That hunger was so big that Hartnup could not grasp its dimensions. It was the god of this thing.
The hunger was all.
And all was hunger.
The dead body in which he floated staggered on, heading down a slope, away from the road, heading into the farmland. To where the food was.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Dez woke up in the backseat of the state police cruiser. She was alone, JT was nowhere to be seen. Her hands were cuffed and her head hurt like she’d been kicked by a horse. She had been slumped over as far as the seat belt would allow, now she straightened, and just that little bit of movement sent a wave of nausea sloshing through her head and guts.
“What the hell happened?” she growled.
The windshield wipers slapped back and forth. The trooper in the front ignored her.
Dez kicked the back of the seat. “Yo! Fuckface! I asked you a question.”
Without turning, the trooper said, “I can pull over to the side of the road and tase you again, Officer Fox. Or you can behave yourself and wait until we get to your station.”
“Is that where you’re taking me?”
“Yes.”
“Why the hell didn’t you just say so? Whatever happened to professional courtesy?”
He made a sound. She thought it was a snort of laughter. She kicked the seat again.
“Hey!” he barked.
“Why did you ass-monkeys tase me in the first place? And who hit me in the head?”
“You struck your head on the counter when you fell. An accident … and I’m sorry about that. Doesn’t look serious though.”
“Feels pretty goddamn serious,” she snarled. Dez considered throwing up on the screen. That would make her stomach feel better and would really piss this guy off. But she didn’t. Instead, she asked, “What the shit is going on here?”
“You’ve been arrested, Officer Fox. I’d have thought that was clear. Even to you.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
He didn’t answer. Dez looked at her cuffed wrists. For most prisoners the chain of the cuffs would be threaded through a D ring on the floor, but they had given her the smallest slice of courtesy by cuffing her hands in front of her without attaching her to the ring. Even so, the rear doors were reinforced and could not be opened from inside. The wire mesh cage separating front from rear seat was heavy grade, and she wasn’t going to kick her way through it.
Dez looked out the rain-slick window. They were halfway across the county from the hardware store, just a couple of miles from the center of town. Stebbins was a tiny community on a massive piece of land. The “town” proper was one traffic light long. Three blocks in one direction, two in the other, and all of it clustered around a Baptist church and the public safety office — which served as the police station, post office, fire station, municipal offices, mayor’s office, and various other one-person offices. The next biggest building in town was a Bean-O’s coffee shop, a greasy spoon with aspirations of Starbuckshood.
Even on its best days Stebbins was a ghost town. The only thing that kept Stebbins from drying up and blowing away was some state and federal money for a regional elementary school that occupied the northwest corner of the township and a slightly smaller regional middle school a few miles away from the town proper — and the county hospital whose campus shared real estate with Bordentown.
They stopped at a crossroads to allow four yellow school buses to pass, heading from the middle school toward the shelter of Stebbins Little School. Dez craned her neck to look at the buses, at the pale, frightened faces pressed to each window. One of the kids, a little girl with yellow curls, waved to her. Dez waved back, needing to lift both hands to do it. Then the buses turned onto Schoolhouse Lane and were gone into the swirling gray wind.
“Where’s my partner?” Dez asked.
“You’ll see him at the station,” said the trooper.
“What’s going on? We’re the frigging police, or were you too busy looking at my tits to read the wording on my badge?”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“Fuck you and answer the question. Why arrest us?”
“You’ll have to discuss that with Lieutenant Hardy.”
“How about you stop being a total prick and tell me. What happened back there? Did you stop them?”
Nothing.
“Did you fucking stop them?”
“Stop whom?”
“What the Christ do you mean, ‘stop whom’? There were fifty of those things in the middle of the street. You had to have driven right through them.”
“I think we should get to the station and you should listen to your Miranda rights before you say anything, Officer Fox. And that
“What?”
“I don’t like seeing another cop in cuffs, and I don’t know what happened out there or why you did what you did,” he said, “but you need to have a lawyer in the room and your rights on record. That’s me talking here, cop to cop.”
Dez stared at the back of his head. The impossibility of the day had slid sideways into the surreal and she sputtered, trying to find a route of logic that would take her back onto firmer ground. She suddenly stiffened.
“You didn’t even
“See who?” he demanded again.
“Christ.” Dez tried to think it through. JT said that they were coming up the road, but he’d been hunkered down behind the pickup truck, and everyone else was in the store. The rain was getting heavy and it was dark as the devil’s asshole out there. Maybe that was it, she thought. Maybe those things lacked the brain power or imagination to seek out prey unless they saw it or heard it. Or smelled it. Walking uphill toward an empty road in a downpour, they might not have had anything to go on.
So … where did they go?
There was forest on both sides of Mason. Forest with farmland beyond it. She tried to remember if you could smell the farm animals from Mason. Probably. You could always smell cow shit.
“Did anyone go to the crime scene at Hartnup’s?”
The trooper shook his head. “You really don’t want to do this now.”
“Yes, I fucking well do, because you have me cuffed in the back of your cruiser when I should be out there. Somebody’s made a big goddamn mistake and we’d better do something before it bites us all in the ass … and that is not a frigging joke. Now pull over, undo these cuffs, and put me on the radio with someone who doesn’t have his own dick in his ear.”
The trooper sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
“For whatever happened to you. For whatever’s wrong with you. I heard you were a fuckup off the job, but I always heard that you were pretty good on the clock. What happened? No … wait. Save that for when we’re doing this right. I don’t think I want to hear it.”
Dez leaned as far forward as the cuffs would allow. “What’s your name?” she asked.
There was no need for him to stonewall her on that, so he answered, “Trooper Brian Saunders.”
“Trooper Saunders. Good. Brian. I’ve seen you around. People call me Dez.”
“I know.”
