"So you finally opened the garbage bags, you brainless little snatch."
Coming through her husband's mouth, Isaac Hamilton's voice is grating, rippled with caked filth and swamp slime. At this moment Sue realizes that the grin wrinkling across its face is not, as she first thought, the result of rigor mortis or some other half-fathomed notion of what happens to your muscles after you die.The thing has been grinning up at her this whole time.
She tries to twist free, but the corpse's grip is far tighter than Jeff's. And this makes sense. He's come farther along the route than Marilyn or Jeff. He's almost fully resurrected. His fingers squeeze into the soft hollow of her throat until she feels something pop, shooting a bright spike of pain through her neck.
"It fucking took you long enough," Hamilton's voice says. Crawling forward, out of the trunk, shedding the last of the tattered garbage bags, her husband's corpse jams her body up and out so that her feet are no longer touching the ground. Then he starts to shake her so hard that her legs flop and jitter, feet flying everywhere as she fights pointlessly to pry his hands off. The rotting, black-eyed face laughs at her. She fights the urge to black out, because she's certain she'll never wake up. He's going to kill her, this thing that's inside her husband, this parasite that lives in his guts.
She starts praying then, not the kind of prayer that startsDear God, but the kind that goes, "From Ocean Street in Old White's Cove," spitting the words with the blood that's now pouring into her mouth. "Across the virgin land he drove-"
Phillip goes motionless, holding her upright, head tilted back. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?"
"-to paint each town and hamlet red, with the dying and the-"
Whack!He slams his head into hers so hard that she bites her tongue, incandescent waves of green stars shimmering before her eyes, the pain itself not even a factor compared to the sheer shock of the attack. When Sue hoists up her head again he's still holding her by the throat, his head angled back. "Don't you try that shit with me, you brainless, lowbrow whore. It doesn't work. It's notgoing to w-"
"He walked through Wickham and Newbury," Sue says, except her tongue is bleeding and swollen and the words spill out mushy and malformed. "In Ashford or Stoneview he might tarry-"
Whack!Another blow, the corpse's skull clubbing hers like the back of a shovel, sending her reeling.Now the pain is here, big-time pain, an eye-popping Las Vegas of it and then in the muffled distance, very far off, Isaac Hamilton's musty cackle.
"I'm going to enjoy this," his voice is saying behind the pain, behind the funny-colored stars and constellations that flutter close to her head, blinding her. "I'mreally going to enjoy this, Susan."
"To call…child…to…knee…" she's mumbling, on total autopilot now, "where he slew it…one…two…"
WHAM!A massive blow, the worst yet, something cracking, and it pitches her whole upper body backward, the pain so intense that Sue can't help it, she feels herself start crying again, he's breaking her and she's going to let him. She's got no choice. Bright hot needles pierce her flesh from every possible angle as she feels her scalp beginning to swell with bleeding under the skin. Her mouth sags open, drooling. She can't see. She can't hear. She can only feel the pain. Unconsciousness beckons her forward as seductively as any controlled substance she can imagine and she feels herself sliding toward it gratefully, almost all the way there, when a single thought cuts through her like a bullet.
Veda.
If you black out now she's dead.
If you black out now she's dead.
If you black out now she's fucking dead.
That centers her. Blind, numb, but somehow centered, she makes her lips and tongue move. It's like a guttural foreign language that, to an uncomprehending ear, sounds more like snarling than diction, Arabic or German spoken through a mouthful of stiffening rubber cement. She pushes the words out anyway until they don't sound like any language at all. They're merely sounds. Animal noises.
"…un fum…In-sluh fuh…GuhHuhn… Whuh uhmuh… " It's such a completely debilitating effort expelling these noises and she's dizzy, fading, losing whatever's left of herself. "Whuh…uh…muh…"
Far beyond the darkness that fills her eyes, through Phillip's lips, Isaac Hamilton is laughing, laughing. Coughing on dirt. Mimicking her feeble attempts, mocking, "Uh-fuh-uh-fuh-uh-fuh-" She can hear the stuffy noises getting more congested as his hilarity crescendos. "I didn't know it was fucking barnyard night, Susan. Moo, moo, cock a doodle-doo!" As he says this, her vision clears slightly, perhaps for the sheer novelty of seeing her husband's reanimated corpse-a thing with maggots in its sinuses and worm shit on its breath-making fun of her enunciation. Through swollen eye-slits she sees Phillip's head tilting itself back again, preparing to drive forward for the blow that will no doubt turn out her lights forever, rendering whatever good intentions she might still have utterly irrelevant. She cringes away with the last of her strength, and waits for it.
Then nothing happens.
"Sue…?" It's so tentative, that familiar voice. It doesn't sound like Isaac Hamilton at all. "Honey?"