Vile Blood (20 page)

The cramped little bookstore had just appeared one day in a backstreet in town, the owner a gangly ageless man with the whitest skin Skye had ever seen. He’d stared at her blankly from behind the counter as she slouched in, his fingers tapping along in time to dirge-like electronic music

She learned later that Leonard was from the city, come back to bear witness to the last, agonizing months of his mother’s life. He ignored Skye each time she visited the shop, drawn by books on the occult and Aleister Crowley and the Freemasons. She bought none of them, standing by the shelves flicking through their dusty pages, looking for something she never quite managed to find.

Then one day Leonard reached beneath the counter and withdrew a large book of photographs.

“You may enjoy this,” he said in an almost foreign voice. “But don’t let your mommy and daddy see it.”

Skye looked at the price—fifteen dollars—and was handing it back when he said, “It’s a gift, little girl. Run along now.”

She put the book in her backpack and went home. She had the house to herself, Gene at work, Timmy at school. She sat on her bed and flipped open the book of photographs and gasped. Slammed the book shut. Closed her eyes. Felt something twitch and itch, so deep down in her that it almost wasn’t there.

She opened her eyes and risked another look. Beautiful black and white photographs the likes of which she had seen only in her dreams. She was looking at dismembered corpses with the body parts lovingly arranged in bizarre compositions with fruit and flowers. Tattered meat. Torn genitals. Grimacing heads atop torsos they didn’t match—torsos leaking organs from post-mortem incisions.

The book had been a portal to another realm for Skye. It had terrified her, but also reassured her. Some strange order and beauty emerging from the carnage and atrocity.

One day Gene was sitting waiting for her when she got back from school, his face set in hard lines, the book lying on the coffee table beside his chair.

“Where did you get this?” he asked, tapping the cover.

“I found it.”

“Found it where?”

“On a bus seat.”

His lawman’s eyes bounced her lies right back at her. “This is pornography,” he said.

“It’s art,” she said.

“It’s the work of a pervert. I see things like this everyday. Car wrecks. Homicides. Suicides. It’s my job to ensure that the dead are treated with respect and dignity, not made the subject of some freak show. You understand this man bribed morgue officials across the border to be allowed to do this sick thing?”

She nodded. She had read as much in the foreword.

“I will not have this in my house. Am I clear?”

“Yes,” she said.

He took the book and went out to his cruiser. A few days later when she passed Leonard’s bookstore it was shuttered and locked. She never saw Leonard again. The books disappeared and in time a dog parlor moved in.

She’d found the photographs, of course, and many more like them on the internet. Surfing at night when Gene was on duty or asleep, not daring to save the images to her hard drive lest her brother discover them. Sitting staring at the flickering monitor, absorbing the images of death, a soundtrack of
Joy Division’s
manic depressive anthems throbbing in her headphones. Reaching desperately for some understanding that always eluded her.

So, last night at Drum’s house, it hadn’t surprised Skye that she’d chosen to turn his death into a performance. That the part of her that had remained intact within The Other had needed the distancing properties of artifice to allow her to be present, participate in and—yes—to enjoy what she did.

And she had enjoyed it. She felt satisfied now, falling asleep on the gently rocking bus, no moral ambiguities clouding her mind. Drum had deserved what he’d got.

Timmy’s screams woke her and before her eyes were open she was standing, feeling the surge of power as The Other rose within her, her hands gripping the top of the seat in front, brushing the lacquered hair of a woman with a majestic black beehive.

She searched the bus, staring into the faces of weathered old-timers, fat women and their children, servicemen with shorn hair and unformed
jaw lines.

Just a dream, Skye, just a dream.

She was about to lower herself to her seat, willing the heat of The Other from her blood, when she was struck by an image so vivid that it had her running down the aisle of the bus, shouting for the driver to stop.

She saw Timmy, gagged and bound, the velvet Jesus poised over him with a scalpel, his wavy hair brushing the boy’s bare skin as he brought the blade to Timmy’s throat.

