by Chris Miller
Another laugh barked past her lips, more absurd than the first. Then another. They continued to slip past her throat and out her mouth, despite her mind’s efforts to stop them. She couldn’t stop them. Before her, even now, was a depraved and evil man, intending her perhaps the worst harm a man can inflict on a woman. But in spite of this, she couldn’t stop laughing at him. Was he truly so ignorant as to believe the anatomy between races was actually different? And even if he was, was he so delusional as to believe that the pitiful little member choking in his hand—withering, she saw, even as she laughed—was capable of filling anything larger than an ant hole?
This thought brought fresh howls of laughter rolling up from deep in her belly. She was laughing so hard, in fact, that she actually grabbed her side as she slipped over to her left, propping on her elbow. The guffaws were deep, almost like screams, she realized. But they just kept coming, and no amount of willpower was going to stop them.
Through tears she could see the confused awe on the man’s face transforming into quivering anger. His cheeks flushed red high on his face, his forehead turning to a nasty shade of purple. This almost sent her into a fresh fit of screaming laughter, and she looked away from him in an effort to keep it at bay. The whole thing was so absurd as to border on madness, but she liked this feeling more than she cared for the desperate fear that still lurked just beneath the surface of her laughter.
She caught a glimpse of the other man, the one who she’d seen with Denarius and the stranger. He’d been sitting in the pew, crying from what she could tell, but now he was staring at her, his hands still forming a cradle before his face. But he wasn’t crying now. The look he gave was very similar to the confused astonishment the bad man had expressed when her mad laughing fit had begun.
Something struck the side of her face. Pain exploded through her head and her eye, and she tasted blood a second before she saw strings of it slinging to the floor from her lips. All the levity of the moment was gone in an instant, and the crushing weight of anguish and terror filled the vacuum expertly and instantaneously.
“You shut your fuckin’ whore mouth, bitch!” the man growled. “You think this is a goddamn joke?”
She held her face with one hand as she pushed herself off her side and slid upright. The trembling was back and her breathing was coming in shallow gasps. She saw his penis again, flaccid and even smaller than before, peeking out from his underwear. But it wasn’t funny this time. All the humor had been sucked out of the situation, horrifying sanity crushing it under the clarity of indifferent reality.
He was going to hurt her. Hurt her bad. She didn’t think he would kill her, not intentionally, anyway. She’d been brought here for a reason by one of those . . . things. No, other plans were in store for her. But it didn’t mean something worse wasn’t in store for her at the hands of this filthy piece of refuse. And God only knew what he intended for her boy.
“You gonna pull that black cunt out or am I gonna have to start diggin’ for it?” he asked, his tone dripping with vile intent.
“P-please, suh,” she started, swallowing hard in an effort to keep her voice steady, “not in front of my boy. Please. He’s only a—”
Another slap across her face and her hands instinctively covered her belly.
That was when something clicked in her mind. She’d been struggling all morning since the knock on her head to get her mind straight. She couldn’t even remember her husband’s name for a time, so it was no wonder she’d forgotten this other thing. A fresh level of sickness seemed to ooze over her body at the realization and she looked down to the hands covering her stomach and the precious cargo within.
“Oh, my God . . . ” she whispered as it all came back to her.
Denarius doesn’t even know, she thought as her eyes glanced, fearful and wide, back at the man who was reaching out for her. Oh, Jesus, Denarius doesn’t even know yet!
His hands grabbed the front of her dress, his fists filled with fabric, and he began hauling her toward him. Martin began screaming again. Marlena was faintly aware that she was screaming again, as well. Terror flooded every pore of her body and oozed out like a viscous gel, coating her entire being. As she struggled with the man, she caught a glimpse of his feral eyes, the dark stumps in his mouth, and his bobbing cock.
It wasn’t flaccid anymore.
“No!” she screamed as he pulled her under him and began ripping at her dress, her undergarments, her thighs. “No! No! NO!”
There was a wet thump, and she felt it reverberate through the man’s body and into hers. Her screaming had stopped. Martin’s had stopped. The wheezing growls from the man on top of her had stopped. She looked at him then, his face settling back into a kissing cousin of the one from earlier which had displayed confused awe while she had laughed. But this one was slightly different. His eyes, for one thing. They were blinking rapidly, a tear caught in the corner of each. His mouth also was different. Where before it had been hung in slack-jawed wonder, now it formed a sort of oh. Drool began to collect near the bottom, preparing to spill over his lips, as one of his hands released its grip on her clothes and began to move toward the back of his head.
It never made it there.
There was another wet thump, this one underscored with a sickening crunch of bone, and the man’s body jolted again. Then his eyes were rolling up in his head and he was slumping to the side. He hit the corner of the top stair hard with his temple and began rolling listlessly down to the floor below.
Marlena’s eyes flitted several times, riveted in place on the man, then they looked up. The second man was standing there, breathing hard, his face a display of horror and confusion. In his hands, beneath white knuckles, was a large, bronze candle holder. Blood dripped from the thick base.
