Chapter 12
FROM THE TIME he was old enough to walk, Teddie Ross had been the town bully. A head taller and twenty pounds heavier than his male contemporaries, year after year, he did as he pleased with everybody, and what pleased him most was of a perverse, sadistic nature. In the fifth grade, his favorite hobby was hanging stray cats to death on tree limbs. At a young age, he accosted a slight 'girl in the park and made her take off her clothing. Then he dropped his own trousers and made her perform a number of unnatural sexual acts with him. In the end, he raped her. A mature male physically, he sent the child home hurt and bloody, crying hysterically. For that little caper, Teddie spent a year in reform school.
Incarceration only whetted his appetite for the cruel and unusual. Mainly, his target was the weaker sex. He loved to make women suffer. Unfortunately, Teddie was blessed with a handsome face and a rugged physique that made females especially vulnerable to him. His treatment of them ranged from blatant physical torture to subtle mental torment.
One of the most insufferable things he ever did was on the night before his wedding to Sara Blake, daughter of the richest family in Coaltown. He married Sara for her father's money, but, while he was courting her, he was also seeing the daughter of a local farmer. Rachel Fields was the prettiest girl in Coaltown High School, a raven-haired, fawn-like creature with a sweet face and liquid, brown eyes. She was a tiny girl, just five feet tall, but her petite figure was perfect in all respects. It was her frailty that excited Teddie.
Rachel knew nothing of his plans to elope with Sara Blake. She was madly in love with him, and thought he loved her too. She was a girl with high moral principles, and refused to let Teddie make love to her no matter how insistent he was. She did let him slip his hand inside her blouse and fondle her cute, plum-sized breasts, and she would shyly bring him comfort with her small, gentle hands. Teddie pretended to go along with her, but all the while he was planning diabolical revenge on Rachel.
The night before he married Sara, he drove Rachel out into the country and parked beside a moon-drenched lake. The air was sweet, the setting romantic. Teddie had never been so glib and persuasive in his life. Kissing her little plums, he slipped his hand underneath her skirt and caressed her trembling belly through her panties.
"I love you, Rachel," he said. "Please let me do it to you."
"No," she said stubbornly. "I'll never do it with anyone except the man I marry."
He wriggled his tongue around a small, pink nipple. "I want to marry you, dear. Let's run away together tomorrow morning."
Rachel's infatuation blinded her to his deceit. "Are you serious?" she asked breathlessly.
"Completely. Tomorrow morning." His hand slipped inside the waistband of her panties and stroked her bare flesh.
The girl was drunk with happiness and the glow of desire his skilled fingers kindled in her body. "Oh, Teddie," she sighed. "I love you so much."
His ringers worked the panties down over her rounded hips and plump thighs. "What's one night?" he said slyly. "Tomorrow we'll be man and wife. Let me do it to you, baby."
She couldn't rebuff him any longer. "All right, darling. I suppose it's all right."
She let him undress her completely. She blushed as his lecherous gaze traveled over her lovely, delicate body and he covered her breasts with her hands. The blood drained out of her face quickly though when Teddie undressed. She had never seen a naked man before, particularly a man who was bursting with lust. The sight of him petrified her.
"Oh, darling" she said nervously. "I'm afraid."
Teddie laughed. "Oh come on now! We've fooled around plenty in the past. It shouldn't be this much of a shock to you."
She hung her head shyly. "I never looked," she said softly. "I always kept my eyes shut."
He thought that was hilarious. "You're a cute little doll, did I ever tell you that?" He grasped her around the waist and lifted her onto his lap. She put her arms around his neck trustingly and sighed in wondrous expectation as he clasped her buttocks in his big hands. Rachel had read too many romantic novels. She believed that all lovers were gentle and patient with their women. That illusion was exploded in one sharp, brutal thrust. Her tender flesh convulsed in agony as the man she loved vented his lust and savagery on her helpless body. When he was finished with her, she doubled up on the seat, moaning and writhing in pain and humiliation.
The hurt he inflicted on her that night was pale compared to the cruel blow he dealt her the next day. When he took her home that night, he gave her specific instructions to meet him at the railroad depot at noon the following day. When she arrived in her best Sunday dress and her little valise in hand, she saw Teddie boarding a train with Sara Blake.
Tipping his hat politely to the stunned girl, he said without a qualm of conscience, "Hello, Rachel. This is my wife, Sara. We're off on our honeymoon. Wish us luck."
Stricken with grief, she watched the train pull out of the station. Then she went home and hanged herself in her father's barn. Nobody except Teddie Ross knew the reason why Rachel did it.
As it turned out, Rachel may have been the luckier of the two girls. Before the honeymoon was over, his new bride was in a state of shock from his cruel sexual excesses. Less than a year later, she was committed to a state mental institution.
By the time he was thirty-five, Teddie had left his evil mark on the flesh and spirits of a dozen more girls.
The day the bubonic plague struck Coaltown, Teddie was ecstatic with excitement. Violent, painful death had always thrilled him, and plague meant violent, painful death on a mass scale. There were the side benefits too, the hysterical depravity on the streets, muggings, rape, fights, drunkenness, the bloody war on the rats. This was his element.
