Page 4 of Turn That River Red

But it was someone.

Someone who had been decapitated and tossed into the only place in this world I’ve ever known peace.

CHAPTER TWO

AMBROSE

Well.Thatdidn’t go how I expected, although I can’t say I’m disappointed by the result.

I had intended to take some inspiration from my friend Jaxon and set up a vaguely blasphemous sculpture with the inedible body parts on the bank of the Concho. Considering I’m doing this entire thing as a favor for his girlfriend Charlotte, it felt fitting, even though I normally prefer not to leave evidence of my crimes lying around.

Especially since, in the last fifty years or so, I’ve developed a taste for the meat.

At this point, I’m nearly two hundred years old, counting any time spent in the dirt recovering after a death, and I’ve had a baker’s dozen of those in my lifetime. You get tired of things, living this long. You get tired of sex and sleep. You get tired of food. But back in the ‘70s I befriended another one of my kind who argued we ought to treat humans the way the better humans treat deer and wild boar. Got to use them up completely.

She was an unusual one, and older too, about a hundred years older than me. She had fallen into the hippie shit that hadbeen popular a few years earlier. Back to the land. Long hair and bare feet. Kill for food, not pleasure.

Still, eating her big succulent roasts gave me a taste for human meat, and so I started to collect the best cuts from my victims: the rump, the thigh, the belly—which makes a fine, salty bacon. The man from the church was no exception. Waste not, want not, my old hippie friend would always say. Sometimes, I wonder what she’s up to, if she’s still using every part of the human. She’s not in Texas anymore.

Anyway, my point is that most of my victim is currently sitting in my freezer. What I’d brought with me for my bait was just the unusable parts, since using every part of the human really isn’t feasible. The head, sans its teeth, being the main one. I also had both forearms and his hands, fingertips still intact since I want him identified. The feet. Big, awkward pieces that are so obviously what they are. Soft meats, like the innards and the lungs and such, I feed to my dogs. I was ready to get to work.

But when I arrived at the river, someone was there.

I smelled her before I saw herorheard her, a soft lilac scent that drifted on the balmy early morning air. I stood beside my Oldsmobile, dragging that sack of hands and arms and a single severed head, and breathed it in, trying to place where it was coming from.

Then I heard her over the rushing babble of the river—her soft, rhythmic heartbeat and the gentle whisper of her breath. I dropped the sack and crept forward along the riverbank until I saw her: Young, pretty, her long pale hair up in a braid and silvery in the starlight. As I watched from the brush, she waded into the ankle-high water, a flashlight dancing over the surface.

I knew immediately she was from the church because of how she was dressed, in one of those shapeless calico dresses. But what the hell was she doing out there at five in the morning?

I had to consider my options then. Clearly, I couldn’t set up any displays. But I had my witness here already. A pretty little thing who could run screaming to the church and set off the turmoil I needed to worm my way inside.

Fortunately, we’ve had all those thunderstorms, which do little to break the heat but do put on a great light show and, more importantly, flood the rivers. This morning the Concho was churning its way through the West Texas desert, right past my witness. My job just got a lot more easy.

So I went back upriver and tossed in the body parts, one after another, throwing them toward the center of the river where she was shining her flashlight. I knew there was a chance she wouldn’t realize what she was looking at, but I figured if it didn’t work, I could just drive downriver, recollect them, and try again tomorrow night.

But then the poor thing slipped and fell into the water. And then I heard her start to scream.

In my many years walking this earth, I’ve become a connoisseur of screams. Humans can’t tell the difference between them, but I can. Screams of pleasure have a throaty undercurrent like good whiskey. Screams of pain have a desperation to them, a pleading, that always goes straight to my cock. And screams of fear—well, those are the classic, aren’t they? Pure adrenaline converted to audio. It’s like hearing the creation of the universe.

That girl screamed with fear, mingled with a touch of disgust and—most deliciously—sorrow. As soon as I heard it, that braided, multilayered scream, I knew she had found the head.

Even better, though, I suspect she recognized its former owner. That’s what the sorrow was.

At that point, I was about a half-mile upriver from her, but I’m not a human. I’m the boogeyman, and it only took me about a minute and a half to clear the difference. I got therejust as she was dragging herself out of the other side of the river, the head still in the water.

She didn’t see me.

Of course not; it was still dark and she was panicked and I wasn’t about to follow her up to the church compound. But I saw her. She practically dove into her golf course and peeled out across the dirt, heading straight to the church in a cloud of panic.

Like I said, it all worked out better than I had expected.

I’m home now,home being an old ranch house set off the highway. I’ve got a half dozen houses scattered across the western half of the state, having collected them over the years. It’s easier to hunt if you have a wide area, a bigger pool of victims, and traveling’s a lot easier when you’ve got a semi-permanent home to go to.

This is always the hard part. Biding my time. Letting them steep before I sweep in and destroy their lives.

I pace around my hot, sunny living room while one of my dogs, an old mutt I call Max, follows around at my heels, hoping I’ve got more wet meat for him. I keep thinking about the girl I saw—my second victim, technically, even though right now I’ve got no intention of killing her. Sometimes, humans are better use to you alive.

I sink down on my couch and flip open my laptop and type inCocana County murder,even though I suspect the church will try to keep this out of the press for as long as they can. I’m right. Nothing. I slam the laptop shut and toss it aside and Max hops up on the couch beside me, his big curling tail wagging. I pet his head distractedly, rubbing him on the spot between his ears that he likes, and just kind of stare at the wall.

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