The Revenant Road (6 page)

9

Lenny and Marcus

“I met Marcus Grudge back in 1963.

“I was fresh out of high school, taking college courses during the day. My nights belonged to Nat Wilson. He was an old blues singer who owned Nat’s Corner, a little café and nightclub on the South Side of Chicago. I worked there as a waitress.

 “One night, a man came in and sat at one of my stations. When I went over to take his order...when he spoke to me... I’d never seen him before, but it seemed as if I’d known him all my life. His name was Nestor Charles.

“We sat and talked. I don’t know why I wasn’t fired. It was Saturday night and the place was packed. But this man exuded something I’d never felt before. It was as if the rules didn’t apply to him somehow.

“He was wearing an old black suit that looked about two years out of date, tall and too skinny by a good twenty pounds. But he was the most compelling man I’d ever met.

“When my shift was over, I met Charles outside in the parking lot. It was after
midnight
and I really shouldn’t have gone. My parents raised me to know better, but I felt as if my wits had been dulled, submerged in a river of ice.

“He was driving this big, black car with the words
Willingham Funeral Home
written on the sides. At the time, I remember thinking how odd that was, this man driving around the
South
Shore
in this big old hearse. At the same time I felt as if I’d met the love of my life.”

Lenore looked up from her whiskey.

“That’s a trick the undead can play,” she said, “to win your confidence before they make the kill. Your father once told me that the monsters can ‘shape the darkness,’ and use it for their own ends. Nestor Charles used the darkness. He played with me the way a cat plays with a mouse, made me see things,
believe
things that…that weren’t real. Then he bit me.”

Lenore paused, her eyes damp with memory. Then she cleared her throat and poured another drink.

“He sank his teeth into the flesh of my throat and he... he drank my blood. My God. What to say about that?”

I waited while she found the words. Lenore seemed to look through me, her eyes focused on some distant point far beyond the walls of her neat little kitchen.

“In one way, it was better than sex, better than chocolate, better than the best morphine you could ever buy. Oh, there’s pain, at first. It feels like God injecting fire into your veins, a fire that warms without burning. But it leaves a little of itself inside you, changes you.

“At the same time, I could feel myself, my real self,
dwindling
, screaming, somewhere in my mind while Charles stole from me, while he
fed
.

“Then, this big white light flooded the car.”

Lenore smiled again, her gaze focused squarely on mine.

“Someone yanked the driver’s door open. I could see this big black man standing in the light. He was carrying an axe handle in one hand. With the other he reached in and pulled Charles off of me. When his fangs slid out of my throat, it was... it felt...”

She shuddered and uttered a nervous chuckle.

“Charles was strong, stronger than me. But he was newly Risen. He’d only broken out of the colored funeral home the night before. When Marcus grabbed him he didn’t stand a chance. Marcus hit Charles. He beat him with that axe handle until he stayed down. Then he and another man picked Charles up and threw him into the trunk of their car.

“Life changed for me that night. I missed two weeks of school because I was too scared to leave my parents’ house. My mother didn’t know what to make of me. I walked around in a daze, lost in a kind of waking dream.

“Sometimes, in the dead of night, I would get up and sneak outside even though I was afraid: I
had
to get out and feel the night wind on my skin. My mother asked if I’d gone and gotten myself pregnant. She didn’t have a clue.

“But finally, I had to go back to school, which meant I had to go back to work. I crawled back to Nat and told him that I’d been sick. He took pity on me and let me come back. He also told me that a big, good-looking fellow had been asking around for me.

 “I didn’t see Marcus again until two weeks later. He came into Nat’s. He waited for my shift to end and we sat together. He told me that he’d driven a stake made from the heart of an ash tree through Nestor Charles’s heart the night we met. That way, when they buried him he would stay in his grave.

“I let him drive me home. In one night I’d met the man I would marry, and the man who would haunt my dreams.”

Lenore’s eyes flinched away from mine.

“I know how all of this must sound.”

“Not at all,” I said, finally. “It all sounds perfectly reasonable.”

I sat very still, taking great care to make no sudden movements. 

“Ah... let’s see,” I said. “In the last twenty-four hours I’ve learned that my estranged father may
or may not
have been gay; may
or may not
have left us to pursue a career as an independent contractor—a choice which cost him his life in a plane crash by the way—but that’s okay, because mom believes he was really the Unknown Ghostbuster. That about sum it up?”

Lenore spoke softly: “Obadiah, Marcus didn’t die in a plane crash.”

I stared at her, uncomprehending for a moment. Then I slapped my forehead.

“Oh! Of course!”
I said.
“
Was it the Mummy? Giant Leeches? Or the Creature from the Black frigging Lagoon? Silly me, I actually believed the
County
Medical Examiner
’s report.”     

