He wasn’t.
Dr. Slattery gasped.
Mr. Wieland heard the small sound and his head jerked up, eyes darting toward the part in the curtains. His roved over the curtains, not lingering for even a moment on the narrow part. Those eyes were completely empty.
His mouth, however, was full.
Red bubbled on his lips and ran in lines down his cheeks and over his chin and splashed on the ivy pattern of the Wolverton Hospital patient gowns. Mr. Wieland’s mouth worked and worked, and even across the twelve feet that separated them, Dr. Slattery could hear the sucking, smacking sounds as his teeth chewed on what he had taken from old Mona Greene.
Dr. Slattery should have backed quietly away. She should have cleared the area and called security. She should have called the police. She did none of those things. Instead, Gail Slattery did the one thing that she should not have done.
She screamed.
Mr. Wieland’s eyes snapped back toward her and now he did see the narrow part. And the eye that looked through it. His lips curled back from his teeth and he dropped the remains of the sticklike arm he’d held.
With a howl of insatiable hunger, a hunger not at all satisfied by all that he had consumed, Mr. Wieland rushed around the bed straight toward Dr. Slattery. She screamed and screamed. She screamed as long as she could. As long as she was able.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
MAGIC MARTI IN THE MORNING
WNOW RADIO, MARYLAND
“This is Magic Marti at the mike with new tidbits for travelers. Well, it’s official, campers … the cow manure has hit the fan. We got a major storm clamped down over the region. Airports and bus terminals are shut down. Schools are closed and all nonessential activities have been canceled all across our listening area. And there’s still some police activity on Doll Factory Road in Stebbins. And we have unconfirmed reports of an incident at Wolverton Hospital on the Stebbins-Bordentown border. No details yet except that state police are on the scene. And … one more thing, kids. I know that big storms are kind of fun in a haunted house, roller-coaster ride sort of way, but this is serious business. Folks are out there dealing with this. Police, fire, and rescue units are going to be pushed to the limit, so please … no more of the crank calls about monsters eating people. Aunt Marti likes a good prank as much as the next gal, but c’mon guys … now’s not the time.”
CHAPTER SIXTY
THE FOREST
STEBBINS COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
Hartnup moved through the woods a dozen yards from the road, paralleling Doll Factory, heading toward Mason Street. He had no control over where his body went, just as he had no idea where it was going. There were more like him in the woods. Some close enough to see, others merely gray shapes in the rain. Some headed in the same direction, drawn by some force beyond Hartnup’s perception; others walked across his path, going north or south or east, drawn by other needs, other calls.
The body around him moved stiffly, and he could still feel it. The hoped-for rigor mortis was upon him now, slowing him, making his limbs move like stilts … but they kept moving. It hurt, too. No human before could ever appreciate the terrible, ceaseless pain of rigor. He knew the science and that was no comfort. The pain was going to get worse and worse. It was a process that starts as soon as respiration ceases. Muscles begin an inevitable and irreversible contraction. It was worse than a charley horse, worse than stomach cramps. It was everywhere at once and each jarring step sent nerve flashes through the dying muscles.
Hartnup’s world was pain. He tried screaming to endure it, but there was no way to escape this hell. All he could do was experience it.
This is hell, he thought, I’ve died and now I’m in hell.
His body moved like a badly managed puppet, and there, beneath the pain, was something far worse. Something that burst through the cracks of agony in each contracting muscle.
Hunger.
That hunger was so big that Hartnup could not grasp its dimensions. It was the god of this thing.
The hunger was all.
And all was hunger.
The dead body in which he floated staggered on, heading down a slope, away from the road, heading into the farmland. To where the food was.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
MASON STREET NEAR DOLL FACTORY ROAD
Dez woke up in the backseat of the state police cruiser. She was alone, JT was nowhere to be seen. Her hands were cuffed and her head hurt like she’d been kicked by a horse. She had been slumped over as far as the seat belt would allow, now she straightened, and just that little bit of movement sent a wave of nausea sloshing through her head and guts.
“What the hell happened?” she growled.
The windshield wipers slapped back and forth. The trooper in the front ignored her.
Dez kicked the back of the seat. “Yo! Fuckface! I asked you a question.”
