by Peter Nealen
A couple more of the dark figures melted away when I glanced back at the motel. I still had the truck running and the headlights on; the truck itself was my most potent weapon. The rumble of the engine meant I couldn't hear much of anything outside, but I wasn't willing to shut it off.
Finally, one of the watching figures, wearing a coat very similar to the meth-head's, took a step forward, then another. Here we go, I thought. I lifted my 1911 to the edge of the rolled-down window, ready to punch it out and blast the guy if he came at me.
Whether he sensed my movement or not, I don't know, but the figure stopped. There wasn't enough light spilling from the headlights to illuminate his features, but his eyes glinted under his hood. A few others drifted closer, but the standoff continued.
I resisted the urge to check my watch. I was too busy trying to see in three hundred sixty degrees at once. It felt like Eryn had been in that motel office forever. She should have gotten a room by now. There had to be something wrong. I hadn't heard a gunshot, but something bad must have happened.
I think it was just the eerie decay of the town, the hostile watchers, and the circumstances of our being there that led to the hard, cold knot of fear that was building in my gut. Not fear for myself; I'm perfectly confident in my ability to handle myself in a fight, particularly against people as opposed to monsters and demons. I also hadn't had any ideas about dying in bed for several years. No, I was terrified that something had happened to Eryn inside, where I couldn't see, couldn't hear, and couldn't do a damned thing to stop it.
Finally, a wan bit of light spilled out into the parking lot from the motel office door. I only saw it because I'd turned my head to make sure somebody wasn't trying to come up in my blind spot. Eryn stepped out and hurried to the door, her Smith held openly in her hand.
She pulled open the door and climbed inside. Strangely, as she did, the people watching us started to move away, drifting either into the shadows or into more crumbling, decrepit houses.
Eryn shook her head. “That was painful,” she said. She sounded slightly shaken.
I didn't look at her, instead continuing to watch our stalkers disappear into the night. “What happened?”
“When I went in, there was nobody at the desk,” she said. “So I waited, figuring they'd come back sooner or later. They didn't come back. So I rang the bell on the counter.
“This older lady came bursting out of the back room as soon as the bell rang. She looked really mad, and stared at me like I'd just stabbed her cat or something. 'Why'd you ring the bell!?' she yelled at me. As if I'd somehow committed a crime by disturbing her while she was at work. I told her we were looking for a room. That made her really mad. She got red in the face, and didn't say anything for a moment, then screamed at me that there weren't any vacancies, and I should go away before she called the sheriff on me.
“I told her there wasn't any call to be treating customers like that, and she tried to hit me. That was when I pointed my gun at her.” Fear started to creep into my wife's voice. “Jed, it didn't even faze her. She just kept yelling and cursing at me.” She stopped and looked back at the motel. “There is something really, really wrong here.”
A handful of the people in the street hadn't moved, even as their compatriots had faded away. The guy in the coat with only his eyes visible had even taken a step closer. I kept my eye on him as I said, “I'm rather inclined to agree with you.” Shoving the 1911 into the little pocket on the inside of my door, I put the truck in gear and started to pull away from the curb, ready to mash the accelerator and turn the big F250 into a battering ram. “Obviously we can't stay in the motel tonight.”
“What are we going to do?”
I considered the question as I pulled out in the street. We passed only a few feet from the guy in the coat, who just kept watching as we rolled by. I caught a glimpse of haggard, gaunt features, but his hood still mostly obscured his face.
The truth was, we were already off to a bad start. Whatever Blake had gotten mixed up in here, in this benighted little decaying town, it was already advanced enough to make what looked like the entire town actively hostile. I suspected that if we started digging, we'd find the rot went deeper than a bunch of creepy meth-heads on the street at night. That was, of course, assuming that digging deeper didn't end in a shallow grave down by the river. I had little doubt that these people would resort to violence if pushed. I only wondered what had managed to corrupt an entire town like this. Even Silverton, with everything that had happened there, hadn't ever gone this bad.
