Horror Within : 8 Book Boxed Set Page 12

  He dared to hope they would gouge each other’s eyes out, but they didn’t fight long, and gradually, they managed to climb. Near the top, however, one knocked the other off, and he hit the ground without even trying to break his fall. A moment later, the kid was up, foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog, and reaching for one of the many hanging ropes.

  Ropes hung everywhere like jungle vines, brighter strands of gray under the glowing moon. They braced the rope bridge and reinforced the other obstacles. Safety first, after all. Delphus grabbed the rope the kid was trying, and somewhat managing, to climb. He whittled through the rope and the kid thumped back to the ground. The kid shook off the fall and tried another rope. His right arm dangled at a weird angle. Fractured white bone gleamed through his bloody and dirty skin. The kid didn’t even notice. Luckily, he couldn’t climb well with only one arm.

  The other kid, shorter and angrier, like a gremlin, had made it to the top of the rope net and approached Delphus with uneven steps, yet somehow he didn’t fall over. He growled and chuckled at the same time. Bloody saliva trailed from his mouth.

  “You want me?” Delphus said. He held up the little knife. “Come on then.”

  The kid came for him. He swung his arms like a kitten batting at a catnip mouse. Delphus sliced the kid’s hands and blood spurted across him and over the wooden platform, but the kid kept coming. His mouth was wide, his tongue a black slug in a bloody pool.

  “You don’t back off, I’m going to show you your own eyeballs.”

  The kid did not back off. His grimy hands pawed at Delphus, tore his shirt, and his open mouth loomed larger and larger, like his jaw was dislocating, a snake swallowing a rat. He stank like he’d been eating from the pit in the outhouse.

  Delphus batted the kid’s arms away and stumbled back. His foot found the edge of the platform. Had the kid come at him then, they would have tumbled off down to the other kid, who was still trying to climb with a broken arm.

  Don’t know what they made on their citizenship grades, but I got to give them an A for effort here.

  Delphus kept his balance and went for the kid just as he came for Delphus. He aimed for the kid’s head, but the pocket knife pierced one of the kid’s swatting hands and sliced right through his palm. Delphus drove him back into the wooden post and jammed the knife as far into the wood as he could. The handle still protruded from the kid’s hand, but he was stuck. He reached for Delphus, tried to come at him, but he couldn’t move and he couldn’t figure out why. Blood streamed down the wooden post.

  “You can just forget about your merit badge,” Delphus said. The other kid had managed to climb a few feet before falling again. “That goes for you, too.”

  Delphus looked around, grabbed one of the hanging ropes, and tugged on it. He sure as hell wasn’t going through this whole obstacle course just to get down. If he descended the net rope, he’d probably get tangled or sprain something. If he slithered down the rope, the other kid might be on him too fast. Even with a broken arm, that kid would be hard to fight off if he moved fast. Especially since Delphus had no more weapons except his seven teeth.

  Guess I got to Tarzan it.

  He rolled up a length of rope, braced himself and took a running jump off the platform. The moment he was airborne, he feared he would lose his grip or even purposefully let go—Hooray, a quick death—but a second later, he was swinging through the air and the night breeze felt great, refreshing, and he could have unleashed a genuine Tarzan cry.

  The kid below stared up at him with a stupid expression, mouth gaping wide. Crazed kid probably thought Delphus actually was flying. If, that was, he thought anything except his teeth.

  Not quite in the same league with a Tarzan yell, Delphus yodeled with obnoxious, gleeful satisfaction. The sound echoed around him.

  His hands slipped on the rope and that pushed a tremble of fear through him and he lost his focus and then he was swinging directly at a support timber with a rope ladder dangling off it. He tried to redirect his weight but he was picking up momentum and all he could do was turn at the last second and take the hit on the back.

  All the air went out of him with a painful grunt and he lost his grip. His feet, however, saved him from a neck-breaking ground smack, tangling in the rope ladder and snaring him. The world spun around him.

