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JOHNNY MAJORS STRETCHED, feeling the ripple of ot out of bed and moved in the dark toward a chair in one corner of the bedroom where his clothes had been thron in hasty disarray As he buttoned his shirt he looked across at the woman&039;s nude for fro She said softly, "It early yet You don&039;t have to go"
"Ten to eight," he said, struggling into his jeans "Old lady&039;ll be wonderin&039; where I ao over to the Landfall and see I ain&039;t there and then what gonna happen?"
"You scared?" she asked; a et to hionna play her to the listree won&039;t be back &039;til torinned, his teeth glea in the darkness "The hell you say If your man found us here in the mornin&039; uh uh, no And my old lady wouldn&039;t be so daot to play it sh of you for bothherself up on the pillows, her heavy breasts hanging over the sheet
He castree&039;ll have one most all the time as it is now So" He stroked the smooth flesh between her breasts "Damn me, you&039;re a fine woman, Nora," he said in a husky voice
"I need you to stay with ht"
Leaning over, licking beneath a nipple, he realized he was hard again, but he couldn&039;t spend the tiht, and two hours the night before; there was no use in pressing his luck But damn, what a woman she was She twisted those soft, beautiful hips a thousand different hen he was inside her, wringing hi hihty, if that sonofabitch Cale ever found out his wo ti to hi his belt buckle, but he stood up and o now" He slipped his shoes on "There&039;ll be more times"
She smiled at him seductively and he looked at her appreciatively - she was still war of their heated flesh He stood over by the rooh a broken red shutter When he bent down to lace his shoes she saw so past theShe sat up in bed, catching her breath in a sudden gulp of air
"What&039;s wrong?" he asked, thinking she was playing with hiain "Hey, what&039;s theif she had really seen soh the shutter? Someone her husband sent to keep a watch on her? She reached down for the sodden sheet and drew it around her like a shroud Maybe it was even Cale himself, the bastard co his shoes, eager to be going The house was aride in the dark on his bicycle The look in the wo hi, he demanded, "Hey What you lookin&039; at, damn jumbies?"
The shadow fell across the shutter slats She raised a hand, palm out as if to ward it off Her mouth opened, and her voice came out as an eerie whine
Even as Johnny Majors whirled around, sensing the presence of so beyond the , there was a sharp crack of splintering wood as a blow struck the front door He cried out in fear, hisIt was Cale come back, either that or so the wo into the bedrooh the , and Johnny caught the brief flash of a wrench in the ht There wereinto one pulsating darkness that ripped at the shutter and tore the glass away Nora screamed, and backed into a far corner, Johnny looked around desperately for a weapon, hearing the front door being broken open He picked up the chair beside theand struck at the shadows, again and again, and for a moment they backed away
"Jesus," he cried out, his chest heaving, holding the chair before him like a shield "Jesus God who is that out there WHO IS THAT OUT THERE?"
And in the sudden silence he heard theed, painful, as if they were unused to the air, as if each lungful was raging fire He could hear no voices, nofroh toslowly through the rean to pull it away
Johnny stood transfixed; the woman whined like a child fronarled and brown, the skeletal fingers like the claws of an anilass, a tiny noise which see about the room, borne in by the ht theus, or sliuts of the sea
In the next instant the shadow hurtled itself through the rest of the glass, its ar for the man The woman screamed, a pitched, terrified noise - oh God, asn&039;t this Cale not Cale NOT CALE
Thething that had crawled over the sill; he struck so as solid as bone but could not stop the phantoh the door and were now behind hiht hiripped his hair Nora&039;s screa of her throat, then fell away to becoht free of the things, flailing with his ars, but now they were all around hi close, those terrible hands sharp icicles on his face, his throat, his ar one of the of foul breath close to his ear; a tre hi pain of a broken shoulder as he slid helplessly to the floor He twisted around, his heart ha at his insides, to face the shadows as they approached The wo on the floor on her stoainst the wall, blood dripping fros as they reached out for him
The darkness covered them, but he could see their eyes Red pinpoints of hate, they burned deep within withered skulls, unblinking and penetrating The shadows breathed like the rising and falling of the elbows that fanned Hell&039;s blaze Johnny Majors held up his hands in horror and supplication, for he knew the hour of his death had arrived
