Bad Juju: A Novel of Raw Terror (37 page)

He reached the end of Main Street
and began to jog back toward the sinkhole.

He was drawn to it. There was
something about the sight of that shadowy mist whirlpooling into the hole that
commanded that he watch.

The civil-defense siren atop the
pole high over the firehouse died with a final sinking glissando:
WHEEEOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooo....

Luke stopped running and stood
still. Listening.

 An eerie quiet settled over Main
Street.

 Spooky silence.

Like the hush of a lonely
churchyard.

Luke watched the last vine of dark
mist snake into the gaping hole in the street.

He held his breath.

The ominous silence seemed to grow
thicker, as if God had hit the
mute
button on His remote control.

Then a low-pitched roar rose from
the earth and the ground began to shudder.

This is it
, Luke thought.

***

The pale hands on the steering
wheel were his. He knew that much. He knew they were guiding the hearse down
the alley. They seemed to know where to go. Lem didn’t. He didn’t know much. He
didn’t know how he’d ended up in this broken husk of a body.

He did remember dying.

He remembered leaving his body and
floating high above it and feeling wonderfully detached from all earthly cares
and concerns. He remembered seeing his brother die in the dirt in front of the
barn. And their old man too, dead in the dirt. But it was no big deal.

 He recalled thinking that his life
had been a bad joke played by a sadistic God. One second you’re there, taking
it all so seriously, and then God yanks the rug out from under you and you fall
out of your body and float up into the spaces between the worlds of the living
and the dead. You drift above the hunk of flesh and bone you used to live in,
as if you’re still attached to it by an invisible umbilical cord. You watch
with little interest as your old body is hauled off to the dead place and
you’re pulled along with it to see the dumb things they do to your corpse. You
feel nothing. You aren’t yourself. You’re an empty shape filled with echoes of
memories. You are the ass-end of an electrical discharge, a ghost of a cosmic
mistake. A vacuum waiting to be filled...

Darkness rushed in to fill the
vacuum. He remembered that well enough. Remembered the awesome power of that
darkness. After that he remembered nothing until he woke to this nightmare of
being back in his ruined body, dead but still walking the earth, riding the
streets and now driving down this alley of a familiar place. Luther was sitting
beside him. Luther was dead too, but he was still
in there
, inside that
messed up body, his face and head like raw, bloodless meat, his one eye taking
it all in like he was having the same nightmare.

There was no pain. Not much feeling
of any kind. He could feel the vague pressure of  the steering wheel against
his hands and the slightly cool sensation of the seat against his backside, but
that was all.

I’m a ghost having a bad dream.

A ghost dream.

Then the darkness bubbled up inside
his confusion and he felt...hate. Black hate. Hate stronger than death. This
wild, dark thing inside him was driving him, running on the hate that survived
his death, pushing him through this world he thought he’d left behind forever.

Lem looked over at his brother.
Luther looked back with his dead-fish eyeball.

Lem tried to speak, tried to tell
Luther that he understood now, but he couldn’t speak. The dark thing didn’t
need him to say anything, so it hadn’t restored his power of speech. It didn’t
matter. Luther probably already knew what was going on, knew that after they
did this one last thing, the dark thing would release them and their souls
could finally rest. All he and his brother had to do was ride this inner wave
of darkness and hate and do what it directed them to do.

He stopped the hearse in the narrow
alley behind the antique store. The front bumper knocked over a garbage can.
The clatter it made sounded a world away and was quickly overshadowed by the
roaring howl coming from the dark depths of the earth.

 
***

She was still sitting in front of
the mirror when the warning siren on 2nd Street fell silent. Thank God. She
needed quiet to digest Beau’s last words. Why did he have to speak in riddles? she
wondered. Why couldn’t he just come out and say what he meant in plain English?
She got the part about the “dark fire of the dragon” being loosed by wicked
spirits, or at least she thought she got it, and she sure as hell knew that the
dark thing was running amok, but what did “the dragon’s fire will burn you”
mean? Was the dark berserker going to have its way with her?  And what the hell
did Beau’s final warning mean?
You must not smoke.

