Grim Tidings

by Caitlin Kittredge

  I blew my nose hard. Hank looked out the window at the cars whipping past us on the highway. “He never talked much about what happened to him in the camp. He just talked about you.”

  “Was he okay? After?” I said. “Was he . . . happy?”

  Hank smiled. “He came here in ’52 and he met my grandmother. He got his medical license again and he was a surgeon in Kansas City for decades. Everyone loved Dr. Gottlieb. There’s even an OR suite named after him at his hospital.”

  “He was a good man,” I said. “He deserved that life.”

  Hank handed me more tissues. “He taught us well, me and my dad both. He became a rabbi like my great-grandfather after what you and he went through. Never saw any problem with being a mystic and a surgeon. But the psychic thing was all me.” He flashed an ID badge. “I’m a city engineer. Never got to the rabbi part. Guess I don’t have the patience to learn all the stuff I needed to be a real live golem-making, demon-banishing badass.”

  I started the truck again and pulled out onto the highway. “Tell me where to find the Walking Man,” I said. “Tell me everything and don’t lie and maybe I’ll consider listening to your insane suggestion I don’t end him.”

  “You have to listen,” Hank said. “Do you have any idea how rare it is for half a dozen psychics to have the same dream? Killing the Walking Man will touch off something catastrophic.”

  “I doubt that,” I said grimly, pressing the accelerator down to the floor as Jacob directed me onto the southbound interchange.

  “Why?” he said. “You of all people know there are forces out there capable of ending the world as we know it.”

  “Because I killed him once already,” I said. “And the world did not end. In fact, it was a far better place without his poison in it.”

  “Really?” Hank cocked his head. “You killed him?”

  “Dead as a doornail,” I said. Even as I said it, though, I felt a little flip in my stomach. My grandmother used to say it was the truth trying to fight its way past the lie.

  “Are you sure?” Hank said. “Because if you did maybe there’s something about my own impressions I’m not getting.”

  “Maybe,” I agreed. I felt the lie again, and I swallowed it. “Because I killed him. I’m certain.”

  CHAPTER

  12

  KANSAS, HIGHWAY 30

  APRIL 1951

  The wig itched, and a herd of sweat droplets stampeded down the back of my neck. Even with the car windows down, it was warm and wet as a sodden wool blanket. April wasn’t supposed to be this hot, and I drove toward a horizon of bruise-colored sky hemmed in by charcoal thunderheads.

  The gas gauge of Tanner’s Ford hovered on E and I sighed, tapping my fingers against the steering wheel. I’d been driving up and down this stretch of road for almost six hours, making passes as the world got hotter and the sky got darker, just waiting. Waiting for the broken-down car and the big man flagging me down.

  In the months since we’d met and talked with Val, it’d gotten easier to accept we were dealing with something old, something monstrous that the other monsters hadn’t noticed, lurking way back there in the shadows.

  Maybe not Cain, the character in a Bible story, but something that was primeval. A monster who was the first of its kind.

  And now I was driving around Kansas in a blond wig trying to pick a fight with him, when he’d already beaten me once before without even lifting a finger.

  The wig had been Val’s idea. She was the reason I was driving around now. Her impression said he was going to take someone today, and after months of chasing and falling short, Tanner and I had decided to hell with it. We weren’t having any luck chasing, so we were going to turn around and let him chase me.

  I was who he wanted, after all. If he thought he was getting the upper hand, that he was going to have me back in his grasp when I showed up in the stupid wig, blustering like a superhero, acting like I’d caught him, he might drop his guard. He might slip just long enough for Tanner and me to finish him.

  It was that, or I’d be his again. But we didn’t have any other choice.

  I reached over to fiddle with the radio and try to find a station that wasn’t just hissing. I couldn’t be alone in this silent car, on this silent road. My company was a gun in the glove compartment and a knife resting up against my thigh, tucked into my garter.

  Those weren’t for him. Nothing that was a weapon could hurt him. The gun was for me, if he caught me and I could still use my limbs.

