by Cullen Bunn
But never on a Friday, I mused, the bluejay’s day in Hell.
Eventually, when we had gone as far as the hollow would take us, we climbed the craggy hillside and continued through the woods along Prescott Ridge. Stepping back under the blanket of forest shadow, I felt relieved to be shielded from the harsh glow of the blood moon. The woods grew dark around us, as if a wash of runny black paint had spilled across the trees and stumps, the creek beds and jagged outcroppings of mountain rock. Some light trickled through the branches overhead, though, and we managed without the use of the flashlights for a while longer.
Jack cradled his shotgun in his arms. He had tucked the flashlight into a denim loop in the leg of his coveralls. He clenched a cigarette in his teeth, and a flare of red illuminated his face like a devil’s mask. He offered me one of the smokes, stick thin in his thick fingers, the trademark silver band between the filter and tobacco. A Millennium Red. My brand. Only I didn’t smoke anymore. Cut back when Doc Bishop informed me I had the choice of either living to a ripe old age or choking on blood and lung tissue before I ever reached my golden years. The good doctor’s bedside manner was for shit, but he presented a mean argument.
“You know I quit.”
Still, Jack offered the cigarette. “You got to die of something.”
Black as witch’s milk, the forest rose up around us.
“Thanks for reminding me.” I plucked the cigarette from his hand and took a deep drag.
Best damn smoke I’ve ever had.
“You reckon this is gonna be bad?” I asked Jack.
“A-yeah,” he responded matter-of-factly.
I had known, even before asking, what his answer would be, but asked anyway just to make small talk and break the monotonous crunch-crunch-crunch of our footsteps through the leaves and twigs carpeting the hills.
I hoped Sue would be all right. Again I found myself wishing we had met under better circumstances.
“What’s on your mind?” Jack asked. “You thinking about that girl?”
“Huh?” I laughed. “I reckon I got better things to worry about right now.” I tried to turn my thoughts away from the pretty young college girl waiting for our return.
“I wonder if Cecil is putting the make on her,” Jack said through a mischievous grin, “don’t you?”
Warmth flooded up my neck and the back of my ears. Jack may have just been funning with me, but his jibes struck a cord. Cecil fancied himself something of a playboy—a tobacco-chewing, unemployed, weasly Romeo—and he wouldn’t let an opportunity to charm Sue slip away. Sue, being a more sophisticated girl, wouldn’t hardly fall for Cecil’s pass, but it made my teeth hurt, thinking of him offering her a glass of home-brewed cherry mash, dimming the lights, and putting Don Williams on the record player.
“You are one mean old bastard,” I said, but I couldn’t help but chuckle.
Our laughter raced off into the darkness, a good sound, but a sad sound, too. Final.
“How would you feel,” I asked, hoping to give Big Jack a taste of his own medicine, “if it was Cordelia waiting back there with Cecil?”
Jack’s laughter ended abruptly, and his smile drooped to a frown. “That ain’t funny.”
Miss Cordelia Miles. I could almost hear Jack’s heartbeat quicken at the mention of her name. The torch he carried for her had been burning for a long time, and while she let him take her out every now and again, she didn’t really love him and he would never win her favor. The prettiest girl in the county, she’d been crowned queen of the Founders’ Festival and classic car ralley five years running, and the thought of her long legs, full lips, and luxurious auburn hair sent fellas from sixty miles away into a fever. She had her pick of well-to-do men, and a guy like Jack, who scraped his coins together by hauling junk for the auction barn same as me, simply didn’t stand much of a chance. Still, Heaven help the man who hurt sweet Cordelia, because he’d have to go a few rounds with Big Jack, and nobody in their right mind and proper sobriety would want that.
Standing over six feet tall and built like a brick wall with prize hams for fists, Jack could pound fence posts into hard-packed earth with one swing of a sledgehammer and lift tractors out of mud holes without breaking much of a sweat. I myself once saw him rip a St. Louis phone book in half just to show how easy it was, and I’ll never forget the night he whipped all three of the Dobson brothers, who had been drinking a little too much and running their mouths a little too loudly.
I hadn’t seen anything, though, until we came across the bull.
* * *
Here’s what happened with Big Jack and the bull:
As we reached the hill overlooking the Stubbs farm, we noticed three things.
First, the place was pitch dark. I turned the flashlight on and aimed the beam downhill, scanning across woodpiles and fence posts, clapboard shacks and crumbling barns. Just out of the beam’s reach, the dim shapes of other buildings loomed. No lights shone through windows. No sounds came from within.
Second, an awful smell, like a meat freezer gone bad on a summer day, clung to the air.
Third, somewhere in the darkness, the Stubbs’ bull, Samson, bellowed like the devil himself was riding him bareback.
I reckon every small town has a bull like Samson, a creature of such ferocity and meanness that it had become a legend—a monster who’d just as soon gouge and trample you as look at you. Foolhardy children dared each other to brave the pasture where Samson roamed. Men nodded solemnly and speculated in grim whispers about the day that bull might break out of captivity and wage war on every living soul for miles.
Maybe Samson had attacked Seth, I thought.
