Vile Blood (2 page)

“I was thinking of something a little closer to home.”

Gene tilted his head and looked him in the eye, trying not to go back fifteen years to when he was just a boy, and Drum was a deputy in this county, working under Lavender, before he got ambitions. Tried not to see Drum and Lavender standing in the
nightmare
that was the living room of his parents’ house. His house now. Shut the memory down fast.

“No,” Gene said, his voice even. 

Drum laughed, taking a long drag on his cheroot, blue smoke boiling around his head.

“That a fact?”

Gene walked away from Drum, his eyes on the crime scene, afraid that his face would betray him. He stood staring into the night, working hard at keeping his imagination from slipping its leash.

“Now you remember me to your little sister, you hear?” Drum said as he climbed up into the Expedition.

But Gene didn’t hear him, or hear the Ford grind into motion, or see the spotlights dim as the car swung back toward the road, he saw his foundling sister, or the thing that had possessed her, breaking open their father’s breastbone, her toddler’s face ancient and demonic as she fed on his heart.

3

When Skye Martindale came back into herself she was standing on the oil-stained bricks outside the garage, right where Gene always parked his cruiser at the end of his shift. She had no recollection of what had happened and when she saw the blood on her arms and hands she guessed that she had been in an accident—a car wreck, maybe?—and was suffering from shock.

She was astonished at how profuse the blood was, matting her hair, covering her face—caked thick around her mouth, and even bitter and muddy on her tongue—and molding her torn clothes to her body. The blood was drying, stretching on her skin as she moved her limbs. And then the first flashback came to her, and she understood that none of this blood was hers.

Unbidden more flashbacks rocked Skye and threatened to take her knees from under her. A big car. Four men surrounding her.
And then what happened when she was both herself and something else entirely.

The flicker of the TV screen though the living room window caught her eye and she saw Maria, the babysitter, staring at her in slack-jawed horror. Then she realized that the woman was slumped low on the cushions of the sofa, her jaw unhinged by sleep.

Move your ass, girl, Skye told herself, sneaking a reflex glance up at Timmy’s room. She thought she saw the twitch of a curtain. Just the wind picking up, she whispered, gathering to her what bits of torn reality she could find on the breeze coming in hot across the desert.

The boy awoke hearing his mama call his name.

“Timmy,” she said, “Tim-
mee
!”

He opened his eyes and saw her pretty face and she was right there with him so he reached out his hand to her. Then he couldn’t see her face no more, she was just gone.

Timmy felt tears and a choking in his throat and he said out loud, “You must be a big boy, now Timmy. For your daddy.”

And he lay back and he heard the voices on the TV downstairs and guessed that was what woke him.

He knew he had to go and make a pee now—not wet the bed like he had for the longest time after his mommy went away—and he got up and padded toward the door, but something drew him to the window and when he peeked through the gap in the curtain the Creepshow kicked in and what he saw made him jump back and cover his eyes, too scared to scream, feeling the warm pee run down his legs and puddle on the floor.

He’d seen just a flash—it always began that way, the Creepshow, a quick bright flash, colors always kinda sickly and way too bright—of a monster standing in the yard, underneath the basketball hoop. A monster with a falling-off face and arms too long.

Timmy forced the Creepshow out of his head and peeked through the drapes a second time. It was only Skye standing there and what the red was on her Timmy couldn’t say. She looked up at the window and Timmy ducked down real quick. He didn’t want her to see him wetting himself like a little baby so he pulled off his pj pants and used them to wipe the pee from the floor.

Then he made them into a ball and found a plastic bag filled with action heroes and dumped the figures and put his pants in the bag and shoved it deep under the bed. He got back beneath the covers, hiding his head with the comforter when he heard the front door open, real quiet, and click closed.

Skye eased her way into the house, slipping off her Nikes so she didn’t track blood onto the rug. Maria didn’t waken, her face awash with the flicker of the tube. Skye snuck past her and up the stairs, risking
a quick look
into Timmy’s room, backing out when she saw his still form under the bedclothes.

