Revenant

by Allan Leverone

  33

  Brett Parker heard the sound of airplanes buzzing overhead, nonstop, one after the other, like he was right next to the runway at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. How the hell had he gotten here? He tried to remember. He had been working at the new summer retreat in Maine when—

  —He opened his eyes, doing his best to ignore a pounding in his skull unlike any headache he had ever experienced, and realized it wasn’t airplanes buzzing around his head at all; it was mosquitoes. The insects were everywhere, swarming around him, feasting on his flesh; great black clouds of mosquitoes, more of the vicious blood-suckers than Brett had ever seen in one place; more than he would ever have imagined could be present in one place.

  He lay on his side, crumpled in a pile inside the wreckage of the Porsche, his body stuffed uncomfortably into the foot well on the passenger’s side—again—like some giant had used him to try to plug a hole in the floor of the car. His head hurt and his arm throbbed painfully and his back felt like a soccer team had used it for kicking practice. But he was alive, and, it seemed, unharmed, relatively speaking.

  Brett raised his head painfully and glanced up into the driver’s side of the vehicle, looking for the freak who had kidnapped him right out of his own home and put this whole nightmare in motion. He was nowhere to be seen, and the car door on that side of the vehicle had been torn completely off its hinges. Safety glass from the windshield—and, apparently, all of the broken passenger windows—covered every available inch of surface, glittering colorfully in the muted light. A pine tree branch, at least two inches thick, had smashed through the rear window and then snapped off, the blunt end looking exactly like a battering ram, suspended inches from Brett’s head.

  But the creepy lunatic who had been driving the Porsche was gone. He had disappeared, maybe ripped from the car’s interior by the force of the crash, maybe propelled through the windshield by the pine tree branch. Brett didn’t know and didn’t care. He was gone. In all likelihood he was dead. The guy hadn’t been the picture of health to begin with—the smell of death hung on him like a shroud—and the odds of him surviving such a violent car wreck were absurdly low. Brett wondered how he had managed it.

  He braced his right arm on the floor and pain flashed up it from wrist to elbow. He sucked in a breath, trying not to cry out, not wanting to alert his captor he had awakened. He knew he was being foolish, Freaky Dude had to be dead, or at least badly injured and incapacitated, but the world had suddenly gone mad, tilting crazily on its axis, and he wasn’t taking any chances.

  He eased his right arm out from under his body. Something was obviously broken in that one. He tried the left arm, pushing gingerly until assuring himself it was okay. It held his weight. He pushed harder, wishing he could shoo away all of the mosquitoes. They seemed to be everywhere and had redoubled their attack when he began to move.

  His arm throbbed and his back throbbed and his head hurt, he felt like he might be sick to his stomach at any moment, but gradually Brett rose up from the floor of the Porsche like a magic trick, pushing and straining, managing to slide his legs underneath his body until he was in a kneeling position, his stomach braced against the supple leather of the passenger seat, his face pressed against the backrest.

  He reached for the door handle with his left hand and pulled. Nothing happened. He pulled again, and again nothing happened, and the old cliché about insanity being defined as attempting the same thing over and over and expecting a different result popped into his head and he almost chuckled.

  The door was obviously jammed. He could pull on it all day and it was never going to open. He would have to go out the driver’s side. No worry about that door being jammed; it was missing in action. Of course, there was the small matter of crawling under the broken pine tree branch, and trying not to cut himself to ribbons on all of the broken glass, but he was alive, and the freak who had caused all his problems was gone, and he could do this.

  Brett pushed with his feet and slithered sideways, bracing himself with his good arm as the gearshift stabbed him in the belly. The branch pushed relentlessly down on his body and for a moment he thought there might not be enough room to squeeze through. Then the small of his back dipped under the branch and the pressure was gone and his upper body slid off the driver’s seat and he fell into that foot well.

