Of course, there was no place for straightforwardness in human politics. The bank shot was always best. As in the case of ol’ Harry, his problems were best addressed by a separate phone call entirely. A very simple directive, to be executed right away.
Ah, but Harry, he sighed to himself. How nice it would have been to, just once, show you how I really feel.
Blake shrugged, dismissing the notion as shamelessly romantic. He sat back and sucked on his Chivas, staring into the fire.
The fire was beautiful.
It knew no compromise.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
born of poison
raised in poison
claiming all form as its own
it rested
silent virulent hidden growing
surrounded by trees and crawling shadow
sharing itself with the mud
and rock beneath its wheels
the desolate road ahead
the dead-end culvert where it all began
in the days before the bridge
awakening its seed in everything it touched
reaching out in insatiable monstrous desire
for more of its own kind
There were five dozen drums half-buried in the shit pit out back of Terry Honeger’s land.
It was, in fact, Boonie and Drew’s first dump site, way back at the dawn of their PWD affiliation. Boonie’d picked it for many of the same reasons he was to later select Black Bridge: privacy, proximity, ease of disposal.
At the time, it had seemed like genius. The Honegers, after all, were the most worthless fuckers in all of Felton Township, with a hardcore defile-your-own-nest tradition that spanned back over generations. Of the three to four heavily wooded acres they owned or abutted, literally dozens of pockets had been cleared and devoted to rubble, kibble, and rot.
But the shit pit was their apex of achievement. It was an old sinkhole, some eighty feet long and thirty feet wide, and a good fifteen deep at the center. It had opened up one spring like an act of God, and far be it from the Honegers to quibble with Providence.
They had every kind of crap you could possibly dream of throwing away down there: washers, driers, box springs, packing crates, old tires and engine parts, cardboard, baseboard, drywall, brick, raggedy linen, regular garbage, on up to auto parts, including a rusted-out Gremlin that Terry’s cousin Strong John had rolled straight over the steep embankment and left wheels-up like a capsized beetle.
The rains, when they came, filled the hole, making a rich garbage soup. In the warmer months it was stagnant, home to snakes and mosquitoes and all manner of crawling, grublike things. Come the cold it became even more treacherous, a forgotten and frigid wasteland.
They would never even know the difference, Boonie had said. And even if they did, fuck ‘em. Nobody could prove nothin’, and nothing could be traced. Even if the Department of Environmental Resources caught on, the Honegers would be the ones to eat it; but even that problem never arose.
The Drew-spawn shuddered as Overmind sifted through its ruined brain: pirating thoughts, cannibalizing memories.
Remembering.…
The first trip had worked out well. They were able to drag some debris aside, roll down the first two dozen drums, and pretty well bury it over. But the fact was that they’d underestimated how much sheer space the drums took up.
The second trip had consisted of one half barrels, the other half cover: an abandoned sofa, some rickety lawn furniture, one hell of a lot of cardboard. It had barely been enough.
By the third load, Boonie and Drew had learned two valuable lessons. First: how amazingly fast this shit piled up.
And second: what a great big wonderful world it was.
The following year was devoted to locating spots that could accommodate anywhere from a dozen to a hundred-odd barrels. They were few and far between, but they still managed to sucessfully unload in dozens of remote locations before stumbling on Black Bridge.
And destiny…
The Drew-spawn reclined in the driver’s seat, stretching and shifting in ways not intended for mortal flesh.
Before it was done, it intended to revisit them all.
It caught its own gaze in the rearview mirror, paused to marvel at the renovations it saw.
The face: no longer Drew’s, but a dissipated, scum-sheened caricature. Socket-skin receded, the ligature visible, like fleshy little points on a compass. One eye, loose and paddleball dangling at the end of its rubbery optic stalk.
The head: staved in from the left, as if a demented soda jerk had doled out two scoops’ worth of brains from mid-forehead to ear. That ear, disengaged by the blow from its mooring, weighted at the lobe by a heavy cross earring and dangling by a thread.
