Bad Juju: A Novel of Raw Terror (38 page)

***

Ree tried to get up off her knees
before the axe came down, but a powerful shock wave bounced her off the floor
and she came down on her face. The same aftershock threw off the axe-wielder’s
aim and the axe blade chopped into the floor two feet from Ree’s head. Ignoring
the eye-watering pain in her bloodied nose, she rolled away from her attacker
and scrambled to her feet.

The man with the mutilated face
swung his machete side-arm style, and the blade sliced into Ree’s left hip,
hindered only a little by the thickness of her jeans. The force of the blow
knocked her into the wall, but this time she didn’t lose her footing. She
looked around in desperation for something to use as a weapon—or a shield.

 The axe man was struggling to free
his blade from the hardwood floor.

Ree picked up a small end table and
threw it at the monster with the machete. It struck him squarely in the face,
momentarily stunning him, and she made a break for the front door. As she ran
past a tall mirror, she saw the blurred reflection of the man raising his axe
over his shoulder, saw it fly from his hands as he hurled it at her.

The axe-head hit her between the
shoulder blades and knocked her off her feet. Her head banged into an
antebellum chest of drawers and she was out cold.

***

Luke tried to make sense of what he
was seeing, but the scene was too bizarre for rational explanation. He saw the
backsides of two naked men going after Ree with an axe and a machete. There was
no time to make sense of it. There was no time to stop the man from throwing
his axe at Ree’s retreating back. It struck her upper back and knocked her
down. On reflex Luke reached down to his right hip for his pistol, but it
wasn’t there; he’d left it in the glove box of his truck.

The man with the machete moved
toward Ree’s sprawled body, and the realization that this was her vision coming
true flashed through Luke’s mind. He shot forward on the balls of his feet and
tackled naked man with the wide blade. As he came down on the man’s bare legs
and butt, he knew this was no ordinary man. The cold, rigid flesh, the raw-meat
smell and the vague hint of an antiseptic odor informed his instincts that he’d
tackled something less than human—something that was not even alive. He
remembered Ree’s insistence that Hondo had come back from the dead to attack
her, and now that idea seemed perfectly plausible.

He crawled up the man’s back and
grabbed the wrist of the hand holding the machete. The man’s head turned
stiffly on his neck, and Luke recognized the battered profile.
Luther Porch.
It wasn’t possible, but here he was, a dead man with a machete, apparently bent
on killing the woman Luke loved.

Luke dug his knees into Luther’s
back and wrested the machete away from him, then he raised the blade and
brought it down across the dead man’s neck. He sprang to his feet and spun
around to face the second man, who was bending down to pick up the axe. As the
second man straightened up, Luke swung the machete at his head. The blade
chopped the side of his face with a hollow thump. A blank expression on his
face, Lem “Cowboy” Porch looked at Luke with dull eyes, then raised the axe
over his right shoulder, preparing to counter attack.

Luke charged him with a body check
and knocked Cowboy off balance before he had time to swing the axe. He dropped
the machete and grabbed the axe handle with both hands and tried to wrench it
out of Cowboy’s cold hands. The raw flaps of the dead man’s opened torso
slapped against Luke’s chest as they struggled in an obscene parody of a World
Wrestling Federation death match. Raw-meat Zombie vs. Bozo Cop. Luke might’ve
laughed if he weren’t fighting for his life—and Ree’s.

He shoved Cowboy into the wall and
at the same time yanked and twisted the axe from the dead man’s grip. He
stepped back, cocked the axe and swung it with all his might. The blow struck
side of Cowboy’s neck and went through it like an axe blade through rotten
wood. Cowboy’s head came off, hit the floor and rolled to a stop against the
leg of an old Singer sewing machine. The headless body flapped its arms as
though trying to fly, then staggered forward a few steps and fell over.

Luke turned back to Luther, who was
shambling toward him with the machete.

The slow-moving brother was an easy
target. Luke swung the axe and took off Luther’s head. Luther’s body kept
coming. Luke stepped out of the way and let him go by. Headless Luther bumped
into the wall and started hacking at it with the machete.

Luke braced his feet on the floor
and started chopping down the middle of Luther’s shoulders. He struck again and
again, until the dead man’s back began to split open like a hollow log and his
body crumpled to the floor.

