He punched at the restraining limbs, struggling to break free. Several of the meatless fingers tore through his shirt, and he mewed in disgust when the cold bones touched his skin.
Then the man leaned through the window, into the light.
And Jimmy’s shouts of repulsion died in his throat.
Somewhere in his brain the information being sent from his eyes failed to find a rational point of emotional reference, and terror, bewilderment, humor, and awe collided together with a paralytic affect.
Unlike before, the corpse was no longer headless.
At the point where the man’s neck should’ve started, a railroad of thick stitches connected the severed head of a coyote to the human skin of his torso.
Jimmy shook his head in denial, unable to escape the glare of the animal’s yellow gaze as it stared down at him over a lipless snout filled with jagged white fangs. It pulled him to the edge of the window, inches from its reeking flesh, where a legion of maggots explored the bare patches of skin that dotted its fur.
“It was an accident!” Jimmy heard himself repeating again and again.
The chemical stink of formaldehyde wafted out from the thing’s dripping maw when it opened its jaws, and a new degree of terror pushed Jimmy’s mind to the edge of insanity as the monster started to laugh.
“Yee-nadlooshii!” the undead nightmare declared, speaking each syllable with perfect clarity despite the mouth that produced them.
Its putrid breath gusted into Jimmy’s face, but the ghastly state of the creature’s physical composition no longer compared to the terror of facing an intelligent being with supernatural strength and a malevolent spirit.
Suddenly the back of his head crashed into the wall.
A swarm of fireflies swirled across his vision, but when they cleared he saw the monster towering before him, still only halfway through the window, holding two equally shredded halves of his tee-shirt in its boney hands.
Jimmy patted his bare chest, just then realizing that he’d braced both feet against the sink in an effort to escape the creature’s grasp and must have torn clear through his clothes!
The coyote-headed horror roared, spraying spittle through the air.
It gripped the edges of the window frame and with the gunshot noise of cracking timbers it yanked a five-foot section of the wall into the night.
Sparks hissed from a severed electrical line and the bathroom lights went out.
A ruptured pipe shot water at the ceiling.
But Jimmy was already through the door and across the bedroom, fleeing from the building wearing nothing but his boxer shorts.
Behind him came another thunderclap of destruction. Another downpour of rubble.
Outside, in the parking lot, a blue convertible sat idling in the space reserved for the room next to Jimmy’s, trunk open, front end facing away from the building.
Jimmy jumped into the driver’s seat without even touching the door and left twenty feet of burnt rubber smoking on the asphalt as he peeled away from the motel with the accelerator mashed to the floorboards.
8.
Stuart’s house emerged out of the murk.
Jimmy drove the stolen car right up on the lawn and left the engine running when he hopped out and hurried to the door. No lights glowed in any of the windows, but he pounded on the door and franticly thumbed the ringer.
When no one answered, he kicked the door open.
Inside, he found Stuart sitting in the living room with a double barrel shotgun.
What remained of his head was still dripping from the ceiling.
9.
Jimmy pushed through the police department’s front door at ten minutes to midnight.
Deputy Vern Ferguson was eating a late dinner behind the long counter that separated the lobby from the offices, and Jimmy ignored the kid’s muffled commands to halt as he tried to speak through a mouthful of ham sandwich.
“Hey!” the young officer shouted when Jimmy let himself through the partition.
He found Sheriff Picket sitting at one of the desks in the open central area of the building known as the bullpen, and even from a distance Jimmy noticed the frown beneath his storm cloud of a mustache.
And he wasn’t alone.
A tall American Indian man in blue jeans and a suit coat (cop casual, Jimmy called it) stood off to the left. A roadmap of fresh cuts crisscrossed the man’s face, some linked by dozens of black stitches that looked all too reminiscent of the patchwork monster he’d faced at the motel. The sight stopped him in his tracks, and he had to make a cognitive effort to refocus his thoughts on what he’d come here to say.
“Want me to cuff him?” Ferguson asked from behind, but the Sheriff merely motioned for the kid to go back and finish his food.
“Sheriff, we got trouble,” Jimmy said.
Pickett stood, repositioning his pistol belt as he did. “Oh, I don’t doubt that,” he answered. “After what you pulled yesterday—”
“Forget that shit!” Jimmy rushed on. “I’m the reason that dead guy disappeared from the morgue today!”
Pickett let out a short bark of laughter and raised his hands as if surrendering to Jimmy’s statement. “What a surprise!” he added with sarcastic flare. “Tossing a feller outta the john with his pants around his ankles and stealing his phone wasn’t enough fun, was it? Ya just had to find something more interesting! Alright, then, Cooley, enlighten us; what the hell did you do with a half-mutilated corpse?”
But before he could answer, Pickett’s eyes narrowed to two suspicious slits that focused on Jimmy’s boxers.
“You didn’t fuck it, did you?”
Jimmy stared at the man. “What? No! Jesus, Sheriff, I ain’t like that; I just ate one of the fingers—”
Pickett’s bushy eyebrows seemed to fly off his forehead. “Christ, almighty, son! Now you’re mixed up in cannibalism?”
Deputy Ferguson laughed through a mouthful of his drink, expelling spurts of orange cola out his nose.
Pickett glared at the younger officer like an executioner with one hand on the power switch, ending the amusement. He then redirected his attention at Jimmy with equal intensity.
“This is Detective Riverwind,” Pickett said, motioning to the American Indian with the lacerated face. “He’s the one you’re going to have to make friends with if you don’t want to spend the next decade in prison.”
A phone rang at the desk. Vern answered it.
“Now listen up, Cooley,” Pickett continued. “If it wasn’t for the detective’s investigation I’d can your ass right now and Judge Morton would put it on the shelf ’till winter. So if you have some serious information—and I mean it better be a goddamn treasure map with a big fuck’n X at the end of it—then start talking.”
“Hey, Sheriff!” Ferguson said. “We just got a call from that rescue shelter over on route nine. The neighbors say some nutjob broke into the place and hacked up all the animals with an ax. Sounds real messy.”
“Wonderful!” Pickett exclaimed. “Has the whole world gone crazy?”
“I think it would be best if I questioned Mister Cooley alone,” detective Riverwind said. “Do you mind?”
It was the first time he’d spoken since Jimmy arrived, and the power of the man’s voice sent a shiver down his spine.
Pickett waved them away. “You can have him!”
10.
A scarred, coffee-stained table sat in the center of the police station’s only interview room and Riverwind gestured for Jimmy to have a seat as he closed the door.
“Look,” Jimmy said once they were alone, “this is a waste of time, man. That psycho you’re after ain’t dead! He’s walking around right now, looking for me!”