Ghost Road Blues pd-1

by Jonathan Maberry

  “Get your fucking foot off the pedal!” Ruger hissed. When Tony didn’t, or couldn’t, Ruger cocked his arm and drove his elbow into Tony’s nose once, twice. The brittle cartilage in Tony’s nose crunched and blood exploded from his lacerated skin, pouring down over his mouth. Tony sagged against the door and his foot slid from the pedal. Thoroughly enjoying himself, Ruger grinned, shifted his hips, then reached over with his own left foot and stamped on the brakes. The car jerked and jolted, throwing Ruger against the dashboard and Boyd against the back of Tony’s seat. Tony’s seat buckled forward, and Tony’s right temple struck the steering wheel with a sharp crack.

  A moment later there was a much louder crack! and then the car swayed drunkenly to the right, slowed abruptly, then stopped altogether.

  The engine growled in confusion as it wound itself down.

  Pushing himself away from the dashboard, Ruger reached over and shoved the automatic transmission into park, then switched off the engine. A tarpaulin of silence dropped over the car, broken only by small tinkling sounds from the now still engine and the far-off rumble of thunder.

  Chapter 4

  (1)

  Long black lines of burned rubber marked where the car had gone off the road into the corn. The tall man with the blond hair stood at the outer curve of the skid mark and stared into the field for a long time, his mouth cut into a cruel smile of triumph. Despite the total cloud cover his skin and blond hair seemed to glimmer with a luminescence like cold moonlight.

  He reached out his left hand, fingers splayed so that from his perspective his hand encompassed the whole of the car; then he closed his hand slowly, forming a knotted fist. A wind seemed to blow past him and into the cornfield.

  Then his smile changed as he felt a presence behind him. He slowly lowered his arm and turned, his eyes both bright and dark in the strange light. Across the road, standing just at the edge of the forest, was a second man. His skin was gray as dust and he wore a black suit smeared with dirt. The blond man’s face twisted into a sneer.

  The man in the black suit opened his mouth to speak, but though his lips formed words, there was no sound. His face registered alarm and then frustration. He tried again and the strain of his effort was clear on his face.

  The blond man shook his head and laughed. “Pathetic,” he said in a voice that was the sound of icy wind blowing through the limbs of blighted trees.

  Straining, the other man forced out two words—“…stop…you…”—but the effort drained him and his shoulders slumped. He mouthed bastard, but it had no sound and carried no force.

  “You thought you had won, didn’t you?”

  The other man could not make himself heard, his lips writhed without sound. Finally he stopped trying to talk and just stood there looking stricken.

  “You have no idea what you did. You have no concept of how powerful you’ve made me.” He took another step closer and was now only a few feet away from the gray man. “So now…every drop of blood that falls will be on your head. Every. Single. Drop.”

  Then his eyes flared from pale blue to a fiery red as hot and intense as the furnaces of hell.

  In terror, the man in the dark suit fled into the shadows and was gone.

  Lightning flashed in the sky, bathing the road with harsh white light; when the shadows returned, the road was empty.

  (2)

  Malcolm Crow held the severed arm in both of his hands and wondered what to do with it. Put it with the others? Or maybe hang it in the window.

  He opted for the window.

  Tossing it playfully up and down as he walked, he went to the long counter that formed the floor of the display window and peered at the tangle of skulls, rats, spiderwebs, tombstones, and necrobilia that lay strewn with artistic abandon in front of the thick plate glass. He pursed his lips, made a thoughtful decision, and then bent down to lay the severed arm in front of the largest tombstone, the one that read:

  COUNT DRACULA

  Born 1472

  Died 1865

  Died 1900

  Died 1923

  Died 1988

  Died 2007

  He checked to make sure the price tag was showing.

  Whistling “Cemetery Blues” along with the CD player, he strolled back to his worktable and began opening a second box of gruesome goodies. Both cartons were stamped with the distinctive death’s-head label of Yorick’s Skull: Repulsive Replicas, Inc. He removed four more identical severed arms, tagged them with his price gun, and set them on a shelf next to the severed hands, human hearts, and glow-in-the-dark skulls. When the bell above the door tinkled he glanced over his shoulder to see a familiar burly, bearded figure amble in.

