Authors: User
Sue screams her daughter’s name and throws herself among them like she’s digging a grave with her bare hands. She clutches skin and fabric and hair, yanking out clots and patches and chunks. It all comes to a halt with a fist flying into her face, a white flashbulb between her eyes that sends her crashing backward again. Sue spills like a bucket of water and somebody catches her under the arms, now she’s being dragged away, her bare heels squeaking along the sticky floor, until she feels a gust of cold air across her belly and they’re spinning her, throwing her out.
She feels wet pavement against her lips, smells garbage, beer, onions, tobacco, grease.
Rolls on her back. Opens her eyes.
Next to the Dumpster, the two dishwashers she saw earlier are gazing down at her, the orange firefly of the joint’s tip floating back and forth to illuminate first one face and then the other. At last one of them leans down to offer her his hand. They continue to stare as she rises to her feet.
“You okay?”
“My daughter,” Sue hears herself say. Her lips feel two syllables behind the words they’re emitting. “Her name is Veda Young. She’s been kidnapped by some people in there.”
They blink at her, so stoned. “Ki’nap?”
“They’re in a van. It’s parked out front. They’ve been following me all night to make sure I do what they want. They’ve got my little girl and they told me if I…”
One of the men unclips a cell phone from his apron string and holds it out to her. “You call police?” His dark eyes watch her closely.
Sue takes the cell phone. She looks at the man’s face. His eyes are black and reflect no light. There is nothing there that she can see, either way. “Is there a pay phone anywhere around here?”
“Pay phone?”
Then behind them in the parking lot something slides into view, moving steadily across the snow. Her eyes fly to it, already knowing what it is. The van. For the first time she realizes that it’s gray, the color of brain and ash, as if by default.
It stops forty feet away, turns away from her, and sits, waiting. Thirty-eight feet closer the two men continue to stare at her body. They’ve given up offering their assistance and have gone on to simply ogle her bare breasts and the glossy blue shadow of her pubic hair. Over their shoulders Sue sees the back of the van open. She steps around them, toward it. There’s a long pause and then something falls out of the van with a clank.
It’s the stroller. It lands on its front tires, teeters briefly, and then tilts forward and collapses so that the bundled shape inside, a soft pellet refusing geometry, vanishes underneath it.
Still naked, she breaks into a run.
Closing in, the van starts moving again, Sue tasting carbon monoxide in its wake. Her feet, numb as beef, smear crosswise over a patch of packed ice and disappear beneath her. Just before she starts to fall, she grabs the stroller, which flips over sideways with the force of her tackle so the handle hits her in the face. What spills out is a bundle, a canvas-wrapped package, and as Sue pulls it out she realizes it holds a coat. There’s something soft buried in its folds.
Not a child.
Clothes.
They spill like entrails across the snow. Not the ones she left behind but clean, unfamiliar ones, a pair of sweatpants, underwear, a T-shirt and turtleneck sweater, socks, gloves, and a bra. Nondescript wool coat with a hood. Two boots. Something slides out of them.
A cell phone.
It begins to ring.
1:51A.M.
“So now you see,” the voice says. “You see
yourself.
”
It’s a few minutes later. Sue has climbed back inside the Expedition, wrestling the newfound sweatpants up around her hips. This is difficult enough, holding her hips off the seat by pressing both feet to the floorboard between the gas and the brake, but at the same time she has to keep the cell phone clenched between her shoulder and her jaw. The clothes are too large for her, the sleeves of the sweater flopping over her hands, the sweatpants bagging slightly around the ankles—nothing fits, and the footwear he left for her is a pair of men’s snowmobile boots. But at least they’re warm. She’s got the engine running and the heat on, combating a chill seeping in from the broken window.
Outside, cars are pulling away from Babes, leaving the parking lot, shuffling home through the blizzard. Closing time.
“My scars,” Sue says. “What happened to them?”
“What?” he asks.
“The scars from my accident.” Once again she runs her fingers over herself and once again she finds the scar tissue missing, supposedly permanent geography erased by an unexpected reversal of time’s current. How easily things enter and exit a map. “They’re gone.”
