Cat's Eye

by William W. Johnstone

  * * *

  Carl followed Dee back up to the Blue Ridge Mountains. With the load he was carrying—and Dee still didn’t know what was under the tarp—he stayed well within the speed limit and followed all the rules. Any Virginia trooper who looked under that tarp would probably have a mild heart attack; and that would be just before he had Carl spread-eagled on the pavement with the muzzle of a pistol stuck in Carl’s ear.

  As they passed through Butler, Deputy Harrison passed them traveling the other way. He did not even look at them. Carl smiled, thinking: Amazing what power just one man can have.

  He and Dee were both amazed at the amount of work that the crew had done in four days. The timberline had been pushed back more than five hundred feet in all directions and every scrap of brush had been cleared.

  “There is no way they could have done all that in four days,” Carl said in astonishment.

  “Here’s why,” Dee said, holding up a note she’d found on the gate. “It’s from the foreman. Dad sent a crew up to lend a hand.” Her eyes touched his. “You want to tell me what’s in the truck?”

  But petting Dingo and calming him down came first. The big dog was jumping around like a young pony, so happy he was going around and around in circles.

  “I never thought another dog would replace Chow-Chow,” Dee said. “But I was wrong.”

  Dee had found a friend and protector, and Dingo had found a home.

  Then Carl threw back the tarp, and when Dee’s eyes finally sorted out all the cargo, her mouth dropped open.

  There were cases of .223 ammo, boxes of various types of grenades, and other cases and crates that held—well, she didn’t know what they held.

  “Are you planning on starting a war?” she asked, finally finding her voice.

  “Yes.” Carl spoke the word grimly. “My own special brand of Jihad.”

  “That’s a Holy War.”

  “Yes. It is. And one other thing you’d better understand, Dee—”

  “I don’t want to hear any further comments about me going away,” she said interrupting.

  “I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to say that this is one Holy War we’d damn well better win. We either win it, or we die—very unpleasantly.” His words were offered in a very cold manner.

  Looking at the tall young man with the serious eyes, Dee finally got the last ten percent of doubt knocked out of her. She knew this was not going to be some sort of happy adventure where the good guys always win and the bad guys fall by the wayside like bowling pins and the hero sweeps the heroine up into his arms and they sail off into the sunset to live happily ever after.

  “If you’re trying to scare me, Carl . . . you just succeeded.”

  “I hope so, Dee. After the . . . horror was over, I went to a lot of funerals over in Ruger County. Some of the caskets were empty.”

  “Why?”

  “Because either the dead were eaten, or we couldn’t find all the pieces.”

  * * *

  Dee had helped him unload the equipment—in silence. His words had touched her and affected her as he had hoped they would. They stacked the equipment in the huge den; actually about sixty percent of the entire lower floor was the den.

  “Sit down, Dee,” Carl told her. “It’s classroom time.”

  She sat down, hands in her lap, and looked at him.

  “Can you shoot any type of firearm?”

  “Because of our wealth, with the constant threat of kidnapping or being killed by some nut who resents the rich, Daddy made all of us learn weaponry. I am competent with a pistol, rifle, and shotgun.”

  “You have weapons in this house?”

  “I have a shotgun in the closet and a handgun in my nightstand.”

  “Loaded?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Then they’re not worth a damn for anything except throwing at your assailant. You might as well be armed with a fly-swatter.”

  “I could bluff them with the guns!” She said indignantly, sticking out her chin.

  “You don’t bluff with a gun, Dee. Either you’re going to use it, or you’re not. Don’t ever pick up a gun in any bad situation unless you’re mentally prepared to use it. You try to bluff someone with a gun, and odds are you’re gong to wind up badly hurt or dead. My father preached that to us all our lives. There are no little kids in this house, so there is no point, conditions being what they are—and about to get worse—why your weapons shouldn’t be ready to use. Go get them and let’s see what you can do with them.”

