Part 3 (1/2)

”I figure whatever kilt them two Negroes was like an alligator. Gators drag their kill down into the riverbed and bury 'em in the mud to soften up. Maybe that's what Oli was doin' with you. Waitin' till you were softened up.”

”Look, sir, you need to get out of here. The parade. It's bad news.”

”Hah.” Another stream of chaw shot from his dried and stained lips. ”I stormed the beaches of Normandy. No need to worry about me. They opened the backs and we all dived into water over our heads. Some of us drowned. Some of us were mowed down by hungry bullets. I barely escaped myself. My brothers. They tried to take me down into the water too. Grabbed my feet and legs. I kicked away and swam for my life.”

”I . . . have to go,” Sheldon meant to back away (run away) from the old man, but he tightened his grip on his arm.

”The dead will hold you down, boy. Try to drown you like a rat in a washtub. Don't let 'em do it.”

Sheldon finally freed his hand and backpedaled, stumbled down the stairs.

The old man stood and the blankets fell from his lap. ”The dead will pull you down!”

Sheldon turned and ran away from the house, afraid to look back. But just before he ran, Sheldon saw what the old man was wearing. And it wasn't the first time he'd seen them.

The old man wore a pair of worn and scuffed leather boots with too many buckles on them.

n i n e The rest of the trip did not take quite as long. He wanted to put as much distance between himself and the creepy old man (those boots!) as possible. Even so, if someone's life depended on Sheldon finis.h.i.+ng the sojourn in a timely manner there was a good chance they had perished while he was en route. Eventually he turned the corner onto Columbine and maneuvered around the traffic cones placed along the intersection. He walked with his head down, eyes fixed on his feet, one-two one-two, march-march. It was easy to pretend he was still in his living room, watching the halftime show on TV, marching along to the imaginary drums banging in his head.

BOOM-BOOM, march-march, BOOM.

BOOM . . . click-click-click . . .

The clicking sound dulled the drums of his marching band. The clicking sound was new. It would forever remind him of being in the real world, in Poe's Creek, where nightmares come true. He wasn't in his living room. He was downtown, where the parade had been heading. As hard as it was to lift his head and look for the source of the clicking noise, he did. Slowly.

Mister or Missus Twaley, it was hard to distinguish between the two with all the gore, was sprawled out, face down on the sidewalk in a rigor mortis-induced Superman pose. Sheldon knew it was one of the Twaleys by the matching warm-up suits the senior couple were fond of, although blood-soaked and shredded all to h.e.l.l. Physically, if you took Mr. Twaley's. .h.i.tler moustache and Mrs. Twaley's bad perm-job away they were identical to begin with. Both being giant, walking bowling pins with textbook pear-shaped physiques. The blood covered up any other distinguishable features. All that was left were patches of naked, spongy flesh leaking insides all over the sidewalk.

Click-click-click . . .

Underneath all the girth grinded the mechanical legs of another abomination. Welded steel and stolen flesh sc.r.a.ped grooves in the cement. Mr./Mrs. Twaley must have fallen on the a.s.sailant, squis.h.i.+ng it under a gore-seeping mountain.

Pressed up against a picture window, Sheldon slid past the first of many horrific scenes in Poe's Creek. He felt terrible. Only a few days ago, the Twaleys had walked past his house. He stood at the living room window and watched them waddle by. They had waved. He didn't return the kind gesture and never would be able to.

Underneath the corpulent body of his neighbor, the creature finally lay still. A single stream of hot motor oil spit against the cement and sizzled. Sheldon walked on. Still uncomfortable with the intensity of the outside world, he held a hand up to his eyes. He gasped at the scene before him.

At first, he thought someone had dumped a lifetime of dirty laundry out on the streets. There were big piles of linen everywhere. Whites and colors (mostly red) were mixed together. After a few more steps, however, he realized it wasn't discarded wash. Those were bodies littering the streets, piled on top of each other, leaking their insides all over the pavement.

There were only around four hundred adults in Poe's Creek. If he had the stomach for it, he could've done a body count and the math would just about add up. There were bodies everywhere.

What had been unleashed on these poor people? He shuffled closer to the carnage. Had it been more spiders? The Devil himself?

Sheldon weaved and ducked through the bodies, not sure of where he was even going. He did his best at seeing without seeing, not letting his eyes focus on any of the carca.s.ses strewn around his feet. He didn't want to recognize the Mayor, whose eyes had been gouged out, bits of viscous eye-jelly clinging beneath his b.l.o.o.d.y, jagged fingernails, ears bleeding, or Princ.i.p.al Meyers with his house key buried deep in his own jugular vein, Darlene Hagan with a mouthful of meat the same size as the piece missing from her best friend, Suzette's, face.

