Chasing the dead

by Joe Schreiber

  "Don't look, sweetie." Sue hits the brakes, throws it into reverse, and whips backward, Marilyn sliding off the hood. There's a crunch that she assumes is Jeff, then the Expedition gets stuck and doesn't go any farther. Sue puts it in drive, reverse, and then drive again, but she's high-centered on one of the drifts at the top of the street, the wheels gouging out snow until they're screaming off of nothing. She feels the Expedition tilting, the nose angling into gravity, suspended here on a single lump of snow beneath the undercarriage.

  In front of her another door on one of the small, old-fashioned houses opens, and Sue sees something coming out-a smaller shape, its form so mangled, so badly decayed that at first she doesn't even recognize it as human.

  But it is, or it was-a child.

  And behind it, another.

  Sue tries to swallow, finds no moisture in her throat and coughs. Her eyes flick to the sideview mirror. Behind her, all around her, children fill the street. They spill in stumbling profusion, their black eyes like holes punched through the very texture of time itself. Moving on the Expedition in a teeming mass.

  Detective Yates, from the corner of her mind:They dug up her body, took it away. They did it with all of them.

  Sue stares at the children.His children. From the summer of 1983, and 1793, and all the summers in between, and all the summers since. Their faces black with the rage of the dead. More than she can count. Surrounding the vehicle, filling every window, approaching the glass. Fingers scratch against it, peeling at the rubber gaskets with horrible eagerness.

  The cell phone begins to ring. She doesn't answer it.

  She doesn't have to. Outside she can already hear Isaac Hamilton, laughing.

  8:08A.M.

  The children crawl up on the hood and begin pounding the windshield with their fists. Sue pulls Veda from the passenger seat, squeezes into the back, and sees them through the rear window. They're on top of the Expedition too-she hears them up there scurrying over the roof in quick furtive movements, like rats, and sees one peering down from above at her, dragging the cold ice of its bare-bone fingertips against the glass. Veda looks at the face, her eyes going wide, the corners of her mouth melting downward as two large, frightened tears roll down her cheeks.

  "It's all right, baby."

  Is it? I don't think so. I don't think you can get much further from "all right" than this. And if you don't come up with something right now-

  Sue's gaze darts over the interior of the Expedition and settles on the box in the back, an idea forming in her mind. She parks Veda in the backseat, dead center, as far from the windows as possible, and buckles her in. "Stay here." Veda just cries harder, arms outstretched, needing to be consoled, but Sue can't be with her right now. "Baby, it's okay, we're almost done."

  Kneeling next to her daughter, Sue sticks her arm into the back, rips open the cardboard case, and pulls out two bottles of the liquor she's been riding with all night. In the midst of everything, the label catches her eye. It's 151-proof rum, she realizes-her reward for getting Sean Flaherty his little piece of real estate on 151 Exeter Street.

  Thank you, Sean.

  She tosses both bottles into the front seat, then grabs two more, crawls back into the front, and peels off the plastic seals, uncapping each one. Fumes of high-proof alcohol immediately begin to flood the car as she grabs a handful of the wadded-up faxes from the floor. She twists up the papers, ramming them down the necks of the bottles, spilling some of the rum on another piece as she punches the dashboard lighter.

  Next to her, behind her head, she hears glass shatter. She feels a small, cold hand groping in the roots of her hair, and ignores it. The cigarette lighter pops out and Sue jerks it free at the same moment that she hears Veda's crying becoming one long scream.

  Sue's head snaps around and she sees them crawling in through the back windows, the dead children, coming at her daughter from both sides. They're using one another to stand on, holding one another up, one of them already head-and-shoulders into the backseat.

