Charnel House (12 page)

Garraty crept forward, his eyes darting from his friend to the next room and back. Where was the little fuck? He tapped one of Luis’s feet with his own. Nothing. He did it a second time, harder, and Luis’s scuffed loafer scooted across the floor, leaving a streak of watery vomit on the linoleum. Luis snorted once—or maybe it was a snore—but didn’t stir. Garraty didn’t like the thin trickle of blood he saw in his friend’s ear, or the way his eyes weren’t completely closed. Some dim memory told him that was bad news. Concussion, maybe. Or worse.
The patient is exhibiting signs of a subdural hematoma, Dr. Garraty
.
Recommend a hemicraniectomy to relieve the intracranial pressure, stat.

He moved a little closer to the opening, leery of the part of the room he couldn’t see. The kid could be just around the corner, waiting for him to poke his head through the doorway like a stupid teenager in a bad horror movie. While this
felt
like a bad horror movie, Garraty was no stupid teenager. Stepping over Luis once more, he edged forward, the countertop pressing into his ass. As more of the front room came into view he tensed and tightened his grip on the butcher knife.

Keeping to the left side, the one closest to the back wall of trailer, Garraty crouched and leaned over the threshold so he could see the rest of the room. The coffee table had been turned into kindling when he fell on it. Droplets of blood dotted the wood, bright dapples of color against the pale oak pieces. No sign of the boy. He could see the front door now, still closed and latched. The kid had to have gone down the hall, to the bedroom or bathroom.
Maybe he finally decided to wipe
, the cheerful voice in—

“
Wadded!
” the dead boy rasped from just behind him in the kitchen. Garraty had an instant to wonder how the fuck the kid had gotten past him and then the knife was arcing down past his right ear like a stainless steel lightning bolt, skewering the soft meat of his cheek and pinning his tongue to the bottom of his mouth. With a flick of the boy’s now healed wrist, the knife peeled away a section of Garraty’s face in a thick fleshy flap and split his tongue into two wriggling halves.

Salty-sweet blood flooded his mouth and cascaded down his face. The butcher knife slipped from his grip, forgotten. Dimly, he was aware of the sound of his own pulse in his ears, a rhythmic
chewchewchewchew
that reminded him of the time he visited the obstetrician with Tina and listened to the tiny hearts of the twins beating in sync through the ultrasound machine, and the thought brought a faint unconscious smile to the side of his face that still worked right. There was no pain on the other, just a blessed numbness between his eyes and his chin, and Garraty knew he was going to die.

He thought that might not be such a bad thing.

The back wall was a bland white magnet pulling him to it, and he let himself go willingly. He collapsed against it and slid to the floor, leaving a smear of blood like a giant question mark on the smooth surface.

“
Jew due!
”

Garraty tried to raise his head so he could look up at the boy but he was too tired. His body felt so goddamn
heavy
. Cool air whistled through the hole in the side of his face with each breath, chilling his teeth. The metallic scent of blood filled the room, stronger even than the shit smell that baked off the boy like a fever. At the edges of his vision black motes whirled and darted like insects.

Why hadn’t the kid finished him yet? Was he just going to stand there and watch as Garraty bled out?

He’s giving you a taste of your own medicine.

Moving as slowly as an octogenarian, Garraty rolled onto his back to face his attacker. The boy loomed over him, not short at all from this perspective. Gore streaked his right hand—no longer hamburger but completely whole as far as Garraty could tell—and the edge of the stubby knife blade shone red and wet. Red and wet with
his
blood.

Fury rose in him like a dark tide at the sight of it. What had he done to deserve this? He didn’t
ask
for the kid to run out into the road without bothering to look first. Christ, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Story of his life, right? It wasn’t fair that the kid—this phantasm dredged up from the depths of his subconscious—should win.

The boy regarded him with emotionless half-lidded eyes. No triumphant gleam brightened them, no smug look of satisfaction pulled at his distended features. The anger he thought he’d seen moments before was gone, and nothing had taken its place. His slack cold flesh held no feeling at all that Garraty could sense.

And that made him even more furious than seeing his blood on the knife in the boy’s hand.

