HELLz BELLz (15 page)

“I don’t care,” said Sara. “She’s got no right to—”

Joe seized her chin and looked her in the eye. “Stop it. I mean it. Keep your mouth shut and do what I say.”

Her eyes went wide, but she kept her mouth shut, tightlipped and pouting.

“Good. Now let’s go.”

“Aye aye, Captain,” Suzie said, saluting with her middle finger.

They tramped down the carpeted stairs. The grandfather clock Sara had inherited from a favorite aunt stood at the bottom of the staircase, and it was chiming. According to the hands on the clock face, it was 10:15. So why was the old clock chiming? It usually rang the hour and chimed once at the half-hour, but here it was, chiming nonstop at a quarter after. Joe glanced at his wristwatch and confirmed the time. Was it possible that the church bell was affecting more than human behavior? That its relentless ringing was also affecting things mechanical like the grandfather clock? Or was it odd coincidence? Given all that had happened so far this night, he was just about ready to believe that the church bell’s vibes could be striking a sympathetic response in objects like the grandfather clock’s cylindrical chimes. A magical, mystical resonance. Why not? The world—or at least Druid Hills’ part of it—had fallen out of phase, slipped its normal moorings and drifted into a steamy Twilight Zone where irrationality ruled and anarchy reigned. Society was imploding. Anything was possible. And it scared the hell out of him even as it thrilled him with the promise of fantastic adventure. The bookstore dude was packing a rod and was hitting the road with two hot chicks, the three of them against the nutso world. It was like something out of the pulp-fiction junk he sold to his less discriminating customers. They even had a name for the sub-genre: urban fantasy, but with the gratuitous violence, you’d have to add the
slash,
as in urban fantasy/horror. Yeah, that was it, all right. They were trapped in the grimmest of adult fairytales, and they might have to shoot their way out.

All this went through Joe’s mind in the time it took to get from the grandfather clock to the front door. As he opened the door for the two women, he reminded himself that this wasn’t just macho-man fantasy. It was real, it was happening, and he had to be prepared to kill if their lives were on the line.

“Hold on,” he said, grabbing Suzie’s bare shoulder and stopping her in the doorway. “Let me go first.”

He yanked the .38 out of his pants and stepped out onto the front porch. The porch light was off, and the front yard and the street beyond it were cloaked in a sepia haze of illumination from the nearest streetlamp. The haze was soupy with sweltering heat, but the sound of the church bell was iron-clear and cold. He scanned their immediate surroundings for any sign of threat, and, finding none, he waved the ladies on. They piled into the car, Joe and Sara in the front and Suzie in the back. He stuck the pistol back in the waist of his trousers, cranked the engine and backed out of the driveway, into the street. He tamped the cotton balls deeper into his ears. He popped a CD into the player’s slot and pushed Play. It was Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack from
Black Hawk Down,
an eerie amalgamation of African and European music, with occasional slashing guitar riffs of American heavy metal. To Joe, it was deeply haunting music, very moving, but Sara hated it, which was why he listened to it in the car rather than on the home stereo system. For now, it provided a good wall-of-sound cover against the haunted bell ringing out from Holy Cross Hill. At least, he hoped so.

“Where are we going?” his wife asked. She looked rather childish in the earmuffs.

“The fastest route out of town and away from the sound of the bell. We can get a motel room in Wakefield.”

She had lifted the left muff from her ear and leaned toward him to hear his answer. Now she nodded and settled back in her seat, folding her arms across her chest. “I hate that music,” she said in a near shout. “It gives me the creeps. Reminds me that those Islamic terrorists are trying to destroy our country.”

Joe shrugged. Kept his eyes on the road. He turned at the corner and headed west through the residential area to avoid downtown, which was likely to be more chaotic with crazies.

Suzie was quiet in the back. He checked her in the rearview mirror to make sure she was all right. Her mood had turned a little hostile after their taste of sex and violence in the bathroom, and he didn’t altogether trust her at his back. They all were on edge. Nerves were raw. Dangerous impulses lurked just below the surface of tenuous civility. Violence could come suddenly and without warning. It could come from without or from within, from those close to you or from absolute strangers. Suzie’s eyes were closed. Joe relaxed a little and watched the street ahead.

