Chasing the dead

by Joe Schreiber

  It is the old farm pickup.

  It sits perfectly still in front of her, its engine burbling, its headlights on. Before Sue has time to react the door opens and the driver jumps out.

  This time he's standing directly in her headlights and she sees him clearly, the outline of his body as clear and bright as a life-size cardboard cutout of a pop star in a record store. But even so, the disconnect between what she's expecting and what her eyes actually report is surprising enough that it still takes the data a moment to percolate through her consciousness.

  He's just a kid.

  No, she thinks, not a true kid, but young and lean, late teens, with a long face, short-cropped hair, and no expression. His eyes are cups of shadow. He's wearing a T-shirt that hangs out over his jeans, and no jacket. And he's headed toward her.

  Sue is still fumbling for the wheel even as he runs over to the Expedition and comes right up to the passenger side, yanks the handle, and opens the door. He actually tries to climb inside before realizing that there's something in the way.

  "What the hell is this?" He's got a surprisingly deep voice for someone his size and age, and a big Adam's apple that goes up and down as he talks. He yanks the blanket off so Marilyn's face is exposed. "Holy shit!" He jumps backward, practically tripping over his own feet, and stares past Marilyn at Sue. "There's a dead girl with no eyes in your front seat!"

  "Who are you?" Sue asks.

  "There is a dead fucking girl with no eyes in your front seat!"

  "That's my daughter's nanny, Marilyn," Sue says, and she sounds so calm saying it that she too is having some difficulty believing all of this is unfolding quite the way it seems to be. "You don't know anything about that?"

  "It's already happening. Oh shit, I knew it, it's already too late." Now the kid is opening the door to the backseat, climbing into the Expedition on the right side behind Marilyn's body, and crouching down with his head low as if anticipating a mortar attack. "Come on, we've got to get out of here." This doesn't come off as a demand so much as a plea, as if he's on a mission as urgent as hers. "I'm serious, lady! Let's go!"

  "Who are you?" she asks again.

  "I'll tell you later, just hit it."

  "Hold on," she says. "You've been following me. You're telling me that you don't have anything to do with my daughter's kidnapping?"

  "Not me." The kid shakes his head and points. "Him."

  Sue is about to turn around and ask the kid who he's talking about when she sees another car coming toward them from behind, rolling down the middle of the snowed-over road toward the pickup. She sees it clearly now. It's a van, the old-fashioned rectilinear model of no particular color.

  "Who is that?" she asks.

  "Look," the kid says, "I'm telling you for your own sake as well as mine, we've got to get out of here right now, okay? The dead travel fast. Just get us the fuck out of here."

  "First tell me why you're following me."

  "Toprotect you!" he explodes. "Now come on, let's go."

  Sue puts the Expedition into drive and starts moving east down what's left of Townsend Street. At the same moment, on the other side of the street, the van is pulling up alongside the kid's pickup, where it creeps to a halt. She sees movement inside the van, dark and indiscriminate, and then they're too far away to see anything else.

  "Who was in that van?" she asks, as Townsend Street trails away and becomes Route 117 in her rearview mirror. "Was that the man who kidnapped Veda?"

  The kid crouched behind her in the backseat doesn't say anything. She can hear him breathing, cornered-animal style, and it sounds like he's trying to keep every nerve in his body from bursting through his skin all at once. Sue keeps her eyes on the road. She flashes back through everything that just happened and sees it all clearly, though it doesn't make any more sense than when it first happened. There's no question that the old farm truck was the same truck she saw out on the road an hour or so earlier, when she was first trying to dial Phillip's number in Malibu. It's the same truck that flagged her down after the night at the pumpkin patch. Probably the same truck that chased her out of the Prudential Center. And those are just the times shenoticed it. So the kid has to be an integral part of it whether he admits it or not.

  "Why did you run away the last time you saw me?" she asks.

  No reply. Sue looks back. Then she sees the headlights coming up behind them fast. Right away she knows it has to be the van.

