by Ninie Hammon
A blond man, probably near as big as Bishop, got to the doors first, pushed down the flapper handles and shoved the doors outward. Or tried to. The doors wouldn’t open. They weren’t locked. The handles released and the fasteners unlatched, but something on the outside was preventing the doors from moving apart.
Theresa was one of a handful of mourners who’d gotten to the doors before most everyone else. Seated on the back row, she hadn’t had as far to go as the rest of the fleeing throng. Even aware as she always was that for a woman of her size and girth, running didn’t usually end well, she’d nonetheless dropped her purse and raced mindless to the room’s only exit, as panicked as everybody else. But soon’s she seen that them doors wasn’t gone open, that there wasn’t nowhere for everybody to go, she wiggled back out of the tangle of bodies and turned around—just as another wave of hysterical people broke on the doors, plowing headlong into her and the blond man and the half dozen or so other people already there, mindlessly crushing them up against the doors. And people kept coming, jamming themselves into the crowd, screaming and clawing at those ahead of them, shoving and elbowing others aside, using whatever brute force they could muster to break through the dam of people, get to the doors and escape.
Held in place by the crowd with her back to the doors, Theresa watched in revulsion as the casket continued to vomit horror. Two more copperheads slipped out, over the side and onto the floor, followed by king snakes, green snakes and rat snakes. Behind them was a cottonmouth and two monstrous timber rattlesnakes, must have been five feet long, the sound of their furious rattles drowned out by the screaming crowd.
Theresa might have been the only person who noticed when the nature of the screaming changed, or maybe just the only person who knew why, who watched shrieks of terror become cries of pain as the snakes began to claim their prey.
Old Man Gregory was probably the first snakebite victim, certainly the first fatality. He used a walker, and when the crowd stampeded toward the back of the room, it was kicked aside, and he was knocked to the floor. The first snake got to him before he made it to the walker. A water moccasin struck him in the neck as he crawled. He screamed and went rigid, then fell face-first and lay there, his legs twitching like a chicken’s legs after you’d wrung its neck.
Clarice Singletary, Dr. Clements’s office nurse, lay on the floor on her side in a pile of collapsed folding chairs, holding her right leg. Blood drained down from twin holes in her calf where fangs had ripped through her pantyhose. She was trying to get to her feet, to get up and away from the snakes on the floor when another one—a timber rattler, looked like—struck her in the shoulder. It stuck to her shoulder, hanging there, until she reached up and knocked it away. She didn’t cry out, only looked confused for a moment, then sank back down to sit on the floor, unaware of the snakes slithering by her and over her.
Tyrone Adams fought back. The eighteen-year-old high school basketball star dumped the flowers out of one of them tall vases and was using it as a club, hammering any snake that got near him. Theresa watched in horrified fascination as a timber rattler and a copperhead, slithering toward the crowd at the door down what had been the center aisle between the chairs suddenly turned aside and joined the snakes encircling Tyrone where he stood with his back against the wall near the casket. He'd taken off his Michael Jackson jacket and wrapped it around his left arm, holding it out in front of him like a shield. It was probably made of red and black vinyl instead of leather but it still offered some protection. That boy was in a rage, hollerin' obscenities as he kicked some snake butts, if snakes’d had butts. A handful of crushed snakes lay at his feet.
“Want some of this?” he yelled at a diamondback on his left. “Huh? Well, come and get—”
A water moccasin got him on the ankle. He shook it off, continued to hammer at the other snakes, but his movements were slower now. He looked unsteady on his feet. They moved in for the kill then. A diamondback coiled—Theresa knew a coiled snake could strike farther—and lunged, sinking its fangs into his groin through the thin fabric of his gray parachute pants. Tyrone didn’t cry out. He was breathing funny, though, and seemed to be having trouble holding onto the vase. A copperhead got him on the calf, and he staggered, went down on one knee. Another water moccasin lunged at his chest and planted fangs deep into his flesh, and the front of his white shirt showed a growing red circle, like the bull’s eye on a target. His arms went limp, and he dropped the vase, fell to his other knee and remained like that, on his knees as snake after snake struck him, like he was a punching bag. When he finally fell forward on his face, Theresa knew that boy wasn’t gone be using that basketball scholarship to Western Kentucky University this fall.
