Thunder Road
Page 1
Outstanding praise for THUNDER ROAD
“Somewhere east of Edwards Air Force Base, south of Fort Irwin, folks have seen the signs in the sky, stirring weird beliefs and strange desires. That’s only the beginning, because the forces that converge over the desert have designs of their own—and desires that transcend human flesh. Tamara Thorne has captured the flavor and terror of such alien intrusions, but she forces us to take another forbidden step beyond the edge of obsession, with profound consequences the reader cannot forget, or survive with innocence intact.”
—Jacques Vallee, author of Passport to Magonia
“[Thorne] is one of the best tellers of dark fantasy tall-tales, able to spin a yarn that’s both outrageous and surprisingly convincing, peopled with flesh and blood characters you can’t help but like and care about. . . and she wields her wild sense of humor like a claymore.”
—Bill Gagliani, Cemetery Dance
“Tamara Thorne knows it’s no fun being scared unless you’re having fun being scared. She’ll take you on a weird and harrowing trip down Thunder Road that’s a helluva fun ride.”
—Aaron Hughes, FantasticReviews.com
“[Tamara Thorne] uses her considerable skill to slowly shape characters who change, resisting simple definition. And she does it with good humor and a dear sense of story, engaging the reader’s emotions with aplomb.”
—BookLovers
“A magnificent symphony of characters and subplots that twist and tangle with each other—until they reach the impossible crescendo of theology, mythology, and murder. . . . this is an excellent book—not as much horror as some would like, more like the piccolo in an orchestra . . . it’s there, it’s wonderful, but it’s not center stage. Should you buy it? Oh yeah . . . especially if you enjoy religious, supernatural, scientific, or action-based horror.”
—Kelli Dunlap [HorrorWench] Horror-Web.com
And outstanding praise for THE SORORITY TRILOGY
“With summer reading season in full swing, what might best hold your interest and goose you in all the right places? Well, a humorous but gruesome, sexy, mythology-based romp through an evil sorority house might fit the bill, and Tamara Thorne’s got the place for you. Better yet, slice the bloody pie into three equal size wedges and you’ve got The Sorority, Thorne’s answer to the serial novel and the summer book all rolled into one—er, three.”
—Bill Gagliani, Cemetery Dance, on Eve
“Thorne’s take on Green Man mythology crossed with skewed Arthurian legend and evil cheerleader B-movies finds its niche—and hits its stride—with dead-on portrayals of witchy, bitchy sorority brats—some of which turn out to be immortal sorceresses, members of Fata Morgana, a secret coven within the Gamma Eta Pi sorority of Greenbriar University, home of the Forest Knight.”
—Bill Gagliani, Cemetery Dance,
on Merilynn and Samantha
“Too many of today’s horror writers are so concerned with being stylish that they forget to have fun. Tamara Thorne never forgets, and as a result The Sorority is a whole lot of fun to read. . . . The Sorority makes for highly entertaining reading from start to finish.”
—Aaron Hughes, FantasticReviews.com,
on The Sorority
Praise for Tamara Thorne’s novels
THE FORGOTTEN
“Tamara Thorne is at the top of her game with some of her best writing to date.”
—Horror World
“Tamara Thorne has an uncanny knack for combining the outrageous with the shuddery, making for wonderful, scary romps and fun reading.”
—Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
CANDLE BAY
“This is not an Anne Rice knock-off. Thorne has added her unique touch to the much repeated vampire tale with gratifying results, which makes Candle Bay a treat.”
—Horror World
HAUNTED
“A wonderful, terrifying book. . . a worthy successor to The Shining and Ghost Story.”
—Nancy Holder
“Don’t read it if you have something else to do . . . it just might have to wait.”
—After Hours
“Combines eerie eroticism with page-turning terror.”
—Pasadena Weekly
BAD THINGS
“One of the most entertaining horror novels that I have ever read . . . with characters to die for, Bad Things comes highly recommended.”
—Horror World
Books by Tamara Thorne
HAUNTED
MOONFALL
ETERNITY
CANDLE BAY
BAD THINGS
THE FORGOTTEN
The Sorority Trilogy
EVE
MERILYNN
SAMANTHA
THUNDER ROAD
Published by Pinnacle Books
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Outstanding praise for THUNDER ROAD
And outstanding praise for THE SORORITY TRILOGY
Praise for Tamara Thorne’s novels
Books by Tamara Thorne
Title Page
Dedication
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE
PART ONE - Tales of the New West
TUESDAY
PART TWO - Signs and Portents
WEDNESDAY
THURSDAY
PART THREE - Revelations
FRIDAY
SATURDAY
PART FOUR - Apocalypse
120 - Tom Abernathy
121 - James Robert Sinclair
122 - Marie Lopez
123 - Moss Baskerville
124 - Justin Martin
125 - Carlo Pelegrine
126 - Tom Abernathy
127 - Marie Lopez
128 - Alexandra Manderley
129 - James Robert Sinclair
130 - Tom Abernathy
131 - Carlo Pelegrine
132 - Hannibal Caine
133 - Cassie Halloway
134 - Alexandra Manderley
135 - Hannibal Caine
SUNDAY
EPILOGUE - October
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Copyright Page
For Jacques Vallee,
Keeper of the rare trinity
of science, of wit, and of wonder
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to John and Kay for guidance
along the winding road
To Quinn and to Q for reminding me to stop
and smell the joshua trees
To Damien, traveling companion
To Jacques Vallee for continued inspiration
To Paul Najarian, M.D.,
and Dana Issacson for good advice
To my ghost-loving pals for stocking the road
with phantom hitchikers
And a special thanks to my webmaster, Heather,
and my publicist, Wiley,
for making me presentable at the end of the journey
PROLOGUE
April
T HE LAST THINGS MADGE MARQUAY SAW WERE THE BALLS OF light darting across the night sky.