She closed her eyes and offered a
prayer.
God, if it’s Your will, please let me survive whatever’s about to
happen. And please watch over Luke Chaney.
That was it. Short, sweet, and
simple. Ree had never asked much of God; her prayers were generally of
worshipful thanksgiving, asking blessings for others rather than for herself.
She hoped she wasn’t being too selfish in asking now for the Lord’s protection.

The air-conditioner clicked off. A
pregnant silence filled the shop. The air was charged with ill omen.

 
The quiet before the storm
,
she thought.

 The floor beneath her chair’s
rockers began to shimmy and shake.

She stared into the mirror. She
watched herself watching herself.

A low-pitched moaning drone
accompanied the trembling of the building and the ground beneath its
foundations.

She felt, rather than saw, a blackness
rising from the earth. It sickened her. She felt like throwing up. She
swallowed hard. Licked her dry lips.

She knew what it was.

Hate.
Raw, virulent, hungry.
Hatred in all its many forms: blind, specific, vengeful. Intense hate. A
thunderhead of hate, ready to unleash a rain of violence and blackest evil.

This is it
, she thought.
The
fall of the town.

She gripped the flat arms of the
rocking chair and held tight. Ceramic and glass knick-knacks fell from shelves
and shattered. Legs of furniture danced on the hardwood floor. The glass
display windows of the storefront imploded with a tinkling crash.

The howling grew louder, and Ree
saw a vivid image of the demonic sinkhole opening like a giant mouth to howl
its hate at the Heavens.

***

The street shook so violently that
Luke could hardly stay on his feet. He tried to turn, tried to run, but it was
like running on a treadmill gone wild. At one point he was actually moving
backward, though he was trying with all his strength to run forward and get the
hell out of the street. Main Street had become a carnival funhouse where
everything was distorted and every motion was a goofy parody of itself—a
perversion of physics.

He ran. He fell. Got up and ran. He
ran past the Post Office like a drunken sailor trying to run across the deck of
a storm-tossed ship. He hit the corner of Main and Auburn and cut right toward
2nd Street just as the ground opened up and took down a line of stores thirty
yards behind him. He looked back over his shoulder to see the hardware store,
the feed store and Mookie Vedders’ law office disappear into the yawning hole
and a great cloud of dust rising like some angry beast to tower over the
massive destruction.

He lost his footing again and fell
forward onto his hands, the asphalt ripping them raw. He pushed up and ran on.

A powerful explosion rocked the
earth and knocked him down again. A gas main, Luke thought. No one had thought
to have the gas shut off.
Shit.

Once more he got to his feet and
started running. Hot winds licked the back of his neck and whistled past his
ears. Even as he ran for his life, he could feel the evil intelligence behind
the destruction. He could feel its hatred, its hunger for human misery and
death. And it made him furious.

He was going to destroy this dark
beast, no matter what it took.

He would kill it—or die trying.

***

Lem Porch shambled to the back door
of Yeardley’s Yard And Garden and used the hearse’s tire iron to smash the lock
and knock the door open. Luther shuffled along behind him, the flaps of his
dissected torso hanging open like lapels of a hideous coat.

The ground shuddered beneath the
brothers’ bare feet, but they ignored the sound and fury of the geological
upheaval that was wreaking havoc on Main Street. They were single-minded in
their mission (said single-mindedness was remarkable, given the fact that their
brains were gone). The dark thing directed them to ignore all else. This they
did.

Lem moved among the garden tools
and fertilizers, while Luther stood motionless in front of a display of garden
hoses. They were oblivious to the shaking of the small building. Lem’s cold
fingers wrapped around the wood of a long-handle axe. Luther stood inert like
the dead weight he was. Dragging the axe on the floor as he shuffled down the
aisle, Lem spotted a bushel basket filled with machetes and pulled one out. He
walked back to his brother and put the machete in Luther’s hand. Luther looked
at the wide blade and made a grunting sound in the back of his throat.

