The day got away from me, and by the time I headed for Ronnie’s cabin, the sun already hung low in the sky. I had a couple of hours until dark, but given how late it was in the year, night fell early. I definitely wanted to have Eli out of commission before the sun went down.
Calling the place a “cabin” begged discussion. My house is a cabin, log walls and all, but it’s a three bedroom with a full kitchen and basement, plus a loft. Ronnie’s place was World War II vintage clapboard with a small porch, faded gray paint, and a roof that desperately needed new shingles. The place was the size of two small hotel rooms stuck together, with a minimal galley kitchen thrown in as an extra. It would have been tight for more than one person as a permanent residence, clearly designed for weekend or seasonal use. Out back, a garden shed that had seen better days looked like a stiff wind would knock it over.
Still, I guess I could see the charm, if I squinted. The gray boards of the dock were weathered and warped, but it looked solid. Although trees surrounded the cabin, giving it a secluded feel, the nearest cabin was close enough that I probably could throw a baseball and hit the side of it, if the ball could get through the branches. Town was less than two miles away, so supplies were easy to get. And the overhead wires and meter on the back of the building told me it had the hookups needed for modern life.
I unlocked the door and stepped inside, glad that the lights turned on when I flicked the switch. While the outside needed a coat of paint, a new roof, and some patches to the porch, the inside looked like what I’d expect from the bolt-hole of a crotchety old man. A brown film darkened the walls, and the stench of old cigarette smoke still hung in the air. I sniffed again and reminded myself to warn Ronnie about mold, and maybe a dead opossum somewhere.
The worn and stained furniture sagged, cushions flattened and upholstery threadbare. A faded throw rug showed a clear path where Eli most often walked. Fishing and hunting magazines covered every surface. A boxy TV with rabbit-ears sat on a table opposite the couch.
Taxidermied trophies of deer heads, prize antlers, and one or two big bass covered the walls. Little dangling oddments hung from some of the antlers, like a rustic substitute for a Christmas tree. Dreamcatchers, crystals, a saint’s medallion, and a couple of other ornaments that looked handmade. They might have been decorations, or maybe lucky charms for good fishing. Sportsmen can be just as superstitious as athletes, especially when it came to beseeching the heavens for a good catch.
One glance into the kitchen and the tiny bedroom told me Eli had been living here full time before he kicked the bucket. Canned goods of questionable age lined a shelf on the wall, and a vintage refrigerator hummed in the corner, which I wasn’t about to open. A back door squeezed in between the counter and the fridge. The bedroom held a twin bed, a rickety nightstand, and a small dresser. The bed was unmade, and a few articles of clothing lay on the floor. Apparently, Eli had run out of fucks to give.
Now I wished I’d have asked Louie where old Eli died. That might explain the haunting, although I was a little worried about Ronnie’s claim that Eli looked solid. That usually meant a ghost powerful enough to cause trouble on the poltergeist level. Glancing around at the mess, I wondered what might hold enough emotional connection to keep Eli around.
A faded photograph in a frame with cracked glass sat on the nightstand next to the bed. From the clothing, I figured it was early 1970s. The couple smiling for the picture might have been in their mid-thirties, without a care in the world. I wondered what happened to her, whether she died or left, and how Eli ended up here. A look inside the nightstand drawer turned up nothing significant, and the dresser was mostly empty, with only a few changes of clothing. The bathroom was hardly bigger than an airplane restroom, too bare-bones to hide any secrets.
I walked into the living room as the shadows lengthened and looked out the window toward the creek to glimpse the sunset. An old man sat on the dock with a fishing pole in his hands.
Eli.
I’d brought my bag of gear in with me, and I grabbed an iron knife and the Parmesan cheese shaker I’d filled with salt because the larger openings in the lid let me spray more of Morton’s finest faster. Then I headed out the door toward the wooden dock and my chance to lay this ghost to rest.
The smell hit me as soon as I cleared the front steps. I’d scraped a roadkill deer off the highway in front of my parents’ house one summer, shoveling the bloated, maggot-ridden body into the woods on the other side of the asphalt. I’d thrown up afterward and couldn’t get the smell out of my nose until I put menthol chest rub into both nostrils. This was worse.
