The Nightrunners Part 19

"You do that. Now, so long. I got to get to bed so I can get to school in the morning."

"School?"

"Yeah, unlike you guys, people know I'm alive and I can catch h.e.l.l about not going to school. I'm going to keep my nose clean."

"I thought you got expelled."

"So they let me back in. My mother begged some."

"That's s.h.i.+tty."

"Twenty-eighth's my last day. After that, we're blowing up-country."

"Suits us."

"Now, so long."

FIVE.

It would be over a week before the authorities found Brian's mother cut to pieces in her bed. And they would find her only because the next-door neighbors had complained about the stink. Since she lived on a retirement check and had no friends, just her "loving little boy," no one had missed her. But it would be determined that she was probably murdered early on the night of the twenty-eighth. Written on the wall in her blood was a note. It read: Good night, Mommy. Gone to h.e.l.l. Won't be back. Your loving baby boy.

P.S. Clyde sends his love.

SIX.

October 28, 11:3O P.M.

They went over to the apartment where Becky and Montgomery Jones lived, climbed out of the car and stood for a moment in the crisp October air.

"Jimmy, you're going with us. Angela, you're going to stay in the car, be ready to honk the horn if anything comes down we should know about. If that happens you crank the motor and drive over to the stairs so we can get in quick like. Got me?"

Heads nodded all around.

"Let's do it," Brian said. The four of them crossed the lot, went upstairs, Brian pressed his ear to the door.

No sound.

He took out his pocket knife and put it between the edge of the door and the lock and rocked the blade from side to side until there was a snicking noise.

"Easy as h.e.l.l," he whispered.

They went inside, Brian and Stone and Jimmy with knives, Loony with the shotgun. Less than a minute later they discovered the apartment was empty.

Except for a cat and Loony picked it up and petted it. "She got herself a cat," he said.

Brian cursed. He looked about. Found on the bar a note that read: Dear Dean and Eva: Just throw Casey's litter box out once. Fresh litter under the sink, food is there too.

Thanks so much for feeding him. And thanks for the loan of the cabin once again.

Beck "s.h.i.+t!" Brian said. "Gone camping or something." "They'll be back," Loony said, scratching the cat behind the ears.

"We're not waiting. We're going to find them."

"How?" Loony asked.

Brian turned on the light over the bar, flipped open the little phone and address book there. He found a Dean and Eva Beaumont listed. They lived on Heard's Lane.

"Well," Brian said, "here we are, the Beaumonts. We'll pay them a little visit, find out where this cabin is." He tore the page out of the address book.

After Loony killed the cat they drove over there.

The pot of blood on the stove of h.e.l.l had just begun to boil.

PART THREE:.

The Shark Shows ItsTeeth.

October 31 (Halloween).

Somewhere in the United States, someone is brutally murdered every twenty-six minutes.

- Statistical fact.

Fierce as the Furies, terrible as h.e.l.l.

- Milton, Paradise Lost.

By the p.r.i.c.king of my thumbs.

Something wicked this way comes.

- Shakespeare, Macbeth.

ONE.

October 31, 12:O2 A.M.

-clay road winding, '66 Chevy humming, falling forward in time . . .

And so for a few more miles the car rolled on. Brian driving with his pale face looking ghostlike in the night, the others sleeping, storing up ...

TWO.

October 31, 12:27 A.M.

They found another pasture, Brian stopped the car and Loony got out to open the post and barbed-wire gate.

Brian drove the car through. Loony closed the gate and climbed back inside. They drove through the pasture, past sleeping cows, some of which came unstuck from sleep to look up and watch the black shark sail past.

They found a collection of pines next to a metal enclosure that contained water and had salt blocks placed on the outside and all around. The car stopped and the lights went out.

Brian got out, took a leak. "I'll be back," he said. He walked off.

Five minutes later Jimmy and Angela climbed out of the car, walked off in the opposite direction. They looped over a slight rise in the pasture and found a copse of hardwoods that the fall had shook free of leaves, sat down beneath them, backs to an oak.

"I'm scared, Jimmy," Angela said.

"I know. I am too."

"What are we going to do?"

"I don't know." Jimmy didn't want to admit it, but he was even more frightened than Angela thought. The moment she began to get rattled, show obvious fear, he had begun to rip out at the seams. For all his macho bravado, Angela was his anchor, and when her calm and cool began to slip, the final st.i.tch of his own control began to unravel -rapidly.

"He's crazy, Jimmy. They're all crazy."

"I know."

"By the Blessed Virgin, how did we get into this?"

"Me. Me wanting a few friends. Me the tough guy. I'm not so tough, Angela."

"So, who wants tough. I've grown up with tough. I've seen tough. I want to see gentle. I want to get out of this. Those poor people, Jimmy."