  He landed on his right arm and this time he couldn’t help himself; he screamed in pain. He shifted his weight, easing the pressure on his arm, resting for just a moment. He realized he was sweating and panting heavily and wondered when he would swallow a mosquito. It seemed inevitable. He was amazed he hadn’t done it already.

  Brett grabbed the rocker panel under the missing driver’s side door with his left hand, hoping not to slice a finger off on the razor-sharp exposed sheet metal. He pulled mightily and his shoulder cleared the door. He pulled again and his upper body once again fell onto his injured right arm, this time on the soft carpeting of millions of pine needles. He screamed again but this time the pain was tempered with a sense of accomplishment. He was almost out of the wreckage!

  He rolled to the left until his broken right arm was no longer pinned under his body, then pushed against the driver’s seat with his feet, sliding along the bed of pine needles away from the car and toward the mammoth tree trunk. At last he was clear of the Porsche. He looked back at the wreck, amazed he was still alive. The back end of the vehicle had been compressed into roughly half the area it had previously occupied, crammed right up against the seats, which had been shoved forward until they were almost flush with the dashboard.

  Brett now realized it was only by the most random form of luck that he had survived. By being unconscious, his unresisting body had simply been pushed into the foot well, the only place it could have gone without him being crushed to death. Had he been conscious, he would undoubtedly have tensed up—it would have been an instinctive reaction—and he would have been impaled by the pine tree branch. It would have run him through from back to front.

  Brett waved his hand around his head weakly, trying without any measurable success to scatter the millions of mosquitoes, which seemed to have called in reinforcements once he had freed himself from the car. Now they surrounded his entire body, from head to toe, landing and feasting with impunity. It would be the ultimate irony to survive this horrific car wreck, only to die by having his blood drained by these parasitic insectile vampires.

  All he wanted to do was rest, to close his eyes and sleep for a few minutes, but Brett knew that if he succumbed to that intense desire, he might never wake up. Even if he did, the daylight was passing quickly, and it would probably be night when he awoke. And an injured man in this remote area, defenseless and bleeding, would stand virtually no chance of surviving until morning. He would become nothing more than a midnight snack for some passing family of black bears.

  Brett groaned and rolled to his knees, holding his upper body off the forest floor with his left arm. He felt weak and lightheaded. He sat back on his haunches, doing his best to ignore the mosquitoes, and unfastened two of the middle buttons on his dress shirt. He lifted his right wrist with his left hand, sweating heavily from the pain and exertion, and slid the injured arm inside the unbuttoned portion of his shirt. Then he clumsily fastened one of the buttons, forming a makeshift sling for his broken arm. He didn’t know how long it would hold, but it had to be better than nothing.

  Now came the hard part. He would have to stand and fight his way out from under this gigantic tree, through the thick underbrush, and out to the road. Brett had only visited Paskagankee once before, when he purchased the land upon which his summer retreat would be built, and didn’t know how Freaky Dude had gotten here, or even where “here” was. He might be a hundred miles from Paskagankee for all he knew. He had no idea how heavily traveled this road might be or how far he might have to walk to get assistance.

  But Brett didn’t care about any of that. He had survived the bizarre encounter with the lunatics who had kidnap
ped him, and he was going to be okay. He would fight his way to the road, he would stay conscious and clear-headed for as long as it took to get help, and he would get the hell out of this backwater horror-show of a town. He would sell his brand new house for whatever he could get for it—monetary losses be damned—and he would fly back to Seattle and never return.

  Brett stumbled to his feet and the cloud of mosquitoes rose with him. His broken arm throbbed and his head pounded and his back hurt and the goddamned bloodsucking mosquitoes were relentless.

  Getting out from under the pine tree was easier than he had expected it to be. The Porsche had punched a fairly significant-sized hole in the wall of branches and pine needles during its high-speed backwards run, and Brett took full advantage, dropping to his knees and duck-walking through the opening. On the far side he stood and continued to follow the path of destruction the Porsche had opened, stumbling forward, pausing every minute or two to catch his breath and try not to puke onto the forest floor.

