The Scream (46 page)

To date, anyway.

Because as bad as the dead Screamers were, they absolutely paled in comparison to the one in the latter category. The one who wouldn't give it up. The one who
wouldn't
die.

That was the one who was as yet still pinned to the inside of Cody's shed. With Logan, that made for a grand total of two prisoners of this little war.

Which is exactly what they were in, Junior realized: a war. The thought was perhaps more unsettling than the grisly chore at hand. It lent an air of permanence to the madness, as though this were less an aberration than a preview of coming attractions: the next lurid installment of the future as told by George Romero.
Evening of the Dead
. Special effects by Tom Savini. Soundtrack by The Scream. Coming soon to your living room, whether you like it or not.

They finished dragging their load over to the far side of the shooting range. The arc lamps mounted on surrounding trees were lit, filling the clearing with a harsh, glaring light. Hempstead was standing over the bodies, stripped to the waist, a swath of white gauze around his forehead and the rifle on his hip. He was holding a pair of shovels.

"Here." He handed them each one. "Best you both start digging."

"What do you mean?" Bob Two asked, more than a little aghast. "What the hell's going on here?"

"I don't know," Hempstead replied, "but we're about to find out. In the meantime, start digging."

"We can't just
bury
them here! We should be calling the police or something!"

"Oh, yeah, well, hey, why don't you go do that! And when they
get
here, you can point out the one whose head
you
personally beat in with a pool cue!"

Hempstead prodded with his boot at the one with the crushed jaw and flattened skull. Its own putrefaction was no less exponential: its skin was already sloughing off in soapy, adipocerous clumps; a noxious whiff of methane and hydrogen sulfide pooted out of its bloated torso. Bob Two felt sick all over again. "But that was self-defense," he muttered.

"Yeah, I know," Hempstead said. "And so is this." He thrust a shovel at each of them.

"Now start digging. And make it deep."

Bob Two was tempted to say something else, but it faltered before he could even voice it. He really wished he'd taken that gig with The Del-Rays.

Junior was already at it, shovel sinking and rising, sinking and rising. He didn't look up, he didn't say a word. Bob turned his back to the bodies, tears welling in his eyes.

And he started digging.

Jake could not allow himself to feel. To feel would be to cave in. To feel would be to die. He could not afford the luxury. Not yet.

So he let the cold take over.

And concentrated on the facts.

The fact was that Natalie would be okay. Jake checked her for signs of serious damage: unfocused eyes, disorientation, drowsiness, bleeding. She checked out positive, in the best sense of the word. A nice bruise forthcoming, and some serious nightmares. But no trip to the hospital.

Which led, of course, to Rachel.

She had been sliced, oh, yes, no question, but she would be okay, too. No major cables severed, no major muscle groupings: just a series of painful and ugly flesh wounds. Thank God for the denim of her pants and vest.

She wouldn't even need stitches, from the look of it. Just a lot of love and Jake's patented field dressings. The latter he whipped up in an instant.

The love would have to wait.

Sticking to the facts:

Three
. Chris was dead. Ted had not told anyone, but now it came out. Chris was killed by a Screamer-by one of those things-at Rock Aid.

This explained quite a bit.

Four
. Ted had a copy of The Scream's two-record set. It was an interesting piece of work, the way Ted described it. Ted was terrified.

Jake borrowed the album.

Five
. Ted had killed the Screamer. Jake was very proud of him.

Or would be soon.

Six
. Pete had come to the house tonight. Pete was one of those things.

Jake would not allow it. Not allow himself to feel.

Seven
. Jesse was gone.

Eight
. Rachel needed to be held, very badly. So Natalie. So did Ted. Jake could manage that all right. could even utter the right assurances.

But the cold had taken over.

While the facts spoke for themselves.

At the shed, mayhem still reigned.

The Screamer's head was still nailed to the door jamb. The feathers at the end of the shaft were tickling the back of its left eye socket. Coochie-coo. The other socket was just as empty, but it seemed to be watching them closely all the same.

Cody was still stuck inside, the crossbow in his hand. He was keeping his distance. An understandable thing. The Screamer was pissed off in general-growling like a pit bull, tugging fruitlessly at its mooring-but it seemed to have a special affection for Cody.

