There's Blood on the Moon Tonight (66 page)

Bidwell yawned. “You can get dressed now, Ralph. You may not know it yet, big boy, but someday you’re gonna be
very
popular with the ladies.” Bidwell clicked his pen, pocketed it, and snickered out the side of his mouth.

Tubby assumed the man was mocking him. Even in the adult world, he couldn’t get away from the bullies. His face burned with shame.

“My nurse will take some blood and give you a specimen cup to fill before you leave. I’m confident, though, that like Rusty, you’re rabies free. If your mom has any questions about the exam, or any other concerns, she can call me tomorrow afternoon. I’m going to be swamped until then, I’m afraid.” Bidwell’s face darkened as he pointed a finger at Tubby. “Now like I told Rusty before, for your own good, stay out of those damn woods, you hear me?” He then turned away from the boys, already dismissing them from his mind. 48 hours had come and gone with no further outbreaks! A thought occurred to him.

“Rusty…how are Bud and Josie?”

“Sir?”

“Their eyes, Rusty,” he sighed. “Are they bloodshot? Has either of them complained of flu-like symptoms the past two days? Be truthful now, son.”

“No, sir. They’re the healthiest two kids I know.”

Relieved to hear it, Bidwell smiled again.

                            *******

Joel went straight to his room and put his Spiderman backpack into his tiny closet. He checked the Jimmy Neutron clock on his bedside table. 3:19. Josie should be home any minute now. His father stared back at him from a framed photo beside the clock, as if trying to impart some solemn wisdom. The grainy image on the photo, as always, though, remained mute and secretive.

              A gurgling sound from Joel’s gut made him jump.

“Jeez alou,” he said, rubbing his rumbling stomach. “I’m as hungry as a hippo!”

He tiptoed past Shayna’s closed door, hoping she might be out, or at least asleep. He wondered at his sister’s inability to see the difference in their mother. To Joel, the change was as obvious as the metamorphosis of a maggot into a fly. And quite possibly, just as apt. From bad to worse, as the saying went. Shayna was dead inside where it mattered most. And the bitch of it was, the woman didn’t even know it! Like one of those soulless zombies from
Night of the Living Dead
. A movie he’d had to go behind his sister’s back to watch—like most of the cool horror films Josie brought home.

If Josie wouldn’t listen to reason, maybe it was time to talk to Rusty or Bud. At least they wouldn’t dismiss it out-of-hand! It was as if his sister was blinded by love or long lost memories of how their mother used to be. By the false promise of their mother’s return to those days. Not having any fond memories of Shayna, Joel was more inclined to see the truth.

He was checking out the slim pickings in the fridge when he heard a sly sort of sound in the hallway beyond the kitchen. The sound of a door slowly creaking open…             

Shayna’s door.

He stood still as a mouse that knows a snake is about and on the prowl. The stink of vomit and body waste wafted out to him from the hallway.
Coming my way…

A throaty laugh turned Joel’s skin into a sheet of frozen goose pimples. As fear fell on top of him like a toppled cow he felt the hair lift up on his head. Something wicked was crouched now on the other side of the open refrigerator door. Dark and inhuman, it waited for the fridge door to close. He decided it could stay there, too. As long as he didn’t close the door, then he wouldn’t have to face his Fate. That rancid stink, waiting to swallow him whole. A dark shadow spilled underneath the Frigidaire door and crawled over his feet. His toes curled inside his Nikes as he became aware of an echo in the house. It assaulted his ears with a deep, pounding bass.

The clock.
The black cat clock!

Ticking off the remaining seconds of his life on the wall above his head. Sounding like an amplified heartbeat. Like Bud, eight years ago, Joel accepted this impossibility as irrefutable fact. Evil was afoot here, and Joel knew that, too. Knowing he was about to die, he began to cry, his body shaking violently. A stream of urine ran fast and hot down his leg, and puddled around his sneakers.

