Dead Man's Song pd-2

by Jonathan Maberry

  Tonight he wasn’t thinking at all about his money troubles, or what it was going to cost him to replace the head gasket on his battered Ford pickup. Tonight he couldn’t have cared less about the mortgage payment due on Wednesday or the fact that the sprinkler system on the western ten acres was older than he was and needed an overhaul. He didn’t care about the heating bill, the cost of day labor, or the fact that he’d recently discovered that his sixteen-year-old daughter was taking the Pill. Tonight he was thinking about what was going on in town. Yesterday he’d had lunch with Gus and some of the boys from town, and even though everyone was all laughs and buddy-buddy, he could see in their eyes that they were scared. Even Gus was scared. Killers running around, people dying. Carby was scared, too. So scared that he had unlocked the gun cabinet and made Tyler clean, oil, and load each rifle and shotgun, and then, with the whole family trailing along, he’d taken one long gun to each bedroom in the house, wrapped it in a pillowcase, and put in between mattress and box spring.

  “Any of those rat bastards break in here, I want everyone to grab the closest gun. We ain’t going to end up like Henry Guthrie, God rest him.” Carby had taught Tyler and Jilly how to shoot before they were out of single digits and by the time they were in their teens both of them could drop a pheasant at fifty yards. Lily? Well, she could fire a shotgun and anyone could hit something with a shotgun, especially an intruder in the close confines of a small farmhouse. Even so, Carby was scared for his family. He walked the fenceline with his pipe between his teeth and his own shotgun in the crook of his arm; the gun was broken open at the breech but loaded with buckshot. His dog, a big shepherd named Spooker, was back at the house with the girls and Tyler.

  Life’s a bitch and then you die, he thought as he walked. He’d always loved that expression. As close to Zen as he had ever seen, with the exception of No Pain, No Gain, which he had tattooed on his left shoulder back in his wrestling days. Not pro wrestling or any of that TV comedy, but Greco-Roman during his four years at Pinelands College. Carby had studied animal husbandry and agriculture, and for the most part he hadn’t learned much beyond get your cows to screw and plant as many crops as you can.

  “Yeah, life’s a bitch and then you die,” he said aloud, and that made him think of death. Not just the headline deaths out at the Guthrie place, but death closer to home. His buddy Bailey Frane had buried his mother yesterday morning. Passed in her sleep, even though she’d been healthy as a horse for all her eighty years. Carby had stood by Bailey during the funeral and had sipped kitchen whiskey with him all afternoon, the two of them growing more philosophic about life and death as the tide-line of the bottle receded.

  There was a breeze coming out of the southwest and he stopped for a moment at the edge of a fallow field where he planned to grow blueberries next season. So far the blight hadn’t touched the berry crops in the region, so he thought he’d try blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, and maybe some raspberries. The better berries sold pretty well in farmers’ markets or to the buyers for the store chains; the second-best always sold to the jelly companies in New Jersey.

  He sniffed the wind, searching for the scents he liked—tilled earth, manure, sweetgrass—but then he frowned. There was an odd smell on the air; threaded through the earthy smell of churned soil, wood smoke, and dried corn, there were other scents, and Carby had a farmer’s nose. There was some old skunk there, but that was from roadkill over on Seven Mile Road on the other side of the Pine River, less potent than it had been a few nights ago. A whiff of gasoline, too. And something else. Sweeter, but not sweet like fruit. More like the sugar-up-your-nose stink of something left out to rot. Sweet like that. Nasty sweet. He took his pipe out of his mouth and held it at arm’s length, clearing his nose as much as possible. The breeze brought the olio of smells again, and there it was. The bad sweet smell. Only this time it was stronger. Fresher. Nearer, he thought.

  Dead deer out in the woods, he thought, but the idea of something dead in the woods spooked him. What if it wasn’t a dead deer out there? What if that Boyd fellow had killed someone else and what he smelled was a dead body out in the woods?

  “Balls,” he told himself and he screwed on a mocking smile. Even so, he reached over to the fence rail, tapped the coal out of his pipe, grinding it into the mud and put the warm pipe in his pocket so that he had both hands free. For a moment he stood there unconsciously holding the shotgun at port arms, sniffing the wind like Spooker. The dead-sweet smell was, if anything, stronger, and that wasn’t right. The breeze was coming out of the west, blowing across Pine River. The state forestland was north and east of his place, and Pinelands College was south and east. There were no deer woods to the west. Just farm fields and the river, and on the other side of the river was a big auto junkyard that covered more than a square mile.

