Deathgrip

by Brian Hodge

  DEATHGRIP

  By Brian Hodge

  A Macabre Ink Production

  Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition Copyright 2014 / Brian Hodge

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  Called “a spectacularly unflinching writer” by Peter Straub, Brian Hodge is the award-winning author of ten novels of horror and crime/noir, over 100 short stories, novelettes, and novellas, and four full-length collections. His most recent collection, Picking The Bones, from 2011, became the first of his books to be honored with a Publishers Weekly starred review. His first collection, The Convulsion Factory, was ranked by critic Stanley Wiater as one of the 113 best books of modern horror.

  Recent and upcoming works include a lengthy novella, Without Purpose, Without Pity; a collection of crime fiction, No Law Left Unbroken; and an updated hardcover edition of his early post-apocalyptic epic, Dark Advent.

  He lives in Colorado, where he’s currently engaged in a locked-cage death match with his next novel and other projects. He also dabbles in music, sound design, and photography; loves everything about organic gardening except the thieving squirrels; and trains in Krav Maga and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, which are of no use at all against the squirrels.

  Connect with Brian online through his web site (www.brianhodge.net), his blog (www.warriorpoetblog.com), or on Facebook (www.facebook.com/brianhodgewriter).

  Book List

  Novels

  Dark Advent

  Deathgrip

  Mad Dogs

  Nightlife

  Oasis

  Prototype

  The Darker Saints

  Wild Horses

  World of Hurt

  Collections

  Falling Idols

  Lies & Ugliness

  Picking the Bones

  The Convulsion Factory

  http://www.brianhodge.net

  DISCOVER CROSSROAD PRESS

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  Join our group at Goodreads.

  For two friends, one old, one new,

  one here and one departed:

  Gerald Mayo,

  pilot of the airwaves;

  and

  Ray Rexer,

  July 29, 1953 – April 27, 1991.

  No man is an island …

  but a few are peninsulas.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This page just gets longer every time out. To the following people, many of whom answered some of the weirdest questions imaginable, go heartfelt thanks:

  My agent Lori Perkins and editor Jeanne Cavelos, for being such skilled, astute, dependable, and pleasant partners to deal with.

  For electronic media insights: Tom and Jerry, Weasel, Ebes, and Brett Blume, personnel past and present of WMIX-AM/FM; Ron Hamburg, Robert E. Carter, and Earl Flanigan of WSIL-TV.

  For medical information and other ooky tidbits about our bodies and minds: Jeff Hamilton, R.N. C.E.N.; Keith Backes, R.T.; Dave Griffith, R.P.T.; Susan Coady, R.P.T.; Anita Bauer, O.T.R./L; Joe Wilks, R.Ph.; and Charlie Hughey.

  For photography pointers, Dan Ober; for oil refinery info, Caroline Quinn. And major undying gratitude to Dick Sanders for the Macintosh loaner while waiting for Apple to catch up with demand.

  Might as well throw in the music of Skinny Puppy, Nine Inch Nails, and Fields of the Nephilim, for fueling inspiration and imagery during the hard parts.

  And thanks and love to the usual circle for sanity of one form or another: Mum and Dad, Doli, Clark, Beth, Wayne, Yvonne, Jeff, Joan, and Bill. Buy me a beer, and you too can end up on this page next time.

  DEATHGRIP

  When we peruse the first histories of all nations, we are apt to imagine ourselves transported into some new world; where the whole frame of nature is disjointed, and every element performs its operations in a different manner, from what it does at present. Battles, revolutions, pestilence, famine and death, are never the effect of those natural causes, which we experience. Prodigies, omens, oracles, judgments, quite obscure the few natural events that are intermingled with them.

  —David Hume

  Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things.

  —Hippocrates

  Friday, November 22, 1963/Chicago

  In the years to come, nearly everyone who had struggled through childhood would remember exactly where they were, what they were doing, when they first heard the news. Carmine would, no question. He had, just minutes before, rolled his cab curbside for the first of the day’s two most memorable fares.

  Midafternoon, and the remaining hours of his shift could be measured in miles. Miles without end, these traffic-choked streets that had become his lot in life. The drizzle was a royal pain, too, slickening the pavement and making quick stops a frantic guessing game as to whether he’d slide into someone’s back end. Or whether someone would do the same to him. Temperature in the sixties, humidity steaming his windows, and some days you just could not win.

  All roads led home, eventually, though home was rarely more inviting; home, den of ear-splitting noise on Chicago’s south side, domestic bedlam of four rooms in a third-floor walkup, hot and cold running cockroaches, and these days filled to capacity and beyond. Carmine Costelli. His wife, much too tired for love these days, even if privacy had been more than a dead dream. His wife’s corpulent mamma mia, a screeching harridan intent on becoming as broad as she was tall. And the brood of lads who shat their pants at every available opportunity and were becoming furniture climbers of near Everestial skill. Home sweet home.

