Creekers

CREEKERS

Edward Lee

Necro Publications

— 2010 —

— | — | —

Smashwords Edition

CREEKERS

Creekers © 1994 by Edward Lee

Cover Art © 2008 Travis Anthony Soumis

This digital edition 2010 © Necro Publications

Prologue

Roughened hands disrobed her before the cracked mirror.

“You are the most perfect of all of us,” came the equally roughened whisper to her ear. She could feel the heat of the breath, and of the words themselves.

But then more words oozed through her head:

So perfect…

So worthy…

So beautiful…

“Yeeeeesss,” keened the voice behind her.

So beautiful…for Him.

Only a few crooked candles lit the downstairs parlor. In the mirror she could see herself, and she could see the Reverend standing behind her like a queer, tall shadow in its black raiments and drooping hood which hid his face.

“So beautiful for Him,” he whispered.

Beautiful, she thought. Yes, she was. Much more beautiful than the other girls. Clean, they called her, and the few others who were born like her. A clean baby. A clean child. A clean woman. So few were ever born clean…

The Reverend’s large hands peeled away her threadbare dress like a shift of rotten cheesecloth. She did not flinch. Being stripped at any given moment was nothing new to her; she was used to it, and she was used to the things that always happened afterward. Now her naked flesh shone starkly in the mirror’s dark veins: sleek, womanly curves, unblemished skin, long legs and high, full breasts. Hair shiny and fine as black silk framed her youthful, striking face. Once she asked why the men from town paid so much less for her. “‘Cos you’re clean, child,” she was told. “You ain’t all uglied up like most the others. Cain’t hardly even tell you’re Creeker, ’cept fer yer eyes…”

She never understood this at all. They should pay more, shouldn’t they, since she was so much prettier?

But tonight was different. Somehow she knew that. There were no men from town in the house, and something in the air made her skin feel all crawly like that time she fell asleep out near Croll’s field and woke up covered with ladybugs.

We’ve finally done it, after all this time—

“—finally,” whispered the Reverend.

And then the other voices continued to churn in her head:

On-prey-bee!

Us-come-too!

On-prey-bee!

When she’d been fully stripped, the Reverend’s hand stroked her raven-black hair, brushing it off her brow. Her eyes gazed back at herself in the mirror…

They were bright and clear, their large irises revealing only the slightest tincture of red…

««—»»

Next, she was being ushered…up. She felt dizzy and strange. The old wood stairs creaked beneath her feet as the Reverend’s hands guided her toward the landing. The hands of the others reached out to touch her as she passed.

And the heat of this midsummer midnight drenched her in sweat in moments.

“Yes, you are the most perfect of all of us—”

—so go forth now and bless us.

The door closed behind her. All that lit the long, high room was the moon in the window. She smelled something funny, and as her vision grew accustomed to the dark, she noticed strange shapes inclined on the dusty wood-plank floor.

Then something stirred.

And the man walked out of the great gulf of darkness.

He was the most handsome man she’d ever seen. Tall and slender, with chiseled muscles, strong arms, sturdy legs. The kind face looked back at her.

He never said a word.

He was nothing like the men who usually came to her: men who slapped her, pulled her hair, spit on her and bit her nipples till she shrieked. This man was sweet, gentle. His soft hands on her breasts filled her with warmth, not revulsion.

And when he kissed her…

Visions swam. Sensations. Waves of love more intense than the heat of the noonday sun. His caring hands lay her down on the floor; his smile seemed lit, like a halo. Without ever talking, he told her things. He told her how beautiful she was, how important, and how he loved her more than he’d ever loved anyone. All the things she’d yearned to hear for so long: the dreams buried in dust, the promises that never came true.

But now they were true.

Now…he was with her.

««—»»

Her pleasures were untold. Her orgasms quaked. Each release of his semen into her sex was a gift to be revered. It filled her to overflowing—with rapture and compassion and real love. I’m in love, she thought with each beat of her heart, and with his. He delved into her far deeper than any man of her past, and far longer, unlocking sensations of joy she’d never thought possible. At one point, he knelt upright between her spraddled legs, the beautiful penis throbbing yet again for her. It was huge, curved, and gorgeous. In anguish, her hands reached out to touch the reality of its hardened flesh.

So hot, it nearly burned.

Her eyes pleaded to him. She was crying, she was so happy, so replete in her love. Without words, he assured her that he would love no other woman but her, ever.

You are the one, he vowed.

She grasped the stout, hot shaft, then guided it down to enter her again. Her breasts heaved; she gasped aloud, squealing her bliss to the night. Her arms and legs wrapped about the fine, hard body, and pulled him deeper into her.

Give me your love, her thoughts panted.

Oh, yes, his own thoughts answered. I will…

««—»»

Hours later she lay exhausted in her own ecstasy. Her sweat drenched the warm wood floor beneath her, and his seed trickled from her. He’d rolled off her now, and gently kissed her throat and breasts. Then he moved away…

Her plea sounded powerless, feeble; she could barely speak at all.

“Don’t leave me!” she cried out.

He stood near the corner by the window. The sweat on his muscles shined in the moonlight—he looked silver.

He looked like an angel.

Alas, my curse…

Then she noticed the odd shapes again in the corner. What were they? Why were they there?

The door opened quickly. The others came into the room bearing candles, and the meld of voices rushed:

On-prey-bee!

Redeemer…

Thanks we give you!

Bless us…

The Reverend stepped forward in his coal-black robe and hood, then knelt before the naked man at the window.

Bless us and sanctify us. Show us your way and keep us whole, we beg of Thee.

Her eyes shined wide in the wavering candlelight as her lover very slowly turned. He seemed to have changed. His radiance—that lovely halo—had darkened to a sour hue, and the beautific muscles turned ruddy now, swollen and coarse. The handsome face shifted into corrupt angles, while deep, lumpen furrows grooved the high forehead.

It can’t be, she thought. It must be the darkness. Of course, the darkness, her blissful fatigue, and the strange way the candlelight tinted the room.

Give us this day our daily flesh…

The others lifted her up. They were carrying her out of the room now, but not before she was able to finally detect the odd shapes in the corner.

They were—

Bodies, she realized. Dead…bodies…

On-prey-bee! rejoiced the twisted voices. Give-ona-us-beg-thee-wee!

Aloft in the others’ arms, she stared, caught one last glimpse, then fainted dead away, for in the previous moment, her lover—once beautiful, now hideous—had knelt down before the fresh dead bodies and begun to eat.

— | — | —

One

Lt. Philip Straker double-checked the cylinder of his Smith Model 65. Paranoid, Phil? he asked himself. What, the rounds are going to disappear? The good fairies going to take them when you’re not looking? The stainless-steel cylinder shined, still full of six Remington +P+ .38s. It snapped shut with an oiled click. At least rank had its privileges; everyone else packed Glocks.

Phil was cooking in his Second Chance Kevlar vest, but a guy’d have to be crazy not to wear one on a narc bust. Red night-vision lights bathed the inside of the tac van—they called them “War Wagons”—one wall lined with commo and DF gear, the other with an array of weapons: AR-15s, a sniper rifle with a night-scope, MP-5s, and enough pistols to start a gun show. Two tac guys from S.O.D. waited with him: Eliot, one of the team leaders, and the “shooter,” some ex-Marine with the unlikely name Cap, who sat stolid as a carved-wood figure, cradling a 15A2. Phil had heard this kid could pick cherries at 800 yards—a grim assurance tonight—because Phil realized full well there’d probably be some shooting. There always was during a lab bust. The bastards know they’re caught, but they fight anyway. When you shoot at tac men, you die, and the fuckers don’t even seem to care. It was like a VW Bug playing chicken with a D8 bulldozer. The Bug will always lose…

“Commo check, Bob,” Phil instructed Eliot. “What’s Dignazio doing all this time—”

“Probably spitting on his dick, sir,” Cap, the kid-sniper, suggested. “Or consulting Mr. Johnny Black first.”

“He keeps stalling, I’m gonna miss the Yankees game.”

Eliot pulled a squad communications check. Dignazio’s team was going in first, to block the exits they’d gotten off the building’s blueprints. Then Phil would take his guys in the front and break bad. Dignazio had always ticked him. Probably stalling on purpose just to make me cook a little more in this vest, Phil thought.

Phil Straker, at thirty-five, would be up for captain next month; it went without saying that he’d make deputy chief by forty. He had three valor medals, plus a Distinguished Service, not to mention the half-dozen letters of commendation from the mayor. Hard work on a B.A. in Criminology had taken him out of the depressed, redneck burg he’d been born in and gotten him his dream job with a major metro police department. He’d taken it from there, grabbing his Masters at night, using his brain on the street, and moving up the ranks faster than almost anyone in the department’s history. He’d busted his ass for the transfer to District Narcotics, and now he was calling the shots.

Phil hated dope.

Five years driving a beat in District 3 had shown him the truth. Movers and shakers who didn’t give a shit about anything. Street gangs hiring fucking lawyers from the biggest firms in the country. Crack stools hung upside down and gutted like deer for spinning, and distro rings addicting six-year-olds to skag. Phil had never conceived of such evil in his life…

“Roger on the commo check, sir,” Eliot announced from his perch in the red-lit van. “Sergeant Dignazio says five more minutes, then they ram the door.”

“He’s just busting our chops, sir,” offered the kid.

“I know,” Phil said. “It’s because of me. The old bastard’s had a hard-on for me since the day I met him. I guess I’d be a little ticked myself if it took me nineteen years to make sergeant.”

“Word is, sir,” Eliot jumped in, “Dignazio sees it he should’ve gotten your job.”

Phil laughed, reholstering his piece. “Tell me something else I don’t know, like gorillas are hairy.”

He didn’t care. If Dignazio deserved the promo to luey, he’d have gotten it. I ain’t crying for him, for Christ’s sake, the busted hump. Maybe if he spent less time drinking and more time busting his ass, then I’d be taking the orders from him

“Green light,” Eliot interrupted the thought, and dropped the headphones.

They burst out the van’s back doors. “Technical Services has already cored the lock. We go in quiet and clean,” Phil said, leading his men. “Watch your target acquisition and watch for crossfire. And for Christ’s sake, watch for kids.”

The U-Street Crew, like all the dope gangs, used kids for spotters and dealing because their testimony wasn’t admissible, and they could not be tried as adults. A couple years in juvie and they were right back out on the street again. You had to be careful.

“What if some eleven-year-old points a piece at me?” Cap asked.

“You’re an ex-Marine sniper, Cap, not a creamcake,” Phil said. The question ruffled his feathers. “You scared of kids?”

“No, sir.”

“Then you fire over their heads. Aim for hips and shoulders if you gotta, but don’t be killing any kids while I’m running this team. Shit, Cap, you’re wearing a titanium-plate vest that’ll stop a seven- point-six-deuce, and you got one-mile kills in the Gulf War. Ain’t no excuse for you to be dropping kids. You gotta problem with that, Cap?”

“No, sir.”

“Good.”

Then Eliot, charging his Heckler-Koch MP-5, said, “These U-Street assholes pack Uzis and MACs and all kinds of other shit. What about adults?”

Phil stared at him. “This is a PCP lab, Bob. These fuckers trash lives faster than Dignazio goes through pint bottles of Scotch. Either of you guys—any adult who even looks like he’s gonna point a gun at you, redecorate the wall with his brains.”

Cap nodded. Eliot said, “Gotcha, sir.”

Then they slipped in through the door.

The stench of hydrocarbons kicked Phil in the face. The intelligence boys called this one right. Unless they got a license to manufacture ether in a closed warehouse, Phil thought. All the signs were here; this place was a lab.

And darker than all hell.

“Quiet,” Phil whispered. He had his 65 at the ready. “And don’t scuff your feet. We don’t want to ring the doorbell, do we? And, Cap, keep that laser-sight down till we get into the shit.”

It was almost too easy. Down the main corridor, then a left and a right, just like the intel blueprints read. At once, they were on a ten-foot catwalk overlooking the biggest PCP lab Phil had ever seen. About a dozen skell were hard at work below, beneath flanks of fluorescent lights. “Don’t fire if they run,” Phil whispered, “only if they start popping caps at us. Dignazio’s crew is at all the exits.”

Phil’s two tac men nodded in silence, and acquired protected firing positions behind the roof and catwalk props. Time to grow some balls, Phil thought. He stood boldly in the middle of the cat, raised his megaphone, and calmly announced: “EVERYBODY FREEZE. MY NAME IS LT. PHILIP STRAKER OF THE METRO POLICE NARCOTICS SQUAD, AND IT TICKLES ME PINK TO INFORM YOU THAT YOU’RE ALL UNDER ARREST. I’VE GOT FIFTY TACTICAL POLICE OFFICERS SURROUNDING THIS BUILDING AND TWO GUYS JUST ITCHING TO KILL SOMEONE AT EVERY EXIT. PUT YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR AND STAND STILL. ANYONE WHO EVEN THINKS ABOUT MOVING LEAVES IN A BODY BAG.” And then he thought, These guys must be getting soft in their old age. Each and every skell looked up, gaped, and raised their hands. Nobody moved. And not one gun was fired.

It was like a freeze-frame. I ain’t gonna miss the Yankees after all, Phil thought. Several seconds later, the tac team moved in, covering the paddy boys. No one moved, and not one gun was grabbed for or even seen.

“Shit, sir,” Eliot commented. “We’ll be out of here in time to catch all ten dancers at Camelot.”

“I think you’re right, Bob. And I’m buyin’. Just give me a minute to find Dignazio. We’ll let him do the paper, and we’ll blow.”

More labware than a college chemistry class, Phil observed after taking the stairs down and walking through the aisles. The paddy boys from District 6 were cuffing the skell so fast they’d honed it to an art form. Guess they’re Yankees fans, too. Dignazio, sided by a pair of golems with MP-5s, stood back by the delivery concourse.

“Hey, Dig,” Phil said, trying to be at least cordial. “Looks like we pulled this one off without a hitch.”

“My guys pulled it off. All you did was take a walk and talk shit.”

Phil smirked. Typical. “Fine, Dig. Look after the cleanup. Your guys check all the halls?”

“You ain’t gotta tell me how to do my job, Straker.” Dignazio glared, torqued-up, wiry, and with a face with more cracks in it than the original Mona Lisa. Then the sergeant walked off, taking his two gunners with him. Then:

chink

Phil jerked his head.

He strained his eyes down the concourse and thought he saw something flutter. A shadow? No…

A glint?

What the hell is that?

Not a dozen steps into the dark concourse, and Phil realized it wasn’t what but who.

A small shadow seemed to whisk from one open doorway to another

A spotter, he thought. A kid.

Phil slid his Kel-Lite from his belt, then began down the dusty, linoleum corridor. His light roved. Then—

“Jesus!”

The kid popped out of one of the storage rooms and sprinted toward the dead EXIT sign, his feet scuffing frantically.

TSD had already chained that exit from the outside.

“Come on, kid. You can’t get out that way. Let’s you and me have a talk, all right? I won’t hassle you, I promise.”

It was sad, the way these dope-gangs indoctrinated kids into their business. Of course they grow up to be criminals—it was the only thing they knew. And how old was this one? Ten? Twelve? Christ, Phil thought drearily. The kid hit the door, found it locked, then turned around, wide-eyed in his terror.

This kid looked about seven or eight.

“Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you,” Phil assured. “But you’re gonna have to come out here now so we can get you squared away.”

The kid’s face looked like a dark skull in Phil’s Kel-Lite beam. Tears glistened on lean, dark cheeks. He’s shit-scared, all right, Phil realized. The worst part was the district court’d just stick them in an orphanage, and nine times out of ten they’d just run back to the streets at the first opportunity.

“You’re gonna have to come with me now,” Phil said.

He never saw what was coming—he never even saw the gun. At once, the ever-familiar sound of a small-caliber pistol clapped his ears

pap! pap! pap!

The moment was mayhem. Fierce tiny lights blinked in his eyes; Phil only had time to let instinct haul him behind an empty refuse drum. His Kel-Lite rolled across the cement floor when another bullet pinged into the drum. Phil drew his service revolver

“Goddamn it, kid! Are you nuts?”

Then he fireda shot high over the kid’s head.

The kid stopped shooting.

How could I have been so stupid? Too busy worrying about the goddamn Yankees. A second later, two S.O.D. men were aiming lights down the corridor. “Don’t shoot!” Phil hollered. “It’s just a kid!”

Now more cops were trotting into the hall. “You all right, Lieutenant?” Eliot was asking, and helping him up.

“I’m fine,” Phil replied. “But I’m not sure I can say the same for my shorts.”

“What happened?”

“Just some shit-scared kid. I popped a cap over his head.”

But Eliot was giving him a funky look, and then Phil thought he heard some guys down the hall calling for an EMT.

No, no, Phil thought, and sprinted down the hall himself. “I swear to God I fired over his head!”

More cops spilled into the hall, flashlights bobbing…

“Fired over his head, huh?” Dignazio was striding loudly behind. He glared at Phil. “That’s a real piece of work right there, Straker. The deputy comm’s gonna love this.”

The words groaned in Phil’s mind like an old house in the wind: Good God Almighty…

The kid lay at the foot of the chained exit doors, blood pumping from the bullet hole in his upper-right chest. He was dead before they could even get him on the stretcher . . .

««—»»

Phil peered into the memory. Six months ago I was a metropolitan police lieutenant about to make captain, and now I’m a nightwatchman making $7.50 an hour. The death of the kid had been ruled a justifiable homicide by Internal Affairs, even though Phil swore up and down that he’d fired well over the kid’s head. “Not high enough,” the chief investigator had told him. But that wasn’t why he’d resigned…

Dignazio, he thought.

It had to have been Dignazio.

The IAD chief investigator was an anal-retentive stoneface named Noyle. “Lieutenant, what kind of ammunition were you using in your service revolver on the night in question?” he asked.

“Thirty-eight plus P plus,” Phil answered, taken slightly aback at the undue inquiry.

“Thirty-eight plus P plus. Hmm. And what type of service ammunition does the department authorize for sidearm use?”

“Nine millimeter hardball, and thirty-eight—”

“Thirty-eight plus P plus?”

“Yes.”

“And does the department authorize the use of any other type of service sidearm ammunition, Lieutenant?”

What the hell is he driving at? Phil pondered. Why this roundhouse of irrelevant questions? “Only for S.O.D. personnel,” he replied, “but only when specifically authorized by Special Operations Division Deputy Commissioner.”

“And are you an S.O.D. officer, Lieutenant?

“No,” Phil said. “I’m in Narcotics.”

“And on the night in question were you for any reason authorized by the Special Operations Division Deputy Commissioner to use ammunition in your service revolver other than thirty-eight plus P plus?”

Phil was hard-pressed not to frown. “No.”

Noyle leaned back in his chair, centered at the long conference table like a low-rent Caesar, with Cassius and Brutus to his left and right. His steely eyes never blinked. “Lieutenant, do you know what a quad is?”

Why’s he asking me about quads! This was getting aggravating. “Yes,” he answered, perhaps a little testily. “A quad is a special kind of bullet.”

“And why is it ‘special’?”

“Because it fires four cylindrical slugs instead of a solid, one-piece projectile.”

“And what is the purpose of this?” Noyle asked.

“Increased stopping-power. On impact the slugs separate in the target and disperse. Quads, in other words, do a lot more damage than standard one-piece projectiles.”

“A ‘dum-dum’ bullet, so to speak.”

“Yes,” Phil answered. “A factory-made dum-dum, I guess you could call it… But, sir, if you don’t mind, what’s the purpose of these questions? If you want to know about tactical ammunition, you’d be better off talking to the rangemaster or the S.O.D. armorer.”

Noyle outright ignored Phil’s query. “Lieutenant, do you know of any occasion when quads have been or would be authorized for use in this department?”

“No,” Phil said.

“No, Lieutenant?”

A pause followed, then Noyle was whispering with his IAD counterparts. Phil took the opportunity to probe their faces. They all looked the same: similar suits, similar blank expressions. They looked like inquisitors, and Phil felt like a warlock on trial for heresy. What in God’s name is going on here?

Noyle’s rodent eyes returned to Phil’s face. “Lieutenant, you’ve just admitted to myself and the other hearing officers that quads are unauthorized for use in this department.”

“Right,” Phil said. He was starting to feel itchy, hot.

“Then why were you using them?” Noyle asked.

The question fell on him, like a wall collapsing. His temper had begun to simmer. He wrung his hands in his lap.

