Doll Face (18 page)

The doll people were coming.

Not one or two, but groups of them from every direction, moving like metal filings, following lines of force to a central magnet. And that magnet was the house. Soo-Lee, Creep, and Lex watched them coming, hobbling and weaving and dragging themselves forward, but never veering from their set path.

We’ll drown in them,
Creep thought.
There’s so goddamn many that we’ll be buried alive in them.

“We better get back inside,” Lex said. “This looks like a siege.”

But Creep didn’t like the idea. “Fuck that! Let’s run for it!”

“We can’t run for it. There’s nowhere to run
to,”
Soo-Lee reminded him.

She was right. He knew she was right. They were trapped and, once again, their decisions were being made for them and they were reacting rather than acting just as she and Lex had said earlier.

“C’mon,” Soo-Lee said. “Back into the house. It’s all we can do.”

Lex started backing up with her, but Creep didn’t follow because he saw a way out. At last, a way out.

“Creep,” she said. “Let’s go.”

But he shook his head vehemently. Obviously, they weren’t seeing it or they’d be thinking what he was thinking. “Look!” he said. “Over there!”

They still weren’t seeing it.

Their faces were blank, practically bovine in the bright moonlight. They didn’t see it and they weren’t getting it. Christ, it was right there! Just up the street! A fucking car! How could they not be seeing it? The beauty of it was that it was an old sedan from the days before steering wheel locks. It would be no big deal to hot-wire an old car like that. He had a pocket-knife with him and that’s all he would need.

“The car!” he cried. “Right over there!
Look!”

But they’d already seen it and it was obvious they didn’t like the idea of it. He knew what they were thinking: it was a setup. The puppet master (as Lex liked to call him or her or
it
) had put the car there so they would foolishly jump into it. Creep knew there was a certain amount of sense to that…particularly in this place where there were no cars, but fuck it, he was scared and he couldn’t think straight anymore. He needed to get out. The way he was figuring things, even if he had to fight a couple doll people for it, then it was still worth it.

Beat the hell out of holing up in that damn house and trying to survive through some
Night of the Living Dead
scenario.

He took off, running to it.

Lex and Soo-Lee called out to him, but by then the doll people were closing from every quarter and they didn’t chance coming after him. Which was good, because he wasn’t going to hide in that fucking house, waiting for those things to get him.

Behind him, Lex and Soo-Lee were still calling out.

They were going to feel real stupid when he rolled up out front with the car and got them the hell out of there. As he approached it, he saw one of the doll people rise up from behind it like a gas-filled balloon. It was a man whose face ran like white greasepaint as if he were under a hot lamp. He had no eyes, but that didn’t stop him from looking right at Creep and it sure as hell didn’t stop Creep from letting out a little cry.

He looked over his shoulder.

Lex and Soo-Lee had gone back into the house and the streets were filling with doll people. There was no going back now; they were everywhere. He was alone and he either did what he came to do or—

The doll man came shambling around the car, his mouth opening and closing with a rigid, mechanical sort of movement as if it was wired like the jaws of a puppet. And maybe it was. Creep tried the driver’s-side door. Locked. That brought a jolt of panic. He ran around to the other side, the doll man scarce feet from him. The passenger-side door was locked, too.

But the rear door was open.

He threw himself in there, slamming the door and throwing the lock. He quickly pushed down the other rear lock and breathed a sigh of relief. The doll man was ineffectively slapping at the windows.

Hit them all you want, dipshit. Car windows only break easily in movies.

Now, he would hot-wire this sonofabitch and get the ball rolling. It was going to work out and he knew it. He could almost see it playing out in his mind. That was the only thing that gave him pause, because things never worked out this easily in real life and especially not for him.

What the hell?

He hadn’t really noticed at first, but now he was seeing it: there was no color in the car. It was completely washed out. It wasn’t real easy to tell with nothing but moonlight, but he was seeing it all right—the inside of the car was black-and-white like in an old movie. His hands were a cream color, the car itself varying degrees of gray.

He pulled himself up to hop over the seats, deciding he wasn’t going to be thinking about what that might mean. It was just a trick of the moonlight and he sure as hell didn’t have time to be freaking out about shit like that. There were things to do and he was the only one who could do them.

The keys were in the ignition.

The keys were in the fucking ignition!

Now that was a real break and it made him more paranoid that this entire thing was going to blow up in his face. He started climbing over the seats. There were several doll people out there now, converging on the car.
Yeah, well fuck you,
he thought.

Then something hit him.

There was no one or nothing in the car with him, yet he felt something like a hand strike him square in the chest and knock him into the backseat. Maybe it wasn’t a hand exactly. Maybe it was something more along the lines of a wave of force. Regardless, it had physical impact.

Creep pulled himself up.

This was how things went bad and he knew it.

Stupid dumbfuck! You knew it was too good to be true but you went for it anyway!

Seized by panic, expecting that invisible force to hit him again, he reached for the door handle…except there was no door handle. It was like the back of a police car, no handles. He tried pulling up the lock but it was fused. He tried the other door. It had no handle either. He peered over the seats. He knew there wouldn’t be any handles up there either because that’s not how it worked. This was a trap. This was a fucking Roach Hotel—
Roaches check in, but they don’t check out.
It was at this point that he lost it, pounding against the windows, beating on them until his fists ached, knowing he was not going to get out, but like an animal in a cage he was unable to accept it.

