The Hungry Dead (28 page)

Nancy could not answer. Her faith was not shaken by Cynthia's tirade. But she could not intellectualize her beliefs, especially not in the face of a challenge from someone who had nothing to lose, whose life was not at stake. The rote memorizations of catechism class were of no use in such an existential argument.

“For now, you will pray mindlessly,” Cynthia said. “But in the end you'll know that your God has forsaken you and I am your master.”

“Get out of here, you bitch!” Gwen spat viciously, giving all her energy to impotent hatred. Crying out so vehemently gave her excruciating pain in her ribs.

Cynthia merely laughed and left the room, scornfully turning her back on her victims.

In a little while, Nancy resumed praying her rosary, reciting it from memory, keeping count of the Our Fathers and Hail Marys by imagining herself fingering the beads.

The sign still said Peterson's Country Store, although the place was not run anymore by Mr. Peterson, who had been driven away by grief ten years ago, after the mysterious disappearance of his young son and daughter. Now the owners were a nice elderly couple, Mr. and Mrs. Jamison; they used the few extra dollars they made in the store to supplement their Social Security. Sitting in a squeaky rocking chair behind the counter, Mrs. Jamison looked up from the red wool sweater she was knitting for her husband and watched fifteen-year-old Sharon Kennedy browsing among the aisles.

Sharon was always intrigued by the almost nonsensical variety of goods for sale, which included meat, poultry, coldcuts, and produce; fresh milk, eggs, and butter; dog collars, handkerchiefs, and shotgun shells; rifles, pistols, and handguns; fireworks, baby rattles, toys and games, and handbags; socks and underwear and toothpaste and non-prescription medicines. Just about anything and everything might be found in the country store—except sometimes just the thing you wanted.

“Got any Easter egg dye?” Sharon Kennedy called out.

“Let me see, now,” said Mrs. Jamison, making the most of the opportunity for conversation, “I believe I saw some just the other day, when Mrs. Casper was in with her tribe of young ones. Oh, yes, Sharon, you look right over there on the third shelf, beside the toothpicks.”

Delving and pulling out a packet, Sharon asked, “Do you think it's still good?” The package was so faded and old, having been in the store since God knew when; but the price was only twenty cents, which was typical of the sort of bargain that could be had sometimes in the country store if the goods hung around for years and years till just when you needed them.

“Oh, stuff like that never wears out!” exclaimed Mrs. Jamison.

Sharon began reading the directions so she could estimate how many packets she'd need to color eggs for her younger brothers and sisters. They weren't getting baskets this year because Daddy couldn't afford them, but at least Sharon could see to it that they each got a couple of Easter eggs. She would do the eggs at night after the younger children had gone to bed, so they'd be surprised on Sunday. She intended hiding the packets of dye in her jacket when she went into the house, bringing Daddy the aspirin he wanted for his cold. To buy the eggs and dye, she was using money one of her aunts had sent for her birthday.

“When the hell is she coming out?” Abraham mumbled impatiently under his breath. He and Luke had the van parked out in front of the country store, by the gasoline pumps. The store was located at a crossroads several miles from the Barnes estate.

The elderly Mr. Jamison, in bibbed coveralls and faded plaid shirt, finished pumping gasoline into the van and hung up the nozzle, then took his time screwing the gas cap back on. He hobbled around the side of the vehicle and spoke to Luke, the driver. “Some damn fine weather we're havin', ain't it? Old man winter can stay away for good, for all I care. Cold weather makes my bones ache. This here oughta make a real swell Easter.”

“Yep,” said Luke.

Chuckling as if a joke had been mutually enjoyed, Jamison said, “She didn't take a full tank. That'll be ten dollars.”

Luke already had his wallet open, and he handed the old man a ten-dollar bill.

“Thank you kindly,” said Mr. Jamison. “Have a nice day, now, y'all hear.”

“Right, you old fart,” said Abraham for Luke's ears only, barely moving his lips.

Luke took his time getting ready to pull out, slowly starting the engine and putting the van into gear. He and his brother watched Mr. Jamison limping toward the store. As the old man held the door open, Sharon stepped out with her bag of purchases.

Jamison smiled, saying, “Bye, now, Sharon. You tell your daddy me and Martha said hello, and hope he gets over his cold real soon.”

“Thanks, Mr. Jamison. So long.”

Sharon walked briskly across the gravel lot, turning left at the crossroads. From the van, Luke and Abraham watched, beguiled by her long brown hair and the youthful stride of her shapely legs and buttocks, encased in tight blue jeans.

