HELLz BELLz (18 page)

“Who’d do that? Your mother?”

“Nah, she wouldn’t do that.”

“Then who did? Think those freaks came in and did it?”

James shrugged. He put his hands on his grandmother’s shoulders and shook her again. “Grandma, wake up,” he said.

She didn’t respond. Her eyes remained closed, her head propped on the edge of a pillow.

“There’s her teeth,” said Josh.

James picked up the upper plate of dentures from a fold in the sheet and set it on the bedside table. “
Something
sure happened to her. She looks bad.”

Josh picked up the Bible from the bed and fanned through the thin pages.

“I’ve got to find my mother,” James said. “She might be next door. Come on.”

“What about her?” Josh put the Good Book back on the bed as if it might offer the old woman divine protection.

The church bell seemed to be getting louder. James could feel it chiming in the center of his skull, scattering his thoughts. “I think we…we have to get her out of here. To the hospital.”

“Not Druid Hills Medical Center.”

“No. The one in…” James couldn’t think of the name of the neighboring town.

“Wakefield?”

“Yeah. Wakefield.” The word felt strange in his mouth. Sounded odd to his ringing ears.

Josh went to the window and looked out. “Can’t see those freaks from here. If we’re going next door, we better take your guns. They could be out there waiting for us.”

“Okay.” James stood staring down at his unconscious grandmother.

“Well let’s get going.”

“Isn’t that bell getting to you?” asked James.

“Nah. Guess I’m used to it.”

“It’s fucking with me. I can’t…I don’t feel…right. I…”

“Shit, man, fuck it. Let’s roll.”

James followed his friend out of the room, glancing back at his grandmother and remembering when she used to give him shiny new quarters from her little blue change purse. Old memories were bubbling up from nowhere, adding to the disorder in his mind.

They went to his room, got the .22 bolt-action rifle and the 12-gauge shotgun from his closet and loaded them. Doing something with his hands helped to focus his thoughts. A few minutes later they were slipping out the back door and across the small yard to his neighbor’s house. Josh had the shotgun and James had the rifle. The back porch light of Mrs. Randall’s house was off, but the kitchen light was burning, and James jabbed the doorbell. Josh looked in the kitchen window and said, “Don’t see nobody, but the place is wrecked. There’s a dead cat on the floor. No shit.”

James looked through the dirty glass and saw a gray cat stretched out in a pool of blood on the tile floor. A broom was on the floor in front of the fridge, and little brown squares of cat food were scattered everywhere. “That’s not good,” he said. “We better check it out.”

He tried the door. Unlocked, it swung open. The boys stepped inside.

“She’s a widow, ain’t she?” Josh whispered.

James nodded. He held the rifle at his waist, pointing it forward. Josh bent down to examine the dead cat, resting the shotgun barrel across his bent knee. “Throat cut, looks like. Old Lady Randall musta freaked out too. Hope she didn’t do the same to your moms.”

James shot him an angry look, then walked toward the next room. “Mrs. Randall?” he called out. “You all right? It’s me. James Winter.”

They went from room to room, imitating moves they’d seen SWAT team guys do in the movies. They found another dead cat beheaded on the living room floor.

“The bitch don’t like cats,” said Josh.

“She loves cats,” James said. “She’s got three or four.”

“Not anymore.”

They found her in the upstairs bedroom. She was sitting in the middle of the bed with a dead cat between her outstretched legs. A bloody meat cleaver was embedded in the bedpost like an ax in a tree stump, and she was in the process of skinning the calico feline with a butcher knife. She was naked except for a pair of bloodstained white shorts, and her pendulous breasts rested against her round belly. She looked up at the boys as soon as they stepped into the room. She smiled and said, “I always heard there was more than one way to skin a cat, but damned if I see how.”

“Mrs. Randall, have you seen my mother?”

“Why, yes I have.” She put the knife on her knee and grabbed a handful of the animal’s pelt and pulled it, turning it inside out and exposing the cat’s grayish musculature. “I was looking out the window and I saw her going into the church. Then those carnival people showed up and my cats just went wild. They were always such good kitties.”

“Why’d you kill ’em?” asked Josh.

“That big voice told me to. It was clear as a bell.” She laughed as she picked up the knife to cut the pelt from the base of the cat’s skull. “You boys going hunting?”

