Highways to Hell

by Bryan Smith

  “Please…” His voice was horse, thick with sobs and desperation. “Please…don’t kill me…I won’t testify. I swear. You don’t have to kill me.”

  Logan Caine laughed.

  The fine-tuned engine of the Lexus revved. A window rolled down and Dal Higgins, the man behind the wheel, said, “Don’t fuck around. Do it and let’s get out of here.”

  Mitch squealed.

  An embarrassing sound.

  The sound a spoiled child makes when his favorite toy is taken away as punishment for misbehavior. He reached out with groping, pleading hands for the front of Logan Caine’s guayabera. “Please…have mercy…I have a daughter…”

  Logan groaned. “Aw, not that shit.” He snorted laughter. “Christ, I hate it when they start in with that ‘I’ve got a kid!’ shit, like that’s gonna help ‘em.”

  Mitch managed to snag a handful of smooth fabric with one fumbling hand. “Please…”

  Logan clubbed him upside the head with the Glock.

  Mitch yelped and pitched sideways. He was off-balance and his arms pinwheeled wildly in a desperate effort to restore his equilibrium. But Derrick Mullins drove a booted foot hard into his stomache and sent him reeling into the ditch. The back of his head struck a rock and pain exploded in his head and arced down his body like forked lightning. His vision went away in a burst of white light.

  When he could see again, he saw only darkness.

  Then he saw the white crescent of a quarter-moon suspended high in the sky above him. For a moment, he forgot about his predicament, forgot he was about to die. He was overwhelmed by the loveliness of the rural sky at night. Jesus, you could actually see the stars out here. He lifted a shaky hand to the sky, reaching for the moon, imagining he could hook his fingers around one indented edge of that white sliver.

  But the moment of mysticism passed.

  He saw Logan Caine and Derrick Mullins looming over him. They looked like giants standing at the edge of the ditch. Cloaked in the shadow of the nearby forest, they looked like Satan’s own foot soldiers, leering harbingers of doom.

  The guns pointing down at him looked like hands of judgment.

  He heard Logan Caine’s guff voice one more time. “Say goodbye, Mitch.”

  The Glock and the Sig Sauer discharged several times. A bullet whizzed by Mitch’s throat and embedded itself into the soft earth.

  It was the only shot that missed.

  A slug punctured his stomach. So did another, popping beer-gut flesh like a potato bag. The large caliber rounds punched all the way through him, creating holes in his lower back that pumped blood into the ground. Another bullet shattered a rib and lodged inside him. Two more entered the region just slightly north of his groin. The high-velocity invaders stung like bees, but that initial snap of pain was nothing compared to the wash of agony that engulfed him once his nerve-endings responded to the damage. There was little conscious thought at this point, just perfect awareness of total pain, but he did manage a prayer for a bullet to the head.

  For an end to his suffering.

  But the guns fell silent.

  Logan Caine said, “That oughta do it.”

  Mitch wailed.

  Derrick Mullins glanced at Logan. “He ain’t dead. I’ll put one in his head.”

  He raised his arm to aim again, but Logan gripped his wrist. “Nah, fuck it, man. He’ll die in a few minutes.” He chuckled. “Let the asshole get the full experience.”

  Mullins smiled. “Sure. Whatever.”

  They got back in the car and Dal Higgins stepped on the accelerator. The Lexus pulled away from the shoulder, then he heard the car gathering speed as it zoomed away from him. The engine noise swelled for another moment, then quickly receded.

  They were gone.

  Mitch McCaffrey’s eyes filled with tears. He was all alone. He was going to die here in this ditch. Unnoticed. With nobody to comfort him as he slipped into the abyss—or stepped into the light, or whatever it was that really happened when you died. He thought of his father, who’d made it to eighty-two and had died in relative peace on a hospital bed. An image from that night taunted Mitch, the face of the friends and family gathered around the dying man’s bed.

  God, how he wanted someone with him now.

  He was terrified of facing this alone.

  He cried out for his mother.

  Who was in a nursing home hundreds of miles away. Lois McCaffrey had advanced Alzheimer’s and wouldn’t recognize her youngest son if she saw him.

