Deep Down (Hallie Michaels)

by Deborah Coates

  “Goddamnit!”

  Hallie made to follow him, but Beth grabbed her arm. “What should we do?”

  Boyd was walking across his devastated front yard, and Hollowell was standing there, just standing there.

  Can’t cross iron.

  The fireplace poker. Which was in her truck. Which she’d have to go past Hollowell to get to.

  But, iron, yes. That had been amply demonstrated already. She headed into the kitchen, ignoring Beth, who was safe for the moment, if only because Hollowell was still outside. And he was going to stay outside if Hallie had anything to do with it.

  Boyd had pots and pans in the drawer under his stove, but no cast-iron skillet. She went halfway down the basement stairs, but as soon as she saw there was no workshop or anything except an old furnace and a row of shelves stacked with plastic tubs, she reversed and ran back upstairs and straight out the back door.

  At the garage she didn’t hesitate, just lifted her foot and smashed in the side door, feeling the impact all the way up her spine. There was a red tractor with narrow wheels in the middle of the garage, parts laid out in rows on the concrete floor. Tools hung on the walls, and Hallie grabbed a prybar though she wasn’t sure how much iron it had in it, but what had the dog told her? It had said something when she’d asked about the hex ring, about why it worked, because buried iron didn’t last and the hex ring definitely had.

  Dead man’s blood and sacrament. That was what made steel as good as iron.

  But you couldn’t get a dead man’s blood just anywhere, not even in a cemetery, not after embalming fluid and all that. Goddamnit, she didn’t have time for this.

  Wait.

  She’d been dead once. Right? Maybe it counted. The dog and Hollowell and even the reaper out at Pabby’s had all treated her like she was different. It was what she had, right now. And right now was when she had to have something. She left the garage, ripped off the butterfly bandages, scraped the cut on her forehead hard to start it bleeding again, and rubbed the blood on the tip of the crowbar. She didn’t really know any sacraments, just, “Now I lay me down to sleep.…” It would have to do.

  She arrived in the front yard in time to hear Hollowell say, “I simply want to talk to her.”

  “You’ve already talked to her,” Boyd said. “She doesn’t want to talk to you.” He didn’t have anything to back him up, to stop Hollowell from doing pretty much anything he wanted. He must have known there was hardly any chance the bullets in his gun would work, but he stood there like they would, like he had the entire Taylor County sheriff’s department backing him and maybe the state police besides, like Hollowell could never move him.

  Like he would defend this spot to the death. Which Hallie knew he would.

  “I’d like her to tell me that,” Hollowell said. He sounded so smooth and urbane, as if this were any conversation, as if he were confident that he would prevail in the end, as if he hadn’t tried to kidnap Hallie, hadn’t tried to kill Brett, hadn’t just visited destruction on Boyd’s yard.

  “No.” Boyd brought his own brand of steel. Hallie could hear it in his voice.

  But all the backbone in the world wasn’t going to do him any good; one touch from Hollowell and he’d be dead. And he didn’t know it. Though Hallie knew he’d stand there anyway, even if he did.

  Hollowell tilted his head and looked at Boyd as if he were some particularly odd bug. “I should have killed you when I had the chance.”

  A muscle twitched just under Boyd’s cheekbone. He shook his gun out of the holster.

  Jesus.

  Hallie stepped straight in before either of them could do anything else and hit Hollowell square in the chest with the crowbar. “Does that hurt?” she asked. He flickered—actually flickered, but then he came back. Steel, not iron. Maybe this wouldn’t work. Then Hallie hit him again. He stayed gone.

  “What the hell was that?” Boyd asked her.

  Hallie stumbled. Boyd caught her by the elbow. It felt like something had gone out of her when she’d hit Hollowell. Not like the headaches she sometimes got, more like hollowed out, like something gone inside her.

  “We need to get out of here,” she said.

  Boyd nodded, focused and direct, but he said, “He can find us anywhere.”

  Hallie had some thoughts about that, because he seemed to be able to find her—her, not Boyd or Beth—all the time. But her thoughts were so muddy, swirling in her head with black dogs and Death and everything that had been slammed across Boyd’s yard. “I know a place,” she said. “Where Hollowell can’t get to Beth. But we need to go now.”

