They Thirst

by Robert R. McCammon

  Chairs scraped back from the poker table. Immediately the place was filled with the ozone smell of danger and hot tempers.

  With eyes like solid chunks of blood-veined ice, the albino said, “I don’t like that shitkicker music.”

  “You crazy, man?” Louis shrieked, sweat popping out on his face.

  Bobby Hazelton, his hands curled into fists, said between clenched teeth, “You gonna pay for that machine, freak.”

  “Sure as hell are,” Ray Cope echoed.

  The albino turned on his stool very slowly and faced the men. His smile froze everyone but Will Jenks, who stepped back a pace. “Got no money,” the albino said.

  “I’ll call the sheriff then, you bastardo!” Louis started to move down the bar toward the pay phone on the wall, but instantly the albino said “No you won’t” in a softly chilling voice. Louis stopped where he was, his heart hammering.

  “No call to bust that machine,” Matty said and picked up a pool cue from the rack. “This is a peaceable place.”

  “Was,” Bobby said. “What’re you doin’ around here anyway, freak? Lookin’ to rob somebody maybe? Have some fun with somebody’s wife or daughter when the man’s gone to work? Huh?”

  “I’m heading through. Going to L.A.” The albino, still smiling faintly, glanced at each of them in turn—the track of his gaze freezing Ray Cope’s veins, making Will Jenks’s temples throb, sending a shudder along Slim Hawkins’s spine. “Thought I’d stop to fill up, like the sign says.”

  “You’re gonna pay,” Louis threatened, but his voice sounded weaker. There was a shotgun under the bar, but to get it he’d have to step nearer to the albino, and something within him warned him not to.

  “Nobody asked you to stop here, cottonhead!” Ray Cope steeled himself and began to move around the pool table toward the albino. “We don’t like you biker freaks around here!”

  “I don’t like shitkickers either.” This was said calmly, almost offhandedly, as if the albino had just said he didn’t particularly care for the dry tang of the Lone Star beer, but instantly a surge of electric tension ringed the room. Bobby Hazelton’s eyes bulged with anger, the sweat stains under his arms growing larger in circumference. The albino slowly began to unzip his jacket.

  “What’d you say, freak?” Bobby hissed.

  The albino, his stare impassive, whispered, “Shit…kickers.”

  “You sonofabitch!” Bobby shouted and then leaped toward the biker with fists swinging. But in the next instant the albino’s jacket came open; there was a terrifying roar, a burst of blue smoke, and a hole where Bobby Hazelton’s right eye had been. Bobby screamed, clawing at his face even as the wadcutter slug tore away the back of his head and spattered the men behind him with bits of bone and brain. He pinwheeled across the poker table, crashing down on kings and jokers and aces, and on the floor the legs of the corpse kept jerking as if Bobby were still trying to run.

  The albino, blue smoke wafting between him and the other men, had withdrawn from the inside of his jacket a pistol with a long, thin barrel, a squarish black body, and a grip that resembled a sawed-off length of broom handle. The deadly muzzle was drooling smoke. The albino stared, his eyes slightly widened, at the contorted corpse on the floor.

  “You killed him!” Slim Hawkins said with incredulous wonder, clawing at the droplets of Bobby’s blood across the front of his gray cowboy shirt with the pearl-stud buttons. “Jesus God, you killed him…” He choked, gagged, and started to throw up through his hands.

  “Godawmighty!” Will said, his mouth hanging open. He had seen a piece like the one that kid held once before, at a gun and knife show in Houston. It was an old automatic the Germans had used back in World War II—a broom-handle Mauser, he thought it was called. Ten slugs to a clip, and the damned thing could fire faster than a man could blink. “Bastard’s got a machine-gun pistol!”

  “Yeah,” the albino said softly, “that’s right.”

  Louis, his heart beating so hard he thought it would explode through his chest, took a breath and dove for the shotgun. He squawked with terror as his feet slipped out from under him on a wet spot. But even as his hands curled around cold iron, the albino had whirled around, eyes brimming with bloodlust. Louis looked up into two bullets that sheared off the top of his head. He crashed backward into a shelf of beer mugs, his brain exposed to the world; the corpse uttered a soft, eerie sigh and crumpled into a heap.

