Тим Леббон - New Fears 2 - Brand New Horror Stories by Masters of the Macabre

Orrin breathed through his mouth, trying not to smell the rot breaking down Val’s body. She smelled worse than the carcasses they threw in the animals’ cages. Of course she did. She was whole, guts and all. She was human.

That was his way out.

But before that.

TUESDAY

Raymond asked, “So, you’re the lawyer for the county now too?”

“Nosir. I’m just doing my job. You asked and I told you. And since you’re here looking me face to face, it doesn’t matter if I put these in your hand or toss ’em at your feet. You been duly served as I see it.” She held the papers out and waited another couple of seconds. Raymond reached over and snatched them out of her hand with a sound like “Fuck you” beneath the rattle of the envelopes, but definitely not a clear “Fuck you,” or else Pat would have been inclined to take another step or two up onto the porch after him.

“Unconstitutional!” he shouted. “It’s my goddamned property, and I can do what I want with it.”

“Tell it to the judge. Afternoon, Raymond.” Pat didn’t need to stick around to watch him open the envelope. She’d done her duty. Though she wanted the extra pleasure of seeing the results of her effort play out on his face, it would only aggravate him more to linger. Her job was to deescalate conflict. So, she tipped her hat and turned to leave. Pat stepped down and started back toward her truck. She heard the sound of paper being balled up, but didn’t care. If Raymond ignored the summons and they issued a bench warrant for his arrest, all the better. She’d be happy to come out again and gaffle him up personally. She’d even do it on her day off. Hell’s sake, she’d do it on Christmas if it meant shuttering Tigertown for good. It wasn’t until she heard the sound of something hard sliding against leather that she realized she shouldn’t have turned her back on the man. She spun around, flipping the leather tab off the hammer of her revolver and tried to draw. The bullet from Raymond’s gun caught her in the thigh and sent her sprawling. She lost hold of her gun and it bounced out of her hand and slid away in the dirt. Heavy footsteps raced toward her as she tried to scramble for it. But the broken bone and screaming hole in the back of her leg kept her from reaching it in time. A shadow fell on her and she turned over, holding up her hands.

Raymond loomed over her, his expression dark and angry. He hadn’t had time to regret what he’d done yet, but it would come. His face would change when he realized what a terrible mistake this was.

“It’s a fucking injustice and I won’t stand for it. This is my property and this is still America.”

“S-stop. Stop this. The D-deputy Sheriff knows I’m here. Everyone… knows. Th-this is… is official business. It’s not personal,” she lied. She hadn’t told anyone she was coming out to Tigertown. She’d seen the envelopes awaiting service and, instead of handing them on to her deputy, had taken them herself. She wanted to see his expression when she served him. Because it was personal.

Raymond’s face fell. Fury changed to fear and the realization that he’d just lost everything. His house, his farm, the cats, and now his freedom. Maybe, eventually, his life at the end of a needle. No matter what, he was going away. Pat felt a hint of satisfaction at the idea of it. But while the day was hot, she was starting to feel cold and tired and satisfaction soon became fear and realization. Oh, shit. I’m bleeding out.

She tried to reach for the radio transmitter on her epaulette. Raymond stepped on her arm and bore down. It hurt less than her leg, but still, it hurt goddamn bad. She couldn’t help it and cried out in a way she never had done on the job. The only female sheriff in all the state’s forty-six counties, she didn’t have the luxury of a high-pitched cry. In her own ears, she sounded like one of her sons. The seven-year-old had a way of keening high at his hurts. Pat thought she sounded like him just then.

She thought of her sons.

Raymond reached down and yanked the transmitter cable out of her radio. He took the whole thing and threw it back up toward the porch. It squawked once and was silent. “Pigs don’t squeal in Tigertown, Sheriff. It gets the cats too excited.”

FRIDAY

Orrin found the gun locker in a room downstairs. It might have been a dining room once, some place for the family that built this house to gather at the end of a long day of honest work and eat together. Orrin knew hard work, though he wasn’t sure he could call much of it honest. And if his family had ever taken a meal together, it was before he was old enough to hold on to such a memory. In the corner stood an oak gun cabinet like the one his grandfather had owned. The glass door and tiny lock wouldn’t keep anyone from getting their hands on anything inside—it wasn’t a safe, it was a china hutch for rifles. And Raymond had a collection. Any other time, Orrin would be considering taking the lot of them home with him. There was a pump shotgun, a pair of .22 calibre rifles, and exactly what he was looking for: a Remington bolt-action .30-06 with a scope. He tried the door and wasn’t surprised to find it unlocked. He grabbed the thirty-aught and considered taking the shotgun as well. He could only fire one rifle at a time, though, and if his plan worked, he wouldn’t need the shotgun at all. Still, while he’d have to leave the deer rifle behind to make it look like Raymond had put down the cat before taking himself out, the Mossberg was going to be Orrin’s reward for having to endure this mess of shit.

He pulled out the drawer underneath the cabinet. Boxes of ammunition were stacked neatly inside. It seemed to him the only space in the house that had any order. He dug through until he found the right calibre and took the box. He loaded four long rounds into the rifle, stuffed the remainder, still in the box, into his jacket pocket and returned upstairs.

His stomach did a hard flip in the doorway to the bedroom and he gagged again. Time in the house wasn’t doing anything to help him get used to the smell. He set the rifle by the door and shrugged out of his leather jacket, letting it drop to the floor. The buckle on the kidney belt made a loud clank as it hit the hardwood and he flinched a little. He pulled off his T-shirt and wrapped it around his face the way he’d seen kids playing in his neighbourhood do, pretending to be ninjas. He tied the short sleeves behind his head. The shirt was sweaty and smelled like his body odour and engine grease. Though the house was stifling and breathing through the cloth only made him feel hotter, the smell of it was soothing in its familiarity. Those were the aromas of sitting in his garage working on his bike, smoking a little weed and drinking a beer. They were the smells of normality and peace. Still, there was much more than a hint of Val’s stench getting through. He’d heard stories of how the smell of a dead body never came out of things. That you could smell it in a house for years afterward. He could burn his clothes and buy himself brand new ones, all except for the denim cut-off jacket he wore over his leathers—his kutte. He couldn’t replace that or the club patches sewn on it. He’d slice off the tattoo over his heart and throw that in the fire first. His kutte was therefore destined to always stink. If he survived this, he’d happily smell like a corpse. But first he needed to get out with both it and his skin intact.

Orrin took a deep breath through his mouth and approached the bed. Val’s skin was grey and mottled with long purple streaks, like her veins were swollen with dark ink. Her lips were the same purple and starting to blacken on the inside. Touching her felt like a very bad idea, even with his gloves on. As if death itself might rub off onto him. Bacteria was eating her up from the inside. He knew it couldn’t hurt him. He could wash up and everything would be fine. Still, he felt a powerful repulsion at the idea of getting too close to her, like the prehistoric fear of death he’d inherited from his most distant ancestor, calling out to him from across millennia: this is unclean. This is a bad thing. But he couldn’t listen to that voice. Moving Val was the only plan he’d come up with, and nothing else was springing to mind.