Billy was standing before him, suddenly.
“That’s what Marci said when he took her, ‘Don’t hurt me, please,’” he said. “She said it over and over again. While he dragged her here. While he choked her to death.”
Alan held the knife tighter.
“He said it over and over again as he cut her up and buried her. He laughed.”
Danny suddenly bucked hard, almost throwing him, and before he had time to think, Alan had slashed down with the knife, aiming for the face, the throat, the lung. The tip landed in the middle of his bony chest and skated over each rib, going tink, tink, tink through the handle, like a xylophone. It scored along the emaciated and distended belly, then sank in just to one side of the smooth patch where a real person—where Marci—would have a navel.
Davey howled and twisted free of the seeking edge, skipping back three steps while holding in the loop of gut that was trailing free of the incision.
“She said, ‘Don’t hurt me.’ She said, ‘Please.’ Over and over. He said it, too, and he laughed at her.” Benny chanted it at him, standing just behind him, and the sound of his voice filled Alan’s ears.
Suddenly Davey reeled back as a stone rebounded off of his shoulder. They both looked in the direction it had come from, and saw George, with the tail of his shirt aproned before him, filled with small, jagged stones from the edge of the hot spring in their father’s depths. They took turns throwing those stones, skimming them over the water, and Ed and Fred and George had a vicious arm.
Davey turned and snarled and started upslope toward George, and a stone took him in the back of the neck, thrown by Freddie, who had sought cover behind a thick pine that couldn’t disguise the red of his windbreaker, red as the inside of his lip, which pouted out as he considered his next toss.
He was downslope, and so Drew was able to bridge the distance between them very quickly—he was almost upon Felix when a third stone, bigger and faster than the others, took him in the back of the head with terrible speed, making a sound like a hammer missing the nail and hitting solid wood instead.