From a Buick 8 (37 page)

Now screaming so loud his cheeks were red and the cords stood out on the sides of his neck. He wasn't just playing me anymore; Brian had moved on to an authentic shit fit. What a pleasure getting rid of him was going to be.

We went up Bookin's Hill, George driving a little faster than was strictly necessary, and there was Troop D at the top. George signaled and turned in, perhaps still moving a little faster than he strictly should have been. Lippy, understanding that his time to annoy us had grown short, began shaking the mesh between us and him as well as thumping down with those John Wayne boots of his.
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'JACK-you-BOYS!'
Clump-clumpclump! Shake-shakeshake!

Up the driveway we went, toward the parking lot at the back. George turned tight to the left around the cor-ner of the building, meaning to park with the rear half of Unit 6 by the back steps of the barracks, so we could take good old Bri right up and right in with no fuss, muss, or bother. And as George came around the corner, there was Mister Dillon, right in front of us.

'
Watch out, watch out!'
George shouted, whether to me or to the dog or possibly to himself I have no way of knowing. And remembering all this, it strikes me how much it was like the day he hit the woman in Lassburg. So close it was almost a dress rehearsal, but with one very large difference. I wonder if in the last few weeks before he sucked the barrel of his gun he didn't find himself thinking
Imissed the dog and
hit the woman
over and over again. Maybe not, but I know I would've, if it had been me.
Missed the
dog and hit the woman. How can you believe in a God when it's that way around instead of the
other?

George slammed on the brakes with both feet and drove the heel of his left hand down on the horn. I was thrown forward. My shoulder-harness locked. There were lap belts in the back but our prisoner hadn't troubled to put one on - he'd been too busy doing the Jacubois Cheer for that - and his face shot forward into the mesh, which he'd been gripping. I heard something snap, like when you crack your knuckles. I heard something else crunch. The snap was probably one of his fingers. The crunch was undoubtedly his nose. I have heard them go before, and it always sounds the same, like breaking chicken bones. He gave a muffled, surprised scream. A big squirt of blood, hot as the skin of a hot-water bottle, landed on the shoulder of my uniform.

Mister Dillon probably came within half a foot of dying right there, maybe only two inches, but he ran on without a single look at us, ears laid back tight against his skull, yelping and barking, headed straight for Shed B. His shadow ran beside him on the hottop, black and sharp.

'Ah Grise, I'be hurd!'Brian screamed through his plugged nose. '
I'be bleedin all fuggin over!'
And then he began yelling about police brutality.

George opened the driver's-side door. I just sat where I was for a moment, watching D, expecting him to stop when he got to the shed. He never did. He ran full-tilt into the roll-up door, braining himself. He fell over on his side and let out a scream. Until that day I didn't know dogs
could
scream, but they can. To me it didn't sound like pain but frustration. My arms broke out in gooseflesh. D got up and turned in a circle, as if chasing his tail. He did that twice, shook his head as if to clear it, and ran straight at the roll-up door again.

'D, no!'Huddie shouted from the back stoop. Shirley was standing right beside him, her hand up to shade her eyes.
'Stop it, D, you mind me, now!'

Mister D paid zero attention to them. I don't think he would have paid any attention to Orville Garrett, had Orville been there that day, and Orv was the closest thing to an alpha male that D had. He threw himself into the roll-up door again arid again, barking crazily, uttering another of those awful frustrated screams each time he struck the solid surface. The third time he did it, he left a bloody noseprint on the white-painted wood.

During all of this, my old pal Brian was yelling his foolish head off.
'Help me, Jacubois, I'be bleedin
like a stuck fuggin pig, where'd your dumbdick friend learn to drive, Sears and fuckin Roebuck?

Ged me outta here, my fuggin dose!'

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I ignored him and got out of the cruiser, meaning to ask George if he thought D might be rabid, but before I could open my mouth the stink hit me: that smell of seawater and old cabbage and something else, something a whole lot worse.

