Half-Made Girls

by Sam Witt

  Walker leaned on his cane. “You do not do anything the way God intended.”

  Then to Joe, “Let’s go and see to my people. They have not heard the word of God since that wretched girl defiled my church.”

  Joe rolled his eyes at the back of Walker’s black head, but followed the old man. He motioned for Zeke and the rest to come along, but Al didn’t get out of the Rambler. He watched Joe with the hooded eyes of a big mountain wolf stalking a limping deer. Joe didn’t care for that one little bit.

  Other than their state of decay and ingrained squalor, the trailers were all different. Some were white streaked with rust, others were blue streaked with rust, still more were a rust-streaked yellow. By the time they’d walked past the third set of trailers, Joe decided maybe they weren’t that different at all. He figured a tornado coming through the region would only improve property values.

  Stevie pinched his elbow at that last thought and shook her head, biting back her own laughter. The setting sun flashed in Joe’s eyes, and its golden glow reeled him back twenty years, before the curse, when he could touch Stevie without wanting to strangle her. The wind blew dust into his eyes, and he wiped it away with an irritated swipe of his hand.

  Preacher Walker reached the first trailer and tapped on its flimsy aluminum door with the head of his cane. When no one answered, he tapped again. “Brother Alan, I’ve come to pray with you.”

  Joe slipped up alongside the trailer and cupped his hands against a fly-specked window. The interior was dark, but enough sunlight slipped through the grimy glass to show him a sagging couch, a ratty recliner, and a dog-chewed coffee table covered with a mound of cigarette butts and a crooked pyramid of dented Busch cans. “Nobody home, Preacher.”

  Walker grumbled and hobbled down the steps. For an old, fat guy with a giant hole in his gut and a hip that looked just about shot, he seemed pretty spry. Joe and Zeke followed him from trailer to trailer, peeking in windows while he banged his cane against the doors. No one answered.

  Meanwhile, Stevie crouched down in the middle of the crossroads and drew a neat circle in the dirt around her feet with her left ring finger. She muttered a handful of old words and pressed her palm flat against the cracked earth. The dust shuddered at her touch, and its groaning voice whispered of the life around her. A dozen dogs, two old men, one man who was not only a man, a youth. That was all she got, no sign of the people from the trailers, no children playing in the scattered thickets of dogwood trees or hiding in the rutted, shallow valleys on the back of the trailer park. No one.

  “Joe,” she called out. “There’s no one here. They’re gone.”

  Walker grunted with frustration. “Miss, look around. How many cars and trucks do you see?”

  He was right; every trailer had a car or truck or banged up four-wheeler parked in front of it. Stevie doubted they all had spare cars. But, still, “The earth doesn’t lie, Preacher. There’s no one here.”

  The preacher scowled, but didn’t argue. Instead he turned toward another trailer, Joe and Zeke trailing behind him. Joe shot his wife a miserable glance, but she shrugged. It wouldn’t hurt to check a few more of the aluminum shitboxes.

  Walker didn’t bother knocking at the next trailer. He turned the knob and shoved the door open. It skidded a few inches across a threadbare carpet, then stopped with a mushy squelch. He grunted and threw his weight against it, bowing the door out of shape in the middle, but it didn’t open any farther.

  Joe sighed and put his hand on the preacher’s shoulder. “There’s something on the other side. You’re not going to get it open like that.”

  There was enough room for Joe to squeeze into the trailer, but only just. He felt the bent door scraping across chest and hips as he forced his way through the tight gap. The trailer was dim, and his hand went for his badge. He concentrated on the symbol of his office, but its light was thin and watery. He tried not to think about whether it was his faith that had weakened or the Long Man’s power. Time to use the old-fashioned lights. He reached back to the wall next to the door and found the greasy switch. He flipped it, and dull yellow light flickered from the fixture overhead.

