I finished the chili. It was getting dark. Getting cold, too, because winter was coming on. I tossed the empty can in the lake and turned back toward the house. The last purple smear of twilight silhouetted the place, and a pair of birds darted into the chimney as I walked up the dock. I wouldn"t have seen them if I hadn"t looked at that exact moment, and I shook my head. Birds building nests in October? It was just another sign of a world gone nuts.
Inside, I settled on the couch and thought about lighting a fire. I didn"t care about the birds-nesting in that chimney was their own bad luck. I"d got myself a chill out at the dock, and there was a cord of oak stacked under the carport. Twenty minutes and I could have a good blaze going. But I was tired, and my arm throbbed like it had grown its own heartbeat. I didn"t want to tear the st.i.tches toting a bunch of wood. I just wanted to sleep.
I took some painkillers-more than I should have-and washed them down with Jack Daniel"s. After a while, the darkness pulled in close. The bedroom I"d used the summer before was on the ground floor. But I didn"t want to be downstairs in case anything came around during the night, especially with a cool liquid fog pumping through my veins. I knew I"d be safer upstairs.
There was only one room upstairs-a big room, kind of like a loft.
It was Barnes"s bedroom, and his blood was still on the wall.
I didn"t care. I grabbed my shotgun. I climbed the stairs.
Like I said: I was tired.
Besides, I couldn"t see Barnes"s blood in the dark.
At first, Roy and I stuck to the sheriff"s office, which was new enough to have pretty good security. When communication stopped and the whole world took a header, we decided that wasn"t a good idea anymore. We started moving around.
My place wasn"t an option. It was smack dab in the middle of town. You didn"t want to be in town. There were too many blind corners, and too many fences you couldn"t see over. Dig in there, and you"d never feel safe no how many bullets you had in your clip. So I burned down the house. It never meant much to me, anyway. It was just a house, and I burned it down mostly because it was mine and I didn"t want anyone else rooting around in the stuff I kept there. I never went back after that.
Barnes"s place was off the beaten path. Like I said, that made it a good choice. I knew I could get some sleep there. Not too much, if you know what I mean. Every board in the old lodge seemed to creak, and the brush was heavy around the property. If you were a light sleeper-like me-you"d most likely hear anything that was coming your way long before it had a chance to get you.
And I heard every noise that night in Barnes"s bedroom. I didn"t sleep well at all. Maybe it was my sliced-up arm or those painkillers mixing with the whiskey and antibiotics-but I tossed and turned for hours. The window was open a crack, and cold air cut through the gap like that barefooted girl"s knife. And it seemed I heard another knife sc.r.a.ping somewhere deep in the house, but it must have been those birds in the chimney, scrabbling around in their nest.
Outside, the chained seats on the swing set squealed and squeaked in the wind. Empty, they swung back and forth, back and forth, over cool white sand.
After a couple months, Barnes wasn"t doing so well. We"d scavenged a few of the larger summer houses on the other side of the lake-places that belonged to rich couples from down south. We"d even made a few trips into town when things seemed especially quiet. We"d gotten things to the point where we had everything we needed at the lodge. If something came around that needed killing, we killed it. Otherwise, we steered clear of the world.
But Barnes couldn"t stop talking about those books he"d s.n.a.t.c.hed from the wrecked Chrysler. He read the d.a.m.ned things every day. Somehow, he thought they had all the answers. I didn"t know about that. If there were answers in those books, you"d have one h.e.l.l of a time p.r.o.nouncing them. I knew that much.
That wasn"t a problem for Barnes. He read those books cover to cover, making notes about those lesser demons, consulting dictionaries and reference books he"d swiped from the library. When he finished, he read them again. After a while, I couldn"t stand to look at him sitting there with those reading gla.s.ses on his face. I even got sick of the smell of his coffee. So I tried to keep busy. I"d do little things around the lodge, but none of them amounted to much. I chainsawed several oak trees and split the wood. Stacking it near the edge of the property to season would also give us some cover if we ever needed to defend the perimeter, so I did that, too. I even set some traps on the other side of the lodge, but after a while I got sloppy and began to forget where they were. Usually, that happened when I was thinking about something else while I was trying to work. Like Barnes" maybe"s and what if"s.