Fuck you, kid.
And
the goddamn horse you rode in on.

“Toomey,” the boy said, and raised the knife.

Garraty found the strength to raise himself onto his elbows.

“Not gonna be that easy, kid,” he said, and drove the heel of his shoe into the dead boy’s crotch. A bolt of pain shot up his leg, and he thought he might have just made the stab wound in his calf a little worse. The boy stumbled back, that terrible blank expression never leaving his face, and tripped over Luis. He went down in a heap next to the unconscious man, scattering empty beer cans and silverware across the floor. Immediately he started to get up again, his half-lidded green eyes locked onto Garraty’s, unwavering.

What a terrible thing to lose feeling in one’s nards,
the chirpy voice in Garraty’s head offered. The good side of his face pulled into a humorless smile, and he rolled onto his belly. Cords standing out on his neck, he began the arduous task of climbing to his feet. From the corner of his eye he saw the boy, slowly and methodically clambering up like one of the zombies from that TV show Tina liked so much. He seemed dazed, confused, like he wasn’t sure what he was doing.
And they’re off, ladies and gentlemen! Will it be The Little Dead That Could Boy or Cuckoo Kid Killer? Come one, come all, place your bets!

Garraty got to his hands and knees and then pulled his working leg under him so that he was kneeling. Placing both hands on that knee, he pushed up with his leg and down with his arms, and slowly rose into a standing position. The world took a sudden tilt as he got upright and he limp-staggered to the corner wall, hugging it for balance.
And it’s Cuckoo Kid Killer by a nose!

He looked down at the butcher knife on the carpet. Would it stop the boy? Maybe. Maybe not. The bigger question was whether or not he could actually bend and pick it up. He thought the answer to that question was likely
not
. The way his head was swimming and whirling he imagined trying to stoop would send him reeling head-first into the other wall, adding a new splotch of blood for the tittle of the question mark he’d left earlier. If that happened, he doubted he’d be able to get up again.
The fat lady’s already warming up, Garraty my man, best just turn tail and run.

He was beginning to think he wouldn’t be able to win a fight with the boy anyway. It was apparent the kid had no intentions of abiding by the rules of the physical world. Neither Luis nor the old lady had been able to see or hear him, and it simply wasn’t possible for someone to heal as quickly as the boy had. Even if Garraty managed to get the butcher knife in his hand and drive it home, he thought maybe it wouldn’t hurt the boy at all. Perhaps his skin would part bloodlessly, like latex, only to heal itself as soon as he pulled the blade out. Perhaps the sharp steel wouldn’t even penetrate, just deflect off to one side or the other, sinking into the wall as if his skin were some kind of high-tech armor.

Or perhaps your hand would go right through him this time because you can’t hurt something that’s not there.

Garraty found the thought unsettling.

He heard the squeak of a sneaker on wet linoleum. The boy was up. Garraty pushed away from the wall and hobbled toward the front door. Luis was on his own. The kid didn’t seem interested in him, anyway. The floor seemed to tilt and roll before him, and the door was a wavering thing from a carnival funhouse. The motes swimming at the periphery of his vision swelled into black thunderheads that threatened to blind him.

“Wadded,” the boy said, from directly behind him.

Garraty screamed. Redoubling his efforts, he reeled into the flimsy door and caught hold of the deadbolt knob with blood-slicked fingers. He didn’t look back, because he was afraid of what he might see. The bolt clacked into its recess and he yanked the door open.

“Jew due.”

Bright pain lanced his side as the knife slid into his flesh near his armpit and Garraty screamed again, his voice raw and cracked. He stumbled onto the top step and tried for the next one, but his injured leg buckled and before he could do anything he found himself on the ground in front of the trailer. The thin thread that held his mind tethered to his body like a balloon seemed to have snapped. Distantly, he thought he heard someone crying.

“Toomey.”

The grass felt so
soft
on the side of his face! A weed poked through the split made by the knife and tickled at the roof of his mouth. The scent of raw onion filled the air, and it made him think of the long summer days of his childhood when he mowed lawns with Tanner Frank for spending money. He could see nothing now but swirling blackness, and a small patch of illuminated grass right in front of him. He felt calm, adrift in a peaceful sea.
A man could die worse than this
. The voice in his head seemed as far away as whoever was crying.