The doll people were gathered around the car now.

Dozens and dozens of eyeless white faces were pressed up to the windows, crowding in, more and more of them until he could see nothing but those grim visages, faces of splintered wood and cracked plastic and melting wax and burlap that hung in threads.

They were all grinning.

They were all laughing.

It was then, as tears rolled down his face and his mind seemed to fly apart inside his head, that he heard the keys hanging in the ignition jingle as if they had been grasped. He clearly saw them move. The car started up. The doll people retreated as the sedan pulled away from the curb.

It drove off down the street, Creep beating against the rear window as it disappeared into the night.

30

Standing in the middle of the street, Ramona heard something that made her jump. It wasn’t much of a sound. Just a clattering as if something had been dropped, but in the silence it was big and unexpected and she knew it was but the first stirring of what was going to happen next and the very idea chilled her.

You were raging a minute ago. You were ready to take on the world. Where’s that anger now? Where’s that determination?

She didn’t know. It was just…gone. It dried up inside her, evaporated, leaving her standing there shriveling in her own skin, trapped in this hell zone of a town, this twisted and very fucked-up dream and she honestly did not know what to do about it.

Yes, you do. The east, the east. That’s where this is all coming from. Track it to its source. You know what you have to do.

And, yes, she did.

It was a very simple strategy, of course, but executing it would not be so simple at all and she knew it. She heard another clattering sound and this time it came from above as if something had dropped on a roof up there. She could hear it rolling down and falling. Then something hit the pavement not three feet from her. It landed with a meaty thud and exploded like a pumpkin, spraying her with goo and what appeared to be a stringy sort of tissue.

It was a head.

Not a human head, of course, but a doll head…yet, one that was grotesquely well-fleshed. She screamed and brushed the tissue from her. God, it was warm. This wasn’t something from a doll shop; it was flesh and blood even if the very idea of that was impossible.

Clatter, clatter.

Something else now. A hand. A mannequin hand. It landed three feet away and began to crawl in her direction. Another hand fell and then another. A leg came down and clattered on the sidewalk. Then an arm, another head—this one was empty, rolling like a ball in her direction.

It was raining doll parts.

Still another head came down. A woman’s head with dirty blonde hair. It barely missed her. It rolled over and over, blood exploding from its mouth with a gurgling sound.

But that’s not possible,
a voice in Ramona’s head told her.
It’s nothing but a mannequin head and mannequins don’t bleed, they’re not real and they can’t bleed because they’re not alive, not alive, not alive—

But it
was
alive.

The blood-spattered face was moving, the mouth trying to say her name and she knew it.

The doll parts were falling everywhere now. Some were breaking apart upon impact, but most were quite lively. Ramona stood there, hearing them dropping around her, unsure what to do. She had to get out of there, but in what direction should she escape? The longer she hesitated—the entire rain of parts had only been going on less than a minute by that point—the more limbs and heads there were. She was standing on the one spot where nothing was falling, but before long she would be trapped on her little island in an ocean of animate parts.

The heads were screaming her name. Legs hopping in her direction, arms crawling and hands pressing forward like albino spiders.

A woman’s head dropped a few feet away, rolling in her direction. It had bulging white eyes and whipping red locks, its jaws opening and closing.
“RAMONA,”
it shrieked.
“RAMONA! RAMONA! RAMONA! RAMONA!”

Ramona screamed, unable to keep her cool now as the doll parts converged on her and more heads rolled forth crying out her name. Something hit her shoulder and clutched there. A doll hand that was hot and almost flabby. Its fingers dug into her flesh as it crept toward her throat. She pulled it loose and tossed it. Other things fell on her. Smaller things that writhed in her hair like worms. Screaming again, she pulled them free along with locks of her hair—fingers. They were crawling over her scalp, one of them sliding down her neck and creeping down her spine.

She squirmed, tearing the fingers from her hair and slapping away one that tried to worm its way into her mouth. She fought, screeching and hysterical, as another worked its way into the valley between her breasts and the one tracing down her spine forced its way down the back of her skinny jeans. Down on her knees, oblivious to everything else now, she unzipped her pants and pulled them down, seizing the finger as it attempted to slide up her rectum.

The body parts moved in.

A hand clutched her wrist and another slid up her thigh. More fingers dropped into her hair. One of them pushed itself between her lips and she bit down on it and it went to pulp between her teeth. Gagging, sickened, she spit the remains out as waves of nausea rolled through her.

But there was no time for that.

All the parts were pressing in and there was no time for anything but flight. Juiced with absolute terror, she broke free with manic acceleration, knocking everything out of her way and batting aside a head that came spinning end over end out of the shadows. She tore more fingers from her and threw herself into the first doorway she found, that of a clock shop. The door was open as she knew it would be because nobody locked their doors in Stokes, not in the good old days of 1960.

As she got through the door of the shop, the bell jingling above, a hand grabbed her by the throat and she fought frantically with it as its fingers squeezed her windpipe shut. She stumbled to her knees, tearing at the fingers, finally yanking them free, the nails cutting trenches in her neck. The hand was almost slimy with some hot secretion like sweat.