“You’re a smart lady, Susan, you figure it out. Think hard.”
“It’s like they’ve been healed.”
“Healed?” He sounds disappointed. “That’s a meaningless term in this context. You were an EMT for enough years. You know you can’t heal something that’s already dead.”
Meaning her scars, she thinks, dead tissue.
“What about the lobsters?” she says. “I had lobsters in the car. They were boiled, completely dead. But while I was driving, they…” Feeling him waiting, she makes herself say it. “They came back to life.”
“Ah.”
“But that’s not possible.”
“There are two kinds of people in the world, Susan. Pragmatists like yourself, who believe what they see, and the rest of the world who, when they see something they don’t believe or can’t understand, pretend that it isn’t there. You’ve seen these things, and felt them for yourself. So why are you fighting it?”
“It can’t be real.”
“Oh, but it is real. It’s as real as the knife I’m holding to your daughter’s throat. And believe me when I say, the longer you wrestle with this, the closer the knife gets.”
That punctures the moment for her. She doesn’t have to think about it for long before it hits her that this was one of the reasons he chose her. Besides digging up the thing underneath the bridge, she was also, as the voice on the phone said, a pragmatist, one who could be counted on to believe what’s in front of her no matter how impossible it seems. So she says exactly what he wants to hear.
“This route,” she says, “and these seven towns. When you drive through them in the right order, it brings the dead back to life.”
“Bravo.”
“But why—”
“Now do you understand the significance of what I’m asking you to do?”
Automatically: “Yes.”
“No,” he says, “you don’t, not yet. But you will.”
No, she thinks. All she really understands is that she saw Veda again, touched her and almost got her back. Then she failed. Also she understands that her night is not over—there are hours left until daybreak—and after what she’s just done she has no idea what else to expect between now and then.
“Don’t worry, Susan. Veda’s still safe and sound for the next five hours. She’s sleeping. She never saw her mommy standing naked onstage in front of strangers.”
He hangs up.
A red light appears in the corner of her eye.
1:59A.M.
She looks down.
On the dashboard she sees a diagonal blip the size of a fingernail clipping which, along with that chiming sound, is indicating that one of the doors is ajar, specifically the passenger door behind her on the right.
Opening her door, she steps out, walks back to pull the other door open the rest of the way with the intention of slamming it shut. That’s when she sees it.
Jeff Tatum’s body is missing.
The leather upholstery in the backseat is still looped and spat on with his blood—otherwise the fact that there isn’t another corpse back here might never have struck her as noteworthy—but the body itself is definitely not present.
She peers behind the seat, into the storage space where Marilyn’s body still rests next to the thing wrapped in garbage bags, with Sean Flaherty’s case of booze crammed between them like some kind of sick joke. She doesn’t know why she checks back there, it’s not like the kid was in any shape to climb over a seat. And he isn’t there either. He’s gone.
Turning around slowly, Sue looks back at the parking lot, deserted now except for one or two cars parked off in the distance. Snow keeps falling, covering them up. It is so silent that she thinks she can hear the far-off buzz of the light behind the building. There are no traffic noises, no other sounds at all except for her breathing. Her eyes shift reluctantly forward.
There are marks in the snow, leading away from the passenger side of the Expedition. Long, scraping tracks with red streaks down their centers. The marks shuffle away from her in sequence, creeping upward from the vehicle in the general direction of the embankment dividing the parking lot from the main road. Sue’s eyes trace them. Midway up the embankment she sees the heap of rags that can only be the kid’s body.
She walks over to it.
Tatum’s corpse is sprawled on its belly, his buttocks humped in the air, the back of his skull torn open so she can see the cavern where his brains lived until the man standing on her roof blew the kid’s eyeballs through them. One arm sticks out while the other is folded beneath him.
If somebody dragged the body out of her car, why would they just leave it here? And if somebody
didn’t
drag it out…?
From here Sue can see that there’s something tucked under the body, a sheet of paper. If it’s what she thinks it is, she needs it back.
