MELISSA STOOD AT THE DOOR and peered into the bedroom. The light filtered in from the window and illuminated the space, giving it a glow that was absent in the rest of the house.
The walls were freshly painted in a pale blue color, accented by white trim and floorboards. The wood floor had been washed clean but still showed signs of age. On opposite walls there were twin beds, made with military precision, each with a solid color comforter. She walked over and sat down on the one below the window, the place she used to sleep. The bed was not her original, for it must have rotted out like the rest of the house furnishings, but it stood in place of it. A monument to a time long past. She lay down and gazed up at the window, a faint memory of moonlight passing through glass in a toddler’s eyes.
She sat back up and stared over to the other bed. It was precisely where her brother had slept. In her mind’s eye she could envision him sitting there, playing with Hot Wheels cars, driving them over the foot of the bed in mock races.
The room had been restored to a reflection of its past. The paint, the cleaning, the placement of objects on the walls, they were all done by an unskilled but purposeful hand. A museum of the past. A memorial.
Melissa thought about Michael. Had he restored this room as a trophy for past sins or as a penance? An effort to bring back into being something that he had destroyed?
A memorial to a family shattered beyond repair?
Family.
Was Michael still family? The idea came to Melissa as an epiphany. For most of her life Michael had been the focal point of all her rage, anger, and spite. He hadn’t been flesh and blood, merely an idea. But now, he’d suddenly become real. Flesh and blood. But more so. Her flesh and blood. Flesh and blood that had reconstructed this room and was living as a pauper, isolated from the world.
What was this feeling mushrooming inside her?
Empathy?
Empathy for the person who selfishly destroyed her family?
But if she were unable to empathize for family, what did that make her?
The days of her childhood had blended together, and Melissa could not recall the last time that she had slept in this spot. Her head began to swim with conflicting emotions until a haunting feeling of nostalgia started forming in her gut.
She shot up from the bed, ran to the hallway, and out the front door.
She could not open herself up to sentimentality.
The room was but a mere imitation of a past life. That time was long gone. It had been violently taken from her, and she had come to Coldwater to execute the justice owed her. Romanticizing her youth did nothing toward accomplishing that goal.
Melissa walked back to her car and opened the door. She reached down and placed the gun under the seat. She got in, started it up, and pulled back onto the dirt road. In her rearview mirror she saw a flash of light, sunlight on metal, and saw a truck parked back in the brush. She stopped the car and stared. It hadn’t been there when she pulled in. Suddenly her nerves coursed with vibrant energy as she realized how incredibly alone she was out here in the boondocks.
She could see two shadows sitting in the cab.
Reaching under her front seat, she pulled the pistol out and held it on her lap, her eyes on the vehicle lurking behind her. She put her foot on the gas and crept down the road. The truck didn’t appear to move at first, but after she had gone a bit, it pulled onto the dirt and started following her.
Melissa slid the gun under her left leg, put both hands on the wheel, and slammed on the accelerator.
thirty-seven
HAYWOOD LED THE WAY DOWN THE TRAIL, Clinton behind him with a rifle he’d grabbed from the back of the SUV, Davis following, similarly armed. The ferns were parted by the repeated trampling of a boy’s feet, but the men made their way easy enough. The dog next to the trailer had raised its head and watched the men go, then lowered it back to the ground, its motivation to run into the woods sapped from its body by some unseen force.
The trail led in for roughly a quarter mile, then rose up the spine of a ridge. To the south, the lowlands were dry, save for a few scattered marshes that reflected the sun from their dying pools. North, the woods ran on and on, the trees so dense that Haywood could not see the road they had been on when they pulled up to the family’s trailer.
Haywood’s eyes were fixed forward, Clinton and Davis scoured the sides in a lackadaisical fashion, the thought of actually finding Michael never a serious concern in their minds.
The ridge leveled off and the men kept walking.
The air was like a mausoleum, still and heavy and ancient. The woods felt prehistoric, the men walking back in time as they walked farther in.
“Hey,” Davis said, breaking the silence, “that might be something.” He pointed down the ridge to a clearing.
Haywood doubled back and saw what Davis was pointing at. It was a vast dead patch surrounded by green.
Davis rubbed his eyes with his sleeve, the smoke from his cigarette sitting over his head. “That thing growing?” He shook his head. “Nah. I’m seeing things.”
Without hesitation, Haywood made his way down the ridge. A dugout and the remnants of a small campfire came into view once he had descended the hill. He moved the tarp and looked inside.
“What you see?” Clinton asked.
“Campsite,” Haywood said. “Not old. There’s a hole in the hill here.”
“You see anything?”
“No. Looks more like a kid’s fort. Probably that sick boy’s.”
Haywood stood straight and looked around. The dying off he recognized. He had seen it before. The edging out of life from an epicenter. It was just like Michael’s house. He had been here, but he needed something more tangible. Some physical proof. Haywood trusted his gut more than anything, but he knew Clinton and Davis and the boys were getting ready to bail.
He walked around the site while Clinton and Davis stood perched on the ridge.
