by Aric Davis
The duffel was road weary, almost as much as Matt, but like him, it was tough and also seemed to keep going. Matt took his grandfather’s ax from it, rubbing his hand across the side of the blade and then, ever so carefully, his thumb down the cutting edge. It was still sharp enough to split hairs with—or to cleave through a skull, for that matter—but it would need to see a grinder one of these days, if for no other reason than to fix all of the grooves years of fighting had burned into its beautiful blade. Matt laid the ax down on the table and walked to the only other room in the shack.
The front room and kitchen had been sparse of furniture and decoration, and the bedroom was no different. Matt walked to the bed, sat on the edge, and felt waves of tiredness crash over him. It had been a long day, a long week, a long everything since he’d come out of the ice. There was a tiny alarm clock on the nightstand. He set the alarm to wake him up in two hours. The bed was soft, too much so, but when his head hit the pillow, Matt Cahill was asleep.
***
The chirp of the alarm woke him from a sleep as solid as any he’d known in a long time. He rose with a start. Then the knowledge of where he was and what was happening came back to him, slowly but surely. The memory of the pipe and its dangerous drug came back as well, but Matt found that the less thought of that, the better. Thank God they were out of gas to light that damn thing. Matt couldn’t know for sure what would have happened if he had taken in that smoke, but he had a feeling it would have been very bad. He wondered if perhaps use of the drug might explain the small amount of rot on Free’s neck or if there was something else that he was missing. Sure that there was, and just as sure that there weren’t going to be any answers here, but rather, with Free and his friends, Matt readied himself to leave.
Matt left the bedroom, dropped the ax in the bag, and then shouldered it before walking to the sink and turning the water back on. Letting it run like the last time, he filled the cup, drank from it, and replaced it on the counter. If he didn’t come back, Kenny was going to have to deal with washing it on his own, might even do the guy some good to get some soap on his fingers. Giving the sparse room a last look, Matt let the door close after him, then locked it with the key before wandering off into a warm summer night, the only light from the moon.
Once Matt was back on the main drag, he was at Mortimer’s in just a few minutes. Not wanting to see the van out back for fear they might have refilled the gas tank on the torch, Matt walked into the bar. Mort was where Matt had seen him last, and Matt sat at the table he’d been at the first time he came in. The bar was as it had been before, a few old-timers watching the TV—not baseball, American Idol—and Matt wondered if maybe it would be easier to catch them in the parking lot and try out some other type of solution. Mort came over with a mug of draft beer a few minutes later, inadvertently interrupting Matt’s thought process, plunking the beer down in front of him and then taking the chair across from Matt.
“You’re making a mistake with those guys,” said Mort, “a bad mistake, the kind you might not get to make twice.”
“I know what I’m doing,” said Matt, not liking the way he sounded, but knowing he had to be this way, “and guys like that don’t worry me much. They’re the puffed-up-chest kind.”
“Well, that might be the case for some of them,” offered Mort, “but that’s not the case with Free. He’s a bad dude with a reputation in the gutter, and if you keep your ear real close to the ground, you might hear tell that his old man is one of the higher-ups in the organization around these parts.”
“You mean the Redneck Mafia?”
“Yes,” said Mort, glancing over his shoulder and looking flustered, “only that’s not something people around here say. That’s a group that don’t really exist, not on paper, and not on your lips, either. Look, you seem like you think you have to do something, and there’s nothing I’m going to say that’s going to change that. Small piece of advice: Free always wears a compact Glock inside his vest on his left side. I’ve seen the butt sticking out enough times when he’s drunk and leaning over the bar to almost feel like an expert on it. I’ve also seen him draw it, and he’s got fast hands. He starts going for his piece, you’re going to need to act, not think.”
“Thanks,” said Matt. “You best get gone, keep them drinks coming for your customers. I’ll be gone soon enough, and hopefully, in the morning, I’ll be seeing you about some food.”
