Vile Blood (11 page)

Gene found the red cartridges in a box in the drawer, broke the shotgun and loaded it, remembering the last time he used it: the barrel blowing the feral woman clean in half, her
severed
legs kicking and bucking in the red dirt, sending up a little cloud of dust until the
last
charge of life left her nervous system and her limbs were stilled.

Gene locked the cabinet and carried the Remington across to the front door where he threw the
bolts.
He walked into to the kitchen, his fingers finding the wall switch, and he blinked in the hard glare of the fluorescents as he laid the Remington on the counter beside the silent TV. There was no bolt on the door leading out to the yard, and in his haste to get Skye gone he had forgotten to demand the house keys back.

Gene unplugged the icebox, put his shoulder to the metal and moved it, cockroaches
seething
on the floor
and the wall
where the refrigerator had stood undisturbed for years. It was old and heavy and it took all his strength to shove it up against the door.

He doused the lights and went up to Timmy’s bedroom, stepping around a creaking floor board, and settled himself on a cushion by the window, listening to his son’s soft breath, the Remington leaning beside him.

Gene would not close his eyes tonight. He would sit vigil and if Skye returned he would shoot her.

21

The Other woke her from dreams of blood and flesh, the predator’s hunger driving her from the bed, Skye a passenger, an onlooker, an invaded host. Despite regular jolts of caffeine she’d fallen asleep and the dark thing had lain in wait, ambushing Skye when she was most vulnerable.

She’d taken a cold bath in an attempt to stay awake and had opened all the bedroom windows, hoping for a breeze, lying nude under the bed sheet, drinking coffee and a Red Bull filched from Minty’s icebox, the TV blaring out an endless stream of late-night action movies until the man below had hammered on his ceiling with a broom handle.

Still she’d slept.

But she was awake now and moving naked toward the open window, lifting the drapes and stepping out on the metal fire-escape, the raised lozenges on each step cool and distinct on the soles of her feet, her vision clear and sharp as she descended to the sidewalk of the empty street.

Skye, battling to find something of herself within The Other, tried to seize control, tried to tell her legs to stop, to turn back. It was no good, the barrier between herself and her
invader
was too porous and her fear was diluted and
swept away
by the hunger of The Other.

There was a surge of speed—buildings blurring past, sand and rock beneath her feet—a sensation of impossible strength, an animal panting in her ears, her lolling tongue drinking the night air: soil, dust, stale gasoline fumes and a faraway wood fire.

And flesh.

The
tang
of human flesh, coming warm and succulent from the dark houses as she sped past. Flesh beaded with night sweat; flesh marinated in liquor; flesh
rank
with the juices of sex; flesh sour and rancid with age; flesh wrapped sweet and tender on the soft bones of infants.

This carnal smorgasbord only spurred her on, out into open country, past the water tower, its looming bulk etched black against a silver gauze of night cloud.

And then she was Skye enough again to see the pale shape of the house that had once been her home, and sense the man and boy asleep upstairs.

No, she screamed silently, her voice lost in the roar of the beating heart, the rush of hungry blood, the excited panting.

Skye tried to grab hold of something, to pull The Other back, but she felt the way she had when she was nine years old, out riding with Gene and Marybeth and her horse had bolted and she’d released the
reins
and clung on with her arms and her legs until Gene had chased her down and
grabbed
the
bridle
and brought the horse under control.

No way to control this.

The Other flowed up the clapboard wall in seconds and paused on the roof outside Timmy’s room, the sash window open, a curtain
swelling
out into the night.
Timmy
lay in his bed, sleeping, his face innocent and unguarded. Skye registered another presence: Gene sitting with his back to the wall by the window, a shotgun beside him. Also asleep.

An arm, an impossibly strong, muscular arm, was already reaching toward Gene when the last fragment of Skye not yet lost to The Other found enough purchase to start silently gabbling a half-remembered prayer.

Our Father who art in Heaven

Hollowed be thy name.

The prayer caused the arm to pause.

Thy Kingdom come

They will be done

On Earth as it is in Heaven.

