And wasn’t this like that? Something that could take men and women, strip their civilization away, turn them into primal, violent monsters just as bad?

Louis stopped himself there.

No point getting carried away. Not yet. This all might blow over or maybe it already had and there would be nothing left but a lot of questions when it was done. He didn’t believe it was done with. Maybe he couldn’t believe it. All he knew for sure was that whatever was out there doing this, it was terribly dangerous. But for now all he could think of was getting Michelle home and getting Macy safe. That’s what counted.

“Macy,” he finally said. “I don’t know what this is about. But it’s not the end of the world.”

“What if it’s the end of Greenlawn?”

“Then we find another town.”

“What if they’re all like this?”

“Then we build a new one that isn’t.”

Louis was liking his new pragmatic self. He had never been that way before this moment. He had had very little trouble in his life, a minimum of adversity, so like most people, he fell apart when things got rough. But that was no way to be. This would be sorted out and it would be sorted out by people like him one step at a time.

“Is your mom home?”

Macy just shrugged. “They called her from the school, but there was no answer. She’s probably sleeping one off.”

“Why did the school call?” he asked, realizing it was probably none of his damn business.

Macy was studying her tennis shoes again. “Um…well, I suppose I should tell you. You’ll hear about it sooner or later anyway.”

She told him briefly about the Chelsea Paris incident. He nodded as she spoke, but did not seem judgmental.

“And you think that whatever’s getting to these people got to you, too?”

Macy just shrugged. “It had to have, Mr. Shears. God, I wouldn’t do something like that. I don’t even swat flies. I catch them and let them go outside. I don’t like hurting anything or anyone. It’s…it’s just not me.”

Louis didn’t think it was either. But it brought up an interesting idea and that was that maybe it would just go away. This madness. Maybe it was temporary. That gave him some hope, at any rate.

He patted Macy on the wrist. “Let’s go see if your mom’s around.”

As they stood up, a pickup truck passed on the street. It slowed as it came by, a couple tough looking teenage hoods in it. They stared at Louis and Macy and he stared right back. Gave ‘em everything right back in like doses. That wasn’t the way he was, either. He did not indulge in stupid staring contests with other men or play the my-dick-is-bigger-than-yours game. That was strictly for idiots with a total lack of self-esteem and self-worth. Yet, he did it right then. Those kids looked tough, looked mean—Louis was pretty certain they were infected—just out cruising for prey. What bothered him most was how they looked at Macy, like they were sizing her up for their stable.

That pissed Louis off, so he gave them the hard look.

They kept going.

He wondered if the look he gave them was like what Mr. Chalmers had been doing: marking his territory. Maybe they sensed that he was willing to fight for what they thought belonged to him, so they went off in search of easier pickings. They said dogs could smell fear on you and maybe these people could, too. Like the old adage went, if you don’t want to be a victim, then don’t act like one.

“Come on,” Macy said.

They went up to the door and paused there, Macy reaching out and taking hold of his hand. He clenched it, liking the feel of another sane person nearby.

“What if she’s…what if she’s crazy, too?” Macy said.

“Then we’ll deal with it,” Louis told her.

He went to the door and threw it open. The house was silent inside. No TV or radio going, not so much as a toilet running. Just that immense dead silence that in its own way told him that there was no one there, no one alive at any rate.

“Let’s go,” Louis said, pulling her across the threshold with him.

And soon as he crossed and stood inside on the worn shag carpeting, something inside him plummeted very low and he waited for whatever was coming. Because it was coming and it was going to be bad. Real bad…

 

17

There had been a foul wind blowing through Greenlawn all day and it was only a matter of time before it reached the door of Kathleen Soames, settled there in a ghastly miasma of rot. She had been expecting it.

She had felt it inside herself more than once that afternoon, something boiling, something simmering, something making her think things and want to do others.

Alien things, awful things.

Things she was not capable of.

But it had been there, scratching away in her brain, a darkness and a dankness and an awfulness. A shadow that had fallen over the town was trying to fill her head with shades and unthinkable impulses. Sometimes she was sure it was her imagination and at other times she was sure it was not. For sometimes it was as palpable as cold hands ringing her throat or moldy breath in her face, a hot voice whispering in her ear.

She had told Steve about it twice now, but Steve was not interested.

Steve said it was her nerves. That she was just tired. She needed a good rest. Her nerves and the muggy heat of late August were brewing up a storm in her mind. She’d been working too hard again, trying to keep house and do her gardening and taking care of the kids and waiting hand and foot on Mother Soames upstairs. Christ, that crazy old woman was enough in herself to wear you to the bone. What she needed was a drink and nap. He’d take care of supper. When Ryan got home from his paper route, the two of them would make a nice supper while she slept.

And it was nice, really nice of Steve to offer.

During the whole of that long, listless, and somewhat upsetting day, it was the first thing that had made her smile. Maybe Steve was right. She’d been nervous all day…stomach upset, rolling in waves more often than not; hands shaking; face sweating. She kept screwing up the most simple tasks. Dropping things, knocking things off shelves. She’d tripped on the stairs twice that afternoon when she went up to look in on Mother Soames. She’d cut her fingers with a knife making the old lady’s lunch and bumped her head on the same cupboard door three times. Nothing was right. The town, the neighborhood, the house, and, yes, even Kathleen herself. Off kilter. Askew. Something.

Like a door, she was either open too wide or not wide enough.

And when she tried to sort it out, to make sense of it, all she got was confused. She’d tried to settle in with her soaps that afternoon while Ryan was still in school and Mother Soames was napping, but she couldn’t seem to concentrate. Couldn’t sit still. The TV was too loud or too soft and the pictures were too bright, too hard on her eyes. She looked, but none of it made sense. The storylines were as incomprehensible as hieroglyphics.

It was a hot day, but not so hot that even in the cool of the living room she should have sweated, felt dizzy, felt the need to vomit, been on her knees before the toilet some four times in one hour. Not that anything came of it: just wracking dry heaves that left her breathless and frightened, her head spinning and her temples pounding, her throat tight as braided rope and feeling as if it was coated in a fine, scratchy fuzz.

Kathleen had even taken Steve’s advice and stretched out in bed.

But all she did was toss and turn. There was no position that was comfortable. Her pillow felt warm and damp like some breathing, dormant thing that was waiting to wake. And the one time she’d almost drifted off, she thought she’d heard a voice from inside that pillow say, “Now, Kathleen. Do it now.” She’d come out of that sitting up, not remembering doing so. Sitting up with her knees drawn up to her breasts, her arms wrapped around her legs, sweat dripping from her brow, making her eyes sting.

No, she would not sleep.

Despite Steve’s protests she went right back to it, organizing cupboards already fastidiously organized; cleaning out drawers; wiping down shelves; sweeping and dusting and mopping because she dared not sit still, afraid that voice would speak to her again or she’d start thinking bad things. She had to keep busy, she had to keep moving, she had to beat it out of herself, wrench it from her mind and the only way to do that was with hard work. Thing was, she had become some mindless automaton, just repeating the same tasks over and over again until Steve had demanded to know what the hell was going on.

He’d come back from the garage that day complaining about the heat and the three rings jobs he’d had to perform and goddamn automatic transmissions and vacuum lines and his boss who was just pissing him off, pissing him off so much, he’d admitted, that he’d almost picked up a torque wrench and knocked his brains out.

Steve was calm and easy by nature, but not this day.

He was wired and irritable and he drank his beer and tried to watch CNN and all the time, Kathleen couldn’t stop cleaning. She vacuumed right past him, picked lint from under the couch cushions and straightened pictures and washed walls and emptied plastic fruit from the same bowl five times and polished the bowl, chased every speck of dust from every vinyl grape leaf and plum stem. Steve drank and smoked his cigarettes and every time he flicked his ash in the ashtray, she was right there, emptying it and wiping it clean. Finally as she reached over to do it again, he grabbed her arm like he wanted to break it.

“Listen to me, Kathy,” he said, sweat beaded on his upper lip. “If you don’t sit down and fucking relax, I’m going to tie you to a goddamn chair. You’re getting under my skin, you hear me? Knock it off.”

“I…can’t seem to stop,” she admitted. “I feel so wound up. Like I’m one of those toys with a key you turn, you know? Just wound tight.”

Steve pulled off his cigarette. “Okay, sure. Now I’m pulling the key out and throwing it away. So stop it, all right? I’m not up to this. You don’t stop and God help me, but I’ll…I’ll…just stop it. Please, just stop it.”

“I’ll go check on Mom.”

“Piss on her,” Steve said. “Goddamn parasite sucking the life out of us, that’s what she is.”

“Steve…Steve, she’s your mother.”

But he didn’t seem to care.

All he cared about was CNN and the bad news everywhere: murders and beatings, fires and mob violence. Crazy things. Awful things. But he could not stop watching it all; he was transfixed.

There were things going on in his head, Kathleen knew, just as there were things going on in hers. He could pretend as she pretended, but they were there. Things that did not belong and had no reason for being, malefic shadows reaching out and enveloping, making them into people they were not, demanding that they be everything but what they were.

After that little exchange, Kathleen tried working outside, but, dear God, that sun was hot. It burned the skin from her muscles and bleached her eyes white and evaporated the blood from her veins. And she sweated, God, how she sweated, but not the good sweat of hard work but an acidic-smelling poison that was gray and pungent like the run-off from a sewer. That sun…that burning sun.

She prayed for darkness.

Finally, her head aching and her teeth chattering, she went inside and splashed water in her face, but that stink was still on her. She took a shower, trying to get that smell off with body wash and Camay and Steve’s Irish Spring, but the more she scrubbed and deodorized, the more that stink came off her in hot, rancid waves.

God, what was that smell?

She stood under the cool spray, gagging on the stench that reminded her of hospital waste and the juice dripping from infected abscesses. Her skin was rubbed pink, rubbed red, just raw and hurting and she kept thinking that it was inside her, that whatever it was, she had to cut it out, she had to slice it free like a tumor before it spread.

And then there she was, standing in the shower with her razor, slicing the blade down her arms and over her wrists and the blood ran and flowed and the smell of it…Christ, the black and putrescent smell of what was inside her.

With a cry, she tossed aside the razor and stepped out of the shower, seeing herself in the mirror, naked and wet and smeared with blood. But her mind was beyond shock by that point. She had to get back to work. She had to get outside and get some fresh air before her head flew apart.

So she did that.

And on her way to the stairs, she paused by the door to Mother Soames room, standing there and listening to the old woman breathe and thinking what it would be like to stop that breathing. For she hated the sound of it. Some nights she lay awake listening to it, that ragged and wheezing respiration. It came through the walls and got in her head and she waited, waited for the breathing to stop in the dead of night as they said it often did with old people. Yes, she waited, tensing, wanting it to stop. She hated herself for it, but deep down she wanted that old bitch to die in her sleep. That breathing, that perpetual hollow breathing, it was like…yes, it was like that story she’d read in school by Poe where that heart would not stop beating even after the old man was dead.

Kathleen actually reached for the tarnished brass doorknob of Mother Soames’ room…but she stopped herself. Made herself stop, even though that same whispering voice said, “Do it, Kathleen. Do it now.”

She yanked her hand away, eyes filled with tears, knowing that if she opened that door there would be no going back. For when that door was opened, something, whatever was whispering to her, it would take her, it would possess her and she would like it, she would surrender herself completely to the sweet violation of that other. She would smell the hot, sour perspiration of the old woman, the urine-smell, the age-smell, the medicine-smell, and it would sicken her. Then she would hear that rasping breathing and she would really have no choice but to squeeze the life out of that old, repellent slug.

Squeeze until the breathing stopped and those blanched eyes rolled shut and the foul juice ran from her mouth and ears.

Placing hands to her ears, Kathleen ran downstairs, unaware that she was naked or why such a thing would matter. She grabbed up rugs as she went, two and three and four, wrestling them out the door and standing on the porch, naked and bleeding and mad, beating dust out of them that had already been beaten out five or six times.

She stopped and sniffed herself.

She smelled like Camay and body wash. The fresh, clean scent of it made nausea roll in her belly. That was the problem. Chemicals. All those chemicals and preservatives, dyes and fragrances and artificial things they put in everything these days. It was all making her rot from the inside out.

She wanted that other smell back, the dark poison smell of what was inside her.

There was a garbage bag on the porch. Steve hadn’t brought it out to the cans yet.

She could smell the trash in it boiling, stewing.

It made her mouth water.

That’s what you need, Kathy. You need rotten and foul things, dirty things.

Yes, that was it. Going down on her hands and knees, she tore open the bag and scattered trash everywhere. Panting, drooling, sweating profusely…she grabbed up egg shells and banana peels, tuna tins and used tampons, stinking hamburger cartons with raw, graying meat still clinging to them, anything that stank or had gone over, and began rubbing it all over her skin. She scented herself between the legs with banana peels, loving the greasy sensation. She rubbed old meat and smelling juice over her breasts until her nipples stood erect. She greased her hair with fish oil and rubbed tampons under her arms and down her legs.

She was so excited by it all, feeling so free and so vital, that she slid a filthy finger into herself and brought herself to orgasm right there on the porch. Her body blazed with heat and her fingers vented it, let it all come flowing out.

