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Sue looks at the remaining bottle in her hand, then at the mound of snow with the shovel next to it, where Veda was half-buried in her basket. She leans back, touching the fax-paper fuse to the flames flickering from inside the Expedition. The instant she sees the paper ignite, Sue hurls the bottle dead-center into the army of murdered children, whipping her body around 180 degrees in the same motion, arms and shoulders curling to protect Veda.
The force of the explosion hits her like a battering ram, pushing her away on a wave of heat so intense she feels her skin baking dry. She and her daughter both collapse into the wonderful coolness of the snow. When she sits up, clutching Veda with both hands, Sue sees the corpses churning in a sea of fire, scrambling everywhere at once. The air is filled with an awful screaming noise, of pain and fury, and the acrid odor is everywhere. And as bad as the stench is, the noise is worse. It’s the sound of Isaac Hamilton screaming from every mouth.
Sue doesn’t wait.
She already knows that she’ll get only one chance at this, maybe not even that. Running with Veda down the long slope of the hill, she shifts her daughter’s weight to her left side and grabs the shovel sticking out of the snow, not slowing down. Fifteen feet later she loses her footing and lands flat on her ass, sliding and scrambling with the shovel in one hand and Veda in the other. Sue manages to slow herself, uses the shovel to get up again, and keeps running on the edges of her feet. Three-quarters of the way down she snaps a glance back over her shoulder.
Up at the top of the street, the children are still milling around the burning Expedition—some of them are on fire but not many, most are getting reorganized, pulling themselves together. Sue doesn’t know how much time she has. In the end she supposes it doesn’t matter.
Moving again, she finally gets down to the bottom where the different roads converge along the town’s little mock waterfront. Directly in front of her, the last statue is situated in a wide circle of black dirt, rising ten feet over her head. It is simply a stone pillar, maybe sixteen inches in diameter, with a large metal object mounted on top. Sue doesn’t have to look any closer to know that the sculpted object is an oversized model of a human heart. Isaac Hamilton’s heart. This is where they buried the last of him, that monster, that history of murder in New England, at the end of the route.
She steps into the circle of dirt and feels it trembling under her feet, rhythmically, thump-thump,thump-thump.The ground is shaking hard enough to make the pillar tremble visibly, and she can see the statue of the heart on top shaking along with it. It starts pounding harder, and on some level Sue knows this is because Hamilton’s heart is pumping its will, its fury, into every corpse at its disposal.
She puts Veda down—the girl shrieking in terror as soon as Sue lets her go—and plunges the shovel into the dirt. But the frozen top layer of the ground is as hard as asphalt, and the blade of the shovel bounces off it, the plastic handle vibrating in Sue’s palms. Below her Veda immediately grabs Sue’s leg and tries to climb up into her arms. Holding her daughter back with her left leg, Sue puts the blade down again and drives it with her right foot.
This time the blade does go in a few inches, the crust of the earth yielding to the force of her attack. She can feel the heart beneath her feet laboring harder with each pulse, wiggling through the shovel’s handle and through her palms, and when she looks up again she sees that the children have turned back from the Expedition and are headed down the hill toward her.
Sue thrusts harder, slamming the shovel in, digging up as much as she can and pulling it out again. She starts to sweat and her bangs stick to her forehead. Veda clings to her leg and screams, and Sue tries to put the screams out of her mind. The ground beneath them pulses. The hole at the base of the statue has become a shallow trench, going a foot or two down at its deepest part. As she stares into it, the trench vibrates faster, making crumbs of dirt slide back down.
It’s here. I know it is. I can feel it.
When she looks up, Sue sees that the children have surrounded her again. But this time they have stopped, ten paces away, coming no closer. She doesn’t question it, just keeps digging, picking the shovel blade up and ramming it down.
Not deep enough.
She plunges it harder, pulls it out, smashes it in again, and the shovel clanks off something solid.
Sue looks in at it, the outer edge of what seems to be an ancient metal box. The box is shaking so hard, pulsating, that the ground around it gapes open visibly with every beat. It looks as if it’s going to shake itself loose from the half-frozen ground and burst open any second and Isaac Hamilton’s heart will come flying straight out at her.
If I can just get it out, get it out—
She digs the shovel in, putting all her strength into working the edge of the blade under the box, trying to get enough leverage to pry it up. It skips and scrapes off the edge.
“Come on,” she says under her breath. “Come on, now. You can do this.”
And drives the shovel down, one last time, sinking the blade underneath, forcing the handle up in combination with the box’s own shaking, tearing up out of the earth.
