Bad Moon Rising

Chapter 17

(1)

Val was discharged the next morning and Crow took her home. His home, not hers.

The nurses wheeled her to the front door and she rode in a brooding silence, the cane lying across her thighs, her face stony and set. Crow walked beside her, holding one hand, and as the automatic doors opened before them he jerked them all to a halt. The parking lot was packed with reporters who surged forward to stick microphones in Val’s face as cameramen jostled each other for the best shot. Crow was only marginally relieved to see that Newton was not among them. There were cops there, too, but none of them were engaged in any visible crowd control. Scanning the crowd, Crow saw Polk leaning against a patrol car, legs crossed at the ankles, arms folded across his chest, a shit-eating grin on his face. When Crow shot him a look of pure loathing, Polk responded by giving him a nasty wink.

Prick, Crow thought, and filed that away for future consideration.

As the questions thundered around them, overlapping into a rumbling blur of meaningless words, Crow turned and bent to Val and whispered, “Don’t say anything. Let’s just push through.”

The glasses hid her eyes but there was as much hurt in the set of her jaw as there was offense and anger. Crow helped her out of the wheelchair and put one strong arm around her and used the other to push his way through the crowd. Both of them staring stolidly ahead, they headed toward Crow’s car, Missy. Every reporter tried to be the one to break Val’s silence, and over and over again one would shout a provocative question like, “How do you feel about your brother being killed?” or “Are you devastated now that you’ve lost your whole family?” All designed to gouge a comment out of her, but she bit down on her rage and clutched Crow’s supporting arm like a vise and they eventually got to Crow’s car. Even then, even when they were inside and buckled up, with the car in gear and rolling slowly, the reporters knocked on the glass, even tried the door handles, shouting as loud as they could to be heard and to get through to her. Most people crack; most people get mad and shout, or dissolve into tears, all of which makes for great vidcaps; but Val was Val—she wore her grief like armor and carried her rage like a shield, and she endured it.

More than a dozen film crews followed her out of the parking lot, the news teams scrambling like fighter pilots during an air raid, screeching into turns and pursuing them as Polk and his cronies just watched. Crow didn’t try to lose them, didn’t race down the streets. That would be theater, too, and he didn’t want to give them anything. Beside him Val was a statue, looking neither left nor right, just staring out of the window as the blocks rolled past and the circus followed.

When he pulled up to the Crow’s Nest, the news crews double-parked and hustled out to make another run at a sound bite. Again Crow had to shove past them, and again neither he nor Val said a word or even made eye contact with them. They wrestled their way to the front door of the store; Crow unlocked it and ushered Val inside. When some reporters tried to barge in with them, Crow closed the door on them. Slowly, but with force, pushing them back inch by reluctant inch, then turning the locks. Without a pause he and Val went straight through the store, past the counter, through the rear door that opened into Crow’s apartment. He closed and locked that, too.

“The phone,” she said. They were the first words she’d spoken since the hospital. Crow went over to the phone and switched the ringer off. He drew the blinds on the back windows, made sure the back door was locked, and when he turned around Val was gone. He went quickly into the bedroom and found her sitting on the edge of the bed.

It was only then that she started to cry, and she cried for a long time.

(2)

“Where are you, Sport?”

Ruger took a cold cigarette from between even colder lips. “I’m at Carby’s place.”

“Okay. Might as well stay there today,” Vic said. “It’s almost dawn. You don’t want to get caught by daylight.”

“Nope,” Ruger said. Vic knew that sunlight was not fatal to Ruger as it was to some species of vampires; all it did was hurt him. But Ruger was still supposed to be dead and his face had been on every newspaper, magazine, and Internet news feed for weeks now. Staying in the shadows meant staying off the radar. “I’ll keep out of sight, don’t worry.”

“You know about that cluster-fuck out on A-32?”

“Yeah. Friggin’ Dead Heads.”

“We can’t have more of that, Sport. Not now. You could do us both a favor and lock all those assholes up until the Wave.”

“I’ll see to it,” Ruger said, his voice a whisper.

“Make sure you do. Right now I gotta get going. Mike didn’t come home last night and I need to look into it. If we’re lucky, Tow-Truck Eddie got him.”

“You think so?”

