Ghost Road Blues pd-1

by Jonathan Maberry

  “Okay.”

  To Terry, Ferro said, “Do you want to come with us?”

  “Not particularly.” But he went anyway.

  When they were within a dozen yards of the crime scene, Ferro called out, “Coming in!”

  “Who is it?” Toombes’s voice called tersely.

  “Ferro, LaMastra, and Mayor Wolfe.”

  “It’s clear,” the woman called. “Kind of.”

  They entered the clearing and saw the black car squatting there, dottled with dirt and corn pollen and blood. Jimmy Castle sat on the ground, his back against the bumper, smoking a cigarette. He didn’t even look up at them, but the three newcomers each exchanged a glance. They moved around the car to where Toombes and Head stood. Both officers held flashlights, but the beams were pointed at the ground to lead the way for the detectives. The side of the car, where the body lay, was in a dark bank of shadows.

  Head stepped forward, clearly intending to block the way so they couldn’t see past him. His face looked strained, lined, and sick; it had paled from a deep brown to a sickly ashen gray. Beads of perspiration jeweled his forehead. He nodded at them. In a soft funeral parlor voice he said, “Sir, the crime scene is still pristine. Also, gentlemen, you really better hike up your balls before you take a look because this is some sick, sorry shit. I mean…I have never seen anything like this.” He looked at them, his eyes hard and deep. “Never nothing like this.”

  “Let’s just get on with it,” said Ferro sharply, clearly annoyed at Head’s melodramatics.

  Head just nodded and stepped aside. He turned and lifted his flashlight, training the powerful beam on the side of the car.

  “Oh…” gasped Ferro.

  “…my…” breathed LaMastra.

  “…God,” murmured Terry.

  Terry wiped the sweat from his face and looked at LaMastra, who had turned an unwholesome green. Ferro’s face was set and stony, but there was sweat on his upper lip. Head had joined Castle for a smoke at the back of the car, and Toombes was staring up at the moon as if she’d suddenly discovered a passion for astronomy.

  “Get out the camera,” Ferro said, and his voice was hoarse. “We don’t have time to wait for a forensic unit.” He looked up at the sky. Clouds were racing in from all sides and the air smelled like rain and ozone. “It’s going to rain soon and we’ll lose the entire site.”

  Nodding mutely, LaMastra knelt and placed the big briefcase on the ground. Opening it, he removed a big digital camera with a powerful flash unit. He checked to make sure it was adjusted for the bad light.

  “Take a complete set.”

  “Balls,” LaMastra breathed, but he did what he was told. Approaching cautiously, he came to within ten feet of the scene and raised the camera. He looked at it through the viewfinder, but he didn’t…couldn’t press the Release button. He just stood there, one index finger tapping nervously and unconsciously on top of the camera body.

  “Vince,” a voice said quietly, and LaMastra turned, lowering the camera. Ferro’s eyes were kinder than he had ever seen them. “If you don’t want to do this, Vince…”

  LaMastra inhaled through his nose, then shook his head. “No, Frank. I can do it. It’s just that…” He let it trail off. The English language didn’t really have a proper set of adjectives for describing the scene. Ferro nodded and clapped the younger man reassuringly on the shoulder. LaMastra raised the camera once again, drew in a deep, steadying breath, and began recording horror.

  Flash!

  Tony Macchio, former felon. Former low-level mob muscle. Former enforcer. Former confederate of Karl Ruger. Tony Macchio, former human being.

  Flash!

  A mouth thrown wide in the absolute extremity of pain and outrage. Not just the pain of dying, but the pain of violation on an inhuman scale.

  Flash!

  Eyeless sockets, weeping red-black tears onto bloodless cheeks. Eyeless sockets that saw into the darkness of the soul, a darkness unlighted by any autumn moon or camera flash.

  Flash!

  A chest raped of its secrets. Heart and lungs and life’s breath and soul torn out.

  Flash!

  A pair of clutching, armless hands, fingers spread out like the legs of dead spiders held fast to the doors of the car with long nails. And a pair of handless arms, folded uselessly across the spill of organs from deep within the invaded stomach.

  Flash!

