AFTER (15 page)

Gacy's
frozen form knelt before them like a statue of repentance, hands outstretched.

Quietly, Scott and Heather watched as the Popsicle Man went to work. He slung the spray nozzle across the tanks on his back, then took a pair of pliers from the pouch on his belt. He went to
Gacy
and meticulously began to break the man's fingers off close to the palm.

"What's your pleasure, kids?" he asked.

Heather licked her lips. "I'll take a thumb!" she replied eagerly.

"The middle finger for me," Scott told him.

The Popsicle Man took two sharpened sticks from the bill of his cap and impaled the frozen digits on the points. He then handed the icy treats to the children. In turn, they reached into their pockets and flipped him a quarter each.

"Much obliged," he said with a nod, then deposited the coins in the shiny, chrome receptacle on his belt.

Heather began to lick at the icy coating, relishing the ozone flavor of the Freon. Scott couldn't resist sticking his frozen finger in
Gacy's
unresponsive face. "Screw you, clown!"

It was at that moment that they were close enough to truly see the Popsicle Man's face for the first time. It was not a real face, but a mask, one of those transparent plastic masks that were once popular at Halloween. The ones with darkly painted eyebrows and lips, showing a hint of the wearer's true countenance underneath.

Whatever lay beneath the Popsicle Man's mask was terribly wrong. They could see jagged scars held together by screws and metal clamps, along with blistered lesions and patches of denuded bone. Parts of his face were raw and glistening, teaming with maggots.

"Thanks, Popsicle Man!" they said, neither one phased by the hidden horrors.

"Anytime, kids!" he said cheerfully. "Remember, keep to the shadows."

They both nodded, then walked to a swing set nearby. The sat and swung leisurely, enjoying their treats, anticipating the meaty prizes that lay within.

The Popsicle Man went about his business. He approached each frozen
Clownie
, snapping off their fingers and depositing them in an Igloo cooler he had retrieved from his truck. When he was done, he waved at Scott and Heather. Happily, they waved back and continued to swing.

Heather pushed at the blackened earth with her sneakers, sending herself skyward. She closed her eyes and felt the cool breeze rush through her hair. A scary night had turned into a good one. She would swing to the stars and cherish it. Beside her Scott laughed and did the same.

The ice cream truck roared into life and, with a toot of its horn, started away from the playground. They listened to the cheerful tune of the calliope as the Popsicle Man disappeared into the night, making his rounds.

When they reached the brink of starvation, they went to the garden.

Lenora hesitated at the gate. "I'm scared, Papa."

"Just be careful," Jubal Hayes told his children. "Don't go blundering in the way Ol' Rusty did last time."

Seth shuddered at the thought. Their redbone coonhound hadn't lasted long in the cornfield. He had been skinned and gutted within a matter of seconds.

"Do you really think we
oughta
chance it?" asked Cassie. His wife stood there with a metal bucket in one hand and a hatchet in the other.

Jubal turned around, a bit peeved. "What do you think, woman? Damn, can't none of us sleep at night for the sound of our bellies complaining."

Cassie looked fearfully toward the garden. "If we'll just take it to the Lord in prayer, Jubal, ask him to –"

Jubal's laugh came out harsher than he intended. "Pray? I've prayed till I'm blue in the face!" He glared at her, wanting to hold his tongue, but there was something about hunger that brought out the worse in a person. "Face it, Cassie, there ain't gonna be no manna raining down from the heavens.
If'n
we want it, we've gotta take it for ourselves."

Lenora and Seth stood there quietly, afraid to utter a word. Cassie simply stared at her husband. "Put your faith in yourself
if'n
you want," she told him. "But as for me, I'll put my faith in God."

"Suit yourself." Jubal tightened his grip on the crescent-shaped scythe in his right hand. "You can stay on the safe side of the fence. I'm damned hungry and I know these poor
young'uns
are, too."