Most of the day he spent in one of his favorite haunts, a bar where whores and junkies consorted. Tension built up in his body like high-voltage current. Twice that day he had gone to one of the private bedrooms in the cheap hotel over the bar with girls, but conventional sex brought him only temporary relief. In the gray hours of the next morning, he went upstairs a third time with another girl, a slender, nervous redhead who was rumored to be a nymphomaniac. She was on the bed naked, wriggling her hips in desire before he got his shirt off.
"Come on, honey," she wined. "I'm hotter than a two-dollar pistol."
With a cigarette hanging from his lips, he lay down beside her and ran his hands over her eager body. Her nipples were pulsing like twin beacons. Her loins quivered in readiness.
"Now!" she gasped. "Now!"
Smiling at the sudden inspiration that came to him, he kneeled over her. "You may be hot now," he said, "but you're going to be a lot hotter."
As her hips surged up to receive him, he removed the cigarette from his mouth, palmed it in one hand and slipped the hand between her thighs. The girl's eyes flew open, her face was contorted by shock and agony. She gaped at him in dumb disbelief. Earlier, she had stood on the beach, watching them burn out the rats. She had a vivid recollection of one rodent running with its hind quarters ablaze. She screamed like that rat now, clutching at herself to tear out the terrible, burning pain.
Teddie got off the bed and dressed, laughing at her tortured convulsions. He left the room and shut the door. Her wailing followed him down the hall, fading out as he descended the stairs into the bedlam of the bar below. He felt wildly exhilarated, restless, eager for excitement. The episode with the redhead had whetted his appetite for more of the same.
"Something ought to be done," a drunk was saying to a group of other drunks around him. "This quarantine, you know what it is? The government is making all of us sacrificial lambs. Coaltown is a sinking ship, and they're bottling us up inside of it. They're going to keep us here until every man, woman and child of us dies off with the plague. Then they're going to come in with flame throwers and burn up the whole town. That's the only way you can lick the plague, don't let anybody kid you. Fire!"
Teddie moved up the bar, licking his lips. "You're right about one thing, friend. Fire is the only way to wipe out the plague. Only why wait until we all die off? Why not stamp it out while some of us are still alive? That's how they beat the big plagues that ravaged Europe during the Middle Ages. They heaped up the corpses, yes, and the dying, and they burned them to ashes on huge pyres."
The men and women looked at him uncomprehendingly, their eyes glazed from dope, drink and fatigue. "You figure we should burn the dead?" a spokesman asked.
Teddie's eyes glittered excitedly. "Yes! And the dying!"
"How could we do that?" a woman asked. "The law wouldn't allow it."
"The law!" Teddie hissed scornfully. "A bunch of blue-jacketed puppets taking orders from the governor, who is safe and sound with his family in his mansion. There are certain times when it's a man's duty to take the law in his own hands. If we don't do something to save ourselves, who else is going to help us?"
They were mesmerized by his intensity. "Yeah," several of them chorused, "we got to save ourselves."
Teddie vaulted up on the bar, his voice rising to a mad pitch. "Let's see your hands! Which of you are with me?"
'I don't know," a man said uncertainly. "It's one thing to burn the dead, but those poor devils in the hospital, I don't know."
"Those poor devils in the hospital are goners anyway," Teddie argued. "Put them out of their misery, I say."
"Yea!" a mighty roar went up from the crowd, as all sentiment swung in his direction like iron particles collecting on a magnet.
Teddie threw his arms into the air. "All right! We'll need torches, like the ones they burned out the rats with. We'll need gasoline and pitch and rags. We'll need weapons too. We may have to fight our way through this crisis."
"And we'll need plenty of whiskey!" a man yelled, displaying his false teeth in a crazy smile.
It was daylight when the vigilantes set forth on their mission of terror. They swept through the empty streets, to the morgue, first. The attendant in charge and the policeman with him were stunned by the sight of the torchbearers. Their faces were bestial, inhuman.
"What is this?" the cop demanded, nervously unsnapping his pistol holster.
"We're going to burn this place down," Teddie told him. "Those corpses in there are infested with plague germs. If they aren't burned now, the whole town is doomed. Step aside!"
The cop cursed and went for his gun. He was overwhelmed by a squad of men wielding hatchets and clubs. A flashing blade split his head open from crown to jaw, like two halves of a melon. The scared attendant tried to get inside of the storage room and slam the heavy door closed, but Teddie was too quick for him. He rammed a blazing torch in the poor devil's face, smearing it with fiery, jellied gasoline. The odor of burning flesh and hair were heady stimulants in Teddie's nostrils. Blazing like a human torch, the attendant staggered wildly out of the morgue and collapsed on the steps.
Teddie led his mob into the cold storage room and pulled open a drawer. He sluiced gasoline onto the cold, white corpse it contained and applied the torch. As the flames consumed it, the lifeless body bolted upright in the drawer, impelled by the sudden constriction of its shriveling tendons.
