by The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares- The Haunted City (retail) (epub)
My hands fall to her shoulders, on either side of her fragile little neck.
But how do you keep someone from dreaming?
A young lawman woke up fully dressed in Phoenix. He stepped over Jack Daniel, who was lying down, feeling empty. The lawman felt empty too. He stepped outside, then stepped into his vehicle. It was noon. His shift started five hours ago, exactly at seven a.m. Late, yes, but a first for him. The good lawman had perfect attendance at the PPD and tardy was never on his list of attributes. The Phoenix chief of police would go as far as to say that this specific officer of the law was the best he had. Well liked too. Always remembered a name after he shook a hand—even if the name required seven or eight words to get the point across.
But right now, sitting in his boiling-hot car, he can’t remember a thing.
I can’t hear anything. I’m fucking deaf.
Three hundred and sixty-one days ago, the lawman arrived to his post forty-five minutes early to get his paperwork done. He was more concerned with doing “real” police work when the clock hit seven: catching criminals, pulling speeders, and serving citizens. As he was parking his personal vehicle he noticed a commotion in the alleyway. Quick to service, he ran over and stopped an armed mugger from attacking a pregnant woman, who was kind enough to relieve her morning sickness into a trash can. Just before the criminal could stick her belly with a four-inch blade, the lawman struck the pathetic human in the throat and had him in a wrist-breaker and cuffed. Two months later, the proud mother named her baby boy after the heroic lawman. But a hero’s name is never important, only his deeds.
On this morning, at this moment, the dazed lawman started driving. Fast. Boot to the pedal, metal. Hold on.
Why can’t I remember what he told me? I gotta drive.
His car finds a middle-aged couple, biking. Janet and Danny Marlin. Two peas in a pod. High school sweethearts who made their money in shady real estate deals. Supposedly, last December, Janet sold a rat-infested home to a blind man from Gallup, New Mexico. When he complained about all of the scurrying she told him that the house might be haunted, but there were certainly no disclosures for that sort of thing. Suddenly, the lawman’s car plows into the real estate agents. SMACK! CRUNCH, CRUNCH. Blood and body parts slide off the front of the car.
Just drive.
A woman holding her smart technology looks out of her second-story window and doesn’t understand why there’s a bike in the tree, dripping blood. Halloween is four months away. Must be the pot smokers. Or some failed excuse for modern art. Then she looks at a bloodied cop car racing away. Our lawman turns on his flashers and cruiser-mounted cameras. There are three of them: grille-cam, back-up-cam, internal-cam. Standard issue. You’ve probably seen them, definitely been on them. All used to help in the pursuit of justice. However, justice is not exactly what he’s serving today.
—
His cruiser makes a sharp turn and rips down an alley…two homeless bodies, sons of two unconnected drunks, stir against the brick wall. One takes a swig of cheap malt, the other picks his chapped nose while rambling incoherencies. The car quickly leans in to the malnourished bodies, scraping skin, guts, bones, and brain matter against the already burnt-red wall. A bloodshot eyeball erupts from one of the skulls. The bottle of malt, however, goes unharmed, ready for another hand to wash it down. The cruiser slams into a steel trash can, which flips up over the car.
The black-and-white (and red) cruiser blasts through the puddled alley. Ninety-degree right turn. Ninety-eight degrees outside. SMACK, SMACK. Two unidentified Phoenix hipsters, just leaving a poetry slam, become more unidentifiable.
RED AND BLUE LIGHTS. The young lawman is being chased by his brethren. He checks the rearview.
Friends.
The lawman smiles for the first time. Other police vehicles fall in line behind him. He drives even faster now, leading the men in blue on his quest for an answer. His weary eyes grow strong again and his knuckles crack as he grips the wheel. This march will finish strong and he has his comrades on his side.
The lawman thinks about his best friend.
Good times, BBQs, chasing girls, hangovers, and hunting trips.
They took one hunting trip where the then-aspiring lawman dropped an eight-pointer from 325 yards—a record distance for either of them. His best friend took a doe on the last night of the trip because he didn’t see “any horns.” Besides, a doe tasted better unless they were making venison jerky, in which case it hardly fuckin’ mattered. The lawman joked once or twice that his best friend always took the doe, while he always found a perfect buck. It made sense that the lawman would follow the gun, and his best friend would dive into hydroponics. CRUNCHHH! More bodies and blood fly, bits and pieces hitting the windshield. Simply randoms. No backstory, barely a front story. A ligament hangs over the lens of the rear camera. The lawman checks his digital monitors, habit. A tibia or some leg bone swings off of the ligament.
