The Devil's Beat (The Devil's Mark) (22 page)

Max had a bad feeling about this idea, but his brain wasn't coming up with many, actually any, helpful alternatives. On top of that, he would go to a lot of lengths not to touch that body.

Josh said, “One o'you dudes gotta clean up the blood. Ya gotta pull up that wood, burn it and put down some new stuff.”

Max looked at the new section of flooring which now had a bright red stain on it. He hated the idea of redoing that work. Then his mind kicked in for a short time. He said, “I've got something better.” He went over to Old Bone and gently pulled out the vacuum hose that was still attached to his neck. He walked over to the bloodstain. “Watch this.” He placed Old Bone on the bloodstain. A rare look of contentment crossed Old Bone's face, and as before, Old Bone sucked up the blood like a thirsty sponge.

Max laughed a bit maniacally. “Tough blood stains are no match for the cleaning power of our patented zombie head.”

In moments, the bloodstain was gone. Josh blinked and swayed a bit. “Oh wow. That is so cool! That would have come in so handy back in Chicago!” He showed no evidence that he was in the least bit put out by the display. He said, “Okay, chill dudes,” and walked past them with the body over his shoulder. As he headed out the door, he was whistling the tune sung by all working dwarfs since Disney first penned them.

The two remaining men looked at each other. Max had seen the blood demo before, but he still didn't handle it as well as Josh or Mike. In fact, Max felt sick to his stomach. He picked up Old Bone gently. The head looked noticeably better. His cheeks and hair had filled out a bit more. Max put him back on the table and then he said pathetically to Mike, “I can't be here right now. I need to go home.”

Mike could see the truth in Max's eyes. “Me too. I need a stiff drink. Just think though, we could get a lot of money selling a blood removal service for the mob. He eyed the nasty mess Max's breakfast had made on the floor. “Too bad Old Bone doesn't do vomit as well.” Max didn't respond. He just walked past Mike. Mike gave an uneasy look toward the head, which was back watching television again, then turned and followed.

In short order, the two turned onto the main drag and left the house behind, taking their queasiness with them.

Neither of them saw Josh come whistling back with the body still draped nonchalantly over one shoulder. He went through the front door with his craggy, haggard face full of excitement and yelled out, “Dudes! I just had the most awesome idea!” He went to the music room, and when he didn't find them, he stood there bemusedly scratching his scraggly beard. He dropped the body on the floor and scratched his crotch. “Now, what was I gonna do?... Oh yeah, Gondwanaland here I come!” He staggered off to find his backpack full of better living through chemicals.

***

That evening, Max laid alone in his room while his thoughts traveled down the dark alleyways of Bad City. Images of blood, death, and burst eyeballs repeatedly mugged him. If he were caught, there was no doubt in his mind that he'd be hung and his body left for the crows.

There was no question about it. He had to get out of this town. Unfortunately, the thought didn't provide the relief he was hoping it would. Maybe I should just kill myself, get it all over with. Max hadn't felt this way in over a year. He spent some time trying out the idea, contemplating oblivion. Try as he might, he couldn't imagine not existing, just like he couldn't imagine things getting better.

He lay alone in his room for a while before he just couldn't take it anymore. He needed to get out of here. He jumped out of bed, threw all his things into a suitcase, and prepared to leave. He didn't care where he would end up, he just knew that he was beaten.

He threw his belongings into the car and headed out. He believed that he was leaving town until he pulled into the darkened hospital parking lot. He turned off the car and listened to its engine tinking as it cooled while he eyed the brightly lit emergency entrance. He sat for a few minutes before prodding himself out of the car. He couldn't leave until he knew she was still gone

He walked to the emergency entrance of the hospital and stopped. She was there working at the check-in desk, looking as though nothing was wrong. A flood of feelings swept through him. The more buoyant and most easily identified were relief and joy, but lurking in the muddy bottoms was anger. He opened the door and walked in, and the anger surfaced within him.

He was about halfway to her counter when she looked up. She paled when she saw him, but except for a narrowing of her eyes, her face was set in a mask of bland. Max had imagined this moment many times in the last week. What he planned to say was, “Alice! Thank God, you are alright! What happened to you? How did Lucian hurt you? How can I help make things right?” What came out was, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Alice reflected the anger perfectly. “Me? What the fuck is wrong with me? What's wrong with you? Yaw the one associatin' with that... that scum-sucking pile of catfish dung!”

