Joe Schreiber - Chasing The Dead (mobi)

by user

  BLAM!

  Sue leaps, ears ringing, the gunshot coming from the roof of the Expedition above her head. Before she can tense up it happens again.

  BLAM!

  On reflex—at the moment, she has nothing else left in her arsenal—she throws the car into drive and hits the accelerator. The Expedition lurches to life. Something bumps off the roof and the man on her hood is gone. Sue takes the wheel and steers it back onto the road, looking in the rearview mirror but not seeing anything back there. He’s just gone. The road ahead of her leading into Winslow is empty.

  She drives fifty yards up the road, her stomach twisted backward on itself, the faint lights of Winslow beginning to prism in her eyes. When the road gets too blurry to drive she stops again, crosses her arms over her chest, and for a long time she just sits there holding on to herself and trembling. The dome light is still on and when she reaches around to switch it off with a clumsy, shock-stiffened arm she notices the kid sprawled across the backseat.

  There are two bullet holes through the kid’s eyes. Wisps of smoke are still floating from the sockets. Sue sees this but it doesn’t register with her immediately. She is filled with the simultaneous urges to scream, throw up, and squeeze her own eyes shut—

  But she sublimates all of these urges, puts them aside, with the single thought of Veda waiting for her at the end of the line. Veda the punctuation mark, the only good reason, the final and absolute meaning in her otherwise iffy existence. Veda, whom she is prepared to kill for, whom she’ll die trying to get back. The simplicity of the thought steels her, helps her focus, until it is the only thing she knows.

  Veda.

  Baby.

  I’m coming. Mommy’s coming. I promise.

  And she drives the rest of the way into Winslow.

  12:06A.M.

  Winslow is only marginally less depressing than Gray Haven. It’s deserted here as well, the sidewalks lit by occasional streetlights so she can see empty storefronts along with a barbershop and a boarded-up Depression-era movie theater called the Bijou. A dilapidated church made of fieldstone rises above the square. The local bar on the corner is the Crow’s Tap and there is indeed a sign above the door with a picture of a crow tapping its beak against a keg. But if there’s anyone getting a nightcap inside, they’re doing it in the dark. Not the faintest trace of light trickles through the bar’s front window. There are no footprints in the blanket of snow that lies across the town, no trace of life anywhere. And like Gray Haven, Winslow seems to be a town inhabited only by bad memories and worse weather.

  A speed limit sign commands her to slow to 25 and Sue automatically lifts her foot from the pedal, not wanting to get pulled over by the town’s one cop. Considering her current cargo of corpses, a routine speeding violation would turn into tomorrow’sUSA Today headline for the deputy lucky enough to stumble across it. She isn’t really thinking about any of this—in her current frame of numbness it would be a mistake to say that she’s technicallythinking about anything at all—but she knows if she gets stopped that she will never see her daughter again. This again is nightmare logic, but it is logic just the same. It is the kind of blessed circular logic, beloved of zealots and extremists everywhere, that means she doesn’t have to think about it anymore beyond that.

  But the doubts remain.

  What if I do start thinking about it right now? The dead bodies, the kidnapping, the route, the voice on the phone—will I go crazy? Will my brain just throw up its hands and say That’s it, I quit? Exactly how much horror and shock is the mind capable of absorbing, really?

  She pushes it away.

  At twenty-five miles an hour Main Street seems to go on forever. She speeds up, risking thirty-five, then forty. Despite the wind blowing in through the broken window, she’s flushed, her cheeks and earlobes burning. She feels hot and dizzy, as if she has the flu.

  Her eyes dart out the windows. She tries to pay attention to the town, to figure out why the voice would be so insistent that she detour through here on her way east. But there’s nothing to see. She passes a gun shop, a creepily deserted hobby store called Pastimes on the Square, some cheap housing waiting to be bulldozed, a vacant lot, and at the top of the next hill, a barren-looking little park with a statue of a man standing on a pedestal.

  He’s bald with muttonchops, dressed in a long coat, holding the familiar bone-saw in his right hand as he gazes off to the west.

  It looks just like the figure that stands in Sheckard Park in Gray Haven. Isaac Hamilton, the name that the kid mentioned to her.

  However, there’s one slight difference—this version of the statue has only one arm.

  It’s odd enough for Sue to look twice, sure she’s just seeing it at a peculiar angle, but no, the arm is gone. The left one, to be exact, the one that was holding the Bible back in Gray Haven, is missing from the shoulder. Sue has no idea why two towns would have the same historic figure immortalized in their parks, and right now she couldn’t care. Except that Isaac Hamilton is linked to the towns, and the kid linked Isaac Hamilton to the Engineer…all of which brings her one step closer to understanding the man who kidnapped her daughter.

  Then again the kid also said that the Engineer murdered his brother three years ago, which Sue knows is flatly impossible.

