Hocker put the rifle on the ground with the first aid box and spare flashlight, figuring he had to get something for all his trouble. He spent a little more time shuffling through the contents of the trunk, but everything else looked like useless shit to him. If there was an easy way to carry it, he would have taken more; but they had made it this far without much gear, they could do without. He threw most of it onto the barn floor and slammed the trunk lid shut.
Back in the front seat of the cruiser, Hocker directed his flashlight beam onto the police radio. A small red light was glowing, so Hocker assumed it was on and ready to use. He thought how funny it would be to switch on the radio and call the station. Maybe he could pretend to be Officer Winfield. Again, though, he passed on the idea because it would be damned foolish to alert any other cops that Winfield was in trouble.
“Yeah,” Hocker said as he spit out the car door onto the floor. “He’s in deep trouble, all right.”
Suddenly, the radio hissed and a voice crackled from the receiver.
“One-niner!… One-niner! Do you copy? Over.”
Hocker’s tensed, wondering if Winfield was “One-niner.” If he was, and he didn’t answer, then headquarters would know he was in trouble, Hocker’s eyes darted from the radio to the small doorway leading back up to the house. His hand was shaking as he reached out, ready to pick up the microphone and talk if he really had to.
The message was repeated and then, much to Hocker’s relief, another voice came on, this one so full of static he couldn’t make out any of the words. He could tell, though, from what the voice said, that “One-niner” had responded.
Hocker eased back in the cruiser’s seat and ran his forearm over his brow. His heart was thumping softly in his chest, and there was a warm dampness in his armpits. In the glow of the flashlight, he leaned forward and studied the radio for a moment. At last, he found the on/off switch and pushed it with his thumb. The tiny red bulb on the upper left corner of the radio winked off, and Hocker felt even more relieved.
After a fruitless second search of the glove compartment, Hocker eased out of the driver’s seat. He carefully balanced the flashlight on an old barrel near the barn wall so its beam shone straight into the cruiser. Then Hocker picked up the riot gun, snapped off the safety, and took aim at the black box of the police radio. The rifle slammed into his shoulder when he squeezed off two shots in rapid succession. There was a snap and a sizzle of electricity, as shards of plastic splattered the floor of the car.
“That’ll shut you the fuck up, one-mother-humpin-niner!”
He held the rifle across his chest, only vaguely aware that he was panting with excitement. Now that he had started, though, there swelled inside him, like a noxious, black cloud, a compulsion to do more damage. Gripping the rifle by the barrel, he cocked his arms back and swung the rifle around as if he was swinging for the “green monster” in Fenway Park. One of the blue bubble lights on the cruiser’s roof shattered, sending fragments of plastic flying into the darkness.
Without a moment’s pause, Hocker kicked the cruiser door shut and then slammed the rifle butt into the side window. A spider web of cracks, sickly white in the flashlight’s glow, spread across the window. Hocker saw a brief flash of his own face reflected in the window, a mosaic of wild eyes and wide grin. A low laughter sounded like distant thunder in his chest.
For the next several minutes, Hocker completely lost all sense of where he was and what he was doing. His mind felt like a raging red fire consuming everything it touched as he hammered and pounded the rifle butt against the police cruiser. Mirrors and sirens and lights and windows were smashed into useless junk; everywhere on the car fist-sized dents appeared like twisted flowers. And all the while, Hocker was laughing wildly.
The frenzy stopped almost as fast as it had begun. Hocker let the rifle drop to the barn floor as he leaned over with his hands on his knees. He was panting like a racehorse. Sweat ran down from his brow and stung his eyes. He didn’t notice tiny cuts on his hands from flying glass and metal. Staggering backward, he slammed into the barn wall and almost fell down as he inspected the damage he had done. In just minutes, the cruiser had become a total wreck. Oh, he had no doubt the engine would still start up and he could drive that sucker out of here; but this baby was going to be a long time in the body shop! “All right,” he muttered as he rubbed his arm across his mouth. The unnoticed cuts left smeary blood streaks on his cheeks. His jacket sleeve came away foamy with pink-streaked saliva. Through his exhaustion, he felt a great satisfaction, a tremendous relief almost, as if he had just seen the cruiser get swept up in a raging sheet of flame!
