Coven (18 page)

Besser was paling at the sight.

Break time,
Tom thought. He leaned against the shovel and
chugged more Spaten—nothing like a cold beer after hard work,
whether you were mowing the lawn, laying shingles, or burying girls
alive.

“
She’d been in some of my
classes,” Besser lamented.

“
Too bad she didn’t take,”
Tom said.

“
We’ve got it all worked
out now.” Besser looked fearfully to the hooded sister. “No more
mistakes.”

A froth of foam and bubbles drooled from
Penelope’s mouth. What a grosser. The gelatinous loops of her arms
and legs slopped uselessly, like tentacles on a speared octopus.
Tom figured she was folded in half backward, her big wet breasts
lolling at her armpits. At least she smelled like good
barbecue.

The sister pointed to the hole.

“
Bury her,” Besser
said.

Tom pushed her into the
grave with his boot sole. She didn’t fall in, she
oozed
in, like muck.
Besser held up the lantern and groaned when he looked into the
hole.

At last Penelope’s words blubbered up.
“Plub plub please don’t bulup bulup bury me,
Tom!”

“
Don’t let the minor fact
that she’s still alive dissuade your heart,” Besser regretted to
Tom. “It must be done.”

“
W where’s where’s my
blay blay baby?”

Besser cleared his throat. “Regrettably,
dear, your baby’s dead. Don’t blame yourself. You simply didn’t
take.”

“
I lyly rup want m m m my
baby!”

Where was it? Tom looked
around.
Ah, there.
The jellyish thing was crammed in the corner of the box.
Tom picked it up by what he guessed were its feet and held it up to
the lantern light. It hung limp as a rooster’s wattle.

Penelope blubbered a high pitched
shriek.

—
Give me it!
the sister ordered. She held out her white
hands.

Besser recoiled. “Oh, for God’s sake.
Please.”

Tom shrugged. He gave it to
the woman in black. Grinning, she let its bloated head swing back
and forth like depended pizza dough, throwing a pendulous shadow.
Tom watched with little interest. It wasn’t like it was a
real
baby, right? Not
like the kind he’d been once, not like the kind mothers cuddled and
loved. Not really anyway.

“
Please,”
Besser objected, nausea in his face. “Please
don’t.”

—
Shut up!
the sister said like an irked grade-school girl.
Her bleating wet giggles palpitated up. She turned the dead
baby thing in her white hands and squeezed its head till its
eyes popped out.

Penelope was flopping madly
in her hole, shrieking, trying to get out.
Motherly love,
Tom supposed. He was
amazed at her sudden ability to move. For a moment he feared she
might actually churn herself out of the grave.

Besser winced. “Just throw it in the hole.
Please don’t—”

Gnarled doglike teeth bared
through the sister’s grin. She bit into the top of the dead baby’s
head with a sound much like biting into a crisp apple. The sister
sucked its brain till the boneless bag for a head collapsed. Then
she giggled, munching.
Someone should
teach her some manners,
Tom thought.
Judith Martin would shit railroad ties if she
could see this.

Wet smacking sounds followed, and slurping.
The sister chewed her meal heartily; a big lump slid down her
throat when she swallowed.

Revolted, Besser dropped the lantern. He
stumbled away rubber kneed, fell between some trees, and
vomited in grand style. Now, this was not something you got to see
every day, a three hundred pound college professor
throwing up like a sludge pump in the middle of the woods. Watching
a black cloaked woman eat a dead baby’s brains wasn’t
something you got to see every day either. Even Tom had to raise a
brow at these shenanigans. The sister’s giggles splayed out into
the grove, quite loudly. Tom still hadn’t gotten used to that awful
sound—that giggling. Who could giggle while eating a baby’s brains?
They were one wild crew, that was for sure. Yeah, real party
animals.

She flung the
head sucked baby into the hole.
Splap.
Penelope was still flopping in
throes of absolute amorphous rage. Her high pitched blubbering
shriek blurted out loud like a faulty train whistle.

—
Bury her.

