Dead Man's Song pd-2

by Jonathan Maberry

  “Vic,” Ruger said softly, and when the man turned Ruger said, “You know that I know about the sunlight.” He smiled. “Don’t you?”

  “I guessed.”

  “Why the bullshit?”

  Vic shrugged.

  Ruger said, “It bothers me, but that’s it. I don’t turn into the Human Torch.”

  “Some of your boys do.”

  “Most don’t.”

  “Well…we don’t know what we got all the time. It’s pretty clear that there are a lot of different kinds of you sonsabitches.”

  Ruger said nothing.

  “You got dead heads like Boyd. Like extras from Night of the Living Dead, Part Ten. I mean…are they even vampires?”

  Ruger just looked at him.

  “Then there’s your core group—you and Golub, Gaither Carby, the twins, those guys. There’s your true fang gang.”

  “‘Fang Gang.’ That’s cute.”

  “But in between you got a bunch of weird spins on this thing, some of them I never even heard of before. I know you’ve been reading my books. Do you have an answer?”

  Ruger looked out the window at the fading light. Turned away so Vic couldn’t see his smile.

  Vic waited for a moment, then gave it up. It’s something he would take up with the Man. Too much of what was happening was not part of the Plan, and that made Vic nervous. Even within the Plan itself there were variations popping up, and for the first time in his life he wondered how much control the Man had. Were there things he didn’t know, even about his own kind? Just thinking that made Vic’s stomach hurt.

  To hide his discomfiture, he said, “Wonder how things are going down in the Hollow.”

  “They’re still alive,” Ruger said, closing his eyes. His voice was tinged with surprise.

  Vic stared at him, and the sickness in his stomach worsened. “Yeah, I can feel that, too. Son of a bitch!”

  Ruger wore a knife-slit smile and was slowly nodding to himself. “I guess I’m not the only one who trips over bad luck when that asshole Crow is in the mix.”

  Vic shot him a vicious glare. “You watch your mouth!”

  “Oh, face it, Wingate,” Ruger snapped, “that little bastard has the luck of the devil, and you know it as well as I do. Even the Man couldn’t take him down on the first try. Don’t even try to tell me there isn’t something else at work here. It’s not just me.”

  They smoked in silence as the sun continued to fall. Vic gave a sour grunt and said, “Yeah, maybe. But at least that bitch’ll be dead soon.”

  “Recruited,” Ruger correctly mildly. “Dead’s just a by-product.”

  “If Terry Wolfe hadn’t been going off his nut, I’d have popped Crow weeks ago,” Vic mused. “He’s always been a pain in the ass.”

  “You think Wolfe would make it to Halloween if Crow was off the board?”

  Vic shrugged. “The Man thinks so. He says he has the mayor on a leash, and maybe he is. Hard to say—talk around town is that he’s really starting to crack.”

  “Crack or turn?”

  “Not even the Man knows that for sure. Like I said, Wolfe’s a wild card.”

  “Great,” Ruger said with a sneer, “we got a key player we can’t count on and a sawed-off prick who’s too damn lucky. We’re in clover here.”

  “Shit,” Vic agreed and then peered up at the sky. The sun was almost gone. He said, “Luck doesn’t last forever.”

  (6)

  The Bone Man sat on a fallen log just at the point of the trail where it widened to spill out onto Griswold’s property, his guitar slung in front of him, his slender fingers moving with blurred speed over the strings, the bottleneck slide wailing up and down. The sound of furious, angry jailhouse blues filled the air around him. Birds shouted in the trees, lending a discordance that was somehow appropriate to the moment, and surrounding their noise and the music was a constant rising hiss from the tens of thousands of insects that clustered with fury before him.

  The insects had swarmed back out of the house as soon as the sun began to edge toward the horizon, but at the first stroke of the Bone Man’s fingers over the strings they’d crowded to a stop inches from where he sat. They milled and leapt but not one of them could cross the line from field to forest. The rustle of the bugs and the murmur of the trees in the wind of the Hollow both carried a tone of absolute surprise and total outrage.

