Helltown - Jeremy Bates Page 0,82

plunk down in the rocking chair he set up in one corner of the room and sit there watching the snakes even when they weren’t doing much of anything, which was their usual state of affairs. On the occasion in question he had been drunk and didn’t close the door properly when he left to go to bed. Cleavon woke in the middle of the night shouting. One of the snakes—Toad, Spencer believed—had curled itself around Cleavon’s left arm and ankle, swallowing his arm nearly to the elbow. Even Earl, with all his strength, couldn’t unwrap the thing. Cleavon wanted him to cut it in half, but Earl wouldn’t hear of it. In fact, Spencer wouldn’t have been surprised if, had it come to it, Earl chose the snake’s life over his brother’s.

Fortunately the situation didn’t devolve to this. Instead Cleavon had Earl ring Spencer and explain what happened. The telephone call had been chaotic, with Earl blabbering incoherently and Cleavon cursing in the background. Spencer didn’t know the first thing about snakes, but he had once read about a boy who had been bitten by a pit bull. The quick-thinking owner of the dog got it to release the boy’s arm by dumping half a liter of alcohol down its throat. So that’s what he told Earl to do. Amazingly it worked. The snake regurgitated Cleavon’s limb and released its death grip from his arm and leg.

Now Earl took the key dangling on a string from around his neck and unlocked the door. He stepped fearlessly into the room, hit the light switch to the left, and said proudly, “See, Spence, I told you, they ate them, they ate them good, didn’t they?”

Spencer wrinkled his nose at the sudden stench of feces and urine, and beneath this, the pungent, musky odor the snakes emitted from their anal glands to keep the poisonous organism found in the marshes and swamps of South America at bay.

The two anacondas lay curled in opposite corners. They were both over twenty feet long—nearly twice their length when Toad attacked Cleavon. Their glossy olive bodies dwarfed their heads, which were marked with prominent red stripes. Black oval-shaped markings spotted their backs, tapering down to black spots with yellow centers along their flanks.

Spencer’s eyes went immediately to their grotesquely extended middle sections. He stared, fascinated. Despite the massive sizes of the animals, he’d had no idea they could consume fully grown humans. But why not? he thought. Surely if anacondas could swallow caiman and deer in the wild, they could work their mouths around human shoulders.

Spencer wished he had arrived earlier so he could have witnessed the spectacle of the two men’s deaths, so he could have looked into their eyes and seen the understanding of their impending doom. Now that would have been something.

“Did I do good, Spence?” Earl asked.

“Wonderfully,” he said softly.

“Can I feed ’em more bucks and does in the future? We’ll save on rabbits if I do, and all those does and bucks, they just go to waste where we bury ’em out back, so this way we make use of them, and we save on rabbits. I’m right, Spence, am I right?”

Spencer told Earl he could do whatever he wished in the future—an easy proclamation to make considering Earl would not live to see the morning—and they returned to the front porch where they found Cleavon in a heated discussion with Jesse and Weasel. Cleavon was still lobbying to go find the missing woman, while Jesse and Weasel seemed okay with leaving the matter until first light.

“So what we gonna do till morning then?” Cleavon challenged. “Get pissed and hit the sack like this was any old Friday night? You think any of you gonna sleep knowing that bitch is on the loose out there?”

“Why don’t we hold a black mass, gentlemen?” Spencer suggested. “My mistake,” he added, casting the bound women a glance. “Why don’t we hold two?”

All eyes turned toward him.

“Huh?” Cleavon said.

“A black mass,” Spencer repeated. “Earl’s snakes have taken care of the two bucks nicely. That leaves these two does. It’s either bury them out back right now, which would be a shameful waste, or have some fun first. Given we have the time…”

The women moaned and flopped around on the porch like fish out of water. Their struggles only earned the attention of the men present, whose eyes began to burn with primitive hunger and lust.

“I don’t wanna waste them,” Earl said, squatting next to the