  He couldn’t see the kid but he heard him making sloppy noises. Delphus dangled upside down, unable to do anything.

  A fly caught in a web.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Sheriff Hightower played his flashlight beam inside the dining hall. The place was quiet and dark. It looked no more or less disorganized from what he’d expect to see on any normal day.

  Normal.

  They had a better phrase for that where he used to work:Never happens.

  As in, a normal day where “you get coffee and a donut and shoot the breeze with your partner and then punch out and go home” never happens. A normal day, a real normal day, as in typical, meant that after half a sip of your coffee, there’s a call to a domestic disturbance or some early-morning robbery or some such civic disaster and off you go, coffee spilling on the ground, your head aching from all the beers you had last night, and not even an hour into your shift, you’re going to have some crack dealer’s blood on your uniform and some twisted-out hooker yelling in your face.

  That was a normal day.

  And that was why Hightower had booked his way into the country.

  Well, that and Chop chop.

  Somewhere in the woods, someone screamed. Hightower stepped away from the dining hall and glanced in all directions. Another scream came, this one less powerful, and it faded away rapidly. Impossible to tell from where the scream had come. He wouldn’t do much good bumbling around in the dark woods.

  He glanced back inside the dining hall, just a quick sweep, but the light caught a smear of blood on the floor.

  Damn.

  Not normal.

  He entered the dining hall. Grease stains marked the picnic tables like lesions. The blood smear looked like someone had stepped on it and, looking at it again, maybe wasn’t much of a big deal at all. Some kid probably cut his hand on the old wood or a stray nail. Place probably ought to be razed, not that he’d say that to Eva Dean. It used to be a picnic shelter, where families would gather after church for their reunions. It was the camp’s oldest structure, although much of the kitchen equipment was new.

  He heard something in the back, maybe in the kitchen. He paused. It might have been nothing. He really ought to check out that scream.

  Yeah, you should. What, are you scared, Firewood?

  He heard it again. It sounded like whispering.

  He walked quietly to the back of the room where a crooked doorway led into the dark kitchen.

  When he was closer, he heard the whispering more clearly. He paused, and strained to hear.

  “Somethin’ funky about the biscuits.”

  Biscuits?

  Hightower stepped into the doorway and found the light switch on the wall. The room bloomed with a sickly yellow glow. A fat man stood at the stove, back to Hightower. A platter of biscuits sat on the counter. The guy was stirring something in a skillet. It smelled sweet like sausage. Hightower hadn’t been to this camp more than a few times but he figured this guy was the one everyone called Booger.

  “Biscuits?” Hightower asked.

  Booger sniffed at one and then placed it on a cutting board to his right. A giant cleaver appeared in his hand and swooped down through the biscuit with a heavythwunk.

  “Got moldy and turned,” Booger said.

  “Yum. Just like mama used to make.”

  Booger glanced at him over one rounded shoulder. His eyes looked red and somehow unsteady. “Don’t be talkin’ about my mama.”

  “Pardon me. You mind explaining what’s going on around here?”

  “What’s going on around where?”

  “You know. People killing each other.”

  “Oh, that. Boys wil
l be boys.” Booger sniffed part of the severed biscuit. He seemed pleased, excited even.

  “I think it’s some kind of infectious outbreak. I’ll be calling in the health department.”

  CHOP!—the cleaver swung down violently into the cutting board. The tip wedged into the board and the cleaver vibrated in place. “Don’t bring those pencilnecks out here. They gave me a B sanitation rating.”

  “Yeah, well, this is bigger than both of us.”

  “Whatever,” Booger said. He sounded like he had a cold. “I got to get dinner on the table.”

  “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “Damn kids ain’t had no breakfast this morning. Got to be sure they all eat.”

  “Link sausages?”

  “Yeah, want some?”

  “Smells good. But I got to run—this is my first murder case, and it’s shaping up to be a doozy.”

  “You keep an eye out. I can handle these kids if anything happens here.”

