Helltown - Jeremy Bates Page 0,40
ya?”
“A boy lives here.”
“My son, Scottie. And I’ll ask you again—what’s that to ya?”
“You son told us you don’t have a phone.”
The man smiled triumphantly, revealing stained, barnacle teeth. “That’s right,” he said. “Don’t got no phone. Who the hell I need to call?”
“Your son,” Steve said, swallowing the tightness in his throat, “started to attack us with a hockey stick. My friend tried to take the stick from him. There was an accident.”
The man squinted. “What kind of accident?”
“Sir, I’m sorry. Your son is dead.”
“He’s what?”
“It was an accident. He bumped into a radiator. It fell on him.”
The man stood there, staring at Steve like he was speaking Klingon. Then he clicked back to reality and bounded up the steps. “Scottie?” he shouted. “Scottie?”
Steve and Noah stepped aside as the man shoved past them, leaving a trail of cheap cologne in his wake. He went inside the house. “Scottie? Scottie!”
Steve stared at his feet as he listened to the man wail and blubber and finally break down in sobs. Then he went quiet. Steve glanced at Noah. He was staring off into the trees. Moonlight glinted off his tear-streaked cheeks.
The man appeared in the doorway. His eyes were bloodshot. Snot hung from his nose, stringing off his chin. “Who did that?” he barked hoarsely.
“I did,” Noah said.
“You killed my boy?”
Noah didn’t answer.
“You killed my boy?”
“It was an accident,” Steve said.
The man whirled on him. “An accident? An accident! He don’t got no head no more!”
“I’m sorry—”
“Sorry? You’re sorry? I’ll show you sorry.” He hastened down the steps to his car.
Under his breath Steve said, “I think we should get out of here.”
Noah rubbed his eyes and nodded.
In the next instance, however, the man withdrew a rifle from his car. He locked it into his shoulder, pressed his cheek to the side of the stock, and took aim at Noah through the open sight. “I’ll see you in hell, boy,” he said.
Noah’s hands shot up. “Wait wait wait—”
The man rocked the bolt to and fro, feeding a round into the rifle’s chamber, and fired. The report was like a canon blast. Noah flew backward against the house. His left hand crashed through the living room window, and he crumpled to the ground.
“Noah!” Steve shouted, dropping to his knees. “Noah?” He tilted his friend’s head back. A circular hole rimmed with abraded skin and leaking blood marked the center of Noah’s forehead like a bulls-eye. His eyes were open and unseeing.
He had died instantly.
Heart pounding, barely able to breathe, Steve bumbled backward like a crab, trying to stand but finding his legs uncooperative. The man tromped up the steps, pointing the rifle at him. He cycled the bolt, ejecting the spent casing. It struck the lumber planking with a plaintive clink.
“Fuck you!” Steve shouted in crazy defiance. “You fucking redneck piece of shit! You killed him! You killed my friend!”
“And you’re next, boy,” the man snarled as he closed one wild eye, taking aim through the rifle’s sight once more.
CHAPTER 11
“I warned you not to go out tonight.”
Maniac (1980)
Panting, her throat flayed raw, Mandy stumbled to a stop before a small butte overgrown with vegetation. She glanced behind her, saw nothing but the dark outlines of tree trunks in the ethereal fog, and sagged to all fours. She crawled forward and pressed her back against the rock wall, wanting to blend into it. She was so deep in shock her brain and lungs felt encased in ice. She couldn’t think or make sense of anything.
She waited, listened, every nerve ending tingling, alert. The night was graveyard silent. She didn’t hear any sound of pursuit. She considered continuing on, putting as much distance between her and the freaks as possible, yet she didn’t think she could coax her body into getting up. She’d only been running for one minute, two at most, yet she was out of breath and exhausted. She might be thin, and look fit and healthy on the outside, but her insides were a different matter altogether. The last time she’d gone for a run—a real run with warm-up stretches and Lycra tights and Nike joggers—would have been as a junior in high school. She’d been nothing but skin and bones then. Her mother had told her this countless times at the dinner table when she refused to finish her meals. “You’re nothing but skin and bones, Mandy,” she would say, looking over the top of her bifocals at her in an uncanny impression of a cross librarian. “No