Logan was trussed like a Thanksgiving turkey, eighteen-gauge wire stretching across his chest and down under his crotch and back up to his wrists, which were pulled back so tight that the elbows almost touched. His chest jutted under the strain, which threatened to dislocate both shoulders if he so much as breathed wrong, and the wire between his legs had neatly bisected his scrotum into two one-way tickets to the Vienna Boys Choir.

Slim Jim held him as Hempstead came running up the trail. It was true, all right. Jesse was gone, and whatever else Pete was, he was on the other side now. He relayed the information, then asked, "So who's this asshole?"

"Says his name's Logan." Jim flipped him a billfold. "ID checks, but it could be faked."

"Close enough." He shouldered his rifle, walked over to Logan, leaned in, and said, "Okay, fucker, I ain't gonna ask you twice. I want some goddamned answers. I
know
who sent you. What I want to know is, why? What were your orders? Where is Jesse?"

"Piss off, nigger!"

Hempstead nodded, then grabbed Logan roughly by his bonds and hoisted him horizontally up to waist level. Logan shrieked, a high-pitched wheeze of agony, as his legs left the ground.

"Wrong answer." Hempstead then dropped him like a hundred-and-sixty-pound sack of potatoes. The snap of elbow joints was clearly audible. The mashing of his testicles was a much quieter, though infinitely more painful process. Logan laid there sucking wind for a couple of minutes, unable to speak or think or move. The pain settled over him like a blanket of fire, every cell in his brain screaming for the release of death.

And hoping, when it came, that it would go unnoticed.

Hempstead leaned over him. "Okay, let's try it again. The Scream's manager sent you. Yes?"

"Uhhhhh . . ." Logan moaned. The pain was a smothering black veil of stars.

"Answer!" Hempstead prodded one shattered arm. "Yes?"

"Y-y-yuh."

"Why?"

"Geh . . . geh . . ." The pain shifted, black waves spinning. "Get . . ."

"Get." Hempstead reiterated. "Get what?"

"Bih . . . bih . . ." The pain took shape in his mind. "B-Bitch."

Hempstead and Jim exchanged glances.
Jesse
. "Okay. Get bitch. Why?"

Logan whimpered; the pain folded in on itself.

Hempstead prodded. "Why 'get bitch'?"

"Mah . . ." Logan's face screwed up horribly. The pain intensified a million times, the fold deepening into a huge, sucking void. "Mahhhh . . ."

"Mahhhh-mah . . ."

Hempstead felt a strange chill uncoil in his bowels. Logan was crying now, great wet tears squeezing out of the corners of his eyes. In his body, in his brain, the pain spread. The pain smiled.

The pain opened wide.

"MAHHHHHHHHHHH-MAH!" He screamed, voice climbing from grown-man deep to little-boy screech in one long keening squeal.

"MAHHHHHHHHHHHHH-MAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!"

Hempstead fell back involuntarily as Logan started flopping in the dirt like a cat in a burlap sack. He bounced literally off the ground, landing again and again on his pulverized joints as though whatever he was experiencing inside utterly dwarfed the exterior wreckage in intensity.

A sympathetic vibration seemed to pass through the Screamer as well: he stopped in mid-growl like a dog at the sound of its master's voice, as Logan did the hell-bound hokey-pokey at their feet.

Then he started screaming, too: clipped, hyper cries. Cody's Screamer lurched forward violently, pulling the shaft through the back of his skull, and collapsed on the floor, going "EAYOWW! EAYOWW!"

Cody, Hempstead, and Jim fell back and pointed their weapons, but nobody fired. They were spellbound by the phenomena playing out before them. The two captives seemed gripped in the presence of a unifying field that was overloading them all; turning their attentions wholly inward.

Logan, personally, knew of nothing beyond his own frail boundaries. The release his brain cells had cried for was coming, yes. But it had not gone unnoticed. He had disobeyed orders, and he had fucked up.

Worst of all, he had broken the vow of silence, and the little he had revealed was more than enough to introduce him to a whole new world of hurt.

