Most men can't make it through even five words of what I'm about to tell you (12 page)

Turkeys ambled out of the hole in the building, looking confused. Falconer accidentally kicked one as he approached the

hole in the wall. He ducked around, cautiously, then moved inside. I got closer and I could see inside the building a little,

could see the rear of the Bronco. It looked like it had run into a support beam and come to a stop. The driver's side door

was open.

John went around me, into the building. I went in close behind him and...

The fucking smell. Holy shit. It was one of those stinks that seemed to generate its own warmth. It hit me like a wall. Mold

and poop and rotten meat.

It looked for a moment like there was a foot of snow inside the building, just white as far as the eye could see. Turkeys.

Turkeys so thick you couldn't see the ground, white feathers and thin little twitchy heads and, here and there, a rustle of

flapping wings.

There was a turkey commotion to our left, birds jumping and flapping and squawking and flailing through the air,

demonstrating turkey flight as one of God's failures. It was the construction worker, hauling Franky's corpse. He was

maybe 30 yards ahead of us in this impossibly huge building, the whole thing probably two football fields from end to end.

The construction worker's load slowed him down.

We saw Falconer running at full speed, cutting through and creating a Red Sea opening of turkey. He caught up to the

construction worker and threw a shoulder into his lower back, sending three bodies sprawling into a blur of flapping white

wings and a cloud of feathers.

Falconer got to his feet, knees caked with mud and turkey shit. He put his gun on the construction worker and screamed,

"IF YOU MOVE I WILL FUCKING KILL YOU."

John and I stopped about ten feet away from the scene. Falconer seemed to have it under control.

Illustration b
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The construction worker, flat on his back, put out his hands, palm-up. Then, in a blur of a motion he snatched a nearby

turkey and heaved it at Falconer. The bird whizzed gobbling through the air, smacking the detective in the chest and

sending him to the ground. The construction worker jumped to his feet two seconds before his skull exploded.

Shots roared, turkeys stampeded. Falconer was shooting, and shooting, and shooting. A dozen shots or more, brass shell

casings jumping from the gun. The top half of the construction worker's head was gone, everything above the eyes turned

to shreds of skin and shards of bone and clumps of spongy pink brain matter.

The man fell, dead. Falconer was reloading. We walked up, got close enough to see the big dead man. Before anyone

could comment on this, John said, "Look! His brain!"

Something was moving in the man's skul . A strand of something like spaghetti whipped across the open wound. Another

strand. Another. What took shape was a flimsy creature maybe eighteen inches wide, made up entirely of these spaghetti-

thin tentacles, al joined at the center. This thing, emerging from the dead man's open skul , looked like something from

the ocean floor.

It used its spaghetti limbs to push itself free, then floated up, hovering impossibly in the air.

The dictionary rendering of Falconer's "Are you shitting me" face from earlier would have to be revised with the one he wore now.

Falconer aimed his gun at the creature, uncertain. The thing whizzed away, tumbling through the air as if blown by a fan.

It landed among a crowd of turkeys. John turned to Falconer and said, "Quick! We need your extra gun! We didn't bring

one!"

Something happened. I didn't catch it but the turkeys were going crazy where the thing landed. I could see the spaghetti

thing and it appeared to be attached to a turkey somehow. Then, one of its tentacles shot out, becoming rigid and five

times as long. It impaled four turkeys on the tentacle, punching through them with little sprays of blood and feather.

It extended another tentacle and did it again. Four more turkeys skewered. Again.

Now there were four rows of turkeys joined at the central point where the spaghetti creature's body was.

The X-shaped cluster of turkeys rose as one body, as tall as a man. Two rows of turkeys forming legs, two forming arms.

One "arm" of turkeys curled around the body of Franky Burgess and picked it up with little effort. Turkey feet took strides forward and soon the turkey thing was hauling Franky's body across the building.

Falconer shot at the birds, producing puffs of feathers and no other noticeable effect. John and I followed him, mainly to

see what would happen.

The turkey man finally reached a small closet on the other side of the building, basical y a booth with pipes running out of

the top, probably holding valves for water and shovels to scoop up turkey poop. It couldn't have been five feet deep.

But when the turkey man reached the door and ripped it open, beyond was a vast, dark room, with some kind of large

machinery vaguely visible inside. Turkey man roughly threw Franky's body through the door and slammed it shut.

It turned on us. I couldn't help noticing that the two turkeys it was using as feet had been pulverized into a pink, feathery

mess.

The thing advanced. We ran away. Falconer, too.

We ran across the building, kicking turkeys as we went, all the way back through the hole in the wall left by my Bronco.

We followed Falconer's lead as he dove across the hood of John's Caddie and took cover behind it. He leaned around,

aiming his automatic around the headlight as me and John fell in behind him.

The turkey man ran to our position, then past us. It ran off across the lawn, across a weedy field, and into the woods to

start a new life. We never saw it again.

We stayed crouched behind the Caddie for a long time, nobody quite sure what to say. Without a word, Falconer stood

and walked back inside the building. When me and John got back inside I noticed three workers standing around,

watching us from across the building. Falconer went right to the door Franky had been sent through. He ripped open the

door and saw...

Shovels, in a smal utility closet barely large enough to stand in. And a pitchfork. What was the pitchfork for? I pictured

them skewering birds and handing them to customers that way.

Tentatively, I said, "You saw in there before, detective? When he opened it?"

He didn't answer.

John said, "There was a room. Dark, like a basement."

