The Suicide Motor Club

by Christopher Buehlman

  “Are we in Pennsylvania?”

  “It’s better if you don’t ask questions about geography. Try not to look at town names.”

  She nodded. He smiled at the road, and she guessed that he was proud of her silence, that he saw strength in it. She wanted to ask why but decided to practice patience. God had taken the reins now. That God existed she had no doubt; her only questions were questions of character.

  “They can make you do things. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “They can also make you say things. That’s why no one of us should know more than necessary.”

  She nodded again.

  Her eyes asked a question.

  “You know what they are.”

  “I do?”

  “You just don’t want to say the word because it sounds ridiculous.”

  The thin one in the Camaro the tall one in the backseat the woman like the whore on the beast’s back the teeth on them the eyes that held light like coins on dead eyes quarters quarters quarters the teeth on them could bite holes in cans.

  “Evenin’, miss.”

  They came out after dark like dark brought them like junebugs stupid butting into lights could they help themselves it didn’t matter they bit hard they were for smashing she would smash them if she could oh please let this man be real oh please don’t fool me anymore like when you said I should be a wife like when you put that baby in my arms when his gums hurt my breast and my nipples turned tough and brown for nothing oh please arm me sanctify me I’ll believe what you tell me I’ll say that movie-monster word and if you fool me again then stop telling people about Jesus stop the book at Malachi because all you have in your pockets is Passover and the baby on the rock and the knife in Daddy’s hand.

  She said the word.

  He said it too.

  She turned the corners of her mouth down and laughed, but she was also crying. He laughed, too. He put his hand on her shoulder and drove like that until he had to shift gears.

  —

  BY DAY, THE BARN RESEMBLED ANY NUMBER OF BEAT-UP OLD BARNS ONE PASSES on rural roads without sparing a second glance. A stone foundation and waist-high stone wall gave way to weather-grayed planks that brightened to faint red in a foot-wide band beneath the roof. The trees that once separated the property from a neighboring cabbage farm had been cut, leaving sight lines open for hundreds of yards in each direction. Unremarkable terrain stretched out for miles around the barn, punctuated by a lonely gas station here, a general store there. A fertilizer plant hulked just past the one-stoplight town, making a once-pristine little jewel of a river undrinkable, this despite the prayers of the Amish in the next county. Judith had been nearly asleep when the car approached the barn’s gate, the wood of which looked much older than the cross that sat atop it.

  A small white house with black trim sat just north of the barn, a cross over each window.

  “Welcome to All Souls Ranch,” Wicklow said.

  At that, three border collies sprang barking from the shadow of the barn and ran to the gate, followed by one amiable-looking stout man with a silver cross around his neck and a holstered pistol. He walked from the darkness of the barn in no particular hurry, at last squinting into the window of the car. He smiled, betraying missing teeth near the back, and opened the gate. As they drove in, Judith had time to notice that the single strand of rusted barbed wire atop the fence had been hung with tiny bells, all of them painted black.

  “You’re just in time,” the man shouted after them. “Supper’s at seven.”

  —

  “WE ARE THE BEREAVED,” THE MEN SAID, STANDING AROUND THE RAW PINE TABLE with their heads bowed, their hands clasped. “We unite in hidden knowledge to act for the good of others. Our works will go unseen. We shall not love our own lives, but shall lay them down in the name of good works.”

  “Have you witnessed proof of evil on the earth?” Wicklow said.

  “I have,” the stout man said.

  “I have,” each man in turn said, four besides Wicklow, starting at his left and going around the circle until they got to Judith, who sat next to him. They looked at her.

  “I have,” she said.

  Light from the failing sun leaked in between the planks at the barn’s west side, throwing stripes of golden sunlight across the floor.

  “Have you lost beloved flesh through the machinations of evil?”

  “I have,” each man said.

  Judith said, “I have.”

  “Will you use any means at your disposal to destroy unnatural agents who work evil in the world, and also those who knowingly serve them?”

  “I will,” each man said.

  and also those who knowingly serve them

  Judith paused at the thought of destroying anything other than one of these monsters, meaning a person, even if that person served them. This was her first time speaking the creed. Nobody rushed her. She examined the word knowingly, found it just reassuring enough. At length, she met Wicklow’s gaze and spoke.

  “I will.”

  She heard her own voice as if from afar.

  Did I just promise to kill somebody? Am I really here? Did I die in that wreck and pass into purgatory? Is anyone praying for me to get me out of here? I cannot believe the course I’m on. I can’t turn from it, either.

  “Then let us sit thankfully and break bread, as our enemy cannot,” Wicklow said.

  Judith remained standing.

  I’m in the trunk, Mom.

  I’m ready to come out of the trunk.

  YOU’RE NOT GLENDON

  no

  GLENDON’S DEAD

  Yes

  IT’S JUST ME IN HERE ITS ONLY ME MAKING YOU TALK IN MY HEAD

  Yes, Mommy.