  It was amazing how far off the road the little car had managed to burrow through the underbrush before ramming the tree trunk. But Brett kept moving grimly forward, a death march of one, and eventually a black ribbon of pavement appeared before his grateful eyes. Suddenly he understood exactly what an oasis would look like to someone wandering lost in the desert. He broke through one last thicket of tangled thorns and he was through.

  His watered and the sense of relief he felt was overwhelming. He had done it! He knew it might be hours before he was rescued, but even in an area as remote as northern Maine, Brett knew someone would come driving along this road eventually. If there was pavement in America, people would drive on it.

  He was going to be saved. He smiled and picked a random direction and began walking, focusing his gaze downward so that he could avoid stepping in a pothole and falling one more time onto his broken arm. He almost felt like whistling a happy tune.

  And that was when he ran straight into the stinking, skeletal body of Freaky Dude.

  34

  Sharon hauled ass along the deserted roads, driving the cruiser too fast, angling into turns and tapping the brakes only when absolutely necessary. She wasn’t specifically trying to put a scare into her passenger—her goal was to get Raven to the hospital in Orono and then back to a holding cell in Paskagankee as quickly as possible, then move on to some real police work—but the girl’s drawn face and wide eyes were a nice little bonus.

  She was annoyed and impatient. This young woman had somehow survived the slaughter which had almost gotten Mike killed, in all likelihood had information which could be critical to the investigation, and she had clammed up. A little scare might go a long way toward adjusting her attitude, but even if it didn’t, Sharon had to admit it felt kind of good.

  “How’s your head feeling?” she asked gruffly in an effort to start some kind of dialogue. Raven Tahoma had barely said a word since being loaded into the cruiser, so a meaningful conversation seemed unlikely, but it was worth a try. Maybe the young woman would let something slip.

  “He loves you, you know,” Raven answered from behind the wire mesh separating the back seat of the cruiser from the front.

  Sharon stared at her passenger in surprise, her gaze locked onto Raven’s in the mirror as the cruiser wandered across the centerline of Mountain Home Road, heading for the forest on the opposite side. Raven’s eyes widened in alarm and she raised her hand, pointing through the windshield at the rapidly-approaching thicket of fir trees. Sharon pulled the wheel to the right, thanking her lucky stars for the lack of traffic in and around Paskagankee.

  The cruiser re-settled into the travel lane and Sharon eased off the gas. Being in a hurry was one thing, killing yourself by being in a hurry was something completely different. “He loves me? What are you talking about?” she asked, unsettled, too shocked at Raven’s words to try to turn the conversation around on her.

  “That officer back there, the one you rescued from the freezer. He’s in love with you,” she said simply.

  “I heard you the first time. What I meant was why would you say that?”

  “It’s obvious.” She shrugged. “I can tell just by the way he looks at you.”

  Sharon felt a flutter in her belly, which was stupid. She already knew how Mike felt about her; she felt exactly the same about him. The fact that he had nearly died this afternoon only served to clarify those feelings. But so what? It didn’t change anything. They were still finished as a couple; she had broken off their relationship because there was no way they could be together. That hadn’t changed.

  Still, it threw her off her game to think she was so transparent that this stranger—a criminal suspect who had watched her interact with Mike for a total of maybe five minutes—could see right into the deepest reaches of her heart. It was disturbing. She needed to steer the conversation in a different direction.

  She took a deep breath. “Yeah, well, did it occur to you that maybe he was looking at me that way because he had just come within a minute or two of suffocating to death? What happened down in that basement, anyway?”

  Raven looked away, staring out the cruiser’s passenger-side window as the woods flashed by. “It’s the dead guy,” she said flatly.

  “The dead guy? The one with his throat slashed? He pushed Mike—Chief McMahon—into the freezer before he was killed?”

  “No, no, not Max,” Raven answered quickly. Sharon glanced into the back seat through the mirror and saw her passenger’s eyes filling with tears. “The guy that killed Max had to have been the one that trapped Officer McMahon in the freezer. He knocked me and the rich guy out when the cop identified himself at the front door, and there was no one else down there, so it must have been him.”

