And the eyes…the eyes are black and staring.
While she's looking at them, a shiny black beetle scurries from the corner of his mouth, trundling busily across the curved expanse of skull and ducking up into the corpse's hairline. And with that Sue vomits-no warning, no nausea, just jerks her mouth open and throws up into the snow beside the Expedition. She vomits and vomits, until there's nothing left but a bitter taste in the back of her mouth and tears in her eyes, blurring her vision to a field of soggy prisms.
But of course Sue doesn't need to see in order to recognize the man in the garbage bags. She has seen enough for a lifetime.
"Phillip," she says, her voice stripped away to a hoarse and rasping gasp. "Oh my God."
And that's when the corpse lunges straight up at her, his swollen fingers locking around her throat.
7:07A.M.
"So you finally opened the garbage bags, you brainless little snatch."
Coming through her husband's mouth, Isaac Hamilton's voice is grating, rippled with caked filth and swamp slime. At this moment Sue realizes that the grin wrinkling across its face is not, as she first thought, the result of rigor mortis or some other half-fathomed notion of what happens to your muscles after you die.The thing has been grinning up at her this whole time.
She tries to twist free, but the corpse's grip is far tighter than Jeff's. And this makes sense. He's come farther along the route than Marilyn or Jeff. He's almost fully resurrected. His fingers squeeze into the soft hollow of her throat until she feels something pop, shooting a bright spike of pain through her neck.
"It fucking took you long enough," Hamilton's voice says. Crawling forward, out of the trunk, shedding the last of the tattered garbage bags, her husband's corpse jams her body up and out so that her feet are no longer touching the ground. Then he starts to shake her so hard that her legs flop and jitter, feet flying everywhere as she fights pointlessly to pry his hands off. The rotting, black-eyed face laughs at her. She fights the urge to black out, because she's certain she'll never wake up. He's going to kill her, this thing that's inside her husband, this parasite that lives in his guts.
She starts praying then, not the kind of prayer that startsDear God, but the kind that goes, "From Ocean Street in Old White's Cove," spitting the words with the blood that's now pouring into her mouth. "Across the virgin land he drove-"
Phillip goes motionless, holding her upright, head tilted back. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?"
"-to paint each town and hamlet red, with the dying and the-"
Whack!He slams his head into hers so hard that she bites her tongue, incandescent waves of green stars shimmering before her eyes, the pain itself not even a factor compared to the sheer shock of the attack. When Sue hoists up her head again he's still holding her by the throat, his head angled back. "Don't you try that shit with me, you brainless, lowbrow whore. It doesn't work. It's notgoing to w-"
"He walked through Wickham and Newbury," Sue says, except her tongue is bleeding and swollen and the words spill out mushy and malformed. "In Ashford or Stoneview he might tarry-"
Whack!Another blow, the corpse's skull clubbing hers like the back of a shovel, sending her reeling.Now the pain is here, big-time pain, an eye-popping Las Vegas of it and then in the muffled distance, very far off, Isaac Hamilton's musty cackle.
"I'm going to enjoy this," his voice is saying behind the pain, behind the funny-colored stars and constellations that flutter close to her head, blinding her. "I'mreally going to enjoy this, Susan."
"To call…child…to…knee…" she's mumbling, on total autopilot now, "where he slew it…one…two…"
WHAM!A massive blow, the worst yet, something cracking, and it pitches her whole upper body backward, the pain so intense that Sue can't help it, she feels herself start crying again, he's breaking her and she's going to let him. She's got no choice. Bright hot needles pierce her flesh from every possible angle as she feels her scalp beginning to swell with bleeding under the skin. Her mouth sags open, drooling. She can't see. She can't hear. She can only feel the pain. Unconsciousness beckons her forward as seductively as any controlled substance she can imagine and she feels herself sliding toward it gratefully, almost all the way there, when a single thought cuts through her like a bullet.
Veda.
If you black out now she's dead.
If you black out now she's dead.
If you black out now she's fucking dead.
