Joe Schreiber - Chasing the dead

Sliding out of her seat, she jumps down and walks around the back of the Expedition. From here she can see that the rear door of the van has been knocked open and hangs crookedly from its hinges. There's a faint light on inside. Sue takes two steps, hearing her feet scrape the snow off the road as she advances toward the van, then cranes her neck for a closer look.

All the seats have been removed, creating a featureless cave. Sprawled on the floor, not moving, are two corpses that by now she recognizes immediately-her nanny, Marilyn, and Jeff Tatum. Marilyn is on her side, her legs flopped at an angle, one arm across her face. Jeff Tatum is facedown.

There's nothing else back here.

Keeping her distance, Sue walks sideways around the van. She sees a child's car seat on the front passenger side.

Veda's car seat.

It's empty.

The driver's seat is empty as well.

Sue slowly opens the passenger door, leaning in, placing one hand on the padded car seat, fingertips brushing over the stale cracker crumbs and dried raisins that have found their way into its creases over the months. The fabric upholstery is still warm. Pressing her nose against the seat's headrest, Sue smells Veda's hair, where the back of her skull probably lay just a few seconds earlier.

Veda, what did they do with you? Where are you now?

Behind her in the darkness, she hears the trill of the cell phone in the Expedition. She starts walking toward it and thinks she sees something moving in the back of the vehicle, the shape in the garbage bags sitting upright against the rear window.

Watching her.

Sue blinks, squinting. It's too dark to tell whether she's imagining him there or not. Up front the phone is still ringing. That's definitely real. She opens the driver's side door, takes the phone, and steps away. Her headache is gone again, drowned in adrenaline.

Sue hitsTALK.

"Where's my daughter?"

"Oh, that's right," the voice on the other end says. "You thought she was in the van, didn't you? Well, it's a good thing she wasn't, Susan. You could've really hurt her when you crashed into it." He pauses. "But if I were you, I wouldn't worry about where she is now, just where you're going to be in another ninety minutes, when her life is on the line."

"White's Cove. I'll be there."

"That's good," the voice says. "Meanwhile it looks like your passenger is showing some life of his own."

She glances into the back of the Expedition. The shape against the glass is no longer there. He must've lain down again or lost his strength. Maybe he wasn't sitting up at all. Walking to the driver's side, the phone clasped to her ear, Sue looks in but doesn't see the thing in the garbage bags poking its head up. The Expedition is silent inside. She climbs behind the wheel, starts the engine. "You want me to-"

"Get back on the road," the voice on the other end says. "Get moving."

Sue puts the Expedition in gear. She drives the rest of the way out of town. The yellow lines leap through her headlights, behind the snow, a peculiar feeling of dislocation filtering through her mind. Something is happening here. She's going forward, but she's also traveling backward. Backward in time, more than twenty years, to the day that she and Phillip saw the man at the park. This is not a voluntary remembrance. It's like the memory is being leached from her pores.

Looking through the windshield of the Expedition, Sue can already make out the worn-out assortment of leftover playground equipment through eleven-year-old eyes, wilting in the muggy heat of that lost August afternoon. She and Phillip were sitting on the cracked plastic swings, idly kicking their legs at the small patches of muddy earth underneath them, the last remnants of a weak rain two days earlier. Twenty yards away, two younger children, scrubby-looking toddlers in dirty shirts and skinned knees, giggled and shrieked as they ran up and down through the low weeds while their mothers, mobile-home women in Spandex pants, watched anxiously, smoking cigarettes.

They were the only other kids here. Most people had stopped letting their children venture beyond the center of town that summer. Instead they went to the movies or the mall or played at Sheckard Park in the middle of town, or their parents packed them off to band camp or chauffeured them to the gated community pool two towns over. Sue's mother didn't know that she and Phillip had ridden their bikes out here today-she thought they were at the East Town Mall catching a matinee-and Phillip's parents…well, Phillip's parents never really seemed to question where Phillip was. When in doubt, they assumed that he was at the public library, studying. And more often than not, they were right.

But today, he and Sue had come out here to sit on the swings, kick their feet up and catch a too-infrequent breeze lifting from the empty field down the road, bringing the smell of industrial solvents from the mill in town. Phillip had bought them both Cokes from the 7-Eleven on the bike ride out, the wet plastic bottles covered with dirt and wood chips. Sue wasn't sure why they'd come here, except that they liked it-the conversations they had here seemed different from any conversation she ever had with anybody else, ever. Sure, she and Phillip would talk about school and TV, and how screwed up their parents were. But they also talked a lot about the future-Phillip had already decided he was going to be some kind of millionaire, Sue said she wanted to be an Alaskan bush pilot or possibly a doctor. Sometimes they didn't talk about anything at all, just sat in comfortable silence.

It was during one of those silences, disturbed only by the soft creak of the swings, when Phillip had glanced up and said, almost conversationally, "Hey. Do you recognize that car?"

Sue looked past the dirty playground equipment over to the flattened patch of dirt that served as a parking lot. She saw two rundown cars that the trailer-park moms had arrived in, a rusted-out Chevy and a Ford station wagon with fake wood paneling, parked right in front of the gate. Across the lot, in the shadow of a giant elm tree, sat a long, boxy sedan, a Plymouth or something, she wasn't sure. It was burnt orange with a black roof. From where she and Phillip sat now, there was just enough of a glare on the windshield that she couldn't tell whether or not there was someone behind the wheel.

"It's been there for a while," Phillip said. "It pulled up right after we got here. Did you notice?"

Sue shook her head, still swinging back and forth, dragging the toes of her Chuck Taylors in the cracked and drying mud. Shehadn't noticed, which was strange-her mother was always telling her what an observant girl she was. But the Plymouth had arrived so silently that it must have completely escaped her attention. Like it materialized out of nowhere, she thought, and shivered.

"What if it's him?" Phillip asked abruptly.

She glanced at him. "Cut it out."

"I'm serious. You know he's out there somewhere. It could be him."

"Oh, please," Sue said, in the drabbest voice she could muster. They almost never talked about the Engineer. Not because it scared them, but quite the opposite-it was old news, almost boring to them. All summer the Engineer was all that everybody in town talked about, certainly their parents and teachers and neighbors never gave the topic a rest.

He jumped off his swing. "I'm going over there to check it out."

"Oh, right." She was used to this from him. "What are you going to do, tap on the glass and ask him, Excuse me, do you mind if I check your trunk for human heads?"

"He always goes for the eyes," Phillip said, not looking back at her. "He shoots them out. He doesn't keep souvenirs."

"That's disgusting."

"It's true and you know it. It's in all the papers. And he only gets kids twelve and under."