The world seemed to fall over sideways.
The figure had a big shit-eating grin on his face.
“Hey, Donny,” said Jim.
-5-
“What the fuck?”
It was all Donny said, and he said it five or six times.
Jim laughed.
“No,” growled Donny, “I mean what the fuck?”
“Guess you’re the fuck,” said Jim. “Christ on a stick, you should see the look on your face.”
“You can’t,” began Donny. “I mean . . . you just can’t. You can’t . . . ”
“Yeah,” agreed Jim. “But I guess I can.”
“No.”
“So can you.”
“Can what, man?” screamed Donny. “This is crazy. This is totally fucked,”
Jim spread his hands in a “what can I say” gesture.
Donny pointed an accusing finger at him. “You died, you stupid shit. You died!”
A shadow seemed to pass over Jim’s face and his smile faded a bit. Not completely, but enough.
Enough to let Donny know that Jim didn’t really find this funny.
Somehow, in a way Donny couldn’t quite identify, that realization was worse.
Tears burned on Donny’s face. It felt like acid on his skin.
Jim stepped closer, and with each step his smile faded a little more. He stopped a few feet away, the smile gone now. Donny saw that Jim’s face was streaked with mud. His skin gleamed as white as milk through the grime.
“You died,” Donny said again, his voice less strident but no less hurt.
“Yeah,” said Jim, “I did. Kind of blew, too.”
Donny said, “What . . . ?”
“The whole death thing? Blows elephant dick.”
“What are you . . . ?”
“For one thing, it hurt like a bitch.” Tommy touched his throat. “Nothing ever hurt that much before. Not even when I busted my leg when I fell off the ropes in gym class and the bone was sticking out. Jeez, remember that? You almost hurled chunks.”
Donny said nothing. He wasn’t sure he could.
“They had to carry me out of school. I was crying and shit ’cause it hurt so bad.”
“That was when we were kids,” said Donny weakly. “Fourth grade.”
“Yeah,” agreed Jim. “Long time ago. Lot of ships have sailed since then, huh?”
Donny just looked at him.
“But the day I died? Man . . . that was something else. The pain was red hot. I mean red fucking hot. And all the time it was happening I kept trying to scream.” His voice was thin, almost hollow, and Jim’s eyes drifted away to look at something only he could see. Memories flashing on the inside walls of his mind. It was something Donny understood, even if he could understand nothing else that was happening.
“Help me out here, Jim,” said Donny slowly. “You remember . . . dying?”
“Sure.”
“How?”
Jim gave him a half-smile. “I was there, dude. I was paying attention to that shit.”
“No, assface, how do you remember dying? How can you remember dying? I mean, how’s that even possible?”
Jim shrugged. “I just remember. The pain in my throat. How hard it was to try and breathe. The air in my lungs feeling like it was catching fire. Shit, there’s no part of that I’ll ever forget.” He glanced at Donny and then away again. More furtive this time. “I remember how scared I was. I pissed my pants. Imagine that, man. Me dying and pissing my pants and even with all that pain I think I felt worse ’cause I gave myself a golden shower. Isn’t that fucked up? I mean, how pathetic is that? I’m dying, some motherhumper is tearing my throat out with his teeth, and I’m worried about what people will think when they find out I juiced my shorts.”
Donny looked at Jim. At his neck.
“That’s not how you died? he said.
“What?” asked Jim.
“That’s not how you died. That’s not what happened.”
“Yeah,” said Jim, “it is.”
“The hell it is. I read about it in the papers, saw it on the Net. Heard about it from people in town who lived through that shit, the Trouble. Some drugged-out farmer stabbed you in the chest.”
Donny jabbed Jim in the chest with a finger, right over the place where his friend’s shirt was torn. He jabbed hard. Twice.
“Right there, man. They said you got stabbed with a big piece of wood right there.”
Jim stepped back out of poking distance. There was a look on his face that Donny couldn’t quite read. Annoyance? Anger? And what else? Shame?
