Seed

by Ania Ahlborn

  “You’re drivin’ down this road at four in the mornin’ lookin’ for a candy bar?” The guy spit another mouthful of black saliva into his cup. “Must have a hell of a sweet tooth.”

  Jack offered him a compulsory smile. That dirty trucker cap gave him the creeps. Something about him just didn’t sit right, like maybe this guy didn’t actually work the station at all. Like maybe he just had a key and he flipped on the lights and waited for a car to pull into that shitty parking lot so he could sink a knife deep into a stranger’s belly.

  “Thanks anyway,” Jack murmured, continuing his trek to the door.

  “You might better watch out,” the trucker said, bringing Jack to a halt. At first he wasn’t sure whether it was a warning or a suggestion. The jolly green giant spotted Jack’s confusion and continued. “You bein’ followed, chief, and you done know it too.”

  “I’m being followed,” Jack repeated. He had meant for it to come out as a question, but it just sounded like an echo.

  “You’re runnin’, but you’re runnin’ from something you’ve been runnin’ from all your life, aren’t ya? Runnin’ like it’s gonna make some sort of big difference this time round.”

  Sourness crept into Jack’s mouth. He stared at the bearded giant, said nothing.

  “I’ve seen your kind. I see you all the time, drivin’ down the road like the Devil can’t chase ya if ya step on the gas.”

  A shudder shook Jack from the inside out—a tiny earthquake of the heart. He swallowed the spit that had collected in his mouth.

  “Ain’t no use denyin’, chief. I’ve seen your kind plenty times before. Seems like the ones runnin’ are the only ones that ever stop on in here, lookin’ for an excuse to turn right around and head back to where they came from. They just tell themselves, Naw, I’m just stoppin’ for a Coke. I’m just stoppin’ for a Hershey’s or a HoHo, or maybe they got them one of those slushie machines, but we don’t got none of that do we?”

  Jack cleared his throat. “Doesn’t look like it,” he said.

  “Don’t look like it because we don’t got none of it, that’s why.”

  Shifting his weight from one foot to the other, Jack contemplated making a run for it, sure that the giant behind the counter would lunge at him if he tried. But the longer he stood there the more his curiosity began to itch.

  “Why is that?” Jack asked. “What’s the point of being open if you don’t have anything to buy?”

  “Maybe I do got something to buy,” he said. “Maybe what I’m sellin’ you just can’t see yet.”

  Jack chewed on his bottom lip. Part of his brain urged him to crawl back into that Oldsmobile and continue to Rosewood as planned. But another part of his brain, a bigger part, was convinced this guy knew things, that he was fated to meet this enormous man, a man who could have easily been a mass murderer, if only to prepare himself for the next round of his trip.

  “You go to N’awlins quite a bit, don’t ya?”

  Jack tensed.

  “I can smell it. That place gots the smell of ghosts, chief, and that smell don’t wash off easy.”

  “Why does that matter?” Jack asked. The guy exhaled a laugh.

  “It matters cause you coulda found answers there, but instead you end up drivin’ in the middle of the night to find someone here. You’re lookin’ for a way out and you don’t know which way to look.”

  Jack went silent for a long while, then eventually confessed: “You’re right,” he said. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.”

  “I already told ya. You’re runnin’ like you’ve been runnin’ for your whole damn life.”

  “Except I’m running toward something this time,” Jack assured him. “I’m running straight into the thing I’ve been avoiding, so that’s a start, right?”

  “A start to what, chief?”

  “A solution,” Jack said. “At least I hope it is. If it isn’t, I don’t know what else to do.”

  The trucker took on a thoughtful look before offering Jack a knowing nod.

  “I suppose that is a start,” he said. “But ya aren’t gonna like what ya find.”

  Jack opened his mouth to speak. The trucker cut him off with a smirk.

  “Let me guess, that’s a risk yer willin’ t’take, right? People always think they’ve got to be riskin’ something to get to the end of the story. But let me tell ya: it’s your story. The end of the story is gonna get ya whether you want it to er’not. You think you gotta go chase fate? Fate is chasin’ you, chief. But you know that, right? Better than any old body.”

