They Thirst (41 page)

"Oh yeah?" Bull said quietly. "A brain, huh?"

"Looks like a fairy to me," Weir said and cackled.

Baines and Sutro tried to slip past the Unholy Three, but suddenly Bull's head turned, and Tommy saw his eyes gleam like Gort the robot's power blast from
The Day the Earth Stood Still.
"Where do you think you're goin'?" Bull said ominously.

"Nowhere . . ." Mark stammered. "We're just . . . nowhere . . ."

"Better not be!" Bull said and turned his attention back to Tommy.

Ah, yes,
Tommy thought.
He needs an audience for his performance.
Over Bull's massive shoulders his cohort's faces looked like the half-human animals from
The Island of Lost Souls.
Tommy could feel his heart thumping against his thin rib cage. The "flight or fight" instinct was pumping adrenaline through his body—his head said fight, but his feet said flight.

Bull stepped closer and shoved Tommy against the lockers again. "You think you're smart, don't you? Don't you?"

"Not particularly, no."

"You callin' Bull a liar?" Ross Weir snarled.

Uh-oh,
Tommy thought. Caught by the deadly triangle! His face flushed with a mixture of anger and fear. Bull reached out and plucked off Tommy's glasses. "Hey, don't!" Tommy said. "Those are expensive!"

"Oh yeah? You want 'em back? Come take 'em!"

"You're about three guys bigger than me."

"He's a chickenshit fairy, too," Weir said.

Bull narrowed his eyes into fierce slits. "I've seen you in here before, kid. You got the locker next to mine, don't you? I'm going to give you some advice. I find you in here tomorrow afternoon, I'm going to smear your little fairy ass up and down Fairfax Avenue, you got that?"

"Just give me back my . . ." Tommy began, but in the next instant a massive hand had grabbed his collar and was choking him.

"Maybe you didn't hear me," Bull said evenly. "I don't want to see you in here again. Understand?" He shook Tommy like a dog shakes a bone. "UnderSTAND?"

"Yeah," Tommy said, tears beginning to swim in his eyes. He felt more rage than fear, but he knew if he swung a blow, Bull would probably snap his arms out of their sockets. "Yeah, I understand."

Bull laughed, blowing fetid breath in Tommy's face. He flung Tommy back and sneered at Baines and Sutro. "You want some of it, too?" he growled. Their heads shook in unison.

"My glasses," Tommy said. "Give 'em back."

"Huh?" Bull glowered at him and then smiled. "Sure, kid." He held them out and dropped them to the floor as Tommy reached for them. "Sorry," Bull said. "I'll get 'em." He placed his boot on a lens and ground down on it. The
crack
sounded as loud as a gunshot. Buddy Carnes howled with laughter. "There you go, kid," Bull said, bending to pick up the glasses and then handing them to Tommy. "Put 'em on and let's see how they look."

Tommy was looking through one clear lens and one crisscrossed with cracks. The damaged side kept slipping off his ear, and he had to hold it in place.

"Looks real good," Bull said. His face contorted viciously. "Now get out of here, fuckface! And you don't come back, you got it?"

Tommy slipped past Bull and started for the door. He was almost there, thinking he was really going to make it, when Ross Weir stuck a leg in his path and pushed him. He went down in a tangle of arms and legs, his books falling everywhere. Laughter exploded as he gathered up his books again and hurried out of the locker room, leaving Jim Baines and Mark Sutro to their own unfortunate fates. Tommy walked across the empty parking lot and turned south on Fairfax, heading toward Hancock Park. His knees were trembling, and within him there was a great urge to turn around and shout, "BULL THATCHER SUCKS!" as loud as he could. But what good would that do? He'd only end up with a busted head and a mouthful of loose teeth. Soon he'd left Fairfax High behind and was out of shouting range. He wished he had muscles like Hercules; he wished he could deliver a flying kick like Bruce Lee. Then the Bull Thatchers of the world—and there were so
many
of them—would think twice before they bothered him.
Ah! The perfect fate for Bull Thatcher.
He imagined the boy running through the fog-shrouded streets of old London, fear glistening in his eyes beneath the whale oil lamps as he heard the approaching footsteps. Orlon Kronsteen's Ripper was afoot in the darkness, his three-foot sickle seeking new victims to behead. The Ripper's eyes would look like black holes behind a mask of gray cloth, and as those eyes made out the running figure of Bull Thatcher, the thin mouth would twitch into a cunning smile.
There's no where to run, boy!
The Ripper would call' out.
There's nowhere to hide! Come, let Mary Death take a taste of your blood!