Teddie danced around, laughing in fiendish glee. "Look, everyone, I can raise the dead."
At the very moment the mob was razing the morgue, Dr. Donald Evans was climbing the steps of the police station. He went grimly to the desk sergeant. The sergeant looked up and smiled. "Hi, Doc, what brings you here so early?"
"I want to report a murder," Evans said.
The cop's eyes widened in surprise. "You joking, Doc?"
Evans started to reply, but he was interrupted as Chief Hart burst out of his office, his face pale. "Murphy!" he shouted. "Send out a call to all patrol cars! Contact the militia outside of town! We need reinforcements, but quick! I just got a tip over the phone that a mob is going berserk. They're burning down the morgue, and they're going to burn down the hospital next! Some nutty idea about wiping out the plague!"
Evans blanched, his confession forgotten. "The hospital? We've got to stop them."
"Come on, Doc!" the chief said. "You can ride over with me." The two men rushed out of the station.
When the mob reached the hospital, Evans, the chief and six cops with drawn guns were posted on the front steps. "There must be over a hundred of them," Evans muttered. "We'll never be able to stop them."
"We'll try," the chief said. "Reinforcements are on the way. Maybe we can stall them until the militia gets here."
The seething mob flowed to the steps, and Teddie Ross vaulted up to the third step. He brandished his torch like a sword.
"Get out of our way. We're going to do what has to be done. Kill the plague with fire!"
Behind him, his army murmured in agreement. Their faces were sweaty and black with soot. One girl's blouse hung in tatters, and her large, white breasts were bare. The man alongside her had an arm around her back, the hand crooked under her armpit, his grimy fingers stroking one of her breasts.
"You're insane!" Evans said. "All of you. Bubonic plague isn't spread by the dead or the sick. It's the rats, and the last of them were finished off by the extermination crews during the night."
"He's lying!" Teddie yelled across his shoulder to the mob. "Don't listen to him. If the plague can't be spread by humans, why did they quarantine the whole town? Why are the soldiers keeping us prisoners in this death-hole?"
"It's an extreme precaution to prevent infected rats or fleas from spreading elsewhere in trains, produce trucks, that kind of thing."
"Get out of our way!" Teddie growled. "We're coming through!" He started up the steps, waving the torch.
Evan's gaze lit on the five-gallon drum of gasoline that swung from Teddie's other hand. He turned to the chief and whispered. "Get your men inside and let me have your gun. I have an idea."
"Let me handle this, Doc," the chief objected.
"No time for arguing! Do as I say."
The chief shrugged and handed him the revolver. He motioned his men to retreat inside the plate-glass doors. Evans and Teddie confronted each other on the sweeping stone steps.
"Go ahead, shoot me, Doc!" Teddie taunted him, advancing another step. He nodded back at the mob. "They'll tear you to pieces if you do."
Ignoring him, Evans lifted the pistol and aimed it at the gasoline can in Teddie's hand. He squeezed the trigger slowly. The sharp report echoed over the heads of the men and women milling around in the street. The can twisted in Teddie's grasp as the bullet tore through it. High-test fuel sprayed up all around him. The flaming torch in his other hand ignited the spray. In a spontaneous chain reaction the can exploded like a giant Molotov Cocktail. There was a mighty roar, and a sheet of flame flashed the breadth of the steps. Teddie and Evans were enveloped in fire.
Fear and horror broke the hypnotic spell that Teddie had cast over his followers. They broke away from the flaming stairs where the two men were doing a weird, sickening dance of immolation. Their bodies seemed to grow smaller and smaller as the hungry fire consumed them. It was five minutes before the inferno subsided. Small fires still flickered in pools of gasoline on the worn spots of the stone steps. By that time, Teddie and Evans were twisted, charred, unrecognizable hulks.
Jeeps nudged through the stunned crowd, carrying armed militiamen. The people offered no resistance. The danger had passed.
Inside the hospital, Chief Hart wiped his forehead in relief. "That crazy Doc," he said in a pained voice. "He knew he didn't stand a chance when he did what he did. But he gave us the fraction of time we needed. The militia were too late to have stopped that bunch. Another five minutes and they would have been running amok through every corridor of this hospital." He stared at the charred bodies on the steps and shuddered. "What a way to go!"
At noon, the crisis was over. Coaltown had been free of new plague cases for more than 12 hours. The quarantine was lifted. The citizens of Coaltown straggled back to their normal routines and duties with the dull, somnambulistic attitude of celebrants with king-sized hangovers. Everyone was a little guilty, a little ashamed of what he could remember about the night before. More ashamed of what he could not remember, did not want to remember!
The mayor and the police chief conferred with Dr. Paul Bowles, who had been appointed temporary chief of staff of the hospital after Dr. Evans' tragic demise. The three men went over the town's casualty lists.
"It's ironic," Bowles said bitterly. "What the plague did to the people of this town is mild compared what they did to themselves and to each other."
All over Coaltown, grieving men and women were saying or thinking the same thing to themselves. There was hardly a household that had not been scarred in some way by the never-to-be forgotten night when plague and lust had brought damnation to a peaceful lakeside community.