Richard Laymon
FLESH
This book is dedicated to Dean and Gerda Koontz,
Who consistently top
“Best-People List.”
A Loving Husband
Up the stairs three at a time, snapping open the holster and drawing his .38, still at full speed when his shoulder hit the door.
Wood splintered and burst and the door flew open.
Nobody.
He ran for the bat-wing doors.
He dove through the doors, tumbled into the kitchen, came up in a squat and took aim.
He didn’t fire.
He didn’t know what he was seeing.
The woman in the red shorts was sprawled on the floor, faceup. Faceup? She didn’t have a face. A chin maybe.
Ron was hunched over her, his face to her belly.
No one else in the kitchen.
The cellar door stood open.
“Ron? Ron, which way did he go?”
Ron lifted his head. A bleeding patch of his wife’s flesh came with it, clamped in his teeth, stretching and tearing off. He sat up straight. He stared back at Jake. His eyes were calm. He calmly chewed. Then he reached back for the shotgun.
CHAPTER ONE
Eddie, in his van, had the road to himself.
Except for the bicycle.
When he first saw the bike from the crest of the hill, it was below him and far ahead. At such a distance, he couldn’t tell much about the rider.
He knew it wasn’t a kid.
The bike was one of those high, streamlined jobs, not like you see kids pedaling around on. And the rider looked big enough to fit the bike.
Could be a teenager, Eddie thought.
Could be a gal.
Squinting, he leaned toward the windshield. The bottom of the steering wheel sank into his belly, filling the crease between his rolls of fat.
With the back of his hand, Eddie wiped his mouth.
He was halfway down the hill by now, picking up speed and closing the gap between his van and the bike.
The rider’s brown hair was somewhat long. That didn’t prove much. A lot of men wore their hair that long and longer.
But you don’t see a lot of guys in red shorts.
Eddie sped closer.
Close enough to see how the rider’s hips flared out from a small waist.
A gal, all right.
On both sides of the road were fields with trees here and there. No buildings. No people. The road ahead to where it curved and vanished was deserted. Eddie checked his side mirrors. Behind him, the road was clear.
“Her it is,” he said.
He pressed the gas pedal to the floor.
Though the rider didn’t look back, she must have heard the rising engine sound. Her bike moved to the right, gliding away from the middle of the lane and taking up a new position a yard from the road’s edge.
Eddie bore down on her.
She was hunched over her handlebars. She kept pedaling.
Her T-shirt was so tight that Eddie could see the bumps of her spine. Bare skin showed between the bottom of her shirt and the elastic band of her shorts.
Her left arm swung out. She waved Eddie by.
At the last instant, she looked back. Eddie was near enough to see that her eyes were blue.
She was very pretty.
He turned his van toward her.
Her front wheel jerked right.
He waited for her to meet the windshield.
But she was being hurled the wrong way—forward and to the right. She was no longer on the bike. She was above it, legs kicking overhead, as Eddie’s van smashed through it.
No problem, Eddie thought.
She won’t go far.
I’ll get her. Oh, yes.
His right-side tires bounced over the gravel shoulder of the road and he was about to steer back onto the pavement when he came upon a bridge.
He hadn’t even noticed it before.
He glimpsed the sign as he sped past it.
Not much of a creek.
Not much of a bridge—but it had a concrete guard wall four feet high.
CHAPTER TWO
“Are you all right?”
“Do I
She was sitting on the ground with her back to the road, her head turned to look up at him. Above her right eyebrow, the skin was scraped off to her hairline. The raw place was striped with beaded threads of blood. It was dirty, and a few bits of straw-colored weeds clung to the stickiness.
Jake sat down beside her on the edge of the ditch.
Both her knees and the front of her right thigh were in the same condition as her forehead. Her right arm hung between her legs, knuckles against the ground. She held the arm with her other hand while it shook. She