Mister D suddenly turned and raced to his right, toward the corner of the shed.

'No, D, no!'Shirley screamed. She saw what I saw a second after her - the door on the side, the one you opened with a regular knob instead of rolling up on tracks, was standing a few inches open. I have no idea if someone - Arky, maybe - left it that way

NOW:

Arky

It wasn't me, I always close dat door. If I forgot, old Sarge woulda torn me a new asshole. Maybe Curt, too. Dey wanted dat place closed up
tight.

Dey was
strong
on dat.

THEN:

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Eddie

or maybe something from inside opened it. Some force originating in the Buick, I suppose that's what I'm talking about. I don't know if that's the case or not; I only know that the door
was
open. That was where the worst of the stench was coming from, and that was where Mister Dillon was going. Shirley ran down the steps, Huddie right behind her, both of them yelling for Mister D to come back. They passed us. George ran after them, and I ran after George.

There had been a lightshow from the Buick two or three days before. I hadn't been there, but someone had told me about it, and the temperature had been down in Shed B for almost a week. Not a lot, only four or five degrees. There were a few signs, in other words, but nothing really spectacular. Nothing you'd get up in the middle of the night and write home to mother about. Nothing that would have led us to suspect what we found when we got inside.

Shirley was first, screaming D's name . . . and then just
screaming.
A second later arid Huddie was screaming, too. Mister Dillon was barking in a lower register by then, only it was barking and growling all mixed together. It's the sound a dog makes when he's got something treed or at bay. George Morgan yelled out, 'Oh my Lord! Oh my dear Jesus Christ! What
is
it?'

I went into the shed, but not very far. Shirley and Huddie were standing shoulder to shoulder and George was right behind them. They had the way pretty well blocked up. The smell was rank - it made your eyes water and your throat close - but I hardly noticed it. The Buick's trunk was open again. Beyond the car, in the far corner of the shed, stood a thin and wrinkled yellow nightmare with a head that wasn't really a head at all but a loose tangle of pink cords, all of them twitching and squirming. Under them you could see more of the yellow, wrinkled flesh. It was very tall, seven feet at least. Some of those pink cords lashed at one of the overhead beams as it stood there. The sound they made was fluttery, like moths striking window-glass at night, trying to get at the light they see or sense behind it. I can still hear that sound. Sometimes I hear it in my dreams. Within the thicket made by those wavering, convulsing pink things, something kept opening and closing in the yellow flesh. Something black and round. It might have been a mouth. It might have been trying to scream. I can't describe what it was standing on. It's like my brain couldn't make any sense of what my eyes were seeing. Not legs, I'm sure of that much, and I think there might have been three instead of two. They ended in black, curved talons. The talons had bunches of wiry hair growing out of them - I think it was hair, and I think there were bugs hopping in the tufts, little bugs like nits or fleas. From the thing's chest there hung a twitching gray hose of flesh covered with shiny black circles of flesh. Maybe they were blisters. Or maybe, God help me, those things were its eyes.

Standing in front of it, barking and snarling and spraying curds of foam from his
muzzle,
was our dog. He made as if to lunge forward and the thing shrieked at him from the black hole. The gray hose twitched like a boneless ami or a frog's leg when you shoot electricity into it. Drops of something flew from the end and hit the shed's floor. Smoke began to rise from those spots at once, and I could see them eating into
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the concrete.

Mister D drew back a little when it shrieked at him but kept on barking and snarling, ears laid back against his skull, eyes bulging out of their sockets. It shrieked again. Shirley screamed and put her hands over her ears. I could understand the urge to do that, but I didn't think it would help much. The shrieks didn't seem to go into your head through your ears but rather just the other way around: they seemed to start in your head and then go
out
through your ears, escaping like steam. I felt like telling Shirley not to do that, not to block her ears, she'd give herself an embolism or something if she held that awful shrieking inside, and then she dropped her hands on her own.

