Bad Moon Rising (14 page)

(1)

Weinstock dropped Crow off outside his store and headed home, anxious to be out of the night and behind his own locked doors. Crow watched him go, and in the time it took Weinstock to drive two blocks and make a left the enormity of everything that had happened in the last day and a half suddenly caught up and hit him like a freight train. He staggered backward and leaned against a parking meter as a wave of nausea swirled sickeningly around his head. Gagging, he twisted around to throw up into the gutter but could only manage dry heaves. The corners of his eyes tingled as if little spiders were crawling on his cheekbones and he had to grip the meter to keep from falling into the street.

Three shoppers gave him disgusted looks as they past, and Crow distinctly heard the word “drunk” from one of them. It made him furious, but that only intensified the nausea. He held onto the meter for dear life.

Mike looked up as the bell above the door jangled and he saw Crow come in looking dirty and defeated.

“Crow!” He hurried over, and actually had to support Crow across the floor to the tall chair behind the counter. “What’s wrong?”

Crow sat on the chair, arms on thighs, head low, breathing like he’d just finished a marathon. “Sorry, kiddo,” he gasped when he could manage it. “Feeling a little out of it. No sleep, no food, bad hospital coffee.”

“Stay here,” Mike ordered, then went over and locked the front door, came back, and helped Crow into the adjoining apartment and down onto the couch. Crow’s three cats, Pinetop, Muddy Whiskers, and Koko, rushed over but then slowed to a stop when they smelled Crow’s clothes. One by one they sniffed, turned up their noses, and stalked off. Crow, steadier now that he was sitting down, looked at them and then at Mike. “When you stink so bad you offend animals that lick their balls for fun and sniff each other’s asses, then you really are in sorry shape.”

“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.

(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.”

“Shit.” Weinstock steeled himself and gripped one corner of the lid as Crow told hold of the other. “God help us if we’re wrong about this.”

But Crow shook his head. “God help us if we’re right.”

The lid resisted for a moment, but then it yielded to their combined strength and opened; they pulled it up and daylight splashed down on the silk-lined interior.

They stood there looking into the coffin for over a minute, saying nothing, lost in their own thoughts, each of their faces set into heavy frowns.

“Well,” Crow said. “Now we know.”

“Yeah,” Weinstock said hoarsely.

“What does it mean?”

The doctor shook his head. “As God is my witness, Crow, I honestly don’t know.”

Nels Cowan had been buried in his Pine Deep police uniform. His hands, bloated with decomposition, lay folded on his stomach with the brim of his uniform hat set between the thick, white fingers. The flesh of Cowan’s face was purplish, distended with gas.

“There’s no chance this is not him” Crow ventured.

“It’s him.” Even so he took a sample of skin tissue just in case they needed a DNA match.

Crow lowered the lid.

“So—what’s happening, Doc?” called the caretaker. He was wiping his hands with a rag as he strolled across the graves toward them. “Did he have something catching?”

Weinstock began tightening the wingnuts. “Apparently not,” he said.

“Well, hell,” Holliston said with a grin. “Guess we can all be happy about that. With all that’s happening ’round here we don’t need no new troubles, now do we?”

Weinstock wore a poker face as he tightened one nut and started on the next. “No, we don’t,” he said.

Across from him, Crow worked in silence.

When they were back in Weinstock’s car they sat for a while, sipping Starbucks coffee and staring out at the morning. The trees seemed unusually thick with crows and the birds sent up a continuous cackle. John Lee Hooker was singing “Boogie Chillen”—from the only blues CD Weinstock owned, a gift from Crow that only came out of the glove box when Crow was riding shotgun.

“I don’t know how to think about this, Crow. I mean…I know what I saw on those morgue tapes. I know I saw Castle and Cowan walking around after they were dead. I’m not hallucinating.”

“I believe you, Saul. You showed me the tapes. I know what you saw.”

“But that was definitely Cowan in that coffin, and he is in a state of decomposition consistent with having been dead for a couple of weeks.”

“Which means that he’s dead.”

“So what did I see on those tapes?”

“I don’t know…I believe you, of course, but I don’t know what it means. Maybe Ruger or Boyd tried to convert them into vampires and it worked for a while but somehow, and for some reason, they died again. Died for real.”

“Maybe. We don’t know enough about this stuff to understand if that’s even possible.”

“I know one thing, though,” Crow said and he pulled his sunglasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on.

“What’s that?”

“Before I move one inch toward believing that this whole thing is over I want to see Jimmy Castle’s body.”

Weinstock started the car. “Me, too, and I want to get that done while we still have daylight. I’m not going anywhere near his body at night.”

(2)

Mike worked at the store all day Sunday, gradually phasing in and out of lucidity. There was a steady stream of customers and Mike was able to wear a smiling face, answer their questions, fill their orders, and ring up their sales; but below the surface his mind was blank more than it was filled by thought. He knew it, too, but on some other level. It was like standing on a balcony and looking down on his life, and the feeling totally creeped him out.

“I’m really going crazy,” he said to the cash register at one point.

