The other three followed silently.
Suddenly Brother Elias made a harsh stab into the pile of garbage in front of him. There was an ear-piercing squeal, and the preacher lifted his pitchfork.
Stuck to the points, still squirming, was a fetus.
Gordon turned away, feeling nauseous. Even the sheriff flinched.
Father Andrews stood with his eyes closed, leaning heavily on his pitchfork for support, his lips moving in silent prayer. Though all of them had known, deep down, why they had been carrying the pitchforks, though all of them had known what Brother Elias expected of them, none of them had visualized the experience, had realized just how repellent the actual act would be.
What if Brother Elias was wrong? Gordon thought, sickened. What if he had just stabbed a real baby? But what real baby would be crawling through the dump, through the garbage, at six o'clock in the morning?
The preacher turned toward them. "This is what we are up against," he said. He held his pitchfork forward for them to examine the fetus. The thing was still alive, still squirming, though it did not seem to be in agony. Indeed, it appeared to feel no pain at all. Instead, it struggled furiously to free itself, as though the long steel points protruding from its body were nothing more than a harmless restraining belt. Its face was hideously malformed and was twisted into a malevolent grimace of hate. Thick fur grew on the unnaturally short arms. It stared up at them and spat angrily. There were tiny pointed teeth within its too-red mouth.
Brother Elias nodded toward the sheriff. "Get the blood," he said.
Jim ran off toward the truck.
Father Andrews moved forward gingerly. He was tempted to touch the fetus to make sure it was real. "What is it?" he asked. "I mean, is it alive? I thought these were infants who had died before birth.
Shouldn't they be rotted? Or decomposed?"
"I thought they'd be like ghosts," Gordon admitted. "Not real babies."
"They have corporeal form," Brother Elias said. "But they are not real babies."
The sheriff returned, lugging a box filled with the four quart jars of blood. He set the box down in front of the preacher.
Brother Elias nodded to the sheriff. He lifted the pitchfork, the fetus still struggling on the points, and ran it hard into the ground.
The hideous creature screamed, wiggling crazily. The preacher looked at Gordon. "Get the camera," he ordered.
Gordon ran to his truck and returned a moment later with the camera. He snapped a picture of Brother Elias standing next to the impaled fetus.
The preacher picked up two jars of blood, muttered a short incomprehensible prayer, and walked across the gravel to the smoldering woodpile. Chanting something in a strangely guttural foreign tongue, the words rising and falling in ritualistic cadences, he began walking in a circle around the pile, sprinkling the blood on the ground as he did so.
"What's he saying?" Jim asked.
Father Andrews shook his head. "It sounds like he's repeating some type of liturgy, but I'm not familiar with the language. It's not Latin, I know. And it doesn't sound either European or Oriental." He listened, cocking his head, and his face turned suddenly pale. "I ...
I don't think it's human," he said.
Brother Elias continued chanting until he had completed his circle around the smoldering woodpile. He knelt on the ground and dribbled the last of the blood on the dirt in a peculiar spiral pattern. He waved his hands over the ground, said something in the alien tongue and looked up into the sky. His fingers traced in the air a cross, a spiral, and an unnaturally angular geometric shape.
The circle of blood erupted immediately into flame. Within the circle, the ashes of the woodpile began to burn again until the flames had become a full-fledged conflagration.
The fetus on the pitchfork was now struggling harder and screaming wildly. From other parts of the landfill, other tiny bodies, other babies, other fetuses, pushed their way up through the wet slimy garbage, crawled out from between sheets of metal, and moved toward them. They moved slowly but surely, like large retarded slugs.
"Jesus," Gordon breathed. "How many of them do you think there are?"
"Hundreds," the sheriff said, and Gordon realized for the first time the enormity of what they were fighting against. He felt weaker, smaller, more impotent than he had ever felt in his life. What were they? A ragtag group of four stupid pitiful men fighting an evil so powerful, so organized, so all-encompassing, that it could animate these hundreds of bodies and will the bodies to do its bid ding. There was no way they could hope to battle anything this large. He stared at the small wiggling forms moving toward them across the dirt. This was all part of a long-range plan, a plan that was coming finally to fruition. Something that could do this, that could capture these babies over a period of years, perhaps decades, and save them, hoard them, until needed, could not be fought. Not by them.
Brother Elias grasped the handle of the pitchfork and matter-offactly pulled both it and the impaled fetus from the ground. He shoved the end of the pitchfork into the fire, and the fetus disintegrated in a flash of blood red light. The preacher turned toward them. "Now you know what you must do," he said.
Gordon stared at him. "It'll take us all day to get them all."
Brother Elias' tight lips curled into a smile, and for the first time his eyes joined in. He looked almost happy. "We are not going to get them all," he said. "We are using them for bait." He walked toward another small fetus flopping along the dirt and speared it through with his pitchfork. He shoved the pitchfork into the fire, and the creature disappeared in a squealing flash of red. "Get to work," he said, and his voice was filled with a powerful authority. "We have no time to waste."
Gordon found himself walking toward the large pile of scrap metal to his right. He had seen pink movement against the dull gray and silver of the discarded metal. He stopped in front of the pile. Before him, moving awkwardly toward him, was a hunchbacked creature much smaller than an ordinary baby, about the size of his fist. This, he realized, was one of the fetuses that had been aborted or miscarried early in the pregnancy, not one that had been stillborn. The creature had bent misshapen arms and a thick tuft of coarse black hair atop its pink elongated head. Gordon raised his pitchfork above the fetus, ready to bring it down, but he could not do it. He could not bring himself to stab the creature. Slowly, he lowered the pitchfork. He had never been able to kill. He did not hunt. Hell, he had a hard time getting rid of bugs; he usually took them outside and threw them into the bushes rather than kill them. He realized that these creatures were not exactly alive, but stabbing them felt the same inside as it would stabbing a normal baby.
He looked around. The sheriff, grimacing, was carrying a squealing, squirming infant to the fire, which was still burning as strongly as ever. Even Father Andrews was gingerly holding a tiny creature he had impaled on his pitchfork. Brother Elias was vigorously and enthusiastically spearing infants left and right.
Thoushalt not kill, Gordon thought.
He felt a sharp flash of pain in his foot, and he looked down. The fetus's twisted little hands had clawed a hole through the canvas material of his tennis shoe and were digging into his flesh. He stepped backward, and the fetus crawled toward him. Slowly, grimacing distastefully, Gordon scooped up the fetus, using his pitchfork like a shovel. He held the pitchfork way out in front of him, balancing the still moving creature carefully on the prongs, but before he could reach the fire it fell to the ground. The fetus looked up at him and laughed nastily.
He carefully picked it up again the same way, using the pitchfork as a shovel, but as he approached the fire the creature threw itself off the prongs onto the ground. He was about to pick it up yet again when another pitchfork speared the fetus through its midsection. Gordon turned to see Brother Elias standing next to him. The fetus gave a tremendous screech of rage and agony, way out of proportion to its small size, and the preacher shoved it into the fire where it disintegrated.