Now wouldn’t that be something? he thought.
That was what he really wanted! More than wanted… he needed to see towering sheets of orange flame sucked skyward beneath a heavy belly of black smoke! He wanted to see a windstorm of sparks corkscrewing into the night, taking the cruiser, the barn, and the whole fucking house with it!
His first instinct was to siphon gasoline from the cruiser, and—yes, he remembered seeing a reserve tank of gasoline in the cruiser’s trunk! He could get five, maybe ten gallons of gas even if the cruiser was low on fuel. But these cops always keep their tanks full, don’t they? With that much gasoline, he could easily splash enough around the barn so he could get a ripping good blaze going before the town’s firefighters had time to respond. His fingers itched, and his mind burned to do it; just as he had not allowed himself the luxury of letting the cop’s siren whine, he knew that a fire would attract unwelcome attention.
If this urge became unbearable, Hocker thought, there was always the potato barn they had seen last night, where the men had been drinking together. There was also that ancient barn Tasha had told him she had found when she was making her way back from her “ball-kicking” encounter with the cops. Oh, there were plenty of opportunities around this town for things to go whoosh! All it came down to was a question of “what” and “when.” Right now, he was exhausted from wrecking Winfield’s cruiser. The next thing to do was to make sure Winfield himself, once he came to, was in no position to cause him any trouble. So, with the riot gun under his arm, he gathered up the flashlight, first aid kit, extra ammunition for the rifle and went back to the house.
“We’ll take care of our guest first,” he said aloud, snickering to himself. “Then we’ll see what other opportunities might come our way.” He whistled jauntily as he went up to the back door of the farmhouse and called out, “Hey, Looo-sy, I’m home!”
VIII
Dale couldn’t stop his hands from shaking as he sat in the front seat of his car, trying to break open the blister pack that held four brand-new double-A batteries. He and Donna were parked in front of the local LaVerdier’s. The street light was shining down on them with a cold, blue light.
“There’s a diagram here showing which way they go in,” Donna said as she held the miniature cassette recorder up to the light.
Dale grunted and swore softly under his breath when his fingers fumbled, and the package stayed sealed.
“I have a nail file you can use,” Donna said. She picked up her purse and started rifling through it.
“No, no,” Dale said. His voice was distorted by the edge of the package in his mouth. “I think I’ve got it.” He gave the battery pack a quick pull, and the batteries shook out and fell to the floor. He swore softly as he leaned over and fished around, trying to find the batteries in the dark. Once he found them, he took the recorder from Donna and, squinting to read the directions, slid the batteries in, one by one. He felt like he was loading bullets into a gun. Snapping the cover back on, he sat back in the seat and let out a long, whistling exhalation.
“You’ve still got the tape, I hope,” Donna said.
Dale quickly slapped his jacket pockets, then his shirt pocket. Panic flooded him when he didn’t feel the tape, but when he reached inside his jacket, he found it in his shirt pocket, where it had been all the time.
“Are you ready for
this?” he said, snapping open the plastic hood and sliding the tape into position.
“Never been more ready,” Donna said with a trembling in her voice.
“I feel like I’m prying into someone’s private diary,” Dale said. He grimaced as he turned the recorder over in his hand, found the play button, and pressed it. For the next three minutes he and Donna listened as the voice of Dale’s closest friend, dead for three days now, filled the car.
“… Testing… testing…”
There was the shrill sound of whistling, and faintly, below that, the rumble of a car engine.
