By Ann Morgan
Clark Jacobson sat on the lid of the toilet in the cramped bathroom of his cheap motel suite holding his head in his hands. He was not a very effective thinker under the best of circumstances, and these circumstances were far from ideal. He needed to think of a solution to a very big problem within the next few hours, or at least some way to bullshit his way out of the trouble he was headed for like a semi going down a steep incline with a cliff at the bottom and it's brakes gone up in smoke.
The source of his current attempt at using his underutilized brain was maybe only ten feet away from him, concealed from his view only by the flimsy bathroom door, which he had closed, but not locked (he was currently so upset that he hadn't even been able to think of doing anything more than simply slamming the door, but even if he had thought to lock it, it wouldn't have done any good. The owners of the lovely one-star establishment where he had rented this room were not real big on maintenance, and the lock on the bathroom door had been broken for the past seven months) Beyond the cheap plywood door, with it's cheaper lock was a sparse room with a coat rack, two dressers with a bible and phone book placed neatly on each one, an old telephone with a rotary dial, and flickering television playing a truly idiotic show on the Sci-Fi channel called 'Captain Scarlet'. That an a queen sized bed where his wife lay sprawled out lazily on her back.
Or rather, his ex-wife. Had the proprieters of the hotel been either the friendly or the nosy type, and had entered the room either to visit their only guests, or to investigate what the shouting that had lasted half an hour and had ended only a few minutes ago had been about, they would have immediately seen that Sheila Jacobson needed to be brought immediately to a hospital. Or more likely, the morgue. Her head was bent to one side and down at an un-natural angle that the human neck was really not capable of acheiving unless there was something drastically wrong with it's normal structural integrity.
It was the bitch's own fault, damn it! She had insisted on him driving her 500 fucking miles up to Milwaukee for her father's funeral. Like, what good would it do her father? The old creep was dead, he would hardly know or care who went to gawk at him in a coffin. Well, to be honest, he had insisted on driving her. She had offered to drive herself, but he wouldn't allow that. She would have just loved that, wouldn't she? To get 500 miles away from him and making a slut out of herself with God only knew what kind of filthy dairy farmers they had in this state. He had warned her not to go looking at any other men while they were on this trip, and for a while she had been good. Despite that fact, he had really hated making this trip. Although he would not admit it to anyone, Clark was quite a necrophobe. He was terrified of anything having to do with funerals or the dead. He had been ever since he had been a child, and his mother had died. His father had tried to force him to kiss his mother's corpse as it lay in the coffin. Clark had refused, and when they had gotten home from the funeral, his father had whipped the almighty crap out of him with a crowbar. Ever since then, he had been terrifified of anything having to do with death, or funeral parlors. Hell, he hadn't even gone to his own father's funeral, five years back.
Despite his disgust at this whole trip, and it's purpose, Clark had managed to keep his temper pretty much in line. After all, Sheila had been behaving well. But then he had caught that stupid tramp flirting with the hotel owner. Christ allmighty, the guy had to be in his sixties and here she was, talking and laughing with him like a stupid teenager at her first Prom. When he saw that, Clark's vision had gone red and hazy. He grabbed his stupid wife by the hand and dragged her up to their room, ignoring whatever it was the owner had shouted at them, and slammed the door before chewing him out. She had tried to pretend that she hadn't been thinking of making out with the owner at all, that they had just been telling jokes, but he knew that had been a lie. Then he gave her a good slap in the face to knock some truth into her. Only the stupid bitch had lost her footing and fallen against the dresser. He picked her up and gave her a good shake, actually yelling at her for several more seconds before it had sunk into his rage-addled brain that not only was his wife not listening, she wasn't even breathing. In disgust at actually holding a corpse in his hands, he had flung her onto the bed and retreated into the bathroom to try to think things through.
Which left him where he was now, sitting on a filthy smelling toilet and grabbing his hair in his hands while he tried to think of what to do about the corpse (He wouldn't let himself think of it as his wife. In addition to being afraid of other men, Clark Jacobson also had a severe phobia of the dead, and anything to do with them). He could call the police and tell them it was an accident, that she had tripped, but they probably wouldn't believe that. The room was so sparse, there was nothing to trip on. He kept trying to think, despite the smell. God, but the plumbing in this place sucked. There was a puddle of water on the bathroom floor, seeping up from a hairline crack in one of the pipes. He stared at it for a moment, and gradually an idea entered his rusty mind. People slipped in puddles all the time, didn't they? His wife wasn't all that heavy. Maybe he could just carry her in here and claim she had slipped on the wet floor while looking in the mirror or something. Hell, he could even sue that friggin' hotel owner in order to make his story look good.
Having made up his mind about what to do, Clark began steeling himself for touching his wife's dead flesh, in order to bring her into the bathroom. He had almost gotten enough courage to open the door and do it, when a loud crash startled him so badly that he reeled back against the bathroom wall, and gaped at the door in shock for several seconds before he collected his few wits and flung the door open to see what the hell was going on.
The first thing he saw was that the front window of the hotel room was shattered, and the curtains blowing wildly in the wind. The second thing he noticed, only a fraction of a second later, was that his wife's body no longer lay on the bed.
Being motivated mainly by fear and jealousy, Clark Jacobson was neither a thoughtful, nor an observent man. Had he taken the time to look at the scene before him for a few minutes, he would have noticed several oddities. For instance, the glass of the shattered window was inside the room, rather than out in the parking lot, indicating that the window had been broken from the outside. However, the only thought that occured to him (probably the only one that could occur to him, given his particular type of sociopathy) was that his wife had somehow been feigning death and had now escaped by jumping out the window. There were also several other oddities about the room which a more observant person might have noticed, given time; and several that they might not have, being completely outside the experience of most human beings.
He heard a sudden roar of an engine and ran to the window in time to see a large, dark vehicle swerving wildly out of the hotel's parking lot. Perhaps it was his fear of death that kept him from properly identifying it as a hearse. Instead, he thought it was a large, black station wagon. He looked at it's retreating crimson headlights and swore out loud:
"That BITCH!"
