As soon as his fingers wrapped around the steel and polished wood, the buzzing decreased as if some benign hand had reached into his mind and turned down the volume. It was still there, still so awful, but at least he could think a little. And what he thought about was a place to hide for the ambush. His mother always said simplicity was best, so T.R. just leaned up against the wall next to the front door.
After a time, the day darkened and the pickup truck pulled up, its lights spraying the front of the house. There were three door thunks—the one on the passenger side always needed a second slam after that fender bender a couple years back—and the sound of footsteps on the walk. The screen door, never to slam in the morning again, squealed back on its hinges and his parents slumped into the house.
His dad got the first bullet to the back of the head. It made a neat little hole right below the adjustable strap on his baseball cap and blew his brains out through a giant, ragged one that took away his face. Eugene Dalton’s memories, hopes and dreams, not to mention his entire set of teeth, his nose and eyes arced across the living room and splashed down on the couch. It was where he always plopped down after work anyway. His mother got out a, “Huh?” as she turned and T.R. put a slug through the side of her head. It did about the same amount of damage to her skull as Gene’s, but because the bullet entered through her temple and exited just behind her ear her face was left intact.
She didn’t die right away, though. Through some ballistic miracle, enough of Jean’s brain was left for her to keep drawing breath for almost a quarter of an hour. T.R. could have finished her off but he was frozen with revulsion. Not so much by what he’d done but by her singing. Jean lay on the floor in a puddle of her own pee and gray matter, singing at the top of her lungs. One word, over and over. “La, la-la, la, la, la-lahh!” She had this big goofy grin on her face and sounded just like a little girl skipping down the street on a sunny day. “La, la-la, la, la, la-lahh!” T.R. wanted to tell her to shut up. He wanted to rack another shell and make her shut up, but he couldn’t. He backed up against the wall, eyes wide and watched her sing her little ol’ heart out. After about fifteen minutes and just when T.R. started to get the shakes, her singing began to die away. As her voice faded her right foot began to shudder, flopping around on the hardwood floor like a gutshot rabbit. A minute later she was still, her eyes wide and staring, the smile stuck fast to her face.
T.R. dropped the rifle and it clattered to the floor with a huge noise. He wanted to jump, but he was still frozen. That singing. His mother’s singing like he imagined she must have done when she was younger than half his age. It rang in the empty halls of the house. T.R. could feel it collecting in the corners, swirling in little eddies. It occurred to him that all those little fragments of voice could flow back together. One day he could be walking from his bedroom to the bathroom and all of a sudden, “La, la-la, la, la, la-lahh!” would ring out.
And what about Daddy? T.R. managed to stick out the toe of his boot and touch his father’s left foot. Gene had fallen forward, so T.R. could easily see the waffle pattern on the bottom of his work boot. A coin of dirty pink bubble gum was stuck in the sole. It was somehow obscene, like a pair of soiled pink panties around the ankle of a serial killer’s victim. T.R. couldn’t stand the site of it. He rushed forward, grabbed his father by the belt and hauled him over on his back. Gene’s bulk was liquid and heavy, like turning over a sack full of soaking wet blankets, but T.R. was running on adrenaline and flopped him over with a grunt. What little color T.R. had in his cheeks drained when he saw his father’s face, or lack thereof. He sank to his knees with a hard clunk! but didn’t feel it. There was a ragged crater where Daddy’s face used to be. T.R. could see some of his tongue gleaming like an exotic sea creature and a piece of one molar hanging on for dear life.
“Ahhhh,” his father sighed.
T.R. gave a little shout and crabbed backward until he rammed into the wall. He peered at his father, waiting for Gene to sit up and turn that raw mess toward him. He couldn’t talk, so T.R. imagined he would just point one of his calloused fingers at his murderer. When it didn’t happen, T.R. became curious. Were his parents really dead? He wasn’t so sure. Mama had done all that singing and she was still smiling and Daddy had just done what he done, so maybe…?
“Maybe they’re, like, lobotomized.”
