Vile Blood (23 page)

Lifting himself from the Chevrolet, his muscles cramped after the long hours of driving, Junior stretched, taking in the parched landscape. When he adjusted the peak of his cap to cut the glare he saw the Milky Way sign poking up out of the rock and sand not a mile away. He wondered if Tincup was still there, and what remained of his flock.

He heard the
scratch
of a flint and turned to see the girl beside him, firing up a cigarette with her Zippo. He hadn’t allowed her to smoke in the car.

“This where we gonna keep him? The boy?” she asked, exhaling fumes.

Junior nodded.

“The building don’t look none too secure.”

“Come,” he said, walking unsteadily toward the pumps.

Della fell in beside him and hooked her arm through his,
supporting
some of his weight. Anybody seeing them would have taken them for sweethearts with a fascination for the flyblown detritus of the last century.

Junior stopped and leaned on one of the disemboweled pumps, its
counter
frozen forever on seven dollars and fifty-three cents.

“See that?” he asked, pointing at metal manhole cover sunk into the concrete. She nodded and he said, “Lift it.”

Della crouched, cigarette gripped in the side of her mouth, eyes squinting against the smoke, and
gripped
the handle welded onto the cover. He could see the strain in her body as she tried to move it, but it wouldn’t budge. She took a drag on her cigarette and coughed smoke.

She stood and said, “Wait.”

He watched her disappear into what had been the workshop. After a minute she returned carrying a length of pipe about three feet long. She shoved the pipe through the handle, jammed the one end into the concrete and leaned all her weight on the other.

The manhole lifted and she let it fall back onto the concrete.

She peered into the interior,
took
the pipe and dropped it down the hole. After a second it clanged and echoed inside the empty gasoline storage tank.

“I see where you’re going here, but won’t he suffocate?”

“Not if we leave the manhole open just a crack. Anyway, we don’t want him alive too long, do we?”

She nodded, sucked the cigarette to nothing and flicked the butt away.

“When do we take the little fucker?”

The sound of a car speeding down the potholed road got Junior sliding behind the pump, staring through its gutted interior as an old Eldorado came bumping into view. When he saw the silver Hollywood hair flapping in the breeze he had to laugh.

Junior Cotton believed in living in the moment, remaining alert to the pure potential of the now where there was no such thing as a coincidence—it was all synchronicity, all part of a greater, grander
scheme.

As his mama had said, “Dear heart, any old dullard can
plan
, but the person who can improvise, now they’re touched by magic.”

So, as Tincup flew by toward the Milky Way, his face a pickle of consternation, Junior turned to the girl and said, “You say you like killing people?”

“I do believe I have acquired a taste for it.”

“
Then let’s
go kill somebody.”

He let her help him back to the Chevy and directed her toward the Milky Way.

How elegant this all was. Before Junior took the boy of the lawman who’d once bested him, before he drew the heat of thing the boy called his aunt, he needed to test this girl, Della. Needed to see she wasn’t all hat and no cattle, as his mama used to say, putting on a drawl thick as molasses and making him laugh and laugh and laugh.

Tincup threw clothes into a bag, his hands shaking. He lifted a picture of the nativity scene from the wall of the motel room and unlocked the safe hidden behind it, removing a skinny pile of dollars. No great fortune but sufficient for him to lose himself in the land down south, with its porous border and lax morals.

If Skye Martindale—or whatever she was—had laid waste to the man-mountain Drum, then Tincup wasn’t about to dally and be next item on her menu.

“Where you go?” Marisol said, standing in the doorway, dressed in a pink nightgown.

He didn’t answer, just zipped the bag and shouldered her aside, heading for the Eldorado parked beside the empty pool.

“Hey, motherfucker,” she chased him down and
seized
his elbow.

Tincup threw the punch as he spun, a nice looping left—way they’d taught him when he’d boxed in
juvenile hall
all those years ago, before he’d crawled under a revivalists tent flap and found God. A left that took the big whore on the chin and sat her on her ass in the dirt.