“Eli?” I called out. I agreed with Ronnie—whoever sat on the old dock certainly looked solid. I could see a shock of straggly gray hair and a threadbare flannel shirt over stained work pants. His thin frame hunched forward, both hands on the fishing pole. Then he turned toward me, and I realized he only had half a face.
“Fuck, fuckety fuck fuck,” I muttered, back-peddling quickly as zombie-Eli rose from the dock and threw his rod to one side. From the leer on the half of his mouth that still had skin, I guessed he thought I looked like a tastier catch than the pike in the creek.
Just like me to bring a salt-shaker to a zombie fight.
I didn’t stick around to find out whether Eli was a shambler or a sprinter. I turned and ran, slamming the cabin door behind me.
“Fuck,” I muttered for good measure and went to my gear bag. I threw the salt and short iron knife into the duffle, pulled out a steel machete, then looked for my Glock.
Machetes will take a head off real clean, but nothing beats a hollow-point bullet for once and done.
Before I could grab the gun, Eli plowed through the front window and knocked over the couch, trapping my gear bag—and gun—beneath it. I scrambled back, and Eli came over the couch like a cat, a decomposing cat with half its skin missing, eying me like I was the last can of tuna left in the world.
I swung the machete two-handed, aiming for Eli’s neck, but he dodged and took the blow on his shoulder. It should have hacked his rotting arm clean off, but instead, the blade just stuck in the bone. I wrenched it free and ran for the kitchen and the back door. If I could get Eli to chase me, I could circle around, climb in the broken window, and get my gun.
All I could picture were the cartoon chases where the Scooby gang ran in and out of all the doors on a hallway chasing the guy in the mask. Only I was pretty damn sure Eli’s rotting face was no mask.
I reached the back door, threw the bolt, and yanked it open, plunging down into the yard…and falling over nearly-invisible fishing line strung in an intricate web, a trip-wire trap. Either undead-Eli was smarter than the average shambler, or the old guy had been hella paranoid. I’d never know, and if I couldn’t get free of my spider-wire tangle, it wouldn’t matter, because I’d be zombie chow.
Eli reached the top of the steps as I began slashing around myself with the machete, slicing through the thin, strong lines that had me tied up like Gulliver. Eli sprang at me from the steps as I broke the last of the filament tethers, and I rolled to one side, letting him face plant with a squishy splat. He grabbed my ankle with a bony hand as I tried to get to my feet, and I slashed at his wrist. This time, my blade hit true, and I severed it at the joint, with the skeletal fingers still gripped tight around my leg.
I ran for the front of the house to get my gun, managing to get over the sill without impaling myself on any of the glass shards. My tumble over the couch wasn’t nearly as fluid as Eli’s, which says something when I can’t move as well as a fucking zombie. Eli wasn’t far behind me, and in a few seconds, he’d be through that window, and I’d be in big trouble. I kicked the couch to right it, and then grabbed my gear bag, dragging it back, away from the window to buy myself precious seconds. My hand closed on the grip, just as Eli pushed off from the window sill and launched himself at me like an undead zombie frog.
The Glock boomed in the small cabin and the bullet managed to hit Eli in the other sh
oulder, not the head.
Fuck. I had that shot. Just like I’d swung for his neck before. No one could be that lucky.
Lucky.
Shit.
I’d backed up under the antlers festooned with dreamcatchers and crystals. What if one of these damned things actually sort-of worked?
I grabbed the handful of trinkets down from the antlers, and Eli came to a sudden stop. He stared at me, his dead-fish gaze following the sway of the pendants that swung from their tethers. Seemed like confirmation of my theory, and I eyed the charms, trying to figure out which one might be the real thing.
So that left me with a zombie two steps in front of me, a machete in one hand, and the charms in the other, so how the hell was I supposed to burn the damn things? The long-unused fireplace behind me would be the perfect spot. I could salt and burn the charms without setting Ronnie’s cabin on fire. But the minute I took my eyes off dead Eli, he’d have his zombie chompers on my neck. I had no desire to find out whether his kind of undead was contagious.
