Pill parked his truck in Bunny’s driveway, just like he was doing nothing more than dropping some friends off after a movie. When he got out, he took his gun with him. John watched as the old man walked around the truck to the bed, where Riley, his daughter, and Bunny sat.
“Might should have listened to me, shouldn’t you, Sheriff?” Pill said, leaning into the back of the pickup and looking at Riley.
“What the fuck were you trying to pull back there, Pill!” Riley looked furious, his face red with rage and trembling.
“You know him?” asked John.
“I know him all right. Crazy old man. You crazy fucking old man, you could have killed us!”
“Calm down. Calm down. I just needed to prove a point. Let you all see how serious this situation is.”
Riley lunged at Pill, placing his hands around the man’s neck.
“Riley!” Erma screamed. She’d scooted all the way over to the driver’s side and was kicking the door open. “Stop him, John!”
“Don’t stop him,” said Bunny, watching from the truck bed, her expression blank. “That man drove us right into those monsters!”
“You going to kill ’im, Daddy?” Izzy looked up at her father, her face bright with interest. Riley looked down at her and back at Pill, who did nothing to fight him. Finally, Riley dropped his hands.
“I aim to keep me and my little girl alive,” he said. Izzy stuck her hand into her mouth and began to suck on it, as if enjoying the show of her father’s speech. “Whatever it takes,” Riley said, leaning into Pill’s face. “Don’t you pull that shit again.”
“You’ll understand, later,” said Pill, who looked completely calm. But when Pill thought no one was watching him, John saw, the old man pushed both of his hands into his pockets to hide them. John could see them shaking, even beneath the denim.
“Now,” said Pill, keeping his voice steady, “I said maybe you should have listened to me before. You ready to listen to me now?”
He gave away nothing, John thought. Not a sign of his nerves or fear.
“I’ve got my little girl here, and my aunt…. ”
“You have to save us!” Bunny lunged forward, past Riley and Izzy, and grabbed hold of the front of Pill’s overalls. “You’ve got to save us! Do you know what’s going on here? Do you?” Bunny’s eyes rolled wildly in her head, and John, who’d stepped out of the truck behind Pill, thought the woman had never looked more like her namesake than now, her large front teeth showing from between her lips, too dry with nerves to cover them.
“Ma’am, what I need you to do right now is just calm down.”
“I need you to tell me what the fuck is going on!” Bunny spat the words.
Riley gently pushed his daughter off his lap and took his aunt’s shoulders, turning her to face him. He had pulled himself together, and John could see a hardness in the man that must make him a good cop. “Come on, Aunt Bunny,” Riley said. “We’re all confused here, let’s just calm down.”
Behind him, Izzy began to cry. “Daddy!” she screamed, holding out her arms. “I want up. Up!” Riley grabbed the girl up out of the truck’s rusted white bed and folded her to him. Watching them, John’s heart flipped over as he realized that the little girl would be forever changed by what she witnessed today.
On the horizon the human screaming, unified now, the sound of a pack, drew closer.
“Sheriff,” said Pill, “I’m afraid we don’t have time for any of this drama. You still got your gun on you?”
“I do,” said Riley, reaching down and pulling a small pistol out of his sock. “Thankfully. I’d be dead by now if I didn’t.”
“That’ll be fine for a start,” said Pill, ignoring the jab. “What I want you to do is get these women and your little girl into the house. And be careful. John said he saw one of them in the garage.”
“One of them,” said Riley, rolling the last word around in his mouth as if tasting it, testing it out. “What are they, exactly?”
“They’re Feeders,” said Pill. “And they’re coming for us.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” Riley asked. “And how do you—”
The howling on the horizon rose to an earsplitting roar, and Pill cut Riley off, whistling for Maxie. She leapt down the high truck over Erma’s lap and went directly to Pill’s side. “You really want to stand out here and discuss it, son?”
From the corner of his eye, John saw Bunny draw a deep breath and step away from the dog, and he remembered the woman’s earlier reaction to Maxie. Maybe she did have an allergy to dogs, but she was scared of them, too. Badly scared. Maxie ignored her, however, and sat patiently beside Pill, licking the man’s hand.
