36
Night was coming fast now and Mr. Chalmers, content now for perhaps the first time in his life with who and what he was, smelled it on the breeze. Dogs howled in the distance and he listened, judging from the sounds just how far away they were and if they presented any danger to his clan.
He was watching his hunters by the fire.
In what had once been his backyard, they were hard at work applying what he had taught them. Using the limbs of straight saplings, they were fashioning spears. After the limbs were peeled, the ends were split so the blade of a knife could be inserted and lashed into place. Now they were fire-hardening the points as he had also showed them. Chalmers himself had learned this technique in survival school while he was in the Army. And though much of his former life was now misty, indistinct, or absolutely incomprehensible, he remembered this.
Somewhere, a few streets away probably, there rose a chorus of blood-curdling screams. They came and went, rising and falling with a rhythmic cadence. These were not the screams of agony or fear, but of joy. The night was coming and the clans were getting excited for the barbarity and promise that only darkness could bring.
Chalmers had once been married. Many, many years ago. His wife had passed on and he had never remarried, remained childless to this day. But he had always wanted children, felt the paternal pangs for a brood of his own. And then, as he entered his sixth decade, the pangs for grandchildren.
Now he was satisfied.
Now he had children.
They were his hunters: a ragged, disparate group with naked, oiled bodies, dirty faces and grubby bodies painted up with earthen browns, electric blues, and blood reds. As he watched them by the fire, he saw that they had threaded and knotted beads, feathers, and tiny bones into their hair. With their naked, lithe bodies and the ritual painting, it made them look fierce.
There were a dozen of them. The youngest was six and the oldest was twelve.
Their parents had abandoned them-heeding the call of the wild that had been activated within them to run free-and Mr. Chalmers had brought them together into a cohesive whole. And tonight, he would lead them against the other clans.
Mr. Chalmers still wore his favorite khaki pants, though very dirty now, and boots, but he had torn off his shirt and took to wearing his dead wife’s fox coat that had been stored in mothballs in the spare bedroom. He had cut off the sleeves so that all could see the many tattoos sleeving his arms from his days in the Army. Although for many years he had kept them covered, grim reminders of his days in the Vietnam War when he led reconnaissance patrols and hunter/killer teams deep into enemy territory, he now revealed them. They were badges of honor, symbols of military blood rites, of combat and life-taking.
The children, his clan, respected him and knew he was their leader.
Those that dared question that, he had beaten. And one particularly arrogant fifteen-year old boy, he had murdered, slitting his throat using the same knife had carried during the war: a K-Bar fighting knife with a ten-inch carbon steel blade. He now wore the boy’s ears on a necklace around his throat along with his scalp.
The screams rose up again.
His clan jumped around the fire, imitating the sounds, bristling with excitement for the hunt that would begin soon, the raiding against other neighborhoods.
His blood running hot and sweet, Chalmers felt more like a man than he had since his days laying ambushes along the Ho Chi Minh Trail many years before. He had a plastic tube of eyeliner in his hands. Breaking it open with his K-Bar, he covered his fingertips in the black make-up. Carefully, just as he had in the war, he painted black tiger-striped bands across his face, darkening his chest and arms.
Tonight, after so long, he was returning to the jungle…
37
As they got closer to downtown, they stopped talking. Maybe the conversation hadn’t been much to begin with, but as they started getting a good look at the town and what was going on, it was like they had been gagged, rags shoved into their mouths and taped in place.
“It’s the whole town,” Macy said, not trying to hide the emotion that welled up in her now. It filled her, sank her down to new depths of despair. “It’s the whole town, Louis! The whole town has gone crazy!”
“Just take it easy,” he said, finding it extremely hard to take it easy himself.
But it was everywhere and it wasn’t just a matter of feeling something was wrong now, for you could see it: cars were smashed and left out in the middle of the street, houses were burning, garbage cans were overturned, windows smashed, naked corpses sprawled in yards. Like a tornado of destruction had passed through.
Something had snapped here.
Something had given way.
The whole damn town needed to be buckled down in a straight jacket. Louis watched it all and he was just beyond words to sum it up in his own mind. You’d pass through blocks of wreckage and madness, then, two or three streets over, things seemed perfectly ordinary. People were washing their cars and walking their dogs and cutting their grass. But he had a pretty good idea that those people were not sane either. There was no way they had not heard of what was going down around them, yet they went about their boring little chores like all was well with the world. The only thing that gave Louis hope were the neighborhoods where there were no people at all, nothing to suggest there was anyone around but a few curtains parted to see who was driving by.
“Why isn’t something being done?” Macy wanted to know. “They can’t…they can’t just let this happen. Where are the police?”
Louis was wondering the same thing himself. They should have been out in force, but he had yet to see a single patrol car. Though, in the distance, he was hearing sirens. Lots of sirens. He couldn’t be sure if they were police vehicles or ambulances or fire trucks, but there were a lot of them.
He’d only seen a small portion of the town now, but he suspected it was going on everywhere. If that was the case, there would be way more happening than the locals could handle. Even with the state and county boys chipping in, it would be way too much. They would need the National Guard or something. Maybe they were already on their way and maybe not. Because, realistically, whatever was turning people into maniacs and animals, it wouldn’t just be afflicting the civilians. Cops, too, would be mad as hatters.
Seeing it, unable to understand any of it, left him feeling confused and reeling. A chill went up his spine. It was just too much. A few crazy people was scary…but an entire town?
A country?
A world?
This is nothing, Louis, a voice coldly informed him. This is absolutely nothing. You just wait until tonight. It’ll be dark soon and then you’ll see some shit. Oh yes, you certainly will.
But he had no intention on being around by then.
Macy had had an episode herself, but it had been temporary. Was he hoping for too much in thinking that maybe it would only be temporary with the others, too? Was that even possible now? He didn’t and couldn’t know. But, the fact remained that he had not gone crazy. He had no wild urges or black thoughts. Absolutely nothing.
Not yet.
But if Earl Gould’s theories were true-and Louis was beginning to think they were-then it was only a matter of time.
Regardless, if he was still normal, there had to be others. Maybe those quiet neighborhoods were full of normal people. People that had decided to lock their doors and wait things out. But what happened when the crazies were the majority? What happened tonight when they took the town and started kicking in doors and diving through windows, slaughtering the last of the rational ones?
Louis felt more afraid than he’d ever been in his life.
He wanted to drive out of town before such a thing became impossible, but he couldn’t abandon Macy and he sure as hell could not just leave Michelle. And just where could he drive to? Another town filled with savages?
His hands were white-knuckled on the steering wheel, his teeth chattering. He had to do something, say
