From a Buick 8 (38 page)

Was Mister Dillon on my mind? Kid, I'd like to think so. And that's the best I can say. Because I can't really remember. I think it's more likely that I just wanted to shut that shrieking yellow thing up, get it out of the middle of my head. I hated it in there. Loathed it. Having it in there was like being raped. But I must have been thinking, you know it? On some level I really must have been, because I put the rubber gloves on before I took the pickaxe down from the wall. I remember the gloves were blue. There were at least a dozen pairs stacked on those bags, all the colors of the rainbow, but the ones I took were blue. I put them on fast - as fast as the doctors on that
ER
show. Then I took the pickaxe off its pegs. I pushed past Shirley so hard I almost knocked her down. I
would
have knocked her down, I think, only Huddie grabbed her before she could fall.

George shouted something. I think it was 'Be careful of the acid'. I don't remember feeling scared and I certainly don't remember feeling brave. I remember feeling outrage and revulsion. It was the way you'd feel if you woke up with a leech in your mouth, sucking the blood out of your tongue. I said that once to Curtis and he used a phrase I never forgot:
the horror of trespass.
That's what it was, the horror of trespass.

Mister D, howling and thrashing and snarling, trying to get away; the thing lying on him, the pink threads growing out of its top thrashing around like kelp in a wave; the smell of burning fur; the stench of salt and cabbage; the black stuff pouring out of the thing's dog-bit, furrowed back, running down the wrinkles in its yellow skin like sludge and then pattering on the floor; my need to kill it, erase it, make it gone from the world: all these things were whirling in my mind -
whirling,
I tell you, as if the shock of what we'd found in Shed 13 had whipped my brains, pureed them and then stirred them into a cyclone that had nothing to do with sanity or lunacy or police work or vigilante work or Eddie Jacubois. Like I say, I remember it, but not the way you remember ordinary things. More like a dream. And I'm glad. To remember it at all is bad enough. And you can't not remember. Even drinking doesn't stop that, only pushes it away a little bit, and when you stop, it all comes rushing back. Like waking up with a bloodsucker in your mouth.

I got to it and I swung the pickaxe and the pointed end of it went into the middle of it. Black gunk came out, and I remember thinking of the theme-song from
The Beverly Hillbillies,
that line that goes 'Up from the ground came a-bubblin crude'.

The thing screamed and threw itself backward against the roll-up door. Mister Dillon got loose and backed away, creeping with his belly low to the floor. He was barking with anger and howling with pain, the sounds mixed together. There was a charred trench in his fur behind his collar. Half his muzzle had been singed black, as if he'd stuck it in a campfire. Little tendrils of smoke were rising from it. The thing lying against the roll-up door lifted that gray hose in its chest and those
were
eyes embedded in it, all right.

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They were looking at me and I couldn't bear it. I turned the pickaxe in my hands and brought the axe side of it down. There was a thick
chumping
sound, and part of the hose rolled away on the concrete. I'd also caved in the chest area. Clouds of stuff like pink shaving cream came out of the hole, billowing, like it was under pressure. Along the length of the gray trunk - the severed piece is what I'm talking about those eyes rolled spastically, seeming to look in all different directions at once. Clear drops of liquid, its venom, I guess, dribbed out and scorched the concrete.

Then George was beside me. He had a shovel. He drove the blade of it down into the middle of the tendrils on the creature's head. Buried it in the thing's yellow flesh all the way up to the ashwood shaft. The thing screamed. I heard it so loud in my mind that it seemed to push my eyes out in their sockets, the way a frog's eyes will bulge when you wrap your hand around its flabby body and squeeze.

THEN:

