HELLz BELLz (23 page)

The mad woman came and stood over him. “I thought you were a demon,” she said with an embarrassed laugh.

“Well, I’m not,” he whined. “I just wanted a ride. They were after me.”

“Who? The demons?” She still had the gun pointed down at him.

“Yes, or whatever they are.” He got up the courage and touched his fingers to the bullet hole in his hump and felt warm blood. “Damn.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I feel terrible.”

“Imagine how I feel,” he snapped.

The rain fell harder, but it offered little relief from the heat—now the night air was as sultry as a steam bath. Harry no longer heard the whip-crack of monstrous tentacles.

“I could drop you off at the hospital,” she said, “but I don’t know if there’s anyone there to help you. You know what’s happening, don’t you? The bell and all?”

“Yes. And no, I don’t want to go to the hospital. I just want to get away from that bell.”

“I could bandage it for you if I had something to use for bandages. Guess you’re lucky I got you…there.” She waved the pistol at his back.

“In my
hump.
Yes, I’m lucky as hell.”

“I never shot anybody before,” she said with a look of wonder on her face.

“I’ve never been shot before,” said Harry, wiping away tears. “What a coincidence. Would you please stop waving that gun around? I’d rather not get shot again.”

“Sorry.” She attempted a smile.

Harry got to his feet. He looked around for signs of otherworldly creatures. Didn’t see any. “Look,” he said, “if you’ll take me to the hospital in Wakefield, we’ll call it even. I won’t press charges against you.”

If she heard him, she gave no indication. Her head was cocked as if she were listening closely to the tolling of the bell. Harry didn’t like the faraway look in her eyes and feared that she might take a notion to shoot him again.

“Miss? Did you hear me?”
“It’s
Mis-sez.
I’m married. Mrs. Sara Carr.”

“Harry Loveless. Not exactly pleased to meet you. Will you get us out of here, please?”

She looked around as if she were expecting someone, then said, “All right. I suppose that
would be the right thing to do.”

“Absolutely.” He took a step toward the car and got dizzy again. He put his hand on her shoulder for balance. “You mind? I’m feeling a little weak.”

She helped him to the car. He collapsed into the passenger seat.

She slid in behind the wheel and put the pistol between her thighs. “If this is some kind of demon trick, I’ll shoot you in the head,” she warned him. “Can’t miss at this range.”

A Greyhound bus had run off the road and crashed into the wrought-iron gate of Harmony Hill Cemetery. The passengers were long gone, but the driver lay dead a few feet from the door of the bus, his throat slashed open and his uniform drenched with blood. A battered olive-skinned man wearing an I Love New York T-shirt was sprawled belly-down just inside the broken gate; his head was twisted at such an odd angle that Joe knew the man’s neck was broken. A box cutter with a bloody blade lay a few feet from the dead man’s bloodstained hand.

“He must’ve cut the driver’s throat,” said Joe.

“Getting to be a fad,” said John Woolrich. “In my day it was streaking. Running naked in public never killed anybody.”

“No, but there are some who should be killed for running naked in public,” Suzie said.

Joe hoped was she joking, but he wasn’t really sure. The bell could play hell with anyone’s thoughts, and you just couldn’t be sure what a person was thinking. It was probably just his imagination, but Joe thought the tone of the bell had turned funereal.

“Could be a terrorist,” said Woolrich, “or your run-of-the mill psycho.”

“Wonder where the passengers went,” said Joe, squatting beside the corpse of the bus driver.

“Crazy like everybody else,” offered Suzie. “And killed the box-cutter guy.”

“Probably headed back for the bus station when no cops showed up,” said Woolrich. “Imagine calling 9-1-1 on your cell phone and not getting an answer. It supports my theory that no one can get out of town. Another mile in the direction they were going and they would’ve been out of it. But it didn’t let them get that far.”

Joe stood and gazed at the headstones beyond the cemetery gate. He hadn’t wanted to stop at the scene of the accident, but Woolrich, the eternal seeker of knowledge, had insisted they stop to investigate, and Suzie had sided with the retired professor.

Joe turned his face to the night sky to catch some cooling drops of rain. It was a light rain, but the way the thunder was grumbling in the east, he figured they were in for a downpour pretty soon.

“There will be a lot of new graves in there after tonight,” said Suzie, nodding in the direction of the graveyard. “Gary’s, for one.”