Theresa couldn’t make no sense of what she was seein’. It was like the snakes was singlin' out prey and stalking ’em, which went against everything Theresa Washington knew about snakes. She wasn’t no expert by any means, but she’d always had a garden, had dealt with her share of rat snakes, king snakes, corn snakes—even a few rattlers. Ever’ last one of them’d slither off in the grass the instant she came anywhere near, hightailed it one way fast as she was runnin’ the other. Her mama’d told her snakes was more scared of her than she was of them, and she’d always found that to be true. But this…she’d never in her life seen snakes…attack like this. Yes, that’s what it was. They was attackin'. Not just the poisonous ones, neither. They was all striking. A big black snake had sunk its fangs into Simon Gosset’s calf. Didn’t have no venom, but poor old Simon was horrified, batting at it, shrieking, then he got a funny look on his face, grabbed his chest and collapsed.
Two of Amelia's daughters had clambered up onto the pulpit at the front of the room, the one Reverend Peterson had stood behind to say the prayer. They stood there, huddled together on the flat shelf in the middle where preachers put their sermon notes. Every one of them snakes could climb, though, and the girls watched rat snakes glide up into them big sprays of flowers and black racer snakes slither up into the limbs of them fake trees, danglin' down like they was in a jungle.
They seen the big rattler soon as it started up the pulpit toward 'em. The oldest, Shamika, kicked at it, trying to knock it off with her black patent leather shoe. She succeeded once, but it come right back at her, smarter this time. When she kicked, it dodged and struck her in the leg right above the white socks, folded over neat so the lace on the top edge would show. It hung there, didn't let go when she tried to shake it loose. She fell to one knee, unsteady. Her little sister tried to hold onto her but the child wasn't big enough, and when Shamika went limp, she toppled off the pulpit to the floor, her body lost in a writhing tangle of serpents. The other little girl, her face a mask of terror, remained on top of the pulpit, watching the snakes swarm around the bottom of it, wonderin' when one of 'em was gone come climbing up after her, too.
They was so many snakes spread out now that they come at the crowd like waves of infantrymen. The folks at the back shrieked as snakes sank fangs into their calves. They tried to crawl up the backs of the people in front of them to get away but fell back or was flung off by the folks in front. The snakes slithered into the crowd, striking at ankles and bare feet where folks had lost they shoes.
Theresa felt a snake glide over her shoe and brush up against the skin of her ankle. Her heart was thumping in her chest so fast it was the whirr of a hummingbird’s wings. She tasted terror, like her mouth was full of pennies, and cringed away from the pain she'd feel when the viper sank its fangs into her leg. Then the woman next to her screamed, and Theresa knew the snake had passed her by and struck that woman instead. Shrieks like that were coming from all over the crowd now, sending everybody else into hysterics.
Someone stepped on Theresa’s heel, stood on the back of her shoe, and she lost her footing. She slipped downward slightly—just enough for her full skirt to touch the floor. When it did, the people around her stepped on it, nailing it down so Theresa couldn't straighten up. Half crouched, unable to stand upright,
the crowd suddenly lurched to the right when a snake struck somebody on the left, and Theresa felt a searing pain in her lower back that sent agony up her whole body like a blast from a flame thrower. Snakebite couldn’t have hurt worse. Bein’ struck by lightning couldn’t have hurt worse. The pain was so bad, the world began to gray out.
That’s when Theresa heard it above the cries of the mob around her, a scream that sounded like ripping cloth. Amelia was shrieking in revolted horror, a wail of disbelief and grief so despairing and desolate it surely must have ripped open the very throne room of heaven.
It was the cry of a woman gone completely mad.
Theresa saw her up front beside the casket. She was reaching into it and grabbing handfuls of snakes, shrieking inarticulate hatred and fury at them as she threw them on the floor and stomped them. Handful after handful. She’d been bitten twice, and the snakes still clung to her. A green snake hung by its fangs from her right forearm. A small blacksnake had struck her in the face and dangled from her cheek. Neither was poisonous, but Theresa thought Amelia would have gone on screaming and grabbing snakes out of the casket even if they had been.