  “Judith?”

  Wicklow’s voice.

  She opened her eyes.

  She smelled vegetables and garlic. An older woman with pillowy bosoms ladled soup from a steaming pot into the mismatched earthenware bowls that sat before everyone’s place. The others looked up at her where she stood sweating.

  “Judith, do you require assistance?”

  “No,” she said, and sat at her place.

  This isn’t purgatory. I’m nuts. I’m finally losing my mind. Maybe I lost it before and Robert and Glen are living at the house without me because I’m in the nuthouse and none of this happened.

  Except that it did.

  She took a spoonful of soup and held it, inventoried it. Tomato and chicken broth with carrots and potatoes and onion. Threads of meat; the soup was thick with threads of canned corned beef. She looked again at the faces as six mouths opened around spoons or chewed or got wiped by napkins. Wicklow, intense and certain, like some killing clergyman, some armed prophet doing God’s dirty work. She looked at the eyes of these men.

  If I am nuts, I’m at the right table.

  She took the spoonful of food and ate.

  “We await one more,” Wicklow said. “Upon his arrival, tomorrow, we begin preparing, and we must prepare in earnest. Bram Stoker, quoting the poem ‘Lenore,’ said, ‘The dead ride quickly.’ That has never been more true than now. When that phone rings,” he said, pointing at a wall-mounted telephone that looked quite out of place in the barn, “in whatever state of readiness we find ourselves, we act.”

  “Who’s on the other end of that phone?” Jude said before she could stop herself.

  Wicklow smiled pleasantly at her, and, in a disarmingly mild tone, said, “You will never ask me that question again.”

  —

  NIGHT.

  My name is not Wicklow, but it is the only name I have now. When you speak to the others, do not ask them their last names, do not tell them yours. I would not want members of your family to come to harm because another is taken. This is not a request.

 
That was one of the first rules Wicklow had taught her while they drove.

  Breaking that rule was also one of the first things the stout man from the gate did when they sat down to talk on the back step. He and Judith were the last two who had not retired to the house.

  “My name’s Pete, but everyone calls me ‘Lettuce.’ I picked that up in the air force. Airman ‘Lettuce’ Pettis. Don’t tell me your last name, I don’t want to know. I only told you mine because my family’s gone, so they can’t go looking for anybody if they get you. Not that they’ll get you.”

  “I would have been okay with Pete.”

  “Yeah, but I answer better to Lettuce. Or Pettis. But I didn’t want you to think I was named for actual lettuce. Nothing exciting about lettuce. Not that I’m trying to excite you, it’s not like that. Sorry, I always talk too much around pretty girls. You make me nervous. Pretty girls, I mean. You really a nun?”

  “A novice, yes.”

  “Is that a special kind of nun?”

  “It’s a new nun. A temporary nun.”

  “Like on probation?”

  “No, that’s a postulant. Being a novice is more like leasing before you buy.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Lettuce took a drink from a small flask, and the smell of whiskey rose in the air.

  “You don’t seem like the type, or I’d offer,” he said. “But you just sing out if you do want a nip.”

  “I thought we weren’t supposed to do that.”

  “I can’t sleep without a little. I don’t need much, just a bit to take the edge off. He knows. It’s really more of a suggestion than a rule. Least for me. I been with him the second longest. After Hank.”

  “How long’s that?”

  “Two years. When I say with him, I don’t mean physically with him. You go home. He calls. It’s like that. I’ve probably only spent thirty or forty days with him altogether, and not all at once.”

  She processed that for a moment. Pinched her hand like a claw to ask for the whiskey flask, took just a capful of its bright warmth into her mouth and swallowed.

  “So, none of you are very experienced at this?”

  “I guess you could say we’re all novices.”

  She smiled. A question wormed its way into her mouth.

  “Have you ever . . .”

  He watched her, pretty sure what she was asking but waiting anyway.

  “Destroyed one?” she said at last.

  “No.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “He has, though.”

  “I certainly hope he has.”

  “He has,” Lettuce said. “Not here.”

  “Where?”

  “Cuba.”

  22

  MORNING.

  Judith had lain awake half the night with the silence of the house heavy on her, looking at the red line of light beneath her door. An infrared bulb burned in the hallway and remained on even when sunlight leaked into the frosted panes of window glass; the panes in all the bedrooms but Wicklow’s would allow one to discern shapes and shadows but were not sufficiently opaque for a hypnotic gaze to lock a wakened sleeper’s eyes and render him vulnerable to command. One they called Somchai walked the house for the last watch; a Buddhist monk before Wicklow found him, half Thai and half British, Somchai was hoped to be proof against mind control because of his meditative discipline. Judith got the idea that this, too, was theory.

  During the night, she once again thought she heard music coming from somewhere below, so faint she couldn’t place it except that it sounded weirdly familiar, weirdly like a pop song. Wicklow’s was the only downstairs room, but she couldn’t picture the deadly serious man listening to anything so frivolous.