  She passes the statue and sees the entire village green is full of little statues, and realizes it’s not a park at all. It’s a cemetery. It spreads its old, flat, bald stones out across the snowy field like candy that somebody’s sucked the letters off of, and she starts to hear the poem echo through her head, the one that starts “From Ocean Street in old White’s Cove.” All at once, boom, the headache that she felt between her eyes comes back. It’s not a flu feeling anymore, it’s more like a low-pressure system moving in. The dizziness in her head turns to nausea. Something else is different too, an odd crawling twinge in her chest and abdomen that she can’t quite pinpoint.

  Sue floors the accelerator and speeds up as if she could leave the words and feelings behind her, but the cemetery keeps going and so does the poem in her head. She’s out of breath, her lungs feeling too small to deliver air. Her head is pounding. What is it about these towns, this route, and, as the kid said, the history of murder in New England?

  She’s almost past the cemetery when she hears a muffled scratching coming from underneath the dashboard to her right. It’s mixed in with a sliding sound, like something is trying to drag itself up a vertical surface and keeps falling. Sue follows the noise down to the cardboard box with the two steamed lobsters that Sean Flaherty gave her, six hours ago.

  The box has started shifting from side to side.

  Sue stares at it. The lobsters inside are dead, of course. They’ve been dead ever since the good people at Legal Seafood dropped them in a pot for Sean at five this afternoon.

  Inside the box the scraping grows more animated. She can hear clicking sounds too, quick angry snaps, along with the scuttling of many legs.

  Phillip’s voice says it first.

  They’re alive again.

  “Lazarus lobsters,” Sue says, almost sounding like her old self. “Jesus lobsters, Elvis lobsters.”

  She rolls down her window. There’s a cardboard handle on top of the box and she’s going to pitch the entire thing out the window. Then she’s not going to think about it anymore, just like she’s not going to think about the bodies in the back of her car or the song that tells her about the history of murder in New England. In fact she’s going to restrict her thoughts to Veda and how she’s going to be with her in the morning as long as she does what the voice tells her. Because this is what people do when they’re dealing with maniacs. They do what the voice on the phone tells them.

  She reaches down for the box, her fingers starting to curl around the handle, lifting it tentatively from the floor, when a boiled red claw bursts up from a flap in the cardboard. The claw is wide open, and it snaps shut on her hand, trapping the fourth and fifth fingers. Sue shouts in pain and surprise, je
rks her hand back, yanking the entire lobster out of the box with it. It’s shockingly big—two and a half pounds, Sean told her, though it feels a lot heavier dangling off her hand. But that’s a lot less shocking than the fact that it’s whipping around, alive and completely pissed off.

  She’s forgotten all about the steering wheel. The Expedition veers right and then weaves sharply left, comes inches from hitting the stone fence alongside the road until Sue swings the wheel back to the center again.

  The lobster holds on to her hand even as she shakes it, swings it out the open window, the thing dangling next to her face with its tail and legs clicking and snapping against the glass. Sue hits the power window, raising it so it catches the unprotected joint between the leg and claw and cuts right through it. The body of the lobster drops, leaving only the claw still gripping her fingers.

  Holding the wheel steady with her knee, Sue pries the claw off, lowers the window again, and throws it out. Her hand is bleeding where the claw broke the skin, and between the pain and the cold, her arm is throbbing right up to the elbow. She presses her hand under her armpit and holds it there.

  She sees that the graveyard is gone, taking the town with it, and she’s back in open country again. The snow has tapered off to reveal a clear black sky. Keeping the window down, she inhales until her sinuses start to sting. The air smells clean.

  She looks down on the floor, sees the empty box resting on its side, and remembers the second lobster. It’s nowhere to be seen. She shuts the window next to her head and tries to listen over the whine of the wind coming through the shattered glass on the passenger’s side. After a moment she hears it rustling under her seat, followed by silence. Without hesitating she leans forward and shoves her hand directly underneath her and grabs the lobster by the tail, pulling it out.

  It starts wiggling. With strength that surprises even her, Sue slams it straight down on the dashboard with enough force to crack the plastic. The lobster’s entire carapace explodes and sprays meat along with shards of shell and warm, salty water across her face and lap. She flings the thing’s carcass across the passenger seat and out the broken window.

  She gets out the map again and draws a line to the next town, measuring the distance at two finger-widths. According to the map’s legend that means that Stoneview is about fifteen miles from here. She consciously tries to recall the poem that the kid recited to her, the one that she was terribly certain she could speak word for word only a few minutes earlier.

  Now she can’t even remember the first line.

  12:39A.M.

  Following the capillary bed of secondary roads outlined on the map, Sue finds herself headed down yet another nameless stretch of blacktop. It’s empty, but it’s been plowed recently, and she’s able to cruise along at a bracing seventy with decent visibility. Once again the mindlessness of driving becomes a tonic. There’s no sign of the van or any other traffic. There is nothing but darkness and the broken yellow line receding in her headlights.

  She’s ten miles from Stoneview when her phone starts beeping.

  For the first time she’s seized by the inexplicable compulsion not to answer it. She knows that it’s him, the voice of the man who has her daughter, and she has to answer. Still she lets it ring half a dozen times before finally forcing her hand to pick it up and hit theTALK button.

