The Boys from Santa Cruz

and darted up to a struggling, heaving mass that Pender first took to be a dying calf. But when he adjusted the focus and zeroed in again, he realized that there were in fact two bodies lying there, roped back-to-back. One of them looked like a corpse in an advanced state of decay; the other appeared to be…yes, it was Epstein-no mistaking that built-up shoe.

Pender swung the glasses back around to the west, past the barn, just as the squad’s point man emerged from the woods. Urgently he thumbed the Talk key on the walkie-talkie and clicked the cricket twice.

6

You’d think there’d be some kind of shutdown mechanism that would kick in, some threshold of horror beyond which consciousness would glaze over and self-awareness cease.

You’d be wrong. The only part of Skip’s neurosystem that seemed to be affected by being lashed to a decaying corpse was the olfactory sense, which rather than shutting down completely, merely shifted its baseline. When stench is all, stench is the norm: a fish doesn’t know it’s wet.

Then the first vulture landed. Skip had never seen one close up before. Its face was shiny crimson, its short, sharp beak curved and ivory-colored. It stalked toward him at an oblique angle, moving with a ducking, bobbing gait. “Shoo!” he shouted, his voice cracking plaintively. “G’wan, get out of here.”

The vulture hissed and hopped backward, confusion in its oval-shaped, oddly pensive eyes. It took another tentative hop toward Skip, who yelled at it again. But this time the bird took only a single backward hop before resuming its oblique approach, and the third time Skip shouted, it ignored him entirely.

This is not happening, this is not happening, this is not happening was Skip’s mantra as the creature closed the ground between them. Lying motionless, holding his breath, he waited until it was only a few feet away, then shrieked and threw his body against the ropes.

Startled, the vulture jumped backward, hissing and clacking. You’re going to wake up any second now, Skip assured himself as the bird spread its wings and launched itself at him. Any second now…

The vulture landed heavily on Skip’s left shoulder and upper arm and dug its sharp talons into his flesh to anchor itself. The red head darted downward. Skip shut his eyes and braced himself, but instead of striking him, the vulture tore a chunk of rotting meat from the carrion hulk to which Skip was lashed, and gulped it down whole like a cormorant swallowing a fish.

Skip felt an immense upwelling of relief that quickly died away when a second vulture skidded to a landing in the tracks of the first. An image from a Discovery Channel documentary flashed through his mind: on a wide, grassy plain, the body of an antelope or wildebeest or something is all but obscured beneath a writhing black mound of feathered scavengers. You are so fucked, Skip told himself. You are so fucking-

Crack! A distant gunshot. Crack! A second shot. With a heavy, sullen beating of its wings, the vulture atop him released its claw hold on his shoulder and took flight. Skip opened his eyes, saw what looked like half a dozen helmeted, camo-clad soldiers charging up the hill at a fast trot. Holy crap, he thought, with a rush of gratitude so intense he could scarcely breathe, they called out the National Guard.

A moment later, Pender was kneeling in front of him, wearing an armored vest and holding a handkerchief over his nose and mouth. “Hang in there,” he said soothingly, his voice muffled by the handkerchief as he sawed at Skip’s ropes with a wicked-looking commando knife. “You’re safe now, it’s all over. Just hang in there, we’ll have you loose in a second.”

The last rope parted. Strong hands lifted Skip by his arms and legs, rushed him unceremoniously down the hill with his ass sagging, and lowered him gently to the grass. For Skip, it was one of those eye-of-the-hurricane moments. He lay motionless on his back, staring up dazedly into the bluest, most beneficent sky he’d ever seen, and thinking how sweet and strange it was to still be alive. Then Pender’s face floated above him, big and pale as a harvest moon-funny how he didn’t look half so homely now, thought Skip.

“You okay, Magnum?”

“No major damage,” said Skip. “Did you get him?”

“Missed him by a couple minutes. Do you have any idea who our fragrant friend is?” Pender jerked a thumb behind him, in the direction of the corpse.

“Not a clue.” Skip sat up slowly. The body was fifteen yards up the hill, lying on its side with its back to him. He could almost see the stink coming off it in little, wavy cartoon lines. But in his current adrenaline-filled, endorphin-drenched condition, Skip found his heart going out to whoever it was lying there all curled up and lonesome, and he experienced the weirdest urge to go back and sit with it, to keep it company until the meat wagon arrived.

The tac squad paramedic had other ideas. Learning that a vulture’s talons had inflicted the shallow, parallel cuts on Skip’s shoulder while he was tied to a rotting corpse, she administered a field lavage, a heavy dose of wide-spectrum antibiotics, and a syrette of morphine, then insisted on calling in a helicopter to medevac Skip to the trauma center at Marshall County General.

There was a minor holdup just as they were about to load Skip into the chopper. Due to the residual corpse- stink, the pilot demanded that Skip first be stripped of what was left of his clothes, which were relegated to a sealed, hard-plastic biohazard bin.

At County General, the E.R. doctor was adamant that Skip remain overnight for observation. “Purely as a precaution,” he told Skip, who was feeling so nauseated by the antibiotics that he gave in without an argument, despite a near-phobic aversion to hospitals not uncommon in polio survivors.

Skip slept fitfully, despite or because of all the drugs they were pumping into him-Demerol for pain, Donnatal for nausea, diazepam for anxiety. At one point during the long night, he fell into a troubled, hallucinatory doze and dreamed that they’d moved the dead body from the hillside into his room to keep him company. Curious to get a look at it, Skip’s dream-self climbed out of bed, padded noiselessly across the room, lifted the sheet covering its face, and recognized the corpse immediately, in spite of the horrific damage done to it by the process of decay.

“I–I don’t understand,” said Skip. “If you’re dead, then who kidnapped me?”

But the only answer from the corpse of Luke Sweet, Jr., was a merry wink of his only remaining eyelid.

PART THREE CHAPTER ONE 1

April 17

I did it. I actually did it. Blew the joint to kingdom come, got away clean, and now I only have one question: Who’s crazy now, ladies and gentlemen? Who’s fucking crazy now?

I have to admit, for a while there, things weren’t exactly looking rosy. Maybe I overestimated how long it would take for the gas to fill the boiler room once the shutoff valve had been bypassed. (And by the way, whoever had the bright idea of posting the printed instructions for bypassing the valve right there on the wall next to the boiler: thanks a bunch.) Or maybe I underestimated the speed at which the trail of paint thinner would burn its way from the fire exit to the boiler room door. Either way, the last thing I remember is touching the match to the paint thinner and watching the blue flame sizzling down the corridor and around the corner.

Next thing I know, I’m lying on my back, looking up into a heat-wavy blue sky streaked with oily brown smoke. Scorched flakes spin dizzily through the superheated air, and ashes pile in scalloped mounds atop the