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Well, Reggie had just driven north-east for a little over a day after crossing over the Mississippi River in Iowa. He had been trying to find Mike for quite some time, mainly going on instinct. Perhaps he was a little bit psychic, because he had travelled through several towns obviously decimated by the Tall Man. That dude left an easily identified spoor, empty towns, empty graveyards, funeral homes full of weird shit that Reggie didn't even want to mess with; he just torched them from a safe distance.
For a while after crossing the Mississippi, he had thought he was on the wrong track. For the first few hundred miles, Wisconsin bore no sign of the Tall Man's depradations. In fact, the place was damn near thriving. Especially compared to the south and west where he had been. Perhaps it was the cold their that discouraged the Tall Man. Here it was, April, and there were six inches of snow on the ground.
Well, the snow had not lasted long, and neither did his feeling that he was in the wrong place. By the morning of his second day in Wisconsin,the snow had melted to a few lonely drifts, and he finally came to a town that bore the unmistakable signature of the Tall Man. His first clue was when the traffic suddenly died away on the interstate he was travelling on, I-67, as all the other vehicles went off exits or side roads. Shortly after that he noticed piles of leaves and melted snow on the road, things that would have been cleared away by almost any traffic at all. Finally, he came over a hill, and looked down at had once been an accurate sign, but no longer:
"HANCHOILLE POP 10,093"
"Not no more, it ain't" He mumbled to himself a he pulled over to the side of the road and got out of the Hemi.. Hanchoille was toast, almost literally. Looking through his binoculars, he could see the town over to the west, maybe half a mile away. And he could SMELL it, too. Someone had been a busy little arsonist there. Almost every building had been systematically burned to the ground, leaving a charred hole filled with ash.
"What the fuck?" This was not good, he decided. Not only was this the largest town by maybe a factor of 10 that the Tall Man had sucked dry like an insatiable vampire, but It looked like World War Three had been fought here. He had seen towns with buildings vandalized before, but never this systematic razing. That was new. And anything new in his battle with the Tall Man was liable to get him killed. For a few minutes he debated going back out west and looking for the Tall Man and Mike there, but decided against it. His feeling for where Mike had been led here, and he was afraid that if he didn't spend time in Hanchoille, he would lose whatever psychic scent he was following. Besides which, if that Tall bastard was up to something new, he was best off finding out about it on his own, rather than waiting to have it rammed down his throat.
There was a third reason, as well. The aroma of the smoke was a little stale. And the town of Hanchoille felt... well.... dead. As though he had come just a few days or weeks too late to witness whatever it was that had happened there. He was fairly sure that the Tall Man had finished his work in this town and moved on.
But only fairly sure. Before he put the Hemi back in gear and roared downhill into town, he loaded four shells into his shotgun and put it on the seat next to him.
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Hanchoille from within was even more bizaare than the view from on top of the hill. It took Reggie only a few hours to determine that someone (or perhaps several someones) had apparently found a whole new calling in life as a dwarf exterminator. The numbers of compressed, brown robed corpses to be found littering the streets of Hanchoille were truly impressive. For some reason, most of them seemed to be in heaps either around pine trees, or telephone poles, which led him to discover the second peculiarity in Hanchoille, which was that the telephone lines had been stripped and laid in neat coils on various street corners.
Bizzarre. Why would someone deliberately destroy their means of communication? Unless the phones had already stopped working and they needed a lot of large gauge wire for something else? But what?
In the course of travelling around the twon, he discovered that not every building had been burned. Every house had, or rather every house except one. There was still one rather small house standing near the center of the town. A ditch had been dug around it, and steel plating fastened over the windows. He decided to look at it later. He could only think that the house belonged to someone who had holed up against the Tall Man long enough to fortify the place. It might possibly be a good place to spend the night, if it weren't boobytrapped, but he had other things to check out first.
Near the downtown area, there were more buidings standing. Some stores had obviously been torched by whatever pyromaniac had occupied this town during it's last days, but others, such as the grocery stores, hardware stores, garden store, and Jim's Sport and Bait had been spared. he could only think that their contents had been of some value in survival. But if that were so, why was the book store in the southern part of the town still standing? So someone could club the Tall Man to death with a copy of Atlas Shrugged?
After studying the few stores that were left, Reggie went into a Sentry to pick up some food. The produce and meat were all rotten, of course, and it seemed quite a bit of the canned goods had been removed. There were still some left, though (unfortunately of the cream of broccolli soup variety), along with quite a lot of items such as bags of rice, beef jerky, and other things that would keep a while. He loaded up two carts full of them and put them in the trunk of his Hemi. In case things went wrong here and he got stuck, or was hurt, he might need food badly. While here he finally noticed yet another peculiarity about Hanchoille that had been bothering him for a while. He had a little trouble pushing his cart, and when he looked down to see what the problem was, he saw that the floor of Sentry had been covered with about an eighth of an inch of sand. As had all the roads in the downtown area. Now that he was looking, he saw disturbances in the sand here and there, as if someone had recently walked through the store and swept the sand back into their footprints afterwards.
Weird. He shook his head sadly as he drove out of Sentry's parking lot, leaving tire tracks across a long row of dwarvish footprints that he didn't even notice.
Finding ammo was more of a disappointment. Neither of the 2 hardware stores (Ace and Tru-Value) in Hanchiolle, apparently had dealt in ammunition. Jim's Sport and Bait apparently had, but was fresh out.
Reggie sighed. He had food, a possibility of a place to spend the night, and had at least tried to get more ammo. He couldn't delay the inevitable any longer. He had to go check out the town cemetery.
Luckily for Reggie, that was easier said than done. After locating a map of the town, he determined that the cemetery in Hanchoille had two roads leading in. One of the roads went over a bridge, which had been dynamited (God, someone in this town had been really busy, Reggie cursed). The other road was a few blocks past the Tru-Value hardware store he had inspected earlier. This road seemed to be intact, but almost as soon as he turned onto it, the tire of the Hemi went into a hole, hit something hard, and popped with a bang that made Reggie jump.
