Bobby came around my right side while I was looking at the altar and told two of the Mexicans to get up.
“They don’t speak English,” Eddie said to him. “They’re farmers.”
Bobby either didn’t hear him or didn’t care. “Come on, you little piece of shit. Get up!” He yelled at them, and when that didn’t work, he kicked dirt in their faces.
“Cut it out,” Eddie snapped.
It was too late for that, though. Bobby was drunk and stewed for a fight. When none of the Mexicans would get up, he turned on their statue, grabbed it by the head, and yanked on it ‘til it came loose and fell over into the fire.
Suddenly everybody was on their feet. I pulled my pistol and Eddie leveled his shotgun at the crowd and together we kept them from attacking Bobby, but only barely.
“Come on, you assholes,” Bobby roared. “Come on, I’ll beat all your asses.”
“Shut up, you idiot!” Eddie said. He grabbed Bobby by the shoulder and pushed him toward the door. “Get out of here.”
I kept my eyes on the ring of hostile faces closing in on us. In all the confusion none of us had noticed there was another corridor behind the statue, and while we were busy trying to put the peace back together, a naked man came running out of it and jumped on Bobby. He knocked Bobby down and the two of them rolled into the fire light. The naked man’s entire body was covered with what had to be some sort of bluish-green lichen. Bobby pulled at him and threw a couple of useless punches into the air, but he was too drunk to do any damage, and the other man was a zealot. Bobby ended up on his back with the naked man on top of him, clawing and biting at his chest.
By the time we got to him, the naked man had torn open Bobby’s winter gear and clamped down on Bobby’s skin with his teeth. I kicked the naked man in the head and Eddie grabbed his neck with both hands and pulled at him until we heard something tear and the man came loose with a big chunk of Bobby’s skin still clenched in his teeth. Bobby screamed as they came apart, and then passed out.
Eddie punched the naked man in the face with the butt of the shotgun and sent him tumbling back into the wall. When he hit he fell down into a crouch and growled at us like a cat.
I stood next to Eddie and we put ourselves between the naked man and Bobby. The bluish-green lichen covering his skin made him shine in the fire light, and it had done something to his face, too. His ears and his nose and his lips seemed to have rotted most of the way off. Bobby’s blood was all over his cheeks and his chin, but beneath that, where the lichen had yet to spread, the skin was blistered and cracked like burned linoleum. His eyes were perfectly round and yellow and feral looking.
“What’s that on his skin? He looks sick.” I looked at my hands. Some of it had rubbed off there. “I got it on my hands.”
“Me too,” Eddie said.
Then, before either of us could get off a shot, he jumped sideways toward the back corridor and was gone. Bobby moaned softly at our feet, but he was still unconscious.
“Help me with him,” Eddie said.
“What about them?” I asked, pointing at the illegals.
“Leave ‘em. We need to get Bobby out of here.”
***
We brought Bobby back to the station and put him in his cot and cleaned the wound the best we could. The wound looked bad, but it wasn’t all that deep. The edges turned pink while we were working on him and stayed that way even after the bleeding stopped. He stayed unconscious through the whole thing.
“You want me to call a doctor?” I asked.
“No.”
“He’s hurt bad, Eddie.”
“I know. And if we get a doctor out here we’ll have to make a report on the injury. And when the doctor tells the Patrol the three of us were stinking drunk we’ll all be looking for work.” He shook his head. “No. We’ve got stuff here to help him. He’ll be all right.”
***
The next morning was Christmas and we decided to let Bobby sleep it off. Eddie and I went out to the kennel to feed the dogs and while we were putting out the food bowls I asked Eddie what he thought about the man who attacked Bobby.
“I don’t know,” was all he said, though if you know Eddie the way I do, you know that faraway look he gets when he’s got a lot on his mind but isn’t ready to share it yet. He was wearing that look as he put out the last of the dog food and wiped his hands. “Come on. Let’s go eat.”
