Twenty-four
Early Tuesday morning, thirteen-year-old Mickey
Anderson rounded the corner in downtown Brighton Hollow on his Honda
scooter. He spotted Deputy Rex Hogan leaving the Brighton Hollow
Sheriff's Office, swung the screaming red machine around, and slid to the
curb alongside the deputy. "Doc says to go to his office right now.
Morris Rather got his arm busted."
Rex drove to the office, his drive to Cyprus Ridge
and Orange City postponed for the moment. He could hear Morris screaming
a half block away. Rex burst into the examination room in time to watch
Doc administer an injection. Morris' face went lax, his eyes wide with
confusion and fear. His eyes rolled up to show only the whites and he
fell back against the leather upholstered table. Doc put his instruments
aside and peeled off his latex gloves.
Bleeding scratches filled every square inch of
Morris' exposed skin surface, evidence of a panicky flight through heavy
underbrush. His clothes were torn. He had pissed in his pants. If the
odor was any indication, he had shit them as well. Rex kept silent while
Doc attended the swollen and discolored wrist. "I had a great grandpappy
who did this without the miracles of modern medicine," Doc commented while
he worked. "Personally, I'm going to miss it."
"Broken?"
"Crushed like a pretzel. All I can do for now is
splint it."
"What happened?"
Doc gathered the materials for a splint, two wooden
paddles, gauze, and tape. "Some kids brought him in telling some wild
tale about Caitlin breaking his wrist with her bare hands, and something
about a big caterpillar melting Earl's face. Sounds worrisome, doesn't
it?"
Rex felt suddenly sick. "Where did this take place?"
"Ask the kids. Word's undoubtedly spread by now."
Rex drove the streets of Brighton Hollow at random.
He pulled two local youths on bicycles to the curb with a whoop of his
siren and grilled them for details. One of the boys tattled willingly.
"Jeremy Biggs got ate up and they said Caitlin's got some big bug that did
it. I think the truck is out north near the top of the hill. Everybody's
afraid to go up and check it out."
Rex drove to the site and found the truck parked off
the road. He swung a quick U-turn without stopping and went back to fetch
Doc Kaufman. Morris was sleeping peacefully on the examination table when
he returned, his neatly splinted wrist lying in a sling about his neck and
hand-printed instructions tucked into his shirt pocket. Doc grabbed his
bag and a light jacket and turned to the door.
"You just going to leave him like that?" Rex queried.
Doc visibly restrained his impatience. "I have four
elderly lying dead in their beds waiting for Wallace's Mortuary to give me
a call. I have two diabetics who are going to die if I can't find a
source of insulin. I'm out. I had my receptionist's boy run to
Culverton, but he hasn't as yet returned. I've heard rumors of rioting
there, and another who says that anyone who wanders too far from Brighton
Hollow isn't likely to find their way back. I don't as yet know why, and
I really need to know why."
Rex parked alongside the abandoned pickup after the
short drive and spotted Earl's body in an instant. Doc hurried on ahead
and stood over the corpse looking confused and helpless. The morning's
dew had reduced the bones to a chalky imprint among the weeds.
"It's Earl, okay," Rex said, recognizing the bib
overalls. His heart raced at a thousand miles an hour. "But I sure don't
understand how Caitlin's involved."
Doc stared off into space, thinking. "We have to
find her. We absolutely must find her."
"I'll find her." Rex turned grimly away from the
remains, trapped in a constant surf of gooseflesh running along his
spine.
Secretly, another and higher priority vied for his
attention. Orville had spoken of missing locals. "I'd better make a run
to Cyprus Ridge to see what Orville's up to. Doc, I think we have big
trouble on our hands."
Doc kept pace with him to the car. "I'll ride along,
if you don't mind."
"What about your patients?"
"I need to know what is happening. Maybe then I'll
be of use to my patients."
Rex drove away from town not liking the idea of
leaving Brighton Hollow unguarded during the course of the day. When he
stopped to think about it, Brighton Hollow was actually far from
helpless. The town and surrounding communities were, in fact, armed to
the teeth and a stubbornly independent lot. He couldn't count the number
of good men and excellent shots Brighton Hollow could call upon in a time
of crisis.