Some kid was watching her.

Some teenage boy from down the street, watching her with his mouth hanging open. Kathleen knew he was there. She liked him watching. She wanted him to sense her heat, to recognize her scent by sniffing all her parts. She gasped and cried out and then it was over.

The silly boy looked terrified.

On her hands and knees, Kathy pulled her lips back from her teeth and hissed at him.

He ran.

Little worthless shit! He should have taken the bait! He should have come up on the porch and rutted with her! Then she would have had him! Then she would have sank her teeth in his throat and tasted what came splashing out, filling herself.

Kathy leaped down into the yard and crawled through the flowerbeds, tearing out azaleas and mums in handfuls. She ripped out hollyhocks and zinnias, decapitated bluebells and buttercups with her teeth. She flattened them all, rolling through the sweet, gagging, flowery wreckage she had created.

But it wasn’t enough.

She yanked flowers out by their roots until she reached the cool, moist black soil beneath and then she rubbed it on herself, digging through it, swimming in it, loving the earthy dank smell of dirt.

A worm had been disturbed and she snatched it up, threw it in her mouth and chewed it to a pulp.

She was feeling better than she had felt in weeks now.

If only that damn sun would go down.

Because when it did, when it did…the night would be like no night this miserable, stagnant, shit-grubbing town had ever seen before.

And Kathy knew it.

“What the hell are you doing?”

It was Steve. Silly man, he’d missed her show on the porch, but now he saw her…dirty and bloody and stinking. He looked afraid. He looked confused. Kathleen ran up the porch steps on all fours and dove through the screen door. Steve fell over and she jumped on him, rubbed herself all over him as he fought against her…hitting her, scratching her, bringing delicious waves of pain. But then she had his head and she banged it off the floor until he went limp beneath her.

Panting and sexually aroused, Kathleen took his hand in her mouth, licking it and swooning with the taste of man-sweat. She bit down as hard as she could on his fingers until the flesh crushed and the bones snapped beneath. She worried and chewed until she got some good meat free to eat.

Then dragged him into the kitchen.

She used the carving knife.

She slit his throat, slashed open the carotid until hot, dark blood splashed over her breasts. She cut his clothes off, chewed at his throat and belly, leaving bloody punctures all the way down until she found what she was looking for between his legs.

God, how good it tasted in her mouth.

How delightful it felt smashing to a pulp between her teeth.

Sometime later, Kathleen took his blood and painted the walls in loops and whorls and scraggly hex signs she remembered from a book long ago. When she was done the kitchen was hers. It smelled of raw meat and blood. This was her place, her warren and she had to keep others out.

Squatting by the kitchen door, she pissed to mark her territory…

 

18

When the door to her office opened, Michelle Shears almost came right out of her skin. She didn’t know what she was expecting, but it was only Carol, her boss. Usually she knocked, but today she burst right in. Stood there with a glassy look in her eyes.

“Have you heard?” she said.

Michelle felt butterflies winging in her belly. “What now?”

“It’s all over the radio.”

“I…no. I’ve just been trying to finish up some things. I want to get out of here.”

Carol just stared with those dead eyes. “It’s everywhere now.”

“What is?”

“What’s happening in this town. It’s happening everywhere. There’s rioting in LA. People are setting fires in Chicago. There’s been some kind of mass suicide in New York. Things are going crazy.”

Michelle tried to swallow but couldn’t.

Mass insanity…all over the country? Right away, like everyone else, she started looking for reasons, connections. She started thinking about terrorists letting lose some bioweapon, some kind of germ. She saw a show once where they said that if such a germ were let loose in a major airport, commuters would spread it from one end of the country to the other in a matter of hours.

Was that it?

No, it didn’t make sense. She could see it hitting Chicago and New York and LA, all the major arteries of the airlines. But Greenlawn? Unless someone just happen to have been infected on a flight and come back here, spread it around real fast…no, it didn’t make sense.

“What the hell’s going on, Carol?”

“I don’t know. But it’s all over the place. They said on the news some guy in Fort Wayne murdered a family with an axe. They were his next door neighbors for godsake.”

Michelle felt something beginning to fragment inside her.

She’d been entertaining some fantasy all afternoon of getting home and getting out of town with Louis until the madness blew over. But if it was everywhere…where could you run to?

“The governor of Texas has declared a state of emergency, Michelle. It’s all over CNN. People are killing each other. Like animals.”

“Good God.”

Carol just stood there a moment, hugging herself. Then she looked over at Michelle with dark, simmering eyes. “Animals,” she said. “Animals. I wonder what that’s like…”

She left the room.

Michelle looked out her window.

She saw the sunny streets of Greenlawn. Everything looked perfectly fine. In the distance, there was the whine of an ambulance. All over the country. Good God. All over the country. But she knew she couldn’t worry about that. Not now. She had to worry about this place.

About Greenlawn.

Suddenly, she could see nothing else, know nothing else. Tunnel vision. One place. Her town. Her territory. Everything else faded as something important and vital inside her went with a warm, wet snapping noise. There was purity then. There was joy. She could smell her own skin and taste the salt on her lips and feel the heat between her legs.

She rummaged through her desk drawers.

Found something she could use.

A letter opener with a six-inch blade…

 

19

Dick Starling stood watch over his wife’s corpse.

This was the love of his life, his happiness, his heart, his everything. That’s why he had to kill Megan because she just hadn’t understood. When it had come over him as it was now coming over everyone, she had fought against it. And even though he could no longer really remember what he had been like before, he knew that this was better and Megan was an alien entity, a disease germ in the midst of a healthy body. So he had taken his axe and split her head open.

That had been several hours ago and now he had her strung up in the kitchen by the feet, had dressed her out as he dressed out his deer in November. He’d taken her head off and gutted her, placing her organs and entrails in neat piles in the sink on the drain board.

There was blood all over the floor.

There was blood all over him.

He sat in a sticky, drying pool of it, the blood-stench up his nose and down his throat, permeating every pore and every cell and the joyous, pleasing smell of it made him swoon, made him hard, connected him to the simple rhythms of life in a way he had never known before. He sat there, studying the blade of his axe. It was stained with blood. There with clots of hair and bits of tissue stuck to it.

Cocking his head, he listened.

For intruders.

They had already tried to take his kill once. A woman and two ratty-looking girls with kitchen knives. Some near-submerged, misty portion of his brain told him that they were once Maddie Sinclair and her two daughters, Kylie and Elissa. But that meant nothing to him. They were scavengers, predators. He had chased them off. He had wanted the woman. He wanted to fuck her on the bloody floor, maybe the girls, too. But they had run off.

He wondered where his own daughters were.

He studied the walls of the kitchen. They were splattered with blood and decorated with bloody handprints. When Dick had been dressing Megan out, he had been amazed at his bloody hands so he pressed them against the walls and made prints. He liked the way it looked so he kept dipping his hands into his wife’s torso and painting the walls with red handprints. Those who came here would know this was his lair. That he would defend it.

He heard voices in the distance.

Crawling across the floor with his axe, he pulled himself up by the sink. The smell of organ-meats and intestines made his mouth water, his belly growl. He peered out the window. He saw a man out there, across the street. A man and a girl. It took him a moment, but then he remembered that the man was Louis Shears and the girl was Macy Merchant.

Dick wondered if Louis would give him the girl.

Maybe he would trade her for meat.

Dick slid down to the floor and studied his handprints on the wall and contemplated his wonderful new world. He would need to go out soon. Go out and hunt. But first there were other considerations.

He needed to eat.

Breaking apart several kitchen chairs, he built a fire on the kitchen floor.

Soon, the smell of roasting meat filled the room…

 

20

Louis stood there with Macy by his side, listening to the empty house.

They called out a few times and listened to their voices echo and die out. Louis had been in a lot of houses and it was funny how something as subtle and abstract as an echo could tell you things. Maybe it had something to do with sound waves and maybe it had something to do with some buried sixth sense we all carry within us. Regardless, he could tell that the Merchant house was empty…though that wasn’t exactly the word that was bouncing around in his head at that moment: unoccupied. As in, Louis, this house isn’t so much empty as unoccupied, if you can dig the subtle nuances of that.

He stood there, swallowing down a sour taste in his mouth. “Maybe she stepped out or something,” he suggested and wondered why he did not believe that anymore than Macy seemed to.

“No,” she said. “She’s always home now. She has a job, Mr. Shears, but she doesn’t go on until eight tonight.”

Louis was almost afraid to ask what that job was. The way Macy said it, not going on until eight, made it sound like Jillian had found a job stripping on stage. Thing was, his mind drew a blank when he tried to make small talk, so he just asked. “Oh yeah? Where’s your mom working these days?”

“She’s a cocktail waitress over at the Hair of the Dog,” Macy told him. “Do you know the Hair of the Dog, Mr. Shears?”

The way she said it, Louis just bet that she knew all about the Hair, as it was called locally. The Hair of the Dog was a sleezy bump-and-grind joint out on the highway that catered mostly to truckers and bikers and tough working class types from the mills and factories. Nice place. Louis had only been in there once with a couple guys for a bachelor party and they’d left pretty quick. They were worried the women there might kick their asses, let alone the men. As he recalled, the waitresses were all topless.

“Sure, nice place,” he lied.

Macy grunted. “You’re either a bad liar or you don’t get out much, Mr. Shears,” she told him. “No offense, but there’s nothing nice about a place like that.”

“I’m sorry, Macy.”

She shrugged. “Why? I gave up trying to babysit my mom years ago.”

There were things Louis could have said, but it was absolutely none of his business so he kept his mouth shut. Poor Macy. Such a good, sweet kid. She deserved better than Jillian. That was for sure.

They made a quick search of the main floor and Jillian was nowhere to be found. There were a couple overflowing ashtrays and empty beer cans on the kitchen counter, a sink filled with dirty dishes, the remains of a frozen pizza on the table with a couple flies mating on it, but that was about it. In the living room there was a basket of washing that had spilled over onto the floor, scattered magazines and newspapers with rings on them like they’d been used for coasters.

But no Jillian.

“This place is a dump, isn’t it?” Macy said, obviously embarrassed.

“No…I wouldn’t say that.”

“It is, too, Mr. Shears. Quit being nice about things. It’s not necessary. I know what everyone thinks about us. It’s no big deal. My mom is a lazy, drunken slob and a…a…well, I know what people say.”

“Who cares what they say?” Louis told her. “It’s nobody’s goddamn business but your own.”

“Thanks, Mr. Shears,” Macy said. “That was nice.”

“Quit calling me Mr. Shears. You make me feel like I should be walking with a cane. Call me Louis or I’ll start calling you Miss Merchant.”

Macy reddened. “Oh God, not that! Mr. Hamm at school calls me Little Miss Merchant all the time. It’s embarrassing, you know?”

Louis just smiled. “Hamm is still there?”

“Yes, and just as weird as ever.”

Mr. Hamm…dear God. Mr. Hamm had been there when Louis was in high school and he’d graduated twenty years before. Mr. Hamm was this large, very obese man who stood around in the hallways drumming his fingers on his impressive belly. Back then, Mr. Hamm had been partial to medieval forms of punishment if you acted up in his class. He’d make you stretch out your arms and balance a stack of textbooks in each hand until you thought you were going to drop or stand on one foot with your nose touching the blackboard. It was never anything violent like a ruler across your knucklesthat was Mr. Hengishbut it was just as painful after you were doing it for fifteen or twenty minutes.

Macy went and checked out the downstairs bedroom and bathroom while Louis took a turn through the dining room. Nothing, nothing.

“You know,” Macy said when she came back, “I feel really stupid. You don’t have to stay here, you can go home. I can handle this. I’ll just lock myself in.”

But Louis shook his head. “No, let’s stay together.”

“I was hoping you’d say that…Louis.” Macy looked around. “I have to clean this place up. What a dump. Well, I suppose we should look in the basement in case she fell down or something.”

Louis got a funny feeling when she said that. For reasons he did not understand properly and never would, he said, “I’ll check the basement. You go check upstairs. If she’s anywhere, she’s probably up there. I don’t think Jillian would like me just bursting into her bedroom.”

“Oh no, she’d hate that,” Macy said with all due sarcasm.

He watched her pad up the stairs and he went down the hallway to the cellar door. He opened it and started down the steps. He was worried about more than Jillian; Michelle should have been home by now. He’d looked out the upstairs windows twice and her car was not in the driveway. He pulled his cellphone out and dialed next door. No answer. Nothing but the answering machine kicking in. He called Michelle’s cell, but there was no answer there either. He wasn’t liking any of that a bit.

“Jillian?” he called out. “Are you around?”

He hadn’t been down the Merchant’s basement since the summer before. The pilot light had gone out on Jillian’s water heater and she had been waiting for him to get home from work, sitting out on the porch. He got it lit, all right, Jillian hanging over him the whole time, her tits bursting out of a halter top. He barely got out of there with his virtue intact. Jillian had cornered him at the dryer, on the stairs. He thought she was going to have her way with him on the washer. When he got home, of course, Michelle was waiting for him. He told her Jillian’s pilot light had gone out and Michelle had said, Oh, I’ll just bet. Did you get it lit for her, dear? Get everything burning high and hot again? You’re such a good little neighbor.