“All right, seems to be working. I don’t know where to start really. The date, the date, yeah. It’s Friday, August, August… Damn! I can’t remember! The twenty-something! I’ve gotta think. Let’s see. It’s after midnight, I know that much ’cause I was at the home between eleven and eleven thirty. So, okay, after midnight. I’ve gotta keep my head straight about this, but Jesus Christ! Who could? Fuck!”
“He sounds really upset,” Donna said, glancing at Dale. Her eyes were dark hollows in the blue glow of the street light.
“Understatement of the year,” Dale said, hushing her with a wave of his hand as the tape played.
“I’m driving south, on Route 2-A, out of Dyer, heading toward Haynesville. What I’ve seen and learned in the last few days will… would make anyone think they were crazy!”
There was a long pause, filled only by the sound of the car’s engine.
“No one will ever believe what I’m going to say. Maybe I’m doing this to… to keep my own sanity… to say it out loud so I can… can…”
Larry’s voice suddenly broke off into a wild laughter that quickly shot up the scale until it cracked.
“Gotta get a grip on myself and talk… talk fast ’cause I think they’re… oh, shit! Who’s that behind me? Headlight! I think they’re after me. Okay, talk fast. What I know, what I’ve found out, is basically so simple it’s… it’s crazy! The roads up here have always been a problem… mostly ’cause they were built along old wagon trails that were never designed for motor vehicles. So, okay—that makes sense. But for years, now, we’ve been trying to improve some of these roads up in the County. ’Cause of the logging trucks and other stuff, there have been a lot of fatalities. I… shit!…”
There was a loud smashing sound, and, faintly, the squeal of tires.
“It is them! They know I’m on to them!”
“Stop it a second,” Donna said, as she gave Dale’s arm a quick shake.
Dale snapped the recorder off and looked at her. His whole body had gone cold as soon as he had heard Larry say that someone was following him. There was no doubt that Larry had recorded this message just before he died.
“I don’t think we should listen to any more of this until we play it for Winfield,” Donna said. Her voice was shaking so much her teeth chattered. Her breathing came in short hitches. Dale knew she’d be lighting a cigarette soon.
“I’ve got to hear the rest of it first,” Dale said. He popped the play button, and Larry’s frantic voice filled the car again.
“I don’t know the details of all of this, but I do know that there are reasons certain people don’t want any road improvements up here. They want people to keep having accidents and dying on the roads! They need them!”
Larry’s voice kept fading in and out on the recorder, and Dale had the impression Larry was frantically dividing his attention between dictating his report and watching whoever was following behind him. In his mind, Dale saw the flashing headlights that had threatened to run him and Donna off the road. There was no doubt it was the same person, but who was it?
“What’s been going on up here, for… I have no fuckin’ idea how long… It’s… been checking into it since the day I got up here. I don’t want to say who my first contact was ’cause if they ever get this tape, I don’t want them…”
Again, the squealing of tires hissed from the tape.
“I know who’s doing it, though. There’s an undertaker in town, named Franklin Rodgers. What little I could find out about him tells a lot. He studied botany and did some field work in Haiti on different drugs used in voodoo potions. What seems to be going on is this guy, with help from the local hospitals or something, is getting bodies from accident victims and using these drugs on them. The basic drug seems to be some kind of extract from potato plants. I discovered that the potato is a species of deadly nightshade, and it’s been used for witchcraft for years. They’re taking dead people and turning them into… into… zombies!”
Once again, Larry’s voice broke off into cackling, hysterical laughter; and this time, it didn’t just rise and fall, it kept building higher and higher until it vibrated the tiny speaker of the recorder.
“Please turn it off,” Donna said. Her hand clutched Dale’s forearm, and through the fabric of his jacket, he could feel her fingernails pressing into his skin. “I can’t listen any more!”
Dale stopped the recorder, cutting off Larry’s insane laughter abruptly. He held a fisted hand up to his mouth and bit down hard on his thumb joint as tears stung his eyes and ran down his cheeks. Donna was breathing shallowly, as she stared blankly out at the front of the car.
