Red Hands: A Novel

by Christopher Golden

  Maeve’s brother, Logan, starts across the street without a word. One second he’s with the rest of the family, and then he’s in motion. He doesn’t get far before Mom rushes forward, wraps her arms around Logan’s chest, and halts him in his tracks with a torrent of angry, fearful words. Rose is holding her girlfriend, Priya, who is sobbing and shaking. Maeve’s mother starts comforting those around her, telling everyone to keep back, to go home, to make way for the emergency vehicles.

  As if Kristie hasn’t just died in the street. As if Ted Sinclair isn’t bleeding on the pavement.

  Maeve has forgotten how to breathe. It’s chaos all around, and her heart is slamming in her chest. Across the street, as the water from the hydrant spreads farther, pooling around the mangled body of a girl in an American flag tank top, several other people rush at the BMW driver. Some are smart enough to run the other direction, but these three men take it upon themselves to stop him, maybe thinking they’ll make him pay for what he’s done.

  An icy chill runs up Maeve’s spine. Hot tears course down her face. She shifts a few feet, trying to get a look at Kristie’s eyes, hoping to see a spark of life but knowing in her heart there’s not a glimmer. She thinks of a hundred summer days like this one, spent at the lake, out on Jack Spencer’s boat. She thinks of watching scary movies during sleepovers, Kristie’s eighth-grade determination to get her first kiss, playing soccer together and laughing as they realized neither of them were very good. All those memories lie dead on Main Street.

  When the sirens and the shouts are abruptly drowned out by the roar of a black helicopter sweeping overhead, Maeve barely notices. In her subconscious, she accepts its presence, and a little flicker of awareness recognizes that it means something, that black helicopter, slicing the air, lifting and turning as it searches for a place to land.

  One by one, the three men trying to stop the BMW driver reel away from him, bodies racked with seizure, coughing and gasping, black-red mucus streaming from noses and eyes. From her knees, bereft, alone, and feeling invisible, Maeve thinks she sees their skin flare red or flush pink where the driver touches them.

  Instead of continuing toward the alley, the driver turns toward the crowd. Bloody and stumbling but somehow more focused, his lips curled in a sneer that says he’s made up his mind about something ugly, he lunges toward a group of people clustered too closely together for all of them to elude him. A middle-aged woman with a glorious mane of coiled black hair is nearest and cannot escape the hand he reaches toward her. His fingers close on her bare upper arm. She pulls free, but she’s already dying. Her skin is dark, but even so, Maeve is sure she can see the momentary handprint left behind.

  She can’t watch it anymore. Far off to her left, the dispersing crowd has knocked over a popcorn vendor’s cart, and there is popcorn blowing all over the road and onto the grass and sidewalk. Scattered kernels blow like tiny tumbleweeds onto the pooling water under the BMW and float as if set adrift to race in a child’s dream. Maeve focuses on the popcorn, entirely losing track of the sounds around her. They blend into one larger noise, beneath all of which is the whine of helicopter rotors powering down, somewhere south along Main Street.

  The first police car arrives. There’s an ambulance behind it. She sees them out of the corner of her eye, unwilling to tear her gaze from the popcorn regatta floating in the hydrant water. Until several kernels float up to and bump up against the dead girl in her American flag tank top.

  Maeve flinches and rises to her feet. Her family’s otherwise occupied as she walks half a dozen paces and picks up a baseball bat that has fallen from the hands of one of the kids on the Little League float. The kids are long gone, having fled their miniature Fenway, and that’s for the best.

  It’s possible she hears Logan call out her name as she begins to run, but Maeve doesn’t slow down. She doesn’t turn or hesitate. The BMW driver is a pale, middle-aged, ordinary man with sallow cheeks and dark circles beneath his eyes. He’s got a fistful of a young father’s T-shirt in his left hand, rucking it up to expose the guy’s tattooed back, reaching out his right hand to touch that tattoo. The young father has a curly-haired toddler in his arms, and practically throws the little girl at his wife as the seizures rack his body and he falls.

