HELLz BELLz (19 page)

Ahead on the right was Druid Hills High School’s athletic field. Lights on tall poles lit the baseball diamond with a sickly yellow glow. As she came abreast of the field, she slowed down and craned her neck to make sure she was seeing what she thought she was seeing.

She was.

Bodies littered the diamond, some in baseball uniforms, others in street clothes. In all, maybe twenty bodies lying where they’d fallen, either on the dirt baselines or on the grass. Then she saw several more bodies draped like rag dolls over the bleachers.

She stopped the car and stared at the eerie tableau, trying to imagine what had happened here. She blinked her eyes as if trying to change the scene into one of normalcy. Nothing changed. She saw what had happened; America’s favorite pastime had turned into a deadly free-for-all. The maddening church bell had run riot over the field, leaving bodies in its violent wake.

Then she saw that one of the uniformed bodies was moving, a boy crawling along the third baseline toward home plate. The kid had one arm by his side, dragging a bloodied bat as he inched toward home.

“Je-sus,” she muttered, unable to look away. The car radio was playing an old Bob Dylan song. Sara couldn’t stand the singer’s caterwauling, so she shut off the radio. She could just make out the sound of the church bell above the hum of the Toyota’s engine.

The boy crawling for home stopped moving. She watched him for several more long moments, then broke out of her trance. “He’s done,” she said. “Stick a fork in him.”

Oh my God, did I just say that? What a horrible thing to say! Am I that cold-hearted?

She began to shudder. Tears leaked from her eyes and rolled down her flushed cheeks. She saw herself pointing the pistol at Joseph and at the slutty girl and she wanted it to be something she’d dreamed, not something she’d actually done. It had to have been a dream, because she never would’ve left her husband on the side of the road to be killed by rampaging maniacs. She wasn’t that sort of person. She was a lady of good moral fiber, just as her mother had taught her to be. Even in trying times, a good and decent person doesn’t abandon her high moral standards.

She glanced down at the gun lying on the passenger seat.

“My God, Joseph, forgive me,” she sobbed.

Then she wheeled the vehicle into a U-turn and began to circle back to the place where she’d ejected her husband as casually as she’d ejected that screeching compact disc she hated so.

“Please don’t let me be too late.”

* * *

He knew she was dead, too. As dead as the chick in the nun’s headdress. The bloody grin slashed in her throat had to be fatal. All that blood on the floor around her shoulders. His mother’s blood. Her wasted life shining there in a dark pool.

James retched.

Josh said, “Holy fuck.”

One of the tattooed freaks looked up at them.

James remembered the rifle in his hands and pointed it at the upturned face and fired. The face jerked and disappeared.

The shotgun in Josh’s hands boomed. Two more freaks went down. The others scattered like rats, screaming and shouting.

James saw the skull-faced leader of the pack of rats limping for cover and he drew a bead on the guy’s back and shot him. Skull Face twisted around and fell on his back, his death’s-head tattoo deepened by the real death settling into his face.

Josh fired again. The blast bloodied the breasts of Big Tits and she fell across a table of flickering candles.

They kept shooting until all the moving targets were out of sight.

“Let’s go after ’em,” said Josh, his voice amped with a shooter’s excitement.

“Fuck ’em. Let’s just go.” James thought he should do something about his mother’s body, but what? Call the cops? Call for an ambulance? No point in either. Tonight you left bodies where they fell. If things ever got back to normal, then clean-up crews could collect the corpses and arrangements could be made. But not tonight. Not on the Night of the Bell.

Bouncing on his feet at the edge of the charred floor, Josh said, “Man, we capped their ass. Wow! That was the greatest thing we’ve ever done!”

“I’m going to get my grandmother,” said James, resting the rifle on his shoulder and feeling like a soldier leaving a battlefield, “and get the hell outta here before something else happens.”

“What about the rest of the freaks?”

“Fuck ’em. We got their head man.”

“The bone head, right.” Josh chortled. “But why should we leave? This is our turf. We showed ’em that.”

James pointed a finger upward, in the direction of the tolling bell. “That’s why. That fucking bell rules the night.”

