Bloodstone (26 page)

Dick Pritchard stood within the bright well of light inside his father’s garage and swore audibly to himself. A car was up on the lift above him, its back tires hanging down just over his head. A long, thin ribbon of black oil still dribbled from the pan and into a bucket below. He had misjudged the distance and oil had splattered across the concrete floor. Now he would have to clean that up too. He still had to dump the old oil, put new oil in, and get the car down off the lift. Add scrubbing the floor to the list, or his father would have his ass. He would never get the fuck out of here, not early enough to get laid, anyway. His girlfriend’s parents were still strict enough not to let him come over after eleven, and it was close to ten now.

He kicked at the full bucket, sending more oil slopping over the side onto his foot. His father had no right making him work late like this. Dick stepped over to the workbench at the back and took another beer from the half-empty case, popping the top and downing a third of it in one big gulp. His father was down at Johnny’s, keeping his fat, greasy ass warm and toasty, throwing a few back with some friends, getting ready for a hell of a party tomorrow. And here he was, alone in this shitty shop and freezing his tail off.

A noise came from somewhere out back. The repair shop
included two gas pumps and a junkyard, filled with rusted hunks of Chevys, Fords, and other monsters of American steel (his father wouldn’t let a foreign-made car within fifty feet of his garage, and that went for the junkyard, too). The yard was fenced in and lighted, but occasionally some punk would try to cop a free hubcap by climbing the chain-link, or maybe two or three of them would sneak in with a sledgehammer and smash some glass, just for jollies.

Now it sounded like one of them was at it again. Dick waited, listening. A sound like a body falling to the ground, then the scrape of metal against metal. He finished his beer, tossed it with the rest of the dead soldiers (there were quite a few of them now), then stepped out into the cold air and looked around. This promised to be interesting; it was just what he needed tonight, a good ass-whipping. Beat the piss out of someone…

The floodlights in the junkyard went out. “Son of a bitch.” He stood with only the light of the open garage bay at his back, his shadow stretching out on the ground in front of him. His breath puffed out in front of his face. Impossible to see anything now; the lights over the gas pumps had been turned off two hours ago. He went back inside, checked the breakers and clicked them a few times without success. Some kind of power surge had blown the bulbs. Probably the cold weather. Even with the beer starting to go to his head, he could still feel the cold numbing his hands and face. His nipples felt like hard little pebbles under his work shirt.

“Okay, you fuck,” he muttered. “You asked for it.” Grabbing the big, heavy-duty flashlight from the workbench, he set off on the sloping dirt path that led around the back of the garage to the junkyard gate. As he walked, he whistled softly to himself, slapping the heavy end of the light against his palm.
Gonna beat some ass tonight
. It had been a while since he had been in a good fight, and he looked forward to it the way some people looked forward to a night on the town.

He reached the fence. It was dark back here behind the garage. He clicked the flashlight on and played it along the gate. The padlock was secure, the gate closed, which didn’t mean a thing, except that the little son of a bitch had balls enough to climb the eight-foot high chain-link and drop over.

He let the light play slowly among the rusted hunks of cars, some of them piled two and three deep. The light slipped across shining metal, old rubber, and bits of broken glass. Nothing moved. “Coming in, you pricks,” he said loudly. “Ready or not.” Taking the ring of keys from his belt, he sprung the lock, then pushed the gate back. A hanging, rusted edge scraped along the frost-covered ground, making a sound like cloth tearing.

As he stood there at the mouth of the junkyard, he felt the first hint of fear, like fingers lightly touching the back of his neck. Something was not quite right here, though for the life of him he could not understand what.

“You hear me, you little fucks? I know you’re in there and I’m going to bust your skulls if you don’t come out right now.”

Movement near the back, just beyond his light, as if someone had darted between two of the older cars. He stepped forward, shining the beam on the spot; a Chevy hot rod and an ancient Dodge truck, thrust up at an angle, its empty headlight sockets staring back at him and trailing two fists of wires like optical nerves. The Dodge’s engine was exposed, dull, gray steel thick with grease. The hood was yanked askew and hanging like a flap of skin.

