The Deadsong (20 page)

Thade looked down at the red splatter on his suit. He wiped some of it from his face and tasted it with his finger as though he were carefully considering its complex texture and flavor. He spat it out on what was left above Ellis Pearson’s neck and began walking, whistling as he went.

Deputy Cooley came upon Ellis’s body shortly after, his pistol drawn. Thade hid and watched.

“Sweet Jesus.” The young deputy craned his head over to his radio and said “Cheryl, get a hold of the Sheriff. The Fire Department, too. I’ve got a possible 10-56 right in front of me. Get a hold of anyone and get em down here right away. I’m just off Highway 7 about a mile from Goose Creek. They’ll see the fire, but I need deputies with me. I’ll be in my cruiser on the highway.”

“10-4.”

Cooley clicked off the radio and ran back towards the highway then stopped. He ducked down and examined something Thade couldn’t see. The deputy looked rather defeated, hurt. He leaned over and said something else into his radio, but the downpour covered his words. Thade was wildly curious. Cooley ran back toward the highway and disappeared behind the silver sash of rainfall.

Thade peeked out from behind a tree and watched him go. “Arlo County’s finest,” he chuckled.

He ambled over to see what Cooley had found. His dark eyes saw a leg jutting out from a thicket of brush about twenty yards from him.

“Well, well, well, I spy something!” Thade danced over the brook and through the rain then knelt down to have a better look.

“Ain’t you a looker,” Thade said to the young corpse. A trumpeting sound came from its front pocket.

“Even in death, you’re still a singin.” He pulled the cell phone out of the boy’s muddy jeans, its display lit up. “You damn kids and your cell phones.”

Thade squinted and read it aloud.

“‘Incoming call from Gina’. Ah, baby girl! Well, I think we’d better go pay her a visit, whadaya say?”

Thade looked at Jared’s body as though it might answer back, but it never did.

10

Garrett was in a pickle now. Smitty and Harley Robinson had tied him up pretty good. The chair was newer, sturdier than the old wooden ones that had once been stacked in the Sunday school room.

“You came here to play, Mr. Eucher?” Motley asked.

Garrett said nothing.

“Boy, I tell you what, I ain’t never seen the devils come out of the woodwork like they have this week. I don’t know what it is you were hopin to accomplish by sneaking in here and spreading around that adhesive down there in the basement. Sure stinks to high heaven. Why don’t you fill me in on the details. Did Ellis Pearson send you?”

Garrett kept quiet. He was staring at the Graymar Autoflame crouched in the corner, wondering if it was about to spark and blow them all to high heaven, as Carl Motley put it.

Motley turned around and saw what he was looking at and began heehawing like an escapee from the loony bin.

“I bet you think you’re pretty smart, Mr. Eucher. But I’m smarter. I’d bet my lucky horseshoe you and that Keeper have been working together, am I right? I bet he sent you here on a little revenge scheme. Eye for an eye. I’m familiar with that, sir. Yes, I am. We already torched his little place of serpents. Yes, we did. Didn’t we, gang?”

His gang cheered with ecstatic joy.

“Praise be to Jesus!”

“So, as you can see, we’ve got one up on you little devils. You came here to play with us, so we’re gonna play with you!”

Garrett began to shake. He wasn’t going to make it out alive. He knew that much. The heater should kick on soon, he thought. Any minute now…

“Oh, and by the way, if you think that old piece of junk in the corner is gonna light us up, you got another thing comin. It quit workin about this time last year. So sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Eucher.”

Garrett rocked back and forth in the chair and fell hard on his side. His elbow snapped like a twig. Broken bone poked through the boy’s forearm and when Garrett saw it he wailed in agony.

“Oh mercy, boy, we can’t have you wrestlin around and yellin like that,” Motley said, setting Garrett back upright.

Harley Robinson appeared from the back room carrying duct tape in his right hand. In his left, a nail gun. He passed it to the reverend dutifully.

“Ah, thank ya, Harley. So, Mr. Eucher, what kind of game you want to play? No suggestions? How about we shut you up and tack you down first?”

Harley smacked a strip of silver duct tape across Garrett’s mouth.