  The knife was a last resort.

  A snatch of Bing Crosby filtered out of the speakers, only to get interrupted by the screech of an emergency broadcast. “We interrupt this program to bring you this special weather report . . .” the announcer droned, cutting in and out through the whistle of static.

  I stopped paying attention when I saw the silver of a bumper pulled onto the shoulder, under a stand of cottonwoods.

  I stomped on the brake, pushing on my sunglasses. No point in making it too easy for him. I waited for two heartbeats. My fingers didn’t seem to want to let go of the wheel.

  “Get out of the car,” I murmured to myself as the cottonwoods bent and swayed in a wind that kicked up, almost obscuring the big hulking sedan parked under them. “You’re not scared, you’re not scared. Get out of the car.”

  I shoved the door open and put my feet in the dirt before I could lose my nerve and drive away. “You okay, sugar?” I called out, putting the full force of my former life as a Tennessee hillbilly behind the words.

  The hulking figure bent over the engine compartment straightened up, then turned. The car was a silver coupe, the same make as the one belonging to his last victim, Tom Chavez of Austin, Texas. Chavez was a traveling salesman who moved all over the Midwest fitting aluminum siding. He’d tried to help out the Walking Man a little over three weeks ago.

  “That’s real nice of you, miss,” he said. “You sure you’re all right giving me a ride to a filling station?”

  “You just try and stop me,” I said, and gave him a big, broad, stupid smile. He wiped his hands off on a rag and shut the hood, taking his jacket from the open window. Were his black eyes flashing with amusement? Had he recognized me already?

  “Looks like rain,” he said as he got in my car and shut the door.

  I gunned the engine, pulling us out onto the highway and spraying gravel all over poor dead Tom Chavez’s paint job.

  The Walking Man reached out and gripped the dashboard. “Don’t rush on account of me.”

  I just had to get him to the mile marker Val had seen. Get him there, and get him into the binding hex that Tanner had set up. He couldn’t be killed, but we could at least freeze him in place. Val had looked into the future for us and told us it had to be today, on this road, at that marker.

  Just get him there. Less than two miles, and don’t die in the process. Easy. Right.

  “Really,” the Walking Man said. “Slow down, darlin’. We’ve got all the time in the world.”

  I took off my sunglasses, tossing them into the backseat. I followed with the wig. “Five years is long enough for me.”

  The Walking Man stared at me for a long moment. I’d expected rage, that he might attack me right there and run the car off the road. I’d expected that he might try to frighten me, since I knew most of his victims died in terror.

  I never expected him to smile, and I almost threw up when he started to laugh. “All this time, little bird. I never thought I’d see your nest.”

  I kept driving, the radio roaring and chirping with static the only sound besides the engine as I pushed the Ford past seventy. “I’m not your little bird. You’re done. You’re mine now.”

  He leaned back, hooking his arm over the open window. “I don’t think so, little bird. I think you’re gonna stop this car.”

  “Oh really,” I said. He was going to try to pull me under again, look into my eyes and strip me bare and manipulate my strings, like before. I kept staring at the road
, refusing to look at him. He was just a hulking shape in my periphery. A nightmare laughing at me. If he couldn’t look into your eyes, we’d figured out, he couldn’t pull you close and hold you. It was taking everything I had, my entire body vibrating, but I kept my eyes on the road.

  “Really,” he said. “You’re out of gas.”

  I gasped as the car jerked and shuddered, the steering going soft under my grip as we rolled to a stop in the middle of the empty highway. Fat raindrops splashed against the windshield and a finger of lightning jumped between the clouds on the horizon as the Walking Man continued to laugh. He’d gone for the car, since I’d smartened up, forcing us to stop short of the mile marker.

  Tanner was waiting. He’d come. He would, when I didn’t show.