* * *

Joe rang the doorbell. Suzie held onto his hand. All the windows of the vine-streaked cottage were open to the night, glowing yellow-orange like the eyes of a jack-o’-lantern. No sounds drifted through them.

“Why would he have his windows open on such a hot night?” Suzie wondered aloud. “Doesn’t he have air-conditioning?”

Joe rang the bell again.

The floor creaked and groaned behind the door. A bolt shot back with a metallic crack. The door swung inward a few feet, then stopped. The barrel of an odd-looking rifle poked through the space between the door and the doorjamb.

“John? It’s me, Joe Carr. For God’s sake, don’t shoot that thing.”

The rifle barrel drooped toward the floor and the door swung wide and John Woolrich looked out at them from behind thick glasses. His salt-and-pepper goatee was stained with stringy chunks of something red. Joe remembered the rat-faced guy chewing the storekeeper’s flesh, and he almost turned to run away, but then Woolrich said, “Come in, come in. What an unexpected treat.”

Joe couldn’t help it: he associated
treat
with
eat
and he stood rooted to the cement porch, not wanting to be the next item on his friend’s menu.

Suzie tugged at his hand. Shot him a puzzled look.

“Well,” said Woolrich, “don’t just stand there letting the bugs in. Enter.”

“You’ve got something in your beard,” said Joe, lifting a finger to point.

Woolrich touched his fingers to his chin whiskers, then brushed them with his fingertips. “Sloppy eater, I’m afraid,” he said with a rumbling chuckle. “Microwave pizza in my crumb-catcher.”

Joe laughed in relief. Pizza sauce and little bits of toppings. Not blood and bits of raw flesh. He and Suzie stepped over the threshold and John shut the door behind them.

“Sorry if I frightened you with this antique,” said their host, giving the old rifle a little one-handed jerk. “Civil War vintage. Not loaded. I’m not even sure it would fire if I had the powder and shot for it.”

“You know what’s happening out there?” Joe angled his head at the door and beyond.

“I have a pretty good idea, though I’m not anxious for another first-hand look. Who’s your attractive companion?”

Suzie smiled at John. Gave her eyes a few coy blinks.

“Suzie Shrimpton,” said Joe. “We ran into each other downtown when this whole mess started. Now we’re just trying to get the hell out of town.”

“It won’t let you leave,” said Woolrich.

“What?” said Joe.

“It won’t let you leave town. At least I don’t think it will. I’m still piecing it together—or was till I lost connection to the Internet—but what’s taking shape so far is pretty doggone grim.”

He led them to his book-laden study and to a big cherrywood desk cluttered with open volumes and a nest of papers. A Dell computer and monitor with a blank blue screen hummed in the center of the desk. A couple of frozen-food pizza boxes lay on the floor by the captain’s chair and a bowl of melting chocolate ice cream sat by the keyboard. “I’m afraid you’ve caught me,” he said, adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his bulbous nose. “My secret vice, binge eating. I think the bell set it off.”

“Why do you have all the windows open? It’s so hot outside.” Suzie waved a casual hand at the room’s wide-open windows.

“So I can hear the bell. And make an empirical judgment as to its effect on me—if that’s possible. Of course, it has to be subjective, and is therefore empirically flawed, you see. But still…”

“John, we have to get out of town and away from the sound of that bell. The longer we stay here, the greater the danger. People are killing each other out there. Randomly. Indiscriminately.”

“Viciously,” added Suzie.

“I know, I know. I was in the grocery store when it started.” Woolrich settled his wide rear into the captain’s chair and gazed up at them through his bottle-thick lenses. “The supermarket three blocks from the church. There were only three checkout lanes open and the lines were long and people were already cranky from the heat, so when the bell started to toll, tempers were ready to boil over, and that’s just what they did. It started when an obese white woman bumped a young black woman with her shopping cart and all at once there was a veritable free-for-all with people throwing canned food and packaged meat at each other and others quick to resort to fisticuffs. Being a scholar, not a fighter, I left my cart and beat a hasty retreat. And out on the street more people were going at each other, shouting and cursing at first, then exchanging blows. By the time I got to where my car was parked, I had already made the association between the tolling of the bell and the outbreak of violent behavior.

