I winced as he started on the next one. “This was a mistake, Henry.”
“Could be.”
“Could be? We just let a dangerous, intelligent, probably homicidal creature loose into the countryside. All in exchange for Leon’s legs.”
“In exchange for his life. There’s no doubt in my mind that my nephew would have killed himself sooner or later, just like he said.”
He put the pliers down and looked me in the eyes. “We don’t know what the creature wants. So far all it’s done is stick you with thorns, and for the record, that didn’t kill Leon. Quite the opposite, in fact. Maybe it’s simply trying to reproduce, with the side effect of healing whoever donates the blood? Perhaps all we’ve done is let loose a wave of self-replicating healers.”
“You believe that?”
He shook his head. “No. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s possible. We chose to prevent the sure death of a loved one over a completely unknown consequence. And Leon’s argument was sound. Piotr had to choose to do evil with what he was given. There was no reason to believe that this would be different.”
“I should have known better.”
“Abe, no matter what your body has become, you’re still human on the inside. And like everyone else, all you can do is make the best choices you have and live with what comes afterwards. Maybe this will be a mistake that we can correct before it’s too late.”
“You don’t believe that either.”
He picked up the pliers and leaned over my arm. “Be still.”
The others gathered in the kitchen one by one. By the time all five thorns had been removed and the jar sealed, we were ready to go. Anne, Chuck, Leon, and I headed out to search, while Henry stayed behind to examine the thorns. At his age, a pre-dawn manhunt through the woods was no longer something he was capable of.
It was still dark out and bitterly cold. The air had a dusty tang that promised snow.
We entered the woods with flashlights and low expectations. The four of us managed to cover a pretty wide patch of woods, acres in every direction, but between the darkness and the difficult terrain, I doubt we would have noticed signs of the wooden man’s passage even if we had walked right past them.
Anne detected no trace of the creature, other than the stink of the incident that spawned it, and despite the obvious connection between Leon and his wooden double, he had no sense of its location. We gave up as dawn broke over us with a rosy warmth that we could see but not feel.
On the way back to the house, Leon’s phone chimed. He glanced at the screen, then stopped in his tracks.
“What is it?”
Instead of answering me, he just showed me the screen. The text was from Paulie.
Guess who I met on the road?
We both jumped when the phone rang. Paulie’s name appeared on the screen. Leon answered it and put it on speaker.
“Hello? Paulie?”
There was no answer. An idling car engine could be heard in the background. A second later the phone erupted in a grating squeal, like fingernails being pulled across a blackboard, only louder and harsher.
Then there was a loud clatter and the sound of receding footsteps.
13
We ran for the house. I leapt up the front steps and yelled over my shoulder, “Get the truck, I’ll get Henry.”
We were tearing down the quarter-mile-long driveway in less than sixty seconds.
Leon’s hands were clenched tight on the steering wheel. “Aunt Emily told Paulie to come see me, so it’ll be between here and town.”
At the end of the gravel drive he threw the truck into a hard right that bounced us up onto the asphalt highway, then jammed his foot down hard on the accelerator. We had barely hit the speed limit before he slammed on the brakes hard enough to smoke the tires. Paulie’s car turned out to be less than a mile from Henry’s house.
It was sitting at an angle on the shoulder, the rear wheels still on the road and the front wheels on the grass, resting in the shallow depression that ran along both sides of the highway. A dozen yards past the car were skid marks in the road. Nuggets of glass glittered where the skid marks ended.
We pulled onto the shoulder and parked a few feet from the nose of Paulie’s car. It was still running. We got out to take a look.
The glass in the road had come from the driver’s side window. A few pebbles of safety glass clung stubbornly to the door frame and there was a good bit scattered across the front seats and down in the foot wells. The DJ on the radio yammered at us, breathlessly excited about some kind of diet pill.
There was a bloody handprint on the door that started out clearly defined and then turned into a long smear as it rose towards the window. The fingers of the hand were pointing towards the ground, as if the person had slapped the door underhand. I pictured Paulie being hauled bodily out the window, face towards the sky. His flailing hands would have hit the side of the door just like that.
Long scratches ran down the side of the car from the front corner all the way to the trunk, passing across the door and through the bloody smear. The metal was creased in four shiny silver furrows that had been dug through the car’s blue paint.
A phone lay on the ground just past the rear wheels. We had heard the scratches being made down the car, so the clatter must have been the phone being dropped on the ground afterwards.
Leon picked up the phone in his right hand, which was still connected to the one in his left. He pushed the end button and both phones went dark.
I walked out onto the road. “This is where he locked up the wheels and stopped. From the broken glass I figure this is also when he was pulled out of the car. After that it just idled off the road until it got stuck on the shoulder.”
Leon kicked savagely at the side of the car. “So where the hell is he?”
I nudged him and pointed at Anne. She was staring into the woods with her arms tightly crossed and a grim look on her face.
She spoke quitely. “It’s the same smell as this morning.” I followed her gaze and could just make out a flash of orange on the ground.
Leon brushed past me and headed for the woods. “That’s Paulie’s jacket.”