Of course, he'd catch Bull Thatcher, and then . . . heh, heh, heh!

Tommy caught the smell of oranges and cloves in the breeze. It was the deceptively fruity smell which had lured thousands of prehistoric saber-toothed tigers, giant ground sloths, and mastodons into the clinging trap of the LaBrea Tarpits, over in the green, tree-studded expanse of Hancock Park. Tommy liked to roam around over there on Saturdays when his dad was working at the Achilles Electronics plant in Pasadena and his mom was out making telephone calls for whatever volunteer group she'd hooked up with this month. Last month it had been the Society to Aid Cambodian Orphans. Now it was the Save the African Elephant bunch. While his mother crusaded, Tommy would sit beneath a tree in the park and watch the roller skaters or read H.P. Lovecraft. He was accustomed to being alone.

He turned onto Lindenhurst Avenue, across from the park, and walked along a street lined with Spanish stucco houses that seemed to stretch on out of sight, hundreds of houses that looked similar except for the different colors of paint and different cars in the driveways. But, Tommy had noticed, there was even a pattern to the cars. Most of them were imports or economy cars, including his dad's Pacer and his mother's Toyota Celica. There were a few Porsches and Mercedes Benzes sitting around, too, but most of these were inconspicuously driven and usually covered over with protective canvas. It was a firmly middle-class neighborhood, complete with Boy Scout troop meetings and backyard barbecues on weekend evenings. It was quite similar to the neighborhood Tommy and his parents had lived in when his dad was working at the Achilles plant in Scottsdale, Arizona; and about the same as the one in San Antonio, Texas; and almost identical to the old neighborhood in Denver, Colorado. Actually they'd lived in a small town just outside Denver, and that place had been Tommy's favorite—streets lined with elm trees and white picket fences, chimney smoke stirring in a crisp, northerly breeze, people wearing sweaters and raking leaves into orderly piles. That had been a really neat place. California was different. Everybody was wacky, everybody had ulterior motives. It wasn't the moving that bothered Tommy so much because he knew his father was being promoted gradually through the Achilles corporation. It was changing schools so much and leaving behind whatever few friends he'd managed to make. In his experience real friends were few and far between. But there was one definite advantage to L.A., though. So many monster flicks were shown on the tube! Almost every weekend on Creature Features or Horror Hotel, he got to see an Orlon Kronsteen, Vincent Price, or—very rarely—a Todd Slaughter flick. At the end of the summer, he'd helped his dad attach a gizmo to the TV antenna that pulled in a couple of Mexican stations, and down there they really made creepy horror movies. So all in all, it wasn't too bad.

His heart suddenly gave a kick. A silver Vega was parked in the driveway of the house across the street from his.
Her
silver Vega.
Her
name was Sandy Vernon, the daughter of Pete and Dianne Vernon, and she was a sophomore at UCLA. Tommy had fallen in love with her while watching her mow the lawn on a Sunday afternoon, clad in tight, denim cutoffs and a dark blue halter. She was tanned and blond and . . .
stacked!
She made Melinda Kennimer, Farrah Fawcett, Bo Derek and Raquel Welch look like Selma Verone. He'd melted into a little puddle, like the goo that comes out of a chocolate-covered cherry when he'd seen the tight muscles of her thighs and buttocks as she shoved a sputtering, red Toro mower back and forth across the lawn. He would have offered to help but then he would've been deprived of watching that heavenly body. So he'd sat on the front steps, leafing through an
Eerie
magazine and not making a bit of sense out of the stories.