  But there were other people who cared for him. Sally, his seven-year-old daughter. Karen, his ex-wife, with whom he’d still harbored hope for a reconciliation. No chance of that now. His siblings, Jeremy and Heather. Some of his closer friends and business associates. Yeah, there were still people who would mourn his passing. Despite the series of fuck-ups that had steered him toward this sorry end, people liked him.

  What would those people make of the manner of his death?

  No point contemplating that.

  Mitch knew what they would think. That he’d brought it on himself. That it was what you got for doing business with people like Logan Caine’s boss.

  And they would be right.

  Mitch blinked and again saw the crescent moon. It was so beautiful. There was something…spiritual about his perception of it now, a feeling totally removed from his internalized images of lunar landings and men in bulky spacesuits bouncing around a grey, rock-strewn landscape. He stared at it now, seeking to transcend the pain through a focus of will. He imagined his soul, his spirit, slipping free of its physical moorings and rising high above the earth, ascending not to heaven but toward the moon. He saw it in his mind, his essence rising skyward, glancing back to see his body getting smaller and smaller until it disappeared.

  Until the earth itself became a floating globe below him.

  He smiled at the sense of freedom he would have. He was gripped by a fervent wish that it really be this way. He prayed for his soul to be liberated from this ruined shell. He wanted to exist on that other plane, that place where spirits were free of human frailty and avarice, a place of perfect peace.

  The mental diversion was lovely for a few moments, but the reality of his corporeal senses overwhelmed the vision. He felt the salty tang of blood at the back of his throat. He tilted his head sideways and a stream of blood spilled from the corner of his mouth. Pain lashed him like a bullwhip and he twitched in the ditch, crying out again for his mother.

  Dear, sweet old Mom.

  The lights are on, but nobody’s home.

  Mitch tried to laugh, but more blood rushed out of his mouth.

  Christ, why wasn’t he dead yet?

  It occurred to him that with the proper medical care he might stand a chance of surviving the damage inflicted on him. A slim chance, sure, but a chance nonetheless. The bullets had missed his heart and his head. His lungs didn’t seem to have been punctured, which, considering where most of the shots had been aimed, was nothing less than a miracle. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that a good trauma team and a skilled surgeon could save him. He’d heard of other people surviving multiple gunshots, so he knew such things were possible.

  He also knew that survival hinged on receiving immediate treatment. Which just didn’t seem to be in the cards for him. He cursed those assholes for dumping him in the middle of nowhere. It might be a long time before another vehicle came along. Even if somebody came by, they wouldn’t be likely to see him down here, anyway.

  Maybe if he could crawl out to the road…lie there flat on the asphalt.

  Somebody would have to stop.

  He turned his head to look at the road. It was just a few feet away, no more than a dozen. But it might as well have been on the other side of the world. Pain wracked his body every time he tried to move.

  So Mitch gave up.

  He stayed there on his back and kept staring at the moon. Whatever marginal trace of a fighting spirit he’d managed to dredge up withered and died.
He was again resigned to facing his end in this stinking ditch.

  He cried some more.

  Spit up some more blood.

  He thought, If only I could hurry up and die, if only I could kill myself somehow…

  If only I hadn’t been so stupid.

  After a while—it seemed like a long, long while—he began to feel lightheaded. The pain ebbed some. He was either losing consciousness or finally dying. He prayed for the latter. His vision blurred again, and the sliver of moon loomed large, magnified by the flood of moisture in his eyes. It bloomed like a brilliant flower, an explosion of beautiful light that obliterated everything else.

  He didn’t see the pale, dark-haired woman stepping out of the line of tree beyond the ditch.

  The dizzy feeling became more pronounced.

  This is it, he thought.

  I’m almost dead.

  Thank God.

  The dark-haired woman knelt next to him in the ditch. Mitch became aware of a presence other than his own, and it brought him back from the brink for a moment. He blinked and saw the woman. When he saw how beautiful she was, how very much like an ethereal goddess of legend, he reached out to touch her cheek.

  She smiled and kissed the back of his hand.

  Then she gathered him in her arms and lifted him off the ground.