That wasn't the postman's disemboweled body half-in and half-out of the small post office. No way was he chewing on a mouthful of his own intestines.

The Sheriff's dispatch, Joan, hadn't smashed her head through a window, grabbed a large shard of gla.s.s and carved her face into hamburger.

Sheldon did his d.a.m.nedest not to recognize any of it.

He refused to believe that his neighbors had done this to themselves.

He did such a good job of not seeing that it took a while to realize none of the fallen were children. With this revelation, he forced himself to once more look around at all the carnage.

Where were all the children? He stole quick glances here and there before closing his eyes and waiting for the nausea to settle. All the bodies were too big to belong to a child. He nudged some of the corpses aside to see if something small could be hidden underneath.

Nothing.

Jesus. They were gone.

And he was pretty d.a.m.ned sure where they went.

The parade.

But where the h.e.l.l was it?

Other than the carnage, there was no sign the parade had ever come through town. Gone, as if he'd imagined it all and the townspeople had gone insane, maiming and mauling each other in some kind of apocalyptic rumble. And the children had simply disappeared.

A blue rectangle discarded on the sidewalk near an alleyway caught his attention. He recognized it right away. It was Evan's notebook. He hurried over to the notebook, almost tripping over the bodies of Evan's parents. Mr. Hovland's hand was completely buried in the bowels of his wife. Sheldon s.n.a.t.c.hed the notebook up and held it at arm's length. The cover was speckled with dried blood and flecks of meat.

He prayed none of it belonged to his friend. What had happened to Evan? Perhaps the answer was within the notebook, but it might not be the answer Sheldon was looking for. What if these written words were the last of his good friend? What if it described in detail what happened to Poe's Creek? Did Sheldon really want to know?

Maybe he should just throw the notebook down, walk back to his house and crawl into bed. Forget about the whole thing. After all, there was no one left to judge him. No one to point fingers. But he was left and Sheldon didn't know for sure whether Evan was alive or dead. There was still a chance and he had made a mental promise to help his friend. But what if he was already dead?

It was getting harder and harder to cope, and Sheldon didn't know how much he had left to give.

”Oh, Momma, I don't even know where to start,” Sheldon said. He leaned one arm against a telephone pole with a liberal coat of blood smeared all along its base and buried his face in the crook of his arm. With his other arm, he hugged Evan's notebook to his chest. This was too big for him. He needed help. He needed something to go on. What was he supposed to do, just pick a direction and start walking? And then what? By the time he caught up, they could have gone through a hundred towns just like this one. He looked up toward the sky and nodded.

He stood up straight, exhaled, tucked his pajama s.h.i.+rt into the matching pajama bottoms and thought about which way to go. Someone needed to know what happened. He had to call someone.

He looked around for the nearest phone, but sighed in defeat. Strings of severed telephone lines blanketed the tops of all the commercial buildings.

Of course they took care of that. It was probably the first thing they did. It looked like it was up to him. He swept his hands together as if preparing for a hard, labor-intensive job. If he was going to catch up, he needed a ride. The thought of driving made him weak in the knees, but there was no alternative.

It looked like today would be the first in a long time for many things. First, he learned how to step outside again and now he would have to learn how to drive a motorcycle.

He headed back toward his house, taking a different route to avoid the creepy old guy in leather boots. Specifically, he wanted to go to the garage behind his house. He began to thumb through Evan's soiled notebook. At first he smiled at the boy's recitation of the beginning of the parade: who attended, who looked hung over, or arrived drunk. With all that had gone terribly wrong that day, it was hard not to chuckle out loud at how perceptive and dead-on Evan was with his descriptions. Mrs. Olsen did look like a discount clothing rack. ”Humongous” was a perfect word. He flipped through the pages and steamed along, taking half the time to get back to his house as on the way to downtown. He reached the last few pages of the notebook and slowed. He bit down on the edge of the notebook and dropped the poker. It made a hollow thud in the gra.s.s alongside his garage.

Evan had stopped writing about the townspeople. The writing was no longer candid and humorous. The tone changed, the style more feverish and the handwriting almost illegible.

Without even reading the words, Sheldon knew what caused the mood change. In Evan's world, just a couple of hours ago, the parade had arrived. Panic had begun to set in and the boy's pencil was driven by fear.

t e n Everybody's here, Sheldon. You're really missing out.

The parade has almost arrived. I can feel it. Everyone is really excited. Even me, I guess.

Wish you were here. We'd make fun of the Mayor's wife's lard b.u.t.t.

The first motorcycle just turned onto Columbine Street. Whoa, what a machine. It's like one of those custom jobs you see on TV. I should've brought a camera.