Nothing bothered me along the way, and Roy didn't bother me once I came through the front door. He was upstairs in his room, and he was quiet. or trying to be.
But I heard him.
I heard him just fine.
Up there in his room, whispering those garbage-disposal words while he worked them into his own flesh with the skinning knife. That's what he was doing. I was sure of it. I heard his blood pattering on the floorboards the same way that rat-spiders' blood had pattered the cement floor in the football stadium. Sure it was raining outside, but I'd heard rain and I'd heard blood and I knew the difference.
Floorboards squealed as he shifted his weight, and it didn't take much figuring to decide that he was standing in front of his dresser mirror. It went on for an hour and then two, and I listened as the rain poured down. And when Deputy Barnes set his knife on the dresser and tried to sleep, I heard his little mewling complaints. They were much softer than the screams of those cocooned bloodfaces, but I heard them just the same.
Stairs creaked as I climbed to the second floor in the middle of the night. Barnes came awake when I slapped open the door. A black circle opened on his bloody face where his mouth must have been, but I didn't give him a chance to say a single word.
'I warned you,' I said, and then I pulled the trigger.
When it was done, I rolled the deputy in a sheet and dragged him down the stairs. I buried him under the swing set. By then the rain was falling harder. It wasn't until I got Barnes in the hole that I discovered I didn't have much gas in the can I'd gotten from the boathouse. I drenched his body with what there was, but the rain was too much. I couldn't even light a match. So I tossed a road flare in the hole, and it caught for a few minutes and sent up sputters of blue flame, but it didn't do the job the way it needed to be done.
I tried a couple more flares with the same result. By then, Roy was disappearing in the downpour like a hunk of singed meat in a muddy soup. Large river rocks bordered the flowerbeds that surrounded the lodge, and I figured they might do the trick. One by one I tossed them on top of Roy. I did that for an hour, until the rocks were gone. Then I shoveled sand over the whole mess, wet and heavy as fresh cement.
It was hard work.
I wasn't afraid of it.
I did what needed to be done, and later on I slept like the dead.
And now, a month later, I tossed and turned in Barnes's bed, listening to that old swing set squeak and squeal in the wind and in my dreams.
The brittle sound of gunfire wiped all that away. I came off the bed quickly, grabbing Barnes's.45 from the nightstand as I hurried to the window. Morning sunlight streamed through the trees and painted reflections on the glass, but I squinted through them and spotted shadows stretching across the beach below.
Bloodfaces. One with a machete and two with knives, all three of them moving like rabbits flushed by one mean predator.
Two headed for the woods near the edge of the property. A rattling burst of automatic gunfire greeted them, and the bloodfaces went to meat and gristle in a cloud of red vapor.
More gunfire, and this time I spotted muzzle flash in the treeline, just past the place where I'd stacked a cord of wood the summer before. The bloodface with the machete saw it, too. He put on the brakes, but there was no place for him to run but the water or the house.
He wasn't stupid. He picked the house, sprinting with everything he had. I grabbed the bottom rail of the window and tossed it up as he passed the swing set, but by the time I got the.45 through the gap he was already on the porch.
I headed for the door, trading the.45 for my shotgun on the way. A quick glance through the side window in the hallway, and I spotted a couple soldiers armed with M4 carbines breaking from the treeline. I didn't have time to worry about them. Turning quickly, I started down the stairs.
What I should have done was take another look through that front window. If I'd done that, I might have noticed the burrowedup tunnel in the sand over Roy Barnes's grave.
It was hard to move slowly, but I knew I had to keep my head. The staircase was long, and the walls were so tight the shotgun could easily cover the narrow gap below. If you wanted a definition of dangerous ground, that would be the bottom of the staircase. If the bloodface was close — his back against the near wall, or standing directly beside the stairwell — he'd have a chance to grab the shotgun barrel before I entered the room.
A sharp clatter on the hardwood floor below. Metallic. like a machete. I judged the distance and moved quickly, following the shotgun into the room. And there was the bloodface. over by the front door. He'd made it that far, but no further. And it wasn't gunfire that had brought him down. No. Nothing so simple as a bullet had killed him.
I saw the thing that had done the job, instantly remembering the sounds I'd heard during the night — the scrapes and scrabbles I'd mistaken for nesting birds scratching in the chimney. The far wall of the room was plastered with bits of carved skin, each one of them scarred over with words, and each of those words had been skinned from the thing that had burrowed out of Roy Barnes's corpse.
That thing crouched in a patch of sunlight by the open door, naked and raw, exposed muscles alive with fresh slashes that wept red as it leaned over the dead bloodface. A clawed hand with long nails like skinning knives danced across a throat slashed to the bone. The demon didn't look up from its work as it carved the corpse's flesh with quick, precise strokes. It didn't seem to notice me at all. It wrote one word on the dead kid's throat. and then another on his face. and then it slashed open the bloodface's shirt and started a third.
I fired the shotgun and the monster bucked backwards. Its skinning knife nails rasped across the doorframe and dug into the wood. The thing's head snapped up, and it stared at me with a headful of eyes. Thirty eyes, and every one of them was the color of muddy water. They blinked, and their gaze fell everywhere at once — on the dead bloodface and on me, and on the words pasted to the wall.
Red lids blinked again as the thing heaved itself away from the door and started toward me.
Another lid snapped opened on its chin, revealing a black hole.
One suck of air and I knew it was a mouth.
I fired at the first syllable. The thing was blasted back, barking and screaming as it caught the door frame again, all thirty eyes trained on me now, its splattered chest expanding as it drew another breath through that lidded mouth just as the soldiers outside opened fire with their M4s.
Bullets chopped through flesh. The thing's lungs collapsed and a single word died on its tongue. Its heart exploded. An instant later, it wasn't anything more than a corpse spread across a puddle on the living room floor.
'Hey, Old School,' the private said. 'Have a drink.'
He tossed me a bottle, and I tipped it back. He was looking over my shotgun. 'It's mean,' he said, 'but I don't know. I like some rock 'n' roll when I pull a trigger. All you got with this thing is rock.'
'You use it right, it does the job.'
The kid laughed. 'Yeah. That's all that matters, right? Man, you should hear how people talk about this shit back in the Safe Zone. They actually made us watch some lame-ass stuff on the TV before they choppered us out here to the sticks. Scientists talking, ministers talking. like we was going to talk these things to death while they was trying to chew on our asses.'
'I met a scientist once,' the sergeant said. 'He had some guy's guts stuck to his face, and he was down on his knees in a lab chewing on a dead janitor's leg. I put a bullet in his head.'
Laughter went around the circle. I took one last drink and passed the bottle along with it.
'But, you know what?' the private said. 'Who gives a shit, anyway? I mean, really?'
'Well,' another kid said. 'Some people say you can't fight something you can't understand. And maybe it's that way with these things. I mean, we don't know where they came from. Not really. We don't even know what they are.'
'Shit, Mendez. Whatever they are, I've cleaned their guts off my boots. That's all I need to know.'
'That works today, Q, but I'm talking long term. As in: what about tomorrow, when we go nose-to-nose with
