Daemon of the Dark Wood (32 page)

And totally unprepared to face the bizarre horror that was about to turn the Trucking-A’s down-home restaurant into a slaughterhouse.

It began when the crazy-eyed topless chick burst through the door with a crooked hickory walking stick in her hand. On her head was a wreath woven from a honeysuckle vine. Her cut-off jeans appeared to be blood-stained, as did her thighs and ankles. She didn’t utter a word as her wild eyes swept the entire room, as if quickly counting heads.

Kenny the fry cook looked up from his griddle and shouted: “Hey! You can’t …” His words trailed off as two, no,
three
more wild women in various stages of undress filed in through the front entrance, coming to stand with the first one. One of them had an ax. One had a machete. The other had a pick-ax. All of the blades were blood-streaked.

Marlene dropped her tray of food and it hit the floor with a sharp clatter. Her heart pounded with trip-hammer force, making her eyes jump in their sockets. When the woman with the honeysuckle wreath raised her hickory stick and let out a warbling war cry, an involuntary trickle of urine soiled Marlene’s panties, and she began to tremble all over.

There was a brief moment of relief when Marlene told herself that this had to be a bizarre protest by animal-rights activists or a bit of guerilla theater staged by crazed vegans to shock the meat-eating customers. But her relief died when she smelled this band of wild-eyed women. It was an overpowering feral scent that put unwanted pictures in Marlene’s head, pictures of unspeakable acts of brutality and sexual perversions of the worst kind imaginable.

No, these women weren’t here to protest anything. They had come to do violence. They were here to inflict deadly wounds. These were modern-day warrior women.

When six more of their tribe streamed in through the front entrance and the last one in locked the door and turned the CLOSED sign outward, Marlene turned and ran toward the double swinging-doors to the kitchen, intending to slip out the back door, jump in her car and get the hell out of there. She stopped short, her heels skidding to a halt, when a naked woman with a baseball bat exploded through the swinging doors and bashed the head of Skinny Jenny, the newlywed waitress who weighed ninety pounds in her stocking feet. Jenny went down with her tray of hot food, blood from her scalp spattered on a side-dish of fries.

A big trucker Marlene knew only as Big Bob jumped up from his plate heaped with a T-bone steak and potatoes and advanced toward the woman with the baseball bat. His pinched-face expression suggested a man afflicted with severe constipation. “Give me that bat, you crazy bitch,” Big Bob growled.

The crazy bitch gave it to him. An off-the-shoulder shot right across Big Bob’s prominent jaw, the bat cracking with a homerun sound, and Big Bob staggered backward, stunned, his lower jaw hanging at a strange angle, his eyes red-rimmed and instantly bloodshot. He lowered his head, hunched his thick shoulders, and snorted; Marlene could see that he was going to charge the batter like a mad bull. But Big Bob was too slow. The crazy bitch cocked the bat and swung again, this time connecting with the side of Big Bob’s head, just behind the left ear. The big man dropped to his knees, then toppled forward onto his face.

Marlene had been backing slowly away during the one-sided bout between Big Bob and Crazy Bat, and now she bumped into the lunch counter. She glanced down. Saw the steak knife resting on the edge of a gravy-smeared plate piled with well-gnawed chicken bones that hadn’t yet been bussed. Without giving thought to the consequences, she snatched up the steak knife and held it out in front of her with both hands as if wielding a heavy sword. She pointed it at Crazy Bat and hoped it would discourage the wild woman from coming any closer.
Go bat somebody else and leave me alone.
But of course, she didn’t. She leered at Marlene, laughed demonically, and then slammed the bat down on the counter just to see Marlene flinch.

Seeing the woman up close, Marlene realized that she
knew
this woman, by sight but not by name.
She goes to my church!
Usually on the arm of a distinguished-looking portly man with graying hair. With her face dirtied, her hair disheveled, her long legs streaked with dried blood and breasts bared, she looked more like an Amazon jungle woman than a churchgoer. Nevertheless, Marlene said, “You go to my church. Sweet Jesus, don’t hurt me.” It was a desperate thing to have to say, and it was said to no effect whatsoever.

Crazy Bat again smacked the bat on the countertop. Again Marlene jumped. The woman glanced at Marlene’s nametag and said, “Jesus ain’t here, Marlene. You serve the wrong god. Too bad for you. Marlene.”