Again, no answer from the detective.

John said, "You're probably wondering how they do that. Me and Dave have been studying them for a long time and our

theory is that they're using magic."

I said, "Did you see how bloated Franky's body was?"

Falconer sort of nodded.

"And they wanted his body back pretty badly, right?"

Falconer cleared his throat and said, "Who's 'they?'"

"Don't know. But my point is, whoever they are, al animals protect their young. Right, Detective?"

"Excuse me?"

"I'm thinking that thing in Franky's mouth laid eggs. A lot of them."

He turned on me.

"I didn't see no fucking thing in his mouth."

I heard sirens in the distance. Falconer must have called in backup during the chase.

"Come on, detective. Detect. Put together the facts you've got and make a conclusion out of it."

"Shut up. Shut up and let me think."

John lit a cigarette and said, "Let me tell you how it is, Detective. When I was a kid, about fifteen, my dad brought me out here. This very place, Featherball Farms. Middle of the summer, right? And my dad's drunk because it's Thursday. And

it's the middle of the night and he drives me out here, it's me and my dad and a friend of his."

John blew a cloud of smoke. He rubbed the back of his neck with his cigarette hand.

"And we parked right out there, not by this building but the next one over. We sneak inside and we're greeted by twenty

thousand turkeys. I mean, we are literally an island of human in an ocean of turkey. And at the sound of that door every

turkey head in the building snaps toward us. I guess they thought it was feeding time. So it's me and my dad and Tom,

that's dad's friend, he's outside in the Camaro, the getaway driver I guess. So anyway, Dad pulls out this little sawed off

basebal bat that he keeps around for bar fights. My dad, he steps carefully around amongst the turkeys, this bat raised

over his shoulder, and he's trying to find the fattest one. And these turkeys, they got no idea what's comin', you

understand? So Dad raises that baseball bat and he clubs this one turkey over the head. The thing fal s over dead,

instantly. He picks it up and hands it to me, by the feet. I could barely carry the thing, it felt like it was 50 pounds. He runs out and I'm dragging this thing, its limp head flopping along the ground. So we run out to the car and we speed away, and

I got this warm, smelly turkey in the back seat with me. We drive and go out to the country, a piece of woods behind my

dad's place, along the river south of town. My dad, he makes a fire and pul s out that huge pocket knife he carried. He

skins the turkey, pul ing off this bloody, slimy layer, feathers and all. He pul s out the guts and leaves them in a pile. Then

he shoves a sharp stick through it like a rotisserie. Just propped it up and let it cook right there, over the flames. We sat

around the fire and told ghost stories and tore off pieces of turkey, eating it with our bare hands and drinking bottles of

Pabst Blue Ribbon from his cooler. And I'm telling you, detective, it was the best turkey I ever had."

I looked at John, Falconer continued to stare off into nothing.

I said, "What the hel was the point of that?"

"I'm just sayin', my dad was crazy. And that sometimes meat you kil yourself is the sweetest. Also, some of the people in

this town turn into monsters. With magic."

I said, "We gotta find Franky's body."

Falconer didn't voice agreement or disagreement, either one. Sirens arrived outside the building.

John blew out another stream of smoke and said, "Okay, here's what we tell the cops..."

Two hours later I was behind a counter, trying to peel the magnetic anti-theft tag off a DVD with my fingernail. I had a

swollen lip, a bandage on my shoulder, a Band-Aid on my eye and my ribs gave me a jolt of pain every time I took a

breath. I stank of turkey.

I would have called in, but I had used up all of my sick days for the year and couldn't take off again until January. I take a

lot of sick days, most of them self-declared Mental Health days. Meaning I wake up in a mood that I know will lead me to

assault the very first person who asks me if the Two Day Rentals have to be back on Wednesday or Thursday.

I had worked at Wal y's Videe-Oh! for five years, been a manager for two. I started right after I dropped out of college. I

remember hearing that Quentin Tarantino got discovered working at a video store, and I think I had it in my head to try

work here and write a screenplay. It was going to be about a cop in the future with a flamethrower for an arm. At age 19,

that seemed like a pretty sound plan. The thing about not having parents is you don't have anyone to tell you you're

heading down a path paved with retardedness.

The people who raised me, and I'll leave their names out of this, they did what they could. Nice people, real religious. Kind

of treated me like I was a little African refugee kid they had rescued. They knew my story, knew that I had never known

my Dad. When I got in trouble at school and got kicked out, because of that kid that died, they were real supportive. Took

my side al the way through, then shortly after moved to Florida and hinted that maybe things would be better if I stayed

behind.

My birth mom is living in Arizona, I think, staying with a dozen other people in an arrangement that could be called a

"compound." Some kind of commune, I don't know. She sent me a letter two years ago, thirty pages scribbled on lined

notebook paper. I couldn't make it past the first paragraph.

I scraped the plastic theft sticker off the DVD, put it back in its case, then picked another case off the stack. Pulled out the disc, started scraping off the tag. I looked around, saw there was only one customer it the store. A guy wearing a cowboy

hat. His jeans looked like they were painted on.

The TV we had mounted in the far corner of the store was turned to the news, the sound down and the Closed Captioning

turned on. They had been going back to the "death" of the "hospital shooting" "suspect" every 20 minutes or so. It was hard to tell from the bits and pieces I picked up between customers, but it looked like the story Falconer fed to them was

similar to the one John suggested. Franky apparently had an accomplice, meaning the construction worker. The