“I’m hunting my mother.” James looked at his rifle and added, “Not with this.”

Mrs. Randall’s laughter was shrill. “I reckon you’ll find her in the church. Lord knows what she’s doing there.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Randall. Careful you don’t cut yourself.”

“The Lord knows,” she said as they left her to her skinning.

“I guess we’re heading for the church,” said Josh, resting the shotgun casually over his shoulder as they headed down the stairs.

“Yeah. I guess we are.”

James made a pit-stop in the downstairs bathroom to take a leak. Urinating, he smelled Brenda’s musky scent on his cock. He closed his eyes and remembered the silky feel of her vagina and wished they hadn’t been so rudely interrupted. He looked in the mirror; his red-painted face gave him a devilish look. He grinned. Then he found some cotton balls in Mrs. Randall’s medicine cabinet and stuffed a couple in his ears. He offered some to Josh but Josh refused them and asked him why he’d stuck them in his ears. “To muffle the damn bell,” James told him. “Can’t think straight with that noise in my head.” Josh shrugged and they left by the back door and sneaked around to the street-side of the house, guns at the ready.

The freaks (Mrs. Randall’s carnival people) were nowhere in sight, but their black van was still parked in front of the church.

“Must be inside,” said Josh. “We going in?”

“Have to. No telling what they might be doing to my mother—if she’s in there.”

“Wish we had some dynamite. We could blow that bell to Kingdom Come.”

James looked askance at his friend. “Kingdom Come? Where’d you get that?”

“I dunno. It’s what they always say in them old movies.”

“This ain’t no movie. And there ain’t no Kingdom coming.
Kingdom Come?
That don’t even make sense. If Kingdom is coming, how can it be a place you can blow things to?”

“It’s just an expression. Jeez, get off my case.”

“If something is coming, it’s in motion, it’s moving through space, so it can’t be a place.”

“You buggin’, man. Maybe you ain’t got enough cotton balls in your ears.”

“Fuck it, let’s go.”

“Wait. Ain’t you forgetting something?”

“What?”

“A flashlight. We can’t go in there without a light.”

“Shit. You’re right. I thought of that while ago and forgot all about it.” James hit the side of his head with the butt of his palm as if trying to knock water out of his ears. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

A few minutes later he was jogging back to Josh with the rifle in one hand and a flashlight in the other. With the cotton in his ears he could hear each hollow thud of his heart but that was better than hearing the raw bongs of the church bell.

As they crept into the church, Josh whispered, “If those freaks are too crazy to be scared of these guns we might have to shoot one of ’em to show we’re serious.”

“If they’ve hurt my mom I’ll shoot ’em anyway.” As he said the words, James wondered if he could really do it. Then he wondered if his idol Slim Shady would actually shoot somebody. It was one thing to sing about it, but it was a whole different thing to do it in real life.

They slipped into the darkness of the sanctuary, walking as softly as they could. James clicked on the flashlight and put the circle of light directly in front of his feet. The smell of old charred wood got stronger as they neared the edge of the burned-away floor. There was a flickering glow from the lower level of the building. A drone of voices slipped past the cotton in his ears. The freaks were down there in the cellar, humming or chanting. James clicked off the flashlight and stepped to the edge of the sanctuary floor and peered over it. Josh stepped up beside him, angling the shotgun down at the candlelit circle of naked psychos. The bell ringing above them rattled James’s teeth.

He knew the naked woman in the nun’s wimple was dead as soon as he saw the way her belly had been split open. He grew dizzy. He tottered at the edge of the floor and Josh reached out and grabbed his arm to keep him from taking a header.

Then he looked away from the gutted nun and saw his mother.

* * *

They walked quickly along the side of the street, keeping their eyes sharpened for any new threat. The night air was oppressively hot and the high humidity sucked sweat through their pores. Intermittent gunshots popped in the distance.

“Where you think she’ll go?” asked Suzie.

“I don’t know,” said Joe. “I still can’t believe she left me.”

“Think she’ll cool off and come back for us?”

“I honestly couldn’t say. She’s not herself. You saw how the bell affected her. She obviously wasn’t as together as I thought she was.”

Suzie wiped sweat from her eyes. “Hell of a time for my car to be in the damn shop.”

“We could hike back and get Gary’s truck. Keys have to be there somewhere.”

