Karl met two rubes head on, a gray shell of a man with sagging skin and a woman with a single clump of white hair trailing down the side of her head like a crooked tail. The gray man took a swing at him with a jagged piece of aluminum siding—it looked to have been ripped off a wall with bare hands. Karl deflected it with his forearm and brought his knife down against the man’s shoulder. The woman seized the opening and swung a metal pipe at his leg, hitting him on the thigh. Karl grunted in pain, and the leg buckled. The gray man, blade buried to the hilt in his shoulder, brought the piece of siding up and swung it at Karl’s head. Karl grabbed his wrist and twisted the arm, and the siding fell harmlessly at his feet. The woman took another swing with the pipe, but Karl stepped back. She missed, and the pipe came all the way around and hit the gray man in the stomach. He doubled over, blood oozing from the shoulder wound, and Karl brought a knee up into his face. He crumpled.
David watched all of this with paralyzing sickness. Only when he heard Annabelle gasp did he realized that more rubes were coming at them from the sides, eyes fixed not on Cakey or Karl but on the others. David was facing south, Gooty north, Annabelle caught in the middle. David saw toothless mouths and rolling, glassy eyes closing in, clubs raised to strike. He scarcely had time to react before they were upon him. An old man with a scraggly beard swinging a broken fence post. David ducked the first blow but took a hard hit on the arm with the second. He instinctively grabbed the post with his free hand, but the rube yanked it loose. Splinters tore into his palm and fingers.
David unleashed a scream that seemed to well up from his intestines. The old rube hesitated, a look of uncertainty flickering across his face. David lunged at him, and the burning in his guts gave him peculiar strength. He brought the knife up. The old rube tried to deflect it with his forearm, but it pierced through flesh and muscle and kept going right up into hollow of his throat. The blade sank in deep, and so great was the force of the blow that it propelled the rube backward. He slid off the blade, gushing dark blood, slammed into the rubes behind him, and they all fell together in a hooting, snarling mass.
More rubes closed in. Telly was short enough that they tended to overlook him, and he used this to his advantage, busting kneecaps with the lead weight on the end of his crude shillelagh. Rubes went down in heaps, broken legs unable to bear their weight. When a cackling woman managed to grab hold of him and lift him off the ground, gnashing broken teeth and drawing him in for a bite, he brought the shillelagh up into her chin, breaking her jaw, ejecting teeth from her mouth and knocking her unconscious, all in one fell swoop.
“Get away from the building,” Telly said, pulling himself out of the woman’s failing grasp.
David saw a flicker of flame and understood the reason for the request. A couple of rubes were setting fire to the plywood over the windows. Telly stooped, picked up a loose bit of asphalt and threw it at them, hitting one of the rubes in the shoulder. They glanced at him, sneered and quickly ducked back out of sight. But the plywood was old and dry, and the fire spread quickly. Karl and Cakey began forcing the rubes back, trying to move off the sidewalk away from the flames. Karl grabbed a wounded rube by the neck and flung him backward, forcing the crowd to part. Cakey came in low, swinging his knife left and right, slashing at torsos and legs.
David heard Annabelle whimper and spun around, oblivious to the rubes closing in behind him. Gooty and Belle were locked in a desperate struggle with a rube whose scabs covered almost the entirety of his head. He had a fistful of Annabelle’s hair on one hand, a club in the other. He kept swinging the club at her, and each time, Gooty attempted to intercede. Gooty had managed to stab and slash the rube’s arm multiple times until the flesh hung down in ribbons, but the rube did not seem to care. Annabelle had an ugly welt on one cheek, a series of them across her forearms, and she had dropped her knapsack in the gutter.
“Oh, you filthy rube,” David shouted, and the voice that came out of him sounded like tortured words gurgling up from a pool of acid.
He launched himself in their direction, shouldered Gooty out of his way and slammed into the rube, driving him back. The rube brought his club down on David’s shoulder, but that only made him angrier, crazier. A red veil had dropped over the world. David drove the knife in and up, cutting through rags and flesh and muscle and guts. At the same time, he slammed his forehead into the rube’s face, pulverizing his nose. When the rube fell, David screamed in fury, blood and greasepaint mingling on his face, running pink into his eyes, and went after the next one.