But, bad start or not, this wasn't something we could just run away from. Blake was in trouble, and he'd said to meet him here. If he wasn't here, then this Chrystal person should be, and should be able to lead us to him. Like it or not, dangerous or not, we had to stay.
That didn't mean we would be trying to stay under any roof in town. That was obviously a bad idea. “We'll find a place to bed down for the night, and come back in the morning,” I said. “Wherever we do stop, it's going to be someplace well outside of town.”
Spending the night in the bed of the truck wasn't a problem. I'd spent a lot of nights back there, before Eryn and I had gotten married, and we'd spent not a few since the same way, when we were away from Ray's ranch on a job. There was a canopy over the back, and a mattress. It wasn't roomy, especially with the two of us, but since it was a chilly night, neither of us minded very much.
Not that it was terribly relaxing. We'd found a campsite a few miles down the road, but still close enough to see the handful of lights that barely illuminated Coldwell. I found myself tensing up whenever a car or truck passed by coming from that direction; there was no reason to think that any of the people from the town had followed us, but we'd had a distinctly disquieting introduction to Coldwell, and I wasn't terribly trusting that they wouldn't get a tweaked-out posse together to go find the out-of-towners who dared to intrude on whatever weird stuff they had going on in the dark. I kept my Winchester by my side. Though I hadn't said anything, Eryn had brought her shotgun to bed with her, too.
The mind starts to play tricks in the dark, especially when you're already keyed up. Of course, a lot of the things a Hunter sees can never be un-seen, and they tend to come back to haunt you in the dark, quiet hours.
Every coyote slinking through the grass outside, every odd breath of wind, every creak of the truck turned into something ominous, a worldly or Otherworldly predator creeping up on the truck while we slept. I kept starting awake, expecting to see staring, glinting eyes in a cadaverously thin face under a deep hood, staring in the back window of the canopy. Or worse. Whatever was going on here, I suspected the tweakers were the least of our worries.
Nothing materialized, though. No monsters came out of the night and tried to tear us out of the truck. No meth-heads tried to stab us in our sleep, fitful as it was.
It was not a restful night.
Coldwell was hardly more inviting in daylight than it had been at night. If anything, the light of day just showed the advanced state of decay that much more clearly. It didn't look like anyone in the town owned a lawnmower, or if they did, they were either completely ignorant or indifferent as to its use. Weeds grew out of control everywhere, and it didn't look like there was a single house that didn't have most of its paint peeling off. Windows were broken and maybe repaired with plastic bags, though more often just left alone. I'm fairly sure that about fifty percent of the cars in the town were up on blocks or just rusting away on flat tires.
At first, the place looked dead, even compared to the night before. There was no one on the streets at all. No cars were moving, and there weren't even any faces in the windows looking out to see who was driving down the otherwise deserted main drag. It almost looked as if the disquieting encounters of the night before had only been a dream, and we'd rolled into a ghost town, after all.
I parked almost exactly where we had pulled over next to the motel the night before. The place looked as deserted as the rest of the
town, except for the cars and trucks in the parking lot, which hadn't moved. Not a single curtain stirred. “This is just eerie,” Eryn commented.
The slamming of the truck doors echoed loudly across the street. I looked around carefully, expecting some kind of reaction to the noise, but was greeted by hollow, dark windows and empty doorways. It really seemed like there really wasn't anyone around. Either that, or they were watching us without revealing themselves.
I'd seen Iraqi villages deep in insurgent territory that had been far more welcoming.
I locked the truck, though that wasn't going to stop determined vandals, and we stepped toward the motel office that Eryn had been driven out of the previous night.
