Helltown (23 page)

With a moan, Jeff rolled away from the demonic thing, unwilling to watch it devour the rest of his friend. He closed his eyes, gripped his hair with his hands, and touched his forehead to the floor.

He wasn’t aware of the second green anaconda slithering silently through the darkness toward him.

CHAPTER 19

“Something came out of the fog.”

The Fog
(1980)

According to Mandy’s gold wristwatch—a gift from Jeff—she had been wandering through the ghostly forest for a little over an hour, though it seemed much longer than that. She had started away from the small butte in what she’d thought had been the direction of the highway, but she’d never arrived at it, and now she had to admit she was completely lost. She wasn’t surprised. The forest would have been difficult enough to navigate correctly in the daytime. The thick, soupy shadows and coalescing fog made it near impossible. It seemed every five or ten feet she had to circumvent another tree, ducking beneath the low sprouting branches, each time veering more and more off course. To make matters worse, it had started to rain twenty minutes ago. This had cleared some of the mist, improving her visibility, but it had also soaked through her silly Cheetara costume, making the Spandex cling uncomfortably to her cold and clammy skin.

Nevertheless, despite all this, Mandy had to remind herself she was lucky. She had escaped Cleavon and his brothers. God knows what the others were going through right then. She could still hear Cherry’s screams in her head. What had Cleavon or his brothers done to her? And why? Moreover, why had they attacked Mandy and the others in the first place? What was their motivation? Were they a bunch of sick, depraved rednecks that ran some sort of torture operation back at the “ol’ McGrady place?” Or were they simply psychopaths, who killed for the sake of killing?

She tried to convince herself that Steve and Noah had returned to the scene of the accident with the police and paramedics in time to rescue Cherry and Austin and Jeff. But something told her they would return to find nobody there. They would think Austin and Mandy and Cherry had carried Jeff off in the hopes of finding help. They would organize some sort of search party, but they wouldn’t find them. And this was why Mandy felt so frustrated she hadn’t reached the road. She wouldn’t be able to tell the police about Cleavon and his brothers—and by the time she made her way out of the forest and contacted them, it would likely be too late.

A branch clawed Mandy’s face. She cried out at the burning sensation in her right cheek. She touched the cut and felt warm blood.

Suddenly tears welled in her eyes and threatened to spill down her cheeks in great torrents. This wasn’t fair. This shouldn’t be happening. This was supposed to have been a fun weekend, a chance for she and Jeff to rekindle what had been lost in their relationship. She shouldn’t be wandering around wet and lost and…hunted…in some god-awful national park. She should be in the cozy hotel room in town that Jeff had rented for them, warm, the TV on, snuggling with him under the bed covers.

It’s all your fault, Jeff
, she thought with a hot-blooded surge of anger. If you hadn’t felt the need to play chicken with that hearse, we wouldn’t have crashed. We wouldn’t have run into Cleavon and his brothers. Everything would have been as we’d planned it—

Mandy stopped on the spot. Ahead of her, visible between the crosshatch of branches, illuminated in the cold light of the autumn moon, an old derelict school bus sat in the center of a small glade.

She remained unmoving for several long seconds, trying to comprehend what a bus would be doing out here in the woods, and when no answers came to her, she approached it cautiously, quietly, half convinced it might disappear at any moment, like a mirage.

It didn’t disappear, of course. It was as real as the cedars, firs, and pines that had grown up around it. Judging by its beat-up, weathered condition, it had been there for a very long time. It rested on flat tires and canted to one side, perhaps a result of a broken axle. Many of the windows were cracked or missing altogether.

What was it doing here in the middle of the forest? she wondered again. A car, she could understand. This land might have once been someone’s property. The owner might have abandoned a broken-down sedan when he moved away, leaving it for nature to claim as its own.

But a school bus?

As Mandy ventured closer she made out graffiti scribbled along the vehicle’s shadowed flank. It was similar to the stuff they’d seen beneath the bridge: inverted pentagrams, upside-down crosses, crude drawings of Satan, a goat’s head sprouting evil-looking horns. In blue spray paint: “DANNY WAS HERE, 82!” In red: “look behind you…”

Despite herself, Mandy glanced over her shoulder. She found nobody lurking there.