He popped the trunk and stowed the bag and was opening the car door when a Chevrolet turned in from the road, stopping beneath the sign, blocking his path. He saw a blonde woman driving and a young man in a cap and sunglasses seated beside her.

“We’re closed,” Tincup said, waiting for the Chevy to reverse.

It didn’t. The man unfolded himself from the car, moving slowly, as if he’d recently been in an accident.

“Reverend, no time for an old friend?”

He took off the cap and dropped it back into the car, reaching behind his head and freeing his ponytail, shaking his hair until it hung to his shoulders. Then he slipped off the sunglasses and fixed those unforgettable eyes on the preacher.

Tincup, hand on the doorframe of the Eldorado, thought that the horror he had witnessed over at Drum’s house had left him unhinged, because—surely to God—the man who took form before him was locked away forever in a fortress for the criminally insane.

“Junior?” Tincup said.

“In the flesh.”

Junior Cotton advanced, lurching rather than walking, a smile parting the hair on his face. Tincup shrank back against the car, his arms raised in supplication.

“I had no part in what happened, Junior. It was all the work of Martindale.”

“I never said you did, Reverend.” Junior turned to the blonde girl. “Do it, Della. Do it now.”

The girl said, “Cool,” and stepped in toward Tincup, and he saw her arm lift and something burned as it caught the sun, then he felt a blade enter his flesh just below his throat and travel down, till it bumped against the buckle of his belt.

Tincup’s white shirt turned red and fell open as his
viscera
, no longer contained by skin and flesh, spilled out. Desperately trying to repack himself, he turned and would have called for Marisol had his mouth not been filled with something warm and salty.

He stumbled away from the Cadillac, his vision
strangely
keen, seeing every crack in the broken paving round the drained swimming pool. Then his legs failed him and he plummeted down into empty deep end, landing among garbage, broken bottles, an old deck chair and two car tires.

He dragged himself to his knees, his hot insides bulging against his fingers, grunting out a prayer as the first missile struck him. He looked up and saw Marisol and the other whores ringing the swimming pool, black shapes against the burning sky, pelting him with loose slabs of paving.

Tincup was crawling toward the steps of the pool, a sausage of intestines dragging like a tail, when a chunk of concrete felled him and he died looking at the grinning skull of a dog.

49

As Timmy watched his daddy’s cruiser drive away he felt something in his belly, like when he was at Aunt Sally’s, and the sidewalk and the bright sunshine were gone and the Creepshow flashed him a scary-faced man smiling as he came out of darkness with a little silver knife.

Timmy had to bite back a scream and he almost ran after the car, shouting for his daddy to stop, but he woulda looked like a big
wussy
in front of his buddies who were kicking the soccer ball around on the field, calling to him to come and play.

So Timmy watched the car turn a corner and disappear and the whistle blew sharp and loud as Miss Marples called them together and split them into teams.

When his father had come to get him after school, Timmy had asked to let him stay for soccer practice. His daddy, face more serious even than it normally was, had thought a while and nodded and said he’d be back in an hour.

The whistle blew to start the practice game and the ball came to Timmy and his mind wasn’t there—he was still seeing the man’s dead eyes—and it slipped by, his friend Billy shouting at him, calling him a clown. Timmy scrambled after the ball and took it off another boy, bigger and slow as an old horse, and he let his legs and feet take over, and nobody could stop him as he darted and wove through four, five, six players and banged the ball into the net past the fat goalkeeper.

Face flushed with pleasure and palms stinging from highfives, Timmy backpedaled, moving out to the right of the field near the trees, just knowing that the goalie—feeling like a stooge—would give the ball an almighty thump.

And he did. Right over Timmy’s head and into the cottonwoods.

Timmy went after it, leaving the kids in their bright jerseys and Miss Marples’s screechy whistle behind.

He saw a shape in the trees and he slowed. Somebody picked up the ball and was walking into the shadows. Timmy stopped, then just enough sun poked through the leaves and he saw light hair and blue jeans. Skye. She was back.

