Whatever mischance had brought this burning monstrosity into his town to die, there was pleasure for Packard in the proof of their vulnerability. His father had never mentioned that possibility.
Half-smiling at the thought of mastering such foulness, Packard stepped up to the smoking corpse and kicked it. The crowd, still lingering in the safety of the doorways, cooed with admiration at his bravery. The half-smile spread across his face. That kick alone would be worth a night of drinks, perhaps even a woman.
The thing was belly up. With the dispassionate gaze of a professional demon-kicker, Packard scrutinized the tangle of limbs across the head. It was quite dead, that was obvious. He sheathed his gun and bent towards the corpse.
“Get a camera out here, Jebediah,” he said, impressing even himself.
His deputy ran off towards the office.
“What we need,” he said, “is a picture of this here beauty.”
Packard went down on his haunches and reached across to the blackened limbs of the thing. His gloves would be ruined, but it was worth the inconvenience for the good this gesture would be doing for his public image. He could almost feel the admiring looks as he touched the flesh, and began to shake a limb loose from the head of the monster.
The fire had welded the parts together, and he had to wrench the limb free. But it came, with a jellied sound, revealing the heat-withered eye on the face beneath.
He dropped the limb back where it had come with a look of disgust.
A beat.
Then the demon’s arm was snaking up — suddenly — too suddenly for Packard to move, and in a moment sublime with terror the Sheriff saw the mouth open in the palm of its forefoot and close again around his own hand.
Whimpering he lost balance and sat in the fat, pulling away from the mouth, as his glove was chewed through, and the teeth connected with his hand, clipping off his fingers as the rasping maw drew digits, blood and stumps further into its gut.
Packard’s bottom slid in the mess under him and he squirmed, howling now, to loose himself. It still had life in it, this thing from the underworld. Packard bellowed for mercy as he staggered to his feet, dragging the sordid bulk of the thing up off the ground as he did so.
A shot sounded, close to Packard’s ear. Fluids, blood and pus spattered him as the limb was blown to smithereens at the shoulder, and the mouth loosed its grip on Packard. The wasted mass of devouring muscle fell to the ground, and Packard’s hand, or what was left of it, was in the open air again. There were no fingers remaining on his right hand, and barely half a thumb; the shattered bone of his digits jutted awkwardly from a partially chewed palm.
Eleanor Kooker dropped the barrel of the shotgun she had just fired, and grunted with satisfaction.
“Your hand’s gone,” she said, with brutal simplicity.
Monsters, Packard remembered his father telling him, never die. He’d remembered too late, and now he’d sacrificed his hand, his drinking, sexing hand. A wave of nostalgia for lost years with those fingers washed over him, while dots burst into darkness before his eyes. The last thing he saw as a dead faint carried him to the ground was his dutiful deputy raising a camera to record the whole scene.
The shack at the back of the house was Lucy’s refuge and always had been. When Eugene came back drunk from Welcome, or a sudden fury took him because the stew was cold, Lucy retired into the shack where she could weep in peace. There was no pity to be had in Lucy’s life. None from Eugene certainly, and precious little time to pity herself.
Today, the old source of irritation had got Eugene into a rage: The child.
The nurtured and carefully cultivated child of their love; named after the brother of Moses, Aaron, which meant “exalted one”. A sweet boy. The prettiest boy in the whole territory; five years old and already as charming and polite as any East Coast Momma could wish to raise.