Authors: Bentley Little
"The blood might be a little difficult, but I think I can requisition it from the hospital."
"I want you to get your families out of town," Brother Elias said.
"Take them to a safe place, away from here." He looked at the sheriff.
"Have your wife and children stay with relatives for a few days, until this is over."
Jim nodded.
The preacher looked at Gordon. "Make sure your wife is far away from this area," he said. "This is very important. She must not be here come tomorrow."
"Why?" Gordon asked.
"I cannot yet tell you. The time is not right. But you must get her away from here."
Gordon felt his mouth go dry. He imagined Marina killed, torn apart like the Selways , likeVlad . He licked his lips, looking up at the preacher.
"I don't know if she'll go. I don't know if she'll even believe all this when I tell her."
"It does not matter what you tell her as long as you get her away from here."
"It's her decision," Gordon said firmly. "I can't force her to do something she doesn't want to do."
"Take her from this town," Brother Elias said. "for the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church.. . As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands." Ephesians The preacher pulled out the Bible he had been clasping unobtrusively beneath his arm and began nipping through pages. He pulled a recently taken photograph from between two pages of the Bible, handing it to Gordon.
Gordon stared at the color photo. It had been taken near a beach somewhere. In the background, he could see the ocean. In the foreground were several dead and bloody bodies.
A tiny infant, with grinning bloody teeth, was pushing its way out of a pregnant woman's abdomen.
The implication was obvious.
Gordon handed the photo back, sickened. His rational mind wanted to protest, to label the photograph a fake, to attribute the horrible scene to darkroom trickery, but he knew the picture was genuine.
The preacher turned to Jim. "We need a camera as well," he said.
Jim reached over and grabbed a pencil. "Camera," he wrote at the end of the list. "Film."
"What exactly are we going to be doing?" Gordon asked.
But Brother Elias had moved back in front of the window and was staring out, unmoving, at the black shape of the Rim far above the town.
Ted McFarland pulled his white government-issue Pontiac into the closed and abandoned Texaco gas station next to the Colt Saloon.
Shutting off the engine and the headlights, he sat in the darkness for a few moments, staring out the windshield, thinking. He felt lonely, depressed. He knew he wasn't doing a damn bit of good on this investigation, and he could feel the resentment of the local authorities every time he tried to make a conjecture or offer an opinion. He sighed. He didn't know why Wilson had assigned anyone to this case at all. State police shouldn't have the responsibility of bailing out locals when they screwed up.
A pickup truck pulled in behind him, the bright headlights reflecting back off the rear view mirror and almost blinding him. He tilted the mirror up to keep the light out of his eyes. A minute or so later he heard the sound of the truck's doors being slammed and the sound of boots on gravel as its occupants made their way toward the bar.
He knew he should call Denise. She was probably waiting by the phone for him to call. But listening to her talk, hearing her voice, would probably only accentuate his loneliness and make him more depressed. He stared out the windshield of the car at the lighted doorway of the saloon. He could hear, from inside the building, the raucous sounds of people having a good time, the music of Charlie Daniels. He knew that, in the state he was in, if he didn't call Denise he would be likely to do something stupid, something he would later regret.
A young buxom woman wearing tight jeans and a skimpy halter top came stumbling out of the bar, her arms around a tough-looking man in a cowboy hat.
McFarland looked at her, thought for a second of Denise, then rolled up the window of the car door and got out, locking it. He walked over cracked slabs of asphalt and hopped the low, crumbling brick wall that separated the gas station from the Colt. The parking lot of the saloon was filled with pickups. A few were high riding customized jobs; a few were small foreign gas savers. But the vast majority of them were good, healthy, American stock trucks. Fords primarily. Nearly all had the obligatory trailer hitch on the rear bumper and the gun rack in the back window.
He walked into the bar. It was smoky and humid, the smell of cigarettes and beer and human body odor almost overpowering. The music was loud, too loud, and conversation appeared to be difficult if not impossible. He scanned the room for a familiar face and, seeing none, made his way toward the bar. He motioned for the bartender. One song ended, and before the next began he shouted: "Coors!"
There was a hard clap on his shoulder. McFarland jerked around. Carl Chmura, Weldon's right hand man, was standing behind him, grinning.
"Hey," he said. "How's itgoin'?" McFarland nodded as the bartender brought his beer. "All right." He stared at the deputy. CarlChmura had been one of those who had resented his presence the most, and he had made it clear that he did not want and would not accept the help of the state police, though he would comply technically with all of the sheriff's orders. Now the young deputy was smiling at him, apparently friendly, all hostility gone. Apparently, he was one of those people who could successfully separate all aspects of his job from the rest of his life-something McFarland had never been able to do.
He tried to smile at the deputy, but the smile felt strained and he was aware of the fact that it probably looked false. "So," he said, "what are you doing here?" The question was stupid, and he knew it was stupid, but he could think of nothing else to say.
Chmuratook a swig from the bottle he held in his hand. "I have the night off, I just broke up with my girlfriend, I thought I'd celebrate.
Want to join me?" He looked around the bar. A group of cowboys and their dates were two-stepping to the Marshall Tucker Band. Several unattached women stood around the fringes of the dance floor, looking around for partners. "I bet we could pick up on one of those bimbos there."
McFarland shook his head. "Not tonight. I don't really feel up to it."
Chmuragrabbed his arm, and McFarland realized that the deputy was already drunk. "Come on."
He shook his head more firmly and peeled the deputy's hand off his arm.
