'Help me, Bill,' Nettie called again.
He dodged through the tombstones the way he'd skirted defensive linemen while scoring those high school touchdowns. But he had a feeling that this was the biggest game of his life, that more was at stake than championship rings and scholarships.
The parsonage’s dark bricks were stolid against the trees, its windows with their neat white trim like sanctifying eyes. Nettie was on the porch, holding her left ankle and pulling on the doorknob. Even from twenty yards away, he could see the moonlit tears trailing down her cheeks, her eyes wide and frightened. He rushed across the dewy ground and knelt beside her.
'What's wrong, honey?' he whispered, afraid and feeling helpless, as if Nettie were a bird with a broken wing. He didn't know where to touch her.
'Ankle's broken, I think,' she said between clenched teeth. She put her arms around his neck and hugged him, then put her mouth to his ear. 'I'm so glad you're here.'
He held her a little away from him so he could see her face. Then he saw her ankle, twisted at an awkward angle above her white shoe. 'What's going on?'
'The preacher. Gone bad. His eyes… look at his eyes.'
Bill turned his head. They were coming closer, wet and dripping, arms outstretched like trembling blasphemies. Their eyes shone inhumanly deep and unholy green. The preacher smiled and his mouth was alive, like a thing separate from his flesh, wiggling with bright worms.
Satan.
Satan was here, now, just the way the Bible promised. The Lord had called for the end without so much as a trumpet blast in warning.
'Sweet Jesus, save us,' Bill said.
'I don't think Jesus can beat these things,' Nettie said. 'At least, not by Himself.'
Bill shook his head, lost. 'Green eyes. That part wasn't in the Book of Revelations.'
Sounds drifted across the narrow strip of yard, flyblown hymns rising from those walking gates of hell.
'Bill, they're coming.' She whimpered a little from pain. 'They want me. Us. All of us.'
Bill put his arms under Nettie, lifted her body that was still fresh and warm and naked in his memory. Her breath whispered across his neck. He looked around, wondering which way to run, but already they were upon him, wet arms and bright eyes and dead wet faces and ripped skin and fingernails sharp as thorns.
The preacher pressed his mouth near, the thick rinds of his gums snapping hungrily. Amanda Blevins, or the demon that now owned her fermenting flesh, reached for Bill with viscid hands. Others of their kind had come out from the trees or behind the marble headstones or perhaps up from the very ground itself.
Bill grew confused, as if someone had pumped him full of six kinds of drugs, or Satan had thrown open the door to a crazy house. Because words and images flashed across his mind, things green and quick and not of this earth. He felt Nettie being pulled from his arms as he squirmed under the hothouse assault. Tongues writhed near his cheek like snakes.
'Nettie!' he screamed, swinging his fists like sledgehammers against the blanched pulpy meat of the hellspawn.
Floodlights suddenly erupted, giving detail to the horror, revealing the devil's hordes. Their mouths opened in apocalyptic glee. They had seen the light. And the light exposed their ungodly hunger.
DeWalt stumbled, and then regained his footing. His legs were sodden tree stumps, dense granite pillars, tonnage. He absently reached into his front pocket for the habit of his pipe. He was putting it to his lips when he was struck by the vision of tobacco plants under a gleaming sun, rows upon rows waving their fat juicy leaves in shimmering reverence, full fields of rich decadence and sharp dewy blossoms, green armies with their nicotine arsenals. He tossed the pipe into the undergrowth.
DeWalt looked around at the long shadows of branches and the looming treetops. Even under the full moon, the night woods were secret and treacherous.
No wonder, Oh Lodge Brother. Whose side do you think they're on, anyway?
You're too xenophobic, Mr. Chairman. Maybe that's why you won't let anyone else join the Royal Order of the Bleeding Hearts.
Two hands, two balls. A balanced arrangement.
And what if I defect to that other club?
Which club would that be, Oh Brother?
Greenpeace's evil twin. The Royal Order of Shu-shaaa. The Earth Mouth. The God seed.
You haven't got the nerve. You wouldn't be here now if you weren't even more afraid of showing your true color. Yellow.
I object, Mr. Chairman.
Why do you think you were driven to make piles of money? Why you dodged Vietnam but didn’t give a damn about the peace movement? Why your marriage didn’t work because you could never give enough of yourself? Why you had it all but never enough? Why you always had to start over?
No fair. You're hitting below the belt.
It's your FEAR, Brother. Oh, not of death. A fear of being ridiculed. Of being found out. A fear of having lived. A fear of being caught giving a damn.
Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
This meeting of the Royal Order of the Bleeding Hearts is now adjourned.
DeWalt looked at the shadowy forms of Chester and Emerland twenty feet ahead. He hoped Chester knew where they were going, because DeWalt was as lost as a preacher at a strip joint. Woodsmanship and sense of direction couldn't be ordered out of an LL Bean catalog. And other things also had no price.
His shoulder ached from the sack of fungicide he carried. The dust of its pungent poison wafted from beneath the tucked paper flaps. He had given the shotgun back to Chester, glad to be free of its power. But the dynamite bulged in his pockets, as heavy as the weight of responsibility. The detonator switch and blasting cap were in his vest pockets.
He hoped he would be able to rig the cap. Chester would never let him hear the end of it if he failed. If he remembered correctly, the detonator sent an electrical charge to the cap, and the heat caused a chain reaction in the cap that set off the rest of the TNT.
But how do you expect to remember that, Oh Lodge Brother? Do you trust your memories after your long fling with free love and sex and every sort of mythical motherlode mindmuck known to the human race? Do you trust the ravings of those kitchen-sink radicals you used to swap bedbugs with?
Those were decent people, Chairman.
Quoting chapter and verse from The Anarchist Cookbook?
Well… times were different then.
Yes. You hadn't developed your itch yet. Whatever happened to promoting change within the system?
Viva la revolucion, comrade. Times were different then, but times are different now, too.
You're out of order, Brother.
Yeah, and for everything, there is a season. You know, what the hippies sang, back when we thought the world was worth changing, let alone saving. We couldn’t even change our own damned minds.
He heard Tamara behind him. The can she was carrying sloshed as she changed hands again. The handle had to be biting into her palm, and her arms were probably numb by now. But she was faring better than the rest of them, urging them up the trail.
The moon had started its descent in the sky. Dawn was only a few hours away. Hadn't Tamara said something about the zombiemaker Earth Mouth thing getting stronger under the sun?
Yes, I did, Tamara thought.
Wait a second.
What did DeWalt say?
He didn't say anything. You heard him. In your head. Turn, turn, turn.