“
Yes, ma’am,” Tom said. The
shovel bit into the ground. He tossed in the first load.
Ba bump!
Penelope
squealed again. Tom dropped the second load into her opened
mouth.
That should quiet her down some,
the little dickens.
She gagged and coughed
up wet clumps of earth.

—
This is so much fun,
isn’t it, Tom?

“
Yes, ma’am, it sure is. I
haven’t had this much fun since the last Polanski
Festival.”

He buried Penelope without reservation. He
whistled that great old Guess Who song “Share the Land” as his
shovel gradually filled the hole. Burying girls alive wasn’t
exactly fun for the whole family, yet despite the grimness of the
task, Tom supposed it was a fair trade.

Shit,
he thought.
For immortality, I’ll dig
graves from here to Seattle.

—

CHAPTER 16

An alarm was blaring.

Lydia sat up naked in bed. She could still
hear the alarm, but then she realized it was only the telephone.
The clock read 5 A.M.

She snapped up the phone and yelled,
“What!”

“
You have a nice sleep?” a
voice inquired.

This was outrageous; it was Chief White.
“How come you’re calling me at five in the morning?” she
complained. “You gave me the day off, remember?”

“
I need ya to do me
somethin’. I’d have the night boys do it ’cept they been out all
night flaggin’ traffic. Some stoner done rolled fifteen thousand
gallons of super unleaded all over the Route. My boys are plumb
wore out and stinkin’ fierce of gas.”

“
Okay, Chief. What do you
want me to do?”

“
Go out to agro. Them state
guys are finally packing it up. Some geek named Latin is runnin’
the show. They’ll be trucking out by nine.”

Trucking out?
“Chief, what—”

“
They got a prelim for us.
Go pick it up.”

“
All right,” Lydia
groaned.

“
Good girl. Report to me
when you’re done. Now, this Latin guy’s got a bug up his bum the
size of my Buick. Be nice to him or else he won’t tell you squat.
Nose around, try and see what they’ve been up to. Use your” —White
gave a typical hick laugh— “your feminine powers of
persuasion.”

Lydia rang off, sputtering. White didn’t
want to go himself because he figured Lydia’s tits and ass would
prompt a more cooperative response. She suited up quickly, enjoying
the early morning silence. Dawn had not yet broken when she pulled
into the agriculture/agronomy site. State cadets were loading signs
into a van. “Quarantine Area, Do Not Enter,” they read. Three
semi rigs were parked in a row behind the stables. A state
sergeant directed her to a wheeled trailer. Gas powered
generators pumped racket into the air, like jackhammers. But the
electricity had been fixed. Why would they need generators?

A work booted nerd in
khakis met her at the trailer door. He looked bony, had short hair
and a long neck. “My name is Dr. Hatton,” he said.
Hatton, Latin.
This must
be the guy with the bug up his bum the size of White’s Buick. His
voice was uncharacteristically dark. “I’m senior field officer for
the state department of agriculture. You may have seen my picture
in the
Enquirer
last year. I delivered twin Berkshire hogs joined at the
head.”

Lydia told him regrettably that she’d missed
that issue.

He handed her a single piece of paper. “This
the prelim?” she asked.

“
There is no preliminary
report. This is a state quarantine release form. It authorizes that
your agro site can now be safely reoccupied.”

“
Then what happened to the
agro animals?”

“
We’re not prepared to
release any conclusions as of yet.”

“
In other words,” Lydia
observed, “you have no intention of cooperating with the local
authorities.”

“
I am the only authority
here,” Dr. Hatton said.

White’s got this guy
pegged pretty good.
“Okay,” Lydia agreed,
“but do you think you could take that Buick out of your ass long
enough to give me something to tell my boss?”

“
It’s none of your boss’s
business… Buick?”

This might be fun. “You know what I think,
Dr. Hatton? I think you’re not giving me answers because you don’t
have any. You guys don’t know what you’re doing out here. You’re a
bunch of pussies.”

Hatton was getting pissed. “Pussies?” he
challenged.