The hair: a black tangle, clot-catcher to the squirt of pallid matter that had spritzed from his right earhole.
The skin: pocked and abscessed, the cartilage of his nose exposed, revealing the new forms and colors unfolding within…
A cloud of gnats hovered, drawn like moths to a flame. The Drew-spawn batted absently at them, a reflex action.
Beneath the red bandanna, it chuckled. And why not? All around it was staggering, delirious change. Rippling through the ragged, self-mending upholstery. Rumbling through the chassis, though the engine was down. Awakening in rubber, petrochemical, and steel.
They had been there together, former man and machine, for over an hour. Recouping. Transforming. One tire had blown going through the downed tree, spent the next five miles spewing Möbius strips and shreds of itself down Route 11 while the rim ground out fireworks against the pavement.
It had taken this long for the tire to grow back.
The Drew-spawn got out of the truck, shambled over to the lip of the shit pit. Overmind paused, strategizing. It was a ways down, and far too steep for this awkward form to manage.
No matter.
“Nheh…” it gurgled, raggedy breath rasping through the punctured lungs. It held up its swollen left hand, the fingerless leather glove stretched tight as a sausage casing. With its right hand it grasped the portion of the left middle finger that jutted out. “Hnuh…uh!”
The finger stub came off with a wet pop.
The Drew-spawn regarded it for a moment, an inch-long cylinder of meat and moist bone. It turned the digit round and round as Overmind felt the essential oneness they shared.
It existed in both, rooted in the cells of both stump and stub. It was aware of itself: as parasite and host, as seed and source. Somewhere in the Drew-spawn’s mind was a fragmented memory of a picture in a book: a touch, bringing life.
Drew-spawn and Overmind smiled, as best they could.
And tossed the piece into the pit.
Overmind didn’t even stay to watch as the finger stub tumbled end over end into the soup. It didn’t need to.
It knew exactly where it was going.
The Drew-spawn clambered back into the truck and reached for the ignition, key now and forever at one with the hole. It felt the essential unity, as the engine sparked to new life. Felt itself part of the whole.
While down in the shit pit, sixty drums full of kindred spirits awakened to the touch. To likewise throw off their shackles.
And set themselves free.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
By quarter of one, Otis was fishing for the rudiments of consciousness in a vast Wild Turkey ocean of his own design. He had filled his head with liquid lead; it sagged on his shoulders, too heavy for thought.
That was the whole idea.
In the room at the back of the trailer, Boonie was making those noises again. Terrible noises. In his sleep. Evidently, no combination of shots and downs was enough to kill this pain; but at least it had him down and out, had kept him so for the last four hours.
Otis thanked God for Boonie’s unconsciousness, and not purely out of love for the boy. Once an hour, or thereabouts, he went in to check on his son, and the fact was that Boonie wasn’t simply dying.
Boonie was changing.
There was a bottle on the desk before him, along with a picture of his son the football star. The bottle was nearly empty, and the boy in the picture looked nothing like the swollen grotesque laid out in the dark behind the locked bedroom door.
Otis blubbered, piss-drunk and maudlin. He held in his hands a Colt forty-five that went all the way back to the last days of douba-yew douba-yew two. Them was the good ol’ days, he knew beyond the shadow of a doubt. Back when he and Mabel were young, and he could grab the world’s short’n’curlies and just yank ‘til the eagle screamed.
And then Boonie came along, and he was their little boo-boo, all right. One little boo-boo after another. First the boo-boo of being born, being that they didn’t expect him or nothing. Then a lifetime of smaller, diddly boo-boos, culminating with the boo-boo of having his knee blow out like a cheap retread and wash away any hope of a future.
Then last night’s boo-boo…
The biggest boo-boo of ‘em all.…
Otis sniffled, the gun big and square and clunky in his hand. These days, he mostly used it to jellify junkyard rats. But right at the moment he was drunkenly wondering how the barrel might feel if he stuffed it in his mouth.
