Creekers (11 page)

“Ah-no-save-me!” he thought he heard the girl shriek from the cab. “Ona-prey-bee!”

Who knew what the gal was tryin’ to say. Hell, she probably didn’t know herself, so et up she was with the messed up kromerzomes. Gut guessed it must’ve been some scientist fella named Kromer who discovered ’em. These kromerzomes, see, was so deller-kit, if families hobknobbed together long enough over generations there never weren’t no babies born right. No, none at all. ‘Least, that’s what his daddy’d told him.

“Ah-no! Lep! Evernd! Peese! Ona!” the gal wailed.

Scott’s whooping voice echoed through the grove. “Hot damn, Gut! This is a reg-lar hoot, this is! This splittail’s box is shore somethin’!”

Uh, yeah,
Gut thought. He was fidgetin’ like he had ants on him, the bad feel of the night or the cryptic whispers of the augurs of ancient Rome. He got back up then and began to pace about the moonlit dell, and every time he glanced toward the truck all he could see was Scott-Boy’s devil-grinnin’ face whiles he continued to put serious blocks to this Creeker gal, and then Scott was guffawing, “Oh yessiree bob, I’m gonna blow me a nut so dandy it’ll be squirtin’ out this jabberin’ bitch’s fucked-up ears, it will!”

“Hey, Scott-Boy?” Gut feebly called out. “Hurrys it up, how ’bout. We got that run to make, don’t ferget.”

But Scott-Boy, so busy he was just then, didn’t even hear what Gut had said.

The augural thickened; Gut was sweating now, itching and rubbing his face in some unnamed dread, and the pickup truck was rockin’, and the Creeker chick still jabberin’ away whiles Scott-Boy set to bangin’ her warped head
bam bam bam!
against the door a country mile a minute, and suddenly—inexplicably—Gut felt a fear like he couldn’t ‘magine, and he ducked behind a tree for no reason he could really put a name to, and that was when Scott-Boy started screamin’…

In an eye’s wink, big, quick-moving shadows were crunching around the pickup, and Scott-Boy, he was screaming right away—it didn’t even really sound human, like the sound Cage George’s ’Cuda made that time he was red-lining it and the oil pump went—and next off, another pickup truck was pulling up in the grove, not from the road but from a dirt lane in the woods, only this pickup was real old and beat to shit, with real dim headlights, and then these shadows was dragging Scott-Boy out of the truck, and he was still screaming bloody murder. Other shadows took the Creeker gal out and then carried her to the truck with the real dim lights, but dim as these lights was, Gut could also see Scott-Boy and what happened to him to get him screaming like that

Keeeeee-riiist…

Scott-Boy had no works left at all ’tween his legs, just a crotch-full of blood pouring like a faucet. One of them shadows had cut Scott’s dog and bag clean off, and Scott was still screaming and flailing away in the dirt as several of these big shadows got to holding him down, and one of them was
smack smack smack!
bringing a tire iron or something down fast and hard on Scott-Boy’s arms and legs, breakin’ bones like they was pencils, and another shadow whipped out a buck bigger than Gut had ever seed in his life and started scalping Scott-Boy alive right then and there.

More of that Creeker jabber shot up into the grove, only this weren’t the gal, these were guys by the sound of ’em:

“Ah-no-prey-bee!”

“Ah-no-for-blood!”

“Skeet-inner this one!”

“Ona!”

But then there was another voice Gut coulda swore he heard, but, see, he seemed to hear it in his head instead of his ears, and what he heard was this:

Redeemer Sanctifier, bless us…

Ah-no ah-no!

To thee we bring this gift of flesh…

Ona!

Gut felt like part of the tree he was lookin’ past; he couldn’t move at all. These shadows was really doin’ the job on Scott-Boy, the likes of which turned even Gut’s breadbasket. “Gut, Jaysus ta Gawd ya gotta help meeeee!” screamed Scott-Boy, crushed and scalped but still alive. One of the shadows was givin’ it to Scott-Boy something fierce up the tail, while the one with the shank took to cutting off Scott-Boy’s ears, and whittling the skin off his fingers, and chopping off his toes like they was carrots for stew on a butcher block. Gut shuddered frozen behind that tree, not able to move but knowing if he didn’t, these fellas would surely do the same to him.

Gotta move gotta get out of here right now!

When the one fella finished havin’ his nut up Scott-Boy’s tail, he slid that tire iron right up the same hole and jiggled it around fierce up there, and that other fella with the big buck cut Scott’s throat so deep you could hear the blade scrapin’bone, and that was about it for Scott “Scott-Boy” Tuckton, yes sir.

He shore did pick the wrong folks to razz tonight.