  It's approaching fast, and she doesn't see any particular reason to try to outrun it, especially not with the roads the way they are. So she just lets it get up close behind her, until the kid cowering in her backseat realizes that it's there too and starts freaking out again.

  "Wait a second, what are you doing?" he asks. "He's getting too close. He's going to see me."

  "Then keep your head down," Sue says, and pulls the wheel hard to the right, giving the van plenty of room to pass. Sure enough, the van swings into the oncoming lane, right alongside them, and the kid in her backseat shuts up, ducking his head. Sue is aware of the looming dark shape of the van holding at fifty miles an hour to her immediate left. Then a flashlight beam sweeps out of the driver's side of the van, trained directly on Sue's face, and it's so bright that when she looks over she can't see anything but white light that makes her eyes ache.

  "Don't look at him!" the kid's voice pipes up from behind her. "Don't let him see your face!"

  For about half a second she considers hitting the brakes to get the light off her face and then disregards the idea-again, why bother? The van's driver apparently sees whatever he was looking for, a scared woman in her thirties with a dead body partially uncovered in the passenger seat, and the flashlight beam goes off, leaving spots flashing in Sue's eyes. The van's engine revs and it goes blasting up ahead of her, disappearing around the next curve.

  "He's gone," she tells the kid. "You can come up now."

  "He's not gone." He sits up, climbing and unfolding himself into the backseat right behind her head. "He's just playing with you."

  "Who is he? Who areyou?"

  "My name's Jeff Tatum." He tosses it out there so offhandedly that it has to be the truth. "You don't know me. I live in Gray Haven."

  "You've been following me for months." This is just a guess but she's pretty sure that if she's wrong, he'll tell her. "What do you want? How do you know me?"

  Big surprise, the kid doesn't answer. Sue realizes that he's reached between the seats and grabbed the map with the route planned out on it. He stares at it. "Where did you get this?"

  "It was stuck to Marilyn's body."

  "Punished, what does that mean?"

  "It means he was punishing me. Killing Marilyn and leaving her body here was my punishment. Why-"

  "What did you do?"

  She turns around, looks at him. "I'm done answering questions here. So far you haven't told me anything."

  But Jeff Tatum is just staring at the map, reading the names of the towns aloud. "Winslow, Stoneview, Ashford, Wickham…" He jerks his head up at the road in front of them. "Whoa, wait a second. You're not actuallyfollowing this route, are you?"

  "Yes."

  "Oh hell no. You can't. You can't do that."

  He starts to crumple the map up and Sue grabs it back from him, stuffing it down between her knees, then turns around far enough to look him straight in the eyes. "Leave it alone. I don't know who you are or what you want but so far all I've seen you do is jump in my car and come unglued. It's been an insane night so far and unless you start telling me what you know about my daughter you're bouncing right out of here even faster than you came in, and I don't care who you're running from."

  "Listen to me, Sue, Ms. Young, seriously-" The earnestness that comes into his voice now is almost as alarming as the fact that he knows her name. "I'm sorry about earlier, when I stopped you up the road. I figured that you were calling the police, or even worse, on the phone with him, and I knew if I tried to say anything to you, he'd hear me. I panicked an
d got back in the truck and drove away."

  "Who is he?"

  But Jeff Tatum is looking out the windshield at the road ahead. "I don't know what he told you about this route or these towns, or what you think you're doing, but this is really a huge mistake."

  "Let me tell you what I know," she says. "I know that somebody kidnapped my daughter tonight. Whoever it is killed her nanny and he's given me orders to drive through these roads and these towns by tomorrow morning if I want to get her back. I don't know why he wants me to do it, and I don't care. All I know is that I'm driving his route."

  Of course she's left out one small detail, the thing wrapped in garbage bags in the back of her car, the whole point of everything. And the kid seems to know it too. He doesn't say anything, but his eyes watch her in the rearview mirror, reminding her of how they gleamed from the truck's mirror earlier, only now they look softer, haunted by something deep inside.

  "Why were you following me?" she asks.

