Джеффри Дивер - Nothing Good Happens After Midnight - A Suspense Magazine Anthology

George blinks slow. He’s still there.

George doesn’t wait to consider doubts about all of his wildest tales colliding tonight. He doesn’t care if he is insane and imagining his robot foe. He needs to face all of this lunacy. He stops the Cat, jumps out, and runs headlong for the robot man. It is not Reeker. The man ahead has the frame of a skeleton with skin. This man wears the same jeans and boots as fake-Kyle in the bar. George remembers logging Kyle’s mid-calf Timberland’s when he removed his snow-cleats in Malforson’s mudroom.

“Kyle, it was you! You killed Martha!” George yells. “Stop!”

Robot Man stops, turns, and pauses as George stops short. Facing George, he opens his coat, withdraws the Dickinson, and flings it flat, like a skipping stone, to sink deep in snow between two birches.

Next, he pulls George’s hunting knife from his back pocket.

“I guess it’s mano a mano now, rude boy,” Robot Man says.

In the cold, the smell of George’s breakfast sandwich, still hot given the aluminum wrapper, wafts. It blooms around him.

“Take off that fucking box,” George yells. His rage will not allow him to assess the danger of a man with an extended knife. He feels his rage and his need to remedy Martha’s murder makes him a triple lumberjack and must-be Kyle a toothpick.

Robot Man removes the robot box, throws it to the side.

“Remember me now, rude boy? Ten years ago?”

It is indeed Kyle, but George does not remember him from ten years ago.

“You’re a fucking psychopath. I have no idea who you are.”

“Of course you wouldn’t, rude boy. Of course some big man like you wouldn’t see an insignificant ant like me and would stomp on my foot and walk away. No apologies.”

“That day in the Strand? I accidentally stepped on you? This is why? That’s why you murdered her?” George’s voice is hysterical now, he can barely contain himself from launching at Kyle, hell with his own hunting knife in Kyle’s hands.

“You know, rude boy, that’s the thing with big men like you. You never think you need to care about the people you push out of your way. You never think that maybe, maybe us insignificant ants are mightier than you. Never think we’re a threat. Well I’m a fucking threat, rude boy. I’ll snake away from you, and I’ll kill Karen before you catch up. I’ll take all your life away, make you as insignificant as an ant. I was on my way for you, yeah, when I got popped 9 years ago. I’ve grown madder at you every single fucking day I sat in that cell box. I got your plate number. I knew who you were.”

George lunges for Kyle, but Kyle, true to his word, turns swift and snakes away, down the seam of the mountain, towards Karen, weaving between trees. George is having difficulty keeping up with the snake despite his gripping cleats, but as Kyle is leaving the web of light between trees, a galloping beast leaps in the air and onto Kyle. Kyle is stomped by the animal into the deep snow.

George sees his knife at the base of a Douglas fir, a tree owning layers of umbrella limbs that shield the earth beneath from too much snow. He grabs the knife and, looking at the animal that leapt, sees a familiar figure. It’s Cope all right. Several coyotes stand around in a circle, yipping at Kyle, and yipping at George’s pocket with the breakfast sandwich.

“Cope, off him now, Old Girl. Good Girl. Off.”

Cope, barking mad, backs off Kyle, who struggles to get out of the snow and off his back. George quick steps to Kyle, throwing Cope the breakfast sandwich, bends, and grabs Kyle around his scrawny neck with one bear claw of a hand. With his other, he holds the now unsheathed knife to Kyle’s temple. “You’re coming with me to the river,” he says.

George knows the cold side of the mountain like the back of his own ass. He’s the only one who can work it. He’s got Kyle tied with safety rope, hands and feet, sitting in his passenger seat, right where Reeker was only twenty minutes ago. George is not calling Karen on the walkie now. George has definitely forgotten he wanted to tell Karen he loves her tonight. He has a killer to kill. He has a wrong to right. He has his love’s murder to vindicate.

Has George ever been this homicidal?

No, not ever. But love will do that to you sometimes. Ten years of grief and guilt, guilt for not saving her, that will do that to you sometimes. Being stalked for ten years by a psychopath who wears a homemade robot head, that will fucking do that to you sometimes. Knowing your haste and inadvertent rudeness, a simple second of stepping on a stranger’s foot, led to death. Such snap insanity, such freak and fatal instances, will do that to you sometimes.

At the bottom of the cold side of the mountain, after barreling through the steeps, blind through the dark, which George did not fear, for he’s numb now, they reach the raging river, cold as arctic ice. This violent river never freezes given the constant current.

It’s loud here from the roiling water and the howling wind, which funnels through the basin’s valley. It sounds like a freight train colliding with a rocket during blast off. Around where George has dragged Kyle, light from the snowcat illuminates a bubble of river bank. George’s legs are a foot deep in snow as he removes, with one meatpaw of a hand, the ropes from Kyle’s hands and feet. The ropes go in the river. The entire while, George holds Kyle around his neck. He could crush his windpipe with a mere fraction more of pressure.

It must be 2:00 a.m. now, and, having left his gloves in the cab, George’s thick fingers are beginning to prickle in tightened circulation.

Ignoring Kyle’s throttled cries, which are drowned by the sounds of a train and a rocket, George lifts Kyle as if he’s a single log and thrusts him in the freezing cold water. The wild current sucks Kyle in and away, bangs his head against boulders, drowns him, crushes him, kills him of hypothermia in ten seconds flat.

George watches all ten seconds, and when he looks away for a break, there along the bank, in the far-reach edge of his snowcat’s light, stands Reeker, naked, his hat off, bald. He wears only snowshoes, which, George guesses, the fucker must have stowed in the woods or stolen from a staff cabin. He’s here premeditated. All his round parts, all there, now. Reeker holds a bar of soap in his hands. It dawns on George that this is the Spine Ripper’s modus operandi : Reeker cleans himself in freezing river water before a kill. At least George hopes it’s before, and that nobody from the mountain is already dead. He thinks this because he doesn’t see a body dragged here, waiting to be fileted and deboned, as other bodies were left at other watering holes.

“Reeker,” George says.

Reeker stares back, that same black-eyed, emotionless expression. Despite this blizzard, despite this cold air, despite it all, George notices the man is aroused. Reeker enjoys the fright he’s causing George, the power is a sexual charge. This threat is real. Sure enough, Reeker makes known his weapons by drawing George’s eyes to a tree stump, upon which sits a long serrated knife and a small carving knife.

They must have been in his coat pocket.

He looks to Reeker’s snowshoes.

Shit.

George is sinking deeper in the heavy snow where he stands, and now it’s too late. He might as well be in cement. He’s stuck. He can’t turn and run. He can’t reach any better packed glade, covered in powder, but at least not as keeping as this quicksand. And even if he could run, this larger man, this brutal murderer, would catch him in those snowshoes of his, thrust a knife in George’s back to slow him. Then gut him. Filet him.

George is out of moves, and he knows Reeker knows it.