We went back inside and Eddie fried up some chorizo while I cooked the eggs and heated up the tortillas. A few minutes later Bobby stumbled into the kitchen and yawned and stretched himself wide. He looked hung over, but more or less healthy.
Eddie and I traded a look and Eddie asked him if he was feeling hungry.
“I’m starved,” he said. “Jesus, how much did we drink yesterday? I feel like a fucking goat took a crap in my mouth. What’s there to eat, anyway?”
“Chorizo and eggs,” Eddie said.
Bobby made a face. “Is that what that is?”
“It’s good.”
“I want meat,” Bobby said.
“Chorizo is meat,” I said. “Meat and pork together, actually.”
“Don’t we have any real meat? I want meat. Maybe a steak or something like that?”
“There should be some steaks out in the cooler,” Eddie said. “You’ll have to cook it yourself, though. We’re eating this.”
Bobby stumbled outside toward the cooler. Eddie and I sat down to eat, and I started to feel better about our decision not to call the doctor. Bobby’s appetite seemed to be back, and I took that as a good sign.
But as we ate we heard the dogs making some awful noises outside. It didn’t sound right, so Eddie and I went outside to see what was going on.
Bobby was standing outside the gate to their kennel and the dogs on the other side were barking at him. His breath was coming in little puffs of steam from between the thin line of his lips. Oscar, our big black shepherd mix, was standing opposite Bobby with his fur all bristled up and a fat rope of slobber hanging from his muzzle. The two of them were locked in a stare and both were growling.
“What the hell’s going on?” Eddie demanded.
“Your dogs are going nuts.”
“I can see that. What the hell did you do to ‘em?”
“I ain’t done nothing,” Bobby said, still staring Oscar right in the eyes. “I was just walking by and they decided they wanted to fuck with me.”
Oscar looked like he was ready to eat his way through the cage and Bobby looked like he wanted him to do it. Eddie pushed Bobby out of the way and slipped inside the gate.
“Easy boy. Easy,” he said, and he grabbed Oscar by his collar and whispered to him and rubbed his ears ‘til he started to calm down a little. “Go and get your steak, Bobby.”
Bobby walked off to the cooler while Eddie talked softly with Oscar and I got the other dogs under control. Eddie was still whispering to Oscar and rubbing his ears when Bobby came back down the walkway.
Oscar had calmed down a lot while Eddie was holding him, but as soon as Bobby passed the gate, Oscar jumped out of Eddie’s hands and ran full speed into the gate, barking and growling like something out of hell. Bobby kicked the gate and growled back at him.
“Keep your fucking mutt in line,” Bobby said between his teeth.
“Get out of here, Bobby,” Eddie said. “Go on back inside.”
Bobby walked away, carrying an armful of steaks wrapped up in white butcher’s paper.
When we were all back inside Bobby was smiling again like nothing had happened and even whistled while he unwrapped his steaks. He took out two good-sized rib eye cuts and dropped them in the same pan Eddie had used for the chorizo. He let them fry for about two minutes without bothering to flip them over and dropped them onto his plate.
He sat down next to us and cut into his steaks like he hadn’t eaten in weeks. Eddie and I glanced at each other doubtfully and watched him dig in.
“Bobby,” Eddie said, “are you sure you want to
eat it that raw? I mean, with a hangover and all, isn’t that a little much for your stomach to handle?”
Bobby just grunted at him and finished off both steaks like he couldn’t eat them fast enough. He made a smacking, gulping noise as he ate.
“Still hungry,” he grumbled. “Anybody else want some?”
“No thanks,” Eddie said.
Bobby grunted, got up, and cooked three more steaks just like the first two. While he ate them, Eddie and I pushed our plates away. When he was done he got up and picked at his teeth with his fingers.
“I’m gonna take a nap,” he said.
“We were going into Sandersville in a little bit to give our Christmas presents to the girls,” Eddie said. “You wanna come?”