  “Hey! Wolfman!” Crow said playfully, waving a rubber arm.

  Terry Wolfe smiled back, his grin splitting the red beard with a flash of white. He was a big man, nearly six-five, with logger’s forearms and a huge barrel chest, but dressed with expensive good taste in a Giampaolo Desanti suit in dark blue wool with faint pinstripes, a pale blue shirt, and a tie that matched his suit. His shoes were buffed to a polished-coal sheen, and his red beard and curly hair were clipped short, though Crow noticed that Terry needed a haircut — he usually got one every week — and that his beard was a little uneven. Pretending not to look, Crow saw that Terry’s smile went no deeper than the surface of his face and that his eyes were bloodshot.

  “Whatcha got there?” Terry asked as he stepped up and peered into the box. “Oh, yuck!” He reached in and fished out a huge black rat that lay crushed and sprawled in a congealed puddle of blood and gore.

  “Cute, huh?” Crow said with a happy grin.

  “Good God, what on earth are you going to do with this?”

  “With ‘these,’” Crow corrected. “I have six of them.”

  “Why, for God’s sake?”

  “To sell ’em.”

  “To whom?”

  “Kids. I already sold out of the first lot. Roadkill Ratz are this year’s ‘thing.’” When you step on them they squeal. Kids snap them right up. And split skulls, severed limbs, popped-out eyes, eviscerated dogs, and even bug-eyed monster babies with bloody fangs.”

  “When we were kids we used to have rubber chickens.”

  “Dude, we grew up with Freddy, Jason, and Michael Myers.”

  “Sounds like a law firm in hell.”

  “The difference is that you never went to monster movies when we were kids, Wolfman, so you don’t remember all the good horror stuff from the seventies and eighties. Zombie flicks and slasher pics and the kids loved it all. But all that changed and now every couple of years they have to amp it up to keep kids interested. It’s harder to spook them, harder to gross them out. They want to push the envelope of nastiness.”

  “To reiterate,” Terry sniffed with disdain, “‘yuck!’” He rubbed his tired eyes.

  “Rough day at the office? Tired from sitting up all night counting all your millions?”

  Terry yawned. “Don’t I wish? Do you want me to tell you what kind of week I’ve had so far?”

  “Not really—”

  “Since you ask — mostly it’s this bloody crop blight that is very likely going to put ten or fifteen farms out of business, and most of the rest of them will be mortgaged to the eyebrows to Pinelands Farm Bank. Gil Sanders told me just yesterday that his entire corn crop was diseased, all of it. They’re calling it Scandinavian leaf blight because they don’t know what else to call it. That’s twenty tons of corn that’ll have to be burned. He’s already talking of selling his farm to developers and getting out. A few others, too.”

  “Like thirty years ago,” Crow murmured. “Like the Black Harvest.”

  “God, don’t even say that!” Terry rubbed his face with both hands. “Hopefully this won’t be anywhere near as bad. We have two EPA guys here and the guy who teaches agriculture science at Pinelands College is taking samples all over. Maybe they’ll come up with something. And—” Terry began, then waved it off.

  “
What?”

  Terry gave him a bleak smile. “I know it’s just stress and all that,” he said, “but I haven’t been able to sleep much. Can’t get to sleep for hours, and then when I do I have the weirdest dreams. I dunno, I guess you could even call them nightmares — if guys my age actually get nightmares.”

  I sure as hell do, Crow thought, and was about to say it when a customer came in and Terry watched as Crow sold the kid a pair of vampire teeth and two tubes of fake blood. He gave the kid some advice on how to make the blood trickles on either side of his mouth look real rather than fake and the kid left happy. The intrusion broke the stream of their conversation.

  Terry shook his red head sadly. “You are a sick little man, Malcolm Crow.”

  “Hey, just call me ‘Mr. Halloween.’”

  “Other names occur to me. What does Valerie think of all this…” He waved his hand around, at a loss for an adjective that precisely described the Crow’s Nest. “…stuff?”

  Crow shrugged. “She thinks I’m a fruit ball.”