Seth's stomach gurgled loudly. Embarrassed, he shifted his hoe to his left hand and pressed his right against his belly, trying to make it stop.

Lenora's eyes pleaded, large and brown, like a doe's. "Mama… please."

Cassie sighed. "Then let's get on with it."

Cautiously, Jubal opened the gate of the split-rail fence. "Come on, but keep your eyes open. Let's get '
er
done, then get out. At the first sign of trouble, run like hell."

Cassie regarded him with disapproval. She'd never much cared for his cussing.

"Sorry." He led the way down the center row of the cornfield.

The stalks were tall and plentiful, but like everything else on the Ridge, they simply weren't right. The leaves were a peculiar orange color and the stalks themselves were a streaky yellowish-pink. The corn silk sprouting from the head of each fat ear was not silky and pale, but coarse and jet black in hue. And there was a smell in the air. Something putrid, like decay.

They said nothing as they quietly made their way along the center aisle. Jubal went first, scythe in hand, followed by Cassie and Lenora, with their cutlery and buckets. Seth brought up the rear, holding the wooden handle of his hoe tightly in his fists. The ten-year-old stepped on something brittle. It crackled beneath his boots, drawing a hard look from his father. Seth looked down to see bones scattered across the earth. The dusty bones of Ol' Rusty, stripped clean of flesh.

Silently, Jubal pointed toward two large stalks ahead. Cassie and Lenora separated, preparing to do their part. Off to the east a crow – or something that might have been one once – cawed loudly. The four held their breaths. When nothing happened, they continued. The womenfolk neared their appointed stalk, knife and hatchet held aloft, ready for the harvest.

The long, orange leaves of the cornstalks began to flutter. But there was no breeze that afternoon.

"Now!" hollered Jubal.

Cassie brought her hand axe down, separating a fat, yellow-pink ear from its place on the stalk.

It screamed as it dropped into the bucket.

Hands shaking, Lenora did the same. She had to hack several times with the butcher knife before her ear came loose. It missed the bucket and laid on the ground, bucking and wiggling, mewing like a baby kitten taken from its mother's tit.

"Pick it up!" demanded Jubal. A long leaf from a nearby stalk swung toward him, swiftly, barely missing his right shoulder.

"No!" screamed Lenora. Like a slug, the ear was slithering away into a neighboring row. She clenched her eyes shut tightly and tossed her knife and bucket aside. "I can't do it!"

Cassie's hatchet flashed again and again. Three more ears dropped into her bucket. They rattled and rolled inside, attempting to escape. "Snap out of it, daughter!" she called sharply.

The sound of shrieking vegetation was more than the sixteen-year-old could stand. She pressed her palms against her ears, trying to seal out the mayhem. Tears squeezed from beneath her dark lashes and trickled down her face.

Suddenly, the stalks attacked. The leaves – their edges razor sharp – slashed and hacked at the four invaders. Jubal cried out as one sliced across his forearm, drawing blood. "Get a few more, Cassie, and then let's get back to the gate!" Another leaf, low down on a stalk, nicked his left ankle, trying to hamstring him.

Cassie lopped off a couple more. A slender leaf slashed out, drawing a thin line of blood across her forehead. She stumbled backward, nearly dropping the bucket. But she held fast… for her family's sake.

"Papa!" screamed Seth. "My eye! My eye!"

Jubal turned to see his son standing in the center of the corn row. He had dropped his
hoe
. His hand was clamped tightly against the left side of his face. Blood trickled between the cracks of his fingers.

"I'm coming, boy!" called the farmer. Angrily, he swung his scythe and brought one of the stalks down. It shrieked shrilly, bucking and rolling in agony.

"Let's go, Lenora!" demanded Cassie.

Her daughter was rooted to the spot, however. "I can't stand it! I can't stand it!" she screamed hysterically.

Her mother slapped her violently across the face. "Snap out of it, girl! Stay here and these things will cut you into a dozen pieces! Now gather up your things and get going!"

