Crawl(14)

She landed hard on her left shoulder. Adrenaline numbed the blow but she felt the thud of the connection in her core. Her skeleton vibrated. She pedaled on useless feet, making a mess of herself. What little blood she had left in her body was leaking out through whatever dam she’d broken loose down there. Because of this, she couldn’t find traction in the mud created by the clay and blood. She felt as if she were trying to stand up on a Slip ‘N Slide.

“You’re still alive?” called a voice. She was only vaguely aware that the red priest was rushing from his car toward her.

“HELP ME!” Something rational told her that she was asking help from the very individual who’d put her in this predicament but she didn’t care. She only wanted to be gone from that hellish puppeteer. She didn’t care if the red priest strung her up for sale in a fish market. At least she wouldn’t be torn asunder by whatever devil lurked among the trees.

Hands rolled her over. Scooped her up under the arm pits. Dragged her away from the scrub and toward the fire.

Juliet caught sight of her feet for the first time. A vague memory came to mind. The movie was Total Recall. Arnold Schwarzenegger watched as the mutant taxi driver took off his false arm to reveal a weird two-fingered appendage. Juliet’s legs looked like bloodier versions of those alien hands. For a split second, the devil in the woods was gone from her mind. For the briefest of instances, she considered how she felt about never being able to walk again.

Then a voice came from the bushes, soft and amused, and Juliet screamed so she wouldn’t have to listen to it.

“Boogedy… boogedy-boo!”





11.


She tried to mark the demon’s location, but failed. Those lithe shadows were back, dancing through the bushes and trees, flitting across the scrub and soaring into the entwined branches overhead.

“You’re stronger ’n I give you credit for, child,” the red priest grunted, as he dragged her away from the road and into the clearing with the campfire. The Mercury sat idling off to the left, white exhaust exhaling from its tail pipe. “Did it eat the boy?”

Only half, Juliet answered, but it took the red priest repeating his question for her to understand that she hadn’t spoken the words.

She swallowed what little spit she had. “Only… only his legs.”

“Ah,” the red priest sighed. “He must not be that hungry today. You’re lucky.”

“He?” was the only word she could form.

“Silas, child. Silas. Surely you saw him. I can see it in your eyes.”

Stop calling me Shirley, Juliet mused, and barked forced laughter.

I’m going mad.

The thought of madness was comforting—a welcome reprieve from red priests and devils with vacation homes deep in the Georgia woods. Hell, she might be in Hell. What a helluva concept Hell was. She’d been taught to expect a place of fire and brimstone, not a forest in the southern US of A. What a funny thing, putting Hell in the middle of the Bible Belt. Or, maybe Hell was like a flabby tummy hanging over the edge. Perhaps God had the Dunlop disease. His belly done lopped over…

That brought to mind an entire metric fuck-ton of asinine questions, all welcome distractions to the insanity of her predicament. Was it the Bible’s belt, or God’s? If the devil was a redneck who lived in the woods, was God a rapper living in Bankhead? Made sense, didn’t it? That God was a celebrity and Satan a backwoods hermit. No one paid attention until someone gave either a reality show. Then you found yourself watching Duck Dynasty and the Kardashians, Honey Boo Boo and World’s Dumbest Criminals: Holy Shit Edition.

Juliet found she was laughing. No, not really laughing. Guffawing. Great bursts of strained laughter vomited from her. She laughed so hard her stomach muscles seized. Even her feet seemed comical. Those feet flashing her lopsided peace signs. Silly feet. You so cray-cray!

“You broke this one, Silas!” the red priest shouted.

Silas? Funny thing to call the Devil.

The demon responded, “Boogedy-boo!”

“You can’t help the pets you fall in love with, eh, child?” The red priest asked. “You feed them, nurture them, give them toys to play with, and they take over your very existence.”

Juliet felt the heat of the campfire on her left arm. The memory of waking up with her back ablaze surfaced and suddenly nothing was as funny as it had been. All the levity she had running through her pissed out into a puddle of caustic fluid. She wallowed in it. Was steeled by it. Her hand slapped around at her side, the fire scorching her knuckles. Her aching fingers found a length of wood. She wrapped her clay-caked digits around the piece of firewood, the mud acting as an insulator of sorts, and swung it upward, nailing the red priest, she only hoped, between his beady black eyes.

He harrumphed, as if she’d asked him to clean up his room, and released her. She fell to the ground unimpeded, and her head bounced off the grass covering the floor of the clearing. Embers drifted down onto her blue blouse from the torch she held, leaving burns here and there. No pain came of the hot ash touching her skin once it had burned through the fabric of her shirt. Adrenaline again, she assumed.

She rolled and pressed up onto her knees. Her feet splayed out behind her; they were screaming, but so was she. She was louder.

The red priest, clutching his forehead with both hands, lay prostrate beside the fire. He moaned and groaned in pain. She dropped to her hands and knees—