As if God were actually taking his calls.…
And he didn’t want to picture it, to envision in his mind the apocalyptic WHOOMP that shook the house to its foundation, construct a visual of his wife as she hit the floorboards above his head, match her scream with the face he knew she must be making. He didn’t want to see the sources of that terrible laughter, was unable to conjure up images adequate for describing the sounds being torn from his son.
But when the meat like gravy oozed down through the cracks, he no longer had to use his imagination. It spattered the floor in a rich red rain, drove him screaming from his chair and his sanity. He was halfway to the stairs before he knew he was moving, halfway up the stairs before he saw his salvation.
It was his old pal, Officer Hal Thoman.
911 had come through, after all.
“NO!” Bernie screamed as the dead cop descended. “NO!” as the shadows pulled back to reveal Hal’s full green open-skulled glory. One last full-throated “NOOOOOO!!!” as he slipped in the widening pool of thickly coagulant family-style sauce.
And then no mean old kids could ever bother poor old Bernie again.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Bill Teague had to admit: he liked being his own boss.
He lit a smoke and reflected on that fact as they rolled down the twisty roads, en route to number two. Bill and Ted loved their job. Not the killing, especially, although Bill would confess a craftsman’s appreciation of a job well executed, pardon the pun. They just liked the hours, the freedom, the excellent adventures.
What they hated were the boonies.
Travel was a given, which meant a lot of runs down a lot of secondary highways and back roads, where brain-dead rubes bred like rabbits and lived in nasty little cracker-boxes with concrete jockeys by the driveways or little propeller-ducks whizzing on their squalid little lawns. Give Bill and Ted a city any day: New York, Pittsburgh, Philly. Even Baltimore, if it came down to it. Anywhere but here.
Oh, well. Bill sucked smoke and fiddled with the radio. Came with the territory. “Fuckin’ radio wasteland,” he muttered to Ted, who manned the wheel.
“Fuckin’ worthless radio,” Ted addended, and Bill agreed. The Impala’s radio sucked. At the moment, the only tune coming through on the dial was the loathsome Terry Jacks, crooning “Seasons in the Sun.” Then even that was lost, overwhelmed in a loud wash of static.
And that was when they heard it. From below, around the bend and unseen, rose a crazed industrial clamor. Clanging, smashing.
Roaring to life.
“What the fuck is that?” he asked. They’d been apprised that Pusser ran a scrap and salvage yard; but this sounded more like a demolition derby, minus the roar of the crowds.
Ted Ames and Bill Teague were a team. They’d been in the business for eleven years, which was a remarkably long lifespan for their line of work. They’d seen some pretty strange shit in their day: lots of death and brutality, too many dark pockets of the soul to fill, and muschisimo weirdness of every stripe. That came with the territory, too.
But he had to admit that, in all his travels, they’d never seen anything so flat-out deranged as what lay down the Dark Hollow Road.
They rounded the bend and Ted slammed on the brakes. The Impala swerved and jackknifed nose-down off the shoulder and half into a ditch. “Fuck me,” Ted gasped, incredulous.
“Jesus,” Bill croaked. They couldn’t believe what they were seeing, accept the evidence of their eyes. Bill could only shake his head, seeing his own worst nightmare breeding before him.
There were easily a hundred of them, skittering little forms in concrete and plaster and wood, a frenzied fantasyland of warped animate copulating kitsch. It was a lawn ornament orgy by Bosch; leprechauns in motion, mounting fleeced, bleating plywood lambs. Jockeys sploshing through the mud, riding pink flamingos from behind. Little Dutch girls with their butts in the air, humping the heads off their little Dutch boys.
And at the center of it all was the fountain: pumping up black rank jetties of noxious antilife-giving sludge that slicked and sluiced and enveloped the yard…
“Look at the house,” Ted said, his voice high and thin as a razor.
Bill craned, searchlighting his gaze. “Omigod…”
It was a regular rural tract house, like a large brick trailer. Every single window was broken, a dozen black holes like wounds in the walls. Cement squirrels scurried up one wall and down another, burrowed furiously into the asphalt-shingled roof. A hundred lawn ornaments surrounded the house, pounding on the walls, the doors. The air filled with the clicking and snapping of brittle little limbs.