"Please," he pleaded He could not hear his voice over the din of his bursting heart "Please don&039;t kill littered off rotted, broken teeth, and a black tongue licked along what remained of lips
"Please don&039;t kill" Johnny Majors whispered
Two claws descended; they grasped theblood And slowly, very slowly, they began to pull the man&039;s face apart, even as he screaers ripped away the nose in tatters of dripping flesh; a hand cla deep, choking off the screa a dark red river Johnny Majors lay paralyzed against the splattered wall, his eyes glazed in shock, unseeing, his nerves feeling the agony but his brain gone and unable to respond The hand at his throat began to peel the flesh away, exposing veins and cords The shadows moved closer as the odor and warmth of the blood wafted up to them Another moved in, bent forward, the eyes whirlpools of red; its claw flashed out, ripping away a cheek that dangled on slivers of skin A three-fingered hand, bare bone showing on the knuckles, probed at an eye, in the next instant digging in and tearing it away like a quivering grape from a vine
The man opened his mouth and moaned, then shuddered involuntarily His head fell back, exposing the torn throat to the silver light The punctured artery in his neck continued to pu puddles
And then the criues voraciously consuh and gnawing hungrily on bone; the weight of the things covered hi useless, in the air, the fingers slowly curling, and then fell back The roo of teeth on bone, the sucking at gaping wounds and the tearing away of chunks of flesh Blood covered the floor, and sos bent down to lap at the puddles, an to tear the body to pieces, biting through bone for the marrow and the fluids They worked faster and faster,in the room The woman whimpered where she lay They pushed at each other to reach the wounds and when one wound was dry they groped for others, hissing in fury as another pushed them aside They broke open new rivulets of fluids, like dark wine froreedy as they feasted, ripping strips of flesh and hoarding the out the final drops And when they were finished with the risly pieces and sucked hih to fill their collapsed veins and arteries, not enough to stop the terrible pain, not to quench the raging fire, they turned with a vengeance upon the wo, so themselves across the floor toward her, and she was powerless to ed because they were still not filled, not relieved of their inhuman pain, and their teeth were merciless
As they fed on her led itself and rose to its feet Blood smeared its lips and hands, and as it backed away from the mass of bodies it lifted a palm and licked at the hu as the others tried to satisfy their hungers The agony still remained, deep within dried and twisted tissues, within muscles drawn hard as stone, within flesh shrunken and wrinkled around the bones With each breath the agony welled up, fanning the blaze ever higher The thing in the corner put a hand to its throat in a vain atte pain No pulse beat there; the heart had become a lump of decayed matter, and the veins had collapsed like the walls of ee and madness and hate
On the wall beside it there was an oval mirror It turned its head very slowly and peered into thein that face were the eyes, and those were sunken and terrible, slits of evil in the shriveled head At one ti and wolflike, full of glory and the blaze of battle The once aquiline nose was flattened and almost rotted away, now just a pit into which the face was slowly collapsing Patches of yellow hair clung to theopened its ed teeth glittered in the light
The thing lifted up its ared across thethe vision of the corpse&039;s face into two disjointed parts It struck again and again, the breath coan to fall to pieces When all the glass had broken and the fra let out a hoarse roar of tor in an e on the woman&039;s naked body, heard but did not pause in their feast Currents of blood shifted around the the tattered remnants of their brown uniforo Inn, David Moore sat sipping a drink and watched a light far out at sea A cigarette burned in an ashtray beside his chair; there was a half-ehter, traveling toward the port of a larger island The sight of it stirred his wanderlust, made him think of distant shores, of people he had known and left behind
