HELLz BELLz (9 page)

He put it on and walked up the stone walkway with his heart pounding against his rib cage as if it wanted out.

The porch light was off. The living-room window was a rectangle of soft, yellow light.

He reached a trembling hand to the doorknob, opened the door and stepped inside.

I don’t give a fuck, God sent me to piss the world off.

Slim Shady’s line ran on an endless loop through his head as he crept through dark yards, avoiding the sick-yellow haze bleeding from streetlights. This little corner of the world was sure as hell pissed off, James reflected, but it had nothing to do with the white rapper.

He glanced back over his shoulder but couldn’t see Josh. He paused by a row of garbage cans by the side of the house, cupped his hands around his mouth and called softly: “Josh. Where are ya?”

“Here,” his friend answered, raising his head from an unruly clump of shrubbery. “You know where the fuck you’re goin’?”

“I told you, my house.” He rubbed his sore shoulder, remembering the madness in the psycho ice cream man’s eyes when he swung the tire iron. “Gotta see if my folks are okay.”

“What about
my
folks?” Josh protested.

“Your house is so far in the sticks, they can’t hear the bell. Mine are right down the street from it.”

“What if it ain’t the bell? What if it’s something else?”

“What else could it be?”

“Something in the air. One of those chemical weapon deals.”

“Shit, get real. It’s the bell. I can
feel
it. Can’t you?”

“I dunno, man, all I feel is scared shitless.”

“Stop whining,” James said. “C’mon. You’re too slow.”

Josh gave him a dirty look. “If you hadn’t lost my cell phone, I could call home to check on my fucking folks.”

Someone—a woman?—screamed inside the house. The scream was followed by three loud thumps that shook the wall and rattled the garbage cans leaning against it.

The church bell in the distance kept up its steady ringing, sending evil vibrations out over the city. James felt his nausea returning.

“Jesus, somebody’s gettin’ whacked,” Josh said with a fearful gasp.

“Let’s go.”

Staying low to the ground, the boys scampered away from the house and out of the yard. Gunfire echoed across the residential neighborhood. A single siren died in the muggy distance.

A scattered chorus of dogs howled at the siren’s ghost.

As they stole through the grassy yards of crowded-together houses, James tried not to picture his mother and grandmother going at each other. They had been bickering a lot this summer, and the tension in the house had become so thick that you couldn’t open your mouth without choking on it. If that goddamn bell really
was
turning people violent…

He heard a tinkling clatter of a bell and thought for a moment that the ice cream truck had somehow been resurrected, but then he saw the man walking down the center of Whitlock Street, ringing a bell like a Salvation Army soldier and shouting: “The Lord’s judgment is upon us. Repent, all ye sinners! Repent!”

“Holy shit, that’s Reverend Johnson,” Josh said. “He’s gone batshit, too.”

A pickup truck rounded the corner and bore down on the bell ringer from behind. The reverend turned toward the truck and shook the bell with renewed vigor. “Repent!”

“Get outta the way!” James yelled at the crazed minister.

Reverend Johnson stood his ground on the centerline as though he thought the Lord was affording him divine protection.

The truck increased its speed. At the last second, Johnson tried to step out of the path of the oncoming GMC, but it was too late.

The grill and bumper of the pickup knocked him backward, then sucked him under its front wheels. The violent meeting of human flesh and heavy metal made a sound James knew he’d never forget. As the truck rumbled on down the street the reverend’s little bell rolled against the curb with a final
clink.

James didn’t want to look at the body, but he couldn’t help himself. He looked. Then he threw up again. How much could be left in his fucking stomach?

“Holy fucking shit!” Josh blurted. “Man, did you see the way he flew through the air? Woo-hoo! Wish I could hit ‘replay’ and see that again. That was fucking great!”

“…crazy,” James mumbled as he wiped a string of vomit from his lips.

“I’m gonna check him out.” Josh was already moving toward the minister’s mangled body.

James straightened up, tried to spit the sour taste from his mouth, and was suddenly afraid of Josh—afraid that goddamn bell was already turning his friend into a homicidal psycho. Would he actually turn on me and try to hurt me? he wondered.

Josh stood over the body, the streetlamp overhead giving him a dim shadow. He nudged the reverend with the toe of his shoe. He turned back to James and said, “He’s toast. Shit-on-a-shingle, for sure. Crazy old fuck.” Then he squatted down for a closer look at the bloody carnage.