Sometimes I"d get jumpy. I"d hear noises while I was working. Or I"d think I did. I"d start looking for things that weren"t there. Sometimes I"d even imagine something so clearly I could almost see it. I knew that was dangerous . . . and maybe a little crazy. So I found something else to do-something that would keep my mind from wandering.
I started going out alone during the day. Sometimes I"d run across a pack of bloodfaces. Sometimes one of those demons . . . or maybe two. You never saw more than two at a time. They never traveled in packs, and that was lucky for me. I doubted I could have handled more than a couple, and even handling two . . . well, that could be dicey.
But I did it on my own. And I didn"t learn about the d.a.m.n things by reading a book. I learned by reading them. Watching them operate when they didn"t know I was there, hunting them down with the shotgun, blowing them apart. That"s how I learned- reading tales written in muscle and blood, or told by a wind that carried bitter scent and shadows that fell where they shouldn"t.
And you know what? I found out that those demons weren"t so different. Not really. I didn"t have to think it through much, because when you scratched off the paint and primer and got down to it those things had a spot in the food chain just like you and me. They took what they needed when they needed it, and they did their best to make sure anything below them didn"t buck the line.
If there was anything above them-well, I hadn"t seen it.
I hoped I never would.
I wouldn"t waste time worrying about it until I did.
Come August, there were fewer of those things around. Maybe that meant the world was sorting itself out. Or maybe it just meant that in my little corner I was bucking that food chain hard enough to hacksaw a couple of links.
By that time I"d probably killed fifteen of them. Maybe twenty. During a late summer thunderstorm, I tracked a hooved minotaur with centipede dreadlocks to an abandoned barn deep in the hollow. The d.a.m.n thing surprised me, nearly ripping open my belly with its black horns before I managed to jam a pitchfork through its throat. There was a gigantic worm with a dozen sucking maws; I burned it down to cinders in the water-treatment plant. Beneath the high school football stadium, a couple ratfaced spiders with a web strung across a cement tunnel nearly caught me in their trap, but I left them dying there, gore oozing from their fat bellies drop by thick drop. The bugs had a halfdozen coc.o.o.ned bloodfaces for company, all of them nearly sucked dry but still squirming in that web. They screamed like tortured prisoners when I turned my back and left them alive in the darkness.
Yeah. I did my part, all right.
I did my part, and then some.
Certain situations were harder to handle. Like when you ran into other survivors. They"d see you with a gun, and a pickup truck, and a full belly, and they"d want to know how you were pulling it off. They"d push you. Sometimes with questions, sometimes with pleas that were on the far side of desperate. I didn"t like that. To tell you the truth, it made me feel kind of sick. As soon as they spit their words my way, I"d want to s.n.a.t.c.h them out of the air and jam them back in their mouths.
Sometimes they"d get the idea, and shut up, and move on. Sometimes they wouldn"t. When that happened I had to do something about it. Choice didn"t enter in to it. When someone pushed you, you had to push back. That was just the way the world worked-before demons and after.
*ne day in late September, Barnes climbed out of his easy chair and made a field trip to the wrecked Chrysler. He took those books with him. I was so shocked when he walked out the door that I didn"t say a word.
I was kind of surprised when he made it back to the lodge at nightfall. He brought those d.a.m.n books back with him, too. Then he worked on me for a whole week, trying to get me to go out there. He said he wanted to try something and he needed some backup. I felt like telling him I could have used some backup myself on the days I"d been out dealing with those things while he"d been sitting on his a.s.s reading, but I didn"t say it. Finally I gave in. I don"t know why-maybe I figured going back to the beginning would help Barnes get straight with the way things really were.
There was no sun the day we made the trip, if you judged by what you could see. No sky either. Fog hung low over the lake, following the roads running through the hollow like they were dry rivers that needed filling. The pickup burrowed through the fog, tires whispering over wet asphalt, halogen beams cutting through all that dull white and filling pockets of darkness that waited in the trees.
