I studied my posse each in turn.
Good old Carl, always at my side. Just like Mickey said, my loyal watchdog. Texas Slim, perpetually amused by all around him. Mickey, eyes burning hot and salacious, always ready to please. Janie, her love grown cold, nursing secrets and resentments. And Morse, just crazy as crazy got, fooling with his camera. I think I was attached to them in one way or another and that’s why I wanted them gone.
But I knew they wouldn’t leave.
Because something was out there and they wanted to see it, too.
7
We walked into town that first day, armed to the teeth. I needed to see Bitter Creek up close and personal. I wanted to know what it looked like and felt like and smelled like.
We found our first corpse within the hour.
Some guy twisted up in the grass, a four-leafed clover tattooed on his right bicep. It hadn’t brought him any luck at all. He was slashed open, burnt, crushed…almost looked like he’d fallen out of a burning plane a half a mile up. But that wasn’t it. His death had been ugly and brutal, certainly, but it had nothing to do with planes because there were no more planes. Just like there were no more trains or baseball games or TV. Not much of anything, you came right down to it.
Just the six of us.
We were crouched in a cornfield, watching the little town below us in the valley. There was a sign ahead on the side of the road, its Day-Glo surface blasted with bullet holes. BITTER CREEK, it said. And beneath that: CLASS C BASKETBALL CHAMPS 1996.
I wondered if Lucky had played basketball.
I figured he hadn’t. He was so mangled and misused it was hard to tell if he was thirty or sixty, but with that tattoo, I figured he was some kind of tough. Guys with tattoos are always trying to tell the world something. But this guy? What was he saying? Not much. He looked like something you scraped off the bottom of your oven. But that tattoo was unscathed. Go figure.
Carl said, “I figure this guy ran out of luck.”
“Sure as hell,” Texas said.
There were lots of things that could have killed the guy, but we all knew the Children had gotten him. When they got their hands on someone they always left them looking like this.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s go. Let’s find out what all this is about.”
Morse took a couple pictures with his Nikon and nobody mentioned the fact.
We cut back to the road and followed it towards town. We hadn’t gone too far when we came to yet another gruesome sight: scarecrows. A ring of scarecrows circled the town like a noose. Except, of course, they weren’t scarecrows exactly, but mummified human corpses that had been picked by birds, blown by the dry wind and baked in the sun. The crosses they’d been nailed to were very tall, maybe twenty feet, and they rose high above us like the masts of galleons.
“Looks like a warning,” Carl said. “Something to scare outsiders off.”
Morse got a few shots of them.
“I don’t think it’s anything quite that simple,” Janie said, but would elaborate no more.
She was becoming increasingly mysterious and mystical. But, all that aside, I had to agree with her. This was no warning. Not exactly. I was thinking more along the lines of an offering. I wondered if those poor bastards had even been dead when they were nailed to the crosses. I decided I didn’t want to know.
I stood there, smoking a cigarette with Carl, staring up at them, senseless and transfixed
“You boys might want to watch those cigarettes,” Texas Slim said. He pushed a boot down into the yellow grass. The grasses crunched, broke apart into tiny fragments. “Awful dry here. Awful dry. One dropped match or cigarette…”
I could imagine the place burning and it made me smile. Because even then, hovering at its perimeter, I knew it was nothing but a vile pesthole. It had the same atmosphere as a plague pit.
“Be a shame,” Mickey said.
The six of us rounded the crest of a hill and, stretched out below us, was Bitter Creek. It wasn’t much. Maybe it had held four or five thousand at one time, but that was before the bombs fell. Just another drop of a town in the puddle of Nebraska. A little place surrounded by cornfields.
Mickey grabbed my arm as we started down. “Be careful,” she said. “We all need to be careful now.”
I knew it, too.
The town was just another graveyard, yet I knew it was special. Some how. Some way.
“Where’s that facility that Price told you about?” Carl asked me. “The germ warfare place?”
“Probably outside town somewhere. We’ll look for it tomorrow,” I told him, tuning into the psychic shortwave of the town and feeling its dead immensity settling into me. It was like putting your ear up to the wall of a tomb.
No one said anything as we entered the city limits. There were no signs of anything alive. But there was a smell in the air: death. A putrescent blanket that covered us, suffocating us with its heat and heaviness.
“Mmm, that air,” Carl said. “Nothing smells quite like Nebraska.”
The streets were lined with rusting cars and debris, the gutters clogged with brown leaves and broken glass. The sun was high in the sky in a hazy, filmy pocket, reflecting off the filthy glass fronts of the main drag. All of which had white crosses painted on them. The military had done that in Youngstown, I remembered, when they cleared houses of plague bodies. But I didn’t think that’s what this was about. This was something even darker, something pagan at its roots, something more along the line of hex signs.
A police car with flat tires and an imploded windshield stood watch on the outskirts. Behind the wheel there was a skeleton in soiled rags. A silver badge winked on its chest. It was not the only skeleton we saw. There were others sitting on benches, laying in the grass, even parked in chairs behind the windows of businesses. I rather doubt they had died in that state; someone had arranged them that way.
“I smell something,” Mickey said.
I was waiting for Texas or Carl to crack a joke about that, but no one spoke. I could smell something, too. Putrescence, surely, but this was something almost worse: the stench of disease and drainage, hospital dressings foul with seepage and gangrene.
We came to something like a village green and it was crowded with people who were sitting or sprawled on the ground, huddled tightly together like beggars. Many of them were dead, but many were not. The living ones saw us, but did not speak.
We kept our distance.
“They’re full of the Fevers,” Texas said.
There was no doubt of it. Faces were ulcerated, pocked with sores, cracked open like dry earth and running with bile. Eyes were blood-red and glazed. Limbs contorted. Bodies bursting with blood. They were coughing and sucking in rattling breaths. There had to a hundred or more and all of them burning hot with Ebola-X, plague, cholera, anthrax, diseases I could not begin to identify. They gathered in a pool of their own drainage and filth like people at an open air festival waiting for the first band to take the stage.
I had to wonder who or what they were waiting for.
“I’m thinking we shouldn’t linger,” Mickey said.
We moved on.
8
We walked down those empty, leaf-blown streets of Bitter Creek and I knew we weren’t alone. We were being watched and it wasn’t by The Shape, even though I could feel my significant other getting nearer. It was