She went into the bathroom and locked the door. Stared at the brown tiles patterned with small pink blossoms before she found the courage to turn to her right, like a soldier on a parade ground, and look into the big mirror above the basin. It took all her willpower not to scream. She was a figure from a slasher flick, her hair, her face, her clothes stained red with gore.

Skye crumpled to the tiles and got her face to the toilet just in time to empty the contents of her gut into the bowl. She was shaking, and the stink of the blood and the taste of it on her tongue—along with the rich,
ripe
tang of human flesh—got her gagging again.

When she was done she stripped off her jeans and her torn T-shirt and shoved them up into a laundry bag. Her bra and panties were free of blood, but she was a lawman’s sister and she knew well enough that they, too, had to disappear. And her watch, also, with its stained and soiled strap. Through the splatters of blood dried on the watch glass, Skye saw it was after one in the morning. She had lost more than an hour.

She stepped under the shower and soaped and scrubbed herself until her skin was pink and stinging. Went at her hair with her fingers, tearing out chunks that were matted with blood, using her nails to break down the clots, the water sluicing red down the plughole. After what seemed like forever the water
ran
clear and Skye shut off the shower and dried herself.

When she
slid
her tongue across her teeth and felt it snagging, she got her face close to the mirror, pulling her lips back in a grimace, and saw chunks of flesh lodged between her teeth. Another flashback assaulted her: a hand (not hers, she swore, despite the watch on the wrist) tearing a human heart from its housing, the flabby thing still pumping gouts of blood as the first bite was taken.  

It was all she could do to uncoil a strip of dental floss and go at her teeth, yanking free each unspeakable clot of meat, spitting into the basin.Working a fresh length of floss between each tooth, right up to the gum, until her own blood flowed salty onto her tongue.

She rinsed the basin and flushed away the strips of bloody floss, facing herself in the mirror again. The only evidence of what she had done was pushed down deep along with the thing that slumbered in her.

But when she realized she could see without her glasses, Skye knew that the years of self-imposed myopia, of shutting herself away from the world, were over.

4

The night had begun as most nights
did
for Skye. She’d given Timmy his dinner and waited until the babysitter, Maria Martinez—plump and pretty and tardy as usual—had rushed in with her bag stuffed with knitting, gossip magazines and
horror
DVDs.

Skye kissed Timmy goodbye, seeing the hard, unsmiling angles of her brother’s face beneath the sweet softness of her
six-year-old
nephew’s. Her brother was a good man. A saint, people said. But she prayed each day that the boy would grow up free of the ghosts that haunted his father, that seemed to hollow him from within.

Skye made it in time to meet Richie down on the corner, near the rusting water tower, and get a ride to the diner in his clattering pick-up, the name of a long-dead plumber still painted in fading letters on the doors. Richie grunted a greeting and then said nothing as they drove through the scatter of low houses and strip malls that
flanked
the road into town.

Richie was maybe twenty and Skye remembered him from school, a loner a few years ahead of her. After he dropped out she’d seen him pumping gas at Earl’s garage. When she also dropped out—some unfocused fear keeping her grades way below her potential, keeping her safe from being sent off to college with all its dangers—and started working at Earl’s diner at night, Richie had stopped for her when he saw her walking into town.

At first Skye was worried that he was going to hit on her, but that never happened. He seemed totally disinterested, the rides to the diner some polite
reflex. He worked until dawn and she usually got a ride home with Minty, an older divorcee who waited tables with her. If Minty wasn’t chasing men, that was. Or allowing them to catch her.

 Skye stared out at the mean little town, shrinking now as the big city far to the north leeched its young, its umbilical connection to its ghetto twin across the border its only lifeblood. And now with the fence and the border patrols that too was shrinking.

Richie parked in the strip of bays by the diner, muttered something and walked toward the pumps.