  That’s the last one, though. The last one the driver touches.

  Maeve steps up and swings the bat with all the strength and training of her varsity softball days. The driver turns toward her just as the bat is about to connect. When the blow lands, the aluminum bat rings true, as if she’s hit a homer, but the sound is accompanied by the crack of bone. His eyes are wide as he staggers backward, sways a bit, and then falls toward her, bouncing once as he hits the pavement. His neck is twisted to one side, and she can see the indentation on his forehead where the bat did its damage.

  When he tries to rise, ordinary blood running from his nose, she hits him again, this time in the back of the head. But he’s been shot at least three times, been punched and shoved and kicked, and now he’s taken an aluminum bat to the skull, so he isn’t quite done yet.

  The driver is on the pavement. The puddle of water stretching out from the hydrant beneath the BMW reaches him, flowing around him. He skids himself forward in the water, dragging his chest and face and then lurches one more time to his feet, head hanging askew, reaching for her throat.

  Maeve grabs his wrist with her free hand, twists his arm away. He falls to the ground, but she’s still holding on, barely noticing him, staring instead at her fingers clenched around his wrist. Instinct had done it. She’s reacted faster than she could think, had grabbed him to avoid him doing the same to her, and though he’s on the ground now, it’s only after he convulses once and then dies, his gaze going flat and dull as doll’s eyes, that she manages to release her hold on him.

  A scream cuts through the buzzing in her head. Her mother’s voice. The scream is her name, and she turns as her mother races toward her. Logan and Rose had been deemed more important, more in need of attention, as has always been the case. Her whole life, they’ve thought of her as more capable, less in need of their love and comfort. Now Maeve is listening to her own heartbeat, waiting for the cough and the seizures to come. She’s going to die like the others, she is certain.

  But the seizures don’t come. Maeve shudders. Shock had dried up her tears, but now with her relief, they return. Her hands shake, but she feels good, she feels fine. Better than fine. Somewhere behind her, Kristie Burns lies dead. So many people are dead. Biz Ellroy is lying on the grass across the road, cradling a pink sneaker in her arms. The pink balloon is long gone. But the BMW driver is dead and Maeve is still alive and she feels herself about to shatter inside, fractured by a dozen conflicting emotions.

  “Maeve, oh my God,” her mom says.

  That voice—the voice of safety and reassurance, of comfort and warmth—is the root of her childhood. As often as she fought with her mother through middle and high school and has dismissed so much of her advice since then, in this moment she’s a little girl again and when she looks up and their eyes meet, her mother sees how much Maeve needs her.

  “Oh, my baby,” Ellen Sinclair says, “that was so … You were so brave.”

  Maeve cracks. A sob racks her body and she tries to speak, but no words will come. She laughs at her inability to summon language. She knows this is all part of the shock, but oh God, she wants to go home. She wants to check on her dad. He can’t have gone through all the things he’s endured just to die now, like this.

  Her mom takes her hands, squeezes them, pulls her into an embrace. Maeve leans into her, leans on her the way she always has, even when she didn’t realize how much of her emotional weight her mother carried for her. Ellen kisses her girl’s forehead. Maeve lays her head on her mother’s shoulder, eyes open, and she sees her brother rushing to join them.

  Police push through the crowd, hurrying over to the bodies of the people the driver touched. She spots Auntie Rue, a no-nonsense woman with a sleeve of purpl
e tattoos and half her skull shaved. Rue snaps instructions at the officers, barking orders about quarantine and disease. She isn’t a cop, just a citizen, and doesn’t look like the kind of person the police would ordinarily listen to, but she speaks with authority, and suddenly they’re wary. They’re right to be.

  Logan joins the hug. Maeve reaches up to touch his face, meets his eyes, so grateful for his kindness. As she touches him, she feels her mother jerk in her arms. At first she can’t make sense of it, but Logan steps back, his expression contorting in horror. He lifts one hand to cover his mouth, to stifle a cry, as their mother slips from Maeve’s arms and hits the pavement. Convulsing again, and then again, Ellen Sinclair rolls over, and Maeve sees the vile black-red sludge issuing from the corner of her mouth and dripping from her nose. Dark sores appear on her skin.