  The Bone Man played as fast as he could, but his mind was reeling from this. When he had strummed his guitar the best he had hoped for was to spur Crow and his friend to run faster. He had never expected this, could never have imagined this.

  He didn’t understand it, and even feared that it was all some kind of joke on Griswold’s part—a trick to raise hopes before he closed his fist around Crow for real—but as the minutes passed and the sound of running feet diminished behind him, the Bone Man slowly changed his view. This wasn’t any of Griswold’s doing, no sir. This was something else—the sign of someone else in the game.

  Who or why didn’t matter right now. He played and played and prayed that whatever strange magic was at work here would last long enough.

  (7)

  “Hurry—hurry—hurry!” Newton chanted in a frenzied whisper as he ran; next to him Crow ran in silence. Above them the clouds melted away but the forest did not brighten. The sun hung low and swollen above the far treeline, its fiery corona just singeing the treetops. Night was falling and they were miles from the pitch, with the whole of Dark Hollow between them and safety, and the devil knew what lay behind or before them. By now neither Crow nor Newton was much counting on the world being sane and predictable. That moment seemed to have passed for them, forever perhaps, when they had crossed the line from sunlight to shadows back on the pitch, or perhaps it was when they had entered that marshy swamp. Perhaps both. Two steps into hell.

  Newton turned to look back the way they had come, half expecting to see the tide of roaches sweeping back, but all he saw were shadows. More shadows than when he had looked back only a minute ago. Darker, thicker, closing in on them as the sun began its fatal fall beyond the forest uplands on the far side of Griswold’s farm. Newton could no longer see the farm, or the fields, or even the tall-tree line. He looked at his watch. 6:11. What had Crow told him? Sunset was at 6:24.

  “The sun’s going down!” he shrieked, but Crow didn’t waste breath replying to that.

  A tiny pain flared against Newton’s thigh and he stooped and began smacking hysterically at it, thinking that another of those bugs had crawled up his pants and bitten him, but this was different. A small burning spot three-quarters of the way up the top of his thigh, but when he dug into his pocket to see what he could feel all he brought out was the tarnished old dime with the hole cut through it. Newton peered at it as he ran, looking to see if there was a sharp edge or anything that could explain the sudden pain, but it was just an old dime. The burning in his thigh faded and he raised his arm to throw the dime away, but for the second time that day he made the decision to keep it. He put it back in his pocket and raced to catch up with Crow as the shadows coalesced behind him.

  Fatigue was a huge fiery dragon that breathed hotly in their flushed faces, sat on their chests, and bit them in the sides. They slowed from a dead run to a staggering walk and Crow pulled the canteen from Newton’s pack, took a pull and handed it to the reporter. Newton opened his mouth to say something but Crow held up a hand to silence him and stood there, head cocked in an attitude of listening. He thought he had heard something impossible, something they had both heard before starting down the hill. Was it the ghost of an echo of music on the sluggish breeze?

  “Is it the bugs?” Newton hissed.

  Crow listened a moment longer and then shook his head. He let out a chestful of air. “No…I guess it’s nothing. I think we’re safe.” But doubt was evident in his voice. “Either way, I don’t want to wait around to find out.”

  “Why didn’t they come after us again?”

  “I don’t know. Com
e on, let’s keep moving.”

  At a quick walk—both of them were now beyond running—they set out down the path, picking their way along by starlight, fleeing from the marsh with its methane vapors and stink of rot, far along the valley floor toward the foot of the pitch. It seemed to take hours, days. They didn’t stop again until they saw the great slab-sided slope rise before them, then they rested, drinking the last of their water. The climbing ropes were still there, leading up through shadows and becoming invisible in the gloom far above them.

  Crow found his gloves where they had left them hours ago and slowly fitted them on as he studied the angle of the slope. He nodded to Newton with an uptic of his chin. “What shape are you in?”

  “I’m a wreck.”

  Crow gave Newton a reassuring slap on the back. It was going to be a total bitch of a climb, and Crow didn’t think he had enough left to manage it. He was certain Newton didn’t. He turned and looked back, scanning the forest, listening for the sound of skittering insect feet. Their absence should have been reassuring, but strangely it wasn’t.

