She looked like a cautionary tale against smoking—like someone who would be on a warning poster.
I gave her the keys and she started the minivan, revving the engine just a little too much. I bet she grew up changing tires and oil and doing her own lube jobs. She pulled another cigarette out of a pack tucked in her shirt pocket, and lit the end with the butt of her spent one, then she threw the used butt out the open window.
My litter-bug senses reeled. Ever since pre-school we’d been taught not to litter. I wanted to scream, ‘Hey it’s the twenty-first century, lady. We don’t smoke anymore, let alone drop our butts on the ground’. I guess I had the pretty clear idea that my words wouldn’t matter much.
“I’m 82 years old,” Dorcas said to me rather matter-of-factly as she pulled out of the Swifty’s parking lot and headed back the way we came. I’m glad she told me because I wanted to ask, but my mom always said it wasn’t polite to ask a woman her age. I was just amazed that Dorcas was still allowed to drive a school bus. That’s what she did before everything happened. She was a school bus driver up in the hill-towns district.
“Wow,” I said. “Shouldn’t you be retired or something? Living in Florida maybe?”
“Retirement’s for pussies,” she laughed in a deep, phlegmy croak. I think something chunky got caught in her throat, but she swallowed it back down and wiped the back of her calloused palm across her cracked lips. I really thought she was going to keel right on the spot. “I’ve been working my whole damn life. I’m not about to stop now.”
Fair enough, I guess.
Dorcas sucked a huge wad of snot up her nose then spit out the window. “Well, this Necropoxy crap is a forced retirement, I guess. No more kids to drive around, unless the dead ones start wanting to be educated.”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” I said.
Dorcas laughed again, in that guttural way. “I want to find me a cigar store in Guilford and get me some real smokes. These things are crap.”
I didn’t know what to say so I didn’t say anything. The thought of Dorcas Duke smoking a Cuban cigar seemed right on target, and so very, very wrong.
As we drove with a cone of light in front of us from our high beams, I couldn’t help but feel like a single yellow peg on a Lite-Brite board. It’s weird when there’s no electricity. I remember once, last year, Littleham lost power for something like three days. The sky, which was normally never really fully dark because of all the wattage we put out, had been inky black. It made me think of how it was before Edison created his little magic wonder.
Now, here we were again—a sea of black with one little speck of light floating in the middle of it all—and sharks everywhere.
“You do okay with mileage on this thing, kid?” she asked me as she checked out the gas gauge. Um, hello, sixteen here. I didn’t have a clue what good mileage was. I felt like I was talking to an old auto mechanic and we didn’t speak the same language.
“Sure,” I said. “I guess.” Suddenly, the only thing I knew about fuel popped into my head. “We learned how to syphon gas,” I blurted out, remembering the taste in my mouth when I sucked gas from a dead guy’s car with a rubber hose.
Dorcas chuckled. “We used to do that when we didn’t have enough money to fill the tank.” I think she was reminiscing about the Depression or something. I just went with it.
“So you used to steal gas?”
She glanced at me and did a once over.
“I used to do a lot of things, kid.” I tried to imagine Dorcas Duke as a wild teenager but all I could come up with was Cheryl The It, six inches taller.
I wanted to ask her if she had children or a husband or lost anyone when Necropoxy hit, but there wasn’t any point. Everyone lost people. Instead, I stared out the window into the night.
“I guess we all used to do a lot of things,” I whispered.
Dorcas was quiet for a while—I suppose she was concentrating on the road. After a bit she said, “About the gas—you should always keep the tank over half full. You never know when you’re going to need the juice.” She sounded like someone’s grandfather giving advice.
“Thanks,” I said. Look at me. I was having an honest to goodness real live conversation with an old person. I guess that made me feel a little mature. Then again, I couldn’t afford to be immature anymore. I had to be mature to survive. We all did.
Dorcas palmed the wheel and turned onto the main road we traveled when Trudy Aiken was almost taken out by the helicopter. Damn, I felt exposed here.
“I wish we didn’t have to be on this road,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Those people from Site 37 and the helicopter—you can’t believe what they’re doing there.”
“I can believe it,” she muttered. “There’re a lot of weird things that go on in the hill towns—things that people don’t want to talk about.”
“Big-headed people?” I whispered as I stared out into the black. My mom was the one who told me about the big-headed people, but I always assumed she was yanking my chain. Supposedly, there was a clan who lived deep in the woods who all had giant-sized heads, like pumpkins—even bigger.
Dorcas almost choked on her cigarette. “That old wives’ tale is still floating around? They’ve been telling that one since I was a kid.”
I almost asked her if it was true, but honestly, I didn’t want to know. There were enough things to be scared about without having to worry that there were big-headed people out there, with big-headed mouths and big-headed teeth.
“What else then?” I asked.
“Things,” she said. “Just odd things.” Dorcas took in a lungful of smoke and let the cancerous fumes blacken her ancient insides before shooting twin streams back out through her nostrils. “I’m not surprised the McDuffy Estate was involved in all this.”
“Why?”
