Prisoner 489 by Joe R. Lansdale & Santiago Caruso

Author:Joe R. Lansdale & Santiago Caruso [Lansdale, Joe R. & Caruso, Santiago]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Thrillers, General
ISBN: 9781626410732
Google: Yv3toAEACAAJ
Amazon: 1626410739
Publisher: Dark Regions Press, LLC
Published: 2014-10-20T05:00:00+00:00

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Bernard moved closer to the ropes, flashed light on them, bent forward for a closer look. They had a smell. The wind and rain was carrying some of it away, but the smell was of blood and … shit.

“It’s intestines,” Bernard said.

“What the hell?”

“The goddamn tree must have fallen on him.”

“Toggle?”

“No, Elvis Presley. Of course Toggle.”

“Shit, shit, shit.”

“Jesus Christ,” Bernard said, and then he and Wilson went back and forth cursing and swearing.

“What a fucked up piece of luck,” Wilson said.

“Where’s … the rest of him?”

They moved along the tree and shined their lights into its branches and found his head. It was on the ground, between two limbs. And nearby was a leg.

Bernard bent down close and put the light on Toggle’s head. The man’s eyes were wide and his mouth was thrown open and his tongue was swollen and fat and marked with a wound, as if, in the moments before he threw his mouth open, he had bitten his tongue. The mouth was filled with rain water and blood. Pieces of flesh and a fragment of spinal cord dangled from where the neck had been.

“His leg,” Wilson said. “When the tree fell, it must have jerked it out of its socket, jerked it right off of him.”

“The head too? What are the odds?”

“Pretty rare, I’d say.”

“Yeah,” Bernard said. “I don’t think it could happen like that.”

“But it did.”

Bernard moved the light away from the tree. He saw marks on the ground. “What’s this?”

Wilson put his light on it. It was a big mark. A big shoe mark.

“That is one big footprint,” Wilson said. “A boot.”

“Yeah. But that isn’t Toggle’s print. Those feet, they would have to belong to Bigfoot.”

“A mutant Bigfoot. Hell, Bernard. Those feet, they got to be eighteen inches. Who or what the fuck has eighteen-inch feet?”

“The golem,” Bernard said.

“What?”

“Nothing. Thinking out loud. Come on.”

“We got to get the body.”

“We will. Come on, and watch yourself.”

“Hey, man, you’re creeping me out.”

Bernard made his way to the grave they had prepared. Some of the dirt was gone; there was a gap in the ground where something had pushed its way through from inside. It was a large gap. They could also see the coffin, and they could see inside it, the part near where the head should be. The coffin was knocked open as if by a battering ram. There were bits of cloth from the bags used for burial, and there were bits of orange jumpsuit, the kind convicts wore. The chains were broken and lying loose in the grave. “Damn, man.” Wilson said. “I got to still be drunk, drunker than I thought.”

“Trust me, I’m not drunk and I’m seeing the same thing you are.”

“Just so I got it straight, what you’re thinking is what I’m thinking, and that’s that whoever … whatever … was inside the coffin has knocked its way loose, climbed through hundreds of pounds of dirt, come out of the ground and killed Toggle.”

“I think Toggle tried to get away from it.

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