Bad Juju: A Novel of Raw Terror (2 page)

There she was, lying on her back at
the foot of a tall pine, her white gown riding up above her knees as she tried
to back-pedal away from Odell, who was standing over her, unfastening his
camouflage pants. His gunnysack of dead rats was on the ground near his feet.
Surging wind filled the moss-bearded trees.

“I got what you need, little
honey,” Odell cooed to her. “It’ll settle you right down. Better’n any medicine
they give you at that fuckin’ loony bin.”

Joe Rob pushed through a tangle of
brush and raised his rifle. “No,” he said.

Odell hunched his shoulders and
turned around to face him. His lips twisted into a smile, but there was no
mirth in his cold eyes. “Ain’t no sloppy seconds today. You best git yer ass
outta here.”

“Leave her alone,” Joe Rob said,
his voice quivering as much with fear as with anger.

Odell seemed to notice for the
first time that Joe Rob’s rifle was pointing at him. Then he glanced at his own
rifle propped against the trunk of a small birch, obviously calculating his
chances of reaching it before catching a .22 slug with his flesh. “You stupid
li’l peckerwood,” he hissed like a viper. “You throw down on me, you hafta die.
No two ways about it.”

Jessica Lowell hugged her bare
knees and began rocking herself, whispering some bizarre incantation.

“Just go, God damn you,” Joe Rob
said. “And leave your gun.”

“Cain’t do that.” Odell casually
hitched up his pants and buttoned them.

Joe Rob raised his aim from Odell’s
chest to his snake-eyed face. “I mean it,” he warned.

The first drops of rain began to
fall, pattering softly on the pine straw. Joe Rob shuddered with some
unrecognized emotion.

Odell suddenly pointed his finger
at the girl rocking on the ground. “Take a good look at her,” he said. “See
what yer about to die for and ast yerself if she’s worth it.”

Then Joe Rob made his mistake. He
took his eyes off Odell Porch and glanced at Jessica Lowell. Later he would
wonder if things might have turned out differently if he had not taken his eyes
from Odell—though of course he would never really know.

In the brief instant he looked
away, Odell drew the hunting knife from its sheath at the small of his back and
sprang at him.

Joe Rob instinctively stepped back
from his attacker, startled by the gunshot that rang out. A third eye opened in
Odell’s forehead and began weeping red tears as he staggered about like a
bumbling drunk, determined to stay on his feet.

Then Odell’s eyes rolled up in
their sockets and he toppled to the ground.

The dark eye in his forehead
remained open, leaking blood.

“Oh Lord,” Joe Rob moaned. “I shot
him.”

Jessica A. Lowell began to giggle.
Her giggling became cackling laughter.

The hollow laughter of the mad.

“It doesn’t want
me
,” she
tittered. “It wants
him
.”

She raised her arm and pointed her
finger at Joe Rob Campbell.

***

Skeeter hated his best friend at
that miserable moment. Didn’t Joe Rob see the position he was putting him in?
What the hell was he supposed to do? Sit here and wait while Joe Rob went and
got himself killed? Drive off and leave him to go against Odell Porch? Yeah,
just drive the fuck away.

He put his hand on the key,
hesitated, then cranked the engine. The old green Chevy pickup roared to life,
rumbling and shaking like a harnessed beast impatient to be given free rein.

Skeeter shouted a curse, then
turned off the ignition. Fuming, he hopped out of the cab of the truck, grabbed
his rifle and went after Joe Rob.

He heard the gunshot as he
approached the woods. Fear spawned a metallic taste in his mouth. His heart
thumped wildly in his thin chest. But he pushed on into the woods. He was
pretty sure that the sharp report had come from Joe Rob’s .22, rather than
Odell’s .30-.06. Joe Rob must’ve fired a warning shot to show Odell he meant
business. He was like that, Joe Rob was; whenever he got his hackles up and his
mind set on something, nothing could turn him away. He was one stubborn son of
a bitch then.

Skeeter tripped over an unseen root
and stumbled onto a scene he would never forget. The girl was pointing her
finger at Joe Rob, and Joe Rob was standing over the sprawled body of Odell
Porch. Just below Odell’s headband a neat hole had been punched into the center
of his forehead.

“It wants
him
,” the girl
repeated maniacally.