  “We’ll have to try and rest along the way up,” he said, knowing it sounded lame. Newton just nodded, his eyes glistening in the darkness and he turned away. Crow was sure he was crying. He pulled tension on his rope and raised his leg to brace it on a snarl of root a foot above the forest floor, then with a sigh that spoke of his sadness, his fear, and his exhaustion, he began to climb. Sniffing back his tears, Newton followed.

  Dark Hollow had defeated them.

  Chapter 27

  The sun was almost down and the first stars were igniting overhead as Mike sped on through the darkness, going away from town, riding with no specific purpose along the highway, seeking the loneliness of the farmlands. As he rode, the aches of his body and the aches of his soul seemed to fade as the War Machine devoured the miles. A rare few cars hummed along A-32 but the heaviest congestion, he knew, would have turned off onto College Road, which cut west between the Dead End Drive-In and the Haunted Hayride and then emptied onto the campus of Pinelands College. Overhead a single dark bird flapped lazily, easily keeping pace with him, and he and the bird soared along for nearly two miles, keeping perfect station with the other until they crested the hill that led to the sharpness of Shandy’s Curve. Mike slowed, not wanting to race around Shandy’s Curve again, not since his close encounter with Crow’s old Chevy two weeks ago. He reached the curve and coasted around it, the bird now circling overhead. Mike felt a strange chill as if the air around the curve was colder than along the rest of A-32. It was a moderately cool night anyway for the middle of October, but on the curve it felt like March.

  Mike pedaled a little harder, wanting to be past the spot. He heard the night bird screech and he looked up to see it thrashing erratically, trying to change direction, fighting for control as if caught in a whirlwind. It squawked and dove down toward the forest leaving the road and the boy and the…

  …gleaming wrecker that squatted in the middle of the road just around the last part of Shandy’s Curve.

  Mike grabbed the hand brakes and squeezed with all his strength, brake pads squealing. His tires stuttered for purchase along the pebbled surface of the road. The War Machine skidded to a smoking stop, stripes of black rubber burned onto the hardtop, and the momentum slewed him around so that Mike was sideways to the huge wrecker.

  He froze there, turned to ice by the shock of it, at the impossibility of it, feeling his heart hammer in his chest, staring in total disbelief as the wrecker sat there, huge, incredibly massive, totally black, dominating the road. It was as if time itself had become frozen with shock. The world was totally still. Nothing moved, nothing dared make a sound. Mike lungs clutched tight, holding in his breath.

  This can’t be happening.

  Though he knew that he had actually encountered this same wrecker two weeks ago, seeing it again was totally unreal. One encounter—okay, a drunk behind the wheel or an asshole playing chicken with some random kid—but this…this was a trap. Deliberate, calculated. It was here waiting for him. Waiting. For him. Specifically him. This thing was here to kill him. All of this processed through his brain in a furious second as his logic circuits accepted the impossible and made this reality the only reality. Crazy as it was, the wrecker was right here, and right here was where he was going to die.

  Very slowly he began to walk the bike backward around the curve, hoping that in the darkness the driver hadn’t seen him, that maybe the trap was still poised, not yet sprung.

  Then the lights of the wrecker flared on. Headlights, running lights, fog lights—all came on in a blinding luminous assault, driving white needles of pain into Mike’s eyes. He cried out, throwing his arm across his face; then there was a unspeakable roar as the wrecker’s powerful engine howled to life, rending the air with teeth of sound, clawing at the stillness with talons of pure noise. The driver gunned the engine once, twice…

  Mike knew for sure that he was going to die.

  Using strength he did not possess, he wrenched his bike around and stomped down on the pedal, propelling himself and the War Machine back onto Shandy’s Curve, away from the huge, gleaming monster, away from the thunder of its engine. Behind him, it seemed as if the engine howled with rage at his flight, but Mike knew that was just the driver shifting gears, shifting from park to drive, from waiting into full-bore attack. Mike tore along the highway, using the dips in the road to give him speed, steering small and smart, pumping his legs like pistons. Behind him the wrecker followed; slowly at first, rolling at a strange creeping pace around the Curve, seeming not to pursue, just to follow. But Mike wasn’t fooled. He knew that the wrecker driver was just giving him a head start, making the hunt more interesting. Mike took the chance for what it was worth and pedaled the bike with every ounce of his desperate strength, fighting his bike back up the hill. At first he didn’t look back, knowing that to do so would be to lose maybe a precious second. Instead he switched into a lower gear and his knees pumped up and down and he willed the bike to climb the tall hill. He widened the gap—a quarter-mile, a half-mile, almost three-quarters of a mile, the space of two medium hills. Then the wrecker’s engine howled with a furious delight and the chase was on.