Motley turned the nail gun over his hand. “Let’s see here…ah yes, there’s the button.”

Garrett shook his head violently as Motley shot four nails in his left foot. Garrett screamed though his nose, blood welled up in his cheeks, and veins stood out on his neck in cords.

After Motley put a few more nails in Garrett’s other foot, he passed off the nail gun and looked at the boy, pleased.

“You people underestimate the awesome power of God and the power of His vengeance upon those who seek to destroy his church. I’m a God-fearin man, Mr. Eucher. Are you?”

Garrett’s nostrils flared, trying to reel in as much oxygen as possible before he passed out, but the strong fumes of the adhesive only kept the pain somewhat bearable. He managed to slip two fingers into the front pocket of his jeans. His backup plan was in reach.

Motley began to pray as Smitty wiped off a long serrated dagger with his hanky.

When Motley opened his eyes and saw the butane lighter in the boy’s hand, he stopped praying. The next thing he and the rest of them saw was a brilliant flash of light then darkness.

In a fleeting instant, Sand Mountain Church and its followers––along with a young martyr named Garrett Eucher––were reduced to charred remains scattered along the property.

11

Gina was glad to see Jared when he arrived. But when she and Dylan ran out into the storm to put their bags in the Charger, it wasn’t there.
How did he get here? And why is he covered in mud and leaves?

“Mr. Pearson took me out to kill me. He had a gun, but I shot him instead,” Jared said, but there was something in his eyes that bothered her…

“Did you kill him?” Dylan asked.

Before Jared could open his mouth, sirens began to scream across the farm.
A tornado warning
, Gina thought.

“We’ve gotta get down to the storm cellar,” she said, grabbing his wrist.

“I thought maybe we could go upstairs first and––”

“Are you serious right now?” The wind raged, whistling through the trees and the latticework on the porch. “Come on.”

Rain slashed at them as they ran to the side of the house where the storm cellar doors lay recessed at the base of the foundation. Dylan flung it open and pointed down into the darkness. “Come on!” he screamed. “Hurry!”

They bolted down the wooden stairs to a small room damp with the smell of oxidized copper pipes and rotting vegetable matter. Dylan yanked on a shoestring dangling from the ceiling, sparking life into a single incandescent. It pendulated and burned a harsh orange light that threw up dancing shadows on the cinderblock walls. Wind howled through the planks in the double doors above them, the rusty hinges chattering like castanets. Jared held Gina tightly to his chest, caressing her arms, comforting her. Dylan kicked boxes of old magazines and comic books aside to clear a few more square feet of vacant space.

They squatted in the corner and waited.

11

Come on Gina, Dylan, SOMEBODY pick up the damn phone!

Linda Starkweather pushed
SEND
on the face of her dying cell phone for the third time. The storm grew stronger by the minute, and the weatherman on 97.8 had repeated the tornado warning, cautioning listeners to take cover. It was bumper-to-bumper southbound on Whippoorwill Road, and she was only eight miles from the turn at Highway 7 where her house may or may not be standing. The panic creased thin lines across her brow, and her stomach gurgled from either the worry or the fast food arguing with her innards. Probably both.

After Dr. Schlitzer had thoroughly checked over the old collie with a battery of tests and X-rays, he stepped into the lobby and placidly told her that aside from the obvious cuts and scrapes, Fender had a few bruised ribs, and his tail was broken. No internal bleeding was detected, and the consensus was that ole’ Fender would recover just fine. They agreed it was best for him to stay overnight, letting him rest peacefully sedated, although his hind legs would kick while he dreamt of chasing whatever it is dogs chase in their dreams and jolt awake in a fit of pain.
Bless his heart. I remember when he was just a pup
, Linda thought. Fender’s muzzle was now white with age, and the arthritis in his hips had worsened over the years since the first K.O. in the road which became his namesake.
Bless him.

The news she'd overheard at the jail came back to her. After leaving Fender to recuperate at the vet’s, she had stopped by the county jail to drop off some books she thought Paul might enjoy. They’d been in the trunk since April and were meant for the Goodwill next to The Glendale Department Store, but Paul might need something to flip through until his unsightly lawyer wrangled him from custody.

