Depraved 2 (16 page)

Before she could contemplate this philosophical matter any further, she heard the moaning again. It was the sound she’d heard shortly before going into her trance. Hearing it now reminded her she had more pressing concerns.

Sienna lifted her head and saw the torso of Arlene Baker’s reanimated corpse hanging over the side of the four-poster bed. The thing moaned again and turned its head in Sienna’s direction. Its fingers reached for the floor and clawed at the uneven planks. The creature’s fingernails were long and tinged with yellow and black. One of the nails bent backward as it scraped wood, revealing a bed of inflamed flesh beneath it. Sienna took this as more evidence of how close to death Arlene had been before she’d snuffed her breath with the pillow.

The thing heaved itself off the bed with a final undulating spasm of its torso, its legs evidently as useless in death as they had been in life. It hit the floor with a soft thump, landing only inches from Sienna’s outstretched legs. A moment later it closed a gnarled hand around one of her ankles and began to pull itself forward. Sienna knew she should take some kind of action, but she felt no real sense of alarm. She watched in fascination as the thing dragged itself forward another several inches, breaking off more of its fingernails in the process. Also interesting was the massive brown stain covering the backside of Arlene’s gown, a consequence of the deceased woman shitting and pissing herself in bed for months. Another person might have been repulsed by the sight, but for Sienna it fed her appetite for degradation.

Sienna drew back a foot—the one not currently being clutched by a zombie—and kicked at the creature’s face, the sole of her shoe connecting against its jaw with considerable force, breaking it with an audible snapping of bone. This didn’t kill the thing, but it did impede its progress. After kicking her other foot free of its grasp, she stood up and stepped out of range when it reached for her again.

Being upright gave her a good look at the bloody results of her second murder of the day. The farm boy’s once-handsome face was a bludgeoned study in fleshy ruination. She felt certain no one could look at him and ever imagine that a girl of her relatively diminutive stature had inflicted such damage. He looked as if some big bear of a man—a three-hundred-pound biker, maybe—had gotten hold of him. The gash in his neck was wide and deep, further enhancing this impression. He had bled an amazing amount, obscuring a portion of her lipstick-traced pentagram.. She felt an odd kind of pride as she took in the whole scene. It struck her as similar to how an artist must feel when admiring her latest completed work.

The Arlene-thing continued to come at her, albeit even more slowly than before. This creature was of no more use to her. She had determined that she could indeed raise human dead with sufficient sacrificial juice. But its apparent mindlessness troubled her. Mere flesh reanimation wasn’t enough. She wanted to restore her father to how she’d known him in life. What she was seeing here didn’t bode well for that. But she would not give up. She was more powerful than ever. She would refine her focus and figure out how to pull her father’s essence back from the other side. It could be done. She was sure of it. Of course, sticking that spirit back in its original, long-dead body might result in some nasty complications, but she would cross that bridge when she came to it.

There was a lot of work still to be done and probably a dwindling amount of time in which to get started. Farm stud here had a family somewhere very nearby, people who would begin to worry about him if he didn’t return from his mission to check on Arlene soon. She had hoped to have a little longer to finalize her preparations before heading out to Hopkins Bend. Another week to meditate and become truly ready would have been nice. But that was no longer an option thanks to the meddling of this bible-thumping asshole.

First things first.

Finish this bitch.

Sienna scanned the blood-splattered floor for the hammer and frowned when she was initially unable to locate it. She then realized it must be under the Arlene-thing. Sidestepping its weakly grasping hands, she seized the creature by its ankles and dragged it away from the bed. Sure enough, the hammer soon came into view. It slid along beneath the body for a moment before popping free. The cool feel of the dead flesh in Sienna’s hands didn’t bother her, nor did the way it felt like the dead woman’s brittle bones would shatter if she increased the pressure of her grip even slightly. As always, she felt that calm kinship with dead and decaying things that so spooked other people about her.

After retrieving the hammer, Sienna buried the claw end in the crown of the Arlene-thing’s skull. As she’d anticipated, this had the effect of vanquishing the spark of reanimating magic Sienna’s ritual had kindled in its brain. The creature stopped moving almost at once. Though the hammer’s claw had penetrated the skull with surprising ease, prying it loose again proved harder. She had to brace a foot against the dead woman’s neck and strain to pull it free. Once it finally came loose, she stood panting in the middle of the room a moment as she pondered her next move.

She glanced at her blood-covered hands and it hit her that she should probably see about cleaning up some before doing anything else. Sienna went into the bathroom and studied her reflection in the mirror above the sink. She had forgotten about painting her face with Bradley’s blood. It had dried some and was flaking away from her skin. A little probing with a fingertip revealed that it was still sticky beneath the dry surface. She smeared the sticky stuff around some before plopping her finger in her mouth and savoring the taste of the blood.

After allowing herself a few last moments to admire her blood-caked visage, she turned a tap and was pleased to see the spurt of rust-colored water that splashed into the sink. As with the electricity, she was amazed to find it hadn’t been shut off. By now she was sure Delmont had kept the bills paid to avoid suspicion regarding the level of care he was providing for Arlene.

In a few moments the water turned clear and Sienna bent her head to the sink and splashed water on her face. An ancient, dried-out bar of soap sat on a small ceramic dish at the back of the sink. She coaxed some suds from it by holding it under the water and rubbing it briskly between her hands, after which she was able to scrub almost all the blood from her face, neck, and hands. There would be no getting the stains out of her clothes, but she dabbed at her dress and stockings with a damp washcloth until the thickest, stickiest blood spatters had been reduced to the point of near invisibility thanks to the black fabric.

