Dark Harvest, page 6
So Pete and Kelly bury themselves in the shadows whenever they spot a gang on the prowl. Or they duck into an alley, or hide behind an unlocked backyard gate. In spite of the detours, the two cover some ground. They pass the town market on Oak Street. The butcher is staked out by the front door with a sawed-off shotgun, and Pete nearly doubles over at the sight of all that food safe and secure behind those big glass windows. Just looking at it makes him feel like someone tied a knot around his middle and yanked it tight.
But he knows they’d better hustle along, same way he knows that he’s got nothing to complain about if he measures his misery against Kelly’s. And she’s not complaining at all. She’s limping a little bit, but it’s not like it’s her leg that’s hurt. The way she’s breathing tells Pete that it’s something else, probably her ribs. That’s no surprise—she took some pretty brutal kicks.
“You need to catch a breather?” Pete asks. “We can find a place and rest up.”
“I’m okay. I can make it.”
“I’m not so sure.”
Kelly stops and looks at him. Dead straight in the eye, like she’s trying to see inside his skull, the same way he looked at her a few minutes ago.
Her eyes are green. He hadn’t noticed that before.
“It’s Pete McCormick, right?”
“Yeah. Right. I can tell I made a real impression on you in Bio.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, Pete.” She smiles and lets it linger. “Maybe you did make an impression…and maybe you set it in cement tonight.”
Pete’s glad she smiled. Glad, too, that she said what she said.
“And maybe you’re right about catching a break,” she says. “My ribs are killing me. If we can find a place—”
And then it’s like someone bashed a hammer straight through the night. A window shatters behind them. Pete whirls as a shotgun blast rocks the street, just in time to see a kid who’s holding a brick get blown out of his sneakers in the grocery store parking lot.
Kelly’s breath catches in her throat. Pete yanks the .45. The butcher, Mr. Jarrett, jacks another shell into his shotgun. The market’s burglar alarm is ringing like it’s the 3:15 bell and school just let out. Another kid charges Jarrett, and the sawed-off thunders and damn near cuts the guy in half, but there are three more kids waiting behind the two who are dead. Two of them wind up and fire bricks at the butcher. Jarrett dodges one of them but not the other. It belts him hard and he goes through a window, the busting glass cutting him in a dozen places, but he’s already rolling with that shotgun as the kids move forward. The barrel rises beneath Jarrett’s bloody face, and a couple more bricks hurtle in his direction, and the shotgun spits fire.
“We’d better move,” Pete says, and Kelly’s already doing it. Together, they run up Oak Street. Kelly’s not limping now, though if you listened to her breathe, you’d know she should be. Behind them, the burglar alarm’s banging in the night, and those boys are yelling like wild dogs, and Jarrett’s screaming, and it’s the most awful sound Pete has ever heard in his life. It’s a sound that should be buckled up in a straightjacket.
Then there’s another sound. A police siren. A block ahead, a black-and-white Dodge makes the corner. Pete freezes dead in his tracks. He’s standing there in the middle of the street with a stolen .45 in his hand, and there’s the worst kind of trouble he can think of behind him and a prowl car up ahead, maybe with the owner of that stolen pistol behind the wheel.
Headlights scorch Pete’s retinas. “This way!” Kelly shouts, grabbing his arm, and Pete starts to move. But he can’t escape those scorching headlights. They’re tracking him as he crosses the street, and so is the prowl car.
Tires scream in the night. The stink of burning rubber fills the air. The car door bangs open. Jerry Ricks’s voice chews Pete’s heels. “Freeze, you piece of shit!”
That’s the last thing in the world Pete’s going to do. He’s running along the railroad tracks, following Kelly down a raised strip of roadbed. Gunfire erupts behind them, and one of the slugs rings against the ribbon of steel just inches from Pete’s foot. He grabs Kelly, yanking her toward the far rail. Another shot whips past them as they dive into the darkness. They hit the ground hard and tumble down the gravel embankment on the far side of the tracks, but Pete comes up fast with the stolen .45 in his hand.
