The air was smoky, ripe with an odor of meat, blood, and urine.
Maddie’s limbs shuddered as a dream ran through her simple mind. A primordial dream of the chase, the hunt, bringing down shaggy beasts with spears and arrows, bathing in the blood of immense carcasses.
She chattered her teeth, winced as gas rumbled from her backside, and went back to sleep.
The cellar was dim, moist, and smelled of black earth. Rather like a cave. It was this more than anything that had drawn Maddie here. Guided by untold ages of racial memory and primate instinct, she selected her lair as her ancestors had. The gutted remains of her husband were scattered across the floor along with some of his picked bones and drying flesh, garbage from several plastic bags. A wiry, muscular man, he had not been good eating. That’s why the trap was laid that snared in Matt Hack.
He had been most delicious.
A pit had been dug in the center of the floor and a low fire burned, smoke rising and filling the cellar with a dirty haze. The limbs of the boy, carefully dressed-out and salted, were hanging from the cobwebby beams above on ropes fashioned from his tendons and gut. Over the fire, suspended by a tripod was the boy’s stomach. It had been stuffed with organ meats and fat, sewn-up and now slowly smoked. His torso was dumped in the corner along with his head which had been broken open, brains scooped out.
Maddie’s youngest daughter, Elissa, was still awake.
She squatted by the boy’s head, running fingers along the inside of his skull, getting the last bits of buttery-soft gray matter that had been missed. Staring at what smoked over the fire with vacant eyes, she sucked her fingers clean. Like her sister, she was naked, streaked with grime and filth from head to toe, her flesh intricately cicatrized in patterns of welts and rising scars. Maddie was now similarly decorated. Elissa belched, ran dirty fingers through her fat-greased hair, dug a hole with her fingers and, squatting, shit into it. When she was done, she wiped her ass with a handful of leaves, then crouched down to sniff what she had produced. Satisfied, she buried it, flinging dirt over it like a cat.
Hopping on all fours, she crossed the room, intrigued by the smell of garbage on the floor. A heap of rotting vegetable matter stopped her. She sniffed it, chewed some, decided it was good. She rubbed herself with decomposing lettuce, pulpy tomatoes, bits of onion.
Then she went over to the nest.
Circling it three times, she wedged herself in next to her sister who reflexively encircled her with her arms. Then together the brood slept, dam and offspring, a knot of foul things, trembling with atavistic dreams, waiting for the night and the good hunting it would bring beneath the eye of the sacred moon…
40
Louis knew that the smart thing to do was to turn the car around and head right out of town. He was guessing there were only about a thousand voices in his head screaming for him to do this very thing… voices of instinct, survival, and self-continuation. But these voices knew nothing of love and devotion and duty. These were vague concepts to the voices, bigger and civilized things and they could not have cared less. All they cared about was living, was continuance, about saving the bacon of one Louis Shears who was preparing to jump right into the frying pan, fat side down.
So Louis ignored them.
He pulled over a little hill and entered Main Street from its far eastern edge, seeing all the familiar sights and familiar places that should have been calming, but now filled him with a mounting anxiety. He took it all in, trying to swallow and finding that he simply could not.
“We’ll… we’ll go over to Michelle’s work, see if she’s around. Then we’ll go over to the police station,” he told Macy and he thought it sounded pretty good, pretty reasonable considering the situation.
Macy was tense next to him. “Okay,” she said.
Unlike many towns where the main drag was perfectly linear or seemed that way, Main Street in Greenlawn was a winding, serpentine affair and you could never reach a point where you could see more than a block ahead or behind you. They passed blank storefronts and little cafes, gas stations and bowling alleys, hardware stores and banks. It all looked perfectly fine. All except for one thing.
“Where is everyone?” Macy said. “There should be people around on a Friday night.”
“Just take it easy, honey.”
“C’mon, Mr. She—Louis. Look around, there’s nothing. There’s not even somebody walking a frigging dog,” she said, alarm bells chiming just beneath her words. “It looks like a ghost town and it feels like one, too. Where are they?”
Louis tried to swallow.
She had a very good point, of course. They had seen life in other parts of town—along with a great deal of wreckage—but here it was simply dead. His window was unrolled and he no longer heard sirens or anything else, just the sound of the Dodge’s engine, its wheels rolling on the pavement, a slight breeze in the trees overhead. But not a damn thing else. It was like in the last five or ten minutes, somebody had thrown a switch, shut everything off.
“They must be inside,” he said.
“Why? Why would they be doing that?”
“I don’t know.”
“This is freaking me out.”
It was an almost comical statement considering things, but he did not laugh. Main Street was a graveyard by all intents and purposes. Not a thing moved or stirred. There wasn’t even a bird singing or a cat sunning itself on the sidewalk. Just a great, empty nothing. Yet, deep inside, Louis was certain that those houses and buildings were not empty, that there were people in them or things like people, things with eyes that watched the Dodge slowly roll past, waiting until it stopped, waiting until the man and girl got out and then, and then they would—
“There’s the Farm Bureau building,” Macy said.
Louis saw it, his heart thudding in his chest now.
It was on the corner, set back a bit with a parking lot out front. The building was red brick, kind of looked like one of those old school houses you’d see in the country sometimes. Even had a little belfry on top, but no bell. Louis remembered that it had been the post office when he was a kid, before they moved it to the end of Main. There were a couple cars parked in the lot, but none of them were Michelle’s. Still, he had to look.
He pulled the Dodge to a stop and just sat there, getting a feel for Main as it, he thought, got a feel for him, too. He could smell flowers and grass, the heat boiling from the blacktop. He was feeling those eyes again, watching. There were people nearby and he knew it. They were hiding behind locked doors, in closets and cellars, peering from behind curtains and Venetian blinds. Just watching. Like a group of people waiting to yell, “SURPRISE!” when birthday boy walked in.
Louis figured that’s not what they would say to him, though. It would be something unpleasant and dire… right before they slit his throat ear to ear.
“Well?” Macy said.
He stepped out and breathed in Main Street, felt it in his face. It was hot and still with a dark, sweet smell that he could not recognize, but knew did not belong. He listened for someone, anyone, even the sound of a car, but there was nothing but a flag flapping on the pole above Farm Bureau and wind chimes coming from an antique store down the way.