  Jack stared, frozen in place.

  “I’m sayin’ it don’t matter,” the trucker said. “You want to turn right back around and go home. Ya do that. It ain’t gonna make one bit of a difference. The end is gonna find you no matter which direction ya drive. And if I’m right about what’s chasin’ ya…” He lifted his big shoulders in an almost childlike shrug, his expression shifting toward apologetic. “You ain’t gonna outrun it—at least, not by my experience. I’ve been around for a long time, been sittin’ here watchin’ people roll in and out for my entire life, and I gotta tell ya…” He leaned forward on the stool he occupied, its rusty metal legs whining beneath his weight. “I ain’t never seen anyone, not anyone outrun the Devil.”

  Jack’s mouth went acrid, like someone had cracked open a battery and poured the acid onto his tongue. He took a step back, one of his hands drifting to his chest, pressing against his sternum, where his lungs had gone tight and raw.

  “What do you know about the Devil?” Jack asked, but his inquiry was nothing more than a dry whisper. He was about to tell the guy that nobody knew more about the Devil than him, but when his eyes snagged on the guy’s face, his heart seized. The giant laughed, and when he threw his head back to chortle toward the stained ceiling, Jack caught a glimpse of needle points glinting inside that gaping mouth.

  Jack bolted for the exit, flinging the cracked glass door open so hard it hit the outside of the station and shook. Sprinting across that cracked parking lot, he nearly lost his footing on some loose gravel, the pebbles rolling beneath the soles of his boots like roller skate wheels. Regaining traction, he bounded toward the Olds, all the while hearing that laughter boom behind him—laughter that seemed to be less and less human with each passing second.

  After what she’d seen outside, there was no way Aimee would be sleeping anytime soon. But instead of staking out in the living room to make sure nothing came in, she locked herself in the bedroom and pulled the covers up to her chin. The wind was picking up. The walls of the house groaned with each gust. She imagined the roof being peeled off the top of the house like a lid off an aluminum can. That shadow figure was probably lurking out there in the storm, peering through windows, licking panes of glass with its long serpent tongue. After half an hour of lying in bed with her eyes wide open, she rolled over, grabbed the phone off the bedside table, and punched in Jack’s number. There was no answer. Jack was out of range. And even if he had answered, what would she have said: that she was spooked by something she wasn’t sure was real?

  “Get a grip,” she muttered, kicking the comforter from her legs, trying to reestablish herself as the owner of her space. Not the whole house: not yet. But at least the master bedroom was hers.

  With sleep out the window, the only thing left was productivity. Padding across the room to the closet, she threw open the door and peered at clothes that hung from a badly sagging rod.

  “Nothing like a late-night sorting session.”

  She plucked an old shirt off a plastic hanger. The hanger spun, hit the top of the closet, and tumbled to the floor. She squatted to sweep the hanger up with a quick pass of her hand, but paused when she spotted an old shoebox on Jack’s side of the closet. It was half-buried under a pile of work jeans, peeking out from behind a pair of spark-scorched boots. In Jack’s haste to leave for Georgia, he’d left the corner of one of his secrets exposed. Aimee tugged the box out of its corner and took it back
to bed.

  Tipping the dented lid open, she first found a small stack of family photos. She smiled. The topmost was of Jack and the girls standing on top of a levy, the Mississippi glistening behind them like white fire. In the second, Jack pushed Charlie on a tire swing; Charlie’s expression that of sheer joy while Jack laughed behind her. There was one of Jack and his band mates in someone’s basement, and one with Jack and Reagan throwing up devil horns outside the Red Door on Bourbon. At first Aimee was charmed by these old memories, shuffling through the images one by one, laughing at some, shaking her head at others. But the more she studied them the more something unsettling occurred to her: she hadn’t seen these photographs before, which was strange, because she’d taken half of them herself. She frowned, picturing Jack sorting through them in the pharmacy parking lot before bringing them home, stashing certain ones away like a hoarder.

