They Thirst

by Robert R. McCammon

  “We did a bad thing,” Papa murmured. “Me, your uncle Josef, all the men from Krajeck. We shouldn’t have climbed into the mountains…”

  Mama gasped, but the boy couldn’t turn his head to look at her.

  “…because we were wrong. All of us, wrong. It’s not what we thought it was…”

  Mama moaned like a trapped animal.

  “…you see?” And Papa smiled, his back to the flames now, his white face piercing the shadows. His grip tightened on his son’s shoulder, and he suddenly shivered as if a north wind had roared through his soul. Mama was sobbing, and the boy wanted to turn to her and find out what was wrong, but he couldn’t move, couldn’t make his head turn or his eyes blink. Papa smiled and said, “My good little boy. My good little André…” And he bent down toward his son.

  But in the next instant the man’s head twisted up, his eyes filled with bursts of silver. “DON’T DO THAT!” he shrieked. And in that instant the boy cried out and pulled away from his father, and then he saw that Mama had the shotgun cradled in her shaking arms, and her mouth was wide open and she was screaming, and even as the boy ran for her, she squeezed both triggers.

  The shots whistled high over the boy, striking the man in the face and throat. Papa screamed—a resounding scream of rage—and was flung backward to the floor where he lay with his face in shadow and his boots in red embers.

  Mama dropped the shotgun, the strangled sobbing in her throat turning to stutters of mad laughter. The recoil had nearly broken her right arm, and she had fallen back against the door, her eyes swimming with tears. The boy stopped, his heart madly hammering. The smell of gunpowder was rank in his nostrils as he stared at the crazed woman who’d just shot down his father—saw her face contorting, lips bubbling with spittle, eyes darting from shadow to shadow.

  And then a slow, scraping noise from the other side of the room.

  The boy spun around to look.

  Papa was rising to his feet. Half of his face was gone, leaving his chin and jaw and nose hanging by white, bloodless strings. The remaining teeth glittered with light, and the single pulped eye hung on one thick vein across the ruined cavern where the cheekbone had been. White nerves and torn muscles twitched in the hole of the throat. The man staggered up, crouched with his huge hands twisted into claws. When he tried to grin, only one side of the mouth remained to curve grotesquely upward.

  And in that instant both boy and woman saw that he did not bleed.

  “Szornyeteg!” Mama screamed, her back pressed against the door. The word ripped through the boy’s mind, tearing away huge chunks that left him as mute and frozen as a scarecrow in winter. Monster, she’d screamed. Monster.

  “Oh, nooooooo,” the hideous face whispered. And the thing shambled forward, claws twitching in hungry expectation. “Not so easily, my precious wife…”

  She gripped her son’s arm, then turned and unbolted the door. He was almost upon them when a wall of wind and snow screamed into the house; he staggered back a step, one hand over his eye. The woman wrenched the boy out after her into the night. Snow clutched at their legs and tried to hold them. “Run!” Mama cried out over the roar of the wind. “We’ve got to run!” She tightened her grip on his wrist until her fingers melded to his bones, and they fought onward through whiplash strikes of snow.

  Somewhere in the night, a woman screamed, her voice high-pitched and terrified. Then a man’s voice, babbling for mercy. The boy looked back over his shoulder as he ran, back at the huddled houses of Krajeck. He could see nothing through the storm. But mingled with the hundred voices of the wind, he thought he could hear a chorus of hideous screams. Somewhere a ragged cacophony of laughter seemed to build and build until it drowned out the cries for God and mercy. He caught a glimpse of his house, receding into the distance now. Saw the dim red light spilling across the threshold like a final dying ember of the fire he’d so carefully tended. Saw the hulking half-blinded figure stumble out of the doorway and heard the bellow of rage from that mangled, bloodless throat—“I’LL FIND YOU!” And then Mama jerked him forward, and he almost tripped, but she pulled him up, urging him to run. Wind screamed into their faces, and already Mama’s black hair was white with a coating of snow, as if she’d aged in a matter of minutes, or gone mad like some lunatic in an asylum who sees nightmares as grinning, shadowless realities.

  A figure suddenly emerged from the midst of a stand of snow-heavy pines, frail and thin and as white as lake ice. The hair whipped around in the wind; the rags of its worm-eaten clothes billowed. The figure stood at the top of a snow mound, waiting for them, and before Mama saw it, it had stepped into their path, grinning a little boy’s grin and holding out a hand sculpted like ice.