Huddie put his arm around Shirley and she

THEN:

Shirley

I felt Huddie put his arm around me and I took his hand. I had to. I had to have something human to hold on to. The way Eddie tells it, the Buick's first livebirth sounds too close to human: it had a mouth inside all those writhing pink things, it had a chest, it had something that served it for eyes. I'm not saying any of that's wrong, but I can't say it's right, either. I'm not sure we ever saw it at all, certainly not the way police officers are trained to look and see. That thing was too strange, too far outside not just our experience but our combined frame of reference. Was it humanoid? A little - at least we perceived it that way. Was it
human'?
Not in the least, don't you believe it. Was it intelligent, aware? There's no way to tell for sure, but yes, I think it probably was. Not that it mattered. We were more than horrified by its strangeness. Beyond the horror (or perhaps inside it is what I mean, like a nut inside a shell) there was hate. Part of me wanted to bark and snarl at it just as Mister Dillon was. It woke an anger in me, an
enmity,
as well as fright and revulsion. The other things had been dead on arrival. This one wasn't, but we
wanted
it dead. Oh boy, did we want it dead!

The second time it shrieked, it seemed to be looking right at us. The hose in its middle lifted like an outstretched arm that's perhaps trying to signal
Help me, call this barking monstrosity off.
Mister Dillon lunged again. The thing in the corner shrieked a third time and drew back. More liquid
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splattered from its trunk or arm or penis or whatever it was. A couple of drops struck D and his fur began to smoke at once. He gave a series of hurt, yipping cries. Then, instead of backing off, he leaped at the thing in the corner.

It moved with eerie, gliding speed. Mister Dillon snatched his teeth into one fold of its wrinkled, baggy skin and then it was gone, lurching along the wall on the far side of the Buick, shrieking from that hole in its yellow skin, the hose wagging back and forth. Black goop, like the stuff that had come out of the bat and the fish, was dribbling from where D had nicked it.

It struck the roll-up door and screeched in pain or frustration or both. And then Mister Dillon was on it from behind. He leaped up and seized it by the loose folds hanging from what I suppose you'd call its back. The flesh tore with sickening ease. Mister Dillon dropped to the shed floor with his jaws clenched. More of the thing's skin tore loose and unrolled like loose wallpaper. Black slime . . . blood . . . whatever it was . . . poured over D's upturned face. He howled at the touch of it but held on to what he had, even shaking his head from side to side to tear more of it loose, shaking his head the way a terrier does when it has hold of a rat.

The thing screamed and then made a gibbering sound that was almost words. And yes, the screams and the wordlike sounds all seemed to start in the middle of your head, almost to
hatch
there. The thing beat at the roll-up door with its trunk, as if demanding to be let out, but there was no strength in it. Huddie had drawn his gun. He had a momentarily clear shot at the pink threads and the yellow knob under them, but then the thing whirled around, still wailing out of that black hole beneath the pink weeds, and it fell on top of Mister D. The gray thing growing from its chest -wrapped itself around D's throat and D began to yip arid howl with pain. I saw smoke starting to rise up from where the thing had him, and a moment later I could smell burning fur as well as rotting vegetables and seawater. The intruder was sprawled on top of our dog, squealing and thrashing, its legs (if they
were
legs) thumping against the roll-up door and leaving smudges that looked like nicotine stains. And Mister Dillon let out howl after long, agonized howl.

Huddle leveled his gun. I grabbed his wrist and forced it down.
'No! You'll hit D!'
And then Eddie shoved past me, almost knocking me down. He'd found a pair of rubber gloves on some bags by the door and snapped them on.

THEN:

Eddie

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You have to understand that I don't remember any of this the way people ordinarily remember things. For me this is more like remembering the bitter end of a bad drunk. It wasn't Eddie Jacubois who took that pair of rubber gloves from the pile of them on top of the lawn-food bags by the door. It was someone
dreaming
that he was Eddie Jacubois. That's how it seems now, anyway. I think it seemed that way them.