Tommy said, “Jamming our frequencies, my white ass.”
He made a big show of looking around on the floor.
“What the hell are you doing?” Mitch asked him.
“You smell that perfume? Christ my eyes are watering and my nuts have shriveled up. Just checking the floor to see if she left a puddle.”
They both laughed, but there was something almost nervous about that laughter. Tommy was looking a little tense like maybe he would have felt a lot better right now if he had just drilled Hot Tamale right in the face and been done with it.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Mitch said.
And that’s what they were about to do when they heard the sound of squealing rubber and somebody screamed and a Dodge Intrepid came vaulting the curb, knocking the front end of Mitch’s Jeep aside and slamming right through the front of the store.
And then all hell broke lose.
6
Some distance from Crandon, in the flooded and smelling byways of River Town, the corpse of Meg Sheeves had been adrift for almost two days. What had come into her house that night, a dripping and faceless thing freshly exhumed from a watery grave at Hillside Cemetery, had been quite merciful, all things considered. There were many things it could have done to her as she began to scream her mind away in a shriek of black noise. Many horrible things. But what it did, it did almost instinctively, and this just to silence her. It placed a single moldering and oozing hand over her mouth and held it there until she stopped moving. Until there was only the slushy sound of its own breathing and rain striking the windows.
Meg, quite dead, sat there in bed, her blue eyes wide and panicked and lifeless. And what had been growing in her womb these eight months died with her.
Then, for no other reason than sheer amusement, Meg’s corpse was tossed out the window and into the water. Where it had been drifting ever since. Bathed in the peculiar amniotic waters that had taken River Town and were even then spilling into the city at large. Fish had been at her, as had other nameless things, and most of the flesh been stripped away from her back and throat. Birds had pecked her face down to a grisly deathmask.
And although she was very much dead and would not reawaken, her corpse began to move. It shuddered in the water, shook itself like a wet dog, and then went still again. She floated spreadeagle, her mauled face, breasts, and swollen belly like separate islands breaking the surface. The largest of these islands began to shake, began to pulse with almost rhythmic undulations as something wriggled its way out of her birth canal. Threads of tissue and slime coagulated in the water like egg whites and then something hairless and pale emerged. Water and blood glistened atop its bulbous head. It opened its gray, cloudy eyes. Shaking and gasping, it coughed out a flux of liquid and jelly and pulled itself atop its mother’s corpse like some fleshy and puckered monkey.
Then without further ado, drool hanging from its seamed mouth, it began to feed.
7
“Well, fuck me,” Tommy said.
The Intrepid had buried itself into the front of Sadler Brothers Army/Navy Surplus like a torpedo spearing into a submarine. The store was, after all, nothing but a sheet metal Quonset held together with screws and rust that shook in the wind so it wasn’t surprising that the car slammed right through it. Right up to the driver’s side door as a matter of fact, taking out the front entrance, flattening a display of rubber rafts and sending a couple mannequins in fly fishing gear pretty much airborne.
Mitch was one of the first to the car, followed by Tommy and a dozen others, all talking at the same time, all asking what the hell had happened here. What was going on? This guy drunk or on drugs?
“Probably crack,” said the guy in the yellow baseball cap, the one who’d announced that the TV and phones were out.
The guy behind the wheel was a kid of sixteen or seventeen with a pierced eyebrow and a Social Distortion T-shirt on. The Intrepid had barely stopped rolling before he was trying to kick his door open. But it was wedged in a snarl of mangled sheet metal. There was rolled insulation hanging all over the roof of the car like the Quonset had vomited it out in its death throes.
“Somebody get a goddamn crowbar over here!” Mitch called out.
The kid was trapped in the car, blood all over his face and necklaced at his throat. He was just out of his mind, kicking at both doors and pounding at the windows, leaving bloody fist-prints on the glass.
“Take it easy, son,” Tommy told him. “We’ll get you out.”
The others gathered were talking about calling the police and 911 until someone reminded them that the phones were all dead.
“I got a CB in my pickup,” a guy with a beard and a ponytail said. He made for the back exit.
A crowbar appeared and by then the kid behind the wheel had settled down a bit. He was just sitting there with a glazed look in his eyes, staring forlornly ahead. Tommy kept talking to him as Mitch bent the sheet metal back. You could say a lot of things about Tommy Kastle, Mitch figured, and most of them would have been true. But when somebody was hurt or needed help? He was always there, not a smart comment or salty crack to be heard. That’s the kind of man Tommy Kastle was.
“Oh my God,” said Mindy, the college girl, her bosom heaving. “Oh my God, oh my God…what happened to him?”
“Ahhhhhh…I’m guessing he ain’t having his monthly, honey,” Knucker cracked and there were a few nervous chuckles.
It went right over her head and Mitch was figuring most things probably did. She looked like a sweet kid- honestly concerned about the driver of the Intrepid-but most there had already drawn the conclusion that this girl wasn’t much sharper than your average dessert spoon. Someone else told her to get out of the way, called her Malibu Barbie, and she told them her name wasn’t Barbie at all, it was Mindy.
Mitch worked with the bar, bending back the sheet metal which groaned and snapped. The wind started pushing a wet mist through the aperture the car had created. All around him, the crowd that had gathered was pulling back, some leaving altogether and there was a good reason for that: Hubb Sadler was on his way over.
“What kind of cock-knocking clusterfuck is this?” he wanted to know, suddenly very spry for an old man dependent upon oxygen. He came over with the aid of his cane, his face red and popping with gnarly-looking purple veins that made his white hair look almost luminous. “Holy H. Jesus Christ! Lookit the front of my cocksucking store! Who in the diddly-hopping, mother-raping Christ is going to pay for this fucking mess?”
He looked pretty much like he was about to suffer the same malady that put his hot-headed brother in the ground. He kept swearing and spitting and wheezing, using every form of the word “fuck” he could think of. And when the old well ran dry, he started making up new ones.
“Take it easy for chrissake, Hubb,” Tommy told him.
Hubb turned on him, slapping a pair of helping hands out of the way. “You shut your cock-fucking mouth, you know what’s good for you. Ain’t this my mother-cocking store? Ain’t I got a fuck-sucking right to wonder whose gonna pay for this mother-cunting damage?”
Mitch just ignored him. He was figuring not much save a towel shoved in Hubb’s mouth would shut him up. That or a good old-fashioned coronary. He kept ranting and gesticulating and wanting to know what kind of dick- shitting driver this slit-cocking kid behind the wheel was anyway.
Mitch was wondering a few things himself as he freed the door.
There was a whole heaping helping of blood on the kid and Mitch was thinking it wasn’t from the impact with his Jeep or barreling through the front of the store. Sure, the Intrepid’s front-end was smashed pretty good, the gold paintjob scratched and gouged up from the sharp sheet metal, but that was about the only damage. Something
