Bad Juju: A Novel of Raw Terror (34 page)

He blinked his eyes and tried to
clear his optic circuits of this hideous vision.

But the walking dead man didn’t go
away. He was coming closer with each clumsy step.

Craig drew his .38 Police Special
and aimed it at the man’s empty chest, then he remembered Hollywood’s lore of
the living dead and raised his aim to the thing’s head. “Freeze!” he shouted.

But the chrome-domed zombie came on
with outstretched arms and fingers like fat overblown worms.

Hemphill thumbed back the hammer.
His mind was a jumble of mixed messages:
Lem Porch is dead; he’s been
autopsied; he’s walking toward me with bad intentions; dead men can’t walk;
dead men can’t drive a hearse; shoot him in the head, that’s how you kill ’em;
but his brain’s been removed, and anyway this is not real.

The pop of his pistol shut down his
inner dialogue (he had pulled the trigger without conscious decision) but it
didn’t shut down the shambling advance of Lem Porch’s nakedly obscene and
gutted body.

Craig fired again and saw the slug
impact the dead man’s bald head, but the walking abomination still came on. He
stepped back, holstered his useless gun and popped his baton off his belt. If
he couldn’t kill it, he sure as hell could beat it into submission; even dead
bodies have to yield to the laws of physics.

He cocked the baton over his
shoulder and snapped it forward, landing a solid blow upside the ghoul’s head,
staggering him. Craig swung again, this time striking the outstretched left
arm. The arm buckled and he heard the bone snap.

But the ghoul wasn’t stopping.

Craig gripped the handle of his
baton with both hands and delivered a roundhouse blow to the thing’s left leg.
Again the sound of breaking bone. The corpse listed to its left, but hobbled
forward.

From the corner of his eye,
Hemphill saw a second naked man coming toward him. Luther-fucking-Porch! Sure
as shit, and why not? Butthole brothers gotta stick together, right?
Come
on, motherfucker, I got some for you too.
Craig was beyond freaked-out now;
he was in the
zone
, the never-say-die zone, and he was hell-bent on
putting these dead-but-won’t-lie-down zombie sumbitches down for good, just the
way God planned it. If he was seeing this shit because he was in the middle of
a psychotic break with reality, well, he would just deal with that later, but
right now he was not going to be bested by two dead redneck refugees from a
funeral home, no fucking way.

He took the attack to the walking
corpse of Luther Porch. Hemphill went wild with his nightstick, pounding,
pounding, pounding, and trying to drive the ugly bastard into the ground,
making ground-meat hair pie of the face and head.

But nothing seemed to stop the
ghoul. He was so intent on hammering Luther that he failed to see Lem coming up
behind him, and when Lem’s cold hands closed on Craig’s neck, it was too late.
Then both dead men were on him, taking him to the ground.

Hemphill knew he was dying. The
hands at his throat were too strong to pry off, and he figured he had only a
minute or two left before choking to death. When the ghoul began to rip away
the flesh of his face with its teeth, Craig Hemphill drew his pistol, put the
muzzle to his own temple and squeezed the trigger.

He was dead before the last blasted
bit of his brain hit the road.

***

Otis Delums dug his grubby fingers
into his little can of Vienna sausages and fished one out. He sucked the juice
off it, then popped the whole thing into his mouth and chewed it with great
gusto. He wasn’t really hungry, but eating the sausages gave him something to
do while he waited for Corny to show up here at the train yard. Otis liked all
the fog. Fog was fun. You could see things in it the way you could see faces
and things in clouds. He was seeing something now, but he didn’t think it was
real. If it was real, Otis would be scared, but since he didn’t feel scared, he
thought it couldn’t be real. So he just sat on his haunches and watched the
thing move around in the fog sort of like that thing in that movie he and Corny
had watched a bunch of times—what was the name of it?—and laughed because it
wasn’t scary at all. Who could be scared of something that looked like a giant
blob of Jell-O?
The Blob!
That was the name of that movie. And Corny had
said if he ever saw the blob, he’d get a spoon and eat the thing to death. That
was funny. But this thing he was seeing now wasn’t red like cherry Jell-O. It
was sort of black or purple-gray. And it wasn’t oozing on the ground. It was
floating, sort of. Maybe it was some of that pollution stuff people sometimes
talked about. Sure, that was it. It was just a cloud of dirty air floating in
the fog. Nothing to worry about.