42

Junior Cotton, driving the little green car with Zen-like concentration, kept to the dirt roads skirting the city, the skyline a mirage through the heat of the desert. Junior felt not even a bead of moisture on his body despite the lack of A/C in the car. He was dehydrated and a sharp ache in his abdomen told him he needed food.

He’d drunk the nurse’s blood last night in the bathtub, but the years on semi-liquid swill at the facility had prevented him from cramming a good chunk of her flesh into his mouth and chewing through the gristle and fat and veins and arteries the way his mama had showed him.

“Oh we’re dining in
style
, Junior,” she would say, looking up at him with her teeth stained red as she ate her fill of one of their countless victims.

When she was done she would allow herself a ladylike belch—covering her mouth with a perfectly manicured hand—and then she would clean her face with a scented wet wipe and fix her lipstick.

Now Junior did feel moisture: a lone tear welled up in his left eye and trickled down his cheek. Before the water was lost in his beard he captured it on his forefinger and brought it to his mouth, the salinity sharp on his tongue.

He was parched and close to fainting with exhaustion and hunger.

When he lost sight of the city in the rearview mirror Junior saw an asphalt road running parallel to the gravel one he was traveling on. The old highway heading northward, toward the state line, the small towns strung
on
it like charms on a bracelet, left for dead by the interstate.

Junior came to a
T-junction,
made sure there was no traffic and turned onto the paved road, its surface a lunar landscape of potholes and cracks. Not far along the highway an anonymous beige car was parked on the shoulder, in the scant shade of a row of dusty cottonwoods. Both doors were flung wide—another poor fool without A/C—and he could see the shape of a person in the tipped-back passenger seat.

Instinct took over as Junior slowed the little car and brought it to a stop just beyond the brown sedan. He sat a while, watching the car in the mirror, but the shape in the passenger seat didn’t move.

Junior clicked off the nurse’s car and opened the door, something requiring enormous effort, leaving him panting. Getting out was almost beyond him and he clung to the griddle-hot roof until his hands were scalded and he had to
let go.

He took a step forward, teetered. Took another step. Felt his teeth biting his lip. Somehow he covered the distance between the two cars, grabbing hold of the grille of the sedan—a
Chevrolet,
he saw—its metal shaded enough by the trees for him to lean and catch his breath.

“Car wreck?”

The voice coming from inside the Chevrolet got Junior turning his head as a man popped up above the dashboard, the seat coming to its upright position.

“I beg your pardon, sir?” he said, falling back on the perfect manners his mother had demanded of him, feeling the scalpel up against his pulse.

“Young fellow like you ain’t likely to be the victim of a stroke, so I’m thinking an accident of some description.”

Junior nodded. “Twenty car pile-up on a highway out west. There was a crop fire and visibility was down to zero. I was one of the lucky ones.”

“Well, I applaud you, friend, getting back on the horse. Takes guts.”

The man was in his sixties, with dry graying hair and a
florid
face. He lifted himself from the car, groaning, gut straining at the buttons of his short-sleeved wash-and-wear shirt. He wore a dark tie and suit pants. Junior saw a jacket hanging from a hook in the rear of the car. A salesman, he was certain. Not a prosperous one.

“So friend, where you headed?”

“New Jericho,” Junior said. No place he’d ever heard of.

“Can’t say I know it.”

“Pity. I’m lost and I thought you could help me.”

“That little moon buggy don’t have no GPS?” The man was pointing at the green car and it took Junior a moment to understand.

“On the fritz,” Junior said, using one of the Eisenhower-era expressions his mother had delighted in.

“Now ain’t that the
worst?
Like my darned A/C.”

“I, wonder, sir, if—?” Junior said.

A pink hand was lifted palm out, halting his words. “Weed’s the name, son. Hoagland Weed.”

“Mr. Weed, I couldn’t trouble you for a drink of water could I?”

“My supplies don’t run to water, but I could let you have a Pepsi-Cola. How does that sound?”

“Like heaven.”

Weed laughed and popped the trunk, delving into a Coleman cooler. Junior heard a wash of water and rattle of ice against tin and the man returned with a dripping can of Pepsi.

Junior tore open the tab and poured the fizzing liquid down his throat, ignoring the cloying sweetness. He covered his mouth as gas escaped him and had a more polite sip.

