by Catie Rhodes
Before I even had time to consider how tired I was, one of the motorcycles cut in front of us.
“What the fuck, dude?” Tubby yelled and slammed on the brakes.
The car’s tires screamed. The force nearly flung me over the seat and out the windshield. I pushed myself backward and landed on the backseat.
“Oh no, no, no,” Hannah muttered.
“What is it?” I pushed myself back to a sitting position.
“Hold on,” Tubby yelled.
The car bumped hard, jarring me off the seat and into the filthy floorboard. My elbows ground against the dirty carpet as I tried to raise myself. The car’s wheels rattled over gravel.
“Stop,” Hannah screamed.
“What do you think I'm doing? Pulling my damn pud?” Tubby yelled back.
We slammed into something. I banged my head on the padded back of the driver’s seat. I struggled to get myself off the floor. My depleted energy made it feel as though I was swimming through semi-set Jell-O.
“Why did you do that?” Hannah yelled.
“They was motorcycles parked across the road.” Tubby’s words came between pants.
“You should have just plowed into them. That was Corman Tolliver. Didn’t you see him?” Hannah sounded more disgusted than scared now that the whole thing was over.
“Woman, don’t you think I know that?” Tubby turned to glare at her.
Hannah glared back and stuck out her tongue. Tubby grabbed for her face, and she dodged out of his way.
I tuned out their antics, one word echoing in my mind: Corman.
“You actually saw Corman?” I asked Hannah. Please let her say no.
Hannah quit arguing with Tubby long enough to address me. “Yes, I saw him. He was sitting in the middle of the stupid road on his dumb motorcycle."
My stomach plummeted. How had Corman found us? The answer was easy enough. King’s ghost could have told him if Corman was receptive to contact from the dead. It would have been easy work for Corman to track us from the RV park that Oscar and his band of spectral thugs had destroyed.
The knowledge burned at my already singed nerves. If Corman was this serious, he'd stop at nothing to have his revenge on Wade.
Hannah cut into my silence.
* * *
"Rather than running Corman’s sorry ass over, Tubby ran off the road. After that, we hit a tree.” Hannah pointed at it.
“You don’t have to say it like that, like I did it being stupid.” Tubby thumbed the seatbelt release and slung the belt off him so he could face Hannah.
“I’d have hit them. I’d have run right over them and squashed them flat.” She closed her fist and made a grinding motion.
“Bullshit. You’d have done the same damn thing.” Tubby had twisted around so he could sit on one skinny hip and argue with Hannah.
I ignored them and maneuvered myself to look out the back window. The cloudy night blocked out the moon. The night was so dark it looked like black soup. My eyes slowly adjusted to the murky light. Three figures crept toward us.
“Shut up,” I whispered.
Tubby and Hannah kept right on debating the correct handling of a blocked road. I shoved Hannah in the shoulder. She turned her snarl on me.
I hissed, “Somebody’s coming.”
Without a pause, she said, “I’m ready.” She lifted the handgun. “I’ve been waiting for this chance.”
Tubby spoke in a near whisper. “Y’all duck down.”
The first crack of gunfire cut the silence. Bullets punched into the car with hollow sounding thunks. I held my breath, waiting for one of us to cry out. Nobody did.
Tubby started the car and slammed it into reverse. The bumper let go of the tree with an ugly screech. We flew toward the figures. Gunfire punched into the car. Tubby hit the embankment we’d flown down on our way to hitting the tree. The impact knocked me into the front seats again.
Tubby put the car in drive and floored it. I rose in time to see a black jacketed figure running in front of the car.
“Hit him, hit him, hit him,” Hannah chanted, leaning forward as though this was a particularly good sporting event.
The figure ran for his life. I couldn’t even tell if it was Corman. Tubby gave the car one last blast of gas, and overtook the runner. He disappeared under the car like magic, and we bumped over him. Tubby reversed over our victim and went forward again.
He lowered his window, the old mechanism grinding, and yelled into the darkness, “Who’s next?”