“I was not using quads,” he affirmed very slowly. If he didn’t speak slowly, he’d get mad, and one thing he didn’t want to do was pitch a fit in front of three IAD investigators. These three poker-faces were the department’s ball-cutting crew. Instead, Phil took a breath, exhaled, and repeated, “I was not using quads. I’ve never loaded quads on duty or off. And if you want to know the truth, I’m getting really confused right now. I can’t make any sense out of this line of questioning.”

“Nor can we,” Noyle inserted, “make any sense out of your testimony today, Lieutenant Straker. It seems to us that you’re lying.”

Phil leaned forward across the conference table. “Pardon me?”

“Lieutenant, isn’t it proper protocol for an officer to be placed on administrative leave after a shooting?”

“Yeah,” Phil answered, “just as I was placed on administrative leave after this shooting.”

“And what else did you do? Isn’t it also protocol for an officer to turn in his or her service weapon upon such an instance?”

“Yeah, to the next ranking officer on the site. I did this, too. Immediately. And if you think I was using quads on the night of the shooting, just check my service revolver. It’s locked up in the property room. Open it and look in it, check the ammo.”

Noyle cleared his throat—for formality, not because he needed to. “We did exactly that, Lieutenant, and we found one expended cartridge in the number one chamber. Chambers two through six were loaded with 38-caliber quads.”

“That’s bullshit!” Phil stood up and yelled.

“No, Lieutenant, it’s evidence,” Noyle informed him. “And so is the autopsy report filed by the district medical examiner.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Phil asked as though each word were a stone being expelled from his throat.

“That boy you shot?” Noyle paused a moment to adjust his tie. “According to the autopsy report, he was shot in the high chest area, just above the right lung. Upon impact, the projectile dispersed as, and I’ll quote, ‘four point-three-eight inch fragments, two of which exited the body from a high-right anterior position. A third fragment tumbled down the dorsal-side of the spinal column and lodged in the left calyx cavity of the left kidney. The fourth fragment penetrated the aorta.” Noyle cleared his throat again, then looked back at Phil. “The Special Operations armorer positively identified the referred-to fragments as ‘dispersed missile debris’ from an unauthorized bullet known as a quad, Lieutenant. Records and Ident verified that the weapon which fired this bullet was your own. And the district medical examiner concluded that the victim’s death can be directly attributed to the particular ammunition that was used. In other words, Lieutenant if you’d been using standard, department-authorized ammunition on the night in question, that eight-year-old boy would still be alive…”

Still be alive. Noyle’s final words reverberated in Phil’s head now, months after the fact. At first he’d tried to fight IAD’s findings, but it didn’t wash; Phil knew he’d somehow been framed by Dignazio, but how could he prove it? A week later, Phil was standing before the commissioner himself, and was told, “You’ve got two choices, Straker. You can stick with this ridiculous story about being framed, in which case the district attorney’s office will charge you with negligence, premeditated use of dangerous and unauthorized ammunition, and at the very least, second-degree manslaughter.”

“What’s my other choice?” Phil grimly inquired.

“You can resign. The incident, of course, will go on your department record, but no charges will be brought against you. Use your head, son. Turn in your papers.”

Which Phil did. The comm was right—there was no other choice for him. If he challenged the accusations, he’d be formally charged and prosecuted. And since he had no solid proof that Dignazio had framed him, he’d be found guilty. He’d get sentenced to a year at least, and if there was one thing he knew, cops rarely lasted a month in the joint.

So here I am, he thought now, standing in the middle of a textile factory at two in the morning. Blackballed. Washed up. No police department in the country would touch him, not with the bullshit in his metro personnel file. At age thirty-five, his blazing career in law enforcement was over, his degree useless, and over a decade of hard work had been reduced to nothing more than a small pile of ashes.

He almost laughed. All right, so my cop career is over. Now I’ve got a new career as a security guard working midnight-to-eights and pulling in $7.50 an hour It’s better than being in the joint…

The job itself required very little in the brain department; a well trained chimp could do it, he supposed. Security work was about the only thing he could think of that was relative to his education and interests, and Preventive Security, Inc. was the only company in the state which offered him a job despite his rep with the metro cops. The job was simple: he punched a Latham roundclock every hour in the factory. The rest of the time he sat in an office, drank diet Pepsi, and read novels. “It’s a cinch,” his new boss promised. “We haven’t had a break-in at this place in twenty years.”

Interesting work.

Then the perimeter alarm went off.

“So much for the boss’s twenty-year record,” Phil mumbled to himself. Probably an alarm malfunction. He checked the jack plate on the Sparrow/Jefferies alarm system. ZONE TWO, the light blinked. ENTRY BREACH.

I don’t believe it! I’ve got someone busting into the place! He cut the office lights and screwed the red lens on his Kel-Lite. Then he grabbed his GOEC Mace—Preventive Security was an unarmed company, no gun permits—and slipped out into a secondary transport aisle. He kept his light low; he didn’t want to scare anyone away, he wanted to catch them, if only to relieve the boredom. Walking through the dark factory, though, put him on edge. What if the intruders were armed? Just be careful, skillethead. Flanks of nameless machines led him around the production area. At the other end of the building (designated ZONE TWO) he could see the exit door ajar.

Someone’s in here, all right, he realized. But who would want to break into a freakin’ textile factory? What’s to steal? Spools of thread?

Down the aisle and another turn, and his question was answered. How stupid can crooks be? he wondered. Someone had turned on the lights in the automat, and right this instant he could see a shadow leaning over one of the machines. A coinbox jockey, it seemed obvious to him. Why work a job when you can make a living busting into vending machines? On Metro, this would’ve been an easy collar, but Phil’s new boss reflected some very serious sentiments for situations that actually involved a burglar. “Remember, Phil, you’re not John Law anymore, you’re just a guard. You see anyone actually break into that place, you call the county cops and get out. No playing hero. Christ, in this state if a guard injures a crook during a crime, the crook sues and wins. I don’t need any lawsuits or liabilities.” Phil saw the man’s point, especially given the fact that he didn’t have a gun or police powers any longer. But—that didn’t mean he couldn’t have a little fun…

“Freeze! Police!” Phil shouted. “Don’t move or I shoot!”

“With what? A paper clip and rubber band?” the “intruder” replied and casually turned away from the vending machine. Then he smiled. “How’s it goin’, Phil? It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Crick City’s favorite son. I guess you’re not too keen on keeping in touch.”

Phil couldn’t believe it. The man who faced him stood short and fat. The bald pate glimmered in the automat’s buzzing fluorescent light, and his mustache was like a stout caterpillar on his lip. Those features, plus the tidy, starched municipal police uniform, were all Phil needed to recognize.

“Lawrence Mullins,” Phil identified, “Chief of the Crick City Police Department. Would you mind telling me what in the hell you’re doing here?”

“What’s it look like? I’m getting a cup of coffee,” Mullins said and raised the steaming Macke cup.

Phil closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Calm down, he commanded himself. Don’t blow up.

Then, as was usually the case, he…blew up.

“You broke into my factory just to buy a goddamn cup of coffee!”

Mullins chuckled approvingly. “Still got that temper, I see. Good, good. And, you know, you sure got some cheapie locks on this place. Shit, I had that door open in less time than it takes to use the key. Oh, and how about reholstering that 44-magnum can of Mace, huh? What, you get a lot of mean dogs around here?”

Phil sighed. “Please, Chief. Don’t screw with me. I’ve had a bad day—or I should say, a bad year.”

“So I’ve heard. Back in town, we all heard about that shooting when you were with Metro. But we can talk about that later. That was a smart move, resigning voluntarily instead of fighting them. You fight with any big city IAD, you lose your ass. Then you really would have been washed up. Shit, a former cop with convictions… You wouldn’t have been able to get a job cleaning the greasehole at Chuck’s Diner.”

One thing Phil didn’t need to be reminded of was the Metro frame. And another thing he didn’t need was a load of wisecracks. “Chief, look, it’s good to see you and all that, but are you going to tell me why you’re here, or are you just trying to piss me off while you stand there sipping coffee?”

Mullins sipped more coffee, just barely smiling over the steam. “Oh, is that what you want to know? You want to know why I’m here?”

“Yeah, Chief, I do.”

“Well, we’re friends, right? From way on back? Shit, I practically raised you myself. And when I heard about the Metro thing, and you taking this pissant security job, well… I was a little concerned, that’s all. I mean, it’s not like you’ve seen fit to stop by your old hometown once in a while, you know, just to say hello to some of the folks you grew up with. But of course I guess you been too busy for the last ten years, what with the highfalutin’ big city job with Metro. A narc lieutenant, ain’t that what you were?”

Were, Phil slowly thought. Not am. Not anymore. “Chief, are you trying to make me feel guilty? All right, so I haven’t kept in touch. Sorry. But you still haven’t told me why you busted into my gig.”

Mullins laughed. “Well, I wanted to see if you were keeping on your toes, now that you’re not a cop anymore.” The chubby man grinned at the open service door. “Pretty slick lock-picking, huh?”

“Chief!”

Mullins was getting a real kick out of this. “Okay, Phil, I’ll level with you. The real reason I came all the way out to this bumfuck yarn factory is because, well… I want to talk to you.”

Mullins’ cat-and-mouse games got old fast; this was the first Phil had seen of him in nearly a decade, and he was already sick of him. Some guys never change, he dully realized. “Fine, you want to talk to me. About what? Please, Chief, tell me before I have a stroke.”

Mullins finished his coffee and pitched the cup in the trash. Then he got a Milky Way out of the next machine.

Then he said, “I want to offer you a job on my department.”

And that was about all Mullins had elaborated upon, which was pretty typical; Mullins’ hedging sense of humor was part of his overall psychology—he’d always make his point by taking subtle shots. Phil had been born and raised in Crick City. His father had run off a week after he’d been born, and his mother died about a year later when the laundromat she’d been working in caught fire. So Phil was reared by an aunt, who received a subsidy from the state, and about the only thing he ever had that came close to a father-figure was Mullins, the chief of Crick City’s police department for as long as anyone could remember. Mullins, now, had to be close to sixty, but to Phil he’d always looked the same, even back when Phil was in junior high and hanging out at the station after school.

Mullins was a decent man, or at least as decent as any shuck-and-jive backwoods police chief. Crick City, with a population of less than two thousand, wasn’t exactly Los Angeles in its law-enforcement needs, and since nothing in the way of serious crime ever seemed to occur there, the town council never had any reason to appoint a new chief.

Phil had a confused regard for the man. As a kid, it was Mullins who always had an encouraging, if not gruff, word when Phil was down, and it was Mullins who kept him out of trouble. Mullins looked after Phil when no one else could, and it was Mullins, too, who had inspired Phil’s interest in police work.

But on the other hand…

It was the town itself that always rubbed Phil the wrong way, and Chief Mullins was a constant reminder of that. Crick City was a backward, run-down pit of a town—a trap. No one ever seemed to get anywhere, and no one ever seemed to leave. It was the sticks: low-paying jobs, lots of unemployment, and the highest dropout rate in the state. Dilapidated pickup trucks ruled the pothole-ridden roads, at least those trucks that weren’t propped up forever on blocks in the front yards of one seedy saltbox house after another. The only crimes that did seem to occur with regularity were drunk and disorderlies, and the hallmark: spouse abuse. In all, Crick City unfolded as an unchanging nexus. A nowhere land inhabited by nowhere people.

Phil didn’t want to be one of those people.

But there was one thing he did want to be—

A cop.

And now here was Mullins, appearing like a decade-old ghost, and offering Phil the job that had been taken away from him by Dignazio and his blackball battalion.

Of course, police work in Crick City wouldn’t be anything at all like his job on the narc squad. At Metro he had rank, he had respect and credibility, he had goals to pursue, and an important job that utilized every aspect of his education and fortitude. Going from Metro to the Crick City force was the same as going from a Lamborghini to a Yugo.

Quit complaining, he reminded himself. It’s better than punching a clock at a yarn factory. At least he’d be engaged in a job he’d been trained at.

At least he’d be a cop again.

Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, he thought, even when the horse is dressed in a chief’s uniform.

Mullins had left the factory shortly after he’d arrived, planting only enough seeds to keep Phil’s brain working for the rest of his shift. “Stop by the station tomorrow afternoon,” the rotund man had bid, “and we’ll talk some more.”

“I will, Chief. Thanks.”

“Oh, and watch out for them burglars. You never know when the buggers might want to bust in here for some coffee.”

“You’re a laugh a minute, Chief. See you tomorrow.”

And now, hours later, after he’d signed out of his guard post at the textile plant, Phil dogged through morning rush-hour in his clay-red ’76 Malibu. He’d picked it up for $300 at Melvin Motors; now that he was no longer drawing lieutenant’s pay, it was all his purse strings could handle. The early summer sun glared between tall buildings; the air reeked of exhaust. And as he made his way home, he couldn’t stop thinking about Mullins’ off-the-wall appearance at the plant, and the surprise job offer. What would it be like to go back there now? Crick City, he mused. Christ, even the name sounds redneck. Had the town changed? Was Chuck’s Diner still owned by Chuck? Did the rubes still race their pickups on the Route every Saturday night after tying one on at Krazy Sallee’s, the roadside strip joint? Was the coffee still terrible at the Qwik-Stop? Who’s still there that I remember? he wondered. Then, more morosely:

Who’s died since I’ve been gone?

Yes, the prospect of going back to his hometown goaded many questions. And…Vicki? What about Vicki? High school sweetheart, his very first girlfriend. She could’ve gotten out, too, but had chosen to work for Mullins instead, the department’s only female cop.

I wonder if she’s still around…

But then Phil’s stomach turned queasy as he parked the Malibu in his littered apartment lot. Because there was one more question, wasn’t there? Remembering the town and the people tricked him into remembering something else…

The voices, and—

The House, he thought.

There’d never been a name for it. Just…

The House.

Was the House still there?

Moreover, had it ever been there?

Just hours afterward, he’d gotten so sick. The doctor had said that a fever so severe often caused delirium and hallucinations. His aunt must’ve thought he was crazy, just a crazy little ten-year-old boy…

Maybe I was crazy, he reflected now, trudging up his apartment steps. Christ Almighty. I hope I was crazy…

Because, whether it had been hallucination or reality, it was one thing Phil Straker would never forget—

The House, he thought yet again.

And the hideous things he’d seen there.

— | — | —

Two

Cody Natter’s shadow looked like a crane lowering as he leaned over the open trunk. So young, he thought. The girl, bound and gagged, shivered as the shadow crossed. Her lovely red eyes looked lidless in her sheer terror.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Upped and split right out the house last night,” said Druck, whose right eye—which sunk lower than the left—had a way of ticking when he was excited about something. Druck was the only creeker Natter trusted to remain competent; and he could talk right. “Took us awhiles ta find her. Caught her runnin’ ‘long Taylor Road just ‘fore the sun come up.”

Pity. Natter couldn’t take his own red eyes off of her. She was shivering, and she’d wet herself. Of course she’s afraid, he considered. These are frightening days. Their stock grew worse and worse. Could they even last another generation before…

No mind, he thought. Faith…

“You must be good,” he whispered to her in a voice that sounded like old wood creaking. “You must trust your providence. Do you understand?”

Certainly the meanings of such words would ellude her, but nevertheless she nodded, gasping through her gag.

There was more to understand than mere words.

Druck would expect to handle the usual punishment—hence, his obvious ticking enthusiasm. Sometimes the boy drooled.

“Untie her,” Natter said.

“But ain’t we gonna—”

“Untie her, and remove the gag.”

Druck, dumbfounded, did as he was told. The girl heaved in her tattered clothes,

Cody Natter’s long, bony hand touched her cheek. “Go now,” he allowed. “And be good. Remember your providence.”

Tears of gratitude ran down her warped face. She squealed something, some inner words of thanks, then climbed out of the trunk and scampered off into the woods.

Natter turned back to Druck, whose own warped face reflected his disappointment.

“Kill her later,” the gaunt man whispered. “Kill her tonight. And be kind.”

Druck smiled as a line of drool depended off his chin.

««—»»

“I needs ta kill me somethin’,” Scott said, and he said this with no particular emphasis or intensity—just an everyday, no-big-deal kind of comment. Scott “Scott-Boy” Tuckton rode shotgun today, slouched back on the big bench seat, Lotta ass been on this here bench seat, he mused for no reason. Lotta fine razzin’. Gut drove, Gut being the nickname for one Lowell Clydes, who was called Gut on account of a considerable girth about the waist. Both had cans of beer wedged at their crotches, while Bonnie Raitt sang away on the radio in that hot, cock-stiffening voice of hers.

“Yeah, Bonnie’s tonsils shore make my dog hard,” Scott-Boy commented, giving his groin a nonchalant rub. “Ain’t that right, Gut, my man?”

“Uh, yeah,” Gut replied.

Scott stroked his burns in the mid-afternoon sun. “And I say, it’s a great day, ain’t it? Yes, sir, a great day ta kill us somethin’.”

“Uh, yeah.”

“’Course, we’se’ll probably have ta wait till tonight. Night time’s always the best time fer killin’.”

Scott liked to kill things. He liked to run down animals in the road. On several occasions he’d run down people. Once they’d plastered a little girl on one of them fancy 10-speeds, then dumped her in the woods up near Waynesville. Another night one of the retard kids from up on Prospect Hill was loping along the Old Dunwich Road just as pretty as you please. Scott had been driving that night, too, and he’d run the kid right smack dab down-Ka-BUMP! “Scott-Boy, why’d you wanna go and do a thang like that?” Gut had inquired.

“Fer the hail of it, I s’pose,” Scott had replied.

Scott-Boy and Gut were what clinical psychiatrists would label as “affect stage sociopaths.” They harbored no organic brain defects, nor were they subject to any mode of reactive or cerebro-chemical maladaptations. They were capable human beings who knew right from wrong, who had never been sexually abused, and who had never been locked in closets as children. Both were born of decent, hard-working parents and had been raised in an acceptable fashion. Their conduct could not be liberally excused by environment, abuses incurred during the formative years, or abnormal brain chemistry. Instead—and to put it more simply—they were two bad, evil, shit-kicking, redneck motherfuckers.

For instance, they didn’t work. They were perfectly capable of working, they just didn’t. “Money’s walkin’ all over!” Scott-Boy had once postulated. “Uh, yeah,” Gut had agreed. Best thing about the south counties—most were unchartered, which meant they didn’t have police departments. So they came down regular from Crick City (razzin’ too close to home Scott likened to poopin’ where they et); a thirty-minute drive up or down the Route easily carried them to any number of remote townships where they enjoyed complete anonymity. Everyone drove big pickups this part of the state, and everyone wore the same duds: boots, straightleg jeans, and jean jackets over T-shirts. Redneck fashion was also great camouflage.

Their lives were happily without direction; Scott-Boy Tuckton and Gut lived week to week in pursuit of their joys. But such pursuits, regardless of their nature, generally required some mode of finance. Beer cost money, after all. So did truck payments, trailer rent, and insurance. Bar whores were the easiest pickings. The south counties had more roadside watering holes than you could shake a busted camshaft at, and each and every one of the joints had at least one parking lot head queen to take care of a fella’s business. Wait till about one a.m. any Friday night, entice one of these fine young ladies into the truck with the typical promise of cash for services rendered, let her do her thing first, of course, then crack her upside the head with the brass knucks. What you were generally left with for your troubles was a purse chock full of tens and twenties. An even better gig was the fellas. Any Friday night (Friday nights were best ’cos the first thing these peabrains did before heading to the bars was cash their paychecks) just hide yourself in the woods behind the bar or poolhall, wait for some homeboy to stumble shitfaced into the parking lot, then crack him a good one upside the head with the brass knucks. Drag him back into the woods, tie him, gag him, then pluck the wallet, which was almost sure to contain half of the dupe’s cashed paycheck. A few minutes later the next sucker drags ass out, then you repeat the process. Scott and Gut could commonly take out six or eight guys like this at the same parking lot, in like, about the space of an hour.

Lately, on the side, they made even better money running angel dust for a couple of local dope dealers. Not exactly a job, but it was something. They didn’t use the stuff; they just helped sell it a few nights a month. A thousand dollars a drop, not what you’d call chicken feed. So between that and ripping folks off, Scott-Boy and Gut did all right, yesiree.

