Authors: Anthony Izzo
Evil Harvest (11 page)
“We have to do something, get out while we can. There’s going to be damn near an army of them.”
Harry shook his head. “We’re not going anywhere yet. Not until I talk with Matt.”
“Harold, you barely know him.” Liza shook her head in exasperation.
“Just let me talk to him, okay?”
“Always playing the cowboy, aren’t you?”
“You’re the one talking about packing a cannon under your apron when he comes for dinner,” Harry said.
Liza sat back in the recliner. “You’re an old fool, Harry. But you’re my old fool and I love you.” She picked up the magazine. “If you want to play hero and get yourself killed, do it without me.” She gave the magazine a flap and resumed reading.
The ice queen had spoken. The conversation was over, and Liza simmered in the chair. She would get over it. Liza always did.
C
HAPTER
9
HAPTER
9
As daylight began to fade, coppery sunlight filled Jill Adams’ living room; it wouldn’t be long before the shadows started creeping in. She wouldn’t admit it to anyone, but having Matt here made her feel better. With a rogue cop who had more than a passing interest in her roaming the streets, and Matt telling stories of creatures of the night, she was a little uneasy.
She chided herself for being afraid, but she couldn’t help it. “Go ahead, Matt, tell me what happened.” She reached over and patted his hand as if to give him reassurance that she wouldn’t mock him or laugh at him, although she was still skeptical, as anyone with a full deck of cards would be.
Matt sat upright in the recliner, his drink resting on his lap, hands clasped around the glass so tight that the knuckles were white. He stared straight ahead, the sweat beading on his forehead and dribbling down into his eyes. He wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, exhaled and began the story.
That Memorial Day had begun with great expectations, with the start of summer just around the corner. Matt’s mother and father planned a picnic at Emerling Park, and it was close to eighty, unusually warm for that time of year in Lincoln.
His mother made fried chicken and pasta salad, packed a bag of fresh apples and had made Matt’s father go to Tops Market that morning for a loaf of crusty Italian bread. Six-packs of Pepsi and pudding cups rounded out the meal.
John and Maggie Crowe, Matt and his younger brother, Mike, had headed out in the family Bronco for Emerling Park, which was situated on the edge of a ravine ten miles out of town and was a popular spot for campers, hikers and picnickers. At the bottom of the ravine was Lincoln Creek, rippling over jagged rocks and surrounded by dense firs.
They had arrived around eleven, his mother and father unloading the Bronco and setting up on a picnic table under one of the shelters.
Mikey had tugged on Matt’s arm the moment they got out of the truck, pestering him to play catch, practically putting Matt’s baseball glove on his hand for him. The little turd had gotten a new mitt for his birthday in February and had been itching for the snow to melt so he could try it out. Matt gave in, and the two of them jogged over to a spot not too far from the shelter to begin their game of catch.
After about twenty minutes, Maggie Crowe announced that lunch was served, and they all dug in. Even though Matt normally loved his mother’s cooking—her fried chicken especially—he told Jill the food tasted bland, like wads of wallpaper paste in his mouth. It got to the point where he actually became nauseous and couldn’t finish his lunch.
He remembered it as one of the worst meals he had ever eaten, and reflected that maybe it was a premonition that something was about to go horribly wrong.
Jill broke in, “That can’t be true, Matt. I have days where nothing tastes good either.”
“Everything I ate that morning tasted fine. And when my mother was cooking that chicken, it was all I could do to keep my mouth from watering over it. But once I got to the park and started eating, it tasted like crap over easy,” Matt said.
After lunch, Mikey asked his dad to hit some fly balls to him with the aluminum bat he had brought, and the two of them went to the Bronco and got it out. Matt had helped his mother clear the picnic table and throw out the trash. He remembered his mother asking him if he was all right, and he responded that he would be okay, blaming it on indigestion.
The aluminum bat pinged as John Crowe began hitting pop flies to his youngest son, who was doing a better than average job of catching them. It was then that his father announced that he had a surprise; after the park they were all going to Darien Lake. Now, Matt wasn’t much for amusement park rides, but his brother and father were ride maniacs. Matt planned on heading to the waterslides to scope out the girls in their bathing suits.
John Crowe got a little too enthusiastic and popped one over Mikey’s head. Mikey backpedaled toward the woods, but couldn’t shag the fly before it hit the ground and caromed into the woods. So Mikey and their dad went into the trees, beating the brush with sticks, but still could not find the baseball. Matt remembered that they had been in the woods for nearly ten minutes when he heard his father urging Mikey to run.
“The two of them sprinted out of the woods, Mikey first, Dad pushing him along as fast as he could. My father yelled for me and my mother to get to the truck.”
“Obviously he saw something in the woods,” Jill said.
“Yeah. At first my mother and me just stood there, not knowing what the hell he was talking about. My father was a sane, logical man who didn’t panic easily. There wasn’t much he was afraid of. But he came out of those woods yelling like a maniac and waving his arms like he was on fire.”
“What was it?” Jill asked.
Matt swigged the last of his wine and asked Jill if he could have a refill. She said sure, and he got up to go to the kitchen and get it, but his legs turned to noodles and he found that he was shaking when he stood up. He collapsed back into the chair, the room spinning. The wine and telling the story had taken its toll on him physically.
“I think thats enough wine for you,” Jill said. “This must be awfully hard. You don’t have to continue if you don’t want.”
“No, I want to.”
The summer night had set in outside the windows, the sunlight replaced by purple-black shadows broken by the yellow glow from the streetlights.
“You were telling me what came out of the woods.”
“At first I thought it was a bear, or maybe a mountain lion. But they aren’t common in this area. It took me a minute to realize that it wasn’t any animal I had ever seen before.”