He stays low, sticking to the shadows, watching the headlight glow spilling over the raised roadbed, waiting…
Ricks’s footsteps crunch gravel on the other side of the tracks. Backlit by the prowl car, the lawman’s shadow stretches across the roadbed, creeping over the building at Pete’s back. Pete swears under his breath. It’s already too late to make a run for it. Kelly’s still on the ground, and he won’t leave without her…so it looks like he’s going to have to stand his ground and—
In the distance, Jarrett’s shotgun thunders again. God knows who’s got the damn thing now, because the butcher’s screaming like a guy who’s been skinned alive, and the sound of laughing boys does the same job on the night.
Twenty feet away…maybe thirty…Jerry Ricks cusses a blue streak.
“You just got lucky, McCormick!” he yells. “That’s right! I saw you, asshole…and I saw your little girlfriend, too! Right now I’ve got other fish to fry, but I’ll settle up with the both of you before this night’s over!”
The cop’s footsteps set a brittle rhythm as he runs to the prowl car.
The door slams. The big Dodge peels out.
Pete jams the .45 under his belt and helps Kelly to her feet.
“Okay?” he asks.
“Doesn’t matter,” she says. “Let’s get out of here.”
They follow the tracks about a quarter mile.
Pete can’t help looking over his shoulder, but no one’s behind them now.
Before long, a half dozen hard pops of pistol fire sound in the distance. Instantly, Pete pictures those last three kids going face down in the parking lot outside the market, and Jerry Ricks standing over them with a smoking pistol in his hand.
“That’s it for those guys,” Kelly says, as if she’s reading his mind.
She moves away from the tracks, cutting between a machine shop and a storage building owned by the railroad. Pete follows her into an alley that runs east-west. Without a word, they cut back toward Oak Street. The buildings are two-story here—square, brick and stone. Heavy cornices cut off the moonlight, but there are a few lights set above solid rear doors. Not one of those doors has a window, and most of them are marked with two stenciled words: DELIVERY ENTRANCE.
The alley runs parallel to Main Street, so Pete knows he’s looking at the rear entrances of the town’s largest businesses. He eyeballs each door as they pass, looking for a weak spot, but every one looks as solid as the last. Not that he’d trade the .45 for a million bucks with Jerry Ricks gunning for him, but right now he wishes he had a crowbar, something he could use to jimmy one of those doors.
It turns out Kelly’s got something a lot better than that.
She stops at a door marked THEATER EXIT ONLY.
She takes a key from her pocket and slips it into the lock.
In all the excitement, Pete forgot that Kelly’s uncle owns the movie theater. That’s where he first noticed her—working behind the concession stand during the summer. He even bought popcorn from her a couple of times, though he was too shy to say anything.
Pete’s pretty sure it won’t work that way tonight. They’re sitting in a couple of plush seats. Front row, balcony. The house lights are on, but awfully dim. Kelly’s already filled a plastic bag with ice from the snack bar, and she’s holding it against her ribs. She’s fixed up Pete pretty well, too. Brought him a couple candy bars that he gobbled like a hungry timber wolf. Now he’s working on a large Coke and a bucket of day-old popcorn. It’s taking the edge off that five-day hunger, but to tell the truth Pete’s thoughts aren’t focused on his belly anymore.
There’s only one thing he’s thinking about, really.
“That son of a bitch tried to kill us,” Pete says.
“Why do you seem surprised?” Kelly smiles. “After all, you broke into his house tonight and stole one of his guns.”
“He couldn’t know that yet.”
“Well, a guy like Ricks just has one gear. Maybe it doesn’t matter what you did.”
“You don’t have to tell me that,” Pete says, remembering the beating Ricks gave him with that nightstick. “I know all about Jerry Ricks.”
“Uh-uh. You might think you do, but you don’t.”
Pete’s brow wrinkles. As comments go, that one’s a blind-sider, and he remembers what the two football players said about the girl not making much sense. While Pete doesn’t want to put himself in the same IQ ballpark as Riley Blake and Marty Weston, he’s got to wonder if tonight’s events have his brain rattling around in his head a little more than usual.