Huddie

I put on a pair of gloves myself and grabbed one of the other tools - I think it was a hard rake, but I'm not entirely sure. Whatever it was, I grabbed it, then joined Eddie and George. A few seconds later (or maybe it was a minute, I don't know, time stopped meaning anything) I looked around and Shirley was there, too. She'd put on her own pair of gloves, then grabbed Arky's posthole digger. Her hair had come loose and was hanging down all around her face. She looked to me like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. We all remembered to put on gloves, but we were all crazy. Completely nuts. The look of it, the gibbering keening screeching
sound
of it, even the way Mister D was howling and whining - all of that
made
us crazy. I'd forgotten about the overturned tanker, and George Stankowski trying to get the kids into the schoolbus and drive them to safety, and the angry young man Eddie and George Morgan had brought in. I think I forgot there was any world at all outside that stinking little shed. I was screaming as I swung the rake, plunging the tines into the thing on the floor again and again and again. The others were screaming, too. We stood around it in a circle, beating and bludgeoning and cutting it to pieces; we were screaming at it to die and it
wouldn't
die, it seemed as if it would never die. If I could forget anything, any part of it, I'd forget this: at the very end, just before it did die, it raised
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the stump of the thing in its chest. The stump was trembling like an old man's hand. There were eyes in the stump, some of them hanging from shiny threads of gristle by then. Maybe those threads were optic nerves. I don't know. Anyway, the stump rose up and for just a moment, in the center of my head,
I saw
myself.
I saw all of us standing around in a circle and looking down, looking like murderers at the grave of their victim, and I saw how strange and alien we were. How
horrible
we were. In that moment I felt its awful confusion. Not its fear, because it wasn't afraid. Not its innocence, because it wasn't innocent. Or guilty, for that matter. What it was was confused. Did it know
where
it was? I don't think so. Did it know why Mister Dillon had attacked it and we were killing it? Yes, it knew that much. We were doing it because we were so different, so different and so horrible that its many eyes could hardly see us, could hardly hold on to our images as we surrounded it screaming and chopping and cutting and hitting. And then it finally stopped moving. The stub of the trunk-thing in its chest dropped back down again. The eyes stopped twitching and just stared.

We stood there, Eddie and George side by side, panting. Shirley and I were across from them - on the other side of that thing - and Mister D was behind us, panting and whining. Shirley dropped the posthole digger and when it hit the concrete, I saw a plug of the dead thing's yellow flesh caught in it like a piece of diseased dirt. Her face was bone-white except for two wild bright patches of red in her cheeks and another blooming on her throat like a birthmark.

'Huddie,' she whispered.

'What?' I asked. I could hardly talk, my throat was that dry.

'Huddie!'

'
What,
goddammit?'

'It could
think,'
she whispered. Her eyes were big and horrified, swimming with tears. 'We killed a
thinking being.
That's murder.'

'Bullshit's what that is,' George said. 'Even if it's not, what damn good does it do to go on about it?'

Whining - but not in the same urgent way as before - Mister Dillon pushed in between me and Shirley. There were big bald patches in the fur on his neck and back and chest, as if he had the mange. The tip of one ear seemed to be singed clean off. He stretched out his neck and sniffed the corpse of the thing lying beside the roll-up door.

'Grab him outta there,' George said.

'No, he's all right,' I said.

As D scented at the limp and now unmoving tangle of pink tendrils on the thing's head, he whined again. Then he lifted his leg and pissed on the severed piece of trunk or horn or whatever it was. With that done he backed away, still whining.

I could hear a faint hiss. The smell of cabbage was getting stronger, and the yellow color was fading from the creature's flesh. It was turning white. Tiny, almost invisible ribbons of steam were starting to drift up. That's where the worst of the stench was, in that rising vapor. The thing had started to decompose, like the rest of the stuff that had come through.

'Shirley, go back inside,' I said. 'You've got a 99 to handle.'

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She blinked rapidly, like someone who is just coming to. 'The tanker,' she said. 'George S. Oh Lord, I forgot.'

'Take the dog with you,' I said.

'Yes. All right.' She paused. 'What about-?' She gestured at the tools scattered on the concrete, the ones we'd used to kill the creature as it lay against the door, mangled and screaming. Screaming what?

For mercy? Would it (or its kind) have accorded mercy to one of us, had our positions been reversed? I don't think so
. . .
but of course I wouldn't, would I? Because you have to get through first one night and then another and then a year of nights and then ten. You have to be able to turn off the lights and lie there in the dark. You have to believe you only did what would have been done to you. You have to arrange your thoughts because you know you can only live with the lights on so much of the time.

'I don't know, Shirley,' I said. I felt very tired, and the smell of the rotting cabbage was making me sick to my stomach. 'What the fuck does it matter, it's not like there's going to be a trial or an inquest or anything official. Go on inside. You're the PCO. So communicate.'

She nodded jerkily. 'Come on, Mister Dillon.'

