Dead Horizon (13 page)

“Shit fire and burn to death,” Elroy muttered over Cracker’s shoulder.

The visitor was a corpse, no doubt about it, but the damn thing was standing there of its own free will, head tilted to one side, looking at Cracker through the remains of what used to be an eye, but was now nothing more than a rotten, fetid black hole oozing slime.

Cracker pissed his pants.

“Wiiiffffe . . . waannt my wiiiifffffe. . . .” the corpse groaned, spilling maggots from its mouth.

The reanimated corpse reached for Cracker, and this time Cracker didn’t piss his pants, he simply fainted dead away.

Elroy screamed just as the thing grabbed him by the neck. . . .

* * *

“Found it like this when I got here this morning, deputy,” the caretaker said. “I been tendin’ this cemetery longer than you been alive, and I ain’t never had no trouble like this before. Never seen nothin’ like it.”

The deputy looked into the grave, scratched his chin, then turned and spit on the ground. “Saw those two last night,” he said. “They looked a little more lively at the time.”

“What do you want me to do with ’em?” the caretaker asked.

The deputy glanced into the open grave one last time. He read the bloody words scrawled on the inside of the coffin lid:
May they be eternally happy as one.
He hated paperwork, and that’s what this looked like to him, a whole bunch of paperwork. Besides, they looked awfully nice together.

The deputy shrugged, spit on the ground again, then said, “Cover ’em up, they make a cute couple.”

“Whatever you say,” the caretaker replied.

The deputy left him to his work. As he got back into his squad car, he couldn’t help but whistle a familiar tune, and then he actually began to sing the words to the song, although about as off key as a man could sing.

“Here comes the bride . . .”

His mama never did get around to paying for those singing lessons. . . .

Line ’Em Up

George Franklin could handle his booze, fuck what anybody said. He wasn’t some dumb-ass kid out drinking with his buddies on Friday night, showing off so he could get laid. No, George was a professional. A grown man, by God, and if he wanted to drink, he was damn well going to drink.

“Line ’em up,” George called to Max the bartender.

Max was at the end of the bar, polishing glasses. He looked in George’s direction, still polishing a shot glass, and shook his head.

“I said line ’em up,” George demanded, slurring his words and spraying spittle all over the top of the bar. “I’m a goddamned paying customer. I want my fuckin’ whiskey.”

Max set a freshly polished glass in front of George. He produced a bottle of Wild Turkey and poured one more. George finished it in quick order and said, “Line ’em up,” slobbering all over himself.

“I think that’s your last one, George,” Max said.

“You don’t get paid to think. You get paid to serve me drinks.”

“Forget it,” Max said. “Last call is over.”

George picked up a glass and slammed it down on the bar. The glass shattered and cut his hand, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“Gimme more,” he demanded.

“Leave, George, or I’m calling the police,” Max said.

George struggled to his feet, cursing and bemoaning the injustice in the world. He stumbled outside and paused long enough to relieve himself on the building, then he staggered to his car and fumbled for his keys.

George could drink and work a motor vehicle like a pro. He’d been at it for more than twenty years, and if anybody knew his limits, it was good ol’ George Franklin. He wouldn’t get behind the wheel if he didn’t think he was capable of driving while intoxicated. Not with all the tickets he’d managed to acquire over the years. That’d be just plain stupid.

George got his car started. He backed out of the parking space, shifted into drive, and dropped his foot on the accelerator.

Something that sounded like a foghorn scared the shit out of him. He jammed his foot on the brake, stopping with the nose of his car partially in the street. An eighteen-wheeler shot by, narrowly missing him.

“Dangerous sons a bitches,” George mumbled, flipping off the driver of the truck as he pulled onto Highway 18 without bothering to check traffic.

He began playing with the radio dial and continued to do it a full minute or so before he realized the radio wasn’t on. He solved that problem right quick, then he spun the dial to a country-western station.

Highway 18 was a two-lane ribbon of blacktop twisting through farmland and rock enclosed grades. This stretch of Highway 18 was better known as Blood Alley. Some nonsense about it being one of the most dangerous stretches of road in the whole United States. The percentage of alcohol-related accidents was higher here than on any other comparable road in America. Didn’t that just beat the shit out of everything?

George knew why the road was so dangerous. Most folks didn’t know their limits. George knew his limits just fine. He could handle this. Focus was all it took. A little focus and knowing your limits.

His vision was a little blurry, sure, but he could see well enough to know he was driving fine, even if the nose of his car edged over the center line every now and then.

George thought about the statistics. It was those damn kids to blame for all the accidents. None of ’em knew how to drive. They got out on the road without knowing their limits. Wasn’t it Dirty Harry that said a man’s got to know his limits?

A horn snapped George from his haze just in time to see a pair of headlights staring him in the face. He jerked hard on the wheel, bringing his car back into his lane, narrowly avoiding a head-on collision.

“Goddamn kids,” George mumbled.

All along highway 18 there were wreaths that had been placed to mark the scenes of fatal traffic accidents. More wreaths than George had ever seen. Flowers too, and even a few placards with names and dates and loving-memory stuff.

George shook his head to clear away the cobwebs. His eyelids were heavy. He rolled down the window, hoping the chilly night air would help keep him awake.

He reached down and thrust a hand under the seat, craning his neck now and then to watch the road. He found the bottle of Wild Turkey, still unopened, and worked the cap off.

“Just what the doctor ordered,” he said, bringing the bottle to his lips to take a healthy swig. “That should keep me sharp.”

