Ghost Road Blues pd-1

by Jonathan Maberry

  Something passed between them. Some tiny bit of knowledge, some small breath of understanding.

  And for a moment, a frozen fragment of a second, Mike was not on the road, not standing by his bike, not confronting a great white stag. For a splinter of time Mike Sweeney was in a dark swampy hollow. Everywhere he looked there were fires burning. In some places the bushes and trees were blazing, and in others it was bodies that were burning. Bodies that ran and capered and screamed as they burned. Mike looked down and saw that he held a samurai sword in his hands, the length of the blade covered in blood that was almost black in the firelight. Fire danced and flickered in the parts of the steel that weren’t smeared with blood.

  Mike raised his head and looked around. Malcolm Crow, the guy who owned the hobby shop, lay on the ground near him. He wore a big tank on his back that had a long hose, which was still clutched in his hands. Crow’s eyes were closed and he reeked of gasoline. A line of fire was eating its watch across the grass toward him. There was blood on Crow’s face and his eyes were closed.

  Near him were two men — a big white guy and an older black guy — both of them were soaked with blood and stared blankly at the sky.

  Mike turned all the way around and he saw Val Guthrie, the woman who owned the big farm outside of town. The one who went out with Crow. She was on her knees, weeping, holding her father in her arms. Her father, Old Man Guthrie, looked dead.

  Everywhere Mike looked he saw death, and where there wasn’t death there was pain. His mother was there, smiling at him with a mouth that was rimmed with blood. As she looked at him her eyes went from their familiar green to a bloody red and she stepped backward into flame-tinged shadows and disappeared.

  A shadow passed over Mike and he turned again to see what had cast it. He turned and looked up…and up. It stood there, impossibly huge, monstrous, towering above the flames, laughing in a voice that rumbled like thunder.

  “Mine!” the creature hissed, and reached for him.

  And time caught up with him so fast and hard it was like a slap across the face. Mike staggered backward against his bike, knocking it over. The stag twitched, shaking its great rack of antlers again.

  The image — dream, whatever it was — still burned in his mind, but already it was starting to fade. Mike tried to catch it, to remember it, knowing on a very deep level that it was important — though he couldn’t begin to guess why — but it faded almost instantly. Becoming fog and then blowing away, leaving only the faintest memory of fear behind like a bad but indefinable smell.

  The deer backed away a few steps. It stood there, eying him, waiting for something; then it turned toward Mike’s War Machine and kicked it lightly with a sharp hoof. It kicked it again and looked at Mike. It took Mike a few seconds to understand. He got up very slowly — it was really all he could manage — and stood there, looking from the cornfield to the deer and back again. Another shake of the antlers. Mike advanced toward the bike, and the deer backed away, matching his pace. They never broke eye contact, even as Mike bent down to pick up his bike.

  “What are y—” Mike began to ask, but stopped. The deer just looked at him with those wise old eyes, and to Mike it felt wrong to actually say anything. He got back on his bike, confused, amazed, even overwhelmed. It’s just a deer, he told himself, trying to make himself listen. Just a deer.

  Yeah, he thought, right. Just a deer, my ass.

  Slowly, and with great effort, he began to pedal away. He didn’t look over his shoulder again until he was at the bend at the far end of the straightaway. He paused and half turned to look back just in time to see the white deer leap gracefully across the ditch and walk slowly and purposefully into the field between the stalks of crushed and trampled corn.

  “Man,” Mike said. “Man oh man oh man.”

  He turned to the front again and tried to get his confused mind and battered body to solve the problem of getting home, trying not to think about the deer. Or about the wrecked car. Or about the tow-truck that had tried to run him down. Or about his battered body.

  Or about Vic’s hard hands waiting for him at home.

  He did not want to think of any of these things. All he wanted was to get home and go hide in his room. He struggled on, his legs already weary, his breathing forced. Around him, the night loomed with vast black shadows.