She had hounded him for weeks about that.

Louis went into the utility room where the washer and dryer, furnace and hot water heater were. No Jillian. There was a junk room and a furnished bar room, but she wasn’t there either. He called out for her a few times and just stood there, feeling…well, he wasn’t sure what he was feeling. Only that he did not like it. He did not like it at all. He was feeling what he’d felt when he’d first walked into the house, that something bad was building around him. Standing there, his guts twisting up, he felt like a kid standing in a deserted house on a dare. Waiting for the boogeys to come sliding out of the walls. It was like that. He did not know what to expect, but it was there, all around him, gathering strength and thickening in the air like poison.

“Jillian?” he said, his voice sounding very dry and very old.

There was one last room to check, a spare bedroom at the back.

It was where he had to go and exactly where he did not want to go. But he had to. Just go in there and get it done, get back upstairs to Macy, because honestly, he just did not like the idea of leaving the girl alone. Not with how things were. He walked over past the bar and to the doorway leading to the bedroom. There was no door, just a set of old plastic hippie beads hanging down. The kind of thing Greg Brady had in his bedroom…or had it been Davy Jones on The Monkees? Louis brushed them aside, smiling, remembering similar beads his sister had strung in her room. Ah, the seventies.

As soon as he got in there, he stopped smiling. It did not seem to be a conscious effort on his part.

“Jillian?” he said.

The bedroom was long and narrow and ran the length of the back of the basement. It wasn’t a bedroom really, but more of storeroom where everything went that didn’t seem to have a place anywhere else. There were cardboard boxes stacked right up to the bare rafters overhead, stray pieces of furniture, racks of clothes with aisles in-between. It was dim in there, no window to the outside. Louis felt blindly along the walls until he found a switch. A single bank of fluorescent lights buzzed on overhead. Only one tube worked, the other dirty and flickering. It cast an uneven, surreal illumination, shadows jumping all around him.

Louis walked down the aisles of clothes that were hung from rods connected to the beams overhead. Lots of the clothes were Jillian’s and Macy’s, old coats and snowsuits and you name it, but much of it was men’s suits and jackets, a couple dusty overcoats. This must have been Macy’s father’s stuff. Jillian had never thrown any of it out, just relegated it to this rummage sale, this morgue of cast-offs.

Everything smelled moldy down there, like mothballs and rotting linen.

Louis moved down the rows of coats and dresses, brushing them with his fingers as he passed. He wasn’t even sure by that point why he was even bothering. All these clothes dangling around him, much of them in motion now from his brushing against them. Wild shadows creeping around.

“Well, I suppose you’re not here, Jillian,” he said.

He pushed on to the end, stepping over cartons of Macy’s baby clothes, boxes of old toys, a stool, his hands parting clothes as he went. Denim and corduroy and twill…and then his fingers touched something cool and rubbery at the same moment that his eyes caught sight of a hulking shape that did not belong. Yes, right there, tucked between a couple coats.

Louis let out a cry and stumbled back, falling right over a carton of toys.

Jillian was here, after all.

She was hanging there amongst the coats. She was naked, her flesh pale, her head cocked to the side from the noose encircling her throat. Her face was livid like a bruise, her eyes open, and her tongue dangling out thickly.

“Oh no,” Louis heard himself. “Oh, Jillian…not this…”

She’d tied clothesline rope around her throatand very tightly by the looks of itand tied off the rope around a roughhewn rafter above. Then she’d jumped off the stool and hanged herself, tucked neatly amongst the other hanging things.

Louis just stared up at her with a horror that was shocking and depthless, his eyes wide, his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He wondered what it had been like, what had gone through her head. He was picturing her almost casually undressing, her mind filled with blackness. Maybe folding her clothes very carefully. Coming down here and tying off that rope, fastening it around her throat, maybe whistling the whole time.

Dear God.

But he would never know what she had done exactly or what she had thought and he was glad for this.

Jillian just hung there, swaying slightly from side to side, turning in a slow and lazy semicircle. What struck Louis the most was not her puffy and purple-blue face, but the fact that she was naked. Even in death, she was somehow sensual and well-proportioned like maybe wasn’t dead at all.

Louis did not look away from her.

For some reason, he did not dare.

The idea of taking his eyes off that hanging corpse was unthinkable. His belly rolling with nausea, his hand feeling oddly cold where he’d brushed hers, he backed away, finally finding his feet and dashing out of there.

“Louis?” Macy called.

Good God, he’d forgotten about her.

Louis stood in the barroom, looking from the dangling hippie beads that were still moving to the steps leading upstairs. He could hear Macy coming down them. He started to sweat, to panic. Okay, buddy boy, are you going to let Macy see her mother like this or are you going to move? There was no real choice in the matter. He went over to the stairs and stopped her before she got down there and got any fool ideas about looking around herself.

“She’s not down here,” he said, a little louder than he’d intended.

“Okay,” Macy said. “Okay.”

Taking her hand, he led her up the stairs and didn’t relax any until the cellar door was shut, hiding its sins in its dark belly. He stood there a moment, just breathing. Macy was staring at him. She looked concerned.

“Louis…you’re not…losing it, are you?”

He almost burst out laughing. “No, no, no.”

“You had me worried,” she said. “You sure you’re all right? You look a little green or something.”

Sure, he was green. Who wouldn’t have been? His stomach kept trying to crawl up the back of his throat like it wanted out, wanted to jump out his mouth and pirouette on the floor. He touched his face and it was cool, clammy, moist with sweat.

“Tell me what’s wrong,” Macy said. “Please.”

Louis thought quick because he had to. “Um…it’s just closed-in spaces. I get kind of claustrophobic sometimes. It’s nothing.”

“Oh, that’s too bad. You were in the back bedroom, weren’t you? It’s creepy in there.”

It’s even worse now.

“Well,” he said, “Jillian’s gone. We’ll just have to wait for her. Maybe we should go to my house. Michelle should be home soon. Then we can figure out what we’re going to do.”

“Okay.”

Macy was easy with it and Louis had to wonder why.

Was it just the paranoia about what was going on in Greenlawn or was it something more? Was she feeling the badness in her own house just as he was? Good God, his mind was all mixed-up and he did not know what to do. Sometimes he stressed so easily. This time, it was understandable. He needed Michelle home. She would know what to do. She always knew what to do. What scared him most was the idea that she would never be coming home. That she was dead somewhere, perhaps swinging from a rafter like Jillian.

But that was just paranoia.

They crossed through the Merchant’s sideyard and climbed up on to Louis’ porch. Michelle’s car was still not in the driveway. Maybe that meant nothing, but he was beginning to think otherwise.

“When will she be home?” Macy asked.

But Louis could only shake his head. “I wish to God I knew…”

 

21

The smell of raw meat was overwhelming.

Mike Hack knew that he and his brother were supposed to find some nice young gee-gee, but the meat…oh God…such a wonderful odor. He had smelled it down the alley and traced it here. To this yard. Nothing had ever smelled this good before. He would have the meat. He must have the meat.

But wait.

Careful.

Remember what Mr. Chalmers said.

This is war.

This is survival.

Those other neighborhoods, they’re gonna try and take what we got, so we got to hit them first. We gotta take what they got. Their women, their food, their weapons.

Yes, caution was advisable. Next to him, sweating and grinding his teeth and breathing hard, Matt could barely contain himself. He wanted the meat, too. Mike put a hand on him, stayed him from diving over the hedges and taking what was offered.

Mike held a finger to his lips.

He saw—

A plate of raw meat slabs sitting on the picnic table. Raw, ready for grilling. He could smell the juice, the fat, the blood pooling on the plate.

The meat was unattended, except for a few flies. No one was around. On all fours, down low, smelling the earth and feeling he was part of it now like a worm tunneling through mulch, he crept forward into the yard. Matt was behind him. Still grinding his teeth. Still breathing hard.

Mike sniffed the air.

He scented the raw meat.

But something else, too, something that made him alert for danger: the scent trail of others. People were near. Hunters like him, perhaps. Yes, he thought they must be. He could smell their passage in the yard as a wolf can smell a game trail: a gamey, vile musk.

It excited him.

Still on his hands and knees, fighting the very simple need to roll in the grass and scent himself, Mike crept forward. Past a kid’s pool. Around a swingset and a row of decorative peony trees. The meat was close now. Just a matter of reaching out for it.

Careful.

With Matt at his back, he sidled up to a little potting shed, lost himself in the cool fragrance of cedars. But the fragrance was not so strong that he did not scent the others and know they were near. Very near. He could smell their sweat, their heat, almost hear the thudding of their hearts and the rush of blood in their veins.

Where were they?

Matt made a moaning sound in his throat and jumped out of the shadowy protection of the cedars. He ran to the picnic table and grabbed a raw meat cutlet, shoving it in his mouth. He chewed and slurped, pink juice running down his chin. He made a squealing sound in his throat that was nearly orgasmic.

But then—

A woman and two naked girls came rushing out of the potting shed where they’d been waiting all along. Mad things with wild hair and grime-streaked faces. Their eyes were huge and staring, lips pulled back from teeth.

And Mike, his brain reeling and misfiring, recognized them.

Or who they had once been.

Kylie…Elissa…those girls are Kylie and Elissa Sinclair. And that’s their mom…Maddie, Maddie Sinclair.

This passed through his mind like a dying echo, but had no true substance and quickly faded.

Matt turned and kicked out at the woman, driving her back. But as he did so, one of the girls took a long-tined meat fork and stabbed him in the side. He let out a yelp of pain and turned to fight and the other girl slashed him across the throat with a knife.

No!

Mike jumped in, diving on the woman, trying to thumb out her eyes and get his teeth to her throat, but she threw him off. Threw him down. Kicked him and kicked him again until he rolled away, panting and stunned and breathless. She left him there and joined the two girls in goring Matt, taking him down, hunters to prey, slashing and cutting and stabbing him until he was a coiled up thing on the ground, raw and red-stained.

Mike crawled off towards the hedges.

One of the girls came after him.

He tripped her up and punched her twice in the face, feeling her lips mash against the teeth below. She went down but not before laying his face open with her nails in four red stripes.

Mike ran off.

He looked back once, knowing his brother was beyond help.

The woman and the girls were poking Matt with their forks and jabbing him with their knives. He was making a hoarse bleating sound, but he was all used up. He barely moved. The woman and the girls were spattered with blood. It stood out in bright, vibrant contrast to their pale faces.

As Mike ran off, he saw the woman hike up her sundress and piss on his brother, scenting him with territorial pheromones.

Marking her kill…

 

22

For the longest time, there were only the sounds of shovels scraping concrete, of things popping and snapping and dripping. The kid was stuck to the concrete and it took some work for them to shovel him free. It was back-breaking labor, all right, messy, dirty, stinking work. But under Warren’s direction, they finally got the kid’s body into the wheelbarrow and by then they were sweating and filthy and not in the best of moods. Then they stood there in sweat-stained and gore-streaked uniforms, not saying anything, just looking at the stain on the sidewalk and the red sprawl of arms and legs spilling over the sides of the wheelbarrow.

“That’s it,” Warren said, studying his pink-stained hands. “That’s it.”

“Now what?” Shaw said to him, his fat face beaded with sweat.

Kojozian smeared blood over his chest.

A crowd had gathered to watch—men, women and even children—and they pressed in close as they dared, not really amused or horrified or suffused with any other emotion you would readily expect. Others had came, sure, but they got out of there right away when they saw what was going on and maybe when they saw how that crowd looked, what was in their eyes and, more importantly, what wasn’t. Their eyes were dead, distant moons that looked and watched, but did not seem to see. Some of the men pulled off cigarettes and a few of the women held babies. Many were naked. Many had painted arcane symbols on their chests. They admired the X on Kojozian’s face. One old lady had brought her knitting. A little boy had a sucker in his mouth that he slurped on.

“Our uniforms are a mess,” Shaw said. “They smell.”

Warren scratched his head, wondering why that mattered. They were cops. They had to keep the uniforms on, especially the shiny badges. People would know them by these things. Symbols of office, of authority.

Kojozian said, “What do we do with this kid? We just gonna wheel him around all day?”

“Why don’t you dig a hole,” one of the crowd said.

“Sure,” said another. “A hole is where something like that belongs.”

“Plant flowers on top so it looks nice,” said the old lady with the knitting.

But Warren explained to them that this was police business, official business, and you just couldn’t go burying a dead kid anywhere you wanted. There were rules and regulations to be followed. Rituals. Yes, rituals that must be observed. They just didn’t understand.

“I say we find out where he lives and bring him over there,” Kojozian suggested.

Warren shrugged. “Yeah, that might be the thing to do. Whoever he belongs to will like that, don’t you think?”

Kojozian grinned. “It’s the least we can do.”

The kid who was working the sucker stepped forward. “That’s Ryan Soames. He delivers our paper. I know where he lives. It’s just a block over.”

“Okay, kid,” Warren said, “lead the way.”