His time in Baltimore seemed like someone else&039;s life now He had been a different David Moore then, a man naive and unaware in soas fate, it hadon a path fro could ever alter his own personal tragedy; the scar would always reed, on his soul Since the deaths of his wife and son he had deterh he had fallen in love with places and experiences he could never really get close to people again It was too dangerous He had been attracted to other woht sexual encounters just as the wohts with did, but he found it difficult to express his emotions anymore He knew he drank too much because he was afraid of both life and death; rather, he was suspended between the in the multitudinous experiences his travels had offered him, while his deep-seated emotions were numbed and frozen He was now just the shell of a h Beth&039;s hair and felt the power spark between them like currents of electricity And yet, in all this tirow closer to her Sometimes, locked in a dream, he knew he only had to reach out a few inches and touch her supple naked body, draw her closer to hiain
And thinking of Brian, his son, was just as difficult: What sort of man would he have becoo to college? God forbid that he would have taken a position at his grandfather&039;s bank and been stifled just as David had been No, that was too easy Perhaps the boy would have been intrigued by the ocean, and would have chosen a life that would have fulfilled hiraphy, say Those were fields David ht have picked, had not the family decided on his direction in life He would have made certain that Brian knew there was an entire world of choices; he would have made certain the boy knew his life was his own
Nohen the ru across the reef, when he sat alone with the night, he couldn&039;t keep the i touch-football in a wide, grassy park under fleecy clouds, Beth&039;s hand reaching for his under a long waxed table during a Thanksgiving dinner at the elder Moore&039;s estate, the flashing blare of a carnivalas Brian, on a red-rinned
And after it had happened, after the day of stornosed his listlessness, insoe as "survivor&039;s syndro room of the family hoh a flat haze of blue Cuban cigar s intent on the flae ain, David," the oldto help you I want you to understand that here and now Your barrooone far enough"
The youngershifted, then burst into fla to say to ainst ice, and locked "I didn&039;t ask you to help me last time," he said quietly
"By God, so off ashes onto the Oriental carpet "What was I to do, leave you in jail for the rest of the night, let sooddamned reporter find you in there drunk and do a story about how Horton Moore&039;s son ild and shot out every daht city blocks? Jesus! That would be exactly what my investors would like to see!"
"Fuck your investors," Moore said, in a whisper, too low for his father to hear
"And you&039;d be in jail right this minute if I didn&039;t have a lot of friends at City Hall!" the old"My God, boy, what&039;s to become of you? There are no black sheep in the Moore family; I want you to know that! And I won&039;t sit here and watch you become one, not while I have breath left in ; he heard the fire burning and to him it sounded like the noise of the sea over rocks
"I don&039;t know, I don&039;t know," his fatherout a strea above the , solerandfather "Maybe because you were my only child, maybe that&039;s why I&039;ve been so lenient with you Maybe I&039;ve loved you too much, I don&039;t know I thank God your mother isn&039;t alive to see what you&039;ve becoave him was so fierce the old man was silent "And what have I beco ofboreswalls, the dead rustle of papers I was a born executive, isn&039;t that what you told your associates? An executive in the Moore ain"
"Then ill you do, you idiot? Goddamn it, that&039;s what you&039;ve been educated to do! There&039;s nothing else for you! My God, I know you&039;ve been through a bad ti like a lunatic! They&039;ve been gone sixback, and there&039;s nothing else now except putting your nose back to the grindstone and doing what you&039;re supposed to do!"
"No," he said "I can&039;t"
"I see," the old ar from his mouth and his smile was cool, sarcastic "You can&039;t or you won&039;t?"
"Both"
"Then if you won&039;t pull yourself together like a htly, "you&039;re no son ofabout you I can see that now"
"Maybe" David Moore stood up; their conversation was co to an end, as it usually did, like the weakened last blows of weary gladiators "I&039;ll tell you what I a over for a long ti to travel; I don&039;t care where to I&039; until I&039;ve seen what I want to see, and ain There&039;s nothing forto run Froo on and run! I don&039;t care! Where do you think you&039;ll run to? What are you looking for, another girl like her?" He stopped suddenly; the last word had come out as a half-snarl His son turned on hie made the old man lean back He closed his mouth, not too obviously because he didn&039;t want David to think he was frightened
Moore controlled himself and then said, "When I was a child and knew no better," he said, "you told me how much alike ere I&039;o on," the old man told him "Run"
Moore looked once into his father&039;s face to find the man that was truly there; his father quickly averted his eyes "I&039;d better go now," he said finally