But then another explosion rocked the city, the ground shook, and a black cloud of debris burst into the sky not a block away. Bricks and wood and bits of metal fell down among them. David felt something rather large hit him in the side of the head. It hurt, but it did not penetrate the veil of madness. In front of him, a chunk of a brick buried itself in the temple of a rube. Above them, windows shattered. He was aware that Annabelle had fallen, and he stooped to help her. But another cluster of rubes rushed at him. He loosed his grip on her hand and rushed to meet them. Something about him, perhaps the gruesome pinkish slime sliding down his face or the madness in his eyes, or the guttural noise escaping from his throat, reached through the sickness, and the rubes drew up short. Then one, a younger man, scarcely more than a boy, dropped the tree branch in his hand, turned and fled. The others seemed to consider this, and they dropped their weapons, as well, and joined him.
David spun in another direction, looking for someone, anyone, needing to fight. He saw Gooty behind him, trying to drive back a rube who wielded clubs of splintered wood in either hand. David noted a fresh bloody gash on Gooty’s arm. Gooty stepped forward and swung his knife, and the tip of the blade caught the rube just above the right eye, parting skin like paper. At the same time, the rube brought down both clubs. One missed, but the other caught Gooty on top of the head. Gooty’s whole body convulsed, and he collapsed on the sidewalk. Annabelle rushed to his side. David leapt over Gooty and Belle, brought his knife down and drove it into the rube’s face, hitting him right between the eyes. He felt it crunch through flesh and bone, heard the death rattle escape the rube’s throat. They landed on the sidewalk and tumbled, but David quickly recovered, worked the knife free and hopped to his feet.
Karl, Gooty and Telly had managed to clear a path all the way to the middle of the road. Behind them, bodies lay here and there, some stacked on top of each other. David had a sudden troubling flashback to the stacks of burned bodies on the road, to a time before he’d gone crazy. It almost broke through the veil, almost. Telly took a swing at a rube, and the duct tape on the end of his shillelagh finally ripped. The lead weight broke free, sailed up and over the rube and landed somewhere in the mob behind him. The rube laughed, snatched the stick away from him and made as if to hit him with it. But Telly brought up the pistol and fired, one clean shot, and the rube, still grinning, fell, pouring blood from his eye.
David felt heat on the back of his neck and, turning, saw that the fire had spread all the way across the front of the building. He helped Annabelle drag an unconscious Gooty out into the street. Telly saw them and came over to help.
“Is he dead?” Telly asked.
“Don’t think so,” Annabelle said. “Hope not.”
Telly glanced at David and did a double take. “My God, kid, look at you,” he said.
David ran a hand down his face and felt a layer of vile, bloody slime come away on his fingers. He wiped it off on his clown suit and turned to face the rubes. But most of the survivors had fled. Cakey and a particularly large rube were locked in a violent embrace, each snapping teeth at each other, the rube trying to take the rifle off his shoulder. Karl had another in a head lock. A few more remained but at a distance, watching the fight, reluctant to enter. Karl’s opponent finally passed out, and Karl picked him up, lifted him over his head and threw him across the street. Cakey’s rube took a knife to the belly and went down howling. And when his howls finally died out, the fight was over. The l
ast of the surviving rubes turned and ran.
Bodies littered the street all around them, fire burned on either side, black smoke rose like curtains, and the howls of the rubes faded into the distance. David’s knees buckled, and he collapsed to the cold concrete.
Chapter Nineteen
A Deeper Level of Bad
“Those explosions,” Telly said, when another one rocked the city, a plume of smoke rising in the distance. “Are they setting off bombs or what?”
“Mortar rounds, maybe?” Cakey said. “Missiles? Swamp gas?”
“Who in the hell would be firing mortar rounds or missiles into the city?”
“Maybe Peavey and his guards are firing them at the sick,” Karl said. “Maybe all the locals were fleeing north because they’ve got some kind of armory up there.”