“No. I want to take a nap. Wake me up when you get back. Or I’ll wake myself up if I get hungry.”
Bobby went off for his nap and Eddie and I cleaned up and then drove into town to see our girlfriends. We spent most of the day in Sandersville and drove back around three so there’d be time to take care of some chores around the station and still have some time to just sit and hang out before nightfall.
Bobby was eating when we came home. The garbage can in the kitchen was full of a lot of white butcher paper and crushed bones that looked like they’d been gnawed to splinters and all the marrow sucked out.
“How many steaks did you eat?” I asked him.
“Don’t know. We need more.”
“What do you mean we need more?” Eddie asked. “We had twenty pounds of meat in there.”
Bobby just grunted and then got up from the table and said he was going to his room for another nap.
About an hour later we heard Bobby banging around in his room and it sounded like he was moving furniture. He was making a lot of noise, and when we heard something crash we both got up and went to his room.
“You okay in there?” Eddie asked through the door.
“Go away.”
I looked at Eddie and he at me. Bobby’s voice didn’t sound right. “Hey, Bobby,” Eddie said, “open the door.”
There was no answer that time.
“What do you want to do?” I whispered.
“Open it,” Eddie said. “Hey, Bobby, I’m gonna open your door, okay? We’re just making sure you’re all right.”
But he didn’t have to force it open. Bobby opened it himself and walked away from the door to the middle of his room, where he turned around and faced us. He was wearing jeans and nothing else, not even shoes and socks. The first thing I saw was the wound on his chest. It had gotten a lot worse and turned black around the edges.
“It started hurting about an hour or so ago,” he said when he noticed me looking at it. “Something’s wrong with it, isn’t it?”
“It’s starting to bruise up probably,” said Eddie, though not very convincingly. “That’s probably why it’s black around the edges.”
“You think so?”
The wound was so nasty it took me a second to notice something was wrong with his face, too. I had expected to see worry there, maybe a need for reassurance, but what I saw instead was something more primitive, almost animal. His features looked wrong, like they had been stretched out at the mouth and the nose chiseled to a point. The chin, too. I thought maybe it was the light playing tricks on me or something, but then I looked at Eddie and realized he had noticed it too.
“Bobby, why don’t you lay down for a bit. Try not to worry yourself too much. Jason and I will get the first aid kit and we’ll clean that wound again.”
“Yeah, okay,” Bobby said, and climbed into his cot.
Eddie sent me to get some rubbing alcohol and he got the first aid kit and we met back in the rec room. He put the kit on the pool table and looked through it, making sure he had what he needed.
“I’m thinking he needs a doctor,” I said.
“No.”
“Eddie, come on. That wound on his chest looks really bad. There’s no way that can be normal.”
“It’s not normal—and I wasn’t thinking about the wound. You saw his face. Did that look like something a doctor could fix to you?”
“Eddie, he really needs a doctor.”
“Let’s see what we can do first. If we can’t help him, we’ll call a doctor.”
Something made a huge crashing noise in Bobby’s room and we both ran that way. It sounded like he was throwing stuff around and when we got to his door something heavy hit it from the other side—hit it so hard the whole wall shook.
I banged on the door with my fists and yelled for him to open it. The noises in his room stopped for a moment, but then they came back even louder. There’s something in there with him, I thought, something animal. I heard a growl like the kind cougars make out in the desert at night.
“Bust it open,” Eddie said.
I took a running start at the door and plowed into it with my shoulder. It flew open. I brought myself to a stop on the other side of the threshold and nearly lost my breath. There, on the ground, crouched and ready to strike, was something awful, something that had to have been Bobby at one time.
All the furniture in the room had been thrown against the walls and the thing was alone in the middle of the room. There was enough of Bobby left in that thing to recognize the shell of the man, but he was horribly changed. His mouth was wide open, filled with jagged teeth, and his face looked grotesquely stretched to make room for it. The nose and chin were even more pointed than when I saw them last, and it made his mouth look diamond shaped when it was all the way open. When he closed it I could see his eyes were closer together than normal, perfectly round and piercingly yellow.
