Creekers (31 page)

Cody Natter made a single, resolute nod.

“Time ta listen up, Ms. Vicki, and ya’s best listen good—” Druck slid his double thumbs all the way to the back of her throat and pressed down. He pressed down hard.

Instantly, Vicki was gagging, her green eyes widening, her body in tremors. “Don’t’cha bite,” Druck kindly repeated, “an’ don’t’cha dare puke. Just listen.” Beads of sweat welled on Druck’s protuberant forehead; his scarlet eyes focused intently. “You tell Cody here what’cha were doin’ today. You tell Cody where ya been.”

He pressed down hard one more time until she nearly retched. Then he removed his thumbs.

“Go on.”

After a violent coughing fit, she managed to catch her breath. Tears and sweat pasted shocks of her red hair to her paling face. “I just—went—for a drive,” she croaked, then whined when the boy behind her resumed the clenching pressure on her elbows.

Cody Natter blinked. His own eyes, though keen and clear, were uneven, one lower than the other and noticeably larger. His ears, too—each the size of a pastry—pressed the sides of his head so unevenly they scarcely appeared real. And in spite of the monstrously malformed face—long, bony, runneled—a sane and even considerate sense of deliberation seemed suffused through his twisted features.

“A drive,” he said. “That’s all? And where did this drive take you?”

“Nowhere, Cody, I swear!” she exclaimed, her teeth gritting against the pain of being chicken-winged. “I just went for a drive ’cos I was bored!”

“Hmm. Well.” Natter steepled his triple-jointed fingers in his lap. “What do you think, Druck? Is my fair wife telling the truth, or is she lying?”

“Well, jeez, Cody, I don’t rightly know, ya know?”

“How about you, Scooter? Is there a liar in our midst?”

The third Creeker boy babbled excitedly, tossing his squashed head and rubbing briskly at the obvious erection in his trousers. A foot-long line of drool depended off his bulbed chin.

Natter sighed. “Perhaps a trifle more convincing is in order. Yes, I think so.”

“No, please!” Vicki shrieked. “I didn’t do anything, I swear to God!”

“You needn’t swear to God, my dear. Not here.”

Natter nodded then to the third boy, who quickly appeared and returned a moment later, dragging along a gagged and blindfolded Creeker girl. Immediately, he clutched her by strings of jet-black hair and threw her to the floor.

“Lovely wife, please. Come sit with me.”

Vicki was released and shoved forward. Natter’s queerly long arms and hands shot out, grabbed her about the waist, and pulled her in, forcing her to sit in his lap.

His grip tightened, and his big grouper lips whispered in her ear: “So many choose to stray from our fold. Shanny tried to run away again last night. Such a pity. The poor thing doesn’t realize.”

Scooter, the third boy, stepped clumsily out of his overalls, clucking like a psychotic chicken. The second boy pinned the girl’s shoulders with his knees while Druck, drooling himself now, opened a buck knife and cut off her gag and blindfold. Then Scooter—sporting an erection so large and genetically malformed it more resembled a loaf of French bread—climbed atop the girl and began to rape her.

The girl’s screams were dizzying.

Each time Vicki tried to turn her face away, Natter’s claw-hand vised the back of her head and forced her to return her attention to the madness on the floor. “You must watch, my love,” came his shredded whisper. “You must
see.
Everything that we see makes us more real in the face of our faith. Do you understand? Some sights aren’t so pretty, but they’re real just the same…”

Vicki looked on from her husband’s lap, paralyzed, nauseous. Druck and his two dutiful attendants took turns raping the screaming girl. Her shrieks rattled the windows and pierced Vicki’s ears. All manner of molestation and sodomy ensued until the sheer gravity of shock robbed what was left of her senses, leaving her silent, bug-eyed, and convulsant on the wood floor. Blood poured freely as if dumped from a bucket.

“All things serve a higher purpose, wife. Even terrible things. One day you’ll see that as clearly as I do.”

Again, Natter nodded.

Druck slit the girl’s throat to the bone. She twitched feebly once or twice, then died. The two boys jabbered on, their bulbous heads bobbing in glee. Druck’s knife flashed, cutting an expert seam from the girl’s pubis to her chest.

“Soup’s on, boys!” he exclaimed.

The three of them, then, sloppily disemboweled the girl where she lay, reveling in a wet, noisy festival of gore. Hands dipped down and came away red. Jabbers of enthusiasm rose above the sounds of evisceration. Organs were promptly scooped up and consumed…

Natter’s hand released the back of Vicki’s head; her eyes fled away.