  Boyd was moving almost before she finished talking, striding ahead of her into the house and back out again with a shotgun in addition to the pistol he was already carrying, three boxes of shells, and Beth following him, bewildered but also looking kind of pissed, which Hallie understood and which would probably get her through this thing, whatever this thing was, better than being afraid. She also thought the pistol and shotgun were kind of useless, but she didn’t say it.

  Boyd had brought a first-aid kit—because of course he had an extra—which he tossed to Hallie as he passed. She turned and followed the two of them—Boyd and Beth—to the vehicles and realized only when they were standing in front of them that the second vehicle in the driveway was not Boyd’s red Jeep Cherokee, but a late-model metallic gold SUV with Iowa plates she’d never seen before.

  “What’s this?” she asked as Boyd slid the shotgun into the back.

  Boyd straightened and looked square at her. “We had a little problem,” he said.

  Hallie might feel as if her thoughts were thick and slow, but she figured that out quick enough. “He found you down there?” Because that shot her theory all to hell, her theory that he could find her but not them, what they did next depended on that one specific fact.

  Because she was past.

  “No,” Boyd said, then, “No, no. It was just … it was stupid. Some truck, a gravel truck, its brakes failed and it hit us in an intersection. My phone got smashed. Your number was stored in my address book. I’m sorry.”

  “Really? That seems—” Well, actually, it seemed like exactly the kind of thing that happened right when you needed it not to happen. But he could have called the ranch, because that was in the directory. “Are you all right?” she asked suspiciously. “Because—”

  “Are we in a hurry?” Boyd asked. “I thought we were in a hurry.”

  “Right,” Hallie said. “Okay.” Because Boyd was right—they could talk about the details later. She backed up a step, away from the SUV, and Boyd stepped toward her. Beth was already in the passenger seat, adjusting her seat belt and looking straight ahead out the windshield, like, Let’s get on the road already. Hallie held up her hand to hold Boyd off and tried to think things through. “I don’t know if I can explain this well,” she finally said. And then she didn’t explain it at all. “I think he’ll find me before he finds you,” she said.

  Boyd was standing really close to her now, his gaze locked on her face. “I don’t think we should split up,” he said, as if he were already ahead of her.

  Hallie put a hand on his face, so natural and automatic, she didn’t realize she’d done it until he raised his hand to hers. “We have to make sure Beth is safe,” she said. “That’s what’s important right now.”

  “You’re important too.” He pulled her hand down and held it.

  “But I’ve got this,” she said, holding up the prybar. “You saw what it did. And,” she added, “I can handle myself. You know that.”

  “I do know that,” he said. “But I don’t like it.”

  Hallie liked it, liked parts of it anyway. She liked the part where she might get into a straight-up fight. And she liked the part where Boyd and Beth might be safe. She didn’t like the part where they didn’t know where Hollowell was or when he might appear. She particularly didn’t like the part where she didn’t know whether this would work.

  But Hollowell k
ept finding her. Not Boyd. Not Beth. Her. It made sense that she could draw him off, head away from Pabby’s ranch while Boyd and Beth headed toward it. He couldn’t kill her—she was pretty sure—hurt her, maybe. Kidnap her, which was the real danger of this plan. Or that it wouldn’t work at all, that Hollowell would find Boyd and Beth on the road and Hallie wouldn’t be there.

  “I don’t like it either,” she said. “But it’s what we’ve got.” She took the prybar and Boyd’s extra first-aid kit, carried them back to her pickup truck, and slid them behind the seat.

  She turned back to Boyd, glad at the moment for the extra distance between them. She wanted desperately to stop, to get her bearings, to sit with him somewhere quiet, for him to tell her everything that had happened in Iowa. But those were not the options on the table. And if the army and Afghanistan had taught her anything, it had taught her to go and keep going, because sometimes that was all that got you through. She sucked in her breath.

  “You know Pabby Pabahar, right?”

  “Delores?”

  “Okay. Yes.”

