Roland gave his lucky Blue Jays baseball cap his magic wiggle. A secret switch that transformed him from the dumpy little man he was into Roland Friar, long-haul trucker.
The hat was a good luck charm, given to him by Carmen on their wedding day. He’d worn it every mile of the road.
Damn it, he loved sitting up this high. When you were the runt of a family of grasshopper knee-highs, altitude was nothing to be sneezed at. Sitting up here in his custom Peterbilt, he felt as large as King Kong on a pair of skyscraper stilts.
Roland was nearly five feet tall. Five one if he rocked on his toes. He made up for it in muscle, standing as wide as a forklift. Mostly, thanks to the beer and truck stop eggs, as sure as death rides a pale pony.
He shifted down and revved it up. The big rig roared into life. There were flames and a name painted on the cab. A truck wasn’t worth a beggar’s fart, unless you named it. Roland named it after himself, calling it “Rolling Fire”.
He roared ahead, happy as a bird on the wing.
It was a good day.
It could only get better.
* 3 *
What remained of Vic Harker shook the grave dirt from the pegs of his feet.
He’d strained all night, and now he was free.
He stood stiffly, like a pair of long johns left to freeze on a winter clothesline.
Shit.
How’d he get so deep in the dirt?
He’d been drunk, maybe.
Maybe he was part gopher?
Christ.
His head was splitting. He felt like he’d brained himself with an axe.
He touched his skull.
He couldn’t quite feel it, his fingers still numb from last night’s drunk.
Hell.
He couldn’t feel his fingers, either.
And what the fuck were daisies doing up this time of year?
It was the goddamn scientists, pumping the air full of shit and corruption. There was no telling just what the fuck would grow, they keep doing it. Vic shook his head which felt as if it might fall off.
Fucking hangover.
He must have been on a real howler, most likely drunk as ten skunks in a whiskey barrel.
He remembered an argument with Maddy.
Something about eggs.
Hell.
Arguments were what married folks did. Scrapping didn’t make for the end of days. His own ma and pa had a hell of a lot worse arguments, and their marriage had lasted.
He looked towards the house.
Christ, what was he doing out here?
How the hell had he got out here in the field?
He took a step, but could barely feel his feet. He fell to the dirt like a toppled tree. He tried to laugh at his foolishness. His throat felt clogged, like he’d gargled in mud. He tried to spit, but that wasn’t working, either.
Fuck.
Then he saw his hands.
He saw what was left of them.
What the hell?
His legs, too.
Black and muddy, they looked like sticks were running through them.
Damn.
He stumbled for home.
He had to get to Maddy. She would forgive him. She would make him better. The two of them could kiss and make up, just as soon as he washed out his throat.
He made it to the back door, but his hands still wouldn’t work.
Fuck.
What had happened?
Had he amputated himself? He stared at his reflection in the window glass, backlit by the rising sun. What the hell had he got into? Had he been abducted by aliens? Had he drunk a glass of toxic moonshine? Maybe he had pissed off the wood fairies?
Damn it.
He looked like a Halloween costume on legs, only way worse.
He looked like a nightmares of ten thousand Elm Streets.
He started remembering things, like flashes of light and the taste of dirt, slapping on his face. He remembered the feel of that spade beating him down and the stink of his pulverized dead flesh.
His memory clogged, gave one good dry heave, and then he threw the whole scene right back up in his face.
All at once he remembered just how it had all went down.
“What the fuck am I?”
Tatterdemon, whispered a soft blue echo.
CHAPTER 18
Waking Up To Bad Dreams
* 1 *
Maddy dreamed of digging up Vic’s body, only she couldn’t find a shovel.
She ran through the fields, hunting for one. When she finally found the shovel, it shot up higher than a lightning-struck jack pine. Vic’s maggoty corpse hung from the D-handle like a rice-stuffed piñata. She knelt at his feet praying, rosary beads sliding through her teeth like strings of sour candy.
Then he was on her back. She piggybacked him across the field, out to where her she’d buried daddy. Daddy stood there, all blue and tattery, wearing a battered straw hat so big it made him look like a giant haystack. She blew at the hat and the straw whipped and cut her flesh like a wave of dried killer bees. She felt Vic’s leg bones sticking into her flesh, then out of her flesh, like she’d become some kind of puppet.
When she woke up things were way worse.
She opened her eyes.
Staring back into them was a maggot ridden corpse.
It wasn’t Vic. It all came back to her. She’d killed Vic and buried him. She’d clocked Marvin Pusser with the paint can and desecrated his truck with the other.
It came back slowly, like a photograph developing.
Helliard.
Duane.
“Well, if it isn’t sleepy-fucking-beauty. Did you have a nice nap?”
Helliard stood in the doorway. He had one of her favorite bandanas, wrapped about the wreckage of his ear. Dried blood stains clotted and darkened the cheery red paisley.
“I hope you got your beauty rest, because I’m horny man,” he told her. “A horny morning man as regular as sunrise, my dick shoots up every morning.”