Kojozian pushed the wheelbarrow down the sidewalk, the kid out in front, marching like he was in a parade. Behind them, the crowd plodded along. They were all excited to get to the kid’s house. This was really gonna be something…

 

23

After Ray Hansel and Paul Mackabee of the State Police CSI left Greenlawn High School and Principal Bejamin Shore and the crime scene in general, they drove through the town, trying to get a feel for it. And what amazed them most was that they couldn’t.

The town felt…what?

Hansel wasn’t sure exactly, but almost blank, empty, deserted. The way a ghost town would feel, the sense that it was unoccupied. That you were the only thing in it. And that didn’t make much sense because he saw people out in the streets walking, washing their cars, shopping, women pushing baby strollers and men leaning on the backs of pickup trucks, chatting, as men will do. There was life, there were people, but why could he not feel them? Although it made absolutely no sense on the surface, Greenlawn was like a town peopled by mannequins, dummies. Things that looked like people, pretended to be people, but were not people.

You be careful with that, Hansel told himself, you be real careful. There’s something wrong here and you know it. If all goes to hell as you are suspecting it will, there’s going to be need of a few clear, clean heads that can do some thinking.

“Don’t know about you, Ray,” Mackabee said, “but I’m getting a chill right up my spine.”

“Me, too.”

They listened silently to the squawk coming over the radio and it did not allay their fears much. There were a couple of old houses burning on Water Street on the north side. A couple kids had drowned in the Green. Lots of domestic disturbances. A couple of assaults. A child had gone missing after school. And there had been no less than three reported suicides within the hour. All this in Greenlawn. Whatever this was, it was building, gaining momentum.

Maybe if it had just been here and not the rest of the country they might have felt a little relieved. But it was everywhere and that scared the shit out of both men.

Hansel thought: Nowhere to run. No matter how bad it gets here, there’s nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. No safe harbor. One town will be just as insane as the next.

Jesus.

He drove downtown and pulled up before the police station, a tall and narrow slab of pale brick. He stood there on the sidewalk, sensing things that he did not like.

An old man walked past and his eyes were filled with murder.

A woman walked by holding a little girl’s hand and there was something almost synthetic about the expressions on their faces.

“I’m gonna go grab a cup of coffee across the street,” Mackabee said and from the way he said it, the idea of that disturbed him.

Hansel nodded. “Keep your eyes open. Watch yourself. I’m gonna go see Bobby. See what he has to say.”

Sighing, Hansel went directly upstairs to Bobby Moreland’s office. Moreland was the chief of the city police. He was a fat, funny man who seemed to know just about everyone in town on sight. Some said he would advance soon into politics.

Hansel found him sitting behind his desk, sipping coffee. He was still large, but there was no humor in those eyes and certainly no laughter wanting to come out of that dour mouth.

“Ray” he said.

Hansel sat down. “What’s going on?”

Moreland was staring at the screen of his laptop. “Things are going mad over in England. There’s a group of hundreds that are currently laying waste to central London…they’re murdering, raping, pillaging. Unbelievable. They’re practicing a scorched earth policy, Ray. Burning and destroying everything. They’re even killing the animals in the stockyards. Slaughtering them. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

Hansel shrugged, considered it. “Sure. It’s going on in Washington and New York right now. The army is fighting a house-to-house guerilla war in the Bronx and Brooklyn. Baltimore is burning. So is St. Louis. Cleveland is a war zone. Dallas and New Orleans are so bad that they sent in the Marines. Except, from what I’m hearing, discipline has broken down and scattered bands of Marines are raiding at will. And did I mention that the governor of California ordered an airstrike on East LA?” Hansel just shook his head. “Civilization is crashing, Bobby. But to be honest, I don’t really give a shit about those other places. I’m mostly concerned with this state, this county, and Greenlawn in particular at the moment.”

“Well, we have a little bit of everything, as you well know.” Moreland picked up his Styrofoam coffee cup, realized it was empty and set it back down. “I can’t keep a handle on it all. Between my boys, yours, and the county boys, we got our hands full. I keep hoping this is going to die down…but it’s not dying down, Ray. Can you tell me why that is?”

But Hansel just shook his head. “I don’t know. Something has this town, this country, this whole goddamn world, and it squeezing the guts out of it.”

Moreland looked defeated. “My wife…she’s a little soft on religion and all…she thinks…she thinks it’s the Devil. Devil come down to Earth. Armageddon, the Rapture, all that happy horseshit.”

Hansel did not laugh as he might have a week ago. “Well, Bobby, if it was the Devil, then at least we’d have an enemy to fight. Something to go after. But this…shit, there’s no rhyme nor reason. It’s coming down everywhere and there’s no fucking reason for it.”

“Yeah.”

“Wanna hear something funny?”

“Sure, I could use a laugh.”

“Oh, you won’t laugh, trust me.” Hansel got up and went to the window, peered through the Venetian blinds to the streets below. “I see people out there, going about their business, but I don’t feel ‘em. Does that make sense? They’re there, but it’s like they’re not there at all.”

Moreland just nodded. “Town feels empty, don’t it? Things going on, more things than we can ever handle and a lot more we won’t know about for days and days, yet it’s quiet out there. You know? Just quiet.”

“People you see don’t smile, Bobby. They don’t even talk. They just walk around like they’re lost, like they’re trying to find their bearings.”

“Maybe they are.”

Hansel thought so, too. All of them out there were feeling it. Some had been affected by it, many in very devastating ways. But the majority were just confused, trying to make sense. Trying to understand why reality had been unplugged and they were about to fall headlong down a steep incline. One without a bottom.

“I got units that aren’t reporting in,” Moreland said. “That scares me the worse. But what can I do? Call the governor and say that this town needs psychiatric help? How would that sound?”

“Like you were cracking up,” Hansel told him.

“I am.”

“No, not yet you aren’t.”

Moreland studied his hands for a long time and when he spoke, he did not look up and meet the other man’s eyes. “You want to hear a confession, Ray? One that won’t sound so good at all.”

“Sure.”

“I’m scared,” Moreland admitted. “I’m scared like I’ve never been scared in my life. I’m scared for the world. But more than that, I’m scared for Greenlawn.”

But Hansel understood. For he was scared himself. He licked his dry lips, said, “Sad thing is, by the time this is over, Bobby, I’m afraid there won’t be anything left of civilization. Now how’s that for drama? People going crazy, people acting like animals. Six months from now we might be living the way our ancestors did. A world lit only by fire…”

 

24

When they got over to his house, Louis went upstairs and cleaned up, got a new shirt on. Then he came back down and took a belt of whiskey. It didn’t do him much good, but he figured he was better with it than without.

Michelle still wasn’t home.

She was not answering her cell and Louis was starting to worry. Mainly because when they’d been outside, he could smell smoke like maybe there was a house burning somewhere. Smell smoke and hear more sirens and all that told him that whatever was going on was far from finished. It was still rolling. Maybe gaining momentum.

He picked up his cell and called Farm Bureau Insurance.

The phone rang and rang over there, but nobody picked it up. It was after hours now. Well past closing time. Michelle was not there and neither was anyone else. That meant she was either on her way home or…

Well, he wasn’t going there.

Not yet.

“I wish I knew where my mom was,” Macy said, sitting there on the couch, tense and expectant.

Louis just swallowed. “She’s…she’s probably out shopping or visiting someone.”

“I guess.”

Louis could not look at her.

He walked over to the window by the door and watched the streets, wishing as he’d never wished before to see Michelle’s little Datsun come swinging down the block. But he was disappointed. Not only was Michelle not coming but no one else was either. It was Friday night. People should have been coming and going.

And what is that saying to you, Louis? What exactly do you think that means?

Honestly, he thought it was time for a good panic attack, but that would hardly solve anything. And he had to consider Macy. She was scared and he knew it. Maybe she was sixteen years old, but that was still a kid. He could not go to pieces on her. She needed him and for the first time in his life, Louis had a newfound sense of respect for parents. Because parenting was an awesome responsibility when you actually thought about it. He was worried sick about Michelle, but she was an adult and whatever was happening out there, she was better equipped to handle it than Macy was.

“Listen,” he said. “Do you have any relatives in town? Somewhere your mom might have gone?”

Macy shook her head. “Not really. They all live other places. There’s Aunt Eileen, but she’s way down in Greencastle. She sends a Christmas card every year, but her and mom don’t get along.”

Surprise, surprise. “Anybody else?”

“Um…well, there’s Uncle Clyde. He lives here. Way on the other side of town, but him and mom never talk. I haven’t even seen him in two or three years.”

Louis figured that this Uncle Clyde was family anyway. That was something. Worse came to worse, he could farm Macy off on him. But that was later.

“I got an idea,” Louis said. “Let’s take a ride.”

“A ride?” She brightened a bit.

“Sure. Beats sitting around here staring at each other. Let’s see if we can find Michelle and we’ll keep an eye out for your mom, too.” He shrugged. “Michelle will probably pull in the driveway five minutes after we leave, but at least we’ll be doing something besides twiddling our thumbs.”

“Yeah,” Macy said. “Okay. I just thought of something, though. Mrs. Brackenbury down the street. Sometimes mom goes over there.”

Mrs. Brackenbury was an old lady who lived alone with about twenty cats. She had to be pushing eighty. Her husband had been dead for years. Just her and the cats. Louis had heard about Jillian going over there, not to visit, but to borrow money from the old lady. It was rumored she had quite a pile.

Louis tossed Macy his cell. “Why don’t you give the old gal a ring? I’ll go write Michelle a note.”

Macy pulled back her hair and tightened her pony tail ring, then started punching up Mrs. Brackenbury’s number.

Louis walked into the kitchen, glad to be away from her for a moment.

God, she was a sweet kid, but he felt so responsible for her. He didn’t like that. And mainly because he did not know if he was up to it. Up to watching over anyone in a crisis. He quickly scratched a note to Michelle and hung it on the fridge.

They’d take a drive and at least they’d be able to see what was going on. Something had to be done and quick. He had to tell someone about Jillian’s body over there and then he was going to have to break it to Macy.

But first things first.

He jogged down into the basement and grabbed his tackle box. He took a Schrade lockblade knife out. The blade was six-inches long and razor sharp. He stuck the knife in his pocket. Maybe there would be no trouble out there at all, but you just never knew. If things continued like they had been, Greenlawn was going to be like the deep dark woods come nightfall and you just never knew when the wolves might show when you were on your way to grandmother’s house…

 

25

Across the street, Dick Starling covered himself in mud.

After roasting his wife’s corpse in the kitchen and feeding on it, he went out into the backyard, feeling the sun on him. It warmed him. He stripped off his filthy clothes which were crusty with bloodstains and danced around, arms upraised, soaking in that sun and feeling its wonder.

The sprinkler was going.

Down on his haunches, tensed, ready to spring, he watched it shooting gouts of water into the air. He was fascinated by it. He honestly had no cognitive recall of setting out the sprinkler that morning to water the flowerbeds. In fact, by that point, he really did not know what a sprinkler was. There was some gray area in his brain associated with it, but he shook it away.

He crept over there on all fours.

The water splashed against him. He liked it. He seized the sprinkler head and brought it to his mouth. As the water pulsed into his face, he licked and gulped at the flow until he was sated. Then he tossed it aside. Blades of grass were stuck to his belly and legs. He liked the way they smelled. He went over to the flowerbeds. The bright colors of the blooms were nice. He snatched an azalea, chewed it, spat out it back out, disgusted by the sweet taste. Then he tore all the flowers up and cast them about.

He did not want flowers.

He wanted mud.

With the sun beating on it, the dark earth of the flowerbeds was warm and mucky. He scooped up handfuls, sniffing each one, and smearing it all over his chest and legs and arms and genitalia. Especially his genitalia. It was warm, thick, and comforting like primordial ooze. He greased his wet hair back with it and painted black bands across his face.

He felt safer then; camouflaged, stealthy.

He grabbed up his bloody axe where he’d left it by the back door. It felt good in his hands. A hunter needed a weapon and this one had already been blooded. On his hands and knees, he crept around the side of the house. He was full now, his belly stuffed with meat. His needs were quite simple: food, shelter, weapons. But there was another desire as well: sex. Since his daughters had not returned, he knew he had to go hunt a woman.

Peering from the hedges that flanked the front of his house, he watched the home of Louis Shears across the way…

 

26

Kathleen Soames was not surprised when she saw the crowd.

She had felt them coming for some time as she dismembered her husband on the kitchen floor and decorated the walls with his blood. She had willed them to her. She wanted them to come and marvel over what was hers. She wanted them to try and take it so she could fight them, roll in the dirt with them.

But when she saw them, she knew they had not come to raid.

They had come for other reasons.

So she looked at them and they looked at her, each recognizing one another for what they now were, grateful that they had found each other at long last.

The crowd.

Dear God, yes, the crowd.