  She gave Boyd directions to Pabby’s ranch and explained as much as she could explain about Pabby and the hex ring. “Beth will be safe there,” she said. “You and I will have some time to plan our next move, specifically how to take care of Hollowell. Because there has to be a way.”

  She didn’t tell him that Death was talking to her, because frankly she didn’t think there was much to tell. She also didn’t tell him about the people who had disappeared, even though there was a lot to tell there, even though they absolutely needed to figure that out. And how weird had her life gotten that she expected their disappearance was related to everything else that was going on and not, say, a random serial killer.

  Boyd wrote down a phone number in the small notebook he carried in his pocket and handed it to Hallie. “Beth’s cell phone,” he said, and Hallie realized she should have thought of that, thought of how they were going to stay in touch when they split up.

  “Listen,” she said. She stepped over and took the iron fireplace poker out of her truck. She still had the prybar, which worked if not quite so effectively. “Take this,” she said to Boyd. “It’s like the hex ring—iron. Not that he can’t cross it, but if you see him, if you hit him with it, it will stop him.”

  Boyd unloaded his shotgun, put it in the SUV on the floor. He fastened the pistol in its holster to his belt and took the poker from Hallie. “Hit him with this?” he said, though he had seen her with the prybar.

  “Don’t let him touch you,” she said, and couldn’t keep the tension from her voice. “He’s a reaper. He’ll—” She couldn’t say it. “Don’t let him touch you.”

  “I don’t—,” Boyd began.

  “I know.” Hallie cut him off. Because he didn’t like it and he didn’t want to do it this way and there wasn’t any other way to go. It had to be like this. “I think I can make iron shot,” she said. “Cast iron crumbles; it should be doable. We just need to find some—like a skillet, or old pipe. We can smash it up, load it into shells.”

  “We need to know what he wants,” Boyd said.

  “He wants me,” Beth said. She’d rolled down the passenger window of the SUV.

  “But why?” Hallie asked. “And why doesn’t he just take you?”

  “Why didn’t he just take Lily?” Boyd said. “It’s as if he doesn’t just want to have her or to marry her—he wants her to want to marry him.”

  “He said he was sure I’d do it—go with him—if I just took the time to understand,” Beth said.

  “Would you?” Hallie asked.

  Beth wrinkled her nose. “No,” she said definitely.

  “All right,” Hallie said. Though it wasn’t, was getting more and more messed up all the time.

  Boyd kissed her before he left, by her pickup, close and awkward, like high school freshmen about to board separate buses. Hallie wanted to laugh, though there was nothing to laugh about, wanted this moment to be lighthearted: See you in the funny papers, as her grandfather used to say when she was five. But it wasn’t lighthearted and she didn’t laugh. She didn’t even say good-bye.

  20

  Hallie watched Boyd and Beth pull out of Boyd’s driveway with mixed feelings. If she was right, then they would be safe driving out to Pabby’s ranch. If she was wrong … well, she’d better be right.

  There was a crack in the windshield that she hadn’t noticed until she was sitting behind the wheel. It began low in the center directly underneath the rearview mirror and went straight up and to the right. Faint spidering ran from the original point of impact, dirt driven hard into the glass. She started the engine and put the truck in gear. One more thing she’d worry about later. She drove out of West Prairie City and took a left toward Templeton. If she didn’t see Hollowell, she’d stop at the grocery store over there and stock up. If Pabby was going to be putting them—or at least Beth—up for several nights, she’d need more food. She should probably get that prescription she hadn’t managed to pick up last night. There wouldn’t be another opportunity for a while.

  Hallie thought she saw Hollowell just at the edge of West Prairie City, but it turned out to be Will Tolliver, whom she’d been in high school with, standing in his parents’ driveway. He was dressed like a banker in a white shirt and tie, which was what had fooled Hallie—also that she hadn’t seen him in four or five years. She waved at him as she drove by and he waved back, though she was pretty sure he had no idea who she was. Then, as she watched—and it happened fast, because otherwise she’d have been past him and missed it—he took a step forward and disappeared. Hallie slammed on her brakes and sat there with her truck idling in the middle of the road, too stunned to do anything else.