How long ago? Hours? Days? A week or more? She couldn’t be sure in this unending darkness. All she knew was that after working late at Madland, she had strolled out to the amusement park’s apparently deserted parking lot and paused by her car to breathe in the crisp desert air. Then she glanced up at the midnight sky, at the brilliant dusting of stars.
She had heard about the lights from friends and neighbors, but it was the first time she’d actually seen them. The orbs were amazing, simultaneously magnificent and frightening, as they cavorted above the stark silhouettes of the Madelyn Mountains, flashing in and out of existence at whim. Suddenly she understood why no on
e who had seen them believed they were aircraft from the military bases, weather balloons, or ball lightning.
Madge had been easy prey for her attacker as she stood, mesmerized, staring at the sky, wishing Henry were here with her. Suddenly someone had grabbed her from behind and clamped a chloroformed rag over her nose and mouth.
And then, nothing. Now she wondered if the strange lights would be the last things she would ever see.
She could hear the tourists, but she couldn’t make them hear her. Madge Marquay, bound, gagged, and blindfolded, lay somewhere below the Haunted Mine Ride in a cold rocky room that reeked of death, in a darkness so thick that it seemed to clog her lungs. Far above, one of the little mine trains rumbled by, and she moaned around her gag, trying to free a scream that could no more escape her lips than she could the mining pit.
Tears ran down her cheeks as utter silence resumed. Henry had to be looking for her, had to be worried, but would he ever think to walk the old passages in their own property, to climb down the ancient iron ladders to find her here in a pit dug and abandoned 130 years ago? She’d be a fool if she believed he would. Henry, their friends, and the police would search the canyons and mountains, they would look behind rocks and in brush-clogged drainage ditches, just as they had when Kyla Powers vanished a month ago.
But they never found her, or Joe Huxley, for that matter. But Madge thought she knew where they were. Down here with her. Despite the chill, she could smell death all around her. It was not an odor that numbed her sense of smell, but one that grew stronger, breeding sick panic in her gut.
She lay there, slowly being hypnotized by the dark, by her thirst and hunger, barely aware of the searing pain in her arm where her captor had peeled away her flesh. Her mind drifted, escaping to the past, to the time nearly fifteen years ago when she and Henry had leased the old Moonstone Silver Mine from the County Parks Department and turned it into the biggest and best attraction in Old Madelyn.
They rigged music to play in different parts of the ride, using the Grand Canyon Suite for the tame vistas, “Night on Bald Mountain” for the runaway train sections, and “In the Hall of the Mountain King” for the huge central showcase, a room containing treasure boxes filled with gold-painted rocks that were guarded by Disneyesque dwarfs and presided over by an imposing golden-haired king on his throne. It wasn’t perfect, or even terribly original, but it was the product of their labor and they loved it. It was their dream.
Shoring up the dirty old mine, making it safe, then running the wiring and track for the passenger cars had been Henry’s job, while Madge did art and design in her spare hours. As a history teacher, she loved digging into the books of Irish mining lore and turning the tales into figures and images to delight and frighten visitors. The stories had become so vivid to her that, in her mind’s eye, she could see the dwarfs sneaking up on an unwary human miner, their pickaxes ready to strike.
Another train rumbled overhead, bringing reality with it. She moaned around the filthy rag between her teeth, felt the tears coursing down her cheeks and wished to God she could suck them into her mouth. She was so thirsty. So very thirsty.
PART ONE
Tales of the New West
Perhaps they have always been here. On earth.
With us.
—Jacques Vallee, Dimensions
. . . Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
—Isaiah 40:3
I will be disappointed if they [UFOs] turn out to be nothing more than advanced spacecraft.
—Jacques Vallee, Confrontations
TUESDAY
1
Tom Abernathy
SHEEP, THOUGHT TOM ABERNATHY, DAMNED, STUPID SHEEP. HE hopped down into the runoff ditch to avoid getting caught in the mass of wool coming up behind him, thinking that these days he spent a good portion of his time avoiding one sort of flock or another.