“
That’s right.
Lightweights. You’ve been sitting out here for two days, blowing
tax dollars and doing nothing.”

Hatton glowered.

“
Did you at least autopsy
some of the animals?”

His tension strained further. He was getting
closer to the line she wanted him on. “Of course,” he said.
“Dozens. There was an inconsistency in some aspects of the
structural pathology.”

“
Great answer, Doc. Show
me.”

Hatton smiled. “You don’t have the stomach
for it.”

Lydia laughed in his face. At D.C. she’d
broken into hardhouses full of weeks old corpses of junkies.
She’d hauled up maggot swollen floaters. She’d cut down drug
stoolies who’d been hung upside down and gutted like deer. “I’ve
seen things that would make your worst nightmare look like Ronald
McDonaldland. You talk big, Hatton, but if you had any real guts,
you’d show me what you’ve got in those rigs.”

Now Dr. Hatton’s true self was beginning to
glimmer through. “It would be a pleasure,” he said.

He took her out to the
closest semi rig. This would be his
morgue on wheels; that’s what the generators were for, to
run the coolers while the trucks were parked. Inside, buzzing tubes
lit a tiny office. There was a water cooler, a coffeepot, and a
little fridge for snacks.
Cozy,
she thought. A metal door stood
opposite.

“
So we’re all pussies, is
that it?” He pulled on a yellow raincoat and hood, then a plastic
face shield. He looked ridiculous in it. “Well, I’ll show you what
this pussy has been doing for the last two days.” He heaved open
the metal door and led her in.

Inside was very cold. High coolers gusted
chill and noise through metal grilles. In back, pairs of animals
lay strapped to steel shelving, probably a dozen pairs. Each had
been split like a cleaned fish; body cavities were stuffed with
bagged organs, and an eye had been removed from each beast, to
check ocular potassium levels, she assumed. This great bulk of
bagged meat whelmed her.

Dr. Hatton stood by a metal table. On the
table lay a dead horse. “You wanted to see? Well, take a look at
this.”

He tossed her a small
plastic pouch which contained several ounces of some
red marbled gray mush. A tag on the bottom gave an index
number, time and date of dissection, and Hatton’s initials. The
next line read:
Palomino, white, 2 yrs.
approx., testes.

“
They’re balls!” Hatton
yelled at her. “Horse balls!”

Confusion screwed up Lydia’s face. “It’s
just mush,” she said.

“
They’re
balls!”
Hatton
reiterated. “You know, nuts, pecker jewels, doodads! Those are from
the first horse I autopsied yesterday! It’s the same for every male
animal on the site!”

Lydia had no idea what he meant. Hatton
patted the horse on the table. “I was saving this baby to open for
the people back at AHL, but what the hell! Who the fuck are you to
come here and question my competence!”

“
Doctor, I
wasn’t—”

“
Shut up!” Hatton barked.
Then he laughed. “It’s show time!”

Lydia gasped. Hatton raised a
sixteen inch Homelite chain saw. It started up on the first
try. Hatton flipped down his visor and went to work. He delved the
blade up into the animal’s top hind leg, through the joint. The
sound was atrocious, a searing, hitching scream. Lydia almost
couldn’t watch.

“
This is what I’ve been
doing the last two days, bitch!”

He’s crazy,
she thought.
He’s
fried.

Hatton continued to saw. Clumped blood and
shreds of muscle spat out of the meaty groove; his face-shield and
coat were flecked with it. Then the horse’s leg flipped over on the
floor. Hatton turned off the saw, then went right to work with a
big autopsy scalpel, cutting a deep gash into the animal’s rear
belly. He was a maniac. He grinned like a madman through the
flecked visor.

“
Lo!” he shouted. From the
gash, bare handed, he yanked out a flap of yellowed tissue. “A
little of the old mesovarium! See?” He threw it on the floor and
ripped out more. “A little peritoneal tissue, a little
stroma!”
Flap, flap!
It all went onto the floor. “Ho! A kidney! My mistake!”
Flump!