Otis looked at his wristwatch and
tried to make sense of the numbers and the little black arrows called hands.
The short hand was pointing close to the 10 and the long one was on the 2. He
chewed his lower lip and tried to remember how to figure out the time from
those numbers. Was it almost 10 o’clock or was it already after 10? He wished
his daddy had given him one of those watches without hands that just came right
out and told you what time it was, but his daddy was always saying it would be
good for him to think things through and figure them out his own self. Maybe
so, but if you had to know the time real quick, wouldn’t it be better to have a
watch without hands?

When he looked up from the watch
face he saw something that did scare him. It scared him so much he peed in his
britches. The dark stuff in the fog was changing, turning into the shape of a man.
Not like a snowman shape but like a real-life man. Otis wanted to jump up and
run but he couldn’t move. The only thing moving was the pee running over his
lap and the dark stuff making a man right in front of him.

“C-Corny?” he said when he saw that
the man-shape had Corny’s face. “You ain’t gone hurt me, are you? It’s me.
Otis.”

The dark thing with Corny’s face
moved toward him and suddenly he
could
move. He dropped his can of
Vienna sausages, jumped up and ran up the embankment to get away from it. Otis
didn’t know what the thing was, but he knew it wasn’t really Corny. He knew it
wanted to do bad things to him.

***

There were times when George
Taggert wished he’d chosen a different career path, and this was definitely one
of those times. A small-town druggist is frequently called upon to leave the
comfort of his home and go to his place of business to fill a prescription for
a customer outside of regular business hours. George didn’t really mind doing
it if the customers were truly in need, but nine times out of ten they weren’t.
Millie Peak’s husband Ralph had called George at home this morning and said
Millie was in “a bad way” and needed a refill on her Prozac. Ever the faithful
pharmacist, George said he would be glad to oblige and told Ralph to meet him
at the store in half an hour, though the truth was, George didn’t believe
Prozac was what Millie needed. If the sour old biddy needed anything, it was a
swift kick in the ass and an ultimatum from her husband that she straighten up
and fly right—or else. With these unprofessional thoughts running through his
head, George Taggert got out of his Pontiac, walked up to the front door of
City Drugs and stuck his key in the lock. The fog seemed to cling to him and it
chilled him to the bone. Damned odd fog it was. Something otherworldly about
it, he thought, almost as if it had rolled in by magic from some remote and
exotic corner of the world. George was not accustomed to such fanciful
thoughts, and he wondered if this mental tug backward into the magical thinking
of childhood was a sign of getting old. The proverbial second childhood. The
tip-off that your brain wasn’t firing on all the right cylinders and that
memories embedded long ago were suddenly flaring up and burning brightly enough
to color your sober-adult perceptions.

He shrugged off the thought and
keyed the lock.

“Ai-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi...”

George turned toward the source of
the strange childlike cry. He saw Otis Delums running out of the fog near the
sinkhole. What on earth had gotten into the boy? He was moving with a stumbling
gait along the edge of the hole, and George was afraid the poor kid was going
to fall in. “Hey! Get away from that hole!” George shouted.

But Otis didn’t get away from the
sinkhole. Instead, he began to shamble around its jagged rim, as if he were
playing some retarded version of ring-around-the-rosy.

“Merciful Heaven,” George said,
borrowing a phrase his mother had been fond of using when he was a kid. (Second
childhood?) He dropped his keys back into his pocket and hurried to rescue the
boy from his dangerous game. He ducked under the yellow tape and stood at the
hole’s edge to wait for Otis to come around again. If Otis was aware of
George’s presence, he gave no sign of it. He came on in his sad, lumbering run,
his eyes bugging out of his large head, his mouth O-ed and still making that
run-jarred “Ai-yi-yi-yi” noise.

George squared and braced himself
to intercept the boy. “Otis!” he shouted again. George spent most of every
working day on his feet, and he had kept himself in pretty good physical shape
since his days as a Naval officer patrolling rivers in Vietnam, so when Otis
Delums crashed into him, he was able to stop the boy (
The Catcher In The
Rye?
)  and wrap him up in his arms.

“What hell are you doing, son?” he
asked the bugged-eyed, babbling boy.

