“She’s fucking whacko,” I said.
“Please.”
“Well,” Carl said. “She wasn’t acting real human or ladylike when I found her, Janie. But you can give it a try if you want.”
Carl pulled the duct tape from her mouth.
She watched us with beady, metallic eyes.
Janie put a hand on her shoulder. “Honey…” she said.
The woman flinched, screamed full in Janie’s face, then lunged forward trying to bite her. Carl knocked her to the floor, crouched on her back, and taped her mouth shut again.
“So much for that,” I said.
“She’s nuts,” Janie said. “Absolutely fucking nuts.”
Carl and I laughed our asses off.
4
Night.
We holed up in a little machine shop after a day wasted looking for better wheels than the VW. I chose the machine shop because it was defensible and set back from the street. There were even bars on the windows. If anything or anyone tried to get at us, we’d see them just fine in the moonlight and the street outside would make an excellent killzone.
I pulled up a chair before the window, cradling my Savage bolt-action. 30.06 in my lap. I was figuring there wasn’t much Gary could throw at me that I couldn’t cut down with that.
I was sitting watch. Carl was snoring in the back room with Texas. Janie was sleeping, too.
There was nothing to do but watch that empty, waiting street. Now and then I’d lean forward up against the glass and see the moon up there above the town. It was not quite full, but damn close. Just round and fat and leering like a yellow eye, its gaze painting the buildings a phosphorescent yellow.
It reminded me of when I was a kid.
There was an older girl named Mary LaPeer who had this flowing dark hair and brilliant blue eyes. I was just absolutely in love with her. Mary had a telescope and on warm summer nights she’d take it out in the backyard and look at the moon and stars, sometimes until one or two in the morning. I’d watch out my window, my heart beating with a slow and expectant roll, waiting for Mary to come out. When she did, I’d slip out my window and join her. Mary showed me the moon and Mars and the Crab Nebula one time, but no heavenly body she showed me burned brighter than the stars in my eyes when I looked at her and listened to her talk about the rings of Saturn or the misty yellow orb of Venus.
Mary was five years older than me. I was infatuated with her until the day she graduated high school and moved away, off to college. On that day, I cried and cried because I knew I’d never see her again and I didn’t. Even now the memory of that pained me, cut something open inside my belly and made me bleed. But I never forgot those summer nights or the crickets chirping, the soft whisper of Mary’s voice and the Milky Way spread out over the sky and Mary telling me that one day, her and I would travel out there. Together.
Sitting there at the window, peering off into graveyard of the world, that moon poised above, I remembered Mary and missed her and wanted to sob. Maybe I lost myself in my memories too much, because I think I drifted off.
And when I woke, the Geiger Counter was ticking madly at my feet.
There was someone out in the street.
I started in my chair and nearly fell right out of it. I blinked my eyes a few times to see if I was imagining things, but I wasn’t.
There was a girl standing out in the street looking right at me.
She was like some wraith that had burst the gates of a tomb, just thin and ragged and flyblown. And that’s when I knew she wasn’t a girl at all. That’s when something jumped in my stomach and I could smell the acrid stink of fear sweating out my pores.
She was one of the Children.
I think I tried to call out to the others, but my mouth went all rubbery like I’d just gotten a shot of Novocaine in the gums. I made a sound, but not enough of one for anybody but myself to hear. More than anything, I just sat there stiffly like something whittled from a log. Maybe I thought if I played dead, pretended I wasn’t alive, then that awful little girl out there would just go on her way. But no dice.
She saw me.
She knew I was there. Maybe she saw me move or maybe she smelled me, tasted the fear rising from me and decided she wanted more. In the dappled moonlight, I could see her just fine-the colorless hair falling to her shoulders, the gray skin and horribly seamed face that looked more like an African fetish mask than human features, something worked with a knife and chisel. Her eyes were yellow and luminous, sunk deep into exaggerated bony orbits like candles burning from the depths of mine shafts.
Breathing hard, the spit dried up in my mouth, I brought up the. 30.06 with what I thought was a careful, confident motion. But the truth was that my hands were shaking so badly I could barely hold onto the damn thing.
The girl out there had not come any closer.
She stood her ground and I stood mine.
I had to shoot her. I had to put her down. I had to spray the irradiated filth in her skull all over the pavement and I had to do it soon. Because whether it was out and out telepathy or something biochemical, when one of them knew where you were, they all knew.
But I hesitated.
I knew Carl wouldn’t have and not Texas Slim either. But even after all I’d seen and done, the various encounters I’d had with these little ghouls, I still was human enough where the idea of killing a child…or something that had once been a child…just turned something sour inside me, filled me with rot and venom, made me want to vomit out my stomach.
A voice in my head that did not belong to The Shape, but was probably simple old instinct told me, Look at that fucking thing, Rick, it’s not human, it’s not a child. It’s gray and shriveled and embalmed-looking, dusty and filthy like something that crawled from a grave. It’s walking meat, nothing more.
Great advice. I brought the gun up and I was going to kill that thing because I knew I had to. But as frightening as that child was, she was also somehow pathetic, more victim than victimizer even if she was lethal as the glowing rods pulled from a reactor core. At that moment, perhaps sensing my indecision, she brought up her hands, held them out palms up like some miserable waif begging for alms, for a couple dirty nickels to feed her starving siblings with.
Just do it, you idiot.
I sighted her in with the rifle, seeing her for what she really was: a monster. A seething, creeping horror from a pit of radioactive waste. Even at that distance, I could see those eyes perhaps too well and they seized something up inside me. Maybe they weren’t luminous exactly, but a shiny translucent silver-yellow staring from those depressions like shimmering opals planted in the sockets of a skull. There was nothing in those eyes. That were flat and dead, voids filled with a blankness, a blackness that existed, perhaps, beyond the rim of the universe.
I hesitated too long.
Her hands fell away and then one came right back up, pointing at me and her oval mouth opened like the maw of lamprey, moonlight winking off all those tiny hooked teeth. And she screamed. Made a shrill droning sound like a locust in a summer field, but loud enough to make my ears bleed.
And the others started coming.
I heard a commotion in the back room that I knew was Carl and Texas coming to do some killing.
I took aim again and put a round right into that little girl. It shattered the plate glass window and caught her right in the chest, throwing her back and down, spraying blood and meat twenty feet or more. It happened