Our standoff couldn’t last forever. So I did the only logical thing.
I attacked.
Eli’s rotting brains hadn’t expected me to go Rambo on his ass. I gave a full-throated battle cry and lunged forward, slamming the machete through Eli’s chest and out the other side, taking him down to the floor with enough force to stick the tip of the knife deep into the boards.
I scrambled backward, covered with slime and goo, as Eli flailed like a gigged frog. The charms clinked in the fireplace when I hurled them, and after another couple of seconds, I’d retrieved the lighter fluid and salt from my bag. Eli flopped and wriggled, and he’d tear the hilt of the machete right through his ribs if I didn’t hurry.
A douse of lighter fluid and a spray of salt, and then I flicked my Bic and threw the disposable lighter into the fireplace. The charms went up in a Butane flare, and a heartbeat later, so did what remained of Eli, crumbling into a pile of ashes around my soot-streaked knife.
Relief coursed through me, and I stumbled, catching myself on the mantle before I fell. The cabin looked like it had been hit by…a rampaging zombie. I pulled my machete free and reached for my phone. Ronnie was going to need to do something about that window.
Chapter 3
“What makes you think this is my kind of job?” I asked when Louie caught me outside the body shop just as I was closing up.
“Because three kids are missing from a bus shelter, and the only thing we’ve got is a footprint in the mud that looks like Bigfoot,” Louie replied. “We’re running down everything we can through regular channels, but if this isn’t a…normal…perp, then we’re going to hit a wall. And if those kids might still be alive, we can’t afford to waste time.”
I pulled off my ball cap and wiped my sleeve over my forehead before I dug my key out of my pocket, opened the door, and motioned Louie toward my office.
The place smelled of grease and motor oil, with an undertone of burnt coffee. My desk, as usual, sat piled high with papers. Pete took care of everything he could, but when it came to official stuff, the buck stopped with me. I groaned inwardly, looking at a solid morning’s worth of administrivia I’d need to sort through, and then pushed it aside and turned my attention back to Louie.
“A big footprint? That’s all you’ve got?”
Louie shrugged. “Three middle-schoolers vanished. Their backpacks were still in the bus shelter. We found the footprint at the edge of the woods, but the rest of the ground was too hard to pick up anything else. Searched the forest all the way down to the quarry, but came up with nothing.”
“Hart’s Quarry?”
“Yeah. They closed it a couple of years ago and just reopened a section back a few weeks, but the new dig is on the other side, and we didn’t pick up anything near there.”
I tried to remember what I knew about the quarry. When I was in high school, it was a favorite place to sneak off for some underage beer drinking. Been to more than a few parties in the quarry back in the day, until the cops got wise and started patrolling. Hart’s Quarry sat back in the woods between half a dozen farms. It had been working its way through a large hill, hauling away gravel, for decades. Just a big pit with some construction equipment. I couldn’t remember hearing about any gruesome deaths, which made it even less likely for the disappearances to have a supernatural cause.
“I’ll check it out, but are you sure the kids didn’t just run away?”
Louie gave me a look that said I was a dumbass. “And go where? Their parents saw them off at seven thirty in the morning. Mrs. McNamara waved at them at seven forty-five on her way to a doctor’s appointment. The bus driver says that when he pulled up at eight oh-one, no one was in the shelter, but he saw their bags, and that’s when he called the cops. They never showed up at school, and they haven’t come home. I don’t think they hailed a cab,” he added sarcastically. Out here in the middle of farm country, cabs were a rarity, something we were more likely to see on TV than in real life.
“Okay,” I agreed, rubbing the back of my neck. “I’ll go take a look, but if I find anything, I’m betting it’ll toss the ball back in your court.”
Louie let out a long breath. “Frankly, if you just turned up a lead, I’d be happy. Right now, we’ve got three missing kids and no leads. Except one.”
I looked up. “Yeah?”
“Carl Kinney lives at one of the farms that is assigned to that bus stop. He’s in the same school as the missing kids, but he quit taking the bus last week. Said it was ‘creepy.’”