  “Mom?” Maeve whispers as a vast hollow place fissures open within her, an empty chamber where emotion should be. She cries out this time. “Mom?” But there is no answer.

  When Maeve’s sister shouts, though, it isn’t for her mother. Rose shouts her brother’s name. Maeve glances up and sees Logan in the midst of a shaking fit that sprays that hideous sludge from his mouth. His eyes are squeezed tightly shut, but squibs of that sludge are being forced out through his lashes. There’s a hint, a little red afterimage, the imprint of Maeve’s hand on Logan’s cheek, but when she blinks it’s gone, and so is he.

  Logan is dead before he hits the pavement.

  Her sister stares at her, stares at her hands.

  Maeve sways from side to side, not knowing what to do, or where to run, or what she’s become. She glances at her father, who has propped himself up on one hand, wincing in pain but alive. The BMW driver, the man she’d killed, the man whose hands she’d avoided but whose skin she’d been touching while the last flicker of life left his body. The small-town cops pushing people back from the bodies, from the crime scene, have paused and watch her with the same stunned wariness as the rest. Auntie Rue takes a step toward her. Maeve stares at her hands.

  A second black helicopter buzzes overhead. The remaining bystanders have been staring at her, but they glance up, tracking the helicopter, and as one they all hear the voices barking commands. People begin to clear a path. Through the crowd, she sees three figures in yellow hazmat suits accompanied by armed men in black body armor. All of them wear air filtration masks like they’re afraid of contamination. Of contagion.

  She turns toward her father. He must see the decision in her eyes, because he shakes his head.

  “Maeve, no,” he says, clutching his ribs, wincing in pain, blood on his face.

  But Maeve has never been good at doing what she’s told. She sees those hazmat suits, the guns and the body armor, and she thinks of the bullet holes in the man she killed, the man who killed so many, and she can’t stay here.

  So she runs.

  People who saw her mother and brother die get out of her way. People who did not are already in motion, clearing a path for the black helicopter’s team. The police who saw Logan and Mom die don’t try to follow her until Rue shouts at them that they can’t let her leave, but by then, Maeve has broken into a run. She bolts through the crowd, across the park, away from Main Street, away from the river. She races through backyards on Kingsbury Road, and then she’s into the woods she’d spent most of her childhood wandering. Maeve knows every path, even the ones that are so narrow and overgrown they hardly look like trails at all.

  She glances up. Sunlight streams through breaks in the canopy of the woods, and in those breaks she can see the mountains ahead. Her heart races, and she doesn’t allow herself to think of anything except reaching the foothills, getting lost up there. She won’t be able to hide forever, but she needs time to think.

  Her hands itch. Her fingers feel strangely cold.

  She thinks of her mom and of Logan, and her breath hitches in her chest. Tears stream down her face as she runs. All she wants to do is scream, to lie down on the trail and curl up and wait for all of this to catch up to her, to punish her.

  Branches whip past her face. Maeve ducks and stumbles, then turns off the trail. She wonders if this is what madness feels like. If this is what it feels like to be a killer.

  In the distance, she hears the buzz of a black helicopter, and she plunges into deeper woods, always staying on course for the mountains.

  She thinks of Callie Ellroy’s pink balloon and feels the icy cold of her fingers, and a terrible knowledge stabs at her—she can never touch anyone again.

  Not ever.

  2

  Rue Crooker stood in the middle of a street rapidly emptying of spectators, surrounded by broken, bloody bodies and the loved ones grieving over them. Armed men and women in black body armor wove between abandoned floats and spread out to encircle the scene while a woman in civilian clothes strode through, glancing left and right to survey the carnage. People in hazmat suits rushed by her, heading for the crashed BMW. The body-armored security detail approached the car with weapons leveled, as if they expected to be attacked from within.

