Vile Blood (19 page)

Erased.

But now, as she knelt over Drum, she felt that what she’d always called Skye had fused seamlessly with The Other. She was reborn. No more an unwilling observer, she was a participant now, marrying her sensibility to the brute power of the predator, ready to take her time and savor what was to come.

She looked at her arm, recognizing it as her own even though it was filled with a new power, her skin stretched taut across muscles that were
hard
and tight. Her fingers were thicker, the nails long and
sharp
. Glancing down at her chest she saw that her soft breasts had sunk into her pectorals, the nipples dark and erect, and her belly below was flat and caged in muscle.

Drum groaned and his eyes flickered and opened. “Jesus,” he said.

Before his arm even moved Skye saw him ball his fist and take a swing at her. She caught his elbow and wrenched it, the
joint
shattering with a brittle crack. He screamed—high and girlish—his arm falling useless at his side.

Pearls of sweat beaded his hairline and one of them flowed down to his right eye, where it hung from his almost feminine lashes like a tear, before it fell to the dusty floor with a smack that Skye could hear with perfect clarity.

She smelled the fear he wore like a coat, could actually see the fumes rising from his body like heat haze off blacktop. For just a second she marveled at
her heightened senses,
then she accepted them as part of what she’d become.

She freed Drum’s arm from the sling and tore his shirt from his body, revealing a huge torso covered in a pelt of black hair thick and sticky with blood from the wound in his shoulder. He tried to get up again and she hit him in the throat with the edge of her hand, just hard enough to make him gag and subside to the carpet.

Skye grabbed a leather boot in each hand and
unshod the sheriff
, his sockless feet ripe, the toenails curling long and yellow. Taking his belt by its ridiculous
horseshoe
buckle she broke it with one tug, the concertina folds of his pale belly revealed. She ripped his pants from him, tearing them along the seams, throwing them aside, until all he wore were piss-stained boxers, which were gone with the jerk of her index finger.

Drum’s penis, even in his state of fear, was thick as a club, and she knew he’d enjoyed using it to inflict pain.

What goes around, she thought, as she gathered together the things she needed for the performance piece that lay ahead. She tore his shirt into strips and used them to fashion tourniquets for each arm, tying them hard enough to bite into his flesh at the elbows, getting him groaning again. Ripping his trousers into lengths, tying off each leg above the knee.

Skye lifted the bottle of liquor from the table, uncapped it and poured some over Drum’s face. He blinked and spluttered.

 “Fuck you, bitch,” he said.

She reached down and took the shattered arm in her right hand, her left gripping his bicep. With one easy twist she tore the limb free at the elbow, bone splinters, veins and arteries left dangling, the tourniquet allowing only a trickle of blood.

When Drum opened his mouth to scream she stuffed it with his boxers and all that escaped him was muffled weeping, a flow of tears and sweat tracing his cheeks and pooling in the hollow beneath his Adam’s apple. He closed his eyes and whimpered.

She slapped his face with the hand of the detached limb and when he looked at her she saw the depths of his terror. A box of matches had spilled when he’d shattered the table and she had a sudden inspiration. She lay down his arm and snagged a couple of matchsticks, inserting them into his eye sockets, forcing his eyelids open.

She wanted him to see this.

All of it.

She laid the arm on his chest and reached across and tore off his other arm, easy as if she were ripping paper from a roll of kitchen towel. She placed the second limb across the first, leaving him in a mockery of an attitude of supplication.

She cocked a head and looked at her handiwork, adjusted one of the arms a little. Better. It was going to be beautiful, her little homage.

She
seized
Drum’s massive left leg just below the knee and for the first time felt a
moment’s doubt.
Then it evaporated and she knew she could do it. And she did: ripped the leg free, hearing the sharp snap of bone and the wet tearing of flesh. She lifted the leg to show him, his eyes bulging with agony. He passed out and it required more slaps and malt liquor to revive him in time for the other leg to be taken.

She arranged the severed limbs beneath his stumps, as if he were doing a little prancing jig, or a Morris Dance, and it so pleased her that she heard herself grunt.