  (2)

  From the edge of the cornfield, hidden by the stalks of corn, the white buck watched Mike go. Then it, too, turned away, moving step by measured step on its four hard hooves. Lightning painted corn-shaped shadows on its white flanks. Between the bursts of light it seemed to vanish, reappearing again as the storm drew closer to Pine Deep and scattered its fireworks across the sky. The deer walked through a space of shadows and then as the next thread of lightning stitched the sky, the creature illuminated was not an albino buck with a massive rack of horns but a gray man in a black suit that was spattered with mud, a guitar slung across his shoulders. He moved just as slowly, along the same angle, and his footsteps began where the marks of the white deer ended.

  The Bone Man stopped and looked back the way he’d come. He wore a crooked smile. “Let’s see Tommy Johnson do that,” he said in a voice like a faint wind. “Hell, let’s see Robert Johnson do that.”

  He went to the top of a rise and watched as Mike labored over the farthest hill. The Bone Man’s mind burned with the image he’d seen in Mike’s mind. His gray lips formed a single silent word.

  “Dhampyr.”

  Overhead, thunder detonated with apocalyptic fury. The night birds took to the sky and uttered their plaintive ululations, like lost souls on the dark breeze. The moon was climbing into the sky, hiding like a criminal behind the storm clouds.

  There were hours and hours until dawn, and the night still had work to do.

  (3)

  Crow rocketed along the twists and turns of A-32 at unsafe and irresponsible speeds. He found it relaxing. His car was one of those big Impalas from the early seventies: too much engine and about as long as an aircraft carrier. Crow claimed that you could land a plane on the hood and he wasn’t far wrong. It was Hershey Kiss brown except for the right front fender that was an improbable shade of greenish yellow. The interior roof lining sagged down like a windless parachute, constantly tousling Crow’s curly hair, and all of the seats had been patched with duct tape of various vintages. There was red reflector tape over some of the rear lights and one headlight shone askew, giving the car a cross-eyed look. Crow had found her squatting dispiritedly in a used car lot, bought her at once, and named her Missy after his first girlfriend who’d had the same cross-eyed beauty.

  He tried never to drive Missy at anything less than a breakneck speed. Terry called Missy Crow’s “getaway car” because that’s how he drove it.

  After Terry had left the store, Crow had been mildly amused at his “mission” and the novelty of having some big-city bad guys fleeing through Pine Deep. It was unreal enough to be funny, and it also tickled his curiosity, though not as much as it would have a few years ago. Back when he was a full-time cop Crow would have relished this kind of scene. Of course, back then there was even some talk about Crow running for Gus Bernhardt’s job. It was Terry’s opinion that he would have gotten the job if he’d taken even a halfhearted shot at it, and Terry’s opinion held enormous sway in town, but Crow had not wanted the job badly enough.

  It had been a strange time in his life, full of extreme peaks and valleys. The first couple of years he’d worn the badge were definitely the valleys because he’d also been a drinker, and that had resulted in some bad scenes. He was drunk on the job a couple of times, and once even had a fender bender coming off a long speed trap shift where he’d whiled the hours away with a bottle of Knob Creek and a stack of blues tapes. A guy in a Crossfire had come bucketing down A-32 at ninety and Crow had peeled out after him. The guy saw the lights and heard the sirens and didn’t make a game of it, dropping his speed and pulling over onto the shoulder, but Crow was half in the bag a
nd misjudged his own speed and had rear-ended the speeder to the tune of a grand’s worth of bodywork on the Crossfire and eight hundred on the cruiser.

  Crow would have been fired for that, but Terry had intervened. Gus was purple with suppressed rage when he told Crow that he was only getting two weeks off without pay. During that week Terry had sat Crow down and leveled an ultimatum at him: dry out or lose him as a friend.

  Crow’s first response was to spend the rest of the night getting totally wasted; and then after waking up in his own backyard, naked except for socks, and covered in vomit and bird shit, he’d decided that rock bottom was not much fun.

  With shaking hands he poured all his booze down the drain and spent the rest of those two weeks developing an addiction to coffee, chain-smoking cigarettes, and bitching about life to anyone who would listen, which was a small community. He also started going to AA meetings, sometimes as often as three times a day. When he returned to the job after his suspension, he was ten pounds lighter, looked ten years older, had yellow skin, red eyes, a case of the shakes, and had been sober for twelve days.