“People have stayed away from that place for years,” Dorcas said. “Even when I was a kid, everyone knew that place was haunted. I once even saw the Donkey Man near there.”
“The whoseewhatzee?”
“The Donkey Man—you mean to tell me you’ve never heard of the Donkey Man?”
“No,” I said, but just the name gave me the willies. There’s something about scary things and farm things mixed together that amps up the creep-factor like a thousand times, you know? Like ghosts and haylofts, or scary little girls in old wells, or, well, the Donkey Man.
“The Donkey Man got lost in a snowstorm way back when—right around the time that stupid law, Prohibition, was making everyone really antsy.”
I learned about Prohibition in history. That was when the US government decided to make booze illegal. Of course, the more it was banned, the more people drank. It’s funny how people rebel like that.
Dorcas continued as she drove into the night. “All that was ever found of him was his coat, his boots, and his donkey’s horseshoes.”
“What about everything else?” I’m not quite sure what everything else was, but seriously, if you’re traipsing around the Berkshires in a snowstorm with a donkey, you have to be packing something—moonshine, maybe?
“No one knows, but they say he walks up and down the Mohawk trail to this day, all dressed in white and leading a white donkey, looking for his coat, his boots, and those damn horseshoes.”
“And you saw him?”
“You betcha. It was nighttime. He scared the bejesus out of me—just crawling alongside the road like that. And you know what else? The donkey’s eyes glowed red.”
Okay, now she was just trying to scare me, and I was already plenty scared. I really wish we were on our little mission during the day instead of at night. I hated the dark. I always have. Trina used to make fun of me because I slept with my closet light on with the door open all the way. I never understood why
Trina had to sleep with her closet door shut. Maybe she thought if she couldn’t see the monsters they weren’t really there.
Not me. I wanted to see the uglies before they got me. That just made more sense, don’t you think?
“What did you do?” I asked, even though I’m not sure I wanted to know the answer.
“I ran,” she croaked. “I ran like the wind.”
Okay—Dorcas Duke running like the wind was something out of ancient history. She couldn’t even crawl like a breeze at her age.
Outside looked dark and lonely as we made our way along the desolate stretch of road. The inky blackness made me nervous. “Can we cool it with the spooky stories?” I asked.
“Why, kid?” Dorcas chuckled. “You ready to crap your pants or something?”
“No,” I grumbled. This was going to be a long ride. “And it’s Tripp,” I said thinly.
“What?”
“Tripp. That’s my name. It’s not ‘kid’. Krystal’s a kid. I’m not a kid.”
“Oh,” she sort of humpfed and waved one hand like she was saying ‘piffle’ or ‘poppycock’.
No, I wasn’t a kid anymore. Those days were gone. I wasn’t a kid anymore and I would never be a kid again.
Necropoxy had seen to that.
15
DORCAS WAS DRIVING really slow, like the speed limit was still 15 miles per hour, or whatever the speed limit was back in the Stone Age when she first learned how to drive. More than anything, I wanted her to step on the gas. My mom was sick. Nedra and Freaky Big Bird and Eddie with the fake hair and Randy Stephens and Trudy Aiken were all sick.
I’m all about driving responsibly, but come on. We were in a life or living death situation here. Speed it up, Grandma.
Besides, I felt like there were eyes in the sky boring through the top of my head. Who knew if Cheryl The It was up there right now, staring down at us like we were the only speck of light in a field of dark—which we were. I felt naked, like in one of those dreams about walking through high school in your underwear.
Maybe five minutes passed without either of us saying a word before Dorcas muttered, “There’s the covered bridge.”
It grew out of the darkness ahead of us—an old wooden bridge that had probably been around for a whole mess of years. Dorcas slowed the van to a crawl.
“Do you see that?” she said.
“See what?” Honestly, I wasn’t really watching the road. My eyes were glued to the sky.
“There’s something in the middle of the bridge. I can’t make it out.”
The opening was like the dark mouth of Laugh in the Dark, this amusement park funhouse at Riverside, our local yokel answer to Disney. Trina used to love squishing into the old, metal cars and holding the safety bar with white knuckles as we lurched forward through a painted demon’s mouth into a hokey fluorescent attempt at cheap scares.
I used to think the ride was boring.
The mouth of the covered bridge was far from boring. The dark maw gave me the willies. Besides, Dorcas was right. There was something in the middle of the bridge that I couldn’t make out any better than her eighty-two-year-old eyeballs.
“Stop the van,” I said.
“What?”
Maybe there was smoke in her ears, too. “Stop the van.”
“Aye aye,” she croaked, and pumped on the brake. I caught her looking in the rear view mirror with a wistful look, as though she half expected there to be little kids in the back seat getting ready to be dropped off. Dorcas slowed the minivan until we were barely crawling. Then she pulled over to one side of the road and stopped in front of the covered bridge from hell.
I reached for my seatbelt, but she smacked my hand away—harder than I thought she could.
“Ow! What the—”
“Stay here. I’m going to see what’s going on up ahead.”