  This room was much like the last he’d peered into. Old furniture with blown springs and holes in the upholstery patched with duct tape squatted against the walls. There was a little box of a television with a pair of crooked wire rabbit ears sprouting out the top and a screen filled with ghostly images struggling to fight through walls of static. The rest of the world might be all flat screens and cable, but long stretches of Pitchfork County were still tube televisions and over-the-air programming. Nobody was going to string cable way out here and the ridge line did an admirable job of blocking satellite signals down in the valley.

  But no cable was the least of the worries here. Joe smelled the dead man through the funk of spilled beer and cigarette ash. He looked back to the door and found what he expected - a bloating corpse crumpled against the door. He sighed and got a little closer for a better look at the poor dead bastard in his tighty whiteys. “Dead guy,” he called back through the crack of the door. “A day or so, looks like.”

  What he didn’t mention was the man’s face. Someone had gone to work on it with something sharp. His lips were sliced into dozens of vertical ribbons, like a fringed curtain hanging over the yellow stumps of his meth-rotted teeth. His nose was shattered and splayed open, reformed into an ornate, almost floral pattern that revealed an interior lined with bristles of black hair and caked with dried snot.

  Above that, someone had broken the man’s head open, smashing one big hole in his face that encompassed most of his forehead and both his eye sockets. They’d grouped both of his eyes in that hole, so they stared up at Joe, blind with the milky white veil of death.

  There was a third eye, or something supposed to represent one, a pale orb the color of bone. Joe didn’t know what it was; a knuckle, maybe a vertebral knob, something like that. Didn’t matter. The poor fucker was dead, and the message was clear. This place belonged to the half-made girls and the batfuckers who followed them.

  Outside, Stevie screamed, and the old men kicked up a fuss, too. Joe jumped in surprise and shoved his face against the gap between the door and its frame. There were kids out there, a crowd of them, moving toward Stevie with clumsy, rolling steps. More were spilling out from the gaps between the trailers, a horde of slack-jawed, pint-sized shamblers. “Get in the car,” Joe shouted. “Get the fuck out of there.”

  He yanked at the door, but the body was still in the way. He could hear the children out there, chanting together, a singsong, schoolyard sound that gripped his ears with hands of ice. The words they were saying were old, terribly old, and they made Joe want to scream just to blot them out. He shoved his face against the gap again and could see the children’s faces, their mouths drooling blood, their eyes wide and unblinking. “Get in the cars,” Joe shouted again, but he knew his words were swallowed up by the chorus of broken children.

  Joe grabbed the body and dragged it away from the door by its feet. The head bounced and flopped from side to side, eyes rolling in the gaping hole in its face. With the body out of the way, he went back to the door and yanked on it. It was jammed. The preacher had smashed the door out of true, and it was hung up on the frame.

  Outside, Joe could see the children moving toward Stevie. Al was out of the Rambler, running toward his mother. One of the kids got too close to him, and Al’s hand flashed out, knocking the kid back three feet and onto his ass. Blood streamed out of the kid’s forehead, sheeting his eyes and cheeks with startling red.

  Joe hauled on the door for all he was worth, both hands locked on its frame, muscles bulging in his forearms and shoulders as he threw his weight back again and again. The door bent, but wouldn’t open. “Give me a hand, you fat fuck,” Joe shouted.

  That got the preacher’s attention. He turned back to the door and slammed his bulk against it. Joe flew back as the bigger man’s mass smashed the door right off its hinges. H
e ended up flat on his back on top of the dead guy, hands still locked around the mangled door’s edge. “Goddamn,” he groaned.

  Zeke pushed Stevie and Al into the trailer and limped in behind them. “Joe, we got a problem.”

  “No shit.” Joe got up off the floor and slid the door to the side. He joined Zeke at the doorway while Preacher Walker and Stevie muttered in quiet conversation next to the couch.

  There were a few dozen kids out there, from toddlers on up to teenagers a little younger than Al. They were all barking the same horrible words, a rhythmic chant that split their lips and chipped their teeth and was doing god knew what to their throats. Throwing around old words was a good way to end up dead if you didn’t know what you were doing. The kids didn’t look like they cared; their faces were blank masks of pale flesh streaked with blood that flowed over their chins and down their necks.