Then, from beneath, came a roiling rumbling sound.
“Jesus!” Bill hissed. The earth around the house was turning lividly liquid, sucking the structure down greedily, swallowing it. The house creaked and crumbled as beams gave way and walls buckled; something inside crackled and sparked into flame.
From inside, Bill could hear screaming.
“GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!” he yelled. “NOW!”
Ted ratcheted the shifter into reverse and hit the gas. The rear tires spun wildly, sinking into the mushy shoulder. Mud and gravel sprayed every which way, spattering the windows.
“GO! GO! GO! GO!” Bill chanted, pounding the dash. The tires caught on something solid, squealed and yanked the Impala out of its rut, tires smoking onto the road.
And at that moment, something heavy thudded onto the hood of the car. A neon-green lantern ignited, klieg-light bright, less than a foot from his eyes. He blinked back the glare, instantly blinded, tried to see through the pain and the puke-green floating dots.
The light swung away, and Bill stared into the black-faced rictus of the little concrete jockey with the lantern.
It showed him its teeth.
“YAHH!!” Bill screamed as the jockey rode the hood like a miniature concrete Terminator, smashing through the window with one lantern-fisted blow, spraying the interior of the car with glass and liquid fire. A dollop of molten incandescence spattered against his face. He screamed again. His right eye blew apart and ignited. In the hollow of his skull, Bill’s brain began to sizzle like fatty bacon slabs.
Ted floored it. The g-force flung Bill back in his seat, howling as he ground his palm into his socket, trying to put out his face.
He was blind as the car screeched and gunned away from the suburban inferno, blind as it sawed into a hairpin turn, flinging the jockey off the hood and into the woods, blind to the cause of the screee and the spin as the brakes locked up seconds later and hurtled him forward. His forehead slammed into the already shattered windshield and it gave way entirely, showering them with glass.
Bill blacked out. The harsh industrial din roared before them.
And it was Ted’s turn to scream…
The road to Pusser’s was completely blockaded by the procession that clattered and spilled from its gate.
They were not machines in any readily comprehensible sense. No fuel source. No logically movingparts. Where they had wheels or rims, they used them. Where they did not, they simply threw themselves forward in utter defiance of natural law: scuttling crablike on bent metal legs, spinning on drums, shambling stilt-like or dragging loose cable behind like tails, like useless vestigial limbs.
Still-twitching bits of dog and rabbit and junkyard rat crowned them like riders on a Rose Bowl float, impaled in places of honor on the gigantic amalgamations of sentient scrap and salvage. Thousands more swarmed lemminglike beneath them, red eyes gleaming with the wisdom of the hive.
They were impossible juggernauts of destruction, spitting out shrapnel and flame, throwing stray parts like seeds.
And they were heading for town.
As the first great jet of projectile fire blistered the hood, Ted slammed the car into reverse, the speedometer needling up and up as they careened back the way they’d come. Ted was a professional driver; he was prepared to run ass-backward and full-throttle out of this hellhole and all the
way back to Philly, if need be. He could handle that.
But he wasn’t prepared for what was behind them.
The lawn ornaments had swarmed into the road, blocking it completely.
“Sonofabitch!” Ted barked a hard burst of laughter, neck craned back as he drove. Nothing else in this world made a bit of sense, but he knew a squeeze play when he saw one. Ahead, the juggernauts chugged forward, chewing up the road.
Ted laughed madly. There was nothing else to do.
He punched it.
The Impala reached eighty in the space it took to close the distance. When it rammed the front line, it was like hitting a concrete abutment. The Impala went airborne, assend in the breeze, rear wheels angrily raking at nothing. It came down hard. The gas tank ruptured and spewed its contents onto the animated rubble beneath.
Ted blacked out, came to quickly, found himself pinned beneath the shattered steering column: his right femur crushed, his big body still strapped into place. He looked over to Bill Teague. Judging from the position of his neck, the partnership was officially over.
Ted sniffed the air. Gas. Shit. He wrestled desperately with his seat belt. It only took seconds.
Unfortunately, they were the last ones he had.
The first blind leviathan rolled over the hood, thrusting a lance through the windshield that skewered his septum, sawed down through his heart. His mouth jetted blood and bellyflesh.
