Risen (47 page)

Tom buried the knife deep, up to the hilt in the mortician's throat. Grimm bellowed. The voice that emerged gurgled with blood. It was an ancient, animal cry of rage and pain.

Grimm threw out his arms and Tom felt himself lifted off his feet and flying backwards through the air. He landed hard. Immediately Risen swarmed over him, pounding him with their fists, biting and scratching and screaming his name. Suddenly Annie's face was an inch from his, contorted with rage. Her tiny hands clawed at his face.

Tom placed a hand on her chest and shoved her away. His fists lashed out at the twisted faces, connected with the satisfying crunch of cartilage. He bit at the finger pulling at his mouth and tasted blood on his tongue.

He caught a glimpse of Jed Grimm writhing on the floor, blood spewing from his ravaged throat, choking to death as his lungs pulled in blood and expelled it in great, heaving gasps. Doc Milford flung himself on top of Grimm's convulsing body, stuck two fingers into the wound and tried to hold open the airway, but too much blood had already filled Grimm's lungs, too much blood continued to pour into the gash.

Tom rolled into a fetal position, hands curled over his head, and accepted the blows that rained on his body. Fists pounded and feet kicked and he heard a rib crack but he stopped trying to defend himself. He couldn't beat them all. His only hope was to wait it out.

A woman's shriek sounded above all the rest. Moments later the blows ceased and Tom dared to lift his head.

The shrieking woman was Madge Duffy. Her husband John stood with his hands at his throat, desperately clutching parted flesh that had split from one side of his neck to the other. Blood gushed between his fingers. His face wore a look of disbelief and terror as his legs gave way and he toppled to the floor.

Madge fell silent as the back of her head simply disappeared, and she crumbled to the ground.

Cries and moans rose around Tom like tormented ghosts rising from the grave. Everywhere he looked he saw ripped flesh and blood oozing from resurrected wounds.

Deputy Haws clutched his stomach over the neatly patched hole in his shirt. A wet puddle of blood soaked through from the gunshot wound in his belly. Beside him, his sister Lucy gasped for breath that would not come.

Clyde Dunwiddey collapsed with a hole in his forehead and the back of his skull missing.

Frank Gunnarsen's head was a bloody, pulpy mess as he fell.

Reverend Small's hands clung to the pulpit as he slipped to the floor.

Doc Milford clutched his gut and fell to his knees then pitched face first onto the hardwood.

Galen and Darren and Buzzy and Kent screamed in agony as their bodies burnt themselves black. Fat crackled and skin crisped from an invisible heat. Tom turned away, but not before he saw Galen's eyeballs explode in their sockets.

He saw his mother sitting on the floor beside the pulpit. Brant lay beside her, his head cocked at an impossible angle. In her arms, Peg held Annie, cradling her head with one hand. She rocked back and forth and sang in a sweet voice that propelled Tom back to his own childhood, when he was the one she'd cradled and rocked and sung to sleep.

The floor heaved and swayed beneath him as he staggered over to her. His head throbbed and he ached everywhere he could imagine. The stench of the burning bodies tightened his throat so that, when he spoke, his voice was weak, barely more than a whisper. He held out his hand to Peg, but she didn't seem to see it. Her eyes were blank. Tom knew the dark dimension that had claimed her mind. She had taken up residence in the Blacklands.

"Come on," he said. Peg continued to rock the child in her arms, singing sweetly. Tom moved to her side and helped her to her feet.

"We have to go," Tom said.

Tom looked out over the fallen congregation, the bodies fallen among the pews, bloodied, burnt, and in their midst, unsteady but upright, the figure of Cindy Robertson.

"I didn't know," she said. "I thought I was the only one left."

Tom led Peg and Annie down the aisle between the pews and the stained glass windows, past Franz Klempner lying on the floor, the charred body of his wife clutched to his bloody chest, past Merle Tippert and Jack and Dolores Frelich, past Mark and Carol Lunger and their son Josh in his Spider-Man pajamas soaked with blood, past all the bodies in all the many contortions of death. He held out one hand as they passed Cindy, and she joined them.

They picked their way across the lawn in front of the church, threading a path among the corpses that had gathered for the midnight service. He found a car with keys in the ignition and drove his mother and sister home.

He left them in the living room. Peg sat in the easy chair and sang to Annie. Cindy clung tightly to his arm as he regarded them from the open door.

"We aren't finished," Tom said. "We have to go back to the church."

"Why?"

"I have to send a man to Hell."

It was hard to say which swarmed thicker around the corpses, the flies or the reporters.

True to Carl Tompkins' prediction, it was the biggest thing to ever hit Anderson. The networks showed up in force. Police were called in from all corners of Cooves County to barricade the area and seal off the town from curiosity-seekers. The pounding roar of helicopters seemed never to cease.

Because all the bodies were discovered at the church, the comparisons to Jonestown came easily. Phrases like "Satanic cult" and "religious fanatics" were tossed out over the airwaves. As closer examination of the corpses revealed bullet holes with no slugs and murders with no evidence of murderers or weapons, the case took on more mysterious overtones.

Peg screamed and fought and bit and had to be restrained physically and chemically when they took Annie away from her. She was hospitalized in Junction City until arrangements could be made to transfer her to the Greenhaven Convalescent Center.

Tom and Cindy peacefully accompanied the officers who took them into custody but refused to answer questions until a lawyer could be found to represent them. They were flooded with offers of pro bono representation from attorneys in need of a high-profile case to clinch their book deal, but they accepted the attorney appointed by the court, who advised them to say nothing.

They were placed under twenty-four hour guard at the Junction City Hospital where they were confined for observation, and from which they escaped at eleven o'clock on Tuesday night.

