Devil's Kiss (40 page)

“Me,” Sam said calmly.

“They'll get you,” Sorenson spat up blood. “You can't kill us all.”

“I can try,” Sam lifted the muzzle of the Thompson and squeezed the trigger. He looked at Chester. “You people stay loose. Anything that moves, shoot it. I'm going in the house. I've got a bad feeling about that barn, so wait for me before you try going in.”

He walked into the house, knowing what he would find. He was not disappointed. The home was a repository for everything evil.

Chains and whips and torture instruments lay everywhere. Contrivances of sexual perversion could be seen in every room. Huge artificial penises, torture racks, and much more. The sight disgusted Sam. He went from room to room, setting the house on fire.

As smoke billowed around him, Sam stepped out on the porch, watching Chester. The man moved from body to body sprawled in the yard, a .45 in his hand, putting one round in the head of each devil worshipper. Sam glanced at Wade, watching the man work. The editor's lips were tightly pressed together, his face pale.

Sam knew Wade had never killed before this day. He stepped off the porch. Don't leave any alive. Kill them, then burn them.” He walked toward the barn.

“Wait!” Wade called. “I'm coming with you.”

The minister's eyes were cool, a half-smile on his lips. “Then be well cautioned, Wade. What you'll probably see in there, if they are in there, is something you'll have to live with for the rest of your life.”

“Taking everything into consideration,” the man retorted, “that might not be all that long a time.”

“Then come on.”

Wade looked behind him one more time. He looked a little ill; he could not take his eyes off Chester, or the manner in which the head exploded as the .45 caliber slug smashed through brain. The bodies seemed to dance on the ground under the impact. He had known Chester all his life, considering him to be one of the finest men in Fork County. An elder in the Church.

“You get used to it after a while,” Sam said. “At least, I did. And I think Chester did, too. In World War II. It's something every combat vet has to live with. Once a person has learned how to survive, and what must be done, that instinct lies just below the surface, very thinly covered with a civilized veneer.”

Sam swung open the doors to the barn. A stale, musty odor struck them. The odor of evil. The barn was dark.

“God!” Wade said.

“Godless,” Sam corrected. “Like those people lying dead in the yard.”

“Why don't we just burn this barn down?” Wade asked, as the men stepped into the darkness.

“Because I want to meet those inside. And beat them.”

Outside, Chester had moved his people around the barn, covering all exits. Only one of the women stood at ready: Jane Ann, with the slug-loaded shotgun in her hands. Faye, Anita, and Doris had received a couple of hours of instruction in the use of firearms, but they were not yet mentally ready to use them. Killing is entirely a state of mind, with very little physical effort required, and with most people, it takes time to prepare the mind for what society deems wrong. The women were still in a mild state of shock at the sight of so many dead bodies, and the seemingly ruthless manner in which Chester had disposed of the wounded.

Sam handed Wade his stake, picking up a pitchfork. His smile was hard. “This won't leave much room for doubt.”

Wade moved to his left, away from Sam. A small bit of hay and dust suddenly drifted down from the loft. An almost inaudible creak of timber.

The barn doors slammed shut behind the men, plunging the barn into darkness. Only a few shards of dusty sunlight leaked through cracks in the barn walls.

“Sam?”

“I heard. Coming.” The minister walked through the gloom. At Wade's side, he looked up at the disturbed dust filtering from the loft.
Back up,” he whispered, lifting the Thompson. When Wade was out of the way, Sam pulled the trigger and held it back.

Splinters flew in all directions. Dust poured down from the loft as the slugs ripped through thin wood flooring. A howling, once-human form hurtled downward, crashing on the barn's lower level. The thing lurched to its feet, screaming, its yellow eyes glowing in the semidarkness. Still-smoking bullet holes leaked putrid odors from the body.

There was no blood left in Glen Haskell.

“Father Haskell!” Wade shouted.

The thing offered no sign of recognition. Haskell's hands resembled claws as he moved toward the men, his mouth open, exposing fanged teeth, a thick red tongue. Unable to push words out of its mouth, the creature uttered animal sounds. Haskell howled, then charged.

Sam lifted the pitchfork chest high and the ex-priest ran into the tines, the needle-sharp points driving through lungs and heart and out his back. Filth flew from his mouth as clawlike fingers wound around the wooden handle.

Sam forced the Undead to the floor and savagely drove the pitchfork in and out of its body. Haskell died on the manure covered floor, wallowing in animal excrement. His mouth opened and closed, teeth snapping, snarling sounds from his dying throat fading away into silence.

“SAM!” Wade yelled.

The minister spun around. “Open the doors!” he shouted. “Chester! Open the doors—let the light in!”

In the murkiness of the barn, before Chester could throw open the doors, Sam saw Wade backed up against a wall, a small Beastlike creature stalking him, heavy, hair-covered arms held up, claws working as the editor fumbled for the gun at his side.

Sam tore off the cap from a canteen of Holy Water and hurled it at the Beast. The creature screamed in anguish as the blessed water hit its body, searing the hairy flesh. It spun, and Sam recognized it.

Max Steiner's youngest boy, Ralph.

“Dear Lord!” Sam said, disbelief in his eyes.

The Steiner boy was half a Beast, from the waist up, as if the transformation had somehow failed to work.