  “Oh…God…” Will breathed. Bile rose to the top of his throat, and he almost strangled on it.

  “Hold on now, fella…just hold on now…” Matty was saying over and over again, like a record that had gotten stuck on the jukebox. His face was now almost as white as the albino’s, and his cowboy hat was splattered with Bobby Hazelton’s blood. He put his hands up as if begging for mercy, which he was because in that terrible instant the men knew they were going to die.

  The albino stepped through a churning curtain of smoke. He was smiling like a child at Christmas who wanted to see what would spill out when the packages were ripped open.

  “Please,” Will said hoarsely, his eyes wide circles of terror. “Please don’t…kill us…”

  “Like I said,” the biker replied evenly, “I stopped in to fill up. When you boys get to Hell, you tell the devil Kobra sent you. That’s with a K.” He grinned and opened fire. A bloody cowboy hat sailed up toward the ceiling; bodies writhed and spun and fell like marionettes on crazy strings; a few teeth torn from a blasted mouth rattled to the floor; fragments of a gray shirt with pearl-stud buttons floated toward the rear of the room on the breath of a volcano.

  Then—but for the soft dripping—silence.

  Kobra’s ears were ringing. He flipped the Mauser’s safety and laid it on the bar where it gleamed like a black diamond. For a few minutes he stood motionless, eyes sated and lazy, examining the specific postures of death each corpse had taken. He breathed deeply of the bloody smell and felt electric with life. God, it was good, he thought. So damned good! His erection was gone. He walked around the bar and drew another bottle of beer from the refrigerator, downing it in a couple of long swallows and then tossing the bottle toward the other discarded containers. Maybe I ought to take some with me, he thought. No. Don’t want to weigh myself down. No room anyway. Want to be fast and free. He returned to his weapon and slipped it into the special leather holster sewn into the inside of his jacket. Little bitch had cost a lot of money in Salinas, but she was worth it, he told himself. He loved that weapon; he’d bought her from a canny old trader who’d sworn she had actually been used by Nazi security units and wasn’t just a gun shop antique. The magazine had jammed a couple of times but otherwise the weapon was perfectly responsive. She could cut a man down to bone pretty damned fast. He zipped up his jacket. The pistol burned its imprint into his side like a passion mark. He breathed the smell of blood until his lungs felt swollen with hot, sweet copper. Then he went to work, first going through the cash register. There was a little over forty dollars in ones, fives, and tens. The change he didn’t care about. He rolled the corpses over and dug into their pockets, careful not to leave a bootprint in any of the puddles of thickening blood. In all he came up with about two-hundred dollars. He was about to rise up from the body of the first man he’d shot when he saw that gold tooth shining like a mother lode in the half-open cave of the mouth. He knocked the tooth out with the butt of his Mauser, replaced the gun in its holster, and put the tooth in his pocket.

  And now he was ready to go.

  Outside the desert air smelled weak and impure to Kobra as compared with the rich death smell within the Waterin’ Hole. In both directions the highway vanished into darkness; he saw his shadow, thrown blue across the earth by the neon sign over his head. Someone would find the shit kickers soon, he told himself. All hell would break loose. No matter. I’ll be on the road to L.A. and a long way from here by the time the troopers show up. Kobra turned his face toward the black western sky, his flesh faintly tingling.

 
The feeling was stronger than it had been in Ciudad Acuna, stronger than in Sonora, stronger even than in Fort Stockton just a few miles back. Like the prick of needles and pins, like a quick rush after a snort of coke, or the delicious, tormenting anticipation when watching a spoon of sugar-fine horse begin to cook. And getting better all the time, slowly increasing as he moved west. Sometimes now he thought he could smell blood when he faced west, as if the whole Pacific had turned crimson, and you could wallow in it all you liked until you got drunk with it and fell down and drowned in it. It was like being fed the greatest drug in the world drop by drop, and every mile Kobra traveled he grew more maddeningly eager for the whole kick in his veins.