  “Hello?”

  The voice is right there in her ear, a moist, heavy murmur.

  “Susan, are you beginning to understand what’s happening here?”

  “What?”

  “The changes. Do you feel the changes?”

  “What changes?”

  The voice sighs. “That’s what I was afraid of. You need to be punished again, Susan. It will open your eyes.”

  “No, wait.”No more punishment, she wants to cry. “What do you want? Just tell me.”

  “I want to see you.”

  “What?”

  “I want to look at you, Susan. I want you to look at yourself.”

  “How…?” she starts.

  “When you get to Stoneview, there’s a place called Babe’s. You’ll find it.”

  “Please, don’t—” she stops herself, realizing that he is still listening and probably enjoying hearing her beg, maybe that’s the whole point to begin with. So instead she says, “Who was Isaac Hamilton?”

  “Ah.” He sounds pleased. “Youare beginning to understand. Just when I was ready to throw you to the wolves.”

  “Is his statue in all the towns along the route?”

  “Do you want to see your little girl in the morning, Susan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Babe’s, Susan. I’ll see you there.”

  He hangs up before she can say anything else.

  She puts the phone down, still cruising along at seventy, seventy-five. She doesn’t know what else to do except follow the map. She thinks about Isaac Hamilton. The name has an enchantment on it. It has a kind of power, like a key dangling from a chain, a key that might open a box—or a cage.

  Sure enough, six miles later, she sees the sign coming up:

  STONEVIEW—ESTABLISHED1802

  12:48A.M.

  The town is a husk.

  Empty buildings with no glass in the windows, a dead gas station, vacant houses, and great dinosaur spines of snow drifted up in the streets. It’s like a hurricane came through, or a virus, and took everyone with it. She wouldn’t have thought such towns even existed in Massachusetts. And apparently they don’t, at least on any map but this one.

  Sue drives through it, her sinuses expanding, the enormous, cabbage-size pain at the base of her skull beginning to pound again. She feels a twinge of nausea, and her skin is moist to the touch. Her ribs squeeze her chest like a pair of skeletal hands. The lines and edges of the Expedition are running together—the bloodstains and bodies that she shouldn’t be able to see are trickling into her peripheral vision, occluding her eyes.

  Up ahead the road bends to the right, around an island of snow-buried land that she assumes was once Stoneview’s town common. There is a bench, two or three bare trees, and in the middle, there is another statue. She says his name aloud.

  “Isaac Hamilton.”

  As her headlights reach out to touch it Sue can see the statue plainly. And it’s different again. This time it’s just a head, body, and legs. Both arms are missing.

  Now she slows down, magnetized. There’s a small amount of snow on it but she can still tell right away, the arms were never there. It’s not like a bunch of kids came along and cut them off as a prank or ran their car into it and knocked the arms off. The sculptor deliberately left them off, fashioning smooth stumps at either shoulder. Beneath the statue, the pedestal has the same plaque as the others, and Sue thinks of the lines inscribed upon it, lines that she never bothered to read though, somehow, she’d always thought they were poetry, by virtue of the way they were laid out.

  She thinks of the poem that Jeff quoted. She squints at the old copperplate type—difficult enough to read already, abraded further by the passing decades. Though it’s impossible to tell without getting out of her car (she’s not getting out of her car, not here, not now, no sir), she thinks it looks long enough to be the poem.

  So what? So they wrote some poem about Hamilton, so what is that supposed to mean?

  Her eyes shift away. Behind the statue the road rises and falls again. Instead of a cemetery, the hill behind the statue gives way to an unexpected surge of red neon, a glowing cigarette tip aimed at the flat, windowless structure cowering beneath it like a blind dog.

  Babe’s is a roadhouse surrounded with crookedly parked vehicles. Travelers like herself, Sue thinks, caught in the storm. She pulls in and cuts the engine. Already she can hear the music playing inside, a machinelike thud of pure distortion, skinned of all melody. Bending forward to climb out triggers something in her stomach and she almost gets sick, managing to hold it back at the last second.

  The cell rings.

  “I’m here
,” she says.

  “I see that.”

  Sue stops and turns around, her eyes searching the lot until she sees what she’s looking for. The van sits shivering in a handicapped spot with a rag of exhaust dangling from its tailpipe. She can see nothing inside.

  “What am I doing here?”

  “I’ll let you know when the time comes,” the voice says. “Go around to the back. Go through the kitchen. Inside you’ll find another door, marked Employees Only. Go through it. And keep that phone handy.”

  She starts walking. There’s a freshly shoveled pathway leading around the side of the building and Sue follows it until she hears voices murmuring quietly in Spanish or perhaps Portuguese, she can’t tell. There’s a light mounted on the roof, aimed down, and a giant fan blasts the smell of fried onions mixed with garbage and cooking grease. Two men in aprons and bandannas are passing a joint back and forth behind the Dumpster. They flick their eyes up at her for the briefest of appraisals and then resume their conversation.