Vile Blood (24 page)

“Well, sir, the driver reported that a passenger demanded he make an unscheduled stop and allow her to disembark.”

“You got a name for the passenger?”

“I surely do, and I can only imagine she is kin of yours.”

“Skye Martindale?”

“Yessir, that would be correct.”

“How far from the city was this?”

“Just shy of halfway.”

Gene was already firing up the cruiser by the time the call ended, speeding toward town, reaching for the microphone and speaking to Darlene the dispatcher.

“My boy Timmy’s been abducted at the school playing field. Suspect to be considered dangerous. All units to use necessary force.”

“10-4. Identity of the suspect?”

“Skye Martindale.”

“10-9, unit two.” Asking him to repeat himself.

“You heard me.”

A buzz of static. “Uh, that wouldn’t be your sister, Gene?” Darlene, in her consternation, losing her command of the Ten Code.

“Goddamit, yes, Darlene. That would be my sister. Now get this out to all units.”

Gene skidded to a halt by the soccer field and freed the Remington from the clips beneath the dash, pumped it and ran toward the teacher and the group of boys who stood in a huddle, staring at him.

50

The brat lay unconscious in the trunk of the Chevrolet and Junior Cotton
feigned sleep
, the cap pulled low over his eyes, his head resting against the side window of the car as Della drove into the twilight, the sky the color of a fading bruise.

Not Junior Cotton’s favorite time of the day. A time when old memories flickered and looped through his mind.

The gloaming, his mama had called it, this hour between sunset and dark. The witching hour that had so enchanted her in the summer months. A time when, if they were holed up in a motel, she’d wander out onto the porch, or stop the car if they were driving and stand alone a while, watching the world shrug on a coat of darkness.

Junior saw her clearly, that last evening, standing beside a field, her back to him as he waited in the car. She hugged herself and moved her upper body in the merest suggestion of a dance and he could just about hear her humming over the sound of the corn whispering in a slowly stirring breeze and the orchestra of night creatures tuning up.

Then she’d turned to him and waved and he knew she was smiling even though her face was in darkness. Mama came back to the car and the dome light clicked on and caught her perfect teeth as she slid in behind the wheel, smoothing her skirt under her. She reached across and hugged him, kissing his cheek.

She giggled and put a hand to her lips. “Oh, that beard of yours is getting to resemble a cheese grater, Junior
. Where
oh where did my little boy
go
?”

He laughed too,
just
shy of fourteen, his voice breaking and his body in the grip of a growth spurt—his shirts cuffs left short of his bony wrists and his ankles exposed beneath his ironed blue jeans.

She shut the door and the light died and she lit a cigarette, filling the car with the familiar scent of her
Virginia Slims
, the ones that had littered the ashtrays of his childhood, the butts stained red with her lipstick.

Mama started the car and pulled off the berm onto the blacktop, some back road linking two rural towns of no consequence, the yellow headlights leading them into the empty night.

She started singing the old Sinatra song, “In The Blue of Evening,” her voice pure and true, made just a little husky by her pack-a-day habit. The voice of a chanteuse.

Junior was lulled into a near sleep and it was only in the very last second, right before the impact, that he heard the howling engine of the pick-up truck running without lights that speed down a gravel farm road and ploughed straight into his mama’s door in an explosion of glass and tearing metal, their car flipping and tumbling, Mama
unrestrained
by a seatbelt—they’re designed by
men
, Junior, who have no notion of the
female
anatomy
—
flying out through the windshield, her feet left shoeless by the violence of the collision.

Junior, conscious but dazed, was suspended upside down, held by his seat belt. The only sound the plop of liquid dripping onto something metallic.

“Mama?” he said and when he received no answer he unclipped the belt and fell onto the roof of the car and crawled out through the shattered windshield.

The pick-up truck, crumpled and ripped, stood smoking off to one side, and in the beam of their car’s one surviving headlight he saw that the driver—the sole occupant—was slumped across the wheel. Junior had seen enough dead people to know this drunken redneck’s
time had come.