The Porch brothers exited through
the back door.

  
***

Above the din of deep-earth rumbles
and the rattling clatter of the various objects in her shop, Ree heard a
rhythmic banging coming from the back door. It was a slow, steady pounding, as
of something heavy striking wood and metal. Was someone trying to break in
through the back door? No, that made no sense. Looters usually waited until
after a disaster was over before they started their looting, and who would want
to loot an antique shop? Nobody.
Nobody human
, she amended.

She wanted to get up and run, but
she couldn’t get out of the rocking chair. The bone-jarring vibrations of the
quaking earth seemed to have wrung all strength from her leg muscles. It
reminded her of a recurring nightmare wherein she sees a deadly coral snake at
her feet but she is frozen by fear, her legs as useless as rubber limbs. The
only way to escape the snake is to wake up. But there was no waking from this
waking nightmare. All she could do was keep her ass in the chair and wait for
the quaking to stop.

She kept her eyes glued to the back
door. Saw it jump with each banging blow. The upper half of the door began to
splinter.

Then she remembered her vision of
the man with a blade coming after her here in the shop.
Stupid, stupid,
stupid. I should’ve gone home like Luke told me to. God help me.

Then the door crashed inward and
hung askew by one broken hinge.

A naked man with an axe shuffled
through the doorway.

A naked,
gutted
man. His
chest cavity was an empty cage of raw ribs.

A second man, naked and similarly
gutted, followed him and he too carried a blade—a machete. He looked like a
skeleton wearing a meat suit and a fright mask of pulped flesh.

“No,” she said, “no fucking way.”

She forced herself to stand on
rubbery legs. The rocker bumped the backs of her knees. The shop shook and
rattled. She took a step but the floor seemed to dodge her foot and she went
down on her knees, throwing a hand out to keep from falling on her face.

She looked up as the living-dead
abomination raised his axe.

***

As his feet hit the pavement of 2nd
Street, Luke cut left and started running toward the firehouse and the police
station next to it. A fire truck was roaring out of the bay with its siren
already screaming. It accelerated up the street and was about twenty yards away
from the fire/police complex when both buildings shuddered violently and
dropped into the ground. The fire truck narrowly escaped the fate of the
buildings.

The street cracked open like a
giant egg, and Luke drew up just short of the jagged fissure in the asphalt. He
fought to keep his balance, then spun and darted across the street toward the
funeral home. He had the idea that the massive cave-in had a personal interest
in taking him down, and given what he knew of the dark orchestrator of the
disaster, the idea didn’t seem that far-fetched. He glanced over his shoulder
and saw the slanting roof of the firehouse; he saw no sign of the police
station. He wanted to know if anyone in either building had survived the
cave-in, but he knew he had to get himself clear of danger and wait till it was
over before he could go back to help. His priority now was survival.

He ran. He cut across the funeral
home’s lawn and emerged in the unpaved alley between 2nd and 3rd Streets. The
rumbling and quaking seemed to be subsiding. Luke stood in the middle of the
alley and tried to catch his breath.

Then he saw the hearse behind
Yeardley’s Yard And Garden, and through the gap between the garden shop and
Ree’s antique shop he saw his truck parked in front of Ree’s shop.

Why in hell did she come to the
shop? I told her to go home.

He knew the answer, of course. She
had come in search of her guardian angel.

As he started toward the front of
the antique shop, he noted that the doors of the empty hearse were hanging
open, suggesting that its occupants had bailed out in a hurry, but in his haste
to reach Ree and get her out of the downtown area, he gave the abandoned hearse
no further thought.

Until he saw the shop’s back door
standing open, its upper half splintered like balsa wood.

He juked around the front of the
hearse and went through the broken door of Ree’s shop.