“Well,” Mike said, “fair’s fair. You smell pretty bad.”
“Thanks, kid, I knew you’d have my back.” Crow picked up the CD remote and aimed it at the big Nakamichi Home Audio system. He had five disks in the trays, a mix of classic rock and blues. Leadbelly started it off by singing “Bourgeois Blues,” and the disks that followed went from The Ides of March’s “Vehicle” to Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” to Albert King’s “Born under a Bad Sign,” all of it wrapped up by Big Bill Broonzy singing about “Trouble in Mind.” It was the music he’d listened to before setting out to Dark Hollow with Newton, and he almost turned it off, but didn’t. The music wasn’t any kind of threat. The music was a safe place and even the first few notes of Leadbelly’s rough voice were immensely soothing.
Mike brought him a bottle of Gatorade and a PowerBar. “Here, these might help until I can get some food delivered.”
“Thanks, Mike.” He looked at the bottle. “My favorite flavor. Green.”
Mike sat on the arm of the guest chair. “Do you want to talk about, um, anything? I mean, I heard some stuff on the news, and a lot of customers came in asking about you, and you told me some stuff, but—”
“Can it wait until I have a shower?”
“Sure,” Mike said. “You don’t…uh…need help in the bathroom or anything, do you?”
“No, and let us both give thanks for that.”
“Amen,” Mike said, and went back into the store.
2
Vic finished his shower and dressed in fresh clothes, going slowly through the steps of washing, drying, and dressing. His body hurt as if he’d been stomped by ten skinheads wearing Doc Martens. When he pissed his urine stream was tinted red, and when he brushed his teeth he spit as much blood as toothpaste into the sink. He blew his nose carefully to clear away the clots of blood, and used a rag and then Q-tips to clean his ears. His old clothes—stained with shit, piss, and blood—he dumped in a black plastic trash bag he got from the hall closet. He wouldn’t even bother making Lois clean them up. He’d just throw them the hell out. Shoes, too. He wanted to traces, no reminders. Never, not once in his whole life, not since he’d first met Ubel Griswold in 1970, had Vic been punished. The memory of it—what he could remember after the blackout—was so humiliating, so traumatic that all he felt inside was a vast empty sadness.
He finished buttoning his shirt and then sat down on the edge of the bed, putting his face in his hands, feeling lower than he ever had.
“What do I have to do to make it up to you?” he whispered. “You tell me, Boss, and I’ll tear down Heaven for you. I’ll burn this whole town to ashes. Anything. You just tell me what I have to do to make it right.”
The voice—that sweet, dark voice—was there in an instant. The presence of it after so much terrible silence was almost as jarring as that scream of rage had been and Vic toppled forward onto hands and knees, then collapsed onto his forearms so that his brow was pressed into the carpet.
“Tell me!” he begged.
With a whisper as soft as bat wings on an autumn night, Ubel Griswold named the price for redemption. It hit Vic hard—harder than he thought it would. Neverthless he closed his eyes and kissed the floor. He would do anything—even that—for his god.
3
Ruger touched the handle, feeling the roiling darkness beyond the door. Vic be damned, he was going out to hunt. To kill and to recruit; to build the armies of the Red Wave. He turned the knob, forcing it against the tumblers that twisted and screamed beneath his hand. Metal pinged and snapped and the door sagged open in defeat.
With a snarl of delight he pushed the door open and vanished into the night.
4
Terry Wolfe’s face was bruised meat, his body debris. He was ruined, smashed, nearly gone. The vitals on the machines sagged, and the brain activity was just above the level where families begin to discuss pulling the plug.
Yet there are some levels of the brain, some chambers of the sleep center that have thicker doors, stouter walls, fewer entries. The deepest dreams live there, playing out in shadowed corridors and in cellars where no light has ever shone. There are cobwebs and spiders down there; there are blind rats in those catacombs, and colorless things that wriggle in the relentless dark. No machine can record those dreams, no meter will ping or beep when something scampers through those places.
When the doctors and nurses came into his room to look at the patterns on his charts their faces fell into sadness, their eyes showed the defeat each of them felt. Everyone loved Terry, everyone respected him. He was Pine Deep, but it was pretty clear that Terry Wolfe had left them, had caught the night train out of town, and now all they could do—the sum effect of their years of training, their collective experience, the weight of their science—was to watch and wait for him to die. Because Terry had left.