There was nothing.
He went back to the dugout and peered inside. It was dark and the smell of earth filled his senses. There were small toys scattered about and the dirt floor was packed down like smooth rock. He crawled inside and lay down on his back, his eyes on the low-hanging ceiling above him, the weight of the ridge suspended over his body. As his eyes adjusted to the low light, he saw the dirt above him, the small roots that stuck out of the walls and ceiling. Bits of rock and stone and mud coming into view. And something else.
Above his head was writing.
The dirt had been carved by someone’s finger.
A word.
As his eyes focused, the message became clear.
Haywood.
A cold chill ran through Haywood’s body as he looked at his name scrawled with a killer’s hand. He couldn’t get out of the dugout fast enough.
Haywood scooted himself out of the dugout, stood, and brushed himself off. “He was here!”
Clinton and Davis looked down.
“You sure?” Clinton said.
“Yes.” Haywood scurried up the ridge and thought about what to do.
“You think that’s why the boy is sick?”
“Look around,” Haywood said. “Wherever Michael goes, death goes with him. The dying plants, the sick boy, Kyle, James, Old Man Jackson . . .”
Davis lit another cigarette. “You mean like voodoo or something? That what you saying?”
“What if that’s what I’m saying?”
“Then I think you might be crazy,” Clinton said.
“I used to doubt it too. But now, now I don’t. You all didn’t believe me when I told you Michael was evil. Not fully. But look down there. Look at what’s happened over the past couple days. If you had gone out to Michael’s place, you’d see the same thing. Everything within a hundred feet of his house, just dead.”
“Hold on a minute. Clinton, you buying this?” Davis asked.
“Call Frank and Earl,” Haywood said, “ask them what they saw out there. See if it matches what your own eyes are te
lling you.”
Clinton put his hand up to calm his friend and addressed Haywood. “You actually believe that Michael is running around cursing everyone, like out of some movie? That’s a pretty big thing to swallow, Haywood.”
“It’s just like Morrison,” Haywood said, more to himself as he looked around to see if he could spot a clue as to where Michael ran off to. He walked past the men and headed toward the trailer and the SUV, leaving Clinton and Davis looking at each other.
“You believe all that?” Davis asked, flicking the butt of the cigarette down the ridge. It landed in the dead void, a small wisp of smoke rising.
“Doesn’t matter. Haywood does. It makes sense to him.”
“Okay,” Davis said, firing up another smoke, “as stupid as that notion is, tell me this: why are we messing with him then? If Michael is some black-magic, source-of-all-evil demon seed, why are we out here chasing him? Why in the world would we have messed with him in the first place?”
“It’s a bit too late to ask that now, I guess,” Clinton said.
“You boys coming?” Haywood yelled from down the trail.
“Yeah, we’re coming,” Clinton said and headed back to the car.
Davis looked out through the woods.
“Yeah,” he said to himself as he spit on the ground. “We’re coming.”
thirty-eight
MICHAEL SAT IN THE DIRT, his hands tied behind his back and his legs tied under him. The man with the shotgun stood beside him. The person he had seen through the trees in the metal garage was still tucked away in the shadows.
“You a cop?”
“No.”
“No . . . of course not. You a junkie trying to get some freebies?”
“No,” Michael said.
“Just thought you’d spy on us out here?”
“I didn’t even know you were here. I was just walking through. I’d keep walking if you’d just untie me.”
“That ain’t going to happen.”
The door of the trailer slammed open and the skeletal woman Michael had seen before fell out of the inside. She caught herself after one step, found her balance, and proceeded to sit on the top of the metal steps that led to the ground. She looked over at Michael and his captor, but her eyes were vacant. She looked both childlike and grizzled, aged and infantile, as if she had experienced too much of the world in too little time.
“Artie, get in here!” a voice yelled from the darkness of the garage.
Michael’s captor slung the gun over his shoulder and walked into the apparent laboratory.
Artie was met outside the stall by the haggard beast of a man in overalls. He was shirtless underneath, and rolls of skin hung from his waist over the denim. He had a gray mop of hair that shot in every direction but up, and on his hands he had thick industrial rubber gloves.
The two men talked at a level that Michael could not hear, but he surmised from the random glances and nods in his direction that the men were talking about him.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize what he had stumbled into. The years in prison had brought him in contact with folks like this. Illiterate white trash who somehow possessed the chemistry expertise of Einstein, cooking up lethal concoctions out of household products. The vapor coming out of the garage looked like their business was in full swing and the woman sitting on the trailer steps a waiting and eager customer.
The men talked for a long time and the sun beat down on the spot where Michael sat. The world had stopped and was considering what to do next. As Michael looked on, out of his peripheral vision he saw the woman stand up and approach him.
She was rail thin. Her blonde hair was ratted out and the color was returning to its darker brown in patches across her scalp. Her face contained numerous sores, acne gone too far, and in a couple spots there appeared the faint color of bruises. The way she was walking toward Michael made it appear that the earth below her was in a constant state of flux, her equilibrium vaporized from her possession.