  She was a surprisingly good shot with the pistol, a Colt Diamondback .38-caliber with a four-inch barrel. The shotgun was a Browning pump, twelve-gauge. Carl loaded the pistol with hollow-nose ammunition and the shotgun with buckshot.

  “If they get into the house,” Carl told her, “grab that shotgun first.” Then he added, “It makes a big mess, but that buckshot will sure stop somebody.”

  Back in the house, Dee clicked on the radio, set to a local station. They both paused as the announcer read the local news.

  “The body of lifelong resident, Mrs. Ermma Barstow, was discovered about noon today by boys out hiking. Local law-enforcement personnel are being very quiet about the condition of the body, but the boys reportedly said it looked like she had been attacked by a bear. They further stated that parts of the old woman were scattered over a wide area and that she had been eaten. To compound the mystery, the boys also said there was a very foul odor lingering in the woods near Mrs. Barstow’s body, and that the odor did not come from the mangled remains. We’ll bring you further news of this tragedy as we receive it.”

  Carl walked to the window and looked out at that part of the woods where he had wandered for several hours. He glanced back at Dee. “It’s begun.”

  Chapter 6

  Sheriff Rodale had looked at the ripped and scattered remains of Mrs. Barstow and had almost thrown up. He had seen all kinds of sights over the long years behind a badge, but he could truthfully say that he had never seen anything quite like this.

  Deputy Hotdog Harrison had upchucked his lunch. The chief deputy, Jim Hunt, who really ran the sheriffs office, and who despised Sheriff Rodale with as much intensity as a mongoose hates a cobra, knelt down beside the torso of the woman.

  Rodale walked up and squatted down like a fat frog. “What’d you think, Jim?”

  Jim looked around him; the other deputies were busy securing the area, marking off the locations of various body parts, and taking pictures of the scene.

  “We don’t want this made public, Ned. Not just yet.”

  “What made public?”

  “Her heart’s been torn out.”

  Rodale looked, swallowed hard. “Why would a bear tear out the heart?”

  “No bear done this,” the chief deputy said. “Those are human teeth marks.”

  “Great God Almighty!” Rodale said in a hoarse whisper. “You mean a human bein’ ate on the poor old woman?”

  “Yes. And not a very large human. More like a child. And look here,” he said, pointing with the tip of a pencil. “Those are paw prints of a cat. And right there”—he pointed to the ravaged piece of the body—“is where the cat ate.”

  “What are these little black specks all around the body and on the body and everywhere else?” Rodale said, pointing a finger.

  “I don’t know. They look like flecks of something that’s been burned. And here is something else that puzzles me. Those are some sort of footprints leading away from the body and into the woods. But this left print doesn’t have a big toe, and the right print is minus a couple of other toes. The paw prints are deformed. I never seen anything like it.”

  The lawman in Rodale surfaced, overriding the man’s normal laziness and indifference. “Damn rough country to go barefoot. Boys!” he called to his deputies. “Not a word about this to anybody. Any statements got to come from Jim here. Anybody who talks is fired that day and I’ll run his ass out of the county.”

  “Newspeople from
Lynchburg and Charlottesville is gonna be all over this place in a few hours,” Jim noted. “I’ll get the coroner to do an autopsy and then have him seal the casket.”

  “What you think, Jim?” In all matters concerning law enforcement, Rodale always deferred to his chief deputy.

  “Satanism, I reckon. I always knowed it would someday come to Reeves. It was just a matter of time. It’s everywhere else.”

  Jim Hunt slaughtered the English language, but it was not due to ignorance. He was a very well-read man and highly intelligent. He was a hillbilly and proud of it. He was comfortable with his colloquialisms, and anybody who didn’t like it could go sit on a candlestick as far as he was concerned.

  But unlike Rodale, Jim was not on the take from anybody and never had been. He was a God-fearing Baptist, and not only enforced the law, but obeyed it.

  Both the laws of God and the laws of man.