Her husband tried to pull her away and was struck several times before he staggered back and collapsed on the dais. Amelia remained focused, intent on ridding the casket of every serpent, desperately trying to uncover her son from the monsters writhing on top of him. It wasn’t long before the floor around the casket was slick with snake blood and guts and their trampled bodies.
Amelia’s youngest little girl, Stella was her name, about four years old, was on the floor at the foot of the casket. Theresa’d watched, horrified, as a big diamondback struck the little girl in the face, and now that side of the child’s head had a softball-sized lump on it. Suddenly, her little body went rigid, and she began to shake, convulsing again and again, lying among the bleeding snake bodies on the floor at Amelia’s feet. Her mother didn’t notice.
The casket had been jammed full of snakes when Elmer Potter had opened the lid. But when Amelia finally reached the bottom of it, cleaned out every last one, her son’s body wasn’t there.
“Christopher!” she cried in a bone-chilling wail. “Where’s my son? Where’s my baby?”
******
Sheriff Cunningham had been serving a summons at the south end of Caverna County when he heard the call go out over the radio. At first, he thought the dispatcher had made a mistake. Code 10-34 was a riot. How could there be a riot at a funeral home? The dispatcher filled him in as he drove. Lights and siren were useless driving through fog as thick as Elmer’s Glue, so he was not the first emergency responder to arrive at Potter’s Funeral Home. But even half an hour in, with every deputy, every Bradford’s Ridge Police officer, emergency medical technician and paramedic in the county working to establish order, the carnage was hard to fathom.
The double doors on the first viewing room on the left off the main hallway were mangled. One had been ripped off its hinges, torn from the frame. It lay on its side, still fastened to the other door by a padlocked chain that affixed the doors’ handles together.
Injured, bleeding people were everywhere. So were snakes. The sheriff had almost stepped on a small garter snake when he walked into the building. At the sudden sound of a shotgun blast, Cunningham jumped and reached for his service revolver before the EMT standing beside him put his hand on the sheriff’s arm.
“They’re killing snakes,” the man said, a kind of skin-crawling horror in his voice you couldn’t miss. “When we got here, they were all over the place—every kind of poisonous snake I’ve ever seen. Rattlesnakes, water moccasins—”
A boom sounded again.
“Seven confirmed fatalities from snake bites, but there could be more—will be more,” he said. “I’ve seen several I know aren’t going to make it.”
The EMT wore the uniform of Ballaster County Emergency Medical Services. Caverna County EMS had apparently called for assistance from neighboring counties.
Victims, some conscious, most not, were wheeled past the sheriff on gurneys to waiting ambulances. He spotted Victor Hernandez, the barber who wouldn’t likely be cutting the sheriff’s hair anytime soon because he appeared to have a broken arm. Theresa Washington lay strapped to a spine board on a gurney with an oxygen mask over her face. She was dragging in great heaving gulps of air. And he watched the paramedics hurry down the hallway to a waiting ambulance pushing a gurney with a small woman who looked like Tweetie Bird’s grandmother. Ella Fletcher didn’t appear to be breathing. And who knows what the body count would have been if the weight of the crowd hadn’t torn the door off its hinges.
The sheriff heard another blast and then became aware of a high keening, a sound that almost wasn’t human, coming from inside the viewing room. He stepped to the opening where he could see paramedics struggling with an obviously hysterical woman. She had snakes dangling from her face and arm, but she held fast to the edge of the casket screaming, “Where’s Christopher? Where’s my baby?” Then she slumped into the arms of one of the paramedics, finally sedated by the injection he’d given her.
A deputy stepped up to the sheriff.
“The little dead boy’s body—we found it. And that’s not all we found.”
