Free Vile Blood by Max Wilde Page B

her head brushing the ceiling—could that be?—and reached across the table, the yellow roof light throwing her shadow like a blanket over the terrified man.
    “What the hell are you?” he asked, trying to fight her—which was silly, of course.
    The Other held him, enveloped him, his flesh rich and ripe, and her hand took him by the throat, her teeth were already ripping into the meat of his neck, ready to take his head from his shoulders when he said, “Please, I’ve got a child. A little girl. Her name is Donna Lee.”
    And how she didn’t know, but she—his blood and skin and a hank of flesh in her mouth—could see that child. Two, maybe three years old. Blonde like her daddy, soft white hair framing her face, smiling.
    The image of the child was an empathy bullet that smashed straight through The Other and took Skye square between the eyes and somehow she was back in control, her body coursing with some kind of mad strength, and she tore open the side door of the RV, hearing the rattle as it bumped on its castors, spat the warm blood and meat from her mouth and took off into the night.
     

16
     
     
    Gene Martindale sat vigil at the deathbed of Sheriff Milton Lavender. The old man, shrunken and reduced, his bowel and most of its neighboring organs taken by cancer, lay in a place somewhere between here and the afterlife, a place that allowed him access to the living and the dead in equal measure. His wife Roseanne, gone these four years, was as real to him as Gene was, and he addressed them alternately in rambling monologues which were sad, boring and—most unsettling for Gene—frankly sexual in content.
    When Gene and Skye had been taken in by the sheriff and his barren wife— sister to their dead mother—there had been no hint that the couple, then in late middle-age, had enjoyed vividly carnal pleasures behind the closed door of this very bedroom.
    But Gene sat, stoic. He owed Lavender this vigil, owed it to the uncle who had mentored him and taught him all there was to know about good and evil and the strengths and weaknesses of men.
    It was only natural that Gene had joined the sheriff’s department when he graduated from high school and for years it was understood that when Lavender hung up his badge Gene would succeed him.
    Before, Gene would’ve assumed this position as his right, determined to continue the work of his uncle. Now it was tainted and he wished he had a God out there to pray to for a miracle. That the rampaging cancer would go into remission and Milton Lavender would rise up and continue with his duties, leaving Gene in the comfortable role of understudy.
    But there was no God and there would be no miracles. The old man would die and Gene would run for sheriff. It was so ordained. And Gene, to protect himself and his foundling sister, would become the pawn of Dellbert Drum, allowing the toxic fruits of Drum’s and Tincup’s labors safe passage through his county to the interstate and the city.
    It was the price he had to pay, he understood, for the lies he’d told. For the secret that had made him silent and inward. For allowing himself to believe those lies. Believing the thing that had happened that one night would never happen again.
    The vibration of the cell phone in Gene’s pocket released him from the bedside and he passed the old woman, dressed in head-to-toe black like no nurse he had ever known, who hovering in the shadows like the very angel of death.
    When Gene saw the babysitter’s name flashing on caller ID he felt dread take him low.
    “What’s wrong, Maria? Is it Timmy?”
    He’d called her on his way over here, told her to keep the doors locked. Told her to call him if Skye came home early.
    “No, no, Mr. Martindale. Timmy is sleeping. It is just my mother, she is sick and there is nobody with her—”
    “I’m on my way,” he said killing the call.
    Gene stood a moment, staring into the darkened bedroom that had once been his, thinking of death and loss,