Men, women, and children tagging behind three cops in filthy untucked uniforms. The big one in front was bare-chested and painted for battle. He was pushing a wheelbarrow and in it was what Kathleen expected to see. Something broken and bloody and tangled. Something that made her heart split open momentarily, made her remember things, remember a swollen belly and a kicking, a chubby pink thing pressed to her breast, a growing and hungry thing, blue-eyed and wheat-haired. A smiling face and a boy’s laughter and a world drowning in love and joy. But it vanished so quickly maybe it never existed at all. The heat of the memory became a frost that settled deep into her, a killing frost that withered roots and closed blossoms and then there was just a winter deadness inside her that no spring thaw would ever melt again.

The crowd.

They came up to the porch and stayed there, watching her, smelling her scent and recognizing it as their own. She had marked the porch with her urine and now they smelled it. They would not cross her scent unless she allowed it. Not unless they wanted to fight.

They pushed in, compressed into a single mass, a single breathing machine, something with eyes that did not see and hearts that barely beat and minds that were flat and metallic and cutting. They waited at the edge of the porch.

The white-haired cop who had no hat on looked up at her and said, “Ma’am, I’m Sergeant Warren. This is Officers Shaw and Kojozian. We brought this back to you because we knew you’d want it.”

Kathleen just stared.

She could feel her breasts rising and falling, the blood drying on her arms, taste the sweat on her lips. Smell the darkness oozing from her, content that they, the crowd, smelled as she did now. A stink of things dead and things horribly alive, things pulsing with a morbid vitality. She stared at Warren and at the thing in the wheelbarrow. Her mind was a hollow oblong that filled with blackness drop by drop.

Wary as any animal with others intruding so close to its warren, she hopped down the steps to inspect the offering they had brought. She examined the tangled corpse in the wheelbarrow. She sniffed it carefully. Bending her head down, she licked the skin of a stiffened arm.

“Yes,” she heard herself say. “Yes. It’s mine.”

“We bring this to you,” Warren said, indicating the corpse of her son. “Have you something for us?”

“Yes. Inside. Upstairs.” She was breathing hard. “Would you like to see my husband?”

“Yes.”

Then they filed past her and she heard them in there, heard them laughing, heard them snarling and fighting over things. She would share. Of course she would share. She’d always been a good neighbor. The crowd filled the house with motion and voices, claws and teeth and intent. Kathleen watched them file from the living room. She touched the dirt and blood ground into her skin, fingered the filth in her hair. The crowd was in awe of her. They stood in silence, faces like yellow wax and dead moons, mouths painted red and fingers still redder.

“Well,” Warren said, wiping blood from his cheek “What do you offer?”

Kathleen grinned and her teeth locked tightly together. They felt long and sharp and ready. “Upstairs,” she told them. “Upstairs is the one you want.”

The crowd moved up the stairs, leaving a blood-smell and a meat-smell in their wake. They smelled as she did, only more so. Just dirty and rank and repulsive. A bouquet of death lilies and graveyard roses and mortuary orchids pressed into cold, waxen fingers. A good smell, a fine smell, a real and true smell.

As they filed up the stairs, Kathleen grinned.

The sun outside was so hot, so very hot, burning and blinding. She wanted sunset and shadows and steaming darkness, the feel of cooling pavement under her hands and feet, night-smells and night-tastes. The pure and atavistic joy of running wild and free and hungry with the pack.

Upstairs there was the pathetic, broken scream of an old woman.

Kathleen grinned.

Hurry sundown.

Hurry…

 

27

Well, that’s how it ends. That’s how it all crashes down around you.

This is what Benny Shore, Principal of Greenlawn High School, was thinking as he left school that day, just amazed at all of it. Yes, beside himself with the horror of it, surely, but more than that, just amazed. Like they said, what a difference a day could make. He’d come to work that morning, chipper and happy, whistling some silly tune…and now he was leaving, depressed and hopeless, wanting to slit his wrists.

Yes, one day could make all the difference in the world.

There was little to do now but wait and see what came next.

The school board were beside themselves, the city and state and county cops just scratching their heads. Shore’s phone had been pretty much ringing off the hook ever since it all happened and then, for the last hour or so…it had been oddly quiet. He was expecting to be besieged by parents once their workday had ground to a halt, but it had been quiet.

The calm before the storm?

Or a sign of something worse?

The sign of a world going into the shitter, that’s what. It’s breaking out everywhere now…random violence, bloodshed, savagery. And, for once, old boy, you don’t need to turn on CNN to see it: because it’s HERE. It’s in the STREETS…

Shore hopped into his Jeep and buried his head in his hands.

He sat there like that for maybe ten minutes and then just stared out into the deserted parking lot. There were a few police vehicles there, but that was about it. He was thinking about what Ray Hansel had been telling him as the State Police CSI unit combed through the wreckage, about the violence not only at the school but in the town as well. So much of it in one day that it made even the most skeptical onlooker more than a bit nervous. Was there an underlying cause to it all as Hansel had suggested? Was there a pattern very much evident, but one they could not see because it did not fit the usual parameters? And probably the worst and most unthinkable thing of all, was it possible, as Hansel had hinted at, that this was only the beginning of something much larger?

Would this infection of violence gut the world?

Shore shook his head.

Too much, too much. His head was beginning to hurt from it all. There had been a nasty headache threatening all day and now it was coming, landing hard in his head with reinforcements.

He dug a bottle of Ibuprofen from the glove compartment and chewed a few tablets up, washed it all down with a swig of coffee from this morning that had been sitting in the Jeep all day. It was awful tasting, but he did not notice. He fumbled a cigarette into his mouth, lit it, and blew smoke out through his nostrils.

He felt so…helpless.

So utterly helpless.

He’d been principal at Greenlawn High for nearly eleven years, before that assistant principal and guidance counselor. This school was his school and he did not like the idea that he could do absolutely nothing. That this was all in the hands of others, most of them with no true personal interest in the school, the kids, their combined impact on the community at large. He felt like he was giving up without a fight.

He unrolled his window the rest of the way and stared up at the school.

Two stories of red brick that had been standing since 1903, right on the spot where the old schoolhouse—tall and narrow, whitewashed clapboard with a rising belfry—had been until it burned to the ground in the winter of ’01. He thought of all the classes that had passed through those high, arched doors, the class pictures that had been taken out in the grassy courtyard. All the football games and track meets that had been held in the athletic field behind. He could almost hear the cheering and laughter, the boom of drums and thunder of the high school band. Yes, he could smell autumn in the air, leaves and bonfires and apples.

That’s what it was all about, he suddenly knew.

Tradition.

It was all about tradition.

And those goddamn kids in Biolab had taken that all away.

Not just from Shore himself, but from the whole goddamn town and the generations that had yet to set foot in the school. Those kids had tarnished that and it would never be the same again. For the next hundred years, maybe, if the school stood that long and the world was still turning, kids would be telling stories of that terrible day. Horror stories. That was the ultimate legacy of this day, this Friday the 13^th, grist for horror stories.

Shore felt the headache building in his skull. Fucking kids, he thought. What the hell were they thinking? What the hell came over them? How dare they do something like this, turn my school into a goddamn sideshow!

The headache amplified and Shore actually cried out, pressing his hands to his temples. The cigarette fell from his lips and landed on the seat between his legs, burning a hole there, but he neither noticed nor cared. The pain passed and he swore under his breath. He was actually hoping that none of those little shitting monsters from 5^th hour Biolab was ever found. He hoped they did the right thing and threw themselves into the deepest, darkest hole they could find and pulled the dirt in after them. Hell, yes. Let the evil of this day die with them and then nobody would point their fingers at Greenlawn High, they’d just speculate and speculate and finally accept the fact that those kids were all fucked-up on drugs.

Shore smiled at the idea.

He started the Jeep and threw it in reverse, then drive, coasting it slowly through the parking lot. He lit another cigarette and brushed the burning one on the seat to the floor. He pulled around behind the building, taking the circle drive, so he could take a good long look at his school.

He liked to see it.

It made him feel good inside, important maybe.

Necessary.

This was his territory.

His.

As he came around the corner, passing through the faculty lot, he decided he had better not see any of those damn dirtbags smoking cigarettes or necking in the trees behind the lot. If he did…well, if he did, he was going to come down on them like never before. He’d bust their heads open. He’d bust their goddamn heads right open.

But he saw no one.

At least until he came around the back of the school and then he saw a kid standing there, right in the middle of the road. Some dumb kid staring at the oncoming Jeep like he had no idea what a moving vehicle was. Shore grimaced and hit the horn a couple times. The sound made his head throb.

Dumb kid…what the hell was he doing?

Then Shore got a good look at him.

No, just not any kid. That was Billy Swanson. Goddamn Billy Swanson from 5^th hour Biolab.

“Billy,” Shore said under his breath. “Well, well, well.”

He knew Billy fairly well.

A little nothing shit, an outsider dwelling in a world of fantasy. He didn’t try out for sports, volunteer for any of the clubs. He did absolutely nothing and like any kid that did not fit in, he took the standard ration of shit. Shore had disciplined kids like Tommy Sidel—another 5^th hour Biolab monster—for picking on Billy, for shoving him in the halls or punching him in gym class or tripping him up outside. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It had fallen on Shore as it always fucking fell on Shore. But right then? Had he been able to go back, he would have picked on that little shitting mama’s boy himself. Knocked his ass to the floor and kicked his fucking Star Trek paperbacks away, wiped his ass with them.

Kind of shit was that for a growing boy to be reading anyhow?

Feeling it rising in him, the anger, the rage, the frustration, Shore slammed on the brakes about ten feet from Billy. He hopped out. “Billy! Get your ass over here, I want to talk with you! You hear me?”

Billy just looked at him, his eyes dead and flat and somehow defiant.

Shore did not like how the kid looked at him, because not only was there defiance there, but an absolute lack of fear. Shore did not like that in the least. Billy should have been cowering, hanging his head, but he was not. He was glaring. Shore glared right back at him, his lips peeling back from his teeth. It occurred to him that they were facing off like two dogs disputing territory, which had the right to piss on a given tree. But he dismissed that, for suddenly things like metaphors made no sense to him.

“Billy…” he said.

The kid just smiled.

Smiled and spit at his feet, made sure Shore watched him do it, too. Why, the defiant little shit. He had no idea what he was stepping in this time. Benny Shore did not take crap from losers like Billy Swanson. He stepped on them. He crushed them. And Billy was about to find out all about that.

But Billy had no interest.

He turned and walked off at a very leisurely pace, again indicating no fear.

Shore reddened, fumed. “Billeeeee…”

He thought he heard the kid laugh, was almost sure of it.

Billy was now moving off at a casual jog, the sort of jog that said, you couldn’t catch me anyway, you stupid fuck.

So that was the game he wanted to play? All right, all right.

Shore jumped behind the wheel of the Jeep and threw it in drive.

He squealed out and rocketed right at Billy Swanson. Although he was not aware of it, something had finally and ultimately burst in his head like a sore, filling his mind with pus and diseased drainage. All he knew is that Billy Swanson had really stepped in it this time. Really and truly. He accelerated, gripping the wheel and the very act felt so good, so liberating, so very right. The Jeep came speeding up behind Billy at almost forty miles an hour and the stupid kid just didn’t have the sense to get out of the way. He tried to dart to the left at the last possible moment, but no dice. Shore struck him and the impact tossed him up onto the hood. He rolled off and tumbled into the parking lot.

Shore squealed to a stop and spun the Jeep around.

Billy got up.

He was young and the impact had hurt him, but he was hardly down for the count. He glared at Shore with wild eyes and then limped off like a wounded animal. But Shore wasn’t having that. He gunned the Jeep and swung the wheel when Billy hobbled up over the curb. He almost got away, but then the Jeep hit him again and Shore cackled. Billy was thrown face down and the Jeep rolled right over him.

In the rearview, Shore saw him back there, broken and bleeding. But still no fear. Billy was scowling and snapping his teeth. Shore threw the Jeep in reverse and rolled over him again. This time he clearly heard the sound of bones snapping. It was a good sound, one that Shore had wanted desperately to hear.

But it wasn’t enough.

So he drove over Billy again.

And again.

And again…

 

28

Ray Hansel was just leaving Bob Moreland’s office at the Greenlawn Police Station when he saw the woman coming up the stairs. Under ordinary circumstances, he probably wouldn’t have paid much attention. It was a police station, after all, and people tended to come and go at such places. Particularly today where there was a constant stream of visitors…some were out of their heads and went straight to lock up; most were just normal, or nearly, normal and scared and worried. They came in to report assaults and arson and even a few murders, but mostly it was just to report missing family and friends or neighbors that were just acting a bit off.

But the woman Hansel saw was not one of them.

He shut the door to Moreland’s office—where they had just decided that it might be a good idea to call together an emergency meeting of the city council because what they were looking at was civil unrest—and he saw her step into the corridor. What drew his attention to her was the fact that she was wearing only a bathrobe, a ratty old terricloth thing that was dirty and dusty with strings of cobwebs stuck to the collar and sleeves like maybe she’d been hiding out in an attic. Her face was pale, terribly pale, her hair teased into a great rat’s nest. And her eyes were like black holes burned into her face.

“Ma’am?” Hansel said, his hand instinctively going for the butt of the bluesteel Beretta 9mm in his holster. It did this automatically without any help from him. “Can I help you?”