“Oh, my God,” the man said quietly. “Oh, my God. Oh, shit!”
Marlena was already on the move. She got to her feet and snatched the candle holder from the man’s hands. He didn’t protest or fight her, but continued standing there, staring off into space, repeating the same words over and over again.
“Oh, my God . . . ”
Marlena leaped down the stairs and, without thought, began to pummel the dying man’s head with the weapon. The sounds were wet, sucking, sloshing, crunching. She wailed on. She wasn’t aware that she’d been issuing a sort of growling scream until her son’s voice finally cut through and caused her to stop, looking at him, her face speckled with blood.
“You got him, mama,” he said in a soft voice. “You got the bad man.”
She looked back at the candle holder in her hand, dripping with gore and blood, and she released her grip on it at once, sending it clanging to the floor beside the corpse. Her hands trembled as she stared at them while she turned in a slow circle. Martin came to her, and she embraced him as he buried his face in her stomach, crying softly.
A hand on her shoulder caused her to jump and turn with a scream. It was the second man. The one who had just saved her. His face was concerned and frightened, but there also seemed to have purpose there.
Her lips trembled.
“Th-thank you, suh,” she whispered. It was all she could say.
He nodded, running a hand through greasy hair and putting his hat back on as he looked about the room.
“We, uh . . . ” he began, seeming to search for words. “We gotta be getting you folks somewhere’s safe. And I gotta get my family somewhere’s safe t—”
There was an explosive boom just outside the door to the church. She realized she’d been hearing voices drifting through the door, but was only now registering their presence. She glanced to the door and then back at the man who’d saved her. His face was awash with alarm. Somewhere outside, the distant roar of an abomination bellowed in the streets.
“What’s happening?” Marlena managed to ask in a tremulous tone.
The man blinked a few times, still staring at the door. She could hear more muffled voices outside. Finally, the man turned to her.
“Oh, shi—”
The door blew apart.
29
Quentin was sprinting through the street in a mad rush for the church when Dee blew the door open. His feet sucked and sloshed and splashed as he went, the rain pelting his skin like chilled needles.
Almost there! his mind howled crazily at him. Dreary will be too pleased to kill me now!
Dee was tossing the shotgun he’d snatched from the woman from much too far away, and while this trick of physics confounded Quentin, it paled in comparison to the abominations he’d seen skittering through town and ripping Avery apart.
Slosh-suck-slosh.
Dee snatched both his revolvers from his hips, thumbed back the hammers at either side of his shoulders as he started to march through the ragged cavity where the door had been a moment before, the black man stumbling slack-jawed and shocked behind him.
Slosh-suck-slosh-splat.
He was off the muddy street now, running across sodden grass. His feet threatened to slip from beneath him twice before he managed the proper footing, and soon he was barreling away again at full speed. His breathing was deep and harsh, snot bubbling from his nostrils and sucking back in with every heave. He was running up an incline, no more than thirty yards from the church now, and Dee was almost inside.
Just a little closer and I’ll be in range, he thought, and pressed on.
Twenty yards. Fifteen. He knew he could drop to one knee and likely have a perfect shot. Neither Dee nor the black fella had noticed him coming yet, and for that he was thankful. What he’d seen the gunslinger do in the alley next to the jail and with taking the shotgun from the woman was not something he had any desire to face head on. A nice bullet through the back would do just fine and he wouldn’t lose a second’s sleep over it, either. Dreary would be satisfied and he could reap whatever spoils this damned little town had to offer as he would any other time.
A shot cracked through the air to his left, echoing through the sheets of rain twice before being swallowed by the wood and mud. He instinctively dropped to his knees and slid several feet, his arms windmilling about to maintain his balance. When finally he slid to a rest, his wide eyes took in a sight he almost couldn’t believe.
Blood was spraying on the tattered frame of the door to the church and Dee was growling something incomprehensible, first thudding hard into the crimson-soaked frame, then stumbling beyond its threshold into the darker interior of the pagan temple. Quentin could now see an angry and spurting wound high on the gunslinger’s shoulder, and the man’s wide eyes were darting around, finally landing on Quentin.
Then, without grace or ceremony, Dee fell first to his knees, then to his face with an audible thunk inside the church.
Quentin’s face was splitting into an awestruck smile that he wasn’t even aware of when he looked back down the connecting street the shot had come from. Far down the lane he saw Dreary and Bonham stepping from behind a stack of boxes and barrels, the repeater in Bonham’s hands still smoking in spite of the pelting rain cooling the hot iron. He started to raise his hand, to call out to them, when the wall of the building next to them blew apart as though a pair of dynamite sticks had just gone off. Wood and glass flew in all directions, and Dreary and Bonham were ducking and covering their heads, starting to turn toward the destruction. Dreary hit the mud and rolled away, while Bonham turned head on, raising the rifle.
