Joe Schreiber - Chasing the dead

But it is, or it was-a child.

And behind it, another.

Sue tries to swallow, finds no moisture in her throat and coughs. Her eyes flick to the sideview mirror. Behind her, all around her, children fill the street. They spill in stumbling profusion, their black eyes like holes punched through the very texture of time itself. Moving on the Expedition in a teeming mass.

Detective Yates, from the corner of her mind:They dug up her body, took it away. They did it with all of them.

Sue stares at the children.His children. From the summer of 1983, and 1793, and all the summers in between, and all the summers since. Their faces black with the rage of the dead. More than she can count. Surrounding the vehicle, filling every window, approaching the glass. Fingers scratch against it, peeling at the rubber gaskets with horrible eagerness.

The cell phone begins to ring. She doesn't answer it.

She doesn't have to. Outside she can already hear Isaac Hamilton, laughing.

The children crawl up on the hood and begin pounding the windshield with their fists. Sue pulls Veda from the passenger seat, squeezes into the back, and sees them through the rear window. They're on top of the Expedition too-she hears them up there scurrying over the roof in quick furtive movements, like rats, and sees one peering down from above at her, dragging the cold ice of its bare-bone fingertips against the glass. Veda looks at the face, her eyes going wide, the corners of her mouth melting downward as two large, frightened tears roll down her cheeks.

"It's all right, baby."

Is it? I don't think so. I don't think you can get much further from "all right" than this. And if you don't come up with something right now-

Sue's gaze darts over the interior of the Expedition and settles on the box in the back, an idea forming in her mind. She parks Veda in the backseat, dead center, as far from the windows as possible, and buckles her in. "Stay here." Veda just cries harder, arms outstretched, needing to be consoled, but Sue can't be with her right now. "Baby, it's okay, we're almost done."

Kneeling next to her daughter, Sue sticks her arm into the back, rips open the cardboard case, and pulls out two bottles of the liquor she's been riding with all night. In the midst of everything, the label catches her eye. It's 151-proof rum, she realizes-her reward for getting Sean Flaherty his little piece of real estate on 151 Exeter Street.

Thank you, Sean.

She tosses both bottles into the front seat, then grabs two more, crawls back into the front, and peels off the plastic seals, uncapping each one. Fumes of high-proof alcohol immediately begin to flood the car as she grabs a handful of the wadded-up faxes from the floor. She twists up the papers, ramming them down the necks of the bottles, spilling some of the rum on another piece as she punches the dashboard lighter.

Next to her, behind her head, she hears glass shatter. She feels a small, cold hand groping in the roots of her hair, and ignores it. The cigarette lighter pops out and Sue jerks it free at the same moment that she hears Veda's crying becoming one long scream.

Sue's head snaps around and she sees them crawling in through the back windows, the dead children, coming at her daughter from both sides. They're using one another to stand on, holding one another up, one of them already head-and-shoulders into the backseat.

"Leave her alone," Sue snarls, and touches the lighter's red-hot tip to the rum-soaked fax paper in her left hand. It goes up with a suddenwhoomph of heat and light and Sue waves the burning paper at the children clustering in the windows. They don't pull away from it, but they don't come forward either-for a second they just hang where they are, half in and half out, waiting to see what's going to happen next. She drops the lighter on the floor, touching the burning sheets to the pages she's wadded up in the liquor bottles, then uncaps another bottle and splashes as much booze as she can on the children trying to attack her daughter. Veda is screaming, arms outstretched, begging Sue to take her away from this.

Almost there, honey. Just one more second.

And Sue heaves the burning wad at the corpse on the right. There's a loud pop and the thing is immediately enveloped in a thin jacket of flame, flailing, struggling to retract itself from the car. Black smoke billows off of it along with a high, sick stench that defies metaphor. Within seconds the backseat of the vehicle has started to burn.

Sue lunges forward, unbuckles Veda, and pulls her out of the seat-Veda practically leaping into her arms-and picks up the two remaining paper-stuffed bottles with her free hand. They're heavy and slick with spilled alcohol, and one of the bottles slides out, bounces, and hits the floorboards, the clear liquor glugging out under the seat. Sue tucks the other one under her arm, cradles Veda, and swings herself out of the burning vehicle.

The children crowd before her, a wall of stolen flesh. Beyond them the street slopes downward toward the last statue at the bottom of the hill.

Sue looks at the remaining bottle in her hand, then at the mound of snow with the shovel next to it, where Veda was half-buried in her basket. She leans back, touching the fax-paper fuse to the flames flickering from inside the Expedition. The instant she sees the paper ignite, Sue hurls the bottle dead-center into the army of murdered children, whipping her body around 180 degrees in the same motion, arms and shoulders curling to protect Veda.

The force of the explosion hits her like a battering ram, pushing her away on a wave of heat so intense she feels her skin baking dry. She and her daughter both collapse into the wonderful coolness of the snow. When she sits up, clutching Veda with both hands, Sue sees the corpses churning in a sea of fire, scrambling everywhere at once. The air is filled with an awful screaming noise, of pain and fury, and the acrid odor is everywhere. And as bad as the stench is, the noise is worse. It's the sound of Isaac Hamilton screaming from every mouth.

Sue doesn't wait.

She already knows that she'll get only one chance at this, maybe not even that. Running with Veda down the long slope of the hill, she shifts her daughter's weight to her left side and grabs the shovel sticking out of the snow, not slowing down. Fifteen feet later she loses her footing and lands flat on her ass, sliding and scrambling with the shovel in one hand and Veda in the other. Sue manages to slow herself, uses the shovel to get up again, and keeps running on the edges of her feet. Three-quarters of the way down she snaps a glance back over her shoulder.

Up at the top of the street, the children are still milling around the burning Expedition-some of them are on fire but not many, most are getting reorganized, pulling themselves together. Sue doesn't know how much time she has. In the end she supposes it doesn't matter.

Moving again, she finally gets down to the bottom where the different roads converge along the town's little mock waterfront. Directly in front of her, the last statue is situated in a wide circle of black dirt, rising ten feet over her head. It is simply a stone pillar, maybe sixteen inches in diameter, with a large metal object mounted on top. Sue doesn't have to look any closer to know that the sculpted object is an oversized model of a human heart. Isaac Hamilton's heart. This is where they buried the last of him, that monster, that history of murder in New England, at the end of the route.

She steps into the circle of dirt and feels it trembling under her feet, rhythmically, thump-thump,thump-thump.The ground is shaking hard enough to make the pillar tremble visibly, and she can see the statue of the heart on top shaking along with it. It starts pounding harder, and on some level Sue knows this is because Hamilton's heart is pumping its will, its fury, into every corpse at its disposal.