Once she was satisfied she had cleaned herself as well as possible, she returned to the bedroom, where she rooted through her backpack until she found her phone. She then took several pictures of her handiwork from various angles, setting one close-up she particularly liked of Bradley’s ruined face as the phone’s background image. Satisfied that she had documented her work as well as she could, she put her phone away and patted the dead boy’s pockets until she found his keys. Next she retrieved the rest of her things and stashed them in the backpack. This included the hammer, the knife, the jar she’d kept Spooky in, and the empty absinthe bottle. Sienna had always been something of a packrat and hated to throw anything away.

One of the few regrets she had about Jodi kicking her out was all the things she’d had to leave behind, including her books, journals, stuffed animals, vinyl records, and, perhaps most of all, her massive collection of random junk, most of it cast-off crap she found either by poking through other people’s garbage or while wandering like an aimless waif through the streets of Bedford. Some of her discoveries were nearly practical, such as an ashtray or empty Altoids tin. Other items she procured were of the sort that made people question her sanity. She had fond memories of the disgusted looks people gave her when she would stop on a sidewalk to pick up discarded cigarette butts, used condoms, and, on more than one occasion, the remains of a dead bird or rodent. These things she sealed in Ziploc bags and carried home with her. Her dresser drawers and closet were overflowing with them. The birds and rats she kept because, hello, dead things. The butts and condoms she kept because she had vague notions of using them in future magical rituals. She was sure she could one day use the DNA traces to compel the people who’d discarded them to do nasty things. It would at least be fun conducting the experiments.

But she didn’t have a car and had only been able to leave with what she could fit inside her backpack. Like always, she got angry when she thought about how Jodi tried to run her life, as if she were her mother instead of her sister. Just as bad was the constant barrage of judgmental bullshit. Getting out from under all that was a great thing, but beneath the contempt she felt for Jodi was a deep reservoir of hurt. She just wished her goddamn sister at least had been able to accept her as she was, but that had never even come close to happening. A time of reckoning was coming for that bitch, just as soon as she could bring their father back.

Sienna zipped up her backpack and walked out of the bedroom, not bothering with any last goodbyes to Arlene or Bradley. She would miss them, but the pang of loss was mild. There were more dead things—and soon-to-be-dead-things—waiting for her down the road a piece.

15.

James Rowe knew he should never have listened to his old pal Harley Birdsong. Harley was a piercer at the tattoo shop in Jackson, TN, where they both worked. When it came to his job, Harley was a real pro. He hardly ever called anyone a fucking moron for asking to have their sexual organs pierced, for instance, and he never received any serious complaints about the work he did agree to perform. The problem was that outside of the work environment he was almost always stoned out of his goddamned gourd.

And today had been no exception. James, Harley, and their pal Bubba “Big Train” Enwright had been on their way back from the big tattoo and horror festival in Knoxville when the 70’s era Mustang James had inherited from his crazy uncle Jack “Rabbit” Rowe started having engine problems.

When the sputtering started, it was mild enough for James to hope they could make it as far as Nashville before having to stop. He abandoned that hope when the sputtering intensified and the banging commenced. They were out in the middle of that long stretch of not much between Chattanooga and Nashville when smoke started to seep out from under the hood. His plan at that point had been to pull over on the interstate and call AAA. He was on the verge of doing just that when Harley piped up with his fateful goddamn suggestion.

After a dim sense of what was happening penetrated his brain, Harley took a look around and swore he knew exactly where they were, claiming that the next exit up would take them to a little town where his cousin Ace Woodhoe had an auto body shop. He further insisted Ace would take better care of them and have them back on the road way faster than any lame-ass AAA motherfucker.

James sighed.

I should have fucking known better than to listen to that assclown.

They were stranded roadside, all right, but they weren’t on the interstate. Instead they were stopped at the side of a narrow rural road. James had the Mustang’s hood up and had been staring at the engine for some fifteen minutes. During that time, no other vehicles had come along. James wasn’t sure, but he thought it was possible they had discovered the fabled “middle of nowhere” people were always talking about. There was no real point to his poking around the engine. He wasn’t a damn mechanic. But the bad judgment he’d shown in trusting Harley had him frustrated and he’d needed an excuse to step out of the car for a while.

This shit is going to seriously set me back, I just know it.

Flush with cash from the successful convention stint, James was bummed out by the prospect of squandering the bonus income on car repairs. That was how life always went, it seemed. Just when it felt like you were getting ahead of the game a little, some damn crisis or other would come along to bring you right back to square one. A more superstitious man might attribute this tendency to some malevolent balancing force in the universe, one that had a special hard-on for keeping hard-working middle class people in their place while doing nothing to check the gluttons of greed on Wall Street. But James didn’t believe in things like that. What he did believe in was bad luck and stupidity. And when you made a habit of hanging around brain-damage cases like Harley and Big Train, those things had a funny way of following you around. His strong desire to hold onto a chunk of the convention cash caused him to take the ill-advised gamble on Harley’s ability to lead them to this Ace person’s shop.

He really should have known better. Harley meant well, but the past was rife with evidence of how easily the guy could get confused. For instance, there was the time they’d gone looking for the War Memorial Auditorium in Nashville to see their favorite band Blitzkid. James and his friends lived in Jackson and were prone to getting lost when they visited the Music City. It happened yet again on this occasion. The Internet directions they’d printed out ahead of time turned out to be wrong and they were left scrambling to find the venue with showtime drawing near. Out of nowhere, Harley insisted he knew how to get to where they wanted to go. Running out of options, James decided to trust his pal. Harley did kind of deliver on his promise, guiding them to a sidewalk plaque commemorating Civil War dead. The sidewalk overlooked an empty field. But it was a kind of war memorial.