“Oh,” said Jim. “Yeah, well, there was that.”
“That’s how you—”
“No,” Jim said, cutting him off. “It’s not how I died.”
“But . . . ”
“When that happened,” continued Jim, “I was already dead.”
-6-
Donny said, “What?”
Jim touched the spot on his chest where he’d been poked. He tried to push the torn material back into place to cover it, but the shirt was too ragged.
“Um,” he said, and strung that word out for as long as he could.
“What the hell are you trying to say?” demanded Donny. “You got to start making sense out of this shit.”
“Sense? Damn, man, you don’t ask for much.” Jim shook his head. “I was killed, man, but not by that ass pirate with the stake.”
“ ‘Stake,’ ” said Donny, tasting the word and not liking it one bit.
“It’s all part of the way they look at us. They think that stakes and all that shit really works.”
“W-what?”
“Stake. It’s just bullshit man.”
“What are you talking about? C’mon, man, don’t do this to me,” pleaded Donny.
“Dude,” said Jim sadly, “it’s already done. I died when I got bit. I was already dead when I got staked.”
“Already dead . . . ?”
Jim nodded.
Donny stared at him, his mouth forming words, trying to shape sounds out of broken echoes of what Jim had just said.
“You got . . . bit?”
“Bit, yeah.”
“By . . . what?”
“The fuck do you think bit me? The tooth fairy?”
“But are you trying to say that you were killed by a . . . a . . . ?”
“Go on, man, nut-up and say it. Put it the hell out there.”
Donny licked his lips and tried it, forced the word out of his gut, up through his lungs, and out into the world. As he struggled to say it, Jim said it with him.
“A vampire.”
“Yeah,” said Jim, “I got bit by a goddamn vampire. How totally fucked up is that?”
They stood there staring at each other as the heavens wept and the trees shivered.
“Before you totally lose it,” said Jim, “just think about it. All those stories about the Trouble? All that wild shit everyone was saying about how when everyone got stoned from the drugs the militiamen put in the water they started seeing werewolves and ghosts and vampires. You read about that, right?”
Donny said nothing.
“Well, there really wasn’t any white militia . . . not like the papers said. There was a jackass who was a racist prick, but he was working for someone.”
“Who?” asked Donny in a ragged voice.
Jim shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. A big bad mothergrabber from Europe somewhere.”
“A vampire?”
“Oh yeah. He started killing people, turning ’em into vampires and shit. Then there was a big-ass fight and people started killing each other, killing the vampires, vampires killing civilians. It was totally fucked up.”
“And . . . you?”
“Oh, they got me like ten days before the shit hit the fan. I was home on leave and I was on the way over to Jessie Clover’s place. You remember her from school? Brunette with the ass? I started banging her the day I got home and I was tapping that every night. I was on my way to
her place for some pussy when someone grabbed me and dragged me over a hedge.”
“A vampire?” asked Donny.
“Shit yeah it was a vampire, but here’s the nut-twister . . . the vampire was that kid, Brandon Strauss. You know him, fourteen or fifteen, something like that. Hung out with Mike Sweeney all the time.”
Donny nodded numbly.
“Kid’s half my size, but he’s got all these vampire super powers and shit,” said Jim. “I tried to beat the shit out of him, and I got some good shots in, too, but . . . like I said, he’s got that strength and speed. That part of the vampire legend is true. Speed, strength. Hard to hurt. Hard to kill. And . . . always hungry.”
Donny took an immediate step backward.
“Hey,” said Jim, “no, man . . . don’t be like that. You’re my road dog. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“You’re a fucking vampire, man,” said Donny.
“Yeah, well, that part sucks.”
They stood there, cold and awkward as the rain fell. Donny pointed to his friend’s chest.
“You did get stabbed though, right?”
“Yeah, and that hurt, too. Hurt like a bastard. That’s the thing . . . even being, um, like dead and all? We still feel pain. And that hurt. Not as much as Brandon killing me, but it was bad.”
