The Revelation (11 page)

A few minutes later, tired and out of breath, he pulled his mouth away from the baby's and once again pressed his ear to the infant's chest.

Nothing.

He pounded hard on the infant's skeletal ribcage, trying to jar the heart into action, and again started the mouth-to-mouth.

It was no use, though. And he knew it was no use.

The infant was dead.

After a few more seemingly endless moments of frantically trying to revive the dead baby, Phil gave up. He pulled back, wiping the sweat from his eyes, and looked at the small child. It was a girl. Or would have been a girl. Her face, as he had feared, as he had known, was monstrously malformed. There was only one eye-open and staring--and no nose. The mouth spread almost vertically up the side of the right cheek. Her arms and legs were twisted almost beyond recognition.

He covered the infant with the blanket and stood up. Jill had come in while he'd been trying to revive the baby. She was standing at the foot of the bed, half-dressed but fully awake, a concerned-social-worker expression on her face. He told her to stay with Mrs. Perry until Dr. Waterston came. "The rest of you," he said, gesturing toward the gathered patients, "go back to bed. We'll get everything sorted out by morning, and we'll have a group meeting at ten in the dayroom and talk. I'll answer all of your questions then."

The patients reluctantly shuffled off to their individual bedrooms, talking in low shocked tones amongst themselves, while Phil carried the dead infant to the infirmary. He placed the blanketed baby on the steel counter that ran along the south wall of the room, making sure she was completely covered, and went back down the hall to help Jill with Mrs. Perry.

The doctor arrived fifteen minutes later.

"What the hell happened?" he asked, stepping quickly through the open doorway.

"Mrs. Perry had her baby," Phil said.

Dr. Waterston strode down the hall toward Mrs. Perry's bedroom. "She wasn't supposed to have that baby for another month!"

Phil shrugged, not sure of what to say.

"Why didn't you call me earlier?" the doctor demanded. "When she was in labor?"

"She wasn't," Phil said. "I mean, I looked in on her, checking to make sure she was okay, and she was sleeping soundly. Five minutes later, she started screaming, and when I rushed in there she was covered with blood."

"What did you do?"

"She was sitting up. I made her lie back down, then I spread her legs and looked. The baby's head was already halfway out."

"That's impossible."

"That's what happened. It looked like the baby's neck was broken."

They walked into Mrs. Perry's room, and the doctor took a needle and syringe from the white bag he was carrying. He rubbed a swab of alcohol on the old lady's arm and injected her. The drug took effect almost immediately, and Mrs. Perry's sweaty, agonized, tear-stained face relaxed into unconsciousness.

Dr. Waterston examined the mother, checked her heart, her breathing, looked at her pupils, thoroughly studied her dilated vagina, then turned to Phil. "Let's look at the infant."

Phil led the doctor down the hall to the infirmary without speaking.

He opened the infirmary door, turned on the light .. . and saw that the baby was gone.

"What the--"

He ran over to the spot where he'd lain the dead infant. The bloodied blanket was thrown onto the floor next to the counter, but there was no sign of the baby. The doctor strode up behind him. "Is this where you left the infant?"

Phil nodded. "I don't know who would ... I can't understand why anyone would want to .. ." He swallowed hard as he thought of the newborn girl's deformed face and horribly twisted limbs. He looked at the doctor. "It must have been one of the patients." He started going over a mental list of the more emotionally unbalanced residents of the nursing home. "It had to be one of the patients."

The doctor was bending over, looking down at the linoleum floor.

"Maybe," he said quietly. "Maybe not." He stood up and pointed at the top of the steel counter, at the small pool of blood left by the baby.

Claw marks were clearly outlined in the blood.

And the faint imprint of tiny feet could be seen on the floor next to the discarded blanket.

"It woulda scared the shit out of me, too." Brad loaded the last case of Pepsi onto the truck and pulled down the metal door, closing it.

"I'd sue the bastards if I were you."

Gordon shook his head. "I wouldn't know who to sue. Besides, there's nothing really to sue over. The tests said Marina's okay. Even if she was exposed to something there's no way we could prove it." He picked up his hat from the table and put it on. He jumped off the concrete rim of the loading dock and got into the passenger seat of the cab.

Brad finished locking up the warehouse, then came around to the front of the truck and got in. Gordon lifted up the visor of his hat and scratched his head. "As if that wasn't enough, I had a real mother of a nightmare last night."

"That's understandable."

"I can't remember all of it exactly, but it had something to do with my cousins and a huge monster spider."

Brad grinned at him. "You know what that means, don't you? It means you're a fag."

Gordon laughed.

The truck pulled out of the warehouse driveway onto Cedar, then turned from Cedar onto Main. The turn was sharp, and the left rear tires dipped into the ditch as they rounded the corner. Gordon braced himself for the sound of tires popping--a sound he knew was inevitable--but the truck, against all odds, made the turn safely on to the paved street. He looked at Brad and smiled. "I thought for sure we'd eat it that time."

"Are you kidding? Take a lot more than that to cripple this baby."

Brad pounded the steering wheel affectionately and the horn bleated. A

small car, a Toyota, passing them in the left lane, heard the sound and honked back. Brad leaned on the horn, sending out a long sustained blast, and stuck his middle finger out the window. "We weren't even honking at you! Asshole!"

The truck turned onto the highway and headed toward the south end of town. Today they would be covering the gas stations, liquor stores and fast food places within Randall. And, as always, they would work from south to north, then from east to west, big streets to little streets.

Brad pulled into the Whiting Bros, gas station at the southern tip of town. "You say that's what happened to Julie Campbell's baby, huh?

Something to do with the water?"

Gordon shrugged. "Near as we can figure."