Out front, a car pulled up, and the dogs began to howl.
“Huhwhafuck?” Otis blurted. It lit a fire under his ass, jerked him out of his stupor and onto his feet. All idle threats to Leonard aside, the mere thought of cops pumped his bladder full of lava and flooded his heart with dread.
“Oh, damnation,” he droned, three hundred-plus pounds staggering toward the window.
There was a blue and white wagon with the ACTION-9 News logo, idling at the gate. The driver stood beside his open door, shooting home movies for the tri-city area. For a second, Otis thought about putting a .45 slug through the lens.
Then it focused on him.
Kirk stared through the viewfinder at the fat man engulfing the window. The shot was succinct and superb: blurry, at first, through the chain link fence, then the chain link gone muzzy as El Tubbo’s eyewhites shone. The terror in that man’s face was more than naked perfection.
It might just save Kirk Bogarde’s ass.
Because he had taken a step from which there was no turning back. He was no longer a mild-mannered junior reporter, scarfing shit-duty assignments. He was now Kirk Bogarde—Renegade Reporter!
And the clock was definitely ticking on his destiny.
Because if I pull this off, I’m a hero, he realized. I’m God fucking almighty. Hell, I may even make the cover of People!
And if not…
Not an option, Kirk decided. Kirk Bogarde—Unemployed! just didn’t have the same ring to it.
And so his fate was sealed.
Kirk had stopped at a pay phone at a Turkey Hill minit market and called in a favor from Jerry, a hacker friend who worked at Motor Vehicles. The fact that Motor Vehicles wasn’t open on Sunday left him undaunted.
Kirk had Jerry’s home number. He called and got Melinda, Jerry’s wife. Melinda said Jerry was in the garage, working on the Bonneville. Kirk said he needed a trace on the plates. Jerry said he’d get it for him first thing Monday. Kirk said he needed it now. Jerry said he couldn’t. He told Jerry the story depended on it. Jerry told him to go fuck himself. Kirk said thanks anyway, he’d run another story in its place, like an expose on the disgraceful local street trade, with actual Spy-Cam footage of an actual citizen soliciting actual prostitutes from his actual Bonneville.
Kirk got a trace on the plates.
All in a day’s work for Kirk Bogarde—Renegade Reporter!
Now came the hard part: Kirk sat at the gate, inventing bullshit by the board foot. When Otis didn’t move, Kirk leaned into the horn, still shooting.
Come on, he urged Otis silently. Come tell me what I want to hear.
A second later, the door opened wide.
“Our ACTION-9 News team traced the toxic truck and its lethal load back to Pusser’s Scrap & Salvage, on the outskirts of Hellam,” Kirk intoned. He was locked in his Geraldo mode now, riffing off the top of his head and liking what he heard. “With its overtones of Texas Chainsaw Massacre-style squalor, it seemed the perfect setting for this saga of murder, corruption, and greed…”
“Hey!” yelled the fat guy, lumbering toward him. “Hey!”
Kirk went silent, kept him centered, in frame. As he got closer, Kirk managed to work the chained-up dogs into the background. Nice.
“We’re looking for Otis J. Pusser, Jr.,” Kirk said, keenly aware that there was no we. Somehow, that made it even better.
“Izzat on?” the guy demanded, pointing at the camera. He was nearly to the gate, and Kirk could see now how utterly blasted he was, see the drunken defiance lock horns with the terrified hand-in-the-cookie-jar guilt in his eyes.
Yes, Kirk silently told him. Your ass is mine.
“That’s right.” Out loud. “It’s practically airing live. Are you Otis Pusser?”
Silence. A wall-eyed, weaving stare.
Kirk smiled. “Do you know why we’re here?” Only half a beat of silence before kicking back in. “How do you respond to allegations that your truck—the truck that you this morning claimed was stolen—has already been tied to a hazardous spill off Black Bridge and at least one death?”
The Pusser man—and who else could it be?—flinched minutely as each point-by-point ticked off. Watching him, Kirk gauged the best way in and steamrollered through.
