F Paul Wilson - Novel 10 Page 13

  Al let loose a stream of curses through his pain-clenched teeth when he saw the bear trap attached to his leg. Its sharp, massive steel teeth had sunk themselves deep into the flesh of his lower leg.

  But fear began to worm through the all-enveloping haze of his agony.

  The bitch set me up!

  Kenny had wanted to find the guys who were killing the cowboys. But now Al had done just that, and it scared him shitless. What a dumbass he was. Baited by a broad—the oldest trick in the book.

  Gotta get outta here!

  He lunged for the door but the chain caught and brought him up short with a blinding blaze of agony so intense his scream damn near shredded his vocal cords. He toppled to the floor and lay there whimpering like a kicked dog until the pain became bearable again.

  Where were they? Where were the rest of the cowboy killers? Upstairs, laughing as they listened to him howl? Waiting until he wore himself out so he'd be easy pickings?

  He'd show them.

  Al pulled himself to a sitting position and reached for the trap. He tried to spread its jaws but they were locked tight on his leg. He wrapped his hand around the chain and tried to yank it free from where it was fastened below but it wouldn't budge.

  Panic began to grip him now. Its icy fingers were tightening on his throat when he heard a sound on the stairs. He looked up and saw her.

  A nun.

  He blinked and looked again.

  Still a nun. He squinted and saw that it was the broad who'd led him in here. She was wearing a bulky sweater and loose slacks, and all the makeup had been scrubbed off her face, but he knew she was a nun by the thing she wore on her head: a white band up front with a black veil trailing behind.

  And suddenly, amid the pain and panic, Al was back in grammar school, back in St. Mary's before he got expelled, and Sister Margaret was coming at him with her ruler, only this nun was a lot younger than Sister Margaret, and that was no ruler she was carrying, that was a baseball bat—an aluminum baseball bat.

  He looked around. Nobody else, just him and the nun.

  "Where's the rest of you?"

  "Rest?" she said.

  "Yeah. The others in your gang. Where are they?"

  "There's only me."

  She was lying. Had to be. One crazy nun killing all those cowboys? No way! But still he had to get out of here. He tried to crawl across the floor but the fucking chain wouldn't let him.

  "You're makin a mistake!" he cried. "I ain't one a them!"

  "Oh, but you are," she said, coming down the stairs.

  "No. Really. See?" He touched his right ear lobe. "No earring."

  "Maybe not now, but you had one earlier." She stepped over the gaping opening of the phony tread and circled to his left.

  "When? When?"

  "When you drove by earlier today. You told me so yourself."

  "I lied!"

  "No, you didn't. But I lied. I wasn't in the basement. I was watching through the window. I saw you and your three friends in that car." Her voice suddenly became cold and brittle and sharp as a straight razor. "And I saw that poor woman you had with you. Where is she now? What did you do with her?"

  She was talking through her teeth now, and the look in her eyes, the strained pallor of her face had Al ready to pee his pants. He wrapped his arms around his head as she stepped closer with the bat.

  "Please!" he wailed.

  "What did you do with them?"

  "Nothin!"

  "Lie!"

  She swung the bat, but not at his head. Instead she slammed it with a heavy metallic clank against the jaws of the trap. As he screamed with the renewed agony and his hands automatically reached for his injured leg, Al realized that she must have done this sort of thing before. Because now his head was completely unprotected and she was already into a second swing. And this one was aimed much higher.

  CAROLE . . .

 

  Sister Carole looked down at the unconscious man with the bleeding head and trapped, lacerated leg. She sobbed.

  "I know," she said aloud.

  She was so tired. She'd have liked nothing better now than to go upstairs and cry herself to sleep. But she couldn't spare the time. Every moment counted now.

  She tucked her feelings—her mercy, her compassion—into the deepest, darkest pocket of her being, where she couldn't see or hear them, and got to work.