“And ours if we aren’t careful,” said Joe. “Let’s get going. The longer we let that bell ring, the higher the death toll will be.”

“Right,” said John. “In the words of Gary Gilmore, ‘Let’s do it.’”

“Who’s Gary Gilmore?” asked Suzie. Her rain-wet halter-top clung to her breasts. Her nipples were clearly erect.

“Convicted murderer who asked for and received execution by firing squad,” said Woolrich.

“Look there,” said Joe, pointing into the cemetery. “Somebody’s dancing on the graves.”

“The hell you say,” said John, fiddling with his whiskers as he turned to look into the misty semi-darkness, where some of the tombstones seemed to glow with an otherworldly light.

“Damn, there’s a bunch of ’em,” Suzie said. “Naked, too.”

“Certainly a ghoulish display,” Woolrich said.

“Okay, let’s go,” she said. “This is too much like
Night of the Living Dead
.”

Woolrich chuckled. “If there’s one thing that bell can’t do, it’s raise the dead.”

“Yeah? Well let’s not stay around to find out,” said Suzie, already walking back to the car.

“What a night,” Woolrich remarked.

Taking a last look at the naked grave dancers, Joe and Woolrich followed Suzie to the car. Joe didn’t believe the dead could walk either, but the graveyard revelers made him more certain than ever that he needed to arm himself for protection against the living, as unpredictable and erratic as they were.

* * *

It was a great relief to James that his inner struggle was at an end. The funny thing was, he hadn’t been aware of the mighty struggle until it was over, and now that it was, he saw how futile his unconscious efforts had been. The bloodlust—the urge to kill and maim others—had won out, and now he was ready to rock-and-roll with anyone who crossed his path. Had he bothered to stop and analyze it, he probably would’ve concluded that seeing his mother and grandmother dead had been the deciding factors, but thoughtful analysis was out of the question for a kill-crazed berserker. All he wanted now was more firepower. And Doyle’s Sports Shop was the place to get it.

Josh was a question mark. He even looked like a question mark, the way he slumped and slouched along the sidewalk in front of Doyle’s, shotgun across his rounded shoulders and his long neck crooked forward. James didn’t trust him. Something in the guy’s slack expression—or maybe in his dark, beady eyes—said he was right at the edge of going totally loopy, and if that happened, James knew he would have to kill him and go alone into battle against the city’s sundry freaks. Probably better that way, James thought. Go it alone. Hit them hard and fast from the shadows, then fade back, circle round and hit them again from a new point of ambush. The sooner he cut Josh loose, the better. The Gangsta Terminator traveled alone.

“Want me to blast it open?” Josh asked, leveling the shotgun at the glass door of Doyle’s.

“Go ahead.”

Slumped over the shotgun, Josh the-human-question-mark grinned, drooling a little, and fired, blowing a jagged hole in the glass. “Shit,” he said, then fired again. Most of the glass below the door’s metal crosspiece was gone. Josh bent down and ducked through the opening. James followed.

The store’s interior was dimly lit, but the boys knew well enough where they were going. The gunroom was in the rear of the shop, a big American flag draped above its arched doorway as if proclaiming the citizen’s right to own and bear arms. Gun-control assholes would hate that shit, James thought.

“I’m surprised nobody’s been here ahead of us,” Josh said. “All those fuckheads out there shooting each other musta been strapped already. I tell ya, buddy, from now on I ain’t going nowhere without a gun. No sir. Half the muthafuckas in town musta been carrying concealed.”

“Nah, just sounds that way,” said James. “I bet half the assholes are hiding under their beds and praying to Buddha or Jesus or Allah or some damn body to end this buggin’ shit.”

Josh laughed. “Shit, I hope it never ends. We were born for this shit.”

James stood in front of a glass cabinet of high-powered rifles. The cabinet was secured with a long metal bar, locked into place. He smashed the glass with the stock of his .22 rifle.

“Woo-hoo!” Josh said in near-perfect imitation of Homer Simpson.

James was reaching for a Ruger bolt-action rifle when he heard a car door slam in front of the store.

“Somebody’s coming,” he said.

Two more doors slammed. He grabbed the rifle and went looking for .223 caliber ammo. Josh followed him like a deformed shadow.

It was time to lock and load.

Time to bust some caps in these unsuspecting assholes.