  "I already told you, to protect you." He sounds like he means it. "To protect you and your daughter and other people from getting killed."

  "You're protecting me by stopping me from doing what this guy is telling me to do?"

  "Exactly."

  "That doesn't make any sense."

  "If you know your history it does."

  "History of what? People who do stupid things?"

  "The history of murder in New England."

  "And you know about this, why?"

  "I've done research. I know this route. I know what it can do. Just trust me, okay, this is not something you want to mess around with."

  That does it. Sue takes her foot off the gas, letting the Expedition roll to a gentle halt. Of course the kid notices this and pokes his head back up hopefully. "Wait, we're stopping?"

  "Get out."

  "Wait, you can't just leave me here."

  "Believe me," Sue says, "I'd like to."

  "I'm trying to help you."

  Sue opens her door and climbs out into the cold stillness of the long, empty road in front of them. "Come on, let's go."

  "What are you doing?"

  "Rearranging a few things. You're sitting up front with me. And then you're going to tell me what I need to know." She looks him right in the eye. "I mean it."

  11:39P.M.

  Their first job is hoisting Marilyn's body from the front seat and transferring it to the back. The kid holds Marilyn's legs and Sue takes her under the arms, with the nanny's head propped against her chest so it doesn't fall backward. For about two seconds Sue thinks this is going to be difficult for her emotionally, cradling the lifeless body of the woman who cared for her daughter, but she surprises herself with her own stoicism. Not that she doesn't love Marilyn like a little sister, not that the horror at what happened has diminished one iota. But these feelings have become remote, as if her heart's fallen asleep the way a leg or a foot might when circulation has been cut off.

  The kid-well, the kid is a different story.

  He tries to be a tough customer about it but when he gets back into the passenger seat next to Sue she can see how washed-out he looks, his face the color of the mushrooms that grow under the bridge in the summer, the slick nasty ones with spots on them. Mentally she's readjusted his age to seventeen at the outside. He keeps wiping his hands on his jeans and that Adam's apple of his just keeps bobbing and jerking like he's trying to swallow something greasy that he can't quite keep down.

  "I shouldn't be up here. He might see me."

  "You can crouch down if it makes you feel better," Sue says.

  He tries. He's too tall. "Not all the way. There's nothing to hide behind."

  "If the van comes you can jump into the backseat. But right now I want you up here. Now, fasten your seat belt." She hits the gas.

  The kid grabs the dashboard. "Hold on, where are we going? We're not going to Winslow. I thought you were turning around."

  "Winslow is exactly where we're going," she says, "and after that, the next town on that map, all the way through, until we get to what is it, White's Harbor?"

  "White's Cove," the kid corrects her. "You have to remember that. From Ocean Street in old White's Cove, across the virgin land he drove…"

  Sue feels something curdling inside her. She knows this tune or at least it's familiar to her from when she was young. "What is that?"

  "It's an old poem," he says. "You have to remember it. It can help you."

  "Help me how?"

  "He hates the poem. They made it up a long time ago as a kind of charm to keep him away. It's like the only thing around that's as old as he is, so it's got some kind of power over him. Pushes him back inside so that whatever he's infected has a chance to get out. Maybe not for very long, just a few seconds, but hell, sometimes that can make the difference, you know what I mean?"

  Sue just looks at him. "No."

  "Just listen," he says, and in a slightly more audible voice he begins to recite:

  "From Ocean Street in old White's Cove

  Across the virgin land he drove

  To paint each town and hamlet red

  With the dying and the dead.

  He walked through Wickham and Newbury

  In Ashford or Stoneview he might tarry

  To call a child to his knee

  Where he slew it-One! Two! Three!

  Then from Winslow to Gray Haven

  Where he may begin again

  Bedecked in his unholy shroud

  To paint the Commonwealth with blood."

  "Who ishe?" Sue asks.

  "You don't know?" The kid looks at her, his eyes as big as silver dollars. "Isaac Hamilton." Then somewhat bizarrely he reaches for the radio dial and seems to remember it's not his. "You mind if I turn this on?"