There was a bare foot in the patch of grass, small and dirty and streaked with blood and vomit. A child’s foot. The jeans-clad leg attached to it ascended into the maelstrom of black ringing his vision. He didn’t need to look up to know who the leg belonged to.

As the darkness swallowed him, Garraty realized the person he heard crying was him.

So much sound.

Beep.

Sssssssss-clack.

Beep.

Sssssssss-clack.

The squeak of wheels, growing louder at first then fading until he was left with the incessant beeping and hissing and clacking again. Garraty floated blind in the void and listened to the sounds. Hushed whispers, somewhere nearby. The burring of a telephone.

Beep.

Sssssssss-clack.

Beep.

Sssssssss-clack.

A muted, distant female voice intoned
Aubrey Crawford 2-6-7, Aubrey Crawford 2-6-7
. The voice had a tinny, electronic edge to it.

Garraty opened his eyes. He lay in a bed, in a room with beige walls and a speckled drop ceiling. Towering over him on his left was a shiny metal rack in the shape of the letter T. From each arm dangled a transparent bag filled with clear liquid. High on the wall before him an ancient tube television balanced on a steel platform attached to a movable arm. Lower, to one side, a closed door of pressboard and laminate designed to look like solid wood. He knew there was a bathroom behind the door, but didn’t know
how
he knew. Not yet. Another door was midway down the wall. This one was open, and Garraty saw a small section of hallway outside it, more of the beige walls and another of the faux-wood doors across the way.

Something was squeezing his finger. He raised the hand a little and saw a plastic clip gripping his index finger like one of the plastic clothespins Tina used when she hung the wash out to dry. He ought to know what this was, but his mind refused to make the connection for him. It was still lost in the black sea. The hand was heavily bandaged, thick white gauze held in place by even whiter tape.

Beep
.

God, but his throat burned! He tried to swallow and gagged. Something was in his mouth, rigid and thick and smooth. It felt like a dead snake, pressing down on the part of his tongue that wasn’t numb and stretching down his throat to who knew where. Next to him, something hissed with the drawn out
sssssssss
he’d heard while he drifted in the darkness. His chest rose, pushed up not by an inhalation but by the air forced into him by the machine, cool and sterile and unstoppable. He tried to draw a breath of his own but his body wouldn’t obey. The machine clacked and his chest collapsed as the violating wind seeped out of him.

In his head, the voice was full of wonder:
Is this what getting raped is like?

As panic swelled in him, the darkness pulled Garraty into its embrace once more.

“Mr. Garraty?”

The voice came from the unlit sky above and rolled across the smooth black water in which he drifted, everywhere and nowhere at once.
Are you there, God? It’s me, Garraty.
He looked into the void but saw nothing, then closed his eyes again because keeping them open seemed like too much effort. He felt weightless in the warm caress of the water, like an astronaut free of gravity’s pull, and he sensed its depths went as far as the universe itself. How easy it would be to simply let himself slip beneath the surface and sink into eternity.

“Mr. Garraty? Joe?”

A hand grasped his left shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. This time when he opened his eyes he found himself in a room that seemed vaguely familiar, one with beige walls and a speckled drop ceiling. Sunlight filled the window in the wall to his right and fell in a bright yellow splash on the tiled floor. There was a man standing next to him, a young guy who looked like he was barely out of grade school, with thinning red hair and a freckled face. He was smiling.

“Welcome back, Mr. Garraty. I’m Jim Redman, one of the staff physicians here. Do you know where you are?”

The smiling man wore white and for an instant Garraty wondered if he was one of the angels his daddy thought every good Christian would find waiting to lead them to heaven when they died. But heaven didn’t have beige walls, did it? Hell, it shouldn’t have walls at all, just streets of gold and endless boring songs plucked on a harp.
Besides, heaven has no place for murderers. You see an angel when you die, it’ll be Lucifer himself.
He realized the man in white was simply wearing a jacket. A blue collar peeked out from the neck of the coat.

