Off Season - Jack Ketchum [51]
He thought of the spirits, angry, maleficent, and powerful, and a chill scuttled like a crab through his body.
The wounded women and children began to whimper. He motioned them back to the fire.
The carcass was nearly burned on one side. This, too, was bad. It was the flesh of the dead that gave them power. He gestured to the kill and they understood him. He picked up a hatchet and hacked off one of the legs. Holding it sizzling and dripping fat in front of him, he walked back to the house.
The thin man brushed away his tears of rage and severed the head with his knife. He cracked it open on a nearby outcrop of rock. He scooped out the brains and with the brains in one hand and the head in the other, followed his brother. One by one the others followed suit, stripping the flesh from loin and breast and returning to the front of the house. There they stopped and waited for the man in red to join them, holding the flesh high so that those inside could see what they had done and fear them.
The man in the red shirt walked empty-handed from the fire to the body that lay sprawled beside the car and separated it from the body of his woman. He dragged the man in front of the car so that all could see in the headlights, and laid it on its back. The bullet wound was long and wide. With his knife he slit the man open from vent to sternum and, bending over, buried his face in the liver. He looked up, his face smeared with blood, and saw that the others had also begun to eat.
When the liver was half finished he pulled out the slippery pile of intestine and with one hand worked its contents down and away from him, while with the other he fed the long gray tube into his mouth and chewed. He smiled when he heard them screaming inside, and knew they had seen him, feeding like a wolf on their friend. The thin man joined him, then, slitting the man’s pants from the bottom to the top of the leg, and began tearing at his inner thighs. Around them the dark venous blood oozed into a slowly spreading pool. The thin man gestured to the eldest woman and the pregnant girl to come nearer.
He opened his knife and sliced off the penis and testicles and handed the penis to the girl and the testicles to the toothless woman. The girl ate with quick, birdlike movements, her head darting forward to her fingers like a bird pecking seeds on the ground.
He watched the door and window for signs of movement, for the gun, ready to spring away at any moment. He saw nothing. After a while he relaxed. Only the sound of someone sobbing reached his ears through the thick haze of pleasure and the good salt taste of blood.
It was Marjie who screamed, gazing out the window and seeing what they had done to her lover and her sister. The rest of what they heard outside was Laura’s ghostly keening wail as she pressed herself to the back wall and hugged her knees like a child, the wail turning to tears, having seen nothing and knowing all that she needed to know. For Marjie it was the end of something, and the beginning of something else. The beginning of acceptance, physical and mental which included the sudden numbness in the lips, the ringing in her ears that was only partly gunfire—acceptance of the fact that the death that was spread around her like a plague and that had come to her sister in such horrible fashion could come to her as well within the instant. It was cold and final, this feeling, a push into icy waters, but it made her clear-headed and sane where Laura was not, awakened part of her that loved life and would not retreat from death, because retreat was death now.
She saw that Laura was doomed and felt a surprising contempt for her—Carla had fought, Dan had fought. If she would not, to hell with her. She turned to Nick on the floor.
“How bad is it?” she said.
Nick grinned. It was not