  Had there been a flash of black, like the world had gone negative? She thought maybe—maybe there had. Then he’d been gone.

  Jesus.

  Jesus.

  She pulled the truck to the curb, left it running, and got out. She walked to the spot where Will had been. She thought the grass was a little flat, but it was all low and brown and hard to tell. The sky was dark enough though it was still midafternoon that things had a faded flat quality. Hallie reached out tentatively and touched the ground. Pain like a pinprick through her fingertips.

  Everything is thin now, she thought. And it works both ways. Reapers and black dogs come through to our world; we fall into theirs. If they didn’t stop Hollowell. If they couldn’t fix this. She didn’t even want to think about what that would mean.

  At the intersection between SR 54 and the county road, she thought she saw the shadow, Death’s shadow. She stopped the truck and got out. She jumped the fence into an ungrazed pasture, her ribs twingeing at her. She could see it—or what she thought was it—bending the grass over like a breeze that wasn’t there, heading straight into the field away from her.

  Damn it.

  She walked back to her truck, put it back in gear, and went on.

  She didn’t see anything suspicious the rest of the drive to Templeton or running errands. Besides the grocery and the clinic, she stopped at the ag supply where there was someone new at the checkout and picked up a box of steel shot. Self-loaded cast-iron shot would be good, but she could make the steel shot work too—or so she hoped. Halfway out the store she went back and got some steel-jacketed bullets. Maybe they could make Boyd’s pistol useful too.

  She stopped at Laddie’s, but he wasn’t there. She called him. He answered on the second ring.

  She didn’t waste time on a greeting or small talk. “I need more,” she said. “I need to know what the ‘moment of death’ thing means.” Because it better mean something. It better not be a waste of time. Hallie couldn’t afford to waste time.

  “They’re not talking to me,” Laddie said.

  “What?”

  “The dead. I’ve been trying to get someone to talk to me for the last day and … nothing.”

  “That can’t be good.”

  “Yeah, I don’t thi
nk it is,” Laddie said. He sounded worried, like maybe the dead were getting out of town before disaster hit.

  “Laddie, it’s—” Hallie had told Laddie some of what was going on, but she wasn’t sure whether he understood that they were talking life-or-death. But then, they were talking about reapers. Wouldn’t it always pretty much be life-or-death? “I really need to know.”

  “Did you talk to Prue?”

  “She wasn’t exceptionally interested in helping.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m at your place, but I’m heading out to the Pabahar ranch from here.” She told him about the hex ring and why it was important.

  “Look,” Laddie said after she was finished, “I’ll talk to her.”

  “Prue?”

  “Yeah.” He drew the word out long, like in his head he was still talking himself into it. Hallie told herself to talk to him about his history with Prue after all this was over. If there was an after.

  “Thanks, Laddie.” She paused, then added, “Laddie, this is—I think this is more than just one rogue reaper. And I think it’s getting worse, like a lot worse. If you want to walk away, it’s okay. You can still run your cattle.”

  “You know,” Laddie said. “People come to see me. Some of them, they come in kind of sideways, like they hope no one will see them, like they’re kind of embarrassed by the whole thing. They want to know if someone will love them or if their wife will leave them or they want to talk to their kid who died in Iraq or something. They hate asking and they don’t want to want it. After, it’s like they won’t look me in the eye. I go to the feed store or down to the Viking or the cattle auction all the way over to Pierre, because people come from all over. And they won’t look at me, don’t hardly want to admit they know me. People say it’s because I’m bad luck, because I lost the land or my wife left me, but it’s because I tell them things they don’t want to know or want to know so bad, it makes them cry.

  “This, what you’re doing, feels important. Like it matters. And I’d give a lot to do something important. It’s been a while since I’ve done that.” He was silent for a long moment and Hallie wasn’t sure if he’d disconnected or not. Then he said, “One of the dead, she’s been around a long time. She says she once heard of a man who fought off his own death. That he could see the reaper and when it touched him, he stabbed it in the chest with a … well, I don’t know what it was, but the reaper disappeared.”