Once the money was had, their joys remained. “Razzin’,” Scott-Boy liked to call it. “What say let’s razz up some splittails tonight, ya reckon,” he’d suggest. Hitchhikers provided prime razzin’. Lordy Jeez, in this day and age you’d think gals’d be a tad smarter than to get into a vehicle with a perfect stranger. Just the same, if you cruised around long enough, there she’d be, skippin’ along some road darker than the devil’s buttcrack. She’d be pretty more times than not, and she’d always be alone. And Gut would just pull the pickup right on over. Scott-Boy always did the talkin’, in his laid back, farm boy sort of way. “Hey there, purdy lady, where you headed this fine night? Well ain’t that just plumb dandy, see, ’cos it just so happens me and my buddy here, we’se headed fer the ’zact same place. Just slide right on in, and we’ll git ya where you’re goin’ safe an’ sound.”

Safe an’ sound, indeed.

Scott-Boy and Gut knew every dell, grove, hillock, and backwood hideyhole anywhere they might happen to be at any given time.

All’s it took was one turnoff, and the unsuspecting gal realized that something wasn’t right, but of course by the time this realization had been made, it was already too late. Way too late. Way on back deep in the woods, no one could hear them scream, and scream they did—like holy everlivin’ heck. Diversity proved requisite to any venture of uniqueness, and Scott “Scott-Boy” Tuckton was a very diverse young man. He liked to hear them scream, and his powers of imagination spared no possibility through which they might do so. Ol’ Scott-Boy, yeah, he had himself a headful of visions that would make Ivan the Terrible look like fuckin’ Bambi.

Gut supposed they’d killed at least a dozen people. They’d never really set out to, it just happened once by accident. One night they’d been jacking drunks as usual, and Scott-Boy had cracked one poor fucker a tad too hard upside the head with the brass knucks. Exit muggers, enter killers. The poor fucker’s head had split, showing pink brains. “Well, hail, would ya look what I just up and done?” Scott-Boy remarked with dull fascination. Like they say, accidents will happen. But for Scott, murder was like potato chips; ya couldn’t eat just one. That same night, Scott had sliced open a bar whore’s throat after she’d fellated him in the truck. “Jesus ta Pete, Scott-Boy!” Gut exclaimed. “What you go and do that fer?” “Dunno,” Scott chuckled his remorse. “Dag good thang we got the vinyl pole-stree.” He scratched his head. “Gals shore do got theirselfs a lotta blood in ’em, huh?”

Gut pretty much just helped out or watched. It was Scott who was the virtuoso. He had a thing for slowly stranglin’ gals during coitus, fashioning a tourniquet around their necks with sisal twine and a dowel rod. He had also buggered, then beaten to death, a hippie boy he’d first thought was a hippie girl; he’d carved up a yuppie couple he’d found camping in the woods; and then there was that redheaded hitchhiker who must have been at least eight months and twenty-nine days pregnant…

But, never mind what they did to her.

— | — | —

Three

Home, sweet home, Phil thought as mordantly as he could. Was it shame? How would it look? Christ, a Master’s degree and over ten years on a major metropolitan department, and now I’m coming right back to where I started, back to good old Crick City, the moron mecca of the world.

A few minutes after exiting the interstate, the road funneled down, plummeting with his spirits. This was State Route 154, known to locals simply as “The Route,” a winding 30-mile patchjob of asphalt that cut a swath through south county’s rolling hills and forest belts. It also cut a swatch through some of the poorest and least developed townships in the state: Luntville, Tylersville, Waynesville, and Crick City. Soon the massive scape of the metropolis faded behind him, only to be replaced by bridged ravines, famished tracks of farmland, trailer parks, and one rundown shack after another. The pits, Phil reflected. Waynesville, Luntville, Crick City—it didn’t matter what these towns were called; to him, they were all the same. Bustedville. Even the woods looked destitute—sickly vegetation and ancient garbage clotted between dense masses of trees, some scrawny and skeletally thin, others stout as sewer pipes and hundreds of feet high. Rampant fungus shined like green-white snot over diseased and grossly knotted tree trunks. Most of the road signs could no longer be read thanks to the pockmarks of midnight shotguns; shattered glass littered the shoulders like halite, along with the innumerable carcasses of small animals—“Road Pizza” in police parlance. “Possum Pie”—which were forever being run down by motorists to be scavenged of course by still more small animals, which were then promptly run down by still more motorists. Cyclic carnage.

The easterly ridge loomed to Phil’s right, a great wall that seemed to keep the entire Route in perpetual darkness. He passed one town called Lockwood where, several years ago, most of the tiny population had disappeared seemingly overnight, and another, Prospect Hill, where dozens of residents had died or gone blind all on the same weekend from bad hootch. Yes, hootch, moonshine, panther piss—some of these communities made the stuff like it was the Prohibition era, from stills back in the woods. Phil had tried it once, and one sip had about knocked him on his ass.

Abrupt turnoffs periodically marked the Route, roads with absurdly redneck names. Turkey Neck Road, Furnace Branch Road, Old Mill Road—there was even a Tick Neck Road, and as far as Phil knew, ticks didn’t even have necks. Ah, sophistication, he thought. A used car dealer’s called Lucky Lee’s, Fast Eddie’s Pool Hall, and a roadside diner that seriously sported a sign: GOOD EATS.

In between the towns, Phil knew, were even more remote communities—actually sub-communities—that existed in complete obscurity, loosely knit hamlets known as “hill towns,” where the populace remained unknown to public record. “Hill folk,” they were called, and “hill squatters.” There were more conventional names, too.

White trash. Crackers. Uncensused settlements of the catastrophically poor. People who lived off the land and had never had a real job, never been to the doctor’s, had never owned a television. Children who’d never been to school. The Third World of America the Beautiful. They lived in lean-tos, tarpaper shacks, and abandoned trailers with no running water and no electricity. A cliché to the average person, but all too real in these parts. But Phil knew that all states had their rural poor, and all states had their hillfolk, tiny flecks of humanity swept aside by the world. For cash they sold scrap metal and moonshine; for food they took to the woods. It was hard to believe that in a society of computer chips, banana chips, and anti-lock brakes, of sitcoms, Home Shopping Clubs, and pay-per-view, and of surround-sound stereos and microwave ovens—it was hard to believe that such destitution could exist at all, much less under the very nose of the same society…

He’d see them all the time as a kid, picking through garbage bags dumped in the woods, or wandering down the Route in ragpatch clothes and homemade fishing rods slung over their shoulders. Sometimes the children, filthy and smudge-faced, would beg for pocket change in front of the Qwik-Stops and general stores, until the proprietors ran them off. Yes, he’d seen them many times.

And maybe that explained Phil’s unease about returning to Crick City. The hand of fate often dealt from a bad deck. How close had Phil come himself to being one of these people?

Christ, he thought.

The Malibu’s corroded ball-joints shimmied through the next long, winding turn. To his right, up on the hill, stood the Fletcher place, a bedraggled old antebellum house that was leaning with its own weight. There were holes in the roof, but the Fletchers still lived there—they refused to move. And to Phil’s left sat a trailer on blocks at the edge of Hockley’s pond; it had been there for as long as he could remember, and during heavy rains the creeks would fill and the water would rise up past the trailer’s floor. Yet the inhabitants never moved.

I moved, Phil pondered. I moved out of here over a decade ago…and look where I am now.

Past the next bend, the sign appeared:

CRICK CITY TOWN LIMITS

There was no main drag per se; the Route blew right through Crick City like a spit through a kabob. Decrepit houses passed sporadically, as if shoved into the woods. A small trailer park here, Hull’s General Store there. Every so often the woods receded, opening up into tracks of hilly, unkempt farmland, some with great barns off in the distance so rotted you could see through them and vermiculated wooden crosses on which scarecrows had once been crucified until they, like the barns, had eroded away. Phil swerved twice to avoid waddling possums at the centerline; a third possum had not been so lucky, already crushed by a previous car to a plop of meat. A crow lifted off as the Malibu swooshed past, carrying with it a string of entrails a yard long. Phil grimaced as the pink ribbon sailed away.

Didn’t the Romans or someone read the future in animal guts? It was an absurd circumspection but one that fit with the image. What did the future hold for him? How could his future be a productive one, now that he was coming back here? My fortune told in possum guts…

Past the next plot of farmland, a rising plane of disheveled corn, he spied Krazy Sallee’s, the town strip joint. The bulb-bordered sign promised GO-GO GIRLS AND BEER TO GO! Even this early, several pickups spotted the great gravel lot. A mile past was Bouton’s Farm Supply, and another mile Crick City’s sumptuous four-star hallmark of cuisine, Chuck’s Diner. They didn’t have terrine of duck foie gras or roasted quail with porcini mushrooms, but the hash wasn’t bad. Several stragglers walked along the shoulder as Phil drove on, a couple of rednecks in overalls, and the infamous Armless Man, whom Phil remembered from early childhood. Every day the guy would walk from the Crownsville trailer park to Snoot’s Liquors, pick up a bottle of Bushmills, and walk back. Every day, like clockwork. And it was a good five-mile clip each way. The guy must be a hundred by now, Phil thought, amazed. Some things never change.

And around yet another bend…

A third pedestrian ambled down the shoulder. Hillfolk, Phil deduced the instant he got a good look. The boy, in his late teens, looked tall and lanky, and he seemed to walk at an awkward pace like someone with a trick knee. Long black hair hung in greasy strings, and from afar the kid’s face more resembled a smudge of dirt. I hope this hill kid’s on his way to the store for some soap. And his clothes offered another vestige: they clung to his body like fetid rags, patched up with oilcloths, old towels, pieces of other garments. Yeah, he’s hill folk, all right, Phil felt certain, until—

Phil shuddered.

—until he’d approached close enough to recognize the giveaway details.

Christ, his face…

One half of the kid’s face swelled forward, the other half seemed collapsed. A bent nose showed one nostril tiny as a pegboard hole while the other nostril seemed flared out to the diameter of a quarter. And the ridge of the forehead was totally bereft of eyebrows.

And the eyes—

A Creeker…

—showed maroon irises.

That’s what they called them around here. Creek people. Creekers. The utmost extremity of the hill dwellers. Though often talked about, they were seldom actually seen. (Phil had only seen them himself a handful of times in all the years he’d lived out here.) The creek people were inbred over multiple generations, to the extent that nearly all of them displayed drastic physical deformities. Malformed heads and faces. Arms and legs all different lengths. One eye larger than the other. Phil had heard some were born with no eyes at all, and no mouths. To intensify the tragedy, mental defects were just as apparent. Some Creekers couldn’t speak at all, and many of those that could were only able to mumble globs of words that made no sense. Like the hill folk, Creekers were the secret of any backwoods town—unacknowledged, as if they didn’t even exist.

««—»»

“Well, there he is. I was beginning to think you were gonna stiff me,” Chief Mullins said from behind his huge, cluttered desk. Phil was taken aback; the Crick City Police Station seemed much smaller than he remembered it, compressed and stuffy. Through the back window he could see the tiny jailhouse, and parked next to it was Mullins’ Pontiac Bonneville fitted with a siren horn and red and blue lights. Hunting trophies lined the top of the chief’s banks of beaten file cabinets, along with his framed certificate of appointment as the town’s head law enforcement officer. The certificate, once bright white, had yellowed from the countless years it had been propped there.

“You gonna sit down, or you got poop in your pants?”

“Actually, Chief, I’ve got poop in my pants, but I’ll sit down anyway.” Phil pulled up a metal folding chair, then quickly declined Mullins’ offer of coffee, remembering that it generally tasted like caffeinated turpentine.

I can’t believe I’m sitting here, he thought.

Mullins’ corpulent face and balding head shined in the sunlight. He sipped his coffee and sighed. “Bet’cha never thought in a million years you’d ever be working for me.”

“Look, Chief, you said you wanted to talk, and I’m here to listen. I haven’t taken the job yet.”

“‘Course you’ll take the job. Once a cop, always a cop. Shit, you’d rather spend the rest of your life guarding piles of fabric?”

Good point, Phil admitted.

“Besides,” Mullins added, “I need ya.”

“All right, so what’s the scoop?”

“The scoop is I ain’t got no cops, and though Crick City ain’t exactly big, I ain’t a one-man police force.”

Mullins, as Phil remembered, always had two or three officers working for him. Phil struggled to recall their names. “North and Adams, they’ve been with you for years. What happened to them?”

“What happened?” Mullins chuckled in despair. “The fuckers quit, that’s what happened. They turned in their notice and walked, got better paying jobs with other departments. North’s driving a sector beat in Fairfax, and Adams got snagged by Montgomery County.”

“They were good men, Chief. You should’ve given them more money.”

“Yeah, and the mayor should be fucking Santa Claus. There was nothin’ I could do. I can’t offer the money and bennies of a county department. All I could do was watch and wave bye-bye.”

Hmmm, Phil thought. North and Adams left for better departments. But I wonder what happened to—

“What about Vicki?” Phil asked.

“I figured that’d be your next question. Well, she left too, years ago. You’d be more informed about things if you’d keep in touch.”

“Hey, I sent you a Christmas card, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, back when Reagan was in office.” Mullins scratched his chin. “Or was it Carter?”

“Funny, Chief. I’m laughing hard, see? Now what were you saying about Vicki?”

“I wasn’t saying nothin’. You were asking… Still got a torch burning for the old sweetheart, huh? Still got the hots for that red-haired little cutie-pie…”

Phil frowned, but he couldn’t help but think back. He and Vicki Steele had dated from high school through college—his first love…well, his only love in reality. Guess I didn’t love her enough, though, he considered now. When they’d gotten their degrees, they’d had the most awful fights. Phil had been hired at once by Metro. She didn’t want to leave. He did.

He left. She didn’t.

End of story.

“But,” Mullins rambled on, “there’s one thing I never understood. How come you dumped her?”

Phil frowned again. He had a feeling he’d be frowning a lot if he did indeed take this job. “I didn’t dump her. Things didn’t work out so we broke up, and are you going to tell me what happened to her, or are you gonna jerk my chain for the rest of the afternoon?”

“She quit, just like the others. Walked right out on me.”

“What department picked her up?”

“I never said she quit to go to another department,” Mullins took the opportunity to cryptify. “She’s still around, though. I’m sure you’ll run into her sooner or later, so put it back in your pants and let’s get down to brass tacks. It just so happens that those turncoats North and Adams boogied on me right in the middle of a crisis…”

But Phil’s attention phased out; he was still musing upon Vicki. Christ… Where was she working now? Where did she live? Did she still look the same? And when—

When was the last time she thought about me? he dared to wonder. Grow up! he ordered himself. She probably doesn’t even remember who you are anymore, you smug, pompous ass…

“What’s that you were saying?” he finally got back to reality. “A crisis?”

“That’s right, I got big problems here all of a sudden, and if I don’t fix it, the town council might give me the boot.”

Phil couldn’t imagine any kind of genuine “crisis” out here, much less one severe enough to depose Mullins’ seemingly endless reign. The guy had been chief here longer than Caesar had ruled Rome. “What,” Phil jested, “You got stoners ripping off parking meters from the town square?”

Mullins didn’t laugh, or even smile. It was hard times when this man got serious. “No, smart boy. You remember Cody Natter, the Creeker?”

“I remember Cody Natter, vaguely.” Rumor had it that Natter was sort of the governor of the Creekers, the tribemaster.

“Well, the ugly fuck and his Creeker cronies are givin’ me problems like to make me shit my pants.”

Phil, if only indistinctly, remembered the tall, gangly, and incredibly ugly Cody Natter. Yeah, ugly as all hell but smart as a whip. The guy, it was claimed, was either psychic or could count cards, since he’d cleaned out many an illicit poker game in the back of Sallee’s after hours, and he had this subtly twisted smile that, the few times he’d seen him, sent shivers up Phil’s back. His own childhood’s version of Hannibal at the Gate; Phil’s aunt always told him, “If you don’t go to sleep, Cody Natter’ll be stopping by for a visit tonight.” The guy always drove a souped, rebuilt ’69 Chrysler Imperial, dark-red, and was always blowing money all over town, though no one knew how he earned it. And he was ugly, sure, the ugliest Creeker of the clan.

“Oh, so it’s Cody Natter who’s ripping off the parking meters from the town square. Sounds like a crisis to me.”

“I thought Sam Kinnison was dead, funny man,” Mullins responded. “Take my word for it, Cody Natter and his Creekers are a pain in my ass.”

“But the Creekers always pretty much kept to themselves,” Phil said. “At least that’s what I remember.”

“Yeah, well, they’re all over the friggin’ place now. Shit, he’s even got the less-fucked-up-lookin’ ones working around town.”

“Christ, Chief, I lived in Crick City twenty years, and I don’t think I saw more than a dozen Creekers in all that time.” But then Phil paused, reflecting. I just saw one ten minutes ago, didn’t I? Walking down the Route? The image remained: the swollen head, the uneven arms and legs, and—

—The red eyes, he remembered.

“I don’t care what you seen when you were a punk,” Mullins articulated. “Things have changed in ten years. Natter’s trying to take over the town, and the ugly motherfucker’s doing a great job since I ain’t got no cops on my department.”

Phil still couldn’t quite believe this. The Creekers had always been harmless, and so seldom seen that most people didn’t even believe they existed. This sounded like bullshit to him; he stood his ground. “Okay, Chief. How’s Cody Natter taking over the town? Tell me that, will you?”

Mullins’ fat face turned dark, and his little eyes narrowed in puffy slits.

“He’s dealing drugs now,” he said. “Right here in town. Right now.”

“Drugs, huh?” Phil jeered. “Cody Natter? In Crick City? So what kind of drugs is he dealing? Laughing gas out of empty whipped cream cans?”

“No, funny man,” Mullins said. “He’s dealing PCP.”

— | — | —

Four

When darkness fell, Scott and Gut’s spirits rose. Well, at least Scott-Boy’s did. All of a sudden, Gut wasn’t feelin’ too good…

A little later, they had a big dust drop to make; they’d be making a big pick up of product—in this case, pure, distilled PCP to later be turned into “flake”—and drop it off at one of the primary points just out past Lockwood. It would be their biggest run yet and, hence, their biggest payoff.

Gut ordinarily would’ve been pretty keyed-up at the prospect of making such a fine grab of money for so little effort. But…

He drove the big pickup with authority, down the Route and out of town. It was feigned authority, actually, though he tried hard not to show it. Somethin’ bad in the air tonight, his thoughts swayed. And he felt sure it didn’t have anything to do with their dope run later.

They weren’t due to make the pickup for another couple of hours; they had time to kill, in other words, and Gut knew too well how Scott liked to kill time.

“Hey, Scott-Boy? What say we do somethin’ different tonight ‘fore we make the pick up.”

Scott Tuckton was lounged-back in the big bench seat, swigging his can of Red, White & Blue. It was a warm, balmy night, and everything was perfect. A high, bright moon. Cold beer. Crickets makin’ a ruckus. Warm air rushed in through the open windows while Elvis crooned “Blue Moon” on the radio.

A perfect night, in other words, for killing.

“What’choo mean different?” Scott-Boy inquired, stroking his sideburns. “We’se goin’ on a razz first, ain’t we?”

“Uh—” Gut replied. He steered through the Route’s next bend. “How ’bout we go to Sallee’s instead? Gander us some knockers and tail.”

“Sheeeeee-it,” Scott came back. “Why’s look at it—at a tittie bar—when we’se can have it fer real in our face?”

“All rights, then how ’bout we go there and buy us some whores? They gots whores at Sallee’s. Or maybe stop by Crossroads fer some. We’se can afford it, ‘specially with the green we’se be makin’ later after the drop. We’se can afford a bunch of girls.”

Scott-Boy gaped. “Sheeeeee-it,” he repeated with typical verbal eloquence. “Bein’ able ta afford it ain’t the point, Gutter. We’se razzers, man. We never pay fer it. We’se gonna have a nut tonight, fer sure, and if you wants ta razz some bar whores ‘fore the run, well, that’s just dandy. We’ll pick ’em up, lay some peter on ’em, then bust ’em up and take their green likes we always do. I don’t know abouts you, but I needs ta get my dog in some bush in a big way, but they’ll be sellin’ snowcones in Satan’s place before I pay fer it. ‘Fact, I could go fer some serious razzin’ too, like ta crack me up some bitch’s head with my hickory pick handle, or maybe like that time out near Nalesville. ‘Member that, Gut? When we snagged us that pixie with that real purdy long dark hair hangin’ all the way down past her ass?”