  She tossed the photos back into their box and peered at them, knowing that her discovery would end up as an argument. She’d accuse him of keeping secrets; he’d accuse her of invading his privacy. She’d yell that in marriage, privacy doesn’t exist; he’d snap back that maybe they shouldn’t be married at all. And then they’d get bored, the argument would fade, they’d quote each other for a few days with stupid smiles and gentle teasing.

  Aimee grabbed the box lid, ready to shove it back beneath Jack’s pile of denim, when something caught her eye. Narrowing her eyes at the photograph on top of the pile, she scrutinized the backdrop behind Jack as he stood in Jackson Square. A greasy bag of sugar-covered beignets in one hand, a fresh fried Louisiana doughnut in the other, his grin of utter indulgence had distracted her the first time around. But what caught her attention now was something hiding behind a tree: a shadow peering out from behind the trunk of an oak, glaring at the photographer while Jack mugged for the camera.

  Aimee examined the image for a long while. She was just about ready to dismiss it as a trick of the light, when she flicked down to the next photograph in the pile. There, practically staring her right in the face, she saw the same thing. In the picture of Charlie on the tire swing, the same shadow lurked in the background.

  The third photo was harder to spot. Jack and Reagan posed in front of the Red Door beneath a neon glow. Aimee held the photo a few inches from her nose, searching the details of that street scene for what she hoped she wouldn’t find.

  But she found it. Half-hidden by a doorframe, it lurked across the street, standing next to a big bearded guy in a John Deere cap.

  Her heart hammered against her ribcage. Those photos, they were all of either Charlie or Jack.

  Wavy through a sheen of tears, she saw a picture of Charlotte standing in the front yard in her white summer dress, Nubs sitting obediently at her feet. And there, in an otherwise perfect background, the darkness lingered yards away. She shook her head, refusing to believe this was the root of Charlie’s problems, refusing to acknowledge that Jack knew—that he’d known all along. She swiped at her tears and looked back to the photo in her hand, only to drop it and scramble away.

  Charlie stood in the front yard in her white summer dress, smiling with razor-sharp teeth, Nubs dead at her feet.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Jack hadn’t been back to Rosewood in nearly twenty years, but as soon as he crossed the town limit, an air of familiarity wrapped itself around him. He drove along Rosewood’s main street, passing locations he hadn’t given even a passing consideration since he was a kid. There was the old Pizza Hut, where he had attended his first all-kid birthday party and learned how to play PacMan on a flat-top arcade table. There was the mini golf course where he had scored a hole in one, an achievement he had bragged about for days before Stephen lost his temper and told him it wasn’t that big a deal. The Superette, where he’d swiped a Pez dispenser, was still standing. Gilda had marched him right back into that store and made him hand it over to the manager, successfully crowning it the most humiliating moment of his entire childhood.

  The further he drove the more spread out things became. Rosewood’s main street ended in a fork—a right turn would take him to the rural road where their trailer sat, hiding the secret cemetery behind it like some sort of blight. Jack came to a complete stop at the junction, hesitated, then veered right, the giant’s howl of laughter echoing inside his head.

  That rural road hadn’t changed. The pavement was still as bad as ever, monster potholes playing their part as permanent roadside obstacles. The tall grass and weeping trees were identical to what he remembered from his youth. He’d walked up and down this road during summer vacations a hundred times over, making the long and humid trek from the trailer to the drive-in for a cherry-flavored slush so cold it froze his brain every time. Some of the trailers that had been parked along that road were gone, and the spots they’d sat over were long overgrown. A few of the houses were still there—some spruced up with new paint and upgraded roofs, others fallen into disrepair. A few looked like they’d been torn down either by the county or a tornado, faint signs of remaining foundations the only clue that a house had ever stood there at all. Rosewood wasn’t a place people wanted to raise their kids. It was nice and quaint and humble and had that air of classic Southern hospitality, but it wasn’t the type of place you wanted to spend your whole life unless your whole life was already behind you.

