David Morrell - The Totem

"What?"

Abruptly Marge heard the snarling. Instinct almost made her run away, but she moved slowly forward as the window in the dining room came bursting toward the porch, two figures struggling through the broken edges, falling, writhing on the porch. The mother and the father, the mother snarling, the father screaming, and the mother was on top where she was scratching, biting.

Marge ran up the steps. "You've got to help me! Get her off him!"

"But she's crazy!" the neighbor said.

Marge would later recollect how she had thought of Slaughter at that moment, wondering how the chief would try to handle this. She wanted him to say that she had done the right thing when an instant could make all the difference. She pushed at the man behind her, shouting "Go get help!" as she looked all around for something to subdue the mother. She wasn't about to grab the mother and get bitten like the father screaming there, but when she saw the thing she needed in one corner of the porch, she couldn't bring herself to grab it. Warren evidently had been playing with it the day before he died. She didn't want to touch it, but the father's screaming was too much. She reached for it. Slipping on the broken glass, she lurched toward the mother, raised the baseball bat high above her head, and thinking about Slaughter, started swinging.

Slaughter waited in his locked house until Rettig and Hammel arrived. He shouted out the window that they'd better look around before they left the cruiser. So they flashed their searchlights, but there wasn't anything. He went outside to meet them, staring past them, scanning all around them and then pointing. "This way."

"Well, what is it?"

"Don't you think I wish I knew?"

They stiffened. They were dressed in jeans and sport shirts, a gunbelt strapped around each waist. They saw that Slaughter had his own gun out, and they were drawing theirs as they walked toward the fence where he was pointing.

"Shine your flashlights."

The beams arced out across the field.

"But I don't understand this," Rettig said.

"Just keep your back protected. Keep looking all around you," Slaughter told him. "There was something out here. Hell, it came up on my porch."

Slaughter climbed over the fence and flashed his light while they jumped down beside him. Then he started walking with them through the field.

"Your porch?"

"That's right." Slaughter was embarrassed, determined not to admit that he'd run in panic. He felt safer with his men to help him, but he couldn't subdue the burning in his stomach, and he wished they wouldn't ask too many questions.

But they kept on. "Well, what is it?" Rettig asked again.

"I told you, I don't know. I never got a look at them."

"Your porch, though."

"I was talking to you on the phone when I heard it. When I looked, it wasn't there."

Then Slaughter saw what he was searching for and wished that he'd been wrong. With his flashlight aimed, he glimpsed the fallen objects in the field, and he was hurrying through the grass toward them. He stopped and stared. The horses were mangled like the steer that he had seen by old Doc Markle, like the other steer that he had seen by Bodine's pickup truck, except that these were worse, so mutilated that he almost didn't recognize them. He heard his men gasp.

"Some damned thing was out here all right. God, I'm sorry, Chief."

"These horses… They were all I…"

Slaughter stalked toward the gully. "I heard three of them up in those bushes, two more by the barn. I'd like to-"

"Wait a second, Chief." Rettig grabbed his shoulder.

Slaughter pulled his hand away. "These god-damned-"

" Wait a minute . We don't even know what we'll be up against. You say that there were five of them?"

"That's right. Like a bobcat."

" Five of them?"

"I know it doesn't make much sense, but-"

"I don't care about that. Sure, bobcats don't hunt in packs, but anything can happen. What I mean is, we need help to do this. We need better light."

"You want the sun to come up? Damn it, they'll be long gone when that happens."

"You can find a tracker."

"Who, for Christ sake? I already thought of that. These cowboys maybe think they're expert trackers, but I never saw one yet that knew enough to be able to trail a sick man to the outhouse. If we don't go now, we'll never find whatever did this."

"I'm sorry, Chief, but I'm not going."

Slaughter scowled at Rettig, then turned to Hammel. "What about you?"

Hammel shrugged.

"You don't have a lot to say since we saw Clifford's body."

"Well, I figure I'll just watch and learn," Hammel said.

"Yeah, I bet you will."

Slaughter spun to face the gully. Even with his flashlight and the moon, he couldn't see much in the bushes, and his anger became fear again.

"Okay, you're right. It's stupid to go in there. Looking at these horses, I just-"

"Don't you worry. We'll be sure to get whatever did this," Rettig said. "But not right now."

Slaughter's anger changed to grief. He had to get away from here.

"But what about your horses?" Rettig asked.

"Leave them. Hell, what difference does it make?"

Slaughter heard his men walking behind him as he climbed the fence, and when he stepped down, from the house he heard the phone again. Whoever kept on calling, he was thinking, livid. He would make sure that they stopped it. He was running, cursing, toward the house, but when he burst in, grabbing for the phone, he heard a voice this time, and as he listened, he mentally started running again. It seemed as if the last few days he'd never stopped.

He charged along the corridor, the nurses staring at him. Rettig and Hammel were on guard back at his house, and he was thinking of his mangled horses, hoping that the two men would be safe as he pushed through the door marked morgue and rushed across the anteroom to push against the second door. The morgue looked like a shambles. There was blood and broken glass and scattered instruments. The medical examiner was leaning against a table. He had blood across his gown, his face mask hanging around his neck. His face was pale in contrast with the blood. He looked as if he'd been sick, although he might have seemed that way because the neon lights reflecting off the green tiles tinted everything a sickly pallor. The medical examiner was shaking, and the man beside him, wearing street clothes, didn't look much better. Owens. Slaughter recognized him as a veterinary whom he had come across from time to time and had last seen on Friday morning when they'd looked at old Doc Markle on the floor beside the mangled steer.

The two men turned to him, and Slaughter kept glancing all around. The smell of chemicals, of sick-sweet clotting blood. He didn't understand it. He inhaled, drawing breath to ask them, but the medical examiner interrupted. "I just killed him."

Slaughter stared at him and then at Owens. He was puzzled, walking toward them. "Look, you'd better take it easy. When you called, you sounded like you'd had a breakdown."

"But I killed him."

"Yes, I know. You told me on the phone. You said that at the mansion. But you had no way of knowing that the sedative would kill him. What's this blood here? I don't understand what's happened."

"Christ Almighty, listen while I tell you. I just killed him."

Slaughter spun toward Owens. "What's the matter with him?"

"Over there. You'd better take a look."

Owens had trouble speaking. He pointed toward the far end of the room, beyond the final table where a smear of blood was trickling down the wall, and Slaughter felt apprehensive again. He started forward, although a part of him was holding back. He peered down past the corner of the table, and he saw the tiny feet on the floor. Then he leaned a little closer, and he saw the boy, his belly sliced wide open. "Christ, you mutilated him!"