Bentley Little - The Burning

She wondered what was happening at Babbitt House right now.

She hoped the cops had raided the place and locked everyone up under quarantine.

That wasn't fair. The Chrissie who'd called her a stupid brown bitch was not the Chrissie she'd been living with since the beginning of the semester. That was the mold talking. And as easy as it might be to take her cue from science fiction movies and assume that the mold brought out and amplified her roommate's true deep-seated feelings, Angela knew in her heart that wasn't the case. The black fungus had imposed those ideas on Chrissie and the others, had made them that way.

But why hadn't she been affected? She was the one the corpse had grabbed.

She had no answers, only questions.

Back in the motel room, they turned on the television. Derek and his brother, Steve, were sharing one queen-sized bed, while she and Derek's mother took the other. No one except Steve cared what they watched, so they let him flip around until he found a local independent station showing reruns of The Simpsons and King of the Hill. Derek's mother went in the bathroom to take a shower, and Angela dozed off for a while.

When she awoke, the lights were off and the news was on. Only Derek was still awake, and he put a finger to his lips, telling her not to make any noise.

On the Salt Lake City newscast, the top story was a massive gathering of Native Americans who had assembled in the northern portion of the state and had come from all over the country for no apparent reason, or at least no reason they were willing to divulge to television reporters.

A handsome man with a microphone stood on railroad tracks before a jam-packed crowd that had to number in the thousands. "Promontory Point was the spot where the Central Pacific and the combined Union and United Pacific railways met to form the transcontinental railroad in 1869, and where the golden spike that joined the two was driven in by Le-land Stanford and Thomas Durant. Why so many people have been caught off guard here is that there is no anniversary involving events at this location, and there do not appear to be any speakers or performers or any other reason for this historic gathering. So as of this moment, what's happening here at Promontory Point remains a mystery. We will keep you informed as events continue to unfold."

Derek turned down the sound with the remote control. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but Chinese workers helped build that railroad, didn't they?" he said, speaking softly.

He was right. She didn't know why that was important; she just knew that it was.

Promontory Point.

"That's it," Angela said. "That's where we're going."

Twenty-nine

Promontory Point, Utah

"Holy shit," Henry said.

It looked like a Native American Woodstock. For as far as the eye could see, people and tents, campers and pickup trucks, were packed like sardines across the open land. The air was filled with a thousand separate sounds that coalesced into a single ebb-and-flow hum. His companions

made no effort to join the throng, to find its center and purpose; they simply parked the pickup on the edge of the gathering and started to set up camp. This consisted of placing a rusty hibachi next to the truck, grabbing cans of beer out of the cooler and spreading out sleeping bags on the dusty ground.

They talked to no one.

They didn't have to.

He understood why they were here, knew now the story behind it, but there was still something of a disconnect. He felt as though he were watching himself do things rather than doing them. According to Wes and the other Papagos who had picked him up, there was a purpose to their pilgrimage, yet none of them seemed at all focused. Rather, they were on autopilot, following some predetermined plan rather than making conscious decisions.

Henry didn't like that.

They sat around, talked of nothing, drank, exchanged occasional greetings with other men from other tribes.

Night fell.

And with darkness came the shadows.

There were women and men, as well as figures so vague they were impossible to identify, and they came up from the ground, down from the sky, in from the plain. He should have known they would be here, but he had not expected it and it did not appear that many of the others had either. The shades moved seductively, enticingly, their purpose explicit, and Henry noticed that they were more solid than before, more dense and real. He was seized by the terrifying notion that despite what Wes and the others believed, the Indians had all been lured here for this purpose. They had been tricked into congregating in one area-in this area-so they could be assaulted, used and drained.

He looked about him at the approaching figures. There were gradations of darkness now, areas that suggested eyes, nose and mouth, pubic hair and nipples. There was, in addition, the promise of something more, the suggestion that if allowed to finish what they had started, these forms would become real, would gain flesh and substance and provide the complete pleasure they could only simulate now.

Most of the men weren't responding, were trying to chase the shades away, and even those who did succumb seemed to be fighting it, desperately attempting to keep their clothes on, to stop themselves from interacting with the spirits. Henry was thankful for that. And relieved. Surrounded by those like himself, their moral support granting him a strength he did not possess when alone, he found that he was not aroused by the twins when they came to seduce him. Once again, he was able to see the female body for what it really was: a collection of nerve endings and orifices with grotesque physiological functions. And while the twins did not exactly have bodies, the idea was enough to dampen his already wan libido.

As strange as it might seem to someone else, it felt good to be himself again.

One of the Chinese twins-they were Chinese; he knew that now-sidled next to him, running her left hand slowly over her voluptuous breasts even as her right hand reached out. The other sister stood in front of him, rubbing herself between her legs, her body undulating in time with the movements of her hand.

He was not aroused in the slightest.

And, as before, he could sense under the surface sensuality an anger, a seething rage hidden beneath the sexual behavior.

Henry looked up at the bed of the pickup where Wes and Milton were trying to shoo away the full shadows of two slight boyish-looking teenage girls.

"It is our life force," Wes explained. "That is why the dead crave our seed. It gives them what they do not have."

To Henry's right, one older man had succumbed and was masturbating furiously, pants around his ankles. As he reached his climax, a horde of shadows flew about him, attempting to ingest his semen. Henry's twins fled there as well, and he watched in fascination as their forms seemed to change, became more like the rounded buxom matron seducing the elderly man before they merged into one figure identical to the man's seductress.

From here and there, throughout the crowd, came cries of anguish or remorse, grunts of pleasure, but gradually those noises were supplanted by the rhythms of conversation, by the sounds of radios, tape decks and CD players being cranked up as men turned away from the shadows, ignoring them in favor of the mundane trivialities of ordinary existence. This continued for the better part of an hour, the shadows growing ever more frantic and desperate in their attempts at seduction until finally, as one, they departed, not retreating the way they had come but fading away, blending into the night. They made no noise-they never did-but from the earth itself came a strange rumbling sound, a howl of frustration muffled by layers of dirt, and it was then Henry knew for certain that they had been thwarted in their efforts. He felt good, proud of himself and the others around him.