  Jack passed the ghosts of his childhood at fifteen miles per hour, going as slow as he was partially to take in the scenery, partially to delay the inevitable. The road leading to where he grew up eventually gave way to nothing but sagging trees and a locust hum. There was an invisible barrier that the folks of Rosewood knew not to cross, and the Winters trailer sat far beyond it.

  As Jack crept along, he eventually caught sight of what he’d come back to Georgia to see—that trailer, still sitting far within no man’s land. Alone. Washed out. Nothing but a bad memory.

  Something about seeing his childhood home in such disrepair afforded him a strange sense of disappointment. The front porch, which had been Gilda’s favorite place, had dislocated itself from the front of the house and sagged into the yard like a broken limb. The porch steps were destroyed—half of them missing, the other half on the ground, rotting into the soil. The corrugated metal that had covered their roof had been peeled back; most likely the work of an unforgiving storm. The majority of the windows were broken, and the screen door hung outward on a single hinge like a loose tooth. The next storm that whipped through Georgia would take it clean off. The siding that Stephen had put up to make the trailer look ‘nice’ was rusted over and had come loose, jutting into the wild grass like an outstretched hand asking for help.

  Jack guided the Olds onto the spot that used to be the driveway. He approached the trailer with caution, his hands shoved firmly in the pockets of his jeans. It was like a bad accident along the side of the road—he didn’t want to look, didn’t want to remember, but those dingy broken windows called out to him. Come look inside, they said. Come see what you left behind.

  Avoiding the destroyed front deck, he stepped around back where his bedroom window had been, pausing when he spotted the collection of holes that decorated the paneling there. It was where Stephen had nailed two-by-fours to the outside of the house. He took a forward step, his curiosity getting the best of him, wanting to get a peek at the room that used to be his.

  “Can I help you?”

  Jack veered around. A man in tattered jeans and a faded t-shirt stood not five yards from him, shielding his eyes from the early morning sun.

  “Um…” Caught off-guard: Jack hadn’t expected to see anyone here. “Hi.” He lifted a hand in greeting, the way they did in space movies, cautiously greeting an alien race.

  “Howdy,” the man replied, then paraphrased the question Jack had failed to answer. “What can I do you for?”

  Glancing over his shoulder, he hitched a thumb at the trailer. “I used to live here,” he said.

  “That right?”

  “Long time ago. Just came back
to see if it was still here.”

  “It’s still here, alright.” The guy stalked over and stopped in the thin strip of shadow that ran along the length of that mobile home, hiding from the sun. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped down his face. “I’ve been meaning to haul this old bitch out of here for years now, but I just haven’t been able to justify the cost.”

  “You own the land?”

  “Bought thirty acres out here about fifteen years ago. It’s out of the way but still close to town. Good for farming.”

  “Is that when the people who lived here moved out?”

  The guy folded his handkerchief, careful to match the ends to one another, then slid it into the back pocket of his jeans.

  “This place was empty when I got here. From what I know, it was empty for years before. Looked just about the same now as it did when I showed up.”

  Jack hesitated, considering whether he actually wanted to ask the question that was poised at the tip of his tongue. It was unlikely this guy would have the answer he was looking for, but he’d driven hundreds of miles—the least he could do was convince himself that he hadn’t driven to Georgia for nothing.

  “Do you know where they went?”

  It was the land owner’s turn to pause. He gave Jack a once-over, then turned his attention back to the dilapidated trailer taking up space on his land. His eyes crinkled in the corners as he peered at it, then glanced back to Jack with a curious expression.

  “I moved to Rosewood a year before I bought this property, so I’m no expert in local history,” he explained. “People told me I was crazy buying this land. People in town say it’s cursed.”

  Jack tried not to react. He stood motionless, concentrating on keeping his expression as unreadable as possible. But his heart was thumping in his ears.

  “Why do they say that?”