She felt around, feeling ill in the pit of her belly, trying to find a pulse.
The skin of the wrist, if skin it was, had felt cold before but now it was feeling warm, practically hot with life. Then she found something else. Something that made her yank her hand away.
There was a clear seam between the hand and wrist.
It wasn’t a cut or an injury, it was a seam as if the hand and arm were some kind of prosthetics, artificial parts joined together. She turned to tell the others about it, but something happened that sealed her lips shut.
A siren.
She heard a siren.
But it wasn’t from any ambulance or police car. No, this was loud and cutting, a constant droning that rose and fell like a World War II-era air raid siren. It was a shocking, unnerving sort of sound as it reverberated through the streets, echoing across the dark little town, bouncing off rooftops and down narrow alleyways.
Danielle began to sob and nobody was accusing her of being a drama queen or a wimp; everyone was as scared as she was. They were rooted to the spot. Hands went up to ears as the droning grew louder and louder, but nobody bolted or ran because there was nowhere to bolt or run
to.
Ramona herself was shaking.
The siren had a very primeval sound to it like the roaring of some prehistoric beast. Her mind vainly searched for an explanation, but there simply wasn’t one. It wasn’t a shift whistle or a fire siren. It was bigger than that, louder than that, more menacing than that.
“What the fuck?” Chazz cried out, but they could barely even hear him.
Then it cut out and the only indication that it had even been was the constant ringing in their ears like they’d just sat through a set with Metallica.
All of them were looking up toward the sky, the rooftops, maybe expecting something big, something
really
big to come ghosting down like a mother ship and abduct them in a beam of light.
Ramona heard a clicking.
Click-click, clicka-clicka-click.
It was coming from the man Chazz had run down. There was a weird clicking sound coming from him, coming from
inside
him. He started to tremble, then shake, thumping and thrashing on the pavement. He reminded her of one of the dummies from that old Herbie Hancock “Rockit” video…it was like his brain was going haywire. His legs were kicking, his hands slapping, his body twisting, his face hammering against the pavement.
She pulled away from him, her guts white with fear.
Then he started to rise.
Still making that weird clicking noise, he got to his knees. His head was bent over to his right shoulder, his hair hanging off to the side as if his scalp had been nearly peeled free. His spine was horribly twisted, his hips nearly sideways, one arm obviously broken as was one leg.
He stood up.
He was still facing away from them, balancing himself on his good leg, the other horribly crippled, broken in several places, the foot jutting out at an unnatural angle. As he stood, Ramona heard those clicking sounds. And as freakish as they were, they were nothing in comparison to the series of creaking and cracking noises as he pulled himself up uneasily.
Lex said, “Listen, mister, you better stay down. The ambulance is coming and—”
That’s when the guy turned his head and looked at them.
He was still facing away from them…but his head swiveled completely around on his neck until it was facing backward. His face was a contorted thing of some white putty-like material, not a face at all but a mask. He had no eyes, only empty sockets where they might be placed.
Danielle screamed and she wasn’t the only one.
Creep, Lex, and Soo-Lee almost went over in a heap as they tried to backpedal away and got tangled in each other’s legs. Danielle folded up and went to her knees. Chazz slowly backed away.
Ramona fought to her feet. The flashlight shook in her hand, creating a strobing image of the broken man as he looked back at them. With more groaning and minute snapping, he turned completely to face them, bringing his head around.
It had to be a mask.
It was just some guy wearing a mask, she thought, but it rang hollow.
He turned his fucking head completely around.
He started in her direction, dragging himself forward, his head bouncing on his broken neck. His face was no mask because masks could not grin and he was grinning at her with a lewd, puppet-like smile, making a grating sound in his throat as he tried to speak.
He held out one hand to her, the smashed one, and it looked like a bloodless, crushed starfish.
In all the commotion, no one heard the door of the van slam shut.
6
Everyone scattered.
Chazz shouted out to them to get in the damn van, but they were horrified and something inside them demanded that they run like hell. There was no thought behind it. There was only instinct, cool and unreasoning survival instinct.
“HEY!” Chazz called out again. “OVER HERE! WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU GOING?”
Lex and Soo-Lee led the charge, Creep pulling Danielle along with him. All of them ran flat out to the end of the street and darted around the corner, disappearing.
Ramona was slowly backing away from the thing that was bearing down on her with its painful, damaged stride. Its body was wrenched to the side, one shoulder humped higher than the other, its head bouncing around. It was making some awful scraping sound that might have been a voice.
“Ramona!” Chazz cried. “Over here! C’mon! C’mon! Over here!”
In the back of his mind, he knew that this was one of those defining moments in life where a man either proved himself a man or he spent the rest of his years squatting to pee. The freak bearing down on Ramona was not a big guy…but he was weird and fucked-up and disturbed. Chazz figured he could have flattened him, but he wasn’t about to do that.
No way in hell.
If that
thing
got its hands on him and put that white grinning face in his own, it would be too much. He would faint. He would go right down. He would crawl under the van and start sucking his fucking thumb and even all his muscles and machismo on the gridiron could not change that fact.
“C’mon!” he cried again.
Ramona was keeping her distance from the broken man, but if she tripped and fell, he would have her. And Chazz had the worst feeling that he would not be able to help her. That he would scream and run. He would not be able to stop himself from doing so.
