Joe Schreiber - Chasing The Dead (mobi)

by user

  “How—” Sue pauses, wipes the blood from her mouth. She’s pretty sure that the bleeding has begun to taper off, but the headache…oh, the headache is another matter. It flares up with every vibration that comes through her throat, like she’s got a couple of hard cons serving time breaking granite between her eyes. She tries to focus past it, making herself look at what’s left of her husband. “How did this happen?”

  “Doesn’t matter now.”

  Maybe not, but she’s got a few ideas of her own. “It’s because we put one of his bodies, his vessels, out of commission.” Her mind swirls back to the playground, that afternoon. “Hisfirst one.” Maybe it’s the beating she just took, or the presence of Phillip’s voice, or the route itself, but she can see it all clearly. “The Engineer.”

  “Yes,” Phillip says. “You’re right. Do you remember, Sue? Can you see it?”

  “Yes.”

  And just like that, she’s back in 1983.

  But it’s different from the way she used to recall it, in that desolate patch of abandoned playground equipment beyond the empty outskirts of her hometown. For the first time she’s actually seeing it the way it happened, not the way her memory has homogenized it over the intervening years. For the first time Sue realizes why it haunted Phillip so mercilessly ever since—because he must’ve remembered it this way, the way it reallywas.

  In the restored memory she sees the Engineer getting out of his orange Plymouth, dressed in the bib overalls with the red handkerchief dangling from the back pocket. He’s wearing a big pair of aviator-style sunglasses that cover not only his eyes but also a good part of his face above the bridge of his nose. He’s sporting a workman’s tan, leathery and deep, and within seconds he’s already moving toward them fast, like he’s on roller skates or something, Sue thinking, how can any guy move so quickly—this part is still the way she’s always remembered it—and the Engineer reaches behind his back, pulling out the red handkerchief, blotting at his forehead above the sunglasses.

  “My goodness,” he exclaims, in a just-folks voice that’s somehow all the more shocking for its laconic intonation. “Sure is a scorcher out here, isn’t it?”

  Sue just looks at him without answering. She looks at herself reflected times two in the big lenses of his shades, a little girl with wide eyes and skinny arms.

  “Boy howdy.” The Engineer jerks his head toward Phillip, standing next to her, a foot or two away. “Why, I’d think you and your friend here would be off taking a dip at the pool on a day like today, or maybe down in the creek. It’s hotter than blazes out here in the sun. Enough to boil the skin right off your bones, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Sue, wait.” Young Phillip is standing to her right, a step or two ahead of her. He looks back at the Engineer. “You want something, mister?”

  At first the man doesn’t turn his head away from Sue. When he does shift his attention toward Phillip, it happens reluctantly. He blots his head with his handkerchief again, and Sue notices how gingerly he applies the square of fabric to his skin.

  “You’re all by yourselves out here.” A sly smile seems to tease at the corners of his lips, where the skin is more than slightly cracked. “You don’t get scared being out here by yourselves?”

  “Scared of what?” Phillip asks, his voice trembling a little, though he does a pretty good job of holding it steady.

  “Oh, I don’t know. A lot could happen out here in the middle of nowhere. But I guess you can take care of yourselves, can’t you? How old are you?”

  “Thirteen,” Sue says. It comes from her so smoothly that she almost believes it herself. Because she’s tall that summer, taller than Phillip, and that helps too. She can sell this lie, she realizes; she can make him believe it. Because the Engineer never takes kids older than twelve.

  “Well, I suppose I’ll be on my way, then. You two kids take care.” He turns around and walks back to the car, climbing in. At the last minute, he sticks his head out the open window. “Say, would you do me a favor and take a look at this map, tell me how I can get back to the interstate?”

  Phillip takes another step toward the Plymouth, and then another, and Sue realizes she’s going with him, because they’re in for a penny, in for a pound. They started this thing by walking toward the car in the first place, and they are going to find out the truth; or at least Phillip is, which means that she is too.

