Untitled.FR11 (25 page)

“Just a minute,” Katt said.

Sherry stopped, sensing something in Katt’s voice. A coating of soil, like dark batter, climbed her arms.

“Oh god,” their buried nemesis moaned, “oh god oh god oh god.” Beneath his chin, the fresh-tossed earth grained out in lightly packed clumps. Later, they’d tamp it down, make it look as it had before.

Katt set the spade on the ground.

Above his head, she knelt.

She placed her hands on his forehead, where soil held him in curled embrace above the hairline.

He awakened to groin-pain, head hurting, bruises when he breathed. On the ground. As he’d been back then, back when his slab of a mother had insisted he go to school and Jenkin, Bart, and Sarno had led day after day of noontime torment, kicking and pouring while the behind-handers made palm cups in front of their mouths and did nothing to stop them. But no kickers and pourers tormented him now. Just the naked duo he’d clonked in the cabin, busty girl-fucks, no longer behind-hand, no longer giggling and watching and doing nothing, but now doing everything. The sexy one was pum-

meling him below, doing mayhem to his seeder and to the balls that fed it. Her fury, so great he could feel their whole race behind it, brought home the agony he had always known lay at the heart of the universe. Before this, that agony had trickled out, an idle drib and drab around the illusion of content; now, it no longer hid, but blasted full and punishing as unleashed firehose water, breathing nearly impossible in the face of its rage. His crotch screamed in a scandal of ravage, far beyond recoverable pain.

Then she left off.

She was gone but not done, leaving him writhing in an agony of moans. The moon-man, up above through his tears, had his O mouth open in commiserative woes. He lit up the black sky, still black, and the tall tops of trees, sweeps of rusde way high up. Foreboding. The fat one impassive stood near. She’d smashed his hand, then brought night in to claim him. Sly bitch under her mommy facade. She made no move, but awaited the return of the other. Then he saw her eyes perk up, felt the earth pound with running, and—punch and puncture below, oh god the impaling, some lethal something thrust through his seeder and beyond, in where a coil of shit lay like a thick dark snake, viscera torn and befouled. He’d die, he’d die—and it couldn’t happen soon enough for him.

But when he heard them talk of burial, there was life enough left in him to protest. He needed doctors. An end to this nightmare, wash him, patch him, make it all better again. But they dragged him, every movement an agony, and dropped him and packed him in dirt, the stuff getting into his mouth and nearly choking him. He craned his neck back and prayed they’d let him breathe, the next gasp, the next after that, even though the pain was so pervasive he ached for oblivion.

He throbbed immobile in the earth, a packing crate of hurts. His face lay at the bottom of a shallow bowl, rise of dirt gradual to its rim. “Just a minute,” the ugly one said, and he could see her eye-achers spill over where she knelt, unflattering bladder things. Her hands banded wide ribbons of warmth across his forehead.

“Oh god oh god,” he was saying, but the litany slowed at her soothe. Insane. She was looking for something. A presence joined him in his head. It was her, somehow. He felt her assess him, review his life, find his failings in swift survey, his kindnesses. She homed in—he could feel how encompassing she was—on his goal, on the raw thoughts that had obsessed him so magnificently since Waco, even on memories of his failures, with April and Amy and his other misattempts at planetwide undoing of their sex.

She was planning to hoodwink him, disable him, unbend his resolve. He couldn’t have that. The bitch was trying to “cure” him, to normalize him, was his guess. With what small give his earth restraint allowed, he neck-wiggled to squirm free of her touch. But it was hopeless. Something was happening in his head, some transformation he couldn’t resist. “Don’t, please,” he managed, but she was deaf and her eyes remained shut and the blood-smeared redhead stood sleek as a goddess in the moonlight, watching.

But no.

It wasn’t curing him she was about.

She affirmed the truth of his suspicions, found them, unfolded conclusions he’d not yet reached. They formed an earthspanning network, all right. But he’d misjudged them as to intent. Not merely to populate the planet by luring men inside them, but to replace them en masse, spawns only of girl-babies—that was their goal. He’d been sending the wrong message entirely. Lay off the seeders, he’d thought as he drilled; keep them out of your baby-holes. But they despised seeders completely, lusted for women exclusively.