  "Leave her alone," Sue snarls, and touches the lighter's red-hot tip to the rum-soaked fax paper in her left hand. It goes up with a suddenwhoomph of heat and light and Sue waves the burning paper at the children clustering in the windows. They don't pull away from it, but they don't come forward either-for a second they just hang where they are, half in and half out, waiting to see what's going to happen next. She drops the lighter on the floor, touching the burning sheets to the pages she's wadded up in the liquor bottles, then uncaps another bottle and splashes as much booze as she can on the children trying to attack her daughter. Veda is screaming, arms outstretched, begging Sue to take her away from this.

  Almost there, honey. Just one more second.

  And Sue heaves the burning wad at the corpse on the right. There's a loud pop and the thing is immediately enveloped in a thin jacket of flame, flailing, struggling to retract itself from the car. Black smoke billows off of it along with a high, sick stench that defies metaphor. Within seconds the backseat of the vehicle has started to burn.

  Sue lunges forward, unbuckles Veda, and pulls her out of the seat-Veda practically leaping into her arms-and picks up the two remaining paper-stuffed bottles with her free hand. They're heavy and slick with spilled alcohol, and one of the bottles slides out, bounces, and hits the floorboards, the clear liquor glugging out under the seat. Sue tucks the other one under her arm, cradles Veda, and swings herself out of the burning vehicle.

  The children crowd before her, a wall of stolen flesh. Beyond them the street slopes downward toward the last statue at the bottom of the hill.

  Sue looks at the remaining bottle in her hand, then at the mound of snow with the shovel next to it, where Veda was half-buried in her basket. She leans back, touching the fax-paper fuse to the flames flickering from inside the Expedition. The instant she sees the paper ignite, Sue hurls the bottle dead-center into the army of murdered children, whipping her body around 180 degrees in the same motion, arms and shoulders curling to protect Veda.

  The force of the explosion hits her like a battering ram, pushing her away on a wave of heat so intense she feels her skin baking dry. She and her daughter both collapse into the wonderful coolness of the snow. When she sits up, clutching Veda with both hands, Sue sees the corpses churning in a sea of fire, scrambling everywhere at once. The air is filled with an awful screaming noise, of pain and fury, and the acrid odor is everywhere. And as bad as the stench is, the noise is worse. It's the sound of Isaac Hamilton screaming from every mouth.

  Sue doesn't wait.

  She already knows that she'll get only one chance at this, maybe not even that. Running with Veda down the long slope of the hill, she shifts her daughter's weight to her left side and grabs the shovel sticking out of the snow, not slowing down. Fifteen feet later she loses her footing and lands flat on her ass, sliding and scrambling with the shovel in one hand and Veda in the other. Sue manages to slow herself, uses the shovel to get up again, and keeps running on the edges of her feet. Three-quarters of the way down she snaps a glance back over her shoulder.

  Up at the top of the street, the children are still milling around the burning Expedition-some of them are on fire but not many, most are getting reorganized, pulling themselves together. Sue doesn't know how much time she has. In the end she supposes it doesn't matter.

  Moving again, she finally gets down to the bottom where the different roads converge along the town's little mock waterfront. Directly in front of her, the last statue is situated in a wide circle of black dirt, rising ten feet over her head. It is simply a stone pillar, maybe sixteen inches in diameter, with a large metal object mounted on top. Sue doesn't have to look any closer to know that the sculpted object is an oversized model of a human heart. Isaac Hamilton's heart. This is where they buried the last of him, that monster, that history of murder in New England, at the end of the route.

  She steps into the circle of dirt and feels it trembling under her feet, rhythmically, thump-thump,t
hump-thump.The ground is shaking hard enough to make the pillar tremble visibly, and she can see the statue of the heart on top shaking along with it. It starts pounding harder, and on some level Sue knows this is because Hamilton's heart is pumping its will, its fury, into every corpse at its disposal.

  She puts Veda down-the girl shrieking in terror as soon as Sue lets her go-and plunges the shovel into the dirt. But the frozen top layer of the ground is as hard as asphalt, and the blade of the shovel bounces off it, the plastic handle vibrating in Sue's palms. Below her Veda immediately grabs Sue's leg and tries to climb up into her arms. Holding her daughter back with her left leg, Sue puts the blade down again and drives it with her right foot.