Then she grasped the fat penis that drooped from the tangle of graying pubic hair and slapped it playfully against his belly, flicking his balls with a long nail.

His eyes glazed with terror behind the matchsticks, desperate not to see what was to come.

Skye dipped her head, fighting back some old squeamishness and took the thing in her mouth, clamping her jaws around it, and tore it free with one toss of her head. She sat up with it dangling like an eel from her teeth, a geyser of blood spewing high and thick
from the gash
between his legs.

She spat the
bloody tube
into her hand and forced Drum’s mouth open, removed the boxer shorts and stuffed his penis
inside
, holding his jawbone closed. He gagged and retched, and when he passed out Skye didn’t try to revive him.

She wanted to feed alone and unobserved.

39

Gene stood at his uncle’s deathbed staring down into the face of a stranger, regretting that he had come here. In the day since he’d last seen Milt Lavender the old man seemed to have edged closer to death. His sunken mouth gaped on a few remaining yellow molars, false teeth submerged in a glass beside his bed, the pink plastic gums and nicotine stained enamel magnified to cartoonish proportions by the water.

There was no rambling monologue now, just the ragged suck of tired lungs.

Lavender’s eyes were open but if they saw anything it was not Gene, who had
brought
the selfish hope of finding some solace when he should have taken his boy home and calmed him and told him the lies necessary to send him peacefully to sleep. Instead Timmy lay on a sofa in the parlor, restless,
troubled
by dreams, his muffled cries reaching Gene through the wall.

The black-clothed nurse haunted the doorway, as mute as before, her eyes willing Gene to go. As he turned to leave his cell phone warbled in his pocket. He was tempted send it to voice mail, fearful of hearing some barely coherent account of the carnage at Drum’s house. But he answered it, the woman clucking low in her throat as he edged past her into the passageway.

“Martindale.”

“Chief Deputy, this is Detective Vern Winslow from the state police.”

“Yes?”

“Am I correct in saying you had some trouble with a Junior Cotton round five years ago?”

“Some trouble, yes,” Gene said, a low dread taking hold of him.

“Be advised that Cotton has escaped from the facility where he was incarcerated and is, as yet, unapprehended.”

Gene found himself standing in the doorway to the parlor, staring at Timmy lying on the sofa beneath a lamp with an orange vellum shade.

“Chief Deputy?”

“I’m here,” Gene said, and forced himself to ask the obvious questions.

Heard about the murder of an orderly. The abduction of a nurse. Heard the cop voice an opinion that Cotton was heading north, out of state. An opinion
unsupported
by fact.

Gene thanked the detective, pocketed his phone and lifted Timmy from the sofa, carrying him out to the Jeep, trying to quell the premonition that Junior Cotton would not head north. That he would be traveling south.

Coming here.

40

Junior Cotton awoke disorientated, with no tally in his head of the lost years, months, days, minutes and seconds. And, for a disturbingly long while, with no idea where he was.

A rectangle of piss-yellow sunlight fell hard through a broken window and stretched across a flaking wall to warm the toes of his left foot that rested on the rim of a discolored tub, the enamel worn away in piebald patches.

He lay on his back in the tub, a pair of legs—female, judging by the varnished toenails—somehow entwined with his. If not for the blood, he would have been able to imagine a bathroom tryst right out of a one of the cheesy rom-coms he and his mama used to love, lying on a motel bed after a long day of slaying,
chortling
at these absurd mating rituals, so conventional and dull compared with what the two of them had shared.

It was only when Junior turned—feeling the waterbed undulation of viscera beneath his back—and stared into the bloodless face of the nurse, that the last day was returned to him in a frenetic montage: slicing Alfonso’s throat, abducting and killing the woman and bathing in her blood and entrails.

He sat up, the gore making kissy sounds. As he levered himself from the bathtub he was pleased to note that his strength was returning. The clothes he’d stolen from the washing line lay in the dust, but he couldn’t dress and leave looking like a refugee from some butcher’s theater.