While the crumbling building reminded me of more than a few unsettling, haunted placed I'd been in, the door was unlocked, and it was still intact and still had all of its hinges, unlike most of the haunted motels I'd been in. There was even a little bell that chimed when the door opened. The office itself had definitely seen better days; the two couches against the wall were faded, stained, and threadbare, the linoleum was bubbled up and worn out in several places, as was the counter top. There was a small service bell on the counter, but nothing else—no hours, services, brochures, nothing. There also was no receptionist. There was the faint sound of what might have been a TV coming from the back, though, so the place wasn't entirely uninhabited.
I held off ringing the bell for the moment; Eryn had found out how they reacted to that. I didn't feel like sitting on one of the couches; they looked like you could catch something from them. So I leaned against the worn, slightly tacky counter, and waited. I'd pulled my jacket back around behind my 1911 on my hip, so that it was at once easy to get to and obvious to anyone with eyes to see that I was carrying it. Eryn stayed back, keeping away from the door but putting some distance between herself and the counter. I don't think she liked the idea of talking to the receptionist again.
We must have waited, hearing the faint noise of the TV but little else, for almost fifteen minutes. I think both of us were getting a little fidgety by the time the receptionist finally came out of the back. She didn't look that surprised to see us, but just snapped, in a nasally twang, “What d'you want?”
She was probably in her early fifties, though living in a place like Coldwell she could have been as young as forty. Her hair was a sort of dirty blond, in a sort of half-hearted puffy hairstyle. Her eyes had deep bags under them, and her skin was, well, saggy would probably be the best word. She wasn't fat, but she looked like gravity was set on pulling her into the ground anyway. There was a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, in defiance of the “No Smoking” sign on the wall beside her.
A glance at Eryn's tight-lipped expression confirmed for me that this was the same woman who had screamed at her and threatened her the night before. I briefly considered bringing that up. I'm a lot more intimidating than my wife; I stand about six-foot-two, broad-shouldered and kind of gaunt, with an unruly mop of black hair and equally black stubble on my jaw. Eryn had somewhat prevailed on me to look a little bit less like a dangerous drifter over the last year, but I still don't usually look that friendly, as opposed to Eryn, who is small, red-haired, green-eyed, and probably the most beautiful woman I've ever seen.
I'm also almost as ornery as I look.
I refrained, however. This probably wasn't going to be pleasant as it was; there was no reason to turn it into a fight before we had what we needed. Priorities. I reached into my shirt pocket, pulled out the only photo I had of Blake, and showed it to her. “We're looking for a friend. He said he might be in trouble, and we haven't been able to contact him. Thought maybe he'd been here.”
She just stared at me coldly for a moment before she reached down, with an exasperated sigh, and picked up her glasses. She was making me mad already. She peered at the picture for a long moment. Then a strange transformation came over her.
She almost seemed to twitch. She blinked rapidly a few times. Then she looked up at me with pure hate in her eyes. “You gotta lotta nerve, comin' in here like this!” she yelled. “Get out! Get out now, 'fore I call the cops!”
I didn't move. I just glared at her and shook my head. “Go ahead,” I said coldly. “The phone's right there. Somehow I doubt the sheriff's department is going to be terribly amused if you call them to arrest somebody just asking questions. Last I checked, that still wasn't a crime in this country.”
“You'll see!” she shrieked, snatching the phone off its cradle. Apparently, she was nuts enough to think this was actually going to work. “They'll throw you in a deep, dark hole with the murderers and the child molesters!”
I could see Eryn frowning. I kept my own expression carefully thunderous, but didn't move. There was definitely something very, very awry here. I just didn't know what.
The receptionist was screaming into the phone about harassment, robbers, and terrorists now. She wasn't terribly coherent. I almost doubted if the sheriff's department—Coldwell was too small for its own police department—would bother to send anybody, or just put it down to somebody being off their meds again.
She slammed down the phone triumphantly. “You better run!” she yelled at us. “They'll gun you down, yeah, you'll die in the mud, you scum-sucking...” Her ranting got steadily louder, more profane, and more abusive. I just folded my arms and glowered at her. I could feel Eryn tensing up next to me, and not without good reason. There was no telling when this psycho would go from loud to violent.