Marlene was dimly aware of violent commotion in other sections of the restaurant. She heard the disturbing sounds of blows being struck, of blades chopping into live flesh, going
ker-chook! ker-chunk!
And the screams, Jesus! the screams and the pitiful cries for help! A little boy crying for his mama—one of the vacationing couple’s towheaded twins. The shouted curses. The whimpers. The desperate pleas. She couldn’t think about that now. She had to concentrate on getting away from the woman with the bat and getting the hell out of this … abattoir.

The wrong god
. What the devil did that mean? The woman had said plain as day that Marlene served the wrong god.
Ask her! Put her off! Distract her with the question and then run for it.

“Whaddaya mean, I serve the wrong god?” she asked, her voice quaking with mortal fear.

With a casual flick of the bat, the woman knocked the knife out of Marlene’s hands. “Wanna see?” Crazy Bat asked with mad glee. “Wanna see?” Then she chivvied Marlene behind the lunch counter, made her place her hands palms-down on the countertop, and proceeded to use the bat to hammer Marlene’s hands to the countertop with steak knives.

Marlene passed out when the second knife pinned her left hand to the counter. She couldn’t have been out for long, because when she came to, the slaughter was still going on. She was a captive witness. She watched in a painful daze. It was almost as if she were watching a movie. Drunk-sick and watching a snuff film. Bodies sprawled across tables and on the floor in pools and smears of bright blood.

Only one man remained alive. A tall trucker with a CAT hat sitting sideways on his head. He’d taken an ax away from one of the wild women and split her head with it, and now the other women had him backed into a corner and were menacing him with their weapons. He swung the ax but the females stayed just out of his range. The woman with the honeysuckle wreath in her hair poked at him with her hickory stick and he swatted it away. A weaponless woman with short blond hair pegged him with a bottle of hot sauce, right between his eyes. He swung blindly, and the women swarmed over him and wrestled him to the floor.

Marlene shut her eyes after a fat woman with a huge heart-shaped ass planted a meat cleaver in his throat. She tried to shut her ears to the ungodly sounds coming from the killing corner, but of course it wasn’t possible to shut your ears. Your ears were defenseless when your hands were pegged in place with knives and helpless.

Marlene drifted in and out of consciousness. At one point, she felt an overwhelming presence and was suddenly certain that if she opened her eyes she would see the powerful god she’d neglected to serve, but all she saw was a wicked bunch of gluttonous women hungrily eating the raw flesh of severed limbs.

In recent years Liza Leatherwood had sometimes imagined how Death might take her, how she would finally succumb. She’d never believed that she would die peacefully in her sleep. She doubted that anyone
ever
died peacefully in sleep. Death might find you abed, in the middle of the night, but there was no way you could sleep through it. There had to come that moment when you found yourself in Death’s cold grip and you
knew
your time on earth was up. When your heart stopped or something vital exploded in your brain, there had to come that moment of panic or regret when you realized you were about to be evicted from your body and that your body was only hours away from the undertaker’s table, days away from burial or cremation. Dying peacefully in sleep was nothing but a tall tale people told themselves, hoping to take comfort in the myth.

But of all the ways Liz imagined Death would claim her, she’d never dreamt that Death would come in the guise of a ferocious bear. Yet, there the bear was, charging down on the professor, chuffing like a steam engine as it closed in for the kill. If Thorn couldn’t stop the giant beast with his little pistol, the bear would surely take her after it was done with him. It was to be her punishment for daring to interfere with the Dark Man of the Wood’s unholy plan.

The tree remained standing, the souls still imprisoned within it, and the man who’d tried to cut it down lay dead, nearly decapitated. It galled her that she might die in such abject failure. Her own noble plan had come to nothing. The goat-man would win and have his way, and Liza’s pitiful soul would journey from this mortal realm bearing that failure. She would have to stand before God in shame, knowing that her failure had needlessly cost many innocent lives.

She found her bifocals and slipped them on, and then pushed herself up into a kneeling position so that she could bear solemn witness to Thorn’s demise (she owed him that much) and so that she might offer a final prayer for forgiveness before the beast savaged her.