Damn. He got out to look at the flat, and saw what had caused it. There was a huge crater, two feet across and nearly that deep in the gravel leading to the cemetery. In fact, now that he looked, the whole road was full of such craters.
He sucked in his breath. These were way to big for potholes, even for Wisconsin. Reggie jumped back into the Hemi and dragged out his binoculars. The cemetery was full of craters of various sizes, along with several overturned and burnt out hearses. What it was not full of were the usual rows of empty graves. The Tall Man had not been able to get access to them. Someone had filled the cemetery with landmines. All 120 acres of it.
Reggie got back in the Hemi and carefully backed it up on the same path he had taken in. When he was safely back in the street, he parked it. He opened the trunk and dug under the groceries he had just put in. taking out a jack, lugwrench, and the spare tire. To his disgust, the spare was also flat. He made an ugly face at it as he inspected the rubber. It seemed to be intact, but the air must have seeped slowly out of it during the years it had spent in the trunk. He would have to walk back to the hardware store a half mile away and try to find a bicycle pump. He didn't want to risk driving it even that far with a flat, lest he wreck the rims as well.
On his way to Tru-Value hardware stoe, Reggie passed a large church with a sign in front proclaiming "St. Paul's Lutheran Church" There was a large black char mark on the front of it, as though someone had tried to burn this building as well, but been unable too, due to it being made mainly out of bricks. He looked at it for a moment. Maybe if he went inside, he would find out what had caused whoever had burn all these buildings to engage on their pyromaniacal rampage. If it hadn't been simple insanity, that is.
The church was fairly ordinary. In fact, the door wasn't even locked. Inside there were about 30 rows of pews, and an altar in front, with a beam of gold sunlight shining on it. He walked up front, put his hand in the warm light, and tried to see where the beam was coming from. The windows were all stained glass and would have discolored the light. He squinted as he followed the path of the light. It seemed to be coming from a hole in the ceiling, about 6 inches across. Just about the right size for a sentinel, although there weren't any of those around here, or he would have heard them in the dead silence. Squinting against the brightness, He thought he saw something else on the ceiling, some sort of scriptures written up there or something.
Reggie stepped out of the light, looked at the ceiling again, and saw that the words there weren't scriptures, and they weren't written. Up there in the plaster, at least 30 feet higher that even the Tall Man could reach, someone had carved letters three feet high, forming two seperate cryptic messages:
"HE IS TAKING US FROM THE WORLD!!"
and:
"HANCHOILLE: POP STILL 10093"
Great, Reggie thought. He had moved from the realm of the bizzarre into the realm of the frankly impossible. The only way he could think of to get a message up that high would be by use of scaffolding, and there was no way to get scaffolding into this room. The pews were all bolted to the floor.
Screw this, he decided. I am going to fix the flat on my Hemi, hole up in that fortified house I saw earlier and first thing in the morning, I am getting the hell out of this fucked up, burned down town.
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Clark Jacobson cursed and kicked at his car. He had gotten maybe 100 miles north of that fleabag hotel on the outskirts of Milwaukee he had stayed in when his car had made a horrible grinding screech. He pulled over to the side of the road, and swore. He had chased that damn black station wagon that he was convinced his wife was escaping in (probably with several horny, longhaired boyfriends) all this way, but now the stupid slut was going to get away, all because of a damn cheap Japanese car. He just knew he should have gotten a Chevy, but he couldn't afford it. A sickly sweet smell filled the air as the damn car pissed quarts of coolant all over the road. "Shit!" he swore.
He looked around. There weren't any houses in sight. In fact, there hadn't even been any traffic for the last few miles. He was going to have to walk until he found a gas station or something that had a phone and call to get the car towed. In the meantime that stupid bitch Sheila would be merrily on her way to Vegas or wherever her boyfriends were planning on taking her.
Or would she? To his astonishment, the car he had been chasing had also pulled over to the side of the road. He could see it's tail lights just sitting there in the dark, maybe a quarter of a mile ahead of him.
"What the hell?" he wondered. Had she told her boyfriends to stop so they could beat him up? In that case they were in for a surprise. He had an old Colt .45 revolver in his glove compartment that he had bought illegally. He pulled it out, checked to see that it was fully loaded, and marched towards the car.
When he got closer, he saw that the car was not a station wagon as he had assumed, but a large hearse. That was kind of creepy, but he had heard of Goth types who drove such things. Probably be right up Sheila's alley to hang out with losers like that. He got up closer to the car, intending to rap on the window with his gun, but to his surprise, it was already rolled down. An old man in a severely cut suit sat at the drivers wheel, staring straight ahead, as though oblivious to Clark's presence, or even to the fact that his car was no longer moving.
"Hey!" Clark shouted at him. The old man made no reaction. God, he looked creepy though. A deaf creep maybe.
Clark shouted again "Hey! Where's my wife?"
The old man slowly turned his head to look at Clark. "The one you seek is not here." He turned to the front again.
Clark felt rage starting to creep over him again. He was not used to being ignored. "Maybe you don't listen so good, you old freak! I want to know where you took my wife!"
This time the old man seemed to pay a little better attention. "You seek the one you were married to?"
"Yeah, my wife! I know she was in this frickin' car with you! Now where is she? Did you drop her off somewhere, or is she hiding in the back or something?" He tried to look into the back of the hearse, but the glass was mirrored or something and all he could see was a distorted reflection of his own face leering back at him.
"Why do you wish to find her?" The old man asked.
" Why?" Clark gaped at the crazy old freak. Was he drunk or something that he didn't realize Clark could probably pull his head off with one hand? "Because she's mine, dammit, and I ain't having her mess with any other guys, especially not some kooky old freak like you! Now, if you know where she is, you better tell me pretty damn quick before I fuckin' beat it out of you!"
The old man suddenly grabbed Clark by the throat, moving so quickly that Clark didn't even see his hand move. One second it was resting on the steering wheel, and the next it was around his throat like a steel vise. Then, just as suddenly, the grip released, and Clark fell back onto the pavement, gasping for air.