The body still seemed to be that of a man, but only vaguely. It was lithe and sinewy, more predatory. My sense was that it was a being caught midway between man and cat, and every part of it was poised to strike.
“Bobby?” I asked it.
He growled at me and gathered up for the kill. His eyes narrowed and his teeth flashed. When he jumped for my throat it was so fast I didn’t even have time to stagger back. I just stood there stupidly, bewildered by his speed and fierceness. The thing was still in the air when Eddie hit it with his baton. He came around my right side just as the thing leaped for me and hit it on the side of its head. All I saw was a flash of metal and the next thing I knew the thing was on its side up against the wall and Eddie was standing over it with blood dripping from the tip of his baton.
“What in the hell is that? Jesus, Eddie, is that supposed to be Bobby?”
Eddie didn’t answer. He walked out and I followed him into the hallway. He closed the door and stuck his baton through the handle so that thing couldn’t open it if it somehow got up.
“You didn’t kill him, did you?”
“No.”
“What the hell was that?”
Eddie didn’t answer. He was looking into space over my shoulder, his mind somewhere else.
“Eddie?”
“Build a fire,” he said, and went over to the ready lockers and put on his coat and took the keys to the Bronco.
“What?”
“Go outside,” he said. “I’ll be back in about an hour. I want you to build a fire. A big one. One that’ll burn all night. Have it burning big by the time I get back.” And then he reached over the door to the dorm rooms and took down the antique branding iron we found the previous summer while out on patrol. “Toss this in the fire. Make sure it’s good and hot.”
I put a hand on his shoulder, meaning to make him stop and explain himself. “Where are you going? Tell me what’s going on.”
He brushed my hand away.
“Just do what I ask, Jason. Be ready when I get back.”
***
I had a raging fire six feet high by the time he returned. He backed the truck up to the rec room door and went to the kennel. When he came back he had a dog pole in his hand, the kind with the leather noose at the end to secure rabid animals.
“What did you do?” I asked him.
“Help me,” he said, and handed me a pair of blue surgical gloves. “Put these on first.”
He had the lichen priest stuffed into a dog crate in the back of the Bronco. He was handcuffed and leg cuffed and it looked like Eddie had beaten the living crap out of him to get him in that position. There was still plenty of fight left in him, though, because as soon as Eddie opened the tailgate, the lichen priest lunged at us.
Eddie punched him in the face ‘til he wilted. He put the rope end of the dog pole around the priest’s neck and then dragged him into the rec room.
He handed me the pole. “Hold him down,” he said.
Eddie went out to the yard and came back with the branding iron in his hand.
He got on top of the lichen priest and went to work with the branding iron. The rec room started to smell. When the lichen priest stopped moving, I got up and went over to the trash can so I could throw up. Then I came back and grabbed the priest’s legs so Eddie could start in on him again.
The two of them fought a strange kind of battle long into the night, but just before daybreak, they reached some kind of accord. I speak fluent Spanish, but they said things I didn’t understand. They spoke that pidgin language Eddie used when he spoke to the farmers from the Indian parts of Coahuila, and to this day I have never been able to get Eddie to tell me what went on between them. I only know that Eddie understood the lichen priest. And more importantly, the lichen priest understood Eddie.
When Eddie finally let him up, the lichen priest stood slowly, painfully, like he had a broken back, and then limped out our door, out into our yard, and off into the desert without ever looking back.
Eddie and I watched him walk off and then we stayed there to watch the sunrise.
“So what about Bobby?” I asked.
Eddie wet his lips, like he was tasting the cold morning air. “Help me with the dogs,” he said. “After that, we eat some breakfast.”
HELP! WANTED: Tales of On-the-Job Terror Page 27
