Joe Schreiber - Chasing the dead

Sue raises her head, manages to peel back the lid on one eye. Phillip's corpse has fallen absolutely still and is just facing her now, what's left of his face tinged pinkish. She's not sure if this coloration is due to the blood in her own eyes, or the Expedition's taillights glowing behind his head. Whatever the cause, it makes the thing look slightly more human, less dead. He's leaning over her, and that's when she realizes she's on the ground, sprawled in the snow at the side of the road, her legs tucked underneath her. When exactly did she fall down?

"Sue," he says, "is that you?"

"Phillip." His name flows from her battered windpipe in a watery whisper, zero inflection, zero strength. "Don't hit me. Don't hurt me anymore."

"Sue, honey, what's wrong, are you…?" Phillip stops, and her sight is good enough now that she can see the wave of realization washing across his face, a single foamy whitecap across a midnight sea. "Oh no. Oh, Sue. Oh, baby." His legs buckle and he slumps down on the roadside next to her, the tailpipe of the Expedition pumping exhaust out in plumes behind his head. "I'm so sorry. I don't know what to say." He holds out one hand and then lets it fall. "He's in me, Sue. I can feel him."

She nods. It hurts. Everything does.

"That's how he works."

"I don't-"

"Listen to me, Sue. Without a vessel he's only a dismembered corpse in the ground. Regardless of what he wants you to think, he can't read minds or hunt people down by himself. That's what took him so long to find me."

"Why?"

"He only has power over the corpses he commands. He had to send one of his vessels out to kill a private detective and bring him through the route just so he could get someone with the skills to locate me. I had to keep hiding. That's why I sent Tatum to warn you."

Sue's mind darts back to the farm truck following her on and off over the past few months, how it had known where to find her. "Yousent Jeff Tatum?"

"Met him…at his brother Daniel's funeral in Gray Haven three years ago. Kept in touch with him after I went to California. When Hamilton started tracking me down in August, after I called the radio station, I contacted Jeff. Asked him to keep an eye on you."

"They got Tatum too," Sue says.

"I know."

"Phillip-"

"The worst part is, he never stops." Phillip's corpse nods shakily. "Hamilton's spirit, Sue…it's like having a fever that won't break-you can't…push through it. Always there. Always building."

"How-" Sue pauses, wipes the blood from her mouth. She's pretty sure that the bleeding has begun to taper off, but the headache…oh, the headache is another matter. It flares up with every vibration that comes through her throat, like she's got a couple of hard cons serving time breaking granite between her eyes. She tries to focus past it, making herself look at what's left of her husband. "How did this happen?"

"Doesn't matter now."

Maybe not, but she's got a few ideas of her own. "It's because we put one of his bodies, his vessels, out of commission." Her mind swirls back to the playground, that afternoon. "Hisfirst one." Maybe it's the beating she just took, or the presence of Phillip's voice, or the route itself, but she can see it all clearly. "The Engineer."

"Yes," Phillip says. "You're right. Do you remember, Sue? Can you see it?"

"Yes."

And just like that, she's back in 1983.

But it's different from the way she used to recall it, in that desolate patch of abandoned playground equipment beyond the empty outskirts of her hometown. For the first time she's actually seeing it the way it happened, not the way her memory has homogenized it over the intervening years. For the first time Sue realizes why it haunted Phillip so mercilessly ever since-because he must've remembered it this way, the way it reallywas.

In the restored memory she sees the Engineer getting out of his orange Plymouth, dressed in the bib overalls with the red handkerchief dangling from the back pocket. He's wearing a big pair of aviator-style sunglasses that cover not only his eyes but also a good part of his face above the bridge of his nose. He's sporting a workman's tan, leathery and deep, and within seconds he's already moving toward them fast, like he's on roller skates or something, Sue thinking, how can any guy move so quickly-this part is still the way she's always remembered it-and the Engineer reaches behind his back, pulling out the red handkerchief, blotting at his forehead above the sunglasses.

"My goodness," he exclaims, in a just-folks voice that's somehow all the more shocking for its laconic intonation. "Sure is a scorcher out here, isn't it?"

Sue just looks at him without answering. She looks at herself reflected times two in the big lenses of his shades, a little girl with wide eyes and skinny arms.

"Boy howdy." The Engineer jerks his head toward Phillip, standing next to her, a foot or two away. "Why, I'd think you and your friend here would be off taking a dip at the pool on a day like today, or maybe down in the creek. It's hotter than blazes out here in the sun. Enough to boil the skin right off your bones, wouldn't you say?"

"Sue, wait." Young Phillip is standing to her right, a step or two ahead of her. He looks back at the Engineer. "You want something, mister?"

At first the man doesn't turn his head away from Sue. When he does shift his attention toward Phillip, it happens reluctantly. He blots his head with his handkerchief again, and Sue notices how gingerly he applies the square of fabric to his skin.

"You're all by yourselves out here." A sly smile seems to tease at the corners of his lips, where the skin is more than slightly cracked. "You don't get scared being out here by yourselves?"

"Scared of what?" Phillip asks, his voice trembling a little, though he does a pretty good job of holding it steady.

"Oh, I don't know. A lot could happen out here in the middle of nowhere. But I guess you can take care of yourselves, can't you? How old are you?"

"Thirteen," Sue says. It comes from her so smoothly that she almost believes it herself. Because she's tall that summer, taller than Phillip, and that helps too. She can sell this lie, she realizes; she can make him believe it. Because the Engineer never takes kids older than twelve.

"Well, I suppose I'll be on my way, then. You two kids take care." He turns around and walks back to the car, climbing in. At the last minute, he sticks his head out the open window. "Say, would you do me a favor and take a look at this map, tell me how I can get back to the interstate?"

Phillip takes another step toward the Plymouth, and then another, and Sue realizes she's going with him, because they're in for a penny, in for a pound. They started this thing by walking toward the car in the first place, and they are going to find out the truth; or at least Phillip is, which means that she is too.

Sue stops walking when she gets near the driver's side window, a safe five feet away. Behind the steering wheel, the man is holding up a map of eastern Massachusetts. He pokes a finger at a crooked line connecting a cluster of towns.

"This is where I started…"

Looking up at the other side of the car, Sue sees Phillip gaping down into the Plymouth's backseat. Whatever he sees there has erased any vestige of expression from his face. Sue follows his stare. Lying there in an open cardboard box behind the driver's seat are several rolls of packaging tape, stacks of clean rags and gauze, and a large knife. The blade of the knife is very bright, very clean, and it reflects a narrow obelisk of light onto the seat cushions above it.

"I came down this way, heading west-"

In front of her, behind the wheel, the man in the bib overalls and aviator-style specs is still pointing out the route he took, tracing it with his fingertip. He doesn't appear at all concerned as Phillip wanders around the back of the Plymouth, to where Sue is standing, and stops alongside the open window of the backseat, less than a foot away from the cardboard box. She keeps waiting for the man to stop looking at the map and glance into the rearview mirror, but he doesn't.