“Hello, Mrs. Cannon,” said Matt. “We were supposed to get some young gee-gee but we came to see you first.”
Mrs. Cannon, well past eighty, was thin and weak and did not move so good anymore. But her ire was up and she directed it with vehemence: “Get out of my house! You filthy little monsters! Get out of my house!”
And bare seconds after she had said this, she knew it was the wrong thing to do. Because you didn’t try and intimidate rabid dogs. And that’s what these two were. She could see it in their eyes: that blank, glaring animal hatred. They had parted company with civilization. They stared at her with eyes that were shiny, intensely loathsome. Just the sight of those eyes and what was behind them made her bladder let go. She shook. She trembled. But tried not to move because didn’t they say that if you did not move, made no aggressive posturing, that a mad dog would not attack?
But it was too late because they smelled the fear on her.
Matt leaped forward and Mrs. Cannon swatted him in the face, but that just enraged him, made him let go with a coarse growling sound that filled her with more terror than she’d ever known in her life. He grabbed her by the wrist and threw her to the floor and with such force her left arm snapped upon impact. She was old, her bones fragile and reedy. She cried out and he stomped down on her side with his foot. Three ribs gave like dry twigs.
Mrs. Cannon screamed, cried, sobbed, just beyond herself with agony.
She looked up at Matt Hack and knew that what she was dealing with here was not a boy, it was something else. Something evil and cunning and inhuman. There was no boy left inside that dirty husk, all of the culture and learning and civilization that had been hammered into his head for the past ten years had been stripped away, peeled back, revealing this primordial monster.
While she squirmed on the floor, Mike rushed in and helped his brother. They stripped Mrs. Cannon, revealing the shriveled used-up body she hid even from herself. Skin and bones, not much more. Mike took up her unbroken arm, studied it, sniffing his way up the forearm and, deciding that the flabby bicep was by far the meatiest part, bit down on it with everything he had while Mrs. Cannon screamed and flopped and he drew blood. He did not particularly care for the taste of old lady flesh, so he promptly spat it back in her face.
She didn’t last long after that.
The boys jumped up and down on her, shattering her bones until shards of white erupted through her skin. When they were done, Mrs. Cannon was not moving anymore. She was just a bloody, loose-limbed heap and they soon lost interest in her.
They ravaged the house.
They emptied closets and dressers, shredding clothes and bedding with steak knives from the kitchen. They broke mirrors and emptied cupboards, pulverizing dishes and crockery on the floor. They urinated on the sofa and chairs and on the corpse of Mrs. Cannon. Mike took a shit in her bed. Matt did the same on the living room carpet. Like an animal, he was amazed and excited by the raw stench of his own feces. He played with it. He sniffed it. He held it in his hands. He threw it at his brother. Then he knocked the pictures off the walls and wrote his name again and again in brown looping whorls of excrement.
And by that point, his name meant very little to him.
But he enjoyed how it looked on the walls…
16
Louis Shears stood there with the golf club in hand, looking at Macy Merchant. She was standing by the porch steps of her house, battered and terrified, her forehead gashed open. She was wearing baggy cargo shorts and an oversized T-shirt that she practically swam in. Both were streaked with dirt.
“ Macy,” he said. “Macy…it’s okay, it’s me, Louis.”
But Macy was not buying his line. She looked around, wondering maybe if she could get away from him before that golf club came down. “Please,” she said. “Just go away…”
Louis lowered the golf club. She seemed all right. After his experience with the beaten kid, those cops, and then Lem Karnigan…well, he was a little on edge. He’d been standing there by the door, peering outside, waiting for he did not know what, that awful paranoia brewing inside him. When he saw Macy come running across the street, he knew he had to go to her. She was either crazy or just scared. And he had to prove to himself which it was for his own state of mind.
Thing was, she was looking at him as if maybe he was the crazy one.
“ Macy, it’s okay, really it is. I’m not nuts.”
She sighed, but didn’t look convinced. She just kept staring.
Then Louis remembered the blood on him, how he must look. “I had a run in with a…with a crazy man,” he explained. “I haven’t changed my shirt yet.”
She sighed again and lowered herself to the steps. She buried her face in her hands and wept.
“ Macy…what happened? Did somebody do something to you?”
Macy looked up at him, her face streaked with tears. Her shirt was torn, her arms and face bruised, crusted blood smeared on her forehead. She nodded, sniffed. “The Hack twins…I babysit them. They were throwing rocks at a car. I told them to stop and they pelted me…”
She told him it all, including what Mr. Chalmers had said. How they were not to kill her on his territory. Louis could just about imagine what was going through her mind. The unreality and disbelief of her own experience. He’d felt that way telling his story to the cops and then to Michelle on the phone.
When she was done, he just shook his head. He knew Mr. Chalmers and you couldn’t hope to meet a nicer guy. The image of him whipping out his business and showing the kids how to piss to mark your territory was not only ridiculous and disturbing, it was actually kind of funny in a mad sort of way. Had anyone told him this yesterday or even this morning, he supposed he would have laughed.
But he wasn’t laughing now.
And certainly not when Macy told him about Mr. Kenning and Libby.
Shit.
“ There’s been weird things happening all over town, honey. I don’t know what’s going on.”
“ At the school, too. A bunch of kids went nuts and killed a teacher. At least, that’s what I heard.”
It’s building, Louis thought. Whatever’s happening, is building now. It’s not even slowing down.
He wanted to get out of town with Michelle…but he’d had the TV on before and this crazy shit was happening everywhere. Did he dare tell Macy that the whole country was unraveling? No, he couldn’t freak out, not in front of the girl. She did not need that. He was an adult and he had to act like one. Give her some reassurance that the whole world had not just been shoved into the pit. That’s what he had to do.
“ What’s going on?” she asked him. “It wasn’t like this this morning.”
“ No, it doesn’t make sense. But a lot of people in this town have just went off the deep end.”
“ I’ve been hearing sirens all the way home from school.”
“ Yeah, I think we’ll be hearing them for awhile. Until this stops.”
Macy just nodded, staring down at her feet.
Louis wanted to say something to her that would make it better, make her not worry or be afraid. He figured that’s what adults were supposed to do with kids, but the problem was he couldn’t think of anything. He had been looking for something that would make himself feel better, too, but he hadn’t been able to find it. Maybe if he had been a parent, he could have. Maybe he’d be well-practiced in the art of clever, consoling bullshit. But he had no kids. Michelle couldn’t have any and he’d just accepted that, as she had. And as a result, he was simply no good at this.
Macy looked up at him. “What if this doesn’t stop?”
“ Well, it has to.”
“ Why?”
Well, there was a good one. The simple logic of it floored him. “Because…because it has to, that’s why. I mean, the entire town hasn’t gone crazy, just some people. I’m not nuts, though I probably look it, and you aren’t either. I don’t imagine everyone at school was or you wouldn’t be here. Am I right?”
She nodded. “I guess. But what about everywhere else?”