The sheriff felt a sick dread in the deepest pit of his stomach as he drove through the swirling mist out to the Caverna County Cemetery on the edge of town. At the end of a winding lane, the cemetery occupied a wooded hilltop where the view was spectacular on a clear day. More than a century old, the graves were like the rings of a tree—the oldest at the top of the hill and subsequent generations down the sides so the newest plots rested near a small creek at the bottom of the hill beside the road.
The mist granted everything an otherworldly look, cast ghost shadows, swirled and contorted around the headstones so as to make everything foreign and other. That’s why the sheriff couldn’t figure out what he was seeing when he passed the first one. It vanished from view before he could decide what he’d seen, and by then, he had come upon another. He stopped the car, killed the engine, got out and strode nearer, horror and revulsion rising in his chest and threatening to choke him.
It was a grave. A disemboweled grave. The headstone had been knocked aside, the grave dug up, and the casket hauled out. The contents of the casket lay in a pile beside it. This was a fairly recent grave. The stink of moldering decay reached his nostrils, and he swallowed hard not to vomit. He got back into his car and drove on in mounting horror. Though it was impossible to tell in the thick fog, it appeared that graves had been desecrated all over the cemetery. They all bore the same signature. Headstones shattered, graves unearthed, caskets removed, and bones and bodies strewn all around.
He saw bright colored lights through the fog that resolved themselves into the bubblegum machine on the roof of Kentucky State Police Trooper Craig Wilson’s cruiser. He’d been dispatched after a hysterical 911 call from Elmer Potter’s two sons. The boys were there, in the back seat of the trooper’s cruiser, obviously in shock. Their father, Elmer, had tried to slam the coffin lid shut to contain the snakes in the viewing room, but had been swarmed by snakes, bitten repeatedly before he had a chance. That’s what the EMT had told the sheriff, said the funeral director was one of the seven confirmed fatalities.
“I think this must be the little boy from the funeral home,” Trooper Wilson said, his voice tight with restrained emotion. He walked through the mist to a freshly dug grave that was awaiting Christopher’s burial that afternoon. The funeral home tarp with its crank that lowered the casket gently into the grave remained, as did the rows of folding chairs for the mourners. The headstone was in pieces.
The little boy’s body sat on the ground with his legs dangling into the grave. A folding chair placed behind him held him upright. Rigor mortis had made the body as stiff as a plank. His back and both legs had been snapped to get his body to sit at the proper angle. Lying in the little boy's lap and draped around his neck were snakes, dead ones, missing their he
ads.
The sheriff turned aside and was sick, splattering his breakfast on his shoes.
CHAPTER 33
2011
At 8:30 Thursday evening, the following was posted on Daniel Burke’s Facebook page and on the page for Voice of Hope Community Church: “A good friend has often teased me that our congregation is bigger than the army of some small countries. I always tell him that we’re not an army, we’re a family. Families love each other, help and support each other—and I need my family to do that for me right now. I need your help to save the life of a little girl. I have to find someone—quickly! Unless the man can be located in time, a little girl will die.”
Daniel didn’t lie. But he carefully crafted the wording of the post so it didn’t set off any alarm bells, either, so it sounded like the child needed the man for medical reasons, as a blood donor, maybe.
“I don’t know the man’s name or very much about him. But I do know that he was in a BetterBuy in Cincinnati or northern Kentucky today, bought chocolate ice cream, and he ate dinner at a Tony Barroni Pizza Parlor—maybe with some friends, a Hispanic man and a black man with dreadlocks. The child’s loved ones can’t go to every BetterBuy and Tony Barroni in Cincinnati and northern Kentucky looking for him. But their ‘family’ can.”
Daniel explained that the man he was seeking had a red, black and green dragon or sea serpent tattoo on his arm that reached from his shoulder to his fingers. He was driving a blue car with New Mexico plates.
“Would you help these desperate members of our church family? Please, go to the BetterBuy store and the Tony Barronis in your neighborhood and ask about the man. Ask the checkers and the managers if they saw him today, the stock boys and bag boys. The man has no idea anyone’s looking for him, doesn’t know how frantic this family is to find him—because unless he can be found, a precious little girl with pale blue eyes just like her mother’s will not live to see another sunrise.”
