“She’s in that last room?” I said.
“With explicit instructions—”
“Which one,” I said across to him.
When he just gave me that same stare, I slowly, as if showcasing it, pulled out my wallet, and started laying down Julia’s money, twenty by twenty. ‘Jackson by Jackson,’ to him. It made it worse.
At two hundred and forty, all of it, the clerk shrugged.
“Guess she didn’t say anything about not telling you what floor,” he said, pulling the bills across, folding them around his thumb like a Vegas dealer. “Try nine, boss man. Nine might just be your lucky number, tonight.”
“Odd or even?” I said.
“Your lucky numbers tonight won’t be prime … ” he said in his best fortune-cookie voice, liking this game so much more than I was. I turned, was already running.
Someone was going to die here tonight, I knew. One way or another. Quiet or loud. Because there are rules. The Elvis Room, it was occupied. And Julia was here. And Mary.
I punched the elevator call button continually until the door dinged open, and it was just sliding shut when a hand stabbed in, caught it.
The clerk, I knew, going back on his deal.
Instead, there was the distinctive sound of gurney wheels.
I knew it from the lobby of that concert hotel.
I went to dislodge the fingers but they were already gone. The door swished shut.
I breathed out, was going to have twenty seconds to myself here. Nearly half a minute to collect myself, to prepare. To settle down.
Except I wasn’t alone.
In the distorted reflection afforded by the brass frame around the numbered buttons, I could just see an absolutely still shape in the corner behind me, to the right. Small enough to be miles away, yet necessarily within five feet. Which was one single lunge.
And it wasn’t looking down like they’re supposed to, either. Like anybody in an elevator is supposed to, living or dead. It was watching me. With the hollow cavities that used to hold eyes.
I spider-walked my fingers down the double-row of buttons, afraid of any sudden motions, of any offensive sounds, and when the elevator jerked up in response to my selection, the lights faltered in exactly the way they never had before, in all my time here. Not a bad connection so much as the light not pushing out far enough from the bulb. A dark flash.
I turned around, protecting the back of my neck with my hands for some reason, but when the light came back, I was alone again.
I told myself I had been the whole time. That this was all in my head.
My breath hitched once, twice, and I threw up anyway, my vomit splashing the brass handrail. At the end of it my eyes were crying, my hand shaking.
When the elevator car shuddered to a stop I crowded the door to make my escape.
It opened onto the balding man with the wide mouth. Just standing there, his head lowered as is proper for them, as if death is a lower class, not a separate state, but even lowered, I knew the specific planes and contours of that face. I’d seen it on sketch paper over and over, until I’d felt my own mouth spreading into a rictus, in sympathetic response.
Instead of twitching a shoulder or pulling his mouth improbably wider—I would have screamed—he just stood there, the “5” on the wall over his shoulder indicating that I’d hit the wrong number, that I was on my floor, not Julia’s. Not her new one.
Once upon a time, I had told Mary that the dead couldn’t hurt you. Even if you could see them somehow, still, how could they interact?
She’d wanted so badly to believe me. She’d wanted so badly for science to save her.
Here was the refutation of my claim, though.
What this dead man was telling me was that I could get off here if I wanted. That I could call it a night, if I was ready to retire. If I could be content with letting them proceed with what they had to do.
He was an usher, fully prepared to nod as I passed, keep his face thankfully hidden.
I could sleep this all off.
Except I couldn’t. Because of Julia.
This was no longer an experiment. This was my life.
“Wrong floor,” I said, giving my voice the smallest amount of air possible, and like I’d started a great clockwork mechanism, the balding man started to raise his face, and I punched the door-close button deep enough to splinter a fingernail.
I scrabbled for nine and hit it again and again, my lips praying for the first time since childhood. It wasn’t words from the Bible but a basic diagnostic procedure. Still, it worked: four dings later, the ninth floor hall opened up before me.
It was empty.
Somehow that was worse.
“Two, three, five, seven,” I recited to myself, navigating from side to side, figuring out that the evens were all to my left, even if “2” was stubbornly prime.
I ran past the first three doors, not sure how to conjure Julia. I started hammering on them at the fourth, and went down the hall that way, bang bang bang then run, do it again.
Until I got to 922.
It was already open.
There was a burgundy apron with white stitching on the part of the floor I could see. It matched the upholstery of the waiting room benches at Julia’s restaurant.
I looked behind me, to the people I’d roused. A woman in her milky nightgown, a man in faded boxer shorts, another man in a suit jacket, his tie loosened for scotch. They were trying to figure me out, and to map the appropriate response.
“Call security,” I told them, holding my empty palm up to show them I wasn’t the threat here, and then I shook my head no and stepped into the room.
Julia was sleeping just under the sheets like she liked, because of a report she’d seen on hotel comforters. The heater was on to compensate. And the lamp was on because she was alone. And the box of tissues was by the lamp, because of me.
I wanted to tell her everything.
But at street level.
I was three steps into the room when the white sheet she was under began to stain red.