  Two legs, broken and rebroken and twisted in puppet directions.

  Flash!

  Flesh, torn and lacerated, rent and bitten, bruised and gouged so that barely an inch of skin remained unblemished by the leprosy of violence. A destruction so total that it was only by an inventory of all the sundry parts that a puzzle of a man could be made.

  Flash!

  Flash!

  Flash!

  The flash kept popping, recording image after hideous image of the charnel house scene, until the film was gone and the Release button refused to yield even one more time to the horror there on the ground.

  Once again Ferro laid his hand on LaMastra’s shoulder. “Okay, Vince, that’s good enough.”

  LaMastra lowered the camera and looked at it, amazed that so simple and unassuming a machine could record and contain such things. He knelt down and put the camera in the briefcase, squinting up at Ferro. “You know, Frank, I saw the crime scene photos of the lighthouse.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Same sort of stuff, man. Just ripped apart.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Like it was a pack of dogs did it rather than a person.”

  Ferro pulled in a chestful of air through flared nostrils. “Yeah,” he said.

  LaMastra shifted around and sat down on the ground, only dimly aware of the crushed stalks and smashed ears of corn under his rump. He was also only vaguely aware that Chief Bernhardt had come down from the road, taken a single look, and then rushed past him to throw up into the cornfield. LaMastra turned and watched him with a strange, vague distance.

  Ferro stood by silently pulling on thin latex gloves. “If the weather holds we’ll get a lab crew in here and see if they can lift prints. If not we have to spread a tarp…preserve as much as we can.”

  LaMastra just sighed and looked up at the lightning. It was going to rain soon, but he knew there wasn’t enough rain in heaven to wash away this horror.

  After a minute or two, Terry Wolfe joined them. His face was the color of sour milk, and he stood so that his back was to the car. He tried several times to form articulate words, failed each time, and then paused to take in a couple of long, slow breaths. Finally, he managed to say, “Is this one of the men you were looking for?”

  Ferro snorted. “Well, that’s the car, sure enough. And there is plenty of evidence of cocaine and money in the trunk. As for the identity of the deceased? A pathologist is going to have to make that decision for us. As you can see…well, no, don’t bother to look, but there isn’t enough of a face to make a clean ID, and the fingertips have been, uh, chewed…so I don’t know if we can get…”

  But Terry had clamped a hand to his mouth and staggered away to fall to hands and knees beside Bernhardt. They took turns retching and coughing. Ferro tried on an amused and superior smile, but it tasted wrong, so he spat it out.

  Terry shambled back, wiping his mouth and looking even paler, if that was possible.

  Ferro looked at him. “Are you okay, sir?”

  “What do you think!” Terry gulped some air. “You figure that this Karl Ruger did this?”

  “Well, I sure as hell hope so.”

  Terry gave him a quizzical look. “You ‘hope so’?”

  Nodding, Ferro said, “You should hope so, too, Mr. Mayor. That, or you’ve got two incredibly dangerous homicidal maniacs running around in your quiet little town.”

  “Oh no…” Terry breathed.

  “Relax,” said Ferro, “what are the odds of that?”

  (2)

  Crow closed his cell phone and slid it back in
to his pocket. He was beginning to get the first tingling of unease. He’d called Val’s cell twice and got no answer, and had called the house and gotten nothing. He wanted to get this job done and get over there.

  The ATV was a chunky little three-wheeled Kawasaki with puffy low-pressure tires and motorcycle handlebars. Every time Crow used one, he felt as if he were in the jet-speeder chase in Return of the Jedi. The ATV growled to life, hinting at more muscle in its belly than one might guess, and as Crow gave her some gas, it kicked out a cloud of dust and leaped forward.

  “Hi-yo, Silver,” Crow yelled, “away!”

  Barney and Mike watched him go, standing side by side: the eighteen-year-old with the fake knife in his chest, and the fourteen-year-old with the broken rib and the marks of a near-fatal encounter with madness flickering in his eyes. They watched until Crow’s taillights vanished around a bend in the road.

  “Crow’s a friggin’ goof,” Barney said, scratching at the adhesive bandage that held the knife.

  Iron Mike considered for a moment. “Yeah, he’s just about weird enough.”