  "The radio? Why?"

  "There's something I want to hear." Without waiting for express permission he hits the power switch. Sue has it set for the Boston NPR affiliate, but the kid thumbs the scan button up to 102.8 and sits back as an obnoxious modern rock song, half-rap and half-screaming, plays through. Sue winces but doesn't say anything. She regards this music with the kind of irritation she reserves for mosquitoes and coffee shop hipsters who wear desert camouflage ironically.

  Finally, as the DJ comes on, Sue looks back at the kid. "You know, I've still got a lot of questions for you."

  "Shh." The kid cocks his head to the speaker, listening to the DJ's voice.

  "You're listening to Damien on the midnight shift, WBTX, 102.8," the DJ says, "playing all your requests right on through till morning. Keep listening for more requests including one for that new War Pigs track and…" There's the sound of paper being flipped over and the DJ laughs. "Oh, I like this, Elton John's 'Daniel,' for my good buddy Jeff in Gray Haven."

  Sue sees the kid nodding to himself. "Jeff in Gray Haven," she says. "Is he talking about you?"

  "Yeah."

  "You requested an Elton John song?"

  He nods. When the DJ comes back he says, "Okay, Damien here on the X midnight shift and like I said, I had a request here from Jeff to play Elton John's 'Daniel.' Now, obviously this isn't the sort of thing we normally play here on the X but Jeff's what you might call a special case. Some of you might remember when he called in to the midnight shift last summer and told us how he lost his brother, who died a few years ago-the kid's name was Daniel." The DJ hesitates like he's not sure he wants to go into this, then plunges right in anyway. "And as we're on the air Jeff mentioned the Engineer."

  Just like that, Sue's whole body goes cold. She looks at Jeff. "What is he-"

  "Shh," Jeff hisses, staring at the radio dial.

  "Now," the DJ continues, "I don't know if any of you were listening that night but if you were you know what I'm talking about, because we had some pretty messed-up people calling in to say some wild things. It turned into kind of a big deal, actually, the cops came by the station afterward and the whole thing was just totally out of control. Anyway, I'm just going to play the song,
so here you go, Jeff."

  The song starts, Elton John hitting those first few notes, and Sue sees the kid tilt his head forward toward the glowing dial. Two tear tracks shine down either side of his face, the kid crying silently in the dashboard light.

  And Sue says, "What's the story with your brother?"

  Jeff Tatum, monotone: "He died."

  "What does the Engineer have to do with it?"

  The kid doesn't say anything. He sniffles and wipes his eyes with the heels of his hands. Lets out a shaky breath. "The Engineer killed him."

  "What? When was this?"

  Jeff Tatum looks at her. "Three years ago."

  11:49P.M.

  "That's crazy." Sue feels herself go numb from the stomach outward. "That's not possible."

  "That's what you think," he says, reaching into his pocket. "First, though, you better listen to this. I taped it last summer because I had a feeling he'd call in and I wanted to have proof." Without further explanation he pulls out a cassette tape from his hip pocket and pops it into the Expedition's tape deck. Static hisses and Sue hears the DJ's voice come on again, Damien, cut back in mid-sentence, saying, "listening to 102.8, the midnight shift, all-request line…"

  Then her phone starts beeping.

  Sue stabs the power on the cassette deck off and gropes down to answer the phone. "Yes."

  "Hello, Susan," the voice says. "How's your passenger?"

  She freezes. How would he know about Jeff? Had he seen Tatum come out of the truck? Was there some kind of bug in the Expedition?Say something, she commands herself.Anything is better than just staying silent. "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "I hope you don't mind that I took out her eyes. Don't worry. They'll come back."

  "Her…" Then Sue realizes that he's talking about Marilyn. "Her eyes."

  "Oh yes. They are the windows of the soul, after all."

  Sue doesn't answer. Her mouth feels sealed shut. Up ahead on the right side of the road she sees a white sign coming up.WINSLOW-ESTABLISHED 1802. The same year as Gray Haven.

  "Susan, are you still there?"