She took two steps forward, moving with an odd mechanical cadence, not seeming to see or hear Hansel. Her attention was focused on Moreland’s door with such intensity that it was almost scary.

Hansel stepped in her path. “Ma’am?” he said.

She turned and looked at him and snarled like she’d been scalded.

Her hand came out of the deep pocket of her gown and there was a seven-inch carving knife in it. Without hesitation, she slashed at Hansel with it, going right for his throat. He ducked away and grabbed her arm before she had a chance to repeat the maneuver. She screamed and fought, but he got her off balance and tripped her up. She dropped the knife and immediately went after him.

“Need some help out here!” he called out as she scratched and kicked at him.

Two cops came running from an office down the corridor and took hold of her, pulling her off Hansel and throwing her to the floor. She landed with a thud, rolling over, and coming up on all fours like a dog ready to bite. Her bathrobe was wide open, her pasty white breasts on display. Her teeth were clenched, a rope of saliva hanging off her chin, black and leering eyes darting from man to man.

“Okay, lady,” Hansel said. “Just take it easy, we’re not going to hurt you.”

She made a hissing sound, blowing air through her teeth. Her face was contorted, deranged, and there was no getting around the fact that she needed to be put in restraints. There was something blatantly vicious about her and Hansel was certain she would have sunk her teeth in his throat given the chance.

One of the cops took out his Mace and she charged him.

He never even got his finger on the button.

He was a big boy, outweighing her by an easy hundred pounds, yet she struck him with such force that all he had time to do was cry out as she slammed into him, knocking him flat. His partner grabbed her around the throat with an armlock and she came alive in a loose, writhing mass, head whipping from side to side, spit spraying from her mouth. She jumped up in his grip, kicking back with both feet and catching him in the shins, her splintered nails laying his arm open. He released her with a gasp and she seized his arm and sank her teeth right into it. He screamed a high and whining sound and Hansel saw the blood well from where her mouth was attached to his arm.

Then she turned on Hansel himself.

Her teeth snapping, her chin smeared red, she came right at him and he brought down his gun, butt-first, catching her right between the eyes. The impact knocked her back and she spun around in a crazy circle, hissing and shrieking, and then just collapsed, out cold.

“Holy shit,” Hansel said.

The cop with the bitten arm let his partner drag him down to the first aid station, leaving Hansel alone with the unconscious woman. She was breathing hard, her bathrobe hooked up around her waist, legs splayed in opposite directions. Catching his breath, Hansel pulled out his handcuffs and kneeled beside her. One eye was open and staring, a metallic gleam to it; the other was closed. He took hold of her left arm and the flesh was hot and greasy feeling. He snapped a cuff on it and as he was about to put the other on, Moreland appeared.

“Oh, my Christ,” he said.

Hansel lifted her and snapped the other cuff on her, breathing easier when it was done with. He couldn’t stand the feel of her beneath his hands, her flesh feverish and moist, almost reptilian in its slipperiness. He looked down at the one eye and it reminded him of the eye of a jungle snake, flat and predatory.

“She was heading right for your office, Bob,” he said. “She had a knife.”

Moreland just stared dumbly.

“You better get that council together, Bob,” he breathed. “We need people in here. The mayor can give the governor a jingle, I’m thinking. We need bodies in here. National Guard and maybe the CDC out of Atlanta. This goes on, we’ll have a fucking revolution by tonight. You hearing me, Bob? We need martial law here.”

That’s what came pouring out of Ray Hansel’s mouth, even though he knew none of the above was remotely practical. Knee-jerk, that’s what it was. Whole state was going crazy, governor wouldn’t give a high hot shit about goddamn Greenlawn.

But Moreland was oblivious to anything he was saying. He kept staring at the woman sprawled on the floor. Hansel did not like what was in his eyes.

“Bob…Bob, do you know her?” he asked.

Moreland slowly nodded his head. “Yes…yes, I do. It’s my wife…”

Hansel swallowed.

And then downstairs, the screaming started…

 

29

When Susan Donnel pulled into the driveway of her house on Tessler Avenue, she was in a state of high panic. She’d downed a Darvocet at lunch and washed it down with two Bacardi and Cokes. The world was unraveling. So much was happening in so many different places that she refused to even listen to the radio anymore.

Doom.

Gloom.

Horror.

And this time it wasn’t just in Afghanistan or the Left Bank. It was here. It was everywhere. Even Greenlawn, her oasis, had lost its collective mind. As she drove through town, she saw devastation. Burning houses. Trash in the streets. Dogs running in packs. People running wild and naked in the streets.

And when she pulled in the driveway, hoping Ray was home and wondering why he wasn’t answering his cell, she had to sit behind the wheel for five minutes. It took that long to pry her fingers off it. They were white-knuckled claws. Her stomach was upset. Her head was aching. She was shaking, every muscle drawn taut.

She stepped out into the driveway.

Into the absolute silence of Tessler Avenue. Not so much as a passing car. A kid on a bike. The hum of a lawnmower. Nothing. Oh, Jesus, that silence was worse than just about anything. Holding back a cry, she ran into the house.

“Ray!” she called. “Ray!”

Dammit, it was his day off. His car was at the curb. He had to be here, he just had to be. The house was neat. There were the remains of a sandwich on the table. Ray’s lunch. She dashed from room to room in a frantic, sweaty panic. They would get out of town. They would pack up what they needed and get up to the cabin on Indian Creek, wait for this…madness to blow over. For God help her, it had to, it just had to.

He wasn’t in the house.

Dammit!

She ran outside, looked in the backyard, saw the door to the garage was open. Of course. Of course. The garage. His private haven. Probably practicing his OCD, arranging his gardening tools or numbering his screws.

“Ray! Ray! Goddammit, Ray, why aren’t you—”

A dank clamminess spread over flesh, her head spun, cold sweat ran down her face in rivers. She went down to her knees, a scream breaking loose in her throat. “No, no, no, no, no, Jesus God, no…”

Ray was hanging on the wall.

He was hanging by a hook there amongst the shovels, rakes, and hoes. Her husband. Her lover. Her rock. Hanging there. His eyes were wide and staring, the crown of his head ruptured, cleaved open in a grisly, jagged rent. Fingers of scarlet blood had run down his face, accentuating his chalk-white pallor.

Screaming, crying, her mind gone to sauce, Susan crawled out of the garage on all fours. She found her feet, staggered a bit, went down in the grass, vomiting. A voice in her head kept saying that such things as this could not be. They’d gotten up together this morning. Ray had made her breakfast. They’d laughed together. They’d showered together. He kissed her goodbye at the door and now…and now…

Susan ran.

Marge, she thought, Marge.

She ran next door, diving right over Ray’s carefully sculpted hedges and landing face-first in a flowerbed. She scrambled through the yard. The Shermer’s. Marge Shermer was practically like a mother to her. Her husband, Bill, was cranky, but he would know what to do. He was a crusty old war vet that always seemed to know what to do. He would know. Susan saw his pick-up truck in the driveway. The windshield was shattered.

Oh, no.

She went to the door, didn’t bother knocking. Inside, there was wreckage. Paintings had been yanked off the walls. The TV set was tipped over. Potted plants scattered from one end of the living room to the other. She trampled across black potting soil, not daring to call out. Something inside her, long dormant, was aware now. It sensed danger. No sense alerting anyone or anything to her location.

She slipped into the kitchen, flattened herself up against the refrigerator.

The same, dear God, it was the same. Cupboards had been emptied, the contents of drawers scattered over the floor: knives, spoons, forks. Canisters of flour and sugar had been spilled about. There were bloody handprints on the countertops. The walls looked like they’d been gouged with knives.

There was a stink of raw urine in the air.

Somebody had gone insane in here and then pissed with glee.

Susan went down to the floor, grabbed a knife.

Tears ran from her eyes, drool filled her mouth. There was a wild tic at the corner of one eye. Shadows jumped in her brain. She was hearing a creaking sound. It was coming from the backyard. Tensing, Susan crept over the floor, leaving footprints in the flour. She eased herself up the counter so she could peer through the kitchen window out into the yard.

Careful, don’t give yourself away.

She saw the bushes back there, the potting shed. She craned her neck. There was the clothesline. A gentle breeze made sheets flap. But that creaking. That continual creaking. It reminded her of—

She craned her neck. Her body was prickly with sweat, her blouse stuck to her back. She saw…she saw Marge. Marge was hanging from the oak tree back there. Susan saw it, wanted to scream, to cry out, to do many things, but by that point something had shut down in her.

So she just looked.

Marge, poor old arthritic Marge, was strung up from that oak like a lynched desperado in an old western. She was naked, her body bloated and purple and broken. Her face was a swollen contusion. She was only recognizable by her fine silver, moon-spun hair. It looked like she had been beaten to death. With bats. With boards. With hammers. It was hard to know. Her limbs were shattered, bent at unnatural angles.

Susan didn’t bother looking for Bill.

Not running now, but moving with a quick, stealthy burst of speed like a hunted animal. She went to the Lychek’s next door. They were a bunch of Bible-thumping Jehovah’s Witnesses who were always leaving pamphlets and leaflets in everyone’s mailboxes: SIGNS OF THE SECOND COMING or JESUS IS HERE NOW ON EARTH or YOU CAN BE GOD’S FRIEND! Nobody liked the Lychek’s. They didn’t believe in things like Christmas or Halloween. Pagan holidays, they said. The neighborhood kids always pranked them on Halloween. Oh, the awful things they did.

But Susan didn’t care what they believed or what they didn’t believe. For she could not be sure at that moment, as the world lost solidity and focus for her, just exactly what she believed in herself anymore.

She didn’t bother knocking.

She stepped right in, brandishing her knife, waiting for attack that never came. She could smell blood, shit, piss, worse things. The living room was trashed. Bound volumes of The Watchtower, Awake!, and Our Kingdom Ministry had been yanked from bookshelves, pages torn out in a wild rage. They lay everywhere like fallen autumn leaves along with dozens of pamphlets preaching against progressive ideas like evolution and the separation of church and state. Then someone had defecated all over them. And by the amount of shit heaped and smeared on those pages, probably quite a few people. Susan immediately had a lunatic scenario in her head where a bunch of crazies came in here, torn up the books, and then, dropping their drawers, squatted down and happily shit together.

It was ridiculous.

But she feared it wasn’t far from the truth.

Apparently they’d been using the pages as toilet paper, too, which was probably the most constructive use any of it had ever been put to, she decided.

Thump, thump, thump.

Susan went down in a crouch. The knife trembled in her hand. That thumping. What was this now? It was coming from a doorway at the far side of the room, possibly a dining room. She thought of running. Her animal sense demanded it. But being that she was still more or less a reasoning being, she was curious.

Tensed, ready for battle, she stepped across the room, very aware that she was stepping through human shit. The smell was overpowering, sickening. She noticed that there were bare human footprints in the waste, that filthy prints led away into the room she was now creeping up on.

She got to the doorway.

Thump, thump, thump.

Louder now. She could hear a man grunting, a woman gasping. The sound of flesh slapping against flesh. No, no, it couldn’t be that. Not here. Not with shit spread all over the place. No human beings could be that vulgar, that crude, that low and bestial. But the sounds were getting louder and louder. There was no mistaking them. Despite herself, Susan felt a stirring inside her.

Looked in there.

A man and woman were screwing on the floor. The man was entirely naked, his body covered with scratches and dried bloodstains. The woman wore only a short skirt and this was pushed up around her hips. Another woman, older, was crouched by them, rocking back and forth in mimic of their motions, gnawing on an apple.

And beyond them…in fact, only a few feet away…the remains of the Nychek’s, Jack and Wendy. Her legs were missing. He’d been split open like a suckling pig, his abdomen wide open. His entrails bulged out, were heaped on the floor in a fleshy, coiling mass. Blood had spread out from the both of them in a sticky red pool. The couple were fucking in it, streaked with blood and shit, just happily going away at it.

Susan just stared, appalled and sickened.

In the back of her mind there was a memory. Some show on TV. Something about man’s modern world, his cities and technology, being like a cage that he had locked himself up in. The captivity repressed his natural instinctive desires, his animal impulses. In the cage, man no longer had to fear predators or hunt for food or defend his territory. Like a monkey in a zoo, he had no other instinctive outlet but sex. That’s why people were so obsessed by sex. Simply because all the other impulses nature had installed were repressed. All that remained was sex, sex, sex—

There were low voices in the kitchen, the sound of bottles or jars smashed on the floor.

Susan made to back away…and then something hit her from behind. Right between the shoulder blades with an explosion of impact and agony. She was tossed into the room, slipping on the blood and landing atop the lovers. The man paid her no notice; he was intent on what he was doing. The woman hissed at him. She struck out with a backhanded fist, catching Susan in the mouth and sending her sprawling. This time she landed in the viscera on the floor. She cried, slipping and sliding on it, feeling it under her shoes like greasy snakes.

The old woman spit phlegm at her.

Susan crawled away, whimpering and shaking.