Doctor. Hospital.

He blatted this last word in a dry, cracked voice that sounded alien to him.

“That’s right, Decatur Morgan,” Redman said, nodding. “It’s good to see you awake. It was touch and go there for awhile, but it seems you weren’t ready to leave us just yet. How’s your pain?”

Things were coming to him now, little snippets of film in his head like the remnants of an explosion in the projection booth of a theater. A flash of face in a wash of headlights. The sickening
babump
of the tires as the Prius went over something. A dead boy, and an obscene act under the dilapidated house.

The risen boy, coming for him with a knife.

“Still with me, Mr. Garraty?”

“Water,” he croaked. His throat felt like the arid ground he’d seen all over the news the previous year when the drought in the midwest was so bad, brown earth so criss-crossed with cracks it looked more like plated scales than dirt. He had a sudden memory of a bad dream, one where he was swallowing a snake whole, and his chest tightened. He could almost feel the thing going down.
Must have been a tube. Thank God they took it out before I woke up.

“I’ll have the nurse bring some ice chips for you to suck on,” the doctor said. He reached into one of his pockets and extracted a small tablet computer, which he swiped and tapped several times with one finger. “And a few glycerin swabs for your lips. Lemon-flavored. Be mindful of the stitches in your tongue.”

The organ in question was a thick dead thing in Garraty’s mouth. He remembered the knife splitting it, and the way the blood had pooled in the basin of his jaw. Remembered his cheek folded back like the covers on a bed in an upscale hotel.
Gonna have to change my name to Scarface. Say hello to my little friend. I call him Toomey.
When he pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth, he felt a line of hard bumps against the soft skin.

The tablet vanished back into the lab coat pocket. “Frankly, you’re lucky to be alive, Mr. Garraty. A lot of people wouldn’t have survived your injuries.”

He rambled on, saying things like
penetrating trauma
and
pneumothorax
and
anterior and dorsal lacerations
, but Garraty paid him no mind. He didn’t need ten-dollar words to know he was fucked up. Had Tina come by to see him? Did she even know he was in the hospital?

Does she care?

“You’re lucky your neighbor heard your screams and called 9-1-1. She probably saved your life.” As Redman spoke, the smile dropped from his face like dying autumn leaves. “Another couple of minutes and you would have bled out. We had to give you seven units of blood before we got you stabilized.”

Garraty thought maybe he was supposed to be impressed by this, but he wasn’t. He was more impressed at the thought that the old bitch across the road called an ambulance instead of watching him bleed to death while she sucked on one of those foul cigarettes. He didn’t really give a shit one way or the other about how much blood he needed. He remembered the way it flowed out of him in hot gluts, the way his head seemed to float above him like a balloon bobbing on a string, and didn’t care to think beyond that.

What he
did
give a shit about was the pain, which had wakened in him. Shards of glass grated in his chest with every breath, and his leg hummed like there was an electric current running through it. His hands ached. He tried a smile of his own.

“Think I can get some pain meds, doc?”
And maybe a couple of beers?

“Of course you can.” Redman reached for Garraty’s lap and for a moment Garraty thought the younger man was about to give his dick a good honking, or maybe a quick handjob to take his mind off the pain, but instead the doctor rummaged in the bedclothes and came up with something that reminded him of one of the buzzers people in game shows used years ago, before computers replaced everything. The pen-sized device was designed to fit in a closed fist and had a single white button on one end. From the other a thick wire extended and snaked over the rail of the bed to destinations unknown.

Dr. Redman placed it in Garraty’s hand. “The button controls a PCA pump, and will dose you with morphine as you need it. Just press it anytime you’re in pain and you’ll get some relief. It won’t let you have too much.” Something unreadable flitted across his face when he said the last bit.

Morphine sounded pretty goddamn good. Garraty depressed the button and heard a click from somewhere behind his head. Almost immediately he felt the black water beckoning, and he drifted away for a time. He didn’t know for how long, only that when he opened his eyes again the doctor was gone.

He pressed the button and sank into the deep, where there was no worrying about his troubles, no pain from his injuries, and best of all, no dead boy trying to kill him with one of his own goddamn knives.