Yet, he hadn’t. Nor had the beast.
Over and over again, through lightless passageways and darkened dungeon rooms, into one blind alley after another, in the doorless maze of his own inner oubliette, Terry Wolfe ran screaming and the beast, always hungry, followed after.
Chapter 12
1
Weinstock glanced at Crow and then turned a hard look on the caretaker. “There’s some risk of contagion here. Please, stand back.”
“Contagion?” the man said, eyes flaring wide as he did indeed step back. “From what? I thought this fella was murdered.”
Weinstock’s eyes were hard as flint, but even so they had a shifty flicker to them. Crow wore Wayfarers against the glare of the Sunday morning sun and he kept his face blank. Weinstock wore a heavy topcoat; Crow was in a bomber jacket and jeans. He held the clipboard with the exhumation papers on them, signed by Weinstock himself right over the signature of Nels Cowan’s wife. Her hand had trembled when she’d signed it and it made her handwriting look like that of a five-year-old. There were two small circles on the page where her tears had fallen and puckered the paper.
Weinstock licked his lips. “Not all of the blood work on Officer Cowan was completed at the time of interment. Our tests detected traces of a highly dangerous virus.”
“Virus?” The caretaker’s name was Holliston and his seamed face was a study in skepticism. He rested his shoulder against the bucket of the front-end loader and folded his arms. “Nels Cowan didn’t die of no virus, he was killed by that Boyd fellow.”
“I didn’t say he did, Mr. Holliston,” Weinstock said frostily. “I said traces of a virus were detected in his blood. Tests have suggested that the alleged killer may have been infected, and that during the struggle he was wounded. There may have been an inadvertent exchange of blood during the struggle. It is vitally important to establish if this is the case. Among other things, I am the liaison between the town of Pine Deep and the local office of the CDC.”
“What’s that?”
“The Centers for Disease Control. So, it’s important that I conduct this test under the proper conditions.” He pulled a surgical mask out of his bag and slipped it on, and then began squirming his hands into latex gloves. Holliston yielded and walked a few dozen yards away.
Crow waited until Holliston was far enough away and then said, “We are so going to go to jail for this shit.”
“Joanie Cowan signed the paper and I’m the county coroner. It’s all more or less legal.”
“More or less is not a comfortable phrase.”
“It’s what we have.”
“Any of that CDC stuff on the level?”
Weinstock shrugged. “More or less.”
“Swell.”
They looked around. For a Sunday morning the cemetery was remarkably empty; church probably hadn’t let out yet.
“You ready?” Weinstock asked, and Crow slipped his hand inside his jacket and pulled his Beretta nine half out of the shoulder rig. “If there’s anything in that coffin except a dead guy I’m going to empty this thing in it.”
“Just don’t shoot me.”
“Don’t get in the line of fire.”
“Fair enough.”
On the drive home from the hospital they’d cooked up the plan, going on the basis that if something was still happening in Pine Deep they needed to know sooner rather than later, so by the next morning they were ready. Weinstock printed out the exhumation papers and cooked up the infection story—he’d deal with chain of evidence later—and then called Joanie Cowan at seven-thirty on that Sunday morning, waking her out of a deep sleep in order to break her heart all over again. Overwhelmed by Weinstock’s medical double-talk, she had disintegrated into tears and signed the papers, and the two of them slunk away like thieves.
“This is so wrong,” Crow said as they approached the coffin, which sat on the bucket of a big front-end loader. He brushed away clods of cold dirt and started twisting the wingnuts that held the lid on. His hands shook so bad his fingers slipped on the cold metal.
Weinstock stopped him and handed him a mask. “He’s been dead for two weeks…this is going to be bad. You don’t want to breathe it. Remember…smell is particulate.”
“Oh man. I really could have gotten through the day without knowing that.”
“Welcome to the field of medicine.”
“This isn’t medicine, brother,” Crow said, adjusting the rubber band that secured the mask. “This is black magic.”
They worked together to make a fast job of it. Even without opening the lid it smelled bad. Like rotting meat and raw sewage poured over molasses. Crow gagged.
Weinstock glanced around. The caretaker was ten rows down busy with the task of cutting the turf to dig a fresh grave. The doctor looked across the casket to Crow. “You ready?”
“Not really. You?”
Weinstock tried to laugh and bungled it.
Crow said, “We’re burning daylight, Saul. Let’s do this or go home.”