A swath of relief pasted T.R.’s face. It hadn’t worked. He hadn’t really killed them. But shit, that had been his homework. The movie screen had told him he had to kill them. Except the buzzing was gone, so he must have done something right. Maybe it was enough to just get them out of the way. That was it, must be. So, not an A+ but perhaps a B or B-. He grabbed at his crotch. Sure enough, his days-old hard-on was still going strong, but he guessed he could handle that for now. But what to do with them? The Outrider said to take them to the teacher’s house. That was that dried up old bitch Charlotte Najarian. Why couldn’t T.R. have scragged her ass first? A thought occurred to him: maybe she was supposed to take care of them now that they were lobotomized.
He glanced over at his mother and away again just as quickly, but not fast enough that he didn’t register the spreading stain at the crotch of her khaki work pants. He could smell the shit in the air now, like being inside one of those blue port-o-sans; “shit booths” Daddy called them. People shat themselves when they were dead. Who the fuck was he kidding? He hadn’t lobotomized them. He’d blown their fucking brains out. Everything that made up Eugene Dalton was cooling in a curdled pile on the sofa. Maybe T.R. should get it a beer from the fridge; turn on the game. T.R. barked out a single, screamy laugh. No, no, they were alive. You didn’t sing at the top of your lungs when you were otherwise, unless of course the whole coir of angels deal worked way different than he always imagined.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said out loud. “They gotta’ go to the teacher’s house one way or the other.” First thing was first, though. T.R. got up and walked into the kitchen. He rummaged in one of the counter drawers and came out with a flat-head screwdriver. That fucking screen door was coming off the hinges before anything else.
* * *
He waited a good three hours before moving them. Shard was sleepy all day every day, but it was completely passed out by 9 P.M. on a work night. T.R. didn’t want to risk running into Constable Will and having to explain the condition of his passengers.
T.R. had set the Jeans up next to him in the cab of the pick-up. Daddy was seatbelted in with the shoulder strap, so he pretty much stayed put. The middle seat had been a bit of a problem because it only came with a lap belt; no shoulder harness. T.R. couldn’t stand the thought of Mama knocking out the teeth in that frozen smile of hers the first time he had to hit the brakes. It wasn’t a problem if Daddy joggled around a bit in his seat as they tooled along, the empty socket of his face dripping into his lap, but T.R. wasn’t about to pry Mama’s teeth out of the console if he didn’t have to. Besides, last month Daddy had finally broken down and bought that satellite radio. He tried to make a shoulder harness out of duct tape, but it kept pulling free without anything to wrap it around. (Rigor mortis was setting in and she wanted to curl up like a bug.) There was a ringbolt sticking out of the back wall of the cab in the bed of the truck. T.R. made a rope of duct tape stretching from the ringbolt through the little sliding window at the back of the cab and wrapped tape around Mama’s head.
T.R. switched on the pick-up’s headlights and walked down the driveway a little. He lit a Marlboro and tried to squint through the windshield. He smiled around his cigarette. It was perfect. Just Shard’s famous Pair of Jeans out for a ride with the fruit of their loins—The Dalton Family on a Sunday drive, at night, on a Tuesday, with holes in two-thirds of their heads. A laugh burped from T.R.’s lips and he got moving.
The drive was uneventful. T.R. kept his eyes on the road, afraid that if he looked over, his parents would be staring back him—Mama with that too-big grin and Daddy with that big wet nothing. T.R.’s window was dow
n as well, the smell of coal smoke and sulfur welcome over the smell of shit and cordite. He ran over a split in the pavement when he turned onto Mrs. Najarian’s street and something splashed into Daddy’s lap. T.R. guessed it was probably what was left of his tongue, but wasn’t interested in deep investigation.
He pulled into Najarian’s driveway behind another pick-up and shut off his engine. It was one of those old International Harvesters. He’d seen it around, everyone had. It belonged to Cyrus MacCoy. T.R. could actually smell whiskey radiating from bed. What the hell was that old booze runner doing here? Mrs. Najarian hated most people, especially a low class sort like Cyrus. He was the same as any nigger drug dealer in her opinion. T.R. knew this because she had elucidated her feelings on the matter with the class one sunny October afternoon during sociology hour.
