Chapter 49
“Let her scream,” Jennie said. “It’s not Maggie. It’s the thing replacing her.”
Malcolm wanted to vomit over the side, but his nausea wasn’t prompted by the way the boat jumped and slewed over the waves.
Their mother’s face had become almost unrecognizable.
Blisters grew and burst while he watched, and she dragged her cheeks on the bottom of the boat to scrape off the living skin to reveal the monster beneath.
He could feel evil pulsing from her, prickling his skin even more than the cold and the spray of the ocean.
If the bits of skin had turned to worms and tried to crawl inside his clothes and into his bones, he would not have been surprised.
Minutes passed, but he surrendered to the urge and vomited into the water.
His fingers tightened on the long handle of the shovel he’d taken from the shed.
Jennie had a tire iron from the trunk of the Frazer and a rusty garden trowel.
They’d hoped for a shotgun, but if the owner of the boat had any guns, they would have been in his house.
They were short on weapons, but Malcolm told himself if they worked quickly, the only thing they’d need was the shovel.
Maggie stopped screaming. Without breathing, she seemed dead again, lying there in the bottom of the boat with her hands cuffed behind her back. But when he shifted slightly, he could see her eyes, the way they wandered wildly in search of some escape from her pain.
Her eyes were black cherry red, and Malcolm couldn’t wait to bury them deep in the ground.