“No you’re not,” I snapped. Geez, why did everyone have to be so damn difficult? I took a deep breath and tried a different tactic. “Ms. Duke,” I began. “Um, I mean, Dorcas. How about you let me take a look? I’ll just be a second.” I reached for the seatbelt again and she slapped my hand even harder.
“How about nothing,” she spat. “What’s the matter—you think I’m too old?” Well, yeah, that just about summed it up. “Let me tell you something, sonny boy. I’m just as capable as you are.”
Wow. Someone really had some age issues going on. This was a new one to me. I thought old people were supposed to be nice and pliable. I thought they wanted to be taken care of—like puppies.
“No. That’s not what I mean. I’m just, you know, more used to poxers and stuff.”
She glared at me in the gloom—the lit end of her cigarette glowing hot then burning dim as she sucked on one end like she was sucking up a chocolate milk shake.
Finally, she wiped her palm across her forehead. “Okay, sport,” she rasped. “Have at it. I don’t give a damn.” I guess that meant I had the green light to go—still, I gingerly reached down to undo the seatbelt for fear that I would endure another slap.
As I softly opened the door and stepped out into the brisk night air, she said, “Watch out for the Donkey Man,” then laughed and wheezed at the same time.
“Nice,” I said. “That’s real nice. I’m sure the kids on the bus loved you, Dorcas.” Visions of the old witch in the Hansel and Gretel story danced in my head.
“Me? I’m a doll.” Yeah, right. Maybe she kidnapped the little kids she really hated and baked them into pies or something. Or maybe she canned kiddie-preserves in her basement to sell at the Greenfield Fall Fest. How else could she afford a carton of smokes a day?
“I’ll be right back,” I whispered. “Just keep the high beams on.” Even though the bright lights cut a swath through the darkness, they seemed to be engulfed by the gloom underneath the covered bridge. The darkness was like a deep void in space—a black hole that wanted to suck me into its gravitational pull.
I had a flashlight in one hand and a lighter in my pocket, along with a tourist brochure I took from a rack back at Swifty’s. It advertised a local zoo that probably had one chicken, three goats, and an obese pot-bellied pig.
When I switched the flashlight on, I saw what was in the middle of the bridge. There were two vehicles. The one closest to me was an old convertible sports car—the kind that someone with too much money and time on their hands tools around in on weekends. Frankly, the car was sort of cool. In another life, it would have been really cool, but all I could think about was how impractical a convertible was in our new world of the dead.
The second one freaked the crap out of me. I think the only sight worse would have been a hearse.
Stalled underneath the covered bridge in front of the convertible sports car was an ambulance with its driver-side door wide open.
16
CAN’T ANYTHING be easy? I know the whole world’s gone to crap, but come on. How hard is it to drive all the way through a covered bridge and not totally block the road so that other people—breathing people—have a chance of getting through?
No—everything has to be all creepy and hard—like that’s anything new.
Dorcas beeped the horn on the van. I jumped, and I think a little bit of pee ran down my leg.
“Stop,” I yelled back at her. “Do you want every poxer in hearing distance to come running?”
“What is it?” she choked out as waft of smoke drifted out of the driver’s side window.
“A poxer? It’s a zombie.”
“Funny, kid. Real funny. What’s in the bridge?”
I shone the flashlight in the dark corners before bending down on my hands and knees and pointing the beam underneath the sports car and the ambulance. No poxers anywhere.
“It’s a car and an ambulance,” I said. “The car’s empty.
I don’t know about the ambulance.”
“You need me?”
Like a hole in the head. “No. You stay there.” I thought for a moment. “You might want to close the windows. I don’t know where the drivers are.” All I could imagine was a poxer reaching through the window and pulling Dorcas Duke’s ancient bones out of her driver’s side seat. Then again, they’d probably stay away because of the smoke.
Dorcas closed the window but left it open a crack to let her exhaust spill out in a steady stream.
I focused the light on the ambulance and tried to think about happy thoughts like Prianka and kittens—but I definitely wasn’t getting any happier. If you could actually feel adrenaline coursing through your veins, I was feeling it now.
Still, I had to look on the bright side. I was in an ambulance once—last year in fact. I did a number on my ankle playing soccer—which, by the way, was totally the other guy’s fault and the ref was an idiot. Anyway, they took me off to the emergency room in an ambulance. I remember thinking how cool everything was, because the ambulance was like a mini-hospital on wheels. Besides the stretcher, the whole back was crammed full of all these different supplies that paramedics use.
Most of the things on my dad’s list were probably sitting right there, free for the taking. I just had to muster up the courage to take myself beyond the convertible, past the double back door with the big red cross painted on it, and right to the front door, which was currently wide open.
Every fiber of my being was telling me there were poxers inside.
My instincts were spot on, but not in the way that I expected. In short, what I ended up finding was pretty gross.
When I finally got up the stones to slink along the side of the ambulance, lighter and paper in hand, with all intentions of smoking out the oogity-boogities in the front seat, there was nothing there.
That was good news and bad news.
The Dead (a Lot) Trilogy (Book 1): Wicked Dead Page 7