And there, right before her, standing high and almost proud, was a nude woman with a baseball bat in her hands. Her breasts and belly and face were painted with snaking transverse bands of blood. Her hair was wild, caked with filth. Her blue eyes were wide and bright, filled with a glacial coolness. They stared down with a catatonic glaze that was shiny and wet and utterly inhuman. More like the hungry stare of a wolf.

Now you got it, hon. Wolves. As in were-wolves. You know, shapeshifters, Lon Chaney and all that horseshit. Werewolves. That’s what these things are. Not people. Not really. Not anymore. Maybe they’re not sprouting hair and fangs like movie werewolves, but please be assured, my dear, these are fucking werewolves and you are now in their lair.

And all of that was disturbing, hell yes, but what seemed even worse was that this crazy woman had a leather sling of arrows on her back and shiny onyx bow over one shoulder like she was some demented Amazonian.

“Please,” Susan said, holding out her hands for mercy, trying to catch her breath, trying to find her center which was so lopsided, inverted, and upside down by this point she could have slid right off it like a fried egg in a grease-slicked pan. Over, Under, Sideways, Down, as The Yardbirds had once said. She swallowed, feeling the dryness of her throat. Her heart pounded, blood rushed at her temples. “Please…I didn’t mean to barge in, I was looking for someone, but they’re not here so I’ll just be on my—”

“Hhhhssssssttt!” the woman said by way of reply, forcing hissing air through clenched teeth.

Susan shook her head, not understanding such gibberish. At least on the surface…but down below where the wild things were, where they ran crusted with blood and gamey with their own rancid animal stink, she understood all too well. She was being told in a very rudimentary way to shut her fucking mouth. For the werewolf woman did not want to hear shit like that. She was not accustomed to her prey blabbing on and on; she liked her meat to know its place, to sit on the plate and exude a tasty pink juice, to be tender and filling, to satisfy both tongue and gut.

“What’s…what’s your name?” Susan said, trying a different tact even though her animal instinct told her she was literally fucked here like the virgin on prom night in the old joke.

The woman cocked her head, her face scrubbed of emotion like that of a mannequin. There was excrement all over her feet. Her pale thighs and calves were bright with fingers of blood that seemed to have run from between her legs as if she were menstruating. And judging from the hot, meaty smell wafting off her, Susan knew she was.

“Please,” Susan said again.

The woman grinned. Her teeth were stained red. “I’m Angie,” she said. Then she said it again: “I’m Annnngeeeee,” the way a little kid would say it, enjoying the way it filled her throat and rolled off her tongue. And this more than anything told Susan Donnel all she needed to know about the brain behind those eyes: simple, childlike, the cunning and savage appetites of a beast coupled with the rudimentary reasoning of a child.

Susan opened her mouth to speak and as she did so, Angie swung the baseball bat with a smooth muscular grace. It hit Susan in the mouth and she in turn hit the floor, her teeth scattering like dice. She was barely conscious, just gagging on her own blood. She was barely aware of the two men that stepped into the room and ripped her clothes off beneath the full approving glare of Angie Preen.

Susan came awake to the sharp stab of penetration between her legs, a heavy man that stank of sweat and shit pumping away on her. The horror of this floored her: the invasion, the brutality, the violation of the act. She let out a wild, whooping scream as those hips pistoned and the man’s greasy, hot flesh pressed into her own. His breath blew in her face and stank like meat green with rot, like blood and vomit and boiling fevers. His face was a mask of dried blood, just that grinning mouth and gnashing yellow teeth, the stupid bovine staring eyes, unblinking.

The woman named Angie looked on with amusement. She licked her lips. Her free hand went down to her crotch. Gasping, she slid a finger into herself as Susan was raped.

Oh God, oh God, oh God, please please please no no no—

Then there was a keening cry and another man, a heavy, bulky man, kicked her attacker off and then mounted her himself. Then the first man pulled him free and the two of them were fighting, rolling through the shit-stained papers in the living room, kicking and biting, snarling and scratching.

Angie squatted down by Susan, she grabbed her by the hair and brought her contorted, tearful face to her own. As Susan trembled, Angie sniffed her like a dog. Her throat. Her breasts. Her hair. Then she threw her down.

“When you’re done,” Angie told the fighting men in a low grating voice that was practically a growl, “bring the cunt along. We’ll need her…”

 

30

When they got outside, Macy said, “Well, Mrs. Brackenbury said she hasn’t seen mom. It was worth a shot, I guess.”

“Did she say anything odd to you?”

Macy shook her head. “No…well, I mean, she’s always a little flaky, isn’t she? Her and those cats? I told her to be careful, to lock her door, but she wouldn’t listen. I don’t even think she knew what I was talking about. She’s in her own little world or something.”

Louis had to smile. “Well, she’s getting on in years, you know,” he said, trying to be diplomatic.

“Tell me about it. She calls me ‘Nancy’ half the time.”

Louis suppressed a giggle and led Macy over to his Dodge. There was still a smear of blood on the handle from when he’d jumped in there after his encounter with those wigged-out cops. But the driver’s side rear door was open. He hadn’t left it open. He was sure of it. Without alerting Macy to his concern, he casually closed it, but not before noticing that his bag with the steaks in it was gone. Just…gone. Somebody came and stole raw steaks, Louis. What do you think about that? He was not very surprised. He looked down the street. Nobody was around. Not a soul. Was that good or bad? The smell of smoke was heavier in the air now and he wondered what was burning out there. A house or was it maybe a block of them?

“Hey, Louis!” a voice called.

He paused at the car, craned his head back, wondering what it could be now. It was just Earl Gould from next door. Earl was okay. A retired anthropology professor from Indiana U with far too much time on his hands these days, he just liked to talk. Sometimes Louis could barely get out of the yard without a lengthy chat over Earl’s meticulously trimmed hedges.

“I better talk to him,” Louis said. He checked his pockets. “Do me a favor, Macy, will you? Run inside and grab my wallet. It’s up in my room on the dresser. I won’t be a minute.”

Macy strolled away and Louis went over to the hedges. Earl was there with a pair of trimmers and Louis approached him very cautiously. It didn’t look like he was crazy, but then it hadn’t looked like the mailman was either…not at first. Louis wasn’t really too concerned about driving without his wallet, but he thought it might be a good idea to get Macy out of there in case Earl snapped.

“How’s things?” Earl said.

Louis shrugged. “I don’t know, to be honest. Pretty weird things going on today.”

Earl nodded, peering up at Louis over the rims of his glasses. “That’s what I’m hearing. Goddamn country is flipping its wig.”

“Whole world, Earl.”

“You know what I say, Louis? Screw the world. Let’s worry about this place.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“Small towns can be very funny places, Louis. On the surface they’re boring and ordinary and even serene, but deep down you can never truly say what might be boiling, you know?”

“Sure.”

“Just one day, things happen. Not just one thing, but many. A chain of circumstances that seem to have no common root. At least, not one that you can see. Take Greenlawn for example. No, just humor me. From what I’ve been hearing we suddenly find ourselves faced with what seems to be a wave of random violence. It’s disturbing, isn’t it? Certainly, but it’ll play itself out given time…won’t it?”

“I hope so, Earl.”

“Violence. It’s the core of the human beast. It’s what we are and where we came from and what we descend into with the slightest provocation. It’s true, Louis. We carry within us the animal aggression of our simian and proto-human ancestors. Every beating, every rape, every witch hunt and mass murder is evidence of that. Even a child threatening another with a stick or a gangbanger with a switchblade in an alley is an expression of animal legacy in its purest form. The armed predator. Everything we do—from our urge to find and maintain territory, or real estate, to pecking orders and hostility to those outside our social grouping, the competition for females or males, race hatred and fear of strangers—all of it based on ancient animal patterns, like it or not.”

Louis licked his lips. They were very dry. “But it’ll stop. It has to.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

Louis absently looked at his watch. “I don’t know.”

“This town is a perfect microcosm for the world. People don’t see it as such, of course. Because they’re too close, too involved, that’s why.” Earl worked his clippers, taking out a stray twig. “You need a bird’s eye view of this town to understand what ails it. The people who live here can no more examine their lives objectively than you or I can study the tops of our heads.”

Louis just stood there, not in the mood for it.

Earl Gould was a nice old guy and he was very smart, but he had the sometimes annoying tendency to over-analyze and over-intellectualize things. Louis figured it was the fact that he no longer had a classroom to occupy or students to lecture. So he grabbed anybody that happened by—a neighbor, the meter-reader, the guy from the gas company—and discoursed at length on anything from politics to world economy to small town culture to that patch of weeds growing under the elm in the front yard. Louis would have liked to tell him what he’d seen and experienced, but that would mean sacrificing another hour or two that he just did not have. Because Earl would have to minutely examine each shred of evidence and then play devil’s advocate for a time before finally rendering his hypothesis.

He was a smart guy, sure, but now was not the time for such things.

“Look at it this way, Louis. There is reason and cause if we can only open our minds to see them. And the people of Greenlawn cannot see beyond the ends of their noses, God bless ‘em, each and every one.” Earl leaned closer over the hedges. “I think, though, if they were able to what they would find would scare them. Because small communities like this are often quite scary to an outsider, eh? Isolated, inbred, insular, paranoid even. Tribal. Oh yes, very tribal. Places like this always have one or two episodes of explosive violence in their pasts. Mostly you don’t hear about them because small towns know how to keep their secrets and to lock their closets most securely so that the skeletons do not get out where they can be seen by shocked eyes.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right, Earl.”

“Oh, I am. You can bank on that. I’m not a native. We only retired here because my wife spent her childhood in this very town. But that gives me an advantage, doesn’t it? No rose-colored glasses or troublesome blinders on this old man’s eyes, eh? I can see the mechanics of this town, where decay has set in and where new growth may yet bloom. The very anatomy of Greenlawn is mine to view.” He chuckled at the idea, but there was a sharpness to his laughter, a darkness welling just behind his eyes. “I think, deep down, Louis, that the good citizens of our fair city of Greenlawn are not surprised at any of this. I think they’ve been expecting it. In the primal blackness of their souls, I think they’ve been waiting for something like this, something terrible to happen for a long time. And now the cork has been popped from the bottle and all that fermented juice is leaking out, spoiling everything and everyone it touches. I think, Louis, some will welcome this, what today has brought and tonight might still bring. They’ll see it as an inevitability, won’t they? All those tensions and frustrations building all these years, needing to vent themselves. Oh yes, Louis, they’ve been running hot and rancid like bad blood for too long now. Something that’s needed purging, a sore that’s needed lancing. Yes, my friend, things have been approaching critical mass for some time and I’ve been watching it happen. Critical mass has been reached and now comes savage fruition. All it took was a catalyst and do you know what that catalyst was?”

“It isn’t just this town, Earl. It’s the whole damn world.”

Earl smiled at that as if he was amused by it. “Of course it is, Louis. The whole world. One race trapped in this disquieting moment in time when the shadows of antiquity are crowding in upon them.” Earl nodded. “Do want to know why this is happening, son? Why the human race is descending into savagery? Why our psychological evolution is being thrown clear back to the Paleolithic? Well, I tell you, I’ll tell you. But first ask yourself this: Why do locusts swarm? Why do lemmings purge themselves? Why, indeed? When their populations reach critical mass, some biological imperative is activated in order to cull said populations. Hence, locusts swarm, lemmings purge. Locusts take to the skies in a swarm, descending on fields and stripping them, going into an eating frenzy. And they do this to cull their populations, for inevitably only a fraction of the population will survive the swarming. And lemmings? They do not consciously purge themselves as some think. They overpopulate, that unknown imperative switches on, and they migrate en masse. Again, only a fraction survive the migration. Most starve. Again, population culled.”

Louis just stared at him, pretty certain now that Earl was mad, too. They had all gone mad, each in their own way. And this was certainly Earl’s way. “That’s very interesting, Earl.”

“Isn’t it?” Earl stabbed a finger at him. “But what does this have to do with human populations? I think you’ve already made the connection. Our population has reached dangerous, critical proportions. We are destroying the environment to accommodate this massive population explosion. Nature has thrown every conceivable stumbling block at us to slow it down…disease, famine, natural disaster. But we’ve beaten them off one by one. And now? Yes, the ace in the hole. That same biological imperative that exists in locusts, lemmings, even rats. We are, essentially, swarming. We are purging ourselves. We are cleansing the stock, so to speak. There was a very intelligent man name of Hutson. Roger Hutson. Hutson was an ethnologist from Oxford, over in jolly old England. He wrote a marvelous book called Swarm Mechanics many years ago where he warned of just such a species-threatening event. He claimed that in each of us, as in the aforementioned animals, there was a rogue recessive gene that would become activated if our population reached hazardous levels. That it would bring about unprecedented savagery, that we would literally exterminate ourselves until our population stabilized. And it has come to pass, has it not? This gene is activated, Louis. God help us, but it is. All of them out there…animals, they are regressing to animals, throwing off the yoke of intelligence and civilization, returning to the jungle and survival of the fittest…”

Earl went on and on, unable to stop himself. He cited studies with rats. How when they were overcrowded as humans were now in their towns and cities they began participating in degenerate, self-destructive behavior just like people. Murder, incest, homosexuality, cannibalism. Anything to weaken the overburdened population, to burn it out at its roots. To poison it out, cull the weak, preserve the identity and genetic purity of the breeding pool.