  Sue stops walking when she gets near the driver’s side window, a safe five feet away. Behind the steering wheel, the man is holding up a map of eastern Massachusetts. He pokes a finger at a crooked line connecting a cluster of towns.

  “This is where I started….”

  Looking up at the other side of the car, Sue sees Phillip gaping down into the Plymouth’s backseat. Whatever he sees there has erased any vestige of expression from his face. Sue follows his stare. Lying there in an open cardboard box behind the driver’s seat are several rolls of packaging tape, stacks of clean rags and gauze, and a large knife. The blade of the knife is very bright, very clean, and it reflects a narrow obelisk of light onto the seat cushions above it.

  “I came down this way, heading west—”

  In front of her, behind the wheel, the man in the bib overalls and aviator-style specs is still pointing out the route he took, tracing it with his fingertip. He doesn’t appear at all concerned as Phillip wanders around the back of the Plymouth, to where Sue is standing, and stops alongside the open window of the backseat, less than a foot away from the cardboard box. She keeps waiting for the man to stop looking at the map and glance into the rearview mirror, but he doesn’t.

  Sue glances at Phillip, but he’s looking at the knife.

  No, Phillip, she thinks suddenly. This is a mistake.

  “Oh, one more thing.” All at once the man looks up from the map, straight at her, close enough that she can almost see through the sunglasses’ tinted lenses. “I know you’re lying about your age.”

  Sue is still processing this as Phillip grabs the knife from behind the driver’s seat, comes forward between Sue and the car, and stabs the knife straight into the man’s chest. The man sits straight upright, his left hand flying out in an attempt to grab the blade. And as Phillip’s arm brushes against his wrist, Sue sees the fake yellowish orange color smearing off the Engineer’s flesh, revealing the skin underneath to be bluish black.

  Phillip swings the knife again.

  His second thrust only grazes the Engineer’s arm and more flesh-colored paint streaks away, sticking to the blade. But it’s not just the makeup that comes off, Sue sees, it’s the skin itself, peeling off the Engineer’s wrist and coating Phillip’s hand in a sticky smear of gristle. Phillip isn’t aware of it yet, he’s busy thrusting the knife back at the Engineer, shoving it hard, forcing the blade again and again into the man’s chest.

  And that’s when the sunglasses fall off.

  The eyes beneath are huge and desolate, utterly black, and they jiggle in the man’s sockets like the tainted egg sacs of some unthinkable demon. Within them Sue glimpses some vestige of limited intelligence, but it’s like nothing she’s ever seen in the eyes of people or animals—it’s completely alien, their depths animated solely by appetite which even now seems to be fading swiftly into nothingness.

  Sue is still staring deep into the memory, her mind’s own eye dilated to an almost perfect circle, astonished at how different things really are from the way she’s recalled them in the past. She sees the Engineer’s head swivel to the side, his struggles already weakening, and then suddenly his mouth opens and spurts out a spray of thick grayish black fluid across the ground. Sue sees chunks floating in the fluid, pieces of what looks like dead skin, she thinks, but there’s no blood in it—and in fact, there’s no bloodanywhere. All the punctures and stab wounds across the Engineer’s chest, torn to pieces, his bib overalls and thoracic cavity alike, but there’sno blood.

  And when Phillip finally stops stabbing him, he sits up, sweat trickling into his eyes, breathing in gasps
, and looks at Sue. The hysteria beneath his dazed expression is rising fast, like some iridescent fish flashing just centimeters from the surface. For a second he can’t speak. “What is this?” he rasps, eyes flashing down to the bloodless, black body sprawled out beneath him. “What is this, Sue? It’s like—”

  It’s like—

  “Like he’s not even alive,” Sue says aloud now, and realizes she’s been shocked back to the present moment by the realization. “I—I blocked it out of my memory, Phillip. That whole thing, I blotted the details right out of my mind. I remembered it wrong.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Phillip’s corpse says in its flinty, rasping voice next to her.