Luke said, “This is the one, brother. Purty 'nough for ya?”

Abraham grinned lewdly. “Yup . . . this one's gonna make Mama real happy.” In the cab of the van he leaned forward, tingling with anticipation of the cat-and-mouse game he and his brother would play with the girl before capturing her.

Luke pressed the gas pedal lightly, easing away from the pumps. The van crossed through the intersection, going in the same direction as Sharon and cruising slowly past her as she walked off the berm of the narrow, lonely blacktop road. She stopped, watching the van suspiciously, but felt relieved when the vehicle continued past her, going down a slight grade and disappearing around a bend in the distance.

“Thinks she's seen the last of us,” Abraham chortled.

Luke found a suitable spot and pulled off to the side of the road. He turned the engine off and both brothers sat very still, watching and waiting for Sharon.

She was always frightened of walking alone, even in the daylight. The house where she lived with her widowed father and four little brothers and sisters was almost three miles from the country store. She was aware of the things that could happen to young girls like herself; the newspapers and TV were always full of stories of brutal rapes and murders. This was incomprehensible to her; it seemed too callous and unreal to believe in; yet she knew it happened, all too often. Her father was always admonishing her to be careful, not to trust anybody, even the boys or the teachers at school; he didn't even like her going to the store by herself, but she had done it to fetch him the aspirin.

When she rounded the bend and saw the white van parked less than fifty feet away, she stopped in her tracks. What could they be doing there? There were no houses around, and no other vehicles on the road. For an instant, Sharon considered turning around and going back and phoning her father to come get her at the store. But that would be silly. He was sick, and she shouldn't panic over nothing and make him get up out of bed. The two men in the van didn't seem to be paying her any mind. They were talking about something. Maybe they were lost and were waiting for her so they could ask directions. She resumed walking, picking up her pace so she could get past this white van as quickly as possible and be less scared.

But when she got closer the two men looked up, staring at her, steadfastly watching her approach. They both had disturbing grins on their faces; the looks they gave her were brazen, insulting, as though they were undressing her with their eyes. She lowered her gaze to the ground, feeling shrunken and frightened and demure. She clutched the brown bag she was carrying tightly to her breasts and walked in a mincing gait, wanting suddenly to seem as young and immature and unsexy as possible, so that maybe these two men would leave her alone.

When she was almost past the van, the horn blared loudly, shaking her so badly that she dropped her bag. She turned, expecting to be attacked. But the engine started up and the van peeled out, screeching and spraying clods of black dirt, and the man on the passenger's side turned around laughing at her as the vehicle sped down the road.

“Darn idiots!” she said aloud to exorcise her fear. She was upset, but glad that the men had gone. The sun was bright in a cloudless April sky, but that was not the only reason she was perspiring. She stooped and examined the carton of eggs she had been carrying in her bag. Two eggs had broken when the bag hit the asphalt at the side of the road. Smarting from the loss, she removed the good eggs temporarily and scraped the mess from the broken ones out, then wiped her fingers on the grass. In a little while she had the good eggs back in the carton and the carton back in the bag. She started walking again, hurrying, her trip to the store having become an ordeal.

Her anxiety increased when she approached a stretch where the road was rather thickly wooded on both sides. But she had to get past this if she expected to walk the rest of the way home. It was here that Luke and Abraham leaped upon her, punching at her and knocking her to the ground. They had concealed the van in a narrow cul-de-sac some distance away so they could pounce on the girl from cover, on foot. The sudden ferociousness of their attack was overpowering, giving Sharon no chance to fight back or flee. They stood back momentarily, leering at her, taking sadistic enjoyment out of her feeble attempt to crawl away. Eggs were smashed all over the blacktop pavement. Sharon's breath was knocked out of her; she was badly hurt, nearly unconscious, and terrified. Seeing her struggling to crawl on her hands and knees, Abraham lashed out and kicked her in the ribs, sending her sprawling on her face. With excruciating, blinding pain, her right cheekbone smacked and scraped against the pavement. Abraham drew back his boot to kick her again.

“Easy, now!” Luke shouted. “Don't want to kill this one, or Mama will have her dander up for sure.”

Abraham produced a coil of nylon rope from his hip pocket, and he and Luke rolled Sharon over onto her back to get her trussed up. In her delirium she continued to whimper and moan, reduced to quavering helplessness from the punishment she had taken. The two men tightly bound her wrists and ankles. Then they carried her to the waiting van, the rear door wide open, a wire-mesh dog cage inside. Luke and Abraham hoisted Sharon by her wrists and ankles, as if she were trussed-up dead meat. Kneeling on the floor of the van, Luke gagged her by tying a large red bandanna over her mouth. Then she was put into her cage and the door was locked. She had no cognizance of this, for she had passed out.