He walked slowly up the narrow aisle in the center of the yard, the bodies of abandoned cars looming over him on either side, most of them stripped of anything useful long ago; cloth ripped, stuffing spilling out, pieces of metal and shards of broken glass protruding like broken bones, hinges sticking out into empty space. They threw misshapen shadows all around him, shadows that were constantly changing
as he moved the beam of the flashlight back and forth, stretching and bulging and running from him like living things, until he was no longer sure whether the movements he saw among the narrow rows were real or imagined. Glass crunched under his boots as he walked, and once he kicked an empty bottle that skittered up ahead of him and rebounded off a piece of sheet metal with a dull thud.

Halfway up the aisle the stink hit him, and he stopped for a moment, wondering at the strength of it. Something must have crawled in here and died, a woodchuck or maybe a stray cat. But the smell wasn’t quite the same. Not like rotting meat, more like a sewer. Or like he’d stepped in a big pile of dog shit.

The fear came back again, stronger now, like someone had gripped his balls in a vice. His stomach ached with it, and he knew right then that something very bad was going to happen.

Movement at the end of the aisle. He flicked the light up. A very tall man dressed in a long, black coat stood with his back against the chain-link fence, head down, greasy black hair hanging in his face and arms sticking straight out from his sides.

No, not standing; Dick moved the light down, feeling the muscles in his throat contract with fear. There was a good two feet between the man’s shoes and the ground.

“You,” Dick said, as loudly as he could. Sudden, unreasoning terror made his voice shake. He had forgotten all about his recent desire to fight. “Get down from there, okay? I mean, right now.”

The creature lifted its head slowly and fixed him with its fiery gaze. Deep-set eyes burned like two embers in a dead face, the flesh around them yellow and split and running with pus. Dick felt his bladder let go in a warm gush, and he smelled the sharp, fresh scent of his own urine mixing with the smell of shit. All at once he realized two things. He was in the presence of something that no longer belonged to the human race.

And he was not going to leave the junkyard alive.

“Oh,” he muttered. “Oh, God—”

Slowly, pinned with the beam of his flashlight, it began to descend, its eyes never leaving his face. An inch, two inches, until finally it was standing on the ground. It lowered its arms to its sides, then took a step forward. Dick stared. Something familiar…

Jeb?
This couldn’t possibly be the same spineless twit he went to high school with, could it? He opened his mouth, tried to speak, swallowed, and tried again. What came out was nothing more than a high squeak.

“
On your knees, boy.
”

The voice was impossible to resist. He stumbled backward and fell heavily in the dirt, a shard of glass cutting deep into the meat of his thigh. He raised himself enough to kneel, the ground growing moist with his own blood and urine. He had dropped the flashlight, but he was not even offered the simple blessing of darkness; the light had rolled and come to a stop against a flat tire, still pointing straight ahead.

Laughter. The thing was chuckling. The sound was not human, not coming from such a monstrosity as this.

“Jeb,” he said, pleading now, his words thick and heavy in his throat. “That’s you, ain’t it, buddy?”

“An eye for an eye,” the thing rasped. “
Dickie for Dickie
. Time to get what’s coming to you. Things gonna be a little different around here.”

It stepped closer. Dick recoiled, trying to scramble backwards; the creature raised its arms, and a deep growling sound came from somewhere near the entrance to the junkyard, behind Dick Pritchard’s back. He froze, trembling at the promise of blood in that sound. He did not want to see what was making it.

Then the thing in the black coat stepped forward and reached out and he was gagging as the cold, stinking flesh pressed against his face.

He beat at its legs, tried to turn his face away. A hand curled itself around his head, as strong as iron, pushing him forward in a terrible vice-like grip. He began to pray, tears running down his face as his throat stretched, jaws opening past the breaking point, tissue ripping, salty blood wetting his tongue.
Oh God, please, anything, just let me die
.

Then the real pain began.

