Riders in the Sky - [Millennium Quartet 04]

by Charles L. Grant

  * * * *

  Wishing he were somewhere else and moving up his retirement date because he couldn’t stand this crap anymore, Vale parked off to the side of the trail’s end, in a spot where countless other vehicles had tramped and hardened the sand into a makeshift parking lot. An empty trash barrel stood at each corner. A small sign on a canted post warned drivers not to go any farther.

  “Where?” he asked as he pulled a pair of sunglasses from his shirt pocket and put them on.

  Dub moved to the front of the Jeep, a hand rubbing the small of his back, eyes narrowed against the glare off sand and water. The nearest whale, Baby, was fifty yards away; he pointed to the lead whale, another twenty farther on.

  “Okay, then. Let’s do it.”

  Although he didn’t for a minute believe Neely’s story, he couldn’t help a slight anticipatory tightening of his stomach, couldn’t help leaning to one side as if he could see through the boulders to the place where the body was supposed to be. Those men Dub had claimed had only raised a little hell had in fact done more than that—-two break-ins, a severe beating, an attempted arson.

  Word was, it was Cutler’s boys, not mainland strangers. Stump Teague and his brothers, who lived in separate houses at the edge of the marsh.

  Another reason why retirement was looking better every day.

  Neely didn’t speak.

  The only sound was the crunch of their shoes on the sand, the hiss of the wind across the surface of the beach. The voice of the surf didn’t count—it was there all the time, and the only time it was noticed was when it grew louder.

  As Neely swerved around Baby’s tail, his right hand automatically, absently, reached out to stroke it. For luck. Touch wood, on stone.

  Vale moved in a wide arc, keeping the boulders on his right. The beach was nearly two hundred yards wide along the full length of the eastern shoreline, dotted with clumps of dried kelp, smashed shells; a gull feather twitching where it had stuck in the sand, a pine cone quivering in the depression of a footprint. The tide was out, but he could still see plumes of spray where waves struck the massive teeth of rock jetties that had been built out into the water. The earliest colonists had recognized the danger of erosion from storm and ordinary tides, and every spring and autumn Camoret continued what they had begun—hauling the largest rocks and boulders they could find to add to each jetty’s bulk, repair the winter’s damage. One every quarter mile, and so far it had worked.

  “You know,” Dub said, sticking close to Vale’s side, “sometimes you kind of feel like Robinson Crusoe out here, you know what I mean, Sheriff?”

  Vale did.

  There were no buildings anywhere on the beach, no homes, no shops, all forbidden by law. Waves, then sand broken here and there by sawgrass-topped dunes, then a heavy line of trees and underbrush. An unbroken sky. No ships on the horizon. Stand long enough, quietly enough, and you’d never know there were several hundreds of people back there, thousands in the right season. It was as if no one lived here, or ever had. Ever.

  When they reached Daddy’s head, Vale took off his hat, wiped his face with a sleeve, and said nothing.

  The sand was empty.

  No body, no blood, no stains.

  Just to be sure, he checked the other side, checked the rest of the family, then walked along the treeline for fifty yards in either direction. When he returned, Dub had plopped himself on the ground, his back against the boulder, hands on his knees. Staring at the water.

  “Dub.”

  “Don’t say it.”

  Vale blinked, cocked his head. That wasn’t Neely’s usual voice. No whine, no apology, no sputtering preparation for a story that would explain how the body and blood had vanished. This was Neely’s other voice, stone sober, something he had heard but only three or four times a year.

  “Must’ve been the light,” the little man offered, flatly.

  “Must’ve been,” Vale agreed, no accusation in his tone.

  “That guy must’ve been taking a nap or something. Slept on the beach all night, maybe. I think he does that a lot.”

  “Probably. Lots of people do, the weather’s nice and all. Do it myself sometimes.” He wiped his face again, replaced his hat, adjusted his sunglasses. “Yep. Can see that, Dub. You’re probably right.”

  Neely rocked to one side so he could extricate a dented hip flask from his back pocket. He held it against his chest with both hands, licked his lips several times, finally said, “Do you have any idea what it’s like to be a drunk?”

  Vale didn’t know what to say. This was suddenly way beyond the boundaries of their relationship, such as it was.

  “For one thing,” Neely said, looking up at him with a squint and a half smile, “you see things that ain’t ordinarily there, ordinarily.”

  Vale hesitated, then nodded as if he understood; what the hell else could he do?

  “For example”—and Neely nodded toward the place where he’d thought the body had been—”that giant—”

  “Chisholm. Casey Chisholm. For crying out loud, Dub, the guy’s a little strange but he does have a name.”

  “Yeah,” Neely returned his gaze to the sea. “He don’t have a car, you notice? He’s got this old bike instead, never goes anywhere but where he lives, once in a while I see him in town. But far as I can tell, he never goes off-island, you ever notice that? Thought at first maybe he was on the run, you know? Did something bad and was using us to hide out.”

