“Some of those things are on it.”
When she still did nothing but look at him with a kind of dazed wonder, Ralph attempted to pull it from her fist. At first he couldn’t. She had it in a death grip. He pried at her fingers, hoping he wouldn’t have to break them to make her let go, but he would if he had to. If that was what it took. Those things would be a lot worse than poison ivy if they touched her. And if they got under her skin . . .
She seemed to come back to herself—a little, anyway—and opened her hand. The sock dropped, the toe making a clunking sound when it hit the stone floor. He backed away from the worms, which were still blindly seeking (or maybe not blind at all; they were coming right for the two of them), pulling Holly by the hand, which was still curled from the fierce grip she’d had on the sock. She looked down, saw the danger, and drew in a breath.
“Don’t scream,” he told her. “Can’t risk anything else falling down. Just climb.”
He began to pull her up the stairs. After the first four or five she was able to climb on her own, but they were going backward in order to keep an eye on the worms, which were still spilling from the outsider’s cloven head. Also from the teardrop mouth.
“Stop,” she whispered. “Stop, look at them, they’re just milling around. They can’t get up the steps. And they’re starting to die.”
She was right. They were slowing down, and a great heap of them near the outsider wasn’t moving at all. But the body was; somewhere inside it, the animating force was still trying to live. The Bolton-thing humped and jerked, arms waving in a kind of semaphore. As they watched, the neck shortened. The remains of the head began to draw into the collar of the shirt. Claude Bolton’s black hair at first stuck up, then was gone.
“What is it?” Holly whispered. “What are they?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Ralph said. “I only know that you’ll never have to buy a drink for the rest of your life, at least when you’re with me.”
“I rarely drink alcohol,” she said. “It goes badly with my medicine. I think I told you tha—”
She abruptly leaned over the rail and vomited. He held her while she did it.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be. Let’s—”
“Get the frack out of here,” she finished for him.
22
Sunlight had never felt so good.
They got as far as the Chief Ahiga sign before Holly said she felt lightheaded and had to sit down. Ralph found a flat rock that was big enough for both of them, and sat beside her. She glanced at the sprawled body of Jack Hoskins, made a desolate squeaking sound, and began to cry. At first it came out in a series of choked, reluctant sobs, as if someone had told her it was terribly wrong to weep in front of another person. Ralph put an arm around her shoulders, which felt sadly thin. She buried her face against the front of his shirt and began to sob in earnest. They had to get back to Yune, who might have been more badly hurt than it had seemed—they had been under fire, after all, hardly the time to make an accurate diagnosis. Even at best, the man had a broken elbow and a dislocated shoulder. But she needed at least a little time, and she had earned it by doing what he, the big detective, had been unable to do.
Within forty-five seconds, the storm had begun to lessen. In a minute, it was over. She was good. Strong. Holly looked up at him, eyes red and swimming, but Ralph wasn’t entirely sure she knew at first where she was. Or who he was, for that matter.
“I can’t do it again, Bill. Not ever. Ever ever ever! And if this one comes back the way Brady did, I’ll kill myself. Do you hear me?”
He shook her gently. “He’s not coming back, Holly. I promise you.”
She blinked. “Ralph. I meant to say Ralph. Did you see what came out of his . . . did you see those worms?”
“Yes.”
“Oough! Oough!” She made a retching noise, and covered her mouth.
“Who told you how to make a blackjack out of a sock? And how hard it can hit if the sock is one of the long ones? Was it Bill Hodges?”
Holly nodded.
“What was it loaded with?”
“Ball bearings, just like Bill’s. I bought them in the Walmart automotive department, back in Flint City. Because I can’t use guns. I didn’t think I’d have to use the Happy Slapper, either, it was only an impulse.”
“Or an intuition.” He smiled, although he was hardly aware of it; he still felt numb all over, and kept looking around to make sure none of those worms were squirming after them, desperate to survive in a new host. “Is that what you call it? The Happy Slapper?”
“It’s what Bill called it. Ralph, we have to go. Yune—”
“I know. But I have to do something first. Sit where you are.”
He went to Hoskins’s body and made himself hunt through the dead man’s pockets. He found the keys to the pickup truck and returned to Holly. “Okay.”
They started down the path. Holly stumbled once and he grabbed her. Then it was his turn to almost go down, and it was she grabbing him.
Like a couple of damn cripples, he thought. But after what we saw—
“There’s so much we don’t know,” she said. “Where he came from. If those bugs were a disease or maybe even some kind of alien life-form. Who his victims were—not just the children he killed, but the ones who got blamed for the killings. There must have been a lot of them. A lot. Did you see his face at the end? How it changed?”
“Yes,” Ralph said. He would never forget it.
“We don’t know how long he lived. How he could project himself. What he was.”
“That much we do know,” Ralph said. “He—it—was El Cuco. Oh, and something else: the sonofabitch is dead.”
23
They were most of the way down the path when a horn began to beep in short blasts. Holly stopped, biting at lips which had already taken a lot of abuse.
“Relax,” Ralph said. “I think that’s Yune.”
The path was wider now, and less steep, so they were able to move faster. When they came around the storage shed, they saw it was indeed Yune, sitting half in and half out of Hoskins’s pickup, beeping the horn with his right hand. His swollen and bloody left arm lay in his lap like a log.
“You can quit that now,” Ralph said. “Mother and Father are here. How are you?”
“My arm hurts like blue fuck, but otherwise I’m okay. Did you get him? El Cuco?”
“We got him,” Ralph said. “Holly got him. He wasn’t human, but he died, just the same. His days of killing children are over.”
“Holly got him?” He looked at her. “How?”
“We can talk about that later,” she said. “Right now I’m more concerned about you. Have you passed out? Are you lightheaded?”
“I got a little dizzy walking over here. Seemed to take forever, and I had to rest a couple of times. I was hoping I’d meet you coming out. Praying, more like it. Then I saw this truck. Must belong to the shooter. John P. Hoskins, according to the registration. Is he who I think he is?”
Ralph nodded. “Of the Flint City police. And it’s was. He’s dead, too. I shot him.”
Yune’s eyes widened. “What the hell was he doing here?”
“The outsider sent him. How he managed that I have no idea.”
“I thought he might have left the keys, but no joy on that. And nothing for pain relief in the glove compartment, either. Just the registration, his insurance card, and a bunch of crap.”
“I’ve got the keys,” Ralph said. “They were in his pocket.”
“And I’ve got something for pain,” Holly said. She reached into one of the voluminous side pockets of her beat-up suit coat and brought out a large brown prescription bottle. It was unlabeled.
“What else have you got in there?” Ralph asked. “A camp stove? Coffee pot? Shortwave radio?”
“Work on that sense of humor, Ralph.”
“That’s not me being funny, that’s true admiration.”