I didn"t see anything worrisome in those pockets, but the quiet that hung in the cab was another story. Barnes and I didn"t talk. Usually that would have suited me just fine, but not that day. The silence threw me off, and my hands were sweaty on the steering wheel. I can"t say why. I only know they stayed that way when we climbed out of the truck on County Road 14.
Nothing much had changed on that patch of road. Corpses still lay on the asphalt-the road gang, and the bear-thing that had swallowed one of them whole before we blew it apart. They"d been chewed over by buzzards and rats and other miserable creatures, and they"d baked guts-and-all onto the road during the summer heat. You would have had a h.e.l.l of a time sc.r.a.ping them off the asphalt, because nothing that mattered had bothered with them once they were dead.
Barnes didn"t care about them, either. He went straight to the old Chrysler and hauled the dead driver from behind the steering wheel. The corpse hit the road like a sack of kindling ready for the flame. It was a sight. Crows must have been at the driver"s face, because his fishgut lips were gone. Those scarred words carved on his skin still rode his jerky flesh like wormy bits of gristle, but now they were chiseled with little holes, as if those crows had pecked punctuation.
Barnes grabbed Mr. Fishguts by his necktie and dragged him to the spot in the road where the white line should have been but wasn"t.
"You ready?" he asked.
"For what?"
"If I"ve got it figured right, in a few minutes the universe is going to squat down and have itself a bite. It"ll be one big chunk of the apple-starting with this thing, finishing with all those others."
"Those books say so?"
"Oh, yeah," Barnes said, "and a whole lot more."
That wasn"t any kind of answer, but it put a cork in me. So I did what I was told. I stood guard. Mr. Fishguts lay curled up in that busted-up fetal position. Barnes drew a skinning knife from a leather scabbard on his belt and started cutting off the corpse"s clothes. I couldn"t imagine what the h.e.l.l he was doing. A minute later, the driver"s corpse was naked, razored teeth grinning up at us through his lipless mouth.
Barnes knelt down on that unmarked road. He started to read.
First from the book. Then from Mr. Fishguts"s skin.
The words sounded like a garbage disposal running backward. I couldn"t understand any of them. Barnes"s voice started off quiet, just a whisper buried in the fog. Then it grew louder, and louder still. Finally he was barking words, and screaming them, and spitting like a h.e.l.lfire preacher. You could have heard him a quarter mile away.
That got my heart pounding. I squinted into the fog, which was getting heavier. I couldn"t see a d.a.m.n thing. I couldn"t even see those corpses glued to the road anymore. Just me and Barnes and Mr. Fishguts, there in a tight circle in the middle of County Road 14.
My heart went trip-hammer, those words thumping in time, the syllables pumping. I tried to calm down, tried to tell myself that the only thing throwing me off was the d.a.m.n fog. I didn"t know what was out there. One of those inside-out grizzlies could have been twenty feet away and I wouldn"t have known it. A rat-faced spider could have been stilting along on eight legs, and I wouldn"t have seen it until the d.a.m.n thing was chewing off my face. That minotaur thing with the centipede dreadlocks could have charged me at a dead gallop and I wouldn"t have heard its hooves on pavement . . . not with Barnes roaring. That was all I heard. His voice filled up the hollow with words written in books and words carved on a dead man"s flesh, and standing there blind in that fog I felt like those words were the only things in a very small world, and for a split second I think I understood just how those coc.o.o.ned bloodfaces felt while trapped in that rat-spider"s web.
And then it was quiet. Barnes had finished reading.
"Wait a minute," he said. "Wait right here."
I did. The deputy walked over to the Chrysler, and I lost sight of him as he rummaged around in the car. His boots whispered over pavement and he was back again. Quickly, he knelt down, rearing back with both hands wrapped around the hilt of that wroughtiron trident we"d found in the car that very first day, burying it in the center of Mr. Fishguts"s chest.
Scarred words shredded, and brittle bones caved in, and an awful stink escaped the corpse. I waited for something to happen. The corpse didn"t move. I didn"t know about anything else. There could have been anything out there, wrapped up in that fog. Anything, coming straight at us. Anything, right on top of us. We wouldn"t have seen it all. I was standing there with a shotgun in my hands with no idea where to point it. I could have pointed it anywhere and it wouldn"t have made me feel any better. I could have pulled the trigger a hundred times and it wouldn"t have mattered. I might as well have tried to shotgun the fog, or the sky, or the whole d.a.m.n universe.