A startled sob escaped him, as the monster grew tired of the wait. A hand, the once manicured nails torn free from their nail beds, curled around the side of the refrigerator door and slowly pushed it closed.

Joel made no effort to stop it. He, too, had tired of the wait. He wondered:
Will it be dark or light on the other side?
Joel hoped it would be light. He hated the dark.

The red-eyed thing that had once been his mother stared up at him from the kitchen floor. Poised like a spider ready to pounce on its prey, her elbows and knees splayed in grossly unnatural angles, naked as the day she was born. Her pendulous breasts looked more like bloated sacs of venom than the nurturing body parts that had once given him succor as a babe. The nipples more like fleshy stingers.
              Joel stared at the dirty soapsuds, flowing non-stop from her gurgling mouth.
How is that possible,
he wondered, almost idly,
that much spit? How can it be?

He closed his eyes and waited for the end. And by the sometimes grace of God, it
was
an end.

             
                            *******

The seconds whirred away like playing cards on the spokes of some kid’s bike, as the black cat bore witness to the unspeakable horrors on the kitchen floor below.

              Its soulless eyes seemed to widen, its tail to straighten out, in a contented, self-satisfied manner, which was altogether vile. The slitted eyes watched the rough beast drag the child back into its lair. A swath of blood on the cheap linoleum, marking this, Joel O’Hara’s last journey on Spaceship Earth…

             
                            *******

Neither boy had much to say, walking down Main Street. Despite their parents needing them home, where preparations were well underway for the coming wind and rain, they stopped off at Moon Man’s for a couple of root beer floats, each hoping a Garfield Special would help break the awkward silence, which had inexplicably fallen over them. The experience in the exam room had been so humiliating that Tubby had forgotten all about his discovery in Bidwell’s office. As for Rusty, he was depressed over what he’d witnessed back there. He hadn’t been surprised at how fat Tubby was.
Shit, you can’t cover up that kind of blubber with clothes!
Besides, he’d seen Tubby in the locker room after gym class, even if it had always been from behind. Tubby went to a great deal of effort to block any view of his hanging gut and titties. Anyway, the flab of fat hadn’t been what Rusty was staring at in the first place. It was Tubby’s long, thick pecker, hanging halfway down to his chubby, dimpled knees. Fucking thing looked like a kielbasa sausage! It wasn’t that Rusty begrudged his fat friend such an impressive endowment; he had just come to think of Tubby as a social equivalent.  They were both on the timid side and they both had physical shortcomings that the other could relate to.

             
At least Rusty had thought so.

Over the past few years, Rusty had had opportunity to see what other boys his age had in the way of equipment, and there was no doubt in his mind he was lagging behind in that crucial department. He wondered again if his penis, along with the rest of his shrimpy body, would ever grow any bigger. Or would he end up like that runty black kid on TV? In a perpetual state of preadolescence. It seemed a cruel stroke of Fate, when the Huggins's men had always run to the extra,
extra
large. Rusty would often wonder, of all the exceptional genes he could have inherited from his mom, why’d he have to take after her when it came to body size! She had once caught him standing on a stool, checking himself out in the bathroom mirror. He’d been terribly embarrassed, and his mother was wise enough to know why. Without offering any well-meaning commentary, she’d left a photo album on Rusty’s bed. It was of her family, running many generations past. He saw several young boys, his own age and older, many of whom were just as small as he.
Yep. Just as I suspected!

The Atkins’
men
, however, were another story…

They were all fair-sized fellows—not a
gnat
in the bunch! Her message had been clear: He would grow out of it!
Okay…But when?

“That was a lot easier than I thought,” Tubby said, trying to spear the cherry at the bottom of the glass with his straw. He went with a sugar-free float and was surprised at how tasty it was. Then again, he was so hungry, he bet even the straw would taste good by now.

Rusty looked up from the depths of his beveled glass and blinked. “Huh?”

