I put my hand on Slim’s thigh. The leg of her cut-off jeans was warm and damp. “Wanta go back?” I asked her.
“I don’t know. I think maybe.” She must’ve taken her foot off the gas pedal; the engine quieted and we slowed down. “What about you?” she asked.
I hated the idea of going back to Janks Field. We’d been lucky to get out of there alive, and the chances of finding Rusty alive were slim.
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s go back and find him.”
“What the hell,” Lee said. “In for a penny...”
“ ‘And gentlemen in England now a-bed,’ ” quoted Slim, “ ‘shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap....’ ”
“You bet,” Lee said.
Slim stopped the hearse. She shifted to reverse, started speeding backward, then twisted toward me in her seat to look back over her shoulder. “Damn!” She slammed on the brakes.
I looked over my shoulder. The window behind the front seat was shrouded with a curtain.
Slim glanced at the side mirrors. “I can’t drive backward without a rearview mirror.”
“Guess you’ll have to turn around,” I said.
“Too narrow.”
“Maybe go on to the highway,” Lee suggested. “Easy enough to turn....”
From behind us came a thud as if someone riding in back—in the coffin area—had stomped on the floor or dropped something.
Slim looked over her shoulder at the glass just behind our heads. “Rusty!” she called.
Lee was already throwing her door open.
As Lee leaped out, Slim shut off the engine and plucked the key from the ignition. Then she flung her door open.
I scurried out Lee’s side.
Lee was first to reach the rear of the hearse. She was trying to open its door, but not having any luck. “I think it’s locked,” she said.
“I’ve got the keys,” Slim said. She picked one and tried to put it into the lock hole. Her hand was shaking so badly that she couldn’t get it in for a while. When she finally poked its tip into the slot, it wouldn’t go in any farther. Wrong key. So she pulled it out and tried another. Again, she had trouble because she was trembling so badly. Then it went in.
She turned the key and worked the door handle. The door unlatched. She stepped back, pulling it toward herself, swinging it wide open.
The night, until then fresh and sweet with the aromas of a rain-soaked forest, suddenly went foul. The stench made me hold my breath. Lee clapped a hand across her mouth. Slim stepped around the open door, her lips pressed shut and her chest out. It was the way she sometimes looked out on the river just before she plunged below the surface.
I wished we were out on the river. Or anywhere else, just so we were miles away from here.
Inside the hearse a light had come on. It must’ve been triggered by the opening door.
We all gazed in.
The volunteers who’d gone up against Valeria in the cage were there: Chance Wallace, the handsome Marine; geeky Chester, our old enemy Scotty Douglas the hoodlum; and our chubby, sweet, stupid best friend, Rusty.
They were all naked.
They were all in pieces, piled up next to the casket within easy reach of ... its occupant.
Inside the casket, propped up with his head against the curtains of the window we’d been trying to look through, sat an obese, legless, hairless man. I guess it was a man. He looked like a bloated sack of slippery white skin. Except the skin was mostly scarlet with blood.
His bulgy eyes looked like a pair of bloodshot golf balls.
Clutched in both hands, upside-down just under his chin, was Rusty’s head. Snuffling and grunting, he shoved his maw into the raw gore of the neck stump. He ripped out a large gob, then raised his head, bumping it against the window, and seemed to smile at us ... with a dripping load of Rusty slopping out of his mouth.
Chapter Sixty-three
All things considered, I think we handled ourselves very well up to the point at which we looked into the back of the hearse.
What we saw in there ... it knocked out whatever remained of our brains and guts.
I have vague memories of noises coming from us. Things like “Whoa!” and “Yahhh!” and “Eeee!” as we backed away from the rear of the hearse. And someone—Slim. I think—slammed the door shut. And then we were running down the middle of the dirt road as if we had the boogey-man after us.
We ran and ran and ran. Finally we came to Route 3 and Slim led the way to her Pontiac. We all piled into the front seat. The three of us sat side by side, me in the middle, all of us huffing and whimpering while Slim tried to get her key into the ignition.