Mort stood, and Matt could tell the older barkeep wanted to yell at him, tell him he was a damned fool and he was casting his dice with men who always cheated, but Matt knew all that already, and Mort must have figured as much as well. Half an hour later, Free and Danimal walked in. Free gave Matt a nod, and the three of them left together.
***
Matt was sitting on the carpeted floor of the back of Danimal’s van as they pulled out of the lot, Danimal driving and Free sitting shotgun, but in a quite literal way: lying across his knees was a wood-stocked double-barrel sawed-off.
Matt was trying to ignore the gun but found it an impossible task, and it wasn’t until they were pulling away from the single blinking red light over the road that he realized that he hadn’t been away from that main drag since he’d been picked up by Sheriff Frank. As they rolled down gravel-covered roads, the headlights of the van the only thing coloring the graveled surface, Matt was jarred back to attention by Free.
“You know how to bust heads?” Free asked the question the same way a normal person might ask if he were curious what pizza toppings someone liked, and Matt answered as best as he was able.
“Sure, no problem. Where’s your buddy?”
“He’s having some trouble.” Free turned to look at Matt as he spoke, and it wasn’t just the twitching of his nostrils, steady blinking, and almost-shivering teeth that made Matt sure that the man was tweaking. It was the lack of sunglasses. Free had worn them in the bar, and now Matt could see his pupils, solid black and utterly soulless. Even worse, though, was Free’s neck. Matt might have met the man only a few hours prior, but the rot extended much farther now, spreading across and up his throat, curling up to rest in the twisted bird’s nest of a corpse’s beard that hung off Free’s slowly rotting body. Matt did his best not to look at him but couldn’t help but wonder how long it would be until Mr. Dark had full control over him. How many hits of corpse worms changed to look like black methamphetamine would it take before Free would want nothing more than to kill, and keep killing, until he was felled?
Thinking back to the first kid he’d seen with black eyes, the one who had tackled Frank, Matt felt some part of the puzzle sliding so close to other similar pieces. There was some crucial element he was missing, but Matt knew he’d know soon enough, and in all likelihood, far too soon for his liking. The van meandered down country road after country road, turning so many times that even though Matt was trying to keep track of things, watch for landmarks and count turns, he quickly found it impossible to keep up.
Finally, the van turned off onto a road that was little more than a two-track, just twin runners of dirt clearing the way for the van and with trees on either side of them impossibly close, but not quite touching the sides of the vehicle. The van screeched to a halt in front of a trailer, and Danimal shut the lights off.
“Get out,” said Free, “right now.”
“What for?” Matt said, his voice rising. How could they have made me when there’s nothing to make?
“I’m telling you to get the fuck out of the van, and leave that bag where it is,” said Free, who as he spoke was leveling the impossibly huge barrels of the sawed-off at Matt’s face. “I don’t want you getting spooked and pulling out a gun or something.”
Opening the sliding door in the compartment of the van, Matt gave a look to the bag. Somehow, leaving it with these two assholes was worse than whatever it was that they were making him clear out of the van for. Resigning himself to the reality of what was happening, Matt stepped outside of the van and slid the door shut behind him. Fast mov
ement just ahead of him caught his peripheral vision enough for him to see Free’s arm extend the shotgun out of the van. Matt dove to the earth as Free fired the heavy-gauge into the air. Matt’s ears were ringing from the concussion of the gun, but not so much that he couldn’t hear Free call out to him, “Best get up,” as he rolled up the passenger window of the van. Matt did a quick push off the ground in order to stand next to the van. Someone of his experience wouldn’t need to be told that something very bad was going to happen, but he figured just about anybody could have read the signs here. Wondering what was coming, Matt didn’t have to wait long.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It sounded like a dog running, but Matt had never heard a dog big enough to make the kind of noise that whatever was coming for him was making. Putting his back to the van, Matt took stock of the situation. He was unarmed, something was coming for him, and there was almost nothing he could do about it.