  Then his life slipped into low gear and climbed the long road out of the valleys, picking up a little speed as it went higher. Over the next year he picked up two citations for good conduct, never missed a single day of work, and started socking money away for the store he someday wanted to buy. In January of his second year of sobriety he started teaching jujitsu twice a week at the YMCA in Crestville, bought Missy and rehabilitated her, strengthened his friendship with Terry Wolfe and the rest of the world — except, perhaps, for Gus, Jim Polk, and Vic Wingate — and fell in love.

  Then eight months before he quit the force he had a run-in with a handful of the Pine Barons, the local bike club that had gradually become a pain in the ass to everyone. That situation was one Crow regretted — not for his actions, which even he felt were warranted, if not as heroic as the press made them out to be, but because the whole Pine Barons thing had been vulgar and gaudy and badly misinterpreted by everyone.

  The situation wasn’t really that much, as Crow saw it. He and a couple of other units — a total of three officers in three cars — were sent to roust six of the Barons from a truck stop by the canal bridge. It was part of a program to urge the gang to move on to other hunting grounds. Aside from the usual speeding, drinking, drugs, and brawling, a few of them had taken to harassing the girls from Pinelands High School, seducing a few and turning them on to poppers and speed and gang bangs, and pestering a few others in ways that would have shocked construction workers. There were several complaints filed and the talk of at least one rape that the girl in question refused to talk about, apparently too terrified and ashamed to file charges. The fact that the biker had walked away from all charges both enraged the townies and fueled the cockiness of the bikers.

  The two other officers had arrived first and, despite being told to wait for backup, had gone into the diner, a move that spoke far more of balls than brains. By the time Crow pushed through the door, one cop — Jim Polk — had mouthed off to the bikers and tried to bully them out of there. Crow saw him lying on the floor clutching his balls, his face as red and pinched as a dried tomato. The other cop, Golub, was getting the tar kicked out of him by the whole gang.

  Crow yelled to the counterman to call 911 and had just waded in. When he Monday-morning quarterbacked it he realized that he should have drawn his gun and ordered everyone down. Though he didn’t care much for Polk, he did like Golub — a part-time cop working on his prelaw degree at Pinelands. Crow jumped in and, as the counterman later described to the reporters, “black-belted the whole sorry bunch of them.” Three of the bikers landed in the hospital, two more were treated and released to police custody, and the sixth just ran and hid in the bathroom until the other units came and arrested him.

  The newspapers had a field day with the story, and every single article emphasized Crow’s shortness and leanness, using all the purple prose superlatives in the dictionary to contrast him with the “monstrous bikers” whose “formidable” size and “animal ferocity” were a “deadly threat” to the safety of all in Pine Deep. The level of journalism in Pine Deep was about that of a high school paper. They made a big thing out of the fact that Crow had a black belt in jujitsu and kept using the term “chop-socky,” which irritated Crow to no end. The only moderately mature piece was printed in the Black Marsh Sentinel, which included a sidebar on jujitsu (which was spelled wrong) and segued into a short history of biker violence in Pennsylvania.

  That incident became the stuff of local legends, and it was around that time that people started talking about Chief Crow as if his election was a foregone conclusion. Gus Bernhardt, who had not been able to do a single visible thing about the Barons during those few times the bikers had previously been in town, was beaten up by the press over and over again for his weak record. Even Crow, who didn’t like Gus, thought that was a little unfair. Except for the biker thing, there wasn’t enough crime in Pine Deep to allow anyone to establish a reputation. Gus used that same thought as a platform and took credit for the low crime as an example of how he protected “his” town. Crow hadn’t even decided to run against him and already Gus was making campaign speeches.