  “Right.” Hightower waited another moment, watching Booger’s back with a sense that something wasn’t right. Well, of course, as he had said, people were killing each other, but this guy was just cooking dinner. Heck, he didn’t even seem fazed.Boys will be boys. Had he really just said that?

  “You sure you’re okay?” the sheriff asked.

  Booger grunted. In Appalachia country, that meant both,I’m fineandGo to hell, Law Man. Hightower nodded at the guy’s back and headed out through the dining hall.

  Those sausages did smell pretty good.

  - - -

  The man-formerly-known-as-Booger had just had a conversation with someone but he had already forgotten everything he’d said.

  His mind and his mouth no longer worked in collusion but out of reflex, though it amounted to the same. Booger had no sense of understanding what had happened to him, but if he could have been capable of self-reflection (not that the old Booger ever partook in that particular activity much, either) he would have wondered if the strange disease eating away at him was also preserving him and, more than that, tapping into his brain synapses to control vocal response.

  And for what? Self-preservation, of course. Perpetuation of the infection.

  Every dog had its day and every virus and bacteria adapted in order to survive.

  You kill the head and the body dies, you kill the host and the guests have nowhere to sleep. You kill the appetite and you starve to death.

  He turned the browning sausages in the skillet. The sizzling grease popped and flared for a moment. What was left of Booger could not quite process that the meat in the hot pan was actually his intestines spilling from his mauled gut. A bubble formed in the intestines and popped and brownish slop gushed into the pan.

  A piece of half-digested biscuit oozed out of the cavity as well.

  Mama would be proud.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The thing that used to be Freddie didn’t really see the hanging man as a man, but it knew the thing was food. And the food was trapped. Freddie grinned and chuckled and approached the hanging meat.

  Freddie had once been a decent enough kid, living in a peaceful suburban town. Then he’d made friends with the type of people his teachers called “unseemly” and somehow that alone was enough to make people think he was some kind of loser. People shook their heads and gave him those looks that said,Wow, what a waste. So, screw them. They thought he was a loser, why not be one? He’d gotten caught in the convenience store with a six-pack under his coat.

  All his lame friends fled, but Freddie didn’t dime them out. He even told the arresting cop that they could put him in the “Big House” and Freddie still wouldn’t talk. The cop chuckled. “You’ll talk.”

  But he hadn’t. Freddie wasn’t a squealer. First offense, the typical slap on the wrist in exchange for the promise that he’d “take steps.” So, they sent him here.

  Some step.

  One of Freddie’s arms swung uselessly alongside him as he walked. He almost fell several times, too eager to get to the old man.Go. Eat.

  The man smelled foul, but that didn’t matter to the Freddie-thing. Sweet or foul, meat was meat. The man wasn’t even moving, not trying to untangle his feet from the rope ladder, not screaming in fear. But he wasn’t dead. Freddie knew that, though he didn’t know how he knew that.

  He stopped a foot from the man and his grin grew even wider. Slimy mucus slipped down his chin and splattered on the ground.

  The Freddie-thing sniffed the hanging man and chuckled. With his good arm, he grabbed what the man had for hair and yanked his head toward Freddie’s widening mouth.

  The man’s eyes opened.

  Too late to scream, the Freddie-thing thought in a moment of strange clarity.

  Something rushed at him from behind. He felt it flying through the air, but he did not turn before whatever it was smacked him heavily in the back. He remembered the cop grabbing the collar of his coat, of it pulling tight around the beer, of the cop spinning him around.

  For a moment, Freddie was back in time, back at his Moment of Ill Decision, as his mother called it. Then something like pain—but not quite because pain had really ceased to be—flared in his back. His grin leveled out, he stumbled away from the hanging man, and he hit the ground.

  “Got ‘em,” a woman said.

  “Best shot in the Blue Ridge,” the hanging man said.

  The Freddie-thing tried to get at the thing lodged in his back but he couldn’t reach. He writhed in the dirt, confused.Run. Run. Run. He grunted and groaned, unable to get his feet under him. Unable to obey the panicked instructions from his diseased mind.