Gunfire answered. The flashes came from the woods on Hannah’s side of the car.
Hannah slammed open the door, braced her pistol on the top, and fired off several rounds in the direction of the muzzle flash. Nothing answered. She sat back down in the car and lowered her window.
“I think I hit one of ‘em. Maybe killed him.” She said it like she’d just won the lotto.
But she was wrong. A figure ran out of the darkness, pistols in both hands, firing. Hannah propped her arm on the open window and returned fire. This time, the guy did fall.
I sat in the back, heart pounding so hard it jarred my vision. Everything had happened so fast. And now we’d run over one person—several times—and shot another one.
Gunfire exploded again. This time, it came from Tubby’s side of the car. We all hunched down.
Tubby stared through the space between the seats. “There’s a shotgun and a box of shells underneath the back seat.” He held out one skinny hand for it.
I dug and found a beat-up shotgun and a box of birdshot. This was it? We were going to die out here. I gave him the weapon.
“What am I supposed to use?” I asked.
Hannah, a pistol in each hand, gave me no more than a quick glance. “You suck at shooting. Hit them with something worse.”
“Something worse? What do you think I am? A magic dispensary?” I shot question after question as though it might change the fact that we were being shot at, and one stray bullet could kill any of us.
Nobody answered.
“You ready?” Tubby asked Hannah.
She nodded, eyes fixed and hard. “On three?”
Tubby nodded. They counted off together. On three, they slammed open their doors and began shooting, Hannah over the hood of the car, Tubby crouching behind his door.
The cloudy night was impenetrable except for the muzzle flashes.
“I’m out of bullets,” Hannah hissed at Tubby. She squatted and began reloading.
A few more gunshots came, and Tubby answered.
Tubby reloaded his shotgun. “I can’t hit anything at this range. Need a deer rifle or something.”
“Peri Jean Mace,” Corman screamed.
My insides shrank in on themselves. I hunched deeper in the seat, no longer worrying about who Tubby had run over.
“Peri Jean Mace,” Corman screamed again.
“Answer him,” Tubby muttered.
“No,” I hissed.
“Do it,” Tubby bared his teeth at me.
“What?” I yelled.
“My father’s dead because of you, you nasty bitch.” Corman choked on the last word.
“I hope that asshole’s burning down in hell,” Hannah screamed back.
Corman shot once.
“He’s running out of bullets,” Hannah whispered to Tubby.
“So are we,” Tubby whispered back.
Something deep inside me turned over. A feeling, one I recognized from when the hag and I shared my body, flowed through me. The pure, black-hole emotional destruction the hag delivered twitched at my fingertips, asking to get out.
Something similar had happened when I ate Loretta Nell Grimes’s soul back in Devil’s Rest, Texas. For a few days, I’d felt flashes of her murderous rage inside me. Now I had a measure of the hag’s ugly gift. Could I use it against Corman? I thought so.
“Let’s talk about it. Negotiate.” I shouted out the broken back window.
Tubby sneered at me. “Whaaaat? You can’t nego
tiate with doo-doo. It just gets on you, and then you’re all shitty.”
“We’re never going to get him by shooting at him.” I reached forward, touched Tubby and gave him a light shock of magic.
He grunted from the pain. “Girl, you better know what you’re doing.”
I hoped I did.
“Get out of the car,” Corman yelled back.
“We all getting out,” Tubby answered him. “If you hurt one of us, the other two is gonna kill you.”
“I’m going to kill him anyway,” Hannah whispered.
Nobody bothered to answer her. We all got out of the car and met near the front bumper, huddled together.
“Show yourself,” I called into the darkness.
Corman stepped out from between some trees, only a few feet from us, a chunky semi-automatic pistol pointed in our general direction. Even in the darkness, the hollowness beneath his eyes and under his cheekbones was obvious. He’d also had his nose broken, badly.
“I spent three fucking months in jail because of your sorry ass.” The hand not holding a gun reached up to touch his nose. “Your stupid cop boyfriend did this.”
