Rovers

by RICHARD LANGE

  11

  June 27, 1976, 3 p.m.

  A​FTER A FEW HOURS’ REST I FEEL STRONG ENOUGH TO FINISH setting down the events of the past day. It’s more important than ever there’s some kind of record now that things have turned strange.

  After Czarnecki showed me the boy chained in the shed, we returned to the cabin. The old man poured himself a tumbler of bourbon, and we sat at the little table.

  “What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

  “They call themselves rovers,” he said. “I think they’re some kind of vampires.”

  “Come on,” I said.

  “It’s not what you’re picturing, all that pointy teeth and turning into a bat Dracula bullshit. They’re predators, pure and simple. They stalk humans, cut their throats, and drink their blood. One of them killed my wife, and one killed your son.”

  I’d have thought the old man was insane if not for what I’d just witnessed: Sunlight opened wounds on the kid’s flesh, and those wounds healed instantly in the dark. In any other context, you’d call that a miracle.

  “I use the kid as a pointer,” Czarnecki said.

  “A what?” I said.

  “These things look like just another person to you or me, but they recognize each other—give off some kind of glow only they can see—so I use the kid to sniff them out. It’s something Mr. Otto taught me. The kid finds rovers, and I kill them.”

  Mr. Otto again. I asked who he was.

  “Mr. Otto ran a feed lot in Omaha,” Czarnecki said. “His daughter, Iris, disappeared one day in I believe it was 1922 and turned up later drained of blood. The police couldn’t come up with any suspects, and after a while they stopped looking. Mr. Otto started searching on his own, determined to find whoever’d killed Iris. What he eventually uncovered was something almost beyond his ken.”

  “Vampires,” I said, mockingly.

  “Call them that, call them rovers, call them whatever you want,” Czarnecki said. “But they do exist: bloodthirsty creatures that prey on humans. Once Mr. Otto discovered them, he set out to destroy as many as he could. It was a crusade, good against evil, and he’d been at it thirty years when he visited me in Carson City and showed me this.”

  Czarnecki reached under his shirt for a gold ring hanging on a chain around his neck.

  “This belonged to Marjorie,” he said. “One of the monsters Mr. Otto killed was wearing it. Her name and mine are engraved inside, and that’s how he tracked me down. I was skeptical, as I said before. I even thought he might have killed Marjorie himself. But then he took me on a hunt, and I pretty damn quick became a believer.”

  Czarnecki paused to catch his breath. I noticed how his hands shook when he lifted his glass, how dull his eye was. He’s sick, I thought. He’s coming to the end of his time.

  “Mr. Otto was sixty then,” he continued. “He was looking for someone to take over for him. We hunted together until he passed away, and I kept going on my own. I knew I’d never get the fucker that murdered Marjorie, but there were plenty more to send to hell. My aim was to wipe out every bloodsucker on the planet. I didn’t get there, but maybe you will.”

  “Me?” I said. “Not me.”

  “What was your son’s name?” Czarnecki said.

  “Leave him out of this,” I said.

  “Benny,” Czarnecki said. “You hear Benny calling to you, don’t you? You hear him begging for revenge.”

  “I don’t hear anything except the nonsense of a crazy old drunk,” I said.

  The stuffed head of a bear snarled at me from above the fireplace, and the wooden floor quaked beneath my chair. My hands were balled into sweaty fists as I stood and hurried for the door. I felt like I was walking with someone else’s feet.

  “I’m going hunting tonight,” Czarnecki said. “If you want more proof what I’ve told you is true, come along.”

  I left the cabin without another word and locked myself in the Econoline. Then I sat there, sat there for hours, mind racing. I sat there until the sun went down and the air grew chill. I sat there until night blacked the trees and a light came on in the cabin. I sat there until Czarnecki called out, “There’s an extra can of stew, if you want it.”

  When I returned to the cabin, the old man put a bowl in front of me and didn’t say anything until I’d eaten my fill. Then all he asked was, “You ready?”

  I answered with a nod.