One of the abominations came clambering through the destruction, tentacles and legs spread high and wide, a vicious, screaming roar issuing from the gory wound that served as its mouth. Even from this distance, Quentin could make out the angry red eye protruding from the skin of the poor bastard housing the awful thing. And . . . was the person moving?
Yes. Somehow, the host was still living, though in an apparent torment that seemed to echo the laments of the damned in Hell.
Bonham’s repeater spit flames and boomed. The abomination twisted with the impact, a chunk of flesh tossed into the air, but on it came. One of its terrible legs seemed to have been wounded by the shot, as it seemed to skitter more lazily than the others. Bonham was sending another round home with the lever, resetting his aim. Dreary was to his feet now, and rushing toward the church, his tiny Bull Dog in hand. Another boom erupted from Bonham’s repeater and crimson gel exploded from the terrible red eye of the abomination, a shriek accompanying it that froze Quentin’s blood. The thing’s spidery legs whipped in the air wildly as Bonham seemed to calmly load a fresh round into the chamber. Dreary was getting closer, not slowing at all.
The third shot seemed to end the thing’s efforts, but not before one of the wild, thrashing legs hit Bonham across the chest and sent him sailing across the street, a spurt of blood visible for half a second before he splashed hard in the mud. Then the thing fell to one side and was still.
Quentin realized he was holding his breath, and a shuddering gasp escaped him as he resumed breathing. He was starting to get to his feet, one foot planted, about to rise to both, when three more abominations rounded the corner onto the street behind Dreary and beyond Bonham, a host of screaming people following behind them. Guns and pitchforks were visible, the rabbling voices little more than an angry drone.
Time to move! Quentin thought and stood to his feet.
The world flashed brightly for a moment and then Quentin had the sensation that he was spinning, not unlike a top. White-hot pain started to spread across his face and around the back of his skull as the white light began to dim scarlet.
He was aware that his face was submerged in a muddy puddle, as he could feel the cool water over his face, his breaths bubbling from below. But he could see. It was a sickening feeling, this sight. It was as though he were on a ship, rocking in an angry sea, tossing at the verge of capsizing.
And through it all, he saw the black man slipping into the church, a smoking revolver in his hand.
30
“Denarius!” a woman’s voice cried, and he instantly recognized it. He turned from the door, barely able to open his arms before both his wife and son were embracing him in tears. His throat seemed to close as he folded his arms around his family, and his eyes stung.
“Where are we, daddy?” Martin asked from somewhere near Denarius’s spleen. “What is this place?”
“Shush, now,” Denarius reassured his son. “Daddy’s here. It’s gonna be okay. Now, we have to help this ma—”
A man emerged from the shadows deeper in the church, moving slowly. Denarius tensed as he recognized the man, the same one they’d taken from the ridge when they first arrived in town. In a nervous motion, he swept his family behind him and raised Mr. James’s Magnum. The barrel trembled before him.
“That’s far enough!” he spat. “You just stay right there!”
“Denarius!” Marlena exclaimed, reaching from behind him and putting a hand on his forearm. “This man helped me. He saved me.”
Denarius turned to her, confusion awash on his face. The man had done as Denarius had asked, and stood away from them, hands easily raised to either side. He said nothing.
“The other man, up there,” Marlena said, moving her hand from his forearm to point toward the front of the sanctuary near the hulking, black altar. “He tried to . . . to . . . ”
She couldn’t finish. Her words became choked and her pointing hand returned to her and covered her mouth as tears spilled over her cheeks. It was only then he noticed the speckling of blood all over her face and clothes, the tears in her clothing.
Though she could not finish, Denarius didn’t need her to. Realization crashed down on him and he was filled with grief and fury in equal doses. He looked past the man to the front and saw the dark outline of another man on the floor, the dim evidence of gore winking in the gloomy light.
The rain dancing on the roof was loud, creating an almost hypnotic drone in the large room. Denarius glanced from the dead man to the one standing before him with his arms raised. Denarius lowered the gun and nodded at him.
“I than
k you for assisting my wife,” he said as evenly as he could.
The man nodded back cautiously, slowly lowering his hands.
A groan from behind them snapped Denarius out of his near trance. He turned from his family and the man who’d saved them and saw Mr. James on the floor, a pool of blood collected around him. He was trying to raise himself from the floor, but was having little success.
“The marker,” James moaned in a pained whisper. “Have to . . . before Dreary . . . ”
Then his head collapsed back into the pool of blood and he lay still, save for the rise and fall of his back as he breathed.
“We gotta help this man,” Denarius said, moving toward him and dropping to one knee. “He saved my life in the woods, and he helped me get to you both.”
Marlena was at his side in an instant, tearing off a length of cloth from the bottom of her dress. Denarius rolled James over to get a better look at the wound.
It wasn’t good, but it could have been worse. A couple of inches lower and to the right and it would have been through his lungs. As it was, it seemed to be no more than a nasty flesh wound. It could fester, he knew, but aside from a great deal of pain and some limited mobility in the arm for a time, he thought James would be fine. So long as infection didn’t set in. The bullet seemed to have gone straight through.