That centers her. Blind, numb, but somehow centered, she makes her lips and tongue move. It's like a guttural foreign language that, to an uncomprehending ear, sounds more like snarling than diction, Arabic or German spoken through a mouthful of stiffening rubber cement. She pushes the words out anyway until they don't sound like any language at all. They're merely sounds. Animal noises.
"…un fum…In-sluh fuh…GuhHuhn… Whuh uhmuh… " It's such a completely debilitating effort expelling these noises and she's dizzy, fading, losing whatever's left of herself. "Whuh…uh…muh…"
Far beyond the darkness that fills her eyes, through Phillip's lips, Isaac Hamilton is laughing, laughing. Coughing on dirt. Mimicking her feeble attempts, mocking, "Uh-fuh-uh-fuh-uh-fuh-" She can hear the stuffy noises getting more congested as his hilarity crescendos. "I didn't know it was fucking barnyard night, Susan. Moo, moo, cock a doodle-doo!" As he says this, her vision clears slightly, perhaps for the sheer novelty of seeing her husband's reanimated corpse-a thing with maggots in its sinuses and worm shit on its breath-making fun of her enunciation. Through swollen eye-slits she sees Phillip's head tilting itself back again, preparing to drive forward for the blow that will no doubt turn out her lights forever, rendering whatever good intentions she might still have utterly irrelevant. She cringes away with the last of her strength, and waits for it.
Then nothing happens.
"Sue…?" It's so tentative, that familiar voice. It doesn't sound like Isaac Hamilton at all. "Honey?"
7:19A.M.
Sue raises her head, manages to peel back the lid on one eye. Phillip's corpse has fallen absolutely still and is just facing her now, what's left of his face tinged pinkish. She's not sure if this coloration is due to the blood in her own eyes, or the Expedition's taillights glowing behind his head. Whatever the cause, it makes the thing look slightly more human, less dead. He's leaning over her, and that's when she realizes she's on the ground, sprawled in the snow at the side of the road, her legs tucked underneath her. When exactly did she fall down?
"Sue," he says, "is that you?"
"Phillip." His name flows from her battered windpipe in a watery whisper, zero inflection, zero strength. "Don't hit me. Don't hurt me anymore."
"Sue, honey, what's wrong, are you…?" Phillip stops, and her sight is good enough now that she can see the wave of realization washing across his face, a single foamy whitecap across a midnight sea. "Oh no. Oh, Sue. Oh, baby." His legs buckle and he slumps down on the roadside next to her, the tailpipe of the Expedition pumping exhaust out in plumes behind his head. "I'm so sorry. I don't know what to say." He holds out one hand and then lets it fall. "He's in me, Sue. I can feel him."
She nods. It hurts. Everything does.
"That's how he works."
"I don't-"
"Listen to me, Sue. Without a vessel he's only a dismembered corpse in the ground. Regardless of what he wants you to think, he can't read minds or hunt people down by himself. That's what took him so long to find me."
"Why?"
"He only has power over the corpses he commands. He had to send one of his vessels out to kill a private detective and bring him through the route just so he could get someone with the skills to locate me. I had to keep hiding. That's why I sent Tatum to warn you."
Sue's mind darts back to the farm truck following her on and off over the past few months, how it had known where to find her. "Yousent Jeff Tatum?"
"Met him…at his brother Daniel's funeral in Gray Haven three years ago. Kept in touch with him after I went
to California. When Hamilton started tracking me down in August, after I called the radio station, I contacted Jeff. Asked him to keep an eye on you."
"They got Tatum too," Sue says.
"I know."
"Phillip-"
"The worst part is, he never stops." Phillip's corpse nods shakily. "Hamilton's spirit, Sue…it's like having a fever that won't break-you can't…push through it. Always there. Always building."
"How-" Sue pauses, wipes the blood from her mouth. She's pretty sure that the bleeding has begun to taper off, but the headache…oh, the headache is another matter. It flares up with every vibration that comes through her throat, like she's got a couple of hard cons serving time breaking granite between her eyes. She tries to focus past it, making herself look at what's left of her husband. "How did this happen?"
"Doesn't matter now."