“Dean’s not my boyfriend. Hasn’t been for over a year.” I barely paid attention to the conversation. The dark power moving inside me took up all my attention. It yearned toward Corman, ripe with expectation.
“Tell me where Wade Hill is, and I’ll let you all go.” Corman rested the sights of his gun on me.
“Wade walked out of my life. Dunno where he is.” This wasn’t true at all. I had Wade’s sister’s address and could find him with no problem whatsoever.
“Liar,” Corman yelled as though he could read my thoughts.
Before I knew what I was doing, I stepped out from between Hannah and Tubby and stalked toward Corman. Power sang through my body and lighted my vision as though we were standing underneath a streetlight.
He raised the gun and took a step backward. “Stop. Stay the hell away from me.”
Power sang to me from the trees and the ground. Even the sound of the night frogs seemed just for me. I closed the distance between me and Corman. The darkness Corman carried so deep that he wasn’t even aware of where it began or ended called to me. I wanted to eat it.
Corman pointed the gun at my face, pleasure flickering behind his eyes. His finger tightened. The gun bucked in his hand. The world slowed down to a crawl.
The bullet crept out of the barrel. An eternity seemed to go by before the muzzle flashed. I focused on the bullet, on the killing energy inside it, and sucked it into me. The bullet dropped to the ground halfway between Corman and me.
Still in slow motion, Corman’s mouth fell open. He aimed the gun again. I used the energy I’d stolen from the bullet to set fire to the gun. It turned red in Corman’s hands before he realized what was happening. He screamed and slung it at me.
From behind me, Hannah laughed.
Corman backed away from me, eyes wide, hand out, warding me away.
“Devil, devil, devil,” he chanted.
“That’s no way to talk.” I took the last steps running, grabbed his jacket in my fists, and pulled him close. Touching Corman made my stomach roll in queasy waves, but my need overpowered my revulsion.
I jammed my lips down on his with the vague notion that I could draw from him psychically. Corman’s hands pushed at me. I ignored them and inhaled all that made Corman evil, most of it learned at his awful father’s knee. What was left of the hag’s spirit lapped it up.
The world took on color I hadn’t known existed. Even in the dark of this night, the leaves on the evergreen trees were greener than green. The night air smelled sweet, perfumed with dry grass and Corman’s fear. Euphoria filled me to bursting. I sucked deeper. Corman’s evil tasted so very good. I took one last deep sip of his darkest heart and let him fall to the ground.
Shoulders hunched, head hung low, Corman tried to crawl away from me, whimpering like a hurt animal. I watched him the same way a frog watched a moth getting a little too close.
Hannah walked past me, gun arm out. She was going to kill Corman. That was fine with me. He deserved it.
A woman’s voice came several yards away. “Oh my god. What are you people doing?”
Hannah ignored her and advanced on Corman. She’d take the head shot. Put him down clean and fast.
“Stop right there, ma’am,” came a man’s voice. "Put the gun down. We’ve called the police.”
Tubby, Hannah, and I spun around. Two dark shapes headed toward us, one of them shining a flashlight. This was Texas. They could be armed to the teeth just like us, but I stomped toward them anyway.
When I got close enough to see the whites of their eyes I growled, “Get out of here or I’m going to eat you alive.”
The guy shone his flashlight in my face, and the woman screamed. They nearly tripped over each other getting turned around. Then the man fell down trying to climb the embankment. The woman left him where he was and scrambled away.
Thunder clapped in the sky. Underneath it, I heard those shouts, the ones of Oscar’s band of murderers. The frenzy from feeding off Corman and using his evil to replenish my energy faded in a flash.
“They’re coming back,” I said to nobody in particular.
“Fine,” Hannah said. “Let me go kill Corman, and we’ll go.”
“He’s gone,” Tubby mumbled. “He run off while Peri Jean was making them folks piss their pants. Let’s just go.”
He stomped toward the car. I followed.
“I sucked out his energy. Maybe he’ll go off somewhere and kill himself,” I told her.
She snorted. “Oh, I hope he does.”
