Edward Lee - Creekers

Vicki did things to him she’d never done in the past—things, in fact, that no other woman in his life had done.

She was wild, but—

Too wild…

She was like a predatory beast; Phil’s desires, and her own, were things she hunted down and devoured…

And when it was over, he lay exhausted, debauched, wrung out and used up. He doubted that he’d ever felt so primal in his life. As intense as the experience had been, it scarcely even felt real. There’d been no meaning in any of it, no passion. They were just two phantoms run amok in the moonlight.

And now, sitting here amongst a pile of crabshells, watching the late-afternoon sun sparkle on the bay, he regretted it all even more. The last ten years had trained Vicki well. Her life had a new master now—a cold and very dark master, an alchemist of spirits. It had turned her dreams to fodder, and her heart into a desperate, pleading little thing that had nothing to rise to, nowhere to go.

And then the black voice returned, a voice he’d been hearing a lot lately, sniping the truth he’d been aware of all along but never wanted to face:

She’s nothing now but a coked-up whore…

Phil winced into the sunlight.

And it’s your fault, isn’t it, Phil? You left her cold. You threw her to the wolves. You tossed her love back in her face and let Natter turn her into a junkie roadside hooker. Good job, Phil. You’re a first-class guy.

“Get off my back,” he whispered to the voice.

Yeah, you’re a piece of work, all right. Not only did you fuck her, you lied to her, you’re pumping her for information, you’re using her, Phil. You don’t care about her, all you care about is your goddamn case.

“Eat shit, voice.”

And look what you’re doing now. You’re on a date with a real woman, not some busted whore. What would she do, Phil? What would Susan do if she knew you fucked a whore last night, a junkie?

“Shut up…”

Are you gonna fuck her, too? Are you gonna fuck Susan like you fucked that whore last night?

“Go to hell!”

I’m already there, the voice replied. So where does that leave you?

Then it drained away.

The voice, of course, was his own, the part of his psyche that couldn’t stand himself for what he’d done and was doing. Was he really using her? Were the ruins of Vicki’s life really his fault? And was he really using those ruins, taking advantage of them for the benefit of the case?

He didn’t want to know.

His guilt stuck to him, like an incessant gnat buzzing round his ear. He felt dried up, as mentally ragged as he’d been physically last night, after his venture with Vicki.

“That was fun,” Susan said as they walked back to the car. “We should come here again sometime.”

“Yeah, it’s a great place,” Phil replied, slightly stunned. Maybe her comment was just a casual one, but if she didn’t plan on seeing him again, why would she be making such a suggestion? At the very least, he could take this as a good sign that their first date had gone well.

But it was still early, and now that Phil could pretty much set his own hours, he didn’t need to be going into work by eight p.m.

Where do I take her now?

“Hey, Phil,” she said, “I know this is going to sound really lame, but—”

“Let me guess,” he said, and opened the car door for her. “You have to go home early tonight.”

“No, I have to go to the library.”

“The library?” Phil’s face crinkled. “What for?”

“I left some of my school books there last night. I want to pick them up before somebody rips them off. Do you mind?”

Phil almost laughed. At least now he didn’t have to think of a place to go next. “No problem. Next stop, the library.”

He started the car, was about to pull out, when she added, “And thanks for dinner.”

Then she leaned over and kissed him very lightly on the lips.

— | — | —

Eighteen

The trip to the county library, in Millersville, had taken them back down the Route, across town. “Look, more Creekers,” Susan pointed out when they cruised past the intersection of the Old Governor’s Bridge Road.

Phil spotted them.

Two figures trudged along, a boy in his late teens and a much younger girl, probably his sister. They dragged old burlap sacks behind them, no doubt full of discarded bottles and cans which they’d scrounged from beneath the bridge. Lots of the local punks parked just off the bridge at night, swilling beer and chucking the empties over the side into the water. The litter eventually washed up onto the creekbed, where hillfolk, mostly Creeker kids, would pick it up and sell it for pennies per pound to the recyclers. Picking up junk was all the employment most of these kids would ever have.

Susan, in remorse, turned her face away as they passed. “Christ, that’s sad. Those poor kids.”

“Yeah,” Phil agreed. “I see them all the time now, collecting garbage, or fishing off the streams with strings in the water.”

He’d caught only a glimpse of the pair, filthy, disheveled, in threadbare clothes going to rot. The little girl had no right arm, while the boy possessed arms that were overly long, his hands swinging down past his knees. Their misshapen heads turned, two pairs of tiny scarlet eyes glancing up hopelessly as Phil’s car drove past.

“Some Creekers seem a lot worse off than others,” he observed. “Like those two there—Christ.”

“The way I understand it is it’s kind of like a genetic potluck,” Susan said. “The more these little societies inbreed among themselves, the more deformed they are. Some of the reproductive genes are more defective than others.”

Last night’s excursion into Sallee’s backroom was good proof of that. The Creeker girls Phil had seen dancing were obviously birth defected, yet they also had inherited plenty of normal, and even beautiful, physical traits. Some of them, in fact, couldn’t even be distinguished as Creekers at all, until he’d looked hard.

“And the strangest thing is Natter himself,” Phil went on, following the Route down to the turnoff onto the county expressway. “He’s so big and deformed, but I also remember him being very smart.”

“I don’t know that much about it,” Susan said, “but I did take a sociology class a few years ago on dissociated cultures. Inbred societies aren’t that uncommon, even in this day and age. It’s typical for certain members to have extraordinarily high I.Q.’s while being physically deformed at the same time. And it’s these people who are always the leaders.”

“That fits Natter to a tee.”

“Well, if you want to know more about it, we’re going to the right place.”

Yeah, he realized. The library. Natter was a Creeker, and his PCP operation was run by Creekers. It would be a good idea for Phil to find out as much about them as possible. Then he could deal with them more effectively and with more cognizance.

The library was antiquated: a file card index system instead of a computer, which he was used to from his college days. Susan helped him find his way around after she retrieved her books. They located several titles on the subject, from the very basic—Inbred Life in Appalachia to the very clinical—Genetic Reproductive Defectivity and the Human Genetic Transfection Process.

Phil appraised the stack of books in his arms as they walked back out to the Malibu.

“No Doonesbury for me tonight,” he said.

««—»»

The end of their date had been cut a bit short; Susan, after all, had to work tonight, too, but her hours weren’t as lenient as Phil’s. A goodnight kiss was all he’d gotten at her door, but it was all he’d expected. To push for anything more would’ve been a bad move—even a fatal one, if he hoped to continue seeing her.