For a moment, he found himself in a clear space. He drew a deep breath, his eyes briefly closing, and felt the worm un-coiling deep within his bowels. He released the breath and opened his eyes.
The bullet hit him in the right shoulder, spinning him into the bar. He saw the female cop in the side entrance hallway, cold air entering through the open door behind her. Her hair was matted with blood and rivulets of red ran down the side of her face. She was almost slumped against the doorjamb, weakened by her injuries and exhausted by the effort it had taken her to get to the bar. Buddy reached under his shirt for the gun he had taken from Lloyd Hopkins as Ellie tried to clear her vision for a second shot. There was no pain from the wound, but the arm of Buddy’s shirt was soaked in a black, viscous fluid. People were shouting and screaming, trying to put as much space between him and them as possible. Most of them were already on the ground, or seeking cover behind tables and flimsy chairs.
Buddy felt his body changing. It was as though he were being stretched to bursting by some unseen force. He looked at his hands and saw his pores widening, expanding in size until his skin appeared to be pocked with half-inch-wide holes. They spat black fluid, like miniature volcanoes erupting. He felt more of them appear on his face, and liquid pressure building behind his eyes, increasing the bulge in his sockets and distorting his eyesight. The great worm writhed in his belly, and he felt it shoot tendrils through his system, causing him to spasm in agony. His clothing started to tear as dark nodes pressed upward, bursting through the denim and twisting in the air like newborn eels in clear water.
Buddy’s hand found the gun and drew it from his belt. The muzzle of the cop’s pistol wavered, then fell as Ellie lost consciousness, her body sliding down the jamb. Buddy aimed, following her progress down. He saw her as a vague blue blur, almost lost amid the blackness encroaching upon his vision. He could kill her now, or use her to relieve some of the great force that threatened to overwhelm him. Buddy dropped the gun and advanced on the prone cop.
Something tore a hole in the center of his being. A black spray erupted from his chest, dousing the tables and the floor. Buddy was propelled forward, tripping over Ellie’s body as his hands scrabbled at the walls to prevent himself from falling. He opened his mouth to scream, aware of the massive shock that his system had endured. There was a great wound in his chest. He touched his fingers to it and thought that he saw at last the black worm, twisting and biting in the corrupted remains of his flesh. Its movements appeared frenzied and tormented, as though it sensed Buddy’s end was near and was now intent upon chewing its way out of its host’s system before it collapsed entirely.
He turned to see Lopez standing at the bar, the stock of the big shotgun firm against his shoulder. Buddy’s mouth was filled with fluid. It coursed down from the corners of his mouth as he spoke, turning his chin dark and losing itself in the hole in his chest. His vision left him, and he felt a great absence within as the link between the worm and himself was abruptly severed.
“No cure,” said Buddy.
He was smiling in his final agonies, his mouth a mass of yellow and black like the half-chewed remains of wasps.
“No cure for cancer.”
Buddy raised his gun blindly, and Lopez blew the top of his head off.
VI
By the time the state police arrived, Buddy Carson’s remains had turned to a dark, clotted mass on the floor of Reed’s bar, with only his clothes, his boots, and his white straw hat to indicate that this had once been the form of a man.
The snows came the next day, and piles of earth later marred the whiteness of the town cemetery as the bodies were buried. More would follow, as Buddy Carson’s victims succumbed to the disease with which he had infected them. Some died quickly, others dragged on for weeks. Nobody lasted longer than a month.
Reed’s bar closed. So did the Easton Motel, as Jed followed his son, Phil, into the ground. People left for new places and the town began to decay, as surely as if Buddy had found a way to taint its buildings and corrode its streets. It was the beginning of the end for Easton. Even Lopez left: he followed the trail of pain and death back to Colorado, and drank a beer with Jerry Schneider, who told him of what he had seen at the Benson farm. He traveled through Wyoming and Idaho, and ended up in Nebraska before the trail ran dry. He returned to New Hampshire and settled down with Elaine Olssen near Nashua, but he never forgot Buddy Carson.
He never forgot the cancer cowboy.
In a desert in western Nevada, a man dressed in cheap denim opens his eyes. He is lying on the sand, and though the sun beats down upon him, his skin has not burned. He cannot remember his name or how he came to be here. He knows only that he is in pain and he needs to reach out to someone.
The man rises to his feet, the lizard skin cowboy boots strangely familiar upon his feet, and heads for the highway.
Mr. Pettinger’s Dæmon
The bishop was a skeletal man, with long, unwrinkled fingers and raised dark veins that ran across his pale skin like tree roots over snowy ground. His head was very bald, tapering to a point at the top of his skull, and his face was either scrupulously clean-shaven or quite without natural hair of any kind. He was dressed entirely in purples and crimsons, apart from the white collar that rested at his neck like a displaced halo. When he stood to greet me, deep reds flowing from the pale sharpness of his head, I was struck by his resemblance to a bloody dagger.
I watched as the fingers of his left hand curled slowly and carefully around the bowl of his pipe, while his right hand gently tamped tobacco into the hollow. There was something almost spiderlike about the way those fingers moved. I decided that I didn’t like the bishop’s fingers, but then, I didn’t like the bishop.
We sat at opposite sides of the marble fireplace in his library, the flames in its grate the only source of illumination in the great room until the bishop struck the match in his hand and applied it to his pipe. The action seemed to deepen the sockets of his eyes and gave a yellow aspect to his pupils. I observed him draw upon the stem until I could abide the sucking of his lips no longer, then turned my attention to the volumes upon his shelves. I wondered how many of them the bishop had read. He seemed to me to be the kind of man who distrusted books, wary of the seeds of sedition and independent thought that they might sow in minds less disciplined than his own.
“How have you been, Mr. Pettinger?” the bishop asked, when his pipe was lighted to his satisfaction.
I thanked him for his concern and assured him that I was feeling much better. I still had some trouble with my nerves, and at night I twisted in my sleep to the sounds of shelling and the scurrying of rats in the trenches, but there was little point in telling that to the man before me. There were others who had returned in a far worse state of disintegration than I, their bodies ruined, their minds shattered like dropped crystal. Somehow, I had managed to retain all my limbs and a little of my sanity. I liked to think that it was God who protected me through it all, even when it appeared that He had turned His back upon us and left us to our fate, although sometimes, in my darkest moments, I believed that He had deserted me long ago, if He ever existed at all.
Strange the things that one recalls. There were so many horrors experienced amid the flesh and dirt that to choose one above another seemed almost absurd, as if an ascending graph might somehow be created in which offenses against humanity were graded according to their impact on the individual psyche. Yet again and again I came back to a group of soldiers standing against a flat, muddy landscape broken only by the trunk of a single, blasted tree. Some still had blood around their mouths, although so mired in filth were they that it was hard to tell where men ended and mud began. They were found in a shell crater by advancing troops, after a furious battle led to a minute shift in our lines: four British soldiers crouched over the body of a fifth man, their hands working upon him, tearing strips of warm meat from his bones and feeding them greedily into their mouths. The dead soldier was a German, but that hardly mattered. Somehow this quartet of deserters had contrived to survive for weeks in the no-man’s-land between the two lines by feeding upon the bodies of slain soldiers.