“Aiiiiiiiiiii...” Otis kept up his
haunting, nerve-wracking yammering. He didn’t seem to even see George. If he
was seeing anything, it was nothing in this world.

George held him at arm’s length and
shook his shoulders. Otis’ big feet were still stabbing the pavement, running
in place.

“Otis!” George yelled right in his
face.

Otis ran, going nowhere.

“Aw hell,” said George. It was
clear Otis wasn’t going to stop until he dropped from exhaustion—or dropped
into the hole. Keeping a firm grip on him, George tried to walk him to the
sidewalk, but Otis wouldn’t budge from the rim of the sinkhole. The poor kid
didn’t look that strong, but he was more than George Taggert could handle for
any length of time, and there was no one else on the street to help him.  He
released Otis and ran inside the drugstore to call 911. With any luck, Otis
wouldn’t fall into the hole and break his fool neck before the EMTs arrived to
strap him to a stretcher and zip him off to the ER.

***

Luke wanted to return to his house
to see if the “ghost” of his wife was still there in the bedroom, and Ree
wanted to go to her shop to see if her guardian angel would appear in her
special mirror, so after as rational a discussion as they could muster, given
the bizarre circumstances, they agreed to first go to Luke’s.

“What if she
is
there?” she
asked as they rode up in front of his house. “What if she
can
hurt us?”

“It’s not a
she
,” he said.
“And it sure as hell ain’t Jenny. You heard what Boots said. He’s never heard
of a ghost hurting anybody.”

“I know, but if it’s not Jenny,
then it’s not a ghost, and we don’t know what the hell it is. It sure did
affect your dog. What’s to say it can’t do the same to one of us?
Both
of us?”

“You should wait here. Whatever it
is, I don’t want you near it.”

“No, sir, I’m not letting you go in
there by yourself. We have to look out for each other. One for all, all for
one.”

“No. It’s too dangerous.” Luke
opened his door.

Ree opened her door. “You can’t
stop me.”

“Goddammit, Shorty...”

“Ah-ah,” she scolded. “You don’t
wanna piss off the Lord now. We need Him on our side.”

“Sorry. Come on, then. But you stay
behind me when we get inside.”

“Okay.” He got out of the pickup
and shut his door softly.

Ree walked beside him, holding his
hand. She spoke quietly: “If she...
it
...is still there, what are we
going to do?”

“See if it bleeds,” he said,
patting the butt of his pistol.

***

Paul Goolsby assembled his crew of
six men in the middle of Main Street, twenty yards away from the sinkhole. They
all wore yellow hard hats and navy-blue jumpsuits, and they all listened as
Goolsby briefed them on their initial plan of approach. “As soon as they get
that crazy kid off the site, John will crane the loose slabs of asphalt out of
there and then we’ll do down with the portable drills and see what we’ve got.
The east rim should be stable enough for the crane, because that’s the spot
they used to haul up the dump truck that went down. We already know there’s a
tunnel running off to the west, so that’s where we’ll start. There was a heavy
rainfall yesterday, so it’s going to be wet down there and possibly unstable.
At the first sign of a cave-in, sing out and get out. Questions?”

Stroking his bushy beard, Bear
said, “What the hell’s wrong with that kid?”

“He’s retarded,” said Goolsby,
turning to watch the boy loping around the hole. “The pharmacist has already
called for an ambulance.”

“Here come the cops,” said John,
nodding toward the squad car coming down the street with its blue lights
flashing in the fog. “They’ll take care of the retard. I’ll go ahead and get
into position.”

Goolsby kept his eyes on the young
man circling the sinkhole and did his best to conceal his anxiety. He wanted
his crew alert, but he didn’t want to spook them or infect them with the uneasy
feelings churning inside him. A psycho killer had almost stabbed him, so of
course he was still upset, but that didn’t explain his feeling that the damned
sinkhole wanted to kill them all. As a geologist, Goolsby knew that a sinkhole
was the result of long-term underground erosion, a perfectly natural geological
phenomenon, so why was he entertaining the superstitious idea that the hole
wanted them dead? It was ridiculous. It was unworthy of a man of modern
science. Theirs was a dangerous job, and it was natural to feel a certain
amount of fear in doing the job. The thing was, you couldn’t give in to fear or
cower in the face of a premonition springing from that fear.