“I should be so lucky…but something sure as hell happened and I need to know what. I’ll be in touch.”

Ruger flipped his phone shut and tapped it thoughtfully against his chin for a moment, still smiling. Dawn was coming, but it was still dark, so he settled into the shadows to wait. The song “Time Is on My Side” occurred to him and he killed some time letting it play in his head. Corny, sure, but fun corny—and this was going to be fun. His smile never faded as the minutes of night dropped like cigarette ash on the ground around him.

At five-twenty in the morning the door across from him opened and Vic stepped out, dressed in a jeans and a big Eagles windbreaker. Ruger didn’t move, confident of the shadows around him. He watched Vic lock his back door, check the street, then climb into his pickup and drive up the alley. Vic’s eyes were human eyes—weak and stupid. Ruger kept smiling as Vic’s careful stare rolled right over him without a flicker.

The truck passed within a few yards of where Ruger stood, arms folded, leaning on one shoulder deep in the mouth of a neighbor’s side yard. Ruger grinned as the pickup turned the corner.

“Asshole,” he whispered in a voice like a dead Clint Eastwood, and crossed the street. He had no key, but the lock was nothing to him. He put a palm flat on the wood next to the door handle and gave a single short shove. Wood splintered and the dead bolt worked like a lever to tear the entire strike plate out of the frame.

“Oops,” he said, grinning like a kid. He pushed the door shut behind him and tilted a chair under the handle to keep it shut. Have to keep up appearances.

The cellar was dark and silent, but Ruger could hear sounds in the house. He knew that if Vic was up and out, then Lois had to be up. Vic didn’t cook his own breakfast or make his own coffee. He stood at the foot of the stairs and listened to the scuff of her feet on the kitchen floor. Bare feet, no slippers. He liked that. There was a clank of a pan—Ruger caught the whiff of eggs—and then the clink of a bottle. Definitely a gin bottle; he could smell the sharp juniper aroma as she poured. Lois was starting early today.

“Goodie,” he said. And it was. Drunk would work.

He climbed the stairs. It was high time he showed Vic who really was the big dog. More to the point, it was time he showed that sneering prick who was really the Man’s favored son. The door to the kitchen was also locked and it mattered just as little. Ruger wrapped his long white fingers around the doorknob and with no effort at all pulled the whole lock set right through the hole, splintering the wood and snapping wood screws with gunshot sounds. Beyond the door Lois Wingate screamed in shock.

As he pushed through into the kitchen Ruger’s smile grew into a hungry grin. He liked the sound of that scream, his mouth watering with the knowledge that it would be the first of many.

(3)

They slept through the night, but as dawn approached Val woke up. She lay for a long time staring upward into the empty shadows above Crow’s bed, feeling the weight and solidity of his arm and aware that his need to protect her meant so little in the scheme of things. To her heart, sure, it was wonderful, but to her mind—a machine grinding on its own gears—nothing was strong enough to protect her. Not against her own thoughts. There was nothing that Crow could do—nothing anyone could do—to protect her from the truth of her loss. The town was polluted; there was blight on almost all the crops. Except hers, but the Guthrie farm had suffered its share of pestilence. At that moment, if she could have accomplished it she would have razed all of the crops and every building including her own house to the ground and sown the ground with salt. Not for fear of the crop diseases, but in fear of that other plague. The plague that had made Boyd what he was, which was perhaps the same plague that had drawn Boyd and Ruger to Pine Deep in the first place.

Mark’s body was in the morgue. Cold and empty, without Mark’s soul in it. Just flesh, she told herself. Not Mark at all…just an empty shell…and yet Mark had been killed by Boyd. And Boyd was a vampire. It didn’t matter that Weinstock checked on him three times a day; it didn’t matter than neither Mark or Connie showed any signs of being anything more than corpses. In a movie she’d seen once a vampire had said something about outliving his enemies by simply going to sleep for a century and then rising after they were dust. What if that sort of thing was possible? What if Mark, cold and dead as he appeared, was only waiting for some dark call to awaken him?

It was a stupid thought, she knew. Stupid, and fanciful, and utterly terrible. Val lay there and stared out through the lightless window into the blank blackness of the night and thought lots of such thoughts.