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  “But,” Crow said, holding up a finger, “a lovable fruit ball and dead sexy.”

  “Oh, I’m quite sure.” Terry snorted. “You’re way too far into this stuff, man. I mean, do you even get mail from the real world?”

  “Not often.”

  Most of the year, the Crow’s Nest Craft Shoppe was a respectable, upscale arts and crafts store that sold everything from make-your-own birdhouse kits to Elmer’s School Glue, but with the advent of cooler weather a darkness crept over the store, or at least so it seemed to Terry. The basic craft supplies were exiled to the racks in the back room, while the large main showroom of the shop became a place where monsters ruled. Row upon row of rubber horror masks lined the walls, and Terry was always amazed at the horrific detail of these masks. He would have expected the witches and werewolves and ghouls, but these were overshadowed by grinning freaks with bulging eyes and insanely smiling mouths; demons with flaring red eyes and open, running sores; sadomasochistic cenobites that sprouted grids of pins or exposed gray matter; serial killers with thin, loveless mouths and chiseled features; distorted ghost faces from the Scream trilogy; alien invaders with multifaceted bug eyes and whiplike antennae; huge dragon heads with horns and saurian scales and plates; leprous fiends with leering faces; undead zombies riddled with bullets holes; mummies whose bandages slipped to reveal monstrously deformed verminous eyes; and many more, each more horrific than the last.

  Then there were the monster model kits, stacks and stacks of them, and apple barrels filled with nasty little trinkets: eyeball key chains and human thumb erasers, plastic vampire teeth and stick-on bullet holes, and scores of assorted insects and vermin. Costumes hung on hangers by a makeshift dressing room and accessories were lined up neatly on Peg-Boards. For a few dollars the local kids could walk away with plastic butcher knives, meat cleavers, Freddy Kruger gloves, Jason hockey masks, pitchforks, witches’ brooms, ball-and-chains, pirate hooks, headbands that made it look as if there were an arrow through their skull, and a variety of makeup in black and orange tubes, guaranteed to transform any ten-year-old into a demon from the outer darkness or a newly risen corpse. Crow loved it. The kids in town loved it. Terry Wolfe, however, hated all of it.

  One small counter — Terry’s only haven in the store — was incongruously stocked with rows of beepers and cell phones. Being the local Cingular distributor paid the bills the rest of the year, Crow insisted. The business had its frustrations, though, because the cellular relay tower was on the blink as often as it was working, and no one could understand why; plus more than half the places around town were cell phone dead zones.

  “Hey, that reminds me,” Terry said, drumming his fingers on a case of colorful cell phone covers, “while I’m here can I recharge?” He pulled his cell from its belt holster. “I’ve been on this thing all day and it’s dead as a doornail.” Crow took it and plugged it into a charger behind the counter and then went back to stocking the shelves, glancing covertly at Terry as he did so. He didn’t like the way Terry looked and wondered if he was having troubles with Sarah. That, on top of the town’s crop and financial problems, would be almost too much.

  That, and the coming of Halloween. Terry never liked Halloween, as Crow knew all too well. It had always scared him dry-mouthed and spitless ever since he was ten. Back in the autumn of the Black Harvest when Terry had been so cruelly injured. That had been the worst time for all of them. Crow’s own brother, Billy, had been murdered by the same man who had killed Terry’s sister, Mandy, and had nearly killed Terry.

  Terry and Crow were the only ones in town who had seen the face of the killer and survived — and both of them knew for damn sure it hadn’t been that migrant worker, Oren Morse. The one they’d nicknamed the Bone Man. The bluesman that the town had accused of committing the murders, and had killed.

  Terry and Crow knew different, but not once in thirty years had they spoken to each other — or to anyone for that matter — about it, and that had been Terry’s choice. He’d taken his memories of that autumn and had boxed them up and stored them in a back closet of his mind, never to be opened. Crow, on the other hand, thought about that autumn almost every day of his life, and he’d taken the other routes to defuse the ticking time bombs of memories. First he tried to pickle the memories in bourbon, but that hadn’t really done the job, and had nearly ruined his life. Then he went the other route and made a joke out of them. He indulged them, made them a farce by selling monster masks and designing spooky traps for the hayride. Crow thought that doing that had more or less exorcised the demons of memory, but he couldn’t bring himself to talk it over with a shrink to find out.

