Endless Night (9 page)

“Tom’s gonna have your ass.”

“Oh, fuck off. I’m the only one who even got close enough to grab her. You and Chuck were useless.”

Just when I said that, Chuck came out a back door of the house. He had his ax propped up against one shoulder and the old lady’s body hanging over the other. He was bloody all over.

Mitch saw him and picked up his speed a little.

When they met, they said some things I couldn’t hear. Then they turned around and went into the house.

I perched myself on the wall. Sitting up there with a leg hanging over each side, I’d be able to watch for the others to come, and I could also look down the hillside.

Nothing showed down there, just bushes and weeds and a lot of trees. The moon made some things look dirty white. A lot of places, shadowy places, were just plain black. At the bottom, the ground leveled out for a while. Then came a row of houses with big, fenced back yards. Plenty of the back yards had pools. Most of the houses were dark, but a few had spotlights. The pool of one house was all lighted up, but I couldn’t see anyone swimming in it. Fact is, I couldn’t see anyone anywhere.

Out past the fronts of the houses, there were some cars parked in driveways and also on the street. I could see a long stretch of the street between the ending places where it curved around the hill and vanished. Not a single car was moving on it. Not a person was walking on it. I did see a cat scurry across and hide under a parked car. Nothing else, though.

I sure couldn’t see any trace of the girl or the kid. Couldn’t hear them moving around down there, either.

Maybe if I kept still, though, they might do something to give themselves away. That’s what I hoped for. Because if they didn’t, our chances of finding them were slim to zilch.

The girl’d put in a call to 911, but she hadn’t gotten through. She’d tried to fake us out, but Mitch checked the phone in the bedroom and it was still ringing at the cop end of things. So we’re okay on that score.

Which didn’t mean that
somebody
hadn’t called the cops.

But it was a good sign that none had shown up yet.

Sitting on the wall, I tried to put myself in the girl’s shoes. (Not that she was wearing any, because she wasn’t. Had nothing on at all but that loose nightie. All bare underneath it. Bare and smooth and slim and—coutdn’t have been any older than fifteen, sixteen. Young stuff. Young, fresh stuff. Maybe even a virgin. Right. Not hardly likely. I don’t think there are any virgins anymore. We live in crummy times. Nothing crummy about this gal, though. I can’t wait to get my hands on her—my cock into her. Oh, shit, where was I? Better rewind a little.) Okay. Put myself into her shoes. Right. What I figured was that she might lay still, either because of getting hurt in the fall or maybe because she decided that hiding was the safest thing she could do. If she did keep still, we might stand a good chance of finding her if we fanned out and searched down there.

Or she might try to reach help.

So I kept a sharp eye on the back yards of the houses down there.

In a way, I almost hoped the girl and the kid would make a dash for one of those houses. They’d call the cops the minute they got inside of one, and we wouldn’t have any choice except to bail out.

That gave me an idea.

Just suppose I ran and
told
the others that those two had made it into a house?

There’d be hell to pay if they found out I’d lied, of course.

Hell for me and some others.

But how were they ever gonna find out?

It seemed like a terrific idea. And even if it was a lie, it might save us. It struck me as awfully risky to stick around this place and search for those two. After you’ve done a massacre, you don’t
want
to linger around. You want to get out and far away as fast as you can.

If we carried out a hunt, we might have to stay another hour. Or even longer, depending on how it went.

Tom might even keep us here till daybreak.

He wouldn’t let us leave, not while there was any chance at all of laying our hands on them.

It isn’t just because they might be able to identify us.
I
sure don’t want them alive to pin any of this on us—especially since I’m the one the girl got her best look at—but Tom’s big concern is keeping everything quiet. The last thing he wants is for things to get spread around on the news so we wouldn’t be a secret society anymore.

He’s very big on this secret society stuff.

According to him, it’d ruin everything if people found out about us and what we’re up to.