Liza had to admire the man’s bravery. He stood his ground, aimed his gun and didn’t shoot until the bear was less than five yards away. Bam! Bam! Bam! Three rapid shots that should’ve hit the animal dead in the face, but Liza couldn’t see if they did. The bear didn’t slow down. And then it was too late anyway, because the bear was right on top of the professor.

“Lord …” Liza began her last prayer.

Then the miracle happened.

Professor Thorn turned on his heels and let the bear go past him like a bullfighter waving the bull by with his red cape in a graceful veronica. But Thorn had no cape, and the bear didn’t actually go by. The bear crashed headlong into the ground like a locomotive that has run out of track and must plow into earth like a doomed Leviathan.

Liza raised her clasped hands to the sky, shook her doubled fists and said, “Thank you, Jesus!”

* * * *

Rourke was cruising a back road near Widow’s Ridge when the dispatcher radioed the report of a bear attack on Haunted Tree Trail. One fatality, and one severe injury. EMS was already en route.

He turned around, switched on the emergency flashers and gunned the engine as he headed for Widow’s Ridge Road.

Haunted Tree Trail was the Department’s unofficial designation for the dirt road that dead-ended at the “haunted” tree. The place was a popular make-out spot for horny teenagers, and on weekends it was a routine checkpoint for patrolling deputies. You had to show the colors to keep the kids honest, to keep them from going too far. The kids understood that if you caught them with their clothes off or if two heads weren’t visible when you put the spotlight on their car, they would be in for an embarrassing police escort to their respective homes, where they would be made to confess their fumbling sins to their parents.

But now it wasn’t even dusk, so Rourke doubted that the victims of the bear attack had been teenagers out for a little early park-and-spark action. Besides, if you stayed in your vehicle, you shouldn’t be vulnerable to a bear attack.

Rourke radioed the dispatcher. “Who called in the bear attack?” he asked.

“Professor Alfred Thorn,” the dispatcher said.

“He say what they were doing out there?”

“Negative.”

He sped past the old Leatherwood place and turned onto the twin ruts of Haunted Tree Trail. With the wild-animal attacks on his search party still sorely fresh in his mind, he was obliged to wonder if the bear attack might’ve been—for whatever reason—directed by the same “supernatural” entity, Rourke’s new nemesis.

The trail was bumpy and Rourke slowed down. Even so, the cruiser’s shock absorbers were stressed to the max. The trees and thick undergrowth encroached upon both sides of the trail as if they meant to overtake and obliterate it.

When the top of the fabled tree came into view, Rourke recalled some of the silly stories he’d heard about it in his youth, spooky tales suggesting that tree’s twisted trunk and gnome-like limbs resulted from an ancient witch’s curse. Of course, he’d never believed any of them, but there had been that one time when he, a senior in high school, had parked near the tree with his sweetheart Cheryl Tatum and she swore that she heard eerie voices coming from the tree. Cheryl, normally a levelheaded girl, was so frightened by those voices that she refused to go near that “creepy place” ever again. She was crying as he drove them away in his restored Impala. “They sounded so angry,” she said of the spirit voices. Rob asked what they had said. “Nothing in words,” Cheryl answered. “Just angry screaming.”

Now, as he pulled up and parked the cruiser behind the Tip Top Tree truck and got his first hurried look at the mauled victims of the bear attack, memories of Cheryl Tatum and her spirit voices fled and Rourke steeled himself for a close-up look at the decedent.

Alfred Thorn and an old woman in a long black dress watched as the two paramedics loaded a stretcher bearing a bloodied victim into the EMS vehicle. The biggest black bear Rourke had ever seen lay dead in the dirt, gunshot wounds evident in its head and face. Rourke slid out of the cruiser and joined Thorn and the old lady he now recognized as Mrs. Leatherwood.

“What the hell happened here?” he asked.

Thorn looked at him as if he were a dim-witted student and said, “Isn’t it obvious?”

Then the Leatherwood widow rounded on Rourke and said, “Tell him he has to cut down that tree! You tell him!”

“A man is dead!” Thorn shouted at the old lady, as if this explained his apparent reluctance to do her urgent bidding.

“For God’s sake, make him finish that tree!” Mrs. Leatherwood implored. “More people will be dead if he don’t.”