The Vile Village (19 page)

“Nonsense, nonsense,” the doctor said, pushing him more firmly now, so he had to step backward and ended up sitting on the
table. “Everyone who’s sent by the brothers has to undergo an exam. It’s the rules, mister.” He pulled the bottle from his
smock pocket, took a deep guzzle, his huge, stubbly Adam’s apple bobbing up and down four times before he stopped. “And rules
is rules.” He giggled, his eyes spinning around like pennies caught in a washing machine. “Want some?” He held out the bottle,
which Stone could see was the brown stuff—not his favorite.

“I’ll pass,” Stone replied, holding up his hand with a highly depressed look on his face. He glanced over to a second table
in the half darkness of the candlelit room, and his face winced in horror. For the good doctor had already been working on
someone else—only this one was already dead. A corpse. And God only knew what he had been doing—the damn thing was cut up
all which ways, its pieces lying like unassembled parts to a huge cut-and-paste doll, arms lying alongside legs, the eyes
and ears all cut from the face, and stacked neatly in little piles.

“Jesus, God,” Stone mumbled silently in prayer deep inside himself. Just being in the place and around the red-faced wino
doctor gave him the creeps.

“Now, let me just take a look at your injuries here, my good man,” the doctor said, capping the bottle and slamming it back
in his pocket. He stepped in real close, so Stone had to smell his stinking alcohol and cigar-saturated breath and look into
his red-pored, exploded-capillary face and try not to vomit. The doc looked around the areas on which Stone had splashed blood
and poked and prodded with his fingers, trying to find the entry holes. After about sixty seconds he stopped and stepped back
about a yard so he was staring right into Stone’s face.

“You’re not wounded, you lying bastard. What the hell’s going on here?”

“Shit.” Stone grimaced, starting to reach for his gun, knowing his cover had been blown and instantly trying to start computing
what that meant. But suddenly the Doc’s hand moved real fast. A scalpel he kept concealed just inside the sleeve of his smock
on the right hand came darting up. Before Stone could even respond—as he was totally unprepared—the glistening scalpel slammed
into his shoulder, coming straight down.

“Fuck,” Stone screamed out, grabbing the man’s hand and twisting it so that the doctor turned beet-red with pain from the
jujitsu hold as he was bent over backward, nearly half-way to the ground. “I thought doctors were supposed to heal, not stab,”
Stone said angrily as he reached over with the free hand and pulled out the blade. It stung like fire as he extracted it,
and a stream of blood ran down his chest and back from the wound.

The doctor was sputtering away, trying to rise, but the hold that Stone had on him was unbreakable. “What the hell am I going
to do with you, you old fart?” Stone asked as he looked quickly around the room. “I really should kill you. But there’s something
so pathetic about you, I don’t think I could stand the memory of that red nose on my conscience forever. So—”

He pushed the man around the room, as if guiding a wheelbarrow with one hand, and the doctor sputtered and wheezed and bumped
into things as he stumbled along. Stone saw some twine and surgical tape and reached for them. He suddenly kicked around,
catching the ankle of the doctor, knocking him straight to the ground so that the man fell on his face, knocking a trio of
teeth free in a bloody little clump.

“I’m just going to tie you up,” Stone said, wrapping Doc’s wrists and feet together in an unbreakable knot his father had
taught him, one that would only get tighter the more a man struggled. “You ain’t going to die unless you struggle and have
a heart attack, which would be fine with me. Up to you.” He slammed some surgical tape over the still sputtering doctor, who
was having trouble even getting a few words together. Stone dragged the man by his ankles along the filthy, bloodstained floor
with dried pieces of human anatomy from other “autopsies” lying around the place like droppings from a picnic of ghouls. Mice
and rats poked through them here and there, carrying off unrecognizable, dark, shriveled things back to their holes to eat
them away from their greedy kin.

“Here, Doc,” Stone grunted as he half pushed, half kicked the big body of the alkie doctor into a closet. “Thanks for the
treatment—I’ll tell all my friends to come here for every little injury.” He slammed the door shut and walked quickly out
of the chamber of horrors. But the shit was about to hit the fan, of that there was no fucking doubt. He’d have to get the
hell out of town, fight from the outside. It was too But there was no getting around it. His cover was as blown as the
Hindenburg
.

