“Goodie,” he said. And it was. Drunk would work.
He climbed the stairs. It was high time he showed Vic who really was the big dog. More to the point, it was time he showed that sneering prick who was really the Man’s favored son. The door to the kitchen was also locked and it mattered just as little. Ruger wrapped his long white fingers around the doorknob and with no effort at all pulled the whole lock set right through the hole, splintering the wood and snapping wood screws with gunshot sounds. Beyond the door Lois Wingate screamed in shock.
As he pushed through into the kitchen Ruger’s smile grew into a hungry grin. He liked the sound of that scream, his mouth watering with the knowledge that it would be the first of many.
(3)
They slept through the night, but as dawn approached Val woke up. She lay for a long time staring upward into the empty shadows above Crow’s bed, feeling the weight and solidity of his arm and aware that his need to protect her meant so little in the scheme of things. To her heart, sure, it was wonderful, but to her mind—a machine grinding on its own gears—nothing was strong enough to protect her. Not against her own thoughts. There was nothing that Crow could do—nothing anyone could do—to protect her from the truth of her loss. The town was polluted; there was blight on almost all the crops. Except hers, but the Guthrie farm had suffered its share of pestilence. At that moment, if she could have accomplished it she would have razed all of the crops and every building including her own house to the ground and sown the ground with salt. Not for fear of the crop diseases, but in fear of that other plague. The plague that had made Boyd what he was, which was perhaps the same plague that had drawn Boyd and Ruger to Pine Deep in the first place.
Mark’s body was in the morgue. Cold and empty, without Mark’s soul in it. Just flesh, she told herself. Not Mark at all…just an empty shell…and yet Mark had been killed by Boyd. And Boyd was a vampire. It didn’t matter that Weinstock checked on him three times a day; it didn’t matter than neither Mark or Connie showed any signs of being anything more than corpses. In a movie she’d seen once a vampire had said something about outliving his enemies by simply going to sleep for a century and then rising after they were dust. What if that sort of thing was possible? What if Mark, cold and dead as he appeared, was only waiting for some dark call to awaken him?
It was a stupid thought, she knew. Stupid, and fanciful, and utterly terrible. Val lay there and stared out through the lightless window into the blank blackness of the night and thought lots of such thoughts.
(4)
Mike knew that everything was broken, but he didn’t care. He didn’t know how to care anymore. The impact with the tree had smashed almost every thought out of his mind, and filtered what little remained into a single piece of understanding. “I’m dying,” he said in a wet voice.
He coughed and felt blood splash out of his mouth onto his chin. There was pain. Of course there was pain, but it was a remote island way off on the horizon of his perception. It had been there for hours, ever since he’d crashed, and it had done all the harm to him that it could. Now it was just there. He didn’t care about that, either.
“I’m dying,” he said again, smiling. It was the safest he’d felt in years.
Time, as meaningless as the rest of it, had long ago ceased to move…and yet the sky had changed. Mike couldn’t move his head and had been staring at the featureless black above him forever. Maybe he slept at times, maybe he just stared, but now the sky was less pervasively black, now there was just the faintest hint of color. A brick-red tinge dabbed here and there on the underside of the clouds.
The wind stirred, pushing some leaves around. One leaf blew against his cheek and stuck to the blood, quivering as if struggling to escape. Mike turned his eyes to look at it, saw its jagged brown edges vibrating, and it took him a few seconds to realize that he could see the color. He tried to lift one hand, wanting to see if there was enough light to see his fingers and was surprised when his hand moved. When he had tried to move his hand before it had not so much as trembled; there hadn’t been a single flicker of sensation from anything below his shoulders. That had changed now, but Mike still didn’t care. He was too busy trying to die.
There was the rustle of more leaves off to his left, not in the path of the wind, and Mike turned his eyes that way—and his whole head turned, too. His neck was no longer locked into immobility. Over there, just beyond where his bike lay, there was a man.
Mike looked at him, trying to pick out details in the gloom, but the light was still bad. At first Mike thought he was looking at a scarecrow, because the man was dressed in filthy rags whose tatters flapped in the breeze, but there was no post, no fence to support a scarecrow. And then the man took a step toward him. Such a strange step, and even in his semidaze Mike thought it was odd. A stiff and staggering step, more like the Tin Man from Oz than the Scarecrow. That thought flitted through his mind and Mike almost smiled at the absurdity of it. Another step, managed with equal awkwardness, as if the man’s knees were inflexible or unused to walking.
The dawn was filling in the world with colors, defining shapes, painting the day, and as he lay there Mike could see more of the man. He frowned. The stranger was truly a raggedy man, his clothes nothing but mismatched castoffs. A soiled pair of patched work pants, two different shoes—a sneaker and a woman’s low-heeled pump—a checked shirt that was torn in a dozen places. Heavy cotton work gloves. And some kind of mask, but it was still too dark to make out what it was. It was dark and shiny and the material it was made from rippled in the wind.
Daylight swelled by another degree and though the cloud cover kept any rays from touching the man, the quality of light increased but still the mask made no sense to Mike. There were no holes for eyes. It was just a swirling complexity of wrinkles that writhed and twisted with the steady breeze. The man took another jerky step forward. Mike had no urge, no desire to ask for help. The dying don’t need help to die, and if this guy wanted to be a witness, then that was on him. Mike felt removed from thoughts of help and safety, even of right and wrong.
He just wanted to die and he didn’t care if anyone—especially a raggedy man—stood by and watched. Another step and now the man was no more than twenty feet away. Two more steps, another, another. Ten feet now and the rosy glow of the dawn washed him in crimson from his shoes to his face.
To his…face? Suddenly terror struck Mike like a fist over the heart. In a single moment all of his detachment fractured and fell away. His whole body convulsed, arching belly-up to the sky like a heart attack patient getting the paddles. Every wound, every splintered bone, every inch of torn flesh, every nerve ending screamed in desperate, howling agony and terror. The shriek burst from his throat in a spray of bloodstained spit. If someone had sprayed him with gasoline and tossed a match on him the pain could not have been more comprehensive or intense. His scream went on and on and on. Hordes of crows exploded from the trees and raced in panic across the sky above him, sweeping in vast circles above the field. The sparse green grass that patched the dirt around him withered into sickly yellow twists and curled in on themselves to die. In the soil beneath him the sleepy October worms swelled and burst as if boiled.
The scream ended. Mike sagged to the ground, limp and exhausted. His eyes—more red than blue now—cast wildly about to find the Raggedy Man.
He was there. Right there, right next to him, looming over, looking down. Mike could see that face, that mask—which was not a mask at all, not some wrinkled dark cloth rippling in the breeze. It was his face that rippled, that…writhed. There were no eyeholes because there were no eyes—not human eyes; no mouth either—not a human mouth. What there was, what composed the man’s entire face, was a black, roiling, chitinous swarm of bristling insects. Roaches and beetles. Slugs, maggots, centipedes. Flies and termites. In the gaps between his gloves and his sleeves the exposed arm was the same—every foul creature of the shadows wriggling together to form a wrist. Between shoes and cuffs, the same. Wasps and earwigs, lice and locusts.