(4)

Mike knew that everything was broken, but he didn’t care. He didn’t know how to care anymore. The impact with the tree had smashed almost every thought out of his mind, and filtered what little remained into a single piece of understanding. “I’m dying,” he said in a wet voice.

He coughed and felt blood splash out of his mouth onto his chin. There was pain. Of course there was pain, but it was a remote island way off on the horizon of his perception. It had been there for hours, ever since he’d crashed, and it had done all the harm to him that it could. Now it was just there. He didn’t care about that, either.

“I’m dying,” he said again, smiling. It was the safest he’d felt in years.

Time, as meaningless as the rest of it, had long ago ceased to move…and yet the sky had changed. Mike couldn’t move his head and had been staring at the featureless black above him forever. Maybe he slept at times, maybe he just stared, but now the sky was less pervasively black, now there was just the faintest hint of color. A brick-red tinge dabbed here and there on the underside of the clouds.

The wind stirred, pushing some leaves around. One leaf blew against his cheek and stuck to the blood, quivering as if struggling to escape. Mike turned his eyes to look at it, saw its jagged brown edges vibrating, and it took him a few seconds to realize that he could see the color. He tried to lift one hand, wanting to see if there was enough light to see his fingers and was surprised when his hand moved. When he had tried to move his hand before it had not so much as trembled; there hadn’t been a single flicker of sensation from anything below his shoulders. That had changed now, but Mike still didn’t care. He was too busy trying to die.

There was the rustle of more leaves off to his left, not in the path of the wind, and Mike turned his eyes that way—and his whole head turned, too. His neck was no longer locked into immobility. Over there, just beyond where his bike lay, there was a man.

Mike looked at him, trying to pick out details in the gloom, but the light was still bad. At first Mike thought he was looking at a scarecrow, because the man was dressed in filthy rags whose tatters flapped in the breeze, but there was no post, no fence to support a scarecrow. And then the man took a step toward him. Such a strange step, and even in his semidaze Mike thought it was odd. A stiff and staggering step, more like the Tin Man from Oz than the Scarecrow. That thought flitted through his mind and Mike almost smiled at the absurdity of it. Another step, managed with equal awkwardness, as if the man’s knees were inflexible or unused to walking.

The dawn was filling in the world with colors, defining shapes, painting the day, and as he lay there Mike could see more of the man. He frowned. The stranger was truly a raggedy man, his clothes nothing but mismatched castoffs. A soiled pair of patched work pants, two different shoes—a sneaker and a woman’s low-heeled pump—a checked shirt that was torn in a dozen places. Heavy cotton work gloves. And some kind of mask, but it was still too dark to make out what it was. It was dark and shiny and the material it was made from rippled in the wind.

Daylight swelled by another degree and though the cloud cover kept any rays from touching the man, the quality of light increased but still the mask made no sense to Mike. There were no holes for eyes. It was just a swirling complexity of wrinkles that writhed and twisted with the steady breeze. The man took another jerky step forward. Mike had no urge, no desire to ask for help. The dying don’t need help to die, and if this guy wanted to be a witness, then that was on him. Mike felt removed from thoughts of help and safety, even of right and wrong.

He just wanted to die and he didn’t care if anyone—especially a raggedy man—stood by and watched. Another step and now the man was no more than twenty feet away. Two more steps, another, another. Ten feet now and the rosy glow of the dawn washed him in crimson from his shoes to his face.

To his…face? Suddenly terror struck Mike like a fist over the heart. In a single moment all of his detachment fractured and fell away. His whole body convulsed, arching belly-up to the sky like a heart attack patient getting the paddles. Every wound, every splintered bone, every inch of torn flesh, every nerve ending screamed in desperate, howling agony and terror. The shriek burst from his throat in a spray of bloodstained spit. If someone had sprayed him with gasoline and tossed a match on him the pain could not have been more comprehensive or intense. His scream went on and on and on. Hordes of crows exploded from the trees and raced in panic across the sky above him, sweeping in vast circles above the field. The sparse green grass that patched the dirt around him withered into sickly yellow twists and curled in on themselves to die. In the soil beneath him the sleepy October worms swelled and burst as if boiled.

The scream ended. Mike sagged to the ground, limp and exhausted. His eyes—more red than blue now—cast wildly about to find the Raggedy Man.