  Mitch thought, This isn’t real.

  He was hallucinating, his ebbing consciousness filling his mind with dream-like visions of things that couldn’t be. No woman, especially no woman as slender as this one, could life him with so little discernible effort.

  But the vision persisted.

  The woman carried him out of the ditch and into the forest. He was aware of low-hanging tree branches, the chirruping of crickets, and the occasional glimpse of lovely moonlight through the branches.

  Oh, Mother, he thought again.

  Oh, Mother moon…

  Then, at last, the world faded to black.

  Consciousness returned by degrees. His first awareness was tactile, a cool, smooth surface beneath his body. A warm fire crackled nearby. He rolled closer to the heat source, curled up in the fetal position, and slipped away again. He’d been too tired to register anything beyond the curious fact of his continued existence.

  A while later, he awoke again.

  He was in a small cave.

  A fire burned in a pit a few feet away. He smelled food and a heavy scent of incense. The dark-haired woman sat cross-legged on the other side of the fire. The ankle-length dress he’d seen her wearing before was gone. She was nude, and the light from the fire bathed her body in a mellow, flickering light.

  With a groan, Mitch sat up.

  The woman smiled.

  Mitch frowned. “Who are you?”

  She tilted her head and something silver glittered beneath the hollow of her threat. Mitch squinted and leaned closer. His eyes widened when he saw the little silver crescent dangling from the delicate chain around her neck.

  The moon, he thought.

  The woman spoke. “I’m Diana.”

  The woman’s rich, mellifluous voice was like nothing he’d ever head. It evoked so many feelings simultaneously. It was at once beautiful and forceful. It conveyed compassion and power. It was a lover’s delicate whisper in his ear, and it was a stentorian, commanding presence.

  It was an impossible voice.

  Mitch wasn’t sure what Diana was, but he knew she wasn’t human.

  He swallowed hard. “Why do I feel no pain?”

  Her smile widened. “Because you belong to me now. You called me. You are a child of the moon.”

  “I called you?”

  She rose gracefully to her feet. “Your spirit called me. You will serve me now.”

  She walked to the mouth of the cave, beckoning to Mitch with a curled forefinger. He got to his feet and followed her into the wild night.

  A fat man was being tortured in an office of an abandoned warehouse. Handcuffed to a chair, he was bleeding from multiple straight-razor nicks to his bare torso. He was trying to talk to his tormentors, but what emerged from his mouth was reduced by sheer terror to nonsensical blubbering.

  Logan Caine and Derrick Mullins paced about the room, their hard faces looking ominous in the harsh lantern light. Logan drew in a lungful of cigarette smoke, while Derrick twirled the straight-razor in his fingers.

  Logan blew smoke in the fat man’s face. “I don’t think you’re telling us everything, George.”

  “But I am!” A spray of spittle flew from the fat man’s mouth. “Jesus, you guys know I’d never rat out Mr. Ligotti. I’m not that stupid.”

  Logan laughed. “Horseshit, George. You were stupid enough to wind up here, weren’t you?”

  He put his cigarette out on George’s shoulder and laughed at his scream. He slapped the fat man twice to shut him up, seized a handful of his hair and yanked his head up. He leaned in close and said, “You talked, George. I know it. You know it. Derrick here knows it. And Mr. Ligotti sure as hell knows it. The feds hauled you in on a clean bust. You should be sitting in a cell right now. But you’re not. Know what that tells me?”

  George tried to talk but he’d become inarticulate again. “I-I-I…ooohh…”

  Logan twisted the handful of hair, eliciting a yelp. “George, it tells me the feds scared your ass. They offered you a deal and you ran your mouth like a beauty salon gossip hag.”

  Derrick closed the straight-razor and put it away.

  He produced the Sig Sauer from his shoulder holster. “I guess the feds didn’t like you, Georgy Porgy. You oughta be in the WitSec program right now.”

  George blubbered some more.

  Logan relinquished his hair and stepped away. “Fuck it. Cap the fat bastard so we can get out of here.”

  Derrick aimed the automatic pistol at the fat man’s head.

  Then the door to the office creaked open.