  The first thing she did was tie the cowboy's hands good and tight behind his back. Then she got a washcloth from the downstairs bathroom, stuffed it in his mouth, and secured it with a tie of rope around his head. That done, she grabbed the crowbar and the short length of two-by-four from where she kept them on the floor of the hall closet; she used the bar to pry open the jaws of the bear trap and wedged the two-by-four between them to keep them open. Then she worked the cowboy's leg free. He groaned a couple of times during the process but he never came to.

  She bound his legs tightly together, then grabbed the throw rug he lay upon and dragged him and the rug out to the front porch and down the steps to the red wagon she'd left there. She rolled him off the bottom step into the wagon bed and tied him in place. Then she slipped her arms through the straps of her heavily loaded backpack and she was ready to go. She grabbed the wagon's handle and pulled it down the walk, down the driveway apron, and onto the asphalt. From there on it was smooth rolling.

  Sister Carole knew just where she was going. She had the spot all picked out.

  She was going to try something a little different tonight.

  COWBOYS . . .

  Al screamed and sobbed against the gag. If he could just talk to her he knew he could change her mind. But he couldn't get a word past the cloth jammed against his tongue.

  And he didn't have long. She had him upside down, strung up by his feet, swaying in the breeze from one of the climbing spikes on a utility pole, and he knew what was coming next. So he pleaded with his eyes, with his soul. He tried mental telepathy.

  Sister, Sister, Sister, don't do this! I'm a Catholic! My mother prayed for me every day and it didn't help, hut I'll change now, I promise! I swear on a stack of fuckin bibles I'll be a good boy from now on if you'll just let me go this time!

  Then he saw her face in the moonlight and realized with a final icy shock that he was truly a goner. Even if he could make her hear him, nothing he could say was going to change this lady's mind. The eyes were empty. No one was home. The bitch was on autopilot.

  When he saw the glimmer of the straight razor as it glided above his throat, there was nothing left to do but wet himself.

  CAROLE . . .

  When Sister Carole finished vomiting, she sat on the curb and allowed herself a brief cry.

 

  She dragged herself to her feet. She had two more things to do. One of them involved touching the fresh corpse. The second was simpler: starting a fire to attract other cowboys and their masters.

  GREGOR . . .

  Gregor stood amid his get-guards and watched as cowboy Kenny ran in circles around his dead friend's swaying, upended corpse.

  "It's Al! The bastards got Al! I'll kill 'em all! I'll tear 'em to pieces!"

  How Gregor wished somebody would do just that. He'd heard about these deaths but this was the first he'd seen—an obscene parody of the bloodletting rituals he and his nightbrothers performed on the cattle. This was acutely embarrassing, especially with Olivia newly arrived from New York.

  "Come out here!" Kenny screamed into the darkness. "Come out and fight like men!"

  Stan, the head of this posse, was stamping out the brush fire at the base of the utility pole.

  "We should be getting back, Gregor," one of his guards whispered. "It's too open out here. Not safe."

  All four of them had their pistols drawn
and were eyeing the night, their heads rotating back and forth like radar dishes.

  Gregor ignored him and called out, "Someone cut him down."

  Stan pointed to Kenny. "Climb up there." Hey, no—

  "He was your bud," Stan said. "You do it."

  Kenny reluctantly climbed the pole.

  "I want to let him down easy!" he yelled when he'd reached the rope.

  "Just cut the rope," Stan said.

  "Dammit, Stan. Al was one of us! I'll cut it slow and you ease him down."

  "Oh, fuck, all right," Stan said. "C'mere, Jackie, and help me."

  The woman stood back by one of the cars that had brought them all here. Not the fancy convertible the posse had been using recently—Al had apparently taken that for a drive and never come back. She had a bandage around her head over a blackened left eye. Gregor wondered what had happened to her. Beaten by one of her own posse perhaps?

  He looked at Jackie and remembered lusting after women for their bodies; now he cared only for the red wine running through them. Sexual lust was a dim memory. He hadn't had an erection since he was turned, seventy years ago.