“What happened?”
Jim’s eyes darted away again. “He was alive,” he said. “Even though he was looped on drugs from the water, he was alive. I was hurt . . . and I was hungry.”
“Oh, shit . . . ”
“Yeah,” said Jim. “It kind of blows. I mean . . . it’s evil and all that, but for some reason I don’t really seem to give much of a shit about that. It’s nasty. It’s messy, and even though I have to kill, I really can’t stand the fucking screaming. Oh, man, you think it’s bad when you’re like at a concert and everyone’s yelling? For me, it’s like that but like ten times worse. All that heightened sense of hearing crap . . . it sounds good, it sounds like superhero shit, but then when you actually hear a full-throat, balls-to-the-wall death scream, you go about half deaf. Your head wants to explode and the pain drives you bat shit.”
He stopped as if considering the kind of picture his words were painting.
He sighed.
“Long story short, man,” he half-mumbled, “I only died that one time. And if I’m careful and smart and follow the rules, I won’t ever die again.”
Donny echoed those last four words. “Won’t ever die again.”
“Yeah.”
“But you’re killing other people?”
Donny looked momentarily surprised. “Oh, the vampire thing. No, man, that’s yesterday’s news. I don’t hunt like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I said. I haven’t made that kind of kill in years, man. Not since right after the Trouble.”
Donny narrowed his eyes. “You expect me to believe that?”
“Shit, man, you can believe what you want. But it’s true. I can live off of animals. There’s a whole state forest right here. As long as I feed every couple of weeks, I’m good to go. The taste blows, but I figure it’s kind of like being a vegan. It may not taste good but it’s better for my health.”
“Why? What made you stop?”
“The Big Bad got killed. That night when the town burned, somebody must have killed the vampire that started all this.”
“Who?”
“Shit if I know. I wasn’t there when it happened. I was, um . . . doing other stuff.”
“Killing people?”
Jim looked away once more. “You don’t understand how hard it is. The hunger? It screams in your head. Especially back then, especially when the Big Bad was alive. It was like he juiced us all, amped us up. You couldn’t fight it. And when he died? Christ, it was like a part of me died, too. I wanted to die. Really, man, I wanted to kill myself.”
“But you can’t die.”
Jim snorted. “Everything can die.”
“But you said that you couldn’t die.”
“No, I said that if I was careful I wouldn’t die. Not the same thing.”
Donny frowned. “You can die?”
“Sure. That night, when we had the Trouble? Couple of hundred of us died.”
“There were that many?”
“Yeah. Would have been thousands if the Big Bad had his way. But we almost all died that night.”
“Almost all? There’s more like you?”
Jim didn’t answer that, but that was answer enough.
“This is bullshit,” grumbled Donny. Then he corrected himself. “This is nuts.”
“It’s the world, man. Bigger, weirder, badder than we ever thought. And lately it’s started to get worse. There’s more . . . of them, of people like me.”
“Vampires,” Donny supplied.
Jim flinched. “Yeah. More vampires and maybe something coming—something like the Big Bad we had—coming back. People . . . or something . . . are starting to hunt. Not animals, like we been doing . . . but humans.”
“What do you mean something’s coming? What’s coming?’
Jim said, “Bad times are coming, Donny. Bad times are here. It’s getting dark and there’s something coming. I . . . can feel it. I can feel the pull. It’s Halloween, man. Stuff . . . happens on Halloween. Halloween kicks open a door. You’re from here, you know that. Something’s going to take a bite out of town.”
“No,” said Donny, dismissing all of this as if it was unreal.
His gaze drifted over to the rusted out car. Jim followed his line of gaze.
“Is that yours?” asked Donny.
“Yeah. I miss that old heap. We had some fun with that.”
“It’s a wreck.”
“Well, yeah. Been like that for years.”
“But I saw you driving it.”
Jim frowned.