  Mike crested a hill and finally dared to look back, knowing what he would see. And he did see it. The wrecker was flying down the farthest hill, its massive bulk soaring into the pull of gravity. Mike could hear the driver giving it gas as it came up the other side, pressing the pedal down to keep the speed it had won from the freefall, devouring all of the precious lead Mike had earned.

  “No!” Mike pedaled so hard that his legs blurred and his muscles caught fire; it felt like he was breathing flame. There were still two small hills between him and the wrecker, but he could hear it now, coming closer, closer. Where the hell were all those news vans and tourist cars when he needed them? He was halfway up the next hill when the lights of the wrecker pinned him to the macadam. Mike gasped. In the time it had taken him to go down and halfway up the next hill, the wrecker had taken both hills. It was going to catch him. Soon.

  Which is when Mike Sweeney, the Enemy of Evil, came up with a plan. It was simple, it was obvious, and it was right there in his mind, fully formed. He almost smiled, but the terror was still too big for that. Still as he reached the top of the mount and vanished over it, he did smirk. Just a little.

  Tow-Truck Eddie grinned as he saw the demon on the bike disappear over the nearest hill. Got you, he thought. Did you really think you could get away from me? Know you so little of God’s power and glory? He stamped down on the accelerator and rocketed down the hill, feeling the jolts as he bounced over patched sections of highway, feeling his own excitement build and dance in his mind. I am the Sword of God! The very thought made him feel wonderful, made him so proud, so purely joyous to be a part of his Father’s plans. This second chance to do his Father’s will. It would be a starting place, a cornerstone on which he could build his church.

  He had it
all worked out. He would run him down but not kill him immediately, take him to a quiet place, and with his own hands wrest the truth from his flesh, discarding the polluted skin of evil that was simply shaped like a boy. He would reveal the demon within, then he would cast it out, banishing it into the darkness where it belonged. This was the first truly great mission of his ministry.

  In his mind the voice of his Father hissed, Yes! Slay the Evil one!

  Tow-Truck Eddie grinned as he raced down the slope, gunning the engine as he clawed up the other side. The boy was close, just out of sight on the other side. He reached the top of the crest and peered forward, hungry for sight of his prey. Suddenly something shot by him from the side of the road, something small and dark and fast, heading in the other direction.

  The demon!

  Tow-Truck Eddie saw it flash past, heading back down the slope. He slammed on the brakes and tried to stop the turn, jerking the wheel hard over. There was a horrific squeal of tires, plumes of smoke puffed up from the road; the whole chassis of the wrecker snarled in protest as too many forces fought to control it at once: thrust and gravity and angle, all working for that moment in the service of the Beast. Tow-Truck Eddie screamed aloud as he manhandled the wheel, his mind black with fury, and he could feel almost at once that he wasn’t going to make it.

  The wrecker slewed around and actually slid sideways, burning smears on the hardtop. Immediately the angle of the turn became warped and the back wheels skidded all the way around and then swung completely clear of the road as they spun out over the deep drainage ditch. With neither weight nor traction the wheels raced at insane speeds, sending up a banshee cry, and then Eddie let loose his own howl as the whole back end of the wrecker canted into the ditch and he was bounced around in the cab like a rag doll in a clothes dryer. The front wheel jumped high off the ground and the massive machine slid down five feet into the drainage ditch, front wheels spinning madly in the air now and dirt spraying up in huge clouds as the back wheels touched down again, but the rear tires only dug themselves a trench. The wrecker continued to slide backward until the towing bar thudded with finality into the mud wall on the far side of the ditch.