by J. R. Ayers
The menus came and Joe ordered two orders of beef ramaki for an appetizer along with orange chicken as the later main course. When the waitress left, Joe settled into what he hoped was easy conversation.
“So, how long you been a cop?”
“Almost three years.”
“Just up and decided one day that you’d like to wear a badge, huh?” She smiled briefly and toyed with her napkin.
“It wasn’t like that,” she said. “After high school, I took criminal justice at the College of West Virginia. Mama left a little insurance money that pretty much covered the tuition. After I graduated, I didn’t know what to do with myself. Then I heard they were hiring deputies in Stephenson and I applied. Got the job right away, too. I’ve always expected they just hired to say they had a woman on the force. You know, that, political correctness garbage.”
“I get the impression you don’t care much for women’s lib,” Joe said.
“I don’t need it. I like to do things on my own.”
Joe let the conversation lull while he dug into his orange chicken. A few moments later, with soy sauce greasing his chin he asked, “What’s the story with Glen, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Glen’s great,” she said. “I know he loved my mother.”
“What happened to your father?”
“Car wreck. A head on at the bottom of Tams Mountain. That stretch of road by the river has seen more fatalities than any road in the county. I was just a kid. I don’t remember much about him.”
“So Glen helped raise you and your brother?”
“Yeah. He’s a good man. A Godly man. The only time I ever saw him break down was when Mom died of breast cancer. He blamed the devil. He said it was an evil spirit of cancer that took her life. I don’t think I agree with him, though. People die. It was just Mom’s turn.” She handed Joe a napkin and told him to wipe his chin. “Okay, what’s your story?” she asked.
“Not worth discussing, Joe said. “Spent a little time in the Army, then followed a buddy to Chicago where I joined the south side patrol. Got tired of the rat race, came home, joined the State Police, got married, got divorced, and, here I am.”
“Tell me about your ex-wife,” she said coyly.
“There’s not much to tell. We met at an investment seminar hosted by the Beckley Chamber of Commerce. She was a teller at the Mountain State bank, I was a rookie State Trooper, sparks flew, hearts melted and bam, six months later, we were married.”
“Any kids from this union?” Lori asked.
“Yep, one little adorable girl. Her name’s Chandra.”
“Oh what a pretty name. Do you see her often?”
“Not often enough,” Joe said tersely.
He decided it was high time to change the subject. “How's your brother doing?”
“Still in a coma,” Lori said softly. “Kara’s sitting with him around the clock.”
“And your uncle?”
“I called Helen earlier. He. . . he’s not doing well at all. But. . .”
“But there’s always a chance,” Joe finished for her. She nodded and dabbed at the corner of her eye with a finger tip.
“Just gotta keep praying,” she whispered.
The appetizer came and the conversation turned to the events of the last few days. “I want your honest assessment,” Joe said. “What do you think happened to make those two men go off like that?” Lori swallowed a bit of water chestnut and said,
“I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. In Charlie’s case, I have to think it was stress. What with his injury and losing the ability to work full time, I think it affected him more than most people realized. As far as the other guy—”
“You mean Sayers?”
“Yeah. I didn’t know him, so. . . “ She shrugged and took a sip of green tea. “What do you think?”
He shared his theory about the possibility of toxic gas infecting the men. She wasn’t buying it. “That would have affected everyone who went down in the mine,” she said. “No, there has to be another explanation.”
“Maybe Glen is right, Joe ventured. “Maybe some kind of booger got loose down there and possessed them.” Lori looked up from her plate, a bewildered smile spreading across her face.
“Not you too,” she said. “Please not you too.”
Chapter Twenty
While most everyone else in Stephenson was attending late afternoon funerals, Emily Morton had the unfortunate experience of working the Tuesday afternoon shift at the make shift morgue set up in the back of the clinic. By any measure, it wasn’t an assignment she relished; she’d much rather be getting ready for a date with that good looking, hunk, Billy Woods. He’d finally asked her a week earlier to go to the Pineville Drive In Movies with him and she’d said her schedule would allow her to make it the following Tuesday night. Finally, a date with someone she could possibly take off her panties for.
