Joe Schreiber - Chasing the dead

Sue's foot goes down hard on the brakes. Time seems to take in a deep breath and hold it as the Expedition throws itself into a spin, Sue floating underneath her seat belt, light and darkness flickering past her windshield like a dreaming eye.

There's the flat crack of a gunshot and a shout of light as the Expedition's side window blows out with a crash. Next to her the kid howls. The car shoots through a crust of snow and grinds to a stop.

"Help me," the kid is saying in a watery voice, somewhere behind her head. "Please help me."

Sue sticks it in neutral, unfastens her seat belt, and starts to turn around. The kid's leg is still twisted between the seats but she can't see the rest of him down there in the dark. His breathing sounds like somebody blowing through a garden hose. On an unconscious level her brain is making assessments, ambulance driver assessments, and none of them are good. "Don't try to move. Are you hit?"

The kid doesn't say anything. He just makes that sound again.

She switches on the dome light and hears herself suck in a deep breath through her teeth. The kid is lying there looking up at her. The entire lower right side of his face has been obliterated, reduced to a lumpish mass of blood, muscle, and exposed bone. His right ear is gone and blood is pouring steadily down his neck from a hole in the side of his skull, the fresh blood steaming in the cold air that comes in through the shattered window. His eyes are dreamlike and moony, the lids fluttering.

He finally manages to speak, the words sounding like they're coming from the bottom of a bowl of extra-thick oatmeal. "Is it bad?"

"You're going to be all right. Just hold still."

"Is it bad?" he asks again, though he doesn't sound particularly alarmed. "It's bad, isn't it?" There's a wet puttering sound and that's when Sue sees the gash in his neck, blood bubbling up through it. "Oh man," the kid says weakly. "This sucks."

"Don't try to talk."

He mumbles something that she doesn't understand. Then he grabs her hand and squeezes it, and his eyes go up to her, becoming intensely, almost preternaturally bright, making one last effort at communication. "I've been trying to contact you. I'm sorry. I waited too long."

"Take it easy."

"Kept backing off, when I thought I saw him."

"It's okay."

"That time downtown, I almost caught up to you, but backed away at the last minute. He knows me. Thought I saw him in the crowd. Couldn't take any chances. Afraid he might be using me to find you."

"Jeff," she says, with infinite tenderness, "the Engineer's dead."

"Not the Engineer." He coughs, struggles to swallow, his throat making that same thick bubbling noise. "See, it's not the Engineer, not really. It's Isaac Hamilton. He's…"

The bubbling noise stops. The kid's eyes glaze. It's not a dramatic thing but Sue has seen it enough times to know what it means. She doesn't have to check his pulse but she picks up his wrist anyway and waits a long moment before laying it down again. There are now three dead bodies in the car with her and two of them were people she's spoken to within the last few hours. For all she knows her daughter is already dead as well. There is no reasonable explanation for this except that she is caught in a nightmare. But it is not the kind of nightmare she will awaken from unless her definition ofawakening islosing her mind.

On the other side of the windshield, something hits the hood of the Expedition with a thump. Sue's skeleton jerks inside her and she turns around to look. Beyond the windshield, standing on her hood, she sees a pair of leather boots.

She looks up, but can't see above his knees. The roof is blocking the rest of his body. The only other part of him she can see is the bottom of his long coat flapping at his legs. He's so close to her that she can see the color of the coat, dark green with a red flannel lining. Sitting here mesmerized she can literally count the buttons holding the lining into place.

Sue leaps, ears ringing, the gunshot coming from the roof of the Expedition above her head. Before she can tense up it happens again.

On reflex-at the moment, she has nothing else left in her arsenal-she throws the car into drive and hits the accelerator. The Expedition lurches to life. Something bumps off the roof and the man on her hood is gone. Sue takes the wheel and steers it back onto the road, looking in the rearview mirror but not seeing anything back there. He's just gone. The road ahead of her leading into Winslow is empty.

She drives fifty yards up the road, her stomach twisted backward on itself, the faint lights of Winslow beginning to prism in her eyes. When the road gets too blurry to drive she stops again, crosses her arms over her chest, and for a long time she just sits there holding on to herself and trembling. The dome light is still on and when she reaches around to switch it off with a clumsy, shock-stiffened arm she notices the kid sprawled across the backseat.

There are two bullet holes through the kid's eyes. Wisps of smoke are still floating from the sockets. Sue sees this but it doesn't register with her immediately. She is filled with the simultaneous urges to scream, throw up, and squeeze her own eyes shutBut she sublimates all of these urges, puts them aside, with the single thought of Veda waiting for her at the end of the line. Veda the punctuation mark, the only good reason, the final and absolute meaning in her otherwise iffy existence. Veda, whom she is prepared to kill for, whom she'll die trying to get back. The simplicity of the thought steels her, helps her focus, until it is the only thing she knows.

Veda.

Baby.

I'm coming. Mommy's coming. I promise.

And she drives the rest of the way into Winslow.

Winslow is only marginally less depressing than Gray Haven. It's deserted here as well, the sidewalks lit by occasional streetlights so she can see empty storefronts along with a barbershop and a boarded-up Depression-era movie theater called the Bijou. A dilapidated church made of fieldstone rises above the square. The local bar on the corner is the Crow's Tap and there is indeed a sign above the door with a picture of a crow tapping its beak against a keg. But if there's anyone getting a nightcap inside, they're doing it in the dark. Not the faintest trace of light trickles through the bar's front window. There are no footprints in the blanket of snow that lies across the town, no trace of life anywhere. And like Gray Haven, Winslow seems to be a town inhabited only by bad memories and worse weather.

A speed limit sign commands her to slow to 25 and Sue automatically lifts her foot from the pedal, not wanting to get pulled over by the town's one cop. Considering her current cargo of corpses, a routine speeding violation would turn into tomorrow'sUSA Today headline for the deputy lucky enough to stumble across it. She isn't really thinking about any of this-in her current frame of numbness it would be a mistake to say that she's technicallythinking about anything at all-but she knows if she gets stopped that she will never see her daughter again. This again is nightmare logic, but it is logic just the same. It is the kind of blessed circular logic, beloved of zealots and extremists everywhere, that means she doesn't have to think about it anymore beyond that.

But the doubts remain.

What if I do start thinking about it right now? The dead bodies, the kidnapping, the route, the voice on the phone-will I go crazy? Will my brain just throw up its hands and say That's it, I quit? Exactly how much horror and shock is the mind capable of absorbing, really?

She pushes it away.

At twenty-five miles an hour Main Street seems to go on forever. She speeds up, risking thirty-five, then forty. Despite the wind blowing in through the broken window, she's flushed, her cheeks and earlobes burning. She feels hot and dizzy, as if she has the flu.