Troll Valley Road was deserted. The few cars on the
highway were nonlocal and traveling fast. Cyprus Junction itself appeared
abandoned. Most of the business district was closed. A few store owners
had nailed boards across shattered windows.
Doc sat up as they paused at a traffic light on a
deserted side street. "Did you hear that?"
Rex couldn't have missed the distant, echoing sound
of a gunshot. He tried the radio out of sheer, unstoppable habit and
cringed when the static roared at him. A steady crackling of intensifying
gunfire led him toward the northeast end of town.
Rounding a final corner in a residential area, he
spotted Orville's blue and white cruiser parked sideways halfway down a
dead-end street. Orville and several armed civilians stood behind the car
facing a large white house at the end. The sporadic gunfire came from
trees surrounding the house.
Rex pulled to the curb well back from the scene. He
stood alongside his car in helpless dismay, watching sustained gunfire
break windows and chip paint and wood from all sides of the two-story
dwelling.
Orville ran back to greet the newcomers, cringing at
the crack of a high-powered deer rifle returning fire from the house.
"Man, I'm loosing it!" Orville's eyes were bloodshot and wild with
panic. "One man can't hold the hold a town together by hisself, so I
deputized everyone with a gun and look what I get! Nobody obeys orders!"
Orville wiped sweat from his eyes and glanced back at
the gunfight. "Fuck it. I'm getting out of uniform and into civilian
clothes, and I'm not driving Biggs' cars no more. I'm getting shot at by
white supremacists, preached at by holy rollers, and yelled at by
everybody who thinks I'm the one that's gotta bring it all under control."
Orville took a few deep breaths to calm himself.
"The stores are going to be out of food. People got babies to feed. I
send some kids into Culverton to check things out. Half of them didn't
come back. One got his car stolen. The others say it's worse than it is
here. People scrambling for food, gasoline, hoarding, bickering. Kids
running around at night getting into all kinds of mischief."
Orville's eyes were white orbs against his black
skin. Tears joined the sweat on his face. "And fucking skeletons, all
dried up and crumbly. With clothes on." Orville looked about wildly.
"God, I'm scared. This can't be happening!"
"What's with the shooting?" Rex demanded, appalled
that a gun battle could be on the tail end of Orville’s priorities.
"Maniac's been dragging little girls into his
basement," Orville muttered in abject misery. "Broke into a house down
the way and abducted a fourteen year-old right in front of her family.
They're telling me the father got bit by a furball on the crazy dude's
shoulders and turned into a skeleton right in front of their eyes. The
bastard must have two or three girls in the house by now. I've gotta get
them out of there."
Doc gave Rex a knowing look. Whatever was happening
in Brighton Hollow was bound to be happening everywhere. "We'd like to
capture that man alive, if at all possible," Doc said calmly.
"Yeah, well, tell that to my posse!"
Excited shouts came from the trees surrounding the
house. A volley of gunfire covered a man with a Molotov cocktail running
from the trees in back. He lobbed the bottle with its burning tail
through an unseen window. Following the initial fireball, black smoke
began pouring from the back and side windows of the house as other fire
bombs found their mark. Within moments, the house was engulfed in flames.
A man charged out the front door. He had pistols in
both hands, firing at his unseen gallery who returned sustained fire from
the trees. Once in the open, a thunderous volley of gunfire blew the man
into exploding pieces of flesh and gouts of blood before he even had time
to fall to the ground.
Rex expected the vigilante group to storm the house
to rescue the abducted children Orville had mentioned. Instead, they
quickly vanished back into the trees and watched the house burn from a
safe distance.
"There's a monster in there," Orville said. "I swear
to God, Rex, he had this thing around his neck. It kills people."
Doc came around the front of the car and gave Rex a
gentle shove. "Go take a look. I'm right behind you."
Overpowering curiosity gave him no choice in the
matter. If Caitlin was involved in this, he had to see the face of the
enemy for himself. He had to know before the house burned to the ground.
He unsnapped his holster and drew his thirty-eight
caliber service revolver. In his eagerness to investigate the mystery,
Doc rushed on ahead, but paused before going inside the house. The
ascending flames and smoke had cut off the second floor and attic from a
search, but Rex could see through a ground floor connecting hall to the
kitchen. The basement door hung open.