Her words were lost in a banshee wail of a legion of voices from hell and the smell of Gene and Timmy was in her nostrils—she could already taste their flesh—the wood of the window frame against her groin as she straddled it, the heat of Gene’s body visible to her.

Skye, holding on, desperate, forced out the rest of the prayer.

Deliver us from evil

For thine is the kingdom,

The power and the glory,

For ever and ever.

Amen.

The words enough to cause a tumult within, a heat, a rush of rage and fear so fierce that Skye thought she would be consumed by fire, but the prayer caused the body that was hers and not hers to retreat, to climb back down the wall and take to the desert.

And Skye, exhausted, understood that an accommodation had been made with The Other. They would feed, but not on Gene and Timmy.

Not tonight.

So Skye surrendered, allowed herself to be subsumed, let herself be carried across the expanse of dirt and scrub, down to the nearby border and beyond—the fence
hurdled
with ease—into the
dark twin
of the town she’d grown up in: a reflection in a funhouse mirror, a town of whores and cantinas, a way-station for coyotes and drug mules. And this town, unlike its slumbering sibling, was awake. Music pumping from saloons, snatches of laughter spilling into the night.

Care would have to be taken.

The Other, following some carefully calibrated instinct, found the shadows, moving away from the busy streets to a row of shacks where a man stood by a rusted car pissing into the sand, the smell of his flesh and the chemicals in his
urine
sour to Skye’s nose.

As they moved in for the kill, Skye saw into the soul of the man, saw screaming women in cages, saw a girl child torn and bleeding and a fat priest defiled by his crucifix.

The Other took the man, tearing out his throat before he could yell, and dragged him past the car wrecks, away from the lights, into a ditch filled with oozing garbage bags.

Skye was a mute witness as The Other fed, tearing open the man’s chest, bending back his ribcage like it was chicken wire, removing the sticky wetness of his innards, milking his intestines for their pâté of shit and sucking it down greedily, truffling in his liver, rolling with him in the gore and the garbage, tearing
ribbons
of flesh from his bones and swallowing them and then holding the prize in a clawed hand—the fatty mass of his heart, a
macaroni
of dangling ventricles—and ingesting it whole.

22

“Daddy. Daddy!” Gene opened his eyes and looked into his son’s face, a sweet and untroubled mirror of his own. “Daddy, where’s Skye at? She’s gotta help me with the tower.”

As Gene stood—how the hell had he allowed himself to fall asleep?—the Remington slid down from behind the drapes, knocking one of Timmy’s action figures to the floor. Timmy stared at the weapon, then up at Gene, a single furrow in his brow.

“You sleep here ’cause of the monster?” Timmy asked. He was still in his pjs, barefoot. Hair tousled. Marybeth’s hair.

Gene found a smile somewhere. “There’s no monster, Timmy. Come on, get dressed. You’re going to Uncle Bobby’s place.”

The plan had come to Gene as he sat in the dark, before he’d let sleep ambush him. He’d keep Timmy out of school today while he went on the fool’s errand with Dellbert Drum.
Leave him at Heck’s house, let the deputy’s wife watch over him.

Distress creased the boy’s forehead again. “But I gotta go to school, Daddy. I gotta take the tower.”

Timmy was standing at a low table, a construction of wire, papier-mâché, beads and little mirrors rising from it in a gaudy spiral. The tower. The thing that Skye and the boy had been laboring over for days. Some crude representation of a fanciful place from one of Timmy’s video games.

“What time’s the show-and-tell?” Gene asked.

“First thing,” Timmy said.

“Okay, I’ll take you there directly. Then when you’re done showing it, you’re going to Aunt Sally, okay?”

“Why can’t I stay with Skye?”

“Skye’s gone away for a while,” Gene said.

“Gone where?”

“Up to the city.”

“What’s she doin’ there?”

“Come on, you get dressed now, or you’re gonna be late.”

The kid delved into a pile of clothes and Gene helped him dress. Then he stood under a shower for a minute and pulled on a pair of Levi’s and a check shirt. Let the shirt hang loose, covering the Glock holstered behind his right hip.