Tubby got in the car and gave the ignition key a vicious twist. The car fired to life.
“Get in.” He pounded the car outside of the door with open hand to make his point.
Neither Hannah nor I made fun of him. We just did what he said.
I would replay the moment I decided to let Corman slip into the darkness that night many times over the years to come. But right then, I didn't know any better.
We sped down the highway, lightning flashing behind us. I sat on my knees, watching the show through the back window. Each lightning flash silhouetted the mad band of killers in the clouds. Every clap of thunder echoed their merry shouts. The ghostly headlights of the motorcycles flickered at the cloud’s edges. The insectile buzz of their engines drilled at the edge of my sanity. The wind from the open front windows whipped at me, bringing the smell of wet dog, horse sweat, and gasoline.
The storm picked up speed. Gusts of wind shook Tubby’s Cutlass. The clouds dipped so low they seemed to touch the road. They’d be here soon. How would the three of us alone survive their kind of attack?
“Give me that shotgun,” Hannah poked me in the back.
I patted the floorboard where Tubby had thrown it. My fingertips connected with it just as the ghostly motorcycles roared up behind Tubby’s Cutlass. It might have been my imagination, but I thought I could see King Tolliver’s big teeth, stained red by the glow of the Cutlass’s taillights. It was time to do all the damage I could. I yanked the shotgun off the floor and pushed it at Hannah.
Hannah got to her knees, leaned out the passenger window, and began firing at them. The bullets passed right through the ghostly motorcycle riders. They weren’t quite alive enough for bullets to matter.
“No,” Hannah and I wailed together.
One of the motorcycles roared closer. King. It wouldn’t seem possible for a skull to grin, but King’s did. A big, cheesy-toothed leer. A chill crept over my skin. We had no way to hurt him. He’d keep coming until he killed us.
Or maybe not. My gift allowed me to reach out and touch the spirit world. It would take some doing, but draining away Corman’s resolve had given me a second wind.
I opened my third eye and viewed King and his motorcycle in the realm of spirit. In that dimension, his energy glowed sickly green, velvety black at the edges. He’d chosen to manifest
just as he had in life—a dickless despot riding a motorcycle. It made sense. That identity had ruled his life. Time to see if I could blow it up.
I narrowed my focus on the motorcycle, gathered my energy, and imagined the gasoline inside the tank burning. The gas tank exploded in a shower of sparks. It was nothing more than an illusion, but King’s eyes widened. His mouth opened in a scream. He lost his grip on the energy holding his persona together. The illusion dissolved in a shower of green and blacker-than-black sparks. His image of who and what he’d been in life had burned him in the end.
It would have been more satisfying had I not known King would be back. Ghosts always came back.
The horses took the place of the motorcycles, the dogs running right along with them. Hannah raised the shotgun.
“Don’t bother.” I pulled on both our energy. Hannah squeaked when my power hit her but didn’t protest. I molded the combined energy and opened up blossoms of red-hot flame in the midst of our pursuers. Both inside and outside my head, dogs yelped. A horse screamed in pain. It hurt my heart to harm animals, but they were spirit. They’d be back.
No matter how many times my energy hit its target, the horde simply regenerated and returned. The roar of the motorcycles rose over the thunder of pounding horse hooves. Hannah let out a scream of fury at the sound. But I was too scared to make a peep.
I had already used most of my energy and Hannah’s. There was no way I could keep fighting them. Frustration sat down hard on my shoulders. Soon I’d run out of energy, and that would be that. There was no way to win.
The engine howled as Tubby held down the gas pedal as far is it would go. It was a good effort, but not good enough. These monsters could come at us all night. Soon we’d run out of gas. Then what?
I had to switch tactics and fast. Back at the campground, Oscar had run when I hurt him. He was the one I needed to focus on stopping.
I concentrated on finding Oscar. Though he’d achieved a kind of living-dead status, he was still half-dead. He’d never be able to hide from me. His nasty, hateful spirit bobbed behind his warriors. Of course. The boss isn’t going to risk himself.