“Oh, my love,” creaked the monstrous man’s voice. “Never lie to me, or else they’ll do the same to you.”

— | — | —

Fifteen

“No Ric Flair tonight?”
Phil asked when he pulled up a stool.

The bizarre barkeep gestured toward the TV. “Flair, the Nature Boy, the Champion of Champions? Naw, ya missed him. He’s already been on, whupped the tar out of Rocky Johnson. Like he says, to be the man, you have to
beat
the man. Right now we got Terrific Terry Taylor mixing it up with Rick Morton.”

“Ah,” Phil said. “Of course.”

“Bottle of Bud? Hot dog?”

“Just…a bottle of Bud.”

Sallee’s was buzzing, the crowd waiting for the next dancer. Phil glanced around. Well-bosomed waitresses in ludicrously tight tops wended orders between tables like tight-ropists. Same crowd as last night
—Generic rednecks,
Phil
thought.
Is that all these people do? Bum around in strip joints?
Lights throbbed idly above the vacant dance stage, through lolling sheets of cigarette smoke. Hoarse laughter erupted every so often, and the bar, in its casual discourse, was not lacking in foul language and bad jokes. “Hey, what are two words you never wanna hear in the men’s locker room?” “What?” “‘Nice dick.’” “You got ten gals with PMS and ten gals with yeast infections, what’ve ya got?” “What?” “A
whine
and cheese party!
” Brilliant,
Phil thought. He didn’t see Eagle anywhere, nor Vicki; he felt immediately foolish sitting at the bar by himself He frowned up at the wrestling foolery on the TV.
These guys probably spend more money per year on hair bleach than I spend on car insurance.
The keep was peddling shriveled hot dogs at one end of the bar, while two bearded guys at the other end nearly got into a fight arguing over whether cast aluminum engine blocks were more durable than cast iron.
Next, they’ll be arguing over who should win the Nobel Prize for Literature,
Phil joked over his beer. But this night was no joke. His lame distractions coaxed him to forget he had a job to do, yet he continued to do exactly what Mullins—and professionalism in general—warned him
never
to do: Take things personally. His mind kept homing back—to Vicki, and the dusting of cocaine she’d left in his bathroom.

Addict,
the word kept haunting him.

Eventually the next dancer came on, a blond who was surely half-inebriated as she plunged her routine into another nondescript heavy metal tune. A snake seemed to peer from her navel, but then Phil realized it was a tattoo. Small, weathered breasts jiggled with each high-heeled step, like slackened bags of gel, and wires of black pubic hair leaked from the seams of a flesh-colored g-string.

One thing Phil eventually came to notice, though, in spite of his despondency, was an influx of patrons crossing the bar toward the men’s room but never returning, and as he became more aware of this, he tried to pay more attention without being conspicuous.

What the hell’s going on back there?

A cramped hallway in the corner led to the men’s room, and right next to it stood a door. A funny-looking kid in overalls waited beside the door itself, arms crossed and stone-faced.
A Creeker,
Phil ascertained. The gaunt features and enlarged head left no doubt. One periodic redneck after another approached the kid, bypassed the men’s room, and after a moment of discussion, was granted permission to pass through the cryptic door. It seemed almost as if the Creeker kid was
guarding
it.

Maybe it’s a billiard room or arcade or something,
Phil
suggested to himself, but that wouldn’t make sense.

Why would the kid be guarding it? Then Phil thought back: When he’d first started staking the lot, hadn’t he heard several patrons mention something about a back room?

A hand slapped on his back. Phil jumped.

“Hey, man. How’s it going?”

Eagle, his long blond hair in his face, pulled up the next stool and ordered a beer.

“Can’t complain,” Phil answered. “Well, I guess I could, but why bother? What’s up with you?”

“Same old, same old.” Eagle craned to view the current dancer, then quickly frowned. “Looks like she’s dancing with cinderblocks tied to her feet.”

“Give her a break, Eagle. She probably just got out of Harvard Law School but hasn’t quite found the right firm.”

Eagle chuckled and swigged some beer. “I don’t know where they dig some of these girls up. Sure, some of them are all right, but most of ’em look like death warmed up. Vicki blows them all away.”

“Yeah,” Phil replied but thought:
Yeah, I’ll bet she does, when she’s not blowing Natter’s coke up her nose.