Stranger Read online

  But of course the people did know what they were doing. They lusted for revenge. Here was revenge in a huge meaty heap. And, Christ, were they going to gorge themselves stupid. The good folk of Sullivan eagerly collected their bricks, climbed onto the stage, then placed them on the woman who lay squirming and panting on the table. Her face had a dark, congested look to it. Her facial muscles contorted beneath the skin. Her limbs writhed so much it took all her captors’ strength to stop them thrashing against the table.

  Suddenly I was free of the crowd. One of the cops in the cordon reached out to grab me, but I swung a punch hard enough to knock him clean off his feet. Another cop lunged at me. I got ready to slam him, too, but I saw the canister in his hand. A second later a stream of pepper spray hit me full in the face.

  Instantly the sensation that two white-hot spikes were being plunged into my eyes slammed through me. I went down choking. Blinded. My hands were pinned roughly behind my back. I felt steel tightly encircle my wrists. Hell, my eyes burned so much I wanted to claw them out with my fingernails but, now handcuffed, I couldn’t even touch them.

  More hands pushed me. I felt myself shoved up onto the stage where I stood gasping, blinded, my hands manacled behind my back.

  “Lynne,” I shouted. “Lynne, I can’t see you!”

  Then I heard her voice through the swarming voices of the mob.

  “Greg, I’m here. Help me.” The weight must have been crushing down on her chest. Constricting her lungs and heart. But I heard her all right. Spinning blindly, eyes burning, I began this sheer idiotic search of the platform to somehow find her.

  “Greg. Please, help me, I’m—”

  Simultaneously I heard a popping sound. Muffled yet frighteningly loud. “Greg, please, it’s hurting so much, I don’t think I can . . .” A loud crunch. Really loud. The sound of some delicate structure giving way under pressure.

  “GREG!”

  The force of that final shout of hers exploded inside my head. I stopped spinning ’round, blindly laboring to find her. I dropped down onto my knees, my head bowed. I was shaking through and through.

  I knew Lynne was dead. The good people of Sullivan had their sweet justice.

  Thirteen

  My turn. The weight pressed down on my chest so hard I couldn’t breathe. My heart began to crush, forcing the dark blood that pools there out through ruptured arteries. When my ribs collapsed with the sound of snapping sticks that’s when I woke.

  The dream left me dripping with sweat and panting so hard that it had dried my tongue like an old leaf. For a moment I wondered why my bed had become so hard, but as I reached out for the blankets I felt wooden sides.

  Coffin walls.

  They’ve buried you alive, Valdiva. Those smiling men and women of Sullivan with their polite manners, their big houses and swimming pools, have drugged you, stuffed you in a coffin and buried you six feet down. They wanted you out of their lives, Valdiva. Now you’re going to choke on your own dirty air in this box. Choking in a lungful of air, I punched up into the darkness at the coffin lid.

  Only air, Valdiva. You’re punching air, my man. I turned my head, and the whiskey bottle rattled against my forehead. When I sat up the earth tilted under me.

  Christ. That whiskey had tasted like water. It seemed as alcoholic as water, too. Shit . . . My mouth tasted like I’d been licking a dead ass for the last twenty-four hours.

  My world tilted again. Then turned slowly. But this was no funky special effect courtesy of a hangover. I remembered now. I’d done what I’d be promising myself for days. I’d taken one of the battery-powered cruisers across the lake.

  Even with a gutful of whiskey I’d not been so dumb as to make the trip in daylight. I’d untied the boat in the dead of night; then, with the electric motor humming softly as a purring cat, I’d slipped across here in secret. I’d be back before dawn. No one’d ever know. Of course I’d never even climbed out of the damn boat. I must have slithered down to lie on the duck-boards, where I’d slept like a dead thing for God knows how many hours.

  This was the first time I’d slept since Sullivan’s smiling bastards had killed Lynne. Good grief, was the whole town crazy? That had been two days ago. After macing me, then piling the bricks onto Lynne until her ribs caved in, they’d cleared every sign of the execution. . . . No, it was no execution; they’d simply murdered the woman out of sheer revenge because her father had taken in a bunch of refugees.