  People approached. People taking steps.

  “Poor little guy,” the woman said.

  “Let him suffer,” the man said. “And for Christ’s sake, get me down already.”

  - - -

  Samantha was on the phone and Lewis was back at the microscope, still not quite believing what he was seeing. The cells should be dead and yet there they were, living, dividing, morphing,multiplying.

  Samantha turned from the phone. “Sheriff’s not in. They said he went up to Meat Camp.”

  “Think something’s going on?” Lewis said and turned back to the microscope.

  “Dispatch said other dogs have been reported missing. They got a missing boy, too.”

  “We should notify the state.”

  Damn things just kept multiplying and multiplying.

  “We’d better make sure first. They weren’t too happy the last time we called.”

  “A rabid goat is big news, no matter what they want to say about it.”

  Samantha started to respond but a scuffing and thumping sound silenced her. It was coming from the back room.

  “Did you put the dogs in for the night?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “There’s nothing back there but—”

  They shared a look of equal confusion and worry.

  Nothing back there but a dead dog.

  Thump. Thump.

  - - -

  It took a few minutes, but Eva Dean and Jenny got Delphus untangled. One of the campers, Freddie, squirmed on the ground, an arrow shaft jutting from his back. Freddie formed no words in his pain, just odd choked, liquid gasps. He gagged on blackish-looking blood. Eva Dean had to stop herself from going to him. Something was seriously wrong with him but there was nothing she could do.

  Another kid—Benny, it looked like—was up on one of the wood platforms, making a sound like a cross between a howl and a chuckle. He was on his feet but somehow stuck up there. It had to be a virus or something like a virus. People didn’t just go crazy. Not like this, anyway. Insanity wasn’t contagious.

  Sure, mob mentality led to genocide, but such social infections were slow and systematic, usually nurtured by a few powerful psychopaths. Meat Camp had gone mad seemingly overnight.

  Delphus dusted off his overalls and gave her his “What did you expect?” look. She told him to go ahead and say it. “Say what?”

&n
bsp; “‘I told you so.’”

  “I said the camp was a pain in the ass, not a bite out of your ass.”

  “What did you do to Benny up there?”

  “Me? Miniature buzzard-brains tried to gut me with his hands.” Delphus took a few unsteady steps and looked up at the squirming kid. “I stabbed him with my pocket knife. Damn idiot can’t figure out why he’s stuck.”

  “Like a zombie?” Jenny asked.

  Delphus shrugged. “They’s plenty more kids around. How many of them arrows you got?”

  “Three.”

  “Well, don’t waste one on him.”

  “We’re going to leave him up there?” Eva Dean said. That wasn’t right, no matter what was wrong with the poor kid.

  “Now, just hold on,” Delphus said to her. “I see it in your face. You want to help him. You think you can turn his life around and point him to the straight and narrow. Well, I got news for you. Some things are jammed so far up the devil’s behind that you’ll never shine a light on them.”

  “But I have to try—”

  “You try to help him and he’s gonna chew your lips off.” Delphus went to Freddie, who was still groaning but quieter now, and grabbed the arrow. He twisted it a few times and Freddie twitched and growled.

  “Daddy, stop it.”

  “Little bastard,” Delphus said. “Try to eat my face.” The arrow pulled free with a sickening wet suction sound. He held it up. Clotted grue stuck to the arrowhead.

  He gave it to Jenny. “Make it four arrows.”

  - - -

  Samantha and Lewis stood at the lab door that kept the back room sealed. From the other side, no mistake about it, they heard sniffing and whining and now scratching on the door.

  “You sure the infected dog is the only one in there?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “The dead one.”

  “Yep.”

  The scratching was more insistent. A dog eager to play. Or attack.

  “And it doesn’t sound so dead now.”

  “Nope.”

  Lewis glanced back at the microscope and then took the door handle. “Should I?”