  But there was the bright side. America, hotbed of dreams and opportunity. His grandparents had crossed the Atlantic in steerage to get here. Kingdoms of gold could stand on foundations of sweat, or so Carmine had been told, and he figured his sweat was as good as anyone’s. The man in the White House made him feel that way, assurances, some grand and glorious new road just around the corner. And if not that one, then perhaps the next.

  Dreams of a better tomorrow. You could lose yourself in them sometimes. Never want to come back.

  He picked up the old guy on Michigan Avenue, this slight, tautly smiling fellow hailing him from the curb. Dapper, in a seedy sort of way. No topcoat against the drizzling rain, only a dark pinstripe suit, old but well-kept. A silver watch chain looped against his vest, visible when a gusty wind flapped at his jacket. Pink scalp gleamed like a dome rising from the monk’s fringe of white hair. A closely trimmed beard of the same color, threaded with nicotine stains.

  Carmine would always remember his eyes the most. Eyes of a fallen saint, martyr without a cause.

  The old man ducked his head while entering the cab, mouth twisting into a pained grimace to reveal teeth as stained as his beard. He settled comfortably into the back, slammed the door like a man in a hurry.

  “See those men back there?” He pointed out the back window.

  Carmine looked, said he did. Two of them, suits and long topcoats — none too cheap, visible quality even at thirty yards — and
they were coming along in a hurry.

  “Lose them for me? Please?”

  With a lurch and a squeak of rubber, Carmine was back in the thick of it all. Meter activated with one fell swoop of his arm. He laughed softly, shaking his head in disbelief.

  “You’re kidding, right? Six years I been driving, not once does anybody ever ask me to lose a tail.”

  No answer, so Carmine shut up. Leave the old guy to his own problems or his own fantasies, whichever. After another few moments, Carmine heard what sounded like the rattle of pills from a plastic bottle. He angled his head to peek into the rearview, timeless cabbie tradition. Some of the things you saw were not to be believed. Nothing much this time, only the old man popping his hand to his mouth. The pills went down dry, harsh.

  He had the regular radio tuned to WBBM, volume low so it didn’t override the dispatch. There flickered a momentary compulsion to up its volume, but he didn’t. After another moment, his new fare was humming. Catchy, vaguely familiar. Something classical, Carmine thought, but he could pin it down no closer.

  “What’s that you’re humming?” Curiosity had gotten the better of him. Bad habit. You really should leave people alone if they don’t look like talkers.

  “Beethoven. Ninth Symphony. ‘Ode to Joy.’” A wry, twisted little smile. No joy there, more like irony. “I appreciate a good joke now and then.”

  Carmine frowned. Something wrong with this man.

  “I decided today,” the fellow continued, “that it’s time for me to retire from what is very probably the worst job in the world. You’d think I’d be happier about that. Wouldn’t you?”

  Carmine shrugged behind the wheel. Flicked a glance into the mirror, beyond the backseat this time. Any sign of the two alleged pursuers? Not really. More cabs, always more cabs, but none careening after them.

  “I don’t know,” Carmine finally said. “You do something long enough, you miss it, you know? I got these kids, every time I turn around, one of them’s dropped a big smelly load in his drawers. But when they grow out of that, what you want to bet I miss that, kind of.” Shaking his head again, smiling. “Do something long enough, it becomes a part of you.”

  “Amen,” the old man’s voice sad, distant. Utterly lonely.

  “So what was it you did all these years?”

  “It was … a form of public relations in the medical field. I suppose that’s the easiest way of saying it. I’ve kept on the move a lot.” He withdrew his pills from a jacket pocket, regarded them a long moment before putting them back. A dreadful sigh, gazing dead-on into Carmine’s mirrored eyes. “I … have done … some of the most ghastly things you can imagine.”

  Carmine studied him in the mirror a moment. This guy putting him on? No, he didn’t think so. No. Those eyes, too serious, too hungry for something. Empathy, maybe. Or absolution. Bless me, driver, for I have sinned. Taxi hacks were probably third in line for such honors, right behind priests and bartenders.

  “Never too late to change,” Carmine said.

  “For you, maybe.” He leaned back then, sullen and silent, seemingly content to stare out the windows. And eat his pills like popcorn.

  Carmine was starting to wish this ride was over. He sensed no danger from the fossil in his backseat, but every now and then, rare moments, a perceived threat was actually preferable to the all-out strangeness some people exuded. An attempted robbery could be dealt with, one way or another. All cards were on the table at times like that. But folks like this guy? They were worse, in a way. They lingered. They crawled beneath your skin and burrowed into memory, in that place to which you consign things you hope to forget and know you won’t.

  Carmine didn’t even know where the guy wanted to go. Just driving aimlessly so far, taking corners at random. Maybe he should at least ask.

  The radio, WBBM, soft and low. Loud enough, though. Some announcer, breaking through with a CBS News special bulletin.

  And for Carmine, it may as well have been the end of the known world, and a lot left unexplored. The man was dead. That trailblazer on the horizon, that symbol of an entire nation’s dreams. John F. Kennedy, dead of an assassin’s bullet in Dallas.