  “I’m cold,” Ivon Griska whispered, still grinning. “I have to find my way home.”

  Mama stopped, screamed, thrust out a hand before her. For an instant the boy was held by Ivon Griska’s gaze, and in his mind he heard the echo of a whisper. Won’t you be my playmate, André? And he’d almost replied, Yes, oh yes, when Mama shouted something that was carried away by the wind. She jerked him after her, and he looked back with chilled regret. Ivon had forgotten about them now and began walking slowly through the snow toward Krajeck.

  After a while, Mama could go no further. She shuddered and fell into the snow. She was sick then, and the boy crawled away from the steaming puddle and stared back through waving pines toward home. His face was seared by the cold, and he wondered if Papa was going to be all right. Mama had no reason to hurt him like that. She was a bad woman to hurt his father who loved them both so dearly. “Papa!” he called into the distance, hearing only the wind reply in frozen mockery of a human voice. His eyelashes were heavy with snow. “Papa!” His small, tired voice cracked. But then Mama struggled to her feet, pulling him up again even though he tried to fight her and break free of her grip. She shook him violently, ice tracks lacing her face like white embroidery, and shouted, “He’s dead! Don’t you understand that? We’ve got to run, André, and we’ve got to keep on running!” And as she said that, the boy knew she was insane. Papa Was badly hurt, yes, because she had shot him, but Papa wasn’t dead. Oh, no. He was back there. Waiting.

  And then lights broke the curtain of darkness. Smoke ripped from a chimney. They glimpsed a snow-weighted roof. They raced toward those lights, stumbling, half-frozen. The woman muttered to herself, laughing hysterically and urging the boy on. He fought the fingers of cold that clutched at his throat. Lie down, the wind whispered across the back of his head. Stop right here and sleep. This woman has done a bad thing to your papa, and she may hurt you, too. Lie down right here for a little while and be warm, and in the morning your papa will come for you. Yes. Sleep, little one, and forget.

  A weather-beaten sign creaked wildly back and forth above a heavy door. He saw the whitened traces of words: THE GOOD SHEPHERD INN. Mama hammered madly at the door, shaking the boy at the same time to keep him awake. “Let us in, please let us in!” she shouted, pounding with a numbed fist. The boy stumbled and fell against her, his head lolling to the side.

  When the door burst open, long-armed shadows reached for them. The boy’s knees buckled, and he heard Mama moan as the cold—like the touch of a forbidden, loving stranger—gently kissed him to sleep.

  1

  * * *

  Friday, October 25

  THE CAULDRON

  ONE

  A star-specked night, black as the highway asphalt that bubbled like a cauldron brew beneath the midday sun, now lay thickly over the long dry stretch of Texas 285 between Fort Stockton and Pecos. The darkness, as still and dense as the eye of a hurricane, was caught between the murderous heat of dusk and dawn. In all directions the land, stubbled with thornbrush and pipe-organ cactus, was frying-pan flat. Abandoned hulks of old cars, gnawed down to the bare metal by the sun and occasional dust storms, afforded shelter for the coiled rattlesnakes that could still smell the sun’s terrible track across the earth.

  It was near one
of these hulks—rusted and vandalized, windshield long shattered, engine carried away by some hopeful tinkerer—that a jackrabbit sniffed the ground for water. Smelling distant, buried coolness, the jackrabbit began to dig with its forepaws; in another instant it stopped, nose twitching toward the underside of that car. It tensed, smelling snake. From the darkness came a dozen tiny rattlings, and the rabbit leaped backward. Nothing followed. The rabbit’s instincts told it that a nest had been dug under there, and the noise of the young would bring back the hunting mother. Sniffing the ground for the snake’s trail, the jackrabbit moved away from the car and ran nearer to the highway, crunching grit beneath its paws. It was halfway across the road, moving toward its own nest and young in the distance, when a sudden vibration in the earth froze it. Long ears twitching for a sound, the rabbit turned its head toward the south.