“Get over here! Get in the fucking van, you dumb bitch!”
Sometimes, he figured, a good insult got somebody’s attention all that much quicker. And it worked. She turned away from the thing stalking her and jogged over to him. Chazz, feeling chivalrous, grabbed the passenger-side door and opened it for her.
She was almost to him.
Then, not four feet away, she skidded to a halt and backed away, tripping and falling on her ass. Chazz, grumbling under his breath, made to go help her up—actually, he was thinking of grabbing her by the hair and
throwing
her into the van—but then something touched his arm.
Something soft and warm.
With a cry, he turned and saw another one of those things sitting in the passenger seat. In the glow of the dome light, he saw it was a woman…or a grim mockery of the same. Her face was white like the man’s, set with tiny cracks like an antique vase. She was bald like a mannequin without a wig and had no eyebrows. She had blank white eyes like boiled eggs. She was naked, her breasts—lacking nipples—were pert and artificial-looking.
He screamed.
He wasn’t even aware that he had until it came ripping out of him with considerable volume and force. She had his arm. She was gripping it with considerable pressure, her sharp little fingers digging in deep. As he tried to pull clear of her, he saw one thing that nearly put him to his knees.
Her hand.
It wasn’t real.
It wasn’t flesh-and-blood.
Dear God, the fingers were perfectly white and perfectly smooth, tapering and feminine, though mottled as if they had been stored away in some moldering trunk for many years. But for all that, he saw that each finger was segmented—in place of the knuckles there were glassy ball joints.
It took him maybe a split second to realize that.
And by then, she had turned in the passenger seat. She only had one arm. Some kind of armature protruded from her shoulder where another might have been attached. Her breasts and belly were mottled like her fingers. Her cracked, white doll-like face was smiling at him, one corner of her mouth pulled up in a crooked grin of defilement.
But the worst thing was that she had spread her legs to show him the hairless slit between her thighs.
Chazz, vaguely aware that Ramona was crying out behind him, lost all control. The horror of the situation bottomed him right out. Everything inside him seemed to get sucked into some massive spiraling black hole and he screamed and went wild with rage. With every bit of strength he had, which was considerable, he yanked his arm away and the mannequin woman came with it, holding on tight. He flailed his arm around, trying to throw her and her joints made a horrible clacking sound as if she was a jointed wooden doll. Her mouth was open in a wide toothless grin by that point and she was trying to wrap her legs around him. He saw all of this in ghosting, blurring images as he swung her back and forth.
Finally, he threw her.
She hit the ground and broke apart on impact, her arm clattering away from her body, one leg broken free beneath the knee. Her head rolled across the pavement like a ball, the jaws still opening and closing.
Her hand was still clenching his forearm.
Even divorced of her body, the fingers were still moving, squeezing and kneading his arm. He screamed again and tore it free, leaving four bleeding ruts in his flesh. Not only that, but a single white finger that still trembled like a dying insect.
He was out of it by then.
He was drenched with a cold/hot sweat, shaking and hysterical, making shrill moaning sounds in his throat. When Ramona tried to reach out for him, he knocked her aside, sent her sprawling to the pavement with his animal fury.
Then he ran in a wild, blind flight.
Because the pieces of the mannequin woman were not as dead as they should have been…they were still moving. And he was almost sure her decapitated head was calling his name.
7
When she hit the ground, Ramona was knocked unconscious.
She was out of it no more than two or three minutes, but when she opened her eyes and looked around, Chazz was nowhere to be seen. A voice in the back of her head, the same one that had warned her away from him in the first place, said to her,
he cold-cocked you. He knocked you on your ass so he could make his getaway. That’s the kind of person he is. I hope you’re really fucking happy with your choice in men.
But she wasn’t.
She never had been.
Ever since she was fourteen, unfortunately, she seemed to choose the same type again and again, fulfilling some puerile fantasy of the perfect guy with the perfect body and the perfect face. But if there was one thing she’d learned again and again the hard way, it was that the better something looked on the outside, the less there was on the inside.
This all passed through her mind upon waking, upon realizing that she had been abandoned.
Get your ass moving, Ramona! You’re in danger!
And oh yes, she was, she certainly was at that. It didn’t take her long to remember why. She got up, sitting there on her ass, a throbbing in the back of her head. Her fingers brushed over a knob of flesh that had risen almost cartoon-like under her long dark hair, which was matted with blood.
I swear to God, Chazz, you’re going to regret this. One way or another, you’re really going to regret this, you asshole.
And it was as that passed through her mind that reality inserted itself and she realized exactly
why
she was in terrible danger. The broken man. He had been after her…but she saw no sign of him now. But there was more than just him to contend with.
The mannequin woman.
She had still been alive, been animate, whatever you wanted to call it, after Chazz had knocked her to the ground in pieces.
Very alert suddenly, Ramona looked around.
Yes, the woman’s parts were still scattered, but they weren’t moving.
Her torso was about ten feet away, her leg off to the side, her arm off near her head, which lay there dead and sightless on the ground, jaws sprung. Her hand was over near the curb.
Breathing hard, Ramona crouched there on all fours looking at the remains.