Maybe not, but she's got a few ideas of her own. "It's because we put one of his bodies, his vessels, out of commission." Her mind swirls back to the playground, that afternoon. "Hisfirst one." Maybe it's the beating she just took, or the presence of Phillip's voice, or the route itself, but she can see it all clearly. "The Engineer."
"Yes," Phillip says. "You're right. Do you remember, Sue? Can you see it?"
"Yes."
And just like that, she's back in 1983.
But it's different from the way she used to recall it, in that desolate patch of abandoned playground equipment beyond the empty outskirts of her hometown. For the first time she's actually seeing it the way it happened, not the way her memory has homogenized it over the intervening years. For the first time Sue realizes why it haunted Phillip so mercilessly ever since-because he must've remembered it this way, the way it reallywas.
In the restored memory she sees the Engineer getting out of his orange Plymouth, dressed in the bib overalls with the red handkerchief dangling from the back pocket. He's wearing a big pair of aviator-style sunglasses that cover not only his eyes but also a good part of his face above the bridge of his nose. He's sporting a workman's tan, leathery and deep, and within seconds he's already moving toward them fast, like he's on roller skates or something, Sue thinking, how can any guy move so quickly-this part is still the way she's always remembered it-and the Engineer reaches behind his back, pulling out the red handkerchief, blotting at his forehead above the sunglasses.
"My goodness," he exclaims, in a just-folks voice that's somehow all the more shocking for its laconic intonation. "Sure is a scorcher out here, isn't it?"
Sue just looks at him without answering. She looks at herself reflected times two in the big lenses of his shades, a little girl with wide eyes and skinny arms.
"Boy howdy." The Engineer jerks his head toward Phillip, standing next to her, a foot or two away. "Why, I'd think you and your friend here would be off taking a dip at the pool on a day like today, or maybe down in the creek. It's hotter than blazes out here in the sun. Enough to boil the skin right off your bones, wouldn't you say?"
"Sue, wait." Young Phillip is standing to her right, a step or two ahead of her. He looks back at the Engineer. "You want something, mister?"
At first the man doesn't turn his head away from Sue. When he does shift his attention toward Phillip, it happens reluctantly. He blots his head with his handkerchief again, and Sue notices how gingerly he applies the square of fabric to his skin.
"You're all by yourselves out here." A sly smile seems to tease at the corners of his lips, where the skin is more than slightly cracked. "You don't get scared being out here by yourselves?"
"Scared of what?" Phillip asks, his voice trembling a little, though he does a pretty good job of holding it steady.
"Oh, I don't know. A lot could happen out here in the middle of nowhere. But I guess you can take care of yourselves, can't you? How old are you?"
"Thirteen," Sue says. It comes from her so smoothly that she almost believes it herself. Because she's tall that summer, taller than Phillip, and that helps too. She can sell this lie, she realizes; she can make him believe it. Because the Engineer never takes kids older than twelve.
"Well, I suppose I'll be on my way, then. You two kids take care." He turns around and walks back to the car, climbing in. At the last minute, he sticks his head out the open window. "Say, would you do me a favor and take a look at this map, tell me how I can get back to the interstate?"
Phillip takes another step toward the Plymouth, and then another, and Sue realizes she's going with him, because they're in for a penny, in for a pound. They started this thing by walking toward the car in the first place, and they are going to find out the truth; or at least Phillip is, which means that she is too.
Sue stops walking when she gets near the driver's side window, a safe five feet away. Behind the steering wheel, the man is holding up a map of eastern Massachusetts. He pokes a finger at a crooked line connecting a cluster of towns.
"This is where I started…"
Looking up at the other side of the car, Sue sees Phillip gaping down into the Plymouth's backseat. Whatever he sees there has erased any vestige of expression from his face. Sue follows his stare. Lying there in an open cardboard box behind the driver's seat are several rolls of packaging tape, stacks of clean rags and gauze, and a large knife. The blade of the knife is very bright, very clean, and it reflects a narrow obelisk of light onto the seat cushions above it.