Stone walked outside, looking around carefully to make sure no one was keeping an untoward eye on him. But as far as he could
tell, there were just a few drunken stragglers heading back to their filthy little rooms somewhere to sleep it off. He shifted
his hip holster and pulled his jacket back slightly so he could have quick access. Somehow he had a feeling he was going to
need it. He’d get the dog and then get the fuck out of there.

As he slipped back to the whorehouse through the back alleys rather than the main streets, every dark window he passed seemed
menacing, as if barrels were poking from every sill. It was that doctor, that’s all, Stone told himself. The murderous old
bastard had set him completely edge, just having to touch that bloated flesh.…

He reached the whorehouse by going over a few fences and came in through one of the back screen doors. He entered a room filled
with supplies for the house—buckets, mops, a stack of wood for the winter—and started forward into the dimly lit hallway.
Suddenly there was a motion to his right, and a shape leapt forward, slamming an ax handle down on his head. Stone parried
the blow at the last fraction of a second, taking a hard strike on his forearm, but stopping the handle from reaching his
head. As he started forward, to throw a smashing blow to his attacker’s face, he sensed movement again right behind him. And
even as the baseball bat descended on the back of his head, his father’s admonition, “Where there’s one, there’s two,” echoed
around in his head like a record stuck in its groove.

T
he first thing he heard when he came to were angels singing. Only they were singing off-key, and as he came out of the painful
blackness, Stone saw that they weren’t angels at all, and they weren’t singing. It was one of the Strathers brothers—Vorstel—and
he was looking down at Stone from above, as if he were just about the funniest damn thing Vorstel had ever seen in all his
days. Stone tried to move and found that his wrists and legs were completely immobilized. He was strapped down.

“You fucked up, didn’t you, Preacher Boy?” Vorstel sneered, his three-toothed mouth twisting around like the face of some
nightmarish eel at the bottom of the sea. “You almost got away with it, asshole, except for one thing. Jayson saw you pick
up that piece of chain yesterday. He figured you was saving it for a memento. But you wasn’t, was you? You was planning to
double-cross us.” His fist suddenly slammed down, and Stone’s head rocketed around on his body like it was thinking about
flying off on vacation somewhere.

“That’s for lying,” Vorstel said, glaring down, his smile now changed to something else, something twisted. “And this”—he
grinned, cocking the fist again so that it looked like it was as big as a sledgehammer—“is for making an asshole out of me
in front of my brothers, since I brought you into our thing.” The knuckle meteor came straight down into the side of Stone’s
head, and again his consciousness went on and off, like a light bulb flickering from a shorting wire.

Then Stone heard a scream that was even louder than the explosions in his skull, and the blurred shadow above him suddenly
disappeared.

“Hey, don’t start without me, you bastard,” Vorstel yelled, and Stone heard him take about six steps, his boots slamming hard
on the concrete floor. He heard what sounded like the droning whir of a piece of machinery, and then another scream, this
one much shriller and more drawn-out than the previous one. In fact, it didn’t stop. Somehow Stone raised his head, which
wasn’t tied down, and saw Vorstel and his brother, Rudolf, in front of a large metal device about fifteen feet away. It must
have been some kind of press, for a huge, flat, square section about five feet by five feet was being lowered down onto another
similarly shaped section. Only someone’s arm was being held inside the thing. And it was just a kid.

Bronson’s son, Stone realized in a flash, as his brain cells returned to a state of semi-functioning inside his battered skull.
The bastards had put the kid’s hand inside an ancient paper press, and it was coming down a fraction of an inch at a time
onto the hand, which was tied around the wrist to the edge of the thing.

“Let
me
turn that damn contraption,” Vorstel exclaimed loudly, his voice echoing off the stark concrete was of what Stone assumed
to be the brothers’ torture chamber, since there were various other tables around, and a man, maybe dead, sitting half propped
up against a wall at the far side of the room.

“Oh, here you go, for chrissake,” Rudolf said, standing back and letting his sibling have a go at the wheel, which was attached
to a pulley system that slowly brought the flat press down. He looked over at the eight-year-old boy’s face as if enjoying
seeing the pain on it, pain caused by him as he turned the wheel. The son of Bronson was trying to act brave. He looked like
a miniature version of his old man, bald head, tattoo on each side of his skull, wearing leather pants and vest with studs.
But still, he was just a boy, and as the press slowly came down and crushed his bones and flesh and muscle all together into
a sludge of red, the lad let out with the most unearthly sound that Stone had ever heard.