And when she'd finished, she'd cut the mower and then turned toward him, that mane of blond hair flowing like hair does in shampoo commercials. Even from across the street Tommy had seen that her eyes were a bluish violet "Hi there," she'd said and smiled.

"That's a pretty neat lawnmower you've got there, was the only thing he could manage to say.

She'd smiled wider as if she could read the thoughts—
STUPID! ASSHOLE! STUPID! ASSHOLE!—
that were battering against the walls of Tommy's brain. "Thanks.' It's my dad's. What they need to invent is one that does all the work by itself."

"Uh . . . yeah. I think somebody's come up with a robot mower. It runs along a wire you put down in the grass. My name's Tommy Chandler."

"I'm Sandy Vernon. Your folks just moved in?"

"Since July."

"That's nice. What grade are you in?"

"Uh . .. I'll be a freshman at Fairfax High. In September. You sure did a good job on that lawn."
STUPID! ASSHOLE! STUPID!

"Thanks. I'll be seeing you, Tommy." And she'd pushed the mower away, her cute little behind moving as if on ball bearings.

Tommy's body, in the bewildering throes of change, was never quite the same after that Sunday afternoon meeting. Once he woke up in the middle of the night, looked down at his pajama bottoms, and almost passed out thinking he had some hideous kind of VD. But that was impossible since he'd never had the opportunity to dabble in the mysteries of the opposite sex, and he decided that it was one more of nature's tricks to make sure he was ready for manhood.

Now as he stood in front of his house and looked across Lindenhurst at the silver Vega that meant
she
was home, he saw a collie sitting on the steps in front of the Vernon's door.
Whose dog is that?
he wondered.
Maybe the Vernons bought it in the last couple of days?
It was a large, beautiful dog, and right now it seemed to be sleeping. Tommy strolled out into the street and said, "Hi, boy! Hi there, fella!"

The dog didn't move.

What's wrong with it?
he wondered.
Is it sick?
He crossed the street and stood on the sidewalk. "Hi, fella!" He clapped one hand against his leg, but the collie didn't react. When Tommy placed one foot on the Vernons' lawn, the dog's head came up, the eyes staring blankly at him. "Hi, boy!" Tommy said. "Whose dog are you, huh? Are you Sandy's dog?"
Dogs have all the luck!
he thought. He took another step closer, and the collie bared its teeth, growling very softly.

Tommy froze. The collie slowly rose to its feet but didn't move from in front of the door. A drop of saliva fell from its lower lip and spattered onto the walkway. Tommy backed away, very carefully, and the collie immediately curled up again. On the other side of the street, Tommy stopped and stared across, knowing that Bull Thatcher was going to growl like that when he stepped into that locker room again tomorrow afternoon. It was either that or carry all his books around all day. He wondered if a kid could buy a can of Mace.
Funny the way that dog acted,
he thought.
I always heard that collies were friendly. Well, after all, I guess I was invading his territory or something.

And then he remembered that "The Invaders" was on television in fifteen minutes, so he dug the key out of his pocket and hurried inside so he wouldn't miss the first part where the saucer comes down.

Darkness. Twenty minutes before eight o'clock.

Paige LaSanda cursed as her pale blue Mercedes crashed over yet another pot-hole on serpentine Blackwood Road.
God!
she thought.
Why did I ever tell that Falco character I'd come up this mountain in practically the middle of the night? Why didn't I make him send a car to pick me up and take me back home! If that Prince whatever-his-name-is can afford to rent that castle, then by God he could afford to send a limo to pick me up!
She could hear the wind whining through the dead trees out there, so she turned on her radio and searched for music. She came across the tail end of a newscast from KMET. ". . . registered 3.4 on the open-ended Richter scale, but San Diego residents did suffer some broken windows in a series of aftershocks . . ."
Another earthquake,
she thought.
Christ! If it's not forest fires or mudslides, it's earthquakes!
She turned the dial and found a song she liked, the new Rory Black single. ". . . I'm not the kind of guy who gets a second chance with pretty girls like you;/I'm not the kind of guy who gets a second glance from pretty girls like you. . .."

She was wondering what this Prince what's-his-name would look like when she realized that there was something out there in the dark, running alongside her car.