  I followed him out to the shed, him carrying a bowl of Dinty Moore for the kid. The boy was sitting on the cot in the dark, the blanket draped over his bare shoulders. The only other thing in the shed was a reeking five-gallon bucket that served as a toilet. Czarnecki slid the bowl and a spoon across the floor. The kid snatched them up and shoveled stew into his mouth. When he finished, Czarnecki threw him a ring of keys.

  “Get dressed,” he said.

  “I need more than that slop,” the kid said. “It’s been over a month since I fed proper.”

  Czarnecki drew a pistol, a .45, from the pocket of his coveralls and pointed it at the boy. “Get dressed,” he said again.

  The kid unlocked the shackles on his ankles and pulled on a pair of jeans that lay neatly folded on the floor, then sat on the cot to tie his sneakers. He reshackled his ankles, took off his handcuffs, and donned a T-shirt and a denim jacket. When the cuffs were back in place, Czarnecki ordered him to undo the chain from the eyebolt in the floor and return the keys.

  “Stand clear,” the old man said, waving the .45 at me. “Never let him get too close. They’re no stronger than us, but because they can heal, they’ll take chances you wouldn’t and fight a lot harder. If this one tried to jump me, I’d shoot him in the head. The round wouldn’t kill him, but it’d put him down long enough for me to finish him off, and there are a few ways to do that. I could stop his heart with a knife and leave him to rot, I could drag him into the sun, I could burn him, or I could starve him of blood. The quickest and easiest way is to hurt them enough they can’t fight back, then cut off their heads. They’ll turn to dust in an instant.”

  The kid emptied the slop bucket in the bushes, then carried it to the truck and put it inside the camper bolted to its bed. He was so skinny, he had to hold his pants up when he walked. Czarnecki kept the gun on him until he had climbed in on the passenger side of the cab and secured himself to an eyebolt on the floor. We slid in on either side of him, Czarnecki behind the wheel. I leaned against the door, nervous at being so close to the kid. He stunk, and the whites of his eyes were pus yellow and shot through with veins.

  “So who are you?” he asked me.

  “Nobody,” I replied.

  “Nice to meet you, Nobody. I’m Nobody too.”

  “Leave the man alone,” Czarnecki said.

  “Yessir,” the kid said, meaning Fuck you.

  Czarnecki turned on the radio. A sportscaster was cracking jokes about Ali’s fight with that Japanese wrestler. A “Bicentennial Minute” came on, the story of a Revolutionary War battle fought on this very day exactly 200 years ago.

  “Don’t let me die listening to this,” the kid groaned. “Put on some music.”

  Czarnecki dialed in a country-and-western station and played that the rest of the way to Reno. It was all noise to me. Between my fear of the kid and bracing myself as the old man raced down the mountain, I couldn’t hold a thought in my head. I finally took to reading road signs to have something to focus on.

  When we got into town, the kid started looking for rovers. We cruised the streets for hours, from one end of Reno to the other, past the casinos, past the tourist motels, past the flophouses and dives. Every time we spotted a bum blowing his nose or a hooker preening on a corner Czarnecki would bark, “How about that one?” and the kid’s reply was always the same: “Nope.”

  Czarnecki grew frustrated.

  “If you don’t earn your keep, you’re not worth keeping,” he said.

  “I’m all messed up,” the kid said. “I need to feed.”

  “You know the deal. Find me a monster f
irst.”

  “I can’t see straight.”

  “Find me a monster.”

  The kid’s chains rattled as he slumped, dejected. We made our third pass down Virginia. I asked Czarnecki if they found rovers every time they went looking.

  “I used to get a couple a month,” he said. “Places like Reno draw them, lots of trash for them to feed on. Things have slowed down the last few years, though. I don’t know why. We’ve been out fifteen times in the past sixty days and had no luck. Sometimes I think this asshole is goldbricking.” He slapped the kid on the back of the head. “Are you slow-playing me, boy?”

  The kid didn’t reply, just kept staring out the cracked windshield. Czarnecki slapped him again and said, “Better not be.”

  Around 2 a.m., as we were crawling through a stucco-and-cinderblock barrio, the kid leaned forward so suddenly, I threw my arms up to protect myself.

  “There!” he said.