Sue hunches over, reaches for the box, curling her fingers beneath its lower edges, and lifts it all the way out of the ground. She can feel it pulsating in her hands, making her arms shake along with it.
What now? What the fuck now?
Behind her there’s a soft click of a bolt-action being snapped into place. Sue lowers the metal box and looks back at what the children have been looking at, in their dead and staring way, for the last moment or so.
The Engineer stands on the other side of the statue with his rifle, the flesh of his face stretched into a tight grin. He’s holding a cell phone in his right hand, the phone, she knows, that he’s been calling her on all night. Sue sees how his overalls are still slashed to pieces where Phillip drove the knife in over and over, all those years ago. Next to him, Phillip’s corpse is holding a long knife in front of his face, also grinning. Together they represent the leering face of Isaac Hamilton.
“Thought we’d give you the choice, Susan,” Hamilton’s voice says through the Engineer’s mouth.
“One for you, the other for your daughter,” the voice says through Phillip’s mouth. It sounds identical to the other voice, the voice on the phone, the voice of Jeff Tatum and Marilyn. It is the last voice that so many children heard over the past two hundred years. “Maybe we should use the knife on the little girl.”
Sue moves to pull Veda closer to her, keeping the pounding, vibrating metal box against her side with her other hand. She can hardly hold on to it. “I don’t think so,” she says.
“What?”
“Not as long as I’ve got your heart in my hands.”
The Engineer shakes his head. “My heart has been locked up for centuries. You can’t harm it any more than you can save yourself.” He aims the rifle at her face, directly at her eyes. “Hold very still now. You’ll be joining us shortly.”
“All right.” With her right arm Sue lifts Veda up so that the girl’s face is next to hers, then raises the shaking box upward so that it’s directly in front of them, blocking their eyes. She can actually hear the sound of the heart inside now, pounding the metal interior, an accelerated WHUMP-WHUMP,WHUMP-WHUMP,WHUMP-WHUMP.“Fire away.”
Don’t be stupid. He’ll just shoot your legs out. It’s over. You know it is.
Sue casts her glance back up the hill, over the congregation of silent children, where the Expedition is on fire. She thinks of the 151 in the trunk and the remaining half-tank of gas.
The Engineer, Phillip, and all the children stare at her, then as one they lift their gazes up the hill to where the mound of snow that had been holding the Expedition in place has melted away in the fire. And as Sue watches, the Expedition shifts free, its exhaust system scraping off whatever’s left of the snow beneath it, and begins to roll downhill, flames dancing in its windows, speeding over the shaking ground, a taxi dispatched from the depths
of hell.
WHUMP-WHUMP,WHUMP-WHUMP,WHUMP-WHUMP—
The children have turned completely around to look—the Expedition is now just fifty feet away, now forty, thirty—and as the Engineer and Phillip start to shift away, Sue tucks the metal box under her left elbow, clutching Veda against her right side, and takes three steps from the base of the statue. On the third step she launches herself as hard as she can, putting everything she has and a little more into her legs. At the same time she swings her arm backward, flinging the box directly into the path of the Expedition.
What happens next transpires as much in her mind’s eye as it does in reality. The box strikes the last Isaac Hamilton statue and starts to bounce forward just as the car hits the foundation. In the last flickering instant before impact, Sue sees a brief flash of the box as it disappears between the Expedition’s front grille and the statue’s base, the top bursting open, its metal dimensions suddenly crushed as unstoppable force meets immovable object, and the black heart within it smashed flat, pulverized between the two.
She looks away.
Somewhere behind her Sue hears the final moments of the collision, imagines what’s left of the entire crate of 151 flying forward to slam into the burning backseat. Alcohol igniting, bottles bursting like bombshells inside the Expedition, until with one shrill, earringing blast, the gas tank finally explodes, shooting a tower of orange flame and black smoke straight up into the sky.
Sue raises her head, her hands pressed over Veda’s ears as she looks back at the street behind her. The smoke is too thick to see through. It burns her eyes, siphons through her lungs, makes her choke. Lifting Veda up, she carries her away, down toward the waterfront. Somewhere between the street and the harbor she realizes that the sound of the pounding heart has stopped.
They get to the water, the wooden boardwalk leading to a series of docks. The air is clearer here and Sue holds Veda at eye level, the girl no longer screaming, just crying steadily, the intensity of her panic having drained her.
Sue hugs her daughter tightly, as tightly as she dares, kissing away her tears. “Shhh, it’s okay,” she says. Over Veda’s shoulder, Sue can see the smoke rising, catching in the wind and being pulled eastward, out to sea.
And as the air slowly clears, she sees the statue is still there atop its stone pillar, the front end of the wrecked Expedition wrapped around it, burning.