James considered slipping away and leaving Josh to his morbid fascination with the dead man in the street. He could do it. Just slide around the corner of the house on his right and run for home. Josh wouldn’t have a clue he’d gone until he’d seen his fill of the dead guy. Shit, he was dipping his fingers in the pool of blood. What next? Finger paint in blood? That decided him. He started walking toward the corner of the house. He didn’t feel right about deserting his best friend, but he couldn’t chance staying with him if Josh was going to go
postal
on him.

“Hey! Wait up.”

Shit. He’s seen me.
James halted. Turned to face Josh, who was jogging toward him.

“Where the fuck you goin’? You running out on me, cocksucker?”

“Naw. Going to take a piss.”

“Fuck. You ain’t gotta hide to take a whiz. Do it any-fucking-where. Who gives a shit? Motherfuckers are killing each other off right and left and you’re worried about where to piss? That’s lame, dude. Whip it out right here. Believe I’ll take one myself.” He unzipped, pulled out his dick and cut loose with a thin stream of urine on the wiry late-summer grass. “Ahh,” he said with a shiver.

James started to unzip his jeans, then realized he didn’t think he could piss. It was one of those things you just couldn’t do in the company of somebody you were afraid of.

Josh was waving his dick around, the yellow stream of piss trailing his pale tube of meat.

James saw that Josh was semi-erect. A chill prickled his back.

“Thought you had to piss,” said Josh, shaking the last few drops from the bulbous head of his cock.

“Fuck it. I’ll piss later. Gotta get going.”

“I don’t know about you, man. You’re buggin’, dude. That bell fucking with your head? Tell me if it is. Can’t have you freakin’ out on me.”

James felt a surge of anger. The words spewed out like his puke had. “You’re the one acting weird. I saw you playing in that guy’s blood. What the fuck was that about? Huh? Fucking psycho.”

“You cocksucker,” Josh spat. He balled up his fist, drew back and threw a wild-ass right.

James threw up his arm as he stepped backward. Josh’s fist caught him on the forearm. “Cut the shit,” James said, his voice high-pitched and inexplicably girlish. “I’m warning you.”

“Warn this,” said Josh as he took another swing at his friend’s head.

James was ready this time. He jumped out of range and raised his fists like a prizefighter. He and Josh had gone a few rounds with boxing gloves in Jerry Shaw’s back yard a few years ago, and James had easily out-boxed him, using his long left jab and catching him with body shots the way his father had taught him before the old man ran out on his family. “This is fucked, man,” James said, circling to his right. “I don’t want to fight you.”

“I can take you this time. See if I can’t.”

Josh shifted into a sloppy fighter’s stance. His left was hanging too low to protect his chin and his chin wasn’t tucked into his chest. He held his right fist too wide, leaving a clear path to his chin.

James feinted with his left, then shot a right straight to his opponent’s jaw. It connected with a hollow
pop
like a cork blowing out of a champagne bottle, and Josh staggered backward, then sat down on the lawn. He looked around, dazed, then grinned like an idiot and rubbed his jaw. “Fuck, man, that hurt,” he said with some surprise.

“Can we go now? Or you wanna dick around some more while the world’s going to hell in a hand basket?”

“What the fuck you hit me for? And what the fuck is a hand basket?”

James extended a hand and helped him to his feet. “The fucking bell, man,” James said. “You were buggin’.”

Josh shook his head and rubbed his jaw some more. “No shit,” he said.

They lit out for Holy Cross Hill, hiking the remaining mile with great caution, keeping to the night’s shadows and avoiding contact with potential psychos roaming the streets. James kept a wary eye on Josh, watching for any sign that he was getting ready to turn on him again, but his mind kept going back to the imagined knock-down-drag-out between his mother and grandmother. He feared that it was already too late to avert a familial tragedy.

