the sleeve of his shirt and drew the sharp edge of the remaining crucifix across Gordon's arm in a series of three quick slices.
Blood welled from the wounds, but Gordon felt nothing. His mind was shocked into numbness. He stared down at his bare arm, watching the rivers of red flow and grow.
Brother Elias raised the dried form of the fetus to his lips. He bit off the tiny head, chewing and swallowing it down before bending to Gordon's arm and licking clean the top cut, lapping up the blood.
Gordon did not even flinch. He stared in shocked silence, feeling nothing. It was as if the entire ordeal were happening to someone else. When Brother Elias raised his head, Gordon could see that the top wound had completely disappeared.
'Now you!' the preacher shouted, nodding toward Jim. He held forward the remainder of the fetus's body.
The sheriff's arms and hands were shaking with fear and revulsion, but he found himself, almost against his will, bending down to take a bite of the tiny dried form. His mouth closed upon the upper torso of the unborn infant, and the torso snapped cleanly off. He could taste dust and dirt and mold. He found himself chewing.
'Drink!' Brother Elias commanded, guiding the sheriff's head toward one of the freely flowing cuts on Gordon's arm.
Jim opened his mouth and began licking the blood. He had prepared himself for the worst, but he found to his surprise that the blood had no taste at all. As he lapped it up, he felt a warm strength settle inside him. Beneath his tongue, Gordon's wound healed.
He straightened up, looking first at Gordon's blank face, then at the approving countenance of Brother Elias. His gaze shifted to Father Andrews, and his heart lurched in his chest. Next to the priest, wavering and unclear but becoming ever more distinct, was a familiar white human form. As he watched, the form came into focus, taking definite shape.
Don Wilson.
He stared at the boy, meeting his eyes, trying to make contact, but Don did not seem to see him. The sheriff glanced quickly back at Brother Elias, but the preacher only nodded silently.
Now Gordon was taking a bite of the fetus, chewing upon the dried dusty body. As he swallowed, a light came back into his eyes, his face once again became animated.
He followed the sheriff's gaze and saw the form of the boy coming into focus. The boy was wearing the same clothes he had worn in Gordon's dream. His eyes snapped back to Brother Elias, but the preacher was already stepping toward Father Andrews.
'It's your turn!' Brother Elias shouted above the wind. 'Hurry! We are almost out of time!' The priest looked up. No. He could not. He had watched both Brother Elias and the sheriff participate in this sacrilegious inverse of the Eucharist. He had seen them act out this unholy ritual, and though he felt intuitively that Brother Elias knew what he was doing, he could not bring himself to follow suit. It felt wrong to him.
It felt evil.
A small hand gently grasped his own, slender fingers intertwining with his own larger thicker fingers, and he looked down to see a boy, not more than eleven or twelve, looking up at him. There was an innocent radiance in the youngster's face, and Father Andrews felt the negative resolve fade away within him. He glanced toward Gordon and the sheriff and was shocked to find them staring at the boy next to him. They saw him too!
But that was not possible. Even as he felt the boy's hand squeeze his own, he realized that the figure was not real.
'It is your turn,' Brother Elias repeated.
Moving as if through water, hardly aware of what he was doing, allowing the gentle pull of the boy's hand to guide him forward, Father Andrews bent down to accept the last portion of the fetus's body. He opened his mouth to accept the small dried legs.
He licked the blood off Gordon's remaining wound.
The figure of the boy faded slowly from sight.
Brother Elias placed the final cross, the one he had used to cut Gordon's arm, into the ground at his feet next to the others. The earth lurched beneath them. 'I must now confront the adversary!' he announced. He gestured toward the ring of blood surrounding the field of crosses. 'We are protected against any nonphysical manifestations as long as we remain within the circle.' He looked at Gordon and the sheriff. 'But we are not protected against anything physical. The adversary knows this. So whatever it attacks us with will be real.' He pointed toward the white crosses. 'Shoot whatever comes up there.
Shoot the hell out of it. You must protect us until the ritual is over or we will fail.'
He bowed his head. 'Let us pray.'
There was a high-pitched shrieking, but they all ignored it, bowing their heads. The preacher recited the Lord's Prayer and the rest of them mouthed the words. Immediately after, with their heads still bowed, Brother Elias chanted a prayer that was harsh, guttural, and entirely inhuman. He raised his head and traced in the air before him a cross, a spiral, and a geometric shape.
Gordon looked at the preacher, whose eyes seemed to be filled with an unfamiliar emotion--Fear?
He pointed to the left side of the graveyard. 'You station yourself there,' he told Gordon. He spoke quickly, urgently. 'You stay there,'
he told Jim, pointing to the opposite side.
Both men ran to their positions.
And the ground split open, the white crosses falling over.
'Jesus!' Gordon screamed.
Clawing its way up from the ground was a gigantic infant, easily as big as a large cow. Its skin was rotted and peeling, a disgusting bluish gray. Gordon could see exposed veins throbbing in its temples. A portion of its face had rotted away, leaving only skull. This was not one of the clearly supernatural creatures they had encountered at the dump. This was obviously a corpse that had been reanimated, a dead baby that had been allowed to nurture and grow in the ground underneath Milk Ranch Point for decades. Huge fingers, dripping with slime and dead skin, grasped the crumbling ground.
Jim aimed his rifle and shot the huge infant full in the face. The bullet passed through the monstrous head, sending shattered fragments of bone and skin flying. Black blood began to ooze from the wound.
Jim reloaded, aimed and fired again. And again. And again and again and again.
The huge creature fell, its head a shattered mass of pulpy flesh. The ground was littered with black blood.
Another huge infant pushed its way up from the ground on the far side of the graveyard and another crawled over the dead and bleeding body of the first.
Were these the babies who had been buried here? Jim wondered. He thought of his great-grandfather, Ezra Weldon, whom he had never met.
Was this what had happened last time?
He loaded his rifle and fired again.
By this time, Gordon had regained his senses and was firing his own weapon at the monstrous creatures. They can be killed, he kept repeating to himself. They are real. They are physical beings. His first bullet missed, but the rest found their marks. The targets were too big not to hit.
Brother Elias and Father Andrews stood staring at each other as the ground erupted around them and the living corpses of the gigantic infants pushed their way to the surface. Hot wind whipped against their faces, bringing with it the rotten odor of decay. The priest closed his eyes as he felt an unwelcome and unfamiliar power pressing in on him, straining against his closed senses, trying to find a crack in the psychic block he had constructed in his mind.
'Open yourself!' Brother Elias commanded.
The priest closed himself off tight, protecting himself. The air around him was thick and heavy with the force of power. He could feel the evil closing in on him, and the monstrousness of it made everything he had ever felt before pale by comparison. He began to shake, feeling the pressure increase around him.
'Open yourself!' Brother Elias screamed.
My time is near, Father Andrews thought, recalling the verse from the Bible. I am ready to sacrifice myself.
