Helmet Head (15 page)
CHAPTER 34
The Truck
Fagan ran to the edge of the forest with his gun drawn but by then it was too late. The murk had swallowed it up, whatever it was. Maybe a bear. They said there were bears but he’d yet to see one. Black and brown bears, generally quite timid. Fagan turned and headed back to the club. He glanced at the rear and noticed that the door to the warehouse was open an inch. He was certain that he and Curtis had left it latched when they’d come through.
Pistol in hand he entered through the back door, standing just inside to let his eyes adjust to the diminished light. The horizontal freezer door was open. Fagan approached with gun half-raised and looked inside. Fred’s corpse was gone.
With growing trepidation Fagan rushed through the kitchen into the club.
“Macy!” He whirled in the middle of the floor looking for her. Where could she have gone? He looked again more carefully. He checked the pile of blankets on the sofa and the two restrooms.
The enormity of what just happened smacked him like a Mack truck.
The thing had Macy.
If it could program Wild Bill’s headless body to ride his bike into the side of the bar it could program Fred’s corpse to grab her and run. But how had it managed to sneak in the back and wire up Fred without anyone knowing?
How had it managed any of its astonishing feats?
Was it even human?
Since WW II the Nazis had become the gold standard in evil. Never mind that crimes committed by Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot beggared those of the Nazis. Maybe it was the uniforms and the mystic mumbo-jumbo, Hitler’s astrologer, his phrenologist and fascination with dark arts. The Spear of Destiny,
Raiders of the Lost Ark
,
The Boys From Brazil
. Had there ever been a greater stab at heinous immortality?
The Rabbi would simply say, “Hitler was an evil man.”
Even as a young boy Fagan sensed it would be inappropriate to ask his father about the experiments, the gas chambers and more outré elements of the Nazi war machine.
The Rabbi didn’t even like discussing
Der Golem
. “It’s a fairy tale, Petey. Like
Frankenstein
.”
The one thing Fagan remembered about
Der Golem
was how to get rid of it. Erase the sigil on its forehead. Fagan had wrestled with this as a child. As Der Golem was made of bone-crushing clay, how did you erase something inscribed in its granite-like forehead? Jackhammer? Dynamite? To do so you would have to be in the Golem’s grip. Perhaps that was the point. The destruction of the Golem required blood sacrifice.
Fagan remembered an old VHS he found at a garage sale:
They Saved Hitler’s Brain
. He bought it as a joke and never watched it. One girlfriend asked how he could even have such a thing on display in his man cave. He’d never thought about it much. All that business with the Jews in Germany during WW II seemed so distant. He couldn’t relate despite his father’s best efforts to inculcate in him a sense of grievance. Whether he had actual Jewish blood or not was immaterial.
Fagan had never identified with victims and too often Jews were victims. That was one reason he resisted the Rabbi’s efforts so fiercely. None of the boys he knew admired scholars, Jewish or not. They admired fighters and athletes. Being blessed with a decent frame Fagan went that way. In his senior year he grew two inches. Coaches took a newfound interest in him. He excelled at track and basketball, was on his high school varsity, his name on the trophies in the front hall.
All in his senior year, like a late-blooming cactus.
“Petey,” his father told him. “It’s nice you’re good with sports but you should also cultivate a life of the mind and of the spirit!”
Later, Pops. Got a hot date.
A brilliant flash briefly illuminated the bar through its slot window followed almost instantly by a 120 decibel crack. Fagan snapped his hands to his ears. He had to find Macy before that thing killed her. But how? He didn’t know where to start. And how would he get there? Maybe that old motorcycle in the shed.
Fagan went behind the bar where they’d replaced Fred’s shotgun. His feet crunched on broken porcelain from the steins. He looked down. A steel key lay near the toe of his boot. He reached down and picked it up. It bore the Ford logo.
Snatching up a box of Remington .12 gauge, Fagan strode back through the storeroom, out the back to the truck parked next to the shed. Fagan guessed its year as ’78 or ’79, but it appeared well maintained and he knew from experience old Ford trucks could go for hundreds of thousands of miles. He prayed that it would start.
Looking up, he saw an orange glow reflecting off the underside of low-hanging clouds and knew that Helmet Head would not be hard to find after all.
***
CHAPTER 35
Waking Up in a Strange Bed
She was a little girl hiding from Shane. Shane didn’t want to just stick boogers in her hair. He wanted to stick his dick up her pussy. His words. She barely understood the first time he explained. Now she was thirteen and running for her life. The woods behind the house went down to a stream. Across the stream was a quarter mile of empty fields until the next house. They lived in an old farm rental outside town while Dad looked for work and Mom drank.
Her younger brother Brent stayed in his room in the basement playing with computers.
