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Ten minutes later she hears the screams.
4:41A.M.
They coincide with a series of slamming sounds, like kitchen cupboards banging shut. The silence that comes afterward is seamless. After a span of seconds it’s interrupted by a distant but distinct tumbling noise, something falling down heavily—it’sgot to be heavy if Sue can hear it here, at the end of the hallway. Then from somewhere in the guts of the police station she hears a man’s voice yell:“Holy shit!” There are two more flat bangs. Then nothing. No bangs, no shouting. Not breathing, Sue moves toward the door, almost reaches it, and stops short.
From up the hall someone has begun to shriek,“Oh God, oh Christ, please, please…” It’s so frantic that Sue can’t even tell if it’s a man or a woman. The screaming comes in jagged, irregular bursts, then goes so high that it becomes screeching, a mangled combination of pain and what she can only imagine is hysterical terror. The screamer actually sounds like someone going insane with fright.
Sue feels herself floating back from the door, its rectangular frame seeming to recede away from her, rather than staying in one place while she moves. She listens as the screaming intensifies, getting louder, closer, until it’s right outside the locked door, wholly incoherent. Now it’s accompanied by pounding, hands slapping against the door, clawing at the handle, rattling it with a desperation that makes Sue feel nauseated with dread.
There are two more flat cracking sounds. Gunshots, she realizes. The door shakes and falls still; the screaming, the pounding, go abruptly silent.
Sue doesn’t move. There is one final gunshot, this one tearing straight through the lock, and she jumps so hard it hurts. From her side Sue sees the handle burst out of the door, then dangle crookedly like a broken crank on an old-time ice cream machine. She is slowly aware of the acrid smell of gunpowder seeping through the hole.
The entire planet holds its breath as nothing moves. Out there, Sue feels it waiting, knowing she’s in here.
What’s on the other side right now? What would I be looking at if that door weren’t there? Dear God, what kind of gun-toting horror would I see staring back at me? Another fresh corpse, or the original one, the rotting scarecrow shape of the Engineer himself?
Slow, unhurried footsteps drag themselves down the hall, away from the room. Sue listens as they recede, growing softer, finally gone.
She touches the door.
It swings open about six inches, then stops, striking something. Sue looks down through the crack. The fluorescent lights in the hall seem marginally less bright than those in the room, but she has no difficulty making out the sliver of blue fabric, a police uniform stained darker, the white skin of a forearm against the blood gleaming from the pale wood floor.
She pushes harder but the door doesn’t budge. The body of the cop remains tightly wedged against it.
With new resolve, Sue takes a step back and charges, driving her shoulder forward and putting both legs behind her, forcing the door open another six inches. There’s a wet, rough sound, like a damp sandbag being dragged over gravel, as the body slides heavily backward and then abruptly rolls onto its side, one arm flopping over so the knuckles of its hands hit the wall, the clack of the Fraternal Order of Police ring striking against the plaster.
Sue recoils, ducking back into the room. The first thought in her head is Jeff Tatum’s corpse pouncing on her outside of Babes. But the body on the floor rolled only because of the way the door was pushing it—although she can’t see its face, which is turned to the opposite wall, she can tell the corpse isn’t moving on its own.
Besides,she thinks,the body hasn’t gone through the route. I mean, let’s be logical here.
“Logical,” she mumbles. “Sure, yeah, you bet.”
Still, she has to step over it to get out.
Bracing herself on the door frame, she raises her right leg up over the dead cop and pivots her body sideways so she can slide her hips through the opening. Her eyes go down to the blood on the floor. Seems like more now than only a few seconds earlier. It would be just like her to slip and fall in it, to land right on top of the corpse. Leaning farther, still clinging onto the frame behind her for support, Sue half-hops over the body and plants one foot and then the other safely on the floor.
She gives one backward glance at the body. It’s the young cop with the thin blond mustache. Above the bridge of his nose, both eye sockets have been reduced to a bloody mash. A garish bouquet of arterial blood is splattered across the wall behind him, layered so thickly that it has begun to drip down toward the baseboard heating.
She runs down the hall, through the open doorway to the booking desk. Rounding the corner she sees the body of the booking sergeant slumped over the desk, arms shot out sideways at ridiculous angles, head wrenched down and to the left so that one of his blown-out eye sockets is partially visible from where she stands. The American flag behind him is covered in his blood and flecked intermittently with the gray mattress stuffing of what must be brain matter.
Farther to her right, beyond the desk, next to a pair of vending machines, another dead cop is sprawled on his stomach, a partially unwrapped Mars Bar clutched in his hand. Sue turns to the exit. There’s yet another body between two potted ferns by the front door, lying next to an overturned table in a spray of old magazines and safety pamphlets. As she walks toward it Sue realizes that she’s looking at Yates, both eyes blasted through the back of his skull, his beard transformed into a sodden mop of deep scarlet. His mouth is slightly open so she can see his tongue inside, blood on his teeth.