Sue looks out at the hillside leading down to the water. Through the dissipating smoke she glimpses the streets, the little houses and narrow storefronts of White’s Cove, and eventually she can see the bodies of the children, so many children, sprawled motionless in the snow.
She turns her daughter’s head away.
8:29A.M.
Down by the water, a burning scrap of paper blows across her feet, caught in the wind. Holding Veda close to her chest, Sue leans over and lifts it by the edge that isn’t on fire.
It’s the map, or what’s left of it. She’s not sure how it got here, but in light of last night’s events, the map’s sudden reappearance doesn’t seem the least bit surprising or strange. As charred as it is, Sue can barely make out some of the names of the towns. The first odd thing she notices is that there is no more jagged line running across it. She finds Gray Haven and tries to follow the route east but can’t find the next town. At the moment she can’t even remember what it was called. As the flame inches upward toward the top of the map the town names are consumed one by one, and she doesn’t see any that sound like they were on the route. Now she’s squinting at it, and as she does, the last of the names—White’s Cove—also disappears, just a second or two before the nearby towns that surround it. Spectral images fading along with the memory of the route, vanishing down the pipeline of the night.
The route created the towns, she thinks. They’re still here but the route is gone.
Up at the top of the hill she sees the lights of emergency vehicles flashing red and blue against the steadily illuminating sky.
Chasing the Deadis a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 by Joe Schreiber
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINEand colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to HarperCollins Publishers for permission to reprint an excerpt fromBig Red Barn by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Felicia Bond, text copyright © 1956, 1984, 1989 by Roberta Brown Raunch. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schreiber, Joe.
Chasing the dead : a novel / Joe Schreiber.
p. cm.
eISBN-13: 978-0-345-49560-0
eISBN-10: 0-345-49560-8
1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. Kidnapping—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.C4635C47 2006
813'.6—dc22 2006047713
www.ballantinebooks.com
v1.0
To Christina, who had to know how it ended
PROLOGUE
1983
The man on the ground has finally stopped moving. The boy looks down at him and uncurls his fingers, allowing the knife to slip from his hand. The blade strikes the packed dirt with a dull thud. The girl next to him hears the noise and flinches. Above them the shadows of late August hang low in the damp air.
The girl looks down at the man. “Is he dead?”
The boy is breathing hard, staring at the knife on the ground. He still feels as if he’s ramming it home, over and over, through the shredded denim of the man’s bib overalls and deep into the hollow of the man’s chest. He can’t imagine now where he found the strength to do that. The muscles in his arms are as limp as wet towels, barely capable of supporting the weight of his own hands.
“Is he—”
“Yeah,” the boy says. “He’s dead.”
The girl’s eyes widen a fraction, showing extra white along the rims. She has dark blond hair and a pretty face that finds its center in her eyes, green and bright. But the remains of baby fat in her cheeks and the size of her lips have other kids making fun of her at school, calling her Duck-girl or Fat Ass or worse. “What do we do? Should we call the cops?”
The boy doesn’t move, staring down at the body below him. He’s eleven years old, an age when such focused immobility still seems out of place, even in a kid with such a slight build and intense eyes. “No way,” he says quietly. “No cops.”
“We can explain it to them. They’ll see it and they’ll understand.”
He shakes his head. “We can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Look at it.” He points with his chin. “I mean, jeez, look what I just did. What if we were wrong? What if—what if it wasn’t him?”
“It is him,” the girl says. “It’s him. It’s gotta be. You know it is.”
“Yeah, but thecops… ?” His voice dribbles away and he just looks at her helplessly, wanting to make her agree with him but unable to find the words. “This isn’t what I thought was gonna happen,” he says finally. “I mean, you saw it, didn’t you? Didn’t you see what justhappened ?”
The girl stares back at him, tilting her head down a little to meet his eyes, her gaze steadier. They are the same age, in the same grade, but she is almost two inches taller than he is this summer. It will be another year before he catches up with her. After that he’ll sprout up, putting on weight and muscle, and she’ll be looking up at him for the rest of their lives.
“All right,” she says. “Okay, no cops. But what are we going to do?”
The boy glances up at the plastic garbage bags that line the steel mesh trash receptacles along the empty stretch of dirt. He turns slo
wly, as if in a dream, to the long country road beyond it. Town is a good four miles away, to the north. A hundred yards down the road and to the west, the outline of the old covered bridge rises into the muggy air. The river that runs beneath it, he knows, is as slow and dozy as the August afternoon itself.
“I have an idea,” he says.
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE
BEGIN READING
EPILOGUE