  Just a minute or two after Crow vanished into the night, a pair of headlights cast the parking lot in whiteness. Barney and Mike turned to see a station wagon pull into the lot and crunch across the gravel toward them. Mike hesitated for a moment, then smiled and waved.

  The station wagon rolled to a stop and the driver’s door opened. Vic Wingate unfolded himself from behind the wheel. He was a big man, just over six feet tall and very muscular, with a military-style blond crew cut and a Marine Corps jawline. That jaw was set as he walked over to meet Mike.

  “Hi, Vic!” Mike said, forcing his voice to sound pleased to see the man. “I guess they told you what happened. My bike’s in the—”

  Vic hit him.

  It was a savagely fast, stunningly hard blow. Not a slap, but the full rock-hardness of Vic’s fist. It caught Mike in the stomach and seemed to smash back every bit of flesh between shirtfront and backbone. All of the air whooshed out of Mike’s mouth along with a strangled cry of surprise; after that Mike had no breath even to scream. The pain was worse than anything he had ever felt. Worse than the broken rib, worse than all the bruises from when he’d gone off the road. Worse than any pain from any punishment Vic had ever given him. It was the first time in his life Mike had ever been punched by an adult. Before that it had been slaps, hard slaps with Vic’s hard hands, but just slaps. The punch was so crushingly hard, and so unexpected, that Mike felt as if his entire body had shrunk down into a single twisted knot of white-hot pain. He lay on the gravel in a fetal position and tried to breathe.

  “Yo! mister!” Barney called in alarm, stepping forward. Vic wheeled toward him and pointed a finger at the kid’s nose. The finger was like a steel dagger and it stopped Barney in his tracks.

  “You got something to say, shit bag?”

  Barney’s stood there, speechless, powerless, shocked, and scared beyond action. He watched in horror as Vic jerked open the rear passenger door, then bent and caught Mike by the belt and the hair, hoisted him off the ground, and literally threw him into the backseat. Mike slid across the seat and thumped against the opposite door.

  All the time Mike’s mom just sat in the front passenger seat and looked down at the floor. Barney tried to catch her eye, to make some kind of appeal, but she wouldn’t look at him. Barney wished Crow was still there, though what Crow could do against a guy like Wingate he didn’t know.

  “Where’s his fucking bike?” Vic demanded, closing on Barney.

  All Barney could do was point. Vic stalked over and yanked it out of the back of Crow’s trunk. He didn’t bother to close the hood. He crammed the bike roughly into the bed of the station wagon, slammed the rear door, and then stalked around to the driver’s side. Over the top of the car he again leveled a finger at Barney. “This is a family matter, do you understand me?”

  Barney nodded.

  “Good, then keep your mouth shut or it won’t be a plastic knife you’re gonna find sticking out of your chest. Now get the fuck out of the road.”

  Barney retreated and watched in mute horror as Vic made a screeching turn and left the lot in a spray of kicked-back gravel.

  (3)

  Crow bounced along the road, following the path he knew so well. The Haunted Hayride covered a huge area, spread out over parts of three different farms, two of which were now owned by Terry Wolfe, one of which leased acreage to the mayor for his attraction. It was wrapped like a horseshoe around the north end of the Pinelands College campus and was itself wrapped in the arms of the vast Pine Deep State Forest. Most of the land was given over to pumpkin patches, cornfields, and wheat fields, but since the harvest had begun in earnest for most of the town, much of the crop had already been cleared. Some of the corn stood unpicked, it having been planted later for a late fall harvest. A lot of the local farmers staggered their harvests so they could keep sending fresh produce to the markets up until the very edge of winter.

  Crow loved the place. Even though he had designed every part of it, and knew all of its theatrical ins and outs, he loved the feeling of supernatural dread that he always sensed when he was covering these dark lanes. For a lark, he’d even spent a couple of nights as one of the monsters, scaring the bejesus out of the ten-dollar-a-head tourists.