There came a pause in the din, a fleeting moment of silence, as the Impala crunched and buckled like a tin can in a trash masher. The last thing Ted heard was the muted whump of flame kissing fuel.
When the gas tank blew, their identities vanished in fiery fleshmetal merger. Then the leviathans bowled them over entirely, grinding both car and cargo into sizzling gristle.
The pieces that stuck got to join the parade.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The Iron Horse Tavern was a dingy little whitewashed shingle shack on the proverbial wrong side of the tracks, in the scrubby industrial wasteland bordering the north side of town. The bar itself was grim and grimy, all rough wood and harsh neon signs for Stroh’s and Stoney’s and Bud, with three taps and a jukebox and a ratty pool table in the corner.
Outside, big rigs rumbled by every few minutes, loud enough to rattle the drinks right off the bar. The trains came fewer and farther between these days.
But down at the Iron Horse, the joint was always jumping.
It was nearly twenty after two, after all, and the gang had been socializing since eleven ayem. Lynyrd Skynyrd was back from the dead on the jukebox. There were maybe a dozen people there, and they were feeling pretty frisky.
For Strong John Honeger, that translated into preparing to beat the fuck out of some Volvo-driving faggot who’d made the mistake of stopping by for a six-pack. Strong John was a burly, brainless homeboy in a black leather jacket and a filthy flannel shirt. He was roughly the size of a major household appliance, and he looked mean enough to cause spontaneous incontinence.
The Honegers hailed from a nearby knot of narrow little tarpaper two-story hovels, and were heavy into the “iron and steel” business: the women ironed, and the men stole.
And they owned the Iron Horse by default.
“You callin’ me a liar?” Strong John wanted to know, thick fingers jabbing for emphasis.
“No, I’m sorry, I just…” the stranger blurted. He was well-dressed and had a perfect winter tan, courtesy of some artsy-fartsy tanning booth. Dean snickered. A faggot, pure and simple. Even if he wasn’t, the fact that he denied it irked Strong John to no end.
“So you are a faggot!” Strong John interrupted. His eyes were obsidian marbles pressed into rancid ham. He smelled of tannin and too many Marlboros.
“No! I just…!”
“So, you’re calling me a liar!” He was playing to the crowd something fierce now, milking it for all it was worth. “If there’s one thing I hate more than a faggot, it’s being called a liar,” he added, looming. “And so far you’re two for two.”
The man yammered something unintelligible, trying to be reasonable. Bad plan, Dean thought. Sweat beads popped under the stranger’s baby-blond coif, as if it was just dawning on him how big a lose/lose situation he’d stumbled into.
He looked to Dean and Daryl, desperate for empathy. Daryl flashed him a gap-toothed grin, as Strong John shoved the faggot back onto the bar.
“I’m talkin’ to you!” Strong John said, and he hit him; just a little love-whap to the cheek. To get his attention.
“Eight ball in the side pocket,” Dean said to Daryl, flipping back his ponytail and lining up his shot. Dean didn’t go for that kind of thing, generally speaking. In the tiny world of his own mind he was a lover, not a fighter. But you backed kin, no matter what.
By the door, the jukebox wailed:
“Oooh that smell, can’t you smell that smell?
The smell of death surrounds you…”
Dean took his shot, missed and scratched.
“Haw!” Daryl grinned. “Nice shootin’, thar’, Tex! That’s another twenty you owe me.”
“Yeah, yeah, shit.” Dean spat. He sucked down the rest of his Stroh’s and plunked it on the sill. “Where the fuck is Boonie?” he groused. “Bastard owes me money.”
“How the fuck should I know?” Daryl said. In addition to their other talents, Dean and Strong John had cornered the Iron Horse free-lance pharmaceuticals market, and the Boonster had a thing for Black Beauties.
Dean moved away from the table, deeply interested in distracting Daryl from the deuce. He sauntered off to join Strong John and his prey.
“This guy giving you a hard time, John-John?” Dean asked, trading his pool cue for a handful of baby-blond hair.
“No, I…I just…” the Volvo-fag began.