“Now, my turn on the other hand,” Rudolf demanded, pushing Vorstel out of the way. “You can’t hog the damn press for every
fucking part of him.” Vorstel turned around for a second to look at Stone, who was watching the scene with a sickened expression,
as the press was slowly raised back up again about a foot above the smashed hand, and a whole flood of ooze and slime dripped
down over the side of the rusting metal and onto the floor. There was nothing left of the hand at all—just the crushed stump
of the lad’s wrist, which ended at the very base of what had been the hand. The boy looked down at it, his eyes wide, as if
they’d just seen God. He couldn’t even scream—his mouth just hung on, his tongue sort of moving around inside like a worm
trying to get off a fishhook.

“Ain’t that something,” Vorstel yelled over when he saw Stone watching. “Just got it last week. Ain’t had a chance to test
it out. But it works fine, works just fine. And Mr. whoever-the-hell-you-are”—Vorstel sneered, his heavily lidded eyes narrowing—“after
we crush this little fucker, crush every little bit of him into Jell-O, then we’re going to start on you, friend. And I’ll
just let you wonder where we’re going to start first.” With that, he turned back to see just what the hell was going on, as
he didn’t want to miss a bit of the action. Rudolf had tied the boy’s other hand to the side of the press and was pushing
it in with one hand while he turned the wheel that lowered the top slab of metal with the other. The boy watched as the press
came down, watched as his eyes grew bigger and bigger, his pulp of a right hand hanging limply at his side, sending a little
waterfall of red and pink down onto the floor.

Stone knew he had minutes, maybe seconds, to live. Once the boy was either squashed or dead—whichever came first—they would
vent their sadistic madness on him. And he knew one thing—that though he didn’t mind dying, he didn’t want to go out like
that. Please, God, not like what they were doing to that poor little murderous son of a bitch over there. He searched desperately
through his mental bag of tricks as he tested his bindings, pulling hard, but with hardly any motion so as not to catch their
attention, though there wasn’t much danger of that as the blood perverts were firmly rooted in what was gong on in front of
them.

His left wrist was slightly loose. Not much, but there was just enough slack so that when he turned it, he could feel that
he could almost slip under the leather binding. Stone twisted and pulled at the damn thing like a snake caught in a trap,
trying to free himself. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, for every second seemed like an hour as he heard the boy’s screams start
up again when the press started to squeeze against his right hand.

Stone’s arm suddenly snapped free of the bindings at the exact second that Vorstel just happened to glance over to see how
his honored guest was doing.

“Motherfucker,” he screamed, “he’s getting out, he’s getting out.” They stopped what they were doing, leaving the press just
as it was starting to crush the bones below, and came roaring over toward Stone, pulling huge hunting knives from inside their
jackets.

“Son of a fucking—” Stone snarled to himself as he reached down toward his boot, straining with every sinew to get to the
push dagger hidden inside the heel of his right boot. At least it would give him a weapon, as Stone saw that his pistols had
been stripped from him. But he wasn’t going to get the chance, for the two brothers were tearing ass toward him like they
were in the hundred-yard dash. With a push of breath to relax himself, Stone suddenly shifted his whole body and pulled the
entire table he was on right over on its side. The thing crashed with a great roar, as it was made of steel, and Stone felt
himself jarred hard as he hit shoulder and hip first onto the concrete floor.

But it brought him a few seconds of precious time as the brothers slammed into the legs of the thing and got tangled up in
the mess, the table creating a momentary obstacle. Stone reached down for the boot, struggling hard, as it was just beyond
his reach at the half-crunched angle he was lying in, with half the weight of the table on him. Then somehow he reached his
boot and pushed the heel hard to the right, catching the three-inch-long blade as it fell into his hand. He fitted the small
knife in his palm and gripped his fingers over the hilt. It was designed with the blade coming out of the middle of the handle
and pointing straight out, perpendicular from it. Thus the user could grip his whole hand around the handle and have the knife
blade project forward right between his fingers. It was a commando ace-in-the-hole, just one of the Major’s many little “last-resort”
tricks. It certainly qualified for that category.