We found Paulie just inside the tree line, not a hundred feet from the road. Or rather, we found Paulie’s clothes. The corpse inside them could have belonged to anyone.
It was shriveled and twisted and far too small for the clothes it was wearing. The lips were pulled back, exposing teeth that looked strangely long due to the shrunken gums, and the closed eyelids had sunk deep into the skull. The nose, ears and hair looked untouched.
The withered body reminded me of a mummy, but instead of being dry, the rubbery skin was pulled tight over protruding bones and wrinkled where it bunched up at the joints.
The arms and legs were curled inwards strangely, and it stank of voided bowels.
Paulie was sprawled on his back with his orange jacket opened wide and his shirt torn open, exposing his emaciated torso. There was a dark red sphere the size of a baseball on his chest, next to several black dots.
Henry grunted and eased himself down into a kneeling position so he could get a better look. “These are thorns.” His finger hovered over the black dots. There were four of them, arranged in a curved line. “Same as the ones I pulled out of you this morning, Abe. Just without the soft bits on the end.”
He tapped the sphere, then pressed it with a fingernail. “Spongy.” He fished a pocket knife out of his jeans and gently slid the tip of the blade into the sphere. It slipped in easily and a thick rivulet of bright red blood welled out and dripped onto the corpse’s chest, slowly spreading into a pool.
He wiped the blade on the grass and stood up. “Should be four holes in the ground close by. Look around.”
Chuck found them on the other side of a low bush, all in a row. “How did you know?”
Henry’s answer was cut off by the sudden squawk of a police siren and the chirp of tires skidding to a stop.
14
Two men in tan uniforms got out of the patrol car. There was a sheriff’s star on the door. They glanced at the streaks of blood on Paulie’s car and drew their weapons.
Henry cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted. “Owen! Over here!”
Chuck gaped at him. “Dude! What are you doing? You know we’re standing over a dead body, right?”
“My nephew is dead and my truck is parked next to his car. Did you think that we weren’t going to get involved with the authorities? Besides, the sheriff and I go back a long while. He’s a friend.”
The men trotted over to us with their guns out but pointed at the ground. When they got close enough to recognize Henry they relaxed and holstered their weapons. Small towns never cease to amaze me. Sometimes I wish I’d never left mine.
“Henry? You want to tell me why you’re at my 911 call?”
“We were contacted from Paulie’s phone. Same as you, I imagine. Leon?” Leon passed his phone to the Sheriff, who took it without so much as glancing at the screen. Instead he stared openly at Leon.
“I can’t believe my eyes. Are you really out of that chair? It’s a goddamn miracle.”
Leon nodded. “Yes, sir. I have a lot to be thankful for. I’m trying to take it easy, but I do like to spend some time on my feet every day, just to prove I can.”
The sheriff shook his head in amazement. “Well, congratulations, son. I’m real happy for you.” He gestured to the younger man at his side. “Anyway, this is Deputy Ellis. Can I ask who your friends are?” On cue, Deputy Ellis flipped open a notebook and hovered his pen over a fresh sheet.
Henry answered. “Just friends of the family. They’re staying at my place for a while, mostly helping me take care of Leon.” He named us for the deputy. “Everyone, this is Sheriff Owen Fowler.”
Sheriff Fowler was a big man, tall and wide, and judging by his ruddy features and the pale stripes over his ears where his sunglasses would normally rest, he spent most of his time outdoors. His eyes never stopped moving as he chatted with us, and by the time deputy Ellis had finished taking our names he was already walking towards Paulie’s body.
“Jesus Christ, what happened here?”
Henry shuffled over to the body, as frail as I’ve ever seen him. Grief has a way of thinning a man out and Henry had already seen more than his share. He was a strong man, probably the strongest of all of us in the ways that mattered most, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t hurting. For men of my generation, it just meant that he’d work harder to keep us from seeing it.
A few words from Owen sent the deputy trotting back to the car to summon the more specialized members of the law enforcement tribe: the forensics team and the coroner.
It took about twenty minutes for them to arrive, during which time we were each questioned by Owen, our answers jotted down by Deputy Ellis. When we were done he asked us to leave so that the men and women who were industriously unpacking equipment and planting little yellow markers could work.
Leon handed me the keys before throwing himself into the passenger seat and slamming the door behind him. Unlike his uncle, grief didn’t exactly bring out his stoic side.
After everyone piled into the truck, Henry leaned forward from the back seat. “Head into town. Emily should get the news from family, not the sheriff’s department.”
Leon spun around in his seat. “That’s a great idea. And when we get there, I can tell her all about how I killed her son. What do you think? I can explain to her how it was worth Paulie’s life for me to be able to walk again. Hell, now I can even be a pall bearer at his funeral! I’m sure that shit will cheer her right up.”
Henry’s voice was quiet. “You didn’t plan for this to happen.”
“You got that right. And you know why? Because I didn’t care. All I could think about was myself.” Leon’s breathing was ragged and his fists were clenched. “I honestly thought there was no price too high to pay to get out of that chair. Even if other people had to pay it. That’s funny, right? What you can believe if you want to badly enough?”
There was nothing anyone could say to that. At least nothing we wanted to say out loud. He turned back around and slumped down in his seat, spent.
