Chapter 9
After the deputy brought her back to the trailers - after the frisking, the questioning, the Ride To The Station To Get This Thing Sorted Out - Elsie D curled up in the corner of what had been the living room of one of the mobile homes. The room was empty and cold and echoing, ugly paneling staining the walls, and she sat on the floor with her knees drawn up and her head in her hands, looking at the holes in the floor where the shackles were supposed to have been attached, and a burning sensation grew in her eyes and in the pit of her stomach. She sat there until the light grew too dim to see the holes anymore. Night was coming, and she could hear ghosts begin to creep through the walls.
Suddenly she stood up and stumbled out of that trailer and ran across the yard to one of the furnished ones, the one where she slept. In the tiny bedroom she pulled the drawers out of the bureau and dumped their contents onto the middle of her mattress. She added some clothes from the closet, and pulled the four corners of the blanket together over the pile. She tied the corners into a knot and carried the bundle out to the tomato-color Camaro, and then returned a few minutes later with the television. That bundle was a little harder to manage - the set was a 19-inch screen, and heavy - but she made it to the car without dropping it, and loaded it into the passenger seat.
The Camaro's keys were in her pocket; Jeep hadn't confiscated them because the car currently had no battery. Working with a flashlight and a wrench, Elsie removed the battery from one of the keyless cars and transferred it to the Camaro's engine. Clouds obscured the moonlight, and in the dark her trembling hands dropped the wrench twice. The glow from the flashlight was growing feeble by the time she found the siphon hose and ran it into the tank of the donor car. Squatting underneath it, she sucked on the end of the hose until she tasted gas and saw fluid moving down the tube, and then she clamped her thumb over the end of the hose and stuck the end into a plastic gasoline jug. The ground against her knees was cold and abrasive as she worked, and she ran a chilled arm across her face and rubbed away tears, unaware that she'd been weeping steadily.
When she filled the Camaro's gas tank to her satisfaction, she gathered equipment - more tools, a jumper cable, the siphoning jug and hose - and piled them in the car's floorboard. She slid into the driver's seat. Drew a deep breath. Turned the key in the ignition.
Nothing.
Elsie mentally ticked off all the possibilities. She threw the door open, yanked up the car's hood, examined her work. One of the battery's terminals, she realized, had a thin coating of acidic corrosion. She went to the kitchen of one of the trailers and came back out with a can of Coca-Cola. Popping the top, she took a sip, and poured the rest carefully over the terminals of the battery. A white, angry foam boiled up as the soda began to eat away the acid crust, and with a stick and a cup of water Elsie tried to wash the terminals clean. One particularly stubborn bit of crud refused to let go, and she was forced to disconnect a cable to get at it. She tapped on it patiently...and a sound of barking came up the road.
It can't be them.
They're locked up; they're not strong enough to break a jail door.
Oh God.
Elsie pounded frantically on the terminal, and the errant crust dislodged and dropped into the dark depths of the engine. The barking was moving closer. Elsie twisted the cable back into place as fast as she could, clawing at it, her breath coming in sobs.
She could see them now at the end of the driveway.
She slammed down the hood and flung herself behind the wheel.
startstartstart
The motor roared to life, and with a scream Elsie yanked the gearshift and mashed the accelerator and the Camaro shot across the yard, spraying gravel. She careened down the driveway, steering by sheer memory, too panicked to think of turning the headlamps on. The clouds broke, washing everything in a sudden spill of light from the moon. As the car shot past the pack she saw shadowy bodies leap and heard yelps of surprise. Then she was on the paved road, and then the highway, and then, finally, her heart eased back down out of her throat and resumed beating.
Between Las Cruces and Phoenix the conversation in the Ashcraft van included the following topics, in no particular order:
Dragonball Z
Wolfram & Hart
Advanced Computer Hacking
Music Theory
Algorithms
The Rhythm Method ("Uh, guys, he can spell,")
Soap Opera Digest
English And American Football, Comparative Pansyness Of
Pylea
The Initiative
Food In Tibet
Mexico, Our Neighbor To The South
Rain continued to fall. Jordy swung his dangling feet in Fred's shuffle dance and murmured singsong under his breath, "If it weren't for the Cotton-Eyed Joe/ I'd 'a been married long time ago/ I'd 'a been married long time ago..."
Then the van entered the Phoenix city limits, and suddenly he scooted forward as far as his safety belt would allow. The animal whine that issued from his throat startled the adults. His small nostrils flared, and he gripped the seat in front of him and craned his neck to peer through the windshield. "Calm down, Jord," Oz said softly. "We're almost there." Jordy glanced over at him and then returned his eyes to the road. Houses, empty lots, commercial buildings, more houses...
The rain had thinned to a light mist when the van pulled onto the grounds of a hospital. Jordy's eyes were everywhere, waiting for the slow grownups to park and get out and crawl
(Hurry UP)
down the sidewalk to the building's front doors.
An elderly little volunteer at the reception desk looked up from her paperback novel and nodded at them, smiling at Jordy. Oz felt the boy's shoulder muscles twitch under his hand as they crossed the lobby and rode the elevator to the upper floors. The ride took forever, each numbered button seeming to hoard the light before grudgingly allowing it to pass on to the next number.
On the sixth floor the car softly bounced to a stop. The doors slid open with a hiss, and Jordy inhaled sharply and darted down the corridor, following his nose. One doorway. Two. Three. At the fourth one he wheeled...
"MOMMY!"
...and threw himself into the arms of his mother and father.
Fred and Spike took a seat on a bench outside Maureen Osbourne's hospital room and listened to the sounds of reunion.