The cold, hard pistol nestled against his hip gave him a sense of security, but with that security came the scary knowledge that the handgun had the potential of doing devastating harm if misused. As long as he was in range of the church bell’s dark influence, he could not fully trust himself. There was no assurance that he wouldn’t freak out and shoot an innocent—maybe even his wife. He didn’t think he would, because he didn’t believe himself to be predisposed to violence or meanness. But still…

He smelled smoke as he turned onto Whitechapel Road and cruised past the mansions of Druid Hills’ wealthiest gentry. The Winchester House was completely engulfed in flames, and the house next to it was aflame as well. There were no fire trucks on the street, no municipal response at all to the fiery emergency. As he’d suspected, law and order had totally broken down. Public safety no longer existed.

He accelerated past the burning houses. The car’s air-conditioner finally started cooling down the Toyota’s interior, and Joe shivered with a sudden clammy chill. Gunshots popped in the near distance. Something banged against the side of the car, and he floored the gas pedal as Suzie let out a startled whoop.

“Somebody’s shooting at us?” Sara looked at him with an expression of indignation and disbelief.

“Told you,” he said, hunching down over the steering wheel, “the whole town’s gone nuts.”

A bloodied Irish Setter hobbled across the street in front of them, and Joe swerved to avoid hitting the poor mutt. “Jesus, this is a nightmare,” Sara said.

“You all right back there?” Joe asked Suzie.

He saw her nod in the rearview. In the dim light her face looked pinched and washed-out. He got the sense that she was doing her best to contain her terror. Hell, he was too.

“Where are the police? The firemen?” Sara demanded.

“Forget about it,” he said. “We’re on our own. They’re not immune to whatever this is.”

“The cops are more dangerous than anybody else,” Suzie interjected. “We saw ’em sticking a broomstick up a guy’s ass in the Jiffy-Quick. Sadistic pricks. That’s why we got the hell away from there.”

“God,” said Sara.

“Huh. If there is a God, he must be mighty pissed off,” Suzie said. “Taking names and kicking sinner ass.”

“More like the devil,” Sara shot back.

“I don’t believe in the devil. Men are evil enough without outside help.”

“Maybe the devil believes in you,” said Sara, turning in her seat.

They both were fairly shouting to be heard over the loud music and to get through each other’s plugged or muffed ears. Joe wanted to head off another outbreak of hostilities. “Shut up, please. Both of you. Let’s just concentrate on getting out of here, okay? Eyes open, mouths shut.”

“Heil Hitler,” said his wife, clearly fuming now.

He turned right onto Elm and got the speedometer up to fifty as they zoomed over the narrow roadway overhung with tall trees.

“Give me a cigarette, Joe,” said Suzie.

“No smoking in the car,” Sara told her.

“Law and order’s gone to shit and you’re worried about smoking in the car? What’re you, a tobacco Nazi?”

Sara turned in her seat so she could look her antagonist in the eye. “Who
are
you, anyway? And what are you doing with my husband?”

“Ladies,
please
,” said Joe. “Wait till we’re out of town, all right? Christ.”

“Amen,” snapped Suzie.

Sara turned back around, folded her arms across her chest and stared ahead through the windshield.

At the end of Elm Street, Joe made a left onto Old Boston Road, the four-lane boulevard that would take them beyond the city limits. They passed several abandoned automobiles and what looked like the aftermath of a head-on collision. A woman in a bloody housecoat was wandering along the side of the road, apparently dazed.

Joe toyed with the idea of stopping to help the accident victim and slowed down as he mulled it over some more.

“Don’t stop,” said Suzie. “What could we do, take her to the hospital to be tortured by psycho nurses?”

He got her point. What he had to do was get them out of town. Stopping now would be foolhardy. Dangerous. They had to look out for themselves now. They couldn’t risk getting involved with others, no matter how dire their straits might be.

Then Suzie made a squalling sound, as if she were choking on an all-out scream.

“
What?”
Joe shouted.

“There! That’s Gary’s truck!” She pointed ahead at a pickup with one wheel up on the curb, looking like a boat run aground on a colorless coral reef. “Stop! Stop! Pull over!”

“Are you crazy?” Joe slowed again as his headlights painted the truck with spectral light. The pickup’s cab was empty. The driver’s door was hanging open.