“Huh.” I slid a hand over my jaw and realized I needed a shave. “I know where the Kinney farm is. Think his folks would let him talk to me?”
“I’ll call them. His cousin Jake is one of the ones who vanished. Pretty sure they’ll do whatever they can to help.”
Well, fuck. I hadn’t planned to spend the next couple of days on a hunt, but I couldn’t walk away from a case like this, not if I might be able to help. I still thought Louie was grasping at straws, but if he was desperate enough to risk the raised eyebrows of getting the local “ghost chaser” involved, the least I could do was sniff around.
I headed out to the Kinney farm an hour later, after I’d had a chance to shower, change clothes, and wolf down a sandwich. I tried to time my arrival to miss dinner and sighed when I got there and found the family still at the table. Mrs. Kinney hurried over to let me in. She was a comfortably plump woman with a short blond bob and a firm set to her jaw. I guessed that she was five or six years older than I was and pushed my mind away from dwelling on the fact that other people my age had families and tween children. I had a dog and a reputation as a crazy monster hunter.
“Mr. Wojcik. Come in. Officer Marino said to expect you. Have you eaten?”
“Thank you, but yes. Sorry to interrupt—”
“No interruption,” she said firmly. “Coffee?”
I smiled, giving in gracefully, since I didn’t think she’d stop until she’d supplied me with some kind of hospitality. “Please. Black with sugar.” She hurried away, then returned with a generously-sized mug and motioned me toward the living room.
“Please, sit down. I’ll get Carl.”
She didn’t return, but a young man who looked about fourteen shuffled in. Carl Kinney was all awkwardly long limbs, and he hadn’t grown into his hands or feet. By the size of his sneakers, I figured he was due for a growth spurt that might put him on the basketball team.
Carl sat down opposite me but still didn’t look up. Lank dark hair fell into his eyes, and even in the soft lighting of the side table lamp, I could see a sprinkling of acne. “I told the cops everything I know,” he said quietly.
“I’m sorry to make you repeat,” I said as gently as I could. I remembered being his age and how much it sucked, no longer a kid and not quite an adult. “But I look at things a little differently, and maybe I’ll pick something up the cops didn’t.”
Carl looked at me then, and his pale blue eyes were troubled.
“You’ll just make fun of me, like everyone else.”
“I promise that won’t happen. Louie—Officer Marino—said something about you not wanting to wait at the bus shelter?”
Carl nodded and dropped his gaze again. “I didn’t mind all of last year, or before that. We’ve always waited at that shelter. But lately, it just felt…strange. Like somebody was watching us. I tried to tell the others, but they just laughed it off, said I’d been watching too many horror movies. And then a couple times, I swear I saw something in the woods. But nobody else did, and they wouldn’t believe me. That’s when I asked Mom to drive me to school.” He sagged against the couch cushions, braced for mockery.
“What did you see in the woods?” I asked. His head came up fast, searching my expression to see if I was pulling his leg. He must have found what he needed because he finally relaxed.
“I’m not sure,” Carl said carefully. “It’s not real sunny out at that time of day, you know? But it didn’t move like a deer, and it looked bigger than a person. I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was watching us.”
“Did you ever go looking for it?”
Carl’s eyes widened. “Hell—I mean heck—no. If it wasn’t real, I didn’t want the others to tease me about taking them on a wild goose chase. And if it was real, I didn’t want to catch it.”
“When did you first see it? How long ago?”
Carl was quiet, thinking for a moment. “About two weeks ago. When it didn’t go away, that’s when I asked Mom for a lift. The others wouldn’t listen to me. I should have argued more—”
“Dude, you tried. It’s not on you if they wouldn’t listen. And we don’t know what happened yet, so maybe they’re all right. You’re sure they didn’t decide to go on some crazy road trip? Ditch school and run off to the big city?”
He snorted. “Where? Pittsburgh?” Carl shook his head. “Nah. And they wouldn’t leave their stuff. Caitlin and Jay, they’d never go anywhere without their packs. Or their phones.”
Open Season Page 3