  The day after the killing had been like a dream; everything seemed unreal. Even my cabin, where they’d dumped me, seemed a place of odd angles and weird dimensions. The kitchen looked bigger than it had before. There were more stairs, a whole mountain of them to climb. All the color had leeched from the walls and rugs and drapes. Maybe that was the effect of the chemicals that had been sprayed into my eyes (sprayed with vicious pleasure, no doubt). I figure, also, it was the shock of not only knowing Lynne was dead, but the aftermath as well.

  Now that was weird.

  Like I said, they cleared the Peace Garden where they’d killed her. I took a walk up there as soon as my stinging eyes would allow. And with my eyeballs burning like a couple of baked rocks in my head I saw that all the bricks had gone, as had the table on which they’d laid her. And they’d put tubs of flowering plants on the raised platform. The entire area smelled of disinfectant, too. They must have sloshed gallons of the stuff all over the damned place. And get this: No one would talk about what happened. No one.

  Even when I spoke to Ben about it he changed the subject. When I tried to mention it again he kept saying, “Put it behind you, Greg. You’ve got to forget it.”

  I began to wonder if the Caucus would make another of their sinister announcements, ordering that no one must utter Lynne’s name or even allude to her murder in any shape or form.

  But it didn’t stop there. Townsfolk didn’t actually ignore me, but they wouldn’t make eye contact, or they’d suddenly be interested in a tree or study their watches when I passed by. Any excuse so they didn’t have to look at me, never mind actually passing the time of day. When they had to speak to me for any reason there’d be this cool kind of politeness, as if it was me who’d done something I should be ashamed of—not them, the bastards. They’d killed Lynne, not me. But they were treating me like they did after I’d done their dirty work for them and hacked up some stranger.

  Even when I started delivering firewood again, people would go indoors when they saw my truck pull into the neighborhood. In one street a gang of children threw eggs at the truck. Hardly the crime of the century, but when I had to get out to clear the windshield of yolk that the wipers couldn’t shift I saw the kids’ parents in a garden turn their backs. If you read body language you knew full well that they’d encouraged their nice, well-mannered boys and girls to hurl those eggs.

  For the next few hours I moved in a kind of vacuum. The violence against the woman that they had pressured into sleeping with me shook me badly. So much so that the trees and houses and stores looked distorted somehow, which I guess must be an aftereffect of the trauma. I even lost my sense of taste and smell. Another sure sign of shock. It didn’t help, either, that people treated me like I was rotten with leprosy. They slid away from me whenever I was near.

  You want to see how quickly you can empty a diner? Just picture me walking through the door. And it was all done so politely. No one said anything; somehow they just slipped discreetly away. Leaving the waitress there with a fixed smile that was warm as ice.

  No wonder I had to get away.

  First: I tried to hide away in the whiskey.

  Second: When that didn’t work I took the boat for a midnight trip.

  That brought me to the good old ghost town of Lewis.

  It took a little while to get all my senses back one by one as I sat there in the boat in total darkness. There were no sounds except for the kissing noises of waves lapping against the ferry terminal quay where I’d tied the boat.

  Only I don’t remembe
r mooring it there, of course. That whiskey had been more powerful than it had seemed at the time. For a good ten minutes I sat motionless while my brain reacquainted itself with the cold reality of being awake. Presently my eyes adjusted a little to the dark. I could see the empty bottle in the bottom of the boat, the jacket I’d draped over the seat. After that my eyes followed the pale line of the mooring rope, then ran up the concrete steps to the harbor wall.

  Now was as good a time as any. Time for a little walk. I climbed out of the boat and made it up the steps without stumbling in the dark. At the top I looked across in the direction of Sullivan, now sleeping as innocent as a baby. With it being after midnight the electricity would have been cut. No streetlights or house lights indicated that the fucking lunatic town even existed.

