On Monday, shortly after crossing the Vermont/New Hampshire state line, he came across Link Frazier changing the wheel on his truck and knew it was time to begin again.
Link was seventy, moved like he was fifty, and came on to young women like he was seventeen, but changing a tire was still a damn chore. Link used to own Reed’s bar in Easton, but back then it was called The Missing Link, on account of the fact that his wife used to joke that whenever there was hard work to be done, Lincoln Frazier was always unaccountably absent. When Myra died ten years ago, some of the spark had gone out of Link and he sold the bar to Eddy Reed, on condition that Eddy change the name of the bar to something else. The joke seemed less funny, now that Myra was gone.
Link’s knees weren’t what they once were, so he was kind of pleased when the red Dodge Charger pulled up in front of him and the driver got out. He was younger than Link, decades younger, and wore faded blue jeans and an antique black leather vest over his equally faded denim shirt. From beneath the frayed ends of his jeans peeked the pointed toes of a pair of snakeskin cowboy boots. His hair was black and long, slicked back against his head, with the parallel tracks of a wide-toothed comb visible among the strands. The hair was thin, though, and the white of his skull gleamed between the rows like rainwater shining on a rutted mud track.
The driver reached into his car and removed a battered straw cowboy hat from the passenger seat, then placed it carefully on his head. An oval of white material was stuck to the front of the hat. It looked as if it had been torn from a pair of coveralls, the kind worn by auto shop mechanics, and written on it was the word Buddy in red cursive script.
As the Dodge’s owner drew closer, Link got his first good look at the man’s face, slightly shadowed though it was by his hat. His cheeks were very gaunt, so that Link could see the tendons move as his jaws worked, chewing at something in the corner of his mouth. His lips were deep red, almost black, and his eyeballs bulged slightly in their sockets, as though he were slowly being choked by a pair of unseen hands. He was almost ugly, yet he carried himself with a kind of grace. There was a purposefulness about him, despite the laid-back air his clothing and manner seemed calculated to communicate.
“You having some trouble?” he asked.
His voice had a distinct Southern twang to it, although Link had the feeling he was exaggerating it a little, the way some men will do when they believe that a certain quality adds to their charm.
“Took a nail back a ways,” said Link.
“Flatter than a pancake, that’s for sure,” said the man.
He knelt down beside Link.
“Let me do that,” he said. “No offense. I know you can do it yourself. I know you could probably lift the whole damn truck without a jack, but just because you can do a thing doesn’t mean you should have to do it.”
Link decided to accept the compliment, excessive though it was, and the help that came with it. He rose, and watched as the man in the cowboy hat swiftly loosened the wheel nuts and hoisted the tire off. He was stronger than he looked, thought Link. The older man had been planning to beat on the tire iron with the heel of his boot to loosen the nuts, but this guy just flipped them free with barely a stretch of his back. Pretty soon the tire was changed with the minimum of fuss or conversation, which suited Link just fine. Link wasn’t much for polite conversation, least of all with strangers, didn’t matter how many tires they changed. When he owned The Missing Link, it was Myra who did the charming and Link who dealt with the beer and liquor people.
The cowboy stood, took a bright blue rag from his pocket, and wiped his hands clean.
“I appreciate your help,” said Link.
He stretched out his hand in thanks. “The name’s Link Frazier.”
The cowboy looked at Link’s outstretched palm the way a child molester might respond to an unexpected flash of young thigh in a playground. He finished cleaning his hands, put the rag back in his pocket, then shook Link’s hand in return. Link felt an unpleasant sensation, as if there were bugs crawling on his skin. He tried to hide it, but he felt sure that the cowboy had seen the change in his expression.
“Buddy Carson,” said the cowboy.
He had noticed Link’s response. Buddy was finely attuned to the rhythms of other people’s bodies. It made him good at what he did.
“It was my pleasure,” said Buddy, as the cells in Link’s body started to metastasize and his liver began to rot.
He tipped the fingers of his right hand to his hat, gave Link a little salute, and headed back to his car.
Later that day, Buddy picked up a waitress in a bar over by Danbury. She was fortyish and overweight. Nobody would have called her good-looking, but Buddy worked her pretty well and by the end of a night’s drinking he had convinced her that they were kindred spirits: two lonely but decent people who’d taken some knocks in life, but who had somehow managed to pull through. They went back to her place, a neat little two-bedroom duplex that smelled faintly of musty clothing, and Buddy rattled her bed and her bones. She told Buddy that it had been a long time, that it was just what she needed. She moaned beneath him, and he closed his eyes as he moved upon her.
It was easier when he could get inside people, when he could touch the interior of their mouths with his finger, maybe cut them slightly with a nail. Open wounds were good too, and even a kiss, if he could force the lips apart and get a bite in, but sex was best of all. With sex, it worked faster, so that he could stay and watch with little risk to himself.
The second time, the tone of her sounds changed. She asked him to stop. She said there was something wrong. Buddy didn’t stop. Once it started, it couldn’t be held back. That was the way of it. When he finished, she was already breathing more shallowly, and some of the flesh had receded from her face. Her fingers were like talons gripping the sheets, and her back arched with pain. She couldn’t speak.
