The preacher pressed his mouth near, the thick rinds of his gums snapping hungrily. Amanda Blevins, or the demon that now owned her fermenting flesh, reached for Bill with viscid hands. Others of their kind had come out from the trees or behind the marble headstones or perhaps up from the very ground itself.
Bill grew confused, as if someone had pumped him full of six kinds of drugs, or Satan had thrown open the door to a crazy house. Because words and images flashed across his mind, things green and quick and not of this earth. He felt Nettie being pulled from his arms as he squirmed under the hothouse assault. Tongues writhed near his cheek like snakes.
"Nettie!" he screamed, swinging his fists like sledgehammers against the blanched pulpy meat of the hellspawn.
Floodlights suddenly erupted, giving detail to the horror, revealing the devil's hordes. Their mouths opened in apocalyptic glee. They had seen the light. And the light exposed their ungodly hunger.
DeWalt stumbled, and then regained his footing. His legs were sodden tree stumps, dense granite pillars, tonnage. He absently reached into his front pocket for the habit of his pipe. He was putting it to his lips when he was struck by the vision of tobacco plants under a gleaming sun, rows upon rows waving their fat juicy leaves in shimmering reverence, full fields of rich decadence and sharp dewy blossoms, green armies with their nicotine arsenals. He tossed the pipe into the undergrowth.
DeWalt looked around at the long shadows of branches and the looming treetops. Even under the full moon, the night woods were secret and treacherous.
No wonder, Oh Lodge Brother. Whose side do you think they're on, anyway?
You're too xenophobic, Mr. Chairman. Maybe that's why you won't let anyone else join the Royal Order of the Bleeding Hearts.
Two hands, two balls. A balanced arrangement.
And what if I defect to that other club?
Which club would that be, Oh Brother?
Greenpeace's evil twin. The Royal Order of Shu-shaaa. The Earth Mouth. The God seed.
You haven't got the nerve. You wouldn't be here now if you weren't even more afraid of showing your true color. Yellow.
I object, Mr. Chairman.
Why do you think you were driven to make piles of money? Why you dodged Vietnam but didn’t give a damn about the peace movement? Why your marriage didn’t work because you could never give enough of yourself? Why you had it all but never enough? Why you always had to start over?
No fair. You're hitting below the belt.
It's your FEAR, Brother. Oh, not of death. A fear of being ridiculed. Of being found out. A fear of having lived. A fear of being caught giving a damn.
Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
This meeting of the Royal Order of the Bleeding Hearts is now adjourned.
DeWalt looked at the shadowy forms of Chester and Emerland twenty feet ahead. He hoped Chester knew where they were going, because DeWalt was as lost as a preacher at a strip joint. Woodsmanship and sense of direction couldn't be ordered out of an LL Bean catalog. And other things also had no price.
His shoulder ached from the sack of fungicide he carried. The dust of its pungent poison wafted from beneath the tucked paper flaps. He had given the shotgun back to Chester, glad to be free of its power. But the dynamite bulged in his pockets, as heavy as the weight of responsibility. The detonator switch and blasting cap were in his vest pockets.
He hoped he would be able to rig the cap. Chester would never let him hear the end of it if he failed. If he remembered correctly, the detonator sent an electrical charge to the cap, and the heat caused a chain reaction in the cap that set off the rest of the TNT.
But how do you expect to remember that, Oh Lodge Brother? Do you trust your memories after your long fling with free love and sex and every sort of mythical motherlode mindmuck known to the human race? Do you trust the ravings of those kitchen-sink radicals you used to swap bedbugs with?
Those were decent people, Chairman.
Quoting chapter and verse from The Anarchist Cookbook?
Well… times were different then.
Yes. You hadn't developed your itch yet. Whatever happened to promoting change within the system?
Viva la revolucion, comrade. Times were different then, but times are different now, too.
You're out of order, Brother.
Yeah, and for everything, there is a season. You know, what the hippies sang, back when we thought the world was worth changing, let alone saving. We couldn’t even change our own damned minds.
He heard Tamara behind him. The can she was carrying sloshed as she changed hands again. The handle had to be biting into her palm, and her arms were probably numb by now. But she was faring better than the rest of them, urging them up the trail.
The moon had started its descent in the sky. Dawn was only a few hours away. Hadn't Tamara said something about the zombiemaker Earth Mouth thing getting stronger under the sun?
Yes, I did, Tamara thought.
Wait a second.
What did DeWalt say?
He didn't say anything. You heard him. In your head. Turn, turn, turn.
Nonsense. Clairvoyance is one thing. Telepathy is quite another.
And maybe you're getting delirious from fatigue and hunger and lack of sleep. And maybe, maybe, maybe you can chase arguments around your head like a dog chasing its tail until your brain collapses into a useless heap.
But LISTEN.
And she shut the flap of her own clamoring inner voice, closed up shop and concentrated. She heard DeWalt thinking something about lodge brothers and how the moon looked like a bad rind of cheese and how that reminded him of when he and his friends used to camp in the backyard up in Oregon and how he wished he were a child again so he could live his life all over Then she was out of him, her mind swimming with those extra thoughts.
She stopped walking and set the can of Roundup on the damp leaves.
"You okay, Tamara?" DeWalt asked from under the shadows ahead.
"Fine," she replied, thinking she would never be fine again. "Just resting for a sec. Be right along."
"Chester and Emerland are taking a breather, too. Chester says we're nearly there."
That made Tamara curious. Could she?
She opened her mind and sent her new telepathic ears tenderly into the night, swiveled her psychic antenna.
And she touched Chester's mind briefly, shared his thought that he was sure going to miss old Don Oscar's moonshine, but he was going to enjoy it while it lasted. She absorbed his bright fear, felt the raw spot where the overall strap’s buckle dug into his shoulder, tasted the sting of corn liquor, and smelled sweat-stained long johns. Then she pulled back.
She was either reading minds or else she'd finally shattered into a thousand schizophrenic splinters. It had to be shu-shaaa, the pulsing alien that had brought her Gloomies back from their hibernation. The creature had amplified her sensitivity, maybe from an overload of its own hot cosmic power spilling over, maybe from some undiscovered wavelength that operated beyond the scope of human understanding, maybe a final boon granted by an omnipotent conqueror to the ants it was about to crush. Who could know such things?
A stray thread of thought spiraled up from her crowded subconsciousness, in Chester's thin brain-voice, a sound byte that had probably slipped in randomly during the telepathic exchange.
"Curiosity killed the cat and never did no good for the mouse, neither."
Maybe it was best not to understand. All Tamara knew was that her head was full, brimming with not only her own fears and worries, not only the shu-shaaa blaring its presence in a bright invisible beacon, not only the Gloomies making a comeback that would rival that of John Travolta's, but now she had other brains to wonder and worry and ache over.