She stopped before the bus’s bi-fold door, conflicted. It was cranked open, allowing entrance. It would be dry inside, out of the rain. She could curl up on a seat, wait until the rain stopped, maybe wait until morning arrived.

Then again, was the bus safe? What if the floor had rotted out and she fell through it, her legs shredded by rusty metal? Or what if the ceiling collapsed on her?

She folded her arms across her chest and glanced to her left, to her right, seeing only the thin veil of slanted rain, the dripping trees, the bent, water-sopped tall grasses and saplings.

She climbed the steps that led inside the bus. The metal groaned beneath her weight but seemed solid enough. At the top she gripped the stanchion by the driver’s compartment and detected a sickly smell, like something had died inside the vehicle. This almost made her turn around and head back outside, but she didn’t. The odor wasn’t overpowering; she could deal with it for a few hours.

She turned to face the passenger area. The shadows there were plentiful, but she could make out that all the bench seats had been removed.

She started down where the aisle once would have been. Cobwebs dusted the ceiling while others filled out the spaces where windowpanes had once resided. Soda cans and candy wrappers and other trash littered the floor. Three fluorescent green tennis balls sat incongruously next to a paperback novel swelled to twice its original size, as if it had been dunked in water and dried out. She found no decomposing wood mouse or other small rodent. Whatever was causing the smell must be beneath the bus.

Somewhat relieved by that conclusion she settled down next to a raised wheel well. She pulled her legs against her chest and wrapped her arms around her knees. Rain plinked steadily against the roof. Every so often a frigid gust of wind whistled through the missing windows.

Suddenly Mandy felt extremely small and insignificant—and alone. She could die out here, her body never discovered, and who would miss her? Her mother was dead, she had no siblings, she wasn’t close to any of her relatives, she hadn’t spoken to her father since he’d kicked her out of the house when she was eighteen. Her friends would be shocked at her disappearance, she supposed, but would they miss her, really
miss
her? She doubted it. Their lives would go on as usual, and they would forget about her. Maybe her name would come up now or then, something like, “Hey, did you used to know Mandy?” or “You know they never found out what happened to Mandy?” But that would be all. She would become a memory, then a name, then a girl they once knew, then nothing at all.

To Mandy’s surprise, she yawned. She wasn’t tired, she realized; she was bone weary with exhaustion. She lay down on her side, curled into a ball, and rested her cheek on her forearm. The galvanized steel floor was hard and cold but more comfortable than she would have guessed. The strain and tension seemed to seep out of her weary muscles. Her eyelids drooped, batted, then closed. She wondered if any of those spiders that had spun the webs above her might crawl into her hair or her ears while she slept. However, she didn’t really care one way or another. She was too tired, too comfortable. She would wake in the morning and it would be bright and sunny and warm outside. She would find her way to the highway. She would wave down a passing car. She would find everyone waiting for her at the police station or the hospital. The cops would have arrested Cleavon and his brothers during the night, and Mandy and Jeff and the others would return to New York City, and everything would be back to how it had been before. They would joke about what happened, laughing at how Cleavon had said he was as country as a baked bean sandwich. They would joke and laugh at all of this because it would be behind them.

Mandy heard a scuffling noise outside the bus. She wanted to ignore it, she likely would have, if she didn’t hear it a second time. It sounded very close. It sounded like footsteps—

Mandy hauled herself out of the black pool of sleep she had been sinking into. Wide awake, she lay on the floor of the school bus, unmoving, listening. She heard nothing. Had she imagined the scuffling noise? Or had Cleavon and his brothers found her?

Pulse pounding in her ears, she eased herself into a crouch. She wanted to run, bolt out of the bus, into the trees. But she was too afraid to do that, too afraid Cleavon would be waiting for her in the night.

Maybe they didn’t know she was there? she thought. Maybe if she remained quiet, they would move on, leave her alone?