There was some blood now. That was good. It was red, but soon it would turn to black.
Buddy sat back on the sheets and lit himself a cigarette.
It was slowly getting worse.
There was a time when once a week would have been enough to ease the pain, but no longer. Now, once daily permitted him to rest for a time, but only for a couple of blessed hours. If he managed to corrupt more than one, the hours without agony increased exponentially, but the risk was that folk would notice, so multiple victims were rarely an option for him.
That morning’s troubles were a sign that the thing inside him was becoming harder to control, and to sate. The black blood began to appear while he was making water. Pretty soon he was coughing it up, soaking the towels. He was only just recovering when the fat maid entered the room. He wondered if she would tell anyone about it, and felt certain that she would. He got a sense of her as he held her, his skin working against hers, the rottenness within him seeking purchase in the new host.
He would have to move on soon, but he was so weak.
There was another option, of course, but it represented an enormous gamble. He had been turning it over in his mind for some time, calculating the odds, assessing the risks. Now, with his own pain increasing and the presence of the black fluid in his urine, the prospect was growing more and more enticing. If one offered temporary ease, he reasoned, and two doubled the time he could sleep, what would happen if he took on more, many more? He thought about the family in Colorado: after them, the pain was gone for days, and even when it returned it was diminished considerably, so that taking the waitress had been more out of desire than out of necessity. What might happen if he corrupted a town, a city? Weeks, perhaps months of respite might ensue. Maybe he could even rid himself of it entirely. The possibility of an extended peace dangled invitingly within his grasp.
This was a small community. Under ordinary circumstances, it would be hard to reach out to enough people, but when he had taken a walk the day before he saw something that caused him to reconsider his options. He spent the rest of the day thinking about it, weighing the p
ros and cons and trying to work out how best it might be done.
That morning, with the black blood pooling in the bowl, he reached a decision. He would make a stand here, in Easton, then head north and find somewhere quiet to rest for the winter, maybe forever. His eyes were closing: touching the maid had clouded the pain enough to enable him to sleep. He put the chain on the motel room door, then stretched out on the bed and began to dream.
The cowboy’s name was not Buddy Carson.
The cowboy didn’t have a name, not now. There might have been one a long time ago, but if there was, then it had been lost to him for many years. His new life began on the day he awoke in the middle of the Nevada desert wearing ragged clothes and with tumors on his skin. He had no memory of any existence before that. His insides felt as though they were being slowly roasted, and when he squeezed his hands to his stomach to try to ease the pain, black blood shot from beneath his nails.
At last, he found the strength to rise. He made his way to the highway and thumbed a ride from a garage mechanic who was hauling a red Dodge Charger over to a dealer in Reno. The mechanic had spent months restoring the Dodge in his spare time and now figured that he was about to make a good profit by selling it.
The cowboy felt the growing pain in his insides ease the moment his hand accidentally brushed the mechanic’s hand. Most of the tumors were hidden beneath his clothes, but after he touched the mechanic he could see the one that peeped out from under the cuff of his shirtsleeve begin to fade. Within seconds, it was entirely gone.
The cowboy touched the driver again.
“Hey, the fuck are you doing, man?” said the mechanic. “Keep your hands away from me, you fucking faggot.”
He started to pull over. There were no other cars visible on the highway.
“Get out,” he said. “Get the fuck out of my—”
The cowboy grasped the mechanic’s right arm, then clasped his left hand around the man’s throat. He squeezed. A trickle of blood appeared in the mechanic’s nostril, then dripped down over his lips and chin. The force of the flow began to increase, and the color of the blood began to darken until it turned a deep black. As the cowboy watched, the skin around the mechanic’s eyes began to tighten. His skin grew waxy, and his cheekbones grew sharp in his face.
And for the first time, the cowboy had an image of something inside of himself, like a great black worm that had found purchase within him. It lay in his bowels, feeding off him, slowly turning his cells to black, simultaneously destroying all that was human about him while keeping him alive, pumping its unknown poisons into his system. If it had a consciousness, then it was beyond the cowboy’s capacity to understand. All he knew was that it had chosen him as its host, and if he did not do what it wanted, then it would destroy him.
The cowboy howled, and his fingers broke through the mechanic’s neck and into his flesh. He felt a pressure building in his arm, and then his fingers straightened convulsively as the poison erupted through the pores of his skin. The sockets of the mechanic’s eyes flooded with darkness. He stopped struggling, even as the cowboy’s own pain faded, and then was gone.
The cowboy buried the mechanic’s body in the desert. He kept his wallet, and when night fell he found the mechanic’s apartment and spent the night there. As he rested up, he thought of the image of the worm in his body. He didn’t know if it was really there or was simply his mind’s way of trying to explain to itself what was happening to him. He decided to talk to a doctor as soon as possible, although in his dreams that night the worm inside him spoke to him, its blind head splitting to reveal a barbed mouth, and it told him that no doctor could ever help him, and that his purpose in life was not to be cured, but to spread the Black Word.