And then over the weekend, some nut was rude enough to shoot up the town and ruin everything.
So here she was in the back of the clinic on a lovely afternoon filling out forms and keeping an eye on the body the morgue guys had brought in the day before. The word was some cop had shot him up at the Logan number 12 coal mine. The morgue tech, who she remembered from mortuary school, said the guy was crazy and he was trying to hit people with a coal shovel. A State cop had to shoot him dead when he wouldn’t drop the shovel. “They’ll be more bodies comin’ later,” the tech told her. “An explosion and rock fall killed at least five miners up there. “As soon as they get the bodies out, they’ll be headin’ your way.”
Great, Emily thought, pushing aside the corned beef sandwich she’s picked up at Kole’s deli on her way to work. She was starting to second guess her decision to attend mortuary school. Should have went into the Navy like I originally wanted, she reflected. I could have gotten an education, seen the world, and screwed as many sailor boys as I pleased. Yeah, I should have joined the friggin’ Navy.
While Emily labored over her documents and second guessed her recent life decisions, the Thing inside Buddy Sayers was waking up from a long nap. After transporting him from the coal mine, they had placed him on a stainless steel gurney and stored him in a cold room in the back of the clinic until he could be transported to Beckley for an autopsy.
Big mistake, the Thing thought as it worked incorporeal fingers into Buddy’s heart and lungs.
At precisely four p.m. Buddy Sayers opened his eyes and sucked in a huge breath. He looked around the stark, white room, disoriented, and a little confused. “Get up,” the Thing said. “Don’t worry about where you are. Get up and get moving.”
Buddy slid off the gurney and the white sheet that had been covering him fell to the floor leaving him completely naked. Two black irregular holes stood out in stark contrast against the pale flesh in the center of his chest. He remained still for a moment breathing deeply, and then, at the Thing’s prompting, walked unsteadily to the door and turned the knob.
Emily Morton looked up from her paperwork and immediately let out a high-pitched scream. It wasn’t much of a scream; more like a squeak that cut off sharply in mid squeak as the air rushed from her lungs.
Buddy began to grin and said, “Pussy.”
Finding her voice, and her feet, Emily delivered a full throated shriek and bolted for the door leading out to the emergency room. Fueled by the Thing growing ever more powerful in his head, Buddy leapt across the desk and grabbed Emily by the hair. She struggled to pull away from his grip, but he wound his fingers around the elastic band in her hair and yanked her backwards. She landed on her back on the desk and Buddy was instantly on top of her sporting a giant erection. “No, no, nooooo!” she screamed. “Don’t—”
Buddy’s right fist slammed into her open mouth bursting her lips like over ripe grapes. His left fist knocked four of her front teeth down her throat. As she choked on blood and shattered bicuspids, Buddy ripped off her underwear and began to rape her.
When he wa
s finished, the Thing told him to cut her throat with a scalpel he found on a cart near the desk. She pleaded for him to stop, but her whimpering cries only convinced the Thing to make Buddy cut her even deeper. By the time she had stopped screaming, her face and neck looked more like hamburger meat than human flesh.
She died with a bloody scalpel protruding from one eye and an ingrained image of an utterly deranged Buddy Sayers in the other.
After dinner, Joe drove Lori back to Stephenson. “I had a wonderful time,” she said as they sat in Joe’s cruiser in front of her house.
“Same here. We have to do it again sometime.” A tentative smile played across her lips and she said,
“We’ll see.”
She didn’t seem in a hurry to leave the car, so Joe asked her what her plans were going forward. “I guess I’ll just keeping working with Major Gaston and the County sheriff,” she said. “I suppose the mayor will eventually hold a special election to fill the city sheriff’s position. So, unless I hear differently, I’ll just show up everyday and do what I’m told.”
“Why don’t you run?” Joe asked.
“Run? Run where?”
“For sheriff. Throw your name in the hat. You’d make a fine sheriff, Lori.” She pshawed and pooh-poohed the suggestion to the point that Joe had to laugh at her animated expression. “Why not?” he pressed.