  Blood . . . always blood. Gregor was glad he had supped before accompanying these cowboys to their dead friend.

  This made six dead. Two in the past three days. The pace was accelerating. Olivia would be on the warpath.

  Jackie shook her head. "No way," she said, her voice faint. "I can't."

  "Get your skinny ass over here!"

  "He's comin down!" Kenny shouted.

  "Damn fuck!" Stan shouted as the body slumped earthward. He reached up to grab it and—

  The flash was noonday bright, the blast deafening as the shock wave knocked Gregor to the ground. His first instinct was to leap to his feet again, but he realized he couldn't see. The bright flash had fogged his night vision with a purple, amebic afterimage. He lay quiet until he could see again, then rose to his feet.

  He heard wailing sounds. The woman crouched beside the car, screaming hysterically; the cowboy who had climbed the pole lay somewhere in the bushes, crying out about his back, how badly it hurt and how he couldn't move his legs. But the other two—Stan and the murdered Al—were nowhere to be seen.

  His get-guards were struggling to their feet, enclosing him in a tight, four-man circle. "Are you all right, Gregor?" one said.

  "Of course I'm all right," he snapped. "You wouldn't be asking that question if I weren't."

  Gregor shook his head. He tried to choose carefully for his get, emphasizing intelligence. Sometimes they fell short.

  Gregor began to brush off his clothes as he looked around, then froze. He was wet, covered with blood and torn flesh. The entire street glistened, littered with bits of bone, muscle, skin, and fingernail-size pieces of internal organs, leaving no way of telling what had belonged to whom.

  Gregor shuddered at the prospect of explaining this to Olivia.

  His fury exploded. The first killing tonight had been embarrassing enough by itself. But now another cowboy had been taken out, and still another crippled to the point where he'd have to be put down—all right in front of him. This had passed beyond embarrassment into humiliation.

  When he caught these vigilantes he'd deal with them personally. And see that it took them days to die.

  CAROLE . . .

  Sister Carole saw the flash and heard the explosion through the window over the sink in the darkened kitchen of the Bennett house. No joy, no elation. This wasn't fun. But she did find a certain grim satisfaction in learning that her potassium chlorate plastique had worked.

  The gasoline had evaporated from the latest batch and she was working with that now. The moon provided sufficient illumination for the final stage. Once she had the right amount measured out, she didn't need much light to pack the plastique into soup cans. All she had to do was make sure she maintained the proper loading density.

  That done, she stuck a number-three blasting cap in the end of each cylinder and dipped it into the pot of melted wax she had on the stove. And that did it. She now had waterproof block charges with a detonation velocity comparable to forty-percent-ammonia dynamite.

  "All right," she said aloud to the night through her kitchen window.

  "You've made my life a living hell. Now it's your time to be afraid."

  GREGOR . . .

  "Three in one night!"

  Olivia's eyes seemed to glow with red fire in the gloom of the Post Office basement. She'd taken up temporary residence in the old granite building.

  "They booby-trapped the body." Gregor knew it sounded lame but it was the truth.

  Olivia's voice was barely a whisper as she pierced him with her stare. "You've disappointed me, Gregor."

  "It is a temporary situation, I assure you."

  "So you keep saying, but it has lasted far too long already. The dead serfs total seven now. Seven! Wait till Franco hears!"

  Gregor quailed at the thought. "He doesn't have to hear. Not yet."

  "You're losing control, Gregor. You don't seem to realize that besides our strength and our special powers, we have two weapons: fear and hopelessness. We cannot control the cattle by love and loyalty, so if we are to maintain our rule, it must be through the terror we inspire in them and the seeming impossibility of ever defeating us. What have the cattle witnessed in your territory, Gregor?"