“I said that was pretty easy back there in Bidwell’s office. After everything ya’ll said, I was worried he’d have us quarantined. Even if we didn’t have the virus.”

Rusty shrugged. He too had been pleased to get a clean bill of health. He had no memory, however, of the dog slime that had covered him that day in the Pines. “Best of all, we know we’re not apt to come down with it, either.”

“You mean that remark he made about the bloodshot eyes?” Tubby was glad to be talking again. Rusty seemed distracted, though, and Tubby wondered if it was about his morbid obesity. If Rusty had told him what he was
actually
thinking, it would have blown Tubby’s socks off. Ralph Tolson had made an effort over the years to not only keep himself covered from prying eyes, but to keep his eyes from prying as well—thinking, that to look, would be an invitation for others to
look
at him. Therefore, he had no idea Nature had seen fit to endow him so generously. As far as he knew, every sixteen-year-old boy in the world had the same size Petey.

“Yeah. He barely checked anything but our eyes. And did you get the feeling that the rest of the tests…spit, blood, and piss…were only perfunctory?”

“Perfunctory?”

“Means automatic, a token effort in this case.”

“Yeah, like he was just dotting all the i’s! I doubt if he even goes to the trouble of having them tested.”

“Which tells me the first symptom must be severely bloodshot eyes—like the big gray bitch—and it probably presents itself shortly after exposure. He also mentioned headaches and fever, but for some reason I don’t think either of those symptoms are as significant as the red eyes.”

“Right!” said Tubby. “One look at our clean peepers and he’d already dismissed us from his mind!”

They slid off their stools and left Moon Man’s, waving at Garfield on their way out the door.

Garfield offered up a cheery
“
Toodiloo
!”
from the back room, where he was putting away stock.

Approaching the Drive-In, Tubby saw that his dad was already back home, busy putting up the new steel shutters he’d purchased in Beaufort. Bill and Bud Brown seemed to be doing all the heavy lifting, though.

              “They’re back,” said Rusty, sighing happily.

             
They ran into the yard, where Frank Tolson was handing up the shutters to Bud and his dad, both of whom were standing on ladders next to the second story windows. Stripped to their waists, the Browns’ stood sweating in the afternoon sun, their muscles in slick definition. Tubby wondered if he could ever look half as good.

“Where’s Josie?” he shouted up to Bud, who was using an electric drill to secure the shutters to the window frames.

“Hey, Ralphie boy!” Bud said in his Ed Norton voice. Like all of Bud’s impressions, it was truly awful. To Tubby’s ears, they all sounded like Vin Diesel with a head cold. Bud Brown practically glowed with joy, though.

Realizing that Bud’s happiness was somehow due to Josie, Tubby experienced an ungrateful pang of jealousy.

“She’s inside with your mom, packing up your baby pictures, Hoss!”

Everyone laughed good-naturedly, as Tubby ran inside the house to prevent certain baby photos from coming to light.

“I don’t see what
he’s
so embarrassed about,” Rusty grumbled.

             
Upon their return to the island, Bill learned Bidwell had cancelled yet another appointment for Bud. Dr. Bidwell assured him he had nothing to worry about (according to the Doc, after all this time without any symptoms, Bud and Josie definitely didn’t have the bug), but Bill wasn’t convinced. He went ahead and made yet another appointment for Bud in the morning, demanding Bidwell honor it this time. Despite Ralph and Rusty’s successful physicals that afternoon, Bill wouldn’t be satisfied until he heard the same news for his son.

Since their afternoon was free, he and Bud insisted on helping Frank put up his shutters. What would have taken Frank and Ralph half the day, had taken the three of them less than two hours.

“Did you say something, son?” Frank said, clapping his hand on Rusty’s shoulder.

             
                           
Rusty blinked up at Frank behind his thick specs.

“Huh? Oh no, Mr. T. Just thinking out loud, is all.”