I opened my mouth to … I don’t know.
The door clicked shut behind me, the light flickered again in that new way it had, and in the flash of darkness before it came back, I saw him. The balding man with the wide mouth, the empty eyes.
He was looking right at me, now. Past his lips, in his mouth, it was the same blackness as behind his eyes. As where his eyes had been.
“We didn’t—we didn’t mean to, to take the last—” I tried.
The lights came back up and he remained, and the rational part of my brain slowed the scene down, made it make sense: if the dead congregated at hotels so as to be mistaken for real people, then—then of course they would insist on management leaving a room free.
They could all huddle there. Not sleeping, they don’t need to sleep, just standing shoulder to shoulder. Probably all the ones who hadn’t ventured out, the ones who hadn’t been seen. But this was second best; it was something they remembered from being alive: fresh towels, a crisply made bed. The pad of paper waiting under its pen, the pen you always knock under the bed, never reach down for, afraid of what you’ll touch.
Here, if it was empty, the dead could be just like the living, for the night. They were staying in a hotel room. And it looked just like they remembered.
If there weren’t any rooms, though, then they’d be forced to walk the halls when none of us were.
It would make them feel even more dead. It would remind them that they had no rooms. That they didn’t need them.
At which point, they would start sneaking into rooms, bold and angry, desperate for a room to get empty, so they could pretend until morning again. And one of the rooms would end up empty, one way or another.
Shay Matheson would have seen the truth of it.
And I wished I didn’t.
“I won’t tell anybody,” I said to the man, and he angled his head over, so some of his dead blood spilled from the corner of his mouth
.
It never hit the floor. His shirt was soaking it up, not getting any blacker from it.
Pretty soon the decal there would be drowned.
Because his face was his face, I followed the blood, instead. It’s instinctual for the predators we once were; motion means food, and food means life.
In this case, it led me the opposite way: to the shirt’s decal.
It was the music act that had filled that first hotel.
“You,” I said, my skin crawling in a way I’d never documented in my early studies.
He lifted his arm as if to caress my face, and his elbow squealed with the sound of gurney wheels.
“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice cracking at last, and when the lamp flickered again, I felt the atmospheric pressure in the room shift the smallest little bit, too small a fraction for any but the finest neck hair to ever register.
Someone was joining us.
I barricaded my head with my arms and barreled back out into the hall, running blind now, not even enough breath to scream like my body was telling me to.
When the elevator wouldn’t come no matter how much I hit the button, I fell into the stairway, but this was the maintenance one that always got cocked open for the smokers. It only went up.
I took it anyway, crashed up onto the roof, the night air chilling the sweat I was coated in.
I laughed, fell to my knees.
I’d made it.
The dead had already taken their one life, the sacrifice they needed.
I was sorry it had to be Julia, but—but I had to publish what I knew, didn’t I? In honor of her, now. As her memoriam.
I sat down out of the wind for the cry I knew was coming, that I already wasn’t proud of, that I felt I owed her—science is never cheap—but, patting my pockets for a cocktail napkin, I came up instead with a pen stamped with the hotel name, the pen I’d assumed she’d knocked off the nightstand to roll under the bed, start its cycle anew.
It was coated in blood, this pen.
The blood would be Julia’s.
I dropped it, watched its tacky barrel collect the smaller of the asphalt gravel to its shaft.
“They’re trying to discredit me,” I said, in wonder, and then looked all around, peeled out of my jacket and ran to the edge of the roof, let the jacket go, had to shake my hand when the sleeve caught on my shirt. And then, because the dead had to have secreted more damning evidence on me, I stripped out of the rest of my clothes, let them flutter down as well, drape over trees and streetlights, collect on windshields and in window planters.
“Now what are you going to do!” I screamed to them, trapped below, walking the halls for eternity.
Except Shay Matheson had said nothing about that.
I turned, this time sure it was going to be to a sea of hungry faces gathered in the moonlight. Because they had nowhere else to go.
I was still alone. And, now, naked. On top of the city.
“What do you want?” I said to my idea of them, my voice cracking. I felt back with my bare feet until I had to step up onto the narrow brick ledge, my heels hanging over a hundred feet of open air, my toes gripping down in response.
I wavered my arms, my chest hollowing out, and I would have gone over, except a hand grasped my wrist.
It was Julia.
There was no kindness in her eyes, though. There were no eyes at all.
“I didn’t mean—not for you…” I said, trying to cover her hand with my other one, but she was already gone.
Not for you, I heard like an echo, and I knew it meant that this world, it wasn’t for me. Not anymore. Not now that I knew its secrets.
“But my research,” I pleaded, balancing back and forth, and then I saw that there was blood on my hand. From the pen. From the balding man I had to admit I’d killed. From Mary, whom I’d always known I’d killed, even before I knew she was dead. From Julia, wherever I’d stabbed her: neck, eyes, base of the skull. In the crook of the groin, that ballpoint nosing around for the femoral artery. I could almost even remember the effort.