  Gregor knew where this was headed. "Olivia, please, I—"

  "I'll tell you what they've witnessed," she said, her voice rising. "They've witnessed your inability to protect the serfs we've induced to herd the cattle and guard the daylight hours for us. And trust me, Gregor, the success of one vigilante group will give rise to a second, and then a third, and before long it will be open season on our serfs. And then you'll have no control. Because the cattle herders are cowardly swine, Gregor. The lowest of the low. They work for us only because they see us as the victors and they want to be on the winning side at any cost. But if we can't protect them, if they get a sense that we might be vulnerable and that our continued dominance might not be guaranteed, they'll turn on us in a flash."

  "I know that, and I'm—"

  "Fix it, Gregor." Her voice sank to a whisper again. "I will give you till dawn Friday to remedy this. If not, you'll awaken Friday night to find yourself heading back to New York to face Franco. Is that clear?"

  Dawn Friday? Gregor could scarcely believe what he was hearing. Here it was Thursday morning with only a few hours until dawn—too late to take any action now. That left him one night to catch these marauding swine. And to think he'd just made her a gift of the pregnant cow's baby. The ungrateful—

  He swallowed his anger.

  "Very clear."

  "Good. I expect you to have a plan by sundown."

  "I will."

  "Leave me now."

  As Gregor turned and hurried up the steps he heard a newborn begin to cry in the darkness. The sound made him hungry.

  - 4 -

  JOE . . .

  Joe yawned and stretched his limbs in the morning light. He'd stayed up most of the night and let Zev sleep. The old guy needed his rest. Sleep would have been impossible for Joe anyway. He was too wired. So he'd sat up, staring at the back of St. Anthony's.

  The undead had left before first light, dark shapes drifting out the doors and across the grass like parishioners leaving a predawn service. Joe had felt his teeth grind as he scanned the group for Palmeri, but he couldn't make him out in the dimness. He might have gone out the front. By the time the sun had begun to peek over the rooftops and through the trees to the east, the streets outside were deserted.

  He woke Zev and together they walked around to the front of the church.

  The heavy oak and iron doors, each forming half of a pointed arch, were closed. Joe pulled them open and fastened the hooks to hold them back. Then, taking a breath, he walked through the vestibule and into the nave.

  Even though he was ready for it, the stench backed him up a few steps. When his stomach settled, he for
ced himself ahead, treading a path between the two piles of shattered and splintered pews. Zev walked beside him, a handkerchief pressed over his mouth.

  Last night he had thought the place a shambles. He saw now that it was worse. The light of day poked into all the corners, revealing everything that had been hidden by the warm glow of the candles. Half a dozen rotting corpses hung from the ceiling—he hadn't noticed them last night—and others were sprawled on the floor against the walls. Some of the bodies lay in pieces. Behind the chancel rail a headless female torso was draped over the front of the pulpit. To the left stood the statue of Mary. Someone had fitted her with foam rubber breasts and a huge dildo. And at the rear of the sanctuary was the armless Christ hanging head down on the upright of his cross.

  "My church," he whispered as he moved along the path that had once been the center aisle, the aisle once walked by daily communicants and brides with their proud fathers. "Look what they've done to my church!"

  Joe approached the huge block of the altar. When he'd first arrived at St. Anthony's it had been backed against the far wall of the sanctuary, but he'd had it moved to the front so that he could celebrate Mass facing his parishioners. Solid Carrara marble, but you'd never know it now. So caked with dried blood, semen, and feces it could have been made of styrofoam.

  His revulsion was fading, melting away in the growing heat of his rage, drawing the nausea with it. He had intended to clean up the place but there was too much to be done, too much for two men. It was hopeless.

  "Fadda Joe?"

  He spun at the sound of the strange voice. A thin figure stood uncertainly in the open doorway. A timid-looking man of about fifty edged forward.

  "Fadda Joe, that you?"

  Joe recognized him now. Carl Edwards. A twitchy little man who used to help pass the collection basket at 10:30 Mass on Sundays. A transplantee from Jersey City—hardly anyone around here was originally from around here. His face was sunken, his eyes feverish as he stared at Joe.