  One of them paused by the corpse of the BMW driver—the man who’d killed and injured so many—and went to nudge the body with the toe of his boot. A muffled bark from one of the hazmat suits made him freeze and back away. Whoever the driver had been, the person in the hazmat suit knew him. Recognized him. Had expected to find him here.

  Of course they had. How else could a squad of Blackcoats show up so fast?

  She went to Ted, went down on one knee beside him. “Hey, no,” she said as he tried to rise. “You need to stay right here.”

  His eyes were glazed with pain and grief. He glanced over at the bodies of his ex-wife and his son, then cringed and looked away, unprepared. Five feet away, his daughter Rose wept in the embrace of her girlfriend. Ted cast a pleading glance up at Rue.

  “Maeve,” he said.

  “I know,” Rue replied, though she didn’t, really. How could she possibly guess what part of this horror had carved itself deepest? “Just wait. You need doctors to look you over.”

  Ted seemed to agree, or maybe he was just numb.

  Rue’s heart thumped like it wanted to break free. Flushed with heat, somehow she felt cold inside. So this is shock, she thought, observing the whole, wretched tableau that spread around her. Several of those struck by the car were still alive and in dire need of medical attention. Ted seemed in remarkably good condition. He had jumped right before the car hit him, which Rue thought might have saved his life. At the very least, it had saved him from a broken leg or two.

  Sirens wailed. Police officers hurried through the remnants of the crowd. Several EMTs were on-site, moving from victim to victim, searching for those who were not already beyond their help. Someone shouted for an ambulance. Others called to the Blackcoats for aid but received no reply. The young civilian woman also seemed deaf to these cries. Even the hazmat team paid no attention to the people who’d been struck by the BMW, but Rue had expected that. They weren’t here for the broken, bleeding ones—they had come because of the man behind the wheel.

  “Ted, just keep still,” she said. “Help is coming. I’ll make sure of it.”

  He groaned and nodded, squeezing his eyes closed. There were tears on his face, but Rue thought they had sprung from grief instead of physical pain. She turned away, let him have his privacy.

  She went to Rose and her girlfriend, Priya. Touched Rose on the shoulder. “Stay with your dad.”

  Sniffling, Rose nodded, still in Priya’s embrace.

  The hazmat team surrounded the dead driver. The civilian woman began to shout orders, apparently in command, and the Blackcoats closed in, beginning to surround the people who had been touched by the driver or by Maeve Sinclair. Rue whipped out her phone, tapped the screen, and began to record.

  “Excuse me!” she shouted. “Excuse me, what are you doing? Who are you? How did you get here so quickly?”

  The woman in charge raised a hand to halt the Blackcoat secu
rity team. The hazmat crew had already yanked out a body bag and started to transfer the driver into it without a single crime scene photo having been taken, without even a police officer approving their actions. They didn’t stop what they were doing, but whatever menace the Blackcoats had intended toward those mourning their dead had halted or at least paused.

  “I’m going to ask again!” Rue said. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  Popcorn containers and other parade debris blew along the pavement. A stroller had been left behind in the hurried exodus of onlookers. Someone had snatched up their baby and just run, and Rue didn’t blame them at all. She probably should have run as well, but she wasn’t wired that way. At the age of fifty-four, neither her knees nor her demeanor were inclined to do much running.

  “Put that phone away. It’s illegal to record during a crisis like this,” the young woman said, not taking a step.

  Her whole team seemed to be frozen. More sirens blared. Local police started to shout to one another. An ambulance drove up onto the lawn of a house on the corner of Kingsbury. Another black helicopter buzzed overhead and seemed to hover a thousand feet above the BMW. The woman put a hand to her ear, frowning, and Rue realized that though she might appear to be giving the orders, she was getting them from somewhere else.

  Rue kept recording. She took a step closer. One of the Blackcoats turned his weapon on her.

  “The phone. Now,” the woman said.

  “Fuck you. If you’re any kind of law enforcement, which I doubt, there’s nothing illegal about me filming. And since you’ve got a private security detail with no badges or identification, I’d say you’ve got even less authority over me.”