The Dead Man: Hell in Heaven (5 page)

Matt froze, looking for the source of the cry.

“Over there!” Mouse pointed at a small shack on the left side of the road.

Matt ran toward the shack, not noticing that the pain in his ankle had all but disappeared, his cracked ribs seemed to have knit back together. All he could think about was that scream, and what it could mean.

When he got to the far side of the shack, what he saw was worse than anything he could have imagined.

There was blood everywhere, an inch deep even as it soaked into the dry ground. Two men lay on the ground, covered in gore, each with a hand on the other’s throat. Their free hands were outstretched as if they were begging not to be killed, and at first Matt thought they had both died this way.

Then he saw them move, and realized they were struggling in the mud and blood. Fighting to reach the machete that lay just out of their reach.

Matt vaulted over a decaying split rail fence, then took three long steps and brought his foot down on the machete just as one of the men reached its handle.

“What the hell do you think—” the man grunted. And then he stopped as he looked up and saw Matt standing over him. His hand fell away from the knife, and then slowly he rolled away from the other man. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was you.”

Matt didn’t know why that should make a difference. Maybe the slayer of Joan was entitled to some respect in this town. Then he realized he was still carrying the axe. It fit so comfortably in his hand he’d forgotten he’d been holding it the entire time. So it was possible that it was simply a matter of the axe in the hand outweighing the machete on the ground. Whatever the reason, the two men had stopped trying to kill each other.

For the moment.

“Get to your feet,” Matt said, then turned to the other one. “You, too.”

Both men rose. Matt couldn’t tell if they’d been among the ones he met on Main Street. Blood obscured their features and covered their clothes. They stared down at their feet like schoolchildren waiting for a scolding.

Matt tried to figure out what he was supposed to do here. If he was King Conan, he supposed he would just cut both their heads off. That didn’t have a lot of appeal for him.

Before the silence had dragged on long enough so that that even these two would realize Matt had no idea what he was doing, Mouse ran up beside him. She gave the two men a quick, dismissive glance, then ducked around them to where a mound of bloody flesh lay on the ground.

“That’s Sweetpie,” she said accusingly. “Which one of you two did this?”

Mouse kneeled in the blood and gently stroked what Matt could now make out as the head of a large pig. The animal was dead, its throat slit and its body hacked to shreds, apparently with the bloody machete that still stuck out of one wound. Astonishingly, there were still a few dribbles of blood oozing out of the body, despite the flood that covered its sty.

“It was this murdering bastard,” the first man said. “Alwyn Hoggins came running in here waving that blade over his head like a madman and killed my poor Sweetpie, and her getting ready to breed again in the spring.”

“Your poor Sweetpie is the only murderer here,” said the other one, whom Matt now realized he had met in the line-up with a cluster of other Hogginses. “You Vetches think you own this town and everyone in it. But that doesn’t give you the right to let your pigs run free in my chicken coop. Killed eight of my best layers and chased off three more. I told you last time what would happen if that beast got into my hens, and I meant it.”

“My Sweetpie wouldn’t hurt your damn hens. Just because you can’t string chicken wire tight enough to keep out the foxes, you’ve got to blame your problems on me.”

“You’re so sure of that, Ezekiel Vetch, then let’s cut open that fat sow’s belly and see what we got in there,” Alwyn said.

“Sure thing,” Vetch said. “Right after we cut open yours. You don’t have that bitch protecting you anymore.”

Ezekiel Vetch dived down to the bloody ground and grabbed for the machete. Matt stepped back, then kicked him hard on the chin. Vetch rolled over, clutching his head. Hoggins jumped on his enemy, flipped him over, and pressed his head down in the blood.

“He’s killing him,” Mouse squealed. “You’ve got to do something.”

Matt raised the axe over his head and—

“You can’t kill them,” Mouse said so quickly and frantically that Matt could barely make out the words. “That’s not why I summoned you here. You can’t do that. You can’t.”

—brought it down on a galvanized water pan, splitting it in half and letting out a ringing noise so loud it could have been heard at the highway.

The two men broke apart, staring up at him.

“Next time it hits flesh and bone,” Matt said. “You understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Ezekiel Vetch said.

“You bet,” Alwyn Hoggins said.

“Now get up!” Matt had to repress an urge to laugh. He’d seen himself as King Conan, but he sounded more like a kindergarten teacher. In a sane world, both of these men would tell him to fuck himself, and do to him what Hoggins had done to the pig if he refused. But this must not have been a sane world, because both men were getting sheepishly to their feet.