The squirrelly guy behind the visitor check-in had told her Paul was in the infirmary getting an abscessed molar checked out. She had left the books, but before she got to the exit, she overheard something, a bit of news she wasn’t suppose to hear…

“Poor Martha,” she muttered to the empty passenger seat.

Should she tell Gina what the two deputies had conversed about? Maybe she already knew. News travels fast. It's a small town, surely one of her friends had called her, but now, her own mother couldn't get through to her cell or the house phone. The lines may be down, or she's simply too distraught to talk. Either way, Gina needed to grab her brother's shirt collar and head straight to the storm cellar.

For a moment, she thought about her husband for the first time in a good while. It was like a wind-blown photograph wedged on the lens of her mind’s eye. She shut her real eyes––very blue, much like those of her children––and saw Dick sitting in the backyard staring out at the fiery sky, the stub of a Pall Mall between his lips and a sweating glass of sweet tea in his right hand. With his left, he’d scratch Fender’s back for a while until the old dog twisted his heard back and looked at him with those bright brown eyes, his tongue flopping threads of saliva on the knee of Dick’s blue work pants. 

Her car lurched forward another ten feet before the brake lights on the Oldsmobile in front of her burned red again. The rain pelting her windshield turned into thick tumbling sheets of water that hissed loudly like white noise on a television set after sign off. She tried to drown it out with the calm but hurried voice of the weatherman speaking over the car stereo, but even at max volume, his words were almost indistinguishable. He said the storm was be soon passing over Durden, then Hemming. Golf ball-size hail and hundred mile-an-hour winds would sweep through their little community within the next fifteen minutes, and she prayed her children were safely hiding in the cellar.

She sighed, then dialed Gina’s cell phone again.

12

It sounded like a freight train speeding over their heads. It was the tornado, Gina was sure of it. She’d heard it before. She had been just a little girl watching a funnel dangle on the horizon, its tail devouring a short stretch of deserted farm land before dissipating into a cloud of blue smoke. But that sound was a little different this time. A feeling of terrific dread prickled the back of her neck. The deadsong. It was coming from far away, she could tell that much. It faded into a new movement, a choir of dead voices in no particular key shrieked with nauseating pitch. It was as though someone was singing it for the first time.

Something else something terrible, something much closer was coming. Something had its nose to the ground sniffing her out like a police dog, and soon it would find her and gobble her up. Death would lick his fleshless lips as he digested Gina Starweather’s tasty soul.

The rumbling twister grew louder and louder. The sudden change in air pressure made their ears pop.

“Should we hold onto something?” Gina asked.

“There’s nothing to hold onto!” Dylan said, waving his arms frantically.

“We could grab hold of the staircase if it gets any worse out there,” Jared suggested. His voice was flat and relaxed. If he was afraid, he sure as hell didn’t seem like it. He looked bored.

The light bulb dangling from the ceiling went out with a sharp crack. They could have been blinded and known no difference.

They could see nothing.

Jared’s voice echoed in the void. “You got a flashlight down here?”

“There’s one in the kitchen. It’s in one of the drawers,” Gina said.

“Well that doesn’t do us much good, does it?”

They listened as limbs snapped from trees. Something fell hard against the side of the house. Leaves and debris danced across the huge double doors above them. The wind whooshed with terrific force then slowly began to recede, fading out quietly like the end of a pop tune.

Gina got to her feet and found herself moving towards the stairs.

“What’re you doing?” Jared asked.

“I’m just going up to have a look,” Gina said, feeling blindly for the wooden steps. She winced as a splinter jabbed into the soft flesh of her palm.

“Gina?” Dylan listened to her gentle footfalls on boards that creaked and groaned with each careful step.

“I think it’s let up enough to––”

She screamed. Then a cascade of terrible banging, like huge fists pounding on a castle door. Gina smacked into the concrete floor hard, her left thigh and ass throbbing, something trickling from her knee to her groin, something wet and warm. It was on her face, too.

Blood
, she thought. She licked the corners of her mouth––the salty, metallic taste of a penny. It was blood all right.

Jared and Dylan called out to her, their hands searching.