“Maybe I’m a little thick,” he says. “If you’re trying to tell me something, I think you’ll have to spell it out.”
“Okay. Let’s try this—what do you know about me, Pete?”
“Well, I heard about your parents getting killed in a car accident—”
“Uh-uh. That’s a lie.”
“What?”
“My parents were killed, all right, but not in any accident. One night last summer, three men showed up at our house. One of them was your buddy Jerry Ricks. The other two were Ralph Jarrett and some guy named Kirby…I think he works down at the grain elevator.
“They all had guns—they broke in on us right in the middle of Ed Sullivan. Kirby shot my mom, killed her before she even knew what was happening. Dad went after him, but he never even got close. Ricks got in his way. They fought, and my dad ended up on the ground, and then all three of them started in on him—”
“Jesus.”
“I tried to run, but Jarrett caught me. I think I went a little crazy…I know he hit me with his pistol, and I passed out for a while.”
Kelly stops for a moment, swallowing hard. “When I came to, my dad was sitting in a chair. His face was a mess. Bruised, bloody…I could hardly make out what he was saying. Ricks and the other two were asking him questions about things I didn’t understand. I remember Jarrett asking my father if he really thought he’d get away with jumping the Line. My dad said, ‘Hell, I got away with it for nearly twenty years.’ They all just laughed at that, and Ricks told him that he’d have to pay the price now that they’d finally caught up with him.
“My dad asked them if they were from the Harvester’s Guild. I remember that. Ricks said, ‘Well, we’re not exactly from the 4-H.’ Then he said they were taking me with them to pay my father’s debt to the town. I remember what he said: ‘Blood will square the deal.’
“I was looking at my mom, there on the floor in a pool of her own blood, when Ricks said those words. And then he shot my father. Just like that. That bastard stuck a pistol in my father’s face, and he pulled the trigger, and—”
“You don’t have to talk about it,” Pete says.
“I can’t talk about it. In the end, they got what they wanted. They brought me back to town and left me at my uncle’s house. No one in the family told me anything. They wouldn’t even talk about what happened. I was terrified. It wasn’t the way you’d think it would be, even on days I managed to fight against it. It was like a sickness, the kind of feeling you’d never want inside you. And it kept crawling around in there. I couldn’t sleep at night. I couldn’t think straight during the day. If I wasn’t thinking about things that already happened, I’d be worrying about things that hadn’t happened yet. It was awful.
“I didn’t start thinking straight until school started. That’s when I heard about the Run for the first time. I figured that maybe I could get away. While everyone was hunting the October Boy, I could sneak out of town. It seemed like a really good idea…until tonight. Those two idiots cornered me, and it seemed like my whole plan was over before I even managed to make three blocks. And that’s when I understood that nothing had changed—things were exactly the same as they’d been in our living room last summer when Ricks and those other two men broke through the door. All I could think about was how funny the whole thing was.”
“Funny?”
“Yeah. First me, thinking I’d figured everything out. And then everyone else…”
Kelly stops, shaking her head.
“What?” Pete asks. “What about everyone else?”
“Every kid in this town, chasing after a boogeyman with a pumpkin for a head, scared to death of a walking scarecrow with a big sharp butcher knife. Every kid in this town, thinking that there’s a way out of a nightmare through a fairy tale, when there’s really no way out at all.”
“You’re telling me that the October Boy isn’t real?”
“Oh, he’s real, all right. Sawtooth Jack is out there. But I don’t think he’s the boogeyman, Pete. I think he’s something else entirely…something that’s not really that different from you or me.”
Pete sits there. He’s planted in a plush chair in a movie theater. He’s hanging on to every word Kelly says. He doesn’t even realize it, but he just grabbed another handful of popcorn, the way you do when things are getting really good. And now he’s staring straight ahead at those midnight blue curtains that hang across the stage, and it’s almost as if he’s expecting them to pull back and reveal that big-ticket plot twist that’s been hiding up there on the king-size CinemaScope screen all along—
“Who won the Run last year?” Kelly asks.