“Jesus Christ!” Skeeter blurted.
“You
shot him
.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Joe Rob said
meekly. “He came at me with a knife. I...it just went off. Oh Lord. I think
he’s dead.”

“Check his pulse.”

“You do it. I can’t touch him.” Joe
Rob dropped his rifle and sank to his knees. “I’m sick.”

“Dead head,” Jessica Lowell said,
then lapsed into another fit of inappropriate laughter.

“Shut up, God damn you!” Skeeter
shouted at her. “This is all your fault. Crazy ass bitch.”

She covered her mouth and laughed
into her hands like a misbehaving child.

Skeeter knelt down by Odell and
touched his fingers to Odell’s neck. “His heart ain’t beating. He’s dead, no
shit.”

Joe Rob retched, then spewed a foul
gush of vomit onto the ground.

Skeeter backed away from the
corpse, then moved away from Joe Rob when he caught a whiff of his puke. “What
the fuck do we do now? Huh? I told you not to come back.”

Joe Rob wiped his mouth and nose
with the back of his hand, then turned his face skyward to catch the rain. He
coughed, spat, then said, “We go to Chief Keller. Tell him what happened. It
was self-defense. He had a fucking knife.”

Skeeter shook his head. “Think
about it, man. The law might let you off, but the Porch clan will kill you. You
think they’ll care what the law says? No fucking way. Old man Porch and his
boys will come after you and keep on coming till you’re dead. You
know
what they’ll do to you. They’re
Porches
, man. They ain’t hardly human.
Remember Monroe Shockley. Everybody knows they killed him, but nobody could
ever prove it. Be the same with you.”

Joe Rob nodded acknowledgment as he
sat back on his haunches. “Then what do we do?”

“We bury him deep in the woods
where nobody will find him. If anybody asks, we’ll say we never saw him.”

“What about her?” Joe Rob nodded at
the girl who had thankfully gone silent.

“She’s crazy as a loon. Who’s gonna
listen to her?”

“Yeah, but what if she comes out of
it and tells what she saw?”

“Jesus, Joe Rob,
look
at
her. You think she’s all of a sudden gonna go sane? It don’t work that way. She
probably won’t remember any of this. She’s probably on so much medication right
now that this is nothing but a bad dream to her.”

“It’s a bad dream all right,” Joe
Rob said woefully. “Lord almighty.”

“Well, whadaya say? It’s your ass
on the line. Do we bury him or go to the cops?”

Joe Rob rubbed his face with both
hands. Then he looked at Odell’s corpse. “We bury him.”

“Damn right.”

“What do we do with her?”

“Nothing. We leave her here, just
like we never saw her. They’ll find her eventually and take her back to the
nuthouse.”

“I don’t know, man,” Joe Rob said.
“Something could happen to her. I mean, she’s not safe out here. In her
condition.”

“Hey, we’re not responsible for
her. She ran away. That’s got nothing to do with us.”

“But...”

Skeeter squatted down beside his
friend and put his hand on Joe Rob’s shoulder. “Listen. If we bury the body,
that makes me as guilty as you. An accessory to the fucking crime. That gives
me a say in this. And I say we leave her. Think about it. If we take her back
to the hospital, they’ll want to know where we found her. Hell, she could say
we tried to rape her. We don’t want any connection to her, don’t you get it?”

“But I told her our names,” Joe Rob
whispered.

Skeeter thought about this a
moment, then turned to the girl and said, “Hey. Do you know my name?”

If she heard him, she gave no sign.
She had resumed her rocking motion and seemed to  have folded in on herself,
withdrawing deeper into her madness.

“See? Nothing to worry about. Now
let’s get it in gear before somebody comes along and sees us.”

***   

 Joe Rob looked at her, loathing
her and wishing he’d never laid eyes on her. He got to his feet and wiped his
mouth on the shoulder of his shirt. He tried his best to clear the fog of
unreality from his head, but his thoughts remained jumbled. Logic failed him.
He had to rely on his friend to guide him now.  “Where can we bury him?”

“Out past the wolf’s den. On the
other side of that little creek. Nobody would have any reason to go digging
there.”  

“Yeah. Okay.”

“Wait here,” Skeeter told him.
“I’ll pull my truck up as close as I can.”

He watched Skeeter jog off through
the rain, keeping his back to the man he had just killed, fancifully wishing
the corpse would just disappear while he wasn’t looking.