"Yes..." The old man said. "I will tell you where she is. It could be.... amusing"
He pointed forwards. "She is 10 miles that way. In a small town called Hanchoille. I can even tell you the exact address where you can find her. Would you like that?"
Clark got up. Damn, but that guy was strong for an old coot. He coughed air back into his lungs. "Yeah, I'd like that old man."
The Tall Man smiled "I thought you would, boooy."
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Well, Reggie finally got a bicycle pump to fill the spare tire back up with air. He really hoped that the spare was intact, and the air had just seeped out through osmosis. It was starting to get later in the day, and he wanted to hole up in that one fortified house he had seen for the night. Away from St. Paul's Church and it's impossibly high message he had regained some of his courage. Probably the Tall Man himself was long gone from this town. The few dwarves and such he usually left after he moved on wouldn't be too hard to deal with. Maybe he would even stay a few days and see if he could find any clues as to what had happened to Mike. He had almost reached the Hemicuda when he noticed a pair of long, well shaped legs sticking out of one door.
"Hey!" he shouted! Someone was in the Hemi, trying to rob him or hotwire it or something "What the hell do you think you're doing in there?"
The owner of the legs jumped out as though she had been burned. She was a rather pretty woman, maybe about 45, with long, thick brown hair reaching a few inches below her shoulders. There was a touch of grey around her forehead, but on her it looked good for some reason. She was wearing a denim jacket, and a pair of khaki pants, both of which were well streaked with the ashes ubiquitous in Hanchoille. To Reggie's horror, as she ran, she turned off the main road and onto the crater filled path leading to the cemetery.
"Oh Shit!" He put on a burst of speed and tackled her, barely catching her knees.
"Jesus, lady!" Reggie said in releif, "You almost got yourself killed"
"Please, don't hurt me!" She sobbed "I wasn't going to steal your car. I only wanted to see if there was a little food in there. I'm afraid to go in the grocery stores. It's dark in there, and I'm getting so hungry."
"Yeah, I got food" Reggie said. "But listen, we got to get back off this road. This whole cemetery has been landmined"
"Landmined!" The woman jumped up, and then froze "Who would do a thing like that? And why?"
"I don't know who, but I got a pretty good idea as to why. I'll tell you later, but for right now, lets try to get out of here in one peice."
They gingerly picked their way back, trying to stay in the craters, where the mines had already blown up. Of course, any of them could have been re-mined, but apparently they either hadn't been, or they were just lucky, since they made it safely back to the road.
Reggie wiped the sweat from his head. "Man, I don't ever want to do that again. At least with dwarves you can see where they are."
"Dwarves? You mean those little things in brown robes?"
"Yeah, them? Have you seen them?"
"Just a few. I've only been in this town a few days. I saw a few at night, and I've been scared to come out since then. Only I saw you driving around, and I thought maybe you had some food."
"Yeah, let me get you something. " He opened the trunk, took out a Snickers bar and handed it too her. Then he took out the jack, wedged it under the front of the car and started cranking it up. As he worked, he told her about the Tall Man and the things he had done. In a few minutes he had the old tire off and the new one on and inflated. "Why in the world did you stay in this town after you saw those damn dwarves? Don't you know they're dangerous? You're lucky you weren't killed."
"Yeah, well, maybe I got other things to be afraid of."
"Worse than those?" Reggie opened the door of his car and tossed his shotgun into the back seat. "Listen, it's gonna be dark soon. It's not safe to travel near places like this at night. I think there's a fairly safe place we can stay, but I want to check it out first, while it's still light. Why don't you come with me? If I'm right about this place, it'll be a lot safer there than whatever store you've been in, and tomorrow I'll take you out of town, after I finish checking a few things out here."
She looked hesitant for a moment, but then resignation crept over her face. "All right. I don't suppose you can be any worse than him."
Reggie started the car as soon as she closed the door. "Him? Who's him?"
"My husband." She looked down at the floor. "He used to.... well he used to beat me up a lot. Then, after we drove up from Missouri to Wisconsin for my father's funeral we had a really big argument. He beat me up pretty bad after that." She turned towards Reggie and swept her hair out of her face. What he had thought was a shadow on her cheak was actually a pretty nasty looking bruise. He was no expert, but it almost looked like there could be a hairline fracture of her cheekbone. "After that, well, I got away from him, and kind of ended up here by accident. I'm afraid of the dwarves, but I'm afraid to leave, too. I'm afraid that he might find me."
"Your husband did that to you?" Reggie looked at the injury angrily. Here was one guy he would gladly feed to the Tall Man and his circus of Dwarves. "Well, you don't need to worry about him bothering you while I'm around. Otherwise me and my four friends will have a talk with him."
"You're four friends? Who are they?" Reggie gestured toward the back seat where he had thrown his shotgun. His passenger looked at it, her eyes widening. "Christ, is that even legal?"
"No, but neither is assault, lady."
She thought about that for a moment as they drove. "Well, maybe you need it with these creepy dwarves around. Say, I didn't even catch your name."
"Reggie." he said. He didn't like to use his last name too much. It reminded him too much of his family, long since killed by the Tall Man. In fact, they had died in a fire, much like the ones someone had been busy setting here. No wonder he felt so nervous in this town.
"I'm Sheila" his passenger said. "Sheila Jacobson"
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Clark had breifly considered asking that weird old dude in the hearse for a ride, but decided against it. The guy was some kind of freak. For one thing, he was way too strong for a guy that old. He had to be on some kind of weird drugs or something. And that hearse he was driving was just too creepy. God only knew what was in the back of the thing, behind the mirror glass. Christ, there could have been a coffin with a real live... well a real dead body in it for all he knew.