Gut remembered that one, all right. They’d been killin’ time before a run that night too, and there was this hot brunette they picked up thumbing it down the Old Governor’s Bridge Road. Gut wanked hisself off in her face while Scott-Boy pooped her dog style in the dirt and took a whizz up her tail after he blew his nut. She had a right purdy body on her though, but she weren’t purdy fer long. See, she had real long hair on her too, just like Scott said, long straight dark hair hangin’ to her ass, so’s they tied her hair to the trailer hitch on the back bumper of the truck and then lead-footed it down St. Stephen’s Church Road at about a hunnert miles an hour. Weren’t much left of her time they was done. ’Course, that didn’t stop Scott-Boy from havin’ another roll-around with her ‘fore they dumped her off at the big stinky Millersville landfill…

Razzin’ could be had just about anywheres that had hitchhikin’ gals and bar whores and the like. But Gut and Scott-Boy never razzed in Crick City, their home town, on account of Crick City, unlike most of the burgs along the Route, had theirselfs their own police department and a ball-breaker chief the likes of which Gut and Scott preferred not to fuck with. Plus they didn’t want ta bust up no whores at Krazy Sallee’s ’cos Krazy Sallee’s, they’d heard, was owned by some big ugly fella named Natter. Now, Gut had never hisself seen this dude Natter, but the word was he weren’t no one ta fuck with eithers.

But that were not the problem Gut was a’contemplatin’ as he drove the big pickup onward. There was many, and one were the critters. Gut hisself wanked at least once a day, an’ several times durin’ a fine razz. It wasn’t that Gut preferred the feel of his own hand to the feel of girly works—he just didn’t want to catch no critters an’ such, what with the crabs that were now as big as the crabs the watermen hauled out the bay, and the penicillin-resistant gonorrhea, and this new syph they was talkin’ ’bout that’d put a pusser knot the size of a walnut on a fella’s knob, and a’corse the AIDS. It seemed a prudent concern in these times, but Scott-Boy didn’t seem ta give a tiddly. “Aw, all this AIDS ballyhoo, a bunch of hype, it is. Everbody knows ya only catch it if yer a queerboy or a drugshooter. ‘Fact, I was just readin’ ’bout it the other day in The Enquirer, says the Army invented AIDS to take care of the fudgepackers and druggies ’cos they’se don’t gen’rally amount ta nothin’ noways, or work jobs or pay taxes an’ contribit ta society.”

“But, Scott-Boy,” Gut interjected, “just ’cos we’se ain’t queerboys or drug-shooters don’t mean we couldn’t get it from some gal who’s been with one. Lots of these by-sexshools runnin’ about these days.”

“Aw, Gut, that’s just a load of the horseflop,” Scott came right back. “Sorry day when a natural man can git a killer bug just by makin’ proper love ta a woman.”

Sometimes Scott-Boy could be the shit-stupidest fella to ever walk, but Gut kept quiet. Gut hisself was shore no model of morality or Christian goodwill. He’d cut a fella’s throat for a tenspot anyday. He’d crack a splittail upside the head and wank on her milkers without a second’s reservation. And drivin’ for flake dealers weren’t no problem with him either; if they didn’t move the shit, someone else would. But he did possess one sensibility that Scott “Scott-Boy” Tuckton didn’t, and that was somethin’ called common sense.

Scott-Boy didn’t give a pig’s wink about much of anything. It was like he thought he was invincible. He didn’t care about the herpes or the AIDS. He didn’t care that someday someone might see ’em on a razz and tell the cops, nor were he afraid that someday the cops might nab ’em on a dust run. And he didn’t seem to give an outhouse grunt that if they kept going like they been going, somethin’ even worse might befall ’em…

Sooner or later we’se gonna pick the wrong folks ta razz, Gut thought fairly grimly.

It could happen, shore. One night they might be jacking a drunk with the brass knucks, and the fella might pull a knife, or next time they set to razzin’ a bar whore, well, what’s ta keep her from shucking one of them Saturday Night Specials from a purse and pumping him and Scott-Boy up with .25s? Gut shore didn’t want to do life up in the state slam, no sir, not where a fella couldn’t even take a shower without a bunch of bigger fellas givin’ it to him up the tail or making him get down and do the mouthjob on five or ten guys. Likewise, Gut shore didn’t want to wind up screamin’ like a stuck pig in some parking lot some night with a belly full of Stingers or hollowpoints. Just one mistake and that could be the end of some fine times indeed…

And it was just then, just that very minute whiles he was steerin’ the big pickup down the Old Dunwich Road that Gut’s ponderins socked home, and all of a sudden he had this really low, sicklike feeling way down deep in his breadbasket, and this was either ironic or terribly portentous considering what was about to happen to the both of them.

««—»»

Phil’s boss at the security job cut him loose without demanding any notice, which was quite considerate; Phil had guarded enough fabric shanks and spools of yarn. He spent the rest of the evening unpacking his things in his new room at Old Lady Crane’s boardinghouse. Moving hadn’t been too much of a hassle; he’d rented a U-Haul trailer for his furniture, and stuffed everything else into boxes. Then he was on the road, out of the bustling metropolis he’d lived in for the last decade.

And back to Crick City.

The room was no Buckingham Palace, but it would do for now. The rest of his conversation with Mullins earlier in the day had been pretty cut-and-dry, mostly tying up loose ends:

“Cody Natter’s dealing PCP?” he asked in disbelief. “Here in Crick City?”

“That’s right,” Mullins said. “And that’s why I need you, ’cos you got experience. Besides, I ain’t got no one else.”

This comment didn’t exactly make Phil feel like Cop of the Year, but he could see Mullins’ point. “So what about my rep with Metro?” he asked.

“You resigned, you were never charged. I don’t give a shit what’s on your record there. Just don’t pop any more kids with quads.”

“Wait a minute, Chief,” Phil felt obliged. “Let’s get one thing clear: I never shot anyone with quads or any other illegal ammo. It was a frame. Some guy named Dignazio set me up because he wanted my job. Hell, the only caps I popped were over the kid’s head. It was Dignazio who shot the kid with quads, then he made it look like it was me.”

“Yeah, right,” Mullins rushed. “Whatever.”

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

“’Course I believe ya,” the chief said, smiling. “And even if you did it, I don’t care. What, I’m supposed to give a rat’s ass that you snuffed some pissant ghetto kid who was spotting for a PCP lab? You ask me, they should’ve given you a medal. Only thing I know is I got Cody Natter pushing the same shit in my town, and if I don’t take care of it, you and me’ll both be punching the night clock at the bedsheet factory. So do you want the job or not?”

“Yes,” Phil said without even thinking. But he didn’t really even need to think. The peanuts pay here was still more than he made as a guard, and at least he’d be a cop again.

But it wasn’t so much the job as the issue. Phil had a big problem with drugs. In the city, he’d seen what the stuff did to people, to their bodies, their minds, their whole lives. It was the most integral evil he’d ever imagined. They sold the shit to 6-year-olds on the playground, for God’s sake. The younger they got them hooked, the better, then they’d have the kids robbing liquor stores or turning tricks on the street. It was an industry that perpetuated slavery, and the goddamn courts seemed more concerned with the rights of the dealers than the innocent lives they destroyed. Crack, heroin, PCP—take your pick. They were all different but all the same, all part of the same machine that preyed on people’s weaknesses and used them up until there was nothing left. PCP in particular. They cut the shit with industrial solvents to make it cheaper; each drag caused brain damage, made you crazy. Phil thought if he could ever do anything useful in his life, it would be sending these evil motherfuckers to the joint for life. And here was Mullins, offering him another chance…

“Yeah,” Phil repeated. “I’ll take the job. When do you want me to start?”

“Right now,” Mullins said, pouring more rank coffee into his NRA mug.

“Chief, I can’t just walk off my security job. I gotta give my boss some notice.”

“Fuck him. I’m your boss now. Tell him to hire some other monkey for that no-dick job. I need you here more than he needs you guarding yarn.”

“All right, but my apartment’s over forty miles away. You have to give me some time to find a closer place to live.”

“I already found you a place. Old Lady Crane, you remember her? The old bag’s still got that hole-in-the-wall boardinghouse out off the Route, and she’s holding a room for you. Thirty-five clams a week—you think you can swing that, Daddy Warbucks? And I already paid your first month’s rent. So quit jacking your jaws and get out of here. Go load up that piece of shit you got for a car and get moved in tonight. I’m putting you on eight-to-eights, the night shift, and I’ll even pay you overtime for anything over forty until I can get a couple more men hired on.”

Phil felt winded. “Chief, we’re moving way too fast, aren’t we? First off, I need clearance from the state training academy, don’t I?”

“You’re already cleared through Metro.”

“And I need uniforms, I need a piece, I need—”

Mullins pointed to the corner. “See that big box sitting there? Those are your uniforms. And see that little box sitting on top of it? That’s your service revolver.” Mullins got something out of his desk drawer. “And see this teensy weensy box right here?”

Phil took the little box from Mullins’ fingers, opened it, and removed its contents:

A brand new Bianchi police badge.

“There’s your fuckin’ tin,” Mullins finished. “You’re a big bad policeman again. We’ll send in your new print cards to the state tomorrow. Only other thing I need from you is a passport photo for your department ID, and you’re all set.”

“Christ, Chief.” The badge flashed in Phil’s hand bright as 24-carat gold.

“Now shag ass out of here and get your shit squared away,” Mullins remarked, unconsciously flipping through last year’s Swank calendar. “Can’t you see I’ve got work to do?”

Phil picked up the boxes and headed for the door. “Okay, Chief. See you tomorrow.”

“Yeah. Oh, and one more thing.”

Phil turned.

Mullins’ mustached lip twitched up in a smile. “It’s good to have you back…Sergeant Straker.”

Sergeant Straker, the words drifted. He was staring out the window now, of the tiny room in Old Lady Crane’s boardinghouse that was suddenly his home. Yeah, Sergeant Straker, back in the tin…

Outside looked strange—trees and fields and hills instead of skyscrapers and traffic. Cricket sounds instead of sirens. Pine air instead of smog. Crick City was abed, and the night bloomed in a kind of beauty he’d forgotten even existed. Maybe this won’t be so bad, he considered.

Or was that just wishful thinking?

Because when Phil went to sleep, he dreamed…

He dreamed of his childhood.

And the vague, half-seen horrors of The House.

««—»»

Yes, sir, sooner or later, Gut thought, we’se gonna pick the wrong folks to razz…

Scott-Boy crumpled his empty beer can, tossed it out, and cracked open another. They could go through a case a night, no problem, healthy young livers and constitutions and all. But Gut was nursing his.

“What’s buggin’ you?” Scott inquired, never one to sit calm whiles his only razzin’ buddy displayed signs of psychic distress. “You done look plumb et up with a case of the blahs tonight, Gut.”

“Aw, it’s nothin’. Just feelin’ a tad spotty’s all.”

“Well, we’se shore gonna put a fixin’ to that right soon enough. Coupla bad razzers like us, we gots it all, ya know? Good beer, good set of wheels, plus laters on we’ll both have ourselfs a horse-choke-size wad of cash in each our pockets after we’re done with our run. Yes, sir. We’se plumb got it made.”

“Uh, yeah,” Gut replied with little enthusiasm. But then he decided it couldn’t hurt to air his feelings. He felt weird tonight, he felt really bad. “But I’se been thinkin’, Scott-Boy. Like maybe sooner or later we’se gonna pick the wrong folks to razz.”

“Sheee-it!” Scott whooped. “Yeah, and if worms had guns, birds wouldn’t fuck with ’em! Ain’t no one on the good earth with a pair brass enough to take us on. We’re bad razzin’ fellas, Gut. Ain’t no one can touch us. Why—I’ll show ya! Just lookit this!” And then Scott-Boy shucked his daddy’s big Webley .455 and cocked that sucker.

Scott-Boy laughed, guzzlin’ his brew, and givin’ his crotch a rub now and again on account of the idea of killing gave him as much spark in the loins as seeing a real looker in the buff or a nice big joggly set of milkers, but Gut still had that low sicklike feeling way down deep in his belly. The feeling deepened as he drove the truck on down the road. The moon went right along with them over the trees, kind of funny-colored and not quite full, and there weren’t a cloud in the sky, just a big glittery bunch of stars, and the harder Gut looked into them stars, the worse he felt.

He just didn’t feel like killin’ anyone tonight.

“Scott-Boy, look, I really don’t feel up to a good razz right now. I means like we’se got that run ta make soon. So why don’t we do somethin’ quick, like buy us some whores or somethin’?”

“’Cos, Gut, see, I already told ya, there ain’t no kick to that. That’s like drinkin’ Yoo-Hoo instead of the good beer like we’se always drink,” Scott explained, and cracked open another one. “Can’t have no fun unless we’se into the really groaty hobknobbin’, ya know? And why waste time? We ain’t due fer the pick up fer a good spell, so let’s have us a hoot till then.”

“Uh, yeah,” Gut came back. He could see there was no point; once Scott “Scott-Boy” Tuckton had his mind set, there weren’t no swayin’ him. And what Scott meant by “groaty hobknobbin” was his usual kind of razz, the kinky, down ’n’ dirty kind like he was used to. The really wild, un-Christian kind of stuff like the time they did the job on that old lady walkin’ on crutches, or that time last summer when they’se spotted that gal in the wheelchair waitin’ fer that special bus at the junction, and they stopped and just throwed her in the back of the truck and droved off to one of their fave-urt clearings back in the woods, and Scott-Boy did all kinds of rowdy things to that poor gal ‘fore he got ta snuffin’ her. That’s what Scott meant by groaty hobknobbin’. That’s what gave him his biggest kick: the really pree-verted stuff.

And that gave Gut an idea.

Yeah, pre-versions. Some really plumb bad, down ’n dirty groaty hobknobbin’…

It was something he’d heard about since he was little, something about the Creekers. His daddy’d tell him about it when he was on a drunk which was most ever night, yeah, stories about this place the Creekers had way on back in the woods where a fella could buy hisself a Creeker woman, and these Creeker gals, they’se were all fucked up an’ deformed an all, and it was a place where a fella could go fer some really groaty hobknobbin’. ’Course, Gut hisself hadn’t seen many Creekers ever, and as for this Creeker whorehouse, well, he didn’t know if the place really existed at all, like maybe it was just a bunch of shit his daddy was spoutin’ ta scare him, but if Gut could sell Scott-Boy on the idea of tryin’ ta find the place, then they wouldn’t have ta kill no one tonight, and that sounded just fine to Gut ’cos he still had this really bad feelin’ ’bout killin’ right now, and that feelin’ was a’growin’ in his belly like that time he et some bad squirrel pie, and he was just sick as a dog fer two weeks. So Gut just then, he decided to make his pitch:

“Say, Scott-Boy, ya know, fer longer than I can remember I been hearin’ stories ’bout some really wild whorehouse back up the boonies somewhere, but this whorehouse, see, it’s different from the reg-lar kind ’cos they say it’s a Creeker whorehouse where the gals have funny-shaped heads and a couple more tits than they’se supposed ta and fucked-up stuff like that, and I mean I bet if we found it we’se could have us a real rowdy time, some real groaty hobknobbin’ like we’se never had before, don’t’cha think?”

“Aw now, Gut,” Scott dismissed, “I heard them stories too since I was a kid, and it’s just a load of horseflop, and I ain’t seen me five Creekers in my whole life I bet. So quit tryin’ ta spoil my night of razzin’. There ain’t no Creekers, and there shore’s shit ain’t no Creeker whorehouse.”

That idea shore went bust, Gut concluded. He couldn’t even reckon where he was drivin’; he just cruised down one road after the next while Scott-Boy chugged more beer. The moon kept followin’ him, flashin’ at him through the straggly trees like an eye blinkin’. Then:

“Hot-damn,” Scott-Boy leaned forward and whispered. “You see what I see, Gut?”

Gut saw her, all right. Some chick walkin’ along the Old Dunwich just as fast as her legs’d carry her, wearin’ some real ratty clothes, and she never turned as the big truck approached, not hitchhiking but just walking, and it was kind of creepy, her just walkin’ along with that funny colored moon hangin’ over her.

And Scott snickered. “We’se gonna pluck us this one.”

Gut groaned in his mind, that low feeling in his belly getting hot. He pulled the truck up just ahead of her and stopped, and Scott-Boy was out lickety-split. He cracked her a good one upside the head with the brass knucks and just as quick was hauling her into the truck, and then Gut was stepping on it again just like that, like maybe five seconds was all it took to pluck her off the road.

“Oooo-yeah-mama!” Scott-Boy exclaimed. “I just knowed we was gonna find ourselfs some splittail tonight.” He was pushing the barely conscious girl down into the footwell, giving her a few slaps on the head, and he was just laughing away as usual, all riled up now. “Yeah, Gut, let’s git off this road right quick ’cos I gots ta slip into this skinny bitch ‘fore my pecker busts, ya know?”

“Uh, yeah,” Gut nearly moaned. Up a spell came a dirt turn-off they’d used fer razzin’ in the past. Scott-Boy turned on the dome light, saying, “Let’s have us a gander first,” and he was hauling her up between them as Gut parked in the moonlit clearing. The girl was still out of it from the shot with the brass knucks; her head just kind of lolled like she had no neckbone. But they got a good gander as Scott-Boy got to pulling them ratty duds off her. She had a decent body on her, and a good sized set of milkers fer a chick so skinny, but kinda limp, straggly black hair, and—

“Jaysus!” Scott-Boy exclaimed.

Gut saw it, too. This gal, she had some weirdnesses about her, like, first, she didn’t have no bellybutton, and she had six fingers on her left hand and not but three on her right. She was fully hairless on her plot, too. But that weren’t the cause of Scott-Boy’s exclamation. It was her face…

“Jiminy Peter, Gut. You believe this?”

This girl, her face looked kinda lopsided. A kind of smushed nose, and one ear lower than the other, and that dog-dirty black hair hangin’ over a forehead that looked really queer and round. But queerer still were her eyes.

“Gander them eyes,” Scott-Boy whispered.

They was real big, but one was surely bigger than the other and higher on her head, and the eyes too were a real funny reddish color almost like blood. Gut had never in his life seed eyes this color on anyone.

“Gut, this shore is the fucked-upest gal I ever seen,” Scott-Boy observed.

“She’s a inbred.”

“A what?”

“A inbred, Scott-Boy. Like what I was talkin’ ’bout before. This here’s a Creeker.”

Scott-Boy’s face became a study in fascination. “You know, I never seen me one up close like this. How they get theirselfs so fucked up?”

“Kromerzomes,” Gut answered. “My daddy told me alls about it once. We all gots these things in us called kromerzomes and genes—”

“You means like Levi’s?”

“No, Scott-Boy, I’m talkin’ ’bout some other kinda gene, and these things are real fragile-like. And what happens is, see, these dirt-poor families of hillfolk livin’ way up the boonies, they get to doin’ the bop with everyone, fathers knockin’ up their daughters like it was nothin’, and brothers gettin’ together with their sisters, and mothers gettin’ pregged up by their sons over and over for a long time. And what happens is the genes and kromerzornes get messed up, and the kids come out all wrong like this here gal. And they calls ’em Creekers.”

“Creekers,” Scott murmured, gazing at the girl. “Ain’t this a kick?”

The girl began to rouse, making strange noises that sounded like “allup, allup, allup-harup.” And those big red eyes of hers seemed to be looking up without seeing much of anything, and Gut, in his undeniable erudition, explained, “And most Creekers are real slow in the head on account of their brain’s all fucked up, too. Can’t barely talk, most of them, and those that can just mumble like they’se got their yaps full of backer. It’s ’cos they’re Creekers is why they’re so shit-stupid.”

Then the girl’s twisted mouth began to work, and she blinked those big red eyes and jabbered, “Skeet-inner, come no-hurt.”

“What’s that, girlie?” Scott mockingly asked. He guffawed and slapped her in the face. “What’choo sayin’?”

“Skeet-inner,” she said.

“Yeah, she’s stupider than dogshit, all right,” Scott-Boy determined, grinning in the dome light. He began to take his pants down. “Got a big cooze on her too, don’t she? Sheee-it, I’m gonna blow me a dandy of a nut up them there works, I am. ‘Fact I’ll blow me several, feisty as my dog’s been of late.”

Gut felt even shittier now. He figured this Creeker gal had enough problems, but he didn’t dare raise the suggestion that they let her go. Scott-Boy’s intent was plain as barn paint, and once he got his dog up, there was no gettin’ it down. Hell, Gut had even seen him do it with some sheep up on Miller’s pasture a couple times they couldn’t find no gals to razz. “A nut’s a nut, hail,” he’d said and then got to it. Gut felt sorry for the sheep.

