Haywood saw his chance, picked up the gun, and positioned himself away from the group, equidistant from his ex-accomplices and Nick. With the headlights behind him, he had a clear view of the scene. Clinton and Davis to the left, Frank and Lila were holding up Earl in the middle. Melissa was on her knees blocking the path into the woods. And Nick, the stranger, was standing aside, staring him down with an iron gaze.
“So what is Michael to you, then?” Haywood asked. “He kill a friend of yours too? You and him partners? An old friend from prison?”
“He’s my exit out of this world. I sure hope that you haven’t done anything to him.”
“Not yet, I haven’t. And neither you nor anyone else is going to get in my way again.”
Nick held up his hands in a mock gesture of surrender. He gave a soft grin that Haywood could only see half of in the amber beam of the truck light. “Mister, you have no idea what you’re messing with. I think this is well beyond your understanding. It would be best if you left. Ain’t no telling what strange things might come out tonight.”
Melissa lifted her head to see Haywood raise the Glock and train it on her. The gun looked so much larger from the other end, as if it held the entirety of her life in its steel frame. She could taste the blood in her mouth as it dripped down her chin onto the dirt. She never imagined this. That she would die in the woods, surrounded by strangers, having tried to protect a brother she did not know but had hated most of her life. Then she felt a hand on her shoulder and the throbbing in her head ceased. She felt it roll back like the outgoing wave at low tide. It was a hand that felt both strange and familiar. A hand reaching out from the past and grabbing her from behind.
Michael.
He stepped to his sister’s side and helped her to stand. He was wobbly himself, the abuse he had suffered showing in every aspect of his being. He looked across and saw Nick standing in the clearing. He paid no notice to Haywood, even though the gun was trained in his direction.
Nick looked different from the last time he’d seen him on the railroad bridge. Not just beat up from the fight, or whatever damage from the fall, but the bloodlust in his eyes was gone. He looked calm. Collected. Michael felt confused, staring at the man who had tried to kill him. There was something in his eyes, as if he was hiding an ace up his sleeve at the most important poker game of his life.
“I see that you’re still alive, Michael. That’s good. For a minute I thought my hope was gone. Why don’t you come with me and we’ll sort this out.”
“He ain’t going anywhere!” Haywood yelled.
“It’s not for you to decide. What are you going to do, shoot him? In cold blood?”
“Haywood,” Michael said, exhaustion weakening his voice, “put the gun down. Your friend tried it once . . . Didn’t turn out too good for him.”
“Morrison . . . ,” Haywood said as he waved the gun around. “See, boys, I told you. I told you it was Michael who killed Morrison! I told you all that what we were doing was in the right.”
“Come on. Let’s go,” Nick said quietly as he stepped closer to Michael and grabbed his arm.
“I told you that he would be the death of us all!” Haywood continued.
Michael could feel the darkness in Nick’s hands latch on to that part of his soul that had been clouded since he was ten. The part that had been invaded when he took Marcus into the woods and left him lying there dead. His head swam in the darkness and focused solely on Nick, whose eyes shone differently than at any time before. They weren’t filled with rage or hopelessness. They weren’t the eyes of the killer who had attacked him on the bridge. They were the eyes of an executioner who had suddenly recanted his profession and showered mercy on the headless victims of his work.
“And now we have him here again! Again! This time we owe it to Morrison to not screw it up again!”
Michael and Nick were so focused on each other that neither man, and neither man’s dark inhabitor, noticed Haywood raise the pistol at them. They did not even hear the sound when Haywood pulled the trigger and the blast of the gun echoed through the woods.
seventy-eight
THE SHOT RANG OUT and time stood still. Michael was unaware of anyone else in the clearing but Nick, who had ahold of the deepest recesses of his being. He felt Nick move in front of him, felt the thump in his dark adversary’s back, the bullet crashing into his spine. Nick fell against him, his weight heavy and sagging, forcing him to the earth, Michael’s legs buckling under the unexpected weight. Nick’s eyes widened as if realizing some glorious truth and reveling in the experience.
“Mercy. We have found mercy . . . ,” Nick whispered, the blood bubbling up in his throat, “. . . in the most unlikely of places . . . I am free. I am finally free.”
His eyes rolled back and Nick breathed his last.
Haywood dropped the gun from his hands, the shock and horror on his face spoke louder than words: He had killed a man. Shot him in the back. He had meant to kill Michael, but Nick, this stranger in the woods, had stepped in front of the shot.
He stumbled back, gasping for breath.