  Sue shakes her head. “Itdoes matter. I always told myself we didn’t tell anyone because we thought we might’ve gotten the wrong guy, but that’s not why. We never told because we were so freaked out, and we knew no one would believe us. And eventually I never even believed us. But you remembered. Younever forgot.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”Phillip wrenches his head up toward her. “Go. Get out of here. He’s coming back into me. I can feel it. Leave me here. Turn around.”

  “What about Veda?”

  “He’ll—never let her—live.”

  “Where is she?”

  One hand flicks at her, a feeble shooing movement. “Go. Isaac Hamilton is here. Coming back into me.” Urgently now, but undercut by a failing vitality. “Feel him. So close. Can’t hold him back. Just…go.”

  Sue looks at him, this corpse, this cursed thing wavering in front of her and feels a single blue spark fly across her stomach and land, sizzling, in her chest, where without warning it ignites a puddle of untapped adrenaline. There’s a whoosh, and she feels a wellspring of fury, a geyser of indignation and rage for which no precedent exists in her life, ever. And she says, “No.”

  Phillip doesn’t reply. Maybe he can’t. Sue throws both her arms straight out in front of her, clenching the thing by its shoulders, feeling its collarbones sticking out beneath dead skin and the fabric of the jacket. “Now you listen to me,” she says. “I’m still alive. I’m not dead, and that thing doesn’t own me, and until it does I’m going to fight the shit out of it. So you tell me. Where the hell is Veda?”

  “Hamilton.” The name like a stone. “Using her as bait. To make you bring me fully back to life. Like you said. Vengeance. For what we did that day. Attacking the Engineer. His first and favorite vessel.”

  “Fuck himand his vessel. I’m delivering you to Ocean Street as promised. And I’m getting Veda back from him.”

  “Sue…no.” He’s losing his voice. “A trap.”

  “I know it is.”

  “Won’t be able to stop myself—from hurting you—”

  “I’ll handle that.” She climbs to her feet, digging out infinitesimal scraps of strength from beneath the layer of fatigue and pain that was all she knew a moment ago, gathering it up and compressing it together in an airtight diamond against the wall of her heart. There’s a length of tow rope in the back of the Expedition, and she grabs it. She remembers how Jeff Tatum waffled and wavered right before he started screaming at her again, and she knows she has to hit this right or else she’ll have no chance at all. She waits until Phillip’s face begins to twitch, the fibers contorting, hands going up to the dry sockets—

  “Coming,” he groans. “He’s coming.”

  “Good,” Sue says, “let him come,” and in one fluid move she shoves her husband’s body back into the trunk of the Expedition. Wherever Phillip is on the continuum between himself and Isaac Hamilton, the shove catches him supremely off guard because the corpse tilts and flops straight into the open space, head whacking against the hatchback before he lands inside with a thud. His legs aren’t all the way in, they’re sticking out at shin-level, but that’s how she wants it, and she grabs the hatch and slams it down hard with both hands.

  There’s a dull crunch as one of the bones in his lower leg snaps, and she’s not sure whether she actually hears him howl or if it’s just her imagination. Not that it matters. Her hands are already moving again, looping the tow rope around the steel hitch beneath the bumper and then up to the latch-ring inside the Expedition’s reargate, yanking the hatch down as tight as it’ll go, pinning his ankles. Phillip’s feet, encased in Bass loafers, squirm furiously. But they’re not going anywhere.

  “Let me go, you cocksucking bitch!” the thing in the back of her Expedition shrieks, back to Isaac Hamilton’s voice. It’s pounding on the floor, flopping around back there, gagging on rage. “I’ll kill your daughter, you hear me? I’ll fucking tear out her tongue! I’ll rip her heart out andeat the fucking thing !”

  “Not if I turn around and drive you straight back to Gray Haven. If I do that, you’ll go back to being just another lifeless pile of skin.”

