Chapter 2 - The Sick

When the white lights approach, Harvey knows it's over. Their ghostly glow on the mountain road is not of this world. The phosphorescent sheen wriggles over the trees, coating the forest like a carpet of grubworms. His skin crawls at the sight of that dripping pallor swallowing the earth, creeping relentessly toward him.

If that light is coming for him, he knows, Hell is coming for him.

There is nothing to be done. Harvey can't move. He can't scream. His limbs are mangled, and he can barely taste the gelatinous blood pooling beneath his lips.

He realizes now—much too late—that he should have grabbed another kid. A softer, lonelier kid, with a lamblike smile and trusting eyes. But the skinhead punk had been too tempting to pass on. After all, Harvey thought, who would miss a loser like that, with his mohawk and pierced nose, trudging along the edge of the road, thumbing his way to nowhere…

It should have been an easy thing. It should have been sweet for both of them.

Instead, when Harvey had turned his back to find his skinning knife, the punk-faced kid had wriggled free of his bonds. How was that even possible, Harvey wonders? How did a scrawny fifteen-year-old, drugged on Special K, break out of a constrictor knot?

Harvey winces—or tries to. He’s remembering the gardening shears on the wall of the shed. Another fucking mistake. He had overlooked the possibility that his toyhouse could be turned against him. Now he can taste the tangy rust of those shears on the back of his throat, buried in the root of his tongue.

That little punk kid turned out to be murderer! Imagine that.

But it doesn’t matter anymore. The white light is coming. Hell is coming. Harvey can hear the shrill sirens of the ambulance like a thousand shrieking birds in the jungle canopy. That unnatural light floods in thick, syrupy waves down the mountain. He watches the effervescence sluice toward the cabin door, where he’s lying helplessly with his mouth agape, wearing garden shears like a bloody bowtie.

Open wide, baby.

Something cold snakes through his bowels and pushes its way into his throat. Then the raucous cry of the dead scrapes at his ears, carried in the psychotic klaxon of the ambulance. The otherworldly screaming drowns out his panicked thoughts. It’s an unending nightmare of dissonance. His mind is melting on those oscillations of madness.

At last, the ambulance appears like a rattling hearse on the edge of the mountain. In the weird carousal of light, it moves in stop-motion flickers, its ancient springs shrieking. A dripping red cross is painted across the carriage, crooked and childlike. It’s a slapdash effort, Harvey thinks. No one is fooled by the sight of a cross.

Harvey waits in breathless—airless—terror as the meat-wagon comes to a shuddering halt outside the cabin. Two corpsmen descend from the cab. Their uniforms have fallen into tattered ruin, some ancient shade of white splashed with bloody stains. Ragged masks cover their faces, with worn-down holes revealing black chunks of flesh.

The porters move slowly, bearing a wooden stretcher toward him. The smell of formaldehyde fills his nose, as the stretcher claps to the floor. One of the medics kneels on creaking limbs and presses two black fingers into the side of Harvey’s neck, where his carotid once hummed like a songbird. Harvey can see a single eye through a rent in the medic’s mask; a bloody orbit without pupil or sight.

Harvey wants to scream.

The medic gurgles some alien noise in his ears. Some otherworldly tongue whose syllables sound choking and wet, like a lung full of phlegm. The medic repeats this noise again and again—until the words take shape in Harvey’s mind, and the language slowly crystallizes.

Do not be afraid, the medic tells him. 

A pair of bony hands slide beneath his shoulders and heft him onto the stretcher. The medics carry him out the door, where the ghostly light of the ambulance fills his pores, seeping beneath his nails and worming down his throat. A strange sense of cold and exhilarating terror overtakes him. It feels like the icy paralysis of anesthesia.

The light wriggles deeper inside of him. It’s strangely calming. Harvey thinks maybe this is for the best. Maybe he is sick. After all, he must have known this, deep down--all those years he christened that shed with the cries of lonely kids.

Help me, Harvey begs the ghastly porters. But when he tries to speak, no sound comes from his lips. 

The medic looks down at him and lays a hand comfortingly on his shoulder.

Do not be afraid, the medic tells him. Help is coming.

*

Read on - Chapter 3