People are disgusting.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. The lawman’s vehicle takes a hit. Counts three of them from the vibrations. He calculates, then executes a strong maneuver left like an F-16 dodging a heat-seeking missile. The cops pull triggers. Stamped metal whizzes through the air. Making meat seems to warrant an open-fire policy. Our lawman dodges the swarm of kill-stones and cuts across the opposing lane of traffic and through the corner gas station. Chaos and collateral damage halt the chasing cruisers. He skirts through more oncoming traffic and then finds an on-ramp leading to the freeway.
The sun sneaks out from behind the shrooming clouds and blasts into the windshield, cutting through the thick red blood. The lawman unfolds his aviator sunglasses, also standard issue, and puts them on. He has a moment of regret. One moment. It’s over.
He off-ramps.
Suddenly, and crunchingly loud, another human body hits. It looks a lot like his aunt Shelly, except for the fresh gashes and contortionist ability. His aunt Shelly hasn’t stretched a day in her life, and he realizes it couldn’t be her. The lawman closes his eyes and tries to remember what he was told last night. His crow’s-feet grip tightly, working to extract the information with their horrible little claws, but the vault won’t budge an inch.
Come on! What did he say?
His eyes snap open and up ahead is cute little Jenny Walker, spelling bee champ 2009–13, walking her well-groomed pug. The last word she spelled, competitively, was “crepuscular.” It was on a blog about some vampire and werewolf movie that she first came across the word when she was eleven. She could never forget the abs on the lead actor or the eleven-letter word. Jenny was addicted more to the letters in a word than to the word itself. She didn’t understand the purpose of misspelling a word. “What an affliction,” she told her fifth-grade teacher after one of her classmates spelled “burial” wrong. Little Jenny appears camera left on the edge of the grille-cam…the camera veers over and suddenly eats up the spelling bee. A piece of dog hair annoyingly hangs over the grille-cam.
Dogs. D. O. G. S. Dogs.
The cop car does a celebratory three-sixty, then peels left down a major road riddled with terrified faces and middle-weight children. Time slows for the lawman. He remembers the first time falling in love. It was on this very street, Central Avenue. A miniskirt was involved. It was long before he understood the term “easy access.” Nevertheless, he was in love for a week, until the Xbox was released in 2001, and from that very moment, he never saw nor thought about Mini again. Grille-cam reminds the young lawman of Xbox quite a bit. The pixel-perfect resolution, control in his own hands. It was, and still is, electrifying. His engine roars down the busy street.
Faces smash into the lens, one after the other…almost funny, as if the fools were jumping headfirst into the car. SMACK, SMACK, SMACK, SMACK, SMACK, SMACK, SMACK, CRUNCH, CRUNCH, BOOM, SMACK, SMACK, SMACK, SMACK, BOOM, BOOM.
The bulletproof windshield starts to show signs of weakness. A .44-caliber head attached to a four-hundred-pound body finally makes a decent spiderweb on the p
assenger side. The car bounces over human speed bumps and then digs into another lemming as the lawman adjusts his mirror. He drives the body hard left through a fence that immediately wrinkles around the car, then just as quickly flies off. A kidney and some intestines twist back and forth on the hood. The kidney rolls off, and the long, stringy, small intestine stretches over the fender to the ground, leaving a lengthy trail of gut…and we see it’s still attached to a stomach…and farther up to an esophagus and tongue.
We’re dealing with things that very few volunteer firemen could handle. The lawman stares at the healthy pink tongue.
Tell me, again.
Throat/tongue fly off the side of the car as it burns right.
Let me just watch you say it.
Acceleration. A construction worker pouring sixty yards of concrete for a fast-food chain gets beheaded…but fortunately for his skull, his faithful yellow helmet stays put. SMACK, SMACK, CRUNCH, BOOM, SMACK…a flock of not-so-faithful yellow lids go flying—heads and body parts captured on all of the cameras. Any freeze-frame could be directed by a Wachowski sibling. Anyhow, those heads were building a new McDonald’s, because, well, we need another one. The kaleidoscope of colors is beautiful. It reminds the lawman of the vintage wallpaper in his fiancée’s bathroom. One color doesn’t sit well with him.
