Cabot turned and fired, ran to the left, fired, to the right and fired again. Fingers tore at his jacket and he swung the shotgun like a club, felt it smash into something soft and pulpy. More were coming and he needed to reload, but there just wasn’t time.
He dove through a knot of Wormboys, hammered his way clear. He leaped over a hedge, crawled on his hands and knees through the grass. On his feet again, across a yard, around a house, down an alley. Behind him, they were coming, screaming and squealing, the stench of their numbers gaseous and revolting.
He cut through another yard, paused and fumbled shells into the shotgun.
And then a voice said: “Hey, mister! Over here!”
Cabot felt his heart gallop to a stop, lurch painfully, then start beating again. He turned and there was a little girl standing there in what looked like a white dress that had gone dark with filth. It hung in rags. Her face was as pale as the mist, her eyes huge and black and glistening with wetness. She held a finger like a skeleton key to her lips, said, “Sshhh!”
She began backing away between two ruined houses, arching a finger at him to follow. His breath lancing his throat, Cabot listened to the Wormboys gathering out there, sniffing out his trail. The girl could have been one of them and then, maybe not.
“Hurry! Or they’ll get you!” she said.
He followed her, some electric instinct telling him to run, that this was a trap, a trap, but he was too scared to listen.
He followed.
The girl kept backing away, through the grass, around bushes and trees. Without even turning, she vaulted a heap of dead leaves. Cabot went after her, praying under his breath. He stumbled through the leaf pile and there was a sudden, unbelievable explosion of white agony in his ankle.
He went down, screaming, fighting, the shotgun going one way and he going the other.
The girl turned away, made a high whistling sound like a wind blown through catacombs. And as she did so, Cabot saw in his pain that the back of her head was mostly gone. Strands of dirty hair fell over a gaping, rotten chasm that boiled with meat flies.
She whistled again.
Dear God, she’s signaling the others, calling out to them…
Cabot thrashed, trying to break free.
The pain tossed his mind into darkness and then yanked it back out again. His eyes irised open, blinking away tears, and he saw the girl. Just standing there, giggling softly, looking very pleased. Her eyes were larger than ever, oily and moist, filled with a raw-toothed hunger. A fly ran over her threadbare lips and she caught it with a gray tongue, sucked it into her mouth. Then she ate it, gums shriveled away from teeth that were black and overlapping, filed sharp.
As her insane laughter echoed into the night, Cabot reached down to his ankle to see what held it. The pain made white specks flash before his eyes.
A trap, oh yes, a trap.
A bear trap. The spikes were buried in his ankle, buried deep like the jaws of a tiger. He tried to force them apart and he nearly went out cold from the pain. His hands came away dark and dripping.
Two more figures came out of the darkness.
They stank like tombs.
Cabot screamed, but a pulpy, moist hand squeezed his mouth shut. Somewhere during the process, he fainted.
*
He woke later to the sound of humming.
Humming.
A woman’s voice, but cracked and dry-sounding like her throat was packed with dirt and dead leaves. His eyes opened, shut, opened again. He was in a room that stank of old blood and rancid meat, a shocking rank odor. Candles were flickering on a mantle throwing greasy, wavering shadows in every direction.
The humming went on and on.
Beneath it was the near steady drone of flies.
Something crawled over his face but he dared not move.
He tried to remember, to make sense of it. There were only fleeting, maroon-tinged images of the fog, the things hunting in it. Then that evil little girl. The bear trap. Then…Jesus, just some distorted nightmare of him being dragged through the mist, dragged by the trap that snared his ankle, the agony throwing him into darkness.
You’re in their lair, he thought then. They’ve got you good.
His leg was numb from the knee down and he didn’t know if that was a good thing or not. But he knew the trap was gone. Without moving, without daring to give indication that he was even alive, he peered around. It looked like he was in a living room…or what had once been a living room. Stainless steel traps hung from chains on the walls. Old blood was spattered everywhere in loops and whorls. It looked black in the dirty light.
What the hell is this?
But by degrees, he began to understand.
He was dumped on the floor, resting in a pool of blood gone sticky and cold. All around him were hunched shapes, silent, stinking, netted with flies. Gutted torsos, gnawed limbs, sightless faces peeled to the bone. He was in a litter pile of human remains. He felt something inside him run wet and warm as he realized it. Not just the mantraps on the walls, but tables gleaming with cutlery, saws and axes. Candlelight was reflected off puddles of dried blood clotted with tissue and hair. Flies filled the air in clouds, rising and descending to feed. They investigated his lips, his nostrils, dozens of them crawling over his wounded ankle. A maggoty head was at his left elbow, a cleaver sank in its skull.
A slaughterhouse.
He would have screamed, but what was the point? He had never been alone in his life as he was now. That humming. He craned his head precious inches. He saw a woman in the guttering light. Her hair was long and colorless, matted with tallow and dried blood. Her face was an obscenity. There was a skullish hollow where her nose had been, some cancerous ulceration chewing it away and spreading, leaving a gaping fleshless pit in the center of her face. A black chasm in which carrion beetles spawned. Her eyes were dark and glossy, her teeth jutting from a lipless maw.
She was humming.
Working on something.
Cabot craned his head a bit more and saw. She was kneeling before a cadaver, working it with a knife like a woman preparing a chicken for Sunday dinner. Sawing, cutting. She yanked out moist loops of bowel and glistening lumps of organ, separating them, threw a snakelike ribbon of entrails over her shoulder. Flies covered her, covered what she was working on. She hummed happily. Now she was reaching into cloth bags, sprinkling things into the hollowed belly. Seasoning it. Now stitching the gut closed with needle and thread.
Dear God.
Cabot was trembling. He couldn’t help it. Then through the door came a man in the same shapeless, shroud-like rags the woman wore. His face was white and pulpy, threaded with segmented green worms. They didn’t seem to bother him. He looped a rope around the cadaver’s ankles, threw the other end over a roughhewn beam overhead. Together, they pulled and pulled until the body was dangling in the air, fingertips just brushing the floor.
They tied the rope off.
And that’s when Cabot saw its face: Blaine.
It was the kid. Stupid, dumbass fucking kid. This is how it ended for him in this cannibal’s lair, as meat. The knowledge of this made things unwind in Cabot until he felt hopeless, calm, senseless. The kid was just livestock to be slaughtered, dressed out and seasoned, aged for the dinner table.
Cabot knew he would be next.
The girl that had trapped him came hopping through the door on all fours. She went right over to him, pressing her vile flyblown face into his own. She licked his cheek with a scabrous tongue. Nibbled at his throat, his exposed belly, then downwards towards his ankle.