The look of reproach on her face made me hate myself, but I couldn’t stop. I stood up.

“Maybe Count Chockula ate him for breakfast.” 

Lenore laid a key on top of the black box on the table and said, “Open it.”     

I stared at the black hatbox for a long beat before I answered. “No.”

I turned and picked up my jacket from the back of my chair. The skitter of foreboding in my gut had kicked itself into overdrive when I looked at that box.

Madness inside that box.

 
“Why won’t you look inside, Obadiah?”

“Because I don’t want to,” I rasped, my throat suddenly gone dry. “I don’t want to do that right now.”

“Are you afraid?”

“
Of course not
,” I snapped, lying.

I didn’t care for the sly glint that crept into her eyes whenever she looked at the black box. I cared even less for the predatory smirk that curled across her upper lip.

“I don’t believe any of it,” I said. “You’re crazy with grief, or
drunk...
or ...just plain crazy.”

I walked to the door, opened it and let the cool night wind blow sanity back into my mother’s house.

“Either that or this is the worst practical joke since the two of you brought me home from the delivery room.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off that goddamned box.

“But whatever this was supposed to be about, I’m not buying. I’m going home, where I intend to open a bottle of the hardest liquor I can find, crawl inside, screw the cap on behind me and forget this conversation ever took place.”

“Obadiah,” Lenore said. “There’s more you need to understand.”

“No! Home. Booze. Forget.”

Feeling like the biggest dickhead on Earth, I left her there, sitting alone at her kitchen table.

Before I climbed into my car I spared a look over my shoulder. I could see her through the living room window, still sitting at the table, her spine straight, her chin held at a defiant jut. She looked older and more fragile than I’d ever seen her look.

She believes it
, I thought.
She believes every word.

But that wasn’t all.

As I drove away looking for the nearest bar, I recognized something else. Lenore had told me a story—one that was ridiculous on its face—with the sober demeanor of a judge delivering a death sentence. It was no joke.

My mother was terrified.

10

Athena

 June 21
^st
9:04 PM
: Quickie-mart Asian Convenience Mart.

Detective Athena Talbot was thirty-five years old the night her twelve-year career in law enforcement came to a violent halt.

Talbot had been promoted to the rank of Detective just two months before the
Montgomery
murders. She was the youngest member of her family to make the cut, and the first female.

Talbot’s father was a cop, murdered by a white supremacist when she was nineteen years old. Her mother, a retired sheriff’s deputy, had moved to
Miami
three years ago to be closer to her younger sister Candace, a sophomore at Florida A&M.

Talbot pulled up behind an SPD cruiser that blocked the entrance to the Quickie-mart parking lot. There were ten cruisers stationed outside the front entrance. Cops crouched behind open doors, their guns aimed at the front window. Two Urban Assault Units, tank-like vehicles manned by Special Weapons and Tactics officers, were also present. 

“Jesus,” Talbot whispered.

Then someone yanked her door open.

Instinctively, she reached for her sidearm.      

“Whoa,” the shadowy figure said. “Easy, Annie Oakley.”

Talbot swore, holstered her weapon and got out of the car.

“Goddamit,
Chesterfield
,” she snarled. “I almost blew your balls off.”

Matt Chesterfield covered his crotch with both hands.

“That’s one way to get into my pants.”

Talbot shook her head. She liked
Chesterfield
. He was tall, black-haired and good-looking in a goofy white-boy way. But since he’d made the move to the FBI, Talbot had intentionally kept her distance.

“You slumming, Matthew?” Talbot said, indicating the Quickie-mart.
Chesterfield
chuckled again.

“Don’t worry, Athena. Seattle Office has no stated intention of moving SPD off the Wildman Murders.”

Athena smirked. “That’s reassuring.”

“Nicholson’s getting antsy though,”
Chesterfield
said. “Twelve murders in the last two months with possible racial overtones. That alone makes this one for us.”

Talbot’s brow furrowed. “Racial overtones?”

Chesterfield
shrugged. “Many of the victims are of Asian descent. The first one, Glen Hong, was Chinese. Jeannie Montgomery, the girl from the nature preserve was half-Chinese. Sukhdeep Singh was Punjabi. With the situation in the
Middle East
going critical...”

“I get it,” Talbot grated. “Maybe the Wildman is really Osama Bin Laden.”

Chesterfield
glanced around, but made no effort to hide his smile. “Same old mouth, trooper.”

“Cop’s best weapon,” Talbot said.

“In any event, times are tight,”
Chesterfield
said. “Funding is being diverted to the fuck-up in
Iran
and...”

“And the FBI’s hoping SPD can solve the case so you guys can rustle up some shoe bombers.” 