“So who are you?” she asked. Her voice sounded like tires on a gravel road.
“I’m nobody,” Michael said.
“Yeah? Me too.”
“You live here?”
“No. This place is a dump.”
“So why are you here?”
“Why? Because this is heaven,” she said. The woman stood uneasily, looking toward the garage, and then to the sky, lost in a daydream creation of a boiled mind. She looked back at Michael and giggled in a childish laugh as she slumped to the ground, ending up a few feet from him. “They make it up extra special here. Plus they give me extras.”
Michael stared back at the garage. The men had walked inside and gotten back to their work. He could see their shadows inside working with bottles and canisters, mixing and pouring. The smell emanating from the place was nauseating and vile.
“You use?” she asked.
“No.”
“Too bad. It’d be better if you did. It’s not like you’re ever leaving this place. A hit would just make it not so painful. Artie is a horrible shot.”
Michael knew she was right. He knew from the moment he was led out of the woods that they wouldn’t let him leave. They had too much at stake. Their small enterprise wouldn’t exist with spectators lurking about. He knew this, the inevitability of the future rolled out before him. He knew when harm was coming, he could feel it in his bones like a coiling snake readying itself to strike, but during this whole process of being tied up and held captive, he had done his best to quiet the beast inside him. Now, though, the situation was so obvious it couldn’t be ignored.
The wanderer.
The scourge of Coldwater.
He knew when people were contemplating his death. And he knew that they were painfully unaware of what the result would be. Now, sitting in the sunlight next to a riddled-out addict, he could feel the tension stirring that would spell the end of Artie and whoever joined him in his future plan.
“Are you hostage here too?”
“Me? No. I’m here by my own free will,” she said, throwing her hands up in the air and smiling to the sky.
Michael watched her with morbid curiosity. “I don’t think you’ll want to be around here soon,” he said. “It’s not going to end well.”
She giggled as if his words were a joke. “It always ends well. Every day. Ain’t no way I’m leaving,” she said. Her hands rubbed the grass as if she had never felt such a pure sensation in all her life. She was gone, physically here in this world, but permanently checked into a different plane of existence.
“Cathy! Get away from him!” Artie screamed from the garage and then disappeared back inside.
Cathy managed to get herself upright again, looking around at the world painted new with each breath.
“Bye!” she said seductively as she started to walk away.
He could feel the impending storm forming within himself. The men had made up their mind, in that garage, to kill him. They had set their minds to it, and the protective shade inside him felt the danger and was preparing itself.
“I wouldn’t go in there,” Michael said to her.
Cathy stopped and cocked her head back at him. “But, honey . . . that’s where heaven is.”
She strolled casually into the bowels of the garage.
The coiling snake tightened in Michael’s stomach. He knew it was coming. He knew it was now.
Michael rolled to his side and onto his stomach. He tried to move farther away from the structure, every foot of grass an extra foot of safety. He hadn’t moved far when it happened.
The garage exploded in a brilliant fireball of blazing chemicals and flame. The screams of the three people inside mixing with the roaring plasma. Michael buried his face in the ground as he felt the heat singe the back of his legs and his feet. He rolled over and watched as a body ran out of the doorway. He couldn’t tell who it was—Cathy, Artie, the man in the overalls—as the person was engulfed in flames. The human torch dropped to the ground
after just a few steps and was still, melting out of existence. The heaven that Cathy sought, now an inferno.
Michael’s stomach released itself as he continued to crawl away from the burning structure like an inchworm escaping the heat of a magnifying glass.
thirty-nine
HAYWOOD HUNG UP HIS CELL PHONE and put it back in his pocket.
How had this gotten so out of control?
Frank and Earl had just told him how the mystery woman who had showed up in Coldwater had spotted them parked on the side of the road outside Michael’s place. They also mentioned how they were in pursuit of her, which he sternly advised them to stop. The last thing he needed was for this woman to go to the police, claiming that she was being stalked and harassed. Anything and everything that brought in the prospect of the cops coming up to town and sniffing around filled him with anxiety.
He couldn’t be everywhere at once, and even if he could, that in itself would bring suspicion on him. It was good he was at Jackson’s store when the authorities showed up and pronounced a heart attack. It was good to be at the crash scene when the investigators ruled a simple accident. He was worried about Kyle flapping his guilty conscience to the police, and he had worked extra hard to get Tami to go and sit with her on-again, off-again boyfriend at the hospital. As long as Kyle knew he hadn’t lost everything, he could be trusted to keep his lips zipped.
Now Frank and Earl were causing new problems.
When he heard that this woman was in town snooping around not long after they had buried Michael at Springer’s Grove, a slow, creeping dread had invaded every pore of his body. He felt like he was barely keeping it together, and every time he got one loose end tied down, another one would rise to take its place.
He had told the boys to just keep an eye on what she was up to, not chase her down the roads, putting a scare into her, adding to her curiosity about what could be happening in Coldwater.
This lady’s appearance in town, though impossibly ill-timed, was not catastrophic. He could deal with it, as long as the boys stopped acting irrationally. Stupidly.
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