Bad Juju: A Novel of Raw Terror Read Free Page B

chattering, but the same vacant
expression remained on her face. She was in the world, but obviously not of it. Joe Rob’s heart went out to her but slammed into the stone wall of her
withdrawal. A terrible sadness settled in the center of his chest. He fought
the urge to cry, to bawl like a baby.
    “Let’s get the sumbitch in the
truck,” said Skeeter.
    “Maybe we should wait till dark,”
Joe Rob suggested.
    “No, we need to get this done.
Now.”
    Skeeter bent over Odell’s corpse
and pulled his headband down so that it covered the bullet hole in his
forehead. “Maybe that will keep his brains and shit from leaking on my truck.”
    “Jesus, man.”
    “You get his feet. I got his head.”
    Joe Rob bent to the task and
grabbed Odell’s ankles. “Christ, I think he shit his pants.”
    “’Course he did. That’s what
happens when you die. Everything lets go. Dying’s dirty business.”
    They carried the body through the
underbrush and got it to the back of the truck.
    “On three,” said Skeeter as he
began to swing his end of the suspended corpse like a lumpy bag of potatoes.
“One...two...three!”
    They let go and Odell was
momentarily airborne, then he flopped onto the truck bed with a hollow thump.
Skeeter covered the bed with a canvas tarp and secured it with multicolored
bungee cords.
    “All right,” he said. “Let’s get
the hell outta here.”
    “Wait. We forgot his gun.”
    “Damn. Good thinking. His rat bag
too.”
    They went back for the rifle and
the gunnysack.
    The girl was gone.
    “Where the hell did she go?” Joe
Rob looked around for some sign of her departure.
    “Who cares? Forget her.” Skeeter
snatched up Odell’s rifle. “Better this way. Now you don’t have to feel bad
about leaving her. She left us.”
    Joe Rob picked up the gunnysack.
“Yeah. Good point.”
    The rain was slacking off when they
got back to the truck and tossed Odell’s rat bag and rifle under the tarp.
    “Your shovel still in the back?”
asked Joe Rob as they climbed into the pickup and simultaneously slammed their
doors.
    “Yeah. Pickaxe too.” Skeeter
cranked the engine. “Ground’s pretty soft where we’ll plant him. We can have
him in the ground in no time. Then forget this whole fucking mess.”
    “I wish it was that easy. I’ll
never forget this shit, man. No fucking way.”
    Skeeter drove across the landfill,
winding his way through an obstacle course of junk piles and broken appliances.
The truck skidded over a slick patch of mud, then bumped over a shallow gully
and emerged onto the red hardpack of Nebula Road.
    “Shit, there’s a car,” Skeeter said
as he turned on the headlights against the premature dusk.
    Joe Rob leaned forward and peered
ahead through the windshield.
    A black Firebird with tinted
windows was coming down the road toward them.
    “Who is it?”
    “How the fuck should I know?”
Skeeter said. “Shit, shit, shit.”
    “I’ve never seen that car before.
It’s probably not somebody who’ll know your truck.”
    The Firebird blew past them. It was
an older model, flat black with a coat of primer.
    Skeeter’s eyes went to the rearview
mirror and watched the black car slow, then turn into the mouth of the
landfill. “It’s turning at the dump. Ah fuck! That’s not good.”
    “No shit.”
    “Maybe it’s Odell’s ride,” Skeeter
offered. “We didn’t see his truck, ya know.”
    “Nah, don’t say that.”
    “You think he hiked all the way
from the Bottom to shoot rats?”
    “He could’ve. It’s only five or six
miles.”
    “Not fucking likely. That’s his
ride. One of his brothers coming to pick him up. And he saw my fucking truck.
God damn!”
    “You don’t know that,” Joe Rob
protested. “And if we don’t recognize the car, the driver probably won’t know
your truck.”
    “All he’s gotta do is ask around.”
Skeeter slipped into his imitation redneck voice: “‘Old green Chevy with a
confederate flag on the front bumper? Sounds like