“Thank you Mr. Weed.”

“My pleasure, son.”

“I’m sorry,” Junior said. “I’m Eugene Martindale.” They shook, the man’s hand clammy and boneless as suet.

“I was in a foxhole once with a Boyd Martindale.” Weed’s eyes dimmed and he blinked and looked away, then patched together a smile. “So what awaits you in, uh, New Jericho?”

“Oh, some geological research. And you, Mr. Weed? What do you do?”

“I sell the word of the Lord, son. Have done since I was younger than you.”

He delved into the Chevrolet and emerged with a coffee-table book, the cover awash with lurid colors, the name
TESTAMENT 2
rendered in a font reminiscent of a computer game.

“For the teenagers, you know?”

He handed the book to Junior, who had to contain his mirth.
THE GREATEST ACTION ADVENTURE STORY EVER TOLD!

“And you, sir,” the salesman said, “bear more than a passing resemblance to the hero of that rousing tale.”

Junior laughed now and as he handed the ridiculous bible back to Weed he let the scalpel slip into his hand and he fell on him, shoving the blade deep into the man’s left eye, dropping with him to the sand, feeling the convulsions as the poor fool’s meager life left him. It was over in seconds.

Junior stood, dusted himself off and reached into the car, snagging the suit jacket from the rear. A billfold dragged down the inner pocket. Forty-two dollars in cash, a driver’s license, two credit cards, a blood donor’s card and a faded and creased photograph of a much younger Weed with his arm around a skinny redhead, a fat baby on his knee.

Junior took the money and tossed the billfold out past the trees. Weed lay beside a ditch and Junior put his back to the Chevrolet, using his feet to get the body tumbling into the fold in the dry earth. Hidden enough not to concern any passing Samaritan until Junior was long gone.

He slid in behind the wheel of the Chevrolet, adjusted the seat to his greater height, and turned the car south and drove into the afternoon until the interstate came into view, traffic whispering along the asphalt.

Junior found an on-ramp that sucked him down onto the freeway, its surface lush and smooth with fresh new blacktop, like velvet beneath the tires after the day on the back roads.

After a half-hour a sign in mustard colors
flowered from
the desert: an off-ramp to a gas station and fast food drive-though. A risk, Junior knew, but he was close to fainting, the lines in the road shifting out of register and multiplying.

He nudged the turn signal and left the interstate, pulling up at the window of the drive-through. A pimpled boy in a paper hat and a polka dot bow tie sat sealed behind glass, his voice squawking at Junior through a speaker, demanding his order.

Junior selected a chicken soup and a fruit sundae, a nauseating combination, but all that he would be able to metabolize right now.

The boy squawked again and Junior eased the Chevy to the next window, watching his mirrors. There were no other cars. A girl lived in the second booth and Junior laid a ten dollar bill in a tray that disappeared inward, and reappeared with his order, in some minor miracle of junk food
transubstantiation.

The
swill
made Junior salivate and it was all he could do to click the car into drive and ease away from the window. He stopped on a grid of white lines, the paint bubbling and tacky under the tires of the Chevrolet. Ripping open the soup he took a long draught and burned his mouth. He lifted the top off the sundae and spooned chemical-tasting ice cream to ease the burn, immediately feeling the beginning of a sugar rush.

A hit of soup, a spoon of ice cream, making noises like a pig at a trough. Noises that would’ve got his mother giving him
that
look. Even when they were cannibalizing, table manners had to prevail. Junior filled himself with such greed that he noticed too late the shadow falling across the open driver’s window of the Chevrolet.

A face came level with his, a face ablaze with metal piercings and a female voice said, “You’re him, ain’t you? Him that excaped?”

43

Gene zigzagged his cruiser
through
 town, not seeing the tired paintwork and the cracked windows and the car wrecks on what were front lawns before the drought hit—his eyes were searching for a man whose angelic face belied his true nature.

He
swung into
the main street and drove until the blacktop turned to gravel and there was nothing but dirt between him and the border. Dirt and the ghosts of his dead wife and baby.