Mandy raised her head to peek out the nearest window. A strong wind was blowing, bending the saplings and rattling the branches of the larger trees. She didn’t see anyone. Nevertheless, that didn’t mean she was alone. It was dark, she couldn’t see far—

Footsteps again, now on the other side of the bus.

Mandy yelped in surprise and fear and bumped backward into the bus’s wall panel. A commotion sounded outside. She shot to her feet, ready to run, even as she glimpsed the powerful hindquarters of a deer bounding away into the darkness.

Mandy’s hand went to her chest, and she forced the trapped breath from her lungs. “My God,” she whispered to herself.

She sat back down, pulled her knees to her chest once more, and rocked back and forth, wanting the night to be over, wanting morning to arrive, wanting to leave the miserable forest.

Reluctantly she glanced at her wristwatch and discovered it was still as early as she’d dreaded, 11:42 p.m., leaving her another six or seven hours until dawn broke.

CHAPTER 20

“Wanna play?”

Childs Play
(1988)

Cherry lay in the corner of the smelly room, hot, dizzy, nauseous, her hands and ankles bound with coarse rope. The giant named Earl kept guard less than ten feet away, lounging in a ratty upholstered armchair, farting and burping and mumbling to himself as he drank beer and watched television. He didn’t know she was conscious, and she wanted to keep it that way. Who knew what he would do to her? He and his brothers were monsters. He had nearly killed her.

Everything that had followed her beating in the forest was blurry and muddled in her mind, like a long-ago memory, or a vague dream. Earl had carried her back to where Jeff and Austin both lay unconscious on the ground. Shouting followed, then talking, then nothing for a while, then a vehicle arrived, and there was more talking. Then Earl was carrying her once again. She was flung over one shoulder, Austin over the other.

Finally she lost consciousness, and when she came around a few minutes ago, she was dumped here in the corner of the smelly room, bound by rope, in more pain than she’d ever been in her life.

She didn’t remember Earl kicking her in the face, but he must have, because her jaw was swollen. Her probing tongue had found several gummy gaps where her teeth had once been. And her chest, God, that’s where she hurt the most. Each breath was torturous, as if her lungs were encased in an iron maiden with nowhere to expand but into razor-sharp points.

Cherry couldn’t know for certain why Cleavon and his brothers had attacked them, but she had a pretty good guess. She had seen the lustful look in Cleavon’s eyes while he’d been talking to them and pretending to be civilized. It had taken her back to her days as a masseuse in Daveo. At the end of each massage she would finish massaging her customer’s head, and she would say, “Finished, sir,” and he would open his eyes and look at her how Cleavon had looked at her and say, “How much for extra service?” and she would giggle and say, “No, sir, I don’t do that,” because that’s what they wanted to hear, and he would grin and say, “Come on, just a hand job,” and she would pretend to think about it and give an exorbitant amount like two thousand pesos, and sometimes the customer would pay no questions asked, or sometimes he would work her down to one hundred pesos, which was as low as she would go, and then she would jerk him off and, afterward, ask to use his bathroom to wash the semen off herself, and then she would collect her money, tell him to request her the next time he called her company, and she would wait out front his building for the driver on the Honda motorbike to arrive, who would take her back to the housing where she and the other massage girls lived, and she would try not to think about what she’d done, she would tell herself it was just to pay for nursing school, and she would do it all over again the next day.

Nevertheless, as much as Cherry had detested that period of her life, at least she had been in control then. She had been the one setting the rules. She had never agreed to intercourse, no matter how much money was offered. To this day she remained a virgin, and she vowed to uphold her chastity until she married. Austin had not been happy by this declaration, but he’d accepted it. Maybe he thought he could change her mind at some point, or maybe he wasn’t planning on sticking together with her for long enough for it to matter, but whatever the reason he had accepted it.

Now, however, Cherry was no longer in control. Now there were no rules, and that terrified her like nothing else, because if Earl or Cleavon or Floyd wanted to fuck her, they would fuck her, they would fuck her and take her virginity, and they would likely kill her when they were done and bury her body in a shallow hole somewhere.