  The knock came shortly before sunrise, stirring her from dreams of taking cake from the oven with no mitt, the pan burning her hand.

  “Rise and shine,” Somchai said to Judith and the others he had roused. “The last man is here.”

  Jude was the first down the creaking stairs to the kitchen, where coffee hissed and bubbled in a percolator and fresh sunlight streamed through the drapes. A heavily tattooed man sat at the cramped table, a steaming cup before him.

  “You must be the nun,” he said when he saw her.

  “I’m Judith,” she said.

  He nodded and went back to his coffee. She now saw that his tattoos were all of crosses, or of Christ, or of the Chi-Rho. His neck was all crosses, big, black ones over the carotid arteries.

  “I’m Hank,” he said, after Judith thought they were done talking.

  Lettuce said, “He’s the driver.”

  —

  IN THE BARN, WICKLOW HAD COVERED THE LARGE PINE TABLE WITH NEWS CLIPPINGS and photographs, all arranged in overlapping stacks that made sense only to him. The six men and one woman gathered close, took seats.

  Wicklow remained standing.

  He spoke.

  “While you should know as little as possible about one another, I will share with you most of the relevant information we have about our quarry so that the knowledge might survive. We believe we have the names and living identities of three of those traveling in what we’ll refer to as the Suicide Motor Club, a group of murderers who roam the country abducting women and children, provoking lethal automobile accidents and literally feeding on the blood of their victims. These killers have themselves already died a bodily death and risen from this death to live again unnaturally. Have you witnessed proof of evil on the earth?”

  “We have,” the others said together.

  “We have,” said Judith.

  “We have,” said Hank.

  “And so have I. The group of news clippings I’m about to show you features a man named Luther Nixon, a North Carolina bootlegger turned auto racer. Look well at his photographs, particularly this last one.”

  Here he held up a black-and-white image of a balding man with a closely shaven head smiling broadly and holding up his hand in a victorious wave. A red number 10 had been written in the top corner of the picture. Judith clutched her stomach.

  “You might think the man in this picture had just won his race, but he didn’t. Nixon intentionally collided with the lead vehicle and ran it into oncoming cars. The ensuing fire burned a promising young racer over seventy percent of his body. Luther Nixon was unhurt, as he was in six of the seven other crashes he caused over his bewildering career. I would go so far as to say there was probably no one in the country more practiced at causing and surviving high-speed wrecks. Now, of course, he doesn’t have to survive them. Judith?”

  “Yes,” she said. Her face had gone completely white.

  “Do you recognize this man?”

  “Yes,” she said. Then she walked to the barrel they used for trash and vomited up her coffee and oatmeal.

  —

  “I SHALL NOT TELL YOU HOW WE TRACK OUR QUARRY. IF ANY OF YOU WERE TAKEN, your . . . inevitable . . . confessions would alert our nocturnal friends to our methods, and they would disappear, perhaps for good, before or after turning on their pursuers. What I can tell you is how we come to identify them. The methods are exhaustive but crudely effective. We look for newspaper stories and police reports involving missing persons and stolen bodies. When we find such a story, we rank the likelihood that the individual has joined the ranks of the undead on a scale of one to ten. One through fives are simply filed; daylight abductions, for example. People who went missing in the wilderness, or while swimming or boating. That leaves us with nighttime disappearances in reasonably populated areas, still a very large body of data. Most missing children are rated as fours or fives. Unfortunately, vampires are not the only servants of evil, and children are routinely preyed upon by the malign or unwell. Children come to grief while exploring. Parents kidnap children from spouses and flee the country, or go to ground. Older children run away. Those few who a
re taken by the undead, we believe, are not normally turned, but simply . . .” Here Wicklow searched for a word that might be less painful for Judith but found none. “Consumed. If strange phenomena accompanied the disappearance, they become at least a six. If reliable witnesses claim to have seen them at night after a living disappearance, they become a seven. If a missing body is later seen alive, or if the victim can be associated socially or geographically with another vanished party rating six or higher, that victim is promoted to an eight. Where possible, and prudent, we attempt to speak to any surviving friends or family members about those rated eight or higher. There are less than a dozen nines in all of our files, two of them in the group we’re chasing. Nines are strongly believed to be vampires. Take this young man.”

  Here he held up a yellowed, careworn newspaper clipping preserved in plastic. “He died of blood loss at Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan in 1933. His body went missing that night, and a nurse was murdered, along with a teenaged boy. Nobody was able to say what happened, not even people who were in the same room. His mother says a cousin of the boy’s contacted her years later and swore to have spotted the young man in the subway unchanged after thirty years. Even taking into account the mother’s several stays in Bellevue following nervous breakdowns, we can be reasonably certain this boy is or was undead. Now we come back to our ten. A known vampire. Luther Nixon, the Alpha driver. We don’t know the identity of the Beta driver.”