The Dead Town

again.

The draperies were not closed over the windows, and Frost moved along the porch, checking out those rooms flush with warm light. He saw no one, but in the living room, evidence of recent violence caught his attention: an overturned needlepoint chair, a figured-bronze lamp that had been knocked off an end table, a ginger- jar lamp on which the pleated-silk shade had been knocked askew, and a cracked mirror above the fireplace.

After he called Dagget’s attention to these signs of a struggle, they went around to the back door, which featured four panes in the top, only half-covered by sheer curtains. On the kitchen floor lay scattered knives, a meat cleaver, a few pots and pans, and shattered dishes.

The door was locked. Dagget unzipped his ski jacket, drew his pistol, tapped the barrel hard against the glass, broke a pane, and reached inside to disengage the deadbolt.

The blanketed night and the thick falling snow muffled sound so much that Frost doubted a neighbor would have been alerted by the cracking of glass. He drew his pistol and followed Dagget into the kitchen, closing the door behind them.

The house was as silent as a dream of deafness.

Bracketing doorways, taking turns crossing thresholds, they searched the ground floor. By the time they arrived at last in the living room, they had found no one.

A cascade of sweet clear notes put an end to the creepy silence as Tweetie, in his cage, greeted them. In spite of the circumstances, Frost found the birdsong cheerful and even calming, perhaps because he was reminded of the parrots and other feathered denizens of the equatorial jungle in his past life.

“What neighborhood of Hell is this?” Dagget muttered.

Frost’s attention dropped from the bright yellow bird to a furry blue bedroom slipper lying beside the overturned needlepoint chair. He required a moment to realize that the footwear was not what had inspired Dagget’s question. Beyond the slipper lay a bare foot with toenails painted candy-apple red. A woman’s slender foot with well-formed toes and a delicate arch. Severed at the ankle.

Severed was not the right word because it implied a blade. The flesh and bone were neither clean-cut, as they might have been if the dismembering weapon were a razor-edged sword, nor ragged and splintered, as any kind of saw would have left them. The stump looked both glazed and finely pitted, as if dissolved but simultaneously cauterized by an acid.

Dagget settled on one knee beside that grisly object, to examine it closely. He spoke in a murmur: “It’s damn pale, isn’t it? Skin as white as plaster. No visible surface veins or arteries. The exposed flesh … it’s as pale as halibut. As if all the blood was sucked out of it.”

Not a drop of gore marred the carpet around the foot.

Leaning closer, Dagget said, “The flesh isn’t pitted exactly. It looks … as if it’s been chewed on by a million tiny teeth.”

“Don’t touch it,” Frost whispered.

“I don’t intend to,” Dagget assured him. “It’s evidence.”

Frost’s admonition had nothing to do with a concern about contaminating evidence. The foot looked so strange that he wondered if they could be contaminated by it.

Although Tweetie had most likely continued to sing, for a while Frost had not been aware of the canary. The trilling notes reclaimed his attention, but instead of being cheerful, as before, they sounded thin and shrill and bleak.

“What now?” Frost wondered.

“Upstairs.”

Leaving the living room through an archway, entering the foyer, they discovered part of a hand.

Chapter 14

As Teague took them on a quick tour of the house — the residence of Hank and Dolly Samples — he brought them up to speed regarding what happened at the country-music nightclub earlier in the evening. Considering his certainty about the extraterrestrial identity of their adversaries, Carson wondered how she and Michael would be able to convince these people that their interpretation of events was incorrect.

The men of the Riders in the Sky Church were distributing guns and supplies of ammunition at key defense points throughout the house, fortifying and barring most windows with spaced two-by-fours that were screwed to the interior casings, allocating compact fire extinguishers that they routinely carried in their pickups and SUVs, and taking every precaution they could think of to make the house as much of a fortress as possible.

Meanwhile, the womenfolk were in the kitchen and dining room with the younger children, turning mountains of groceries, brought from other less defendable houses, into pasta salads, potato salads, and casseroles. These could be stored in both the kitchen and garage refrigerators, ready to feed on demand everyone here gathered.

Three portable generators, fueled with gasoline, were being tied into the house’s electrical system to ensure refrigeration and microwave-oven availability if Rainbow Falls lost its power supply. Because the heating-oil tank had been filled only two days earlier, they could keep the furnace going for at least a month.

No one expected this war of the worlds to last anywhere near a month. Either the Lord would support humanity in the quick and utter defeat of these obviously godless invaders from a far world ruled by Satan, or this must be Armageddon. If this was in fact the final conflict, it would surely be swift because ultimate Good and ultimate Evil were clashing head-on, at last, and the latter could not endure more than a single pitched battle with the former.

After Teague delivered them to the spacious and busy kitchen to meet Dolly Samples, he went away to rejoin the guards patrolling the perimeter of the property. Although Dolly was industriously rolling out one disc of dough after another, making pumpkin pies—“End Times or not End Times, a well-made pumpkin pie lifts the heart and gives us fortitude”—she insisted on getting mugs of coffee and homemade sugar cookies for them.

Carson noticed that to one side of Dolly’s pie fixings lay a.38 Colt revolver. The other women working in the kitchen were talking with one another about the recent events at the roadhouse but also sharing such mundane things as fine details of recipes and their children’s latest escapades. They also had serious weapons near at hand: a SIG P245, a Smith & Wesson Model 1076, a Smith & Wesson 640.38 Special pocket revolver, a Super Carry Pro.45 ACP from Kimber Custom Shop.…

They exhibited determination but no desperation, concern and diligence but no obvious fear. There were preparations to be made, work to be done, and busy hands meant busy minds that had no time for dread or despair.

The coffee tasted fabulous. The sugar cookies were divine.

“There were two kinds of these hateful creatures,” Dolly explained as she returned to her pie dough. “The first looked like people we knew, and you would think they would be the worst because they’re deceivers among us, children of the Father of Lies. But when they revealed their true nature by their actions, we could deal with them. They tried to shoot some of us, but we were faster on the draw, and they could be killed. It takes some real good shooting. One well-placed bullet, even point-blank, won’t do it.”

As she picked up a disc of dough and conformed it to a pie pan, Dolly glanced at a framed painting on the wall above the dinette table: Jesus in white robes and cowboy boots, riding a horse that was rearing dramatically on its hind legs. Instead of a cowboy hat, the Son of God wore a halo.

“The Lord was surely with us at Pickin’ and Grinnin’, or we’d all be dead now. We can’t claim it was our shooting skills alone that saved us.”

“But God helps those who help themselves,” Michael said. “And the right gun can provide a lot of self- help.”

Carson noticed with some relief that in the painting Jesus wasn’t packing a pistol.

Dolly said, “The second kind of monster looks like people, too, but not ordinary people. They’re as beautiful as angels. They look as good as Donny and Marie Osmond back when they were young and you just couldn’t take your eyes off them.”