  With the pipe gone his sense of smell began sharper with each breath, and now the dead-sweet smell was much stronger. Not distant at all and…not a dead scent, really. More like sick-sweet. Earthy and rotting and somehow—he fished for the word—vital.

  “Balls,” he said, and decided that he’d had enough of moonlit strolls. He had walked the fenceline for half a mile and it ringed his property, but if he cut across the fallow field he could be home in just a couple of minutes. He looked due east to where the lighted windows of his home gave the house its own definition against the utter blackness of the fields and forest beyond. Those yellow rectangles had always looked homey to him, warm and inviting and—even he had to admit it—safe, but now those tiny dots of light seemed dwarfed by the immense darkness and as he looked at them he thought he had never seen anything look as lonely.

  Carby started out across the field, looking down as he went to pick a path through the shadows on the ground. It wasn’t until he was a third of the way across that he saw the mound, and it stopped him in his tracks. The hump of dirt wasn’t big, no more than three feet high at the crest, but it was there and he sure as hell hadn’t made it. He hadn’t done any digging in this field all year.

  “What the hell is this shit?” There was a small flashlight on his keychain for finding key slots on the fence locks, and he fished in his jeans for his keys and then flicked it on. It was so dark out that the tiny flash threw a pretty good beam and Carby played it over the mound. It was maybe eight feet long, but only a yard high in the middle and tapering off pretty quickly toward each end. The dirt was rough and chunky like it had been hand dug, not clean packed the way a shovel would have done. He shone the beam all along it and then swept the area around the mound. He saw two things that caused gooseflesh to pebble him from feet to hairline. All around the mound were footprints. Clear prints that went this way and that, sometimes standing alone, sometimes overlapping. City shoes with smooth soles, the complex tread-pattern of sneakers, and the rippled ridges of work boots. He counted five separate pairs. That was the first thing, and it froze him to the spot.

  The second thing he saw made his pores open and burst with cold sweat. Just beyond the mound, maybe ten feet farther on into the darkness, was a second mound. He moved the light around and saw a third. And a fourth. All of them were about the same length, the same height. All made up of hand-churned clods of dirt. Then he saw the fifth mound. It was not as high as the others, nor as rounded on top. In fact the top of this mound was ragged and the sides had caved back from the crest. Carby swallowed a lump the size of a corncob. His flash beam played over the uneven dirt and even without drawing any closer to it he could see that this mound was open.

  Open was a strange thought, and Carby took a step closer, examining the mound, trying to understand them all, but trying to understand this one more because this one bothered him more. This one looked even more like a…

  Grave?

  He didn’t even want to think that word, but there it was. The thing looked like a grave. “Oh, shit,” he said, and a thousand thoughts flew around in his head like hysterical crows in a lightning-struck tree. Christ! What if Boyd had killed someon
e else and had come out here to the ass-end of town to hide the body? No, bodies! Terror had him by the throat. What if Boyd had been killing folks all day and had buried them here on the farm. On his farm! Mary, Mother of God, that would be the end of things. No one would ever buy crops from a farm where bodies had been buried. This was the end of the farm, sure as cows shit brown. This was the end of him. Blinking sweat out of his eyes, Carby took a step closer, and then another, crouching to see along the beam of the flashlight, expecting to see a dead hand sticking up out of the earth like a stand of asparagus, hoping he wouldn’t see that and yet weirdly fascinated. He was bent at the waist, head bowed, peering at the mound from four feet away when the earth moved.

  Carby froze as if sprayed with liquid nitrogen, his eyes bugging wide. The shotgun was something stupid and forgotten in his hands as he stared at the movement, still locked in the awful fascination and at the same time not really understanding what he was seeing. The mound of dirt trembled—and Carby had the fleeting thought that it was loose fill stirred by the wind—but then the farmer in him realized that the wind was blowing the wrong way for dirt to fall toward him. He watched, wide-mouthed, as the dirt fluttered down, running in dry rivulets as the whole mound began to shudder. A large clod broke off and fell right by his toe. He picked it up. It was ordinary dirt, of course, loosely packed and cool. Another clod fell out of the mound, and another. Then one large clump, right near the top, seemed to lift. Carby stared at it, still unable to explain or understand what he was seeing. The heavier clump rose, standing almost on edge, and then broke under its own weight and the individual pieces toppled off in all directions.