And Gut surely felt sorry for this gal right now. Scott pushed her on her back, not even needing to wank a little to get his dog hard. The gal just lay there on the bench seat, blinking her big lopsided red eyes every now and again, and then Scott-Boy pushed her legs apart. “Gut, how’s ’bout waitin’ outside on account there ain’t room fer the three of us, huh? I wants ta fuck with her some and fire me a coupla nuts up this bald pussy of hers. Then you can take a turn if ya want, ‘fore we kill her.”

“Uh, yeah,” Gut obliged, and he shore didn’t have no trouble obliging. He could razz with the best of ’em, but he didn’t want no part of this. Just weren’t natural to be doin’ it with a Creeker. So he moseyed around the clearing, finished his beer, and chucked the can. He could hear Scott whooping it up fierce in the pickup. Sheee-it, he thought morosely. He knew Scott-Boy real well, and knew how his head worked, and he figured that the girl’s deformities added a lot of extra spark to Scott’s razz.

Groaty hobknobbin, he mused. Jaysus…

He looked around the grove, up at the moon, up at the sky. He didn’t want to think about what was going on in the truck, but it was a spot hard not to. Scott kept the dome light on, and Gut couldn’t help but catch a few ganders. He could see the Creeker gal’s funny feet sticking up, then he could see her head hangin’ out the window as Scott-Boy turned her over and gave it to her in the behind. Then she started pukin’, and Scott-Boy was just laughing away and slapping her around and all in the truck. “Got’s ta get rid of this dog-dirty hair so’s we can see yer purdy face, jabberpuss,” he was saying, and then he started cutting her dirty coal-black hair off with his buck, right close to the scalp and throwing it all around and laughing it up real good, and this poor Creeker gal looked a sight when he was done, just tufts of scrap sticking up on her big, cockeyed head.

Gut sat down on a stump to wait. Hurry it up, Scott-Boy, he thought. We got a run to make later. These dust dealers they drove for, they wouldn’t take too kindly to he and Scott bein’ late, but ‘acorse that was really just an excuse, bein’ late fer the run. He wanted to get out of here was all. The low, sicklike feelin’ in his breadbasket was still there, not just from what Scott was doin’ to this poor Creeker gal, but from a bit of everything. The whole night just had a bad feel to it.

“Ah-no-save-me!” he thought he heard the girl shriek from the cab. “Ona-prey-bee!”

Who knew what the gal was tryin’ to say. Hell, she probably didn’t know herself, so et up she was with the messed up kromerzomes. Gut guessed it must’ve been some scientist fella named Kromer who discovered ’em. These kromerzomes, see, was so deller-kit, if families hobknobbed together long enough over generations there never weren’t no babies born right. No, none at all. ‘Least, that’s what his daddy’d told him.

“Ah-no! Lep! Evernd! Peese! Ona!” the gal wailed.

Scott’s whooping voice echoed through the grove. “Hot damn, Gut! This is a reg-lar hoot, this is! This splittail’s box is shore somethin’!”

Uh, yeah, Gut thought. He was fidgetin’ like he had ants on him, the bad feel of the night or the cryptic whispers of the augurs of ancient Rome. He got back up then and began to pace about the moonlit dell, and every time he glanced toward the truck all he could see was Scott-Boy’s devil-grinnin’ face whiles he continued to put serious blocks to this Creeker gal, and then Scott was guffawing, “Oh yessiree bob, I’m gonna blow me a nut so dandy it’ll be squirtin’ out this jabberin’ bitch’s fucked-up ears, it will!”

“Hey, Scott-Boy?” Gut feebly called out. “Hurrys it up, how ’bout. We got that run to make, don’t ferget.”

But Scott-Boy, so busy he was just then, didn’t even hear what Gut had said.

The augural thickened; Gut was sweating now, itching and rubbing his face in some unnamed dread, and the pickup truck was rockin’, and the Creeker chick still jabberin’ away whiles Scott-Boy set to bangin’ her warped head bam bam bam! against the door a country mile a minute, and suddenly—inexplicably—Gut felt a fear like he couldn’t ‘magine, and he ducked behind a tree for no reason he could really put a name to, and that was when Scott-Boy started screamin’…

In an eye’s wink, big, quick-moving shadows were crunching around the pickup, and Scott-Boy, he was screaming right away—it didn’t even really sound human, like the sound Cage George’s ’Cuda made that time he was red-lining it and the oil pump went—and next off, another pickup truck was pulling up in the grove, not from the road but from a dirt lane in the woods, only this pickup was real old and beat to shit, with real dim headlights, and then these shadows was dragging Scott-Boy out of the truck, and he was still screaming bloody murder. Other shadows took the Creeker gal out and then carried her to the truck with the real dim lights, but dim as these lights was, Gut could also see Scott-Boy and what happened to him to get him screaming like that

Keeeeee-riiist…

Scott-Boy had no works left at all ’tween his legs, just a crotch-full of blood pouring like a faucet. One of them shadows had cut Scott’s dog and bag clean off, and Scott was still screaming and flailing away in the dirt as several of these big shadows got to holding him down, and one of them was smack smack smack! bringing a tire iron or something down fast and hard on Scott-Boy’s arms and legs, breakin’ bones like they was pencils, and another shadow whipped out a buck bigger than Gut had ever seed in his life and started scalping Scott-Boy alive right then and there.

More of that Creeker jabber shot up into the grove, only this weren’t the gal, these were guys by the sound of ’em:

“Ah-no-prey-bee!”

“Ah-no-for-blood!”

“Skeet-inner this one!”

“Ona!”

But then there was another voice Gut coulda swore he heard, but, see, he seemed to hear it in his head instead of his ears, and what he heard was this:

Redeemer Sanctifier, bless us…

Ah-no ah-no!

To thee we bring this gift of flesh…

Ona!

Gut felt like part of the tree he was lookin’ past; he couldn’t move at all. These shadows was really doin’ the job on Scott-Boy, the likes of which turned even Gut’s breadbasket. “Gut, Jaysus ta Gawd ya gotta help meeeee!” screamed Scott-Boy, crushed and scalped but still alive. One of the shadows was givin’ it to Scott-Boy something fierce up the tail, while the one with the shank took to cutting off Scott-Boy’s ears, and whittling the skin off his fingers, and chopping off his toes like they was carrots for stew on a butcher block. Gut shuddered frozen behind that tree, not able to move but knowing if he didn’t, these fellas would surely do the same to him.

Gotta move gotta get out of here right now!

When the one fella finished havin’ his nut up Scott-Boy’s tail, he slid that tire iron right up the same hole and jiggled it around fierce up there, and that other fella with the big buck cut Scott’s throat so deep you could hear the blade scrapin’bone, and that was about it for Scott “Scott-Boy” Tuckton, yes sir.

He shore did pick the wrong folks to razz tonight.

Then them shadows, what they did next was they hauled what was left of Scott-Boy back to that beat-ta-hell pickup of theirs and throwed him in the back like he was a sack of farm feed. And then—

Another fella stepped outta the shadows.

Fuck, Gut thought.

This fella was taller than the others, and Gut guessed he’d been standin’ back in the dark whiles his buddies did the job on Scott-Boy. He stood there a speck and kind of made to sniff the air, and then he turned in the moonlight and—

Fuck! Gut thought.

—looked right at Gut squattin’ behind that there tree.

Gut’s eyes bugged like they might jump out his head as this big killer dude took to staring at him, and Gut figured he’d just up and die, but what he did instead was piss and shit his pants both at the same time. He only saw the big fella’s face a second but a second was enough, a face squashed up worse than the gal’s with one ear twice as big as the other and fucked-up teeth stickin’ out of his smile, and then he pointed right at Gut with a long, crooked finger, staring back at Gut with eyes just like that gal’s.

Eyes that were blood-red…

Run, boy, Gut heard in his head. We’ll getcha next time…

And Gut ran, and he didn’t stop runnin’ till the sun was comin’ up over the ridge about five hours later.

— | — | —

Five

Phil slowed as he passed Krazy Sallee’s, flagged by its great flashing road sign. Place is jam-packed, and it’s barely 7:30, he observed. Sallee’s wasn’t just the only strip joint in town, it was the only bar—period. Phil had only been in there once or twice back when he was eighteen, the old days before the drinking age went up to twenty-one, and all he recalled were a few docile-looking women with bad tattoos and floppy breasts clopping around a strobe-lit stage; he’d be more aroused watching pigs snort in a mudhole. But as he passed, he realized he’d be paying some close attention to the place. Vices, he’d learned on Metro, always tended to mix together. Booze begat dive bars, which begat strippers, which begat prostitutes, which begat drugs. Sallee’s would be the most logical place for Cody Natter to use as a distro point. Phil couldn’t imagine punks stopping by Bouton’s Farm Supply or Chuck’s Diner to pick up their weekend angel dust.

He parked in the little gravel lot behind the station. First day on the job, he reminded himself. Look sharp. He adjusted his gunbelt and Sam Brown strap—Mullins had purchased good leather—and the starched uniform (navy-blue shirt, powder blue pants) fit pretty well. The gun on his hip, a Colt Trooper Mark III, dragged annoyingly; its hot dog six-inch barrel made it weigh more than the Smith 65 he’d carried on Metro, but of course it was better than carrying a lone can of Mace, which was all he had as a security guard. Just as he turned to enter the station, he heard a door chunk shut, and saw Chief Mullins coming out of the small brick building which sat on its own behind the station house—the town lockup. As Phil recalled, it had only three cells and was rarely used for anything more than a place for drunks to dry out.

“All ready for work, I see,” Mullins remarked, loping heavily across the lot. His bald pate shined like a crystal ball of flesh. “Lookin’ like a regular Dirty Harry.”

“I didn’t know Dirty Harry was a town clown,” Phil came back. “And who you got in the jail?”

“The jail? Oh, no one,” Mullins said, hauling, open the back door to the station house. “For your info, whenever we book someone, we use the county lockup in Mayr now. You know where Mayr is, right? Down past the mobile home dealer on Route 3?”

“Yeah, I know where County HQ is, Chief. And if we don’t use our own jail for prisoners, what’s in there now?”

“Supply room. I was checking the inventory.”

Inventory? Phil couldn’t imagine a small-town department like Crick City needing any significant supply space. “Oh, the SWAT and riot gear, huh? You keep the department helicopter in there, too?”

“No, funny man, I keep the really important cop stuff in there, like coffee filters, which we’re out of, by the way. So that can be your first mission as one of Crick City’s finest. Sometime tonight during your busy and dangerous watch, run on by the Qwik-Stop and pick up a box of filters. The boss needs his coffee in the morning.”

“Ah, so that’s why you hired me. Sergeant Straker the errand boy.”

“Damn straight. Now why don’t you shitcan the jokes for a minute and let me brief you.”

“Sure, boss.”

Phil took a seat in the fold-down as Mullins rummaged through one of his desk drawers. The man’s stomach bulged to the extent that if he leaned over any further, his shirt would more than likely burst. “One thing you need to learn fast, Adam 12, is we use the county signal sheet, not the fucked-up codes you had on Metro.” He passed Phil a copy of the set of radio signal designations. “Learn it fast.”

“Gee, Chief, I don’t know. I’ve only got a Master’s degree; this might take me a while to get in my head—like about thirty seconds.”

“See how hard I’m laughing?” Mullins replied, poker-faced. “Just learn it and quit the wisecracks, unless you want to get fired your first day and go do amateur comedy for tips every Friday night at Rudy’s Tavern.”

Phil smiled. “So we’re on the county commo band, huh?”

“Fuck no. We’ve got our own frequency and our own dispatcher. Her name’s Susan, and she’s in the other room. Make sure you touch base with her before you start your shift.”

“Susan, dispatcher. Right.”

“She’s nice, so don’t break her chops like you do mine.”

“Oh, one thing I wanted to ask. Does the department supply a bulletproof vest?”

Mullins looked back in grim hilarity, “What do I look like, fucking Santa Claus?”

Actually, with white hair and a beard… “Hey, you know, cops get shot at all the time,” Phil pointed out.

“You’re a Crick City cop, not the warrior of the apocalypse. Only thing you need a vest for around here is to keep the mosquitoes from stingin’ your tits when cooping out by the swamps. You want a fucking vest, buy it yourself.”

“Hey, I was just asking.”

“You want to ask questions, fine. Just don’t ask dumb questions.”

“Okay. What’s the department policy on impeachment use of statements obtained without Miranda warnings during spontaneous field situations after probable cause has been previously determined?”

Mullins glowered. “Just whatever they taught you in the academy.”

Phil kept his smile to himself. He steps on my tail all the time, it’s only fair that I step on his every now and then. It seemed only fitting. Plus it was a lot of fun.

Mullins packed a pinch of Skoal under his lip, then spit into the old coffee cup he was using for a spittoon. Phil hoped to God that the chief never actually drank out of it by mistake. “What I want you to do,” Mullins said, “is refamiliarize yourself with the town first couple of nights. That shouldn’t take too long considering you grew up here, unless of course all that smog you breathed on Metro for ten years rotted your brain. After that, everything’s pretty routine. First part of your shift, keep on your ass. Cruise all the TA’s and residential areas real slow, let the lokes know we gotta night cop again. And keep an eye on the Qwik-Stop ’cos it’s open all night. And whatever you do, don’t fuck up the cruiser. It’s brand-new, and it took me years to get the mayor and the town council to requisition it.” Mullins spit again into his cup. “And I guess that’s about it.”

Phil’s eyes narrowed. “That’s it? I thought you were going to brief me.”

“I just did.”

“Yeah, sure, Chief, but you must have some particular operating procedures you want me to follow.”

“For what?”

Phil sighed. “For the PCP thing. You say that’s your biggest problem in town. What ideas have you got? How do you want me to handle it?”

Mullins looked momentarily confounded. “Oh, yeah, well naturally I want you to check it out. Buzz around, look things over. Just do all that good cop shit you did on Metro.”

Phil wanted to laugh. Was the man naive? If the town’s biggest problem was Natter’s PCP ring, didn’t Mullins have any kind of plan? He seemed not to have thought about it at all. Phil could see he would have to use his own initiative; waiting for Mullins to come up with a strategy on his own would be less productive than waiting for his own hair to turn gray. “Well, the way I see it,” Phil began, “is we have to isolate Natter’s distro point, and the most logical distro point in Crick City is probably Krazy Sallee’s. I mean, what else have you got here? Not only is Sallee’s your only watering hole, it’s your only strip joint, and chances are half the girls working there are turning tricks, so it’s a good bet that’s where the local dustheads go.”

“Right,” Mullins conveniently agreed. “Sallee’s is where you’ll want to keep your biggest eye out. So start staking the place out each night close to last call. What, I gotta tell you everything?”

This guy’s something. Must be getting too old for the job. Phil didn’t bother shaking his head. “You want me to stake out Sallee’s every night in the patrol car?”

“Sure. Why not?”

Now Phil did shake his head. “Chief, if Natter and his people see a cop car sitting in the parking lot every night, they’re just going to move someplace else and make it that much harder to step on their tails.”

“All right, smart boy, big city narc, what’s your plan?”

“You want to catch these guys red-handed, I’ll have to go undercover. First couple of weeks why don’t I check the place out in plainclothes and my own car? Nobody’s going to remember me ’cos I never hung out there, and if anyone does, I’ll have a cover story ready. It’ll give me a chance to get some names, tag numbers, and some kind of a read on what’s going on out there. If I’m lucky I might even be able to cultivate an informant or two.”

“Well, sure, a little undercover work, that’s what I was going to suggest next.”

Yeah, right. “Okay, so that’s what I’ll do. Each night about an hour before last call, I’ll change into plainclothes and check the joint out. You’ll pay me mileage for use of my own vehicle, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, fine,” Mullins complained. “Just go do your thing. Report to me in the morning. Oh, there’s one more detail you should know, too. Natter owns Krazy Sallee’s now.”

How in the hell? Phil thought. “How’d a Creeker manage to buy a strip joint? Most of them have no incomes.”

“No legal incomes,” Mullins augmented. “I had IRS investigate the buy, and the records were legit. Somehow he laundered his dope money and bought the place.”

Phil nodded. Makes sense, he realized. There were all kinds of financial loopholes that seemed to exist solely for criminals—this was nothing new.

“Okay.” Phil got up and prepared to leave, but Mullins, after spitting again into his cup, added, “And whatever you do—”

“I know, be careful.”

“Well, that too, but don’t forget to pick up those coffee filters either.”

That’s what I like, Phil thought, a police chief with real priorities. He went out into the front of the station to check in with the dispatcher Mullins had mentioned. Probably some old ditty on social security, he speculated. Looks like Old Lady Crane on a bad day.

“In here,” he heard.

Phil turned toward a cubby of a room off to the side of the front door. Boy, did I call this one wrong, he realized. Sitting behind a big county scanner and Motorola transmitter was a pretty blond woman who looked to be in her late twenties, dressed simply in jeans and a plain pink blouse. Opened in her lap was a textbook of some kind.

Phil extended his hand in greeting. “I’m Phil Straker, the new cop.”

“Well, I sure as hell didn’t think you were the new Good Humor Man dressed like that,” she replied, and strangely did not shake his hand. “My name’s—”

“Susan, the night dispatch,” Phil cut in. “The chief told me to check in.”

She seemed exasperated, though Phil couldn’t fathom why. I guess I better change deodorants.

“We use the county signal sheet, so familiarize yourself with the codes, and do it fast,” she said. “One thing I can’t stand is a green cop who doesn’t know his radio codes.”

Phil frowned. “Do you know what a signal 72 is, by the county signal sheet?”

Her face darkened. “A 72? No.”

“It’s a juvenile complaint call. You can check on your sheet there you got taped to the wall. And if you got some problem with me, fine. Just don’t break my chops for nothing, all right? And for your info, I’m not green, I’ve been a cop for ten years.”

“Yeah. I know,” she said choppily and went back to her book.

Phil walked out of the station, as discomfited as he was confused. He wasn’t anti-social, but he didn’t see any reason why he should take a load of crap from some woman he’d just met.

It wasn’t her rudeness that bothered him nearly as much as the look in her eyes…

They were probably the prettiest blue eyes he’d ever seen, yet in that last moment before he’d left the station, he sensed beyond a doubt that those same blue eyes were burning with outright disdain.

— | — | —

Six

Such a precious little thing, Natter mused, assessing the new girl with his uneven eyes.

“How old is she?” he asked.

“‘Bout sixteen, I thinks.”

Such a precious harbinger…

“You think she’s ready, Cody?”

But what did ready mean? What did it really mean, in the light of everything? Have faith, he told himself. He was, after all, a faithful man. These little people, his own kin, served in their own way. They didn’t realize how, but what did that matter? They all fed the meaning of their providence…

She’d been cleaned up. Her straight black hair hung long and shiny black, shiny as a wet grackle. She was missing one ear, but that wasn’t particularly noticeable, and her eyes were very nearly the same size; she almost looked good enough to use at the club.

Almost.

This curse, he thought in a deep despair. When will it end?

Druck stripped her, to reveal her flesh. Her red eyes cast down during Natter’s perusal. Full, healthy breasts, despite a dual nipple on the left. The multiple navel was barely discernible, and though one leg was longer than the other, her limp, too, could barely be noticed.

Such a lovely thing…

Sometimes, he could cry.

“When?” Druck asked.

Natter’s elongated hand stroked his chin. His red eyes, though dull, looked full of—something. What?

Hope.

“Break her in first,” he said. “Break her in easy.”

««—»»

As per instructions, or rather instructions based on his own suggestions to a boss he was beginning to suspect of either senility or just plain absent-mindedness, Phil occupied the first five hours of his first shift cruising Crick City in the department’s patrol-vehicle. It was a decent ride—a new white Chevy Cavalier—with a standard Visibar, cage, Lecco gun-rack, and commo gear. For some hotdog reason, Mullins also had a Smith & Wesson tear gas gun locked in the trunk, plus an AR-15 with what looked like a quality scope—but, of course, no ammo. Phil called in 10-8 with Susan, the snooty dispatcher, then went about his patrol, cruising the local TA’s—TA’s were private businesses—the few small apartment complexes, and the trailer parks. He also ran by Chuck’s Diner, Hulls General Store, the farm supply before they closed, and Hodge’s tiny mart, which was the only thing close to a mall that Crick City would ever have. He stayed away from Sallee’s on purpose. There’s a new cop in town, and I’m sure not going to broadcast that, he determined.

But driving through the town at large filled him with something almost akin to sentimentality. Yes, this was quite different from the city. It was spacious, laid back, lazy. Long open roads, rolling hills and meadows, plush woods—

So why did he feel so uneasy?

New job jitters, he tried to tell himself. But he knew it was a lie.