  He pointed at a Mexican wearing a black cowboy hat and ostrich-skin boots. The man’s unsteady gait showed he was drunk. He nearly toppled over stepping off the curb to cross the street.

  “Get out and tail him,” Czarnecki said to me.

  “What?” I replied.

  “I’ll circle the block so he doesn’t get wise.”

  Caught up in the moment, I hopped out of the truck and fell in behind the man, keeping a careful distance. Czarnecki drove past and disappeared around the next corner.

  The street was deserted, all the stores shut up behind steel gates. The only place still open was a beer bar with a cracked plastic sign, CLUB TANGO. Mexican music oompah-pahed from behind a heavy curtain drawn across the doorway. The man I was following paused out front, stood there swaying like a palm tree in the wind, then suddenly continued on his way, stumbling as if an unseen hand had shoved him. The lights of a passing bus pinned his shadow to a brick wall, his hat enormous.

  A couple blocks later he came to a two-story fleabag motel fronting a parking lot full of dusty, dented cars and trucks. After a few fumbling stabs with a key, he let himself into a ground-floor room.

  I turned to look for Czarnecki’s pickup. Parked down the street, the old man flashed his headlights.

  “What room?” he said when I rejoined him and the kid.

  “Eight,” I said.

  “Ha!” he said, as if addressing the Mexican. “Got you, you sonofabitch.”

  “What happens now?” I said.

  “We wait,” Czarnecki said.

  “How long?”

  “Till daybreak. They’re weaker then.”

  I could have ended the hunt at that instant, forced the old man to take me back to his place, gotten into the Econoline, and put this madness behind me. I could have, but I didn’t. You see, baby, Czarnecki was right: I do hear Benny demanding vengeance. I’ve heard it every day since learning of his death, and to have shied away from a possible lead to his killer because of my own fear would’ve been another betrayal of him and made me even more of a failure as a father than I’ve already been.

  So.

  Czarnecki got out of the truck. I stood behind him as he drew his .45 and threw the kid the keys. The kid freed himself from the bolt on the floor, slid out of the cab, and walked back to the camper.

  Czarnecki opened the door. Inside was a plywood crate resembling a crude coffin. The kid climbed into the camper, opened the hinged lid of the crate, and lay down inside. Czarnecki closed the lid and secured it with three padlocks. He covered the crate with a canvas tarp. Winded by even this bit of exertion, he sat at the camper’s small table to catch his breath.

  “You stick him in here if you’re gonna be out during the day,” he said, patting the crate. “Keeps him out of the sun.”

  We returned to the cab, and Czarnecki moved the truck so we had a clear view of the Mexican’s room. The motel had quieted for the night. There were no lights anywhere except for the flicker of a TV in the office. Czarnecki lit a cigarette, blew the smoke out his window. He asked if I’d been in the military.

  “The Army,” I said. “From ’51 to ’55.”

  “So you’re used to blood and guts.”

  “I was a clerk, a typist.”

  “What do you do for a living now?”

  I laughed. For the first time in a long time, I laughed.

  “I teach typing,” I said. “I’ve come far.”

  “You must be fast,” Czarnecki said.

  “A hundred and twenty-two words a minute.”

  The old man whistled, pretending to be impressed.

  “I was in the Army too,” he said. “Enlisted at eighteen and stayed in until I was thirty.”

  “Long haul,” I said.

  He shrugged. “The pay was decent, and I learned a trade. I was a mechanic after I got out, before Mr. Otto came along.”

  “Did you like that kind of work?” I asked.

  “It made sense,” he said. “This part does this, that part does that. You figure out what’s not working, replace it, and you’re back in business.”

  He slipped two fingers under his eye patch and scratched while staring with his good eye at what we could see of the night sky through the windshield.

  “Do you know the constellations?” he said.

  “I knew some when I was a kid,” I replied.

  He pointed. “There’s Hercules. His arms, his legs, his club. Scorpius, the scorpion. Cygnus, the swan. Those four in a square there with the bright one on top? That’s Lyra, the lyre.”

  “Well, well,” I said, impressed.

  Czarnecki tossed his cigarette out the window and opened his door.

  “I’m gonna grab a couple hours of shut-eye,” he said. “There’s another bed in back if you want to sleep too.”