So in spite of the fact that Hanchoille was quite a distance away, and he was not in the best of shape, Clarke had decided to walk into town. Even if his wife hadn't been there, there was sure to be a phone or something that he could use to call and get his car towed. However, when he got close to Hanchoille, late in the morning, it became obvious that there was probably not a phone in Hanchoille, and very little of anything else, either. Looking from atop a hill about half a mile from the town, it was obvious that something really bad had gone down there recently. The last time he had seen so many burned up buildings was on a documentary about WWII. If Hanchoille wasn't a ghost town, it damn well should have been.
Clark had almost concluded that that stupid old creep had been bullshitting him and had probably had his wife hidden in the back of the hearse the whole time. Just wait till he got a hold of the two of them. He'd pound the crap out of the old lech, drugs or no drugs!! He was about to turn back the way he came when he heard the whine of a powerful sounding motor, dim with distance, but definitely in the direction of Hanchoille. So, the town wasn't abandoned! And if one person was there, there might be more. Maybe even his wife, or someone who knew where she had gone. He pulled a peice of scrap paper out of his pocket and looked at the address that the old man had given him. 709 Armour Rd.. By the looks of the town, the road signs might very well be history, but there had to be maps of it somewhere. He'd find the damn place. The town didn't look that big, anyways.
About an hour later he got into town, and hid near a high point, on a hill with a watertower directly behind the Tru-Value hardware store. Clark was not aware of it, but when he entered the hardware store in order to get a pair of binoculars, he narrowly missed bumping into Reggie, who entered about five minutes later in search of ammo for his shotgun. By that time, however, clark was busy climbing up the hill behind the hardware store, and by the time he reached the top and searched out Reggie's vehicle with his binoculars, Reggie had already gone to a different part of town.
The scene that greeted Clark when he surveyed the town through the binoculars almost convinced him to leave. There were these weird piles of small corpses, they must have been children, scattered all over the town. Had there been some kind of plague here? One that kiled only kids? But why burn down the whole town? To kill the germs maybe? But if that were so, surely they would not have left the stores standing. Would they? And why were all the dead kids dressed in brown robes like monks? Unease grew in him, and he was on the verge of leaving when he saw Reggie's car through his binoculars, exploring the desolate streets of the town. Thoughts of leaving left him immediately. Whoever was driving that car might know something about where Sheila was at.
Clark followed Reggie's progress for several hours, laughing when the idiot somehow managed to get a flat tire. He had stopped laughing, however, when he saw his wife creep out from a nearby gas station and sneak into the guy's car. He thought about getting after the bitch, but it would take a while to get down to where she was, and by that time she could be anywhere. Instead he continued to watch her, not noticing until the last minute that the car's owner had returned, carrying a bicycle pump in one hand and a very illegal looking shotgun in the other.
At first the guy who owned the car had knocked his wife down, which Clark approved of. Give the bitch what she deserved for messing with other people's cars, not to mention running off from him. But then instead of giving her a good backhand like she deserved, instead he started talking with her, took a few minutes to fix his tire, and they both drove off together.
Damn it! He should have known! Even in a godforsaken place like this, she found some man to run around with. With his luck, they would be headed out of town,and he would never catch up with the two of them. He watched furiously through the binoculars, but to his astonishment, rather than heading on the highway out of town, they drove onto some side rodes and parked in front of the one lone house that had been spared from the otherwise universal conflaguration that had consumed the residential areas of Hanchoille. He put his hand into his pocket and thoughtfully ingered the address he had written. The road signs in Hanchoille had suffered from various demises, as he had suspected, and he had no idea if the house the bastard with his wife was now breaking into was 709 Armour Rd or not, but it was where his wife was, and that was good enough for him. He took a few moments to study the roads, picking out the shortest route to the house before heading back on down the hill.
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Reggie studied the single house still standing in the midst of several blocks of ashes. He had only glanced at it earlier, but he wanted to make sure there were no weak points before spending the night there. It looked fairly safe. Kind of a small place, that was probably originally wood, but had now been covered with rusting sheet metal on all the walls as well as the roof, and heavier metal plating where he assumed the windows had once been. The front door had also been reinforced with the heavy metal plating and large steel hinges where weaker brass ones had once held it to the frame.
To his surprise, it wasn't even locked. He got his shotgun ready, in case someone (or something) unfriendly were already inside. It was as still as a grave within, though. It didn't take to long to search the house and make sure it was really empty, as it was fairly small, having only six rooms and a basement. There were two or three kerosene lamps in each room, most of which were nearly full of fuel.. Reggie took a lighter out of his pocket and lit these, providing some illumination to the house, which, with the metal plating on the windows, was as black inside as a cave. Two of the bedrooms looked like they had been used. In fact, looking in the larger of these, he realized they must have been used fairly recently. There was a large terrarium with three garter snakes crawling vigourously around in it. The water in a small container was almost evaporated, but they didn't appear dehydrated. He opened the terrarium, took them out, and carried them towards the front door to release them.
"Ugh" Sheila said when she saw the three wriggling creatures. "Where did those come from?"
"They were in a terrarium in one of the bedrooms." Reggie said. "Which means that until fairly recently someone was still alive in this town."
"The snakes tell you that?" She sighed with relief as Reggie tossed them out the door.
"In a way. I don't think that a snake as small as these can live all that long without food. Maybe only a couple of weeks. So someone must have been feeding them." He thought about the unlocked front door. Whoever had lived here must have been intending to only be gone for a short period of time, less than a day, but had never come back. What had happened to them? He recollected the cryptic, impossibly high message in the church. Come to think of it, maybe he really didn't want to know.
"Stay up here" He told her. "I got to go check out the basement" He took one of the kerosene lamps and held it in front of him like a talisman against evil as he headed down the stairs. To his delight, the basement was full of goodies! He had noticed a propane camp stove in the kitchen earlier, and right at the bottom of the stairs was a large box filled with several cannisters of propane. In fact, the basement was filled with all sorts of containers. Over to his left, where a refrigerator sat uselessly in one corner were thousands of cans of soup, stew, vegetables, fruit, and tuna. Directly in front of him he found his answer to where all of the ammo in Hanchoille had gone. He went through a doorway into another room of the basement, carefully checking that no dwarves were hiding in the shadows and found even more goodies, such as grenades, several land mines, and large red barrels filled with gasoline. He had noticed a large generator siting in the back yard earlier, but decided against trying to start it. The noise and the smoke it made might attract unwelcome company come dark. He put a cannister of propane, a few cans of stew, and about 20 boxes of shells for his shotgun in a large milk crate and carried it under one arm as he headed back up the stairs, grinning to himself.