“It’s too far and I’m too hot and it’s too dangerous on the main roads. Let’s just steal us one. That one there will do fine.” She pointed at a late-model Chevy parked in the driveway of a darkened house on the right.

“I don’t know how to hot-wire a car.”

“I do. Gary showed me one time, just for the hell of it. He liked to show off his small-time-crook skills.”

“I don’t know. I mean, we can’t just take somebody’s car and leave them stranded.”

“Like we are? Then what do you suggest we do? Go back to my place and wait to go crazy and kill each other before some stranger kills us?”

“Maybe Sara will come back.”

“Bullshit. For all you know she might decide to come back and shoot us. That woman hates my guts.”

“It’s my fault,” he said. “I never should’ve…”

“Go on, say it. Never should’ve hooked up with me.”

“No, that’s not it.”

“Then what? Never should’ve put your dick in my mouth?”

“Oh, so now you do remember it. But as I recall, it was you who put it in your mouth.”

“You would, wouldn’t you?”

“Would what?”

“Remember it that way, being a man and all.”

“Can we just drop this? We have more important things to worry about. Like getting off the streets before somebody tries to kill us again.”

Suzie flashed a wicked grin. “Never met a guy who didn’t like to talk about having his cock sucked.”

“Christ. Can we agree the bell was making us do things we wouldn’t ordinarily have done?”

“You think I wouldn’t have sucked your cock,
ordinarily?
”

He raised his voice: “I don’t know what you would’ve done, okay? I don’t know you. For all I know, you could be the world’s biggest cocksucker.”

She laughed. “I know you don’t have the world’s biggest cock.”

“I didn’t say I did. Jesus.” He threw up his arms as he stepped around a dead poodle lying on the side of the street. “Don’t you see what’s happening? The bell is bringing out our hostilities. Like it did with you and Sara. We can’t give in to it. It’s like we’re walking on the edge of a razor. We have to be very careful.”

“The razor’s edge. Wasn’t that a movie?”

“It was a book, first.”

“Oh yeah. You’re the bookstore dude. I forgot. The bookworm.”

“Cool it, please.”

“I’m sorry. I’m just playing with you. You’re bigger than a worm. Really, you’ve got a nice cock. And I wouldn’t mind sucking it, you know, at the right time and place.”

“Thank you.”

Headlights appeared at the end of the street and they ducked behind a parked car until it passed. Joe stared at the receding taillights and satisfied himself that it wasn’t Sara coming back for them.

“I’m thirsty,” she said. “Let’s get some water from that spigot.” She pointed at the front of a two-story brick house on the right. The only light on in the house was in a top-floor window.

“Good idea. This heat’s draining me.”

Suzie squatted down and turned her head sideways under the spigot and slurped her fill of water, then sat down in the wiry grass while Joe took his turn. When he was done, he sat and rested his back against the brick wall. “I know a guy who lives a couple of blocks from here. We could see if he’s home. And if he’s okay. He should be. He’s not the type to freak out and start trying to kill people.”

“You never know. It’s those quiet ones who go nuts and walk into Burger King and start wasting people.”

“Not John. He doesn’t even own a gun. He’s a retired college professor. A history teacher.”

“He has a car?”

“Yeah. Unless he’s already figured it out and left town, we can get him to drive us out of here.”

“Wish he had a gun, though,” she said, fiddling with her sweaty hair. “If you didn’t have yours while ago, those truck guys would’ve killed us.”

Joe stood up. His knees popped. “Can’t have everything,” he said, offering his hand. She took it and he pulled her to her feet. “Don’t I know it,” she said.

* * *

Sara Carr slowed down for the intersection ahead. The traffic light was out and she didn’t want to be broad-sided while crossing the intersection. With the radio playing, she couldn’t hear the church bell now, so she didn’t think she needed to retrieve the earmuffs from the floor. It was too damn hot for them anyway, even with the air-conditioner going full blast.

She saw no other cars, so she put her foot to the pedal and accelerated through the intersection. She hadn’t planned out an escape route and found she was navigating the streets she was most familiar with, turning here or there simply because she’d gone this way many times in the past on her way to the mall at the edge of town. When she realized what she was doing, she broke free of the old pattern and turned left onto Harper Street because she knew it would lead to the quickest path out of this town-gone-to-hell. She cut right on Fairview and goosed the gas on the straightaway, getting up to 60 mph.