“Let’s get inside,” Pill said. “Those walls ain’t much, but they can keep us hidden long enough for me to try to explain some of this to you.”
“Fine,” said Riley. “But if you don’t make sense and make sense quick once we’re in there, whatever is out here won’t be the only thing coming for you.”
John opened the door on his own side and helped Erma out, turning to look toward the garage in case the man he’d seen earlier might be sneaking up on them. A Feeder. That was what Pill had called him.
Feeders.
“John?” Erma said, holding tightly to her husband’s hand.
“What is it, sweetheart?”
“I’m just glad, that’s all. That if it has to happen…if something happens here, we fixed us first. You and me. That we’re okay.”
John pulled her to him and held her. “Me too.”
Feeders. The word replayed itself in his mind as he stepped away from Erma and led her in a jog toward Bunny’s front door, following the sheriff and his small group. Pill stayed with Maxie by the truck, his shotgun held at his shoulder to cover them as they ran.
Bunny fumbled in her purse for the house key as everyone waited on the porch nervously. Pill limped across the yard, gun out, and joined the rest of them as Bunny clicked open the lock.
Everyone piled inside, Pill entering last, slamming the door behind him. But even with it shut and locked, they could hear the screaming growing louder, the mass approaching.
The Feeders were coming.
Javier Martinez swerved across the street, the ax, now covered in more of the black blood, clutched tightly to his chest. He had not yet made it to the church, but he’d already killed four more of them. The town was quieting down now. They, whatever they were, had gotten most of the people. Either that, or whoever was left was hiding, but after having seen three more sets of the monsters in human skin feeding, Javier didn’t think the latter was very likely.
He himself couldn’t last much longer. Javier looked behind him to the pile of human bodies, three of them, that he’d left in the street. The two on the bottom had been kids he’d seen with Mabel on several occasions, walking home from school. A blond girl and a boy with dark hair and a pierced lip. He guessed they might have been on the cross-country team with her. When he arrived, the boy was already dead, and the girl was missing her left arm. The creature, a monster wearing what looked to be the flesh of a middle-aged house-mom, was working on the blond girl’s right arm. She hung above her, crouched, balancing herself on just one arm. They were strong, these creatures, that was one thing Javier had noticed. They also had amazingly advanced senses. The woman spun around. As she turned and Javier brought the ax down, he noticed that the woman was probably his mom’s age, and had bright brown eyes and arched, nicely shaped eyebrows. Maybe she’d been pretty at one point in time. It was hard to tell with all the blood smeared on her face.
He took the house-mom’s head off with a single blow from the ax (he’d sharpened it with a home knife sharpener that he’d found in an open garage just a few houses back—he kept it now in the side pocket of the hunting vest, which he’d also stolen). The blond girl looked up at him with relief and gratitude, and then promptly died.
Oh, well.
Oh, well.
Wasn’t his problem. He didn’t care who lived. Only who died. Only who he could kill. He fingered the splintered handle of the ax with a bare hand, letting a piece of the wood prick his skin and work its way under his flesh.
Didn’t matter.
Nothing mattered.
He was headed toward the church, toward the Feast, where, from the sounds of it, all hell had broken loose. Good. Fine by him. Javier knew hell all right. He could get down with that ball of flames, that finger-flopping, body-plopping death dance. Hell was just awesome by him. He’d been living in it since this morning.
A shape appeared in the path across from him. Javier lifted his ax, but then stopped as the shape unexpectedly solidified into a recognizable form. A man. A man Javier had seen almost every day of his life since he’d arrived in Cavus. Otto. Otto Blomgren, who worked with Javier on the line at the factory and liked to invent stories about Javier’s conquests of women and then tell them to the rest of the line just to watch Javier blush. But it had all been in good fun, and Javier had found in Otto the closest thing to a friend that he had at the factory.
Otto continued to approach, and for a wonder, the man looked completely sane, completely normal. In fact, he walked toward Javier with a hand raised in greeting. And he spoke.
“Javier. Good God, man, am I glad to see you.”
Javier paused, the ax raised. “Otto?”