She strides toward the glass doors, toward the darkness beyond them, thinking that she’s never been so relieved to see so little daylight in the sky, and that’s when she hears the noise behind her. At first she doesn’t recognize it because of the way it’s being filtered, through a tinny speaker, like a pair of headphones cranked up to maximum volume. When she does figure it out, she realizes it’s the sound of laughter and cheering, applause, and rhythmic music playing in the background.
Sue turns back toward the booking desk. The TV that was showing the old Clint Eastwood movie when she came in is still on. But the tape has been changed. Now the image on the screen—she can see it clearly from here—is of a naked woman onstage, running her hands over her stomach and breasts while the men in the crowd howl rabidly.
Sue frowns, looking closer, and just when she sees that the naked body onstage belongs to her, the taped footage breaks off.
There’s an instant of snow.
Then a new image fills the screen.
4:56A.M.
Sue gazes at the TV monitor, unblinking. Onscreen, the child strapped into the car seat is asleep, her head tucked to her chest. Sue sees at once that it’s Veda.
The child doesn’t appear hurt, just totally exhausted, sleeping deeply enough that the harsh glare of the video camera’s light shining in her face doesn’t even make her flinch. The camera holds its position and Sue notices that the time code streaming across the bottom of the screen reads 04:09A.M ., less than an hour earlier.
He taped that footage and he left it here.
She sees a hand enter the frame from the right, gently grasping Veda’s head underneath her jaw and lifting it slightly upward to expose the soft white flesh of her throat.
For a moment Veda tenses, still asleep, trying to pull her head away, but then she just sighs and falls still again. Sue stares at the screen as another hand enters the picture, this time from the left side. It is holding a long, serrated knife.
“Oh God, no,” Sue hears herself say, in a voice that doesn’t sound like it belongs to her at all. “Don’t you dare, you son of a bitch.”
The hand holds the tip of the knife to Veda’s neck, so close that it’s impossible to discern whether the tip is touching her skin or not. All it has to do is push the blade upward, or let Veda’s sleeping head drop down. But it holds the tableau, child and knife, for that breathless span of seconds.
“You promised,” Sue sa
ys. “Youpromised. ”
Nothing on the screen moves. A moment later the image erupts in static. Sue is aware that she’s leaning so far forward that she’s in danger of falling over the desk. There’s a sharp chirping sound on the counter next to her. She looks down.
It’s her cell phone, the one that came with her new clothes. She grabs it, hitsTALK . “You promised you wouldn’t hurt her.”
“You’re letting your imagination run away with you, Susan,” the voice says. “I always keep my promises. You know that by now, don’t you?”
“I’ll do whatever you want.”
“I know you will. That’s why I cleared the way for you.” The voice chuckles, but there’s no humor in it. “Even the Engineer needed a little guidance from time to time, Susan.”
She looks at the bodies sprawled around the police station.That’s why I cleared the way for you.
“You’ll find your car in the impound lot behind the station. But you need to hurry. You’ve got a long way to go before sunrise.”
She nods, grunting, and heads for the door. She’s getting that vibe again, the feeling that the voice is waiting there on the other end even though it isn’t saying anything. What’s it waiting for, she wonders, a thank-you? Or is it waiting to see if she’ll remember something she’s forgotten?
She stops with one hand resting on the cold door handle, and thinks of the map.
Walking over to where Yates’s body lies, she squats down and sticks her hand into his pants pocket but finds only his wallet and keys. She checks the other pockets. There’s nothing but a disposable lighter and an almost-full pack of Marlboros, some wadded-up Kleenex, and loose change. Then something occurs to her, and she lifts the body up, rolling it onto its side. The floor beneath him is covered in blood.
The map is down there, pressed between his body and the floor, protected in the evidence baggie. In one smooth gesture Sue lifts it from the baggie and tucks it under one arm, puts her hands in the pockets of her unfamiliar wool coat, and heads back out the door.
5:05A.M.
She climbs over the fence into the impound lot. It’s brightly lit and full of wrecked vehicles, snowcapped ghosts of a dozen different traffic accidents, making the Expedition easy to find. It’s the only one that hasn’t sustained some kind of career-ending automotive trauma. She opens the driver’s side door, hears the familiar chime. The keys are in the ignition, tagged with an orange piece of cardboard with her name and the date of impound written on it.
She needs to get out of here, but there’s one other thing that she has to do first.
Leaving the door ajar, she walks around to the back of the Expedition and lifts the hatch, lowering her eyes swiftly for a look inside.
Marilyn’s body is missing.
Is this a surprise? Not really. From what Yates told her, it sounded like they’d taken it out already. And under any other circumstances, on any other night, that fact alone would’ve been a sufficient explanation for why it was no longer here.
But Sue notices that the other body, the Engineer,is still here—or movedback here, anyway—wrapped in his shroud of plastic garbage bags. The question arises: Why is he here while Marilyn is gone?
