Chapter 05: The Devil Went Down to Georgia

They got their coffee black with A.R. throwing in a pack of gum, and went back outside, where they lit their cigarettes and Boss acquainted A.R. with Death made manifest.

“I ain’t gonna get into the specific medical details. Whole thing was brutal. Stabbed thirty-seven times. All over. Tongue cut out. Coroner said she had been strangled too, but the cocksucker had shoved a cicada in her throat first. Guess he knew it cuz it was half swallowed and chewed on. Her head had been shaved with a knife but it was so violent she was borderline scalped. Nothing appears to be explicitly ritualistic or specific, ‘cept one of her…one of her breasts had been partially removed. You ain’t have to see the pictures if you don’t want to.”

“Nah, let me see ‘em. I have to.”

And there she was. All her twelve years lying on cold steel, stripped naked as the day she was born, her skin bruise-blue, her wounds gaping pits of scarlet and black. Dried pus filled the corners of her eyes, and the matte white of bone shown smooth beneath the tatters of her half-shaved head, a flap of her scalp hanging over the side of her face almost covering one eye.

A.R. looked away for air, but finding it just the same, he turned back. Her left breast, small and childish, hung over itself, half-inverted, exposing the red and white of muscles and sinew, small pockets of yellow fat; her heart back in there somewhere.

“So whatchu think?”

“Man, I don’t know. I’m fucking reeling, bro.”

“Yeah, I get all that, but this ain’t about you. You came down here because you have a Gift. You look straight into that Void and you tell me what you see.”

A.R. looked at the picture again.

“There’s some method to it, but I don’t have a damn clue as to what it means. It’s weird. If you were going to do anything ritualistic or with a method, you’d need a spot, something consecrated. Like, this shit doesn’t seem personal. It’s got impulse toward a direction but it’s delusional. Hysterical but no rage. She has her clothes off but no rape, its more un-sexing.”

“Man, any expert’s gonna to tell me speculative bullshit. Knife is phallic. Brains and heart open to the world. Unsexing? Tell me where the fuck any of that has helped shit? It’s all made-for-tv dick stroking, man. Get past that. You look into the void and you report back what you see, you don’t fucking analyze it.”

“Bro. I don’t know. I…I can’t, man. Discernment is when the Spirit speaks to you. It’s part of a Holy War. Nothing to discern right now, it’s just pure Evil. It’s just identifying the enemy. Evil saw something pure and it tried to turn it into meat, which, in one sense, I guess it did. Ausby didn’t mean a goddamn thing to ‘em.”

“How so?”

“It’s the nature of evil, to reduce. To take whole lives, all connected, and sever them for its own purposes. Sounds like death, but death ain’t personal. Killing ain’t. Reduction is. Ausby doesn’t mean a damn to anyone but her family and friends.”

“So why her?”

“That’s my point. There ain’t no why. You give this girl a toe tag and a body bag, she’s a number to more people than she was a person to. She was just a collector’s item for the cause. I’m not sure there’s more to it. That’s what we’re up against. Unceremonious Evil that figured out what to do with what it hated. It took what was good, what was real and natural, then mutilated it and called it something else. Left nothing but meat.”

Boss sniffed, listening to the songs of birds.

“I need to shoot something. There’s an old gravel pit we can go to. Come on.”

They drove in silence, barely over the speed limit. AR looked through his reflection in the window but saw much of nothing at all.

Turning past a boiled peanut stand with a sign that said ‘Honk If You Like My Nuts’, Boss honked but kept holding the horn. Never letting go, he hit the gas hard and they went wailing and roaring down the road.

They pulled into the pit, gravel crunching and crackling underneath the tires. Clouds had grown in the afternoon sky with a half-hour summer shower inevitably on its way.

Boss popped his trunk, and he and A.R. stood looking at a small arsenal that was their birthright.

“That AR15 right there? That’s my baby. That’s ‘Roosevelt aka Big Stick’. Don’t worry though, I brought the AK too. Know you mountain hippies are half-commie.”

“AK got a name?”

“‘Chekhov.”

“Nice. Didn’t know you could read.”

“God’s fair. Big brain was the only way to figure out how to haul around such a big dick.”

There were already a few hole-ridden sheets of plywood edged up against a wall of the pit. Boss sauntered up and stapled a poster-size target of an attacking zombie.

He walked back, aimed, but then turned.

“You ever notice they don’t hardly ever show zombies eating in movies? I’ve never in my life seen zombies attacking and thought they were eating, even when they take bites. Just ripping.”