What organ is green? That’s her favorite color…
The cameras are completely obscured by blood and tissue. The innards drip off now that the car is in reverse. SMACK, CRUNCH, SMACK, SMACK. The lawman remembers how he used to reverse the Evinrude motor on his fishing boat to get the weeds off the propeller. This is sort of like that. Unathletic bodies, currently residing at the Dunkin’ Donuts, do backflips over the car and land on the hood. Parkour is apparently not an option at this speed. Pathetic, really. The lawman looks to the right.
Maybe I should call him.
Suddenly, he jacks the car into forward. GLUNK, GLUNK, BOOM, BOOM, CRUNCH. Bodies barely slow the car. The cruiser targets Wrett’s Body Shop, but he’s not stopping for repairs. One second later, he’s blasting through wrenches, drills, sheet metal, blowtorches, and the hands attached to them. Mike Fernandez had just earned his auto-mechanic’s license last week, and his wife, Julia, retrieved the embossed certificate from the mailbox this morning with a giant smile.
Tomorrow she’ll receive another certificate from the county morgue and will attempt to recover benefits from their mediocre insurance company to cover living costs for her and the three kids.
It’s almost pitch-black inside the garage. Bodies and blood cover the lenses. BLACK. BLACK. BLACK. EXPLOSION! The lawman breaks into the light and the car jumps across the street with a hint of a fishtail. A portly older woman, Ms. Greene, never married for obvious reasons, stands in front of a stone building. KERRUNCH. A perfect spray of blood as the car pins the old woman against the gray—now red—building wall. Soon Ms. Greene will finally look her color. Livor mortis, rigor mortis, algor mortis, eventually green at some stage of mortis.
It’s so quiet right now. I can’t hear a thing. What did he say?
Engine revs and the car jolts backward, one-eighties, and blasts off down the empty road. Fast. Wind attacks the car. Tissue, bone, ligament, and debris slide free from the roller coaster, then even the individual cells, plasma, and platelets disappear. The camera lenses crystal-clear. That’s a verb. The car jumps over a railroad track and the road becomes more rural. The lawman must be going 150 miles an hour, but his speedometer only goes up to 85. I’m not sure why that is. It’s very deceptive. The lawman is moving so fast now that he can barely read the road signs through the motion blur. Roads and intersections pass like a dream. An old cemetery passes on the left.
Get more stones.
SMACK. Feathers slap the window. A barn swallow—an annoying little bird with mathematical precision. Must have been the runt.
The car gets angry and turns into a field. Grazing cattle unknowingly prepare their steaks. BOOOOM. The hits are devastating; these fuckers are big. The car takes a beating. Cattle are getting branded left and right. It sounds like waves crashing into breakers. Blood, guts, and a head or two land on the car. A slab of rib eye lands on the hood. Up ahead, swine mingling with the beef. The lawman has a tangential yet quite insightful thought.
He heads straight for the pigs. BOOOOSH! Hot dogs.
When we met we had hot dogs at T.G.I. Friday’s. I proposed to her there last year. Why am I so fuzzy? We’re getting married soon, aren’t we?
The car still manages to pay its bill at the steakhouse and then heads for the farmhouse. A farmer uses his hand, brow level, to look at the law-enforcement vehicle tearing toward him. SMACK! Farmer Brown takes an early retirement. His organs will not be donated to science. Mrs. Brown rushes toward the man-of-many-pieces and she gets crumpled under the car. “Crumpled” and “run over” are sort of different. FYI. Oh, important point, apparently the dog is faithful too, or maybe just hungry to eat some of the human tartar. CRUNCH! Second dog of the day.
The cruiser narrowly misses a tree and finds itself safely back on the road. Now the car is blasting toward the upper part of a lower-middle-class neighborhood. A group of kids are playing hooky around an aboveground pool. The car targets the group, then suddenly veers off and skid-parks in front of a white-and-beige double-wide. This is the home/office of his best friend. Attached to the back porch is a small greenhouse filled with hydroponics. There’s a Phoenix medical license displayed in the square window. Respectable cannabis leaves gently waving inside. The cruiser shakes a bit as if someone is getting out. The car door closes. Our hero—correction, my hero—walks up the stairs of the home/office and enters.