“We’ve got to get out of this place, folks,” Telly said. “East to the gate. Is Gooty gonna make it?”
Annabelle had laid him down on the street and was examining the top of his head, digging through blood and hair to find the wound.
“It looks nasty,” she said. “He’s breathing, though. He’s alive. We’re not going to leave him.”
“I never said we were gonna leave him,” Telly said. “Karl, can you carry our dear friend? Anyone else injured?”
Karl squatted down next to a dead rube, wiped the gore off his blade on the rube’s burlap shirt, then tucked the knife under his belt. Then he duck-walked over to Gooty, slid one hand under his shoulders, the other under his knees and picked him up the way one might pick up a sleeping child. He rose, grimacing in pain.
“Any other serious injuries?” Telly said. “Cakey?”
“Fine,” Cakey said. He grabbed the flat of his blade just above the hilt, pinching it between thumb and forefinger and squeegeed the blood off. “Few bruises, mayhap, but I got the better of them, by far.”
“Annabelle?”
She pointed to the long, red welt on one cheek, then lifted up her arms to show the crisscrossing welts running from elbow to wrist. “That’s the worst of it for me,” she said.
“Karl?”
Karl lifted Gooty slightly, raising his arms so they could see the long bloody cut on his left forearm. It ran from his wrist almost all the way to his elbow, and, though it didn’t look deep, blood ran down his arm and dripped off his elbow.
“Rube cut me with a piece of siding,” he said. “Can you believe it?”
“That might need stitches,” Telly said, gesturing at Annabelle.
“Well, the first aid kit is in the trailer,” she replied. “So it’ll have to wait.”
“I’m fine,” Karl said, though the pained look on his face said otherwise.
“There might not be a trailer anymore,” Cakey said. “Good chance the rubes burned it. One more thing they owe us.”
“I think these poor fools paid us back in spades,” Telly said, gesturing to bodies strewn around them. “David, you okay?”
David shrugged. He wasn’t aware of any pain, but his whole body still felt like it was full of poison. He wanted to run at the retreating rubes and tear them apart. He was not okay. He looked at the bloody knife in his hand, at his fingers coated in red-white slime.
“Poor kid,” Telly said, shaking his head. “Someone get him a towel or something, so he can wipe off his face.”
Cakey sliced a corner off a rube’s shirt and tossed it at David. David snatched it out of the air, closed his eyes and wiped his face. He kept wiping until the bit of cloth was a useless mound of goo. Then he dropped it at his feet. His face still felt moist and disgusting.
“It’s a bit of an improvement,” Telly said. “Mostly you just smeared it all around. We gotta find you some soap and water once we get out of here. You look ghoulish. Come on, folks. Let’s find that east gate.”
Telly led them south, toward the intersection with the broad street. Annabelle walked back to the gutter to retrieve the knapsack that contained their last few possessions, then hurried to catch up. David wanted to unsee the dead, the bloody, slashed bodies, the sad spectacle scattered on the road. How many had he killed? He didn’t remember. The whole fight was a red blur in his mind, sick faces rushing at him, blades flashing, the feel of flesh splitting open, hot blood splashing his face. Suddenly, he was close to tears. He dropped to the back of the group, so nobody would notice, but Annabelle looked back at him.
“Stay close, David,” she said.
He nodded and hoped none of what he was feeling showed. They came to the intersection—a crooked street sign, barely legible, named the streets as Rollston and Dickson—and took a left onto Dickson, the same broad street they had travelled down after fleeing the nightclub. More shops, old restaurants and what might have been a church building—the steeple collapsed onto the sidewalk in front of the door—stretched out before them. Distantly, in the east and beyond the buildings, the landscape sloped upward, the entire hillside cast in the angry orange-red glow of the many fires. David could still hear the howling of the rubes, but they were far off and to his left now.
They found more bodies on Dickson Street, some in the middle of the road, some on the sidewalk or hanging out of windows or crumpled in doorways. Sick people, mostly, but also a few locals, stragglers who had not escaped the invaders in time. David saw men and women dressed in nightgowns and t-shirts, sprawled in pools of blood, beaten, stabbed and burned. Annabelle stopped to check one of the bodies, feeling at the wrist for a pulse, until Telly urged her on.