It was the memory that he’d been burying for most of his life…

Was the House really out there?

Did it really exist, or was it just something he’d imagined all those years ago?

He’d tried to forget about it—and he had—until…

Until I came back here.

The sedate hum of the engine merged with his resistance—memory was hypnotizing him, seducing him like a tittering sprite on his shoulder, and then—

Christ, no…

—slim shards of the imagery glittered back in the eye of his mind. It was a child’s eye, wasn’t it? A sputtering, nightmarish bogeyman flashback of a terrified little boy:

…no…

Open doorways.

Slats of sunlight cutting through sluggish darkness.

Then that same darkness…began to move.

He could see things there. Shapes. Moaning. Moving. In the thin tines of sunlight, he could see—

People…

Flashes of faces.

Flashes of flesh.

A twisted hand here, a crooked bare foot there.

Squirming o’s of mouths opening, closing, gasping. Lines of drool swinging off cleft chins, and tongues struggling like fat pink sea worms between rows of broken teeth. And—

…God, no…

Phil pulled over onto the shoulder, squeezing his eyes shut against the mudslide of images. His stomach felt shriveled to a prune-sized clot, and pain raged at his temples…

You never saw any of it! he screamed at himself. It wasn’t real! It was all hallucination!

But as hard as he tried to convince himself of that, he knew he would never be sure.

««—»»

Phil went in the back way to change, then popped into the common room. “I—” he began.

Susan, the dispatcher, frowned in dismay. “Your shift doesn’t end till eight in the morning,” she told him. “What are you doing in civilian clothes?”

“I’m staking out Sallee’s for a little while,” Phil bluntly replied.

“Oh, yeah? Says who?”

“Says Chief Mullins. You know, for a dispatcher, you’re not very well informed.”

Her frown deepened. “Well, how can I be informed unless you inform me?”

“I’m informing you now,” Phil said.

Susan hesitated, putting up her book. Now she was reading a text called Forensics 1994. “The chief didn’t tell me anything about you going undercover to Sallee’s tonight.”

Phil sighed. Organization, yes sir. “Actually, Susan, I’m making the whole thing up. I’m gonna go drink beer and watch strippers on the clock.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me. Sallee’s is probably your kind of place.” She paused again, tapping her finger against the lit transmitter. “I don’t know about this. I better check with the chief.”

“Go ahead,” Phil invited. “I’m sure he wouldn’t mind at all being woken up at one in the morning by a dispatcher who doesn’t even have enough initiative to inquire about any daily SOP changes.”

“Asshole,” she said, glaring through blond bangs.

“Hey, that’s my middle name. Look, you go ahead and do what you want. Call the chief, call the mayor and the town council. You can even call the Little Mermaid and Steven Spielberg if you want, but I’m 10-6 to Sallee’s.”

“Don’t forget your radio.”

Phil held up the Motorola portable. “What’s this look like? A toilet tank cover? Log me in 10-6,” he snapped and left the station.

God, she gets on my nerves! Phil got into his Malibu, updated his DOR, and pulled out. How come she hates me? the question nagged. Sure, he was new, and cop folks routinely took a while accepting new hires, but—Christ, she acts like I pissed on her dog. Must be a permanent case of PMS.

Or—

Maybe it’s me, he considered. Maybe it’s my karma or something. Phil could recognize no reason at all for Susan to treat him with such ill-will, but he had to admit women seldom took to him, and he never knew why. He’d had his share of relationships during his time on Metro. Yeah, and they all went bust, with me looking like the heavy. But maybe he was the heavy. The longest one had lasted maybe eight months, and by the end of it they were arguing worse than the schmucks on Crossfire. Be real, Phil, he ordered himself. It was easy to be real about one’s self when driving alone at just past 1 a.m. Self-realization, man. There’s something about you that rubs women the wrong way. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I am an asshole.

On that note, he decided that self-realization might not be the best thing to ponder right now. Why rub your face in your own shit if you don’t have to? he reasoned. Worry about Sallee’s, Natter, the PCP ring—that’s what you’re here for. Not to bellyache to yourself about why women act like you’re the Boston Strangler.

Around the next bend, the great lighted sign flashed: KRAZY SALLEE’S. Gravel popped under the tires as he pulled into the lot and hunted for a strategic place to park. Certainly the beat-up Malibu wouldn’t be conspicuous, but some guy parked right up front with a portable police radio would be. He edged into a space toward the back which afforded a pretty wide survey of the building and the lot.

Plates, he reminded himself. All he wanted to do the first few nights was get a log of all the vehicles that remained in the lot till past closing, descriptions, tag numbers, physical makes on the owners, then compare them at the end of the week and see who the regulars were. He also wanted the tags of any out-of-state vehicles. This would be slow, but slow was the only way to start.

Pickup truck paradise, he thought. Half the vehicles occupying the lot were, unsurprisingly, pickups in various states of bad repair. The rest were equally beat cars like the Malibu, and a smattering of souped hot rods. No, this ain’t the parking lot at the Hyatt-Regency, he joked and began jotting down tag numbers with his lit CRP “NitePen.” He’d also brought a tiny pair of Bushnell 7x50’s with a zoom for the plates out of eyeshot. This didn’t take long, which left him with nothing to do but watch blue-jeaned and T-shirted patrons come and go. He guessed last call would come at about one-thirty, then the lot would clear out and he could see what was left. Weed out the louts, he thought. Whoever’s still here are the folks to check out.

Boredom set in quick.

Undecipherable C&W boomed through the lot each time someone left. Most who left were clearly drunk, harping about the “hot babes.” Many saw fit to urinate between cars before leaving. If I had a nickel for every redneck I’ve seen piss in public tonight, Phil reflected, I could probably fill my gas tank with high-octane. He tried to divert his thoughts, but every time he did, they kept roving back to himself: the topic of the evening.

Working in Crick City would never earn him a silver star, but at least it was a job and one that fit his college and career goals. So he supposed he should be grateful. Beats sudsing fenders at Lucky’s Carwash. Despite Dignazio’s frame at Metro, Phil realized things could be worse—a lot worse. It didn’t even matter that no one here would ever believe he’d been set up. At least he was working, at least he was getting a paycheck for something more fulfilling than punching a clock at the yarn factory. Lots of people these days didn’t have jobs at all.

So what am I moping for?

Like an undertow, then, his thoughts took him back to earlier contemplations. Women. Relationships. I’ve struck out more times with women than Boog Powell struck out at the plate. Maybe he’d never taken things seriously enough. Maybe he’d taken things for granted. Human compatibility wasn’t supposed to grow on trees. It can’t all be me, he, well, pleaded with himself. To think so was quite a condemnation, wasn’t it? Shit, he thought. Two more rednecks staggered out of Sallee’s. They both relieved their beer-strained bladders before piling into a primer-red Chevy pickup and driving off.

What the hell’s wrong with me? Phil thought.

Vicki had been his only genuine, long-term relationship. He knew that he’d loved her—he’d loved her more than anything. Only on my terms, he regretted now, and then his thoughts turned mocking. Yeah, the woman of my dreams. Only thing she didn’t do for me was change her whole fucking life. What a dick I am.

But why think of this now? Ancient history. This was over ten years ago, and here he was doing stakeout in a redneck strip joint parking lot, and all he could think about was some girl he dated through high school and college, and who probably hadn’t thought about him since Three’s Company was still on the air.

Get your head together! You haven’t been back in town two days and already you’ve turned into a moron!

Again, he tried to refocus, on his job, on the stakeout. And on Natter. How well had the guy held up over the last decade? Phil had only seen him a few times in his life, and that had been a while back. Must be uglier than ever now, he concluded. Natter was an inbred—a Creeker—yet the man, despite his physical deformities, also spoke with great articulation and seemed keenly intelligent. Was Natter’s car here now? And was he himself in Sallee’s this moment? These were things that Phil should’ve considered previously, but he hadn’t. It was getting close to two—closing time; the cars in the lot had begun to clear out. Christ, Phil thought. I should have at least asked Mullins if Natter was still driving the same car…

More locals stumbled out, jabbered, and drove away. “Man, that back room’s somethin’, ain’t it?” one frightfully large redneck remarked, expectorating a plume of tobacco juice.

His companion, even larger, did a rebel yell. “Man, those chicks got me all fired up,” he replied. “We’se comin’ back here ever’ night!”

Please don’t, Phil thought. They were just stoners, not dope dealers. And what had they said? Something about a back room? I don’t remember any back room, Phil thought. They must’ve expanded the place—

Then…

Here we go.

Phil jerked alert and raised the tiny pair of binoculars. Only a few vehicles remained in the lot now, a couple of pickups (one of which looked absolutely ancient) and a fully refurbished ‘63 Chrysler Imperial, an eerie dark, dark red.

And next, in the building’s front entry, a figure appeared. There he is, Phil realized. There could be no denying the identity. Faces like that you don’t forget, and Phil actually gave a quick shiver when he focused the Bushnell’s. Inhumanly tall and thin, Cody Natter stepped out into the lot, dressed in jeans, an embroidered button shirt, and a black sports jacket. The bastard must spend a fortune on custom-made clothes, Phil thought. Forty-five-inch inseams weren’t easy to come by at Wal-Mart. Slivers of gray looked like webs of frost in the man’s shoulder-length black hair—of course, all Creekers had black hair—and they all had red eyes too, irises as red as arterial blood, which momentarily glinted now as Phil squinted on through the binoculars. Then a second shiver traipsed up his spine, like a procession of spiders, when he took his first good, hard look at Cody Natter’s face…

It looked runneled, warped; waxpaper skin stretched over a gourd of jutting bone; Phil swore he could actually see veins beneath the thin sheen of skin.

Lips so narrow they scarcely existed formed a mouth like a knife-cut in meat; a sprawl of uneven teeth outcropped from the depressed lower jaw. One big earlobe hung an inch lower than the other, and seemed to depend in a way that reminded Phil of a shucked softshell clam. Several crevices ran across the enlarged brow, deep as gouges made by a wood chisel, and, lastly, the four fingers on each of Cody Natter’s hands each displayed an additional joint.

Christ, what a living wreck, Phil observed.

A pair of uppity blondes filed past, short skirts, tattoos, and an excess of makeup. Strippers. They each seemed to bid Natter a downcast goodnight, but Natter did not reply. Instead, he stood just outside the entrance as if in perturbed wait.

Who’s he waiting for?

Then another male Creeker came out, limping toward one of the pickups, his forehead so defected it seemed to possess a bolus. And, next—

Phil zoomed in.

Three women made their exit, keeping their heads down as they filed past Cody Natter. They were dressed similar to the blondes: high, racy skirts, glittery blouses so tight across their bosoms Phil was surprised the rhinestone buttons didn’t fly off. They all wore straight, raven black hair shiny as oil, and they all had red eyes…

Creekers, Phil realized.

The realization carried more weight when he recognized more telltale traits, however slight:

Misshapen heads, uneven limbs, queerly thin lips. Trace veins could be seen running beneath skin so pale it could’ve passed for white Depression glass. One woman walked with an obvious impairment, while another seemed to have two elbows on one arm. Natter stopped the third, speaking to her as her scarlet eyes remained leveled to the ground. During this pause, Phil noticed that her mouth was so tiny it was hardly a mouth at all but something more semblant of a puncture.

They’ve got Creekers working in there, Phil couldn’t help but deduce. Creeker girls doing a strip show… He couldn’t imagine anything so obscene.

The first two women got into the back of the Chrysler, while the third clopped awkwardly across the lot and got into the dilapidated pickup truck with the second man. The truck pulled out, and was followed by a second pickup, whose tag number Phil had already logged.

What the hell is going on here? he wondered.

And what was Natter waiting for?

The tall man remained by the entrance, inspecting inch-long nails on his multi-jointed fingers. Then the front door swung open again. A sleek shadow crossed the entry, high heels ticking on cement, and then the shadow materialized in the pallid yellow light, a curvaceous redhead in a skintight black-leather skirt and black-leather bra. Obviously another stripper, but—Not a Creeker, Phil knew. She looked flawless, and her tousled red hair shined like spun cinnamon silk in the flashing lights of the large bar sign. The stripper paused, coyly tossed her head, then took Natter’s arm and got into the Chrysler with him.

A moment later they drove away.

But by then Phil was nearly in shock, nearly in tears, and nearly sick to his stomach.

The thought cracked like a stout bone in his head:

My God…

—because he easily recognized the redheaded stripper as Vicki Steele, the only woman he’d ever been in love with in his life.

— | — | —

Seven

“Where’s the girl?” Jake “The Snake” Rhodes asked the kid with the fucked up head.

“She went on inside. Wants to freshen up a tad—you know how gals can be.”

Yeah, well, she ain’t gonna be fresh for long, Jake promised himself. He was feeling mean tonight.

The kid grinned; you could count the gaps where his teeth were missing. Jake had parked right behind the kid’s rust bucket pickup, surprised how long it had taken to get out here. Didn’t know the roads went back this far into the hills. The kid drove like a maniac—Jake had barely been able to keep up—and at one point the road narrowed so severely he could hear branches scraping either side of his own pickup, which pissed Jake off more than a little. In these parts, it wasn’t a man’s home that was his castle, it was his truck—in Jake’s case, a midnight-blue GMC full-size with slot-mags and about ten coats of lacquer and the last thing Jake needed was some fucked up rube road fucking up his paint. But he was so hot tonight, he didn’t pay it much mind. One good thing about dealing dust, the money was so good you didn’t worry about your paint job if it got scratched up. I’ll just buy another paint job, he concluded, his springs bouncing over the road’s deep ruts. And I’ll sure as shit take an extra piece out of that Creeker girl’s ass…

Yeah, Jake was feeling mean tonight, real mean.

Sallee’s was a good place to hang out after a gig, have a few beers, eye some pussy, plus sometimes he’d get a line on a good buyer. He’d been there plenty of nights, but this was the first time he’d heard anything about that back room. One look was all it took.

“Well, what’choo waitin’ fer, Jake?” said the kid with the knot on his head. “She gonna die of old age ‘fore you get up there.”

The kid was pissing him off; Jake didn’t like that wiseass, busted-tooth grin, and he had a mind to slap it right off his fucked up face. Of course, that wouldn’t be such a hot idea, not back in these parts. Hill folk looked after their own, and—

Jake caught something funky “Hold on a sec,” he said. “How do you know my name?”

“Oh, we’se know all about’cha, Jake Rhodes.” The kid thumbed his overall straps, leaning back against his rusted fender. “If we didn’t, then you can bet yer ass you wouldn’t be here.”

What the fuck’s that supposed to mean? Jake thought. And why did he sense the kid was mocking him? Crickets trilled during the impasse. Then Jake blew it off. These inbreds are weird, that’s all. How can they not be, fucked up as they are? And the kid said they’d heard of him—they, no doubt, meaning Cody Natter. Maybe Natter had an interest in Jake’s “enterprises.” Maybe this was his way of suggesting they get together to do some business.

Now there’s a thought, Jake considered.

“I’se just funnin’ with ya, Jake,” the kid told him, grinning away. The knot on his head looked as big as a baseball, and when he scratched his belly, Jake noticed he had two thumbs on his hand. “Just mosey on up and go right in, she’ll be waitin’ fer ya. She cain’t talk much, but she’ll suck yer dick so hard yer asshole’ll inhale. Best head in the county, and a good tumble, too.” The kid chuckled, a high-pitched titter. “Just don’t ‘spect no rousin’ conversation.”

I ain’t interested in talking, Jake reminded himself. “All right,” he agreed. “I’ll be done in a spell.”

“Take yer time, Jake. Have fun.”

Jake left the kid at the old pickup and followed the short, rutted drive. He didn’t see any other cars or trucks around, and no people either. The moon hung just over the trees behind him, and up ahead he could see the big house sunk back in the woods against the clearing. Faint amber light glowed softly in the shuttered, lower-level windows. The steady chorus of crickets and spring peepers rushed in his ears like gentle ocean waves breaking on a beach.

As Jake climbed the wood steps to the porch, he thought, Aw, yeah, for at the same time the stripper appeared in the entry and held open the screen door. She’d changed into a frilly white robelike sort of thing sashed at the waist. It was so sheer she practically looked naked standing there, the outline of her body cut sharp as a freshly stropped blade against the lamplight behind her. But when Jake came into the parlor, he saw that the light came from several old oil lanterns. They ain’t even got electricity in the joint, he thought. The parlor was stuffy with old furniture, old framed paintings, and old avocado wallpaper that was peeling at the seams. An enormous oval throw rug covered the hardwood floor.

“All right, hon, let’s get to it.”

The screen door flapped shut. Then the girl turned abruptly, took one of the lanterns, and padded barefoot down the hall. Jake followed.

Christ, it’s hot, he realized, but that’s the way Jake “The Snake” Rhodes liked it: hot, humid, the air thick in its own heat. A hot night for some hot fucking. They called him the Snake because he was as mean as one, and he needed to be. Nice guys didn’t last in Jake’s business. When someone ripped you off, you had to get rough. And when new guys tried to move on your turf, well… You had to do what you had to do. Jake had knocked off more than his share of cowboys—that was the only way to keep the word out that he wasn’t one to fuck with. Every now and then his distro people got greedy and thought they’d make a few quick extra bucks by stepping on his raw product with turpentine. Jake didn’t need his customers dying, so sometimes he’d have to break a few bones or pop a few kneecaps. That got the message across loud and clear: Don’t pull shit on Jake Rhodes.

And chicks? Shit, it’s easier this way. What did he need a steady squeeze for? He’d never met a woman in his life he could trust. They all turned on you eventually; they all sold you out when they thought they could get a better deal somewhere else. He remembered one splittail he kept around a few years back, fucked him anytime he wanted and seemed straight up. Then Jake started losing some of his point distributors, and he found out it was the chick selling his points to some cowboy from Tylersville. Well, Jake had set the guy’s trailer on fire—with the guy still inside, of course, conveniently gagged and handcuffed to the drainpipe under his bathroom sink. And he had a good old time cutting up his squeeze with the stainless steel Seymour machete.

He followed the Creeker girl into a cramped room off to the right. Here several more lanterns glowed, and their dancing flames made the drab wallpaper look alive with pulsing swirls of light; the room seemed to breathe. No bed, just a big old scarlet scroll couch and a highback armchair with cracked upholstery. “How about gettin’ that shit off,” Jake said, and sat down in the chair. “Lemme have a look at ya.”

The girl paused and blinked, then falteringly stripped herself of the veil-like robe. She just stood there, blinking stupidly out of her pale nakedness.

“Now how’s about layin’ down on the couch and playin’ with yerself awhiles, like you were doin’ at the club?”

She stared a moment, then mumbled something that sounded like “lay-ply-self? Ah.” But evidently she got the gist because then she lounged back on the couch and began to run her hands up and down her sides and inside her legs, and Jake noted that her right hand was much smaller than the other, like a toddler’s, while her left was as big as his own. And then he noticed something else: when her flat, thin-lipped face inclined to look at him, he saw that the color of her eyes very nearly matched the dark strawberry-red of the velvet couch.

“Thlyke thisssss?” she asked.

“Yeah, baby, just like that.”

Jake pulled out a roach; he saw no harm in taking a hit of his own stuff every now and then. What he did, like most, was spray the raw dust in liquid form on mats of Old Bugler tobacco, then roll it up into joints. Just a nip. His lighter flashed, and he took a quick snatch down his throat and held it. The sharp, edgy buzz hit him quick, unpleasant at first, but then it smoothed out in his head and left him gritting his teeth in a tight grin. Jake wasn’t into nice gentle lovemaking; he wanted a nasty, down and dirty fuck, and a good toke of his own product got him in the mood right quick. He tamped the roach out with his fingers and went on watching the girl through the hard, glitterish buzz.

“That’s it, you little mushmouth. Rub up on them funny tits of yours awhile.”

Jake had chosen this one for just that. Her breasts. Small, like cupcakes, but fascinating in their imperfection. Two dark pink nipples sprouted out from the center of each breast, large as the end of Jake’s thumb. I’ll be biting on those big suckers real hard, he thought. But first…

Jake stood up and walked to the couch. “Get’cher face right on up here, retard. Yer brother outside says you give some good head—or is he yer father?” Jake cut a laugh. “Guess he’s probably both, huh?” Then he grabbed the girl by a rough handful of her shiny black hair—the tiniest shrill leaked out of her throat—and lifted her to a sitting position. Then he dropped his jeans.

“Go on, uglypuss. You know what to do. Bet you been sucking yer relatives’ cocks since you was in kindergarten,” and then he laughed again. “‘Course I guess you never went to kindergarten ’cos I don’t imagine they take Creeker retards like you into kindergarten.”