  “And ... now you don’t think so?”

  “Nope.” Neely unscrewed the top, took a drink and coughed, took another, and screwed the top back on. “Another thing about a drunk is, people don’t pay you no attention except to kick at you once in a while, get you the hell out of the way. So you see things, you know? Hear things.” He laughed silently. “Don’t always remember what it is, but it happens.”

  Vale rolled his shoulders against a light chill that rode the breeze. Now this was more like it—Neely not making any sense.

  “So, uh, what did you see, Dub?”

  “Ain’t seen nothing, not really.”

  “Then what did you hear?”

  Top off, another drink, longer this time, and this time, no coughing.

  “I’m sitting right here last night.” He smacked his lips. Another drink. “Communing with the stars, you know what I mean? The meaning of life, Sheriff. The meaning of life. Kind of an existential haze sweetened by a good red wine. Anyway, that giant comes walking up the beach. Moon’s big enough, but I’m sitting right here, so he don’t see me. So he’s walking along, got his hands in his pockets, just out for a stroll.”

  “So what?” Vale said impatiently. “Jeez, Dub, you eavesdrop on him or something?”

  “Nope, that ain’t what I heard.”

  “Dub, damnit, if you don’t tell me, I’m gonna smack you into the middle of next March.”

  “Horses.”

  Vale barked a laugh, “Horses? Christ, Dub, we don’t have any horses on the island, you know that as well as I do.”

  “Don’t care, Sheriff. That guy’s walking along the beach and he gets a little way up there, and all of a sudden I hear horses. Kind of walking slow, but I hear them.”

  Wearily Vale massaged his brow with two fingers, adjusted his Stetson, rubbed his brow again. “Hell, I’m going back. You want a ride?”

  “No. Thanks anyway, I think I’ll just sit here a while. Commune, you know?”

  “Whatever,” Vale said and started back to the Jeep.

  “I’ll tell you something else,” Neely called after him.

  Vale lifted a hand over his shoulder, an I-don’t-care-see-you-around gesture.

  “He heard them too,” Neely called. “Didn’t see jack, but that Chisholm guy heard them too.”

  * * * *

  3

  1

  A

  lmost autumn; long past noon.

  A light warm wind that still carries dampness from a brief storm just passed, pushing ripples across puddles,
nudging raindrops from sagging leaves; a dead branch lies in the slow lane of the interstate, and the occasional car swerves around it, lifts a wave, each time pushing it a little closer to the shoulder; the smell of mud and wet grass and oil smeared to rainbows on the north-to-south highway; a crow in the left land, tearing at the bloody body of a cat.

  The interstate is divided by a wide grass median slowly turning brown, with an infrequent run of young trees in the process of shedding yellowed leaves; beyond the deep ditches that line the outside of the road, steep weedy embankments topped with fences, some wood, some wire, sagging here and there, rusted here and there, while cattle graze and horses drink and a tractor makes its way across a rolling fallow field.

  And once, only once, the distant echo of gunfire.

  * * * *

  2

  His name is Reed Turner, and he’s much too young to be so old.

  Once tall, he trudges along the highway with a stoop to his shoulders, too much weight there for him to stand upright. His face, once smooth, has dark lines at the corners of his eyes, the corners of his mouth, lines that have little to do with the road dirt that has settled there. He has long since lost what little baby fat he had left when last he bothered to look in a mirror. Really look. Really see what stranger would look back at him.

  * * * *

  He is, now, just a year and a few months past the last of his teens, but when people look at him they think they see a man twice as old. Twice as tired. Twice as beaten.

  Her name is Cora Bowes, and she’s much too young to be so old.

  She wears a baggy pair of sun-bleached jeans, a baggy denim shirt, and in her right hand she holds a gnarled length of wood she’s learned to use as a club and walking stick. Her hair has been lightened by months on the road, is pulled back into a ponytail but still looks ragged where she’s cut it herself. When she’s relaxed, when she can find a good reason to smile, she is attractive in a way that puzzles others into wondering why. Nevertheless, she is. When she’s relaxed. When she can find a reason to smile.

  She is, now, only fifteen months past her nineteenth birthday, and once in a while she wonders exactly how old she looks. Whatever it is, it’s too old, and she knows it, and sometimes, at night, she wonders where it’s all gone.

  * * * *

  They have been together since the day and night their world blew up. Three years, too many months, too many days since almost everyone they knew, everyone they had known, had perished in a firestorm battle that had left nothing standing but a church whose bell tolled every night though no one pulled the rope. Far too long since they had seen—and took years to really believe they had actually seen it—the only man they had ever trusted struggle with a woman in the bell tower, heard the screams, heard the explosions, saw him fall. Believing him dead, they had run. Nowhere in particular, just... away.