* * *

Joe Carr looked at the scatter of broken glass around the foot of the door to Doyle’s Sports Shop and said, “Somebody beat us to it.”

“They couldn’t’ve taken all the guns,” Suzie said.

John Woolrich was looking longingly at Marie’s Ice Cream Parlor two doors down. “Chocolate Chip Mint Delight would go down quite well just now,” he said.

“Bottomless pit,” Suzie said, shaking her head.

Joe stuck a finger in his right ear and pushed the cotton wad deeper. They were only blocks away from the tolling bell and he was feeling a renewal of its insidious influence. The air round about them thrummed with poisoned energy, and he felt it seeping into his pores. It seemed as if the bell were sentient and knew they were bent on silencing it. Joe was sure the damned thing would not go quietly; it would fight them with all its unnatural power. It would do its damnedest to kill them off, by their own hands or by the hands of others.

He looked at Suzie. “Bottomless,” he repeated her word.

“Huh?” She gave him a quizzical look.

“That’s what it is,” he said. “The bell. The sound has no bottom. There’s a subwoofer thing going on. It…like the bass tone is wide open, opening up…something…”

“Huh?” she repeated.

“Opening up some deep channel to…something…or some
place
.”

Woolrich fingered his chin whiskers and said, “I think you may be onto something. But is it opening secret portals to Hell, or is it opening something in
us
? Pathways to our primitive aggressions, perhaps. Or awakening dormant tendencies we thought we’d left by the wayside on our evolutionary journey. Interesting, yes. Certainly worth pondering.”

“Ponder this,” said Suzie, grabbing her crotch, no doubt aping one of Gary’s gestures. “Let’s get the frigging guns if we’re going to. You can figure out the meaning of life later. If we still have a life.”

Woolrich chuckled. “Quite right, dear. I bow to your practicality.”

“Right,” said Joe. “We have to hurry. It knows what we’re doing and it
will
try to stop us.”

* * *

James crept toward the broken door with a spanking new Ruger Mark II at the ready. Josh was just coming out of the gunroom, having been slow in finding ammo for his weapon of choice—a Steyr Classic Mannlicher.

The low buzz of conversation on the other side of the door told James there were at least three people out there. Two men and a woman. He was trying to decide if he should shoot them right away or show them his devil-red face and then shoot them. He opted for the latter. It would be a shame to let his accidental war paint go unseen. He wanted to see the terror on their dumb faces before he wasted them. They’d probably shit their pants when they saw him.

When they came into view, one of the men was bending over to enter the busted-out lower half of the door, so James stepped back into the shadows and signaled Josh to hold back. Let them come inside, he thought, and then they’re mine. He figured they were also here for weapons and were likely unarmed. They were going to be sitting ducks.
Shitting
ducks.

A broken Eminem rap line ran through his head: “…tempt me, push me, pussies, I need a good reason to give this trigger a good squeeze.”

* * *

Sara Carr was lost. She had turned the wrong way on a one-way street and kept going rather than turn around, and now she and her wounded passenger were as lost as Hansel and Gretel in the deep, dark forest. Why she should think of fairytale characters now, she didn’t know, but she did, and even said so to Harry Loveless, who groaned in response, leaning his head against the passenger door window.

“How the hell can I be lost in this little town?” she wondered aloud. “Jesus. Get it together, Sara.” As she said her own name, the word felt strange on her tongue and sounded hollow in her ears.
What if I’m not Sara? What if I’m someone masquerading as this Sara person, like a fugitive in deep cover, just like that stupid movie on TV last week, only I forgot for a while who I really am? Maybe that feeling that something is about to be revealed is me almost remembering who I really am.

“I don’t feel so good,” Loveless moaned. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

She slammed on the brakes and the car fishtailed to a halt in front of a dark two-story house. “Hang your head out the door if you’re going to puke,” she said. “If I smell vomit, I’ll get sick too.”

Harry Loveless threw open his door, leaned his head out and threw up a thick stew of puke on the street.

Sara gagged when she heard the splatter. She stared at the repulsive humpback and hated him, wanted to shoot him again and leave him on the side of the street to die. She lifted the gun from between her thighs and pointed it at the back of his head. One little squeeze, she thought, and he’s out of my hair. Out of my car. She thumbed back the hammer.
Click.
He swung his head around and found himself staring down the gun barrel. “Hey,” he said, a string of vomitus hanging from his lower lip, “what the hell are you doing?”