“These people aren’t going to elect a woman sheriff,” she said. “Especially a twenty-five year old barely out of school woman like me.”
“Why, are they all a bunch of Neanderthals?”
“No. But let’s just say their attitudes more closely reflect what was common in the middle part of the twentieth century verses what we define as popular culture today.”
“Dang, you’re awfully smart and articulate for an ole’ hillbilly girl,” Joe said grinning.
“Let’s just say I’m smart enough to know when I’m being bull-shitted,” she said returning the grin.
While Joe and Lori chatted away in the cruiser, the Buddy-Thing, naked as a newborn baby, stopped long enough to wolf down Emily’s sandwich, wrapper and all, and then slipped out the back entrance of the clinic. As he made his way down a sloped ramp, an ambulance pulled up to a pair of dumpsters marked with Bio-hazard logos and a man began unloading plastic bags of waste material, most likely packaging from gauze pads, saline bottles and IV tubing.
Buddy slipped up behind the man, grabbed his head with both hands, and twisted until he heard a sound that closely resembled the snap of a breaking branch. When Buddy let go of his head, the man went limp and twitched a couple of times before falling to the ground.
Buddy was a big man, well over two hundred pounds and nearly six feet tall. The ambulance attendant was no more than one eighty and an inch or two shy of five ten. The size difference didn’t stop the Thing from instructing Buddy to strip the man and put on his clothes, however. The trousers barely covered his shins and the arms of the white medic coat stopped a good four inches above Buddy’s wrists. He looked ridiculous, but the Thing had other interest besides critiquing fashion.
Climbing into the ambulance, Buddy fired up the engine and peeled out of the parking lot. As he drove, the Thing was talking to him: “Got to get back to the mine. Got to find a place to hide in the rock. Got to get stronger so we can destroy all these people who have hurt us.”
As he approached Main Street, Buddy hooked a hard left turn on his way to the highway. A Raleigh County deputy lounging in his patrol car beside Homer Day’s gas station heard tires squealing and immediately turned on his roof lights when he saw the ambulance speeding past him. “Better pull over,” the Thing said. “All we need is to have the whole town after us.”
Dutifully, Buddy pulled over to the side of the road and waited for the officer to approach the driver’s side window. “Goin’ on a call?” the deputy asked. Buddy nodded.
“Yep. Yep. Yep.”
The deputy took a closer look at Buddy, noting his pale, waxen complexion and ill-fitting clothes and put his hand on his service weapon. “Get out of the ambulance,” he said brusquely. Buddy reached through the open window and grabbed the deputy by the throat. He squeezed until the man stopped clawing at his arms and slumped against the side of the ambulance. Then Buddy floored the gas and drove off, leaving the deputy on the ground gasping for air.
Joe had just said goodnight to Lori and returned to the cruiser when he heard the radio squawking an officer needs assistance call. He’d set his car radio on the local frequency after arriving to help out on Saturday and had yet to change the channel back to a Beckley frequency.
He picked up his mic to respond to the frantic message, but Major Gaston’s voice came on asking the officer for more detail. The deputy was having trouble speaking, but Joe was able to make out that an ambulance had just been jacked from the clinic. He’d no sooner heard the transmission when a Med-Star ambulance came zooming down the street right behind him heading in the direction of State Route 16.
Joe didn’t give it a second thought. He made a wide turn in the middle of Lori’s driveway and took off after the ambulance as fast as the narrow, car-lined street would allow. His radio kept squawking intermittent chatter, most of it unintelligible, but he did pick bits and pieces of a description of the suspected carjacker. “That can’t be,” he said to the radio. Someone, probably the responding deputy, had just described a man who sounded to Joe like the man he’d shot at the coal mine the day before. “Buddy Sayers?” he said incredulously. “Naw, somebody’s mistaken. Somebody’s all confused.”
The ambulance, with its hellish occupant, pulled onto State Route 16 and turned left heading in the direction of the Logan number 12 coal mine. Joe was right on its tail, lights flashing and siren blaring. As he drove, he tried raising Major Gaston on the radio, but as he traveled further away from town, the transmission broke up to the point where two-way communication was virtually impossible. He finally gave up and concentrated on catching up with the ambulance.