  I let that keep me from screaming as the Walking Man spoke. “You’re brave, I’ll give you that. Brave as a hero from a storybook. But Theseus was thrown from a cliff by his own people and Perseus fell from Pegasus when he became too proud.” His fist connected with my jaw, slamming me into the driver’s window hard enough to crack it. Just as in the camp, his hands were around my neck. “And now, you are in the Minotaur’s maze, except there is no thread to guide you back home. We are getting out of this car, little bird. I promised to clip your wings, and those friends you managed to con into helping you will find your body by the side of the road.”

  He leaned in close and that hot, burnt smell filled my nostrils and defiled what little air I had left. “I’ll have the decency not to mark you as one of my children. I’m not the monster you think I am.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut as I also laughed, hysteria bubbling its way out of me like a kettle boiling. I wasn’t going to look. He could kill me right here, choke me or beat me to death, but I wasn’t going to look at him. He wasn’t going to possess me again.

  “Look at me,” he croaked. I shook my head, still laughing, although now it just sounded like the wheeze of a dying machine, inhuman and mechanical. He grabbed my cheeks with his rough hands, crushing the flesh against my teeth. “LOOK AT ME!” he bellowed.

  I would gouge out my own eyes, I thought. I would slam my own skull into the engine block and fry my eyelids shut before I’d look. The world was black and lightheaded, sounds and the smell of him, and far away the slamming of rain on the car roof.

  The Walking Man reached over me with his free hand and yanked the door handle. Nothing happened, and he smashed at it more, bashing my head each time and making me see stars.

  “Perseus didn’t ride Pegasus,” I rasped as I felt his skin heat with the rage that always lurked just beneath the surface. “It was Bellerophon. And he didn’t fall from Bellerophon’s back. Zeus pushed him.”

  “What did you do,” the Walking Man snarled, slamming my head into the door once more. I licked at the blood dribbling from the cut inside my mouth, where my teeth had sunk into the delicate skin.

  “I didn’t,” I said, sliding my hands in front of my eyes. “But a friend painted a barrier spell all over this car. Up under the headliner. Door panels. Floorboards too. You can check in but you don’t check out.”

  Tanner hadn’t wanted to—had begged me, in fact, to not trap myself with the Walking Man. But there’d always been a chance we wouldn’t make it to the mile marker. And I’d decided long ago that the next time we met, he wasn’t getting away.

  As quickly as he’d landed on me, the Walking Man let me go. “So what now, little bird?” he said. “You and I sit here until one of us dies of old age? Because here’s a hint: it won’t be me.”

  “Eventually my friends will come along, we’ll cut off your head, burn you down to nothing, and dissolve the ashes in sulfuric acid,” I said. “We’ll put those ashes inside a barrier hex inside a hole so deep even the Devil himself can’t find you, and we’ll leave you there. I think that will be the end of you, old age or no.”

  I wiped the blood from my lips with the back of my sleeve, pressing my face into the scratchy material of the door liner to avoid looking at him. “Are you really him?” I said. “Cain? Is that your name?”

  He shook his head, his nostrils flaring with every breath. “I haven’t been called that in centuries. And you have no idea what I am, what I’m capable of, what this endeavor of ours is . . .”

  “There is no us!” I screamed. “I am not anything like you, you get it?!” I tried to squirm away from his weight and he let me go. I was surprised, but I pulled myself up, spinning sideways in my seat, burying my face in my knees. “I am a hunter,” I whispered. “And for once, the bird is not trapped with you. You’re in my cage now, and if neither of us leaves, that is just fine by me.”

  Cain lunged for me again, grabbing me by the front of my blouse and pulling me close. “You listen to me, little one—you may think you are a mighty hound sworn to that vile thing that calls himself Gary, but you are not a hound, and you do not belong to anyone but me . . .”

  There was an enormous crack of thunder, and the ground shuddered, rain thrumming on the car hood so hard I couldn’t see ten feet in front of us. Lightning illuminated Cain’s snarl in camera flashes, and I ducked my head in terror that the glance had been enough. But all at once our brief contact was broken by a roar that sounded like the big freight trains that raced by on the tracks next to Valentine’s trailer. It was so loud I felt like it could suck the air out of my lungs, like it was pulling sound and sense and feeling out of everything around me.