“There’s no horror in the eating. The horror is they’re never satiated.”

Boss looked at A.R. before aiming the rifle and shooting five rounds: one high-right, one low-left, center mass, center mass, center mass.

“Crazy to have one of those bastards running right at you, all ravenous and shit.”

“That’s why they never stop attacking. That’s why you have to shoot them in the head. Their mind is what’s starving.”

A.R. aimed and shot five: four high center, one headshot.

Boss whistled and aimed.

“So you just have to remove part of their brain, huh? Like, surgically…like with this .556!”

Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.

The echoing shots segued into Boss’s phone blaring ‘Yeah Alabama’

“That them calling about you winning a dick sucking contest?”

“Man, shut up. Yelloh?”

Boss’ face darkened. He put the phone on speaker.

“It’s one of my deputies.”

A.R. could hear many men puking in the background, at least one was crying.

“You gotta get here man! There’s goddamn eight of them. And looking like some hog got in here and started tearing at ‘em too. It’s a whole house full of abomination. Jesus fucking Christ. I text you the location already. Just get here.”

“Yeah, we’re coming.”

They took the twenty minute drive south toward the county line down a lonely highway before turning off on an unpaved road where, after passing a few farms on one side and waves of trees on the other, they were flagged down by a patrol car parked outside an interval in the woods.

Boss jumped out with A.R. following.

“Officer, you been back there yet?”

“Nah sir, just called in to help with traffic. Something happen?”

“So I’ve heard. Come on, bubba.”

Boss started jogging through an opening in the trees.

“Ay, don’t you dare let any media round through here!”

The rain began to pour.

They tromped through the pine-straw about a quarter-mile off the road when the trees suddenly stopped and gave way to a large expanse of land and sky, as if the whole place had its own atmosphere. Inside that beautiful grove, where the blues and greens of Earth were exemplified and glorious, crime scene tape stretched around the perimeter. At center and built up against a kudzu-swallowed grove of dead hickory and pine was an old, wooden barn, big enough to be a small house, also smothered by vines. Kudzu had claimed every inch of that area, building, space and trees, leaving only the sky out of reach.

Amidst the downpour, a couple deputies stood off to the side, needlessly pouring bottles of water through their hair and down their necks. Loftis, a rookie–one of the deceased was discovered to be his sister–walked aimlessly off to the side, another deputy walking cautiously behind him. The rookie looked heavenward and then at the ground before each step. He floated along, craning his neck back to the point of breaking, before snapping it down and lulling there, then taking a step and repeating the gesture; lost between reflection and question without a single thought to guide.

McKnight, the deputy that had called Boss, walked out the door on the side of the barn, his hanky covering his mouth, his hat brim pulled low over his eyes.

“Ranger got a call about some hogs tearing around and came looking. There’s eight of them in there. I…”

“Naw, man. Just keep that. We’re going in.”

Boss unfolded a hanky of his own and called through the door.

“Yall get some fresh air. Clear out right quick. ‘Preciate yall.”

The remaining officers filed out. Boss looked at A.R. and nodded. Seemed like every step they took was another one they weren’t coming back from.

Sunlight, shaded green by the gluttonous vines outside, squirmed through the wooden slats. The interior was a bare dirt floor, completely emptied inside but for nine wooden posts, a body shackled to eight of them.

Kids.

Each post was taller than a man, chains ran from the top to arms stretched to the point of grotesque, their legs were wrapped around the poles, their knees smashed to bend backward with the feet chained tightly behind their back, heads rolled back Godward, unclothed and in various states of decay; deceased through tremendous harm. Witnessing positions of such vulnerability, A.R. felt shame rise with everything else in his stomach. All their genitals had been removed, as had the girls’ breasts.

Rutting led to each post where a hog had begun to eat and tear at the lowest available extremities of each Child. Muddy, bloody hoof prints smeared the posts all over where the Beast had reached higher.

“God help us.”

“Come on. Come on. There’s nothing else for us yet. Just let forensics do their thing. People can’t comprehend shit like this without a context. Come on.”

A.R. turned to Boss, as they exited the shed, their eyes watering from the sudden brightness.

“But why?”

“Why what?”

“Why a lot of shit, but why’s there only one hog’s tracks?”

A guttural squeal sounded loudly, choking the air of the grove and filling it to overflowing.

The rookie Loftis took pause from his state of shock. Crying out, he sprinted headlong behind the veil of vines and trees toward the screeches, squeals and grunts that had defiled the silence.