The smiling void revealed that to him as it opened wide. It would reveal much, much more, in the dread fullness of time. Logan screamed, one last long "MAHHHHHHHHHHH . . ."

And it swallowed his soul.

A buzzing in the hive-mind: calling out to the faithful, making the many One. A time to retreat.

A job done.

And to Hell with the lost.

Logan was one dead fuck. Only the husk remained, an expression of bottomless anguish etched into every line of his features.

"Jesus," Jim whispered. "What just happened?"

Hempstead leaned over Logan's corpse and shook his head at the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.

In the doorway, on the floor, the Screamer laughed.

It was a coarse, husky gurgle, halfway between a chuckle and a sob. It flashed Hempstead back to a time years past, when he and Jake had tripped and gone to see
The Exorcist
: the way Mercedes McCambridge's demon-voice had issued from Linda Blair's child-face. It had caused every hair on the nape of his neck to do the fandango back then, and that was only the relative fantasy of the silver screen.

This was indescribably worse. Even the rules of fantasy didn't apply anymore; fantasy had flown right out the fucking window. Like it or not, this was
reality
, and Hempstead had seen enough of the dark fringes of reality to guess that conventional, rational logic no longer applied.

All of which meant, tactically speaking, some kind of new logic. That meant new rules. And embracing those rules would allow him to think strategically. Embracing the irrational would allow him not to lose his mind.

Which he was not about to do.

So he studied the situation, which at the moment included the thing on the floor. It had grown weaker in the aftermath of whatever killed Logan; the veneer of terror had stripped right off of it, leaving what looked very much like a sixteen-year-old undead waif. It no longer appeared fearsome so much as abandoned, as though it were suddenly marooned here, cut off from its source of power.

He thought about that, as he watched the thing laugh and cry and writhe on the floor. He wondered if it could speak.

One way to find out.

He reached over and gingerly rolled the quivering thing over onto its back. Cody and Slim Jim drew closer. It curled like a thalidomide baby into his grasp, still rasping its laughing, halting cry. If it noticed their attention, it gave no outward indication.

He studied its face: sunken, drawn features, breath hitching through tightly stretched jaw ligaments. Its jaw locked up periodically, clicking as it tried in vain to close. Its expression was one of intense confusion, intense sadness, intense pain. It stared upward, eyelids opening wide.

Pockets of thin, vaguely luminescent red worms squirmed wildly in the holes.

Hempstead studied it.
New rules
. He had seen them before; they were a natural segment of the food chain. They usually waited until their host wasn't breathing.

New rules
.

"Do you have a name?" His voice was soft but insistent, less the inquisitor than the hypnotist. "Do you have a name?"

The thing nodded weakly. "D-d-dickey . . . ," it managed, barely a whisper.

"Dickey . . ."

It started to cry then, gulping air to feed its lamentation. The thalidomide curl turned fetal in position; the wormy tears fell.

"Where'd they take Jesse, Dickey?"

A flash of schizophrenic grin cut across the sorrow; Dickie giggled grotesquely in his grasp. "T-took her for the s-sh-show."

Hempstead frowned; the kid's mind was cooked. He looked up at the bolt wedged in the doorjamb and saw where some of Dickie's brain cells had been left; he wondered where he'd left the others. Dickey started humming some atonal melody, blinking back the worms.

"Why, Dickie?"

Dickie laughed, coughing thickly. His jaw locked up again. Hempstead shook him.

"
Why??
"

It was no use; he was almost used up. The coughing laughter became violent, racking sobs; Hempstead was about to just give it up when the Screamer stopped in one last gasp of fractured clarity and spoke. Two words, cryptically out of context.

Two words: both anthem and answer.

"
Raise
. . .
hell
"

When Jake came back up the hill, the bodies were gone. Very little was said. Little needed to be.

Jake went back up to the lodge.

Jim had a couple of calls to make.

It was close now. Very close. The only thing between him and the heat from its jaws was the cooling spark of life that held him to his body.

But it was time to die.

Alex Royale lay on the bed, in the space between his blindness and the darkness deeper still. If there were others in the room, he could not hear them. If they were touching him, he could not know. The outside . . . even only so far as his skin . . . was fog and miles of distance.