What was he supposed to do now? If he walked away again, the two men were going to start trying to kill each other again. Not that he could bring himself to care all that much about either of them. But Mouse did seem concerned, even frantic. He thought back to when he was ten years old and had gotten into a fistfight with his best friend, Eli Messenger. His father had caught them, pulled them apart, and then made them apologize and shake hands, after which the boys went back and finished the Monopoly game that had started the fight. Trouble was, Matt suspected that neither of the two farmers had the maturity and wisdom that he and Eli had possessed before puberty.

There was a tugging at his sleeve. He bent down so Mouse could whisper in his ear. “You’ve got to settle this,” she said.

“Why me?” Matt said. “They’re not going to listen to me.”

“There’s no one else,” Mouse said. “If you walk away, they’re going to kill each other. You can’t let that happen.”

Matt suspected that whatever he did, that eventuality would occur sooner or later. But at least he could try to put it off for a little while. He cleared his throat, stalling for time as he tried to figure out how to end this quickly and without any human blood being spilled.

“Alwyn Hoggins,” he said.

“Yes, sir.” Hoggins actually straightened his back and threw out his shoulders when Matt said his name, as if it was his drill inspector talking to him.

Or royalty.

“You admit that you killed this pig belonging to Ezekiel Vetch?” The words coming out of his mouth were oddly formal, but that seemed to be what both men expected.

“She was killing my chickens,” Hoggins whined. “And I warned him and I warned him but he—”

“Quiet!” Matt roared.

Hoggins’ mouth snapped shut in mid-complaint.

“I am going to ask you again, and this time you will only give me the information I requested,” Matt said. “Is that clear?”

Hoggins nodded.

“Did you kill the pig belonging to Ezekiel Vetch?”

“Yes,” Hoggins said. “I did that. I killed her.”

It was clear that there was an explanation trying to burst its way out of his mouth. Matt held up a hand and Hoggins fell silent.

“Ezekiel Vetch,” Matt said. “Is it true that your pig broke into this man’s henhouse and killed his chickens?”

“He can’t prove anything,” Vetch said. “He’s just blaming me for his own problems.”

“I see,” Matt said. “I believe Alwyn Hoggins had a way to discover the truth of the matter.” He hefted his axe, then leveled the head at the corpse of the pig. “Are you willing to undertake the experiment?”

“Who knows what that lying sack of shit has planted inside my poor Sweetpie’s stomach,” Vetch said. “He might have been cramming her full of feathers before I got here. In fact, I’m pretty sure that—”

“Enough!” Matt roared, and Vetch reared back as if the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz had just let out another blast of flame and smoke.
Good thing they don’t know who’s really behind the curtain
, Matt thought. “Alwyn Hoggins, how many chickens did you lose today?”

“The number’s hard to say,” Hoggins said, a smile of victory cracking the drying blood that covered his face. “There were the eight this monster killed and the three it ran off, of course. But my chickens are delicate creatures, they are. A trauma like this could leave them unfit for laying the rest of their lives and I’ll be putting out for their feed and getting nothing in return.”

“So you lost eleven, right?” Matt said.

For a moment Hoggins looked like he was going to continue his objection. But he cast a quick glance at the axe and swallowed hard. “As far as I can tell today, yes, eleven.”

“And how many chickens was that pig worth?”

Both men started to talk at once. Matt raised his axe and they fell silent.

“Mary Elizabeth Gilhoolie, sister of Vern, leader of all the Gilhoolies and the Hogginses as well, tell me the truth on pain of punishment,” Matt roared, doing his best to capture the cadences in all the barbarian movies he’d ever seen. “How many chickens are equal to the value of the pig this man called Sweetpie?”

“No more than twenty,” Mouse said.

“The girl don’t know what she’s talking about,” Vetch said. “The sow was in the prime of her life, could have turned out another three litters easy.”

“She was older than I am,” Mouse said.

“You’re confusing her with my old sow, also named Sweetpie,” Vetch said. “Named this one for her, since I’ve always been sentimental that way and—”

Matt didn’t bother to speak this time. He raised the axe and Vetch fell silent.

“Twenty chickens,” Mouse said again. This time there were no complaints.

“This is my judgment,” Matt said. “Since Alwyn Hoggins killed a pig worth twenty chickens, and his loss from the pig’s attack was only eleven chickens, then Ezekiel Vetch must pay him nine chickens, or the equivalent in whatever means of barter shall be mutually agreed upon by both parties. In return, Hoggins may keep the pig carcass to do with as he pleases.”

Both blood-drenched men stared at him silently. They seemed to be waiting for him to do or say something else. Matt considered throwing in an “amen,” but it didn’t seem appropriate for the occasion. Finally something popped into his head from an old movie he couldn’t identify. “So it shall be written, so it shall be done.”

