Again, Joe didn’t pay any attention.
Probably kept his sanity that way, Ben figured.
“We have to get out of here,” he told them. “That’s the bottom line.”
“Agreed,” Joe said.
There was a sudden thudding and the Jeep started rocking. It came again and again. Thud, thud, thud. The dogs were back, throwing themselves at the Jeep. They dove at the windows, enraged and filled with maniacal bloodlust, jaws snapping, eyes bulging, snouts spraying tangles of saliva and foam into the air.
“Jesus Christ!” Joe cried. “They’re attacking my fucking Jeep!”
An immense black lab clawed its way up onto the hood, throwing itself at the windshield, teeth biting, tongue licking, paws clawing. Its eyes were huge, bulging, on fire with that profane yellow shine, raging with blind hatred. Its jaws closed around a windshield wiper, ripped it free, and snapped it in half like a chicken wing. It kept smashing its snout into the glass with a savage ferocity until the windshield was painted with foam and slime and blood.
“Wow,” Ruby Sue said. “Un-fucking-believable.”
Joe threw the Jeep in reverse, swinging around in a perfect arc, tires squealing. The lab tumbled through the air, disappeared. The Jeep popped the curb and Joe already had the transmission in drive. They swung back onto the street, knocking dogs aside like bowling pins. The Jeep gave a sickening lurch as it rolled over more than one of them. And they were away and gone, tooling down the road.
Ruby Sue said, “They’re rabid, man. I seen a show once.”
“It’s worse than that,” Nancy said, pressed up close to Ben now.
Joe was shaking his head as they wheeled around a corner, sliding into the street. “I’ve seen rabid. I’ve seen it more than once,” he told them. “And that ain’t rabid. It’s like rabid to the tenth power.”
Joe had the Jeep wailing up Chestnut, doing an easy seventy miles an hour.
The dogs had sent home the message that Ben and Nancy had been unable to: that there was something seriously wrong here and it was like nothing you could possibly imagine.
Now they know, Ben thought and was satisfied with that.
But he knew that the message wouldn’t truly hit home until they saw the people of this town… or what they had become. The dogs were bad, yes, God knew they were, but the people… savages, monsters, inhuman things.
“Let’s just get out of here,” Joe said. “We’ll sort the rest out later.”
Joe brought them straight up Chestnut until they crossed Magnetic Street, and entered one of the blacked-out sections of Cut River. Houses were dark. Cars parked. Bodies sprawled in the streets. Lifeless, empty. A cemetery. At least that’s how it looked, but Ben knew better. He knew what sort of things populated the darkness, their pale faces and grinning mouths and hooked fingers.
Yes, he knew all about those things.
Joe kept putting her to the metal, squealing around corners, firing through intersections, handling the Jeep with a near-suicidal mastery like he was piloting a fighter-bomber through enemy airspace. And, in some respects, that was true. Only thing lacking here was the heavy firepower.
“Up ahead,” Ruby Sue said. “That’s where those cars were, I think.”
Joe nodded. “Yeah.”
Ben sat silently waiting for something, anything. He didn’t know what, but he knew it was coming. Knew it wouldn’t be this easy.
Nancy was feeling it, too, he knew.
Her breathing was deep and labored, her body tight and rigid like it was held together with wire.
The headlights of the Jeep cut through the night like scalpels, peeling back the blighted darkness and revealing the festering underbelly of Cut River: cars with smashed windshields, flattened tires; garbage cans overturned, litter strewn on the sidewalks; tree limbs down from the storm; a pick-up truck driven right through a garage door. The homes squatting dismally in the gloom didn’t look right either—windows were shattered, furniture spilled out onto lawns. There were other things in the yards, too, shapes nestled in the leave-strewn grass.
Ben thought he saw bodies, but it was hard to be sure.
But he did know he saw what he thought were effigies, scarecrows dangling from second-story windows and porch overhangs.
At least, he hoped they were effigies.
“Check that out,” Ruby Sue said. “Did you see it?” Nobody answered, so she elaborated. “Looked like… I don’t know, man… like symbols and shit painted on that house. This place has gone totally fucking pagan.”
Pagan.
It made all the sense in the world to Ben.
Whatever had gotten this town, whatever pestilence had infected its citizens, it almost seemed to have freed something primal, something atavistic dwelling within them. Like the veneer of civilization had been peeled free, baring the dark, feral underbelly of the human race and the calculated barbarity that went with it. These people, like our ruthless, bloodthirsty ancestors fifty, a hundred millennia before, were predatory monsters, killers who reveled in the art of butchery, of slaughter.
“I thought it was the storm,” Joe said to them or maybe to himself. “But it isn’t; not all of it.”
He had his window open just a crack. No more, no less. The air smelled of smoke like maybe there was a fire nearby. It stunk of other things, too: ripe, raw things. Nameless odors that stirred some shadowy race memory in the occupants of the Jeep. Some distant, dark memory of barbaric times when civilization was an unrealized dream.
Yes, Ben thought, these people have reverted somehow. And wouldn’t it be easy, when you came right down to it, to tear off your clothes and join them? Celebrate death and sex and blood?
“What’s that smell?” Ruby Sue inquired. “That burning? What is that?”
Good question because the wind was carrying a stink far worse than charred wood now.
The Jeep slowed down and everyone saw why.
The street was entirely blocked-off now.
Cars were wedged three deep across the road and right up onto lawns, blocking any possible avenue of escape. There were a few battered, mutilated bodies lying on the pavement before them.
And Ben was thinking: Yes, exactly! They’ve marked the perimeters of their territory and everything within is their domain. And the bodies? Sacrifices, blood offerings to whatever it is they think rules the night. A primitive version of breaking a bottle of champagne against a ship. Because it wasn’t always champagne, not in the dire, forbidding days before history. Good luck, good hunting, fertility…
Maybe he was overwrought (he was) and maybe he was giving them too much goddamn credit, but he didn’t think so. This was not as simple as he’d originally thought. This was not just a bunch of crazies acting impulsively, satisfying their basal desires. Oh no, not at all. The blockade proved that; this was organized. Maybe at some aboriginal, tribal level, but organized it was.
Joe clicked on his hi-beams.
“Look,” he said, “by God, look—”
And they were all looking and all seeing, knowing there was no need for explanation here. At the back of the blockade, at the rear row of vehicles, bodies had been lashed to tree limbs and posts jammed into the ground, set afire. They were blackened and smoldering now, curled and withered by flame. The fires had gone out, but the thick nauseating stench of cremated flesh hung in the air like a poisonous envelope.