Friday, July 13, 1984
She ran. She didn't know what else to do. She had faced a monster, and she had killed it. People would believe her, surely, at least some people. Of course, the people she needed to believe her wouldn't.
She'd heard the stories; everyone anywhere near that demon-damned place had. But what were the odds those people would be the ones sitting on the jury? Shelly was dead. Vera. Debbie. Chuck and Chili. And Rick… what it had done to Rick…
But the thing was gone. She would be the one sitting in that courtroom. She hoped that thing was burning in Hell. She hoped the axe was still buried in its brain. Each heavy footstep that took her away from the cabin brought with it a numbing gray curtain. She could see the shore of the lake, but the concept of 'shore' or lake' meant nothing.
She wanted so badly to let go. What use was sanity, anyway? When reality was insane, what good could it do to cling to reality? Why not just release her grip and drift in madness when madness was all that existed?
But she couldn't. A step, a very heavy step. She turned, a breathless, "No…" on her lips. She couldn't keep her footing. She couldn't be seeing what she saw, but what she saw didn't care. It pulled the axe from its forehead, then let the heavy implement swing easily in its right hand as its one good eye lost the glaze of death, its stride regained that implacable smoothness.
And then a voice spoke, from her left. "Well, hey there, pard!"
He paused. He looked to his right. He understood very little, but he understood surprise, after a dull, animal fashion. He had counted the Hated. He had counted them carefully. Only the Hated here. None of the Old-man, and that voice was Old-man. He turned his head, just slightly, this way, that way, tilted it slightly. He sought movement. For a time without time, he saw no movement. And then came the smell of body odor. Old-man body odor, and breath that stank of stale beer and meat.
There was an Old-man. Large, but not larger-than. Wide in the shoulders, jowls on the face, more belly than a Young-man. The iron-color hair of many of the Old-man kind. He felt a special hatred for the Old-man kind. He did not remember many of their number, but he knew they would all be easy to kill, and he hated them for that. It was as good a reason as any other to hate them.
She looked up at the anchor of reality, and she almost hated the old fool for pulling her back from the blessed nothingness of madness. She opened her mouth to warn him away, but he was moving with a long, loping gait and the words wouldn't come in time, and she choked on them as she felt beads of sweat roll down her brow. The dumb old hick didn't even seem to care.
"What'cha figure on doin' out here, pard?" the old man drawled. He lifted a withered hand from the pocket of a plaid shirt under grimy overalls, bit the end off a fat plug of tobacco, and commenced to chewing it contentedly. "Can't have ya hurtin' the little lady, now. Nope, jus' reckon 'at ain't gon' fly. Me 'n' her got some palaver t' be had, y'unnerstan'. Cain't have ya puttin'a kibosh on my plans, ol' son."
The thing from the cabin didn't make a sound. It simply lifted the axe in an overhand motion and brought it speeding down toward the old backwoods boy's skull. The withered hand that flashed up to check the axe handle's progress moved faster that her eyes could track, splitting the air with a whistle of speed.
The thing from the cabin froze. She froze. The old hick didn't. He launched his right leg directly up into the monster's crotch hard enough to lift it bodily off the ground, then slammed his right hand into the top of its skull hard enough to shatter the hockey mask it wore and send it sprawling through the dirt and pine needles before looking up at the axe in his left hand with a bemused grin.
"Son," the old hick said, "I reckon you jes' ain't got the right of this hyer sitchy-ation." What he said next, she couldn't make heads or tails of. "Now, I c'n see you ain't got no thermal signature t' speak of. That rightly indicates no central or peripheral nervous system activity. That ain't hardly usual, for a human 'at's up 'n' stumblin' around, anyways. But you ain't none o' my kinfolk, neither. Nut'n but flesh 'n' bone. You git up agin, though, I tell you what - I'ma break pieces off ya 'til ya stop gettin' up. Y'unnerstan' me?"