Despite his dream, he visited a doctor’s office the next day. He told the old man who examined him of his pain, and of the dark blood that he had coughed up in the desert. The doctor listened to him, then opened a syringe and prepared to take a sample.
The agony as the needle entered was impossible for the cowboy to bear. As soon as it penetrated his skin, he felt the worm in his being convulse, as though the needle were entering through his stomach wall and puncturing his internal organs, scraping and tearing as it went. His screams brought the doctor’s receptionist, and he took them both, just as he had taken the mechanic.
But the pain did not go away that night, and he felt that he was being punished for his temerity in trying to cure himself.
The mechanic lived alone and received no calls that were not related to his business. The cowboy kept the Charger as a souvenir, as well as a pair of the mechanic’s overalls. When they began to fall apart, he held on to the mechanic’s name badge, which he attached to a straw hat he took from a drifter outside of Boise, Idaho. He already had the boots. They had been on his feet when he came to in the desert, and they felt as if he had been wearing them for years.
The mechanic’s name was Buddy, so that was what the cowboy decided to call himself. As for Carson, well, that was his private joke. He had found the word in a medical book for folks suffering from cancer, and Buddy figured that it pretty much summed up what he was, or what he had become. He was Buddy Carcinogenic, Buddy Carson for short.
By the time folks might come to understand the humor, they were already dying.
III
Lopez drove around the streets, letting folks see that he was on the job. Like most small towns, Easton was a peaceful place with little real crime beyond petty theft, the occasional bar fight, and the omnipresent shadow of domestic violence. Lopez dealt with all of it as best he could. In a way, he suited the town: there were probably better cops than him, he figured, but there couldn’t have been too many who tried as hard.
After a couple of hours, during which he did nothing more than hand out a speeding ticket to a salesman doing sixty in a forty-mile zone and warn off a couple of kids who were skate-boarding in the bank’s parking lot, he slipped into Steve DiVentura’s diner for coffee and a sandwich. He was about to take a seat at the counter when he saw Doc Bradley alone in a deuce by the window, so he asked Steve to send his order over.
“Mind if I join you?” he asked.
Greg Bradley looked as if he’d been jolted out of a reverie, although Lopez didn’t think it was one that he was particularly sorry to leave. Bradley was about Lopez’s age, but pure whitebread: tanned, blond hair, good teeth, and money to his name. Lopez guessed that he could have earned a whole lot more for his services someplace other than Easton, but his family was from the country and he had a genuine attachment to the area and its people. Lopez could understand that. He shared Bradley’s view.
He also suspected that Bradley was gay, although he had never broached the subject with him. He could see why the doctor might want to keep that quiet. Most people in Easton were pretty tolerant—after all, they had a black mayor and a police chief with a Hispanic name in a town that was 90 percent white—but patients were funny about their doctors, and there were some who would drive to Boston for a consultation before they would allow an openly gay man to touch them, and that went for women as well as men. So Greg Bradley remained single, and mostly the folks in Easton chose not to comment on the fact. It was the way things were done in small towns.
“Sure, take a seat.”
Bradley’s tuna on rye had barely been touched and his coffee looked cold.
“Glad I didn’t order the tuna,” said Lopez.
“Tuna’s fine,” said Bradley. “It’s me that’s not so good.”
A waitress brought Lopez his coffee and told him his sandwich was on the way. He thanked her.
“Anything I can do to help?” asked Lopez.
“Not unless you can work miracles. I guess you’ll find out soon enough, but you may as well hear it from me first. Link Frazier has cancer.”
Lopez leaned back in his seat. He genuinely didn’t know what to say. Link seemed to have been a fixture around the town for as long as he could remember. Lopez had even dated one of his daug
hters, many years before. Link had been good about the whole thing, not even holding it against Lopez that he’d dumped her one week before senior prom.
Well, not holding it against him for more than a couple of years, anyway.
“How bad?”
“He’s riddled with it, as bad as I’ve ever seen. He approached me a couple of days back, first time he ever came near me. He’d passed blood that morning, a lot of it. He might have hated the idea of seeing a doctor about anything, but he knew there was something seriously wrong. I sent him for tests that afternoon, and they called me later that night with the results. Hell, I don’t think they even had to wait for the biopsies. The X-ray was enough. Looks like the liver’s where it’s worst, but it’s spread to his spine and most of his other major organs. I spoke to his son this morning, and he gave me the all-clear to start telling people close to his father.”
“Jesus. How long has he got?”
Bradley shook his head. “Not long. The thing of it is, he swears he had no pain before a couple of days ago, and no symptoms until the blood appeared. It’s almost impossible to believe.”
“Link’s strong. He could lose an arm and he wouldn’t notice until he tried to wind his watch.”
“Nobody is that strong. Believe me, he should have been in agony for months.”
Lopez’s sandwich arrived, but, like Bradley, he no longer had much of an appetite.
“Where is he?”
“Manchester. I think they’ll keep him there until…well, until the end.”
The two men sat in silence, watching the life of the town pass by the window. People waved, and they waved back, but their smiles were automatic and without warmth.
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