* * *

Because her mouth was taped shut, she did her pleading with her eyes, but the two men with demonic faces regarded her as little more than a piece of meat—or a hog for slaughtering. But that wasn’t quite right. Hogs weren’t crucified before they were slaughtered, and Candace was crucified, her feet and hands nailed to the hardwood floor with rusty spikes, arms outstretched like Jesus on the cross. The pain had been fierce at first, but now her wounds were mostly numb, and for that small blessing she was thankful. The lowlife demons were arguing with each other. That was good, wasn’t it? As long as they were bickering, they weren’t inflicting new torture on her exposed body, naked except for the nun’s wimple on her head. What kind of sick game were these perverts playing? Why were they doing this to
her?
Her mind skipped back to her earlier thoughts of devil worship. She’d seen enough horror movies to know that Satanists often perverted Christian rituals and purposefully stood symbols of the church on end, like turning a cross upside-down. Maybe that was what this was all about. Maybe they were using her as a twisted version of the Holy Mother. That was probably why they’d called her
unholy mother.
Did that mean they intended to kill her baby? Or did they want to cut it out of her womb in hopes of keeping it alive for some other Satanic ritual? If taken now, the infant wouldn’t be too premature to survive, if these horrible men knew how to do a Cesarean. She made herself concentrate on what they were saying, hoping to learn something—anything—that might help her understand what was happening to her and give her an edge on escaping this madness.

Their voices, dirty as if dripping some putrid sludge of low places, wrapped around her and made her hear the words they were making.

“The fuck do you care?” snarled the one called Shades. “Don’t mean shit.”

“The guy ain’t even human,” Woofer said. “What happens when he’s through with us? We’re dead meat, that’s what. I’m tellin’ ya, man.”

“Aw, bullshit, you fat pussy.”

“Say what you want, I wish we’d never hooked up with the man. If he
is
a man. I mean, what the fuck’s he doing now? We’re down here doin’ the dirty work and he’s—what?—yanking his wang up in the fuckin’ belfry? Sheeit.”

“Better watch your fucking mouth,” Shades warned. “He hears that shit, you
are
dead meat.”

“And what’s with that goddamn bell?” Woofer wasn’t backing off. “Bong, bong, bong, Jesus, that shit’s gettin’ on my nerves big time.”

“He ain’t doing it. It’s ringing itself. You saw it with your own eyes. Don’t that tell ya something?”

“Tells me we’re in deep shit. We oughta split right now, ’fore it’s too late.”

Shades jabbed his finger like a knife against Woofer’s big belly. “I’ll split you wide open if you don’t get on the stick. And don’t tell me you ain’t got the balls for this shit. Five minutes ago you was slobbering all over yourself to get started on the bitch.”

“It ain’t that. It’s just…I don’t feel right. The guy scares me. Like he’s doing something to us. I don’t trust the fucker.”

“We ain’t gotta trust him. I don’t trust nothing but them greenbacks with ‘In God We Trust’ on ’em. The dude’s weird, sure, but his money’s the right color. That’s all you got to worry about. Now crack that cunt’s belly and snatch the bambino.”

Candace didn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe it. This was too horrible to be happening. She was having a whale of a nightmare, probably brought on by her out-of-whack hormones, some sort of
pre
-partum psychosis. She would wake up any second now in her bed, the ceiling fan making lazy circles above her, Brad beside her, his morning hard-on pressing against her hip, and she would reach down to caress it until he came all the way awake and he would kiss her breast and say, “Mornin’, sweet mama.” Then she would tell him about the weird dream she’d been having and he would comfort her and tell her everything was all right.

“You sure you know how to do it?” Shades said.

“Fuck yeah,” said Woofer. “I told ya, I used to be an OR tech. I seen plenty of ’em. It ain’t that complicated.”

“Go ahead, Doctor Death. Get this shit over with.”

“Where ya goin’?”

“Outside. I ain’t gonna watch this shit. Not with that fucking bell banging my brain.”

“Now who’s the pussy?”

“Fuck you,” Shades said on his way up the stairs.

Ignoring the parting shot, Woofer turned back to Candace and smiled at her.

Her eyes went wide. No way was she dreaming this. She could smell the fat man’s body odor, smell her own fear.

“Okay, titty mama,” he said. “Don’t worry, you won’t feel a thing.”

Then he put a piece of cool cloth over her nose, and she breathed a sharp chemical smell that made her gag against the duct tape. The world, already reduced to the candle-lit cellar, shrank down to a single, hazy flame, haloed like the Savior’s head, then the flame went out, and so did she.

* * *

Daisy Winter crouched at the charred edge of what remained of the sanctuary floor and spied on the characters acting out the bizarre scene below. If she didn’t know better, she might’ve thought this was some avant-garde one-act play being staged in the cellar just for her (the wicked sinner’s) benefit. But she did know better. She knew the three people down there didn’t know she was up here, watching, and anyway, nobody used the church anymore, and if they did, they sure as hell wouldn’t be using such nasty fucking language—not if they were Christians.