Blood County

by Doris Piserchia

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Blood was what they called that mountain town and the forbidding land around it - and the name was significant. Folks there knew a secret that would have shocked the world...but nobody was ever going to get out of Blood to tell. Not even when Portia Clark arrived, hot on a news story for a national magazine. Especially not her... Clint Breen, who had been in the outside world, tried to save her. But he had to fight a tradition that drove men and women to unspeakable lusts and that ruled secretly the lives and afterlives of everything being in the county. Blood was the place where more men and women walked the night than were ever seen by day. Horror was their heritage, for they were the people that the census dared not count!

Release date: April 30, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 170

Sample

Thoughts of the telegram made him careless so that he reached into his pocket to feel the paper at the same time that he stepped off the curb. The fast-moving van knocked him into the air and threw him against a tree.

There were street traffic and people on the next block but the area where he lay was quiet and wet. His hand trailed through the rainwater in the gutter. The van screeched to a halt and the driver ran toward him.

“I’m sorry, I’m terribly sorry,” she said. “I didn’t see you.”

Illumination from a street lamp touched his face. Her hand closed on his arm as she caught her breath.

“It was my fault. Entirely. I was going too fast. You shouldn’t have jaywalked. No, don’t move. Don’t try to get up.”

The water felt cool in his palm, helped him to orient himself. She was young and dark of hair, silken skinned and white of throat, pale and horrified because of his wounds.

“What are you doing? Why don’t you be still?” Gasping, she stared at the gaping cut above his left eyebrow. She didn’t persist, didn’t try to hold him down.

Sitting up, he said, “It’s all right.” For a moment he couldn’t see. With water from the gutter he cleaned his face.

“I’ll call an ambulance if you’ll only—”

“There’s no need. I’ll be fine.”

In despair she looked up and down the block but there was no one to beckon to or summon. “Please stay still. I did this to you. You have a dreadful gash close to your eye. You must go to the hospital.”

He hadn’t lost total consciousness nor did he feel disoriented now. The water had cooled his hot face and he took time to look and see if anyone had been attracted to the scene. Avoiding the woman’s hands he stood up, laid his handkerchief against the raw place. He saw her staring at his hand, looked to note the soggy patch where the skin had been scraped away.

“Don’t worry, you’ve done nothing permanent,” he said.

“There’s a phone booth up the block. I want to call for an ambulance.”

He walked away. She followed him across the street. “No need,” he said. “I don’t need medical help.”

“You’re in shock. Why don’t you stand still and let me do something for you? You’re going to collapse.” Plainly believing in her own prediction she followed him all the way uptown and only stopped when he went into an alley.

At its end he turned and watched her standing silhouetted against the light. Good nerves, he thought. She seemed sensible and compassionate and he had probably traumatized her forever. She would have nightmares because he had been too thoughtless to check traffic.

Pulling aside a loose board in a fence, he left the alley, crossed a yard and entered a boulevard. From there he walked to his apartment building. Remembering the telegram, he started to take it out of his pocket. It wasn’t there. At once he searched all his pockets but in vain. The paper must have fallen out during his encounter with the van. Probably it was at this moment washing along the gutter with the other debris. He wouldn’t go back for it. Having it in his possession wasn’t that important. The message was there in front of his eyes, tangible and full of meaning. Jared was dead. His brother was dead.

Not until after he showered did he look in the mirror. His yellow hair was too long. Before Sugie came to take him back to Blood he would snip the ends with scissors. As always he looked for Duquieu in the lines of his cheeks, the angle of jaw, set of eyes. Nothing. He could discern no visible likeness.

He didn’t have so much property or clothing but it was dawn when he finished packing. Closing the bedroom drapes, he fell down onto the bed and closed his eyes.

When he awakened it was dusk and someone leaned on his front doorbell.

“I was about to go down and try to talk your landlord into breaking the lock.”

He didn’t recognize her, stood blinking in the light that came from the hall behind her, stared and finally started to shut the door.

“You don’t know me, do you?” she said. “I came close to knocking your brains out last night.”

“Oh, yes. I apologize for not recognizing you. I told you to forget it. I wasn’t hurt.”

“You had a hole in your head big enough to shove my hand through.”