The cooling rainfall felt clean and
good, but he knew there would be nothing to wash away his sin. He had taken a
human life and nothing could change that fact. His finger had twitched and a
man had died. 

It was so easy—too easy—to kill a
man.

I had to do it, he told himself.
Odell would’ve gutted me with his knife if I hadn’t shot him. Sure as hell he
would’ve. I didn’t even think about pulling the trigger. It was like it pulled
itself, or maybe it was that part of me that wanted to survive that did it. Can
that be a sin? No. I did nothing wrong.

His ruminations were interrupted by
the approach of Skeeter’s truck. As he neared the edge of the woods, Skeeter
swung the truck around and backed right up to the outermost trees, then he
hopped out of the cab and let down the gate of the truck bed. The gate dropped
with a metallic bang.

Joe Rob glanced at the girl to see
if she would react at all to Skeeter’s return. Her long hair was plastered to
her head by the rainfall, and her teeth were chattering, but the same vacant
expression remained on her face. She was in the world, but obviously not
of
it. Joe Rob’s heart went out to her but slammed into the stone wall of her
withdrawal. A terrible sadness settled in the center of his chest. He fought
the urge to cry, to bawl like a baby.

“Let’s get the sumbitch in the
truck,” said Skeeter.

“Maybe we should wait till dark,”
Joe Rob suggested.

“No, we need to get this done.
Now.”

Skeeter bent over Odell’s corpse
and pulled his headband down so that it covered the bullet hole in his
forehead. “Maybe that will keep his brains and shit from leaking on my truck.”

“Jesus, man.”

“You get his feet. I got his head.”

Joe Rob bent to the task and
grabbed Odell’s ankles. “Christ, I think he shit his pants.”

“’Course he did. That’s what
happens when you die. Everything lets go. Dying’s dirty business.”

They carried the body through the
underbrush and got it to the back of the truck.

“On three,” said Skeeter as he
began to swing his end of the suspended corpse like a lumpy bag of potatoes.
“One...two...three!”

They let go and Odell was
momentarily airborne, then he flopped onto the truck bed with a hollow thump.
Skeeter covered the bed with a canvas tarp and secured it with multicolored
bungee cords.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s get
the hell outta here.”

“Wait. We forgot his gun.”

“Damn. Good thinking. His rat bag
too.”

They went back for the rifle and
the gunnysack.

The girl was gone.

“Where the hell did she go?” Joe
Rob looked around for some sign of her departure.

“Who cares? Forget her.” Skeeter
snatched up Odell’s rifle. “Better this way. Now you don’t have to feel bad
about leaving her. She left us.”

Joe Rob picked up the gunnysack.
“Yeah. Good point.”

The rain was slacking off when they
got back to the truck and tossed Odell’s rat bag and rifle under the tarp.

“Your shovel still in the back?”
asked Joe Rob as they climbed into the pickup and simultaneously slammed their
doors.

“Yeah. Pickaxe too.” Skeeter
cranked the engine. “Ground’s pretty soft where we’ll plant him. We can have
him in the ground in no time. Then forget this whole fucking mess.”

“I wish it was that easy. I’ll
never forget this shit, man. No fucking way.”

Skeeter drove across the landfill,
winding his way through an obstacle course of junk piles and broken appliances.
The truck skidded over a slick patch of mud, then bumped over a shallow gully
and emerged onto the red hardpack of Nebula Road.

“Shit, there’s a car,” Skeeter said
as he turned on the headlights against the premature dusk.

Joe Rob leaned forward and peered
ahead through the windshield.

A black Firebird with tinted
windows was coming down the road toward them.

“Who is it?”

“How the fuck should I know?”
Skeeter said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“I’ve never seen that car before.
It’s probably not somebody who’ll know your truck.”

The Firebird blew past them. It was
an older model, flat black with a coat of primer.

Skeeter’s eyes went to the rearview
mirror and watched the black car slow, then turn into the mouth of the
landfill. “It’s turning at the dump. Ah fuck! That’s not good.”

“No shit.”

“Maybe it’s Odell’s ride,” Skeeter
offered. “We didn’t see his truck, ya know.”

“Nah, don’t say that.”

“You think he hiked all the way
from the Bottom to shoot rats?”

“He could’ve. It’s only five or six
miles.”

“Not fucking likely. That’s his
ride. One of his brothers coming to pick him up. And he saw my fucking truck.
God damn!”