"What are you so happy about" Sheila asked when she saw him.
"Christmas has come early!" he announced as he set down the crate of items and took out the propane and canned goods. "I don't know who used to live here, but I can tell you one thing: I like the way they think!"
Sheila looked at the stuff "Was this in the basement?"
"That and about enough other stuff to survive World War Three!"
"But, I thought you said whoever lived here must be dead?"
"Umm, yeah, well anyone can have bad luck."
"Reggie, are we going to die?" She started sobbing. "I'm really scared."
"Hey, listen" He went over and held her, "No-one's going to die here. The people who lived here must have gone somewhere else before they were killed. There's no bodies or any sign of a fight in this house, is there?"
"No, I guess not."
"You're going to be alright. You saw what this house was like from the outside. All that metal. Ain't nothing could get in here. 'Sides, ain't nothing that gets past the Regman and his four friends. You believe that, don't you?"
"I guess so." Reggie was glad she did, because he wasn't so sure. If the Tall Man were still around, and really wanted to get them, he could probably drive a two ton hearse right through the walls, metal plating or no metal plating. Still, then he would run the risk of mangling them, and he seemed to prefer his victims fairly intact. What was it he had said about Mike once? That he didn't want him in pieces?
"Listen" Reggie said. "I'm going to go put these shells in the Hemi, and then I'll come right back and cook you a hot meal. Bet you haven't had one of those in a while, huh?"
He threw the shells into the back seat and locked the Hemi's doors. Then he went into the kitchen, tinkered with the camp stove until he was rewarded with a burst of blue flame, and cooked up three cans of the stew in a small pot he found under the sink. Surprisingly enough, the water still worked in the sink, although both faucets gave off cold water. He filled another pot with the water and few spoonfuls of instant coffee from a cannister sitting on the counter. When he was done, he carried in two plates of stew and two cups of coffee all balanced precariously on a large cookie sheet.
"Here you go!" Reggie announced proudly "Dinner is served. Not exactly haute' cuisine, I'm afraid, but it'll fill you up better than a Snickers bar"
Sheila laughed and dug into her stew with a spoon. It was good stuff, with lots of chunks of beef. Better than the crackers and jerky Reggie had been planning on for supper. He ended up going back to the kitchen to get them both seconds, and boil up some more coffee. Then he took a few more trips to the basement to put some more shells and some of the tastier canned goods into the Hemi. By this time, there wasn't a lot of room left in the trunk, so he just took out some of the dried beans and threw them into the road. Let any dwarves that were around have that crap. By that time, it was starting to get dark, and the big meal was making him drowsy. Reggie lit two of the kerosene lamps in the living room, locked both of the doors in the hous, yawned and stretched out on the couch, the shotgun on the floor right next to him, where he could grab it in less than a second.
"I'm tired" He announced, "I'm going to sleep for a couple of hours. If there's going to be any trouble with those damn dwarves, it will usually happen late at night. Can you stay awake for a few hours and wake me up before you go to sleep?"
"Sure" Sheila picked up one of the kerosene lamps. "I think I saw a bunch of books in one of the bedrooms earlier. Maybe I'll go see if i can find anything to read."
"Good. But if you here anything strange, wake me up right away, okay?"
She nodded, and Reggie let his eyes close.
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It seemed only a few minutes later, but was really after he had been asleep for two hours that Reggie was woken up by something tickling him on his chest. for a minute he thought it was the wind, but then remembered that the windows on this house were all sealed shut. Had one of them been broken? His eyes snapped open with alarm, and he saw Sheila. She had somehow unbuttoned his shirt while he was sleeping and was softly kissing and licking his chest.
"Uh? What are you doing?" he asked dumbly
"Please don't move. I just want to hold you. To love something warm." She moved her head up a few inches and kissed his lips softly. She smelled of some rosy perfume she had found somewhere.
"Jesus'. He moaned and lay still while she kissed his cheeks and his stomach. Her hands drifted downwards, and he wrapped his arms around her, rolling of the couch. The light from the lamp struck her face with soft rays, and he saw the nasty bruise on her right cheek. "I don't want to hurt you, Sheila."
"You won't" She said, not understanding what he meant. Of course, his heart was thumping so loud, maybe he didn't undertand either. It had been such a long time since he had loved a woman. Almost of their own volition, one of his hands went under her shirt, and the other went between her legs. he clutched at her madly, and pretty soon the border between their two bodies seemed to dissolve in a haze of delirious golden pleasure that faded all to soon into a relaxed sleep, still tangled in eachother's arms.
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Clark had waited until late at night before he dared approach the house where that bastard with the muscle car had gone with his wife. He had watched them from a distance as they settled into their shelter. The short, pony tailed man had made several trips from the house to his car while it was still light, putting something in the trunk, Clark couldn't quite tell what from where he was. As soon as at got dark, though, the door of the house had closed, and neither of them had ventured out again. The windows of the house were boarded shut or something, and he couldn't see what was going on inside, but he was pretty sure what that stupid creep was doing with his wife. What else would a man be doing with a woman in a strange house in the middle of the night?