Then them shadows, what they did next was they hauled what was left of Scott-Boy back to that beat-ta-hell pickup of theirs and throwed him in the back like he was a sack of farm feed. And then—

Another fella stepped outta the shadows.

Fuck,
Gut thought.

This fella was taller than the others, and Gut guessed he’d been standin’ back in the dark whiles his buddies did the job on Scott-Boy. He stood there a speck and kind of made to sniff the air, and then he turned in the moonlight and—

Fuck!
 Gut thought.

—looked right at Gut squattin’
behind that there tree.

Gut’s eyes bugged like they might jump out his head as this big killer dude took to staring at him, and Gut figured he’d just up and die, but what he did instead was piss and shit his pants both at the same time. He only saw the big fella’s face a second but a second was enough, a face squashed up worse than the gal’s with one ear twice as big as the other and fucked-up teeth stickin’ out of his smile, and then he pointed right at Gut with a long, crooked finger, staring back at Gut with eyes just like that gal’s.

Eyes that were blood-red…

Run, boy,
Gut heard in his head.
We’ll getcha next time…

And Gut ran, and he didn’t stop runnin’ till the sun was comin’ up over the ridge about five hours later.

— | — | —

Five

Phil slowed as
he passed Krazy Sallee’s, flagged by its great flashing road sign.
Place is jam-packed, and it’s barely 7:30,
he observed. Sallee’s wasn’t just the only strip joint in town, it was the only bar—period. Phil had only been in there once or twice back when he was eighteen, the old days before the drinking age went up to twenty-one, and all he recalled were a few docile-looking women with bad tattoos and floppy breasts clopping around a strobe-lit stage; he’d be more aroused watching pigs snort in a mudhole. But as he passed, he realized he’d be paying some close attention to the place. Vices, he’d learned on Metro, always tended to mix together. Booze begat dive bars, which begat strippers, which begat prostitutes, which begat drugs. Sallee’s would be the most logical place for Cody Natter to use as a distro point. Phil couldn’t imagine punks stopping by Bouton’s Farm Supply or Chuck’s Diner to pick up their weekend angel dust.

He parked in the little gravel lot behind the station.
First day on the job,
he reminded himself.
Look sharp.
He adjusted his gunbelt and Sam Brown strap—Mullins had purchased good leather—and the starched uniform (navy-blue shirt, powder blue pants) fit pretty well. The gun on his hip, a Colt Trooper Mark III, dragged annoyingly; its hot dog six-inch barrel made it weigh more than the Smith 65 he’d carried on Metro, but of course it was better than carrying a lone can of Mace, which was all he had as a security guard. Just as he turned to enter the station, he heard a door chunk shut, and saw Chief Mullins coming out of the small brick building which sat on its own behind the station house—the town lockup. As Phil recalled, it had only three cells and was rarely used for anything more than a place for drunks to dry out.

“All ready for work, I see,” Mullins remarked, loping heavily across the lot. His bald pate shined like a crystal ball of flesh. “Lookin’ like a regular Dirty Harry.”

“I didn’t know Dirty Harry was a town clown,” Phil came back. “And who you got in the jail?”

“The jail? Oh, no one,” Mullins said, hauling, open the back door to the station house. “For your info, whenever we book someone, we use the county lockup in Mayr now. You know where Mayr is, right? Down past the mobile home dealer on Route 3?”

“Yeah, I know where County HQ is, Chief. And if we don’t use our own jail for prisoners, what’s in there now?”

“Supply room. I was checking the inventory.”

Inventory?
Phil couldn’t imagine a small-town department like Crick City needing any significant supply space. “Oh, the SWAT and riot gear, huh? You keep the department helicopter in there, too?”

“No, funny man, I keep the
really
important cop stuff in there, like coffee filters, which we’re out of, by the way. So that can be your first mission as one of Crick City’s finest. Sometime tonight during your busy and dangerous watch, run on by the Qwik-Stop and pick up a box of filters. The boss needs his coffee in the morning.”

“Ah, so that’s why you hired me. Sergeant Straker the errand boy.”

“Damn straight. Now why don’t you shitcan the jokes for a minute and let me brief you.”

“Sure, boss.”

Phil took a seat in the fold-down as Mullins rummaged through one of his desk drawers. The man’s stomach bulged to the extent that if he leaned over any further, his shirt would more than likely burst. “One thing you need to learn fast, Adam 12, is we use the county signal sheet, not the fucked-up codes you had on Metro.” He passed Phil a copy of the set of radio signal designations. “Learn it fast.”

“Gee, Chief, I don’t know. I’ve only got a Master’s degree; this might take me a while to get in my head—like about thirty seconds.”