  Carby straightened and leaned over to try and see what had disturbed the dirt. Was it a gopher in there? A rabbit? He truly could not understand it. He leaned close and shined the flashlight into the hole created by the large clod. The weak yellow light of the flash illuminated the hole with a splash of light, glimmering on small pieces of smooth stone in the soil, glinting off a fragment of an old Coke bottle, reflected redly off the eyes of the face in the mound.

  Carby let out a cry and jumped back. He backpedaled and fell down. It had been a face in there! The thought horrified him. Had someone…buried a body out here? The thought made him gag. Was that it? Boyd had murdered someone and carted their body out here, burying it in his fallow field. He looked around wildly and saw the other mounds.

  “My God…” he whispered. Five of them. That cop-killing son of a bitch had come out here and buried five bodies in his field. “Jesus God Almighty.” He reached for the fallen flashlight and wiped the dirt off the lens, then swung the beam back to the mound, and all thinking abruptly stopped. His heart nearly stopped as well. He was aware only of sensation: the constriction in his chest, another hard lump in his throat, an iciness sweeping down his legs. His skin crawled. Carby had always heard that expression, but until that moment he had never actually experienced the grisly sensation of the muscles under his skin knotting and writhing as his body chemistry misfired. His glands discharged microfluids into his system, his nerve endings sent out signals triggered by shock, and the adrenaline discharge made the hair on his scalp ripple like wheat in a cold wind.

  The dead body in the mound was struggling to sit up. It pushed dirt away from its mouth, pushed at the heavy clods, clawed at the soft soil for purchase until it sat erect. Then it turned a dirt-smeared white face at Carby and smiled. Carby screamed once, a shrill, tearing scream of absolute horror, and ran.

  He had no idea when he got up, or how. He had no thought at all. He just ran, the shotgun in his hands as forgotten and useless as the flashlight that now lay in the dirt behind him. A quarter of a mile away the lights of his house beckoned with welcome and safety. In the house there were door locks and a telephone. Inside the house were his son and daughter. Inside his house was his wife, Lily. They were all farm people, they all knew how to handle guns and every gun in the house was loaded. In the house was one big, mean sonovabitching German shepherd. In the yard beside the house there was a car. The walls of the house, even in shadows, looked tall and strong and safe. If he could only get there, get inside. Gaither Carby ran as fast as his thick legs could carry him. He never once looked back; he never paused, never slowed, even when his bladder released and warm piss ran down his legs. He ran until that seized-up heart in his chest began to hammer again and he ran until lights burst in his eyes like fireworks. He ran as if his life depended on it.

  But he didn’t run fast enough. A dark something came out of the shadows to his left and smashed into him, knocking him sideways with terrible force, tearing a strangled scream out of him before the weight of the thing slammed him down and drove all of the breath from his lungs. He hit hard and slid a few feet across the sandpaper roughness of the fallow field. He was blind from the shock but he could feel fingers bunching the cloth of his jacket, could feel the heat of breath on his cheek and something bent low over him. It was man-sized but it panted like a hungry dog and its weight was oppressive. Gasping a lungful of air, Carby swung a strong overhand right, aiming blindly, and he felt his knuckles crash into something that crunched like cartilage. A nose? An ear? He shook his vision clear and pounded his fists at the hands that held him down. Around him he could hear the pounding of feet as someone else ran up to join the fight. He heard other sounds, too.

  He heard the low snigger of laughter. The figure on top of him was a dark silhouette but Carby knew it was a man, and he hooked punch after punch into the man’s ribs. He heard them go, felt them break under his punches, but the figure just crouched there, holding him down, not even grunting with the pain.

  “Let me go, you shit-eating bastard!” he bellowed and swung his biggest punch yet, cracking right across the point of his attacker’s jaw. The blow snapped the man’s head around and he toppled sideways as Carby kicked and scrabbled out from under. He spun around onto all fours as the man that had brought him down rolled away. Carby looked left and right. There were four other people there. Five in all. Ringed around him. One on the ground, crouched like Carby, was on all fours; four were standing. Two of them were close enough for the starlight to cast their faces in cool blue-white light.