He walked up to the stupid bastard's car and considered shooting out the tires. But it was a pretty nice vehicle. Maybe he'd just shoot the idiot that was making time with his wife, and help himself to a new set of wheels, since his own was a pile of junk miles back on the road. Damn, but he needed to smash something, though. He had worked himself into a fine frenzy over the last several hours. His car sucked, this damn town sucked, his feet hurt, his neck hurt, his lungs hurt from the damned smoky smell, and to his fury, when he thought about his wife going at it with that freak with the pony tail it had actually turned him on, and now he was horny and couldn't do anything about it. Not to mention that he kept hearing strange noises, like some kind of large animals crashing around in the night. Whatever they were, they smelled terrible, worse than a skunk. More like something dead. Come to think of it, they smelled like that old creep's hearse had. Maybe they were coyotes or something that had been eating something rotten. But he really wished that he could see what they were and stop worrying about it. As Clark headed onto the sidewalk, he noticed a small striped snake crawling along the curb strip. Stupid thing. He raised his foot and stomped on it as hard as he could. Something crunched inside it, and blood trickled out of it's mouth as at writhed wildly, stuck to one spot by it's own protruding entrails. He laughed at it's suffering. He just wished it was that prick in the house lying there at his feet.
Clark stepped up to the door of the house and drew his revolver. He was going to see if that fucker inside was stupid enough to let him in. If not, he would kick his way in. Either way, he was going to kill that guy, and make sure his wife learned a lesson she wouldn't forget in a long time. He was about to pound on the door with the butt of his gun when he noticed a peepholle drilled in the metal plating that covered the door, and remembered that nasty looking shotgun the man inside had been carrying with him. If the guy looked through the peephole and saw him with a gun, he was liable to get a face full of steel shot before he could pull the trigger. He jammed the gun down the waistband in back of his pants and pulled his shirt over it. Better to set the prick's mind at ease first, and then shoot him when he wasn't expecting it.
He grinned in what he hoped was a fairly charming manner, raised his fist, and knocked on the door
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Reggie lay sprawled contentedly on the living room floor with Sheila's head on his chest, stroking her hair. The light of the lamps' flame glinted off it, giving it golden highlights. It had been far too long since he had made love; he had astonished even himself by doing it three times in two hours before either falling asleep or fainting (he wasn't sure which). This was really a beautiful woman, and not all that much younger than him. Maybe after he found Mike, he would have to get in touch with her. There must be some way they could communicate, maybe by putting ads in the New York Times. Maybe he was getting a little old to think about having another kid, but he wasn't too old to have another family, even if it was just a wife and a dog. He opened his mouth and was about to tell her tothat he would drive her somewhere safe in the morning, before going back himself to investigate this town a little further, and that she should buy the Times at least once a week to look for a message from him in the personals ads when he was startled by the last thing in the world he expected to hear in a place like this.
Someone was knocking at the door.
Reggie practically jumped back into his pants. Sheila loked fearfully at him and asked "What is it? Who could be here? So late at night in a place like this?"
"I don't know." He said as he pulled his shirt on and grabbed the four barrelled shotgun. His first thought was that it was either the Tall Man or one of his minions. But they really weren't the type to knock.Then he wondered if maybe whoever had holed up in this house until so recently perhaps hadn't been dead after all,and had now returned. But why would they knock on the door of their own house? Then who could it be? Surely it couldn't be Mike? He wouldn't let himself hope for that.
"Take one of the lamps and your clothes, and get in the farthest bedroom" He told her. "Keep the door open a crack, and if you see anyone but me coming down that hall, you run out the back door, you hear?"
Sheila looked pale, but nodded as she did what Reggie had instucted her. He held the shotgun ready, his finger on the trigger as he looked through the peephole on the door. A man stood out there. He had blonde, rather grasy hair and was a little taller than Reggie. He didn't appear to be armed, but he could have had a small handgun under his rather loose shirt. Reggie opened the door a crack and stuck the barrels of the shotgun through it.
"Who the fuck are you?" Reggie demanded.
The man raised his arms "Hey, I don't want any trouble, man. I'm just looking for my wife, Sheila. I thought I saw her come into town earlier, but I lost track of her. Then I saw your car parked out front, and I thought maybe she was with you."
"Yeah, she's with me" Reggie moved the shotgun closer to the stranger's chest. "Now why don't you just get yourself the fuck out of here?"
"What for? Hey, I just want to talk with her!"
"Well, your wife already did plenty of talking about you, mister." Reggie said angrily "She told me all about the way you treat her."
"What did she tell you?" The guy looked pained."That I hit her? Christ, that's what she tells everyone."
"Everyone? What are you talking about?"
The man waved his hand at the Hemi in the street. "See, she likes hot cars like that. That's why I figured she might be here. Have you caught her trying to hotwire it yet?"
Reggie remembered back a few hours, when he had in fact caught Sheila in the driver's side of his car. "How did you know about that?"
The man sighed and shook his head. "Becuase that's what she does. She runs off with guys whose cars she likes, and then steals their car to go on a joyride, before she dumps it somewhere. You wouldn't believe the number of guys I've had to pay off to keep her out of jail. This shrink said it was a compulsion or something, and she's supposed to take medicine for it, but she never does"
"Oh, really?" Said Reggie. "Then where did she get that big bruise on her face?"
"Hey, I didn't do that, man!" the guy protested. "She got that from the last guy whose car she tried to rip off. Only when he caught her at it, he wasn't real happy. Look, it's been a hard night. My own car is on the other side of town and won't start. Will you just let me in to talk to her for a few minutes?"
Reggie thought about this. "No, you stay right out here. I'll go talk to your wife and tell her you're here. If she wants to talk to you, fine, but I warn you, I'm not going to force her to if she doesn't want to."
The man smiled. "That's fine. I'll just wait right out here for you."
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Reggie entered the bedroom, where Sheila was standing in front of a large bureau, looking into a mirror.
"Sheila, there's this guy at the door. He says that..."
She interrupted him without turning around. "I know. I heard his voice. It's my husband."
Sheila sighed. Were those tears Reggie saw reflected in the mirror. it was hard to tell with just a kerosene lamp for illumination.
"I'm sorry, Reggie." She said. "I didn't tell you the whole truth before."
Reggie scowled. "You mean that your husband out there was telling me the truth. That he doesn't beat you?" And you only slept with me to get my car, not because you loved me, he thought sadly.
"No, I was telling the truth when I told you he beat me. But it wasn't the whole truth, because I didn't tell you that he beat me to death."