And as he watched through his earth-packed pain, they tantalized more and more. Tremors roared in his bones and bruised flesh. The redhead radiated desire; his shameless need for her bounced back as if it were hers for him. Her two burled points tipped up, below where he’d drilled her. Tight milk-givers, tit-suck, soft damned stereo nipples at work on him, turning him crazy. He was spewing words, had been for some time. They spilled out too fast to register any meaning, and all he could see were the behind-hander’s damned eye-achers and the tufts and curls of her baby-hole tormenting with its allure. Even the fat ugly dugs of the bitch stroking his forehead tempted his flesh, and he felt the confined squirm of his body and the ruined rise of his seeder pressing in pain against the earth. The power they wielded shot into him with such savagery that even

through the trauma of mutilation he felt a raw stiffening, a pain-column of ravaged erection. Amidst the ruins of his groin jagged the Mercurochrome sting of a ripped wound.

His words came faster, scarcely time to breathe. The redhead was clearly stirred. Her mouth moved. Rumble too above him. But he babbled over it. The limbs of the sexy bitch shifted, rubs of labia like a frenzied invitation as she walked. They were going to enjoy him together, but he sizzled with far too much excitement to wait, his body was not able to stop itself long enough to be dug out, for the twin bitches to grope him in the grave—and he felt soiled seed arc out through unspeakable pain, a kind of love, and of hatred, his eyes on them, on the redhead slinking forth to kneel down and touch his face, her palms approaching as jags of sexfire again razored up the ruins of his flesh.

Touching him to drop him into the ground was as close as Sherry could manage for a while. Her anger, though the planting of the earth flag had defused some of it, rippled still in her. It had felt so good to scurry dirt over him and hear him whine. By god, she should have brought Derek to trial, made him pay, gouged him good right smack in the groin of his bank account, his time, made it so he’d never hurt anyone again.

But then she paused. The bastard’s head lay ear-deep in the earth. His body angled down, and all she could see were his neck and head, emerging from the solid earth like a baby struggling to be born. They were going to kill him as surely as anyone had ever been killed. She felt a high hot radiance coursing through her bones. There was also a hint of ought-not creeping in. They could still choose to exhume him, turn him in. Ah, but then he’d exist, and she would know he existed, stuck in some loony bin somewhere, thinking about her and thinking about Katt. That couldn’t be. That would eat at her. She deserved peace. And this warped bastard deserved to die. Would doubts come back to haunt her? It didn’t matter. Not now. All that mattered was that his life end here.

She watched her lover lean forward, setting her hands on his forehead. She thought at first that Katt would try to unwarp him, to show him the insanity of his ways before they laid him low. But then his moaning turned to babble, and it was clear that Katt, perhaps recalling news reports about what he’d done, was coaxing his insanity on its way.

It disgusted and excited, this turn of events. Dirt-smeared face rumbled and pooled with all the loathsomeness the earth had ever spewed forth. His moving lips (Derek’s lips, Derek’s mouth) painted the night sky with a perverse rant against women, against humanity itself. The sputters of sound flew by too quickly, too incoherently, even to be parsed and understood, fricatives riding over flows of hot laval invective. But scattered phrases dug deep into her, and his driving tone—unstoppable, an insane blend of lust and hatred—pushed her anger to new heights of frenzy.

Sherry moved toward him now unhurriedly, but with one steady purpose. Katt withdrew her fingers and eased back, resting on her knees; she knew, without Sherry’s having to tell her, what had to happen. The bastard’s eyes tracked Sherry as he spat forth his venom, spurts of glossolalia, the incomprehensible babble of the possessed. Those eyes invaded her privacy, claimed her, a male prerogative she’d felt countless times before. She knelt over him, arching her body to torment him. She’d swear, if she didn’t know better, that the fucker was coming.

Katt had tamped down the dirt over his body, but even so, Sherry’s knees sank wide frowns in the soft mound that covered him. She felt as though she were gazing down into a coffin, its head-lid open and off. Scoop after scoop of earth would wipe out that vile face, which lay in its deep earth-tureen like a stone caught in the ground.

