Off Season - Jack Ketchum [63]
She noticed their ornaments—the beads and colored stones for the women, the leather fringes. Knotted into the fringes was what might have been human hair. One of the girl children wore a necklace. Finger bones, Marjie thought.
She watched the thin man eyeing the couple rutting on the floor of the cave. Around his neck was a silver crucifix. It was the only ornamentation she saw on him. The women wore gull feathers and porcupine quills in their hair. Both men and boys were painted with coal dust, vermilion, ochre, ashes, and berry juice thickened with fat.
They wore the smell of fat and decay like a second skin. The odor was everywhere, in their browse beds and in the stolen clothing, in the very walls of the cave itself.
She had smelled something like it once before. It was on a car trip to Florida she and Carla had taken with their parents when they were teenagers. They had been visiting friends for the day and were on their way back to the motel, driving a narrow two-lane blacktop that skirted the Everglades. It was Carla who spotted the vultures up ahead on the side of the road, and Carla who wanted to stop. Her parents made a fuss and refused at first, but even then Carla was used to getting what she wanted. The vultures were feeding on the carcass of a dog. Marjie surprised everybody by deciding to get out of the car with her. Her parents had made them promise not to get too close—though they couldn’t have walked far from the car if they’d wanted to.
Even yards away, the stink was immense and awful, a salty unspeakable tang in the air that spoke of years and years of dried and matted blood, of old rotten meat; the dark breath of corruption. Somehow she’d known instinctively that it was the birds and not their prey who bore this horrible, foul odor, and that they bore it for a lifetime. And it was the stench and not those tiny alien eyes—terrible enough in themselves—which drove them back inside the air-conditioned automobile. It was the unmistakable smell of the carrion-eater, the very reek of death.
And now, inside the cage suspended above the floor of the cave, she smelled it again. From where she sat she could see the stewpot, a set of disembodied fingers turning slowly. She would not call these people human, she refused to think of them that way. They were what they smelled like: vultures. They intended to make a grisly meal of her. Just as they’d made of Carla. Just as they planned to do with this strange, sad boy sprawled on the bottom of the cage.
Marjie had touched him, then shook him, and gotten no response whatsoever. He seemed worse off than Laura. The children had not even bothered trying to rouse him with their sticks. She wondered how long the boy had been here, what miserable sights had been presented to those blankly staring green-blue eyes. Had he watched them butcher others? She didn’t doubt that he had. There would be no help from him or from Laura. Only Nick. Only Nick waving from the rooftop, safe, Nick who would follow her. If he could.
That man in the woods, she thought. The man in red. Nick might not make it. He might not live to follow her. She had to consider that. What then? Please, she thought, let him follow. Her fingers clutched the bars of the cage. Her knuckles went white. The thin man was staring at her from where he sat against the wall. The couple on the floor had finished with one another. How long, she wondered, before they start on us. How long do I have, how much time?
Her answer came swiftly.
4:12 A.M.
Nick lay on his stomach behind the sand dune and waited. He heard