They rode Tom's Honda out to the Cooves County Reservoir and looked out over the still water to the center of the lake. The boat they'd borrowed the night before was still tied to the dock. The chain that had once blocked the access road and the concrete chunk fastened to it were hidden from view. They were wrapped and padlocked around the body of Jed Grimm, which now floated near the bottom of the reservoir.

Tom recalled all too clearly dragging Grimm's body out of the church and loading it into the car. He remembering staring at the nearly bald head as he dragged the body across the grass, weaving around the corpses, and thinking how ironic it was that Seth, who could raise the dead, couldn't resurrect the follicles of his own scalp.

He'd brought the padlocks from home. He'd wrapped Grimm securely with the chains and fastened them tight in two places. If the water rusted them shut, so much the better. Then they'd paddled the body out to the center of the reservoir and the two of them manhandled it over the side and watched it sink. They'd returned home to make the calls that would land them in jail with Kent's lock picks hidden discreetly on their persons.

Now, Tom looked at his watch.

Five to midnight.

Five minutes to think about Anderson and all the people he'd grown up with, now dead, sealed in zippered bags awaiting the inquisitive scalpel of the coroner.

To remember Brant, too late and too briefly his mentor.

To remember Merle Tippert's movie house and Carl Tompkins' hardware store, and school, and Galen and Darren and Buzzy and Kent.

To remember Annie as she was in life.

To remember his mom before Seth and her own obsession led her into lunacy.

To remember his past life, which was as distinct from his future and as separate as if a surgeon had parted them with a knife.

His past was everything before midnight. Come twelve, it all would change. They were never returning to Anderson. They would ride off and never return, hole up in some other no-account town, or disappear in the streets of New York or Los Angeles. Wherever they ended up, he would never view the world in the same way again. He had discovered the existence behind existence, and he would never be able to put it out of his mind. It would wait in every shadow and lurk in every mystery. It would drive him crazy if he let it. Madness would have to be guarded against.

Cindy looked at him and squeezed his hand. She was all that would make it tolerable.

At some point, he promised himself, they would make love in an art museum.

Twelve o'clock.

Tom watched the crescent moon reflected in the lake. The image shivered and broke as bubbles erupted to the surface. Ripples spread across the water as it boiled. Long, turbulent moments passed.

Eventually the water grew still. The shattered moon restored itself, and the ripples died before reaching any shore.

The End

Life is messy.

It rarely falls into the neat divisions of story structure, into the tidy sequence of cause-and-effect that leads us from one scene to the next. The dominos of life don't fall in an orderly pattern,
click-click-click
, from one event to the next. Life happens everywhere all at once, more like billiard balls caroming around a universe-sized pool table where every ball is in play all the time, "twenty-four/seven" as they say.

Storytelling, then, becomes a matter of looking at one section of the table at a time, taking verbal snapshots of each part of the story, and then laying those sections end to end in an informed sequence.

And often, some good stuff just doesn't fit. It may be disturbing or fun or clever, but sadly, the writer has to make the tough call and leave certain characters and scenes behind. They are left on the cutting room floor…the ship sails without them…choose your own metaphor.

I took five of these misfit notions and wrote them up as short stories to promote
Risen.
They're a bit breezier than the novel and make, I think, a nice little dessert after the main meal.

I hope you enjoy the
Risen
short stories.

"All I'm saying," Louis said, "is that there's more to it than the fact that Duffy came back from the dead."

John Duffy, pronounced dead on Friday afternoon, had sat up in the morgue on Friday night without so much as a scratch to indicate that his throat had, only a few hours before, been sliced from here to there with a filet knife by his wife Madge. He'd passed out drunk on the sofa and woken up on a stainless steel table in the basement of the county hospital, much to his consternation and that of the night-shift attendant. Through no effort of his own, Duffy became the talk of the town and the subject of Reverend Small's Sunday sermon. The sermon itself, praising God for Duffy's miraculous resurrection, was now under scrutiny by the after-church crowd at Ma's Diner.

"What I don't get is, why him?" The speaker was Selma Withers, wife of Martin Withers. The Witherses sat across from Louis Shroeder and his wife Darleen. "If the Good Lord was going to choose somebody for resurrection, what on earth drew Him to a wife-beating ne'er-do-well like John Duffy?"

"Tip of the iceberg," said Darleen, who had the habit of speaking as if she were being charged by the word.

"Tip of the iceberg is right," Louis said. "Let me tell you about my cat, Old Tom."

The group settled in for one of Louis's narratives. Unlike Darleen, Louis was not known for brevity.

"Now we've had Old Tom for, what, nine years? I don't know exactly when he started hanging around, do you, Darleen?"

Darleen shook her head.

"Okay, call it nine years, give or take. Darleen gave him a handout one day and it proved to be a habit too tough to break. The cat wants for nothing. Darleen feeds him in the morning and he spends the rest of the day laying about the yard like he owns the place, as if the only reason the sun exists is to give Old Tom a warm place to take a nap. And once he's settled into a spot, it's like he's taken root. I swear, I have to mow around him.

"Anyway, there's only one thing I've ever seen excite Old Tom, and that's Geraldine."

"Mockingbird," Darleen said.

"Right. Geraldine the mockingbird," said Louis. "She showed up not long after Old Tom did, maybe a year or two later, her and her mate. Grubbing around the lawn, nesting in the bushes and the potato vine. It was that first spring that Geraldine and Old Tom got into it.

"Tom was lumbering along, you know, looking for the perfect spot to park his carcass, and I guess he passed too near Geraldine's nest. She flew at him like the Red Baron zeroing in on a British Sopwith. I mean, she gave him hell, diving at him, pecking at his head, screaming threats! Old Tom didn't know what to think at first, but pretty soon he got the idea. He scurried off and stayed hunkered under a hedge until the sun went down.