Goods. Cop cars always had shotguns in those racks. He would just borrow one, that’s all. He looked at Macy sleeping in the car. She’d be safe for a few minutes.
Louis turned and jogged down the sidewalk to the State Police cruiser. The windows were open, but there was no shotgun in a rack. In fact, there was no rack, just a lot of electronic stuff and a radar gun. So much for that. He turned to leave and then he caught something out of the corner of his eye. Something that made him freeze-up. Through the glass windows of Shelly’s Cafe, he could see forms.
People.
There were people in there.
People sitting in booths. They were not moving, just sitting. Louis felt sweat run down his spine. He made ready to bolt. Surely those people had seen him. Surely they would come after him…but they didn’t. He glanced quickly down the block at his car. It looked very far away. Swallowing, he went up to the cafe, being very careful. Those people sitting in there still paid him no mind. He went up to the door, peered through the plate glass. Yes, there were people in booths and people at the counter. Some at tables. Maybe a dozen at most. All unmoving, just sitting and sitting.
This is where you leave well enough alone, Louis.
Sure, he knew that. He knew that very well. So, ignoring that voice of reason and common sense, he pushed through the door and stepped inside. He could smell the coffee, the burgers, the deep-fat fryers. Hunger actually wormed in his belly for a split second, but it did not last. Because there was another smell: a stench of blood and shit, a death smell that made his belly curl in on itself.
The people were not moving.
Many had fallen over in their booths or right off their stools. Trembling, fighting back a scream, Louis moved amongst them, knowing he had to. They were mannequins and wax figures, sideshow dummies and straw-stuffed effigies. At least that’s what his mind was telling him. But the truth was much darker. They were not wax or wood or thermoformed plastic, they were flesh and blood and every last one was dead.
Their throats had been slit.
Yes, the fat man and his obese wife in the booth; the two grimy men in coveralls sitting behind them; the pretty woman in shorts and her cute red-headed daughter; the two guys and the state cop at the counter. All of them had their throats slit. There were a few other bodies on the floor, people that had fallen from their seats. Blood was pooled on the green tiles. It had coagulated on the counter. Run in rivers down the back of the brown plastic seats of the booths themselves where the fat man and his wife’s heads hung back. All those throats were laid open as was that of a waitress on the floor behind the counter and a fry cook slumped in the corner by a stainless steel cooler.
Jesus.
It was bad. Just morbid and loathsome and frightening. But what was even worse was that it looked like they had slit their own throats. Using steak knives and carving knives from the cafe’s own wares, they had slit their own throats and testament to that was the fact that most of them still gripped the knives in their bloody, stiff fists. Other knives had fallen to the floor. Even the little girl had opened her own throat…if the paring knife in her chubby, dead little fist was any indication.
It hit Louis like it had at the police station, the shock which was huge and physically heavy, overwhelming. He almost went down, but gripped the edge of the counter and clenched his teeth until it passed.
No, they hadn’t needed dogs or mad killers here, they’d done the work themselves just as Jillian had. Louis found himself wondering how it had gone down, how it had worked. Had it hit them all at once? The urge to destroy themselves? Was it some kind of unspoken, unconscious decision to avoid regression, to die while they were still human? The same thing, perhaps, that had gotten inside of Jillian?
He stared at the carnage and was almost certain of it.
He could almost see it in his mind, all these people in the cafe, in their own little world, separated from the raw stench of primeval degeneration that blew through the streets in a hot, rank animal smell. Whatever was human in them rising to the surface like a swimmer desperate for one last gulp of clean air before sinking into the primal waters of race memory. It must have clicked in all their heads at roughly the same time: a complete rejection of that infectious, ancient evil rising from within. The need to preserve something human while they still were human and not slavering beasts running naked, killing and fucking in the streets.
There really was no other explanation for it.
The waitress must have passed out the knives and then, in unison, they’d slit their throats. Some had made a clean, almost professional job of it, while others had been very messy, sawing through their throats not once, but two and three times, their necks hacked and gouged and carved. But they’d done it. They’d all done it.
Louis thought: Get out of here. The rest of it is bad enough, but this is infinitely worse and you goddamn well know it.
But he didn’t leave.
He couldn’t bring himself to.
There were horrors and then there were horrors and some of them simply demanded examination, regardless of how sickened and terrified you were. Maybe the human mind needed reasons, needed explanations. Maybe it could not look on this without out demanding to know: why? Maybe the human mind could not just turn away from something so senseless and gruesome without understanding the design of it. Louis leaned against the counter, his head thick with the stink of blood, hearing flies buzz and the clock tick up on the wall. It scared him. This whole thing scared him. And the very worst thing was that all those corpses were grinning. Their faces were pale, their throats and chests dyed red, and they were all grinning, just grinning the most hideous smiles imaginable.
And their eyes were wide open…
47
When Macy opened her eyes, her first sensory experience was not the plate of spiderwebbed glass that lay over her lap from the shattered window. It was the stink. The stink of those that had ringed in the car in the fading light. Monsters. That’s what she thought. Monsters. These were monsters…ogres, trolls, bogarts from a storybook that had slipped out of the dark and secret wood to feast on children by moonlight. She seemed to recall something like them from a storybook as a child, but maybe, just maybe, the memory was much older: atavistic recall. For the tales of ogres and trolls and child-eating witches were just ancient memories of primal horrors re-channeled into harmless fable. The truth behind them was dark indeed.
They just stood there, looking at her.
Men, women, children. A couple kids she knew from school.
They were yellow-skinned, dirty, half-naked, faces painted up like skulls, hair greased or tied-up with sticks and tiny bones like those of rodents.
A man standing in front of the car had a huge butcher knife in his hands that was almost as long as his forearm. He motioned with it. He made a low barking sound.
Then filthy, scabby hands were reaching into the car, taking hold of her and she just didn’t seem to have the strength to fight. Oh, she reflexively kicked and hit at them, but they yanked her through the window and bounced her head off the roof to take the fight out of her. She cried out, but it was a choked, pathetic sound.
They threw her to the ground.
She looked up at their deathmask faces carved with shadow. Their eyes were empty, shiny, vulpine. She opened her mouth to say something and they rained kicks down on her until she rolled into a heap, barely conscious. When her mouth did open to scream, something was stuffed in it: a foul-tasting, salty scrap. A piece of a shirt soaked with their sweat.
Louis, Louis, Louis…please help me…
Help me…
But he was nowhere to be seen. And as Macy fell trembling behind some black wall of terror in her mind, she felt hands grip her ankles, dragging her through the street…