  Hell, that’s what it had become, an insane town. But it masked that insanity with a terrible, glittering sanity. It was like a drunk who does everything with absolute precision in the hope no one thinks he’s juiced out of his stinking mind. Sullivan was like that. Everyone pretended to be so perfectly sane it sent a great blazing message into the sky. The words might have crackled above the rooftops : WE’RE INSANE. WE KNOW WE’RE INSANE. ONLY WE’RE PRETENDING WE AREN’T.

  So tomorrow life would continue normally in Sullivan. People would make believe that the world outside continued as normal (even though all they need do was switch on a radio or a TV to find nothing but dead channels). Residents would wash cars, have lunch by their pools, take in a movie, dine out, play tennis, walk the dog, chat to their neighbors about little Joey or little Mary’s school show.

  So you see, I had to get away from the place. It would send me crazy, too.

  Now I walked along the harbor into the ghost town.

  Or what was left of it. Most of the downtown area had been burnt to the foundations. Elsewhere buildings had become skeletons. And everywhere it was dark. The more I walked through that silence, smelling the rot and the still sharp reek of burnt wood and plastic and human skin, the more I sensed that this wasn’t the kind of darkness you’d experience at night. This wasn’t so much a case of there being no light. This was dark, dark, dark. Dark . . . as if a black fog had crept out of the lake. Darkness that poured in through doors and windows, or swept like floodwater along a street. Black dark. Wet dark. As they say, “a darkness to be felt.” You could reach out and run your fingers across that cold, damp darkness like you could run your fingers over the cold, still face of your dead grandfather.

  Outside a Burger King that was now as dead and cold as any corpse ever was, I found a wooden bench. I sat there to breathe in the darkness. This is what it was like to be in a ghost town alone in the middle of the night. SILENCE and DARKNESS. They were twin phantoms that haunted the lonely roads.

  Junk littered the streets. Cars thick with rust. Broken glass. Dollar bills mushed by rain. A broken rifle. Lumps of concrete. Cardboard boxes. I even saw a diamond necklace trailing over a woman’s shoe. There were human skulls, too. Hundreds of them. And long thighbones, some with strands of boy and girl meat stuck to them. Maybe the rats didn’t have enough appetite for all that carrion.

  I sat there feeling the darkness of the town wash over me. It came in crushing waves. I found myself being pressed down by the weight of it. Images bloomed out of the dark of Lynne lying there, breathless. The bricks piling up on her breasts. The crushing weight.

  My own heartbeat thudded inside me. The darkness seemed to be changing, becoming even more intense, even darker. I breathed it in. I sensed that velvet dark filling my lungs like black lake water. It oozed through lung tissue into my blood. I sensed it mingle with my blood to coil through my veins. A dark purple tide that poured into my heart.

  These were the ghosts, I told myself. These were the ghosts of all those men, women and children who were slaughtered when our nation crashed and burned last year. They were envious of me being alive. Here they were to suffocate me with that liquid darkness.

  Thud, thud, thud . . . my heartbeat grew heavier and slower.

  I gazed up at the dead bones of buildings. Empty windows like eye sockets stared back at me. Darkness swirled and coiled inside them. Pulsing with purple blooms. All around me pockets of an even deeper darkness exploded.

  Black lightning. I repeated the phrase inside my brain as darkness pooled there, too, thickening like congealing blood. This is black lightning.

  Black lightning’s going to kill you. Black lightning’s going to strike.

  Darkness pouring out of the ruins. The ghost town looming over me. It’s gonna swallow me whole.

  Ghosts emerging from the buildings. They’re coming for me at last. They’re here to take me down to hell, where I will go on suffocating in darkness forever.

  Shadows move slowly out of the doorways. They have tumors for heads. Stones for eyes. Toadstools for tongues. They have long dark arms to wrap around me. Mouths that are wet wounds to suck on my lips.

  Time’s spinning like a falling plane . . . turning in slow motion forever and ever . . . never reaching the ground . . . never crashing . . . never exploding . . . but always—ALWAYS—feeling that terrible sense of falling. . . .

  Black lightning is erupting all around me. How long before it detonates inside my head? How long, Valdiva . . . how long?

  I opened my eyes.