Shane had nailed her twice. She bled, and had to hide it from her folks. He threatened to kill her if she ever told. At thirteen she was a stick figure, a rag doll. Tiny tits and a boy’s ass. At seventeen, Shane was pumped and primed. He lifted weights in the school gym after school, a fact that his counselors noted with irony as he often skipped classes.
Shane was already in trouble for “inappropriate touching” at school events. His hormones were out of control. He should have gone into the Army right then. All he thought about was pussy. Pussy pussy pussy. She could hear him at night jacking off in his room. She found his porn stash and ran in disgust. Shane was extremely good looking. He took after his mother.
When Macy tried to tell Bernice what was going on, she went into total denial and threatened to send Macy to a facility for disturbed children. Not her Shane. Not the star of the basketball court and the football field.
So here she was hiding in the woods, mosquitoes dining on her neck like it was a Country Buffet, and Shane swooping through the bushes singing, “Where
arrrrrrre
you, Macy? Come out, come out wherever you are!”
She wished she had a bow and arrow. Drill that fucker right through the heart. What kind of brother rapes his own little sister? Since her parents seemed to side with Shane she felt she had no recourse except to run away from home. She’d already started packing and saving money. She had a friend who said there were youth shelters in Omaha that would take her in. She would find a lawyer and seek to be emancipated.
She was too little and too young to get a job.
She hadn’t known about Child Protective Services. It never occurred to her to go to the police or her school counselor. These weren’t things you talked about if you were a thirteen year old girl. At school she was shy, a loner, a target for bullies. They made fun of her goth urges, her shyness. Like chickens jabbing at a spot of blood.
She huddled in a copse of alder a couple feet from the stream listening to Shane thrashing around. A green snake slithered over her shoe. She almost cried out.
The woods went away. She stared uncomprehending at an old plaster ceiling, cheap light fixture in the middle, pile of dead insects gathered at the bottom of the globe, plaster trickling down from a couple of holes. She was lying down, on her back. She tried to get up. She could hardly move. A wave of nausea rolled through her. Oh God she did not want to throw up. She’d been doing that a lot lately. It was as if she were at the bottom of the Marianas Trench with 20,000 feet of seawater holding her down.
It took her a second to realize she’d been drugged. She knew that feeling all too well. Well they didn’t know Macy.
What was she doing here? How did she get here?
Then she remembered Fred’s headless corpse seizing her wrist and rising from the freezer like some kind of fucking vampire only instead of a head he had a little circuit board sticking straight up with a tiny camera on the top.
Fred’s grip was like steel. She tried to scream but Fred struck her in the jaw with a brick-like fist knocking her out. That was the last thing she remembered.
Macy shook with revulsion and her body responded. The old bed squeaked in protest. Good! Let her memory get her motor running. She had years of experience fighting her way out of drugged stupors. Like that time they got a call at seven in the morning that the cops were on their way.
Okay, kid. Let’s start with the right leg. Just the right leg. Tentatively she tried raising her right leg. It went up a couple inches and collapsed.
Come on that’s no good! Is this the little girl who ran through the woods for miles and miles? Who rode her own chopper? Who got Wild Bill out of bed at seven a.m. after an epic 72-hour bender? And out the back door?
She tried again and this time succeeded in moving her buttocks close enough to the edge that her leg flopped over. It seemed to take forever fighting through Jell-O to get to a sitting position. What the fuck. She was wearing a red dress. Someone had undressed her and put her in this dress.
She sat and listened to her heart beat. She looked up. An old dresser with a stand-up photograph on top. The closet’s cheap accordion door was shut. Putting one hand on the newel post Macy swayed to her feet. It was three feet to the bureau, a yawning gulf. She had to see that picture. Letting go the newel post she stumbled forward and caught herself on the top of the dresser nearly pulling it down on top of her.
The photo fell on its face. Holding on with one hand she picked the photo up and turned it over. Four by eight, faded color, possibly a Polaroid of the smiling family, tall, good-looking father, svelte blond mother, the two happy kids.
The mother’s red dress. The sleeves came to just over the elbow with a discreetly plunging neckline. Macy looked at her arm. She was wearing the same dress. It felt old and smelled faintly of jasmine and mothballs.
Where was this place? What was she doing here? The room did not look like it belonged to a woman. The walls were bare, the furnishings minimalist. It was monk-like. One hand against the wall for support she went to the closet, the effects of the drug receding with every step.
She seized the plastic handle and compressed the door to the side. For a moment she stood there uncomprehending. She began to shake her head. The closet contained four sets of complete black leathers. Above each on the hat shelf was a full-face black helmet with a heavily tinted shield.
A quartet of monsters.
It took Macy a second to realize they were just outfits. Gasping, she fell back on the bed.
The front door opened and slammed shut.