  Mitch smiled at the identical thunderstruck expressions on the faces of his killers. Their mouths drooped open like those of kids at a magic show.

  Mitch pulled the door shut. “Howdy, fellas. Glad to see me?”

  Logan’s voice emerged in a ragged whisper. “This shit ain’t happenin’. You’re dead, MacCaffrey.”

  Mitch looked at the man handcuffed to the chair. “Hey there, George.”

  The fat man’s wide eyes glistened with tears. “Jesus…they told me you were dead, buddy.”

  Mitch began undoing the buttons of his shirt. “They were right, George.” His gaze went back to Vincent Ligotti’s thugs. “You guys wanna see something cool?”

  Derrick shot a nervous glance at Logan. “I don’t like this.”

  Logan Caine never looked away from Mitch. He pulled out his Glock and jacked a round into the chamber. He aimed the gun at the phantom’s head. “Lock and load, Mullins. Let’s do it right this time. Head shots.”

  Mitch tugged the shirt-tail out of his trousers.

  Derrick’s hand shook as he raised the Sig Sauer. Sweat streamed from his scalp and got in his eyes. He palmed the moisture away and glanced again at Logan. “Logan…”

  “Derrick—”

  Derrick took a step backward. “I really don’t like this, man. Asshole shouldn’t be up walking around, even if somebody saved his ass.” He moved backward a few more steps, yelping when he collided with a desk. “Something’s fucked-up here…”

  Mitch shrugged the shirt off and let it fall to the floor. He smiled again. The ragged holes where the bullets had punctured his flesh were still there. He raised his hands high over his head like a ballerina and twirled slowly around so they could see the gaping exit wounds on his back. When he stood facing them again, he probed one of the wounds in his abdomen with an index finger.

  Derrick Mullins shrieked.

  Even the normally unflappable Logan Caine looked rattled. His jutting lower lip trembled and the hand holding the Glock began to shake. He grimaced when Mitch pushed the finger through the wound up to his top knuckle. When the walking dead
man appeared to wiggle the finger inside him, Logan’s stomach convulsed.

  He choked back bile.

  Mitch pulled the finger out. It glistened with an oily substance that might have been blood or some other bodily substance. Still smiling, Mitch stuck the finger in his mouth and slowly tongued off the viscous fluid.

  Derrick’s Sig Sauer fell from his fingers and clattered on the floor. He bent over, braced his hands on his knees, and spewed his pasta lunch all over George’s blood-stained trousers.

  Mitch laughed.

  He stepped forward.

  Logan’s breath came out in a pant. Mitch could almost hear the jackhammer rhythm of his terror-juiced heart. “St-st-stay where you are, McCaffrey!”

  He took a step back.

  Mitch continued to advance, but he appeared to be in no hurry. “The most incredible thing happened when you guys left me to die in that ditch. I met a goddess. A real, honest-to-gosh goddess. Yeah, I know it sounds nuts. I know you don’t believe me. But think about it guys.” His grin broadened a little more. “It it any more far-fetched than the idea of a reanimated corpse returning to take revenge on his murderers?”

  Logan Caine’s trigger finger twitched.

  A bullet punched through Mitch’s shoulder.

  Mitch barely flinched.

  A moment later, he seized Logan’s gun hand, pried the Glock loose, and tossed it away. “You won’t be needing that anymore, Logan.”

  He gripped Logan by the throat with one hand and ripped open the thug’s guayabera with the other. Logan’s exposed torso was shiny with sweat. The outstretched fingers of Mitch’s right hand pushed through the soft flesh of the doomed criminal’s abdomen with astonishing ease. Logan screamed and spasmed as Mitch pulled out a long coil of intestine. Mitch wrapped the length of wet, steaming viscera around Logan’s throat, then he punched through the dying man’s chest cavity and yanked out his still-beating heart.

  There was an explosion in the room.

  George screamed.

  Mitch relinquished his hold on Logan and saw that Derrick Mullins had recovered his Sig Sauer. Logan tumbled dead to the floor. Mullins was slumped against a blood-spattered wall, the barrel of the gun protruding from his mouth.