Maddy smiled as sweetly as she could. She figured he was going to kill her, sooner or later, and she wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of her being afraid.
“I believe Vic left a couple of stroke books in the bottom of the closet,” she suggested. “If you wanted to handle that yourself.”
Helliard didn’t even bother to grin.
He just leaned over and shoved Duane aside.
“Think wet thoughts, bitch,” he told her. “It’ll go a lot easier.”
Maddy snapped her teeth.
“Come a little closer, fuckhead,” she said. “I’m hungry, and that ear tasted fine.”
He pulled his pistol to remind her who was boss.
“Wake up cranky, did you?” he jammed the pistol into her throat, so hard it made her hurt. “You get any ideas and I’ll put a hole through your skull and fuck that while you’re bleeding to death.”
Then something that was nearly a voice, graveled from the doorway.
“Any fucking to do, I’m the fucker gets to do it.”
Helliard turned towards the voice.
Maddy, who was already looking that way just lay there and stared at the sight of Vic – or something awful close to him, standing there in the doorway.
He’d come back.
It was way worse than watching TV sports.
Maddy still didn’t know who or what to cheer for.
* 2 *
Wilfred woke up somewhere west of the wrong side of ugly.
His leg ached like a bastard from the bruises left over from yesterday’s car wreck. Jumping off the freezer hadn’t help it none, either. His mouth tasted like a sandy handful of shit had been crammed down it. His skull was staging a one-bone rock concert.
He brewed up a pot of Mike Tyson coffee – black, strong and ugly. He took a cup downstairs, with a couple of cigarettes. There was nothing like waking up to a healthy breakfast to kick-start the heartbeat of the morning.
“Morning, Emma. How’d you sleep?”
/>
He took a sip of coffee.
It damn near burnt his lips off.
“I had a fender bender yesterday. Just one of those things. I tried to drag race a jet plane with a broke-down wheelbarrow. I guess I bruised my leg up some.”
He’d already told her this story last night, but she didn’t seem to mind. That was marriage for you. People found a gentle sort of comfort in repetition. He played down the car crash, not wanting her to worry.
“You aren’t missing much, Emma. There’s not a hell of lot happening now that didn’t happen a year before. Nothing changes here in Crossfall. Nothing ever will.”
He talked for a slow-sipped cup of coffee, and both of the cigarettes.
Once he thought he saw her move.
That was crazy, wasn’t it?
He was losing it. He knew she was dead, but he also knew that he was slowly giving up on reality – which didn’t mean he was anywhere close to nailing himself up to the side of a church. It’s just that making pretend was a hell of a lot easier on the soul. He just liked talking to his wife, was all.
“Shit.”
He ought to lie down. He ought to just forget about all of that hanging business. He ought to just lie down in the freezer and let the door bang shut above him.
Why not?
Freezing was supposed to be painless. It would be a lot easier than hanging himself and cheaper than buying rope. All he had to do was just lay back and let go. When they found him he’d be laying in Emma’s arms, just the way he liked to lay.
That’d give them something to talk about.
Maybe he could leave them a note, a last wish.
Maybe they would bury the two of them in the freezer.
Ha.
He’d like to see the pallbearers handle that.
He gently closed the lid, trying not to make a bang. It was time to go to work. There was no rest for the wicked.
He went upstairs.
At the close of the freezer door, Emma opened her eyes.
She stared up into the darkness. She tried to scream, but the chords in her throat were long frozen shut.
“Be still,” a woman’s voice whispered from deep inside her, a voice that slid soft and scary like the whisper of a snake.
Emma, being dead, didn’t argue.
“You just the ridden,” the woman said. “You just waiting to go.”
Emma just lay there and listened.
The voice went on.
“You just the vehicle. Nothing but the locomotion. I’m the rider.”
Emma lay still, like she was told.
She lay still and waited for the call.
The inside of the freezer glowed an icy tranquil blue.
* 3 *
Helliard couldn’t believe his eyes.
The thing walking towards him look like a heap of walking manure poured around kindle sticks.
And those flowers, sticking out like that?
He’d never seen the like.
He turned and fired, putting one big bullet hole right in the thing’s chest.
Only the thing kept moving.
He fired again.
This time he caught it smack in the shoulder.
It kept moving.
It was getting closer.
Helliard let it all fly, squeezed the trigger as fast as he could and fired until Big Fuck was all talked out. He made a lot of holes in the wall, and holes in the thing, but the damn thing just kept walking. It looked like the mud or meat or whatever the thing was made of, just kept moving and filling up the holes.
He dropped the pistol and pulled his knife and hacked off one of the flowers.
The flower twisted on the floor like a goddamn snake and latched onto his ankle. He tried to kick the flower loose, but it sucked on his ankle bone like a goddamn leech.
“Goddamn!” Helliard shouted.
The thing swung out one long stick arm and knocked Helliard’s knife from his hand to the floor.
Then it slammed Helliard’s head against the bed post.
“I think you’re going to be the first,” it said.