I wasn't sure D would go with her but he did, walking neatly behind one of Shirley's brown low-heeled shoes. He kept whining, though, and just before they went out the side door he kind of shivered all over, as if he'd caught a chill.

'Weoughtta get out, too,' George said to Eddie. He started to rub at his eyes, realized he was still wearing gloves, and stripped them off. 'We've got a prisoner to take care of.'

Eddie looked as surprised as Shirley had when I reminded her that she had business to deal with over in Poteenville. 'Forgot all about the loudmouth sonofabitch,' he said. 'He broke his nose, George - I heard it.'

'Yeah?' George said. 'Oh what a shame.'

Eddie grinned. You could see him trying to pull it back. It widened, instead. They have a way of doing that, even under the worst of circumstances.
Especially
under the worst of circumstances.

'Go on,' I said. 'Take care of him.'

'Come with us,' Eddie said. 'You shouldn't be in here alone.'

'Why not? It's dead, isn't it?'

'That'snot.' Eddie lifted his chin in the Buick's direction. 'Goddam fake car's hinky, still hinky, and I mean to the max. Don't you feel it?'

'I feel something,' George said. 'Probably just reaction from dealing with that . . .' He gestured at the dead creature. '. . . that whatever-it-was.'

'No,' Eddie said. 'What you feel's coming from the goddam Buick, not that dead thing. It
breathes,
that's what I think. Whatever that car really is, it breathes. I don't think it's safe to be in here, Hud. Not for any of us.'

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'You're overreacting.'

'The hell I am.
It breathes.
It blew that pink-headed thing out on the exhale, the way you can blow a booger out of your nose when you sneeze. Now it's getting ready to suck back in. I tell you I can feel it.'

'Look,' I said, 'I just want one quick look around, okay? Then I'm going to grab the tarp and cover up

. . .
that.' I jerked my thumb at what we'd killed. 'Anything more complicated can wait for Tony and Curt. They're the experts.'

But calming him down was impossible. He was working himself into a state.

'You can't let them near that fake car until it sucks in again.' Eddie looked balefully at the Buick. 'And you better be ready for an argument on the subject. The Sarge'll want to come in and Curt will want to come in even more, but you can't let them. Because - '

'I know,' I said. 'It's getting ready to suck back in, you can feel it. We ought to get you your own eight hundred number, Eddie. You could make your fortune reading palms over the phone.'

'Yeah, go ahead, laugh. You think Ennis Rafferty's laugh-ing, wherever he is? I'm telling you what I know, whether you like it or not. It's breathing. It's what it's been doing all along. This time when it sucks back, it's going to be hard. Tell you what. Let me and George help you with the tarp. We'll cover the thing up together and then we'll all go out together.'

That seemed like a bad idea to me, although I didn't know exactly why. 'Eddie, I can handle this. Swear to God. Also, I want to take a few pictures of Mr E.T. before he rots away to nothing but stone-crab soup.'

'Quit it,' George said. He was looking a little green.

'Sorry. I'll be out in two shakes of a lamb's tail. Go on, now, you guys, take care of your subject.'

Eddie was staring at the Buick, standing there on its big smooth whitewall tires, its trunk open so its ass end looked like the front end of a crocodile. 'I hate that thing,' he said. 'For two cents - '

George was heading for the door by then, and Eddie followed without finishing what he'd do for two cents. It wasn't that hard to figure out, anyway.

The smell of the decaying creature was getting worse by the minute, and I remembered the Puff-Pak Curtis had worn when he'd come in here to investigate the plant that looked like a lily. I thought it was still in the hutch. There was a Polaroid camera, too, or had been the last time I looked. Very faint, from the parking lot, I heard George calling to Shirley, asking her if she was all right. She called back and said she was. A second or two later, Eddie yelled
'FUCK!'
at the top of his voice. Another country heard from. He sounded pissed like a bear. I figured his prisoner, probably high on drugs and with a broken nose to boot, had upchucked in the back of Unit 6. Well, so what? There are worse things than having a prisoner blow chunks in your ride. Once, while I was assisting at the scene of a three-car collision over in Patchin, I stashed the drunk driver who'd caused it all in the back of my unit for safekeeping while I set out some road flares. When I returned, I discovered that my subject had taken off his shirt and taken a shit in it. He then used one of the sleeves as a squeeze-tube - you have to imagine a baker decorating a cake to get what I'm trying to describe here - and wrote his name on both
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