The thing that exploded out of the woods was tall and lithe, its back hunched, with a row of spikes down the length of its spine. Its skin color was somewhere between black and green, and it had mottled yellow spots on its arms and legs. A few tufts of quill-like fur grew out of its back, along with pebble-size growths. They looked like mutant warts.
The thing was over six feet tall, Matt guessed, and it moved quickly, bounding out of the woods and pinning his father to the ground. Mikey had stopped to look back when he heard his father fall. He screamed as the thing worked on him with its claws. Matt ran to get his little brother, but Mikey took off, past the truck and toward the ravine, screaming like a fire whistle.
Over at the picnic shelter, Matt noticed that his mother was frantically trying to pack up the picnic goods and put them in the cooler. She was shaking her head and repeating, “No, no, no,” unable to comprehend what had just happened.
Matt yelled at her to drop the damn food and get to the truck.
While the creature was finishing off John Crowe, two more of its kind charged out of the woods with frightening speed, one knocking his mother to the ground and scattering garbage on the concrete slab under the shelter.
Somehow Matt hit the ground in time to avoid the second creature’s leap at him. It rolled in the dust and get back up for another try.
Over at the picnic shelter, a creature had Maggie Crowe pinned to the table. It slashed her across the chest, leaving the table painted with her blood. Then the thing looked up at Matt and grinned through a mouth full of razor-blade teeth, as if to mock him.
He started for the shelter, having no idea how he would stop it, since he was unarmed, his only thought to save his mom. But the other creature pounced on him, pinning him in the dirt facedown. He managed to wriggle around onto his back, only to be face-to-face with a nightmare. Saliva dripped from its jaw onto Matt’s chin, a sticky fluid that smelled like rotten eggs. He gagged, his lunch churning in his stomach.
Behind him, he could hear his mother’s cries for help and the beast grunting as it tore her to shreds. The beast that had him pinned raised an arm and Matt closed his eyes, hoping that one slash would result in a quick death. But he wasn’t killed, and he opened his eyes and saw that the creature had cocked its head, listening.
It had heard Mikey, still running toward the ravine.
The thing leapt off of him, panther-quick, and chased after his brother.
He chased the thing, but he would have had better luck trying to stop a runaway train screeching off its tracks. Up ahead, he could see Mikey nearing the edge of the ravine, screaming, “Mom! Mommy!”
His little brother’s hat had fallen off, and Matt found it and picked it up off the ground. Stuffing the hat in his pocket, he watched as his little brother ran over the side of the sixty-foot ravine, the little voice rising to a shriek, then suddenly cutting off. Matt tried to tell himself that he didn’t really hear the sound of his brother hitting the rocks, a sound like a watermelon being smashed with a hammer. The creature followed.
Upon reaching the edge, Matt peered over and saw the monster shimmying down the cliff face, lowering itself with its lanky arms.
Once at the bottom, it picked up Mikey’s body as easily as a construction worker might pick up his lunch box and scampered across the ravine, disappearing into the murk of the forest on the other side.
There was no saving his little brother, so he sprinted back toward the truck, his lungs burning. He glanced at the picnic area. Their bodies were gone. He reached the truck. Wasting no time and fearing they may return, he climbed into the Bronco, started it up and spun out of the clearing.
Matt cleared his throat and took a final swallow of his drink.
Jill’s heart went out to him: he sat in the chair, still staring straight ahead, but with tears streaming down his cheeks. There were puffy bags under his eyes, and he looked like he had aged ten years just by telling the story. It was an incredible tale, and Jill was convinced that his family had died in a catastrophic manner, but she wondered if maybe some part of Matt’s mind had invented the creatures to cope with his loss.
After all, monsters from a B-horror flick coming out of the woods was a lot to swallow, even for someone with an open mind and a good imagination. Nevertheless, she set her drink on the coffee table, got up and went over to him.
She leaned over, put her arms around him and whispered into his ear, “It’s all right.”
The Barbieri basement stank of blood.
The refrigerator had a splash of blood across it, as if an artist had thrown crimson paint across a canvas.
Perpendicular to the fridge was a workbench stocked with shiny new tools. To Rafferty, they looked like they were used once, maybe twice, and pictured the owner as some prissy rich guy who bought them for show.
He found the rest of the basement unremarkable. A furnace stood on the opposite side near a storage room. It was relatively damp in the basement and the walls gave off a stale, moldy odor.
If he caught the one who did this, they would be wearing their own guts for a scarf. He didn’t need this kind of attention drawn to Lincoln.
The amount of blood on the walls amazed him. It splashed in gory streaks on the block walls, the windows and the workbench. He guessed the victim struggled, maybe even got away briefly, before it finished her off.
They had received a call at the station house about ten o’clock, one of the neighborhood locals telling Clarence that he heard some glass breaking and a woman screaming. The caller told Clarence he figured it was a domestic dispute. Rafferty had had a sinking feeling in his gut when Clarence told him the nature of the call because the house was on Dorchester Street.
The houses in that area were all big Victorians. Hummers and Volvos were in the driveways, and landscapers did all the mowing and planting. The chances of domestic dispute in Dorchester were small. That led Rafferty immediately to believe something worse had happened.
Clarence tramped down the basement stairs. “Holy shit, what a mess!”
Rafferty looked over at Clarence. “What’d you find upstairs?”
“Not much. Some clothes thrown in a ball on the bedroom floor and a can of Diet Coke on the kitchen table. Found her driver’s license in her purse. Name’s Rhonda Barbieri.”
“No sign of entry up there? How about footprints, markings on the rugs?”
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