Max yelled back, “Oh yeah? If I'm the only one associating with him, why did you nearly rip my arm off when you saw him? What did you ask him for?... Your perfect curly hair?”

Alice's rage swelled within her, and her body swelled with it. Suddenly her eyes blazed green, and she started to grow. Her clothes held on valiantly against the pressure, but suddenly the buttons started flying off the white uniform. When Max finally recognized that something was really wrong, his hot anger froze immediately and tinkled into his gut as heavy cold fear. He stood rooted in horrified fascination, unable to move as Alice grew a foot and her arms started bulging with muscles.

Suddenly, Alice's eyes rolled back into her head and then closed, shutting off the green glow. She slowly and literally deflated back to her normal size as she collapsed behind the desk, revealing Doc Bob standing behind her. One of his arms was holding an empty syringe, and the other was catching Alice and easing her to the floor.

Suddenly in a panic for Alice, Max ran to the counter and vaulted it. Well, actually he tried to. His feet caught the top lip and Max crashed to the floor beside the Doc and Alice. Max managed to get his hands out in front of him enough to cushion the blow to his head when he slid and hit the wall, but the impact still knocked him even more senseless than he had been when he tried to vault the counter.

When he came to moments later, the Doc was gently checking him for head and back injuries. When his eyes started focusing again, the Doc said, “Don't move.” He finished his inspection and asked, “Can you feel your toes?” When Max nodded faintly, the Doc said, “Can you move them? Good. Anything feel like it's broken?” Max tried to focus on his body.

After a short introspection, Max said, “No, just my head.”

Doc Bob snorted. “Then yaw probably just fine. That skull of yours gotta be thick as a brick.” The doctor spent the next few moments putting Max through his paces, and when he was satisfied, he told Max, “What kind of stupid ass kids are those Yanks raising these days? You have to be dumber than a post!”

“Hey, I tripped! I was just worried for Alice.”

“That's who I am referring to. I ain't talking about yer acrobatics tricks, boy. What kind of stupid are you, goin’ and getting her all riled up? That is twelve kinds o' dumb. If you'd kept it up, I'd be picking bits and pieces of you off the walls for days.”

When Doc Bob saw the confusion in Max's face, his demeanor gentled down a bit. “Oh, you didn't know about our Alice's delicate condition.”

Max remembered her glowing eyes and sudden growth spurt. “What happened to her?”

The old doctor went back to Alice. “That ain't my story to tell, boy.” He crouched beside her on the floor and gently stroked the tangled hair from her sleeping face. “Now, you grab her shoulders, and I'll grab her legs, and you can help me get her into a bed.”

Max did as he was directed. He was surprised at how heavy Alice was. She apparently was backed with a lot of muscle. Either that or she ate too much iron. After they had fumbled and grunted her into a bed, Max took in how pretty and vulnerable she looked just lying there. Another surge of anger filled Max. “What did that bastard Lucian do to her?”

The Doc, standing at the foot of the bed gave Max a speculative look. “Well, like I said, the details are hers to tell, but let's just say you shouldn't get her angry or scared.” A moment later he added, “Sounds like yer keeping some bad company, son. Did you get in over your head?”

Max looked at him and his kind gray eyes. His grandfatherly concern made Max want to talk, so Max told him. Everything.

While his story was pouring out of his mouth, a part of Max was wondering what he was doing. He had never told anybody about his deal with Lucian, but, once he started, he couldn't stop talking. He stood there for a half hour and told the Doc about meeting Lucian, the deal he made and the trap Lucian had sprung on Max. When he was done, he felt drained and hollow. Compared to what he had been feeling lately, it was a blessing to be empty.

Doc didn't say anything when Max ran down. He just looked kindly at Alice lying on the bed. “What do you think, Alice? Sound familiar?”

Max turned and saw with shock that Alice was lying on the bed awake. He said, “Oh God, please no.” This was like his worst nightmare. He had just revealed the depths of his weakness and his sin in front of her. The disgust on her face... wasn't disgust... it was sadness—sadness mixed with understanding.

Doc Bob looked at the two of them. “I think the two of you kids got some talking to do.” He turned, left, and pulled the curtain around the bed closed behind him.