  “They’re not alive,” Stevie said. “I mean, there’s something in them that’s alive, but they aren’t alive.”

  The mob of kids was ten feet from the door. “We have to get this door back up.”

  Joe grabbed the aluminum door and rammed it into the bent frame. It sort of stuck there, leaving big gaps in some spaces and jamming tight in others. “Couch,” Joe commanded with a snap of his fingers.

  Preacher Walker grabbed the couch with one hand and swung it around, upending it and slamming it up against the door.

  Joe raised an eyebrow at the display of strength. “The red God provides,” the Preacher responded.

  The kids hit the door, but not very hard. They were determined but clumsy and weak. Joe could see them through the gap around the couch, sort of piling up against the door in a tangle of loose bodies and floppy limbs. “How long are these things going to keep at it?”

  Stevie shrugged. “I can’t feel whatever’s behind them. It’s just a blank. Could be a few minutes. Could be days.”

  “Great.” Joe didn’t wait to discuss the matter with the room. He drew his pistol and rammed it against the nearest kid’s forehead. Looking into the little boy’s eyes, Joe saw the triple pupils burning in the kid’s left eye. He drew the hammer back and squeezed the trigger.

  The boy’s head opened like a dropped watermelon, spraying thick black blood and curdled clots of brain back through the pile-up. The bullet tunneled through a little kid’s face, then tore a girl’s arm clean off.

  The little boy’s cratered head wobbled on his shoulders as the other kids jostled for position. Joe watched, mouth dry, as something stirred inside the hollowed shell. It wrenched and shoved this way and that inside the broken skull, digging up through the last of the sloshing brains. Then it raised its head and opened its fanged mouth and let out a shrill shriek.

  One by one, the children opened their mouths and Joe watched as other, uglier heads wormed their way out into the light, a chorus of screeches that deafened them all.

  Bats. Hundreds of them.

  Joe clenched his pistol and groaned. His head throbbed with a brewing headache. He didn’t see a way out of this mess. “Well. Fuck.”

  CHAPTER 50

  THE DOGS WERE screaming and running in circles outside the trailer Joe was hiding in. Bats covered the animals, carving open their hides with curved fangs, burrowing into their flesh. The dogs were doomed, but the animal instinct for survival wouldn’t let them lie down and accept their fate.

  Joe swapped his pistol for a broken chair leg and smashed the bats down as they tried to force their way through the gaps in the trailer’s door. He felt a strange weakness worming through his muscles, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that there were eyes on him. “Get me a sheet, blanket, something. Gotta plug these holes.”

  Stevie grabbed the filthy vinyl table cloth off the trailer’s tiny dining table and rushed into the kitchen to grab a handful of dingy steak knives. She unfurled the table cloth as she hurried to Joe and he took the left corners from her. Together, they threw the vinyl sheet up across the gap between the frame and the bent door. Stevie slammed the steak knives through the corners of the table cloth and through the trailer’s aluminum walls. She bent the handles over at right angles, pinning the cloth in place. She grinned at Joe as their makeshift barrier bulged with bats. “That’ll show ‘em.”

  Joe grinned back at his wife. It felt good to be working with her, comfortable in a way he’d never imagined possible. He turned to Walker and Zeke. “What are you old farts going to do while my wife handles all the real work around here?”

  But the old men were already hunkered over the table, leaning on their canes on opposite sides of the flimsy surface. “Reckon you oughter take a gander at this,” Zeke grumbled.

  Joe left the door under Stevie’s protection; the bats were filling up the barrier, but they hadn’t figured out how to get into the trailer just yet. He could afford a few minutes to look at whatever was getting up the old man’s ass.

  The top of the table was covered with needle-fine, engraved lines that formed patterns that Joe had to drag his eyes away from before his head filled with bad thoughts. Just that brief glance was enough to start a throbbing ache behind his left eye; Joe had no idea how the old men could stand to study the damned thing. Every time he looked at the design on the table he felt it sinking hooks into his attention, pulling him along a path that would lead only to madness. The air felt too thin in the little trailer, and he found himself swallowing to get his ears to pop. The designs were like those he’d glimpsed in the Blackbriar place, but there were strange differences as well. “What am I looking at?”