Squatting down, she reaches out for the triangular edge, tugging the corner of it out from beneath the weight of his chest—and just as she thought, it is the map, the one with the route outlined on it, the one that saysPUNISHED . Whoever dragged the kid’s body out here brought the map along too, maybe as a message, maybe as something else. It doesn’t matter. All Sue knows is that she needs that map to get her daughter back, and she’s certainly not going to leave it out here in the snow just because somebody left a dead body on top of it.
She starts to pull it the rest of the way out.
The corpse rolls over, its arms shooting out for her. Too startled to shout, Sue lets out a gasp and falls hard on her side on the embankment next to the body. The map lands in the snow next to her. She’s not so much frozen as paralyzed, all her muscles disconnected from her nerves. The kid jumps on top of her, the raw, black-red holes of his eye sockets facing her straight on. There’s something shimmering deep inside the sockets. They don’t quite look like eyes. Sue doesn’t know
what
they are.
“Please,” she says.
The sound of her voice is all he needs. He lunges for her. She feels only the faintest pressure as his fingers dig into her neck, but she sees him and hears him, smells him even, with exaggerated clarity. His face is the color of yogurt that’s been left out of the refrigerator too long. What’s left of his jaw goes up and down and makes a dislocated clicking noise and she can see his tongue flickering around inside his mouth. Their faces are so close that Sue smells cordite floating from the ruined crockery of his skull along with the sourness of scorched tissue. He pushes the words up out of himself, snatching the map back, wrinkling it, and shoving it in her face.
“
Don’t go…”
His breath steams faintly in the night air, less so than her own, his voice sounding like a cartoon version of the voice that’s been talking to her on the cell phone.
“
Any farther…”
A rotten sound pushed through moist ground beef.
“
Up the road.”
Paralysis shatters. Sue plants her foot on his chest and propels him back into the snow, the kid’s legs tangling and bringing him down in a sliding heap. Sue rolls, rights herself, and grabs the map, backing away, putting as much distance as she can between herself and him, expecting him to jump up again and charge her.
But he just lands on his back. The initial burst of aggression seems to have cost all his energy, and his mostly empty eye sockets appear to have rendered him largely blind. Still on the retreat, Sue jams the map back in her pocket and watches him trying to roll over, reminded of when Veda was learning to turn herself on her side, no coordination and very little strength. One hand jerks and collapses across his face so he’s talking into the crook of his arm. He’s still trying to say something but she can’t understand any of it now—it’s drunk talk, random babble giving way to a ragged kind of sobbing, then spasmodic breathing, and finally silence. He twitches his right foot and falls totally flat and unmoving.
Stumbling back from the corpse Sue feels her way to the Expedition. She doesn’t take her eyes off the kid’s body, even for one second. This is only partly a matter of not letting her guard down. She realizes that she’s hoping that if she looks at it long enough then she’ll believe it.
Pragmatists like yourself believe what they see.
At the moment her rather permissive ability to believe feels like a snake trying to swallow a pig. No matter how detached she is from the events of this night, no matter how far the elastic of her incredulity may stretch—and tonight it has stretched pretty fucking far—she cannot make herself believe that she just saw the kid’s dead body sit up and attack her.
But it did.
This is Phillip’s voice in her head now, calm and steady.
And those scars on your body are gone. You’re not waking up from this one, Sue. You need to accept that.
Maybe, she thinks, maybe not. Phillip isn’t exactly the go-to guy when it comes to acceptance.
She wedges herself back into the Expedition, still watching the body. It hasn’t budged. Inside she hears the putter of paper rolling out of her fax machine. The cell phone is ringing too. She answers it.
“You found Tatum,” the voice says. “Now you understand a little better.”
“Yes.” Telling him what he wants to hear. “A little.”
“Good. Because it’s important you understand your role in it.”
“My role?”
“You’re not just a chauffeur tonight, Susan.”
She waits, her mind flashing to Gray Haven and the poem that Jeff Tatum recited and the statues of Isaac Hamilton. “What really happened in these towns?”