“Javier!” Otto took another step forward. “What’s going on?” There was a tremble in the man’s voice that betrayed his fear. Javier dropped his ax completely to his side and hurried to him. He hadn’t thought it would feel so good to see another human! He hadn’t wanted to, hadn’t wanted to see anyone at all, only to cut the heads of these monsters free from their bodies.
When he reached Otto, he held his hand out for his coworker to shake. Instead, Otto pulled Javier forward into a tight embrace. “Javier, man, you look like you’ve been through hell.”
“I’ve taken down a few of the bastards,” Javier said. “I plan on taking down a few more.”
“Are you okay?” Otto still held him tightly, and although the embrace was growing uncomfortable, Javier did not pull away.
“They killed my mother. And my sister. They killed my little sister.” Javier’s voice broke, and he did not try to hold back the tears.
Otto pulled him tighter. “It’s okay, my man. You can cry. Don’t fight it. Don’t fight it, Javier. You’re pretty upset, aren’t you?”
“Damn right I’m upset.” He could smell the sweat rising from Otto’s body, and it was beginning to make his stomach knot. It smelled of iron and mud and a little like piss. Had the man been so afraid that he’d wet himself? Otto squeezed him tighter.
“Of course you are. How old was she?”
“Four.”
“Four years old. Probably still had a pretty tight little pussy, then, didn’t she, man?”
Javier stiffened. “What did you say?”
“Hey, relax, hombre. I just said she probably had a tight little pussy. Isn’t that right? Don’t all you beaners like to keep it in the family? Mexican pride and all that.”
Javier struggled to pull away, but Otto held him tight. The man’s strength was unreal. Javier couldn’t even draw a breath. But though his body was pinned, his mind worked on, and in less than a second, the details of the situation clicked into place, the pieces fitting neatly together. Otto was one of Them.
And although Javier had been planning on dying today, he couldn’t let himself do it here. Not without avenging the filth that had just fallen from that man’s lips. No, not man. Demon.
“Let me go.”
“Relax, hombre. Just chill.” Javier felt Otto shifting above him, although he couldn’t tell what he was doing. The breath leaked out of his lungs, one painful gasp at a time. There again was the piss smell of the man, stronger now. Javier tried to turn his head away, but Otto pulled him closer, pulled him into the red-and-blue plaid of his flannel shirt…soft, really. Soft enough to just fall into and forget. Let it happen. But Otto shifted and then there was the skin of Otto’s arm, its surface covered in coarse black curls of hair, and these curls tickled Javier’s cheek, tickled and poked and worked against his skin like a hundred tiny ant feet, needling, needling, irritating to rage with their maddening lightness. Javier lowered his head and butted it into Otto’s chest, but the blow contained no power. He was too close.
“I’m going to give you a little something,” Otto said. “It won’t work right away, so I’ll have to knock you out after you eat it, so you’ll calm down a little. Should have had a communion wafer, my man. That shit was instantaneous. Powerful.”
“Let…me…go! I don’t know…what you’re…talking about.”
“Don’t fight it. Just admit it. Admit your sins, man. They’re beautiful. You’re beautiful, you humans with your dirt and your filth and your sins. It’s the trying to cover them that’s wrong.”
“Fuck…you.” The world around him began to go black as the last of the air in Javier’s lungs departed. He had to think. Javier willed himself to focus. Just think of one thing. Think of what was cutting off his air. Javier stilled and let the image of Otto’s face form behind his closed eyes.
Whatever was holding him might not be Otto anymore, might not be human, but if Javier had learned anything from his encounters with Them, he knew that although they were stronger than normal, quicker than normal, they could still die.
Javier felt his hands, pinned against Otto’s body. Their circulation was failing, but he could still feel them, and, tentatively, he moved him. Yes. Just there, he could feel a softness behind the denim. With his remaining consciousness, Javier dug his fingers into the softness of Otto’s groin and squeezed. He felt the denim crush beneath him and under that something soft gave, and then resisted, and then a popping sound. Otto immediately let go of the boy and doubled over into himself.
“Why did you do that, my man?” Otto grunted from his doubled-over position. He looked up, hands clasping his balls. “Why?” Now he was laughing. “Why? Why? Why? Why?” he laughed. “Why?”