  The hayride was set up so that one main path led through all of the traps. The traps were the spots where costumed staffers waited to leap out and, in their own scripted or improvisational way, go “Boo!” Some of the traps were set scenes, such as a witch trial that showed a poor wretch being crushed beneath planks weighted with rocks, or tied to a chair and dunked into the creek; or where a line of victims were led up to a chopping block where a burly headsman (the defensive lineman for the Pine Deep Scarecrows) waited to shorten them by a head. Some of the traps were shockers, which had either mechanical or human monsters leaping unexpectedly out at the customers during lulls in the ride. There were a few interactive traps as well, such as Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre rushing at the flatbed with his chainsaw buzzing. The chain on the saw was totally blunt, so when he tried to cut through the planks on the side of the flatbed, he really got nowhere, but Crow had added plastic bags of sawdust taped to the outside of the planks that would burst as soon as the chainsaw was pressed against them. The swirling sawdust and the buzz of the saw made it really appear as if Leatherface was really cutting his way through the wood and was actually going to dismember the paying customers.

  The nicest touch this season, though, was the Valley of the Living Dead trap. This was a new one, and was Crow’s pride and joy. Just past the halfway point of the hayride, the tractor would pull the flatbed through a patch of mud. The mud was only surface muck kept wet by a sprinkler system, but in the darkness it looked real enough to create the illusion that the tractor had become hopelessly mired. Coop, or whoever was driving, would ease the tractor into neutral and just gun the engine, growling and swearing (in a thoroughly PG manner, of course) at the predicament. While all this was going on, dark shapes would begin to move in the bushes near the flatbed. These dark shapes would slowly — very slowly — advance on the flatbed. They were white-faced, decaying corpses, slouching and shuffling with all the gracelessness of reanimated bodies. It would be a race to see if Coop could unmire the tractor and get them on their way before the legions of walking dead could reach the flatbed.

  Of course, timing was everything. Coop would get “unstuck,” but just a moment too late. The ghouls would manage to reach the flatbed and would, amid a chorus of ungodly screams, drag one poor soul off into the bushes. The screams would be truly terrifying, and as the flatbed was towed away, the stricken survivors would look back and see ghouls staggering away nibbling on an arm or a leg or a string of intestines.

  As a set piece, it was a corker. The tourists, especially the ones who had never been to a haunted hayride before, were stunned to a stricken silence. Until, of course, the next monsters leaped out at them. T
he “victim” was a staffer posing as a tourist, and the victim was changed almost every day so that repeat customers could never tell who was going to fall prey to the living dead.

  There were other traps as well, but the Valley of the Living Dead was the star attraction on the Hayride, and had even been written up in Sci-Fi Universe and Fangoria magazines, as well as every newspaper on the East Coast. When it came to producing genuine horrible thrills, Crow was a genius, albeit a twisted one with a penchant for very dark humor.

  Now that twisted genius was skimming along on his ATV. He stopped periodically to tell the staffers that the ride was closing down. He told the Creature from the Black Lagoon to cut across the swamp and let the Pod People know. He sent the Wolfman and the Brainiac down through the gully to bring in the Mole People, the Headsman, and the Flying Monkeys. He had Jack the Ripper go back to the shed for another ATV and sent him heading backward along the path of the ride to tell the Vampire Children and the Bog Beasts to stand down.

  Ten minutes later he caught up with the tractor just as Henry Pitts was being dragged into the bushes by the ghouls. Crow honked his horn and flashed his headlights off and on. The ghouls straightened from their bloody feast, and Henry sat up, too, amazingly unhurt despite the entrails dripping from the mouths of the zombies.

  Coop killed the engine of the tractor and the Valley of the Living Dead grew quiet except for a faint buzz of inquiring voices.

  Dismounting, Crow walked over to the tractor and looked up at Coop.

  “Hey…what’s going on?” Coop asked. He was a middle-aged man with a paunch, loose jowls, and a look of almost total stupidity.

  Crow turned to face the mass of confused and semifrightened tourists. “Folks, I have some bad news. Because of severe technical difficulties beyond our control, we are going to have to close down the Haunted Hayride for tonight.” He had to raise his voice to be heard over the chorus of groans. “Everyone will receive a full refund, plus a free coupon good for any night you wish to return. Mr. Wolfe regrets having to do this, but as I said, it is beyond our control.”