And the answer surges up from the animal part of her brain. The Engineer is her passenger, just as he’s been her passenger for all these years, riding along in the back of her mind through whatever else was going on in her life. Because, she thinks, it is like Phillip says, the past is never done with us, not in any substantial way, and anybody who tells you otherwise hasn’t taken a good look into their backseat lately.
But Marilyn, where is Marilyn?
As she climbs back into the driver’s seat, from the corner of her eye Sue catches a shadow-flicker of motion off to the right, on the far side of the chain-link fence, twenty, maybe thirty yards away. The high-powered sodium lights end abruptly at the fence’s perimeter, as if they don’t have any interest in illuminating whatever lies beyond, but she can still make out a shadow of something trundling its way over the snowy hillside where it gives way to the access road. It’s a human-sized shadow, but it doesn’tmove like a human, or even an animal; it lumbers and flops its way along with the innate clumsiness of something stiff and inanimate being dragged across the snow, kicking up clouds of white powder as it advances blindly forward. Like an anchor dragging the ocean floor.
Sue’s eyes chase the shadow over the snow between two pine trees, where it vanishes momentarily in a pool of darkness, then reappears on the other side, right outside the police station. There’s a vehicle waiting in the lot. She can see the beams of its headlights—and then the shadow steps into their glare. From here Sue can see the source of the shadow with undeniable clarity.
It’s Marilyn.
For a moment the woman who was her daughter’s nanny stands wavering in the headlights, hunched stupidly forward, jaw slack, arms dangling at her sides. She looks very old, very dead. Her hair is a greasy ruin of kinks and angles, mashed unevenly against one side of her skull, and dried blood covers her cheeks and neck like a beard, staining the entire front of her sweater.
Then with a slow shuffling of feet, Marilyn turns herself until she’s facing Sue. She’s twitching her head up and down with little sniffing gestures.
Is she smelling me? Sue wonders. Searching for my scent?
She can’t help but stare. Even from this distance she’s aware that the vacancies of Marilyn’s eye sockets are not entirely empty anymore. There’s a dark gleam inside them, moving slightly, as her head jerks up and down, as if some alien optic instrument were incubating deep inside Marilyn’s skull.
Her new eyes, Sue thinks. Her route eyes. They’re growing back.
Releasing Sue from that horrible myopic gleam, Marilyn turns and slumps her way toward the embrace of the headlights. And though she’s moving more slowly now it’s the same tree-stump stumble, lunging forward and then catching herself, as if the tendons and ligaments aren’t connected right anymore.
Then she stops again and turns herself back toward Sue.
What’s she doing? It’s like she’s waiting for somebody to join her. But who else is here except for—
All at once a hand grabs her from behind.
5:11A.M.
The fingers are cold, clamping over her mouth. A sudden tree of terror bursts from her spine upward through her chest, its branches spreading down her arms to her fingertips. The hand pulls her back against the headrest and flattens her lips against her teeth, compressing the scream that has no time to emerge. She writhes in the seat, trying to get free, but the grip is unyielding and she can’t even turn her head. One of the fingers worms its way between her teeth and she tastes cold salt, dirt, and blood mingled together against her tongue. Simultaneously gagging and biting down, she shuts her eyes and feels tears springing up from them, her stomach clenching spasmodically.
Relaxing its grip slightly, the thing crawls up between the driver and passenger seats, and only then does Sue manage to twist her head enough to look over to see who it is. She spots the white T-shirt and bloodstained face. Then the smell hits her. A cloud of foulness clings to him so densely that it almost seems to pulsate from his flesh.
“Susan,” Jeff Tatum says. “Remember me?”
She stares at him, her stomach roiling with nausea and shock. Like Marilyn’s, his shot-out eyes are beginning to come back, and now Sue has a closer look at the results. Instead of empty sockets, there are now black, jellylike orbs quivering inside his skull, the way she imagines shark’s eyes must when they’re first beginning to take shape. What must the world look like through such eyes? she wonders bleakly.
“It’s better this way, Susan. You’ll see when you get here. You don’t feel anything anymore. It’s like the best drug you ever had.”
He pulls away so she can respond. “What do you want?”
“I’m just a messenger, here to deliver a reminder.”
“Which is what?”
His fingers go up to tease the
tatters of flesh around his shimmering, embryonic new eyes. “To stay on the route, if you want to see your daughter again.”
“When I saw you before, you told me not to go any farther.”
The ruined face flushes with anger. Without the slightest warning he swings his right hand at her face, slamming her in the cheekbone, knocking her backward into the door. “Don’t youever fucking argue with me, you stupid bitch. I know what’s best. I’ll decide if your little Veda comes back to you dead or alive. Or have you forgotten that already?”
“No,” Sue says levelly. “I haven’t forgotten.” The blow to the face has had a paradoxical effect of restoring some cruel kind of alertness; it occurs to her now that she might be able to use this moment to her advantage, if only in a minor way. “There’s something else I haven’t forgotten, either, Jeff.”