He was there. Right there, right next to him, looming over, looking down. Mike could see that face, that mask—which was not a mask at all, not some wrinkled dark cloth rippling in the breeze. It was his face that rippled, that…writhed. There were no eyeholes because there were no eyes—not human eyes; no mouth either—not a human mouth. What there was, what composed the man’s entire face, was a black, roiling, chitinous swarm of bristling insects. Roaches and beetles. Slugs, maggots, centipedes. Flies and termites. In the gaps between his gloves and his sleeves the exposed arm was the same—every foul creature of the shadows wriggling together to form a wrist. Between shoes and cuffs, the same. Wasps and earwigs, lice and locusts.

“No!” After the scream Mike’s voice was a frayed whisper. Overhead the crows circled and circled in terrible silence.

The Raggedy Man raised his left hand as if to reach for Mike. It was not a threatening movement, but everything about it was dark with wrongness. Mike screamed again, weakly this time, a croak in a torn throat. “Help me!”

Instantly the sky around him was filled with whispery noise as the flocks of circling crows hurtled down toward him. The leading rank of night birds struck with such force that several of the birds died, their necks snapped on impact, but the sheer mass of them surged forward…not at Mike, but at the Raggedy Man. The birds slammed into him and drove him backward, the beaks of the birds slashing and stabbing at the old clothes, their cries tearing the air. The Raggedy Man staggered and for just a moment he seemed to catch his footing, to hold his ground, but the night birds hit him in wave after implacable wave, and then the Raggedy Man exploded, losing whatever power it had to retain the man shape, and the hundreds of thousands of insects that made up its hand, its arm, its shoulder, burst apart into their separate selves and showered Mike, landing on his chest, his face, crawling on him, crawling into his nose and mouth and…

FUGUE.

Mike’s mind burned out like a cinder.

Above him the clouds overhead paled from rose red to gray as the dawn took hold on the day. The crows swarmed over Mike, beaks darting here and there, snatching at the bugs, tearing through carapace and shell in a savage frenzy of killing and eating. They fed and fed and fed. As the sun rose it bored a single hole through the clouds and punched a hard beam of cold yellow light down onto the field. Then another, and another until the morning sky stretched into a blue forever that was clean and hard.

Soon a stillness settled over the place where Mike lay, silent and unmoving. Sunlight sparkled on the dewy tips of the dying grass and turned the morning mist to a ghostly blue-white opacity. The light gleamed on the blue tubing of the bicycle lying by the side of the road. It caressed the freckled cheek of the boy who lay sprawled among the dry autumn leaves. And it glittered on the edges of the broken shells and cracked antennae of ten thousand insects whose corpses lay scattered across fifty yards in all directions from where the boy lay. In the center of this slaughter, the ground around the boy was completely empty except for the tatters of some old torn clothing as all the birds flew away into the trees.

All but one, a single crow that stood on the boy’s sternum.

Everything was as still as death. There was not the slightest tremble under the bird’s feet. The crow tilted its head, angling one black-within-black eye to stare at the boy’s slack face. The smell of blood was everywhere. The music rode the breeze, a little stronger now, the blues melody plaintive. The mist retreated all the way to the road.

The boy took a breath, and the crow cawed quietly.

A full minute passed. The boy took another breath. Then another. The crow hopped down from his chest and walked away, angling to keep an eye on the boy.

FUGUE.

From a blackened cinder Mike’s mind coalesced into living awareness once again.

Minutes floated past on the breeze and gradually sense returned to him along with awareness of his body. He no longer felt helpless and wrecked. It took a while and it took a hell of a lot of effort, but Mike gradually sat up. He shook his head like a drunk, lips slack and rubbery, nose running, eyes going in and out of focus as he stared at the withered grass between his knees. Awareness came back with slow reluctance. His body hurt in a dozen places, his head worst of all. Mike probed his scalp, found lumps. He explored his mouth with his tongue and tasted old blood, but found no cuts. Memory was sluggish and it hurt to try and pull it out of the junk closet of his mind. He looked around, saw that he was in a field, saw his bike lying nearby. He vaguely remembered racing down the road, remembered hitting something in the dark and then falling. But after that…nothing.