As the sound grew louder, the impossible-to-ignore instinct to either run or fight came over Matt, and he slowed his breathing as best as he was able, steeling his nerves and pushing fear into a little pebble in the back of his mind so he could stare deep into the zero, that place where fear cannot live. From the blackness, the creature came roaring toward him.
The beast was the man Free and Danimal had brought to the bar earlier, and he was running like an animal, just as the teenager who had attacked Frank had.
Matt watched the scurrying pattern of the man, a man he felt quite sure had eyes colored obsidian and a dust of burned corpse worms coming from his nostrils. As the thing leaped for Matt, he dove to the ground, just as he had an eternity earlier when Free had fired the sawed-off from the van. The man’s leap was interrupted by the van as the space that Matt had occupied was emptied, and the sound of him hitting the vehicle was like a steel drum.
The man collapsed from the van to his side, howling like a wounded animal, before righting himself as Matt ran around the van and headed to the trailer, its front door open but an impossible distance away. The headlights from the van cut swathes in the darkness, and Matt moved toward the house as the noise of footsteps on pine needles and packed earth began again in earnest.
Diving to the ground at the second the noise stopped, Matt pulled his head up just in time to see the man illuminated by the beams of the van and blocking his path to the trailer. The man was down on all four limbs, his eyes jet and yet still focused on Matt. Closer to the trailer now, Matt was momentarily distracted by the smell of rot coming from it. Then the beast was moving toward him again, and Matt let it come, tense on the balls of his feet.
This time when the man leaped toward him, Matt was aware of two things: it was exerting massive amounts of energy in the all-or-nothing attacks, and if it got him on his back as that kid in town had done to Frank, it was going to be all over. Ready to pounce as the thing dove at him, Matt pivoted on his right foot, letting the man turned animal soar past him, and when it was at the apex of its jump and level with his shoulder, Matt hammered a closed fist into the back of its head, sending it tumbling hard to the ground, much slower to recover this time. Taking the opening, Matt jumped to the porch and ran into the trailer, leaving the door open behind him, on the hunt for a weapon.
The inside of the trailer was a mess. The glass pipe that had been in the van when Danimal’s torch had mercifully run out of fuel sat on a table littered with fast-food trash and empty beer bottles.
Nothing worth grabbing there. Matt turned to his right, entering a kitchen and hearing the skittering noise of the slipping limbs of a man running on all fours hitting the wood porch.
The first drawer Matt threw open was full of towels, but there was a thunk from the back of it, so Matt stuck his hand in as the footfalls disappeared on the filthy carpet inside the trailer. Matt felt a wooden handle, grabbed it, and pulled out a rolling pin as the man, looking much worse for wear now, stumbled into the kitchen.
Matt held the rolling pin like the club that it was as the man growled, black eyes staring through him, and then drove toward Matt.
Matt circled away again, just as he had the last time he’d put hands on the man, only this time when the man rushed past him, Matt laid the rolling pin on his neck, hard enough to make the handle break and to produce a sound like a .22 long round going off.
He dropped the pin, leaned back onto a filthy countertop, and stared at the man-beast. Blood was leaking out of the man’s ears, nose, mouth, and black eyes, and his neck was twisted at an angle that vertebrae typically made impossible. Just as fear had come racing through him at the sound of the unnatural running noises, rage came now, cold and awful, and Matt high-stepped over the dying man to leave the kitchen.
Matt left the trailer with caution in every footstep, feeling the twin headlights from the van cutting through and around him, and also momentarily taking his vision.
Free was hanging his head out of the passenger window, and there was no shotgun in sight. He spit onto the ground, and then Matt saw him take a drink of a beer before disappearing, only to pop back a moment later with another longneck. He tossed it to Matt, who caught it one-handed.
“You stay right there,” said Free. “We gots to talk for a minute, and you look like you might still have your hackles up. First things first, so we can all be safe: Randy dead in there?”