Eyes that raped: She covered them first, palm pats of soil caked thick on the lowered lids, not touching him but feeling his brow move under an inch of earth and imagining his foul breath touching her skin, invading her lungs with each inhalation. Then she reached out away from him, left and right, cupped hillocks of dirt, large ones, bulldozing them down into the depression. The first scoops he fought like a madman, spitting and spewing as best he could. But she kept on. She reached out, grabbed more soil again and again, brought her hands together, shut out the sound, the sight, pressing down, overwhelming him with the weight and volume of her offerings. These were alien hands; and they were her hands. Patch by patch, pat by pat, his face went under, stayed under.

In the moonlight Sherry rose, feeling taller than she had ever felt. Terror and joy coexisted in her.

She placed one foot on the soil over the left side of his face, the other over the right. The dirt packed down. She felt tremors through the soles of her feet, like seeds preparing to sprout into the night air. They had a hearty need for life, those seeds. The tremors lasted far longer than seemed possible. Then the earth quieted beneath her. It grew calm, resigned. Katt, sitting alert on the ground nearby, watched Sherry intently, a question in her eyes.

“He’s gone,” Sherry said. She was standing on death. She’d driven death into the man who’d drilled her body—no measure the law would have allowed, but it felt right even as it felt wrong. She’d never felt more alive. It amazed her how rightness could so blend with wrongness at one and the same time.

“Yes,” Katt said, “gone and buried.” She didn’t seem at all triumphant, simply affirming.

They were both sober and stunned.

“Help me off him.” It was absurd. All it took was a step. But she felt as though she were balanced on a small piece of driftwood in a sea alive with sharks. If she had no help, she would slip off and be torn to pieces.

Rising, Katt held out a hand.

Sherry took it, still standing there. “We must never tell anyone,” she said. “Some secrets are best kept close to the heart. This is one of them.”

“Yes, I know,” Katt agreed, her hand reassuring where it gripped Sherry’s.

Sherry felt relieved. She stepped off the corpse and moved into her lover’s arms, earth and blood on them both, a gritty surface between them. Where rage had festered in her, a replacing calm now held sway.

On high, the trees rustled, this time with assurance. Holding Katt, she stood in the moonlight, again amazed how vibrant and full of contradictory emotion everything felt. How could one be contrite and triumphant at the same time?

And yet she was.

She sensed Katt was too.

“We’ll clean ourselves as much as we can.” Katt, her face lightly frenzied, had lapsed into mommy mode already. “Let’s keep the grit off the carpet. We’ll shower up, get dressed. Whatever he drove’s probably nearby. We’ll lose it somewhere. Along with the spikes and the drill. It’ll be okay. You’ll see. It’ll be okay.”

Sherry couldn’t tell if Katt really meant that. Okay seemed remotely possible, but she had a feeling they might have a long way to go before they reached it.

She watched Katt snatch up the killer’s keychain from where it had fallen.

“I love you, Katt,” she said, feeling suddenly a need for assurance of some kind.

“I love you too.”

“And this will be our secret forever?”

“I’ll never tell anyone.” Truth spoke in her. “It’s true. Some secrets are meant to be kept. And this is one of them, just like you said.” A tremor seized her and she stilled it against Sherry in a tight embrace. “Oh, dear,” she said. “This isn’t going to be easy, is it?”

“No, it’s not.”

“But we’ll get through it?” asked Katt. “You’ll help me find my way through it?”

She nodded. “I will, if you’ll do the same.”

Sherry’d been worried that Katt would feel obliged to bring in the law. Now relief flooded her. A bond of love had begun to form between them. This turn of events, that might have sundered it, only strengthened it.

Katt kissed Sherry lightly on the cheek. Sherry felt the warmth of her lover’s tears where their faces touched. “Let’s go,” Katt said. “We have lots to do.”

She was right. They did.

Hand in hand, they moved off toward the cabin, a full ripe moon lighdng their way from the killer’s grave.

Sherry stood with an arm around Conner, some distance from the grave where Katt knelt. It was Saturday. A mere five days since they’d killed a man. In the soft wafts of a sunny September day, mother and son had shared a time at Marcus’s burial plot.

Now it was Katt’s turn alone.

Sherry observed her lover kneeling at the grave.

She looked beautiful there. It wasn’t fair, that she had lost so good a man. He’d cheated, sure. But many men did, and still made reasonable husbands. And it was clear that she and Conner loved him and grieved deeply.