“The human garden will now be weeded,” he said.

“But, Earl—”

“Oh, how arrogant we were!” Earl raged. “To think we were the masters of this planet! To think we could rape the environment and subvert natural law! And all the time, it was not nuclear war or some deadly pathogen waiting to undo us, but ourselves! We are the instruments of our own destruction! Inside each and every one of us there is a loaded gun and radical population explosion has pulled the trigger! God help us, Louis, but we will exterminate ourselves! Beasts of the jungle! Killing, slaughtering, raping, pillaging! An unconscious genetic urge will unmake all we have made, gut civilization, and harvest the race like cattle as we are overwhelmed by primitive urges and race memory run wild!”

“Listen, Earl,” Louis said. “I need to get going, I have to”

“WHO’RE YOU TALKING TO OUT THERE, EARL?”

It was Maureen, Earl’s wife. She was hard of hearing and shouted everything. Even if you were in the same room with her. But Louis was glad for the intrusion.

Earl shook his head. “I’m talking to Louis! Louis Shears from next door!”

“WHO?” Maureen shouted through the kitchen window.

“Louis! Louis from next door!”

“LOUIS? IS MICHELLE OUT THERE?” she cried. “I SAID, IS MICHELLE OUT THERE?”

“No, she’s not!” Earl looked apologetically at Louis and shrugged his shoulders.

“WHAT?”

“I said she’s not out here!”

“WELL, WHAT ARE THE TWO OF YOU DOING?”

“We’re not doing anything! We’re just talking!”

“WELL, IF YOU WON’T ANSWER, I BETTER COME AND SEE MYSELF!”

Earl sighed. “Christ, but she’s getting bad, Louis. Real bad. All day long she asks me what I’m doing. I’m taking out the trash and she wants to know what I’m doing. I’m cutting the grass and she wants to know what I’m doing. What the hell does she think I’m doing? You take out the trash because it’s full and you cut the grass because it’s getting long just like you take down the Christmas tree or throw the Halloween pumpkins in the can, because it’s time! Because it’s time!”

The screen door creaked open and out came Maureen with her cane, looking suspicious as she always did that something was going on and she had not been informed about it.

Louis looked over his shoulder, wondering what was taking Macy so damn long.

“WHAT IS GOING ON OUT HERE? THAT’S WHAT I’D LIKE TO KNOW!”

“See?” Earl said. “It’s like this all day. How would you like to deal with what I deal with?”

Louis sighed. They were a nice old couple, but now was not the time for this shit. But he knew he wasn’t leaving. Not yet. Not until Maureen came over and got her two cents in. She always had to know what was going on even when nothing was.

“LOUIS! DID YOU HEAR ALL THEM DAMN SIRENS?” Maureen shouted. She was a little woman with a bent back, bad knees, and glasses that made her eyes look about the size of golf balls. She looked frail and she probably was, but her lungs were working fine, despite the two packs she smoked every day. “I SAID…DID YOU HEAR THOSE DAMN SIRENS?”

Louis felt a headache building at his temples. “Yeah, I heard ‘em.”

“WHAT?”

“He said he heard ‘em for chrissake!” Earl interpreted.

Maureen nodded and pulled a Benson & Hedges 120 from her pack and lit it. But her eyes were bad and it took some doing. She held the lighter with both hands and as she brought the flame to it, she kept backing away from it as if she was afraid she was going to light her nose on fire. It took some doing, but soon the old chimney was stoked and clouds of smoke were blowing from it.

“WHOLE TOWN’S GOING TO HELL, LOUIS! FROM ROOT TO ROSEBUD, JUST A MADHOUSE! A MADHOUSE, I SAID!”

“She said it’s a madhouse, Louis.”

But Louis had heard just fine and wondered as always why Earl felt the need to repeat a woman who was on the same decibel level as a Metallica concert. Already his ears were ringing.

“WHERE’S MICHELLE?” Maureen wanted to know.

Louis swallowed, wondering the same thing. “She’s at work,” he said, refusing to shout. He just wasn’t up to it. “I have to go pick her up.”

“WHAT?”

Earl tossed his hedge clippers aside. “He said she’s at work! He has to go pick her up!”

“WHY IN THE HELL ARE YOU WHISPERING, EARL?” she wanted to know. “WHEN I ASK A QUESTION HAVE THE DECENCY TO ANSWER IT!”

“I did answer it!”

“NOT THAT I COULD HEAR!”

“Well you can’t hear a damn thing anyway!”

Louis stepped back from the hedges, trying to get a look at his house. Macy had been gone too long. He was starting to get a funny feeling about that. What if she’d decided to dart over to her house to write Jillian a letter…and then gone downstairs?

“WHERE DID LOUIS GO?” Maureen asked.

“He’s right here!”

“HE DIDN’T EVEN SAY GOODBYE! HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT?” Maureen just shook her head, staring right at Louis but not seeing him. A few feet out of the direct line of sight and she lost you. She pulled off her cigarette. “WELL, IT’S A WONDER MICHELLE PUTS UP WITH HIM! HOW LONG HAVE THEY BEEN MARRIED AND STILL NO CHILDREN! DON’T TELL ME THERE’S NOT SOMETHING FUNNY ABOUT THAT, EARL!”

Louis reddened, but was not surprised. You could pretty much hear Maureen up and down the block when the windows were open in the summer and she routinely gossiped about the neighbors.

“Jesus Christ!” Earl said to her. “Louis is right here! Are you blind?”

“WHAT?”

“I said, Louis is right here!”

Maureen pulled off her cigarette and squinted. “OH! WELL HE CAN’T HEAR ME WAY OVER THERE!”

“I need to get going, Earl. I have some things to take care of.”

“Okay, Louis. Sorry about Maureen.” He tapped a finger to his head. “She means well, but her eyes are shot, her hearing’s no good, and she’s getting soft upstairs.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Louis told him.

“Think about what I said, Louis.”

“IS LOUIS LEAVING?”

“Yes!”

“WHERE’S HE GOING?”

“He’s got errands to run, goddammit!”

“EARL GOULD, YOU QUIT THAT DAMN WHISPERING AND SPEAK UP LIKE A MAN! YOU KNOW I CAN’T HEAR SO GOOD!”

“Shut up!”

“WHAT?”

Louis saw it coming just as he’d seen it coming when Earl started talking about the inevitability of the town going insane, of rogue gene expression sacking civilization as we knew it. The darkness was there. Hiding in the cracks and crevices of his mind and now it was bleeding out like shadows when the sun went down.

He turned to his wife. “I told you to shut the fuck up!”

“WHAT DID YOU SAY? QUIT WHISPERING LIKE A LITTLE GIRL FOR GODSAKE!”

And that was it.

Earl was talking about critical mass and catalysts and all the rest, well here it was for him. Critical mass had been reached and things were about to explode out of control. Race memory descended. He was a fine, gentle old man, but that all changed in an instant. He took two steps right over to Maureen and hit her in the face with everything he had. She went right down, blood splashing from her mouth right up to the bridge of her nose. Her dentures were hanging out like a set of wind-up chattery teeth.

It happened that quick.

Louis actually looked across the street toward the Maub’s house, the Soderbergs, to see if anyone had seen what he’d just seen.

But there was no one around.

“Earl!” he said. “Jesus Christ, what do you think you’re doing?”

But Earl did not hear him or care what he said.

He walked right over to his wife and gave her a good kick in the side and she howled with pain, gagging and gasping and spitting drool and blood into the grass.

Louis was about to intervene, but he heard Macy calling out to him. “Louis! Louis! Mr. Shears!”

Louis suddenly forgot about what he had just witnessed. He turned on his heel and ran to the house. He could hear Macy crying out and whatever was going on, it was bad. Real bad. He jogged up the steps and went right through the front door and it wasn’t hard to follow her voice.

She was in the kitchen, but she wasn’t alone.

She was behind the kitchen table and facing her was Dick Starling from across the street. But not the Dick Louis knew. Not the same Dick that had taken a picture of him with Jillian Merchant over his shoulder, that same funny and wisecracking man that had helped Louis lay the slab for his garage out back or threw Sunday afternoon backyard barbecues during football season.

No, this was not that Dick Starling.

This Dick Starling was covered in mud and dirt, hair wild and matted, completely naked, his penis standing erect. And his eyes…God, cold and dark like undersea caves. A rank stench of blood, death, and moist black earth blew off him. And he had a bloody axe in his hands.

“Hey, Louis,” he said in a clotted, dirty voice. “I’m gonna get me that little cunt and when I’m done, you can have what’s left. It’s only fair that I have some, don’t you think?”

Dick Starling was a monster…

 

31

Inside Benny Shore’s head, there was a mirror maze like the kind you could find at a carnival. You looked into this one and you were a compressed little dwarf, into that one and you were a tall skeleton man. You looked here, there were ten of you, over there and there were fifty Benny Shores. Sometimes they were the principal of Greenlawn High School and sometimes they were little boys with frightened faces lost in the expressionistic tangle of their own jagged thoughts.

Careful, careful, Benny, those thoughts will kill you.

See how they glisten?

See how the lights catch their razored edge?

Yes, yes, easy now, because those thoughts will slit you right open, spill all your goodies out in coils of red, slopping things.

After he ran over Billy Swanson, Shore drove home taking a most leisurely route to his house over on Tessler Avenue near the river. He was in absolutely no hurry. When that headache had finally found him, delivered him from the here and the now into some distant and possibly primeval place deep in the core of his being, it had done things to him. It had changed his needs and wants and ambitions.

What had mattered before was now rendered meaningless.

Everything was different.

In his own way, perhaps he was still a scurrying insect, but the nature of the colony had certainly changed. It was like a shade had been drawn and the light was finally, thankfully shining in.

For some time, Benny Shore felt in touch with the world at large, with the community, with nature itself. No, none of that silly nonsense of budgets and meetings and planning boards…what the hell was that about anyway? No, what he felt was deeper, bigger, more fluid. Like some psychic channel to his fellow man had been opened and he was tuning in. With what they were and had always been and what they all soon would be. It was marvelous. So marvelous, in fact, that Shore was almost offended by the vehicle he drove. He wanted nothing better than to strip his clothes off and run mad through the streets.

At least, that’s how it was for a time.

Then, suddenly as it had come upon him, it began to desert him.

What had been warm and inviting and peaceful became cold and awful, a December wind blowing through his skull and turning everything inside him into white ice. And that voice, that terrible goddamned voice began to say things, things that reminded Shore of who and what he was and that was not a good thing. Benny…Benny, just what have you done? it kept saying. What in God’s name has happened to you? What do you think you are doing here? You just ran over a kid at the school, goddamn Billy Swanson…you ran him over and kept running him over…that’s murder, you crazy sonofabitch! Don’t you realize what you’ve just done? You’ve committed MURDER!

And, God in heaven, why didn’t that voice just leave him alone?

Why didn’t it go away? Because that voice was cruel, inflexible authority and Shore did not want to be part of that world of board meetings and budgets and committees. He wanted to run free with his nose to the ground. He wanted to lift his leg and piss on trees. He wanted to find a female and mount her. He wanted to hunt prey and bring it down with his hands. He wanted to feel the meat beneath his teeth and the blood on his tongue.

He wanted, needed, these things.

Alive and vital and free, stripped of boring authority and meaningless purpose.

But the voice reasserted itself and it began to speak to him like he spoke to kids at school, kids that cut class and smoked in the bathrooms and got into fights. It kept at him and at him, cutting and sharp. Murder, murder, murder. And that’s when the mirror maze opened in his head, showing him as he now was—shaking and sweating and shocked, streaks of white in his hair—and as he had been—demented and giggling and kill-happy—and as he would soon be—a mad thing hunting through fields and woods.

No, please, no, no, no…

Yes, the mirror maze was open and it didn’t even cost a dime for admittance and Shore was lost in its corridors, seeing himself, reflections of who and what he was and who he would never be again. Yes, Benny, Benny, Benny. And not just himself, but high windy gallows and cold graveyards and rising tombstones with open, waiting graves. It was all there in the mirrors, all the insidious things that had been set loose inside him, they were all showing themselves. Dirty, monstrous, crawling things.

And they all looked like him.

Distorted, narrow and blown-up and slinking, jumping and dancing. But him.

Oh, dear God.

He tried to squeeze his eyes shut so he would not see those faces, those Benny Shores sticking out their tongues at him, laughing and drooling and jibbering. Would not see himself running over a boy named Billy Swanson and giggly madly at the very idea.

Yes, slowly, painfully, it all began to fade.

Even the mirrors were dissipating like morning mist. The last things he saw in their smoky, polished surfaces were all those deranged Benny Shores running away from him, hating who he was becoming again, hating his authority and his look and his smell and his touch that was sterile as fresh bandages. Yes, Benny, Benny, Benny, childhood Benny and teenage Benny and adult Benny and Principal Benny running and running with a flurry of night-echoing footsteps. And then it was all gone, not even a reflection of the heat and perfection of that other simpler, baser world he had known and loved even as it now repelled him.