The revenant brought his hands together under his chest and pushed, beginning to pivot his body to face Sharon.
NO!
In desperation she lifted herself up off the seat and snaked her hand behind him, reaching for what she had seen Manning slip under the waistband of his saggy jeans a few minutes ago—her Glock 9 mm service pistol.
Sweat poured off her in a tidal wave and her slick fingers scraped the butt of her gun and she grabbed desperately for it. For a split-second she had her weapon in her grasp and then the gun slipped away as Manning continued turning. He twisted slightly farther and Sharon knew it was now or never, and she shoved the revenant against the brace one last time and stretched farther than she would have thought possible.
Her fingers wrapped around the butt of her gun and she pulled again, and Manning twisted again, but this time Sharon was ready for it and she maintained her grip with a strength born of desperation, yanking hard, and then the weapon was free. She clutched it fiercely, taking strength from its mass and deadly power, but of course it wouldn’t be deadly because Earl Manning could not be killed.
One thing at a time.
Sharon reached out with her right hand and placed it over her left, hanging on to the Glock in a two-handed grip that had less to do with aiming accuracy than her fear the weapon might slip out of her sweaty palm and tumble to the floor when she needed it most, and if that happened all would be lost.
Manning pushed himself up and twisted his skeletal body and grinned as Sharon jammed the gun in his face, shoving it between his eyes. “Something about me you apparently don’t know,” he said, as somewhere in the back of her mind Sharon heard Parker panting and moaning in the back seat in abject terror. She had almost forgotten he was there, but now that she heard him she knew exactly how he felt.
She said nothing to Manning, simply concentrated on keeping her hands steady. Her stress and her fear and especially her skyrocketing adrenaline levels caused the Glock to jitter and jump like she had drunk two dozen cups of coffee. Manning continued, “You can pull the trigger on that thing till you’re blue in the face—welcome to my world if that happens—and all you’ll do is add a few holes where there weren’t any before. This reanimated corpse gig is a major drag, but it does have one advantage. I can’t be killed, you stupid bitch, because I’m already dead!”
And just like that, a sense of calm descended over Sharon. This was it. Her desperate plan would either work or it would not, and if it didn’t, she wouldn’t live much longer than a few more seconds, anyway. Instead of making her more frantic, that thought had the opposite effect. This nightmare was about to end, one way or the other. Her hands stopped shaking and the Glock steadied against Manning’s forehead and she stopped panting and began to breathe normally for the first time in what felt like a century.
Then she lifted the pistol away from Earl Manning, banking on his arrogance about the knowledge that he could not be stopped with the weapon to prevent him from simply snatching the gun out of her hand. He was certainly strong enough to do exactly that if he thought of it quickly enough.
His horrifying grin began to falter and his eyes narrowed as Sharon twisted slightly to the left. She forced herself back in the passenger seat to get a better angle, sinking into a position that was a crude parody of an invitation, legs spread, pants around her ankles. She curled her finger around the trigger and locked her elbows, taking careful aim on her target. She would get only one chance.
Suddenly her plan seemed to dawn on Manning. Sharon squeezed the trigger just as her captor unleashed a bellow of fear, whipping his dead hand toward the weapon. The Glock roared, the sound incredibly loud inside the closed cabin of the cruiser, and fire belched from the end of the barrel just as the back of Manning’s hand impacted the gun, knocking it from her grasp and sending it tumbling to the floor, exactly as she had feared.
But he was too late. The wooden box tucked safely into the corner of the dashboard exploded, and so did the windshield, and so did Earl Manning’s heart. The box disintegrated into a thousand wooden matchsticks and the heart flopped onto the dashboard, torn apart by the 9 mm slug, as shards of safety glass pelted it, falling like glittering raindrops.
Sharon’s ears were ringing and she could just barely make out the sound of Brett Parker screaming behind her and the sound of Earl Manning screaming next to her, muffled and far away, as if someone had stuffed several pounds of cotton batting into her ear canals.
She ignored the screaming and sat up, focusing on Manning’s shattered heart, lying on the dashboard of the cruiser like some kind of hideous Halloween display. It beat once, struggled to beat again, and then managed a third. And then it simply stopped beating and lay still.
Sharon swiveled her head, turning her hopeful gaze at Manning. Her heart sank. He was still looming over her. He stared at the unmoving muscle on the dashboard, eyes wide and fearful, but still alive.
Or undead.
Or whatever the hell he was.
Her plan hadn’t worked. Mike had said whoever controlled the box containing the heart controlled Manning, so she figured it stood to reason that if she could destroy the heart she would destroy whatever bizarre curse had been placed on Manning allowing him to maintain this strange state, halfway between living and dead.
It made perfect sense. It should have worked.
But it hadn’t worked. And Manning seemed to reach the same conclusion as she did, and at exactly the same time. He nodded in satisfaction and turned to look at her, and the grin which had disappeared at this unexpected development returned with a vengeance, leering and horrible.
“Nice try, sweetheart, I wasn’t expecting that,” he said, or at least Sharon assumed that’s what he said, since the ringing in her ears hadn’t even begun to diminish. “Now, where were we, do you remember?”