She gripped the edge of the dresser, as if trying to cling to a life preserver. "The Tall Man came for me right after that. That was almost exactly 24 hours ago.... God, it seems so much longer than that."
There were more tears now. Reggie wasn't sure if they were hers or his. Maybe both.
"I'm sorry, Reggie" Sheila sobbed as she turned away from him, back towards the mirror."I do love you. Please try to get away."
There was a sudden, high pitched noise that Reggie recognized as the drill of a sentinel. It was oddly muffled, though, as if.... he suddenly realized and screamed. "Oh no!. Please God, no!. Not you."
He dropped his shotgun and grabbed the covers off the bed, thinking perhaps to trap her in them and prevent the sentinel from drilling it's way out of her somehow. But it was too late. Crimson blood blossomed like a rose on her faded denim shirt between her two round breats, where her heart was. Then a spray of red and silver burst out of her chest onto the mirror, shattering it in a thousand pieces.
"Oh, God!" Reggie screamed again. He turned to get awy from the sentinel, but his legs got tangled up in the covers he had pulled from the bed. As he fell to the floor, he was vaguely aware of a gunshot nearby, but paid no attention to it. By the time he got back to his feet a few seconds later, the sentinel had flown over his head and left the room. He ignored it, and stumbled over to Sheila's limp form, crying. He lifted her onto the bed and smoothed her hair around her face, arranging it so it covered the bruise on her face. He knew he should be getting out of the house and into the Hemi before the Tall Man came, but at that moment he didn't care. He was only distracted from his greif by a horrible scream from the other end of the house. Somehow thinking it was Sheila being hurt even worse than she had been, he grabbed his shotgun off the floor and ran back into the living room.
The man he had left on the doorstep, Sheila's husband, was wedged against one wall of the living room screaming. He had broken into the house by using a large revolver to shoot out the lock of the door before kicking it in. The revolver lay uselessly on the floor now, several feet away from him, apparently knocked from his hand by a sentinel. The same sentinel was now a few feet below his beltline, gouging a huge wound as fast as it could. It was the first time Reggie had ever seen one of those flying brain suckers drilling into the wrong head. He didn't know whether to laugh, or cry, or scream, and didn't dare to do any of them, lest he do all three and not be able to stop until the Tall Man came, which he surely would any minute now. He brought his shotgun to his shoulder, intending to destroy the sentinel before dealing with the creep pinned against the wall.
He let the shotgun drop. He couldn't do it.
"Damn it all to hell!" He thought out loud as he pushed past the two of them, out the front door, and into his Hemi. He peeled away from the curb barely in time. In his rear view mirror he saw the distinctive shape of a hearse silhouetted against the earliest glimmerrings of dawn, approaching the house from the other end of the block. As he sped around the corner, two snakes that had been curled under his car hissed at being deprived of their shelter and headed for a patch of weeds that had sprung up across the street. It took them about 15 minutes to find a nice rock to curl up under, by which time Reggie had put over 20 miles between himself and Hanchoille, population zero, regardless of any weird messages to the contrary.
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The Tall Man entered the house barely two minutes after Reggie had left. A man lay on the floor in a growing pool of blood. He was not dead yet, but soon would be. The tissue the sentinel had mangled was one of the fastest bleeding areas on a man. The sentinel floated in one corner, low to the ground, as if ashamed at it's failure to fulfill the Tall Man's bidding that it kill the ice cream man. He scooped it up in one hand and glared at it, learning of what had transpired during the past few hours.
"Pathetic." He sneered at the sphere, before tossing it it one corner. It bounced once, and then lay forlornly in a heap of dust.
The Tall Man turned his attention to the unconcious man on the floor. Not the prize he had hoped for, perhaps, but he could always use new raw material. Plans for a new trap for the ice cream man formed in his head. He scooped up the sentinel from the floor and gestured to two of his dwarves. "Take him, too." He said, pointing towards Clark.
He stalked to his hearse, the dwarves pulling the bleeding man behind him, before they dragged the awkward (and now dead) body into the back. The Tall Man drove off to the west, towards the remains of the night, leaving behind only the two snakes, too small brained to understand the struggle that had just transpired, but glad that the disturbances seemed to have come to an end.
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Clark Jacobson saw nothing but darkness. Was he dead? He wondered? He remembered breaking into a house, after that pig who was making time with his wife (if he hadn't been certain before entering, he was certain right afterwards. The whole place reeked of what they had been doing. He ddn't remember much after that, though. There was some screaming, and something small and bright had flown at him. After that, there had only been a haze of pain, but he couldn't remember where or from what.
He decided he wasn't dead. If he were, he wouldn't have been able to think. Was he asleep? His eyes seemed to open and shut, but there was nothing but blackness to be seen.
Suddenly there was light. There seemed to be a hundred small points of it, like candles, or maybe stars. He squinted, and could see that weird old guy who had been driving the hearse standing over him. And was that his wife behind him? Christ, was there anyone she wasn't sleeping with? Something dripped into his eye, making it burn, and when he could see again, his wife was gone, and there was just this silver ball floating weirdly over the old guy's shoulder, where his wife had been looking at him a second ago.
God, he felt terrible. It was freezing in this place. He reached out his arm, trying to grab somethind in order to get up, but there was something wrong about it. it seemed too small and short, as if a child's arm had been grafted onto his shoulder, and he couldn't seem to make the fingers move right.
Unable to get up, he looked around to see where he was laying. it seemed to be in a cramped box of some sort, lined with white satin and a heavy lid looming above him.
He almost vomitted as he realized "A coffin! They've put me in a coffin!"
He tried to scream, but could only manage a whimper. Please, anything but a coffin. He couldn't stand it. If he stayed in here another second, he would go insane. It wasn't fair. When you were in a coffin you were supposed to be dead. You weren't supposed to have to know about it!
The old man squinted one eye and ran an icy cold finger down Clark's face, wiping away a trickle of yellow blood, and what little was left of his sanity.
"I've got plans for you." He told his newest dwarf.
The coffin's lid slammed shut.