  When they heard he had lived, had actually survived the fight and the fall, they went back to find him, and have been searching ever since.

  * * * *

  They sit on a log at the side of the road, lifting a thumb at every car and eighteen-wheeler, making frantic angry gestures that have them giggling when every car and eighteen-wheeler takes a look and passes them by.

  Finally Cora drags a backpack from under her legs and zips it open, reaches in and pulls out a chocolate bar. Slowly she turns it around in both hands, smacking her lips loudly, as if preparing her stomach for a grand Thanksgiving meal.

  “Cora, for crying out loud.”

  “What’s the matter? I want to appreciate this, you creep. We’re almost out, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “If we’re almost out, don’t eat it.”

  She sticks her tongue out at him and peels half the wrapper away, passes the bar under her nose as if testing a fine cigar. “I hope this is the right way.”

  “You’re supposed to eat it, dope.”

  “I mean where we’re going, Reed. God.”

  He doesn’t answer right away; he’s too busy squinting up the hilly road to check for traffic. They’ve been walking for weeks, with only three rides to ease the aches and blisters on their feet, and they’re headed south now, because of a dream.

  “It’s right,” he says at last. His voice, once high, has deepened a little.

  “If you say so.”

  “I do, Cora. I do.”

  “Want a bite?”

  “Nope.”

  “We’re almost out.”

  “You eat it. I’ll be all right.” He rests a hand against his chest. “Don’t mind me. I’ll manage.” His other hand pulls a piece of dark bark from the log. “This’ll do just fine. I don’t mind. It’s roughage.”

  “Creep.”

  “Dope.”

  They smile but not at each other; they don’t have to, not after all this time. Not after all they’ve seen.

  Cora chews and swallows, the production so exaggerated he can’t help but laugh.

  “What day is it?” she asks.

  “Tuesday.”

  “What year?”

  Reed shrugs. “Who the hell knows?”

  Their first plan after they’d left home the second time, for the last time, had been to head for the South, because that’s where their friend, Casey Chisholm, had come from. But they hadn’t realized how large a place the South really was, especially when they had little money, no transportation of their own, and not a clue where in Tennessee, or anywhere else for that matter, he might have gone to ground. It took them a while, but they soon learned how to talk to strangers, how to sift through rumors, how to judge a face and a smile and a tone and a gesture. That made the searching easier, but it didn’t make it successful.

  And every time they think they see a huge, white, gunboat Continental with a silver hood ornament shaped like a charging horse, they go to ground themselves. They made it through the famine, were untouched by the plague, had been hassled and attacked and several times nearly separated, but the only thing they really fear is the sight of that Lincoln.

  Death drives that car.

  They know it.

  They have seen her.

  * * * *

  3

  By sunset it’s clear they won’t get another ride today, so they pick up their backpacks and sleeping bags and trudge away from the road, into a stand of trees at the edge of a small farm. They don’t bother with the farmhouse because they have nothing to trade in exchange for a bed and meal. Besides, Reed thinks as they bat aside branches in search of a dry clearing, the last time they had stopped at one, the farmer had spent the whole night reading to them from the Bible, trying to save them before it was too late and the world ended and they were damned.

  And doomed.

  It was tempting to tell the well-meaning old man not to bother, thanks but no thanks, they had already seen part of the End.

  They had already seen the first Horseman.

  Reed didn’t, though. The old man wouldn’t have believed him, and would probably have run them off at the business end of a shotgun for being blasphemers or something. It had happened before; Cora had a scar on her right thigh to prove it.

  Water drips on his hair, splashes in his face. The earlier Reed, the one who lived in Maple Landing, New Jersey, and lusted after Cora, who wouldn’t give him the time of day, that Reed Turner would have lost his temper and started screaming, kicking at the trees and cursing everything that moved. This Reed, however, only wipes the water away.

  “Just think,” he says as he follows her around the lower boughs of a fat pine, “that the guys who settled this place back in the old days, they had to live like this all the time. Pretty amazing, don’t you think?”

  “Pretty stupid,” she answers, stepping into a small clearing and dropping her bags. “I would’ve stayed home and let someone else do it.”

  “Some pioneer you are.”

  “I’m not a goddamn pioneer,” she snaps. “I am a goddamn orphan, and don’t you damn forget it.”

  He starts to say, well tha
nks a lot, what about me?, but he doesn’t. She’s in one of her moods, and even a grunt would set her off, and he’d have to put up with her temper for the rest of the night. Not that he blames her. More times than he wanted to count, she had almost convinced him to give this up, that Chisholm was a lost cause and they’d never find him unless they suddenly got a hell of a lot luckier than they had been. A miracle; it would take a damn miracle.