Max looked at Alice in uneasy silence, then he said gently and fearfully, “I am so sorry, Alice. I didn't mean to yell at you. I was just so scared for you, and you just disappeared, and I couldn't get hold of you and... What did he do to you?”

“He turned me into a monster.”

Max thought of the coarse gray hairs that he had found in the Mayor's bathroom and the ones that had started to sprout on Alice's arms. After all he'd seen in the recent past, he supposed what he was considering wasn't that much of a stretch. “Are you some kind of werewolf or something?”

She snorted and gave a bark of a laugh. “Don't I wish.” Max had little time to consider the disturbing implication that being a werewolf would be better than whatever Alice was cursed with. She said, “Try some sort of mix of the incredible hulk and the swamp thing.”

Max instinctively put his hand on hers. “Why would he do that to you?”

“He did it because I asked him to.” It was obvious that she didn’t want to continue. She sighed. “Well, fair's fair. I got to hear your sordid story. You might as well hear mine. It's a lot shorter and a lot more common than yours.”

Alice recited her story in a monotone. “I married Bobby young. We were high school sweethearts. Things started out well. We had our three beautiful girls together, and he took care of us. Then the economy fell, and he was laid off. He started drinking—and getting mean. I went back to med school to get my nursing degree and the closer I came to graduation, the meaner and nastier he got. He started losing his temper, and then he started beating me. At first, he was always so apologetic that I knew he would never do it again, but eventually, he beat that naiveté out of me. One day he hit little Nell—hard. Put her in the hospital. I told him I was going to leave him, but he went crazy. He told me that if I left, he would hunt me down and shoot me and the girls. Told me I belonged to him. I was terrified and stuck, and when Mr. Black asked me if I would give up everything to be able to keep my girls safe, I said yes. For some reason, I thought he was going to take care of Bobby for me, but he had something different in mind. The next time Bobby came home, mean and drunk, he hit me again. All of a sudden, I was furious! Suddenly, everything around me shrunk, and Bobby was this little pip-squeak of a man crapping his pants in front of me. I hated him so much that it was all I could think about. I ripped him apart—literally. The blood was... it was... Now, every time I'm afraid or angry, I turn into a hairy swamp monster. Mr. Black's little joke on me.”

When her story was done, Max was flummoxed. “I didn't know. I'm so sorry. If I had known, I would have turned around and left immediately.”

Alice said, “When I saw that he was dressed in exactly the same suit and tie that you had on, I just assumed that you and he were playing another joke on me, and I almost lost it. I got more and more angry as I thought about it, and I barely made it to the bathroom and got the window opened before I changed. You probably noticed the smell?”

Now that she brought it up, he did. He had thought the rotten swampy smell had come in through the open window, but when he considered it, he hadn't noticed it from the front of the house when he left. “Maybe you should have just gone ahead and changed. If you're that strong, maybe you could have just ripped Lucian apart and saved us all a lot of trouble.”

She smiled bitterly. “That was the first thing I tried. When I grabbed him, he just knocked me down like a child, and then he stepped on my throat and told me that if I ever tried anything like that again, he would make me tear apart my own children.”

Max's horror at that image made him shutter. “I'm so sorry, Alice.”

“Hey, he gave me exactly what I asked for. Stupid me for not being more specific.”

“No, you're not stupid. You were trying to save your children. No one can blame a mother for that.”

“I can.”

Max left the hospital shortly after that last conversation. The more he thought about it, the more angry and resolute he got. He couldn't leave Alice here to deal with Lucian on her own. He was going to stay, even if it killed him. The thought scared him to death, and he didn't miss the irony of that.

All night Max had been weighing the relative merits of following Mike's earlier advice and just bulldozing the house and then burning the remains. It was now obvious that the house was just one of Lucian's jokes. But, in the wee hours of the morning, a troubling addition to that observation floated in his mind. Max had assumed that Lucian's joke had been at Max's own expense, but what about the other denizens of the house? The ghosts, Old Bone, the seeming sentient nature of the house itself— hell, maybe even Old Josh. If he destroyed the house, would he somehow be hurting these other lost souls? It wasn't a thought he particularly liked, so he decided that must be the case. Besides, didn't Lucian himself say, “You wouldn't want someone else to find your surprise”? How could Max know which surprise he was talking about?