  A few months later, when it was getting to the point where he would absolutely have to make a decision whether to run or not, Crow found a bank that liked the idea of an upscale craft store and was willing to front the money. Crow weighed the benefits of being a chief in a town where the usual breed of criminal was a jaywalker and those of being a happy store owner selling, as Val so kindly put it, rubber dog poop. It took him about forty seconds to make his decision. He handed Gus his notice — and tried not to take offense at the chief’s beaming smile of pure glee — hung up his uniform, wrapped his gun in oilcloth, and became a businessman.

  So, he asked himself, what the hell am I doing tooling down the highway with a pistol in my belt and bad guys on the loose?

  “I’ll be damned if I know,” he said aloud. The pistol felt like an anvil in his belt and he was way too aware of it. He drove five more miles trying to pretend it wasn’t there. Then, as he sailed past Millie and Gus’s big garlic farm, he said, “Oh…kiss my ass, Terry!” pulled up his shirt, and yanked out the gun. He bent, thumbed open the glove compartment, and shoved the gun out of sight. As soon as he slammed the little door shut he felt worlds better. He fished around on the passenger seat until he found the CD he wanted, slid it into the player, cranked the volume all the way up, and he and Howlin’ Wolf sang about going down Highway 41 as Missy tore through the night.

  The twisted length of A-32 was busy with tourist cars heading into town, but was empty in his direction. Crow’s cell phone began its hysterical chirping, a sound he thought sounded like R2D2 being rogered by Jiminy Cricket. He squirmed around as he tugged it out of his pants pocket and saw that it was just a text message. He punched the buttons to bring up the message, which was just two digits: 69. Crow smiled. One of Val’s saucy little jokes. Perhaps an incentive. He saved the message and stuffed the phone into his shirt pocket. He’d call Val as soon as he finished at the hayride, which was ten minutes from now if Coop was in the office, maybe half an hour if he had to take an ATV into the park to find him. An hour tops with getting the kids out of there and shutting the whole thing down.

  He conjured an image of Val in his mind, and for dreamy moments he saw her superimposed over the unwinding road. Her lithe body draped in shadows, glistening with passionate sweat, good muscles rippling under a smooth, tawny hide as she lay back on the blanket in the scarecrow clearing. Crow drummed on the steering wheel as he recalled every delicious inch of her. Maybe she’d want to go for another nice late-night stroll through the cornfields, even though there was no moon and a storm coming.

  Smiling and drumming on the steering wheel, Crow barreled down A-32 out of town, soaring up hills and swooping down the other sides, taking the curves and bends sometimes on four wheels, sometimes on two. Missy, for
all her bulk, was as agile as a circus acrobat.

  In a few miles he’d turn off the extension and head west along Old Mill Road to the hayride, and after that he could backtrack and head over to Val’s. That made him smile. He began singing very loudly with the music, which had cycled onto the Wolf’s jumping version of “I Ain’t Superstitious.” He was yowling out the lyrics in a powerful and rather unpleasant tenor when he nearly ran over the kid on the bicycle.

  (4)

  Even with the rib more or less set and holding in place, Mike’s side still hurt like hell. It wasn’t too bad when the road was flat, but not much of Pine Deep was flat. The long black ribbon of A-32 climbed, dipped, and curved through miles of low hills. Before tonight Mike had always enjoyed the undulating curves of the road, loving the burn in his muscles as he powered up the demanding slopes, but tonight he hated every inch of it. Pedaling in low gear helped a little to ease the pain, but sheer exhaustion was making him pant and panting made his ribs feel as if some little devil were jabbing at him with a red-hot spear. His progress slowed to a crawl. Time had become a paradox: when calculated in terms of how long it would take him to get home at the rate he was going, the night was racing past him; when he tried to climb each new hill every minute was about two weeks long. At his best guess he wouldn’t get home until eleven.

  Still, he thought with false cheer, that meant Vic’s beating would be that much delayed. Cold comfort, he mused, knowing that the longer Vic had to wait the angrier he would get. And like the Incredible Hulk, the madder Vic got the harder he hit.

  A few cars passed him, and each time he saw the glow of headlights he tensed…but the tow-truck did not return and after a while Mike didn’t even bother to stop when he heard an engine or the whine of tires on the blacktop.