Mitch nodded automatically. Despite all that had happened, his mind kept coming back to Lily and Chrissy, hoping they were together even if they were pulling out each other’s hair. The thought of Lily alone without her beloved TV or radio or even the phone was scaring him. And what was maybe scaring him worse was the idea that Chrissy was out in the city somewhere. She was with two other girls, but…
They were about to turn away from the flap when Tommy said, “What’s that…that somebody out there?”
Mitch craned his head closer to get a look. The wind threw rain in his face, but he blinked it from his eyes and saw…saw a couple forms standing across the street. It was coming down pretty hard, but it looked like there were two people standing on the sidewalk across the street. Just standing there in the torrent, getting drenched, but not seeming to be bothered by it. They were facing towards Sadler Brothers and Mitch had the crazy idea that they were staring at him.
“Don’t know enough to get out of the rain,” Tommy said, but there was something lodged in his throat that made his voice sound squeaky, something he couldn’t seem to swallow down.
“I wouldn’t go out there if I were you,” Hot Tamale said.
Of course, everyone was looking at her. Hubb and his posse. Mindy and the kid. Yellow Hat and a young couple who’d come in for battery lanterns, Jason and Gena Kramer, and stayed. Even Tommy and Mitch. Hot Tamale liked to be looked at, liked to be noticed. She liked to be the center of attention and here she was yet again, gathering the faithful around her like an old lady preparing to preach hellfire and damnation.
Mitch saw that cord twitching in Tommy’s neck. When Tommy started losing patience, he generally didn’t get angry; he got mouthy. He pulled off his cap, ran fingers through his sparse graying buzzcut. “Yeah? And why shouldn’t we go out there? C’mon, give us your wisdom, you nutty bitch.”
“Tommy…” Mitch muttered.
Hot Tamale turned on him, her lips pulling back to reveal very nice, very even teeth that were just as yellow as piss in a snowbank. Lots of coffee and cigarettes there. Her left eye narrowed and the right was wide like a shiny new quarter. “Listen, Mr. Mouth, if I want any shit out of you I’ll squeeze your head. So do us both a favor and shut the hell up.”
Tommy grinned. “And if I want any lip out of you, tubby, I’ll rattle my zipper. No, on second thought, I’d chew off my own dick before I’d let it near you. So why don’t you do all of us favor and quit preaching the death gospel. We got enough problems here. Shut your pisshole or I’ll shut it for you.”
Mitch almost burst out laughing.
Jesus, they were facing off now like a couple of kids on the playground. Hot Tamale’s face was redder than her outfit and she was sweating again. Tommy just smirked at her. She’d pegged him right, though. In school, Mitch remembered, he’d been called The Mouth. He was always smarting off and often to the wrong people. But you could never shut him up. You could kick his ass on Monday and on Tuesday he’d been telling you to go fuck your sister. Tommy was slow to anger, but if you pushed him into a corner, he’d come out swinging…sooner or later. Mitch had never known him to hit a woman, but he was guessing that Tommy had already decided Hot Tamale was not of that gender.
Maybe she saw that, too. She looked at her man, gave him a little shove. “Herb? Herb, are you going to let him talk to me like that?”
Herb jerked like he’d been slapped. His eyes were glassy and bovine under the brim of his hat. He looked senseless and numb like he’d just been shot up with Seconal. “Whahuh?” he said.
Mitch stepped in-between Tommy and Hot Tamale. “Okay, lady, tell us why we shouldn’t go out there.”
“Cops’ll be coming,” Hubb said. “That hippie with the ponytail went to get ‘em.”
Hot Tamale laughed, but it was a low, evil sort of laugh. “Oh really? Well, wake up and smell the coffee, people, because he didn’t make it very far. I just saw him. He’s laying out there next to his truck and something chewed half his face off.”
That landed and hit hard. Everyone seemed to suddenly be moving a little closer together like kids around a campfire that have just been told an especially unpleasant horror story. There was an almost communal dread slinking through them as it occurred to each and every one that maybe the cavalry wasn’t coming after all. That Hot Tamale had been right in the first place and they were on their own.