  One was a man that Carby had never seen, dressed in khakis and what looked like a polo shirt. It was so weirdly incongruous to the situation that Carby just stared. The man was in his midthirties, with a handsome face and a trim little mustache. Carby turned to his left and looked at the other person whose face was starlit. A woman. A woman he knew. Eighty years old, with a dowager’s hump and a tangled mass of gray hair, dressed in her best church clothes. Carby definitely knew her, had known her all his life. Just yesterday he had sat drinking kitchen whiskey with her son, Bailey. Just hours after six men lowered her coffin into the ground at Pineview Cemetery. Andrea Frane.

  Carby’s mouth hung open to scream, but there was no sound left in him. Andrea opened her mouth, too. More than once Carby had seen her without her dentures, her toothless mouth caved in on itself, but that mouth was not toothless any longer. Now it had brand-new teeth that gleamed white and wet in the starlight. She opened her mouth to show all of her new teeth to Carby as the others stepped up and took him by the arms and shoulders. The man with the polo shirt grabbed Carby by the hair and wrenched his head to one side, exposing the vulnerable flesh of his neck and throat as Andrea Frane stepped closer and then bent toward him with her gaping, toothsome mouth.

  PART TWO

  SEASON OF THE WOLF

  Early morning, October 3rd, to sunset, October 7th

  There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.

  —Ernest Hemingway,] “On the Blue Water” Esquire, April 1935

  Wolf comes hunting, pale moon overhead Big gray wolf comes hunting, blood moon overhead Better lock your doors, better say your prayers ’Cause the wolf’s come hunting…hunting for your child.

  —Oren Morse, Bad Mo
on Blues

  Chapter 10

  (1)

  In his dreams he was usually Iron Mike Sweeney, the Enemy of Evil, a planet-hopping, dimension-crossing super-hero with high-tech weapons and vast powers that made him invulnerable to harm. In one of his favorite dreams Mike was the squad leader of a team of interstellar commandoes and in those dreams he moved with the ruthless efficiency and eyes-on-the-prize clarity of focus of Jack Bauer—if Jack Bauer had been a spaceman. Frequently the villains in his dreams looked like Vic—and even in the deepest of his dreams Mike realized what that was all about—and in each of those dreams the Enemy of Evil would kick the ass of alien invader-Vic, or demon-Vic, or monster-from-beyond-Vic. Those were pretty good dreams because it felt good to blast Vic with a laser or cut his head off with a two-handed broadsword.

  Sometimes—rarely over the years and then almost exclusively over the last few months—Mike’s dreams changed into very regular and specific nightmares. In those dreams he would be walking through a dark swampy hollow. The bushes and trees around him were on fire and there were people lying everywhere. Dead people, covered in blood, torn apart. In those dreams Mike always carried a samurai sword, a katana, in his hands, which was odd because in his adventure dreams Iron Mike Sweeney always used either a blaster or a big knight’s sword, never one of the slender Japanese blades, but in these new dreams it was always a katana, and its blade was always smeared with bright blood.

  In these dreams the dead people were people Mike knew. Crow was there a lot, and he almost always wore a big tank on his back of the kind that exterminators or lawn-care guys wore, and the hose was clutched in Crow’s dead hand. The only part of him that wasn’t covered in blood was the front of his T-shirt, which showed the logo for band called Missing 84, which Mike had never heard of. Crow’s fiancée was usually alive, but she’d been beaten to her knees and was weeping over the body of her father, Henry Guthrie. There were other people: Dr. Weinstock from the hospital, sprawled with his throat torn out, and the chief of police sitting with his back propped against a tree and his legs spread, a piss stain spreading on his pants as he dribbled blood from his nose and mouth and ears. Others, too, like his mom. She wasn’t dead, but stood naked and covered in blood—and when he was awake Mike wondered how sick it was that he dreamed of his mother naked and tried to imagine how much of his life would be spent in therapy because of that image—and his mom was laughing as the forest burned and people died. There was a dark man standing next to her, also laughing, but he was hazy like an out-of-focus photograph and Mike could discern no details.