He waved the axe in the air, then turned and walked away, trusting the two men would not go back to trying to kill each other.

The Grange turned out to be a grand old barn nestled in the middle of a stand of pines. It seemed like a strange place for such a structure to Matt, but everything else had seemed so bizarre since he got to Heaven it barely even caught his notice. Especially once he’d stepped through the wide doors and discovered just how beautiful a barn could look. There were brightly colored tapestries hanging from the walls and rugs on the floor. The ceiling was open to the roof, revealing an exquisite structure of wooden beams, all painted in a pattern of birds and wildflowers. Oil lamps hung from these beams, casting the vast room in warm, golden light.

Mouse led Matt into the Grange a few minutes before six, and the room was already filled with people. It seemed as if everyone he’d met out on Main Street was here, along with quite a few others.

Three long tables were set up in a U-shape right in the middle of the floor. The two sides were long enough to easily seat a hundred people around each of them. The bottom of the U was much shorter, with only seven seats. Or, Matt thought as he took a second look, six seats and a throne. Unlike the rest of the bare wood chairs, the one in the middle was thickly padded and stood at least a foot higher than the others.

“What a surprise that Orfamay Vetch has got such a nice seat,” Matt muttered to Mouse as they came in.

“It’s her due as leader of the Vetch family,” Mouse said. “Vern’s is just as good as head of the Gilhoolies.”

Matt looked around, but didn’t see another throne anywhere in the room.
Maybe they take turns
, he thought.

“It’s getting late,” Mouse said. “We’d better sit down.”

Matt hesitated, not sure which side to choose. Mouse grabbed his hand and led him to the short table.

“Can’t we just find a quite spot on one side?” Matt said.

“You’re funny,” Mouse said. “I didn’t expect that.”

“I didn’t expect any of this, so we’re even,” Matt said.

As they came around one side of the short table, Orfamay Vetch rounded the other. Matt stopped to let her get past him to the grand seat. But she stopped short and pulled out one of the wooden chairs next to the throne, then sat in it without ceremony. Matt turned back to Mouse, confused.

She gestured to the throne.

“That’s not for me,” he said.

“You set us free,” Mouse said. “It’s yours.”

Like the rest of the town, apparently. Matt had tried to get Mouse to tell him how things had been while Joan was alive, how long she’d been there and what she’d done to them. But somehow the girl always managed to change the subject, telling him little anecdotes about the town and the people who lived in it. If he pressed, she started talking about how happy everyone was that he’d come. Finally she’d led him to Orfamay’s house. It was another shack with no electricity and no running water, but he’d been able to use the pump outside to wash off the pig blood that had been splashed on him, and when he pulled his head out from under the water he could see Mouse disappearing down the road. He hadn’t known how he was going to pass the hours until six that evening, but as soon as he sat down on Orfamay’s soft sofa his eyes closed and he fell into a deep sleep, waking only when Mouse came back to take him to the Grange for the supper. When he did awake, he was pleased and only a little disturbed to discover that the damage he’d suffered when he lost his bike was almost all healed. In the months since his resurrection he’d noticed that his recuperative powers were much stronger than they had been before his death, but this was the first time he’d really put it to the test. So there were some benefits to dying, apparently.

Matt glanced up and saw that almost everyone in the room had taken their seats, and the tables were now filled. He couldn’t be any more certain than he’d been when they’d all lined up to meet him on Main Street, but judging from the very strong gene pools that dominated here, it seemed that one side of the room was filled with Vetches and Runcibles, the other with Gilhoolies and Hogginses. They were all standing behind their chairs, like schoolchildren waiting for permission to be seated.

As Matt reluctantly headed toward his appointed seat, a giant broke away from one of the long tables and loped over to him. He was almost seven feet tall, with arms the size of tree trunks. The only thing about him that wasn’t huge was his face, which seemed squashed and tiny on his pumpkin-sized head. Squashed and tiny and, oddly, almost identical to Orfamay’s.

The giant Vetch—because a Vetch he must have been—reached the throne at the same time as Matt, even though he’d been coming from at least three times as far away—and drew it back from the table for him. Matt cast a questioning look at Mouse, who encouraged him with a nod, then sat down and let himself be slid up to the table.

Only then was there a scraping of wood on wood as everybody else in the barn took their seats. And another, as they all turned their chairs to look at the short table. To look at him.

Matt wanted to ask Mouse what they were expecting from him, but she was seated two seats away. To his immediate left was a sallow kid, maybe all of twenty, with sandy hair, a sunken chest and no chin. He looked like an Easter Peep that had been missed in the egg hunt and left out in the sun and sprinklers for days. Next to him was an empty chair, and then Mouse, who gazed up at him with worshipful eyes.