  A gleaming white orb was slowly rising along the highway. The rabbit watched it, transfixed. Sometimes the rabbit would stand atop its dirt-mound burrow and watch the white thing that floated high overhead; sometimes it was larger than this one; sometimes it was yellow; sometimes it wasn’t there at all; sometimes there were tendrils across it, and it left in the air the tantalizing scent of water that never fell. The rabbit was unafraid because it was familiar with that thing in the sky, but the vibration it now felt rippled the flesh along its spine. The orb was growing larger, bringing with it a noise like the growl of thunder. In another instant the rabbit’s eyes were blinded by the white orb; its nerves shot out a danger signal to the brain. The rabbit scurried for safety on the opposite side of the highway, casting a long scrawl of shadow beyond it.

  The jackrabbit was perhaps three feet away from a protective clump of thornbrush when the night-black Harley-Davidson 1200cc “chopper,” moving at almost eighty miles an hour, swerved across the road and directly over the rabbit’s spine. It squealed, bones splintering, and the small body began to twitch in the throes of death. The huge motorcycle, its shocks barely registering a shudder of quick impact, roared on to the north.

  A few moments later a sidewinder began to undulate toward the rabbit’s cooling carcass.

  And on the motorcycle, enveloped in a cocoon of wind and thunder, the rider stared along the cone of white light his single, high-intensity beam afforded, and with a fractional movement he guided the machine to the center of the road. His black-gloved fist throttled upward; the machine growled like a well-fed panther and kicked forward until the speedometer’s needle hung at just below ninety. Behind a battered, black crash helmet with visor lowered, the rider was grinning. He wore a sleek, skin-tight, black leather jacket and faded jeans with leather-patched knees. The jacket was old and scarred, and across the back rose a red Day-Glo king cobra, its hood fully swollen. The paint was flaking off, as if the reptile were shedding its skin. The machine thundered on, parting a wall of silence before it, leaving desert denizens trembling in its wake. A garishly painted sign—blue music notes floating above a pair of tilted, red beer bottles, the whole thing pocked with rust-edged bullet holes—came up on the right. The rider glanced quickly at it, reading JUST AHEAD! THE WATERIN’ HOLE! and below that, FILL ’ER UP, PARDNER! Yeah, he thought. Time to fill up.

  Two minutes later there was the first, faint glimmer of blue neon against the blackness. The rider began to cut his speed; the speedometer’s needle fell quickly to eighty, seventy, sixty. Ahead there was a blue neon sign—THE WAT RIN’ H LE—above the doorway of a low, wooden building with a flat, dusty red roof. Clustered around it like weary wasps around a sun-bleached nest were three cars, a jeep, and a pickup truck with most of its dull blue paint scoured down to the muddy red primer. The motorcycle rider turned into a tumbleweed-strewn parking lot and switched off his engine; immediately the motorcycle’s growl was replaced with Freddy Fender’s nasal voice singing about “wasted days and wasted nights.” The rider put down the kickstand and let the black Harley ease back, like a crouching animal. When he stood up and off the machine, his muscles were as taut as piano wires; the erection between his legs throbbed with heat.

  He popped his chin strap and lifted the helmet off, exposing a vulpine, sharply chiseled face that was as white as new marble. In that bloodless face the deep pits of his eyes bore white pupils, faintly veined with red. From a distance they were as pink as a rabbit’s, but up close they became snakelike, glittering coldly, unblinking, hypnotizing. His hair was yellowish-white and closely cropped; a blue trace of veins at the temples pulsed an instant behind the jukebox’s beat. He left his helmet strapped around the handlebars and moved toward the building, his gaze flickering toward the cars: there was a rifle on a rack in the truck’s cab, a “Hook ’Em Horns!” sticker on a car’s rear fender, a pair of green dice dangling from the jeep’s rearview mirror.

  When he stepped through the screen door into a large room layered with smoky heat, the six men inside—three at a table playing cards, two at a light bulb-haloed pool table, one behind the bar—instantly looked up and froze. The albino biker met each gaze in turn and then sat on one of the bar stools, the red cobra on his back a scream of color in the murky light. After another few seconds of silence, a pool cue cracked against a ball like a gunshot. “Aw, shit!” one of the pool players—a broad-shouldered man wearing a red checked shirt and dusty Levis that had been snagged a hundred times on barbed wire—said loudly with a thick Texas drawl. “At least that screwed up your shot, didn’t it, Matty?”