Together, Cassie and Lenora ran. Jubal had picked up Seth and slung him over his left shoulder. As he slashed and hacked at the vengeful cornstalks, he felt something warm and wet dampen the back of his shirt. He knew it must be his son's blood… or the gelatinous contents of his ruptured eye.

Before long they finally made it through that awful gauntlet of deadly vegetation. They didn't stop at the gate. They continued to run, past the smokehouse and the barn, to the two-room log cabin they called home.

Jubal set Seth down on the front porch swing. "Let me take a look, son," he said. Gently, he pried the boy's blood-stained fingers away from his face.

"Dammit!" he cursed in spite of himself. One of the leaves had sliced the boy's eyeball cleanly in half. It was no more than a deflated and bloody sack within the crater of his eye socket now.

"It hurts, Papa!" cried the boy. "It hurts so bad!"

"Cassie! Get something to fix him up, will you?" he said.

But his wife was already running through the cabin door. First she headed toward the woodstove. A big kettle of water was boiling on top, ready and waiting. She dumped the
bucketload
of mewing ears into the scalding water, feeling a pang of cruel satisfaction in doing so. When they hit the water, they began to shriek wildly.

Cassie turned and went to a bureau drawer next to her and Jubal's brass bed. She took peroxide and gauze, and an eye patch that Grandma Hayes had used after her cataract surgery shortly before she had passed away last spring.

When she reached the porch, Cassie shut the door behind her. She looked over to see Lenora sitting on the front steps, rocking back and forth, her hands plastered tightly over her eyes. She reminded her of those confounded monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. The sixteen-year-old seemed to spend a lot of her time like that lately.

"Let me tend to him, Jubal," she said calmly. She knelt and examined her son's ruined eye. It grieved her to no end to see that the wound was permanent… that he would be blind on that side for the rest of his life. As she applied the peroxide and secured a wad of cotton gauze to the nasty injury with the eye patch, Cassie felt the sting of her own injury. She looked over at Jubal and saw that he had been sliced by the angry leaves of the stalks perhaps half a dozen times. "
Lordy
Mercy, Jubal, they've cut us both! What if we…?"

Jubal stared at her. "What if we
what
? All turn into a family of walking vegetables? Woman, sometimes I believe you're getting a mite touched in the head!"

"I've seen stranger things happen in these mountains lately," was all she said.

Jubal found that he couldn't argue the point with her. So had he… much stranger things.

Inside the cabin, they could hear the ears of corn cooking in the big kettle. They screamed shrilly like newborn babies being scalded to death.

The Hayes family sat silently on the front porch for a long time, until that awful commotion faded and grew silent.

Then they went in to supper.

They tried to eat the fat ears of boiled corn with salt and the last of their butter. But when they bit into the kernels, their teeth drew blood.

That evening, Jubal and Cassie sat on the front porch, watching the sun set.

They once took pleasure in that simple act… sitting in their rocking chairs and watching the dusk approach in brilliant hues of purple and pink. But now those colors seemed starkly unnatural, as though tainted by the aftereffects of the Burn.

And that wasn't the only thing that had changed. The bluish-gray mist that had once given the Smoky Mountains their namesake was now a peculiar golden color. Every now and then the wind shifted, causing the mist to swirl and sparkle like a thousand tiny fireflies.

"It's the Devil's handiwork," Cassie said to no one in particular.

Jubal sat there for a long moment, thinking. "No," he replied. "And not God's either. It's all man's doing. The spoils of his stupidity and pride."

Cassie chuckled humorlessly. "Pride
goeth
before the fall." She stared into the mist as though hypnotized. "I do believe this is the end times."

Jubal refrained from commenting on that point. He had never been able to understand the book of Revelations. Too much symbolism and not enough straight talk.

They lapsed into silence. It hung between them like a wall of brick and mortar. Jubal gradually realized that it was mostly constructed of his own guilt.