We call ourselves the Krulls, by the way. (Or Kruilers, when we’re feeling whimsical.) Tom came up with the name for us, right at the start of things. He found it in a book. That was back when we were in junior high. Tom was always reading these trashy slasher books, and this one had to do with a group of people called the Krulls who ran around the woods like savages doing all sorts of weird shit. They were a bunch of real sick puppies. They loved to torture and kill people. They ate people, too. A lot of them just ran around naked, but some of the others wore clothes they made out of human skin. This one gal wore a bikini top that was made out of the faces peeled off two dead babies. We all thought that was pretty cool.

Maybe the guy that wrote about Hannibal Lecter read the same book we did way back then. Or maybe both those writers got their ideas from Ed Gein in Wisconsin, who did some of those things for real.

Anyway, Tom was really turned on by all that Krull stuff. The book was like his
Bible.
He made us read it, and he went around all the time quoting from it. Whenever we got together, we used to talk about the Krulls and how much we’d like to be running around in the woods that way, killing and raping and having a great old time.

It was just something we got a kick out of going on about, though. I don’t even think it was all that abnormal. I knew plenty of other kids who weren’t part of our group, but who also got turned on by stuff about perverts and psychopaths and ax murderers and the Nazi death camps—about anything that had to do with brutal, sadistic slaughter.

One guy I knew, George Avery, always carried around this paperback that had about fifteen pages of photographs near the middle. The pictures were in black and white. They weren’t very clear, either. But two of them showed naked dead women who’d been found in the woods. You couldn’t see whether the gals were pretty or not. The shots were so pale and blurry that you could hardly even see their tits. Their nipples were good and dark, though. And so were their muffs. You could see them great. And you could also see their stab wounds, which looked like dark slots all up and down their fronts. I don’t know why, but neither of the gals was bloody. Maybe the cameraman cleaned them off so they’d make better pictures, or something. I don’t know.

That kid, George, always had his nose in those pictures—at least when he wasn’t showing them around to impress the rest of us, that is. And he was not a particularly screwy guy. In fact, he was a model student. Straight As, the whole nine yards.

What I’m getting at, we
all
basically enjoyed that kind of stuff back when we were in junior high. It wasn’t just Tom and his little clique of future Krulls.

This other kid, Harold ...

Wait. I’m running off at the mouth again. The thing is, I’m stuck here for a while and I’ve got this tape recorder and enough tapes to recite
War and Peace
or The
Tommyknockers
or something. It’s a real temptation to blabber everything under the sun.

I do want to tell everything, that’s the problem.

The problem in more ways than one.

Where was I? Am I gonna have to rewind again? No. was on top of the wall. Right.

I was telling about how Tom wants to keep the Krulls a big secret, and that’s why he’d take all sorts of big risks just in order to kill the girl and the kid.

I’d just come up with the idea of lying, saying I’d seen them run into a house.

A stunt like that might get us moving quick.

I decided to give it a try.

Just when I was about to jump down, though, here come the sounds of a skidding roll and thud.

That’s okay, I thought. It’s the side door of Tom’s van sliding shut. They’d gone ahead and tossed the bodies in, so now they were about ready to come over here to help me search.

But then car doors started thumping shut. They went fast: thump thump-thump thump thump thump. Then engines sputtered and zoomed.

My stomach dropped like a ton of lead.

I jumped off the wall and ran for the house.

Ran for about five seconds before two more things happened: the noise of the car engines faded out, and I saw flames behind the big picture window of the old bat’s house.

None of that stopped me, though.

The fire kept me from taking a shortcut through the house, so I raced around the side and had to waste time fooling with a gate. By the time I got out front and had a view of the street, my
friends
were gone.

We’d come up here in the van and five cars, and some of us had doubled up. I’d driven Chuck. I’d picked him up at his house in my Mustang. (Plates covered with masking tape.) We’d passed my flask of rum back and forth along the way, and we’d smoked a couple of his cigars. We’d had us a fine old time, joking around and stuff even though we were feeling pretty tense. As per standard operating procedure, I’d left my key in the ignition before Chuck and I climbed out and headed over to the van.