The Peep caught Matt’s gaze and immediately misunderstood it. “Yeah, I’m Vern Gilhoolie,” he said with the kind of pride at the sound of his name that most would reserve for the birth of their first child. “You did good with that Joan bitch. Wish I’d thought of trying it your way. We would have been out of the shit faster and wouldn’t have needed to bother you.”

“Nice to meet you,” Matt lied, wondering how it was possible the same womb produced these two siblings.

“You want anything, you just come to me,” Vern said. “If you can’t find me, you can ask any Gilhoolie. Any Hoggins, too. They all do what I tell ‘em, and I’ll tell ‘em to treat you right.”

“That’s good to know,” Matt said. “What I really want is a ride back to the highway as soon as possible. Can one of your people help me with that?”

“The highway?” Vern said.

Before Matt could press him further, there was a hacking sound on his right that sounded like another one of Ezekiel Vetch’s pigs being slaughtered. He turned to see that Orfamay had stood up and was clearing her throat for attention. The giant was sitting next to her, and even with her standing and him sitting she barely came up to his earlobe. There might have been someone sitting on the other side of the giant, but Matt was as likely to see him or her as he was to see a satellite orbiting the dark side of the moon.

Orfamay cleared her throat again, and the room settled into silence. Matt took a moment to look around and confirmed what he had thought—the two tables were divided by clan.

“You all know why we’re here tonight,” Orfamay started. “So I’m not going to try to make any fancy speeches about how we were delivered from evil by the arrival of this young man. You lived through it, you suffered the same pain we all did, now it’s over. The bitch queen is dead. I sent Percy and Ranulph out to the house to confirm it, and there’s no one there besides a rotting pile of goo on the ground.”

The crowd erupted in cheers and applause. Orfamay let it go for a few seconds, then cleared her throat again. Somehow that awful sound cut through the celebration, and everybody settled back down.

“You’re happy about this, and you’ve got the right to be,” Orfamay continued. “You know how it was with Joan, you’re glad it’s over. But you know what it was like before Joan was here, and that wasn’t any better. We’ve got a chance to start over a third time now, but that doesn’t mean it’s all posies and kittens yet. There are costs to everything. Before the food comes and we all make fools of ourselves on meat and shine, let’s hear what we’re going to be paying this time.”

Matt didn’t know what that meant, but there was an ominous tone that made him want to get out of Heaven even faster. He was trying to figure out if there was a way to slip out unobserved from his place of honor when he realized that Orfamay had stopped speaking and was now staring directly at him.

“Me?” he whispered to her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’ve got to tell these people how it’s going to work around here,” Orfamay whispered back. “You owe them that much.”

She sat down, never taking her eyes off him. Matt felt the gaze of hundreds of people burning into him.

“I can’t even begin to imagine what all of you went through while Joan was here,” he said, searching for words as he went. “I mean, I can begin—and I’ve got to leave it there. Because what I saw was pretty horrible. If I’d come across anything like that a year ago, I think I would have dropped dead of a heart attack.”

There was a spatter of appreciative laughter from the crowd.

“The fact that you were all able to survive this horror tells me how strong you must be,” Matt said. “I’m sure it won’t be long until everything goes back to normal around here. So, um, welcome back to the real world. I think you’re going to like it.”

Now there was applause from the two tables. But it died away quickly when Orfamay cleared her throat again.

“You’ve got the pretty words,” she said. “But we’re still not hearing what you expect from this town?”

“I don’t expect anything,” Matt said. “There is one thing I’d really like, and that’s a ride back to the—”

His words were cut off by a scream coming from outside the barn door. And this was no sow choking on the blood from the slit in its throat. This came from a woman, and it was filled with pain and fear.

No one moved. They didn’t even swivel their heads away from Matthew.

“Didn’t you hear that?” Matt said. “There’s a woman out there. She’s hurt.”

Still, no one moved. Matt tried to push away from the table, but the throne must have weighed half a ton. It wouldn’t budge.

Matt grabbed the edge of the table and was about to flip it over to free himself when there was a blur of pink motion and a pale form tumbled onto the floor in front of him. Before he could make sense of what was happening, a grizzled man in denim overalls without a shirt stalked in and grabbed the thing he had just hurled through the door.

It was a girl. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen years old, as lovely a young woman as Matt had ever seen. Her hair was blonde and her eyes blue. She had a narrow waist and small breasts that ended in pale nipples; her pubic hair was so pale as to be practically invisible.

Matt could see this all because, aside from the bruise she wore on her right cheek, the girl was naked.

And there was blood running down her legs.