It took us about twenty minutes to reach Emily Miller’s house in the nearby town of Halfway. I parked on the street in front of her small craftsman-style house, clad in immaculate white clapboard and dark green shutters. Emily was on the front porch in her blue nurse’s scrubs, locking up on her way to work.
She turned towards us as we exited the truck. I realized our mistake even as her coffee cup slipped from her fingers and began to tumble towards the ground. Eyes wide and fixed on Leon as he strode across her lawn, she pressed one hand to her chest and sank down into one of the wicker chairs on her porch.
“Oh my lord. Leon, you’re walking!”
Leon hurried up the wooden front steps and knelt down by his aunt. She clutched at him in a fierce hug. “I prayed for this day, but I didn’t think it would ever come.”
Leon pulled back and clasped her hands in his. “Aunt Emily, can we talk? Inside?”
“Of course, baby. Work can wait, you tell me everything.”
Henry hugged his sister and the three of them went inside. Anne, Chuck, and I hung back until they closed the door, then claimed chairs on the porch to wait.
The news of her son’s death was about to break Emily’s life into two territories, divided by a chasm of grief. The fields on the far side would forever remain sunlit and golden and unreachable, and if she wasn’t careful, she would spend the rest of her days staring into that lost land with her back turned on the life she had now.
I spent five years on that precipice after cancer took Maggie out of my life, and only a chance visit from the woman sitting beside me kept me from stepping off.
The thought of Anne moved my gaze to her. She was staring into space with narrowed eyes and pursed lips. “You could have stopped him.”
“I know. If it makes a difference, he told me that he was going to kill himself if I didn’t let him try.”
She reached out and put one of her hands on top of mine. It was warm.
She spoke softly. “Then that would have been his choice. A choice that Paulie didn’t have. It was wrong, Abe.”
Chuck stood up and leaned on the porch rail, gripping it with both hands. “I don’t know. Maybe Paulie is better off.”
“Chuck!”
“I’m serious. Shit’s been fucked up since that night in Belmont. You were there yesterday in the graveyard. The whole place was crawling with corpse-eating monsters. That’s the world we live in now. Whatever Piotr did was fifteen hundred miles away from here, and now we have monsters eating dead bodies, right here in North Carolina. What’s the rest of the country like right now? And that’s not even talking about what you geniuses let loose last night. Maybe Paulie went out at the right time, before he found out what the world was turning into.”
Anne jumped out of her chair and rounded on him. “That’s what you think? That you want to be one of the lucky dead ones?”
“Fuck, no. But you know what I mean. Most people haven’t seen it yet, but things are going to keep getting worse from here on out.”
Emily’s anguished cry sounded from inside the house. She knew her son was dead.
I leaned on the rail between them. “One thing hasn’t changed. Old world, new world, it doesn’t matter. Things don’t get better on their own. I made a mistake. A bad one. So it’s up to me to put it right. Neither one of you are responsible for what happened, so I understand if you don’t want any part of it.”
Anne bumped me with her shoulder. “Don’t be stupid. We’re in it for the long haul, right Chuck?”
He sighed. “If by long haul you mean until the moment somebody finds us shriveled up like raisins on the side of the road, then sure.”
15
Henry came out of the house with the resigned calm of a man who has faced senseless death and grief for l
onger than most people have been alive.
Leon did not. “We need to find this thing. Right now. Give me the keys.”
“And then what, drive around in circles?” I asked. “We have no more way of finding it now than we did this morning.”
He glared at me and balled up his fists. I waited. We both knew he wasn’t getting the keys and that taking a swing at me was pointless. He shoved past me and stomped down to the truck.
“Do you need to stay with Emily?” I asked Henry.
He shook his head, but he was watching Leon who had gotten into the passenger seat and slammed the door behind him. “I called some of her friends from the church. They’ll stay with her for a while. I think our time is better spent trying to figure out how to put this genie back in the bottle.”
“Agreed. You mind if we do our thinking over breakfast?”
Ten minutes later we pulled into one of the last available parking spots at Verna’s Diner. It didn’t look like much, just a square box with Verna’s likeness hand-painted on the big windows out front, but that didn’t fool anybody. As soon as the smell from the cast iron smokers behind the building reached your nose, you knew this was sacred ground.
The floor was made of wood instead of tile or linoleum, giving the place the feel of an old fashioned country kitchen. Unlike most diners there wasn’t a bar you could eat at, nor a single booth in the joint. Just lots of long wooden picnic tables with happy people sitting shoulder to shoulder as they ate. The menu items were half BBQ, half breakfast, and all guaranteed to make a cardiologist faint.
The bell over the door clanged when we walked in. Verna was seating people, as usual, and she greeted us warmly. She was a tall, heavyset black woman with close cropped hair under a bright orange kerchief, wearing one of her trademark flower print dresses and an apron. We’d only been coming in for a couple of weeks, but she already treated us like regulars and seemed to have taken to Anne especially. She winked at Chuck.
“Girl, every time I see you, you got another handsome man in tow. Tell Verna now, what’s your secret?”
Liar's Harvest (The Emergent Earth) Page 5
