Helltown - Jeremy Bates Page 0,95

tossed the blood-covered tree branch aside and stared for a long moment at what remained of his brother’s head. He spat on his lifeless body and turned to leave, to head back to the El Camino he’d parked up the road, when his eyes fell on the Volvo. The back door was ajar. A suitcase and duffel bag rested on the seat. The duffel was unzipped, and a brick of cash wrapped in an elastic band poked out the top.

Cleavon blinked twice, then went to the car. He tugged the mouth of the bag open wider. “Judas Priest!” he whispered. “Judas fuckin’ Priest!” Then he turned his face to the heavens and danced in the rain and laughed like he had rarely laughed in all his miserable life.

CHAPTER 30

“We came, we saw, we kicked its ass!”

Ghostbusters (1984)

Beetle discovered a set of car keys on Goliath’s body, which turned out to be for the rusted old banger parked in front of the church. He set Greta gently in shotgun and the small woman across the backseat. They were both unconscious but breathing. Then he got behind the wheel and sped to town. Given the late hour, and the full-throttled tempest, the rain-slicked streets of Boston Mills were deserted. However, he came across a twenty-four-hour gas station, where a clerk told him directions to the hospital. He arrived at the emergency entrance of the Boston Mills Health Center a few minutes later. Medical staff wheeled the two injured women away on stretchers while Beetle remained behind in the reception to explain what happened. He was then led to a private room where he changed into a dry paper frock and was checked over by a grandfatherly doctor who, upon finding no serious injuries, advised him to rest until the police arrived to take his statement.

Exhausted and emptied, Beetle fell immediately asleep, waking some eight or nine hours later at eleven o’clock that same morning. He was surprised to find a pretty redhead in the previously empty bed opposite his. She was watching him with haunted green eyes.

“Hi,” she said hesitantly.

“Hi,” he said.

“The police were here for you.”

“When?”

“Three hours ago? I was just admitted then. They questioned me. They wanted to question you too, but they weren’t allowed to wake you up.”

“They questioned you?” he said.

“My friends…” Her face dropped. She looked like someone who had just been told they had a week to live. “You saved one of them. Cherry. The doctor told me she’s going to be okay.”

“She was your friend?”

The woman nodded. “The police told me about you. What happened at the church. I told them I had never met you before.”

“Who were those men at the church?”

“Crazies.”

“Satanists?”

“I don’t know. They attacked my friends and me in the woods. I got away and hid in a school bus. Then when it became light I found the road. I followed it out of the national park. I came to the church—or what was left of it. There were police and firefighters. They brought me here. They said they didn’t know what happened to the rest of my friends. But I think…I think…” She rubbed tears from her eyes, shaking her head. “Where could they be?”

Suddenly Beetle remembered the small woman shouting off the names of three or four people who the man named Cleavon had apparently murdered, along with something about a snake…feeding her boyfriend to a snake?

He decided it was not his place to break this news to the already distressed woman. Instead he said simply, “I’m sorry.”

She nodded, still rubbing her eyes.

He said, “Did you hear anything about someone named Greta?”

“The doctor mentioned her. He thought she was my friend. He said she was also in stable condition.”

Beetle felt a bit of the tightness in his chest loosen. Then he wondered where the police were, when they would return to question him. And after they did, would they contact the army, tell them they had an AWOL soldier in their custody? Or would they release him, let him go…to where?

Beetle frowned. It was a valid question. Where was he going to go? Not back to Savannah. The recent events hadn’t changed his relationship with Sarah; there was nothing left for him in Georgia. However, something else had changed. He found he no longer had a desire, a need, to kill himself. Although the night before he had been so sure it had been his only recourse, his only way out from the nightmare his life had become, he no