Best friends need to talk more.
From outside everything sounds calm. Then a pleading. Quiet. A minor rumble. Quiet. The clanging of silverware. Quiet. Human efforts. Quiet. Click—the shitty screen door opens. Clack—it closes.
The young lawman exits with a severed head. It’s wearing sunglasses and a baseball hat. It’s handsome, at least for a guy in sunglasses and a baseball hat with no body.
He said something, but everything’s silent again.
He attempts to make the head a hood ornament. It’s a fail. He drops it on the ground, gets back into the car, and runs it over. CRUNCH.
I want to see her but something has changed, and I’m not feeling very well.
The car blasts off straight into the group of kids at the aboveground pool. This time he doesn’t veer off but splashes through a red tidal wave that overtakes him and caves in the cracked windshield. The lawman punches it out of the way and notices he has company. A piece of a kid in the backseat.
The car safely reaches legal pavement.
The patrol cameras are once again clean. It may be a fresh start, and the road now becomes suburban. A very sloppy father-and-son basketball game is in progress, SMACK, SMACK, and now it’s not…a father-and-son funeral will be scheduled for next Saturday, ruining an absurdly incredible playoff game on NBC at the Johnson home. The car takes out the hoop and screams across the lawn. An insurance adjuster in the opposite driveway is getting into his car, KERRRUNCH! He is now half in and half out of his car. Literally. He will not qualify for an adjustment.
Breathe. Breathe. She always wanted me to take yoga.
An arm flies through the open windshield and takes a passenger seat. More company. Okay with it. A meter reader runs behind a liquor store with healthy discount stickers and finds safety. A telephone worker is not so lucky and phones his mom from heaven. Don’t worry, he had rollover minutes.
The car cruises down the street and slams into a fire hydrant. The water sprays through the windshield, and the lawman rubs his wet head.
I’m starting to remember.
The tax-fed police cameras find five dudes drinking in the back of a moving pickup truck. BAM! The truck tumbles into a ditch, and the five dudes crumple bones and scream like girls, as far as pitch goes. The patrol car roller-coasters up and out of the ditch
, new limbs growing from the grille.
The car is speeding down the opposite lane. Johnny McAllister, born with a degenerative spine condition and told he would never walk, strolls across the yard. He joins his mother, Carrie, who carries rods for today’s fishing trip, and whose stomach was bloated from her pancake breakfast. Their morning hug will hold for eternity as the car mows them off the lawn. Spine and pancakes battered in the truest sense and jammed into the space between the bumper and the radiator.
I need to know what he said and why my fiancée was involved. Can somebody tell me? I’m not asking you for that much.
Acceleration.
Then I need to go to her.
The lawman takes a hard right and heads across a high-school football field. No one’s playing. The team sucks this year anyway. Paul Murphy, the star quarterback, transferred to Dover Prep because his grades blew. The lawman’s best friend and licensed medical marijuana grower also happened to be the assistant football coach. The headless coach wanted to make himself feel better the day Paul quit, so he decided to buy a car way above his pay grade. This left him in an all-too-familiar position, and he had to take out a loan.
The loan officer happened to be a very pretty twenty-seven-year-old blonde named Rosie. Coachless was crazy surprised that the young lawman’s girlfriend was his ticket to a new ride. Rosie was equally elated to see Coachless and loved his choice of the deep-green BMW convertible. Coachless happened to be carrying some medical cones (joints, for those of you who don’t have a medical condition). Rosie had a horrible penchant for oral habits. He and Rosie’s shared cigarette break turned from oral to anal within minutes. In the midst of a great high and sensual bliss, Rosie whispered, “I like to break the law.”
BAM! A surprise PIT move from a police SUV behind the lawman tears off his bumper and the various human remains curled inside it. The young lawman quickly corrects and voices his only word of the day:
“Oh.”
He wakes up, snapped out of his insanity for a moment, and his ears start to pop. No longer is he above the flawed innocents; he is one of them. Another police cruiser positions for a PIT move, but the lawman aggressively shark-tails his cruiser and launches it over the curb and into a McDonald’s. Build one, break one.