Matt opened the beer and stuck the cap in his pocket, then took a long drink of beer. It was cold and wonderful, and the relief made him hate Free all the more.
“Yeah,” said Matt, “he’s dead.”
“Well, that sucks.” Free said it in a way that even though Matt couldn’t see his face, he knew that Free was upset, even if only in his own way. “He suffer much?”
“That shit he’s been smoking is what caused the suffering. All I did was put him down like a sick dog.”
Matt had another swallow of beer, still cold and delicious, but nowhere near the relief that the first drink had been. Free disappeared for a moment, then audibly grunted from inside the van. Matt tensed his now-quite-sore legs and got ready to dive out of the way of those sawed-off barrels. Without knowing the type of load Free had equipped it with, it was impossible to know if the gun would be wildly inaccurate or just plain old useless, even at just fifteen feet or so. When Free returned without the gun, Matt felt himself unwillingly relax, his tired body already betraying him.
“Well, you’re right,” said Free. “Something in that flake makes some folks lose their shit pretty much entirely. Randy, as it turns out, was one of them. To be perfectly honest, it’s almost enough to make me want to give up the stuff altogether. That probably sounds crazy, after what you just seen, but trust me, it’s an unbelievable buzz, a real fucking gut buster.”
“I’m not much of one to turn down a good time,” said Matt, trying not to sound tired or furious with himself for getting involved in the first place, “but I also don’t want to be hopping around like some bloodthirsty bullfrog. I’ll stick to beer and grass, maybe some of the regular flake that doesn’t turn your eyes black.”
“You still pissed?”
“Less so by the minute.”
“Come get back in the van so we can get out of here,” said Free, “and not spend the rest of the night screaming at each other. After all, we still got business to take care of.”
Matt nodded at that, finished the bottle of beer, and tossed it onto the trailer’s poorly constructed porch before walking to the van and sliding the rear door open, then hopping in and shutting it after him.
“No hard feelings about that tussle back there, all right, Matt?” Free asked him in a way that assumed there was nothing wrong with stranding him weaponless to battle against a dope fiend turned monster, and in response, Matt shook his head and placed his duffel back in his lap.
“Same here,” said Danimal, who Matt could see had tears running down his cheeks. “Randy was like a brother to me, but I’m not sore that you had to put him down.”
“All that aside, Matt,” said Free, “I hope
you can see why we had you do that. We didn’t want to kill him on our own. He’s a good friend, after all, and besides, we needed to know you could cover your own ass. We got to go backcountry next, and it just gets worse. It’ll be nice knowing you can watch your own back.”
“Where are we headed?”
“Well, not that the names will mean much to you,” said Free, grinning at Matt in the darkness. “We got to go pick up some more of the black skag from where we get it, and then we got to go drop it off at Sally’s. It’s a whore—”
“I know what Sally’s is,” said Matt. “Kenny filled me in on some of the details.”
“Well, old Kenny should know better than to be flapping gums at strangers, but it worked out okay this time. So what we’re going to do is pick up some dope and then drop it off.”
“Sounds simple,” said Matt.
“It’s not,” said Danimal as he put the van in reverse and began to pull away from the trailer.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Matt watched again for landmarks and gave up almost immediately. Free and Danimal had their windows rolled down, and the air was almost sickly sweet smelling, making Matt feel as though he were breathing in the stink from Free’s slowly rotting neck. As much as he normally hated the smell, it was almost a relief when Danimal lit a cigarette. At least it covered the other stench.
“We going to Bucky’s?” Danimal said it as if he already knew the answer but wanted to be talking anyway, and he looked almost offended by Free’s response.
“You want to bring a new fish to Bucky’s? Are you crazy? There’d be three new holes in them woods, and the three of us would be what was filling them up. No offense, Matt. Danny here is speaking a bit out of turn, not that it’s any of your business, of course, but we ain’t going to see Bucky. He isn’t much for new people on a good day, and these haven’t been his best days.”