  This time the blade does go in a few inches, the crust of the earth yielding to the force of her attack. She can feel the heart beneath her feet laboring harder with each pulse, wiggling through the shovel's handle and through her palms, and when she looks up again she sees that the children have turned back from the Expedition and are headed down the hill toward her.

  Sue thrusts harder, slamming the shovel in, digging up as much as she can and pulling it out again. She starts to sweat and her bangs stick to her forehead. Veda clings to her leg and screams, and Sue tries to put the screams out of her mind. The ground beneath them pulses. The hole at the base of the statue has become a shallow trench, going a foot or two down at its deepest part. As she stares into it, the trench vibrates faster, making crumbs of dirt slide back down.

  It's here. I know it is. I can feel it.

  When she looks up, Sue sees that the children have surrounded her again. But this time they have stopped, ten paces away, coming no closer. She doesn't question it, just keeps digging, picking the shovel blade up and ramming it down.

  Not deep enough.

  She plunges it harder, pulls it out, smashes it in again, and the shovel clanks off something solid.

  Sue looks in at it, the outer edge of what seems to be an ancient metal box. The box is shaking so hard, pulsating, that the ground around it gapes open visibly with every beat. It looks as if it's going to shake itself loose from the half-frozen ground and burst open any second and Isaac Hamilton's heart will come flying straight out at her.

  If I can just get it out, get it out-

  She digs the shovel in, putting all her strength into working the edge of the blade under the box, trying to get enough leverage to pry it up. It skips and scrapes off the edge.

  "Come on," she says under her breath. "Come on, now. You can do this."

  And drives the shovel down, one last time, sinking the blade underneath, forcing the handle up in combination with the box's own shaking, tearing up out of the earth.

  Sue hunches over, reaches for the box, curling her fingers beneath its lower edges, and lifts it all the way out of the ground. She can feel it pulsating in her hands, making her arms shake along with it.

  What now? What the fuck now?

  Behind her there's a soft click of a bolt-action being snapped into place. Sue lowers the metal box and looks back at what the children have been looking at, in their dead and staring way, for the last moment or so.

  The Engineer stands on the other side of the statue with his rifle, the flesh of his face stretched into a tight grin. He's holding a cell phone in his right hand, the phone, she knows, that he's been calling her on all night. Sue sees how his overalls are still slashed to pieces where Phillip drove the knife in over and over, all those years ago. Next to him, Phillip's corpse is holding a long knife in front of his face, also grinning. Together they represent the leering face of Isaac Hamilton.

  "Thought we'd give you the choice, Susan," Hamilton's voice says through the Engineer's mouth.

  "One for you, the other for your daughter," the voice says through Phillip's mouth. It sounds identical to the other voice, the voice on the phone, the voice of Jeff Tatum and Marilyn. It is the last voice that so many children heard over the past two hundred years. "Maybe we should use the knife on the little girl."

  Sue moves to pull Veda closer to her, keeping the pounding, vibrating metal box against her side with her other hand. She can hardly hold on to it. "I don't think so," she says.

  "What?"

  "Not as long as I've got your heart in my hands."

  The Engineer shakes his head. "My heart has been locked up for centuries. You can't harm it any more than you can save yourself." He aims the rifle at her face, directly at her eyes. "Hold very still now. You'll be joining us shortly."

  "All right." With her right arm Sue lifts Veda up so that the girl's face is next to hers, then raises the shaking box upward so that it's directly in front of them, blocking their eyes. She can actually hear the sound of the heart inside now, pounding the metal interior, an accelerated WHUMP-WHUMP,WHUMP-WHUMP,WHUMP-WHUMP."Fire away."

  Don't be stupid. He'll just shoot your legs out. It's over. You know it is.

  Sue casts her glance back up the hill, over the congregation of silent children, where the Expedition is on fire. She thinks of the 151 in the trunk and the remaining half-tank of gas.