Luke jumped into the cab of the van. Abraham closed the rear door, then hopped into the cab on the passenger's side. The van eased out of the cul-de-sac onto the narrow blacktop road and drove away.

“Should have raped her,” Abraham said, the memory of his thwarted desire for Gwen and Nancy still fresh in his mind.

“Nope,” Luke squelched. “This one could be a virgin, the kind Mama and Cynthia need.”

“What about
us?”
said Abraham.

Luke didn't answer him but stepped on the gas and sped down the sunlit road.

On Good Friday, Nancy, Gwen, and Sharon were moved out of the Barnes house. In their cages they were loaded into the van by Luke and Abraham, who then drove the vehicle across the field to the chapel, hoisted the caged girls out one at a time, and carried them into a roomy office that had been partitioned off from the main part of the church. Ten years ago when Uncle Sal used the chapel as his studio, the office was where he relaxed, met with some of his clients, or worked on his ledgers of accounts payable and receivable. Now the former office was crammed full of easels, palettes, and unfinished paintings of bygone Americana. Sal's large mahogany desk and tall black filing cabinets were pushed against one wall. Against another wall, Nancy and Gwen and Sharon were deposited in their cells of wire mesh. Huffing from exertion, Luke and Abraham went out, slamming the door and locking it behind them.

The girls examined their new surroundings. There was one window in the office, but the cages were too low to the floor for the prisoners to see out, except for a tantalizingly restrictive view of unbudded tree branches and clear blue sky. Since it was getting on toward noon, the sun beat down hard on the tarpaper roof, and motes of dust danced in yellow rays slanting through the solitary window. One of the white plaster walls had an outline drawn in chalk where Sal had intended to cut another window. The closed-in air was musty and hot. The three girls fidgeted and perspired, cramped in their cages, trying to find the best way to position themselves so their injuries wouldn't hurt so much. The discomfort of their prison added to their distress.

“What's going to happen to us?” Sharon asked. Like Nancy and Gwen, she had been stripped down to her underwear. Her ribs were bruised ugly shades of blue and yellow and her lower lip was split, caked with blood. Her left eye was black, swollen shut. She had remained unconscious all through the night and now had a frightful headache, which made her worry about the possibility of a concussion or skull fracture.

Gwen felt sorry for Sharon, and Nancy, too, for that matter. “We have to try to get out of here,” Gwen said. The change of environment had rekindled in her the desperate hope of a new chance for escape; maybe there was something the Barnes brothers had overlooked.

“You must be losing your mind,” said Nancy. “There's no way.”

“We can't give up,” Gwen insisted. Her eyes kept moving from side to side and up and down, trying to spot something that could be turned to their advantage. One factor that was against them was time. People had made miraculous escapes from prisons when they had years to dig secret tunnels or file through bars. But how much could be done in a day?

“Why are they keeping us here?” Sharon pleaded.

“They're going to kill us,” Gwen said flatly. “That's why we have to escape. They murdered my sister and Nancy's two friends.”

“Oh, God!” Sharon cried disbelievingly.

“They're not necessarily going to kill us,” Nancy said. “After all, we don't really know what their rituals are like.”

“Let me tell you something,” Gwen said sternly. “My grandfather survived the Nazi concentration camps. Six million people were put to death, and most of them went passively to the gas chambers, willing to believe the lie that they were only going to take showers. They didn't want to face their deaths, and so they died without trying to resist, making it ridiculously easy for the SS butchers. Cynthia and her brothers mean to kill us after they've had their fun. Don't paralyze your will to survive by deluding yourself otherwise.”

“Why
is this happening?” cried Sharon, tears streaming down her cheeks from both eyes, even the blackened, swollen one, which had seemed puffed shut enough to lock the tears in.

“Because they're crazy,” said Gwen. “No other reason. So try to think of a way out of here.”

“God is punishing us,” blurted Nancy.

Gwen looked at her in amazement.

“Jesus showed us that sins must be paid for in suffering,” Nancy said feverently. “Going to confession seemed hard, but it was too easy. I thought my soul was cleansed. But a heavier penance was required. I understand that now, and I can accept it. I'm not going to be like that priest Cynthia told us about who renounced his faith in the end and went to hell.”