Now, it might seem strange that we were standing there, taking this abuse from someone who was clearly not sane and with no intention of telling us what we needed to know. The truth was, if everyone in this benighted town was as unbalanced as the receptionist, there was no way we were going to find Blake by asking questions. I had some burgeoning hope that the county sheriff might actually be sane, and might be able to point us in the right direction.
Far sooner than I expected, there were red and blue flashing lights outside the motel. I stepped back from the door, turning so I was facing both the receptionist and the door, just in case. Eryn followed, her hand hovering nervously near her hip, ready to draw. It was a habit she hadn't quite broken yet, though I was trying to train her out of it.
The sheriff's deputies who came through the door didn't come charging through with their guns up, or even with their hands on them, which was a little surprising, given the racket the receptionist was still putting up, leaning halfway across the counter to spit her bile at us. Under different circumstances, I might even have been a little impressed at the extent of her vocabulary of foul language, but not at the moment.
Both deputies were in uniform and wearing vests. The first one, a short, skinny black guy, shouted down the screeching receptionist with a deep bull-bellow that would have done a drill instructor proud—of course, for all I knew, the guy had been one before he'd been a cop. Nobody's perfect.
“All right, all right!” he yelled. “We're here, we've got it under control!” The receptionist had now shifted the target of her screaming to the deputies, telling them to make sure all sorts of vile things happened to us. Eryn had gone white, mostly with fury. If she'd been anyone else, I'm not sure she wouldn't have drawn and shot the receptionist on general principles. I'll admit that I was sort of tempted. She'd started hacking me off as soon as she'd opened her mouth, and everything she had screamed since had just made it worse.
The deputy turned to us. “I'll need you folks to come with us,” he said, a little too loudly, though seemingly only to make himself heard over the torrent of verbal filth coming from the receptionist.
Since both he and his towering partner, who was as brown as leather and looked about fifty, were trying to be polite and ignore the receptionist's shrieking, I just nodded. I ushered Eryn out in front of me, mainly to shield her from anything the receptionist might take it into her head to throw at us as we left. Of course, the deputies were right behind us, but I also wanted to stay between her and them
, too, just in case.
Their cruiser was parked right behind my truck, the lights still flashing. Somehow, it suddenly struck me that the lights were a warning to the townspeople to stay away. When we got to the sidewalk, I turned to the two deputies and asked, “So, are we under arrest?”
The black guy, who I now saw had a black name tag that said “Craig” on his vest, just snorted. “What for? Because Psycho Kim started screaming at you? We'd have a county lockup full of truckers and clueless tourists if that was a crime. The only reason we showed up was because we've had a cruiser on standby for the last week to come in and rescue anybody lost enough to stumble into this crap-heap of a town.” He squinted at me, while his partner, who had the name tag “Tall Bear,” watched the street. He was looking for trouble. I knew the look. “Speaking of which, what brought you here?”
“Looking for somebody,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows. “Somebody who lives here?”
I shook my head. “This was where he said to meet him.” I held out the picture of Blake. “You seen him around?”
Craig took the photo, saying, “He's got pretty bad taste in meeting places, if he told you to meet him in Coldwell.” He frowned at the picture for a moment, then handed it to Deputy Tall Bear. “Doesn't this guy look kinda familiar, Frank?”
Tall Bear took his eyes off the street to look at the picture. He barely gave it a glance. “Yeah, that was the guy who swung through the office about a week and a half ago, asking if there was anything weird going on, disappearances and such,” he said, turning his attention back to the surrounding buildings. As I followed suit, I was starting to see a bit of movement, though no one showed their faces. There were just a few moved curtains, a slightly opened door, that sort of thing. I could feel the eyes on the back of my neck. “He seemed like a decent guy.”
