Joe Schreiber - Chasing the dead

"Look for the statue."

"Statue?"

"And just a reminder in case you were thinking about somehow alerting the police-"

"How do I know you're telling the truth?"

"You don't."

Something happens in Sue's brain. A neurological event that she does not anticipate, a thing that begins where fear ends, a mother's outrage coupled with an ambulance driver's low-bullshit threshold. "All right." She is not yelling. She is being very quiet. "I'll do what you ask. I'll drive through these towns with this thing in back. I won't call the police or anybody else. I'll be there tomorrow morning to pick up my daughter.But you listen to me. " She pauses to take in a breath. It is a little disorienting to hear her voice sounding like this. As if some other persona has reemerged from a few years of civility, affluence, and good manners to remind her that, at one point, she understood with adolescent ruthlessness that the world ran on blood. "If you kill my little girl tonight then you better make goddamn sure that you kill me as well. Because you're taking away everything I have in the world. And I will spend every waking moment for the rest of my life tracking you down. When I do, I promise you that you will die in a way so horrible that even a sick, sadistic son of a bitch like yourself would have to spend weeks trying to come up with something more painful than what I've got planned for you." She breathes. "Now do you understandthose terms, you cocksucker, or do I have to make it clearer?"

It is a good moment-it almost makes her feel human again-but she is greeted with nothing but a puff of cottony silence from the phone and she knows that he has hung up on her yet again. At this precise instant, however, Sue Young does not care. There are welcome times when the truth spills out of our mouths because holding it back is like suicide. This is one of those times.

She puts the Expedition in drive and, gripping the map in her right hand, starts to turn around and head east.

Ten minutes later she is flying back through Gray Haven with her foot on the accelerator, the map on her lap. It's the kind of automotive sleepwalking that people do on the most familiar roads, the roads that carry them to their jobs, to school and church, the neighborhoods of their friends and family, back and forth through the towns they'll grow old and die in. The years she spent away from here might never have elapsed-she feels as if she knows every pothole and curve from Townsend Street to the outskirts of town.

She glances down at the map, at the route and the remaining six towns that lie ahead of her. Clearly they've been combined in this order for some reason, though any attempt to find logic in a system devised by a man who kidnaps infants and plucks the eyes out of their nannies is, to say the least, ill-advised.

Still, she goes over them in her mind, one at a time, seeing the names, trying to make them add up to something.

Gray Haven.

Winslow.

Stoneview.

Ashford.

Wickham.

East Newbury.

White's Cove.

Six towns she's never heard of and one she knows inside and out.

It doesn't make any sense.

Maybe it's not supposed to make any sense.

She's near the end of Townsend when another car pulls out of a side street in front of her. Sue hits the brakes. The Expedition goes into a skid, its back end coming around and finally stopping less than five feet from the other vehicle. Sue's heart stops.

It is the old farm pickup.

It sits perfectly still in front of her, its engine burbling, its headlights on. Before Sue has time to react the door opens and the driver jumps out.

This time he's standing directly in her headlights and she sees him clearly, the outline of his body as clear and bright as a life-size cardboard cutout of a pop star in a record store. But even so, the disconnect between what she's expecting and what her eyes actually report is surprising enough that it still takes the data a moment to percolate through her consciousness.

He's just a kid.

No, she thinks, not a true kid, but young and lean, late teens, with a long face, short-cropped hair, and no expression. His eyes are cups of shadow. He's wearing a T-shirt that hangs out over his jeans, and no jacket. And he's headed toward her.

Sue is still fumbling for the wheel even as he runs over to the Expedition and comes right up to the passenger side, yanks the handle, and opens the door. He actually tries to climb inside before realizing that there's something in the way.

"What the hell is this?" He's got a surprisingly deep voice for someone his size and age, and a big Adam's apple that goes up and down as he talks. He yanks the blanket off so Marilyn's face is exposed. "Holy shit!" He jumps backward, practically tripping over his own feet, and stares past Marilyn at Sue. "There's a dead girl with no eyes in your front seat!"

"Who are you?" Sue asks.

"There is a dead fucking girl with no eyes in your front seat!"

"That's my daughter's nanny, Marilyn," Sue says, and she sounds so calm saying it that she too is having some difficulty believing all of this is unfolding quite the way it seems to be. "You don't know anything about that?"

"It's already happening. Oh shit, I knew it, it's already too late." Now the kid is opening the door to the backseat, climbing into the Expedition on the right side behind Marilyn's body, and crouching down with his head low as if anticipating a mortar attack. "Come on, we've got to get out of here." This doesn't come off as a demand so much as a plea, as if he's on a mission as urgent as hers. "I'm serious, lady! Let's go!"

"Who are you?" she asks again.

"I'll tell you later, just hit it."

"Hold on," she says. "You've been following me. You're telling me that you don't have anything to do with my daughter's kidnapping?"

"Not me." The kid shakes his head and points. "Him."

Sue is about to turn around and ask the kid who he's talking about when she sees another car coming toward them from behind, rolling down the middle of the snowed-over road toward the pickup. She sees it clearly now. It's a van, the old-fashioned rectilinear model of no particular color.

"Who is that?" she asks.

"Look," the kid says, "I'm telling you for your own sake as well as mine, we've got to get out of here right now, okay? The dead travel fast. Just get us the fuck out of here."

"First tell me why you're following me."

"Toprotect you!" he explodes. "Now come on, let's go."

Sue puts the Expedition into drive and starts moving east down what's left of Townsend Street. At the same moment, on the other side of the street, the van is pulling up alongside the kid's pickup, where it creeps to a halt. She sees movement inside the van, dark and indiscriminate, and then they're too far away to see anything else.

"Who was in that van?" she asks, as Townsend Street trails away and becomes Route 117 in her rearview mirror. "Was that the man who kidnapped Veda?"

The kid crouched behind her in the backseat doesn't say anything. She can hear him breathing, cornered-animal style, and it sounds like he's trying to keep every nerve in his body from bursting through his skin all at once. Sue keeps her eyes on the road. She flashes back through everything that just happened and sees it all clearly, though it doesn't make any more sense than when it first happened. There's no question that the old farm truck was the same truck she saw out on the road an hour or so earlier, when she was first trying to dial Phillip's number in Malibu. It's the same truck that flagged her down after the night at the pumpkin patch. Probably the same truck that chased her out of the Prudential Center. And those are just the times shenoticed it. So the kid has to be an integral part of it whether he admits it or not.