“Oh, brother!” exclaimed Gwen. “Listen, Nancy. You probably weren't particularly religious before. Now you've succumbed to despair and you're clutching at anything that can make you believe your suffering has a purpose. It has none. Turning the other cheek won't help you—it will only make it easier for your enemies by blunting your instinct for survival. You're right where they want you—under their power!”

Nancy did not argue. Curled up on the floor of her cage, she turned her face to the wall to avoid further communication with Gwen, as if Gwen's ideas instead of the Barnes family were the enemies that might pollute her soul.

“Even some of the Nazi war criminals condemned at Nuremberg became religious before they were hanged for their atrocities,” Gwen stated. “The sudden acquisition of deep faith is a common reaction of all sorts of people under stress. Charles Colson, for example.”

“I'm religious, too,” interjected Sharon, in case God was up there listening. “I'm not an atheist, like you seem to be, Gwen. But I'm not giving up, either. Maybe my daddy will come looking for me or call the sheriff or something. In the meantime, what can we do to help ourselves?”

“I don't know right off,” Gwen admitted. “Look around for something in here that might give you an idea. Come on, Nancy—help out. I want to see my daughter Amy again. And your mother still loves you, doesn't she, despite your stepfather?”

But Nancy didn't respond. She had started praying another rosary, and rather than answering Gwen, she kept praying doggedly without moving her lips, saying the words to herself. The repetition of the familiar prayers almost took her mind off the feeling that she might as well die, anyway, because nobody in this world really cared about her. The shocks of the past few days had broken her spirit.

“Is that a palette knife under the desk chair?” asked Sharon, suddenly perking up.

She and Gwen leaned to one side of their cages and peered out anxiously. Nancy did not stir. “I believe it is,” said Sharon, squinting at the knife out of her one good eye. Her cage was the closest one to it.

“Take your bra off,” Gwen suggested. Seeing Sharon's puzzlement, she explained: “I'll take mine off, too, and pass it to you. By tying them together, maybe you can fish the knife out from under the chair and pull it close enough to grab it.”

Sharon looked doubtful. “How far away is the knife?” she asked. “Looks like four or five feet to me, but my depth perception is not so hot because of my swollen eye.”

“You're right,” Gwen said dolefully. “About four feet. We'll never reach it without something long and stiff. Still, we may as well try. We've got nothing to lose.”

The two girls took off their bras and Gwen managed to pass hers to Sharon, who tied the two together and made a loop at one end. But the gauge of the wire mesh was such that she could only stick her fingers out through the tiny steel bars. This prohibited her from getting enough finger or hand movement to fling the tied-together bras very far. She tried dropping them to the floor outside her cage and then crouching down and blowing hard at them in an attempt to force them out toward the knife. But the cloth material was too heavy, and no matter how hard she blew, it would barely budge. “Darn it!” she cried in exasperation, rocking back on her haunches, out of breath.

“Well, you tried,” Gwen said consolingly, still trying to think of some way to make the attempt work.

Just then there was a loud ferocious rapping on the windowpane and Sharon looked up and screamed. Gwen stared, wide-eyed. Cyrus was out there, pressing his red beefy face against the glass, leering and giggling for all he was worth over his delicious eyeful of the nearly naked young girls. They covered themselves hastily with their ragged blankets. Cyrus stayed at the window for a long time, jabbering and pointing and carrying on, his nose and cheeks caked with window dirt he had rubbed away by pressing his face against the pane.

Gwen said, “He can't come in here . . . I don't think. He probably doesn't have a key.”

Cyrus kept staring, spittle drooling from his thick, leering lips.

Nancy kept praying, stifling her terror. Through it all she hadn't made a move.

“He's so
creepy,”
said Sharon, shuddering. She averted her good eye from Cyrus in the hopes that ignoring him would make him go away. Gwen did likewise, and eventually this seemed to work. When they no longer sensed his presence at the window, they turned and looked and saw with relief that he was gone.

Sharon passed Gwen's bra over to her and they both put their garments back on. Silently, they resumed checking out their prison, looking for a way to escape. Every now and then their eyes traveled to the out-of-reach palette knife, just a few feet away on the concrete floor. It was the only glimmer of something usable. But it might as well be on the moon. It wasn't much of a weapon, anyway, Sharon told herself ruefully. Gwen never had thought of it as a weapon, though. She figured that if they could get hold of it somehow, they could maybe jimmy the padlocks on their cages.

Outside, for the next couple of hours, there were sounds of hammering and sawing. Cyrus was hard at work, making three coffins.