Joe Schreiber - Chasing the dead

Her eyes dart out the windows. She tries to pay attention to the town, to figure out why the voice would be so insistent that she detour through here on her way east. But there's nothing to see. She passes a gun shop, a creepily deserted hobby store called Pastimes on the Square, some cheap housing waiting to be bulldozed, a vacant lot, and at the top of the next hill, a barren-looking little park with a statue of a man standing on a pedestal.

He's bald with muttonchops, dressed in a long coat, holding the familiar bone-saw in his right hand as he gazes off to the west.

It looks just like the figure that stands in Sheckard Park in Gray Haven. Isaac Hamilton, the name that the kid mentioned to her.

However, there's one slight difference-this version of the statue has only one arm.

It's odd enough for Sue to look twice, sure she's just seeing it at a peculiar angle, but no, the arm is gone. The left one, to be exact, the one that was holding the Bible back in Gray Haven, is missing from the shoulder. Sue has no idea why two towns would have the same historic figure immortalized in their parks, and right now she couldn't care. Except that Isaac Hamilton is linked to the towns, and the kid linked Isaac Hamilton to the Engineer…all of which brings her one step closer to understanding the man who kidnapped her daughter.

Then again the kid also said that the Engineer murdered his brother three years ago, which Sue knows is flatly impossible.

She passes the statue and sees the entire village green is full of little statues, and realizes it's not a park at all. It's a cemetery. It spreads its old, flat, bald stones out across the snowy field like candy that somebody's sucked the letters off of, and she starts to hear the poem echo through her head, the one that starts "From Ocean Street in old White's Cove." All at once, boom, the headache that she felt between her eyes comes back. It's not a flu feeling anymore, it's more like a low-pressure system moving in. The dizziness in her head turns to nausea. Something else is different too, an odd crawling twinge in her chest and abdomen that she can't quite pinpoint.

Sue floors the accelerator and speeds up as if she could leave the words and feelings behind her, but the cemetery keeps going and so does the poem in her head. She's out of breath, her lungs feeling too small to deliver air. Her head is pounding. What is it about these towns, this route, and, as the kid said, the history of murder in New England?

She's almost past the cemetery when she hears a muffled scratching coming from underneath the dashboard to her right. It's mixed in with a sliding sound, like something is trying to drag itself up a vertical surface and keeps falling. Sue follows the noise down to the cardboard box with the two steamed lobsters that Sean Flaherty gave her, six hours ago.

The box has started shifting from side to side.

Sue stares at it. The lobsters inside are dead, of course. They've been dead ever since the good people at Legal Seafood dropped them in a pot for Sean at five this afternoon.

Inside the box the scraping grows more animated. She can hear clicking sounds too, quick angry snaps, along with the scuttling of many legs.

Phillip's voice says it first.

They're alive again.

"Lazarus lobsters," Sue says, almost sounding like her old self. "Jesus lobsters, Elvis lobsters."

She rolls down her window. There's a cardboard handle on top of the box and she's going to pitch the entire thing out the window. Then she's not going to think about it anymore, just like she's not going to think about the bodies in the back of her car or the song that tells her about the history of murder in New England. In fact she's going to restrict her thoughts to Veda and how she's going to be with her in the morning as long as she does what the voice tells her. Because this is what people do when they're dealing with maniacs. They do what the voice on the phone tells them.

She reaches down for the box, her fingers starting to curl around the handle, lifting it tentatively from the floor, when a boiled red claw bursts up from a flap in the cardboard. The claw is wide open, and it snaps shut on her hand, trapping the fourth and fifth fingers. Sue shouts in pain and surprise, jerks her hand back, yanking the entire lobster out of the box with it. It's shockingly big-two and a half pounds, Sean told her, though it feels a lot heavier dangling off her hand. But that's a lot less shocking than the fact that it's whipping around, alive and completely pissed off.

She's forgotten all about the steering wheel. The Expedition veers right and then weaves sharply left, comes inches from hitting the stone fence alongside the road until Sue swings the wheel back to the center again.

The lobster holds on to her hand even as she shakes it, swings it out the open window, the thing dangling next to her face with its tail and legs clicking and snapping against the glass. Sue hits the power window, raising it so it catches the unprotected joint between the leg and claw and cuts right through it. The body of the lobster drops, leaving only the claw still gripping her fingers.

Holding the wheel steady with her knee, Sue pries the claw off, lowers the window again, and throws it out. Her hand is bleeding where the claw broke the skin, and between the pain and the cold, her arm is throbbing right up to the elbow. She presses her hand under her armpit and holds it there.

She sees that the graveyard is gone, taking the town with it, and she's back in open country again. The snow has tapered off to reveal a clear black sky. Keeping the window down, she inhales until her sinuses start to sting. The air smells clean.

She looks down on the floor, sees the empty box resting on its side, and remembers the second lobster. It's nowhere to be seen. She shuts the window next to her head and tries to listen over the whine of the wind coming through the shattered glass on the passenger's side. After a moment she hears it rustling under her seat, followed by silence. Without hesitating she leans forward and shoves her hand directly underneath her and grabs the lobster by the tail, pulling it out.

It starts wiggling. With strength that surprises even her, Sue slams it straight down on the dashboard with enough force to crack the plastic. The lobster's entire carapace explodes and sprays meat along with shards of shell and warm, salty water across her face and lap. She flings the thing's carcass across the passenger seat and out the broken window.

She gets out the map again and draws a line to the next town, measuring the distance at two finger-widths. According to the map's legend that means that Stoneview is about fifteen miles from here. She consciously tries to recall the poem that the kid recited to her, the one that she was terribly certain she could speak word for word only a few minutes earlier.

Now she can't even remember the first line.

Following the capillary bed of secondary roads outlined on the map, Sue finds herself headed down yet another nameless stretch of blacktop. It's empty, but it's been plowed recently, and she's able to cruise along at a bracing seventy with decent visibility. Once again the mindlessness of driving becomes a tonic. There's no sign of the van or any other traffic. There is nothing but darkness and the broken yellow line receding in her headlights.

She's ten miles from Stoneview when her phone starts beeping.

For the first time she's seized by the inexplicable compulsion not to answer it. She knows that it's him, the voice of the man who has her daughter, and she has to answer. Still she lets it ring half a dozen times before finally forcing her hand to pick it up and hit theTALK button.

"Hello?"

The voice is right there in her ear, a moist, heavy murmur.