Knowing it was useless, he opened one of the faucets, the top spinning in his hand. The pipes moaned and rattled but the spout remained dry.

Naked, Junior went through to the kitchen, using the pimpled walls for support, crossed to the splintered back door and stared out past the little car at the flat brown nothingness. A shine caught his eye and he saw the broken blades of a windmill lying in the dust. The walls of the cement dam beneath the windmill had cracked and crumbled, nothing but weeds and sand where there once was water.

Turning, he searched the torn and dusty closets. A bloated tin of peaches. A slice of bread with a beard of mold. A dead rat cocooned by decomposition. Then, hidden beneath a sack of empty liquor bottles, he saw a jerrycan, rusted and dented. He shook it and liquid sloshed inside. Junior battled with the screw top, slumping with exhaustion by the time it finally broke free of a band of rust. He caught his breath and sniffed the contents, pulling his nose back. Water, okay, but so stagnant it stank like a swamp.

Scrounging beneath the sink he found a red plastic bucket with no handle. He tipped the jerrycan and filled the bucket, a meniscus of slime floating on top of the water like an oil slick.

Returning to the door he reached down past the broken step and scraped up a mound of dirt, carrying it back into the kitchen, where he released it in a little pyramid. He wet his hands in the bucket, took some of the grit as a
scouring
agent and proceeded to work at the blood on his skin. It hurt, but the pain was cleansing, clearing the fog from his mind. He scrubbed at his face, beard and hair, the bucket turning red.

He emptied the bloody water out the door and filled the bucket again. No need for the sand this time and within minutes his skin was pink and as clean as it was going to get. He stank like he’d been wrestling alligators, but there was nothing to be done about that.

Junior rested as until his hammering heart was stilled, then he dressed and went out to the car. The keys still dangled from the ignition and the woman’s purse lay on the rear seat. Rummaging through it he found a couple of ten dollar bills and some change. He took the money, tossed the purse and lowered himself into the car, exhausted again, his foot shaking as it felt for the gas pedal.

You can do this, Junior. You can do this.

He started the car, fed too much gas and stalled the engine. He started it again, willing his foot to obey him and pulled away slowly, bumping toward the fallen gates. He searched for tell-tale dust clouds but the gravel road was empty, pointing straight and true toward the city.

41

Skye rested her head against the window of the bus, the vibration lulling her into something close to sleep, the sand and rock passing in a featureless smear.

When she’d arrived at the
bus
station that morning she’d seen Gene’s cruiser parked across the road, the early sun firing off his sunglasses as he sat behind the wheel, unmoving, watching her as she loaded her single suitcase into the cargo hold of the coach.

She saw a waving hand and realized that Timmy sat beside Gene, thinking her brother had softened enough to bring the boy to say goodbye. But Gene had started the cruiser and driven away as the bus driver called the passengers to board, Skye waving at the retreating patrol car, fighting back tears.

Fighting tears again now, no longer armored by The Other as the bus rumbled along toward the city. Skye knew she couldn’t afford this, that she had to be strong. So she closed her eyes and folded her hands over her belly still filled with Dellbert Drum, and tried to take her mind into a place of emptiness.

No, not quiet empty.

Cautiously, she allowed a very old memory to rise, like a bubble breaking the surface of a dark, still pond. A memory clear as cut glass: the moment she killed the man she’d thought of as her father, her nails and teeth taking his head from his shoulders. She relived exactly how it had felt to be that two-year-old, a mixture of child and something so old it was beyond calibration.

How when the awful power had leaked from her and she was left as just a small girl again, she’d erased all recollection of that night. Repeated to herself Gene’s story of the bad men appearing from the dark, grooving it into her mind so that it became truth.

But memories lying deep in her had stirred and swum through her unconscious when she slept, and her dreams were a fever of body parts and blood. Dreams so terrifying that she prayed sometimes to be released into death to escape them.

It wasn’t until she was thirteen, when she met the man named Leonard and saw the book that had made those dreams real, that she found some imperfect framework in which to place the mosaic of nightmare visions.