“Damn,”
Chesterfield
said. “Up for dinner tonight?”

Against her better judgment, Talbot smiled.

Three news vans screeched up to the scene. The doors of the vans slid open and several camera crews tumbled out.

“Wildman Murders,”
Talbot said. “Why do they always have to name these guys?”

Chesterfield
lit a cigarette and offered Talbot a drag.  

Talbot passed.

“Six dismembered victims, maybe more,”
Chesterfield
said. “Wounds which indicate acts of cannibalism; hair and saliva of an unknown type found on the remains; claw marks; evidence of superhuman strength.

Chesterfield
shrugged. “Seems pretty wild to me.”

Talbot surveyed the crime scene. “Can’t argue with you there.”

The walkway in front of the Quickie-mart was crawling with cops. Several camera crews had set up in the parking lot; the glare of the bright lights threw the entire scene into a kind of reverse shadow play, milling figures outlined in harsh white radiance, hooded eyes and dark-uniformed figures drained of color, made monochromatic by the presence of so much illumination.

Two dead men hung half out of the ruptured front window of the Quickie-Mart. The victims had been impaled on long shards of shattered glass.

As Talbot watched, the front counter smashed through the second window. Police and SWAT Officers ducked as cigarettes, porno magazines and dead fish rained down onto the parking lot. After a moment,
Chesterfield
spoke.

“So, you think this is the guy?”

Someone screamed.

Talbot pointed. “I am
not
seeing that,” she said.

A monster stood in the window of the Quickie-mart.

The creature was enormous, nearly nine feet tall. It looked like a cross between a grizzly bear and a giant gorilla, heavily-muscled beneath a shiny coat of pitch-black hair.

The monster’s eyes flashed, a bright amber glare that slashed across Talbot’s vision like a flail of malice.

The S.W.A.T. Team commander lifted his bullhorn.

“Step out of the Quickie-mart with your hands over your head!”

In response, the inhuman roared. Then the creature vaulted high into the air and landed atop the Urban Tactical Unit. The Police and S.W.A.T teams opened fire, filling the air with the shriek of automatic weapons fire. The inhuman leapt into the crowd of law enforcement officers. In seconds it had slaughtered three of them.

“Oh my God,” Talbot whispered.

Before she knew what she was doing, she’d drawn her Glock 9mm and set out at a run toward the convenience store.

“Athena!”
Chesterfield
barked.

The inhuman shrugged off a hail of armor-piercing slugs, whirled and killed two men with one blow. Then it leaped high over the heads of the police, and landed atop one of the cruisers, crushing its front end to pulp.

The inhuman leapt again, slashing, crushing everything in its path. Claws that gouged steel and flesh with equal ferocity tore four more officers in half.

Talbot followed the inhuman’s movements, looking for the shot. But the howling thing moved too quickly, trailing death as it went.

Wait for it, woman,
Talbot snarled.

The inhuman whirled. Paused. Met Talbot’s glare.

For Talbot, there was only the moment and the target. Her mind shut out the screams of pain, the thunder of gunfire. In her mind, she and the inhuman might have been the only living things on the planet.

Son of a bitch
.

The thing launched itself toward her. Talbot drew a bead on the target as it approached, its tread shaking the earth beneath her feet.

Wait...wait...

The inhuman howled, rage streaming from carious yellow eyes.

Talbot fired.

One yellow orb exploded, spattered the inhuman’s black fur with shining amber gore. The inhuman staggered, its balance disrupted, momentum pulling it forward into a stumbling lurch. Talbot had one second to remember her father’s eyes—

Sorry, Pops

—
Then the inhuman slammed into her, lifted her off her feet, and drove her backward into the side of one of the tactical units. Her breath smashed out of her with a grinding roar. Then she fell, enveloped by hair and muscle and the stench of rotten flesh.

Athena Talbot lay staring up at the stars over
Seattle
. A terrible weight pressed her spine against the concrete and she couldn’t catch her breath. Then the weight on her chest shifted and suddenly she
could
breathe. She turned her head and looked into the bloody face of a deceased Asian male with one yellow eye.

“Officer down! Get an ambulance over here!”

Chesterfield
, Talbot thought.

She laughed, the movement bringing blood up from somewhere deep inside to bubble over her lips. She tasted copper, coughed and drew a shuddering breath.

Should’ve
taken him up on that dinner invitation.

The Asian man snarled at her. Blood that was entirely red spouted from his ruptured eye socket. Then his face...
did something
, something so terrible that Talbot found the strength to scream. A moment later, the Asian was gone.

 “Freeze, asshole!”

More gunfire. Hands grabbing her.
Chesterfield
’s face appearing overhead, blocking the stars, fading, fading...

Then darkness.