Without turning, the trooper said, “I can pull over to the side of the road and tase you again, Officer Fox. Or you can behave yourself and wait until we get to your station.”
“Is that where you’re taking me?”
“Yes.”
“Why the hell didn’t you just say so? Whatever happened to professional courtesy?”
He made a sound. She thought it was a snort of laughter. She kicked the seat again.
“Hey!” he barked.
“Why did you ass-monkeys tase me in the first place? And who hit me in the head?”
“You struck your head on the counter when you fell. An accident … and I’m sorry about that. Doesn’t look serious though.”
“Feels pretty goddamn serious,” she snarled. Dez considered throwing up on the screen. That would make her stomach feel better and would really piss this guy off. But she didn’t. Instead, she asked, “What the shit is going on here?”
“You’ve been arrested, Officer Fox. I’d have thought that was clear. Even to you.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
He didn’t answer. Dez looked at her cuffed wrists. For most prisoners the chain of the cuffs would be threaded through a D ring on the floor, but they had given her the smallest slice of courtesy by cuffing her hands in front of her without attaching her to the ring. Even so, the rear doors were reinforced and could not be opened from inside. The wire mesh cage separating front from rear seat was heavy grade, and she wasn’t going to kick her way through it.
Dez looked out the rain-slick window. They were halfway across the county from the hardware store, just a couple of miles from the center of town. Stebbins was a tiny community on a massive piece of land. The “town” proper was one traffic light long. Three blocks in one direction, two in the other, and all of it clustered around a Baptist church and the public safety office—which served as the police station, post office, fire station, municipal offices, mayor’s office, and various other one-person offices. The next biggest building in town was a Bean-O’s coffee shop, a greasy spoon with aspirations of Starbuckshood.
Even on its best days Stebbins was a ghost town. The only thing that kept Stebbins from drying up and blowing away was some state and federal money for a regional elementary school that occupied the northwest corner of the township and a slightly smaller regional middle school a few miles away from the town proper—and the county hospital whose campus shared real estate with Bordentown.
They stopped at a crossroads to allow four yellow school buses to pass, heading from the middle school toward the shelter of Stebbins Little School. Dez craned her neck to look at the buses, at the pale, frightened faces pressed to each window. One of the kids, a little girl with yellow curls, waved to her. Dez waved back, needing to lift both hands to do it. Then the buses turned onto Schoolhouse Lane and were gone into the swirling gray wind.
“Where’s my partner?” Dez asked.
“You’ll see him at the station,” said the trooper.
“What’s going on? We’re the frigging police, or were you too busy looking at my tits to read the wording on my badge?”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“Fuck you and answer the question. Why arrest us?”
“You’ll have to discuss that with Lieutenant Hardy.”
“How about you stop being a total prick and tell me. What happened back there? Did you stop them?”
Nothing.
“Did you fucking stop them?”
“Stop whom?”
“What the Christ do you mean, ‘stop whom’? There were fifty of those things in the middle of the street. You had to have driven right through them.”
“I think we should get to the station and you should listen to your Miranda rights before you say anything, Officer Fox. And that is professional courtesy.”
“What?”
“I don’t like seeing another cop in cuffs, and I don’t know what happened out there or why you did what you did,” he said, “but you need to have a lawyer in the room and your rights on record. That’s me talking here, cop to cop.”
Dez stared at the back of his head. The impossibility of the day had slid sideways into the surreal and she sputtered, trying to find a route of logic that would take her back onto firmer ground. She suddenly stiffened.
“You didn’t even see them … did you?”
“See who?” he demanded again.
“Christ.” Dez tried to think it through. JT said that they were coming up the road, but he’d been hunkered down behind the pickup truck, and everyone else was in the store. The rain was getting heavy and it was dark as the devil’s asshole out there. Maybe that was it, she thought. Maybe those things lacked the brain power or imagination to seek out prey unless they saw it or heard it. Or smelled it. Walking uphill toward an empty road in a downpour, they might not have had anything to go on.
So … where did they go?
There was forest on both sides of Mason. Forest with farmland beyond it. She tried to remember if you could smell the farm animals from Mason. Probably. You could always smell cow shit.
“Did anyone go to the crime scene at Hartnup’s?”
The trooper shook his head. “You really don’t want to do this now.”