Patricia Cornwell - Predator

“Stupid thing,” he says, and there is no one to hear him, only the dead thing.

“No, you’re the stupid thing,” God’s voice sounds from behind him.

He takes out the earplugs and turns around. She is there in black, a black, flowing shape in the moonlit night.

“I told you not to do that,” she says.

“No one can hear it out here,” he replies, shifting the shotgun to his other shoulder and seeing the wooden lumberjack as if it is right in front of him.

“I’m not telling you again.”

“I didn’t know you were here.”

“You know where I am if I choose for you to know.”

“I got you the Field amp; Stream s. Two of them. And the paper, the glossy laser paper.”

“I told you to get me six in all, including two Fly Fishing, two Angling Journal s.”

“I stole them. It was too hard to get six at once.”

“Then go back. Why are you so stupid?”

She is God. She has an IQ of a hundred and fifty.

“You will do what I say,” she says.

God is a woman, and she is it, and there is no other. She became God after he did the bad thing and was sent away, sent very far away where it was cold and kept snowing, and then he came back and by then, she had somehow become God and she told him he is her Hand. The Hand of God. Hog.

He watches God go away, dissolving in the night. He hears the loud engine as she flies away, flying down the highway. And he wonders if she’ll ever have sex with him again. All the time he thinks about it. When she became God, she wouldn’t have sex with him. Theirs is a holy union, she explains it. She has sex with other people but not with him, because he is her Hand. She laughs at him, says she can’t exactly have sex with her own Hand. It would be the same thing as having sex with herself. And she laughs.

“You were stupid, now weren’t you?” Hog says to the dead pregnant thing in the dirt.

He wants to have sex. He wants it right now as he stares at the dead thing and nudges it with his boot again and thinks about God and what she looks like naked with hands all over her.

I know you want it, Hog.

I do, he says. I want it.

I know where you want to put your hands. I’m right, aren’t I?

Yes.

You want to put them where I let other people put them, don’t you?

I wish you wouldn’t let anybody. Yes, I want it.

She makes him paint the red handprints in places he doesn’t want other people to touch, places where he put his hands when he did the bad thing and was sent away, sent to the cold place where it snows, the place where they put him in the machine and rearranged his molecules.

The next morning, Tuesday, clouds pile up from the distant sea and the pregnant dead thing is stiff on the ground and flies have found it.

“Now look what you did. Killed all your children, didn’t you? Stupid thing.”

Hog nudges it with his boot. Flies scatter like sparks. He watches as they buzz back to the gory, coagulated head. He stares at the stiff, dead thing and the flies crawling on it. He stares at it, not bothered by it. He squats beside it, getting close enough to craze the flies again and now he smells it. He gets a whiff of death, a stench that in several days will be overpowering and noticeable an acre away, depending on the wind. Flies will lay their eggs in orifices and the wounds, and soon the carcass will team with maggots, but it won’t bother him. He likes to watch what death does.

He walks off toward the ruined house, the shotgun cradled in his arms. He listens to the distant rumble of traffic on South 27, but there is no reason for anybody to come out here. Eventually, there will be. But now there isn’t. He steps up on the rotting porch and a curling plank gives under his boots, and he shoves open the door, entering a dark, airless space thick with dust. Even on a clear day, it is dark and suffocating inside the house, and this morning it is worse because a thunderstorm is on the way. It iseight o’clockand almost as dark as night inside the house, and he begins to sweat.

“Is that you?” The voice sounds from the darkness, from the rear of the house, where the voice ought to be.

Against a wall is a makeshift table of plywood and cinder blocks, and on top is a small glass fish tank. He points the shotgun at the tank and pushes the pressure pad on the slide, and the xenon light flashes brilliantly on glass and illuminates the black shape of the tarantula inside. It is motionless on sandy dirt and wood chips, poised like a dark hand next to its water sponge and favorite rock. In a corner of the tank, small crickets stir in the light, disturbed by it.

“Come talk to me,” the voice calls out, demanding but weaker than it was not even a day ago.

He isn’t sure if he is glad the voice is alive, but he probably is. He takes the lid off the tank and talks quietly, sweetly, to the spider. Its abdomen is balding and crusty with dried glue and pale yellow blood, and hatred wraps around him as he thinks about why it is bald and what caused it to almost bleed to death. The spider’s hair won’t grow back until he molts, and maybe he will heal and maybe he won’t.

“You know whose fault it is, don’t you?” he says to the spider. “And I did something about it, didn’t I?”

“Come here,” the voice calls out. “Do you hear me?”

The spider doesn’t move. He might die. There’s a good chance he will.

“I’m sorry I’ve been gone so much. I know you must be lonely,” he says to the spider. “I couldn’t take you with me because of your condition. It was a very long drive. Cold, too.”

He reaches inside the glass tank and gently strokes the spider. It barely moves.

“Is that you?” The voice is weaker and hoarse but demanding.

He tries to imagine what it will be like when the voice is gone, and he thinks about the dead thing, stiff and fly-infested on the dirt.

“Is that you?”

He keeps his finger pressed against the pressure pad, and the light points where the shotgun points, illuminating wooden flooring filthy with dirt and the hulls of dried-out insect eggs. His boots move behind the moving light.

“Hello? Who’s there?”

Inside the fire arms and tool marks lab, Joe Amos zips a Harley-Davidson black leather jacket around an eighty-pound block of ordnance gelatin. On top is a smaller block weighing twenty pounds, and it wears a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses and a black do-rag with a skull-and-bones pattern.

Joe steps back to admire his work. He is pleased but a little tired. He stayed up late with his newest teacher’s pet. He drank too much wine.

“It’s funny, isn’t it,” he says to Jenny.

“Funny but disgusting. You’d better not let him know. I hear he’s not somebody to tangle with,” she says, sitting on a countertop.

“The person not to tangle with is me. I’m thinking of putting red food coloring in a batch. To look more like blood.”

“Cool.”

“Add a little brown, and maybe it will look like it’s decomposing. Maybe find a way to make it stink.”

“You and your hell scenes.”

“My mind never stops. My back hurts,” he says, admiring his work. “I hurt my damn back and I’m suing her.”

The gelatin, an elastic transparent material comprised of denatured animal bone and connective-tissue collagen, isn’t easy to handle, and the blocks he has dressed up were hard as hell to transfer from the ice chests to the back padded wall of the indoor firing range. The lab door is locked. The red light on the wall outside is on, warning that the range is hot.

“All dressed up with no place to go,” he says to the unappetizing mass.

More properly known as gelatin hydrolysate, it is also used in shampoos and conditioners, lipsticks, protein drinks, arthritis relief formulas and many other products that Joe will never touch the rest of his life. He won’t even kiss his fiancee if she is wearing lipstick, not anymore. Last time he did, he closed his eyes as her lips pressed against his and suddenly he imagined cow, pig and fish shit boiling in a huge pot. He reads labels now. If hydrolyzed animal protein is listed in the ingredients, the item goes into the trash or back on the shelf.