For a moment he sat listening to the engine tick. The night was quiet and good. The stars weren’t out but it was warm so that was okay. It was the end of August and already getting pretty cold at night this high up in the mountains. Might not be the Andes or anything, but you could freeze your nuts off in Shard once summer decided to ditch. There wouldn’t be many more even as warm as this one.
T.R. reached for the key and almost turned it. He could leave. He could drive to the town limits, maybe dump his folks at the old mine offices on the way, and just…vanish. He could find somewhere new to start. Join the Army or maybe that new Cyber Opps unit the Air Force was running out of Florida. Seemed like their recruitment ads were always popping up on the hacker sites he visited. He could leave this burning trash pile behind him, heaped with the bodies of his parents and his past and never be Tommy Ray Dalton again.
He closed his eyes and laid his head on the steering wheel. The Outrider would find him. Maybe not right away, but one day T.R. would hear the rumble of a chopped-out motorcycle or worse—he’d look down some lonely road at dusk and see him coming with no sound at all, just floating that big bike down the center line. Besides, the buzzing in his head was still there. It was less since he—he glanced over at Mama, she grinned back—lobotomized the Jeans, but those hornets were still honeycombing his brains. Only the Outrider could get them out. He sighed and bonked his head once against the wheel.
It took him another twenty minutes to get the Jeans inside and situated at the kitchen table. The front door had been open and the house stood empty. In fact, T.R. had never been in a place that felt so devoid of breath or human touch. He’d spent his fair share of time screwing around in the empty buildings of his home ghost town. In the other houses you could feel the presence of the people who used to live there, but this place felt scoured.
He turned on the little fluorescent strip over the kitchen sink and washed his hands. (Daddy had slipped a little as T.R. had been folding him into the chair and as he was stabilizing him, T.R. had put his hand in something.) He turned off the tap and turned around. The right word was ghastly. T.R. was a ghoul in a nightmare. His parents glistened in the low, colorless light, their bulks hauling at the air and space around them as if they were as heavy as dark stars. T.R. gripped the counter behind him. The bones in his legs were gel. His throat clicked. The stories had it all wrong. When you sold your soul, you didn’t get to enjoy life and end up in hell when your time was finally done. No, no, hell didn’t wait. It came and found you.
The basement door swung open.
T.R. couldn’t move. He smelled them before their white faces hung in his peripheral vision, reeking of trash and bloating rot. They filed out of the basement and shuffled across the kitchen floor; standing in a semi-circle framing his parents, it was like some demon’s joke of a family portrait. The fluorescent light glowed on hands, throats, faces. There was Cyrus with the hole chewed in his cheek, the flesh around it raw and puckered. Bill Owens stood with his big workman’s hands at his sides, swaying next to his daughter, Maggie. Her feet were bare and one strap of her gingham dress had slid off her milky shoulder. T.R. used to fantasize about what he would to do to young Maggie if he ever got her in a quiet corner, but now she was a mildewed manikin. One of her eyes was missing and the other clouded over like dirty silk. He guessed the almost headless thing next to her was her mother Lizzy. The innertubes of fat around her upper arms and the glitter nail polish fit well enough, but it looked like her last meal had exploded in the back of her mouth. Luther Becket’s little boy, Ricky, stood next to a creature so blackened from the waste up that identification would be impossible. Well, maybe dental. The thing’s lips had been crisped off giving it a permanent grimace; it was missing a couple of teeth. Smack in the middle of this little town meeting stood Charlotte Najarian, her white arms streaked with grime. She placed a gentle hand on each of the Jean’s shoulders.
Time stretched out. There was no question in T.R.’s burning, buzzing mind as to what these creatures were. Cored out. Dead. Walkers. These were the outstretched fingers of the Outrider. As if to confirm his thought, all their mouths, except his parents, dropped open with an audible crackling. A voice issued from the gaping holes as if from a set of speakers—his voice.
“You have done well.”
T.R.’s poor cock sprang to full, painful attention. The wasps in his head crashed from one side of his skull to the other. He howled and fell to his knees in supplication. A little whimper escaped his mouth as tears squeezed from his eyes. “Ow,” he said and sniffed. “Ow.”
“Now,” the Outrider said through his puppet chorus, “witness my miracle.”