“You’ve been used,” he continued, with utter sincerity, “as the low man on the totem pole of insatiable corporate greed. You’ve done their dirty work; and, as your reward, you’re to be fed to the wolves.”
Pusser’s eyes were watering.
The camera loved him.
“The police’ll be here before you know it, you know. If you’ve got a story to tell, now’s the time to do it.” Just a touch of insider’s commiseration. “Before it’s too late.”
Otis, it seemed, understood his place on the revised food chain. His face, on the tape, was a revelation.
Twenty minutes later, Kirk left Otis, a string of empty promises ringing in his ears. Yes, Otis’s side of the story would most definitely be heard.
So to speak.
Kirk motored up the Dark Hollow Road: solid gold in the camera, a smile on his face. His hunch had paid off. The pieces of the puzzle were falling into place.
It was the story of a lifetime.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The sky was alive with horrors.
The heavens unfurled before Gwen Taylor like churning smoke made flesh: a sickly rippling sea of graymeat phantoms that flowed, misshapen and howling, above her head. Snarling, embryonic things contorted, then tore apart and obscenely reformed: wriggling, writhing, perversely ecstatic. The forms they assumed were dredged up from no great black hole of repressed childhood nightmare.
Never in her life had she had such dreams.
And though she knew that it was madness—though the still-hinged portion of her mind screeched with vehement denial—there was nothing Gwen could do to wipe away the vision, no appeal to reason adequate to the task. Her mind was a muddled bog of delirium, but her eyesight could not have been more clear.
And as bad as the vision was, it paled by comparison to what she saw when she closed her eyes. The shapes were there, too, etched in the fine web of capillaries lacing the inside of her eyelids. Pulsing with her blood. Flush with the life that she gave them.
When she blinked, they came closer still.
Gwen slumped, eyes wide, semiconscious, in the truck’s passenger seat: head shaking no no no no no, cheek mushroom-white and pressed flat against the window, a thin track of spittle tethering her face to the glass. A deep, thrumming buzz filled her ears. Her breath, when it came, was painful and shallow. Her flesh felt flushed, and chill. And her belly…
Her belly felt nothing at all.
Gwen groaned. She could hear Micki’s voice dimly, a muted drone of reassu
rance, going hang on baby we’re almost there you’re gonna be okay; but the words seemed far less substantial than the shapes that undulated above and before her.
As the truck raced past the belching smokestacks of Campbell Chain, a great white plume of condensation snaked up like a skeletal hand and raked across the sky. Gwen stared, aghast, as the hand turned. Its fingers curling. Reaching for her.
When she closed her eyes, it was nearly close enough to touch.
She could no longer contain her screams.
Melissa was on duty when they brought the Taylor woman in.
Emergency got her first, of course; but one look at her condition and they packed her off to Labor Hall just as fast as the wheelchair would carry her.
It was 1:04, Melissa noted in the log. Unfortunately, it was a pretty busy day; there were a half-dozen other names up on the board, all of them ready to pop. Only four RNs were on shift, and that left her to handle the two women coming in all on her lonesome.
They were alternately terrified and hysterical, but Melissa didn’t faze easily. Not that she didn’t care. At twenty-eight, Melissa Reinhard was a natural-born mother, passionately dedicated to the art and science of bringing life into the world. She’d spent three years on duty in Paradise County Hospital’s maternity ward, above and beyond the two trips she’d made there herself.
Somewhere along the line there came a point where nearterm histrionics were no longer a threat. And undue panic would only spook everyone.
So when Emergency called, Melissa got to work. First, she paged Gwen’s physician and pulled her prenatal records, checking for aberrations. The records showed a relatively normal arc: a little high blood pressure, good weight gain. No major allergies. No previous incidents. Normal, normal, normal. Melissa scanned the three sheets, fixing them in her mind.
By the time they rolled in, she was ready.
She looks more scared than hurt, Melissa noted immediately. That’s good. Fear I can do something about.
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