Shaking, Javier drew in long, painful breaths, the air singing his windpipe. Already Otto was standing up again.
It was just a game to Them, just a sick fucking game. Well, Javier could play games, too, couldn’t he?
Behind him, he was momentarily distracted by the roar of an engine as a rusted-out old truck sped down the street. In the back, he saw an overweight man with a little girl on his lap. For a second, their eyes met, but Javier quickly tore his away and returned to the task at hand, studying the clean, white spot of Otto’s forehead.
Javier brought the ax down in one fluid swing, neatly splitting Otto’s face in two. For seconds it continued to laugh. Javier went to it and stomped his boot on it. Again and again. For his sister. For his mother. For himself. Finally, the laughter stopped.
He did not allow himself to waste any time looking at the body, thinking about what he’d done. Instead, he moved onward, toward the church.
He’d hoped to arrive at the building for a final showdown and then to die while he fought. Instead, when he arrived, he found the church silent and still, its doors flung open, one swinging on its hinges, the nightmares of its bowels voided, the creatures fled.
No matter. They were somewhere. He had only to follow the bodies. They lay everywhere along the street; Javier began to walk among Them. He didn’t have to walk far.
Ahead of him, he saw the shape of a girl run past. She had short black hair and seemed to be in a panic, although as far as he could tell no one was chasing her.
She looked, from all appearances, normal. But he knew that They were tricky. He knew that They could look just like everyone else when They wanted to.
The girl hardly seemed to see him as she raced through the streets, her feet catching in the ridiculous high heels she was wearing.
They liked to play dress-up, too. He’d learned that from Mabel.
Javier readied the ax, and turned toward the girl.
Star walked through Them without harm. There was no explanation for it. They were all around her, those people like her father, but not one of them bothered her. It was as if she were invisible. Once, she thought she saw a woman walking beside her, a woman in a white dress who looked a little like her mother, but when Star turned there was no one there.
She wouldn’t have cared if there was. Whatever calm she’d found in the prayer was gone. Or maybe not gone, but changed. Star finally understood that, for better or worse, it was over. There wasn’t a purpose to it anymore. There was no point to staying alive. She’d left her father, who was now, she had no doubt, dead. Her mother was dead. Her friend was no more—the fact that her earthly body still walked didn’t matter. And as for Star? She was nothing. Less than nothing. At any moment, she could become one of those things feeding on one another that she’d seen back in the church. She could become like her father, like Mabel. Better, then, just to die.
Star walked on. Cavus was a familiar town to her. Although her family lived a few miles outside of it, beyond the new factory, they often came here to visit Mabel and her family or just to take a drive into the town where her father worked. She could have gone to school here, but her father’d wanted her to go somewhere bigger; he’d had such dreams for her. Thinking of her father as he’d been before pushed a sliver of feeling back into Star, and she trained her thoughts elsewhere.
The town. Cavus. It was a pretty town; even now, in its madness, it was still pretty. The evening’s summer sun shot through the trees lining Main Street, trees that weren’t native but that made the town look like something out of an East Coast picture book instead of a place in the middle of the northern plains. The houses, each of them well kept and modestly painted in blues, whites, and grays, stood as they’d always stood, on either side of the road. To her right was an older house, a plastic red tricycle sitting in its grass. Yes, all was peaceful, only the Festival tents changed the town from its usual appearance, but even these were familiar, out every year, as they had been since the summer of 1941. All the same. The sky overhead, soaking up the sun’s arms of orange, wrapping them in its blue silk. All the same.
Except, of course, for the people. As far as Star could tell, the once mostly homogenous group of townspeople had separated themselves very neatly into two groups. The ones killing and the ones being killed. To her left, Star saw the familiar shape of the mayor, the bald old fat-ass that she and Mabel had liked to make fun of at the high school football games they’d sometimes attended together.
The mayor, the brown suit that he’d worn to the Service now a torn mess, ran with his head thrown back to the sky, his glasses knocked askew and hanging on by one flimsy wire earpiece. Half of his tie was missing, torn off, and he loped along at an alarmingly fast pace. In front of him a woman ran. She still wore her Sunday-best polka-dot dress for the Feast, but she no longer wore any shoes. She was running, and she was screaming. She didn’t have a chance.