"I know . . . while you were being sick in the hall, Brian, he made me cut the woman . . .

She was dead, but he made me take a knife and do some things to her breast ... I didn't want to, but if I hadn't they'd have killed me . . . and you."

"After they got through with me. Do you see how that Loony looks at me?"

"Yes. I want to kill him, but . . . I'm not tough, Angela. I'm just ... I just am, that's all."

"We've got to split out of this, Jimmy. That Brian, he's going to kill that woman and I don't even know why really."

"Less we know the better."

"G.o.d, he's crazy, so crazy, crazier than the rest. Last night, late, after we'd parked in that other pasture, I got out to go to the bathroom and I found me some trees and it was cool, and I got to thinking how it would be to run, to just take off and not come back."

"You should have,"

"I couldn't leave you. Never. I'd die first. So I'm going to the bathroom-got to pee all the time now, it seems-and I notice that just a little ways off, out in the moonlight, is Brian. He didn't see me, and I was frightened, you know, not sure I wanted to show myself on account of I don't know how he's going to act, you know. Maybe he'll think I'm spying or something. So I just sat real still, thinking he'd go on, but then he starts talking to himself, but . . . This was really scary, Jimmy. And I heard him answer himself, but not with his own voice. In another voice, and I swear on the Blessed Virgin,"

she crossed herself, "the voice that answered him back didn't sound anything like his. The voice made the hair on the back of my neck crawl. It was a human voice, but . . . there was something wrong with it, Jimmy. And this voice, he kept calling it Clyde-I guess that's the guy we've heard them talk about, the creep that hung himself.

"Anyway, I didn't move, just watched. I was really frightened then. And I watched Brian and he started walking back and forth, you know, nervous like, and pretty soon there's another voice, and . . .it wasn't like a human voice, Jimmy, it was deep and rumbly and sounded like someone trying to talk and gargle at once, only it was loud. And I started to just up and run like a deer, but I'm scared, you know. I think, this guy is absolutely Flip City. He's talking to himself and answering in two other voices . . . But I don't know how he could make a voice like that last one, and neither of them sounded like Brian . . . And once . . . I'm not sure about this, Jimmy. I was frightened and maybe I just thought I heard it, but it sounded once like Brian, and this voice he called Clyde, were talking at the same time . . . just for a few seconds, you know, and it was like Brian had accidentally started talking when Clyde started talking and when he knew he was doing that he just shut up and the voice he called Clyde went on.

"I didn't understand what was being said, least not much, Brian was too far away, but I heard something about a razor and about tomorrow night, and then Brian sat down on the ground-I mean he just sat, like his legs had melted out from under him, and then Brian said something . . . crazy, crazier than anything else. He said, 'Clyde, turn off that G.o.dd.a.m.ned television set.' I could hear that plainly, every word of it. It was like someone had a set on and it was turned up too loud for him or something ... So he got quiet then, and while he was sitting with his head hung down, I snuck out of there. I tell you, Jimmy, it was scary. He's crazy, completely Flip City."

Jimmy, who was s.h.i.+vering, said, "I know."

"I think that's where he's gone again tonight. To go out there somewhere to talk to this Clyde, and maybe this other voice-s.h.i.+t, Jimmy, you should have heard ... I don't know how he could have done that with his voice. It was like one of those demon voices out of that movie with the green puke, The Exorcist. Jesus, Jimmy, Jesus and the Blessed Virgin."

THREE.

October 31, 5:49 A.M.

He awoke before the alarm was to ring, looked where his wife should be, and she was not there. Only her indentation and the sweet woman smell of her mingling with the crisp morning air.

Ted Olsen cut off the alarm, cried out, "Roxanne?"

"Making breakfast," she said from the kitchen. "Come in here, it's warmer."

He scratched his head and scratched his s.c.r.o.t.u.m through the slit in his boxer shorts, then he went to the bathroom to wash up and brush his teeth. He always brushed his teeth first thing in the morning, even if he were about to eat. Brus.h.i.+ng made him feel human again, nothing like getting the old green hair off the fangs. After breakfast, he'd brush again. He even went as far as to carry a toothbrush and paste with him while he worked, and two or I three times a day, he'd brush. It was almost a fetish. Probably because his parents had had such bad teeth.

He finished his toilet and dressed without showering, went out of the cold and into the warmth of the kitchen, the smell of bacon and eggs, the sight of Roxanne. Roxanne, Roxanne.

She stood at the stove, spatula in hand. She wore her short blue nighties and the cheeks of her a.s.s showed themselves in a half-exposed, tantalizing manner. Olsen felt a movement in his pants that wasn't pocket change. He checked his watch. Well, it might as well be pocket change. If he'd gotten up just thirty minutes earlier there would have been time.