Vile Blood by Max Wilde Page A

co-operate.”
    Gene closed his eyes for a second and Skye saw how close he was to breaking. She reached forward and took his hand. He pulled it away as if he’d touched flame.
    “I’m asking again, Skye. What happened?”
    “I can’t remember it all. Just bits.”
    “Then tell me what you can remember.”
    She told him about the men in the diner. About them following her in the car and surrounding her in the desert.
    Then she shook her head. “After that I don’t remember anything until I got home. Covered in blood.”
    He nodded, closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and index finger.
    “What did I do to them, Gene?” she asked.
    He looked at her, his eyes blank. “Tore them apart. Decapitated them. Dismembered them. Ate their flesh and their innards.”
    She started to shake, put her hands to her face. Felt the tears on her skin.
     “The night Ma and Pa died, there weren’t no drifters, were there?”
    “No.”
    “I did that?”
    “To Pa, yes. He’d already killed Ma.”
    “Why did you lie, Gene? About what I did?”
    “You saved my life and you were my sister. I loved you.” His use of the past tense like a blow to her. “I wanted to believe that it would never happen again.”
    “But it did.”
    “Yes.”
    “What am I, Gene?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t know what you are.” He looked at her, then his gaze drifted out toward the darkness. When his eyes returned to her, they were cold. “What I do know is that I can’t have you in this house no more. Can’t have you near Timmy.”
    “I wouldn’t hurt him. I love him.”
    “Maybe you do, but the other thing . . .” He shook his head. “I want you to leave town. Get the bus to the city in the morning. It’ll be best for all of us.”
    “And you’re going to carry on with your lies about me?”
    “You saved my life. I owe you that.”
    “And this thing with Drum?”
    “Everything has a price, Skye. That’s the price of my silence and my lies.”
    “When do you want me to go?”
    “Now. Pack a bag and call Minty. Tell her we’ve had a falling out. Hell, tell her I’m a bastard and you can’t be under the same roof as me. But just go.”
    She stood, suddenly dizzy, and had to catch herself with a hand on the back of the chair. “Can I say goodbye to Timmy?”
    “No.”
    “What’ll you tell him?”
    “I’ll think of something. That’s not your concern.”
    She wanted to fall at his feet and beg him, make all sorts of promises. But she knew he was right. And she understood why she’d heard Timmy, crying, terrified. He was in danger. In danger from her. He hadn’t been calling her, he’d been screaming her name in fear.
    She turned and walked up the stairs and didn’t look at Timmy’s door, even when something seized her heart and tore it from her chest, just as she’d torn out the hearts of those men in the desert.
     

17
     
     
    As Reverend Jimmy Tincup lay on his back on the bed in his room at the motel, naked, watching his penis—until seconds before lying useless and slug-like across his slack belly, the way it had these last months—rear up, the foreskin gradually retracting to reveal the throbbing mauve hood, he felt his faith restored. The hydraulic effect of the blood pumping into his manhood brought with it a commensurate swelling of his belief in his maker. And a sense of his own omnipotence.
    Whether it was the effect of the baby-blue pill he had swallowed with mescal straight from the bottle (forcing away the all-to-obvious resemblance between the shriveled worm floating in the piss-colored liquid and his unresponsive cock) or the jolt of lust he felt as Marisol applied paint to the face of the child whore, was of no concern to him. He was hard. The weeks of flaccidity and frustration were over.
    The lack of power in his penis a mirror of the lassitude and torpor that had swamped him. He’d felt like a sailing ship becalmed on some endless yellow ocean, and wondered if he