“You see, I already knew something about the bell’s origin and its accompanying legend,” he went on. “I got interested last year when—”

Joe cut him off. “You can tell us on the way out of town. I’m not joking, John. We have to go. You need to lock up your house and drive us out of here. Now.”

“Where’s
your
car?” asked Woolrich, fiddling with his whiskers. “Where’s your wife?”

“She took the car. Forced us out at gunpoint.”

“We’re lucky she didn’t shoot us,” Suzie said.

“Oh my.”

“So you see how serious this is,” Joe said. “She would never do something like that in her right mind. And that bell is affecting our minds even now.
We have to go
.”

“Yes, yes, I see.” He tapped a finger against a manuscript page of print. “There was an order of monks in seventeenth-century France, a splinter group of Jesuits, really, who got themselves excommunicated for their unorthodox practices. They were the ones who commissioned the forging of the iron bell in the first place. The man who actually forged the bell was one Alenard Dampierre. A mysterious figure if ever there was one.”

“John,
please,
” Joe said, putting one hand on the desktop and the other on his friend’s beefy shoulder. “Where are your car keys?”

“Oh dear. I can never keep up with them. I’m the original absentminded professor, I’m afraid.”

“Jesus,” Suzie said with a heavy sigh.

“They might be on the mantel by the door in the den. Unless they’re still in my pocket.” He patted his pants pocket. “Ah, here they are.”

“Thank God,” said Suzie. “Can we go now?”

“Well, if you really think we must. But this is so damned fascinating, isn’t it? It’s not every day one gets to witness a divine visitation, I dare say. You sure you don’t want to stick around to see how it plays out?”

“We’re sure,” Joe said.

Woolrich picked up the bowl of melted ice cream, turned it up to his lips and drank it down. “One for the road,” he said, licking his lips. “Like a last cigarette for a man facing a firing squad.”

“Why don’t you let me drive?” said Joe.

Woolrich stood up, reached into his pocket and came out with the keys and handed them to Joe. “Be my guest. But if my theory is correct, we won’t be able to leave town.”

“Why not?” asked Suzie.

“God won’t let us.”

They put his unconscious grandmother in the back seat of his mother’s Saturn; her limp body slumped into a sitting position like a puppet with slack strings. With her head back and her mouth hanging open, her upper gums looked like a raw wound.

James hadn’t said much since seeing his partially nude mother with her throat cut. Josh had babbled on about the murdering freaks until James told him to shut up with such ferocity that Josh clamped his teeth tight and held his tongue.

James started the car and backed into the street, then drove down the hill, putting the church and the infernal bell behind them. The pain of his fractured rib helped him block out the bloody image of his dead mother. Josh was in the shotgun seat with the shotgun and the rifle standing up between his legs. Every now and then James would glance over at him and see his lips moving as if he were talking to himself.

“You all right?” James asked him.

“Yeah. Guess so.”

James turned on the radio to find some music but all he found was static. The sound of the bell seemed to be riding close behind them, as if the evil iron were unwilling to let them escape its haunting peals. “Look in the glove box and see if there are any CDs in there,” he said.

Josh rummaged through the box but found no music discs.

“I’m beginning to think this night will never end,” James said as he ran the red light in the center of town. “Like a nightmare you can’t wake up from.”

“Know what I think?” Josh sat a little straighter and seemed glad that it was now okay to speak. “I think that damn bell is ringing something
in.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“I don’t know.” He held on to the barrels of the two weapons like a skier ready to push off down a snowy slope. “You know, like ringing in the New Year, only whatever it’s ringing in ain’t gonna be nothing to celebrate. Unless you’re one of those motherfucking tattoo freaks.”

“Ain’t it done enough already? Killed my mother and turned my grandma into a cabbage-patch doll? Shit, what else could it do?”

“I don’t know, but I
feel
it. Something really big and bad is coming. I don’t know what. What if those freaks were right? What if God’s coming? Or Jesus. Like the Second Coming. And He’s pissed off and laying waste.”

“Bullshit. You don’t believe in that crap.”

“Maybe I do. Maybe we’d better start believing.”

“If He
is
coming, I think it’s too fucking late to get religion. You just go on and get ready to burn in hell.”