  There was no way I was going to be able to sleep, especially not lying five feet from the kid, no matter how many locks were on the crate. I told Czarnecki I’d stay up front, keep watch. He gave me a mocking salute and said, “Blow reveille at sunrise if I’m not up already.”

  The truck trembled and squeaked as he climbed inside the camper and settled down. I made myself as comfortable as I could and tried not to think too much about what morning would bring. The door to the Mexican’s room was painted brown, the number white. Below the number was a silhouette of a covered wagon.

  Sometime around 4 a girl emerged from one of the other rooms, a big girl wearing pajamas and pink slippers. She walked to the pay phone in front of the motel and dialed the operator. Slouched in the soul-bleaching fluorescent bubble of the booth, she looked like a criminal or a victim. She told the operator she wanted to make a collect call and pressed her forehead to the glass wall, listening to the rings, waiting for someone to answer.

  “Mom,” she said when someone finally did, “I’m married,” and started to weep.

  Czarnecki woke me by banging on my window. I’d nodded off somewhere near dawn, slid into a half dream of running, falling, and running again. I was relieved to be startled out of it, but as soon as I remembered where I was, I wished I’d come to a million miles away.

  The sun was rising over the scarred foothills to the east. A few wispy clouds blushed pink. All the decisions I’d made the day before seemed like bad ones, and I was full of dread. I climbed out of the truck and stomped away the stiffness in my legs. I needed coffee. I needed aspirin. I needed a way out.

  Czarnecki hocked and spit and lit his third cigarette of the morning. One foot dragged a bit as he walked up and set a duffel bag on the hood.

  “Let’s get to it before everyone’s up and about,” he said.

  I didn’t ask any questions. It was too late for that. The match had been struck, the lake of gasoline shimmered beneath it. I followed Czarnecki across the parking lot to the Mexican’s room. He unzipped the duffel and took out a crowbar. I felt like I had a sponge stuck in my throat.

  Thirty years fell off the old man as he turned and gave me a wink. He wedged the hooked end of the bar into the crack between the door and the jamb. The flimsy loc
k broke with one tug, and the door swung open to reveal the Mexican lying on a bed in his underwear. He started to sit up, but Czarnecki was on him in a flash. He pushed him back onto the mattress and plunged an ice pick into his chest, and he died without a sound.

  Czarnecki struggled to his feet, a sick old man once again.

  “I like to use a pick,” he said. “Less blood.” He took a few deep, wheezy breaths, then said, “Come here.”

  I obeyed like someone hypnotized, stepped into the room and closed the door. Czarnecki grabbed the man’s legs and ordered me to help move the body into the bathroom. I took hold of the Mexican under his arms, and we lifted him off the bed. After we’d laid him in the tub, Czarnecki got a hacksaw from his bag of tricks and held it out to me.

  “Cut off his head,” he said.

  I finally found my voice. “No.”

  “You’re here for proof what I’ve told you is true,” he said. “Cut off his head, and you’ll have it.”

  I’d already crossed a line. If I left at that moment, the only thing I’d know for certain was that I was an accessory to murder. My sole hope of redemption was that the old man was telling the truth about the rovers, and one way to verify that was to do what he’d ordered.

  Beating back fear and revulsion, I grabbed the saw and bent over the tub. I pressed the blade against the neck of the corpse, closed my eyes, and went to work. The sound of the saw’s teeth chewing through flesh and bone brought bile gushing into my mouth. I peeked through slitted lids to check my progress, caught a flash of bloody muscle and tendon, and nearly fainted.

  The moment I was sure I couldn’t continue, the head came loose. I dropped it, backed away, and forced my eyes open in time to see both the head and body collapse into dust. One instant they were there, and the next nothing was left of the Mexican but his underwear and a mound of feathery gray ash.

  Czarnecki’s monsters were real. While I grappled with the enormity of this, the old man turned on the water and washed the ashes down the drain, using the dead man’s skivvies to wipe the tub clean. I didn’t react when he said let’s go, so he grabbed me by the arm, and we hurried to the truck and made our getaway along empty early-morning streets.