Pat Friedman came awake with a gasp, and sat up on a damp corner of his narrow bed. He remained still for a minute, confused by the bars on the door; for a moment he had thought, oh, he had thought…

What? That he was back in his home, with his wife sleeping peacefully beside him? That would never be again, never, because he had done something so horrible—

S
he was a bitch, a no-good slut, you did what you had to
do Pat a man’s gotta take control of his life you know
…

Pat Friedman moaned, cradling his head in his hands. He was dirty and his face and hands were still flecked with dried blood. He had refused a shower, refused to let them touch him for anything. He would not wash off that blood because it belonged to her. It was all he had left.

What had he done? Oh, what had he done?

He had been dreaming the same dream that had haunted him the past few weeks, the one where the things clawed their way out of the dirt and came for him, tipping gravestones into the grass, their footsteps heavy and relentless. Now, he understood what that dream meant. It meant death, and guilt, and payback.
Payback’s a bitch, and when it finally
comes, you better look out because it’s gonna hurt
like hell
.

He knew he was going crazy because his thoughts did not make sense anymore, and he could not seem to concentrate on anything for very long. Those recent visions of death and decay had become so vivid he could hardly tell the difference between them and reality. And he had killed his wife,
murdered her in cold blood. That fact did not escape him. He remembered the moment too well, the blood seeming to explode from her chest as the shotgun did its dirty work. Was that the act of a sane man? No, of course not. Sane men got angry and then worked their problems out. They sat down and had a beer and talked about it, and maybe if things had gone too far, and too many feelings had been hurt, they got a divorce.

They most certainly did not take a shotgun and blow their wife’s guts out through her back.

He whimpered softly to himself, pulling at his snarled hair and rocking slowly back and forth. Lightning flashed, lighting up the cell through the window and throwing the shadows of the bars across the empty hallway, and a moment later thunder cracked overhead, so close it shook the concrete walls. A storm was coming soon, and from the sound, it would be a bad one. When he was a boy and the thunder was particularly loud, his mother had always said that God was rearranging the furniture in his living room.

Pat waited. He rocked, pulled. Clumps of hair fell to his lap. Light rain began to patter on the roof, sounding like hundreds of tiny rat feet skittering across a wood floor. Usually he liked the rain, found it soothing, but now the sound made him shiver. It reminded him of the day of the reverend’s funeral, when he had stood on the edge of the grave as the rest of the mourners filed away and listened to the slap of mud as each heavy shovelful was thrown onto the waiting coffin. He thought of his wife lying in the cold ground, under six feet of sodden earth, and tears ran down his blood-smeared cheeks. He saw now that none of it had been her fault; he had been inattentive, fat and lazy. What else could she do? He had driven her into the arms of another man.

He held his hands in front of his face. Blood under his fingernails. He used to get that when she had her period and he touched her down there. He thought about making love to
her, holding her close in their warm bed, feeling her breath on his neck. Once, during their first year together, they had been shopping at the mall in Portland, going through the racks in a clothing store, and she had begun to hold up short dresses and strike seductive poses, flirting like a schoolgirl; and then she had glanced around and grabbed him by the hand, leading him into the dressing room, into a private stall. He had taken her up against the thin plywood wall, other customers just a few feet away, and she had tried to keep quiet, really tried, but it had been so hot and so good and finally she was gasping his name, over and over, into the hollow of his neck. Afterward, she told him she loved him, and that he could try on clothes with her anytime.

Back then it had been so pure and so strong. Oh, God, after all that had happened, he still loved her. He would do anything to have her back again.
Please
, he thought,
my
wife. I’m sorry, baby. I’m so sorry. Please come back to me
.

A noise, somewhere out of sight. Like a door opening and closing.

Pat sat up straight on his narrow bunk and stared out beyond the bars, into the hallway. But the noise did not come again. Lightning popped three times in quick succession, illuminating everything with white, blazing light; thunder rumbled and split the sky directly overhead. He blinked, trying to chase away the ghost-figures that blazed across his sight. He realized that the hairs on his arms were standing straight up. A trick of the storm, the electricity in the air.