Skye pushed her way through the glass doors into Earl’s little Formica fiefdom, a showpiece forty years ago, the old folks said. Now the red chairs were leaking stuffing, the yellow tables were chipped and the back-lit slides of sundaes and burgers on the walls had faded to a greenish monochrome.

“Minty’s late,” Earl said, popping up in the kitchen hatch
like
a glove puppet.

He was one of those guys who were born old, Skye reckoned. His skin like a worn out suit, creased and wrinkled, hanging from his bones.

Skye ducked into the locker room beside the kitchen and
snagged
her apron and the dumb little cloth hat with
EARL’S
stitched on the side and went back out.

“You’ll have to handle the dinner crowd,” Earl said.

Skye nodded, looking across the deserted diner. Maybe a couple of truckers would come in before midnight, drawn from the interstate up north by the glow of lights, and nurse a cup of Earl’s dishwater coffee while their rigs pinged and creaked outside.

The door clattered open and Minty sashayed in, pausing a moment to suck the last life out of her Marlboro, then she leaked her smoke out into the night through nostrils and painted mouth, flicked away her cigarette and cat-walked her way across the dinner, her high heels clicking
like
disapproving tongues.

“You’re late,” Earl said through the hatch.

“I’m here, ain’t I?” Minty gave Skye a wink as she headed into to the locker room.

Earl watched her ass beneath her tight skirt and Skye swore she could see the desire rising from the man in waves
. He
slammed the door of the icebox and clattered plates, taking his frustration out on his tools. He’d carried a torch for Minty for too many years, sharpened by the succession bikers and truckers and deadbeats who’d found their way into Minty’s bed and into her heart. Stood stoic and mute as he’d watched her being driven away in semis and on the back of Harleys, swearing never to return, only to creep back a few days later, contrite, nursing hangovers and black eyes.

A rig fumed into the parking lot and stopped with a wheeze of air brakes. The trucker, tall and young enough to catch Minty’s fancy, shouldered his way in, frisbeed his John Deere cap onto a table and slid into a booth. Minty smoothed down her apron and oozed past Skye, speaking out the corner of her mouth.

“This one’s mine, hon.”

Yeah, I bet he is, Skye thought. Minty leaned over the trucker, showing him her powdered cleavage, her false eyelashes fluttering like mating butterflies as she sucked on her pencil.

Skye watched it all play out: the trucker downed his coffee and left and within minutes Minty was felled by one of her migraines, Earl plying her with aspirin that she drank to placate him, winking over her shoulder at Skye as she went off into the night to meet the loser at a bar somewhere, Skye’s ride gone with her.

It was close to midnight when Earl closed the kitchen, Skye still working up the courage to ask him to take her home, when a big black car gargled its way up to the pumps, drawing Richie from his hutch. Four men left the car and the one riding shotgun, a cocky little guy, pointed under the hood.

Richie lifted the lid, propping it up with a stick, the hood yawning open like a gaping mouth as he leaned in to check the oil. The runt knocked the stick loose, catching the lid just before it slammed down on the kid, his high laugh cutting the night as Richie banged his head trying to get out the way.

Three of the men came into the diner, one of them holding the door open for the small man who was dressed in clothes that were ugly but expensive. The fourth, the driver, stood by the car smoking, staring out at nothing.

The cocky one came up to the counter where Earl was locking up the cash register.

“Sorry, boys,” Earl said, “We’re closed.”

“That says different,” the short guy pointed toward the
OPEN
sign dangling from the door. There was something foreign mixed into his voice.

“Kitchen’s closed.”

“You mean we’re not going to be able to sample your fine cuisine?” A laugh like an ungreased axle.

Earl said, “How about Skye here gives you fellows coffee to go? On the house?”

The small man’s eyes, slanty and heavy lidded, skidded across to Skye. “That right, beautiful?” Making a lie of the last word, his buddies chuckling.

Skye didn’t reply as she poured coffee into foam cups, her back to the men.

“You lock up good and tight after you, hear me girl?” Earl said as he brushed past her.

“Yes,” she said, turning to the men as Earl
clattered
out. “Black or cream?”