“A guy named Jim Shepard.”
“And what happened to him?”
“Hell, everybody knows that. Shepard got a pocketful of money, and he got out of town. I heard he’s out west somewhere, and—”
The words die in Pete’s mouth just that quick. It’s Kelly’s knowing smile that killed them. But that’s okay with Kelly. Pete’s silence means his brain’s finally kicking into gear.
Yeah. Pete’s starting to think. Maybe he’s thinking about Jim Shepard’s parents, who don’t seem very happy in spite of their brand-new house, and the free ride at the bank and the market, and that shiny black Cadillac parked in their driveway that doesn’t even have 1,000 miles on the odometer. Or maybe he’s thinking of Shepard himself, what kind of kid he was, what kind of trouble he might have caused in a town like this if he’d been bottled up here for another year and started to wise up to the way the wheels really spin.
Or maybe, just maybe, Pete’s thinking about a group of men called the Harvester’s Guild, and a thing that grows out in a cornfield. Maybe he’s wondering what kind of horror might sprout a misfit like that, wondering too if the seed was planted last Halloween night in dirt tamped down with a murdered kid’s blood—
That midnight blue curtain still covers the movie screen like a shroud, but Pete might as well be the Man with the X-Ray Eyes because he can sure enough see a movie running in his head. It’s called The October Boy, and that sucker has just kicked off the cinches.
You know how that works, even if we’re only talking revelations of the creepshow variety. You lay down your money, you get real comfortable in your chair, you eat your popcorn…and all of a sudden here comes twenty feet of cross-dressing Norman Bates heading your way with a knife in his hand, or Vincent Price pulling the strings of his killer skelo-puppet up there in the house on Haunted Hill, or that poor son of a bitch who discovered that first pod in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Those are the kinds of surprises that make you jump in the dark, but you can leave them right there if you want to. The credits roll, and you suck that last sip of Coke out of your wax-paper cup and shove that empty popcorn bag under your seat along with Normie and Vince and all those rubbery pods and the guy who found them, and you walk out of the theater and down the street and back into the world where you live.
But that’s not the way it works with the October Boy’s story. Darkness…light…it all lives here. Real is real, no matter where you’re sitting. Once you’ve ripped the Phantom’s mask off this sucker, you’re knuckle to door with the truth. You’ve dug a hole in that monster’s ugly skin, and it’s scabbed over the top of you and scarred over, and there’s no way out now that you’re living in the place where black blood flows.
Yeah. That’s where we are right now. Pete McCormick’s sitting in the movie theater, wheels turning in his head like they’ve never turned before. The October Boy’s behind the wheel of Mitch Crenshaw’s Chrysler, driving through a town he hasn’t seen in exactly one year. They’re a study in before and after, these two. This year’s best shot at winning the Run, and last year’s undisputed champ.
Because the October Boy has a name, and if you haven’t already figured it out that name is Jim Shepard. One year ago on a night just like this one, Jim brought down the ’62 version of Sawtooth Jack with a length of case-hardened chain. Shepard caught last year’s model trying to crawl down a manhole over on West Orchard Street, cut the goggle-headed sucker off at that particular pass, and got down to the business of a no-holds-barred, one-on-one rumble.
And that was okay with good ol’ ’62. He’d already killed seven on his way into town that night, and he pegged Shepard for an easy number eight. So the Boy came straight at Jim with his butcher knife, and it was touch-and-go for a while. With a single slash, Ol’ Hacksaw Face notched Jim’s wrist to the bone. He creased the meat between a couple of Shepard’s ribs with another, but that didn’t even slow Jim down. He came back hard, caving in the Boy’s serrated grin with a whip of the chain, turning those taut links on the follow-through and pulverizing half the thing’s head.
When Jim was done wailing away, all that remained of ’62 was a broken thing twitching on the ground. Yet the moment of victory wasn’t the way Jim thought it’d be. It was weird…unsettling in a way he could never anticipate…like winning the Indianapolis 500 but running over his own dog to do it.