“I can’t listen to it any more,” she said again, weakly. “That’s crazy! He’s talking, like… like he’s lost his mind!”
“I know,” Dale said. He nodded his head and slowly wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. His breath felt like it had condensed into a hot coal caught somewhere deep in his chest. “But it does kind of fit in with what we suspected.”
“What? Are you nuts, too?” Donna shouted, her voice harsh and insistent. She turned and looked at him, asking herself what kind of man she’d hooked up with this time. “You don’t mean to tell me you believe any of this!” Dale took as deep a breath as he could and, running his fingers through his hair, let it out slowly.
“I don’t know what I believe,” he said. He turned and gave Donna a harsh stare. “But I do know a few things. I know Larry’s dead, and I know I wasn’t allowed to see his body, prevented by the same man Larry says was doing something with dead bodies.”
“But zombies!” Donna said incredulously. Her voice never even approached the laughter she felt certain was building up inside of her. She took a cigarette and lit it, not even trying to blow the smoke out the window.
This is how you’ll end up if you believe this! her mind whispered. You’ll be laughing insanely, like Larry on the tape.
“All right,” Dale said, slapping the steering wheel with the flat of his hand. “Maybe not zombies, but something sure as hell is weird around this town. Come on, Donna. Think for a minute. What did Sherlock Holmes used to say? ‘Eliminate the impossible, and whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth.’ Right?”
“You’re talking zombies, for God’s sake! Night of the Living Dead comes to Aroostock County!” Donna wailed. “What will we call this, ‘Night of the Living Spud?’ Come on, Dale. This is real life, not some crazy movie! Stuff like that just isn’t real!”
“And how do you know that?” Dale said, keeping his voice low and level only by great effort. “How do you know there isn’t some kind of drug that can do that? Maybe Rodgers found something in Haiti: or the basis of something that he adapted for use up here. What Larry said about the potato being in the nightshade family, is that true?”
Donna shrugged. “I don’t know. I think I remember reading something about tomatoes being in that group of plants, and that people thought they were poisonous until, like a century ago.”
“So maybe there’s something to it!” Dale said, hitting the steering wheel again, harder. “Rodgers is concocting something from the potato plants and experimenting on people. He’s got the perfect opportunity here, being an undertaker. I mean, how much does anyone around here know about him? Where’d he come from? Why’d he set up his business way up north here? Winfield didn’t seem to know a whole hell of a lot about him. So who would? Wh
o’d check this guy out?”
Donna shrugged again. “Hey, people die everywhere. Even up in the County, they need an undertaker or two.”
“Yeah, but there’s something about Rodgers that I just don’t trust.”
“You told me so yourself,” Donna said. “It’s his weird eye that bugs you. Look, Dale, I still think you’re creating some paranoid fantasy out of all of this because you just can’t accept that Larry’s dead.” She suddenly cut herself off and lowered her gaze.
“And because I still can’t accept that Natalie’s dead, too. Isn’t that what you were going to say?”
Donna took a drag of her cigarette and exhaled a transparent stream of smoke. Looking at him, her heart ached. She admitted to herself that she liked this guy a lot! But this business he was wrapping himself up in was so incredibly insane!
“I didn’t want to say that,” she said, huskily, “because I don’t want to hurt you, but yeah. I think you still haven’t really gotten over your grief.”
Dale was shaking his head. “No, it’s not that simple,” he said. “Was that car that tried to run us off the road part of my paranoid fantasy? Was it?”
He suddenly froze when his mind recalled the old man they had seen in the cemetery the night before. Suddenly, it was very clear to him why the man had seemed so empty! He pictured how the man had moved so slowly, as if he had no will of his own.
And if he was already dead, Dale’s mind whispered, that would explain how even if I did run him over with the car, he wouldn’t have been there in the morning! He would have gotten up and walked away, because he was already dead!
The Siege Page 24
