Joe awoke suddenly, brought to consciousness by a smell.
Another sense, too, something he'd acquired recently, nothing specific, more instinct than sense, something within him that told him his quarry was near. It was as if he had a radar for some of them—maybe if you know them, you sense them, or maybe (heh-heh, my insane friend) they sense you and send out unseen feelers to find you.
He reached for the mallet. It was still there, beneath the rags he'd used as a pillow. His whole body was soaked with sweat from whatever fever dream had been buzzing inside his head. He wiped the back of his neck with his left hand. His neck and legs were sore.
How long had he been asleep? Sleep was a problem. After all he'd been through, his body was wearing him down, forcing him to sleep too much. And he was supposed to be on watch. He had appointed himself the one who would not sleep and the last thing he remembered was he had been sitting up, listening for them, waiting for them. Somehow, he'd been tricked into falling asleep.
He trusted no one now. Joe was careful not to wake the others as he rose up from the straw. Only three of them left. Only three. Me, Tad, Becky. His side still ached from a recent wound. He managed to force the pain down deep into his flesh, to forever pretend that the pain was only a vestige of some past incarnation. Had to bite his lip, too, because when he finally stood, it felt as if his legs would buckle and he'd fall again. He held onto the edge of a wooden post that was draped with chains and hooks.
Blood had dried on one of the larger hooks; blood and some hair. Maybe some skin, too, matted with the hair and blood, or maybe he was so used to the gruesome by now that he imagined it everywhere.
He glanced at the others. He didn't want to alarm them with what he was about to do. He was still not positive that any of them were who they claimed to be. The sleeping forms, wrapped in blankets and straw. They didn't have the smell to them, but he mistrusted his own senses more than anyone or anything.
He moved silently through the workroom, grabbing the tool belt from its peg on the cork wall. He could've taken a gun. There were plenty to go around, a veritable arsenal, but a gun never seemed to do the job right. What he had learned in the past twenty-four hours was that it was not enough just to do it and walk away—it took some time, it took patience, this kind of job. You had to watch them suffer before you knew they were truly dead.
He hefted a mallet in his right hand, swung it back and forth as if it were an old friend, and walked out the barn door. His palm was sweating around the mallet—he wondered when the mallet would become a part of him, melded into his flesh, until he was, himself, no longer a man, but a function of something higher—a tool of flesh and blood and wood and steel. He had never had much religious sense, but sometimes the voices told him what to do, sometimes he believed what they said. Sometimes he thought he was meant to be here, this time, this place, this hour.
The light was hazy, not dark yet, and he knew that if he was going to kill them it was going to have to be dark, because he wanted to look into their eyes and see the thing that he was killing—not them, but what was behind them, what gave them their inspiration. He tried not to think of them as Them, with a big T, because it was making him nervous as hell to even think about what they were without adding the larger fear to it. What if I'm crazy? What if I'm one of those psycho killers who imagines that everyone else is a them?—a fleeting thought, through his brain; he ignored it.
It would've been almost impossible to find them in daylight, anyway, but at night, hell, they'd come to him. They'd approach as if they were supplicants coming to the altar and he'd just take them out.
Well, it wouldn't be that simple.
He'd probably get some fight out of at least one of them, maybe all. Who wanted to get his head bashed in, anyway? He knew he was crazy, thinking these things, but what was a man to do? He couldn't just let it all go, all the hurt, and give in. When you give in, they get you. When you give in, they take you over and do things to you you don't want done, they get you over to their side, and then everything looks different.
The trees leaned, cowed by the strong wind, as if his arrival had made them bow down. But you're not God, remember that, a voice told him, you're just you, and you're going to look them in the eyes, one at a time, and you're going to have to bash them and spear them and they're going to know you, what you're thinking, they're going to have already half crawled into your brain, punching buttons as if you're a computer until they find out what's on your mind, and then they're going to do whatever they can to stop you.
He could smell one of them in the air—they stank, had that stink of humanity—the wind was icy, and the stink made him want to retch. He clutched the mallet more tightly. The worst of it was, they smelled like people, just like people who maybe haven't bathed in a while, the strong stink of human flesh.
In the grove, at the edge of the property, he thought he saw someone standing there.
He felt for the tool belt, for the screwdriver.
He'd gone hunting once, when he'd been young, and learned of a phenomenon where a hunter, looking for deer, sometimes took a shot at another human being because the hunter wanted to see a deer so badly that he actually mistook a man for a deer. Not just any man, either—it was often a friend.