Maybe he had broken out of his pin and slaughtered the Stubbs family in his boundless fury.
Maybe he waited, there in the darkness, for Jack and me to approach.
Loose dirt and pebbles skittered under our boots as we slid down the incline, making too much racket for my tastes. I felt as if we were approaching a graveyard haunted by an angry ghost, and I didn’t want the specter to hear us coming.
I swung the light around. The beam played across dirt pathways, partially collapsed split post fences, and shoddy shed walls. I half expected for Samson to charge out of the darkness, snorting steam, blood in his eyes.
Jack must have been thinking the same thing, because he grabbed up his own flashlight and pointed its guttering beam into the darkness.
The bull bellowed.
Not a cry of anger, but of pain and fear.
“Over here!” Jack cried out.
I hustled towards the beacon of his flashlight. I almost ran into the thin grey wire of the electric fence separating the farm from the pasture. The wire trembled and wavered as a great force tried to tear it down.
Jack dropped his flashlight and shotgun at his feet. The feeble ray of light rocked back and forth before coming to a rest, spreading its glow over Jack.
Before him stood Samson, roaring and kicking and shaking his great horned head. The bull had jumped the electric fence, but only made it half way. While his front hooves stamped at the ground and chopped up dirt and rocks alike on one side of the fence, his back legs were still planted on the other. The electric wire stretched beneath his hindquarters, buzzing right across his nut sack. Samson kicked and jumped, but every time his bulk descended, the sparking wire gave him a shock right to the nether regions.
My own balls shriveled at the sight.
“We got to get him off of there,” Jack said. “He’s going to hurt himself if we don’t.”
I put my own flashlight and firearm on the ground and looked for a length of loose board. Didn’t take long before I found a section of two-by-four left over from an unfinished shed.
“I can knock the fence loose,” I said, testing the water-swollen board. “But as soon as I do, Samson’s gonna come after us.”
I couldn’t blame the bull for being angry, but I didn’t want him to vent his rage on the two of us.
“When I say so—” Ja
ck stepped towards the bull. “—do it.”
I didn’t know what Big Jack planned, but I cocked the piece of wood back like a baseball bat.
The wire sizzled and popped.
Samson mooed.
Jack reached out and wrapped a massive hand around the tip of each of the bull’s horns. The muscles in his forearms and neck popped as he started to push the bull back. Samson lowered his blocky head, and his front hooves dug into the ground. Despite the jolting fireworks crackling around his balls, the bull saw Jack’s actions as a test of strength, and he wasn’t backing down. Jack grimaced, holding the huge beast in place.
“Now!” he cried.
I brought the two-by-four down as hard as I could. The electric fence snapped with a metallic twang! and whipped past me, nearly slicing across my eye.
Free now, Samson put all of his weight into the shoving contest with Jack. As mighty as he was, Jack was no match for the bull’s blistered-ball fury. He stumbled and fell, hands still locked like vices around Samson’s horns. The bull kept pushing. He pressed Jack down towards the earth, like he wanted to plant him in the ground. Jack held on, because if he didn’t Samson would surely trample him to death.
Snot oozed out of Samson’s big, pulsing nostrils. Frothy spittle flew from his mouth.
“Get him off me!” Jack yelled. “Hit this ungrateful bastard!”
Drawing the two-by-four back once more, I took aim on the spot directly between Samson’s eyes. “If I hit him,” I said, “I’ll kill him.”
“I don’t care!” All his compassion for the bull’s plight had been knocked from him as Samson bore him to the ground. “Do it!”
I hated to kill Samson, but—
“Get him off!”
I readied to swing.
Just then, Jack let out a mighty yell, and he twisted the bull’s horns like a NASCAR driver steering around a sudden curve. Samson screwed his head around to fight against the motion, but Jack was just too strong. The bull flipped off of Jack and landed on its back with a shuddering thud, all four hooves sticking straight up in the air. I might have seen a look of astonishment in the bull’s eyes.
Jack scrambled to his feet.
I brandished the piece of wood, awaiting the attack.
Samson bucked and rolled onto his hooves, but instead of attacking, the bull shot off in the other direction, running for dear life. Still kicking his back legs to warn us from following, Samson vanished into the night.
“I never seen anybody flip a bull like that,” I said.
“Well now you have,” Jack said, wiping sweat from his brow. He struggled to catch his breath.
“Well, you sure scared the hell out of him, manhandling him like that.”
“He won’t scared of me.” Jack pulled a half crushed Millennium Red from his shirt pocket and lit up. “There’s something else here. Something that made him try to jump that fence in the first place.”
First the tarantulas had fled from Seth’s approach, and now something had scared mighty Samson bad enough to risk his own dick jumping the electric fence.
“I don’t feel good about this,” I said.
Jack leaned down to pick up his gear. “Me neither.”
We started in the direction of the Stubbs’ house, but stopped again.
Something moved through the darkness.
I pointed the flashlight towards the front porch. Several pale figures walked across the yard towards us.
Children.
The Stubbs children came out to greet us.