The monster got up.
"Reckon not. Suit yerself, ya big dumb sumbitch." The old hick - Or what ever he is, she thought - met the monster's headlong charge with a speed that frightened her almost more than the monster had.
The monster slammed its head into the old man with a tremendous crunch. Neither moved. The old man reached up to the left side of his face, and his fingers came away bloodied - he must have been cut by the mask, she reasoned.
Then something awful happened. Something that reminded her of the past twenty four hours. He reached up again, pulled gently, and the left side of the old man's face hung from his fingers. And something else with it, something round and glistening, something she couldn't look at. He didn't scream. He didn't back away. He simply… let the flesh drop to the moistened earth at his feet. "Well." he said, in a considerably less folksy tone. "Now ya gone 'n' pissed me off, boy."
Sidestepping with an agility impossible for a man of his apparent age, he swung the axe with a one-handed backswing so fast and so hard that the crack! as the axe-head met the back of the thing's skull sent a swell of nausea from her stomach into her throat.
The impact lifted the monster off its feet and flung it face first into the moist sod; the old man spun on both feet as gracefully as a ballerina, continued the momentum of that swing, all the way around, to bury the axe through the monster's right shoulder in the earth.
He planted a foot near the axe's head, lifted the spasming, severed arm, and hurled it with an overhand pitch like a Major League pitcher. The creature that had stalked her, killed her friends, caused such terror, only twitched in the mud.
"I done tol' you once, ya ugly sumbitch. Now you gon' learn Mama Skynet's boys don't fuck aroun'." The old man planted his right foot on the monster's left shoulder-blade, seized its left arm in both his hands, and simply extended his right leg, pulling the thing's left arm free of its torso with a sickening, wet tearing sound. She leaned to her left and vomited, hard. She didn't even see the arm flash past over her head.
The old man stared at the bloodied axe, then, as if only just noticing it. With a blindingly fast cross-body swing, he sent it flashing into the trunk of a tree. The axe buried itself halfway into the trunk, irretrievable by human hands. Reaching down with his left hand, he flipped the monster over, then hoisted it to its feet and simply crushed its throat in his fingers.
All she could do was stare. Even the nausea had passed. Nothing remained. Nothing of shock, or fear, or sanity. So when the old man reached up with his other hand and simply ripped the monster's head off and pitched it into the lake, all that came out of her was the high-pitched giggle of a toddler watching a cartoon.
She didn't know how much time had passed. What was time? What difference did time make? She stared at her knees. Under them - feet, those are your feet - were sneakers. Under those, a black rubber floor mat covered in leaves and a few sprays of pine needles.
"What's yer name, li'l darlin'?" a voice asked.
Oh, the old man. Except that's not what he is. No way.
"Chris Higgins." somebody answered for her, out of her throat, in her voice.
"Well now, Miss Chris - hey, ain't that peachy, now - you're safe. Understand? Whatever that ugly sumbitch was, we're gettin' some good distance on 'im, and he ain't gon' find ya. Arright? I ain't never seen a human like 'et before."
"He's not human." a full body shiver, a violent one, rippled through her.
"Psh," the old man said.
"Neither are you."
He looked at her, and the world wavered. His grin was big and friendly - rather, half of it was. The left side of his face was torn away, and what showed there was a skull. Black chrome, white teeth, and an optical sensor that burned as red as the coals in the engines of Hell itself.
"Got me there, darlin'." it said. "I am a Cyberdyne Systems Model One-Oh-Seven. You ask around, though, ever'body in town knows ol' Scooter. Shoot, I bet I'll be tickin' long after you're jes' a memory, know what I mean? Now, hey, now," it shook her shoulder gently. "I got a question for ya, just one. Then you go right on and just get yourself a rest while we ride into town. Deal?"
She shivered as she stared at it, but nodded almost too eagerly.
"Tell me som'n," it said. "you ever meet a girl name of Sarah Connor?"