“I have to see,” she insisted. “See what happened. What if…”

“What if he pops up pissed off and whacked out of his mind?”

“Please stop. I have to know if he’s…he’s…”

Joe pulled to the curb and stopped with the nose of the car about ten yards behind the pickup’s rear end. “This is stupid,” he grumbled, putting the Toyota in park and leaving the engine running. He opened his door, drew the .38 and stepped out. He was about to tell Suzie to stay in the car, but she was already slipping out of the backseat, her brow furrowed with worry. He had to admire her bravery—if that was what it was.

“Who the hell is Gary?” Sara shouted after them as they approached the truck, shoulder to shoulder, with due caution.

The eerie soundtrack music from the Toyota’s CD player echoed off the asphalt. Joe felt as if they were in a movie, one of those low-budget artsy-fartsy flicks on the Independent Film Channel, the unknown actors shot with a shaky hand-held camera and winging it without benefit of scripted dialogue.

He held the gun out in front, waist-high, and grabbed Suzie’s wrist to keep her from getting ahead of him. The night exhaled a breath of hot wind that ruffled the tall weeds in the empty lot on the left. On the other side of the boulevard red and yellow plastic pennants fluttered and snapped over a fleet of shiny used cars.

“Oh my God,” Suzie whispered.

Joe saw it too. There was a body under the front end of the truck, a young man, his head and shoulders humped up over the curb and his hips and legs concealed in the shadow of the pickup’s undercarriage. His eyes were open, glazed in death. The right side of his head was caved in. A pool of blood with lumps of cottage cheese in it glistened on the sidewalk. The lumps were bits of his brain. A three-foot iron pipe lay a couple of feet from the corpse. One end of the pipe was shiny with blood and matted with a tuft of gooey hair from the dead guy’s scalp.

“Jesus,” said Joe. “Looks like he ran him down and then bashed the kid’s head in for good measure.”

Suzie held her hand over her mouth. Her stomach heaved and she made a retching sound but nothing came up.

“Wonder where—” Joe broke off his words when he looked up the sidewalk and saw Gary. Then he said, “Oh.”

“See?” Josh pointed his knobby finger at the small band of freaks arrayed in odd formation in front of the old church. “Just like I said.”

“God,” said Brenda, “what planet are they from?”

“What
graveyard,
is more like it,” said James, anxiously squeezing the spray-can of paint in his fist.

“We’re
not
going over there,” Barb said. “They look dangerous as hell.”

“Did Halloween come early?” Brenda asked with mock sincerity. She moved closer to James.

“Tattoos R Us,” Josh guffawed. He drained the last of his water, then tossed the empty plastic bottle on the ground.

“That’s one way to beat the heat,” James quipped, trying to hide his fear behind his wit.

“Come on,” said Josh. “Let’s go talk to ’em. Ask ’em what the hell they’re doing here.”

“I don’t know, man.” James was reluctant to step out of his front yard. Walking up to a bunch of naked, tattooed whack-jobs didn’t seem like a good idea on a wild night like this. In the sodium-vapor light their skin-etched wounds looked almost real, but of course that wasn’t possible, because nobody with such grievous wounds would be walking around like these odd dudes and dudettes, standing there before the church in human configuration symbolic of secret geometries no one else understood and mumbling incoherent chants like those Hari Krishna guys used to do at airports and bus stations. Maybe, mused James, they were a new band of Krishna freaks, some offshoot branch of the old, a new breed of religious zealots steeped in the philosophies of the far-out Far East and spiritually twisted to the point of believing mutilation would bring them closer to God…or maybe they belonged to some death cult like those radical Muslims who wanted to kill all Infidels—especially Americans. Whoever the fuck they were, James didn’t want to approach them. They were bad news, probably as dangerous as they looked. But the really odd thing was, they seemed to
belong
to the sound of the ringing bell. It was as if the bell had summoned them, as if they had been waiting for the summons and knew all about it—were somehow a part of it.

“C’mon, man,” said Josh. “You ain’t wimping out, are ya? This was your idea.”

Brenda looked at him with cocked eyebrows that said: Where are your balls?

Barb looked with longing at the Poon Tang Cruiser, no doubt wishing it was taking her home and away from this madness.