Dylan’s eyes blazed as red as coals as he plunged his head downward, driving the long spikes of his teeth into Adrian’s throat. Blood geysered past Dylan’s face with tremendous hydrostatic pressure, spraying the wall and scattering ruby-red droplets on the sleeve of the man’s coat.
Karl Ruger raised his sleeve and licked the droplets off with a long, sharp tongue. The taste was
“Do ’em all,” he whispered.
Gaither Carby and Dave Golub rushed past him, howling with red delight.
(2)
Vic Wingate sat on the tailgate of his truck smoking a cigarette and watching the stars wheel overhead, listening distractedly to the screams coming from the nearby house. He knew he shouldn’t be smoking this close to the two drums of paraffin in the bed of the truck, but he figured screw it.
The screaming only lasted a few minutes. He cut a look at the only other house within sight of this one, but it was four hundred yards away and no extra lights had come one, there were no yells, no inquiring calls. With this many trees around even screams didn’t carry well. Vic knew that from long experience. He took a last drag, then ground out the coal on the heel of his shoe, put the butt in his shirt pocket, and stood up. It was a pretty night.
Turning, he reached into the bed and took hold of the corner of the topmost of the stacked body bags, braced his feet against the weight, and pulled. Though the carcass inside was two months dead it still had some weight, so he was careful of his lower back as he pulled it off the truck. He took his time hauling the others down, too, and laid them in a row. One for each of them, stolen from cemeteries around the county. A little bit of selective grave robbing. One here, a couple there, and some caretakers’ palms greased along the way so no police reports ever got filed, no relatives notified. Some quick excavation with a backhoe, and then the empty coffin reburied with all of the sod neatly put back afterward. All told Vic had close to a hundred bags like these, piled like cordwood in a refrigerated storage unit he rented out on Route 202. The manager there has been receiving five large a week in cash since the first week of September, and was an old friend of Vic’s. It wasn’t the first time Vic had used the place to keep something fresh, and he’d swung by there tonight to get what he needed so there would be bones found in the ashes once this place was torched. The proper amount of bones. Residential fire like this, there was little chance of anyone ordering a DNA analysis of the remains. Or, what was the word? Cremains? Yeah, that was it, and Vic liked the word. Cremains.
He pulled down the last two—kid-sized bags. Just about the size of Adrian and Darien. The devil was in the details.
PART THREE
LITTLE HALLOWEEN
“There was about him a suggestion of lurking ferocity, as though the Wild still lingered in him and the wolf in him merely slept.”
—Jack London,
I went Trick-or-Treating in a suburb once. One lady gave me
—Indigo Heart, “Monolog on Halloween”
Chapter 19
(1)
In movies it always rains at funerals. The crowds all stand around dressed in black, their umbrellas forming a ceiling above them. Maybe the hero stands hatless in the rain, too tough to need any umbrella. Either way, the skies weep at death and the hiss of rain is like the white noise that will be the only sound at the end of the universe. Crow thought about this as he stood holding hands with Val under a brilliant blue sky in the big field behind the Guthrie house. The sunshine was rich and warm and the shadows cast by the line of towering elms was soft and cool. Birds sang in the trees whose tops were riffled by a gentle easterly breeze. Crow thought that it should rain, that the heavens should indeed weep literally as well as symbolically when someone like Henry Guthrie passes out of the world, but there wasn’t a speck of a cloud in the vast blue sky.