* * *
Each of them, from the smallest toddler to the gangliest, pimpled teenager, looked like living death—skin bloodless, eyes sunken and reflecting red like a wild animal’s in the crimson moonlight. Their tattered sleeping clothes were bloodied and dried gore flaked upon their faces and fingers, but no cuts or scrapes marred their flesh, at least not as I could see.
Haints, my granddaddy would have called them. Ghosts or monsters or devils. Haints.
Their glowing eyes moved from Jack to me and back again as they lurched towards us.
“That’s just about far enough,” I said. The hair on my arms stood on end. My flesh crawled, recoiling from the presence of the children. I couldn’t bring myself to point a gun at a child, but my hand quivered upon the handle of the Enfield, and my unsteadiness set the flashlight to trembling. “We came to check on you. Make sure everyone was all right here.”
Wasn’t that a damn fool thing to say? I knew by looking at them that they weren’t all right. They were dead. Some part of me knew it, but I had a devil of a time wrapping my mind around the concept.
I quickly counted them. Nine children stood before us. I tired to remember how many children belonged to the Stubbs clan. Was this all of them? No telling. The Stubbs had been breeding in these hills for years, and it wasn’t such a far-fetched notion that a kid might grow to adulthood without ever coming into town.
They took another step. Another.
A watery ball of ice grew in the pit of my stomach.
“He said stay back,” Jack barked. He was still winded from his tussle with Samson, but he hefted his shotgun, took aim.
One of the young’uns in the lead—a girl of maybe seven or eight—opened her mouth hungrily, revealing razor sharp fangs jutting this way and that from her gums. Her brothers and sisters and cousins did the same, eager to impress us by imitating her action. They reached out for us with clawed fingertips.
I snapped the pistol up, thrust it in the direction of the kids.
The children hissed like angry cats, their mouths overfull of fangs, their breath a graveyard stink.
God help me, I didn’t want to shoot a child, but the things lumbering towards us were not children—not real children—but something else.
I fired.
The bullet slammed into the little girl’s shoulder. She whirled around and crumpled to the dirt. She didn’t make a sound. I aimed the gun at the next target, a boy who was likely a couple of years younger. A curl of smoke drifted from the barrel.
He kept coming.
The little girl lifted herself off the ground, the bullet hole in her shoulder dribbling a thick milk-white fluid.
I fired again, twice.
The first bullet punched through the little boy’s throat. His face wore an expression of sudden shock as he somersaulted backwards. The second shot struck the little girl again, this time in the stomach, and she doubled over and staggered, but didn’t fall, almost like she had grown accustomed to the feeling of being shot.
The thunderous flare of Jack’s shotgun set the darkness alight. The blast tore through the group of children, knocking some from their feet but barely fazing others as the pellets sprinkled smoldering black holes in their bodies.
The little boy clambered to his feet again. The remains of his throat dangled in sticky, meaty flaps down the front of his pajamas.
I shot at him again, but he ducked to the side like he was dodging an annoying skeeter.
And then they were on us.
Jagged nails dug through my shirt at the small of my back as one of them grabbed me around the waist, as if playing a game of King of the Mountain. I brought the butt of the pistol down between his shoulder blades once, twice, three times with little to show for my efforts. I drove my knee into his gut, but he didn’t even flinch.
Another child grabbed my arm and knocked the flashlight to the ground in a spinning arc of light.
I cracked him across the forehead with the gun. He staggered and fell back, his forehead split open. A crooked gash, like a lightning bolt, ran from his hairline to the bridge of his nose. I saw the gleam of his skull beneath the broken skin, but no gush of red spurted down his features. Instead, something white and thick as biscuit gravy oozed down the valley between his eyes. Strings of clotting goo stretched across his lips. His teeth were like knives in a messy cutlery drawer.
The boy with his arms around my waist dug his bare feet into the ground and pushed with all his might.
He was stronger than I expected. Not as strong as Jack, but almost. Stronger than me for damn sure. Any minute now he’d drag me down.
I pressed the gun to the back of his neck and squeezed the trigger. The shot near about deafened me. An explosion of snotty gunk spattered my shirt. Gun smoke filled my nostrils and burned my eyes. The boy flopped to the ground, kicking, flailing, screeching an ungodly sound. He clawed at his ruined neck. His head hung to the side, connected to the rest of his body by strips of shredded meat and gristle. A putrid vapor rose from the wound. It stank like rotten eggs.
I drew my foot back and kicked him right beneath the chin. His head ripped away and sailed into the darkness. His body slumped to the ground, still except for the foul-smelling gas rising from the neck stump.
“Jack,” I cried. “Get them in the head! Take their heads off!”
Jack shrugged one of the leaping children away, kicked another as it charged for him, sending the little monster scuttling onto its rump in the dirt. He raised his shotgun and blasted away, taking the child’s head off in an explosion of skin and bone fragments. The body fell, steam oozing rising from the ruin of a face.
A pair of children threw themselves at me, each of them grabbing one of my legs just below the knee. They pulled this way and that, tripping me, and I toppled backwards and slammed into the ground. I heard the metallic clatter of my spare bullets as they flew from my pocket and spun into the dirt.
Jack’s shotgun boomed. He cursed as he cracked open the weapon and hastily reloaded. He’d be out of ammo soon.
