Rob Thurman - Roadkill

“Forget the brandy.” Niko turned back to Abelia-Roo, one more narrowed glance letting me know other things wouldn’t be so easily forgotten. Those things were starting to add up at a fast and furious rate. I had four gates to pay for now. “When was Suyolak taken? Do you have a description of the men and the truck they transferred the coffin into? And were there any strangers around beforehand, asking questions about Rom culture or history?”

“A researcher, you mean. A professor and, yes, one did. We are Rom, not naïve sheep. Of course we know he was behind it. He came to talk of our legends. He brought up the legend of Suyolak over and over. Could he really heal any wound, any illness? We took his money, spun him nonsense tales, and sent him on his way. We’d planned on moving on the next day anyway, but the next day was not soon enough.” She pounded her fist sharply against the table. “ Johai! The card he gave us was false. The name equally false. He was a tall man, silver hair, dark eyes.” Her hands fluttered about, then disappeared and reappeared with one of her infamous tiny bags. “That night they came, night before last. The truck had no license plate. The men wore jeans, black shirts, and ski masks. They shot five of our clan; shot them dead and carried Suyolak away.”

Niko said, “He needs someone healed then.” I nodded in agreement. Whoever it was hadn’t been trying to hide that.

“It would seem.” Abelia had spilled a small mound of gray powder on the table and was stirring it randomly with a sticklike finger. “We gathered the rest of our men and drove the roads searching for them, but found nothing. The Plague of the World was gone.”

By now she’d drawn an elaborate figure in the powder, one piece of it pointed at me like a spear. I snorted and passed my hand over it, wiping it out and leaving a clean surface of powder. I drew a tic-tac-toe design in the middle. The letters to “screw you” fit perfectly-it even left a nice neat space between the two words.

“Unless that’s anthrax and you’ve gotten Ebola-infected flying monkeys waiting outside for me, you’re out of luck,” I responded. “I know you fool the marks, but didn’t your mommy tell you there was no such thing as magic?” The Calabassa she’d sold us had been a thing of technology made by a race long extinct. Iron and zinc were proven to block psychics… by science. I knew that because Nik had made me watch some long, boring documentary on it. And mummy cats? Wahanket infused them with a tiny portion of his own life force… I absolutely did not want to know how.

But magic? Spells and fairy dust? Fall into the piranha pool at the local zoo and try tossing your magic powder at them. See what happens-beyond seasoning the human soup, doubtfully much. To believe in magic, you had to have faith. I saved my faith, what faith I had, for lead and steel, guns and blades. They worked. Even monsters laughed at the idea of magic.

She swept the powder back into the bag. “I and five of my best will follow you in your search. We will need to be there to escort the coffin back to the clan.”

True. We’d need one of their RVs. People are going to give you a second look when you’re driving down the interstate with a coffin strapped to the top of your car. Then again, I’d sooner ride on top of that coffin buck naked, eating nachos and waving a Yankees foam finger, than have Abelia-Roo tagging along.

“We can rent a truck,” I said dismissively, “when we find it. Or just use the one we find it in.”

“You will also need me to make sure the seals are intact on the coffin.”

“We’ll get a padlock. There are Home Depots everywhere.” I nudged Niko with my shoulder to move the situation along. “Hand over the money. We’ll call you when we have what’s-his-name back.”

Niko didn’t cooperate. “She may be right. It might be a good idea to have along those who’ve been responsible for Suyolak for so long. They know more about him than we can find out in weeks of research. Weeks we don’t have. If he gets free before we find him, they could be helpful. They are his people, after all.”

“Who locked him in a box for hundreds of years,” I pointed out. “The only help they could give us then is that they’d be the first people he’d go after.” I thought about that for a moment. “You’re right. It’s a good idea.”

Niko’s lips twitched in a way that let me know I was both incorrigible, as he’d say, and on the money, as I’d say. “The money, Abelia- Roo, and we’ll leave in the morning. By then I plan to have a direction, at least, to head toward.”

She studied us both, although when she looked at me, it was with the revulsion of someone finding a black widow spider at her bare feet and no house shoe or book to smash it. Not that Abelia-Roo couldn’t strike one dead with one second of her hemlock glare. She probably could and did at regular intervals, but it didn’t work with me. I gave her a sunny smile with not one drop of venom to be seen. “The money,” I repeated. The “I win” I didn’t have to say. The price alone said it.

She twisted her features into one of those old dried apple doll faces you saw people selling by the road in Appalachia. It’d been a long time since we’d been that way… since I was eleven… but I remembered them. Most kids would’ve thought they were creepy, as if they’d come to life in the middle of the night and shove their apple heads down your throat to choke you before you had a chance to scream. But most kids didn’t have a remote clue what creepy really was.

Creepy or not, Abelia would have those dolls winning beauty contests. She slid from behind the table and shook out her dusty crimson and dull black skirts. She definitely hadn’t gone the Martha Stewart route in the clothing department. Abelia- Roo in a pink sweater tied around her narrow shoulders and matching slacks: It was enough to make your brain spasm at the improbability of it all, not to mention the added picture of her passing out holiday brownies… topped with cherries and just a hint of arsenic, of course.

And she was afraid of me. Didn’t that put me in the big-boy category or what?

Rustling back toward the sleeping quarters of the RV, she passed through layers of scarves that hung from the ceiling, none of which were pink-Martha Stewart ended there-and disappeared into a gloom no stray ray of sunshine could penetrate. It took her a few minutes, which was not too good for me. Niko seemed to grow larger with each passing second until I felt about the size of that eleven-year-old boy who’d fed one of those apple dolls to a cow hanging her head over the fence by the road (she spit it out, by the way). Yeah, I was the salmon heading up the falls and Niko was the grizzly bear waiting for me at the top.

Finally we heard the sound of one of those cheap accordion doors closing and Abelia- Roo returned with a paper bag. She put it on the table before Niko, who opened it and counted it with quick and efficient fingers. He might be pissed at me, but that didn’t distract him from the fact that trusting the old woman was a mistake only a fool would make; my brother was no fool. The fact that all fifty was there and not half now, half on delivery, told me something. If this Suyolak guy did get out, Abelia didn’t see a future where money mattered.

“He is a monster,” she said sharply to Niko, “this thing you call a brother, but perhaps you are worse. You are his keeper. We keep our monster under lock and key and you let yours run, free to kill and destroy as he sees fit. Everything he does, the responsibility is shared equally with you.”

“Of everything he does, I’m proud to claim half.” Niko rose to his feet. “We will see you in the morning.” I followed him out the door and back to the car. I started to get back in the driver’s seat, when a hand snagged the back of my shirt and jeans and helped me all the way through to the passenger side of the bench seat and halfway out the open window.