Then Junior glimpsed something else at the very edge of the beam that was attracting a floorshow of moths and bugs: a heap of flesh and broken bones that he knew to be his mama, and when he approached and sank to his knees in her blood he saw that in the flight from the car a spur of metal had sliced her open from neck to sternum with the accuracy of a pathologist, the organs of her upper abdominal cavity (esophagus, trachea, lungs and heart)
dumped
out onto the asphalt.

The sight of these glistening innards, so
intoxicating
when they were removed from a butchered stranger, left him gagging, making little high-pitched whoops of grief.

Junior composed himself. He and his mama had made a pact, and that pact needed to be honored. He returned to their upturned car and found a flashlight in the glove box. After a short search he located the sealed Tupperware container that had kept their chicken sandwiches fresh, and emptied out the last crusts.

He went back to Mama and placed the container beside her. Then he opened the Swiss Army knife that he’d carried with him these last three years, taken off some hick kid in a flyblown town.
S
electing the longest blade he severed the arteries and veins
that connected the heart to his mother’s body
and lifted the quivering organ and placed it gently inside the plastic container, sealing the lid.

He carried the Tupperware back to the car and set it carefully on the blacktop while he rooted inside once more and found his duffel bag lying beside the dome light. He tipped out soiled underwear and socks and placed the transparent container holding his mama’s heart inside and zipped up the bag.

Junior walked away across a field. Walked until morning, when he found himself in a small town. He went into a washroom at a gas station, cleaned himself up and checked to see that his billfold was still in his pocket. It was and it still bulged with banknotes, his mama always making him the target of her largesse, the endless flow of cash coming from he knew not where.

Junior rented a room in a small hotel—the desk clerk waiving
the check-in formalities when Junior flashed a pile of dollars—and took the d
uffel bag up to the room and fell asleep cradling it.

A flighty red neon sign danced him awake and he closed the curtains and clicked on the TV—some inane game show with a canned applause track that would mask what he was about to do.

He unzipped the bag, took a deep breath and lifted out the Tupperware container. Looked at his mother’s heart. Cried. Stilled his tears. Took the plastic box into the bathroom, removed the heart and placed it carefully inside the bathtub. He stripped naked and joined the heart in the empty tub, keeping with him only the Swiss knife.

Unbidden the voices rose in him, the language he knew as well as his native tongue, and he felt the strength and purpose that came with them as he sliced open the heart, carving through the walls, exposing the hollow chambers
of the atria and the ventricles, dividing the pump into quarters.

There was some blood. Enough for him to paint an inverted pentagram on the porcelain between his legs and his balls tightened and his young cock grew out of its fuzz and it took no time at all to shoot a sticky stream of seed onto the bloody symbol.

One by one he ate the slices of his mama’s heart, chewing through the rubbery flesh, not gagging once, chewing and ripping and biting and swallowing until it was gone.

As the last mouthful slid down his throat he saw his mother a few years before in a fine restaurant in city of rare sophistication, heard her saying, “There’s something I need you to promise me, Junior.”

“What Mama?”

“If I go first, swear to me you’ll eat my heart so I’ll live on in you forever.”

“I swear,” he’d said, so in love as he mooned at her through the candle flame. “And if I go first?”

“Oh, I’ll do the same, darling boy,” she’d said, swallowing oysters with French champagne, laughing, eyes aglitter as they met his.

 He lay a while in the empty tub, allowing the strength of Mama to fill him, then he scrubbed away the pentagram and filled the tub with warm water and washed himself clean, polishing the blade of the knife until it shone.

There was nothing for it but to wear the clothes from the day before. He dressed, left the room and caught the first bus out of town.

And so began Junior Cotton’s solo pilgrimage, his youth an asset as he continued the work he had learned so well. A few years later—sensing that he needed to hide his tracks for a spell—he found Tincup and his flock and joined them, drifting south as the fake man of God was hounded from county to county, poured to the very bottom of the land and left among the dregs.