Satisfied that the corpses were no
longer a threat, Luke dropped the axe and knelt beside Ree’s unconscious body.
The axe thrown at her back had hit with the dull part of the axe-head, so she
wasn’t cut, but she was still out cold from crashing head-first into the chest
of drawers. He carefully rolled her onto her back, mindful that she might have
a serious neck injury.

The rumbling and shaking of the
earth had ceased during his fight with the Porch brothers. The destruction he’d
witnessed left him with a profound sense of sadness and futility. He’d seen
much of Main Street’s stores fall into the earth, and parts of 2nd Street too,
including the firehouse and the police station. How many were killed? Injured?
He couldn’t worry about that right now. His main concern was with Ree. She was his
responsibility. Her scalp was bleeding profusely, but he knew scalp wounds
often appeared worse than they were because of their tendency to bleed so
freely. He pulled off his shirt and used it to stanch the bleeding.

“Shorty?” he said softly. “Wake up.
Open your eyes for me. Can you hear me?”

Her eyelids fluttered.

“That’s it. Come on, open your eyes
for me.”

She opened her eyes.

Two pitch-black orbs quivered, then
fixed him with a look of black hate.

***

She was floating on a sea of
darkness when it found her.

She tried to resist it, but it was
too powerful. It opened her up and entered her with a violence that was somehow
sexual. The heat of its passion for conquest scorched her. The coldness of its
contempt for all that was human gnawed at her with fanged hatred. The dark
thing was trying to turn her inside-out. Her mind screamed in terror. Her soul
sought mercy. Found none. The thing inside her was unmaking her in order to
remake her in its own vile image—or so she thought, thinking being of utmost difficulty
during this psychic rape.

Then came a great ripping sound, as
if a giant piece of flimsy fabric were being torn apart. She felt it even as
she heard it, and the pain was exquisite.

The bag of skin containing her
physical form was peeled away and turned inside-out just the way she’d once
seen a rabbit’s pelt skinned from its body.

Her inner nature was mercilessly
revealed to her. She was a slug-like thing, a grotesque human maggot sent to
crawl through the carrion flesh of the earth, a small-brained worm burrowing
through rotting muck and the raw meat of humanity. A thing with a pathetic
soul.

She was suddenly catapulted from
her repulsive body. Her spirit soared toward the stars, and reaching the zenith
of its arc, it held there, suspended for a brief moment of eternity, then began
a descent into darkness.

The arc of descent carried her back
through time, back to an age when the dark thing still inhabited its own
physical form and traveled below the earth and lived in dank caverns.
Indigenous tribes of primitives huddled round fires and snuggled in animal furs
worshiped the great serpentine beast. The beast had many names. Great powers
were attributed to it. It could fly above the earth. It could breathe fire. It
could make the sun rise or fall. It could bring storms or summon endless days
of darkness. Men who worshiped other gods railed at it, challenged it, and some
even fought it.  Many a brave warrior died in battle against it, while others
waged war in its name, its fierce likeness painted on their shields to evoke
terror in their enemies.

When the great serpentine worm grew
old and finally died, those who revered it kept its spirit bound to the earth
from whence it had sprung by their stubborn devotion. The great worm’s magic
increased with the number of its worshipers.

Then, following cataclysmic
geological upheavals, the great worm’s spirit fell dormant and slept for aeons
in the earth. Other gods arose from the minds of men to be worshiped, and the
great worm was forgotten by all but a few acolytes and mystics, who prayed for
its awakening.

Then came subtle but significant
changes in the earth’s electromagnetic fields, and the spirit of the old one
was roused from its long slumber. It woke in darkness, drew power from darkness
and
remade
itself out of darkness.

It waited in its earthen lair to be
worshiped by those who lived above ground, drawing power from dark deeds
committed in its vicinity. It influenced beings susceptible to darker desires
and impulses even as it fed on them. No worshipers called its name. It grew to
hate the frail mortals living on the earth’s crust. It longed to vent its anger
upon them and to make them fearful of its dark power.

Sensing the time was right, the
dark thing gathered itself from the ripe darkness and finally surfaced to
proclaim its supremacy and make the human maggots feel its wrath.

Ree saw all this in a momentary
flash of light—the light burning just on the other side of her eyelids.

She opened her eyes to the glaring
light.

She saw the man hovering over her
and she was filled with unrelenting hate for him and his kind. The dark thing
twisted inside her, coiling itself into a knot of burgeoning violence.

“Are you all right?” he asked, his
voice thick with pitiful, raw emotion. His face became a mask of uncertainty.
This man was an enemy of the dark thing. He had to be killed.