"I came down this way, heading west-"
In front of her, behind the wheel, the man in the bib overalls and aviator-style specs is still pointing out the route he took, tracing it with his fingertip. He doesn't appear at all concerned as Phillip wanders around the back of the Plymouth, to where Sue is standing, and stops alongside the open window of the backseat, less than a foot away from the cardboard box. She keeps waiting for the man to stop looking at the map and glance into the rearview mirror, but he doesn't.
Sue glances at Phillip, but he's looking at the knife.
No, Phillip, she thinks suddenly. This is a mistake.
"Oh, one more thing." All at once the man looks up from the map, straight at her, close enough that she can almost see through the sunglasses' tinted lenses. "I know you're lying about your age."
Sue is still processing this as Phillip grabs the knife from behind the driver's seat, comes forward between Sue and the car, and stabs the knife straight into the man's chest. The man sits straight upright, his left hand flying out in an attempt to grab the blade. And as Phillip's arm brushes against his wrist, Sue sees the fake yellowish orange color smearing off the Engineer's flesh, revealing the skin underneath to be bluish black.
Phillip swings the knife again.
His second thrust only grazes the Engineer's arm and more flesh-colored paint streaks away, sticking to the blade. But it's not just the makeup that comes off, Sue sees, it's the skin itself, peeling off the Engineer's wrist and coating Phillip's hand in a sticky smear of gristle. Phillip isn't aware of it yet, he's busy thrusting the knife back at the Engineer, shoving it hard, forcing the blade again and again into the man's chest.
And that's when the sunglasses fall off.
The eyes beneath are huge and desolate, utterly black, and they jiggle in the man's sockets like the tainted egg sacs of some unthinkable demon. Within them Sue glimpses some vestige of limited intelligence, but it's like nothing she's ever seen in the eyes of people or animals-it's completely alien, their depths animated solely by appetite which even now seems to be fading swiftly into nothingness.
Sue is still staring deep into the memory, her mind's own eye dilated to an almost perfect circle, astonished at how different things really are from the way she's recalled them in the past. She sees the Engineer's head swivel to the side, his struggles already weakening, and then suddenly his mouth opens and spurts out a spray of thick grayish black fluid across the ground. Sue sees chunks floating in the fluid, pieces of what looks like dead skin, she thinks, but there's no blood in it-and in fact, there's no bloodanywhere. All the punctures and stab wounds across
the Engineer's chest, torn to pieces, his bib overalls and thoracic cavity alike, but there'sno blood.
And when Phillip finally stops stabbing him, he sits up, sweat trickling into his eyes, breathing in gasps, and looks at Sue. The hysteria beneath his dazed expression is rising fast, like some iridescent fish flashing just centimeters from the surface. For a second he can't speak. "What is this?" he rasps, eyes flashing down to the bloodless, black body sprawled out beneath him. "What is this, Sue? It's like-"
It's like-
"Like he's not even alive," Sue says aloud now, and realizes she's been shocked back to the present moment by the realization. "I-I blocked it out of my memory, Phillip. That whole thing, I blotted the details right out of my mind. I remembered it wrong."
"Doesn't matter," Phillip's corpse says in its flinty, rasping voice next to her.
Sue shakes her head. "Itdoes matter. I always told myself we didn't tell anyone because we thought we might've gotten the wrong guy, but that's not why. We never told because we were so freaked out, and we knew no one would believe us. And eventually I never even believed us. But you remembered. Younever forgot."
"Doesn't matter."Phillip wrenches his head up toward her. "Go. Get out of here. He's coming back into me. I can feel it. Leave me here. Turn around."
"What about Veda?"
"He'll-never let her-live."
"Where is she?"
One hand flicks at her, a feeble shooing movement. "Go. Isaac Hamilton is here. Coming back into me." Urgently now, but undercut by a failing vitality. "Feel him. So close. Can't hold him back. Just…go."
Sue looks at him, this corpse, this cursed thing wavering in front of her and feels a single blue spark fly across her stomach and land, sizzling, in her chest, where without warning it ignites a puddle of untapped adrenaline. There's a whoosh, and she feels a wellspring of fury, a geyser of indignation and rage for which no precedent exists in her life, ever. And she says, "No."
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