  He had stayed on with Sheriff Ned Rodale through the worst of times for the simple reason that he knew if he left, Reeves County would have no law enforcement. It galled him that Rodale was such a spiritually weak, immoral man. But, Jim reckoned, everybody had a cross to bear, and Rodale was his.

  Jim, alone with the torso now—Rodale had waddled off, chewing antacid tablets and belching—again looked at what was really puzzling: The footprints and paw prints turned bloody about twenty feet from the torso; not coming toward it, but going away from it. He would have normally checked that off as both human and animal wading through the blood around the torso, but he didn’t believe that to be the case this time. There just wasn’t that much blood in or around the parts. And it looked to Jim like it had been lapped up.

  And something else: The prints seemed to be more firmly placed as they left the scene. Around the torso, the prints seemed to be staggered and wavy—no, that wasn’t the right choice of words. Shaky instead of wavy. As if the pair of them were weak before they attacked the body, and then gained strength after—he swallowed hard—dining.

  Jim got an evidence bag and tweezers and small brush from his kit and began gathering up the strange black flecks from on and all around the body. He would send them to the lab and see what the lab boys could come up with.

  Calvin Bartlett, the county coroner, arrived at the scene, looked at the scattered body parts, and knelt down beside Jim. “No bear did this, Jim.”

  “I know.”

  “What does Rodale think?”

  “Rodale doesn’t think. After twenty-five years in law enforcement, I doubt he could lift a print. Man can judge the quality of the sheriff by his deputies. Take a look at Harry Harrison and add it up.”

  Calvin smiled. “Word is that Wilber Purdy told Rodale to hang it up. This would be his last term in office.”

  “So I heard.”

  “And that you’re going to be the next sheriff of Reeves County.”

  “I ain’t heard that.”

  “Would you take the nomination if offered?”

  “Don’t know.” He pointed to the torso. “Heart’s been tore out.”

  “Have you found it?”

  “No. I reckon it was eat by whoever done this.”

  “Devil-worshippers?”

  “That’s what I told Ned. Now maybe he’ll go on back to the office so’s I can get on with the investigation and find out something.”

  “You don’t believe it was devil-worshippers?”

  “I don’t know what I believe, Calvin. Only thing I do know for sure about this mess is that I ain’t never seen nothin’ like this here in my whole life.”

  “What is that you have in the evidence bag?”

  Jim held it up for the man to see. “I don’t know what it is. Something burned, I think. Here, you take it and see what you think it is.”

  The coroner went to work and Jim eased that prickly sensation tingling the back of his neck by slowly turning his head and putting woods-wise eyes to the dark timber. Somebody, or some thing, was out there, watching the proceedings.

  Jim deliberately turned his head. The sensation only intensified. “Evil,” he muttered. “It’s evil.”

  * * *

  “That was my father,” Dee said, replacing the receiver. “That . . . horrible-looking worm you gave him died this afternoon. And not from testing.”

  “That’s not good, Dee. I told your father that I remembered Doctor Goodson, up in Ruger County, saying that they had a life span of about twenty-four hours. This means the species has toughened, with a life span of about a week.”

  “And that’s bad, right?”

  “How’d you like to see about ten thousand of those things crawling toward you?”

  She shuddered.

  “Right. I also told your father that nothing except fire or crushing them would stop them. But he wanted his people to try.”

  “And now we ... do what?”

  “Wait for them to come to us. I’m not going back into those woods unless it’s absolutely essential.”

  “The reason you had Daddy get the flamethrowers... the worms, right?”

  Carl smiled, and it was not a pretty smile. “That’s one of the reasons, Dee. Fire will stop just about anything that walks.”

  “You said electricity killed the girl and the cat, right?”

  Carl sighed. “Presumably, Dee. But when you’re dealing with the supernatural . . .” He shrugged his shoulders.

  * * *

  The two forms materialized into human shapes. Sort of. They were charred black. When they walked, tiny flakes of destroyed flesh sloughed off their bodies and fell to the ground. It was very difficult to tell exactly what they were. They appeared to be sightless; they were certainly hairless.