Even Tommy kept his mouth shut.
“You don’t believe me?” she said, vindicated now. “Then step out there and have a look. While you idiots were chatting it up in here, that guy was dying out there. Something got at him and I’m willing to bet that something had teeth.”
Yellow Hat had pulled in closer to her now. He was her kind of people and he went to her like a metal filing to a magnet, falling right into her orbit. Chances were, he would never break the gravitational pull of her big ass and bigger mouth. And probably didn’t want to. But that was fine, that was to be expected, Mitch figured. Yellow Hat was one of these guys who do not look for the silver lining behind clouds, they looked and expected to find misery and often did. And with that in mind, his despairing little brain was easily assimilated by that of Hot Tamale. They went together like dirty bellybuttons and lint.
“You’re talking bullshit,” Mitch said, knowing nobody else was going to.
Way he was thinking, maybe she was right about a few things, but she’d have to prove it. She wanted to sling the shit? Okay, fine and dandy, but Mitch wanted to see what color it was and how bad it stank.
“Oh, am I? Why do you think we ran back in here, bright boy? You think we missed you and your brilliant conversation? We came back because we had to come back! Our car wouldn’t start two streets over and when that rain started hammering down, when it started to fall those things started coming out like goddamned earthworms. I saw ‘em. Herb saw ‘em. And they weren’t people. You hear what I’m saying to you? They weren’t people!” She was breathing real hard now and nobody dared interrupt and she liked that just fine. “You tell ‘em, Herb. You tell ‘em what we saw.”
Herb swallowed something. Maybe a wad of gum the way his throat bobbed. When he started to talk, he spoke in a very calm and controlled matter like he was just reading from a cue card. “The rain started coming down real hard. We got to our car and it wouldn’t start, wouldn’t turn over. And I was thinking, boy, now we’re never gonna get over to the Wal-Mart. And I wanted to go to the Wal-Mart because they had the Moundses bars on sale. You buy one pack of Moundses bars and you get the second pack free. But the car, she wouldn’t start and then I see the lady. The lady was standing right next to the car in the rain, just looking in the window at me. She was dripping wet, the water running off her. Her face was white like a clown and there were holes in it. She was smiling, too, and she had black teeth like them wax Halloween witch teeth. She was…she was real scary-looking, you know?”
Despite the droning narrative, Mitch was picturing it all and it made his flesh crawl. First the kid and his faceless people and now this. Now this. What the hell did it mean?
The rain is falling and the dead are rising.
That passed through his mind at almost hyper-light speed and he let it go, would not take hold of it and look at it, because he could not let himself think things like that.
“Tell ‘em what else, Herb,” Hot Tamale prompted. “Tell ‘em what else.”
Herb cleared his throat. “That lady…she slapped her hands against my window and they sort of splattered. When she pulled them away, there were strands of goo like snot stuck to the glass from her palms. It was like cheese, I thought, like hot pizza cheese hanging from her hands…except, well, I don’t think that stuff was cheese at all. Then, well, we got out the passenger side and we run back here where there was people.”
“Did…did that lady follow you?”
But Herb said he didn’t know. He never looked back.
Now this was the time where somebody would laugh in Tamale’s face, Mitch thought, but nobody was laughing. They had drawn even tighter together, it seemed. Herd reflex. Like a bunch of gazelles sensing a circling lion. They were all looking panicked except for Tommy who just looked irritated. Mitch almost expected them to bolt and run, but when they did, he figured they would do it together. In a herd.
Mindy was sobbing now and the kid-they still had no idea what his name was-was making a funny, almost choking sound in his throat like maybe there was a scream down there that wanted to come out. If you had to peg the atmosphere right then and there, you would have said it was one of confusion. Maybe some fear and uncertainty, too, but definitely confusion. Even Hubb didn’t look like he had the heart to start swearing about it all.