  The ghost of a boy stood there just in front of me. He looked about ten years old. His face had the white waxy look of a candle. His eyes burned with a luminous glow, a bluish light that made you think of phantoms. He reached out a long bone of an arm, his fingers stretching out toward my face.

  I moved my head back to stop the ghost boy from touching me with his tomb-chilled fingers.

  His mouth snapped open, exposing the hard white glint of teeth. I recognized the expression. That was the look of shock. The boy turned away, tripped over the broken rifle, then recovered his balance and ran.

  I snapped to my feet and shouted after the running figure. “Stop!”

  He didn’t stop. If anything he ran faster, his arms windmilling like he was running in terror.

  Or to warn his own kind that a stranger was in town. At that moment I knew I couldn’t let him escape. I raced after him through the darkness. One thought pumped through my mind: Catch him. Catch him. Catch him . . .

  Fourteen

  Ghost be damnned. That kid was meat and bone.

  “Wait!” I called as I ran after him. “Stop. I won’t hurt you!”

  Wouldn’t I, now? That kid might be dirty with the Jumpy virus or whatever the hell it was.

  “Wait!”

  The kid didn’t wait. He ran hard, kicking aside human skulls, scrambling ’round torched cars, raising dust with his flashing feet.

  He was in a hurry all right. Maybe in a hurry to tell his own people that he’d found a weird-looking stranger who’d sat on the bench staring into space. His own kind might be just a bunch of survivors who’d wandered into town. Or they might be bread bandits. If that were the case they’d do their darnedest to rip me to pieces. Either way, my gut instinct told me to catch the kid.

  So we ran through the dead streets. Our footsteps came thudding back to us from the ruins like a heart-beat. The walls had a gray bone look to them now as dawn began to leech up over the city.

  For a ten-year-old he was a fast runner and had gotten a good start, but I was gaining on him now. Another twenty seconds and I’d catch him.

  What then, Valdiva?

  I felt my stomach muscles get a little twitchy. Now, if I did get that knotting sensation in my guts; if instinct yelled loud and clear that the kid had Jumpy, then I knew what I’d have to do.

  The kid was slowing. He’d got a hand pressed into his side where the stitch jabbed him good and hard. He couldn’t run for much longer. I closed in fast. Now I was maybe thirty yards away.

  He took a sharp left. A wrecked school bus stood nose to nose with a truck. I saw the kid pull up sharp when he saw he couldn’t run any farther. He glanced back at me. I had
a vivid impression of a white face framed with a shock of wild, dark hair. When he saw me barreling toward him he began to climb through the bus’s ripped-out flank. There was a chance he could scramble out the other side. Then he’d have the advantage.

  I checked to see if I could squeeze ’round the end of the bus, but, no, it had been rammed up tight against the wall of an apartment building. Maybe people here had used it as a last line of defense before the bread bandits overran them months ago.

  With the kid out of sight I began to suspect I’d lost him. Then he’d be free to tell his people that they’d got a stranger in their midst. I piled into the bus after the kid, scattering the bones of a skeleton still wearing a silver sheriff’s badge. This had been a fortress, all right. The windows on the far side of the bus had metal plates welded across them. That meant the kid couldn’t get out that way.

  Just when I thought I’d got him cornered I saw him climbing out the front where the windshield had been.

  What’s more, the way led straight through a window of the apartment building.

  Damn. That kid’s a slippery fish.

  “Wait . . . just wait; I only want to talk to you . . .”

  But all I saw were the soles of the kid’s sneakers disappearing into the building as he scrambled out of the bus.

  I paused, thinking. That might be the bread bandits’ lair . . . He might have led me into an ambush. There might be twenty guys waiting in there. I listened, trying to pick up any sounds that weren’t drowned out by my own panting as I caught my breath.

  As I stood there my muscles gave a twitch in my stomach. It might be nothing but the sudden exertion. Or it might be instinct kicking in, twisting my stomach into knots. That’s the way it always started. A moment later the shutter would come down inside my head. Then that overwhelming, overpowering urge to kill would come. I killed strangers with that evil little bug in their veins. As simple as that. And believe me, it got bloody. Bloody as hell. But that was the way it was. Amen. There was nothing I could do about it.