  And there was the dream, too; the recurring thing that had drawn him back into the States from Mexico. He’d first had it a week before and for three nights in a row, everything exactly the same and so damned…spooky: he sat astride his chopper in the dream, on a long, curving highway with high palm trees on each side and a lot of tall buildings. The light was funny—it seemed all reddish and murky as if the sun had gotten stuck on the horizon. He wore his black jacket, his jeans, and his black crash helmet, and behind him rode an army of outlaw bikers on every kind of chopper and hog a tormented mind could imagine—firebreathers with chrome shining bright red, metal-flake paint glittering purple and neon blue and gold, and engines roaring like dragons. But the army of outlaw bikers who rode in Kobra’s wake looked strange and skeletal, white-fleshed things with shadow-rimmed eyes that did not blink in the miasmic light. There were hundreds of them, a thousand maybe, their bleached flesh covered with the remnants of buckskin jackets, tattered jeans with leather knee patches, Army surplus jackets burned sickly green by the sun; Day-Glo painted crash helmets, Nazi helmets, cracked and battered skid lids rattled around some of the grinning skull-like heads. Some of the things wore goggles. They began to chant, eerie braying voices from between clicking rows of teeth, louder and louder: Kobra, Kobra, KoBRA, KOBRA, KOBRA! And in the dream Kobra had seen a white sign way up in the hills above the sprawling city: HOLLYWOOD.

  Spooky.

  And two nights ago he’d begun to sleepwalk. Twice he’d opened his eyes in the hot, dry house before dawn and found himself standing—actually goddamned standing!—outside the pitiful wooden shanty of a house that he’d been hiding in for the past three weeks since he’d left the country after that little party near New Orleans almost a month ago. What had awakened him both times was the weary voice of the thirteen-year-old prostitute he was living with, a frail girl with black hair that shone like oil and eyes that looked forty years old, calling from the dark doorway. Señor? Señor? But in the instant before her voice registered in his blurred brain, he thought he’d heard a voice as distant and cold as a Canadian wind whispering through his soul. And what it had said was Follow Me. He was facing west when his eyes had opened both nights.

  Kobra blinked. A sudden gust of desert wind had blown grit into his face. It was time to be moving. And when I get where I’m headed, he told himself as he walked across the lot to his chopper, there’s gonna be one hell of a party. He sat astride the Harley and slipped on his helmet, fastening the chin strap and lowering the visor like a demonic knight readying for battle. He kickstarted the engine and wheeled the rumbling machine out of the parking lot, leaving the silent Waterin’ Hole with its last customers behind. His belly felt gorged.

  On the highway he accelerated to just below eighty. He was going to have to follow the worst of the desert roads to avoid the state troopers. Have to be real careful, he warned himself. But I have to hurry.

  Because of one thing he was certain.

  He was following Death’s keen promise.

  TWO

  When Andy Palatazin opened his eyes in the cool darkness of his bedroom, he had a single, chilling thought: the Roach is here. He lay perfectly still, his bearlike body swaddled in blue sheets, and waited for his heartbeat to settle down. He listened to the quiet nighttime noises: the creaking of a stair down the hallway, the muffled humming of the refrigerator downstairs, the ticking of the alarm clock on the little bedside table, assorted cracks and whispers and rustles. He was reminded of the tales his mother had told him as a child about the elves who crept out at night, riding on the backs of mice to have a festive celebration, then disappeared by dawn. Beside him, Jo stirred and drew closer to him. What woke me? he wondered. I never wake up like this!

  He lifted his head a few inches to look at the clock. It took him a minute to make out the little luminous numerals—eleven-fifty. No, he told himself, the Roach is not here. The Roach is out somewhere in Los Angeles doing those things he likes to do. His stomach crawled with dread and disgust at what the morning might bring. He eased over on his back, bedsprings sagging and whining like poorly plucked harp strings. He expected to feel the sharp jab of a spring cutting into his back or buttocks at any moment. The mattress was thin and worn from years of supporting his weight, which ranged annually from 210 during the summer when he played some golf with a few of the other detectives to 230 around Christmastime when he gorged himself on Jo’s beef-and-sour-cream casseroles.