Nick’s body slid to the ground, and from his skin began to seep a black mist, rising up to the treetops and coalescing above the clearing. Michael could feel a pull in the depths of his soul, as if his body were suddenly turning inside out, the fog releasing from Nick’s body sucking the same ghostly ether from him as well. Spiraling upward, the mists took form above their heads. Earl, Frank, Lila, Melissa, Davis, and Clinton—they watched in wonder and terror as the storm cloud, absolute blackness against the night sky, took two distinct shapes, warring above them. The two entities battled for dominance of the sky until one succeeded in swallowing the other. It then hovered there, a being made of dark matter and emanating the absence of all things pure down on the people below. But its black heart was set on one man. Haywood.
Haywood looked up and saw with fresh eyes what he had done. Nick had been right. What he was gazing up into right now was beyond his understanding. This demon vapor looked down and came spiraling toward him, relentlessly swarming in an ever-increasing sea of darkness, the mirage pounding into Haywood’s flesh, melting into his body, coiling itself around his spine, inhabiting the far reaches of his soul and humanity that Haywood had emptied out in his increasingly vengeful pursuit of Michael. The shot that he had fired, the fatal shot that had struck Nick in the back during his act of selfless sacrifice, carved out a new home for the exiled ghoul and it took up residence in its new home: Haywood.
He screamed.
After all that had happened, he saw the world as Michael had seen it. He felt the guilt, the madness, the total annihilation of his relationship to all those around him. The people standing in front of him were but strangers, never to be friends again. They abhorred him, stood in shock of him, wanted him removed from their sight.
Haywood could feel the protective coils of the cursed angel squeezing at his mind. He hadn’t wanted this, none of it, and now he had become that which he had worked so hard to eradicate from Coldwater. He was now a killer, an outcast. He had rushed in madly to that room with no exit and found that he would be forever alone. The overwhelming sensation threw him into the pit of despair, and all he could see was the spiraling black hole where no hope could escape. He was damned, and he had damned himself.
There was no going back. He realized this and raged against it. The gun in his hand, Haywood lifted it to his head. All he wanted was to be set free. To return to a time when he was not alone, but the demon wind told him it would never be. This was now his curse. His new self. Haywood pulled the trigger.
It did not fire.
He pulled again.
And again.
His new inhabitant knew what it was doing. It had lived through this part countless times before. It pressed Haywood’s mind into a dark singularity until the blackness overcame him and he collapsed to the ground.
seventy-nine
SILENCE CREPT IN FROM THE CORNERS of the clearing like flo
odwaters spilling into a sinkhole. A ring of participants around an open space, in front of them lay the bodies of Haywood and Nick, Haywood unconscious but still breathing, Nick dead to this world but with a serene look on his face, the weight of the years lifted from his shoulders.
The Coldwater people—Clinton, Davis, Frank, Earl, and Lila—looked at Haywood and then at each other and back again in an endless stream of bewilderment. Their eyes had seen what their brains could not process. A vision of hell swirling above their heads and then absorbed by the man they had blindly followed down this demon path. Every horror story they had ever been told manifested in the woods before them.
Clinton looked over at Michael. The man they had pursued, had made the scapegoat for every fear they had, stood near the encroaching forest, his face illuminated by the headlight of one of the trucks. In some subtle way Michael appeared different. His battered and bloody face still showed the evidence of the past several days, and in all likelihood it would for the rest of his life, but something in his eyes shone different.
The boys stood still. They had no idea what was to come next.
Was Haywood just the first to get what was coming to him?
Davis reached into his pocket for his cigarettes. His hands were shaking uncontrollably and it took several attempts to land one in his mouth and get it lit.
Clinton kept staring at Michael.
“Anybody going to say anything?” Earl said, breaking the silence.
Davis looked at him and held up his hands.
Melissa walked over to Haywood and cautiously picked up her pistol.
She turned toward Michael.
Any hint of rage was gone from her bearing, evaporated into the night like the satanic mists that had floated before their faces. She moved in the headlights to her car, opened the door, and placed the gun under her seat. She looked at Michael.
“Come on,” she whispered, “I’ll take you home.”
Michael looked down at Nick. His once-future self. The man who had chased him through the north woods and came close to killing him on the viaduct. The man who wrestled with the same demons he had fought with and who had begged him to take them away.
Nick, the man who saved him.
Michael had no idea where the dark companion that had been dragged out of the corner of his soul had gone, but he felt in his heart that it would not be back. It had been evicted. Nick had done that for him—by taking the bullet in the back, by sacrificing himself, by showing that Michael was worth mercy in his last noble action. As he was unable to ask forgiveness of his dead brother, so he was unable to express his gratefulness to Nick for releasing him back into life by his martyrdom.
Then he looked at Haywood, whose prone body lay on the forest floor.
Michael knew what now resided there.