  In earthly shape, both were horribly deformed. They lurched and staggered as they walked. Since the lips, along with the hair and the eyes and most of the flesh, had been burned away by the millions of volts of electricity that surged through their bodies while they were in earthly form, the teeth of the girl and the fangs of the cat were forever visible and glistening wetly.

  It had taken the girl, Anya, and her other self, the cat, Pet, several years to gain the strength to once more test their powers in earthly form. The ancient gods, the Old Ones, had died on that voltage-charged grid in Ruger County. That tremendous surge had mutilated bodies, ruined flesh, and caused months of anguish for Anya and Pet.

  But it had not destroyed them. Nor had it destroyed their hate.

  Their limitless hate had only intensified as the months festered by and they agonized among the forever-damned in the dead and rotting darkness of the netherworld.

  Now they were back. And they knew that the son of the man who had devastated their original plans and who had come very close to destroying them was near. The young man had made his silly and ridiculously human preparations for war. No matter. He would not succeed. Reeves County had been carefully and quietly and insidiously nurtured for this moment of triumph.

  For the past three years the forces emanating from the dark side of life had been cultivating those who dared enter the woods under whose ground lay another pocket of old gods, lying in wait for the moment when they too would be called forth.

  And that moment was very near.

  Anya and Pet stopped, detecting the nearness of human life.

  The flesh of that stupid and Bible-spouting old woman had been nourishing, but it was not nearly enough. In their weakened form, Pet and Anya needed flesh and blood daily to maintain them.

  They sensed that much-needed nourishment was very close by.

  They waited. Two charred and grotesque creatures from a world that had survived everything God and His people on earth could hurl at them over the eons.

  A poacher slipped through the woods, his rifle at the ready, his eyes searching for a deer to kill. He stepped into a small clearing, and the pair leaped, Pet’s teeth ripping into the throat of the man. His scream turned into a bubbling gurgle as his blood gushed forth, to be eagerly lapped up by Pet and Anya.

  Anya’s charred h
ands tore at the chest of the man. The girl, subhumanly strong, ripped open the chest cavity and tore out the still-beating heart.

  She shared the life-sustaining organ with Pet. Then they dined on the liver and the kidneys before shredding long strips of flesh, stuffing them greedily into their mouths.

  Blood began leaking from the open lesions on the charred bodies as the twin horrors gained new strength while dining on the flesh and sucking the blood from the dead poacher. They cracked bones and sucked marrow from them.

  All around them, the forest had grown silent, as animals lay very still in their burrows and dens and nests, sensing that danger was near.

  In a feeding frenzy, Anya and Pet, now covered with blood, scattered bits and pieces of the man as they chomped and tore and cracked and sucked. Then, with new strength filling them, they moved on through the timber and over the ridges.

  * * *

  At the hospital in Butler, Doctor Calvin Bartlett pulled back from the microscope, his eyes wide in shock and disbelief.

  The tissue taken from the mangled carcass of the woman was thriving with life cells! But unlike any that Calvin had ever seen.

  How could that be?

  Surely his eyes were playing tricks on him.

  He put fresh samples on the slide and fixed the glass in place, checking again.

  He straightened up, shaking his head in disbelief.

  Behind him, on the metal table where the various parts of the Barstow woman were scattered, a hand began to move, the fingers wriggling as new life reached them.

  Bartlett sensed motion behind him and turned, his heart rate picking up. Nothing. He silently berated himself for behaving in a most unprofessional manner and returned to the microscope, hoping that he would not again view the impossible.

  But there it was.

  He straightened up, hearing a very odd sound. It sounded like . . . purring.

  Scratch. Purr.

  “What the hell?” Bartlett muttered, looking all around him.

  But the lab was empty, except for the ravaged body of the woman and the slightly rattled doctor.

  He returned to his work, not seeing that the eyes in the severed head had opened and were staring at his back, that the lips had curved in a macabre grin.