He called her name and ran after her and she moved deeper into the trees with the ball, teasing him.

“Skye!” he shouted, running to where he saw her last.

When he came through the trees the grass ended and he was on sand and rock. He saw a car parked by
the dirt road leading out into nothing.
Timmy heard footsteps on gravel and he turned and saw Skye coming up behind him.

But it wasn’t Skye. It was some other girl.

Timmy had it in his head to run, but she threw the ball at him. “Here little guy, catch.”

He caught it and she was up to him real quick and she was holding something in her hand like a handkerchief and he thought she was going to blow her nose, but it was
his
nose that she put the cloth over, pressing hard, and Timmy dropped the ball and tried to fight her but she was too strong, and something sharp went up into his nostrils that made his eyes water, and as the whole world started to go soft and dark the Creepshow kicked in real strong, and Timmy saw dead people around the girl.

Too many dead people to count.

 Gene, up in the bedroom of his house, some dark intuition still skulking at the edges of his consciousness, was
eager to see the town in the rearview of his Jeep.
He shed his uniform and lay the gun belt and star on the bed. He’d surrender them when he and Timmy passed the sheriff’s office on the way to the interstate.

Dressed in Levis, a T-shirt and a clean pair of Nikes, he
grabbed
clothes from the closet and threw them into a backpack. As he lifted the framed picture of a pregnant Marybeth from the bedside table he felt such emptiness that he was tempted to sink down onto the bed and cry
tears enough
for a country song.

But he trod hard on those feelings, tamping them down, sliding the photograph between layers of clothes to protect the glass. He
zipped
the pack, the buzz of the meshing teeth reminding him of how he’d
zipped
his dead wife into a body bag that day out in the desert.

Gene found himself back at the closet, lifting out the one garment of Marybeth’s that he’d kept: her nightgown, a birthday gift that he’d bought up in the city. He brought the silk to his face, felt the softness on his skin and could still detect traces of his dead wife’s fragrance on it. It took all his strength to return the nightgown to its hanger and leave the bedroom, dumping his backpack in the passageway.

He went into Timmy’s room and started shoving kid-sized clothes into a Spiderman pack. The soccer practice was a mercy, giving Gene the time to do most of the preparation without distressing the boy, but he knew he’d have to face a barrage of unanswerable questions about where they were going and why, when he brought him home to let him choose a few toys and precious things to take with them.

Gene had no exact destination in mind. They would go far north, that much he knew. He had the notion to drive them into a vast,
empty
snowscape, as if the cold and the whiteness would
bleach their memories of all darkness and pain.

Marybeth had made sure that they had each taken out life insurance when they married and when she died Gene had been shocked at the size of the payout. He’d never touched it. Felt it was blood money, resolved to keep it for Timmy’s education, so he’d left it in the care of a school friend who was an investment banker up in the city and the money had swelled, despite the turbulence in the world markets Gene saw reported on TV but didn’t try to understand.

He wasn’t rich but he wouldn’t have to worry about getting a job for a while. He’d leave the keys of the house with the town’s remaining realtor, a man reduced to working nights as a bartender to supplement his dwindling income. The realtor
would store the household contents
and go through the pretence of finding a buyer, but Gene knew that most likely the house would stand empty, at the mercy of the wind and the dust, like so many in the borderlands.

But he wouldn’t be here to see it.

His phone rang. “Martindale.”

“Uh, Gene, this is Dolly Marples.”

“Yes, Dolly.”

“Timmy was here at his soccer practice and he went after the ball into the trees by the side of the field and, Gene, he just never came back.”

The intuition that had been dogging him coalesced into hard terror.

“You see anyone, Dolly?” Gene said, rushing back to his bedroom, strapping on the gun belt.

“Not me, Gene, but one of the boys is pretty certain he saw Skye in the cottonwoods.”

Running down the stairs of the house Gene killed the call, speed-dialed the operator and asked for the bus company. When he was connected he identified himself and enquired if there had been any unusual behavior on the city-bound bus that morning.