  The upshot was that Terry was afraid of the dark, and Crow was afraid of the light. If they could have compared notes, it might have been both funny and comforting to them.

  Yet, despite their private terror, both Crow and Terry took a wry amusement at Terry’s being afraid of Halloween and at the same time being mayor of the town Time magazine had once dubbed “the Most Haunted Town in America.” Pine Deep was one of those peculiar little towns that seemed to foster a common belief in ghosts and ghostly happenings; not just among the town’s eccentrics, but in everyone from crossing guards to town selectmen. The haunted history stretched back to Colonial times when ghosts of slaughtered Lenni-Lenape were said to haunt the new European settlements, and the legends hadn’t dwindled with time but seemed to gather steam with each passing year. It was on this rather spooky foundation that the entire financial structure of the town was built.

  Ever since the Black Harvest of thirty years ago when blight destroyed half the farms in the region, the town had begun to change. Developers had bought up the farms and built expensive houses and estates. Money moved in, as the town saying went, and with it came artists, writers, and craftspeople who bought stores and began shoveling in the tourist dollars. The writers wrote horror or gothic novels that made the best-seller lists, the artists painted moody pieces that became popular spooky posters, and the craftspeople made everything from miniature hand-sewn scarecrows to fabulously expensive jewelry like the Vampire’s Tears, a pair of bloodred ruby earrings that Anne Rice wore on the cover of Publisher’s Weekly. The mood and the history of the town seemed to inspire the darker thoughts of the artists, and the tourists loved everything they made.

  Terry, always business smart, joined in with the group that capitalized on the haunted history of the town, and used that as gimmicks for advertising. Soon everyone up and down the eastern seaboard came to Pine Deep for the scary fun and games: the Halloween Parade, the Monster Mash dance-concert — once, years ago featuring, appropriately enough, The Smashing Pumpkins — and the seasonal shopping that attracted the most astute and discerning antiquarians. The whole town came totally alive at Halloween and the accounting ledgers of nearly every store went quickly and happily from red to black between September and Christmas, with the definite peak being the weeks
leading up to trick-or-treat. Chills and shivers helped Pine Deep prosper as an increasingly upscale community. The fact that Terry Wolfe, with his secret fears, was mayor of “Spooksville,” as the Philadelphia Daily News recently called it, was truly ironic.

  The topper of the whole strange pie was that, despite everything, Terry owned the Haunted Hayride.

  Crow’s reverie was broken by the ringing of the phone and he leaned across the counter and picked it up. “Yeah…sure, he’s right here.” Smiling, he tossed the portable handset to Terry. “For you. Chief’s office.”

  “Uh-oh!” Terry said in mock alarm as he reached out a hand to take the phone. Crow strolled a few paces away and began idly poking in his box of rubber vermin and body parts.

  “Yeah, Gus, what is it?” Terry listened for a moment, then said, “No, my cell’s out of energy. What’s the hurry?” He listened for a while and then started saying “Jeez!” every couple of seconds. Terry was a man incapable of profanity and “Jeez” was about as close as he ever got to an expletive. Crow gave Terry an inquisitive look, but the mayor held up a finger and mouthed the word wait. Terry listened for over a minute, then said, “Jeez!” again. “Okay…what about the three gunmen?”

  Crow arched his eyebrows and silently mouthed the word gunmen, and again Terry held up his hand. “Jeez-oh-man!” Terry said with feeling, and that was him at his most profane. “Okay, Gus, I’ll be there in a minute. Yeah. Bye.” He punched the Off button on the portable and stood there, chewing his lower lip and tapping the phone against his thigh. Crow cleared his throat; Terry looked sharply at him. “Man, the manure has really hit the fan now.”

  “Why? What’s up?”

  “You are not going to believe this one, man, but Gus got a call from the Philadelphia Police Department. They red-flagged all the jurisdictions from Philly to the state line because apparently three psychos shot a bunch of holes in some Jamaican druggies and made off with a bunch of drugs and money.”