Was that what faced Perry? Were they consuming him from the inside? But if that was the case, then why were they always screaming at him to eat? They weren’t going to take over his mind. That much was obvious-if they could take over his mind, they wouldn’t need eyes, now would they? Maybe this was just the first stage-if they could grow eyes, why not a mouth? Why not teeth?
He calmed himself, forcing himself to focus, think logically. He was, after all, an educated man. A college boy, as Daddy would say. All he had to do was think, and maybe he could come up with some answers on his own.
He just didn’t have enough information to form any kind of hypothesis, nothing to go on. No clues. Even Columbo would have been stuck with this one. Of course, Columbo would play the blithering buffoon, countering the suave, rich attitudes of his homicidal targets. Columbo would let stupidity show, wear his weakness on his sleeve, allowing his targets’ confidence to grow and grow and grow until they let something slip, something tiny, something that would normally go unnoticed. Unnoticed by normal eyes, but not Peter Falk’s cross-eyed stare. That’s what he had to do; play dumb, and get them talking.
“Hey fuckers.” hey hello
“What is it you fellas want with me?” what do you mean want
“Why are you in my body?” we don’t know
So much for detective work. There was really nothing else to do. Just sit. Sit and wait. He was nothing more than a walking, talking buffet table. Sit and wait. Sit and listen.
You gonna let ’em push you around like that, boy?
Another voice…his daddy’s voice. It wasn’t real, it wasn’t a voice in his head like the Triangles’, it was a memory. No, not a memory, a phantom. His daddy’s voice, as if his daddy were with him in spirit.
“No, Daddy,” Perry said, his voice a dry husk. “I won’t let them push me around.”
He hooked his index finger under his sweatshirt collar and pulled it back violently, ripping it slightly, exposing the Triangle on his collarbone. He couldn’t see it, but he knew that the icy-black eyes were blinking away, taking in the view of the living room and all the knickknacks that Perry had acquired since high school.
The fork still sat on the plate, a few rivulets of spaghetti sauce clinging to the tines. Perry grabbed it with a caveman grip, clutched it like a murderous dagger. He giggled once as he remembered the punch line to an old grade-school joke.
“Fork you, buddy.”
With all the force he could muster, he jammed the fork into his trapezius. The center tine poked through one of the black eyes with a tiny, wet, crunching noise.
The tines kissed off his scapula and out the back side of his trapezius, accompanied by a double-squirt of red and purple that landed wetly on the couch’s worn-thin upholstery.
He wasn’t even sure if he felt it. He didn’t have to scream in pain-the Triangles took care of that.
It wasn’t even a scream, really, just a noise. A loud noise. A fucking hellfire and bear-the-cross loud noise, blaring like a klaxon alarm stuffed down his auditory canal to rest nicely against his eardrum. He rolled off the couch, thrashing his head in sudden and all-encompassing agony.
He rolled onto his back, reached up, grabbed the fork and twisted it, driving it up at an angle deeper into his shoulder.
Perry couldn’t know that on the second thrust the fork tines punched a neat hole through the Triangle’s main nervous column just below its flat head, killing it instantly. Had he known, he probably wouldn’t have cared-all he knew was that he wasn’t a patsy, wasn’t some pushover, he was Scary Perry Dawsey and was once again whipping ass.
“You fucks!” Perry screamed louder than ever before, perhaps needing to hear himself over the horrid death-shriek that raged through his head. “How do you like it? How’s it feel?” stop stop stop stop stop stop stop stop
“The fuck I’ll stop! How’s it feel? How does it feel?” Tears found their way out of Perry’s tightly shut eyes. Pain raged through his body, but his conscious mind felt none of it. fucker you will pay stop Stop STOP
“Bite it, baby!” Perry fed on the pain like an alcoholic diving into that first off-the-wagon drink. “I’m doing this one and then I’m calling the Soldiers to come get the rest!” He twisted the fork again and started to say something, but lost the words as the fork stuck deeply into a tendon. He made the major mistake of giving in to the pain, rolling in useless protest-his shoulder and the end of the fork hit the front of the couch, driving the prongs in ever deeper.
STOP STOP STOP
Perry tried opening his eyes, but vision came only in strobelike bursts. The klaxon scream in his head was too much to bear. He’d lost again, he knew it, but he couldn’t even mutter a single word. Couldn’t
tell them he was so sorry
couldn’t tell Daddy he would behave
couldn’t beg Daddy to please God STOP ripping into my brain!
He fell to the ground, motionless, not hearing the angry, irritated stomping coming from the ceiling above.
41.
Al Turner pounded his heel into the floor. He’d had just about enough of this shit. He pounded again, and the yelling stopped.
He absently scratched his ample, hairy gut, then slid a hand into his boxers to scratch his sweaty ass. Frigging hemorrhoids were killing him. They could put a man on the moon, but they couldn’t make your asshole stop burning. Figures.
What the hell had gotten into that kid? Screaming his head off like that. The guy had always been so quiet, Al rarely gave him a second thought. Well, not since the kid had moved in, anyway, and Al had found out that “Scary” Perry Dawsey lived right below him. Al introduced himself, had Dawsey sign a football for his nephew and a couple of U of M shirts for himself. Dawsey had smiled, as if he were surprised that someone would want his autograph. The smile had faded when Al asked him to sign the Rose Bowl shirt. That had probably been a little crude, but then again Al didn’t exactly subscribe to the Miss Manners school of thinking, right?
He’d never expected Dawsey to be so huge. Sure, football players all looked big on TV, but to stand next to them was another thing entirely. The kid was a fucking monster. Al had briefly entertained the thought that he and Perry could hit the bar every Saturday during football season, maybe hang out on Sundays to watch the games. Wouldn’t Jerry at work be jealous of that, Al Turner hanging out just as casual as you please with one of-if not the -greatest linebacker to ever wear the maize and blue. But that had changed when he met the kid. Just standing next to Dawsey made Al feel like a seven-year-old. He didn’t want to drink beers with that freak of nature. It was like those science shows on big cats-fine to watch on TV, as long as you didn’t have to meet one face-to-face in the fucking jungle.
Al twitched as his asshole flared with another round of burning. Felt like a goddamn red-hot poker was jammed in there. He grimaced and scratched. This shit could piss off the Pope, and Dawsey’s screaming fits weren’t helping his mood.
42.
In Dew’s experience, local cops rarely looked like happy campers. These particular local cops? Well, they looked downright pissed. Three Ann Arbor police cars were parked in front of Nguyen’s house. They’d pulled right up on the lawn and sidewalk, passing the three gray vans that had parked on the curb. The former occupants of those cars stood on the sidewalk and on the snow-trampled yard, staring up at a pair of men dressed in urban camouflage and holding P90s. Dew had told the four men in Squad One to lose the Racal suits and take positions at the entrances, two at the front door, two at the back. Pissed-off local cops always looked like genuine bad-asses, but Dew’s boys looked like they’d kill a man just as casually as they’d squeeze out a fart.