“We can’t help them,” Telly said.
“It’s rube versus rube,” Cakey called back. “Don’t pick sides. Remember, both sides have tried to kill us.”
Annabelle lowered the dead woman’s hand onto her stomach, patting her on the forehead and hurried to catch up. Only afterward did David realize he recognized her—Mrs. Clenold of the bottled beer, the broad, shiny face, and the dull gaze.
“I was checking to see if she’s alive,” she said to David, low enough that the others wouldn’t overhear. “I won’t become a brute. I won’t.”
David didn’t know what to say to this. Whether she meant it to or not, it felt like an indictment. A brute, indeed, is what he had become tonight.
They were passing the crumbled church building when he heard a high whistle overhead. Something streaked past them, a white smoky comet, and hit a building just off to their left. The corner exploded in smoke and fury, casting debris out into the street. Cakey covered his head and ducked down. Karl turned, shielding the body of Gooty with his own. David watched numbly as bits of brick and wood and gravel rained down upon them and bounced in the street like heavy rain.
“Someone tell Peavey his aim is bad,” Telly said, removing his hat and shaking the dust off. “The sick rubes are farther north.”
“I’m sure he’d like to hit us as much as he’d like to hit them,” Karl said.
“Everyone okay?”
“Just more bumps and scratches,” Cakey said. “I’m sorta getting used to them.”
“I’m not,” Annabelle said, picking a coin-sized bit of wood out of her hair.
They continued east down Dickson, clambering over the brand new pile of smoking wreckage. The broken bricks and charred wood were almost unbearably hot against David’s hands, the acrid stench of it stinging his eyes and nose. He tried to pull the collar of his clown suit up over his nose, as he had once done down in the vile basement of the nightclub, but the collar of the too-large suit wouldn’t stay in place. It kept slipping off.
They were just past the destroyed building, started up the slope, when Gooty groaned loudly and thrashed in Karl’s arms.
“Gooty’s waking up,” Karl said.
Gooty opened his eyes, lifted his head and looked around, then took a deep, shaky breath and let his head fall back against Karl’s arm.
“Just take it easy, Goot,” Karl said. “You ain’t dead yet. We’re on our way out of the city.”
Duele la cabeza,” Gooty mumbled. “Donde está Josefina?”
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Karl and Cakey traded a look. “You’re talking crazy there, buddy,” Karl said. “Just close your eyes and rest. I got you.”
Gooty grunted and closed his eyes.
Ahead, David saw a glint of chrome. As they drew near, he realized it was one of the local cars, tipped on its side, the driver’s door folded all the way against the front wheel and flames spewing out of a gash near the hood. A body lay on the street nearby, an old man in a red smoking jacket and linen pants, his face a mess of blood and burns. As they passed the body, they saw bloody footprints heading away from the body to the north. And while David was contemplating the fate of this poor soul, he heard another whistle and, looking up, saw a streak of white arc over their heads and hit the road fifty yards in front of them. The explosion ate through asphalt and the dirt underneath. David covered his head as it rained down on them.
And then they heard the city alarm, as if it had awakened from a long slumber, rising up and up, piercing the night. But, no, he realized this alarm was different, a higher pitch, a harsher tone. It was hard to tell which direction it was coming from. It seemed to echo off the buildings in all directions. Telly called them to a halt and held a hand to his ear.
“What is that?” he said, turning and scanning the city behind them.
“Does it matter?” Karl said. “Let’s go.”
“A deeper level of bad,” Cakey said. “That’s what it is, I’ll warrant.”
David turned and looked behind them. They were on a slope heading to higher ground, the city of Fayette spread out behind and below them, a landscape speckled here and there with fires, some of them burning brightly, others reduced to glowing embers. He thought he saw movement to the north, the last of the torches closing in on the last part of the city yet to burn. And then he turned to the south and saw brighter lights and what appeared to be a river of gray shapes. These lights burned harsh and white, sweeping back and forth as they moved into the ruined area just past the southern gate.
Shadows of Tockland Page 25