“Hey, hey, hey!”

Curdling squeals met inhuman screams and became the soundtracks of violence and struggle. Pistols drawn, the deputies ran to the line of trees, trying to see into the foliage, hollering for their brother-in-arms.

“A.R.! Go get them rifles!”

Boss threw him the keys, and A.R. hoofed the quarter mile, grabbed the rifles and hurried back. When he arrived, the deputies were returning from the now still and quiet woods, dragging Loftis back, his innards trailing slowly behind him, sticking for a moment on a vine of thorns, no one in the state of mind to pick them up and put them back.

Boss had someone call an ambulance and gathered everyone else around.

“We’re going after that fucking hog. Listen for the brush. Y’all know how it’s done. Gotta couple officers bringing their dogs down here. In the meanwhile, don’t fucking shoot each other. Keep shots low. He’s probably ‘bout to the next farm by now but I want that piece a shit. Get to it!”

He grabbed ‘Roosevelt’ from A.R., leaving him with the AK.

“You stay around here and walk the path back to the vehicles. Don’t need you getting shot by my department. Stay safe.”

Boss and the others headed into their quadrants away from the path, whispering amongst themselves, eyes peering between the greens and blacks of life and death.

A.R walked slowly back toward the road, scanning the trees and straining his ears as the deputies’ presence and footsteps receded.

His vision darkened as the surrounding shadows went blacker than a hundred midnights down in the swamp. The treeline groaned as it bulged outward and exhaled, tying its undulations to each of his breaths.

A.R. listened and watched himself breathe, his exhalations suddenly becoming choking and gasping, death rattles.

The boar bellowed and charged from a thicket behind him, and a great flame rose from its back as it did so, its tiny hooves trampling the Earth underneath as it was driven forth by burning.

A.R. whirled and shot twice. The hog screamed as its legs collapsed under encroaching Death, careening into him and knocking him to the ground before he popped up, aimed, and fired again.

The hog lay on its side huffing hellfire, and its beady eyes became the doors of a fiery furnace, arsenic and brimstone rising in wild vapors with every constriction of its orifices, and the trees above blazed as green torches shading the sky the color of the Green Below, and all that was alive had their thread toward Heaven, and the beast began to swell, and its eyes popped dark juices and its stomach, filled with the gluttonies of death, tore wide. Its stench and fire grew, consuming each thread in amorphous conflagrations of organ reds and Pit blacks, climbing ever Heavenward and becoming the writhing energy of Absolute Power, and the Cosmos and its accompaniments were swallowed up by the whole of Babylon and imprisoned inside its Pearly Gates, and thereafter with a shining chorus of the Converted, it sing-song’d:

Great Devourer

Devour Her

Almighty

I Might-ee

Feast Fest

For Flesh

Big Best

The Breast

Demon

We Won

One

Here Lies

The Son

Sun

And He’ll

Call for Hellions

In My Name

They Come.

And the pig leapt to its feet as its entrails spilled and it began to dance and tramp upon its tiny hooves, cramming its jowls with its dangling intestines, chewing as it leapt around Atticus. It wrapped his thread, the very last on Earth, around its tusks and began to play, and the sound it made was the Devil’s Note, and with every pluck A.R.’s being was jerked as a marionette, and the string began to fray, and the Beast pulled out a bow and sawed with wild abandon and an evil hiss, and the line stretched thin then thinner then thinnest and snapped, its twang ringing through Eternity as the cyclical echoes of the Holy War without End. The Great Hog lost itself in dance, the innards shoved down its throat now tumbling again from its open stomach and, fiending to play on, it wrapped them around its tusks and plucked and sawed but there was no sound; its squeal of desperate fury only adding to the ringing silence for where man is not, nature is barren.

And the Host tumbled down from their lofty height, a great chorus of pleas in perfect harmony, and the hog was without that which to devour beyond itself and it shrank slowly to the ground as its bones became meal, its skin sagging under its own weight. The fires that burned hottest were reduced to ash. A.R. felt the distant touch of Southern rain with Hellfire and Heaven both receding as life drizzled itself back into saturation; restored for it had been taken. Nature remained as ever creeping toward the burial of each moment under Time, and he stood in stillness, inhaling resurrected life, squeezing the trigger dry as the hog expired with its dull-dark eyes flickering and closing slowly in the rain like that of any newborn babe. Boss and his cohort approached with great and cautious celebration as they witnessed the menace dead, and A.R. remained above it all, unseeing, speaking in tongues until he was called thrice-forth.