As he and Timmy were leaving the house Gene’s phone rang. He got Timmy strapped into the cruiser, cradling the phone at neck as he took the call. It was Diego Suarez, a cop from across the border
, who’d learned his English from Hollywood movies.

“Gene, hear you had some guys chewed to hamburger few nights back.”

“Then you heard more than me,” Gene said, starting the car, reversing out the drive.

“We had somethin’ similar happen down here last night.”

“Yeah?” Gene said, heading toward town.

“The vic was a real bad son of a bitch, sold women, trafficked organs, drugs, you name it. But the way he was killed, Jesus, I never seen nothin’ like it. Torn apart. Chewed on.”

Gene worked hard to sound disinterested. “So, we talkin’ cartels?”

“People saying no, something else.”

“Like what?”

“You’ll fuckin’ laugh at me, man.”

“Try me.”

Suarez hesitated. “A monster. A demon.”

“Okay, I’m laughing.”

“Fuck you. Least you could tell me what happened your side.”

“Diego, I can’t help you.”

“Gene, throw me somethin’, man. People down here are freakin’ out.”

“Still can’t help you.”

“I’ll remember this, Chief Deputy. Okay?”

“Nice talkin’ to you, Detective.”

Gene dropped the phone, checking his mirrors, checking the sidewalks.

Looking for Skye.

23

Skye sat in Minty’s old bathtub hugging herself, trying to still the tremors that set her teeth chattering, her shaking limbs causing small waves to lap against the enamel sides of the tub.

This was the second bath she’d drawn, the water of the first turned
crimson
by the gore that had covered her naked body and matted her hair. She’d scrubbed her skin almost raw and released the bloody water, scouring the tub with the eye-stinging solvent she’d found in the closet beneath the mirror. Then she’d filled the tub again and sat in it, the water almost unbearably hot.

The shakes lessened enough for her to floss and brush her teeth till her gums bled. She leaned over and spat into the toilet, flushed and watched the toothpaste chase the bloodstained snake of dental floss into the vortex.

The meat of the man sat heavy in her, her belly distended beneath the steamy water, her body toxic with what she’d ingested, and though she’d crouched over the toilet bowl, fingers down her throat, she’d managed nothing but a light broth of muddy brown vomit, as if The Other guarded the contents of her stomach, needing the man-meat to be metabolized to sustain itself.

Lying full length, arms folded rigid beneath her breasts, Skye lifted her foot and used her toes to open the hot faucet, running more water in the tub. She shut her eyes and inhaled steam, trying to calm herself, trying to quieten the self-loathing and anxiety that gripped her.

She imagined herself in a womb, floating in amniotic fluid. A reassuring image. Until a question blinked up onto the blank screen of her mind. What was she? From whose womb had she issued? What rogue DNA did she carry in her that had made it possible for her to commit the acts that she did?

And an action-replay of the night before forced her to relive each of the events: how she’d nearly killed Gene and Timmy; the disgusting episode across the border; finding herself naked and bloody in the main street of her town at dawn, crouching behind a Dumpster, watching a patrol car cruise by, a streetlight washing Bobby Heck’s face as he drove on, oblivious.

Panic
took hold
of her and she jolted upright, heart racing, her knee upsetting a mesh tray hooked over the side of the tub, filled with an array of
beauty products
.
Plastic containers ended up in the water and Skye rescued them, her shaking hands clumsy as she replaced them in the tray. She felt something sharp against her leg and lifted out
a T-shaped man’s safety razor, an artifact of an ex-beau of Minty’s, maybe.

The razor was old with an ornate chrome handle, the edges of a stainless steel blade poking out the sides—very different from the plastic disposables that Gene used. Skye ran a finger against the blade. It was sharp.

Without consciously understanding what she was doing, Skye turned the razor in her hands, looking for a way to open it. She had a flash of memory of her uncle, his face comically white with shaving cream, standing in his undershirt at the basin in the bathroom of the house she and Gene grew up in. He’d scooped some of the cream from his face with a finger and dabbed it on her nose, making Skye—five or six years old—giggle. Then she’d stood on tiptoe, not yet tall enough to see into the basin, and watched as he’d unscrewed the razor, removed the old blade and installed a new one.