The results were hideous to look upon.

The doors to the barn were thrown open, sunlight pouring into the cavernous building. The half-Beast screamed at the raw light from God, throwing up its arms to protect its eyes.

Wade shot the half-Beast with his .38. But the .38 did not have the knock-down power of Sam's big .45. The small creature fell backward against a stall wall, shuddered, and charged at Sam. The minister jerked his .45 from the holster, leveled the muzzle chest high, and pulled the trigger three times. The creature flipped backward as if hit with a mighty foot and bounced off a wall, dead.

Sam ran to Wade's side, jerking him toward the door. He shoved him outside. “Get out of here!”

Sam backed out of the barn as snarling rolled to him, coming from closed stalls. Roaming Beasts had chosen the Sorenson ranch to hide during the day. Sam slammed a fresh clip in the Thompson and emptied it into the barn, into dusty forms. Screaming filled the barn as Sam yelled over his shoulder, “Chester! Cocktails—now!”

Before leaving camp, the men had prepared a dozen Molotov cocktails, whiskey bottles filled with gasoline and a small bit of flour, with a cloth fuse sticking from the top. The flour, wet, would stick to whatever it struck, burning like napalm.

Chester threw three of the bottles into the barn, the flammable liquid exploding as they smashed against the inside wall, turning the barn into an inferno. As the Beasts attempted to escape the flames, they were shot down.

The cocktails, igniting with the dust particles in the barn, acted as a super bomb, blowing the building apart, the walls and roof caving in. Some ... thing, some non-human form, not a Beast, but yet not a human, crawled from the broken beams and burning walls into the sunlight, its entire body ablaze. It screeched and howled in the light, drumming its bare feet on the ground, then died.

Anita, crouched behind a pickup truck, vomited. The nausea was infectious—as it almost always is—and many of the others followed suit. After a moment, there was heavy coughing and mumbled apologies.

Sam jarred them all when he roared, “Burn the bodies. Drag them in a pile, pour gas on them and burn them!”

When the bodies had been dragged into a makeshift funeral pyre, saturated with gas, and blazing, Sam said, “Wade! Take the point, head straight for Little River Ranch, and don't slow up. We've got the High of combat going now, so we're going in shooting. Move it!”

 

Jimmy Perkins screamed out his pleasure as he beat the naked Judy with a piece of rope, marking her white body with red welts, punishing her as Nydia had promised him he could. He fell on her, working out his rage, abusing her with his fists.

“It's always the same,” Wilder said to Nydia. They watched their newest convert from a window of the parsonage. “The play never changes, only the characters. Humans never change. They always want what is forbidden them by their God. Centuries of it is beginning to bore me. Of course, he'll sodomize her next. How droll.”

And Jimmy did just that, pulling his ex-girl friend to her knees, mounting her. She screamed out her pain at his sudden intrusion.

“That's why they are humans, is it not?” Nydia asked moodily. “And is that not the reason we are here?”

Wilder looked at her, irritation in his expression.
Must
I endure another of your deathless lectures on human behavior?”

The witch laughed, a dark brooding bark of little humor. “I seem to recall you enjoy the rear passage, Black.”

“But of course,” he smiled. “Our Master does not condemn it.”

“Now who is lecturing whom?”

His smiled broadened as Judy began enjoying the sensation of pain/pleasure.

“Animals,” Wilder said. “All humans are but a cut above the animals.”

“You bore me, Black. Perhaps you've been here on earth too long?”

“I was thinking the same thing, my dear.” And then he was gone, vanishing without a trace.

Wilder was much older than Nydia, and much more proficient at his craft, but Nydia was no longer afraid of him. She had a plan. And she had talked with her Master about that plan, and he had agreed, chuckling.

She walked into her bedroom, leaving behind her the muffled sounds of pain and pleasure in the front yard, being witnessed by a crowd of Satan-worshippers that had gathered to watch. They urged Jimmy on.

Sitting on her bed, the witch projected her thoughts to the Master, and he, laughing, gave her permission, adding some thoughts of his own.

“Balon!” she licked her lips. “But how is it possible?”

All things are possible, the deep rumblings filled her head.

“But, Black—?”

He wishes to return to me, so let him be destroyed and have his wish. Balon will do it. Oh, what a coup this will be! What a child will spring from it!

And the rumblings changed into dark laughter.

“But how?” Nydia questioned. “When? And afterward?”

I will tell you, he spoke to her.

And she smiled at his words filling her head.

 

The caravan had come upon yet another band of roaming lunatics from the asylum, blocking the trail to Little River Ranch, waving clubs and drooling nonsense at the trucks and their occupants.

Then they attacked, leaving the men and women no choice. They opened fire. Doctor King reluctantly raised his carbine and squeezed the trigger. Afterward, he openly and unashamedly wept.

“We'll pay for this,” he said to no one in particular. “In some way, someday, we'll pay.”

And the caravan moved on, leaving the prairie to deal with the lumpy bodies sprawled in the knee-high grass.

 

The trucks seemed to snarl out of nowhere, hitting the Little River ranch house at three o'clock in the afternoon. Herman heard them coming, roaring in. He rose from the bed where he had been loving the young girl, Jean.