But there were other dangers as
well.

A fire burned nearby, above and
below the earth. Fossil fumes flamed round about, threatening to devour the
dark thing’s energy and send it back into dormancy. It had compressed itself
and had taken refuge in her body and soul, and now it was going to act through
her to achieve its aims and ensure the survival of its consciousness.

Yes,
it whispered to her.

“Yesss,” she spoke its word.

“We should get out of here,” said
Luke. “What’s left of the town is burning.”

She looked around. Saw the beheaded
corpses twitching on the floor.

“Think you can walk?” Luke asked.

“I can fly if I damn well please,”
she said, expressing the dark god’s angry sentiment.  

“Come on,” said Luke as he pulled
her to her feet. “I’ll walk you to my truck. You have the keys?” 

Keys? The dark thing accessed her
memories. She patted the hard bulge in her jeans pocket. She nodded at the man
called Luke.

Luke.

She (a part of her not yet under
control of the entity inhabiting her) seized Luke’s hand and looked into his
eyes. She had to warn him. Warn him that he was in the presence of evil.
“Luke...”

He gave her a questioning look.

“Luke, I...you....”

“We have to go now,” he insisted.
He slipped his arm around her and ushered her out of the shop.

As he boosted her into the truck’s
cab, she said, “It’s in me.”

“What?” he said as she settled onto
the seat.

Then the dark thing dropped a black
veil over her mind and silenced her. She stared blankly into space.

When he pulled up in her driveway
and shut off the pickup’s engine, Ree was still staring blankly ahead and
remained unresponsive to his gentle overtures, but at least her nose had
stopped dripping blood. He picked her up and carried her into the house. He
took her to the bedroom, laid her on the bed and stripped off her clothes. With
soap and water, and then rubbing alcohol, he cleaned the gash on her hip and
bandaged it with gauze and surgical tape he’d found in her medicine cabinet.
Her eyes remained open, staring at the ceiling—or at nothing.

He found a lightweight blanket in
the closet and covered her, thinking that she might be going into shock. He
elevated her feet with two pillows, then kissed her forehead. He wanted to stay
with her till she came around, but his sense of duty and his years as a civil
servant demanded that he return to the site of the devastation and help with
the rescue work. “You rest,” he said. “I’ll come back as quick as I can.”

Her eyelids fluttered and her lips
twitched as though she was trying to speak, but no words came out. He kissed
her lips, then put on his bloodstained shirt and left her in the cool haven of
her bedroom. As he hurried to his truck, he had the feeling that he was
forgetting something—or that he’d overlooked something important. It nagged at
him with the annoying persistence of a South Georgia gnat trying to get at his
eye. Was it the venomous look of hate Ree had given him? Or was it something
she had mumbled under her breath that he hadn’t quite understood? She’d said
something when he was helping her into the truck, something that sounded like
send
me
. Send her where? The hospital? And why would she look at him with such
raw hatred? He’d given her no reason to hate him or to be angry with him. Had
he?

As he yanked open the pickup’s
door, the thing nagging at his memory broke through his mental fog, and
send
me
became
It’s in me.
Of course! That had to be it! And that
explained those hate-filled eyes, eyes clouded with unnatural darkness. The
dark thing had entered her while she was unconscious and vulnerable. But she’d
come to her senses just long enough to warn him before it shut her down again.
The supernatural entity had entered her—possessed her—just as it had done with
Corny Weehunt.

Luke stood for a long moment,
holding the door handle of his truck as he weighed the fantastic possibility.
His natural skepticism battled his intuition and its notion that a supernatural
being might actually be inside the woman he loved. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t have
seriously considered such a thing, but these were clearly not ordinary times;
he had seen with his own eyes the terrible effects of this dark demon and had
felt its evil touch as it took down his town. His world had changed over the
past few days, and now he had to revise his old beliefs and admit that the
world did indeed harbor things never dreamt of in his philosophy.

He slammed the truck’s door and ran
back to the house.

He didn’t know what he could do to
rid Ree of the thing inside her, but he knew he couldn’t leave her alone with
it.

The rescue of any casualties would
have to be left to others. Luke’s mission was clear: He had to rescue the woman
he loved from the clutches of an ancient and evil entity.