Soon they were everywhere, Christly dirty, dust-kicking sheep, before and behind him, chewing and bahing, stinking and shitting, filling Thunder Road and trampling the orange and yellow wildflowers for twenty yards to the north. Marie, whom he had yet to glimpse, wasn’t so bad (quite the opposite, as a matter of fact), though she usually smelled of lanolin and dip, which Tom supposed was a fitting perfume for a lady sheepherder. Truth be told, for two years now that aroma, combined with the soft, sweet scent of Marie’s skin and hair, had intoxicated him.
He wasn’t unique: A lot of the men in town were smitten by Marie. While Abernathy kept his yearnings to himself, Phil, the morning counterman at Ray’s Truck Stop Cafe, down in New Madelyn, was so in love with her that she could have smelled like owl shit and swamp water and he wouldn’t have cared a bit. Phil’s courtship consisted simply of serenading her with “I Get a Kick Out of Ewe” whenever she came in for coffee; not particularly original, but not bad for the likes of New Madelyn, and Marie didn’t seem to mind. Men working at Madland, which was what you called Old Madelyn Historic Park if you were employed there, were a bit more creatively uncouth in their comments, which included such songs as “Marie Had a Little Ram” and questions along the lines of “Ewe want me, Marie? I want ewe.” Franklin Hank Flinn, the Owner of the octopus —Flinn called it the octopussy because he liked to be dirty—once asked Marie about the longevity of ram erections, and that was the only time anyone could ever remember seeing the sheepherder lose her temper. For such a tiny woman, she had astoundingly strong hands, and Frank Hank swore that with one quick grab and twist, she’d almost removed the source of his happiness forever.
Tom sneezed, sucking in dust, coating his teeth with the stuff. “Goddamned sheep,” he grunted, pulling a faded red bandanna from his back pocket. He flipped it, folded it crosswise, and tied it over his nose and mouth bandido-style. He loved doing that as much now, at the ripe old age of forty-two, as he had when he was just a little stick of a kid. For good measure, he tilted the brim of his brown beaver felt Stetson down a little.
“Hey, cowboy!” Marie’s voice, clear as birdsong, rose above the bahing of the sheep.
Aiming for nonchalance, he halted and glanced up. “How you doin’, Marie?” Squinting, he pushed the hat brim a little lower against the bright spring sun.
“Doing good.” She swung off Rex, her raven black gelding, and let one rein fall. Dorsey, one of her border collies, made to grab it, but she stopped him with a meaningful glance. Tail down, he quickly rejoined his partner, Wild Bill. “Get back to work, you two,” Marie told the dogs as she joined Tom in the trench. “Come,” she told the horse, and he obediently moved two steps closer to the dry canal and waited to follow wherever she might go.
She sure has a way with animals, Tom thought, catching her scent. “Bright out today.”
“That’s why they call it the desert.”
“You’re a smart-ass woman, you know that?” He wondered how she kept the dust off her teeth.
“I know it, cowboy.”
Marie Lopez had light olive skin and big chocolate eyes, and if she had favored bright skirts and cheap jewelry rather than Levi’s and chambray shirts, and if she let her wavy dark hair flow loose instead of keeping it tied back under a straw cowboy hat, she would have made a great gypsy.
He ran his tongue over his teeth to clean off any remaining dust, then pulled the kerchief down around his neck. “So why don‘tcha give up these stinkin’ sheep and read fortunes at Madland?” he asked for maybe the thousandth time.
“Because I like to make an honest living,” she replied for maybe the five hundredth time. She had about another five hundred answers, all different, all colorful and pleasantly obscene, and that’s why he asked her the same question so often.
“You sayin’ Carlo ain’t honest?” Disappointment at being handed the stock answer made him feel feisty.
She cocked her head and drilled him with her eyes, but he didn’t do anything except let a calculated smile crack his long, leathery face.
She grunted. “When I look at you like that, you’re supposed to tuck y
our tail between your legs and run like hell, Abernathy.”
“I am?” The smile widened.
“You’re okay,” she said, dead serious. “You don’t spook.”
He nodded, determined to start something. “Carlo don’t spook either, but you write him off because of his dishonest profession.”
“Quit trying to yank my chain, cowboy. Carlo’s a shrink in gypsy’s clothing. He doesn’t do anything but make people feel good.”
That was true. The Madland fortune teller and Marie were a lot alike: smart, hard to figure, and moody as hell, which was probably why he liked them. Carlo Pelegrine, like the shepherdess, spent a lot of time fending off the opposite sex. The only woman who seemed unaffected by Carlo’s moody good looks was Marie, and Tom occasionally worried that their similarities would pull them together, cutting him out of the race before he even got around to getting into it. And most likely, he thought, his teasing them only worsened the odds.
“Tom?”
“Yep?”
“Why aren’t you riding today?”
He shrugged. “Belle’s getting new shoes right now.” The pure truth was, he could have taken one of the other horses, but he’d been in need of the kind of peace and quiet that anything made of flesh and blood, except his favorite mare, would disrupt. He needed to be alone to think: Things were on the wind. He smiled grimly. Things besides sheep.