He had no idea what time it was. It looked like morning, but that was ridiculous. His last clear memory was biking toward the hospital to visit Val, but…had he gotten there? Mike wasn’t sure. Everything was weird, and his head felt like it had been ransacked, all the drawers pulled out and dumped, everything just thrown onto the floor.

He plucked at his shirt, saw that it was crusted with dried blood, but he couldn’t find any cuts on his body. Some bruises, sure, but not even a scrape on his arms or legs or body. Could that much blood have come from a nosebleed? He doubted it, but when he touched his nose it felt eggshell fragile and sore. Some blood caked around the nostrils, though not as much as he expected to find. More blood on his chin and throat. He flexed his hands, pressed his fingers against bones and ribs. There was pain just about everywhere, but nothing seemed broken. Except maybe his head, because that pounded like a psychopath doing a drum solo.

Mike climbed carefully to his feet, swaying a bit, watching the field tilt and whirl like a carnival ride; but after a moment it slowed, steadied, stopped. There was a rustle behind him and he turned to see a crow standing in the grass a dozen feet away. Without knowing why Mike smiled at it. The crow cawed softly. Mike thought he heard music on the breeze, but ignored it. He always heard music. He figured it was just part of being crazy.

On unsteady feet, Mike trudged over to his bike, picked it up, spun the wheels to make sure they were true, and walked it back to the road. He stood there for a moment, looking up and down A-32. There were no cars this early and in the dips and hollows of the road there was the faintness of a dwindling fog. He swung one leg over, wincing with the effort, then turned and looked back to the field. He felt—on some level knew—that he should be more worried about all this than he was, but he couldn’t make himself care about it. His head hurt too much. The strangeness of it all made it hard to think.

“Vic will kill me,” he said, and the crow cawed again.

Vic’s house rules didn’t allow him to be late, let alone out all night, but that wasn’t something he could control. It would mean a beating, but that was okay. He’d had plenty of beatings; he could handle another. He pushed off and began his slow, creaking way back to town. With each mile it became less and less important to try and remember what happened.

(5)

The Bone Man sat on the wooden rail of the farm fence and watched Mike ride by. He wasn’t sure if the boy was able to see him now. The boy probably could, the Bone Man considered, because from what little he knew of ghosts from his days down in the superstitious South the dying were supposed to be able to see the dead. Death was a window, his aunt had told him. He was pretty sure Val Guthrie had seen him that night in the rain, but not since; maybe she’d had one foot on the ghost road and then stepped off. He knew for certain Henry Guthrie had as he lay dying in the rain.

The kid looked bad as he biked by. Sick and thin, bloody and gaunt. He looked mostly dead now, but he never even turned his head toward the Bone Man, so the point was moot.

The last crow came over and perched on the rail next to him, and the Bone Man stared into its black eye for a long time. “I wish you could talk, little brother,” the Bone Man said. “I’ll bet you know a lot more about this than I do.”

The bird opened its mouth and gave a nearly silent caw, almost of agreement.

“Least now I can know whose side you’re on.” He smiled. “It ain’t no good to be alone all the time.”

The bird rustled its wings. They both turned to look down the road.

The Bone Man knew full well that Griswold had not sent the Raggedy Man to hurt Mike—that would have been suicidal—but he wasn’t sure why it was sent at all. Maybe some kind of test, an attempt to gauge how strong Mike was. Well, he mused, I wonder what he’ll make of what just happened. “Bet you didn’t expect that to happen, did you?” he asked the wind, hoping Griswold could hear him. Now Griswold really had something to think about.

So, he realized, did the Bone Man himself, because what he just saw didn’t fit into anything he knew about what a dhampyr was or could do. Maybe dhampyr wasn’t even the right word to use anymore. Maybe there just wasn’t a word to describe what Mike Sweeney was becoming.

That thought sat uneasily on him as he watched the figure vanish into the distance. A dhampyr was something he understood, and a dhampyr had hope built into it, but if Mike was becoming something else, then maybe the last little of bit of hope Pine Deep had was going to leak down the drain. Maybe there was nothing standing between the Red Wave and Pine Deep. Beside him the bird cawed again; the Bone Man looked at him and frowned. Or…maybe there was.