The scarecrow-thing touched Helliard right over his heart. Helliard tried to pull away but the scarecrow-thing held him as helpless as a hooked worm. A soft yellow glow burned inside the stick arm, into Helliard’s chest. He felt that glow, hot as burning blood, eating into his heart like a fistful of Napalm. He opened his mouth to scream, but the sound escaping his suddenly dried lips was no louder than the scrape of sandpaper against bone.
He fell, twisting like a scalded eel, to the floor.
“The first, but not the last.” the scarecrow-thing said, looking straight at Maddy.
Maddy looked back at it.
As for Helliard, well he just wasn’t there anymore. He’d sort of left the equation, dropped to the floor, he was beneath either of their notice.
“Hell, Maddy,” the scarecrow-thing said. “Now what’s a man to think? I go away for a couple of days and come home to find you hip deep in a gang bang with a corpse and a woodpecker-headed bastard.”
He stepped closer.
Maddy just kept rolling her eyes, wanting to scream, but not seeing any goddamn sense in it. She was leaving creation, leaving this planet, raped and butchered and now clear out of her senses.
Closer.
“Now how’s that supposed to make me feel, hey?”
And closer.
CHAPTER 19
Expectations
* 1 *
Marvin got up bright and early, tingling like a kid before Christmas.
Of course, not all the tingling was excitement. The side of his face stung like a bastard from Maddy’s paint-can massage.
He couldn’t wait to get his hands on that bitch.
He’d show the whore what he thought of all her tough talk. She’d asked for it and he’d give it to her in big fucking spades.
She’d beg for it, before he was done fucking her.
Rape.
He liked the sound of the word. It sounded like reap. Like bringing in the crops and harvesting what you’d worked for.
What you deserved.
He made his mind up halfway through the late night news, listening to some politician talk about taxes going up. How there was no helping it. How we’d asked for it and earned it.
Yeah.
Maddy was going to get what she’d asked for.
Marvin had raped before, back in Cape Breton when he ran the painting business. That woman he’d screwed. She’d asked for it too. Hell, his lawyer had even proved that. Deep down he knew that he’d been lucky to get away with it. He’d been lucky that his lawyer could argue like a bastard.
He ought to forget it. He ought to let Maddy go on, wanting him. Fuck, it’d serve her right, but he wanted her now. It was her fault. He just hoped he could get away without being caught.
He was whistling while he slung the mail sack over his shoulder.
Rain, snow, sleet, or hail, Maddy was going straight to hell.
“Hope you got a good sleep, Mrs. Maddy Harker. You’re sure going to need it.”
He couldn’t wait. He was damn near creaming in his fresh new postal trousers at the thought of what he’d do to her.
He’d made his mind up.
He’d see her tits, or die trying.
* 2 *
Vic leaned over Maddy.
She felt his weight, looming over her.
She felt the dankness of his shadow touch her breastbone.
“Now how’s that supposed to make me feel?” Vic the scarecrow-thing asked.
She blinked her eyes hard as she could. He wouldn’t go away. He just leaned there, arms stuck out like a petrified crucifix and bending in strange angles, like he couldn’t remember how to twist.
He swatted Duane’s corpse aside. The corpse hit the floor like a sack of rancid cabbage.
“I’ll tend to you later, maggot face.”
Then he turned back to Maddy.
“How’s my little girl?”
>
He stank like a moldy basement. His eyes were washed out and yellow, the color of rotting sunflowers. His flesh was black, damp and shiny as a meaty garden slug. He looked like a greasy shit sculpture wrapped in wet plastic. I didn’t hit him hard enough, she thought. I didn’t hit him hard enough and I didn’t bury him deep enough and the bastard must have somehow clawed free.
“How about a kiss?”
He leaned closer.
His clothes were part of him, like his plaid shirt was a part of his skin.
The strangest of all were the half-dozen daisies, all black and wet like fresh-caught eels. They were poking and wriggling, like soft lamprey periscopes sticking out of the ruin of his chest.
Helliard whimpered from the floor.
Maddy didn’t know just what Vic had done to him, but whatever he had done, it sure sounded bad.
“Come on,” Vic said. “No good morning kiss?”
He leaned closer.
His breath was a gust of swamp gas blasting across a rotted compost heap. His voice rasped like nails dragging out of a blackened coffin. Then she saw his hands and screamed. His hands, or rather the place where his hands used to be, were nothing now but moldy stumps, black and stubby, like swamp-rotted tree roots.
Vic was a scarecrow.
There was no other name for it.
All he needed was an old straw hat and a couple of buttons sewed into the gap where his eyes hollowed out.
He grinned at her like a rotted jack-o'-lantern.
“Aren’t you glad to see me, girl?”
She shook her head, in horror as much as in answer to his question.
“Come on. Zigger is glad I’m home.”
It was true.
The old dog panted happily at Vic’s foot stumps.
“You’re dead,” was all she could think to say.
“Dead and buried,” Vic agreed. “And I’m just getting started.”
She pushed up from the bed as far as her binding allowed.
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