“No, man.”
“I did. On the bridge and then ten minutes ago.”
“Really,” said Jim, “that car’s deader than me. It’s dead dead, you know?”
“No, I don’t know,” snapped Donny. “None of this makes sense. I finally manage to get home, and you want me to just accept all this shit?”
Jim shrugged.
“It’s bullshit,” snarled Donny suddenly. “This? All of this? It’s bullshit.”
“It is what it is.”
Donny stepped forward and suddenly shoved Jim. “Don’t give me that crap, Jim. We went to fucking war, man. We enlisted to fight for this, to protect all of this.” He waved his arms as if to indicate the whole of Pine Deep and everyone in it. “And while we’re out there fighting real bad guys—terrorists, the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and shit—you’re trying to tell me that vampires came in and killed everyone I know? You want me to believe that?”
Jim spread his hands again.
Donny shoved him again. “No! I fought every day to get back home. I bled to get back home. Do you have any idea how many firefights I’ve been in? How many times I was nearly killed? How many times I got hurt? Do you have any idea what kind of hell I went through?”
“I know, man.”
“No you don’t. You went into the navy, Jim. You played it safe. But I went to fucking war. Real war. I fought to protect . . . to protect . . . ”
Fresh tears ran down his face. They felt as cold as the rain.
Colder.
“And it’s all for shit. There are more like you out there. They’re going to keep feeding on my town. They’re going to make a punk out of me because they’ll just take away everything I fought for.”
Jim looked at him, and there was a deep sadness in his eyes. “Donny . . . believe me, man, I do know what you went through. I know all about it. Everything.”
“Oh yeah? And how the hell are you supposed to know that shit? You get psychic powers, too?”
“No, man . . . I read it.”
Donny blinked. “Read it?”
“Yeah.”
“Read it where?”
; A single tear broke from Jim’s right eye. It carved a path through the grime on his face. “I may sleep under the dirt, dude, but I do read the papers. I read all about you.”
“What are you . . . ?”
“They did a whole big story on you. Donny Castleberry, Pine Deep’s war hero.” Jim shook his head. “Donny . . . I read your obituary, man.”
Donny said nothing.
“They had the whole story. You saving a couple of guys. Getting shot. They played it up, big, too. Said that you killed four Taliban including the one who shot you. You went down swinging, boy. You never gave up the fight.”
Donny said nothing. What could he say? How could he possibly respond to statements as ridiculous as these? As absurd?
The ground seemed to tilt under him. The hammering of the rain took on a surreal cadence. None of the colors of the forest made sense to him.
He touched his chest, and slowly trailed his fingers slantwise across his body, pausing at each dead place where a bullet had hit him.
He wanted to laugh at Jim. To spit in his face and throw his stupid words back at him. He wanted to kick Jim, to knock him down and stomp him for being such a liar. He wanted to scream at him. To make him take back those words.
He wanted to.
He wanted.
He . . .
He fought to remember the process of recovering in the hospital in Afghanistan, but he couldn’t remember a single thing about it. Not the hospital, not a single face of a nurse or doctor, not the post-surgical therapy. Nothing. He remembered the bullets. But it seemed so long ago. He felt as if there should be weeks of memories. Months, maybe years of memories. His discharge, his flight back to the States. But as hard as he tried, all he could grab was shadows.
After all, he couldn’t remember how he came to the bridge that crossed the river to Pine Deep. None of it was in his head.
None of it was . . .
Even there?
“God . . . ” he breathed. If, in fact, he breathed at all.
“I’m sorry,” said Jim. “I’m so sorry.”
Off away in the woods there was a long, protracted shriek. It was female. Cold and high and completely inhuman.
It’s getting dark.
“What is that?” he asked.
Jim shook his head. “I don’t know. Not really. Whatever it is, it’s not right, you know?”
Donny said nothing.
“When it screams like that, it means that it’s starting to hunt.”
HALLOWEEN: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre Page 12