Star watched dispassionately as the mayor, a man who’d hired her father and who’d once shared a dinner at Star’s kitchen table, who’d even brought a tray of brownies, took the woman down and began to feed. Around Star, in the streets, similar scenes played themselves out. The world, in this pretty setting of Cavus, Montana, had gone mad.
Yet it was all around her and not of her. Although she walked through it, they paid her no attention. Why? What else could she do? It was like they couldn’t see her or something. All she wanted was to die. To change. To anything. She just didn’t want to be Star anymore. She couldn’t take so much pain, so much loss.
Run, Star Bear. Her father’s voice, a weak enjoinder to flee.
“Sorry, Daddy. Not this time.”
There would be no more running. No more anything. She was just too tired.
Why had she even bothered to escape from the church? She should have just let them come then. Let them take her. Now it was harder than she might have thought.
Star stepped next to the mayor, his head buried in the now silent woman’s belly. Kneeling, Star gently tapped his shoulder and prepared herself. He turned almost immediately, and stared at her.
He looked exactly as he always had, same eyes, same face, same lack of hair, blood smeared around his mouth, yes, but otherwise…the same. Except not. Not quite. Those eyes. Something behind the eyes that would not focus, something entirely and completely evil.
Star stood and waited.
The mayor stared at her, stood, and then a blank look of confusion fell across his face. His eyes wavered, looking from side to side, glancing over Star, glancing beside her, around her, but not seeing her. If Star could have seen through the mayor’s eyes, she would have seen not herself, but only a shadow, a shimmering shadow that glowed a barely perceptible silver-white.
The mayor raised his head to the sky and let out a long, low howl. It wasn’t the kind of howl Star had heard in the horror movies she’d made her mom watch with her, not one of those cheesy wolf howls. No. It was an actual form of communication, this howl. It was also completely and totally human. Human but soulless. It said both I am here and I come.
The mayor lowered his head, tried once again to look at Star, and failed. Then he ran down the dirty street, dodging between the other Feeders.
In desperation, Star turned the other way and began to walk again. Soon, someone had to see her. They had to. It was only a matter of time until this would all end.
Star marked a new figure, in the distance, advancing. It was a boy. He wore a black jacket, a white T-shirt under it. The shirt was splattered with blood, as was his face.
In his hand was an ax, and when he looked up his eyes, firmly and finally, met hers.
Thank you, Lord, Star prayed. Thank you, thank you.
The boy stopped and then walked toward her, hefting the ax. There was no question that he saw her.
Javier ran his hand along the ax’s handle. Maybe he wasn’t ready to die just yet. He thought he’d like to kill a few more of the bastards.
Ahead of him, he saw the girl coming toward him.
When she saw him, she smiled, and Javier gripped the ax tighter. He would not be fooled again.
Around him, the light streamed from the setting sun, shifting from orange to red, and lighting up the boy and girl on the now empty street like two figures in a silhouette.
She was pretty, he saw. Very pretty. Which didn’t mean a damn thing. Mabel’d been pretty, too. Javier walked forward and when he was a few feet from her, he raised the ax. Behind her, he saw the rusted truck with the man, girl, and older woman in its back pull into a driveway.
The girl did not move. All he had to do was bring the ax down. Just bring it down. Why was he waiting? She was only another one of Them, dammit! Just do it. His muscles flinched.
“Kill me,” she said.
He froze.
“What?”
“Kill me.”
The sun sank lower, and for an instant, the red of it lit up her face, and he saw not a stranger, but his sister, as she would have looked if she’d been able to grow up. The ax fell from his hand and clattered to the street.
He sank to his knees and buried his face in his hands. “I can’t! Ah, fuck, I can’t. Mi hermana. Mi amor. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.” The words stuttered forth from his bruised throat and he could not stop them any more than he could stop that vise from clenching around his chest each time he allowed his sister’s name to creep unbidden into his head.
He waited for the girl to kill him, but instead she sank down beside him. “It’s okay,” she whispered. “Everything will be okay.”