He pulled his legs into the foot well and lifted himself up onto his knees and faced Sharon’s prone body, reaching for her breasts with both hands and she knew she was about to die. She hoped it would be quick and wondered how much pain would be involved and thought about Mike, about the hurt in his eyes when she had broken it off with him and about how humiliating it would be when her body was discovered with her pants down around her ankles.
She squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for the end, wishing she could grab the Glock and put a bullet in her brain and cheat Manning out of his fun.
And she waited.
And nothing happened.
She opened her eyes to see Manning’s body disintegrating soundlessly in front of her, just inches from her face. His skin, which had been grey and paper-thin already, began to shrivel, stretching over his bones like it was being shrink-wrapped right before her eyes. His mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water and no sound came out, but his teeth did come out, a few more blackened stumps falling out of his mouth each time he opened it.
The shrinking skin pulled his lips back over his now-toothless gums, revealing a hideous grimace, and his thinning hair began dropping out of his head in great clumps. Soon his skeletal bones began breaking through his skin, his forehead splitting down the middle and his skull taking its place. His eyelids disappeared and a milky caul covered his lifeless eyes in an instant and he swayed above Sharon as she watched, horrified.
Then he dropped, falling on top of her one last time.
And she screamed, her voice joining Brett Parker’s in a chorus of horror and disbelief.
43
Mike stomped on the accelerator, the cruiser’s engine wailing as he rocketed out Route 24 toward Orono. If Sharon had, in fact, returned to Paskagankee from Mercy Hospital as he believed, there was only one route she would have taken, and this was it. For the hundredth time, he glanced at his cell phone, willing more information out of it, and for the hundredth time he was disappointed as it sat, noiseless, in his hand.
He had no sooner backed out of the driveway at the Max Acton murder scene than Sharon’s cell had gone dead. Either Manning had discovered that it
was still on and had switched it off, or the battery had picked the worst possible time to quit, or maybe someone or something had fallen on the damned thing and broken it. What had happened didn’t really matter. The frustrating fact was Mike now had no connection to Sharon and she was obviously in big trouble.
“Dammit,” he muttered and forced the accelerator a little closer to the floor. The road between Paskagankee and Orono was a single winding, twisting lane in each direction that had been built eighty years ago during the Great Depression by the Army Corps of Engineers, and at the time of its construction had been more than sufficient to handle the slower speeds of 1930’s vehicles and the minimal traffic between the two communities.
But now, the county highway was a death trap in waiting for those foolish enough to drive it at the higher speeds of which modern vehicles were capable. Practically every year saw at least one serious car accident along this road, often involving area teens, often sending them to the hospital, occasionally sending them to the morgue.
So, despite his stint of barely more than one year as chief of the Paskagankee Police Department, Mike was intimately familiar with the dangers of Route 24, known to locals also as Mountain Home Road. He knew he was pushing his luck by increasing his speed. He just couldn’t help himself. Sharon was in trouble and she needed him and he was damned if he was going to allow the shitty driving conditions on this eighty year old glorified cow path to slow him down.
A voice in his head whispered that she was already dead and he tried to ignore it. Manning was about to attack her at least fifteen minutes ago. She’s dead, the voice insisted.
He refused to heed the voice, so it changed tactics. And even if by some miracle she’s still alive, he’s unstoppable, remember? What can you possibly do to save her? And he ignored that, too.
The awful fact was that there was nothing he could do, but he refused to abandon Sharon when she needed him most. She had tossed him aside—why wouldn’t she, really? She was young and beautiful and had a bright future ahead of her, and he was old and guilt-ridden, with a mediocre past and a murky future—but he still loved her. He knew he would always love her.
And he would not let her down, even if that meant he would die, too. Especially if that meant he would die, too.
The trees flashed by, so many trees, it sometimes seemed trees were all that existed in this remote area, and then out of the corner of his eyes as the cruiser flew past, he glimpsed a splash of color and movement. It was off to the right along one of the fire roads that dotted the area, which weren’t really roads at all, but rather narrow firefighting passageways hacked into the forest. He saw the flash for a split-second and then it was gone.
Mike slammed on the brakes. Black smoke rose up out of the cruiser’s rear wheel wells as the vehicle fishtailed down the ancient pavement, Mike funneling all his concentration into keeping the damned car on the road. It finally ground to a stop and Mike jammed the transmission into reverse and dropped his foot onto the accelerator and then he was moving again, backing toward the fire road, traveling more slowly than he had been, but not by much.
When he reached the spot where he believed he had glimpsed the flash of movement, Mike hit the brakes again. The cruiser shuddered to a stop and he looked down the trail and there she was. Sharon was filthy and bedraggled, trudging through the forest with her head down, moving like a person in her seventies rather than her twenties, but it was definitely her and she was alive!
Walking next to her was Brett Parker, who looked equally filthy and just as bedraggled, but who was quite clearly alive as well. The pair hadn’t noticed the cruiser yet, they were still a good sixty feet from the road—Mike had no idea how he had even seen them—and his first thought was, where’s Manning? Just a few minutes ago the revenant had been taunting Mike, clearly in control of the situation. Now he was nowhere to be seen. Could this be some kind of a trap?