  Walker rapped his cane on the edge of the table, but was careful to keep its silver head from touching the designs. “A blueprint.”

  Zeke grunted and spat on the floor. “More like a plan.”

  Joe unfocused his eyes and took in the bigger picture without being drawn into the trap of the details. His skin crawled when he realized he was looking at a map of Pitchfork County, the two spots where they’d found the half-made girls marked with spiraling, looping sigils. There was a third symbol, to the northwest of the two he recognized. He pointed to it, but kept his finger well clear of the table. Those designs looked like they had teeth. “Where is that?”

  Walker and Zeke exchanged glances. “Onondaga.”

  Joe’s stomach sank. “The caverns?”

  “We’ve got a problem,” Stevie called from the door.

  The vinyl table cloth no longer bulged; in fact, Joe didn’t see any bats caught against it at all. “Where are the bats?”

  Stevie shrugged. “That’s the problem.”

  Joe walked over and took a look out the grimy window. The dogs were dead or dying, bloated bodies humping and rolling from the life devouring their guts, but there were no bats in the air. No bats tried to worm their way in through the trailer’s front door, either. “That’s not good.”

  Zeke and Walker were arguing about something at the table. Joe tried to ignore them, to focus on the sounds he could almost hear. The bats weren’t in sight, but he could still hear them somewhere nearby, rustling, crawling. Swarming.

  “Get out of the trailer,” Joe shouted. “Get out of here, now.”

  Stevie didn’t ask any questions. She yanked the knives out of the wall and tossed the tablecloth out of the way. Then she threw her weight against the ragged couch and sent it crashing to the floor next to the kitchen table. Without the couch to hold it in place, the bent door flopped out of the doorway, but the way out still wasn’t clear. Stevie yelped with surprise and jumped back.

  The lower half of the exit was packed with children’s heads, teeth gnashing at the air. Their eye sockets were empty caverns rimmed with blood, blown out when the bats gnawed their way into the world.

  Walker slammed his cane against the floor. “We have to bring this table with us, we cannot just leave it here. The information it holds is too valuable.”

  Joe eyed the dead man in the middle of the floor. He’d been a heavy guy, but his gut was ponderous now, swelling with each passing second
. Joe peered into the crater where the man’s forehead used to be. Red eyes glared at him from the gory gloom.

  He grabbed the dining room table, careful not to look at its engraved surface or touch the designs, and charged toward the doorway.

  The eyeless heads moaned and chewed at the air. As he closed in on them, Joe could see their teeth were long and sharp, like the needle fangs of the devil bats. He didn’t want to think about the kind of damage teeth like that would do if they got hold of him.

  Joe slammed the flimsy table into the barrier of heads, roaring with disgust as he sent the gnawing faces rolling out into the road. He kept smashing the table into the remaining heads, batting them far from the door. Behind him, he could hear something stretching, straining. About to burst. “Stevie, get something ready for bats.”

  He smashed the last of the heads out of the way and carried the table out over the mound of corpses beyond the door. He kicked at the bodies, trying to clear a path, but it was like shoving mud with his toes. For every one he shifted, two more sank into its place. “Everyone out.”

  Stevie was the first through the doorway. She ran a wide circle around the vehicles, dragging the toe of her sneaker in the dirt. “Get in the cars,” she said and worked her fingers through intricate patterns. Her hair floated on currents of static electricity, and the shadows around her eyes were so thick Joe couldn’t see through them.

  Al helped Zeke and Walker out the door, lending his strong arm for support on the inside while Joe did the same from the outside. Joe could see his son’s eyes bulging with fear at the thought of the bats catching him. He hoped the boy could get past it someday, but right now he was half-mad with fright.

  The old men limped toward the Hummer and the truck, and Joe kept an eye on the trailer. “Hobble your asses a little faster unless you want to be bat chow.”

  Stevie saw them coming and shouted, “Don’t break the circle.”