  The Engineer, Phillip, and all the children stare at her, then as one they lift their gazes up the hill to where the mound of snow that had been holding the Expedition in place has melted away in the fire. And as Sue watches, the Expedition shifts free, its exhaust system scraping off whatever's left of the snow beneath it, and begins to roll downhill, flames dancing in its windows, speeding over the shaking ground, a taxi dispatched from the depths of hell.

  WHUMP-WHUMP,WHUMP-WHUMP,WHUMP-WHUMPThe children have turned completely around to look-the Expedition is now just fifty feet away, now forty, thirty-and as the Engineer and Phillip start to shift away, Sue tucks the metal box under her left elbow, clutching Veda against her right side, and takes three steps from the base of the statue. On the third step she launches herself as hard as she can, putting everything she has and a little more into her legs. At the same time she swings her arm backward, flinging the box directly into the path of the Expedition.

  What happens next transpires as much in her mind's eye as it does in reality. The box strikes the last Isaac Hamilton statue and starts to bounce forward just as the car hits the foundation. In the last flickering instant before impact, Sue sees a brief flash of the box as it disappears between the Expedition's front grille and the statue's base, the top bursting open, its metal dimensions suddenly crushed as unstoppable force meets immovable object, and the black heart within it smashed flat, pulverized between the two.

  She looks away.

  Somewhere behind her Sue hears the final moments of the collision, imagines what's left of the entire crate of 151 flying forward to slam into the burning backseat. Alcohol igniting, bottles bursting like bombshells inside the Expedition, until with one shrill, earringing blast, the gas tank finally explodes, shooting a tower of orange flame and black smoke straight up into the sky.

  Sue raises her head, her hands pressed over Veda's ears as she looks back at the street behind her. The smoke is too thick to see through. It burns her eyes, siphons through her lungs, makes her choke. Lifting Veda up, she carries her away, down toward the waterfront. Somewhere between the street and the harbor she realizes that the sound of the pounding heart has stopped.

  They get to the water, the wooden boardwalk leading to a series of docks. The air is clearer here and Sue holds Veda at eye level, the girl no longer screaming, just crying steadily, the intensity of her panic having drained her.

  Sue hugs her daughter tightly, as tightly as she dares, kissing away her tears. "Shhh, it's okay," she says. Over Veda's shoulder, Sue can see the smoke rising, catching in the wind and being pulled eastward, out to sea.

  And as the air slowly clears, she sees the statue is still there atop its stone pillar, the front end of the wrecked Expedition wrapped around it, burning.

  Sue looks out at the hillside leading down to the water. Through the dissipating smoke she glimpses the streets, the little houses and narrow storefronts of White's Cov
e, and eventually she can see the bodies of the children, so many children, sprawled motionless in the snow.

  She turns her daughter's head away.

  8:29A.M.

  Down by the water, a burning scrap of paper blows across her feet, caught in the wind. Holding Veda close to her chest, Sue leans over and lifts it by the edge that isn't on fire.

  It's the map, or what's left of it. She's not sure how it got here, but in light of last night's events, the map's sudden reappearance doesn't seem the least bit surprising or strange. As charred as it is, Sue can barely make out some of the names of the towns. The first odd thing she notices is that there is no more jagged line running across it. She finds Gray Haven and tries to follow the route east but can't find the next town. At the moment she can't even remember what it was called. As the flame inches upward toward the top of the map the town names are consumed one by one, and she doesn't see any that sound like they were on the route. Now she's squinting at it, and as she does, the last of the names-White's Cove-also disappears, just a second or two before the nearby towns that surround it. Spectral images fading along with the memory of the route, vanishing down the pipeline of the night.

  The route created the towns, she thinks. They're still here but the route is gone.

  Up at the top of the hill she sees the lights of emergency vehicles flashing red and blue against the steadily illuminating sky.

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  Document creation date: 20.01.2011

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