“I ain’t TALKIN’ to YOU!” Dean growled, bringing the man’s head down hard against the bar. It cracked like a gourd on a cinder block. The man went wobbly-kneed. Dean held him up, fist twisting around his victim’s hair. A bunch of it came out in his hand.
“Hmmph!” Dean scoffed. “Don’t make ‘em like they used to, eh, John-John?” he said. Harassing passersby was more than a hobby with them; it was blood sport.
“I dunno,” Strong John smiled. “I think he likes you.”
Dean grinned; it was like a cue. “Hey,” he said, lifting the man’s face off the bar. “What’s yer name?”
“Nnuuhh…” the man mumbled; bright streamers of blood leaked from his nostrils and lips. “Nuhn-Niles…” he said.
“Niles,” Dean repeated. “Oooh, I like that name. That’s a nice name. So tell me something, Niles,” he said, lethally ingratiating. “Do you like me?”
Niles looked at him with wide-eyed terror, suddenly caught in a lightning-round of Out-Psyche the Psycho. He had a bad feeling that there simply was no right answer.
“Please,” he pleaded, hands up in supplication. “I don’t want any trouble…”
Dean grinned even wider: all teeth, like a dog smiles. “Well, that’s too bad, Niles, ‘cause trouble’s all we got! Knowhaddahmean?”
Dean gave his best dimwit Ernest Goes to Hell grin and twisted Niles’s hair again; there was plenty enough left to bring him down. Niles grabbed at the bar, trying to resist, but the geometry was all wrong. Dean twisted again; Niles’s legs buckled, and down he went. He landed on his knees, facing Dean.
One by one, the other cheese-faced denizens of the Iron Horse craned their necks to watch the show…
…when suddenly the front windows lit up like angry eyes, as something sputtered and roared into the parking lot.
Dean looked at the opaque glass-block front window and smiled; he knew the sound of the Booniemobile by heart. “S’bout fuckin’ time!” he said.
The headlights loomed larger, as the truck drew near without dropping an ounce of momentum. He’s not stopping, Dean realized. He’s not going to stop.
At all…
“What the fuck?” Strong John started.
…and the scorched-raw nose of the Booniemobile smashed through the front wall, bulldozing the jukebox in a wave of glass and shrapnel debris, killing Skynyrd twice in a lifetime as it plowed on toward the bar.
Before Dean could so much as say duck, the truck drove a corroded mutant wedge into him, pinning him to the bar like a bug in a science project. He thrashed and shrieked in frequencies only dogs could hear. Niles the Volvo Faggot was thrown to the side, came up staggering, fleeing as one of the barrels flew off the back, propelled by the force of impact like an enormous steel spitwad. It hurtled down and clipped Strong John off at the knees even as another catapulted into the back wall like a cannonball and exploded, raining toxin down on everything and everyone in sight.
Dean looked up, still pinned and shrieking, and saw the cab door open. He watched, still shrieking, as a shape emerged that made no sense at all.
He realized, still shrieking, that it was the Boonster, come to pay up at last.
Boonie took one look at Dean and laughed like crazy.
Then he let him in on the joke.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Just when he thought he couldn’t stand any more, Gary stumbled across an open line.
For a second, it utterly threw him. After over twenty minutes of pacing studio B, fruitlessly picking up and slamming down the receiver, he suddenly found himself standing there listening to the first ring.
“Yes,” he said, allowing himself the teeniest smile-crinkle at one corner of his mouth.
By the second ring, the crinkle was gone.
By the fourth ring, Gary was carefully regulating his breathing. Calm down, calm down was the unspoken message. There was no point, no percentage in panic. The fact was that they could be out and still be in no trouble at all. Despite the phone lines. Despite the very bad feeling in his gut.
But by the eighth ring, there was no getting around that feeling, that very bad feeling that something was wrong. He listened to the brrrrrrng of ring number nine, knew that ten was the logical cutoff point, listened to the silence that followed the ring and knew there was no way in hell that he could hang up the phone until Gwen’s voice was on it, speaking to him, letting him know that nothing was wrong, it was okay for him to stick around a bit, ride out this little burst of public hysteria and keep the bosses happy, secure in the knowledge that she was fine and all was right with the world.
The Bridge Page 23