T.R. winced open his eyes. Najarian cracked open his mother’s mouth and clamped her own down over it. Maggie Owens burrowed her face into Daddy’s ruined maw. Silence descended. The chorus swayed like bamboo, touched by the breeze of another’s will. T.R. thought he heard something rustle, something muffled and wet. The teacher and the girl straightened. Najarian’s lips were moist, fresh from a long kiss. Maggie’s face was masked in gore. In the color-thieving light, she looked like she’d been bobbing for apples in motor oil. The smile was still on Mama’s face, but now her teeth were parted. Daddy looked, well, the same. He kicked one heavy boot out hard, knocking into a table leg. Mama began to jerk, her hands spasming open and closed, little explosions of fingers. And as if they were hauled up from the napes of their necks, Shard’s famous Pair of Jeans stood.
T.R. wanted to scream, but the world was going dark around the edges. He could feel the sharp edge of the counter rucking up his back, scraping the knobs of his spine as he slid down to the floor. It was more abstract than painful. The thud of his tailbone onto the linoleum floor was a distant boom of thunder as his teeth clicked together. His vision tunneled to a point on his mother’s left eye. As he lost consciousness, T.R.’s last site was that of his mother’s eye clouding over: the lens of the Outrider’s spyglass. His last thought was a quick prayer to anything that would listen. Please don’t let me wake up.
* * *
If anything had been listening, it ignored his plea. T.R.’s eyes fluttered open some time later and the kitchen came swimming back. For a blessed moment, he didn’t know where he was or what had happened then the pain from his groin and his head yanked him all the way back and he let out a little cry. He scrambled up to his feet, wincing at the scrapes on his back. The kitchen was empty. It was like they’d never been there at all. Even the chairs at the kitchen table had been pushed back in. T.R.’s eyes widened. Maybe it hadn’t happened. Maybe he’d had some kind of episode, some kind of sleepwalking deal and had ended up here. Except, he sniffed, dreams didn’t smell like the inside of a refrigerator where some kid has gotten trapped and smothered. And there was another piece of evidence anchoring his nightmare to reality: a message on the table.
It wasn’t written out on paper or drawn in a smear of spilled salt, but it was easy enough to read. T.R. walked up to the edge of the table and put his fingers on it. A bottle of gin sat like a blue glass pillar in the middle. Mama drank it sometimes—used to drink it sometimes—in gin tonics when she was feeling fancy. Daddy usually got some o
n those nights. But this wasn’t her brand. She liked the stuff in the clear glass bottle with the red lettering. This one was squared off and Windex blue. The message was clear enough, a reminder to pay a visit to George Rhodes. A long kitchen knife lay next to the bottle, the exclamation point at the end of the note. T.R. picked it up. The wasps in his head dulled to a low hum and his rigid dick deflated a little. He looked out the window; it wasn’t quite dawn yet but he could feel the light crouching on the other side of the mountains. Tomorrow night, then. For now he needed rest.
T.R. grabbed the bottle of gin by the neck and used the point of the knife to flick off the fluorescent light. He walked down the hall toward the front door. A floorboard creaked behind him. T.R. turned around. Maggie Owens stood on the stairs about three risers up, her bare feet dainty in the gloom. The shoulder strap of her dress had slipped farther down and one small breast was almost completely exposed. T.R. could see a mole just above the crescent of a gray nipple. It reminded him of the new moon with Venus just off its shoulder. Her jaw creaked open and the Outrider’s voice issued forth.
“He dies under your knife, but the woman lives for me.”
T.R. clutched the gin bottle and knife in his sweaty hands. He was terrified he might drop them. He nodded and whispered, “Okay.”
Like an after thought, Maggie’s left hand drifted over and pulled up her dress. Her other hand dug into her panties and began to busy itself. T.R. grimaced, but his traitor cock thudded. The Outrider’s voice came again from her gaping mouth, “This is yours when you are finished.”
Chapter 27
Will’s eyes flew open and he sat up in bed. The dream had been bad, real bad, but had stolen itself clean from his memory, leaving only a stew of sweat-soaked sheets. A minute passed in the dark, Will’s breathing slowed. It was just after 4:30. He was certain something had happened, or would.