Brad shook his head. "Fuckers." The truck pulled to a stop in front of the ornamental wooden hitching post before the door to the gas station office, and he yanked hard on the emergency brake. The Whiting Bros, station was on the downward end of the hill sloping into town, but it was still on a considerable slant, and once before, when he had forgotten to put on the brake, the truck had started rolling on them.

He always made sure the emergency brake was on now. "I used to go out with Julie's sister," he said, getting out of the cab.

"June?" Gordon raised his eyebrows. "I didn't know that."

"Well, it was a long time ago. Before me and Connie met." He grabbed the back door handle and stood for a moment without opening it, staring at the red, white, and blue Pepsi logo painted on the metal. "Took her to my senior prom. Fucked her brains out in the car afterward. First piece of ass I ever got. I still have the picture somewhere."

"Of you fucking her brains out?" Gordon grinned. "That must be a sight to see."

"No, dick meat Our prom picture."

"Whatever happened to June? I've heard Julie talk about her, but I don't think I've ever seen her. Is she still around here somewhere?"

Brad pulled up on the door handle, pushing it upward toward the roof of the truck. "Married some redneck, I think. Some construction worker up in Prescott or something." He looked at Gordon, and the expression on his face said that the topic was closed. "They always take at least a case of regular Pepsi here. You bring that on in, and I'll see what else these jokers need."

Gordon watched Brad's back as he walked into the gas station office. So Brad still had a soft spot for Julie Campbell's sister. He'd have to tell Marina about that one. She'd get a big kick out of it.

He grabbed a case of Pepsi and, grunting, carried it into the gas station office.

After delivering cases of Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, and Pepsi Light to the other gas stations on the south end of town and to Marty's Liquor, they drove back to the warehouse, loaded up again and then headed back onto the highway to finish the job. Brad pulled to a stop in front of Char Clifton's station. He looked at Gordon. "Is your insurance going to cover the cost of the doctors?"

"I'll probably have to fight like hell for it, but I was looking over our policy last night and it should cover most of it. Of course there is a two hundred dollar deductible. I'll have to scrape that together somehow."

Brad pulled on his beard and nodded. "Tell you what," he said. "I'm going to give you a hundred dollar bonus this month. To help out."

Gordon stared at him in surprise. "Really?"

Brad opened the door and got out, not looking at him. "Yeah. What the hell. This is our busy season. We've made quite a bit this summer from all the tourists coming up to the lakes and all. And you've done a damn good job. Done the work of two men this summer."

"I don't know what to say."

"Don't say nothing," Brad growled. "Just grab a goddamn case and bring it in." He stomped hard on the rubber cable that rang the gas station's bell and started walking toward the office, taking out his order pad. "Shit. Maybe I can get some kind of raise for you too. To help out with the expenses. Kids cost a lot these days."

Gordon just stared at him.

He heard about Mrs. Perry's baby in Pete's Diner.

It was a fifth-or sixth-hand retelling of the story by one customer to another, but at the sound of the words "baby" and "born dead" Gordon had put down his load and stopped to listen. The two customers were seated at the counter, drinking coffee and eatingfrench fries soaked in ketchup. The man who was telling the story looked like a regular, one of those retired men who hang out at diners and coffee shops to talk to others like themselves. He was nearly bald and wearing jeans and a faded work shirt. A straw cowboy hat occupied the vinyl seat next to him. The other man was around Gordon's age and was wearing a greasy mechanic's uniform.

Brad, too, stopped work for a few moments to hear the story, following Gordon's lead.

"She was damn near ninety or ninety-five," the old man said. "They're not even sure how she got pregnant. But there she was. Woke up the whole damn place with her screaming, and by the time anyone got there she'd already had the baby. Guy who told me about it said the thing crawled out on its own."

"But I thought it was born dead," the other man said.

"Oh it was. And it was all deformed, too. Didn't hardly look human at all. They put it in another room while they checked over the old lady, and when they came back it was gone. Disappeared."

"Do they know who stole it?"

The storyteller nodded. "They found some footprints." His voice dropped.

"But they weren't human."

"Really?"

"The cloven hoof of the Beast." The old man took a sip of his coffee.

"Brian--he's the one that told me about it--he said he's thinking of writing to the National Enquirer or something and telling them about it. They'd probably be interested in something like this."

The mechanic nodded. "Make mucho bucks off it, too."

"Damn straight."

Gordon didn't believe the last half of the story, but he had no doubt that the first part was true. Even the most outrageous exaggerations usually had some basis in fact. He looked at Brad, then stepped toward the two men. The thought that yet another deformed and stillborn infant had been born in Randall troubled him. He cleared his throat loudly.

"Excuse me," he said. "I couldn't help overhearing your story."

The old man nodded. "Yeah, it's something."

"I'd like to know when and where this happened. Could you tell me what you know about it, where you heard about it?"

The man put a ketchup soakedfrench fry in his mouth and followed it with a swallow of coffee. "I heard about it from Brian Stevens. It happened at the Randall Rest Home last night." He held up his empty cup and signaled to the waitress for more coffee.

"Last night?"

"Yeah. Brian's wife is in the nursing home. She saw it with her own eyes."

"The woman was ancient," Brad said, tapping Gordon's shoulder. "What do you expect? You think she's going to have a healthy blue-eyed bundle of joy when she's ninety goddamn years old?"

Brad was right. Such a situation could be attributed to age. Women who had children past the age of forty often had retarded babies or babies with birth defects, and that was certainly possible here.

Still, the story bothered him. He knew nothing save what he'd heard from this old man--and three-fourths of that he attributed to exaggeration-but he had a hunch, a gut feeling, that the baby's problems had been unrelated to the age of the mother.