But the girl, if she understood them at all, gave no reaction to Jake’s ugly remarks. Instead, she simply followed suit.

Jake moaned, leaning his head back. He watched the queer squiggles of light rove the ceiling. It was like a sea up there, a churning, stormy sea of shadows and firelight, and again he thought of the sound of the surf as the nightsounds pulsed in from the opened window. The sensation, backed by the buzz of his angel dust, brought an excruciating pleasure he’d never felt anything like before. Gawd almighty, he thought. I’ve had bitches suck my dick hundreds of times but never like this. That lumphead outside was right. This gal gives the best head in the county and then some…

In fact, the sensation was so remarkable that he pushed her face off a moment, and pushed her lower lip down with his thumb. Then he cracked off another laugh.

The girl had no teeth.

Don’t that just beat the bushes! No wonder she sucks such a good cock—she ain’t got a single chopper in her yap!

Jake grabbed her hair again, giving it a hard twist, and urged her to get back to business. His penis felt caught in a hot, wet trap which seemed omnipresent over every inch. “Where’d you learn to suck cock so good, honey? Your daddy teach you that? Yeah, I bet he did. I bet you were suckin’ dick the same time you were suckin’ milk out your mama’s tit.” Jake gave her hair another twist, then reached down with his other hand, to her breast. At once his fingers found that remarkable, jutting dual-nipple. From then on it was instinct; he began to squeeze the gorged, pink double-knot of flesh between his thumb and forefinger, hard enough that the girl whined immediately from deep in her throat. The harder he pinched the more she whined, and this bizarre vocal sensation only added to the mounting pleasures of her mouth. “Honey,” he gasped, “your cock-sucking’s so good I’m afraid I’m gonna have to blow my first squirt right down yer throat.” His laughter hitched up. “You won’t mind none though; in fact you’ll thank me ’cos it’ll probably be the best meal you had in weeks,” and at that same moment everything Jake Rhodes felt converged to a pinpoint of irrevocable, demented lust. The firelight on the ceiling swirled into chaos, the nightsounds rushed, and the girl continued to whine in her pain as the moon glowered in through the window, and Jake’s climax broke like a wild ferret let out of its trap…

His eyes crossed, and all that dust-edged lust poured out of him as he squeezed the girl’s face to his groin by tight fistfuls of hair. She was gagging, but Jake didn’t care. The sensation seemed impossible. As good as it was, it just didn’t seem quite right—

Eventually he released her hair, and she fell back gasping against the couch, her chest heaving. “That was real good, mushmouth,” Jake complimented her, “but something’s really fucked up here, and I aim to find out what ‘fore I fuck you so hard you’ll be shitting out your nose.”

He grabbed her head, turned her face up, and jammed his fingers into her toothless mouth. “Open up, retard. Open yer yap unless you want me to punch your lights out.”

The girl’s panic had nowhere to go. Tears smeared her cheeks along with the bewilderment and terror in her scarlet eyes. Then she let her mouth yawn open.

Jake squinted. The fuck? he thought. He grabbed her slender throat and squeezed.

“Stick out yer tongue, ya cumbucket.”

The girl resisted, whining, gagging. Her eyes seemed lidless as she stared up in total incomprehension.

Jake squeezed her throat a lot harder, till her face began to tint pink. “Stick it out, ya Creeker freak. Right now.”

The pink tint began to darken. Then, tremoring, she stuck out her tongue.

Jake stared back.

It was not a tongue that stuck out of her mouth, but a pair of them, both roving like fat worms on a hotplate.

She’s got…two…tongues, he marveled in the most grotesque fascination.

And that’s about all Jake Rhodes had time to marvel over because at the same instant the fidgety shadow slid up behind him and—

Ka-CRACK!

—brought a yard-long two-by-four straight down on top of his head.

««—»»

“Where’s the chief?” Phil asked brusquely when he returned to the station at the end of his shift.

“You didn’t call in 10-6 for shift change,” Susan smirked in reply.

Phil fumed. “Straker, Philip, ID 8, reporting 10-6 from eight-to-eight shift. Out of service,” he said. “Now, where’s Mullins?”

“If you mean Chief Mullins, I believe he’s back in the supply building—”

Probably checking coffee filters, Phil thought,

But Susan Ryder continued from her console, “And one thing I’ve been meaning to ask you. What kind of service ammunition are you loading…Sergeant Straker?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It seemed like a pretty cut-and-dry question to me. But just let me remind you that sabot, teflon, liquid-filled, and especially quad ammunition is illegal for all law-enforcement use in this state.”

So that’s it, Phil realized. That’s why the Ice Bitch hates me. “I get the gist of what you’re saying, Ms. Ryder, and not that I’m in the habit of reporting the nomenclature of my service ammunition to radio girls, I’m loading Plus P Plus .38 wadcutters, which is what I’ve always loaded.”

“That’s not what I’ve heard,” she said, and redirected her gaze into her textbook.

“Yeah, well, you’ve probably also heard that I’m a kid killer, and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if you’ve heard that Jesus Christ is really an astronaut from another solar system and that Elvis is alive and well and has lunch regularly at Chuck’s Diner, nor would I be surprised if you actually believed those things.” Phil leaned over her console desk. “But let me make a suggestion, Ms. Ryder. I really think it would be prudent for you to not only get your snooty nose out of other’s people’s business, but you also might find life a lot more agreeable if you put a lid on that outrageous ego of yours, and—” Suddenly Phil pounded his fist—BAM!—down on her desk, whereupon Susan Ryder’s derriére lifted at least an inch from her seat in complete surprise. “—and let me tell you one more thing. I’ve never loaded quads, and I never killed a kid. That whole Metro mess was a sham, Ms. Ryder; I was set up. And if you don’t believe that, I don’t give a flying fuck. But I do have one more suggestion, you rude egomanical bitch. Don’t make judgments about people until you know all of the facts.”

Then, in utter calm, Phil turned around, walked into Chief Mullins’ office, and closed the door very quietly behind him.

God, I hate women so much sometimes, he told himself. Through the window, he saw Mullins coming out of the lock-up-turned-supply building and the man did not look happy.

When the back door swung open, Phil beat the chief to the punch. “Look, Chief, I’m sorry, but I forgot to pick up the coffee filters. Bust me.”

“Christ, you kids,” Mullins griped and sat his girth down behind his desk. “Can’t trust ya to take care of your own bowel movements, huh? Looks like I’ll have to waste valuable tax-dollar-time getting the friggin’ filters myself.”

“Guess so,” Phil said. “But I suspect the world will still continue to revolve while you’re gone.”

“That’s what I like about you, Phil. You’re a smartass after my own heart.” Mullins raised a paper cup and spat tobacco juice into it. “You stake out Krazy Sallee’s in plainclothes last night?”

“Yeah,” Phil replied. “Got some tag numbers, descriptions, stuff like that. It’s a good start.”

“You see that ugly fuck—Natter?”

“Yeah, Chief, I saw him.”

“You see anyone else?”

Phil rubbed at minute stubble on his chin. “Yeah, Chief, I did. And right now I got a burning question for you.”

“Lemme guess, hot stuff,” the chief said, “You saw Vicki Steele coming out of there, and now you’re pissed at me ’cos I didn’t tell you she was stripping up there.”

“Bingo,” Phil said.

Mullins spat again. “Well, I figure there’s things a man has to learn on his own, especially when it’s about a woman he’s still got the hots for.”

“I don’t have the hots for her. But I think it would’ve been pretty civil for you to warn me in advance. And you expect me to believe that Vicki Steele quit the department to do a strip show at Sallee’s?”

“No, I don’t expect you to believe that,” Mullins said very quickly. “So let’s make a little bit of an amendment to what I told you beforehand. Vicki Steele didn’t quit like North and Adams. I fired her.”

“For what?”

Mullins let out a stout chuckle. “Shit, Phil, you’re the one who dated her for five years. I gotta tell you?”

“You’re losing me, Chief. And you’re pissing me off more.”

“I fired her for dereliction of duty on the grounds of overt sexual misconduct.”

“Bullshit,” Phil said at once.

“Believe what ya want, son. But it’s true. You think I wanted to tell you about the shit she pulled?”

“Tell me,” Phil asked.

“She was fucking her boyfriends on duty, Phil. And since you asked for it, she had a lot of boyfriends. Or maybe I’m using the term ‘boyfriends’ out of respect—”

Phil glowered. “Be disrespectful, Chief.”

“She was fucking just about anything that moved,” Mullins pulled no punches. “Hey, you’re the one who asked. She was picking up guys at the Qwik-Stop and doing them right in the patrol car. She’d pull rednecks over at night for speeding, and she’d wind up fucking the guys. You want more?”

“Sure,” Phil said.

Mullins shrugged. “One night I came in and caught her blowing a prisoner in the lock-up. I got half a dozen complaints that she was rousting patrons at Sallee’s, pulling them over and threatening to DWI them, and then fucking the guys and letting them off. You want more, son?”

“Sure,” Phil said, a bit less enthusiastically this time.

“I have good reason—documented reason—to believe she was actually turning tricks while on duty. Threatening to write guys up for drinking behind the wheel, then fucking them for money in exchange for not writing them up. Christ, one night she even put the make on me, and I haven’t had a hard-on in about fifteen years.”

Phil sat back in his chair, reflecting. Vicki? A sex maniac? A…whore? Then he reflected further. She’d always been pretty feisty—and sometimes downright kinky—in bed. But that doesn’t mean she’s a nympho, he thought. Mullins seemed straight up about this—at least as straight up as he could be—but Phil had a hard time seeing Vicki Steele changing so drastically that she would actually blackmail traffic offenders into a scenario of prostitution.

“I just can’t believe it,” Phil said. “I just can’t see her doing things like that.”

Mullins’ brow raised as he took another spit. “Neither could I, until she told me the reason. And please don’t ask me to tell you what she said.”

“Tell me what she said,” Phil directed.

“You can’t handle it, Phil.”

“I can handle it. So quit fucking with me, will ya?”

Mullins set his jaw. He appeared genuinely distressed, which was something Phil had never recalled seeing. He cleared his throat, did a fidget in his seat, and said, “When I fired her, she said it was all because of you. You taking off without her. You dumping her.”

Phil stared. Could this really be? I cannot believe this, he told himself very slowly. Then his words grated, “I didn’t dump her.”

“Bullshit, Phil. When you leave a girl for a job, and she doesn’t want to move with you, that’s the same as dumping her. After you left she went nuts. She turned nympho. And when I shitcanned her, the very next week, she was stripping up at Sallee’s and turning tricks every night. Still don’t believe me?”

Phil’s voice turned black when he said, “No.”

Mullins, with a sour look, hoisted himself up, retrieved a folder from one of his file cabinets, and turned. “Buck North, Pete Adams, before they quit for the other departments, this PCP headache was just starting up. So I had them doing the same thing you did last night. Staking out Krazy Sallee’s, trying to get a read on what’s going on up there. Only these guys didn’t just take down tag numbers. They took pictures.”

Phil gulped as if a chunk of broken glass had stuck in his throat…

“Take a peek at your own risk,” Mullins warned. “But don’t get pissed at me for showin’ ya, ’cos you’re the one who asked.”

Then Mullins dropped the folder in Phil’s lap.

It was some presage, a hideous one: Phil refused to believe any implication, yet his hands hitched toward the folder like someone about to unveil an as-yet unidentified cadaver on a morgue slab. He opened the folder—

No, he thought very simply.

—and stared. His face felt as though it had fused into a mask of impassive stone. A small stack of 8x10 black and whites showed him first several nondescript women leaving Sallee’s hand in hand with various rubes. All tackily dressed in tight skirts, glittery blouses, high heels. Some were clearly less-defected Creekers, like the ones he’d seen last night. Next, a few grainy telephoto shots, obviously taken with fast film through a low-light lens. The discreet snapshots depicted the same women engaged in various sex acts with rough, jean-jacketed men. In pickup trucks and souped hot rods, behind the building.

One photo showed a Creeker woman—with one arm undeniably longer than the other—lying on her back on the garbage dumpster behind Sallee’s, her legs wrapped around some anonymous redneck’s back. Natter’s Imperial was seen in several of the shots, and so was Natter himself, tall, gaunt, and crevice-faced as he leaned to speak to several patrons in the entry.

And the last four photographs showed Vicki Steele performing the act of fellatio in the cabs of different pickup trucks. A final photograph showed her flashing a wicked smile as she stuffed paper cash into her bra. Something shiny splotched her blouse and hair, which could only be semen…

“Told ya so, didn’t I?” Mullins harped. He loaded a fresh pinch of snuff and immediately spat. “But you wouldn’t listen. That’s your problem, Phil. You never listen to anyone. You always gotta know more than the next guy about everything.”

Fuck you, Phil thought, but now, as he closed the folder, he knew the chief was right.

I asked for it, I got it, he thought. Happy now, you asshole?

“Now you know the score,” Mullins informed him. His desk chair creaked as he shifted his significant weight. “Sometimes the world really can be a piece of shit, huh?”

Phil didn’t say anything. He coldly placed the folder up on Mullins’ desk, his face still stiff as plaster.

“Go on home. Get some sleep.”

Phil rose as if climbing out of a tomb. The imagery swarmed behind his mind: Vicki’s head buried in some slob’s lap, semen shining like diamond-points in her hair, and like jeweled studs on her blouse.

A whore, Phil thought as he walked out of the station.

I dumped her, and she turned into a strip-joint whore…

— | — | —

Eight

It was a fascinating sound, a slick wet clicking, like duct tape being pulled off something tacky.

The world seemed to hum in his head: glories, wonders.

Mishmash words ricocheted in his brain. My poor brethren, he thought. I bless thee in thy error. I love thee…

Ah-no-prey-bee!

Skeet-inner!

Ah-no, slave-luss!

He watched, in reverence, in faith. What an honor to behold sights such as this… He felt heady and warm. He felt exuberant. The flesh of the world… My God, we are blessed…

That slick, wet sound resumed. Colors glittered, contrast flashed. It was just so beautiful! Red running over white.

His eyes turned to the window, to the sky.

And the wet sounds continued.

Soon, the Reverend thought. His heart burned like an ember, an ember of love, a hot, glowing ingot of molten truth.

Yes. Soon it will be time again…

««—»»

He was a little boy. Bugs buzzed at his face, some of them sinking stingers. Dead branches and leaves crunched beneath his blacktop Keds as the sun blistered through the trees.

He didn’t feel good. At school, Miss Cunningham mentioned that a real bad flu from China was going around. I won’t get it, he remembered thinking. I’m not Chinese.

But his skin felt cold in spite of the drenching heat. His stomach felt dry—he’d thrown up earlier, hadn’t he?—and he knew it must be the stuffed peppers his aunt served for dinner last night. He hated stuffed peppers. Why couldn’t they eat Pop Tarts every night instead? The cinnamon kind were great, and the strawberry kind with the white icing…

He didn’t want to go home. He didn’t want to believe he was sick. I’m not sick, he convinced himself. I don’t have any Chinese flu! So on he marched, wandering as children do in a pent-up glee, in a curiosity that was as honest as it was without direction of any kind. This gully here, he’d played in with his G.I. Joes. And over here by the stump that looked wide as a manhole cover, he and Dave “Cave” Houseman had shot at Nehi bottles with the BB gun that Cave had borrowed from Eagle. And they’d hit plenty of the bottles.

His Keds crunched on. He didn’t know where he was going, and he didn’t care. One night he’d stayed over at Eagle’s house, to watch the Alfred Hitchcock show, and a lady on TV had killed someone with a frozen leg of lamb. And Eagle’s Uncle Frank had come in—he built houses—and said to never go in the woods because there were “things” in the woods that ten-year-olds shouldn’t see. So naturally the next day he and Eagle Peters had gone into the woods, which they did almost every day from then on. One time they’d found a warm can of Miller beer, and they even drank it once they found what Uncle Frank called the churchkey. Another time they found a dead cat behind Buckingham Elementary, and the cat’s belly was moving from a bunch of worms that got in it. And then there was another time they found a big dark-green plastic bag full of moldy magazines, only these magazines had lots of pictures of naked ladies in them, and they laughed because it reminded them of a show called Naked City. One of the ladies was pouring honey between another lady’s legs, then she was licking it off! In another magazine a lady was sticking a gun in another lady’s hole. And after that she was sticking cucumbers and bananas and things in her. And in one other magazine there was a caption that said “WENDY LIKES TO SUCK,” and that reminded them of the song they heard all the time, called “Wendy,” or was it “Windy”? The lady had a black man’s thing in her mouth!

He and Eagle roamed the woods whenever they could, but they never found the “things” that Uncle Frank said ten-year-olds shouldn’t see.

“Uncle Frank said a girl got raked out here once,” Eagle told him one day when they were shooting slingshots at bottles by the creek. “He said it said so in the paper.”

“A girl got raked? What’s that?”

Eagle seemed to know everything, and, as he lined up his next shot—at a Briardale Cola bottle—he spoke like it was nothing.

“It’s when a man puts his pee-er in a lady, and she doesn’t want to.”

This confused him. “Why would a man want to do that?

“‘Cos it feels good, stupid. Don’t you know anything? He squirts baby-juice in her, and it feels good.”

“Oh… What’s baby-juice?”

Eagle laughed. “You’re stupider than Larry on the Three Stooges! Baby-juice is the stuff that comes out a man’s pee-er when he puts it in a lady. It makes ’em have babies. But when rake-ists do it, they do other things too.” Eagle pulled the slingshot back. “Bad things.”

This made him wonder. When Eagle hit the Briardale Cola bottle, it exploded. “What bad things?” he asked Eagle.

They called him Eagle because he had blond hair, but his father always made him get a crewcut, so he looked like a bald eagle. And Eagle said, “Well, they beat the ladies up too, and sometimes they kill ’em.”

Something bloomed in the little boy’s head, a curiosity like the time he broke his arm, and it itched under the plaster so bad he stuck one of his aunt’s knitting needles up there to scratch it. When Doc Smith took the cast off, he cried ’cos the doctor did it with a little saw that sounded worse than Doc Verib’s dentist drill. And when the cast fell away, his arm was covered with white flakes, and all the hairs on his arm had turned blacker than Lisa Cottergim’s eyebrows. She was an Oriental girl who got ’dopted by her parents, and her pretty eyebrows were blacker than a crow’s feathers. Maybe she was Chinese, and that’s why they had this Chinese flu going around that his teacher had told him about. But, anyway, Doc Smith told him his hairs turned black only ’cos the plaster had covered the hairs from the sun for six weeks. And anyway something itched in his head just like the way his skin itched under the cast.

“What kind of…bad things?” he asked.

Eagle hogged the next shot at one of his G.I. Joes that had busted ’cos a rubber band broke inside and made his head fall off. “Like really bad things,” he said. His eye opened behind the rock. “Like this lady? After the man squirted a lot of baby-juice in her peehole, he squirted some in her butt, too—”

“He did not!” the little boy exclaimed, appalled.

“Yes he did, ’cos I heard my dad and Uncle Frank talking about it one night they thought I was asleep. They were watching Naked City and talking about the lady who got raked. And the rake-ist squirted baby-juice up the lady’s butt, too, and then…”

“What!” the little boy nearly shrieked.

“Then he tied her to a tree and hit her with a monkey wrench, and then he stuck the monkey wrench up her peehole. And after that—” Eagle seemed to pause, like he did when he was making something up— “he hit her in the head with a rake and kilt her.”

“With a rake? Why?”

“Why?” Eagle laughed at him again. “Because that’s what rake-ist’s do, stupid. That’s why they call it rake.”

The little boy wondered about this. It didn’t make sense. “But why would a man ever want to do that to a lady?”

“Don’t really know,” Eagle said. “But Uncle Frank said there was lots of folks in the world who were sick in the head, and I guess that’s why. And, anyway, Big Chief Mullins ‘vester-gated the rake, and he told the papers it was a Creeker who done it.”

Creeker, the little boy thought. He let Eagle hog another shot ’cos he was too busy thinking. Creeker…

The word slid down his belly hot and ugly and worse than his aunt’s stuffed peppers, and even worse than her corned beef and cabbage with the lumpy tomato sauce that he hated even more. He’d heard a little bit about the Creekers, just little bits. No one talked about ’em much, like they was some bad secret or something, or like the way nobody ever talked much about Mrs. Nixerman, who got sick in the head and would run around buck naked at night with her big fat bubs flapping. She had to go to a special hospital in Crownsville that was only for people who were sick in the head. But even though he’d heard a little bit about Creekers, he asked Eagle anyway, ’cos he figured Eagle might know more. And that’s what fascinated the little boy, like about the rake-ist, and the “things” in the woods, and all that.