It was the problem with them; they looked so much like anybody else. You couldn't really know for sure until you plunged the screwdriver into them. It wasn't simple, Life. It wasn't gray, either—things were definitely black and white, at least for him. Good and Evil, and you're either for us, or against us. The only way to live, now. Well, the only way to survive.
But what if he was wrong? He could look in their eyes, but if he didn't see what he was looking for, would he kill them anyway?
Maybe I'm just a madman, maybe I had a breakdown and the stress of the shit-hole world has dropped down on my shoulders. Maybe I'm just another Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy out to hammer everyone I'm paranoid about into the ground, bash their faces so I don't have to see their eyes staring at me, twist the old Phillips head number two into that sweet little place between their ribs where a nice plump heart's just waiting to get skewered.
Have to keep my mind on right here, right now, no veering off. They'd want that—you go careening off the edge of a cliff in your mind, and they got you. Once they get you, they put you where they want, and who knows what happens to you, how they hollow you out like a canoe and turn you inside out and then you're not who you think you are, oh, no, boys and girls, you're something altogether different, and you look in the mirror, but you don't see yourself, no no no, you see something else and then you want to break the mirror because of what they did to you, no thank you, ma'am, I ain't buying none of that.
The sky was darkening—not much after four, but getting dark fast. Never find them in their hiding place—have to wait, sometimes,'til they come to you.
"Hey!" he shouted. Friendly-like, neighborly, putting the mallet behind his back a little so whoever was standing there wouldn't completely suspect him. They weren't too smart, these people, and when they were fresh, before they ripened, they had a little bit too much of what they used to have, so they weren't always the smartest things.
You are insane, the voice inside him said, this is just a dream, it has all been a dream, you've been drunk and abusing your wife and family and you drank a couple of six-packs of Rolling Rock and you went over the Edge.
(The voice in his head knew about the Edge.)
Someone came out from among the shadows of the grove. It wasn't an It or a Thing or a Them.
It was a boy. Straw-blond hair, pale skin, wearing a hooded sweatshirt with the hood pulled down. On the front of the sweatshirt, which was blue, were the words: If Virginia Is for Lovers, Then West Virginia's for Us Decent Folks. He couldn't actually read the sweatshirt from that distance; he just knew what the words said because he'd bought the sweatshirt for the boy, himself, not two days before, thinking it was kind of funny.
He knew the boy.
He's one of them, though.
The boy smiled.
Joe stood motionless. His fingers felt numb.
The boy started running towards the man, shouting.
Joe pulled the mallet from behind his back.
When the boy reached him, Joe took him in his free arm, and brought the mallet to the side of the boy's head, ready to bash it.
"You are insane," the voice inside said.
"Am I? Well, go to hell," he told it.
He held the boy's head tight in his arm, and stared down into those eyes as darkness blossomed all around them. He was looking for the light there, to see if he could see the boy's inspiration, if he could see the thing that fueled the boy. If it still existed there.
Tears shone in the boy's eyes.
"Dad? Daddy?"
Joe would only have a few seconds to perform the operation.
But he had to be sure.
He had come too far, from such a far-off land—the territory of sanity and reality—to lose it all in a moment's hesitation.
But he had to be absolutely sure that the boy was one of them before he carved into the boy's heart.
They were tricky that way, because you might slip up and stab one of your own kind—it wasn't like in the movies or books, where all it took was a good jab in the right place—it was bloody and you had to stab them over and over, until there was nothing left pumping—it was just like killing your own kind, only they weren't, they were another species, practically, and if you didn't hunt them down, they'd hunt you.
You'd be the deer in the forest to them.
The voice inside him said, You are tired of this, aren't you? You just want them to take you so you'll be one of them, so you won't have to fight anymore. You don't need to fight anymore. Everyone you love is gone, everything you've ever lived for, vanished. If you kill him, you kill yourself. Look at him, look at his face, his skin, his eyes, you were once like that, remember? When you were his age, in this very place, you set this in motion, you and your friends. What has brought you to this place? You have brought yourself. Who is this boy? He is you so many years ago, running through the groves, setting this in motion so that you will one day return only to pierce your son through the heart as a just sacrifice for what you and your kind have done.
And Joe knew then that he was insane, because, although he was holding the boy and raising the mallet to strike, he saw what he thought was the light of day come up all around him, a color of light that he had never seen before, and the boy was not what he had seemed a second ago, but a creature of mutilation and putrefaction. The world became liquid all around them, until all light was like a river, and the man fumbled with the mallet and dropped it. He tried to reach for the screwdriver to press it into the boy's flesh before it was too late, but something grabbed his hand and pulled him through some land of opening, as if the world were only a removable layer of skin.
And on the other side, she stood there as beautiful as he had ever remembered her. Melissa.
