Doc asked himself why he hadn’t been paralyzed by the spore fall. Was it because he was already stark raving mad when exposed to the stuff? It seemed to have had the opposite effect on him as it had on everyone else: it had straightened out his thinking instead of confusing it. And the spores had only brought a mild numbness to his hands, feet and face. Perhaps he was immune to the chemicals they contained. Perhaps that immunity had something to do with his time travel. With the rearrangement of his atomic structure. Perhaps everyone else’s susceptibility had to do with skydark-produced mutations in their genetics. Mutations that he didn’t have since he had been born one hundred and forty years before it had occurred. None of these speculations satisfied him.
As the others turned to face the baron, Doc pushed away from the wall and moved to the back of the crowd.
“Bring out the chair!” Kerr said.
Two of the men who had ridden in the Baja Bug with the baron pulled a metal office armchair out into the middle of the square. The third rider placed a long pipe with the rag-wrapped handle in a four-wheeled cart and pushed it near the chair. Everyone pressed in closer until they were shoulder to shoulder, ringing the center of the square. They seemed expectant and eager, as if they knew what was coming. They all wore stiff, unnatural grins on their faces.
Doc wasn’t grinning. He didn’t understand what was about to happen, but he had a very bad feeling about it, a premonition that turned out to be well-founded.
Baron Kerr waved the black man over to his side and slapped him in the middle of his broad, muscular back.
“The burning pool is hungry,” Kerr said to the circled crowd. “And we must feed it. As it feeds us. Eat the body. Become the body.”
Doc was taken aback when the audience, without prompting, immediately picked up the chant, “Eat the body. Become the body. Eat the body. Become the body.”
Even the notoriously closemouthed Jak added his voice to the chorus, his ruby-red eyes wide with excitement.
“This evening we celebrate three departures,” Kerr said, pointing at the men who’d been passengers in the Bug. “The road to where they’re going starts right here.” The baron patted the back of the chair. Then he asked, “Who’s going to be first to take the load off?”
The question started a shoving match between the three men to see who would take the seat. The pushing escalated into full-power punches and kicks. When one of the men fought his way to the chair, the others stopped wrestling on the ground and quickly strapped down his wrists and ankles. The winner smiled as this was happening, showing his bloodied teeth to the crowd. The black man with the dreadlocks took the iron pipe from the cart and made a whistling practice swing. Overhead and down, he drove the end of the pipe into the dirt.
Doc watched as the cook then moved to the back of the chair. Planting his feet, he reared back on one leg and swung the pipe over and down, putting all his weight behind the blow and grunting from the effort.
Like pounding in a tent stake with a twenty-pound mallet.
At the last second, Doc instinctively averted his gaze. But he didn’t have time to stop up his ears. He heard the hollow whack of the pipe and the sound of crunching bone.
Dean, who stood next to him, flinched at what he saw, but didn’t look away.
From the crowd there was a unison gasp of amazement.
I am imagining this, Doc thought, shaking his head to clear it. This can’t be real.
But when he looked back, there was no doubt that it was. The top of the seated man’s head was caved in, his body jerking and kicking against the restraints. The old man’s stomach heaved mightily, and he knew he was going to be sick. As he gritted his teeth, stumbling to the side of the blockhouse to vomit, the others were just standing there, staring at the horror that sat quaking in the chair, and smiling. It was as if they were seeing something completely different than he was. Leaning against the blockhouse with a hand, Doc retched into the dirt. He didn’t have much to retch.