***

The moment the man left her alone,
the woman kicked off the blanket, rose from the bed and ripped the flimsy
bandage off her hip. The dark thing inside her didn’t like puny encumbrances of
any kind, and it especially hated those that covered wounded mortal flesh. It
relished the pain and the bleeding of its host—so long as the wounds were not
severe enough to interfere with its control of the pitiful mortal.

Ree was deep inside a dark cave,
watching her other self walk across the familiar room and pull open the drawer
in which she kept the loaded pistol. Even as her bare feet moved her over the
floor and through the bedroom doorway, she struggled in vain to drag her heels
and retard the dark thing’s progress toward its desired end.

Pain throbbed deep inside her
skull. The more she tried to resist, the greater the pain became. The dark
beast was enjoying her pain, and her feelings and sensations were becoming
increasingly intermingled with the alien feelings of the thing inside her. Soon
she would be altogether lost to it, and her sense of self would be forever
obliterated. The dark thing was assimilating her soul. She grew very cold. Her
teeth chattered.

It intended to make her shoot Luke
to death with her pistol, and she was helpless to stop it.

***

Luke charged through the front door
and stumbled to a stop when he saw Ree standing in the middle of the living
room with a pistol in her hand. She looked very small, almost childlike in her
nakedness, and the gun looked outrageously large in her small hand. Her eyes
were unusually big, unnaturally dark. Luke knew without doubt that she intended
to shoot him.

“Ree, don’t do it,” he said.
“Listen to me. You have to fight it.
You
don’t want to shoot me.
It
wants you to kill me, but you don’t have to. Be strong. Fight it!”

She cocked the hammer. Pointed the
muzzle at his chest.

He held up his palms. “I love you,
Ree. Please...”

***

Her thumb clicked back the hammer
of the pistol.

No,
her mind shouted, but
her weakened will found no connection to her body’s movements. The thing inside
her had total physical control.

Time seemed to slow down. Seconds
lengthened like bands of elastic stretched to the breaking point. Each
interminable millisecond bore incredible emotional weight, and the dark gravity
at the center of her soul was pulling her into a black hole of despair. A
slender, shining thread of love was the only thing keeping her self-awareness
alive and connected to the familiar world, the world in which Luke Chaney stood
awaiting his execution by the woman he loved—and who loved him.

She felt the dark thing’s contempt
for human emotion. Love, to its way of thinking, was nothing more than a
deceptive emotion caused by biochemical interactions, an illusion, a passing of
emotional gas. Pathetic human beings were not capable of seeing the world as it
really was; they lived their lives in futility, cutting themselves off from the
natural world with their mechanical gadgets and diverting toys, and pretending
they were something more than glorified monkeys with pitiful souls. They were
hardly worthy of worshiping this dark god. But they were too stupid to see
that.

Losing her desperate hold on that
thin thread of love, Ree struggled to maintain the last bit of her presence of
mind and mount a last offensive against the dark monster. 

Love.

Love is more than an emotion.

Love is a thing of the spirit.

God is love.

Love is God.

I love Luke.

Her eyes found him in a dark fog
and she focused on his face, his eyes.

God help me.

Then she heard Luke’s faraway voice
saying, “I love you, Ree. Please...”

And her finger involuntarily began
to squeeze the trigger.

She sensed desperation in the dark
thing.

It was afraid!

It was not omnipotent. And that
meant it could be defeated.

Emboldened by this revelation, she
plunged into the black center of the beast, seeking the heart of its fear. Even
as her finger exerted more pressure on the trigger, she found what it feared.

The bone-cave—the skull—it had
inhabited when it was still flesh and blood had been destroyed and now it feared
it couldn’t survive without it except by inhabiting the physical form of
another life form. The explosions and the gas fires burning in downtown
Vinewood had somehow wounded it and made it realize it was not immortal. The
thing
could
die!

And it had no place to hide.

I’ve got you, you bastard.

The hammer fell and the pistol
fired, but Ree jerked her hand and the slug thumped into the wall behind Luke.

“I’ve got you now,” she said aloud.
“You’re no god. You’re just an overgrown worm who’s dead and won’t lie down.”

Then she turned the gun on herself.

***

Luke flinched when the pistol went
off, and the bullet zinged past his ear and hit the wall. His ears were ringing
from the report, so he didn’t understand the words Ree spoke, but when he saw
her raise the pistol and place the muzzle against her temple, he shouted: “No!”

She smiled at him and said,
“‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his
friends.’”

He threw himself at her and made
contact just as the gun went off.