He wanted to know.

“What’s a Creeker?” he asked.

“Aw, you’re stupider than Larry and Shemp!” Eagle guffawed. “A Creeker is someone who got born by their father or brother’s baby-juice. And there’s somethin’ about it—I’m not sure what—but if a father like puts his pee-er in his daughter and squirts his baby-juice in her peehole, the baby comes out all wrong. And the same if a mother lets her son squirt his baby-juice in her. Uncle Frank said it’s ’cos you’re not supposed to do it, and God gets so mad, he makes the babies come out wrong.”

Wrong, the little boy thought. It slid down his gut just like the word Creeker, and just like his aunt’s corned beef and cabbage and the stuffed peppers. “How you mean…wrong?”

The headless, naked G.I. Joe took Eagle’s rock right in the chest, and pieces of plastic flew everywhere—

WHAP!

“The babies come out like the hippie, peacenik babies Uncle Frank told me about. These hippies take LSD and it messes up a man’s baby-juice, and it makes the babies real ugly and wrong. Same as Creekers. They’se just hillfolk who only squirt their juice into their reller-tives. And their babies get, like, real big heads like a fishbowl and giant red eyes that are crooked, and ten fingers on each hand instead of five. And girl Creekers sometimes had extra bubs and nipples like a hog and stuff. Sometimes they get born without no arms or legs, so the Creeker fathers kill ’em. They eat ’em.”

“They do not!” the little boy wailed.

“Shore they do, ’cos Uncle Frank told me. And lots of ’em got teeth like Kevin Furman’s bulldog.”

The little boy shuddered. He wasn’t feeling too good to begin with—on account of his aunt’s stuffed peppers, he was sure—but this made him feel even worse. ’Cos Kevin Furman’s bulldog Pepper had the gnarliest, ugliest yellow teeth, and he couldn’t imagine anything scarier than a person with those same kind of teeth in their mouth…

‘Cos there wasn’t nothing uglier than Kevin Furman’s bulldog.

“And there’s something worse,” Eagle said, lining up the next hogged shot.

“What?”

“I don’t know if I should tell ya, ’cos you’d probably cry like a baby.

Eagle missed the next target, a big dead toad they’d found by the creek. But one time Dave Houseman told them his friend Mike Cutt would take live toads and shoot ’em with the slingshot, and he’d even play baseball with live toads. He’d swing the bat, and the toad’s guts would spray way out. And the little boy couldn’t think of anything grosser. And then Eagle continued, “the Creekers, you know, they got their own whorehouse out here somewhere.”

“What’s—” the little boy gulped. “—what’s a…whorehouse?”

Eagle rolled his eyes. His next shot, too, missed the big, dead toad. “It’s a place where men pay money to squirt their juice into ladies, ya moe-ron. Don’t ya know nuthin’? And sometimes the whores put a man’s pee-er in their mouths and let ’em squirt their baby-juice there—”

“In their mouths?” the little boy shrieked.

“That’s right, in their mouths too, not just their peeholes. But anyway, I heard Uncle Frank and my dad talkin’ ’bout it one night, and the Creekers have a special whorehouse, where men can pay to squirt their juice into Creeker ladies, like the kind I was tellin’ you about who are all messed up and wrong and gross-looking and have big heads and ten fingers on each hand…”

And teeth like Kevin Furman’s dog, the little boy remembered.

SPLAT!

The little boy looked up. Eagle had finally hit the big dead toad with the slingshot.

The toad’s insides splattered everywhere, in a wormy red mist.

««—»»

That day Eagle had gone on to say that this Creeker whorehouse was supposed to be a secret. Nobody talked much about it just like they didn’t talk much about Mrs. Nixerman. Not just any man could go there—’cos it was special—but only men who were friends with the Creekers. This all fascinated the little boy. That ladies—they were called whores—would let a man do these things to ’em for money, and ‘specially Creeker ladies…

But now the curiosity itched, much much worse than the way his skin itched under Doc Smith’s plaster cast.

The next day Eagle got grounded by his dad, for beating up his brothers Ricky and Billy ’cos Ricky and Billy had called him “bald eagle,” and only Eagle’s friends were allowed to call him that.

But the little boy still itched with curiosity, with the innocent quest for knowledge. He wanted to see…the “things” Uncle Frank had talked about.

So for the whole time Eagle was grounded the little boy wandered around the woods anyway. Right after school. Sometimes he’d stop by the police station and say hi to Big Chief Mullins, who chewed gross-out tobacco but seemed like a very nice man, and sometimes he’d give him licorice sticks; he even offered him a “chaw” once but the little boy didn’t want to put that stuff in his mouth.

««—»»

Summers made the town—his entire world, in fact—a wonderful, lazy dreamland. School was out; he did his paper route in the mornings, mowed lawns in the afternoon, and sometimes Big Chief Mullins would pay him a few dollars to wash the police cars or clean up the station. Most of his money he gave to his aunt, to help out with the bills, but in the summer he always had some left for Cokes and models. And when his work was done, he’d wander.

In the woods.

Maybe Eagle’s Uncle Frank was just kidding them. So far he hadn’t even come close to finding the “things.” There probably aren’t any, he thought one day, trudging through the wooded hills up behind the creek. Probably just said it to scare us…

But why would Uncle Frank do that?

It was mid-August, and the hottest day of the year. His belly didn’t feel right that day. “Too much of that ice cream,” his aunt told him that morning when he got back from his route, but he knew better. It was those stuffed peppers she’d served again last night. But like most ten-year-olds, he wasn’t about to let a bellyache keep him cooped up at home. He felt even worse mowing that day’s lawns; a couple times he thought he might upchuck. Mrs. Young would fire me for sure, he thought, puking stuffed peppers on her lawn! He should’ve stayed home when he was done, but he couldn’t help it. Bad as his belly felt, after he’d cleaned up the mower and put it back in the shed, he headed for the woods.

He crossed the rushing creek, carefully stepping on the stones he and Eagle had thrown in last year. Some green slimy stuff had grown on some of them—he had to be careful. Clumps of frog eggs clung to sticks in the water, and on the bank he almost stepped on a big brown snapping turtle he thought was a pile of mud. Uncle Frank said they’d bite your fingers off if you got too close. On the bank, he kicked over a log. Two fat shiny salamanders sat there, and they had yellow spots, which was neat. But his heart jumped when he kicked over another log: a nest of baby snakes slithered in the damp spot, six of them, but to him it looked like a hundred. And they were brown with tiny diamond heads. Harmless in reality—they were just hognose snakes—but to a ten-year-old boy, any brown snake was surely a copperhead.

He scaled the embankment up a fallen tree, then pushed into the woods. Eech! he thought when he also pushed through a sticky spiderweb suspended invisibly between two trees. Several trails branched out (he and Eagle hadn’t taken all of them) so he took the one to the far left and just started walking…

Maybe one of the trails would lead to the “things.”

He couldn’t imagine exactly what kind of things Uncle Frank meant. Maybe he’d find more of those moldy magazines that had pictures of naked ladies. Or maybe—

His heart jumped again.

Maybe I’ll find a lady who’s been raked, he fretted.

He hoped not. What would he do? And what would he do with the rake? Take it to Big Chief Mullins?

The sun blazed through the trees; sweat dripped in his eyes, and his T-shirt stuck to him. He passed another creek he’d never seen before and was suddenly swarmed by mosquitoes, and when he tried to run on he—SPLAT!—accidentally stepped on a big toad. Aw, gross! he thought. The toad’s plump body burst under his shoe like a baggie full of pudding.

The bugs were biting him all over, and the harder the August sun beat down, the worse he felt. Not just his belly now, but his throat was hurting too, and his head felt stuffed up, and there were a couple more times he thought he might upchuck. I’m never eating those stuffed peppers again, he vowed to himself. Ever!

After another twenty minutes his belly got to feeling real bad. This is stupid, he thought. There aren’t no things in the woods. Uncle Frank’s full of dog poop! And just as he was ready to turn around and go back home, something snapped. A branch? he wondered.

He stood still.

Then he heard a voice:

“You. Hey.”

Another branch snapped. Behind him.

His eyes darted around. It was a lady’s voice, he could tell, but it sounded sort of…funny. Sort of like the way his aunt sounded on Friday nights when she drank out of that big bottle of wine she kept in the icebox.

“Wha’choo fer lookin’, ah? Lost ya?”

At first he couldn’t see her; the old stained sundress she wore blended right in with the woods. But then she seemed to appear like magic while he squinted toward the direction of the voice. A girl stood a few yards away between two trees. She had real black straight hair, but it was all kind of mussed up in her face, and she wasn’t wearing any shoes, and her legs looked real dirty. She stood there a bit looking at him through her hair, and when he took a few curious steps, she took a few too and suddenly the sun was on her. She looked older, like maybe twelve or thirteen, ’cos she had little bubs pushing against the top of her dress like most of the sixth-grade girls had at school, and he could even see little buds poking through! “Bub-buds,” Dave the Cave called them. “Tittie buds. Milk comes out of ’em when ya suck ’em.” Milk? That sounded pretty silly. Why would milk be in a girl’s bubs, he remembered thinking, when you can get it right out of the icebox? But that was a while ago when the Cave had told him that, and it didn’t matter now. He could see this girl’s buds real good because her dress top was all stuck to her with sweat just like his Green Hornet T-shirt. He could tell he liked her, though, even though she was all dirty and all, and her messy hair was hanging in her face. Yeah, he could tell he liked her, and he could tell she was pretty. And there was one other thing he could tell:

Hillfolk! he realized. She’s a hill girl. Probably lives in a shack somewhere. Probably doesn’t even go to school…

“Hi-yuh, ya,” she said, and black strands of hair hanging over her mouth sort of puffed out when she spoke. “What’s-er-yer name, er-ya?”

He squinted at her, not quite sure what she’d said. “Uh, Phil,” he said. “Phil Straker. What’s yours?”

“Dawnie, me.” She glanced around, like maybe she was nervous about something. “I’m me name Dawnie, me,” and there her hair went again, puff-puff-puff.

This hill girl fascinated him, and he kind of thought he fascinated her too because then they stood there some more just looking at each other, but all that looking made him feel dumb, like he should be saying something, so he just said the first thing that came to his head. “I go to Summerset Elementary. Where do you go?”

“Whuh-ut?” she replied.

What a dumb thing to ask her! he immediately regretted it. Hill kids don’t go to school! Then he said, “I live off the Route in my aunt’s house. Where do you live, Dawnie?”

“There yonder, out.” And she pointed behind her, into the woods, and the little boy wondered exactly where and in what. Did she really live in a shack or a lean-to? Hill folk didn’t have any money at all so they couldn’t buy houses. They couldn’t even buy food, so they had to eat animals they caught in the woods. At least that’s what Uncle Frank had said…

“What’s, huh?” she said, stepping right up to him. He turned rigid as she abruptly put her hands on him, feeling his T-shirt. “What’s this hee-ah?” she asked.

“It’s the Green Hornet,” he mumbled back. Dawnie probably didn’t know who the Green Hornet was ’cos she’d probably never seen a comic. But then he felt flushed, instantly prickly. “What’s this?” she asked again, fingering at the rim of his underpants which stuck up over his belt. Then she pulled at it…

“It’s…underpants!” he replied, feeling hot and mushy, and suddenly his thing was stiff.

Her hands felt strange on him, but they felt good. Her breath puffing through her hair smelled sort of like milk. Then he looked at her hands—

Holy poop!

—and saw that one hand had seven fingers, and the other had four but was missing a thumb. And then he looked at her feet—

She’s a—

—which had at least eight little toes on each.

—Creeker!

She tugged curiously up on the edge of his underpants, and all at once his pee-er felt funny, like something was going to happen. The little boy couldn’t imagine what, though. He stared at her, never moving. She’s a Creeker, he thought more slowly this time. She had to be, just like what Eagle said. They were wrong, they were messed up. Why else would she have so many toes if she wasn’t a Creeker?

Her coal-black hair swayed in front of her face…

“You kin kiss me, ya want,” she said, and in that next second she was kissing him, real sloppy like, and putting her tongue into his mouth. At first he was grossed-out, but very quickly he started to like it. Then—

“Dawn!” a voice cracked out of the woods like a rifle shot. “Dawn! Hee-ah! Now, girl!”

Dawnie jerked back. “I go gotta now,” she whispered in panic, glancing back. “Bye!”

Then she ran off into the woods.

“Wait!” his voice broke. He wasn’t even thinking. He didn’t want her to go. He wanted to…kiss her some more. But off she went, her feet carrying her away.

What should I do? he thought quite dumbly. The answer was simple.

He ran after her.

She’d got a good head start. Leaves and branches crunched under his sneakered feet as he pedaled forward into the brush. Vines and thorn bushes scratched at his arms and face, but he didn’t care, he didn’t even feel it. His eyes darted forward. Where had she gone? All he saw up ahead were trees, woods, spiderwebs. Then he pushed through more thicket and sunlight broke on his face…

Suddenly he was standing at the end of a dirt road which led up a hill. At the end of the road stood a house.

A big three-story rickety farmhouse. Gables stuck out of the upstairs rooms; old gray wood showed through old whitewash, and some of the shingles on the roof were missing, which reminded him of Mrs. Nixerman’s missing teeth. The roof seemed to sag…

He still wasn’t thinking. He was running up the road. He didn’t see Dawnie, but he knew she must live there ’cos there weren’t any other houses around. The house got bigger as his feet stomped along the dusty dirt road. Big bugs zapped at his head.

Weathered planks creaked as he moved up the steps. He stood on the porch a moment, then took very slow steps to his right—

Toward the first window.

He placed his hand above his brow, to shield the sun from his eyes.

Then he put his face to the window and looked in…

— | — | —

Nine

Dream, the parched thought throbbed in his head.

Phil was staring up into an abyss he eventually recognized as his bedroom ceiling. Threads of sunlight strayed through the gaps in his blackout curtains, spoiling the makeshift nighttime that his work schedule forced him to create. Despite the room’s beastly heat, he felt buried in cold mud.

A dream…

Not a dream as much as a replay, a mental towline dragging him back to that day twenty-five years ago. The rekindled images, now, made it seem like yesterday…

The humid, bug-buzzing woods. The little Creeker girl. The long dirt road leading up the hill he’d never seen before, and…

The House, he remembered.

And that was all he dare remember—the House. Not the things he’d seen or at least the things he thought he’d seen. Thank God he’d awakened before the dream had replayed all of that, too…

He groaned, swung out of bed, and frowned fiercely upon opening the curtains. Working at night, of course, meant sleeping during the day, something he was accustomed to by now, except for that first rude jolt of sunlight. It seemed weird getting up at three or four in the afternoon when the rest of the world rose in the morning. But at least, he reminded himself, I never have to put up with rush hour.

The bedroom and cubbyhole den he rented from Old Lady Crane was no Trump Towers penthouse, but the price was right; it was all he needed, at least for now. The only killer was the place had no air-conditioning, and that fact drove home right this minute; he turned on the behemoth window fan, then grabbed a towel and headed for the shower. He paused at the bathroom mirror, though, long enough to mock, Looking good, Phil. Nice tan, too. He supposed he was in decent enough shape for thirty-five, but ten years of police work—not to mention his security stint on the graveyard shift—left him white as a trout belly. His image in the mirror made him laugh: palely naked, stubble on his face, his dark-blond hair in ludicrous disarray from six hours of sweat-drenched sleep. You better forget about that GQ cover, he thought. Even his normally clear hazel eyes had dark circles under them. The dream had worn him out, along with the gruelling memories…

The cold shower felt lukewarm in the ninety-degree heat. By the time he dried off, he was sweating again. He still had several hours before he needed to get ready for work, but he had no idea what he was going to do. What? Hang out at the fire station? Go for a leisurely spin through beautiful downtown Crick City? Christ… He knew he needed to divert himself, or else he’d start thinking about the dream again, or he’d starting thinking about the business with Vicki Steele. He needed to get his mind off all of that, but how could he, now that he was back in the same town, with all the old familiar sights and people? Start by shaving. He lathered up with Edge Gel, then nearly dropped his razor when someone knocked on the door.

Who the—my rent’s not due, is it? I’ve only been living here three days. Maybe it’s Reader’s Digest bringing me my fifteen mil. Shave cream jiggled on his chin as he wrapped a towel around his waist and answered the door.

“I gave at the office,” he said when he saw who it was.

The pretty face offered a snide smile. The blond icebitch, he recognized all too fast. Susan, our amiable, upbeat dispatcher.

“Nice towel,” she said.

“If I’d known you would be knocking on my door, I’d have dressed black tie. Okay, so how much are the Girl Scout cookies?”

“You really are horribly sarcastic,” Susan Ryder said.

Phil could imagine how silly he looked: green Edge Gel fizzing on his face, and a towel as the only thing keeping him from being stark naked. “All right, let me rephrase. What the hell do you want?”

“Well, I think I’m already regretting this, but I thought I’d offer to buy you dinner.”

Dinner, Phil thought nebulously. This woman hates me. She thinks I kill ghetto kids. Now she wants to buy me dinner.

“Or I should say,” she corrected, “whatever it is we night-shifters call the first meal of the day. I guess it’s our breakfast.” She seemed shaky suddenly, or even nervous. “Sort of a, you know, peace offering.”

“Peace offering,” Phil stated dumbly.

“Is your head made of bricks?” she suddenly snapped. “I’m trying to apologize! Jesus!”

“Apologize,” Phil stated dumbly. The shave cream continued to fizz. “Uh…apologize for what?”

Exasperation, or rage, thinned her pretty blue eyes. “For treating you shitty this morning. But if you’re going to be an asshole about it, then forget it.”

“Oh. Uh,” Phil brilliantly replied. This whole scene caught him off guard. “Well, in that case, your apology, and your invitation, are accepted. Can I finish changing, or do you want me to go like this?”

“You can go like that if you want,” she said, smiling. “But if that towel falls off, you’ll have to arrest yourself for indecent exposure.”

“Or unlawful display of shaving cream in public,” he said. “Come on in, I’ll just be a minute. It’s the maid’s day off, so you’ll have to forgive the current disarray of my estate.”

Susan Ryder walked in, and immediately went to peruse the bookshelf in his broom-closet-sized den, mostly law enforcement, judicial, and criminology texts from his Master’s courses. “All my Aquinas and Jung are still packed up,” he said, “but I do have every Jack Ketchum novel ever printed.” He quickly grabbed some clothes and slipped into the bathroom. He shaved haphazardly, realizing his own nervousness when he nearly sprayed Glade Air Freshener under his arms. What do I have to be nervous about? he joked. I have beautiful blondes in my room all the time. She was certainly attractive; perhaps he hadn’t fully noticed that when they’d met, considering the circumstances. He left the bathroom door cracked an inch, and in the mirror he could see her stooped over his put-it-together-yourself fiberboard bookshelf: simply dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a faded lime blouse. Yeah, she’s pretty, all right, he acknowledged as he began to brush his teeth with one hand and haul on his jeans with the other. Unfancified white-blond hair shimmered at her shoulders. Nice behind, too, you sexist pig, he noted of the way her pose accentuated her rear end. He knew what it was, though—not her good looks but the whole apology business. Apologies didn’t seem like her style at all, but—

He didn’t really know her, did he? So how could he make a judgment like that, when only this morning he’d ranted on her for prejudging him about the Metro fiasco. Who’s prejudging who? he admitted with a mouthful of Crest.

“Oh,” she commented from the den. “Did you know you talk in your sleep?”

Phil instantly spat toothpaste into the sink. “What?

“You talk in your sleep,” she repeated, still leaning over his books. “You’re a bigtime ratchetjaw.”

Phil stared into the mirror, toothpaste smeared on his lips like a drunken clown’s whiteface. Of course he knew he talked in his sleep on occasion—the women in his past had always pointed that out—but how on earth could Susan know that?

“Either you’re psychic, or you’ve got a microphone hidden in my room.”

“Neither,” she said. Now, in the mirror, she was flipping through his stack of LEAA journals in a box on the couch. “I rent the room right above yours.”

Phil almost spat his toothpaste out again. “You live here?”

“Yeah. Isn’t Mrs. Crane great? Anyway, eventually you’ll discover that the heating ducts make for a very effective in-house intercom. So you better gag yourself whenever you go to bed, unless you want me to know all your secrets.”