It had to be the strangest moment of my life.
It lasted a good long time.
Twenty minutes later, the fog began to clear a little. A half hour later, it wasn"t any worse than when we left the lodge. But nothing had happened in the meantime. That was the worst part. I couldn"t stop waiting for it. I stood there, staring down at Mr. Fishguts"s barbed grin, at the trident, at those words carved on the corpse"s jerky flesh. I was still standing there when Barnes slammed the driver"s door of the pickup. I hadn"t even seen him move. I walked over and slipped in beside him, and he started back towards the lodge.
"Relax," he said finally. "It"s all over."
That night it was quieter than it had been in a long time, but I couldn"t sleep and neither could Barnes. We sat by the fire, waiting for something . . . or nothing. We barely talked at all. About four or five, we finally drifted off.
Around seven, a racket outside jarred me awake. Then there was a scream. I was up in a second. Shotgun in hand, I charged out of the house.
The fog had cleared overnight. I shielded my eyes and stared into the rising sun. A monster hovered over the beach-leathery wings laid over a jutting bone framework, skin clinging to its muscular body in a thin blistery layer, black veins slithering beneath that skin like st.i.tches meant to mate a devil"s muscle and flesh. The thing had a girl, her wrist trapped in one clawed talon. She screamed for help when she saw me coming, but the beast understood me better than she did. It grinned through a mouthful of teeth that jutted from its narrow jaws like nails driven by a drunken carpenter, and its gaze tracked the barrel of my gun, which was already swinging up in my grasp, the stock nestling tight against my shoulder as I took aim.
A sound like snapping sheets. A blast of downdraft from those red wings as the monster climbed a hunk of sky, wings spreading wider and driving down once more.
The motion sent the creature five feet higher in the air. The shotgun barrel followed, but not fast enough. Blistered lips stretched wide, and the creature screeched laughter at me like I was some kind of idiot. Quickly, I corrected my aim and fired.
The first shot was low and peppered the girl"s naked legs. She screamed as I fired again, aiming higher this time. The thing"s left wing wrenched in the socket as the shot found its mark, opening a pocket of holes large enough to strain sunlight. One more reflexive flap and that wing sent a message to the monster"s brain. It screeched pain through its hammered mouth and let the girl go, b.l.o.o.d.y legs and all.
She fell fast. Her anguished scream told me she understood she was already dead, the same way she understood exactly who"d killed her.
She hit the beach hard. I barely heard the sound because the shotgun was louder. I fired twice more, and that monster fell out of the sky like a kite battered by a hurricane, and it twitched some when it hit, but not too much because I moved in fast and finished it from point-blank range.
Barnes came down to the water. He didn"t say anything about the dead monster. He wanted to bury the girl, but I knew that wasn"t a good idea. She might have one of those things inside her, or a pack of bloodfaces might catch her scent and come digging for her with a shovel. So we soaked her with gasoline instead, and we soaked the winged demon, too, and we tossed a match and burned down the both of them together.
After that, Barnes went back to the house. He did the same thing to those books.
A few days later, I decided to check out the town. Things had been pretty quiet . . . so quiet that I was getting jumpy again.
They could have rolled up the streets, and it wouldn"t have mattered. To tell the truth, there hadn"t been too many folks in town to begin with, and now most of them were either dead or gone. I caught sight of a couple bloodfaces when I cruised the main street, but they vanished into a manhole before I got close.
I hit a market and grabbed some canned goods and other supplies, but my mind was wandering. I kept thinking about that day in the fog, and that winged harpy on the beach, and my deputy. Since burning those books, he"d barely left his room. I was beginning to think that the whole deal had done him some good. Maybe it was just taking some time for him to get used to the way things were. Mostly, I hoped he"d finally figured out what I"d known all along-that we"d learned everything we really needed to know about the way this world worked the day we blew apart the inside-out grizzly on County Road 14.