The customer he was ringing up—Brandon Strauss, a kid from Mike’s own class—said, “Mike…hello? Earth calling Mike.”

Mike blinked at Brandon. “Huh?” He realized that instead of bagging the Robert Jordan novel his friend had bought he was trying to stuff it into the drawer of the cash register.

“You bent the cover, man,” Brandon said.

“Um…sorry.”

“I’ll get another off the rack.” Brandon swapped the battered copy for a new one and peered at Mike while he finished ringing it up and bagging it. He held it out and Brandon plucked it from his fingers as if afraid Mike would mangle this one, too.

“Sorry,” Mike said.

Brandon paused, his scowl softening. “You okay, Mike? You sick or something?”

Mike pasted on a smile. “Sorry, I just started a new allergy medicine. Makes me kinda goofy for a bit.”

“You’re always goofy,” Brandon said, but he smiled back and shot Mike with his finger. “See you in school. Ms. Rainer’s subbing for Donaldson again. Woo-hoo!” Natalie Rainer was the favorite substitute teacher for all the boys in the county. She looked like Kate Beckinsale and always wore tight clothes. It didn’t matter that she taught math, no one’s favorite subject; she could have taught advanced calculus and not one of their friends would have missed her class.

Mike promised he’d be there and smiled as Brandon left. As soon as the door jingled shut, Mike leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. It was getting harder and harder to stay focused, to stay present.

“I really am going crazy,” he said aloud, and this time there was no one to comment on it, or to refute it.

(3)

“Father! Why have you forsaken me?”

The silent emptiness in Tow-Truck Eddie’s heart was enormous, vast. Tears streamed down his face as he drove down A-32 in his police cruiser. Yesterday he had gone into Crow’s store to confront—he thought—the Beast, but instead all he saw was a boy. Just an ordinary boy. Not the Beast, not evil incarnate, not the Antichrist. It didn’t make sense to him.

“I am still your Sword, Father. I am still the avenging lamb!” He cried out these words, but they lacked conviction, even to his own ears. “Please, Father, show me the way.”

The boy in the store—Eddie had not even been able to see him very clearly. The light must have been bad, or something. How different from the Beast: Eddie had always been able to see the Beast with total, holy clarity. When hunting for him on the road, or searching for him in the town, Eddie had never faltered in the purity or certainty of his sacred purpose. His Father had told him that this boy, the child in the store, was the Beast, but when Eddie looked at him he could not see the evil there.

Doubt was a thorn in his brain, a spike in his heart.

(4)

Weinstock got the call while he and Crow were heading back to the hospital. He listened for a minute, said, “Thanks, we’ll be right there!” and hung up.

“They found Boyd’s body. Turn around, it’s down by the Black Marsh Bridge.”

“Damn,” Crow said and spun the wheel.

(5)

She stood in the shadows near the foot of Terry’s bed for days. No one saw her. No one noticed her, even though her little dress was torn and her face and throat were streaked with blood. They walked right by her, and sometimes they walked right through her. When that happened, whoever did it—nurse, orderly, visitor, or doctor—would give a small involuntary shiver as if they had just caught an icy breath of wind on the vulnerable back of their neck. The feeling would be gone in less than a heartbeat and they would forget about it because there was nothing, and no one, in the room to take note of.

Since they had brought Terry in here in the evening of October thirteenth and hooked him up to all of the machines, Mandy Wolfe had been there, keeping her silent vigil. Sometimes she wept, and then the tears would flow and mingle with the blood, diluting it, turning it pink on her cheeks. Most of the time she just stood and watched her brother, aching with guilt and grief. Now that he had tried to do what she wanted, now that he had thrown himself out of his window but failed to kill himself, Mandy didn’t know what to do next. No one else could see her, no one else could hear her.

The fear that reared up in her was immense.

“Terry,” she said in a voice quieter than the soft rustle of dried leaves on the autumn trees outside his window. “Terry…I’m so sorry.”

Terry could not hear her. No one could. Except
him.
And as Mandy wept for her failure, Ubel Griswold listened, and laughed.

(6)

With the Sunday tourist traffic it was twenty minutes down to the Black Marsh Bridge and they could see the knot of police and crime scene vehicles as they crested one of the last hill. “Looks like a party,” Crow said.

Tow-Truck Eddie Oswald was directing traffic, his uniform uncharacteristically rumpled and his face haggard. Eddie was usually neat as a pin. Once he recognized them, he waved them through and told them where to park. As they got out they could see Chief Gus Bernhardt standing at the crest of the embankment that led down to the river and beyond him the near leg of the old iron Black Marsh Bridge. Smoke curled sluggishly up between Gus and the bridge. Crow shot a look at Weinstock, who shrugged, and they crunched over gravel to the grassy hill to join Gus, who was in animated conversation with a couple of firefighters.

“Hey, fellas,” Gus said as Crow and Weinstock joined him. “I hope you brought some weenies for roasting.” His pink face was alight with pleasure as he turned and swept an arm down the hill like an emcee introducing a headline act. “Voilà!”