The kitchen walls had been chopped to Swiss cheese by
the gunfire. Windows had been turned into irregularly sized holes. The
floor was covered in plaster, broken glass, and shards of broken wood.
Rex eased his way through the dark house, glancing into a bathroom and
dining room as he passed.
There was a body on the kitchen table, a small,
naked, bleeding corpse of indeterminate sex and age. The idiots who had
been shooting blindly into the house had badly mutilated one of their
precious victims into an unrecognizable mass of raw flesh. Doc only
glanced at the corpse, then followed Rex down the basement stairs.
The fire sucked fresh air through the basement
windows. Even so, Rex smelled a sweet, metallic odor in the air. A
small, desiccated skeleton devoid of clothing lay sprawled in the middle
of the cement floor. A second skeletal imprint leaned against a cement
wall.
"Watch yourself," Doc called out.
Rex caught sight of movement. Something with orange
and brown fur undulated along the foundation, looking for all the world
like an oversized caterpillar. In the next moment, it had launched
itself. If the thirty-eight hadn't been roughly pointed in the right
direction, Rex would never have been able to react swiftly enough. He
fired from the hip, blasting the rear quarter of the caterpillar into a
crimson mist. The insect spun off to one side, writhing and hissing and
leaking a fluid that looked like grease.
The next shot caught it more squarely and splattered
the remains across the basement floor. The bullet ricocheted and whined
precariously close to Rex's head before spending itself in an overhead
floor joist.
More gunfire sounded from outside in blind reaction
to the fired shots. Bullets buzzed and whistled through the house
upstairs. Orville's bellowing voice stopped the shooters.
"We're on fire," Doc reminded him. "Let's make this
quick."
Smoke crept along the ceiling. The wood overhead was
blackening, soon to erupt into open flame. Rex took a final look around
and guessed that nothing was left alive. He leaned forward and reached
for the biggest piece of the dead caterpillar. Without it, he could prove
nothing of what he had seen.
"Don't touch it!" Doc cried.
Rex jerked his hand back.
"Some of that fluid dissolves flesh," Doc reminded
him.
Rex backed away, chilled by his lack of forethought,
but thankful he had brought along a second, far more capable intellect to
do some of his thinking for him. The caterpillar would have to wait. He
herded Doc up the stairs and out the front way, half expecting to be cut
down by gunfire as he emerged into the open. But Orville stood close by
with his drawn revolver, holding the impulsive firepower at bay, although
only temporarily in control of the situation.
"Well?" the deputy roared impatiently. "Did you see
it?"
"We saw it," Rex said.
"Can we deal with it?"
Rex looked to Doc for his assessment. "Kill the
insects whenever you have the chance," Doc said without hesitation. "I
don't understand the symbiosis between the insect and their hosts.
Therefore, the hosts may be equally dangerous."
"We're talking about Caitlin, too," Rex reminded the
old man.
Doc just nodded. He started back toward the car,
coughing in the acrid haze and looking exhausted.
"We can't handle this, can we,” Orville said, stating
the obvious. "Give me the straight dope."
Rex didn't know what to think. "I've got Doc backing
me up in Brighton Hollow. If you don't have any support here, just take
care of yourself and your family. You don't owe anyone your life."
"That's how I had it figured," Orville said quietly.
His voice quavered. His hulking two hundred pound frame shook from head
to foot. "Even so, I don't know what to do. I hear them caterpillars are
all over the hills."
Rex vividly remembered the sky filled with the green
meteors, hundreds at any given moment, falling indiscriminately across the
face of the earth.
Orville turned absently away. Rex resisted the
temptation to bid his farewell to his old friend, sensing that the fifteen
miles between them might soon become a gulf as great as a thousand.
Rex slipped in behind the wheel of his car. Doc
joined him. “Take me home, please. I’ve seen enough.”
Rex sat quietly for a time, immobilized by shock and
indecision. “But why?”
“A futile question to ask,” Doc said, “even should we
have the opportunity. You can’t possibly imagine the mind that would know
the answer to be a human one.”