Junior’s pilgrimage had ended right here, in sight of the flickering star that he saw when he sat up in the Chevrolet and pushed back the cap and removed his sunglasses.

The girl turned the car off the road and bumped across the forecourt of the old gas station, the tires drumming on the cracks in the concrete.

“I guess we’re here,” she said.

Junior unfolded himself, inch by painful inch, and made his way to the trunk. Della opened it and shone the beam of the flashlight onto the boy curled up inside like a worm.

“Can you carry him?” Junior asked.

“Sure I can,” she said. “I’ve toted heavier than this.”

And to prove it she reached into the trunk and
hefted
the unconscious child out, walking over to the pumps. Junior lit her way with the flashlight and she lowered the boy to the concrete beside the manhole cover.

“You wait here now,” she said, taking the flashlight and heading into the gas station.

Della returned with a wooden ladder which she slid down into the tank until the feet clanged against metal. She checked the ladder for stability, tested the first rung and found that it supported her weight, and disappeared downward like a submariner.

Her voice came up to Junior, metallic, echoing. “Kinda snug down here.”

She reappeared and lifted the boy over her shoulder and descended. Junior very slowly, very carefully, followed her, the flashlight gripped in his teeth.

The tank was circular and he had to bend his knees, bracing his feet against the curve of the metal. The
vat
was empty but stank of gasoline and Junior’s eyes burned and his sneeze echoed like an explosion.

“Well lookee here,” Della said.

The child, lying on the floor, whimpered and his fingers clenched and his foot moved.

“Daddy,” he said, wide eyes staring into Junior’s.

“Oh, Daddy’s gonna come for you, dear heart,” Junior said, crouching down and ruffling the boy’s sandy locks. “Don’t you fret now.”

The scalpel was in his hand and he laid the blade on the boy’s Adam’s apple, jabbing him just hard enough to bring pain to those blue eyes, almost surrendering to the urge to cut the child’s throat. Tempting. Very tempting. But slower would be oh so much sweeter.

He hauled himself to his feet. “Tie it up,” he said and went back up the ladder like a broken thing.

51
      

Handcuffed to a chair in the interrogation room, Skye fought The Other harder than she’d ever fought it. Gene was in the room with her, his face hardened into that of a fanatic, the grooves on his forehead and round his mouth etched black by the fluorescent that hummed overhead.

“Where is he, Skye? Where’s Timmy?”

He asked the same question he’d been asking for the last half-hour, ever since he and his deputies had surrounded and gunpointed her (Bobby Heck shaking his head, sad as a bloodhound) as she walked down the main road of the town, coming right here to the sheriff’s office, to inquire about Timmy.

And she said what she’d been saying, over and over again: “I don’t know, Gene. I truly don’t know.”

He turned away from her, his shirt wet with sweat that came from fear, not from heat. He ran a hand through his hair and as he faced her he swung a fist, taking her on the jaw, toppling the chair and Skye fell to the concrete floor, banging her head, dazed for a second.

Long enough to lose her grip on The Other, felt it rising in her, and before she could rein it in she broke the handcuffs that held her hands behind the chair. She stopped in time before she snapped the shackles on her ankles.

Since that flash of precognition in the bus, she’d seen nothing more of Timmy, no matter how hard she’d tried.
Pretending to doze
in the back of the pick-up truck that finally stopped for her, trying to sink deep into herself, trying to cross some invisible divide between Skye and not-Skye, she’d caught dim traces, like afterimages of the sun through closed eyelids, of the things she was able to divine when she was The Other.

Teetering now in the no man’s land between herself and her twin, she was tempted to just let go and allow the change to come. Allow the powers that came with it.

But fear stopped her. She was too inexperienced with this other thing. What was the guarantee that when she changed she would still remember that it was Timmy who she needed to find? That she wouldn’t be consumed by bloodlust?

Even as she thought this her right hand, still hidden behind the chair, was reaching toward Gene’s boot as he walked to stand over her. Reaching for his boot knowing she would rip his leg off and feast on him.