  Carmine stared past the windshield, stunned into something worse than silence. All of downtown Chicago and the entire world receding away, like lines converging into a vanishing point. The cab was driving itself. Somewhere out in the void, the sound of rolling tires and automobile horns and the tide of humanity. These masses who had sacrificed their brightest and best down in Dallas and didn’t even know it yet.

  The next thing he knew, tears were on his cheeks.

  “Shot him dead. Huh. I’ll be damned.” The old man clucked his tongue, shook his head. “Now aren’t some people wasteful.”

  Carmine blinked, the vast numbness inside making way just far enough for righteous bile. How can you take this so calm? You got no idea what’s happened, is that it?

  It was almost as if the old man had read his thoughts. “You know, in the overall scheme of events, this doesn’t matter much. One man. It won’t matter. No matter how great he was, or what he stood for. Because … if you only knew what else goes on in this world that hardly another soul knows about.” He grimaced, shook his head. “But you’re young. Maybe you’ll learn that in time.”

  Carmine’s knuckles were white against the steering wheel, tight enough to wring out old sweat. He was looking for a lifeline in this worst of all possible moments, something, anything. And all he had was the bleak philosophy spouted by this heartless old bastard too twisted by his own problems to care about anything else. No more. No more of this, at all. Get rid of him and that would be the first step in the right direction. He glided toward the curb, saw someone else needing a ride, hailing him with an umbrella. A young couple. More parasites, deaf and blind, wanting something from him. Closer — the woman was pregnant, the man had his arm on her shoulder.

  All right. Perspective. For them he would stop. But first things first…

  “I want you out of my cab!” And damn the meter.

  Tires squelching against the curb, the fat yellow taxi ground to a halt before the waiting couple. One moment of panic in the old man’s eyes — the premature stop? — and then a look of hurried resignation. He reached into the pinstripe jacket to withdraw a thick envelope. Tossed it into the front, and it landed beside Carmine with a weighty thump.

  “I’m not a bad sort, not really,” and now he was very nearly grandfatherly. Patriarch of stoic misery. “I’m just a great deal unluckier than most. And sometimes…

  “Sometimes I hate them for it.”

  He yanked the back door open, smiled at the expectant young couple. Looking as if the pregnant woman, in her bulging coat and dripping scarf, were the most delightful sight he had ever set eyes upon.

  “Congratulations,” pumping the hand of the father, who managed to look both proud and bewildered. “When’s the due date?”

  “In two more weeks,” said the mother-to-be.

  While the old man nodded, glancing at traffic behind them, inside the cab Carmine was checking the envelope. Unsure as to what sort of nonsense he would find inside. But even John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s shattered skull faded from thought when he saw the stack of currency. Large denominations, lots of bills. Unbelievable. Just unbelievable.

  Later, when thrice counted to account for nervously botching the job, the sum would total over six thousand dollars. Some tip.

  Luck of the draw. You lose some, you win some.

  “Allow me,” the old man was saying to the father, releasing his hand and reaching for the woman’s. “Chivalry is not quite dead in this day and age. Though rare is my opportunity to help a pretty young thing into a car.”

  The father managed a helpless shrug. Who would be so callous as to deny this dapper little old man such a simple pleasure? Quite the gentleman, he took her hand, holding the back of her upper arm in case she slipped. Her face, tired and faintly puffy, lit up when she smiled, flattered to no end. A fl
eeting, mischievous glance at her husband, marital semaphore, as if to say, See? You could learn something from this man.

  The old fellow leaned in after her, doting, making sure she was comfortable, treating her as he might a daughter rather than a stranger whose name he would never know.

  His hand lingered atop hers for another moment. And for the slightest instant, Carmine could see that she suddenly feared that intimate touch, in some small way, and she drained of color.

  The old man, now straightening, watching the father get in. Smiling wide-eyed in what looked like nothing so much as relief, as if this day of gray drizzle and national tragedy were the sunniest in memory. A patented Chicago gust drove darts of rain into his face, cycloned through what remained of his hair.

  The mother, looking at her hand, mesmerized, slowly flexing her fingers…

  “You take good care of that baby.” A tender curmudgeon’s warning, given for all the right reasons. “He’ll be a fine one, I bet.”

  The father perked up in his seat, just in time to see the door slam in his face. “He?” the father said, but the old man was merely peering in through the glass, waving goodbye with waggling fingers as the taxi pulled away. And then, that final glimpse of him, standing at curbside, attention quickly drawn by the sudden arrival of another cab. Turning crisply, starting to run into the flow of foot traffic. A man who wished nothing so much as to simply lose himself. Carmine had seen that look plenty of times.

  But running from something … or to it?

  And who really cared, anyway?

  It was another block before Carmine could touch base with the real world again. He swiveled his head back, topical conversation, had they heard already, had they heard the news from Dallas? No, no they hadn’t, dear lord, how awful. And then, from the mother, a sound with which he was already so very well acquainted. She was going into labor. No false alarm, this one, he knew from the tone. This was the real thing. It came clear up from her toes.