Doll Face

6

Everyone scattered.

Chazz shouted out to them to get in the damn van, but they were horrified and something inside them demanded that they run like hell. There was no thought behind it. There was only instinct, cool and unreasoning survival instinct.

“HEY!” Chazz called out again. “OVER HERE! WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU GOING?”

Lex and Soo-Lee led the charge, Creep pulling Danielle along with him. All of them ran flat out to the end of the street and darted around the corner, disappearing.

Ramona was slowly backing away from the thing that was bearing down on her with its painful, damaged stride. Its body was wrenched to the side, one shoulder humped higher than the other, its head bouncing around. It was making some awful scraping sound that might have been a voice.

“Ramona!” Chazz cried. “Over here! C’mon! C’mon! Over here!”

In the back of his mind, he knew that this was one of those defining moments in life where a man either proved himself a man or he spent the rest of his years squatting to pee. The freak bearing down on Ramona was not a big guy… but he was weird and fucked-up and disturbed. Chazz figured he could have flattened him, but he wasn’t about to do that.

No way in hell.

If that thing got its hands on him and put that white grinning face in his own, it would be too much. He would faint. He would go right down. He would crawl under the van and start sucking his fucking thumb and even all his muscles and machismo on the gridiron could not change that fact.

“C’mon!” he cried again.

Ramona was keeping her distance from the broken man, but if she tripped and fell, he would have her. And Chazz had the worst feeling that he would not be able to help her. That he would scream and run. He would not be able to stop himself from doing so.

“Get over here! Get in the fucking van, you dumb bitch!”

Sometimes, he figured, a good insult got somebody’s attention all that much quicker. And it worked. She turned away from the thing stalking her and jogged over to him. Chazz, feeling chivalrous, grabbed the passenger-side door and opened it for her.

She was almost to him.

Then, not four feet away, she skidded to a halt and backed away, tripping and falling on her ass. Chazz, grumbling under his breath, made to go help her up—actually, he was thinking of grabbing her by the hair and throwing her into the van—but then something touched his arm.

Something soft and warm.

With a cry, he turned and saw another one of those things sitting in the passenger seat. In the glow of the dome light, he saw it was a woman… or a grim mockery of the same. Her face was white like the man’s, set with tiny cracks like an antique vase. She was bald like a mannequin without a wig and had no eyebrows. She had blank white eyes like boiled eggs. She was naked, her breasts—lacking nipples—were pert and artificial-looking.

He screamed.

He wasn’t even aware that he had until it came ripping out of him with considerable volume and force. She had his arm. She was gripping it with considerable pressure, her sharp little fingers digging in deep. As he tried to pull clear of her, he saw one thing that nearly put him to his knees.

Her hand.

It wasn’t real.

It wasn’t flesh-and-blood.

Dear God, the fingers were perfectly white and perfectly smooth, tapering and feminine, though mottled as if they had been stored away in some moldering trunk for many years. But for all that, he saw that each finger was segmented—in place of the knuckles there were glassy ball joints.

It took him maybe a split second to realize that.

And by then, she had turned in the passenger seat. She only had one arm. Some kind of armature protruded from her shoulder where another might have been attached. Her breasts and belly were mottled like her fingers. Her cracked, white doll-like face was smiling at him, one corner of her mouth pulled up in a crooked grin of defilement.

But the worst thing was that she had spread her legs to show him the hairless slit between her thighs.

Chazz, vaguely aware that Ramona was crying out behind him, lost all control. The horror of the situation bottomed him right out. Everything inside him seemed to get sucked into some massive spiraling black hole and he screamed and went wild with rage. With every bit of strength he had, which was considerable, he yanked his arm away and the mannequin woman came with it, holding on tight. He flailed his arm around, trying to throw her and her joints made a horrible clacking sound as if she was a jointed wooden doll. Her mouth was open in a wide toothless grin by that point and she was trying to wrap her legs around him. He saw all of this in ghosting, blurring images as he swung her back and forth.

Finally, he threw her.

She hit the ground and broke apart on impact, her arm clattering away from her body, one leg broken free beneath the knee. Her head rolled across the pavement like a ball, the jaws still opening and closing.

Her hand was still clenching his forearm.

Even divorced of her body, the fingers were still moving, squeezing and kneading his arm. He screamed again and tore it free, leaving four bleeding ruts in his flesh. Not only that, but a single white finger that still trembled like a dying insect.

He was out of it by then.

He was drenched with a cold/hot sweat, shaking and hysterical, making shrill moaning sounds in his throat. When Ramona tried to reach out for him, he knocked her aside, sent her sprawling to the pavement with his animal fury.

Then he ran in a wild, blind flight.

Because the pieces of the mannequin woman were not as dead as they should have been… they were still moving. And he was almost sure her decapitated head was calling his name.