“I’m afraid the bad light distorted your vision.” He took a step forward so that she could get a good look.

“I can see I must have hallucinated.” She gave a little hollow laugh. “It never happens that someone gets hit like that and then stands up and walks away.” Scrutinizing his face, she laughed again. “Your eyes are blue. For a moment there last night when you were coming out of it they looked red. Scared the dickens out of me. I was afraid you were hemorrhaging.” When he made no response but merely stood waiting with a polite expression she said, “All night I imagined you lying unconscious somewhere with a split skull. All day I’ve been coming here to ring your doorbell. You weren’t hard to trace. You’re so tall and your hair is unusually … My name is Portia.” Once more she laughed, no humor, beginning to show the strain. “Portia Clark. I never liked it. It’s so fancy.”

“I told you last night that I was all right. Now I want you to take a good long look at me because you’re entitled to be satisfied. See? No blood, no nothing.”

“Not even a skin break. Maybe I’m here because I suspected you might be Superman.” Taking a shallow breath, she nodded. “Good, I didn’t harm you. All my anxiety was wasted. You’re pink and fresh and whole as a cucumber.”

He stepped back inside and began closing the door.

“Is there really a place called Blood, West Virginia?” she said, causing him to pause.

“May I have my telegram?”

“It was in my pocket.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You placed it there. Subconscious gesture.”

“While coming out of my skull fracture?”

She handed the paper to him. “Clinton Breen. That’s your name. I won’t forget it. You have a friend named Sugarman Phelps who lives in Blood, West Virginia. You’re the first person I ever killed and it didn’t harm a hair of your head.”

He saw her again when he went out later to walk, sitting in the lobby waiting for him to make an appearance, thoughtful, pensive. She didn’t get up as soon as he stepped from the elevator but she followed him to the bridge and watched as he strolled out to look at the water. Portia Clark. Sharp and intelligent. Observant. He thought about her voice and guessed she was from somewhere in New York. He hadn’t lived in civilization long enough to be able to differentiate between accents. Ten years wasn’t long enough. What to do about her? Anything? He didn’t think so. Soon he would be gone and Portia Clark would fade into the background of old memory.

Sugarman Phelps was waiting outside his door when he returned. Sugie. Surrogate mother and father, drunk, semi-literate, every bit as sharp as the woman downstairs though one would never assume it by simply seeing him.

“Wonderin’ how I found you, ain’t you? Good thing you wrote me that letter that time, otherwise I’d never of knowed how to git hold of you. Figured you’d only want me to use your address in case of emergencies.”

“Hello, Pap.”

They patted one another on the shoulder. There was the eternal grin, two missing bottom teeth, skinny Sugie in a clean but wrinkled brown cotton suit from another age and the floppy hat that made him look like a toadstool; never immobile but hopping from one foot to another and grinning like an imbecile.

“Seein’ you’s like comin’ across a long lost dog. How you, son?”

They went inside the apartment and Clint prepared a sandwich that the old man munched with small bites.

Later when Sugie was bedded down on the couch with a blanket firmly clutched beneath his chin, he looked up. With the idiotic grin forever on his face and with tears glinting in the corners of his eyes he said, “Jared’s dead, you know, son?”

“I don’t see why you have to be so afraid of him.”

“Always was, kind of. He’s wild and mean. I had to come and git you. I jist had to.”

“I know.”

“The sadness is comin’ offa you like the fog offa Slate Lake. I reckon that’s life. You’re different from before. You’re my boy but you’re something else too. You’re quieter and calmer in your mind. That’s fine. It was me cared for you and nussed you with a bottle and I know you better’n anyone. I ain’t worried about you now or ever.”

Clint didn’t say he wouldn’t go back, didn’t tell the old man how Blood was a bottomless coffin in his memory. Sugie knew.

“I let you go ’thout followin’ you. I knowed what done it. I knowed Coley was back of your leavin’.”

Later when the apartment was dark and quiet and the old man was about ready to go to sleep, he called out. “How’d it go? What was it like when you left your home and went out into the wilderness? Did anything happen to you that particular sticks in your memory? Did you learn anything? Did anybody hurt you?”