I figured that was the way it was, until I drove back to the house.
Until I heard screams down by the lake.
Barnes had one of the bloodfaces locked up in the boathouse. A woman no more than twenty. He"d stripped her and cuffed her wrists behind a support post. She jerked against the rough wood as Barnes slid the skinning knife across her ribs.
He peeled away a scarred patch of flesh that gleamed in the dusky light, but I didn"t say a word. There were enough words in this room already. They were the same words I"d seen in those books, and they rode the crazy woman"s skin. A couple dozen of them had been stripped from her body with Roy Barnes"s skinning knife. With her own blood, he"d pasted each one to the boathouse wall.
I bit my tongue. I jacked a sh.e.l.l into the shotgun.Barnes waved me off. "Not now, boss."Planting the knife high in the post, he got closer to the girl. Close enough to whisper in her ear. With a red finger, he pointed at the b.l.o.o.d.y inscription he"d pasted to the wall. "Read it," he said, but the woman only growled at him, snapping sharpened teeth so wildly that she shredded her own lips. But she didn"t care about spilling her own blood. She probably didn"t know she was doing it. She just licked her tattered lips and snapped some more, convinced she could take a hunk out of Barnes.
He didn"t like that. He did some things to her, and her growls became screams.
"She"ll come around," Barnes said.
"I don"t think so, Roy."
"Yeah, she will-this time I figured things out."
"You said that when you read those books."
"But she"s a book with a pulse. That"s the difference. She"s alive. That means she"s got a connection-to those lesser demons, and to the things that lord it over them, too. Every one of them"s some kind of key. But you can"t unlock a gate with a bent-up key, even if it"s the one that"s supposed to fit. That"s why things didn"t work with the driver. After he piled up that Chrysler, he was a bent-up key. He lost his pulse. She"s still got hers. If she reads the words instead of me-the words she wrote with a knife of her own-it"ll all be different."
He"d approached me while he was talking, but I didn"t look at him. I couldn"t stand to. I looked at the bloodface instead. She screamed and spit. She wasn"t even a woman anymore. She was just a naked, writhing thing that was going to end her days cuffed to a pole out here in the middle of nowhere. To think that she could spit a few words through tattered lips and change a world was crazy, as crazy as thinking that dead thing out on County Road 14 could do the job, as crazy as- "Don"t you understand, boss?"
"She digs up graves, Roy. She eats what she finds buried in them. That"s all I need to understand."
"You"re wrong. She knows-"
I raised the shotgun and blew off the bloodface"s head, and then I put another load in the her, and another. I blew everything off her skeleton that might have been a nest where a demon could grow. And when I was done with that little job I put a load in that wall, too, and all those scarred words went to h.e.l.l in a spray of flesh and wood, and when they were gone they left a jagged window on the world outside.
Barnes stood there, the girl"s blood all over his coat, the skinning knife gripped in his shaking hand.
I jacked another sh.e.l.l into the shotgun.
"I don"t want to have this conversation again," I said.
After Barnes had gone, I unlocked the cuffs and got the bloodface down. I grabbed her by her hair and rolled her into the boat. Once the boathouse doors were opened, I yanked the outboard motor cord and was on my way.
I piloted the boat to the boggy section of the lake. Black trees rooted in the water, and Spanish moss hung in tatters from the branches. It was as good a place as any for a grave. I rolled the girl into the water, and she went under with a splash. I thought about Barnes, and the things he said, and those words on the wall. And I wished he could have seen the girl there, sinking in the murk. Yeah, I wished he could have seen that straight-on. Because this was the way the world worked, and the only change coming from this deal was that some catfish were going to eat good tonight.
The afternoon waned, and the evening light came on and faded. I sat there in the boat. I might have stayed until dark, but rain began to fall-at first gently, then hard enough to patter little divots in the calm surface of the lake. That was enough for me. I revved the outboard and headed back to the lodge.
Nothing bothered me along the way, and Roy didn"t bother me once I came through the front door. He was upstairs in his room, and he was quiet . . . or trying to be.
But I heard him.
I heard him just fine.