"I can't. I'm married."
Chmuralaughed. "That don't mean shit. I was married once, too. Who cares?"
McFarland looked at the younger man. Married and divorced? He couldn't have been any older than mid twenties McFarland shook his head and pretended to look at his watch. "Sorry. It's almost time for me to call my wife. I've got to get going." He downed his beer and stood up. He'd head back to the hotel and see what was on TV. Maybe he would call Denise. Who could tell? It might cheer him up. It certainly couldn't be worse than this. He clapped an arm onChmura's back in an expression of camaraderie he didn't feel. "I'll see you later."
"Wait," the deputy said, and there was a tinge of desperation in his eyes. "You sure you wouldn't like to just stay here and talk or something?"
McFarland shook his head. "Sorry, but I have to go. Maybe some other time."
There was a sudden jumble of loud voices in the back of the bar, near the jukebox, and both men turned to look at the disturbance.
Something slammed hard against the jukebox and the obnoxious sound of a needle being scratched over a record surface blared through the Colt's PA system.Chmura put his bottle down on the bar, hitched up his belt and grinned. "It's times like these that it's fun to be a deputy." He started toward the rear of the bar and noticed suddenly that the crowd which had been gathered there was slowly backing up toward him. One older woman abruptly turned and ran for the front door. A new song had started playing on the jukebox, a Waylon Jennings song, and Waylon's already low voice became even lower as the power plug to the jukebox was pulled out and the record slowed to a stop.
McFarland watchedChmura hesitate for a moment, patting his waist for a gun and holster that weren't there, then start slowly forward, against the tide of people. He swore to himself, wishing that he, too, had brought along some type of weapon, and reached for the deputy's bottle.
He smashed it against the bar and held the jagged edge out in front of him, moving forward to helpChmura . You could never tell what would happen in these redneck bars. You could never be too careful.
The bar was silent now, all conversation stopped, and the dancers and drinkers in the front of the building were looking curiously toward the rear, trying to figure out what was going on. Some of the other patrons were still backing up, and some were standing their ground, staring toward the door next to the jukebox, but the vast majority of them were making a hurried beeline for the front exit. McFarland followedChmura through the crowd of people and stopped.
A small infant, legless, its arms mere underdeveloped stumps, was flopping along the wooden floor of the saloon through the doorway, laughing and cackling to itself. The sound was low and barely audible, but McFarland could hear it clearly through the silence of shuffling feet and it sent a cold chill down his spine. He moved a step closer and stared at the baby. It was small, undersized, and appeared to be newly born. Its pink skin was still wet with blood, and behind it on the floor stretched a red trail, like that of a snail. Its eyes blinked rhythmically at even intervals as it flopped forward, staring at nothing. Its mouth continued its hideous cackling.
McFarland looked around at the faces of fear and disgust on the staring patrons. He would have expected, under the circumstances, that some woman in the crowd, some compassionate mother-type, would have picked up the baby, feeling sorry for it, and tried to help it. But there was something so decidedly wrong about the infant, something so evil, that he could well understand why most of the people were backing away from the creature, why some were running away. He, too, felt a primal sort of fear at the sight, and he had an instinctive desire to rush over and stomp on the thing, crushing it beneath the heel of his boot as he would a particularly large and repulsive bug.
There was a loud female scream off to the right, and McFarland looked toward the sound. Another infant, equally small and equally deformed, also laughing, was crawling through the open window at the side of the saloon. Its tiny body was halfway over the windowsill, crooked arms flailing wildly in the air. The window, he knew, overlooked a drainage ditch that ran along the side of the building to the field out back. It was a good twenty feet to the bottom.
How had the baby gotten up that high?
McFarland glanced towardChmura . The deputy was staring at the window, his face a blank expression of disbelief. Shock had apparently nullified the effects of alcohol. He turned to look at McFarland.
"What's happening?" he said.
The state policeman shook his head. He had no idea. He saw another baby crawling through the door next to the jukebox, following the red blood trail of the first. This one had a huge oversized head. In the front of the bar, near the entrance, several people screamed.
They were coming in from all sides.
McFarland looked around. The bartender had taken a sawed-off shotgun from beneath the bar and was holding it in both hands, ready to use it if something happened. He was staring at the fragmenting groups of panicked people in the saloon, confused. McFarland nodded quickly at Chmura, catching his eye, and ran over to the bar, pulling his badge from his front pocket. "State police," he said. He reached for the shotgun.
"Hold it right there, motherfucker." The bartender lowered the weapon and snaked a finger over the trigger.
"I'm a policeman," McFarland said in a louder, more authoritarian voice.
"Please let me see your weapon. Mine is out in the car."
The bartender's eyes darted quickly around the saloon and he saw, through a hole in the parting crowd, the first blood-wet infant flopping along the hardwood dance floor. His hold loosened on the shotgun, the weapon drooping, and McFarland wrenched it from his hands.
The bartender looked up at McFarland. "What is it?" he asked. His voice was quiet, subdued, filled with either terror or awe.
"I don't know," the policeman said. Holding the shotgun tightly, he started back across the floor towardChmura . Before he had reached the deputy, however, the saloon was rocked by a harsh shock wave. There was a loud metallic crash from the front of the building, and the crowd, as one, stepped slowly, silently, backward. There were no screams this time, no grunts or groans or mutterings of any kind. No one spoke. No one made a sound. There was only the quiet ragged breathing of the terrified patrons and the sickening wet slapping sounds of the strange infants as they flopped forward on the floor.