Helltown - Jeremy Bates Page 0,32

her clear off the ground, turning her turtle onto her back. He kicked her in her side again and again, relentless. She heard her ribs snapping with twiggy, gristly sounds, and the certain realization that she was going to die filled her with an incomprehensible terror the likes of which she had never experienced.

Mandy blundered blindly into a glade of waist-high grass and cattails. She tripped on a root, pin-wheeled forward, and fell, slamming her chin against the ground so hard her upper teeth punctured her lower lip. Blood gushed into her mouth. She attempted to push herself to her knees, but didn’t have the strength. Instead, she was reduced to pulling herself forward, like something primordial that had just slithered out of the ocean for the first time.

When a shrill cry shattered the night, Mandy knew it belonged to Cherry. Still, she didn’t contemplate turning back. What could she do? She’d tried to fight them, and she’d failed. She was too small, too weak, outnumbered. Cleavon and his freak brothers were animals, crazy, sick. They would surely do to her…whatever they were doing to Cherry.

Cherry wailed again in abject pain and misery.

Somehow Mandy regained her feet.

She ran.

CHAPTER 9

“I’m the guy that’s gonna save your ass.”

Feast (2005)

“Here we are, I guess,” the driver of the white Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am said. “Boston Mills.” He had only spoken a few words since he’d picked up Beetle fifty miles back on Interstate 77, mostly to tell him he could take him as far as the Ohio Turnpike. “Sorry it’s not someplace bigger,” he added. “But I’ll be heading east now to Warren. You’ll be fine here for the night?”

Beetle nodded. His real name was Frederick Walker, but in the army you got nicknames, and they stuck—enough at least Freddy still thought of himself as Beetle, which he’d received because of his thick eyebrows and square face. “I’ll be fine,” Beetle said, “and thanks for the ride.” He got out and watched the Firebird drive off, vanishing into the fog, there one moment, gone the next, like a ghost ship glimpsed momentarily at sea.

The street was deserted. The only light came from a nearby sodium arc streetlamp that cleaved an inverted copper cone through the mist.

Beetle glanced at his wristwatch. 8:40 p.m. Not so late that there shouldn’t be a coffee shop open, or a couple out for a walk. Then again, it being Halloween night, he supposed everyone had closed up to take their kids out trick-or-treating in the residential neighborhoods.

He started walking in the direction the Firebird had gone and passed the typical businesses you found along the main drag in most small towns: a barbershop, a bookstore, a diner, a druggist, a real estate office, a shoe store. The exteriors were weatherworn, most in need of a coat of paint, the display windows as frost-blank as cataracted eyes. Graffiti covered the boarded-up entrance of an out-of-business tavern.

At the end of the block the street signs told him he was at the intersection of Main Street and Stanford Road.

While deciding which way to go he made out voices and laughter from somewhere ahead of him. Some ten seconds later two silhouettes materialized in the gray gloom before resolving into teenage boys. They were sixteen or seventeen, both dressed in torn jeans and wool football jackets with leather sleeves. The one on left had a buzz cut, the one on the right a mushroom cut with bangs that went to his chin. They were each gripping open wine bottles by the necks. They stopped when they saw Beetle. Their bantering ceased. Then, realizing he was too young to be a parent, they continued toward him with the awkwardness of kids who knew they were doing something wrong and were hoping you didn’t say anything about it.

“Excuse me,” Beetle said when they were a few feet away.

They slowed but kept walking. Buzzcut eyed him warily. “Yeah?”

“Can you tell me where the nearest motel is?”

Buzzcut stopped. Angry red splotches of acne marred his face. His mouth hung open slightly, and he could have done with a pair of braces, maybe one of those full headset deals. Mushroomcut slouched against a newspaper box and cleared the bangs from his face with a quick, neat jerk of his neck.

“You a soldier or something?” Buzzcut said, eyeing Beetle’s woodland camouflage shirt.

“The motel?” Beetle said.

The kid shrugged. “Only two in town. The Pines has an indoor pool, but it’s way over on the south side. The Hilltop’s closer, down