Joe Schreiber - Chasing the dead

By the time she reaches the Expedition, she's sweating and badly winded, gasping for air. She drops the thing on the gravel road next to the rear tires and opens the back of the vehicle. The headlights and taillights have gone out now, but her eyes have adjusted. Sue bends down to grab the thing but its weight is too much for her fatigued muscles.

No way am I going to be able to lift this higher than my waist.

You have to.

She gives herself a ten count, as ready as she'll ever be, then sucks in a deep breath and leans down, gripping the shape with both arms. Straining with her arms, back, and shoulders, she hoists it upright. Something pops in her right knee. She can feel the vessels in her face and temples swelling with pressure. For one terrible moment she loses her balance and she and the thing in the garbage bags do an absurd little two-step around the back of the Expedition, staggering like a dance-hall girl and a cowboy too drunk to stand. Then she's back on the balls of her feet again, where her balance is, and she shoves the thing into the back of the car, then slams the door shut.

Not until she opens the driver's side door and climbs inside does she realize there is someone sitting in the passenger seat next to her.

And for the second time in ten minutes Sue Young screams.

As she screams, she scrambles backward away from it, half-jumping and half-falling back out, but her leg gets caught on the inside of the door and Sue gets one good look at the face staring blankly back at her from the other side.

It is Marilyn.

It is Marilyn the nanny.

Marilyn's body is very still and silent. Marilyn's hands lie on her lap. Marilyn's head is wrenched around sideways to face her. Marilyn's shoulder-length blond hair hangs damply over one side of her face. Marilyn's hair is red and stiff with blood like doll's hair. From outside looking in Sue sees the scooped-out sockets of her skull gape red and raw where her eyes once were. A sheet of paper has been stuck to the front of Marilyn's blouse with dried blood, and Sue can see a single word scrawled across it:

And once more the phone begins to ring.

Sue doesn't know how many times it rings before she answers it.

"I told you you'd be punished."

"You didn't have to." Sue's voice is drab, lifeless. It hangs in her throat like a tattered flag on a windless day. "You don't have to do this."

"Don't beg. It's pathetic. And you're wasting t-"

"Who are you, you son of a bitch?"The words fly out of her mouth before she can stop them, borne along on a torrent of fury she never would've guessed she had."If you've got something you want from me why the fuck don't you come out and take it?"

"Come out and take it?" The voice lets out a chuckle, actually sounding appreciative. "Oh, I like that, Susan. I like it a lot. I see you've grown some balls since we talked last."

"Who is this?"

"You'll figure it out eventually. That's part of it too." The voice gets nasty again. "Now get back in the car. We've got some traveling to do tonight. Quite a bit, actually."

Sue looks in at the corpse in the passenger seat staring back out at her. The lifeless thing that used to take care of her daughter, the friendly, slightly chubby girl who once nursed equal passions for Heath Ledger and Heath Bar Crunch and had been Veda's guardian and daytime companion for the last year and a half. The grief that she anticipates is still too deeply submersed in shock to make itself known.

"There's a blanket in the backseat," the voice says. "If you don't want to look at her like that. I wouldn't blame you. Death is pretty darn ugly, isn't it?"

"Fuck you."

"Fuckme? You're getting downright feisty, Susan. Maybe it's time for me to wake up your daughter so you can hear her scream again. What do you think?"

"No," Sue says, "no, no. I'm sorry. I won't-I shouldn't have said that." And despite what has just happened to Marilyn, right now all she feels is relief at the notion of Veda sound asleep through all of this. It is an irresistibly alluring thought.

"Get in the car."

Sue climbs in with the phone still pressed to her ear, takes the blanket from the backseat, and with her right hand spreads it clumsily over Marilyn's lap. Now she does cry a little bit, but silently, sparingly, like a few droplets of condensation leaking out from a high-pressure valve.

"Look at the note that I left you."

"I saw it."

"Look again."

Sue makes herself look at the bloody message stuck to Marilyn's chest. The sheet of paper that it's written on is actually a map, and when she looks more closely she realizes that it's a map of eastern Massachusetts. It starts just west of Worcester and covers the state line right to the coast. The ragged edge of the map would seem to indicate that it had been torn out of a spiral-bound road atlas.

"What is this?"

"This is your route for the rest of the night," the voice says. "Are you ready to ride, Susan?"

Sue peels the map from Marilyn's chest and lays it on the dashboard. Above the wordPUNISHED she can see that a route has been highlighted in careful yellow marker, the lines ruled into an upand-down zigzag pattern across northern Massachusetts beneath the New Hampshire border.

On first glance the route defies logic. It is made up of a combination of country roads, grinding its way in a general northeastern direction from Gray Haven toward the coast. It is by no means direct-rather, it wobbles and bobs erratically through an apparently nonsensical symphony of detours, as if someone were following a bumblebee overland, back to its hive.

The only thing that lends any degree of order to the route is the string of small northern towns that it connects, none of them large enough to warrant red letters on the map. There are seven of these towns strung together by this jagged yellow NASDAQ line, starting with Gray Haven. From there the line meanders through communities named, in order from west to east: Winslow, Stoneview, Ashford, Wickham, and East Newbury before ending at someplace called White's Cove, which perches on Cape Ann just west of Pigeon Cove.

Sue has never heard of any of these towns before, despite the fact that she's lived in Massachusetts most of her life. She certainly can't remember ever seeing any of them on a map. Of course there are literally hundreds of crappy little burgs scattered throughout New England that no amount of regional familiarity could possibly make her aware of, but it's somehow unsettling just the same.

Although let's face it, that might be due to the partially draped corpse of her nanny in the passenger seat, not to mention the stinking, Glad bag-draped thing stowed in the back.

"You've got your route laid out for you," the voice on the phone says. "You've got your cargo in the back and you've got nine hours of night left. If you get started now you should be back in White's Cove by seven thirtyA.M. tomorrow."

Instinctively Sue's eyes go to the fuel gauge. Thank God she filled the tank after leaving work.

"Why do you want me to do this?"

"You'll figure it out as you go."

"What happens when I get to White's Cove?"

"You'll know by the time you get there."

"And that's when I get Veda back? Alive?"

"Always keep my promises, Susan."

Sue wishes that she could believe him. Right now she wishes it more than anything. "Where will she be?"

"The address is Eleven South Ocean Avenue. But fair warning, Susan: If you come even one minute late-or if you get there using any other route but the one marked in this map-you can still have her back. The only difference is that she'll be dead. Do you understand the terms of this agreement?"

"Eleven South Ocean Avenue," Sue repeats, "White's Cove."