Her blood splattered his cheek. He
fell on top of her, his head resting between her bare breasts.

***

“No, no, no,” he muttered as he
brushed back her hair with his fingers and examined the gunshot wound on the
side of her head. There was a raw horizontal crease above her right ear but no
bullet hole. When he’d thrown himself into her he’d caused the shot to go awry.
“Thank God,” he said.

Her eyes were shut and she remained
unconscious and unresponsive to his attempts to rouse her. He ran to the
bathroom, grabbed a towel and wrapped it around her head to cover the
still-bleeding wound. Then he wrestled her into a bathrobe he’d found in her
closet and carried her to the truck, secured her in the shoulder harness and
sped off to the hospital.

He’d expected the hospital to be
swamped with people injured in the sinkhole disaster, but when he drove up near
the ER entrance, he saw only one ambulance backed up to the automatic doors. He
hoped this was a sign that there were few casualties, rather than an indication
that most victims hadn’t yet been pulled from the ruins of collapsed buildings.
He was confident that the shops on Main Street had been empty when the sinkhole
opened up and swallowed half the downtown area, but 2nd Street was a different
story. There were certain to be victims in the firehouse/police complex.

He unbuckled the harness, picked
Ree up and ran through the entrance to the ER. The towel tied round her head
was already soaked through with blood, and his own shirt was bloodied from her
first scalp wound, so he wasn’t surprised when the nurse looked at them with
unabashed shock.

“Gunshot wound to the head,” he
explained as he brushed past the nurse and laid Ree on a bare gurney. “No
penetration, but she’s unconscious. Also a scalp wound here where she hit her
head on a table.”

“Who shot her?” the obese nurse
asked as she wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around Ree’s upper arm.

“She did. Accidentally.” The lie
was better than trying to explain the bizarre circumstances that had led Ree to
try to sacrifice herself. He knew why she’d done it. She thought she could kill
the thing inside her by killing herself. What he didn’t know—had no way of
knowing—was what Ree’s rendering herself unconscious had done to the entity.
Was it also unconscious? Was it awake and trying to get out of its
incapacitated host? Or had it already fled? He stood over her and held Ree’s
limp hand while the nurse wrote down the blood pressure reading. “How is it?”
he asked.

“It’s a little low, but not
dangerously so,” the nurse answered as she began to clean the wound over Ree’s
ear with a sterile swab. “Dr. Larson will be with her in a minute. Is it really
true that part of downtown fell into the sinkhole?”

“Yeah, I’m afraid it is. Half the
shops on Main Street are gone. And part of Second Street.”

“Thank God it happened on a
Sunday.”

Luke grunted.

Dr. Greg Larson entered the
cubicle. A stethoscope was draped around his bull neck and his thick glasses
magnified the dark circles under his eyes. “Hello, Luke,” he said. “Is
that...?”

“Ree Tyler,” Luke confirmed. “A .38
slug grazed her head. She’s been unconscious since it happened.”

“How—”

“Gun went off accidentally.” Luke
was already tired of the lie. “A graze like that couldn’t do any serious brain
damage, could it?”

Larson looked closely at the
cleaned wound, then said, “I wouldn’t think so. Enough of a concussion to
render her unconscious, obviously, but she should be coming around soon. We’ll
do a brain scan to be sure.”

“Take care of her, Greg. I’ve got
to get back to town and help with the rescue.”

Larson nodded. “We’re setting up a
triage now. Any idea how many victims?”

“Shouldn’t be more than three or
four from the firehouse and police station. The last fire truck rolled out just
before it happened. Beyond that, I’m not sure.”

“Thank God for small favors.”

Luke gave Ree’s hand a gentle
squeeze, then he ran out to his truck and drove back to town. He wanted to stay
with her and be there when she woke up, but he knew he would be of more use on
2nd Street.

***

She awoke in a humming metal
tunnel. A dull pain in her head told her that she wasn’t dead and that this
wasn’t a passageway to Heaven or Hell. Then the hard surface she was lying on
began to move out of the tunnel, and she was looking up at a young man in a
blue smock with a nametag that said his name was Don Smith.

“Welcome back,” Don Smith said with
a smile. “Do you know where you are?”

“Hospital?” She realized her head
was held in place by a cloth strap.

“That’s right. Vinewood General.
You’re a very lucky lady, you know. A bullet creased the side of your head.
Another inch or so and it would be a different story. Do you remember what
happened?”