Sergeant Ned Crossen accompanied unclaimed war casualties east. Kids nobody wanted. Kids who had no living relatives or who for one reason or another gave phony I.D.’s to their recruiting officers. There were several Smiths this trip, a couple of Joneses, one actually named Wayfarer. Could you beat that and what kind of dumb recruiter allowed such stuff? Some people claimed the Army consisted of so much stupid meat and there were times when it seemed to Ned as if they were right.

The bodies in the boxes in the train car bothered him. He had never pulled a similar duty before. He could have ridden up front with the other passengers but he wasn’t ready to face that many civilians just yet, so he sat with the coffins and tried to concentrate on a game of solitaire. Civilians disgusted him. That was his problem. Irrational? Sure. Tell it to his psyche. It was as if there were two castes in reality, one that marched into jungles and got pieces of their bodies blown off and one that walked around in noncombat zones living it up.

One-two-three, one-two-three, the train ate up another stretch of track. Not that much farther to go in the heavy grayness of dusk. Wilderness, empty plains. Was it Illinois outside? Pennsylvania? Ned wasn’t keeping apace of where they were. Instead he brooded about dead, busted kids and the fat cats in the cars up ahead.

The boxes were stacked three high, twelve in all, shiny and antiseptic and forever sealed. Nothing short of the resurrection would open those lids except that by then the whole kit and caboodle would probably be rotted to powder. How would it be on that crazy morning, Ned wondered. Were the kids in this car going to climb out of their resting places singing and shouting all together or would they come up one at a time without making any noise?

The train stopped at a junction, jerked like a big clumsy caterpillar, lunged forward and dragged the unwelcome burden of its rear end until everything was synchronized and the whole contraption bulleted along like an eager snake.

The dusk outside deepened but Ned couldn’t really see it unless he got up and peeked out of one of the tiny openings at his eye level. There were no windows in the car. Maybe this was where unsavory cargo was always secured and they didn’t want anyone looking at it.

He sat on a box, not a coffin but just a plain box, and played cards while the daylight died. It seemed to him that the bulb overhead wasn’t working as well as it had before. There were deep shadows in the corners, funny humps and clumps of blackness and grayness that bumped when the train bumped or climbed the walls like vines of ebony.

He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, turned his back on the sad cargo, hunched over the cards like a bleary-eyed giant. Something creaked loudly behind him but he didn’t turn around. All those kids rotting in their antiseptic coffins. Like his dog. Scruff died when Ned was seven. A few weeks after the burial he dug the animal up to make certain it was dead.

It wasn’t souls that were rotting in the boxes behind him, of that he was confident. Only bodies. The spirits were gone. He possessed artistic talent and had painted one really good picture of his own spirit. It was handsome, strong and somewhat ethereal, in the act of dragging his body along behind on the end of a rope. In the painting his flesh was bloated, ugly, feeble, barely human in appearance. That was Ned, half willing, half weak.

One of the coffins suddenly seemed to explode behind him and he turned in a daze. His mind was wounded by the incongruity of it all. Where was the noise coming from? Who was responsible? If there was one place on Earth where there should be tranquility and silence it was among the dead.

Not here. Something was disturbing the slumber of one of the casualties. One of the Smiths was moving or being moved. One of the liars. Number three coffin stacked on the floor of the car beneath numbers one and two was going through some kind of upheaval.

Gross with their own heaviness, the two boxes on top of number three slowly rose upward and then toppled toward the next stack while something inside number three began banging on the lid.

His body wet with perspiration, Ned Crossen sat rigidly. He hadn’t ever been told that resurrection morning could come at night. The thought ran through his head like a cold wind. Resurrection night. It didn’t sound right. It sounded like something full of bad promise.

Hoping that the lid would hold but fearing that it wouldn’t he sat with his back against the card table while the young Smith inside the coffin battered his way free.

The lid ripped open and Ned shrieked as the kid sat up. Yes, it was resurrection night. Smith had glowing red eyes that frightened the sergeant so badly his breath went out of his body with a loud whooshing sound. Smith’s teeth—the dog teeth, the biters—were three inches in length, needle-thin at the tips and glittered like daggers when the light caught them. The face was gaunt and hideous, twisted in a grimace of wild fury and something else.

There was terrible hunger in the gaz. . .