  Cain’s gaze snapped to the windshield and he dropped me so the back of my skull clunked against the steering wheel. He murmured something in a language I didn’t catch, one that had to have been his native tongue, then he turned to me, no longer angry. “If you can get out of this car,” he said softly. “Do it. Run. Now.”

  The rain parted, as if I was watching a film running in reverse. It flew upward, and I saw the funnel cloud bearing down, chunking up the highway a few hundred yards ahead. It was the biggest I’d ever seen, so wide and black it looked like the sky had grown a mouth.

  I didn’t argue with the Walking Man, didn’t bother to wonder why he’d suddenly let go of me. All that existed was the hound’s will to survive, and it grabbed the chance in its jaws and ran.

  I threw the door open and lunged for the ditch next to the highway. I’d been terrified of ending up in it not ten minutes before, and now I’d never wanted to be any place more.

  Road debris and sections of the guardrail started to wobble and pull away. The car scooted forward a few inches, the springs on my door howling as they were yanked the wrong way toward the pull of the wind. I clambered for the drainpipe, half full of fetid rain water, splashing into it and curling up against one of the rusty, crenelated sides as the twister screamed above me. Mixed in with the hollow howl of the wind was a scream that I took to be the Walking Man’s. It wasn’t a rage sound or a pain sound—it was the sound of a lost thing, standing alone when the entire world around it has finally burned down.

  The storm was so loud I was sure I’d be deaf, that the sound alone would rip me apart. I felt the massive pipe shake in its stead, fighting the grip of the earth as the twister passed overhead. I tightened my body into a ball and waited to die for the second time.

  Then, just as quickly as it had come up, it was gone, the ground under me rumbling faintly like the freight had moved on past the junction, going up north toward Chicago. Rainwater rushed around me, almost up to my waist, and I crawled slowly out of the pipe to find dozens and dozens of tin cans littering the roadway. Not just cans—every type of trash and muck that could be dumped on the side of the road was scattered across it. A license plate that wasn’t from my car clanged as I kicked it with my toe. Papers blew every which way and I even saw the head of a baby doll, pitted and worn by weather long before the twister snatched it lying in the chaos.

  The Ford was in the field on the other side of the highway, on its roof as if an errant child had stomped on it good and hard. I broke into a run, sprinting toward the crushed bulk, my feet crunching over the
glittering spray of glass lying all around the body.

  The car was empty. There was blood on the front seat, passenger side. A lot of it. More, in my experience, than a person could stand losing. A big, wedge-shaped chunk of glass lay in the center of the pool, the business end stained a deep arterial red.

  It wasn’t decapitation and a bonfire, but it would do.

  Something gleamed in the backseat, and I reached in to grasp the sunglasses, miraculously unharmed and tangled in the horrid wig. I put them on and sat down in the damp grass, leaning back against the car and turning my face to the sun. The twister had come from the opposite direction of Tanner, and I didn’t know how long it would take him to get through this mess and retrieve me, but I didn’t care. The Walking Man was gone. Sucked up into the sky as if the hand of the divine had dropped down and snatched him its fist. Gone. Gone from the world, gone from the terror that wriggled deep in the turned earth of my mind. Erased like a stain bleached to stark white.

  I had never felt lucky to be on this earth before that moment, and the feeling didn’t last long, but for a few seconds I let it warm me in equal parts with the sun.

  CHAPTER

  13

  WEST OF KANSAS CITY

  NOW

  The sun was just a stab wound of red at the horizon by the time Hank told me to get off the interstate. We hadn’t talked much since I told him about my last meeting with the Walking Man and his voice startled me.

  “Looks bad.”

  Up ahead, across the road, I saw a bunch of flashing lights and barricades and people in windbreakers with big yellow letters on the back standing around gesturing and yelling, mostly at each other.

  A state trooper flagged me down. “Road’s closed,” she said, shining her light on Hank and me. “Going to have to turn around and go back to Route 41 if you’re headed into town.”