Helltown - Jeremy Bates Page 0,88

woman’s body to the floor, and gripped the pew beneath the seat. He managed to rock it back an inch. “Boys!” he rasped in the dry air. “Give me a hand here! We got ourselves a battering ram!”

With Cleavon and Earl on one side, Weasel and Jesse and Floyd on the other, they lifted the pew between them, swung it perpendicular, and carried it up the aisle. On Cleavon’s instruction they set it down still some distance from the front doors.

“This is it, boys!” he said, shaking his spaghettied arms. “On the count of three we charge those doors like it’s nobody’s business! Y’all ready? Y’all fuckin’ ready?”

“Ready, Cleave!” Earl said.

The others concurred with equal enthusiasm.

“On the count of three!” Cleavon said. They lifted the pew simultaneously. “One! Two! Three!”

They rushed the double doors, shouting like a pack of crazies.

The front of the pew crashed into the doors straight on—and came to a bone-jarring stop. Everyone’s momentum caused them to release the pew and torpedo into the doors themselves. Cleavon and Earl bounced backward, lost their balance, and collapsed to the floor in a mix up of limbs.

“Shoot, Cleave,” Earl said after a dazed moment. “That didn’t work real good, did it?”

CHAPTER 28

“We all go a little mad sometimes”

Psycho (1960)

Beetle and Greta stared in disbelief at the white wooden church with the upside down crosses incorporated into its architecture. It was engulfed in a glowing red fire that blazed against the black night. The flames, undeterred by the downpour, licked as high as the overhanging soffits, crackling and popping as they consumed the buckling weatherboards. Clouds of thick, acrid smoke streamed upward into the sky.

Beetle and Greta had frozen at the sight of the inferno when they’d breasted the summit of the hill on which the church had been built. Now they rushed past the two parked cars toward the front doors, where they stopped and stared again at the chain wound through the door handles and cinched together by a large bronze padlock.

“What the hell?” Beetle said.

“Hey!” Greta shouted, cupping her mouth with her hands. “Hello in there! Hey! Can you hear me?”

A chorus of weak croaks erupted from the other side of the doors, followed quickly by an equal number of gut-wrenching coughs.

“We need to help them!” she said as thunder crashed overhead, so loud it seemed to shake the ground. Forked lighting flashed moments later, searing the sky a blinding white.

Beetle was already reaching for the Beretta tucked into the waistband of his pants. “Step back,” he told Greta, aiming the pistol at the padlock.

“You have a gun!” she exclaimed. “Why—?”

“Stand back!”

Greta backed up.

Beetle squeezed the trigger.

The first bullet ricocheted off the padlock, pock-mocking the metal but otherwise leaving the lock intact. He fired two more rounds—pop, pop—both direct hits. The second smashed the tumblers inside the lock to pieces and left the lock dangling by the hook.

He tucked the pistol away, snapped a branch off a nearby sapling, and poked it through the ribbon of flames, lifting the dangling padlock free of the chain. The padlock struck the cement pavers with a metal clack. He worked on the chain itself next, unraveling its length loop after loop until it was free from the handles and dropped in a slinky coil beside the lock.

“Try opening the door now!” he shouted to those trapped inside the burning structure.

For a long moment nobody replied, nothing happened, and Beetle feared he and Greta had arrived too late. Then, abruptly, the right door swung open. In the hazy gray smoke that filled the church a man stood hunched over, the hooded black robes he wore pulled up over his mouth and nose to form a crude mask so only his eyes were visible. He leapt through the flames, took several drunken steps, as if he’d forgotten how to walk, doubled over, and vomited.

A second man clad in black robes—he must have been close to seven feet tall—followed the first. He carried two unconscious men as if they weighed nothing.

“Nuh…nuther…” the big man said between poleaxing coughs. The two men slipped from his grasp like ragdolls. One landed on his back, his arms spread out at his sides, the other on his chest, his arms folded beneath him.

“Another inside?” Beetle said.

The man’s head bobbed.

“Help them,” he told Greta, nodding to the unconscious men. Then he covered his mouth and nose with the crook of his elbow and ducked inside the burning church.

The heat hit him like a physical force. The cloying gray