Whoever it is driving sure has some skills, Joe thought as he pressed the accelerator a little closer to the floor mat. The ambulance was straddling the center line as it barreled down the highway flashing its lights at on-coming traffic. “He’s gonna kill somebody,” Joe muttered between clenched teeth.
A tractor trailer roared past blasting its air horn. Up ahead, a Toyota Prius skidded off the road in an attempt to avoid a head on collision with the speeding ambulance. Joe finally caught up and tucked the cruiser in behind the ambulance, maneuvering as close to the back bumper as he dared.
They drove that way for several minutes, at times pegging eighty miles an hour. Joe was sweating through his Polo shirt and the back of his neck felt as if someone had opened a warm tap above his head. Ignoring the discomfort, he blotted sweat from his eyes with the back of his hand and kept driving.
It took him completely by surprise when the ambulance suddenly turned off Route 16 and headed up the access road to the Logan number 12 mine. Standing on the brakes, Joe executed a sharp u-turn and steered the cruiser up the access road in pursuit of the fleeing ambulance.
While he wrestled with the steering wheel, he called Lori Mackay on his cell phone. As soon as she answered, he told her what was going on and asked her to get in touch with Major Gaston. “Tell him where I am,” Joe said. “And send a couple of cops out this way. Maybe Covey and Goins, at least one of them.”
“I’m coming too,” Lori said before Joe could hang up.”
“No, one of those troopers will be enough.”
“But, Joe, you don’t even have a weapon,” she said. “You’re suspended, remember?”
“I’ll be fine. Just get another car headed this way.” He hung up before she could argue and floored the gas in an effort to catch up with the speeding ambulance.
He got his wish a moment later. As the ambulance rounded a sharp bend in the road, a deer darted across the gravel and slammed into the right front quarter panel. The impact caused the ambulance to lurch to the
left, careen up on two tires and flip over on its side. The back door flew open, and an empty gurney rolled out and went clattering over the side of the road into the ditch.
Joe slammed on his brakes and hopped out of the cruiser in time to see Buddy Sayers crawl from the broken driver’s side window and sprint off into the woods beyond the road. Any doubts Joe had that the hijacker was Buddy Sayers melted away when the man stopped and turned to look at him. “Shoot me now, motherfucker,” Buddy said grinning. Then he turned and ran into the thick brush flanking the woods beyond the road bed.
Joe took off after him, not sure what he’d do if he caught him. What could he do with a dead man? The question alone sent shivers down Joe’s spine. Had the medical people been wrong? Had Buddy somehow survived the two 9mm rounds that hit him center mass right above the heart? Not unless he was wearing Kevlar, Joe thought. And he knew damn well that was not the case.
Confusion and disbelief aside, Joe pushed his way through the brush following the path that Buddy’s large body had made in the lush undergrowth. He could hear the man crashing through thickets of blackberry bushes just to the right of a stand of White Oak trees. As he angled that way, Joe didn’t see a root protruding from the ground between the trees until it was too late. He tried to break his fall by twisting sideways, but the instinctive move threw him off balance and he fell heavily on his left ankle. Pain laced up his leg like liquid fire as he cried out in anguish.
He knew he was hurt bad. The chase was over, Sayers would get away, and that realization bothered Joe almost as much as his twisted ankle.
He fished his cell phone out of his pocket and was dialing up Lori when a shadow fell over his face. He looked up to see Buddy Sayers standing over him with a large rock held over his head poised to strike what Joe knew would be a fatal blow.
But the blow never came. Buddy dropped the rock and staggered backwards as an arrow penetrated his back and pierced his sternum. The triangular blade cut through flesh and muscle and came to a stop three inches beyond Buddy’s chest. He stumbled forward a few feet and fell to his hands and knees in front of Joe. Pinkish fluid poured from the arrow wound staining the pristine brown and gold and amber leaves scattered around on the ground under the trees.