  “Are you talking about Earl Manning?”

  Raven nodded. A tear meandered down her pretty face. She didn’t seem to notice.

  Sharon shook her head. “But you said ‘the dead guy’ did it. Manning couldn’t be dead if he fought with Chief McMahon and trapped him in a freezer.”

  “Oh, he’s dead all right.”

  “What are you talking about? You’re not making any sense,” Sharon said. She was annoyed at the bizarre turn the conversation had taken, but also felt a twinge of fear. She thought about Mike’s mention of zombies and shuddered.

  “It’s the stone,” Raven answered, unperturbed by Sharon’s annoyance. Either she hadn’t noticed or didn’t care. “Once that Manning guy got control of the stone he regained control of his actions, and that’s bad for everyone. I don’t know how much damage he can do now, but I know it’s a lot.”

  “Stone? What stone?” Sharon concentrated on the road as she drove. It would be a simple thing to get so caught up in trying to understand Raven’s words that she drove into the woods, just as she had nearly done once already.

  “It’s a sacred Navajo stone,” Raven answered. “Whoever gains possession of the stone harnesses an awesome power, the power to reanimate the dead and then control the reanimated corpse’s actions.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Sharon answered, trying to ignore the chill running down her spine, wondering if she really believed her own words.

  “Think what you want; it doesn’t matter to me either way.” Raven gazed at Sharon through the rear view mirror. “I’m just glad that Manning guy is away from me. He killed Max and he has the stone, which means he’s going to kill a lot more people before he’s finished.”

  “Let’s say for just a second I believe you. You killed Earl Manning and—“

  “—I didn’t kill him,” she interrupted. “The whole stupid plan was Max’s idea. All I did was make the mistake of telling Max about the stone. After that, he was in charge. Max was like that,” she said, sniffling. “He was an Alpha. You could never tell him what to do.”

  “Okay,” Sharon said, anxious to guide the conversation back to Raven’s confession. She hoped she wasn’t jeopardizing the entire case with her impromptu interrogation, but what the hell. The young wom
an had never specifically requested a lawyer. Besides, she wasn’t under arrest—yet—and this wasn’t an interrogation room, and they were just having a casual conversation. She didn’t know where this was headed, but her instincts told her they were going somewhere extremely important.

  “Okay,” she repeated, trying to gather her thoughts. “So, Max killed Earl Manning and then, what, reanimated him using this sacred Navajo stone?”

  Raven was silent for a long moment in the back seat. She covered her face with her hands and Sharon began to fear she was going to refuse to answer. But then she did. “The process is a little more complicated than that,” she said, “but that’s basically it, yes.”

  Sharon’s initial reaction was one of disbelief. Reanimating the dead? Impossible. Then she thought about the horrors of last fall, about ancient Abenaqui curses and about spirits occupying human bodies and about brutal killing sprees, and she bit off the response she had been about to spit out at Raven.

  Again she thought about Mike’s words as they walked out of the house he had nearly been killed inside. If Earl Manning’s dead, he had said, then he’s a zombie, because he was moving around pretty damned good . . .

  She flicked her eyes to the mirror and saw her passenger still watching her intently. Then she concentrated on the road and hit the gas, picking up speed as she had done earlier. She needed to get Raven Tahoma to the hospital as quickly as possible. And she needed to talk to Mike.

  35

  Brett walked straight into Freaky Dude, who had seemingly materialized out of nowhere. He bounced off his captor’s emaciated form and fell to his knees, skinning one on the pavement and wrenching his injured arm. The stench surrounding the man assaulted him and he gagged, eyes watering, bile rising into his gullet again. Whether it was a reaction to the smell or the pain in his broken arm he wasn’t sure, and really, what did it matter? Freaky Dude wasn’t dead after all; he had somehow survived the crash and made it to the road ahead of Brett. Then he had waited for him to stumble out of the woods.