***
CHAPTER 36
Lone Survivor
The seat squealed like a stuck pig as Fagan shoved it back. He doubted Fred had let anyone drive his truck. Fagan set the shotgun and pistol on the seat next to him. The old Ford started on the first turn of the key. The interior was spotless. It smelled of dust and age. Fuzzy dice hung from the rearview and there was four on the floor. The shift knob was a giant red plastic die. The steering wheel sported a necker knob with a sixties-era nude. Shifting into first gear, Fagan pulled away from the shack hearing empty beer bottles roll and clink against each other in the bed. He drove around the club and onto the state road heading east toward the glow in the sky. The old truck accelerated smoothly up to fifty, which was as fast as Fagan dared push it in the gloom and storm. Eight miles on he came to the turnoff to Milton’s Hollow. Several times he steered around broken branches lying in the road. Soon he was deep in Milton’s Hollow, the forest gloom accelerated by nightfall. His headlights disappeared ten feet in front of the truck.
Fagan slowed way down. He came around a tight curve and the lights briefly picked up a mass of fur and muscle—a coyote dragging something out of the woods on one side and crossing over. It looked like a human arm.
Around another corner an ash tree lay across the road. Fagan thought about plowing through but the tree looked a little too big. Leaving the engine running and lights on he got out of the truck and examined the obstacle. A couple swift cuts with a chainsaw would do it. Fagan looked in the back of the truck. An old lawn chair next to a cooler. Fred liked to sit in the back summer evenings drinking and stargazing.
There was a galvanized tool box stretching the width just behind the cab. It was unlatched. He opened it and found numerous tools including a long-handled ax. It would have to do.
Stripped to his khaki t-shirt Fagan swung the ax. The wood’s freshness made it hard work and the sound of the ax striking the tree struck Fagan as somehow obscene. Every swing of the ax caused his ribs to shriek in protest, other bruises adding to a bohemian rhapsody of pain. Pausing, Fagan looked up and saw red eyes peering at him from the forest.
Strange behavior for a coyote or a wolf. Fagan didn’t care. Part of him actually hoped that something would lunge at him so he could bury the ax in its skull. Nevertheless, he went back to the truck and jammed his nine in his belt while he resumed his work. He chopped the trunk into three sections and laboriously dragged them to the side of the road.
By the time he finished he was drenched in sweat. He got back in the truck and drove through the rubble keeping an eye on the glow in the sky. It disappeared as he hit the bottom of a dense coulee, reappeared as he crested. He could smell burning wood, gas and hay through the open window. Thank God for the storms—at least the danger of forest fire was minimal.
He saw the crushed weeds, the road to the burning barn and took it, the old pick-up jouncing up and down on its springs. Lightning flickered, gleamed metallic red off one of the motorcycle helmets in the little cemetery. Fagan paused long enough to take it in, realized he was near the place Larry died. No time to investigate. Macy’s life was in danger.
A hundred yards on he came to the yard. The Dogs’ bikes lay around like scattered toys. The barn was gone—collapsed in on itself, a bed of coal, leaving the blackened remains of a Caterpillar compact track and loader and the blackened bones of a jumble of bikes. A few overhanging limbs smoked but the woods were too wet to catch fire.
Fagan looked at the old farmhouse. He’d ridden past once or twice and had never known it was there. In the barn’s dying flames and the flicker of lightning it looked like a listing pile of timber inhabited by vermin. The roof was absurdly steep as if it had originally been intended for a mountain climate. The chimney kinked like Fred’s leg.
There … was no sign of the creature’s motorcycle.
A motion drew Fagan’s attention back to the barn. A Kevlar-clad arm swept the air. A mound turned into a man. Slowly Doc sat up. Fagan ran to him.
“Doc! What the hell happened? Where’s Macy?”
“Don’t know. I was out to lunch. We found him. Fucker chopped off Mad Dog’s head, barbecued Chainsaw, I don’t know what happened to Wild Bill. Curtis got caught in the fire. I tried to save him.…”
Doc ran out of breath and spasm coughed. Fagan could see Doc’s jacket and beard were scorched, eyebrows singed, burns on his face, tears on his hands. The coughs came in choppy waves like an angry sea. Gradually they died down.
“Are you okay?”
“I’ll live. Saw had a go at him before the fucker got ’im. That chainsaw was no match for his sword.” Doc coughed spasmodically. “You wanna grab my kit and water bottle? It’s in my left bag.” Doc broke into another paroxysm of coughing.
Fagan gripped Doc’s wrist. “Macy. It took her.”
Doc shrugged. “I don’t know anything about that, son. I only just now come around. But she might be in the house. We found Larry’s head in the oven.”
“Jesus.”
Fagan saw something in Doc’s eyes. “What?”
“There’s a photo in the living room of some Nazi standing in front of a concentration camp.”
“Great,” Fagan said. He ran to Doc’s bike lying on its side, ripped open the saddlebag and found the medical kit in a black leather zip-bag. He popped it open and put in a sealed plastic water bottle and tossed it to Doc from ten feet. Doc snagged it out of the air. Fagan returned to the truck for the shotgun and headed for the house.
***