She opened her mouth to speak, dark water spilling from between her lips.
"I know you're not her," he said. "I know I'm standing outside a barn, holding my son in my arms. There's a town just down the road. And apple trees. It's cold. It's getting on night. I know you can't be her. I don't know what you are, but I know you're not her." Was he shouting? He couldn't tell—his breathing was difficult. He felt a pain in his chest as his heart beat wildly. Unbidden tears streamed down from his eyes as he tried to see her as she was, rather than the way she presented herself.
Her face froze in its expression. Then, for a moment, he knew clearly that the voices within him were the beacon of his insanity: she was, indeed, who she looked like, and she was trying to talk to him, but the voices in his head were getting louder, more raucous, shrieking across his nerve pathways. He knew the world was not the insane place that he had been living in, that it could not be, that the creatures he had been slaughtering could not be anything more than simple human beings. His own obsessions had brought him to this.
He felt the screwdriver in his hand and turned its blade towards himself.
You failed once before, the clearest voice in his head said, so do it, do it right. Do it now.
He pressed the blade against his chest and was about to give it a good shove, when he felt a searing numbness in his leg, and he fell to the ground—the sound of a gunshot—a burning around his right calf. He closed his eyes. Rock salt? When he opened them, it was night, and the boy stood over him, looking at him. He could see the barn and the darkening sky. From nearby a man shouted, "What the hell are you trying to do to that boy?"
Shot, I've been shot, damn it, you don't shoot your own kind.
But of course you do, you always kill your own, it's the law of man.
And what you don't kill, the wild things get.
He looked up, and recognized the other man; it was Virgil holding the gun. He tried to cry out to him. Although he trusted no one at this point, he knew that Virgil thought that he was rescuing the boy from the clutches of a madman. Virgil would try to help the boy.
Joe knew it was too late, knew that they'd tricked him, almost made him kill himself, and now they would descend upon Virgil, too, and all would be lost.
The game was over.
Now he knew the boy was one of them. His son. Aaron.
The boy, who looked just like a boy, a perfect imitation, resembling so closely, in so many insignificant details his own son, looked at him.
Then the boy turned his head in the direction of the man with the gun and sniffed at the air just like a wild animal detecting its prey.
Joe lay there and for just a second, like another scent, came the smell of memory and all that had happened in just a few days. All that had turned him from a sane man into someone who believed that darkness had fallen across the universe.
He grabbed the boy in a full-nelson stranglehold. With his other hand, he brought the screwdriver to his chest, pressing on it. Tears blinded him, as he felt his son's pulse. His son began sobbing, trying to break away, but he held him there. He held Aaron close to him.
"Daddy," the boy gasped (but he's not a boy, he's a monster, he's one of those monsters, he's just pretending to be a boy, he crawled into the little boy suit after that creature ripped the life from Aaron, your son. He's a puppet, he's a repository for blood, an alien harvester, not your son! the voice in his head screamed).
"Please," the boy gasped as Joe carefully brought the mallet up—you have to act fast with them, you have to stop their hearts before they can get you, you have to eviscerate them to make sure they can't function.
Joe whisked the mallet through the air, but let it go, let it fly and land harmlessly on the ground.
Joe barely got to his knees, the pain in his leg too much.
"I can't," he said, letting go of the boy. He touched the frozen ground with his hands. He knew that it would get him. He knew that even though he had slain the dragon, that this boy It had created from his son's body would now destroy him.
But then, something lifted, a great stone, as if the universe had been darkened and was now redeemed by light. The sky seemed to tear apart for an instant, and then was whole again.
It's dead now. I didn't kill the monster down there. I killed it here, I didn't give in to it. All of what I did down in the mine would be nothing if I had sacrificed my own child.
He felt the boy's arms around his neck and heard voices, outside himself, voices which he didn't think he'd ever hear again:
"Joe? Is that you? Oh, my God, Joe!" Jenny cried out. He heard Hillary, too, bawling as if from hunger.
When Joe opened his eyes, he saw the miracle which he had not dared to hope for.
He saw his family again. His wife, his son, and daughter, not Its, not Things, not Drinkers of Blood, but his family, innocent and whole, and alive.
Alive.
He had believed in so much, but not in miracles. He grabbed his son, looking into his eyes. "Aaron? Aaron?"
His son was sobbing. Over his shoulder, Joe saw Jenny, her face filthy, her clothes torn, with Hillary in her arms. Joe cried out, not a word, but a yawp, a human cry of joy which he had forgotten that he had ever possessed.
They fell on him, arms around his neck, weeping, happy, ragged.