Joe Schreiber - Chasing the dead

"Why did you run away the last time you saw me?" she asks.

No reply. Sue looks back. Then she sees the headlights coming up behind them fast. Right away she knows it has to be the van.

It's approaching fast, and she doesn't see any particular reason to try to outrun it, especially not with the roads the way they are. So she just lets it get up close behind her, until the kid cowering in her backseat realizes that it's there too and starts freaking out again.

"Wait a second, what are you doing?" he asks. "He's getting too close. He's going to see me."

"Then keep your head down," Sue says, and pulls the wheel hard to the right, giving the van plenty of room to pass. Sure enough, the van swings into the oncoming lane, right alongside them, and the kid in her backseat shuts up, ducking his head. Sue is aware of the looming dark shape of the van holding at fifty miles an hour to her immediate left. Then a flashlight beam sweeps out of the driver's side of the van, trained directly on Sue's face, and it's so bright that when she looks over she can't see anything but white light that makes her eyes ache.

"Don't look at him!" the kid's voice pipes up from behind her. "Don't let him see your face!"

For about half a second she considers hitting the brakes to get the light off her face and then disregards the idea-again, why bother? The van's driver apparently sees whatever he was looking for, a scared woman in her thirties with a dead body partially uncovered in the passenger seat, and the flashlight beam goes off, leaving spots flashing in Sue's eyes. The van's engine revs and it goes blasting up ahead of her, disappearing around the next curve.

"He's gone," she tells the kid. "You can come up now."

"He's not gone." He sits up, climbing and unfolding himself into the backseat right behind her head. "He's just playing with you."

"Who is he? Who areyou?"

"My name's Jeff Tatum." He tosses it out there so offhandedly that it has to be the truth. "You don't know me. I live in Gray Haven."

"You've been following me for months." This is just a guess but she's pretty sure that if she's wrong, he'll tell her. "What do you want? How do you know me?"

Big surprise, the kid doesn't answer. Sue realizes that he's reached between the seats and grabbed the map with the route planned out on it. He stares at it. "Where did you get this?"

"It was stuck to Marilyn's body."

"Punished, what does that mean?"

"It means he was punishing me. Killing Marilyn and leaving her body here was my punishment. Why-"

"What did you do?"

She turns around, looks at him. "I'm done answering questions here. So far you haven't told me anything."

But Jeff Tatum is just staring at the map, reading the names of the towns aloud. "Winslow, Stoneview, Ashford, Wickham…" He jerks his head up at the road in front of them. "Whoa, wait a second. You're not actuallyfollowing this route, are you?"

"Yes."

"Oh hell no. You can't. You can't do that."

He starts to crumple the map up and Sue grabs it back from him, stuffing it down between her knees, then turns around far enough to look him straight in the eyes. "Leave it alone. I don't know who you are or what you want but so far all I've seen you do is jump in my car and come unglued. It's been an insane night so far and unless you start telling me what you know about my daughter you're bouncing right out of here even faster than you came in, and I don't care who you're running from."

"Listen to me, Sue, Ms. Young, seriously-" The earnestness that comes into his voice now is almost as alarming as the fact that he knows her name. "I'm sorry about earlier, when I stopped you up the road. I figured that you were calling the police, or even worse, on the phone with him, and I knew if I tried to say anything to you, he'd hear me. I panicked and got back in the truck and drove away."

"Who is he?"

But Jeff Tatum is looking out the windshield at the road ahead. "I don't know what he told you about this route or these towns, or what you think you're doing, but this is really a huge mistake."

"Let me tell you what I know," she says. "I know that somebody kidnapped my daughter tonight. Whoever it is killed her nanny and he's given me orders to drive through these roads and these towns by tomorrow morning if I want to get her back. I don't know why he wants me to do it, and I don't care. All I know is that I'm driving his route."

Of course she's left out one small detail, the thing wrapped in garbage bags in the back of her car, the whole point of everything. And the kid seems to know it too. He doesn't say anything, but his eyes watch her in the rearview mirror, reminding her of how they gleamed from the truck's mirror earlier, only now they look softer, haunted by something deep inside.

"Why were you following me?" she asks.

"I already told you, to protect you." He sounds like he means it. "To protect you and your daughter and other people from getting killed."

"You're protecting me by stopping me from doing what this guy is telling me to do?"

"Exactly."

"That doesn't make any sense."

"If you know your history it does."

"History of what? People who do stupid things?"

"The history of murder in New England."

"And you know about this, why?"

"I've done research. I know this route. I know what it can do. Just trust me, okay, this is not something you want to mess around with."

That does it. Sue takes her foot off the gas, letting the Expedition roll to a gentle halt. Of course the kid notices this and pokes his head back up hopefully. "Wait, we're stopping?"

"Get out."

"Wait, you can't just leave me here."

"Believe me," Sue says, "I'd like to."

"I'm trying to help you."

Sue opens her door and climbs out into the cold stillness of the long, empty road in front of them. "Come on, let's go."

"What are you doing?"

"Rearranging a few things. You're sitting up front with me. And then you're going to tell me what I need to know." She looks him right in the eye. "I mean it."

Their first job is hoisting Marilyn's body from the front seat and transferring it to the back. The kid holds Marilyn's legs and Sue takes her under the arms, with the nanny's head propped against her chest so it doesn't fall backward. For about two seconds Sue thinks this is going to be difficult for her emotionally, cradling the lifeless body of the woman who cared for her daughter, but she surprises herself with her own stoicism. Not that she doesn't love Marilyn like a little sister, not that the horror at what happened has diminished one iota. But these feelings have become remote, as if her heart's fallen asleep the way a leg or a foot might when circulation has been cut off.

The kid-well, the kid is a different story.

He tries to be a tough customer about it but when he gets back into the passenger seat next to Sue she can see how washed-out he looks, his face the color of the mushrooms that grow under the bridge in the summer, the slick nasty ones with spots on them. Mentally she's readjusted his age to seventeen at the outside. He keeps wiping his hands on his jeans and that Adam's apple of his just keeps bobbing and jerking like he's trying to swallow something greasy that he can't quite keep down.

"I shouldn't be up here. He might see me."

"You can crouch down if it makes you feel better," Sue says.

He tries. He's too tall. "Not all the way. There's nothing to hide behind."

"If the van comes you can jump into the backseat. But right now I want you up here. Now, fasten your seat belt." She hits the gas.

The kid grabs the dashboard. "Hold on, where are we going? We're not going to Winslow. I thought you were turning around."

"Winslow is exactly where we're going," she says, "and after that, the next town on that map, all the way through, until we get to what is it, White's Harbor?"