I didn’t have any pants to wipe the blood on, so I brought it to my mouth.
It tasted right, so I left my fingers there.
Across the street a woman in the window of an apartment building was watching me, the light from her television set making one side of her glow rancid blue. Twentieth-century blue.
She shook her head no twice, that I maybe shouldn’t do this, and when she turned to look suspiciously behind her, her hair swept around. No, it cascaded down her back, it spilled down her back, it tumbled down her back in something a lot like slow motion, from where I was standing.
Mary?
“But I have to,” I told her—she of all people would understand—“my research, see?” and then I looked down nine stories, into why I’d been left no option but the roof: because this proved my theory.
My notes were all down on the desk.
All the world needed now was my body.
I would get a ticker-tape parade, for what this would prove.
“It’s science,” I said across to the woman like the best secret ever, and then I looked past her, to her shadow self standing against her apartment wall, her murdered twin who threw no shadow, and she saw me looking, bared her teeth in a way that I had to turn away from. Because she had too many. Because her mouth was too wide. Because there was no explanation.
Where I turned was to the safety of the empty roof, except it was empty no more. Julia was thirty feet off. Murdered, dead Julia, thirty feet off, bare feet on the gravel, some of them sticking to the side of her feet, her own hair lifting with the wind. Not because it had to, but because it remembered. Because it wanted to lift.
It gave my chest a hollow feeling, like falling.
“I don’t think she heard,” she said with her impossible mouth, and I started to look back to that window across the way but stopped, came back.
Julia was rushing towards me on all fours, her twisted oval well of a mouth open, to swallow my soul.
“Science,” I said again, weaker than I meant to say it, and she dove into me, to take us both over the edge, to prove my theory. If I couldn’t have the ticker-tape parade, then I could get a ticker-tape funeral procession, anyway.
But, like I’d told Mary: the dead are immaterial.
Julia passed right into me, didn’t come out the other side, and I fell forward into the black gravel, gasping, sure now of only one thing, a thing Mary should have warned me about all those years ago, what she’d learned from having eaten her own twin in the womb: that I could live like she had, or I could join the ranks of the dead, become a walker.
Killing isn’t free, as it turns out.
I could feel it in the pit of my stomach, now. I could see it between my hands, directly under my eyes: Julia’s toes. They were black, decaying, frostbitten from walking on the other side.
She was waiting for me to decide.
“Nobody will believe me if I don’t—if I don’t . . . ” I said, my foolish tears collecting on the end of my nose.
I was trying to convince her of my own suicide. I was asking her permission. For one last kindness, one last withdrawal from her account.
“When I saw you on the bus that night—” I started, but then the gravel crunched again, and again, and all around. In my peripheral vision, there were discolored feet and shins in every direction, an army of the dead. Tattered pant legs, skirts trailing their own hems. Skin slicked with blood, toes crusted with hoarfrost and cracking open, the darkness within blooming.
They’d all come. To be seen.
I shook my head no, finally.
It was a promise. To not publish this in a peer-reviewed journal, as hard-earned findings, but in the usual places, if at all.
Turn the page to find out about Bigfoot, yes. For the incontrovertible truth about aliens.
And then I collapsed into the black gravel, hid my face, my naked back ready for their cold teeth, and when I woke that black grav
el was pocked into my face.
Julia helped me up, guided me back to the land of the living, and here I remain, a shell of a man, a ghost of a human, playing out each day, each act of each moment, as if I’m alone, as if the darkness of a shallow closet or a kitchenette doesn’t make me look away. And if some nights I spin a certain record in the privacy of my room in these lonely, crowded hotels and close my eyes to soak it in, please allow me this smallest of pleasures.
I’m not Elvis, no. But I’ve been in his room.
It was Hell.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephen Graham Jones has fifteen novels, five collections, one other novella, and about two hundred stories published so far. Up soon is a young adult co-written with Paul Tremblay, Floating Boy Meets the Girl Who Couldn’t Fly (Chi-Teen), and a horror collection, After the People Lights Have Gone Off (Dark House Press). Talking Elvis, Stephen was lucky enough to get taken to an Elvis concert when he was about four. Talking hotels, they’re the main place Stephen lives, it seems. And they’re always terrifying. Talking This is Horror, Stephen’s won their Novel of the Year Award and their Short Fiction of the Year Award. Talking everything else: Stephen’s Blackfeet, was born in West Texas, lives in Colorado now, and is married with two kids. And he’s never cutting his hair.
Two vehicles, stripped to the bare essentials, accelerate to 180 miles per hour on a deserted highway. Their journey along this dead straight stretch, known as the Final Five, will decide the fate of the drivers – forever. Only one hundred seconds separate them from the finish line as they hurtle towards their destiny, dreaming of glory.
But this is one highway they’ve never travelled before and neither of them knows what they’ll find out there. One thing is certain: every road has its obstacles.
The eBook includes a special afterword explaining the genesis of Roadkill.
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