Now, everything was gone.

Including my Mustang.

There’s an old John Wayne movie called They Were
Expendable
. It’s about PT Boat guys in World War Two. (It’s been colorized now, so you can see how Duke looks with black lips.) Anyway, I was just a kid the first time I saw it, and had to ask my old man what it meant, expendable. He told me, “It means nobody gave a rat’s ass if they lived or died.”

It means more than that, though.

You’re expendable when the mission’s more important than your life. More important to someone. That someone isn’t likely to be
you.

Those guys, Tom in particular, had decided I was expendable. No matter what the cost—to me—I’d have to stay behind, hunt down the girl and the kid, and kill them.

I muttered, “Thanks a heap, motherfuckers.”

Then fire blasted through a downstairs window of the big house up the street where we’d staged our raid.

SOP: take the stiffs, bum the houses, beat it before the fire trucks show.

We’d never left a man behind, though, until now.

Lucky me.

I ran like hell, going back the way I’d come—through the gate, along the side of the house, past the pool to the block-wall.

By the time the first sirens sounded in the distance, I was crouched down on the dark side of the wall.

Chapter Nine

I stayed there at the top of the slope with my back to the wall for a long time, listening to all the noise. There were sirens, doors banging shut, guys shouting, loudspeakers, fire truck radios, cop radios. I heard water shooting out of hoses, hissing and splashing. And I heard snaps and crackles and crashes and exploding glass, all sorts of noises the house made as it got chewed and crunched by the fire.

My recently departed “pals” obviously hoped I’d be sneaking down the hillside to hunt out the girl and the kid and kill them. That was my mission, after all. That was why they’d abandoned me.

So it gave me a lot of satisfaction not to go down there.

You don’t treat a guy like that—desert him—and really expect him to go out of his way for you.

Anyway, I was tired. I’d been up all day and most of the night. Not only that, but our little foray had taken a lot out of me. That sort of thing is such a rush! But tiring. Really wears you out. You go into a house not knowing what’ll happen. It’d be safer if you did some planning, but we don’t. We just pick a place at random, so we don’t know who might be in it. That way, we get more surprises—good and bad. And a lot more fear. Going in, you’re so scared you want to piss, but you get a hell of a charge out of it. And then they’re the scared ones. They’re fucking terrified. They’ve never been so scared in their lives, they’re just praying it’s a nightmare they’ll wake up and escape from, and it’s all because of you. They’re in your power. They know it, you know it. You’re in charge. They can’t do a goddamn thing about it except maybe beg and scream and cry. And then you get wild, and do anything you want to them. Anything. They’re getting it from every side at once.

By the time it’s all over, you’re so wiped out you feel like a zombie.

That’s when everything goes the way it’s supposed to.

This time, we’re right in the middle of our party when we suddenly find out we’ve got survivors. They really took us by surprise. Just a while before they turned up, Ranch had brought in a fine example of teenage girl on a stick. Brian got inspired. Probably hoped she had a sister hiding somewhere. So after a while, he took off to go looking.

Brian, otherwise known as Minnow, has the worst kill record in the whole bunch, so none of us thought he’d come back with anybody. I sure didn’t. But the last thing I expected was to see a couple of kids staring in at us.

How come Ranch didn’t find them? How’d they get past Brian?

Anyway, there they were. I was worn out before they showed their faces. So then we had to chase them.

Shit, I oughta kill both the little creeps just for making me run so much. And for getting me into this mess.

Which I might never get out of alive, goddamn it and them and Tom and Mitch and all the others straight to hell!

At least I’m okay for now.

I was basically okay last night, too, hunched there against the wall, but I was dead tired. Way too tired for climbing down that hillside.

If they wanted me to climb down and hunt around for those two, they were stupid to drive away like that—they should’ve stayed to help.

So fuck them.

I quit squatting, and sat on the ground. I leaned back against the wall, stretched my legs down the slope, and shut my eyes.