He drifted off again… then his eyes snapped open.
Something had changed.
He wasn’t sure what, but something. Was it cooler in the room? And what was that smell, that whisper of raw decay? Maybe it was all in his imagination, maybe it was only in his dreaming brain.
He looked at the cross on the wall, mumbled some half-remembered prayer from childhood.
The hairs on the back of his neck were standing erect as if the air were crackling with some strange electrical discharge. Gooseflesh covered his arms, crept up his spine. He could smell something sharp, inexplicable, almost like ozone.
The sheet covering Nancy was trembling slightly. It was barely evident, but there… almost as if something was surging through her body.
Ben was shaking now.
Alone in this church, this huge empty silence, breathing and brooding. Alone with his wife.
He sat there, black horror dawning in him.
He stood up. He had to see, had to see…
The body under the sheet began to thrum with evil force. It writhed and thumped against the table as if were being electrocuted. Then it went still.
The air was heavy.
Nancy’s arms slid out from under the sheet to either side, suddenly snapping stiffly erect. They rose up, the fingers splayed and shuddering as if with exertion. A ragged, hollow breathing came from beneath the sheet. She sat up slowly, wearing the sheet like cerements of the grave.
Her fingers twisted and played in the air.
Ben was shaking his head slowly side to side, telling himself there was an explanation for this, that it didn’t mean she had come back from the dead. All around him he could feel dark shadows crawling like worms.
The sheet slid from Nancy’s gray face.
A low, grating sound like an airless, wolfish growl came from the depths of her lungs and became a hissing, inhuman voice. “Ben… oh Ben… I’m better now, I’m better now…”
Her eyes, which had been closed, snapped open.
They were yellow hunting moons rising in that shadowy, pallid face. Slowly they swept the room, found Ben, fixed on him with a flat hunger. Her lips peeled back from even white teeth. She grinned like a rabid dog, tangles of ooze running from the corners of her lips.
Ben backed away, realizing with a bleak, godless terror that, yes, Nancy was indeed dead.
This thing was not his wife.
It only looked vaguely like her.
He kept moving back and fell over the chair.
Nancy flowed off the table with a smooth fluidic motion, one that a human being would have been incapable of. She found her feet, swayed uneasily for a moment like a heaving ship, then steadied herself.
Ben picked up the carving knife from the floor.
She saw it and snarled, lips pulling away from gnashing teeth. “Ben, Ben, Ben,” she managed and it was slithering, wet sound; awful like the noise from a viper pit. Her face seemed to slide and undulate on the bones beneath, creeping with shadow. Her hands were held out to him, fingers wriggling like earthworms caught in sunlight.
He was on his feet then, ready to use the knife. “Nancy,” he said, his voice more of a dry croaking than anything. “Please… just sit down.”
Her eyes were polished glass, reflective like those of an animal as if some shining and invisible membrane had grown over them. Ben could see twin images of the haunted, broken man he now was in her gleaming saffron eyes.
“Hold me, Ben,” she said with a whisper of lonely places. “Come to me, my lover.”
But he would not.
Knife firm in his grip, he kept backing away.
She did not know him. She might have used his name, retained some instinctive memory that he was a friend, but it was only means to an end. She said his name in a mocking voice like a parrot.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he warned her, “so please, just stay away.”
Nancy abandoned the idea of humanity then.
She made a ghastly hissing sound like water thrown on a hot stove and went down low, stalking now like an animal. Rancid loops of drool hung from her chin, frothed from her lips, swung side to side with her creeping motion. Sounds came from her throat, insane barking noises.
“Nancy!” Ben shouted. “For the love of God, listen to me! I was your husband! Do you understand that? Do you know who I am? Who you are?”
But it was obvious she didn’t and did not care.
Reasoning with her was like reasoning with some loathsome queen wasp, stinger bared. And she was much like that—cold and insectile and predatory, human in form only. Unblinking, her glaring eyes were fixed on him, shimmering with a glacial appetite. They were mirrors reflecting some dark and barren void.
She let out a chilling screech and launched herself at him with a frenzied, spidery motion.
Ben brought the knife down and sank an easy three inches of it into her left shoulder. He might as well have jabbed her with a toothpick. She was on him immediately, throwing him down with an easy flick of one white hand. She pinned him down effortlessly. Her face swam in with a wolfish grin, her breath like moldering canvas.
Ben screamed.
Her tongue was blackened and glistening. It played across his trembling lips, feeling cold and fleshy like wet leather. Clots of sour-smelling mucus rained into his mouth. He felt her slimy, frigid lips at his throat. And then her teeth, biting in deep, penetrating like needles.
And then all he was vanished in a cloistral fog.
All that he had been was no more, lost in a haze of thankful madness.
But from some distant room, he could hear the sound of her cackling.
And feeding.
27
“Pass me another one, baby,” Ruby Sue said, reaching down into the GTO and getting another gas bomb from Joe. It was a simple creation—Blatz bottle filled with gasoline, tampon stuffed in its neck. She upended it, getting the tampon wet. She brought it up close to her nose, sniffed it.
Nothing like a little headrush.
What was it about gas that made you want to sniff it?
She flicked her Bic lighter, got the rag burning. “I see a target coming up.”
They passed by a little video store and she threw it with everything she had at the window. The window shattered and so did the Molotov cocktail. The front of Northern Video went up in flames.
“Fucking yeah!” Ruby Sue screamed. “Fuck the world!”
Behind them, three or four other establishments were burning, flames licking from broken windows, plumes of black smoke rising over the streets.
It was all part of Joe’s new plan.
Originally, what he had in mind was something like a front-end loader to smash their way through the barricade of cars and get the fuck out of Dodge. But they couldn’t be wandering around Cut River on foot seeking it out, no more than a blind man was wise to wander around in a cellar filled with rattlesnakes.
When Joe saw the GTO, he knew he had to have it.
Ruby Sue was against the idea, thinking that driving around in a car would attract too much attention in a town where no one was driving. But after Joe hot-wired it and she heard the purr of that big block 400, she was a believer. Problem was, they couldn’t find any front-end loaders. They found some bulldozers and backhoes at an excavating yard, but no front-end loader.
That’s when Joe got the idea.
What they needed to do was to attract attention.
If they couldn’t get out, then bring the people in. There were four or five gas stations in Cut River. Two of them were wide open and waiting. The others could be opened by the right guy. And if the town was burning… somebody would show up.