He was peering out the door again. “No, you’re wrong there, girly. A guitar ain’t nothing but a guitar, just wood and strings and steel and what have you. Your life is all that counts.”
“I’m not going to argue with you.”
He shrugged. “Whatever. Seen cherries like you in the war. Always fretting over good luck charms and religious objects and prized possessions. Didn’t do ’em no good. You got one life, that’s all you get and all you need. Rest is bullshit. Materialism.”
“Oh, you got me pegged, eh? Material girl.”
“You said it not me.”
“You don’t know shit.” She fished a pack of cigarettes out of her coat pocket, fired one up. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“No, you’re right. I don’t know, don’t wanna know.”
This guy. Jesus. He was ruining a perfectly good buzz with his attitude. “What about you? That must be quite a story. Look at you… what is that getup about?” she asked him, giving him a sneer she usually reserved for the cameras. “Camouflage for chrissake? Didn’t notice any jungle around here, Rambo. Time to leave Da Nang behind, Chuck Fucking Norris.”
He closed the door. “You wanna get out of here, rock star? That what you want? Then you’d best zip up that pisshole you call a mouth.” He turned back to the door, muttered under his breath: “Fucking broads. Cooking and sucking dick are their high points, rest is crap. Can’t trust ’em. Can’t trust anything that bleeds for a week every month but don’t have the good sense to lay down and die.”
“Excuse me?” Lisa said, her blood boiling like hot molasses. “What did you say?”
“You heard me.”
“You arrogant, macho shitbag.” She shook her head. “Yeah, just my luck. I get stuck in this fucking mess and who do I get for company? Sexist goddamn loser. What happened, Rambo? What gave you such a high opinion of women? You get dumped too many times? Small penis? Or don’t you even like girls?”
He smiled thinly. “How bad you want to find out?”
“About as bad as I want my tits stapled to the sidewalk.”
“Good place for you, long as your ass is up in the air.”
Lisa was wondering how he’d look with a guitar case shoved up his back door sideways. “Okay, macho man. Save it. Show me the way out. You can do that can’t you?”
“I can do all sorts of things, woman.”
Though there seemed to be no sexual undercurrent implied, she said, “Spare me, Sarge. You couldn’t get laid in a fucking leper colony.”
He pulled off his watch cap, stroked his bald head, put it back on. “You’d be surprised.”
“No, I’d be disappointed.” Her buzz had peaked now. It would hang around for a time, but already this guy had ruined a good thing. She wasn’t going to let him get away with it.
Johnny took two quick, very quick, steps toward her. She saw his hand come up and was powerless to stop him. She saw her life flash before her eyes like a low-budget movie. His hand stopped inches from her left temple.
His eyes, locked with her own, belonged in the head of wild boar, not a man. Finally, he let out a breath, grinned at her, started giggling. “I like a woman with balls that puts me in my place. You’re okay, rock star. You married?”
“Only to myself.”
“Wanna be? You think you could go for a mutt like me?”
“Doubt it.”
She suddenly felt connected to this guy, antithesis to everything she loved about the male species.
He nodded, shouldered his rifle and pulled a shotgun from its sheath at his back. It was a sleek, nasty-looking piece of hardware with a pistol grip. “Let’s go, rock star.”
Lisa stuck her tongue out behind his back, but followed.
Back out onto the streets. The damp. The cold. The grainy darkness.
Yeah, Rambo here was a real piece of work. It wasn’t so much that he’d insulted her or women in general (she’d been gone over by the best), it was just that she had to wonder what sort of combination of circumstances produced a guy like him. He was rough, sure, about as polished as a rusty nail and liked to give the impression he was an A-number one badass lifetaker. And maybe he was, but she had a pretty good idea he was more than that. Something else entirely. There was warmth under that roughhewn exterior.
Like a coal in a firepot, warm at its center, but covered in ash and dirt.
That was Johnny Davis.
“Follow the leader, rock star.”
Meaning: don’t lag behind.
But she had no intention of doing that. In a situation like this, even a complete asshole like Johnny Davis came in pretty damn handy.
He motioned for her to stop.
He did everything with hand signals like he was humping it up the Ho Chi Minh Trail again. Up ahead, he was studying what lay before them.
He was real careful, real professional.
Good man to have on point, she figured.
Especially when the war came home.
11
Lou Frawley’s world was one of madness and damp and perpetual dark.
It was a compacted microcosm of horror and survival where the worse things not only could happen but did with shocking regularity. His world was Cut River and the madhouse it had become. Pretty little snow-globe town. Shake it up and the snow fell on the quaint little village. Except the quaint little village was haunted by monsters that lived in the skins of men, women, and children.
Quite a change, really.
His was a salesman’s life—town after town, one bad meal piled on another, ulcers, failed relationships, promotions that never materialized, shitty hotel rooms, drunken nights, ass-kissing sales managers, one night stands with painted-up bimbos and the only drama in it being what sort of social disease you might bring home like a sick puppy to care for and feed until it did you in, and the road went on forever.
That was pretty much what it was before Cut River.
All that dark revelation and this in only a few short hours.
Maybe it wasn’t much of a life when you stuck it under the scope like a new microbe, but it was his and he tended it well. Watered it, fed it, and kept it growing.
Now there was only survival.
Stay alive long enough to maybe get out of this godforsaken town or, at the very least, to die knowing the answer to the grim puzzle.
I should’ve stayed in Green Bay, he thought. He almost did. Instead, he drove a couple hundred miles north into this.
Sound thinking, all right.
After his little rendezvous with the Snake Woman (as he now called her), he kept moving, keeping in the shadows, keeping his eyes on the big brick building perched on the hill. It had to serve some official function. He knew that much. But what if it didn’t? What if it was some old condemned rathole waiting for the kiss of the wrecking ball? What then?
That’s what he kept thinking.
He was half a block away from it now and could’ve been there a long time ago if he hadn’t had to hide all the time. No matter, there it was.
He was in the doorway alcove of a little craft shop, pressed up stiffly to the plate glass display window, enclosed in bands of darkness.
Safe?
Yes, about as safe as any other place in this town. And that, of course, wasn’t saying much.
He hadn’t seen any more psychos since the Snake Woman, but that didn’t mean they weren’t out there. He could hear them from time to time—wild shriekings and cries. Sometimes the sounds of shattering glass. Oh yes, they were out there and very active. No doubt about that. But not just them; he could also hear dogs barking and whining… at least he hoped it was dogs. And earlier he could’ve sworn he heard gunfire, but it was too distant to be sure.
He liked to think that it was just that: gunfire.