We kept going. Another street, plodding along. More wrecks, more staring empty buildings. Drifts of sand in the street. A light breeze that smelled dirty and low. I watched Texas Slim watch Gremlin and wondered what was going through his mind.
“Years ago,” Texas was saying, “I worked at a quaint little establishment called the Horas Brothers Family Mortuary in Lafayette. That’s in Louisiana, Carl, case you were wondering.”
“Yeah, I know where the hell it is.”
“I had…well, gotten myself into some difficulties with a young lady in New Iberia and it necessitated that I seek gainful employment to pay my child support, you understand,” he said, chuckling to himself. “Well, one day we received the body of a criminal named Tommy Carbone. He was known in underworld circles as Tommy the Tripod and the reason for that should be quite obvious. Anyhow, this poor soul died in prison. Apparently…and you’ll excuse me, Janie…all this poor man did was masturbate three, four, five times a day, I learned. And then it became worse and it was every hour on the hour. In his cell, the prison workshop, the dining hall. Finally, the prison authorities took him to the infirmary and strapped him down. Poor Tommy. He laid there hour after hour with that quite mammoth penis of his standing straight up.
“Finally, he went into convulsions and died and then he came to us. The problem was, you see, that his large and particularly ungainly member was still quite hard. Death will do that, you see. Even after we suctioned the blood from him, it would not lay down like a good dog. Well…we had a sheet thrown over him and it looked like a tent. As it was, his manhood being so long, we simply couldn’t close the lid on the casket so, necessity being the mother of invention-”
“Do we have to hear this?” Janie said, slapping at a fly.
“-we used a rotary saw to cut it off. I’ll never forget that day as long as I lived when I felled that high timber. I felt just like a lumberjack. Timber! I cried when it came crashing to earth. Of course, the director, Archie Horas, being a man of the most morbid imagination, had that gargantuan member stuffed, shellacked, and made into a fine walking stick.”
“Oh, shut up,” Carl told him. “A walking stick. Jesus Christ.”
“I smell smoke,” Janie said.
I did, too. It could’ve been a good thing and it could’ve been a bad thing.
“Let’s follow it,” Gremlin said. “Might be somebody cooking grub.”
“And could be somebody cooking somebody else,” Carl pointed out.
“All right,” I said, a headache beginning to thread its way through my skull. “Let’s shitcan the talking for awhile. Everybody keep their eyes open. We gotta find something here.”
And we did as we reached the western edge of the city, skirting what had once been Tolleston and moving north towards Westbrook across West 6^th and Taft. The stink of smoke grew very heavy.
“Just ahead,” Carl said.
Plumes of smoke were rising over the roofs of buildings.
And there was something on the warm, dusty wind: the stink of death.
15
I took point, ready for just about anything.
In the overcast sky above, I saw birds circling: crows, buzzards.
I led my posse down an alley and around the collapsed remains of a building which had fallen into its own gaping cellar. There was water down there, black and clogged with leaves.
Scanning what lay ahead with my rifle, I said, “C’mon. Move slow. Move quiet.”
There was rubble in the streets, of course, the fire-scarred facades of buildings, buses and cars and trucks scattered about, some smashed, other overturned, many just rusted to hulks of iron in which birds and rats nested. But it wasn’t just this or the bullet-pocked storefronts, the broken glass, and rivers of sand blown over everything.
There were bodies. Fresh ones.
At least a dozen bodies in the street in every imaginable state of mutilation. Some were missing arms or legs, one woman looked like she had been partially skinned. Another had apparently been trying to crawl beneath an overturned truck and somebody had pinned her to the ground with a homemade spear shaft.
I led the way in with my. 30.06 and the others fell in behind, Carl and Texas Slim flanking them, ready to start busting.
“You know what happened here, don’t you?” Texas Slim said.
And I did, all right. But I had other things on my mind and I wasn’t spending any effort thinking about it, doing anything that might divert my attention from what might be waiting out there in the wreckage and the shadowy ruins of buildings. The stench of recent death was in the air. Flies were buzzing in clouds, carrion crows circling high overhead. Three of four cars were burning and I was guessing that they had been running before this happened.
We came upon a young couple spread-eagle in the street. There was blood all over their naked, pale bodies. They had been decapitated, the heads nowhere in sight. Flies swarmed over the stumps of their necks. With a sickening lurch in my stomach, I figured that some of that blood was from what had happened to them before their heads were chopped off.
I was not only sick to my stomach now, I was pissed off. And getting more pissed off by the minute. We moved around a pickup truck that was still blazing with a sharp stink of burning rubber, plastic, and oil. Smoke twisted in the air, ground mist blowing around in damp sheets.
“Oh, God,” Janie said.
There was a heap of bodies on the sidewalk. All of them were naked. They had been slashed and hacked and disemboweled, dumped here in a bloody heap of limbs and staring, sightless faces. Their eyes had been carved out, noses slit free, and the bleeding ovals of their mouths bore witness to the fact that their teeth had been yanked. And every one of them had been crudely scalped.
“Fucking Clans,” Carl said.
Yeah, it was true. The Hatchet Clans always scalped their victims. People said they wore belts and sashes of scalps. Nobody but them came through an area and butchered like this. The Scabs and the other gangs of crazies were violent and bloodthirsty, but they were not this methodical, this viciously creative. The Hatchet Clans were-as Sean had pointed out-like army ants on the march, killing and destroying everything in their path. I knew little about them other than that they were brutal and deranged beyond belief. And that they came in numbers, in huge mobs like swarms of locusts come to devour a field. I didn’t know what held them together, whether it was some social or religious grouping or just a shared bond of insanity.
One thing was for sure: they were tribal and they had gone native. I had heard they were all infected by some kind of morbid fungus. Maybe that was it. Beyond that, they were sinister and smart. They liked to set up ambushes, draw you in by sacrificing a few of their own. Make you think you had the upper hand and then storm in by the hundreds and overrun you.
Everyone was very tense. Other than the Children or the risk of Fevers, nothing could inspire terror like these guys.
We found seven heads, mostly women’s, that had been arranged in some kind of spiraling circle on the hood of a sedan. Symbols were painted in blood on their foreheads. Two men were laying in front of an apartment building. They had been dismembered completely…then with a wicked sense of humor, their torsos and attendant limbs had been arranged in proper anatomical order…just no longer connected.
From a street sign a woman had been hanged by the feet, her fingertips just brushing the pavement. She had been eviscerated, her body cavity hollowed right out. Her breasts had been cut off, her scalp and deathmask peeled free. On her back were more bloody symbols of the sort we were beginning to see everywhere…on dusty windows, car hoods, sidewalks not covered in sand. They looked almost runic and there was something especially frightening about that.
“Goddamn Gary,” Carl said. “This place has always been nothing but a shithole. I told you that when we came in. Fucking sewer. It wasn’t much before the bombs and it ain’t much now.”