The shadow that had coiled itself around Nick’s soul was now setting up house in the vacant spaces that Haywood’s anger had cleared out. The demon finding a new home, a new cell, a new place to live out its days in the hollow thoughts of men.
Michael limped to Melissa’s car, opened the passenger’s door, and slid inside.
He knew the woman sitting next to him.
He knew her when he had walked up behind her in the forest and had placed his hand on her shoulder, as if the cells in his body warmed to the sensation of a similar strain.
They didn’t say a word as Melissa backed out of Springer’s Grove, the headlights illuminating the faces of the defanged Coldwater vigilantes. They turned around and headed back to Coldwater.
He waited for her to say something.
He waited for her to pull the gun out and place a bullet in his skull.
But she just drove on. Down the two-track, onto the main road.
The silence echoed through the car.
The lights of Gilly’s and the diner appeared in the darkness. Melissa brought the car to the stoplight and turned east. She drove past the road to the cemetery. Their brother Marcus, lying quietly now in their taillights.
She turned down the dirt road toward the ashen remains of their childhood home, the embers cooling and giving a soft glow to the dead circle like a scorched bomb blast. She stopped the car in the drive.
And she remained silent.
Michael got out. The heat from the fire now subsided, he could see the trailer in the back, still standing.
The wind through the woods blew the smoke to the heavens, purging the earth of sins gone by. Michael looked back into the car.
Melissa was crying softly.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything,” Michael said.
She nodded but kept her eyes down. Silent.
It would take a while. A lifetime of anger and resentment quickly washed away could not be instantly replaced with a lesser sentiment. The vacuum in his sister’s heart would take some time to fill with new feelings, but perhaps this would be the first step to start again.
He closed the door and stood, watching, as she eased the car onto the road and headed south toward a life yet unplanned.
eighty
WHEN THE BOYS WOULD GATHER as elderly men and sip beers at Gilly’s like old-timers do at every pub in America, they would tell stories of their grandkids or stories of which new ache and pain they might have been suffering from. They told stories of old jobs, of trips they had taken, of times gone past.
But one story they never told by silent consensus was the story of what happened in the woods that night up by Springer’s Grove. Even after years of living and seeing just a sliver of what the world had in it, nothing offered anything close to an explanation of what they saw that night. The gunshot that blasted through the wilderness had opened up the gates of hell and each man had borne witness.
When Kyle returned to their company, wheeled into his spot, they never talked about it.
When Lila and Earl finally got hitched, even they would not talk about it in the confines of their home, their kids none the wiser.
Occasionally they would see a car arrive from South Falls, the woman who appeared that unmentionable weekend. They would see her turn east at the stoplight and disappear into the woods to where a fire once burned an old house to the ground.
But they let the thoughts and memories reside unspoken in their minds.
And when they would see the man walking into town, a hitch in his step from a wound suffered in a story now past, they would hold their tongues and divert their eyes, as if acknowledging what had happened would open up old wounds, old guilt, and old horrors.
Epilogue
THE DAY WAS BORN IN DARKNESS.
Haywood opened his eyes and saw nothing.
Blackness.
The motes in his eyes drifted across the void.
He lifted himself from the bed and placed his feet on the concrete slab below him. He stood and walked over to the bars and felt their cold radiance in his palms. Across the space beyond the cage he could see, through the open door, a chair. Its wood withering from age and the memory of electricity scorching the occupants it had held.
The darkness enveloped him.
It resided in him.
The warden had brought Haywood here, to the shed on the edge of the yard. He said it had been used before to hold a special inmate. An inmate that his predecessor had said needed unique accommodations.
To protect himself.
To protect everyone.
Haywood turned and walked over to the bed. Day would come.
Then night.
The cycle would go on, and on, till the end of days.
He lay down, curling on his side as a child had done years before.
Alone. But never alone.
Acknowledgments
MANY THANKS TO ANDREA, for taking a chance on something different. To the most incredible editor, Barb. To Michele and Hannah, thanks for putting up with me and getting the book into as many people’s hands as possible.
To all the family, friends, and old schoolmates who have supported me over the past several
years. I could never show enough appreciation for the encouragement you have shown.
And lastly, to Liz. You are always a constant source of support and laughter. Thank you for an incredible life.
Samuel Parker was born in the Michigan boondocks but was raised on a never-ending road trip through the US. Besides writing, he is a process junkie and the ex-guitarist for several metal bands you’ve never heard of. He lives in West Michigan with his wife and twin sons.
Also by Samuel Parker
Purgatory Road
SamuelParkerBooks.com
Sign up for announcements about upcoming titles.
Twitter: RevellBooks
Facebook: Revell
Coldwater Page 22