But Manning would have no way of knowing Mike would show up here, and given his rapidly deteriorating mental state, probably wouldn’t care, anyway. Whatever was going on, it seemed obvious Earl Manning was not a part of it. Mike gave a short blast on his siren to let Sharon and Parker know he was here, then opened the door and stepped out to meet them.
At the sound of the siren, Sharon shoved Parker to the ground next to her and stepped in front of him, dropping to one knee and adopting a two-handed shooter’s stance. Mike ducked instinctively behind the cruiser and shouted, “Whoa, it’s me, Chief McMahon! Hold your fire!”
Silence reigned and after a couple of tense seconds, Mike lifted his head over the hood of the car. Sharon remained in a crouch, but she had lifted the gun over her head, its barrel pointed toward the sky. Even from this distance, Mike could see her hands shaking. He stood and walked slowly around the front of the vehicle, holstering his weapon. “It’s just me,” he called. “Are you alright?”
Sharon and Parker nodded at the same time, although neither spoke. She rose and bent in a crouch, hands on her knees, still holding her gun, as Parker stood and brushed off his pants. Given the state of his clothing, it seemed like wasted effort.
Mike moved forward, still cautious and confused, still concerned about a possible trap. “Where’s Manning?” he asked.
Sharon lifted her head to look at Mike and her face looked lined and haggard, like she had aged fifteen years since he had last seen her and not slept a wink in any of that time.
“Earl’s gone,” she said.
44
The cruiser bounced along the fire lane, occasionally threatening to bottom out on the rough terrain, until finally Sharon’s vehicle came into view. Mike was amazed at how deep into the forest Manning had managed to drive it without smashing into a tree and killing his passengers.
Parker was stretched out in the back seat of the police car with his eyes closed. He claimed he was fine, that he didn’t need medical attention, but his complexion was chalk-white and Mike was more than a little concerned about the possibility of the billionaire suffering a heart attack or a stroke. He had called for an ambulance and for backup before entering the woods—both of which were now on the way—but didn’t dare leave Parker and Sharon alone on the side of the road and knew he couldn’t afford to wait for the arrival of backup before ensuring that Earl Manning, the supposedly unstoppable monster, had somehow actually been stopped.
“Where is he?” Mike said softly.
“Front seat,” Sharon answered. Her hands seemed to have mostly stopped shaking and her color, which had been nearly as white as Parker’s just a few minutes ago, was slowly returning.
“And he’s dead?” Mike was dubious. Don Running Bear’s widow had been adamant that there was no way to stop him once he had gained control of the sacred stone.
“He was already dead, remember? What I said was that he’s gone.”
Mike stared at Sharon quizzically; still so relieved to have found her alive and more or less unharmed that he was having trouble concentrating on the matter at hand. Finally he shrugged and opened the car door to step outside and investigate. He didn’t understand, but he and Sharon had been through so much together over the past year, he trusted her implicitly. If she said Manning was gone, then Manning was gone. “Stay here with Mr. Parker and I’ll be right back.”
“The hell I will,” Sharon snapped and opened her door as well. “Parker will be fine. I’m coming with you.”
Mike leaned back into the car and peeked into the back seat. “You’ll be all right?”
Parker nodded and waved his hand as if shooing them away.
“Okay,” Mike said. “This should only take a couple of minutes, anyway, and then we’ll get back out to the road and wait for the EMT’s.” He turned away and began walking toward Sharon’s cruiser, wedged into the Paskagankee forest with both doors on the left side of the vehicle hanging open.
Sharon fell into step beside him and he said, “I’ll send a full investigative team out in a little bit, although it will probably have to be after the State
guys arrive. But before I do anything else I need to see this for myself.” He stopped and looked straight into her laser-blue eyes. They were beautiful as ever. “How did you stop him?”
She took a deep, shuddering breath. She seemed to be recovering, but whatever had gone down out here in this secluded section of the great north woods forest was still weighing heavily on her. “I think it will be easier to explain after you’ve looked inside the car.”
“Fair enough,” Mike answered, and leaned into the cruiser, grabbing the roof over the door for support. What he saw took his breath away. A pile of loosely connected bones lay in the foot well of the cruiser’s passenger side, covered with the filthy, tattered remnants of what had once been Earl Manning’s clothing. Mike recognized the clothes from his altercation with Manning earlier in the day. They looked as though they had been dragged through a sewer—smelled like it, too.
A grinning skull lay on the bench seat, facing him. Its teeth were gone, scattered around the floor of the cruiser. The sagging skin which had covered Manning’s face—another feature Mike recalled from his fight with the revenant—was nowhere to be seen. The skull looked as though the person it belonged to had been dead for weeks, not minutes.
Mike stood and looked over the roof at Sharon, who had moved to the other side of the vehicle. “This makes an explanation easier?”
“I don’t know if there is any logical explanation,” Sharon said. “All I can tell you is what happened, although everything went down so fast, it’s kind of a blur.”
“Give it a try.”
“Okay. You know about the history I had with Earl when I was a teenager, right?”
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