  He stared up at the ceiling and heard a car taking the corner down on Romaine Street. Headlights flickered overhead, then faded away. Very soon now another day would break, he told himself. October in Los Angeles. Not quite like the Octobers he’d known as a boy. Those Octobers had been real, full of wild winds and erratic snowfall, cold gray skies and a dance of hail across the windowsills. These California Octobers were false, hollow, somehow unsatisfying: a chill in the morning breeze and again at night, but hot sun at midday unless the sky was cloudy, which was very seldom indeed. But it was difficult for him to believe snow was falling anywhere in the world when he could see people wearing short-sleeved shirts on the streets of L.A. It was the city of perpetual summer, the land of golden youth. Sometimes his heart ached for want of a single flake of snow. Oh, he could see the autumn and winter snowfall on clear days when the purple rise of the San Gabriel Mountains wasn’t obscured by fog or smog, but somehow the palm trees waving everywhere you looked didn’t seem to fit. It had been over sixty degrees on Christmas Day last year. Palatazin recalled boyhood Christmases of ten and twenty below zero when the windows were caked with ice and snow and Papa had to hack the door free with—Abruptly his mind went blank. He turned his attention to what he thought had wakened him: Roach. The taplo was out there somewhere, crawling through a city of over eight-million people, waiting to strike. Or perhaps striking even now. It was Friday night, and the young prostitutes would be lining Sunset and Hollywood boulevards. Perhaps he’ll make a mistake tonight, Palatazin told himself. Perhaps he’ll try to lure one of the policewomen tonight, and then the nightmare would be over. Four young girls in two weeks, all strangled to death by powerful hands, according to the coroner’s report, then raped. And the notes this hideous animal left on the corpses! They were rambling hand-scrawled messages that in one sentence talked about the divine plan of God and then said the prostitutes—“bad girls,” the notes said—were liars and hellish angels who could only be led to peace through death. Palatazin could recall most of the notes word for word. He’d been studying them continually since the morning of September 27, when a surf fisherman in Venice had found the body of Kitt Kimberlin, a nineteen-year-old divorcée with two kids, beneath a rotting pier.

  “God called me in the night,” the note had read. “God is here among us right now, and out of all the people in this city He’s called me to do His work!” That first note, hastily written in blue ink on ordinary drugstore typing paper, had been unsigned. It had been a Venice police officer named Duccio who’d found that the young woman’s mouth had been crammed full of dead roaches; the story had leaked to reporters, and it was the Los Angeles Tattler that first printed a front-page article, by Gayle Clarke of course, with the headline, WHERE WILL THE ROACH STRIKE NEXT? Several photographs at the death scene by somebody named Jack Kidd were splashed luridly across the page, and Palatazin
knew that the rag had probably sold a million copies that week. When the next woman, a Chicano barely sixteen years old, was found under a tarpaulin in an empty lot in Hollywood, there were the dead roaches again, and the other papers picked up on it.

  The third letter was signed, “Roach. Ha ha. I like it.” The latest note, found on the corpse of a blond, blue-eyed runaway from Seattle, was the most disturbing of the lot: “The Master calls me. He speaks to me by name now, and I have to answer. He tells me he needs me, and my head stops hurting. He says I’m doing it wrong, that he’ll teach me things I never dreamed of. You won’t hear from me again.” It was signed “Roach,” and the girl’s mouth had been jammed full of them.

  That had been on the tenth of October. Thirteen days now with no trace of him. Where was he? What was he planning? Waiting, biding his time, laughing as the LAPD ran to ground every possible lead, rumor, or bar and pool hall story about somebody knowing somebody who knew a guy who’d been drunkenly bragging about snuffing out a girl and getting away with it, every pimp’s tale of the night this really weird customer with strange, flaming eyes said he had a few roaches for Kitt Kimberlin, every after-midnight telephone call from frightened wives who whispered that they didn’t know what was happening to Harry or Tom or Joe but he was acting very strange and not coming home until almost dawn. Palatazin could hear the collective “Yes, ma’am, thank you for calling, we’ll check it out,” being spoken by a dozen different police officers across the city right at this very moment.

  Of course every newspaper from the Times to the Tattler was zeroing in on the Roach murders. The nightly television newscasts always brought him up in some insinuation or reference. The flesh traffic on Sunset and Hollywood had started to thin out for a while after midnight, but now it was swinging back to business as usual. But no one had forgotten: it seemed to be a big joke to some, that the L.A. police couldn’t even find a roach. Those were the words that haunted Palatazin, that sat on his forehead at night chuckling and lay like a moldering corpse beside his bed for him to trip over on the way to brush his teeth in the morning: Find the Roach.