  “Sure did,” Matty agreed. He was about forty, all arms and legs, short red hair, and a lined forehead half-covered by a sweat-stained cowboy hat. He was chewing slowly on a toothpick, and now he stood where he could consider the lie of the balls, do some more chewing, and watch that strange-looking white dude from the corner of his eye.

  The bartender, a hefty Mexican with tattooed forearms and heavy-lidded black eyes, came down the bar following the swirls of a wet cloth. “Help you?” he asked the albino and looked up into the man’s face; instantly he felt us if his spine had been tapped with an ice pick. He glanced over toward where Slim Hawkins, Bobby Hazelton and Ray Cope sat in the third hour of their Friday night poker game; he saw Bobby dig an elbow into Ray’s ribs and grin toward the bar.

  The albino said quietly, “Beer.”

  “Sure, coming up.” Louis the bartender turned away in relief. The biker looked bizarre, unclean, freakish. He was hardly a man, probably nineteen or twenty at the most. Louis picked up a glass mug from a shelf and a bottle of Lone Star from the stuttering refrigerator unit beneath the bar. From the jukebox, Dolly Parton began singing about “burning, baby, burning.” Louis slid the mug across to the albino and then quickly moved away, swirling the cloth over the polished wood of the bar. He felt as if he were sweating in the glare of a midday sun.

  Balls cracked together on the green-felt pool table. One of them thunked into a corner pocket. “There you go, Will,” Matty drawled. “That’s thirty-five you owe me, ain’t it?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Damn it, Louis, why don’t you turn that fuckin’ music box down so a man can concentrate on his pool playin’!”

  Louis shrugged and motioned toward the poker table.

  “I like it that loud,” Bobby Hazelton said, grinning over kings and tens. He was a part-time rodeo bronco-buster with a crew cut and a prominent gold tooth. Three years ago he’d been on his way to a Texas title when a black bastard of a horse called Twister had thrown him and broken his collarbone in two places. “Music helps me think. Will, you oughta come on over here and lemme take some of that heavy money you’re carrying around.”

  “Hell, naw! Matty’s doing too good a job at that tonight!” Will put his cue stick away in the rack, glancing quickly over at the albino and then at Bobby. “You boys best watch old Bobby,” he warned. “Took me for over fifty bucks last Friday night.”

  “Just luck,” Bobby said. He spread his cards out on the table, and Slim Hawkins said in his gravely voice, “Shee-yit!” Bobby reached for his chips and gathered them in.

  “Dumb luck
my ass,” Ray Cope said. He leaned over the table, and Slim Hawkins said in his gravelly voice, empty paper cup. “Jesus, it’s hot in here tonight!” He let his gaze shift past the red cobra on that kid’s jacket. Goddamn biker, he thought, narrowing ice-blue eyes rimmed with wrinkles. Don’t know what it is to work for a livin’. Probably one of those punks who robbed Jeff Hardy’s grocery store in Pecos a few days back. He could see the kid’s hands as the albino lifted the beer mug and drank. Under those gloves, Cope thought, the hands were probably as white and soft as Mary Ruth Kennon’s thighs. His own large hands were chunky and rough and scarred from ten years of ranch work.

  The Dolly Parton song faded. Another record dropped, hissed, and crackled for a few seconds like hot fat on a griddle. Waylon Jennings started singing about going to Luckenbach, Texas. Matty called for another Lone Star and a pack of Marlboros.

  The albino downed the rest of his beer and sat staring into the mug for a moment. He began to smile slightly, as if at a private joke, but the smile was cold and terrible, and Louis winced when he happened to catch it. The albino swiveled around on his stool, reared his arm back, and flung the mug straight into the jukebox. Colored glass and plastic exploded like several over-and-under shotguns going off at once; Waylon Jennings’s voice went into an ear-piercing falsetto for an instant, then rumbled down to a basso as the turntable went crazy. Lights flickered; the record droned to a stop. There was utter silence in the bar, broken only by the sound of pieces of glass clinking to the floor.

  Louis had raised his head from where he’d bent down for Matty’s beer. He stared at the ruined jukebox. Madre de Dios! he thought, that thing was three hundred dollars almost five years ago! Then he looked over at the albino who was watching him with a death’s head grin plastered across his unholy face. At last Louis got his tongue working. “You crazy?” Louis screamed. “What the shit you do that for?”