  “It doesn’t work that way.”

  Sue doesn’t answer, realizing he’s probably right. And even if the processis reversible, there must be other bodies at his disposal. She thinks of the two-hundred-year period that has elapsed since Gideon Winter’s sister inadvertently provided Hamilton with his first servant. One corpse could’ve easily driven the next through the towns, creating an entire arsenal of bodies for Hamilton to inhabit.

  But maybe, she thinks, just maybe, no matter how many bodies he has to choose from, he wants Phillip’s corpse in particular. And her own. Why? Because they were the only two who had ever damaged his most precious vessel, his beloved Engineer, his first infernal emissary sent back into the world to do his will.

  The closest I ever had to a son.

  “If youdon’t need Phillip’s body,” she says, “I’ll turn around. Right now.” She is mindful that she’s walking an extremely perilous line here, gambling with lives, her own, her daughter’s. But that’s the only way to play it—right to the edge.

  The corpse sits up and leers at her from the other side of the glass. Its legs have stopped struggling. “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “Why not? You already told me that you’re going to kill Veda. What’s stopping me from sending the police into White’s Cove and hauling you back to Gray Haven?” Without even waiting for an answer, she walks around to the front of the Expedition and gets behind the wheel. She puts it in drive and turns the vehicle around, arcing across both lanes so that she’s facing the other way, and puts the pedal down, nose to the west, spitting snow to the east.

  And that’s when she hears the voice in the back say: “Wait.”

  “Yes?”

  “All right.”

  She looks back at it. “What was that?”

  “I said,all right. Bring…” The corpse glowers down at its own limbs, sprawled out around it. “Bring this body to Ocean Street.”

  “You said I had to have it there by seven thirty. There’s no time.”

  “Never mind that. Just do it. Your daughter will be there. In exchange for bringing this body, you will get her back unharmed.”

  Why should I trust you now? Sue thinks, but doesn’t say anything. Of course she cannot trust Isaac Hamilton any more than she ever could. But if there’s a chance, however remote, that Veda is still in White’s Cove then she has to go. And if things work out, if fate is kind, if she actually catches a break—

  She might be able to get both of them out of there alive.

  She reaches down to retrieve the map from the pile of crumpled faxes on the floor. She digs through the trash, checks under the seats, even looks in the back where her husband’s body lies glowering at her.

  But the map is gone.

  7:31A.M.

  She finds her way east by dead reckoning.

  Twice she gets completely turned around, finding herself heading down a long, open road without any landmarks, sure that she’s headed in the wrong direction. At one point it gets bad enough that she starts trembling, every part of her body, and she’s convinced she’ll never be able to stop.

  Eventually she realizes that she can smell the ocean, the first foggy tendrils of wet s
and, fish, and salt that never go away no matter what season it is. Up ahead the eastern skyline has begun to lighten beneath its veil of snow, gray dawn dragging itself into the faint encrustation of starlight like old age crawling up to smother something that was once bright and beautiful. In fact, the whole landscape has a lifeless pallor to it. It feels insubstantial, weightless, monochromatic, as if the road and trees and the sloping, snow-covered hills had been sucked dry of all life during the night, leaving only their outlines, ash sculptures that might crumble and spill if she bumped into them.

  In the back of the Expedition, the thing inhabiting her husband’s body doesn’t speak. She can only hear it rustling around every minute or so, a sibilant restlessness of flesh and fabric that’s barely loud enough to be distinguished from the hum of the tires on the road.

  Out of nowhere a seagull dips across the sky, then kites upward, and her eyes follow it as the road curves to the right. Directly in front of her the gull banks sharply, rising into a part of the sky where dawn has not yet penetrated, and vanishes among what’s left of the stars. Sue thinks of the sea, whose proximity is somehow more reassuring to her than the coming of daybreak. Maybe it’s the way that the ocean brings the land to an end, a sense that whatever happens, there can be no more route beyond it.