"Bless his little heart," Fred sighed. "He told me about being abducted. He must have been scared to death. I told him how it had happened to me, too, and it seemed to make him feel a little better somehow. Misery loves company, I guess."
Oz came out of the room and joined them in the hallway. His face was visibly brighter. "Aunt Maureen's being released day after tomorrow, and we're gonna have our family Christmas then." He paused, and then said quietly, "Listen, you guys have been lifesavers. If there's ever anything we can do for you..."
Spike considered. "Might bag me an otter on one of your next calls of the wild. Only so many ways to spice chicken blood before it starts tasting like chicken piss."
A flicker of a smile crossed Oz's lips. His eyes met those of the vampire, and Fred saw something pass between the two men, a kenning, something so subtle that she wondered if either of them were even consciously aware of it. A line from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book popped into her head: We be of one blood, ye and I. She looked at Oz warmly. "We were happy to do it. You just go on back in there, and have fun. Give Jordy a hug for us."
Oz nodded. "Take it easy, then. Tell Angel I said hey."
They parted company, Spike draping an arm around Fred's neck as they walked back to the elevators. An orderly passed them pushing a biohazard waste cart and Spike gazed after it wistfully. God, but that smells delicious. Must'a had a bleeder somewhere; changed some bandages. Shame to throw 'em out like used tea bags.
He heaved a gusty sigh.
In Ashcraft the rain had ceased completely, giving anyone at their windows in the 1200 block of Copely Street a much better view of the thing on the sidewalk. It was thin, nude, hairless, pale as death, and quite human in appearance until one came to the face, where the eyes were wide and vacant and the lower jaw slammed open and shut, open and shut, . It walked as fast as a normal man can run, and it came relentlessly, and running ahead of it was a little girl. She looked back over her shoulder at it, stumbling a little, then lunged forward with a renewed burst of speed. Crossing the road at Copely and Ninth, she darted behind the Red Dot Washeteria.
The thing followed. In the bluish light of the streetlamps it saw the girl standing, trapped by an eight-foot-tall wooden fence. It came on at a walk-run. The girl stood motionless...and then suddenly began a little boogie dance. Her expression as solemn as an owl's, she waved her arms in cheerleader cadence and chanted, "U-G-L-Y, you ain't got no alibi, you' ugly - you' ugly."
"GOT HIM!" Gunn's shout of triumph interrupted Thu's performance. From out of the shadows he and Paloma had sprung to their feet on either side of the creature and looped a wire around its neck. They dropped to their knees, using their combined weight to pull the thing off balance and bear it to the ground. Thu snatched a hatchet from Gunn's hiding place and swung it over her head.
"Watch your hands," Paloma warned. They loosened their holds on the wire and drew their hands back, and the hatchet whistled down and lopped off the creature's head. It bounced into the air with a thin spray of clear fluid and rolled a few feet away. Thu, Gunn, and Paloma all scrambled after it as if it were a prize pinata, ignoring the body which had stood up and was staggering around blindly. They squatted on the ground and gripped the severed head by its ears, pinning it against the pavement, keeping their fingers well away from the still-snapping set of teeth. Gunn peered into its nostrils with a flashlight and began probing there with a long pair of tweezers.
"Can you see it?" the chupacabra asked him.
"Uh-uh. Damn thing keeps jerkin' around. It's like a fuckin' nutcracker!" He glanced up in Thu's direction. "Sorry."
"Pottymouth," Thu grunted. "Oh, shitass, can't we just break its jaw off?"
A little squeal of automobile brakes in the road went unnoticed. From that automobile, Spike and Fred took in the weird tableau behind the laundromat.
After a moment Spike got out and strolled over.
"You can pick your friends," he recited, "And you can pick your nose. But you can't pick your friend's nose."
The little slayer broke into giggles. Paloma grinned. "Season's Greetings to you, too, Asshole. You gonna give us a hand with this thing?"
Spike regarded the champing jaws warily. "Why don't you just smash it to bits and be done with it?"
"Can't. There's a little herb bundle up its nose that-" The body stumbled against Paloma and she pushed it away impatiently with her foot, sending it blundering into the fence. "That has to be taken out in one piece. Otherwise the rest of it'll just grow a new head."
"Oh." Spike nodded toward Gunn and the tweezers. "Well, that explains Saint Dunstan." He knelt beside them and stuck the blunt end of the hatchet into the mouth and held it there. Thirty-two little square teeth ground and clattered on the metal. "Any more of these about, or just the one?"
"This is the only one we've seen so far." Gunn lowered down to his knees and elbows and prodded inside the nasal cavity again. "We're tryin' to track down the dickhead that created it. We think Pale Rider here may have been swiped from a medical college."
"Is it safe to come out?" Fred called. She hung from the driver's side window and waved. "Did you have a good Christmas?"
"Oh my god, yes. I got a cell phone and the prettiest leather jacket. There is NO WAY I'm wearing it patrolling." Thu wiped the back of her hand across her sweatshirt, leaving a wet smear. Gunn gave a sudden relieved gasp and held up the tweezers with a minute wad of thread and twigs clutched in its tip.
The manic jawbone went limp.
The body fell flat on its back.
Paloma studied the head, then picked it up and held it in front of her own with the jaw sagging open and a palm against each cheek. "Hey, look," she said cheerfully. "The Scream."
Author's note: Dunstan was a British saint, and the subject of the nursery rhyme, "Saint Dunstan, as the story goes / Once pulled the devil by his nose / With red-hot tongs, which made him roar / That could be heard ten miles or more."