He recapped the bottle and shoved it back under the seat. As he did, he crossed the center line, driving on the wrong side of the road half a minute before he realized what he was doing and eased back to his side of the road.

He began humming along to a song on the radio. He didn’t know the words. Didn’t matter anyway. He was too tired to sing.

A hard-working man deserves his down time. George liked to stop at Max’s bar on his way home from work. Stress relief. He worked hard all day. Selling insurance wasn’t easy. A guy needed to unwind, and who the hell did Max think he was anyway, running a paying customer out of the bar.

George saw more wreaths in his peripheral vision. Sort of pretty, all lined up one after the other like they were, but damned distracting to a motorist when you got down to it.

Line ’em up—

He was in the wrong lane again. When the headlights of an oncoming vehicle hit him in the face, George froze like a startled deer. He heard the horn but couldn’t react in time. The next sound he heard was the sound of squealing rubber . . .

The two cars collided, sending the sounds of crunching metal and shattering glass ringing through the night like a death song.

* * *

George opened his eyes. He was on his back now, looking at the sky. A few stars twinkled. Something warm ran down his forehead.

A baby was crying. There were wreaths everywhere, and George realized he was lying right alongside them. There were people too, rising from the ground. More people than George could count. Horrible-looking people. A one-armed child maybe eight years old, her face mangled on one side, sort of like hamburger, and her hair matted with dry blood. She carried the charred remains of a baby doll in one dangling arm.

She turned and lumbered toward the twisted wreckage on Highway 18.

A woman joined her, carrying the baby George had heard crying, and then came a man whose chest was caved in. There were others still; two children—one with a shard of glass in his forehead, the other badly burned and missing an eye; a teenage girl in a prom dress, her head hanging limp to one side; a female minus legs, crawling after the others, dragging her entrails behind her.

None of the dead noticed George. They stepped over him and walked around him, moving like a ghoulish parade, lumbering over to the smoking remains of twisted metal on the road.

They retrieved the occupants of the car George had collided with. There were two of them—a woman and a little girl of about three. They were dead too, and the little girl took her mother’s hand as they joined the parade of the living dead.

George was in pain. His bones felt broken. He was bleeding and couldn’t breathe well. “Take me,” he begged the corpses as they passed him by again. “Don’t leave me behind.”

There were many wreaths on Highway 18, but none of them belonged to George. He was going to live beyond tonight, and maybe he would be better from here on out. Maybe this was a lesson well learned.

Probably not.

Line ’em up, George. . . .

Little White Church

“This is it?” Gil asked, dropping his half-smoked cigarette to the ground and crushing it beneath the toe of his shoe.

Gil and his agent Larry were standing in front of a white clapboard church in a tiny town somewhere in northeastern Missouri.

“This is it,” Larry answered. “This is your next book.”

“It sure as hell doesn’t look haunted to me,” Gil said.

“Oh, it’s haunted, baby,” Larry assured him. “In fact, haunted is too nice a word for this place. It’s evil.”

“I don’t believe there’s anything more evil in this church than a few rats, but if you want a book, I can write a good book. Fiction is my specialty.”

“You won’t be writing fiction,” Larry said. “If what the local people say is true, you’ll be lucky to write a book at all. It’s coming out alive you’ll have to worry about.”

“Ooo, spooky,” Gil said, lighting another cigarette. “You got keys?”

Larry tossed him a rusty key. “I’ll see you Monday.”

Gil watched Larry drive off. He was about to put the key in the lock when the door clicked open on its own, groaning on rusty hinges as it swung inward.

The inside was nothing but shadows and dusty strips of sunlight. There were twelve pews, six on either side of a center aisle leading to the pulpit. Behind the pulpit was a massive wood carving of Christ on the cross. Gil stared at the carving for some time.

The Savior raised his head to look at Gil.

Gil squinted in the semi-dark, focusing on the carving. It was the same classic pose as always, Christ hanging with his head slightly to one side. It hadn’t come to life at all. It was a simple trick of the mind, combined with all the deep shadows and floating dust motes.

The church was silent.

Gil returned to the car to retrieve his briefcase, which contained legal pads, a handheld recorder, blank tapes, and a carton of cigarettes. He’d brought along a change of clothes too, but he didn’t expect to need them. His original intention had been to spend a weekend at the church, but he was beginning to believe a few hours would be enough. Afterward, he’d check into a motel, have a nice dinner, then whip up an outline for his book in comfort. If anything was going to come of this little excursion, it was going to come from his imagination, not from the church itself.

He decided to do a walk-through. He checked the tape in his recorder, then toured the church, making verbal notes as he went. When he finished, he turned off the recorder. That’s when he heard voices coming from the front of the church, followed by a slamming door. When he went up front to check out the disturbance, the church was as silent as before.

“Okay, relax,” he told himself. “Don’t start feeding into this nonsense.”

He climbed onstage and stood behind the pulpit, trying to imagine the country congregation that had once sat in those pews; little girls in pretty dresses and hair ribbons, ankles crossed, legs swinging back and forth; little boys in jackets and slacks, fidgeting and wishing they could be anywhere else but church; women dressed in their Sunday best, with dour-faced men beside them, feigning interest in the fire and brimstone speech delivered by the preacher when all they really cared about was the bottle of whiskey hidden in the barn back home.

“We’ve gathered here today to let Gawwwd into our lives,” Gil said, addressing his imaginary congregation. He set aside his recorder and raised his arms up high and apart, palms facing the pews. “Because when you let Gawwwd into your lives, you chase Saaaatannnnuh right out the dowah!”

Gil jabbed a finger toward the front door for emphasis. Thunder rumbled at that moment, as if on cue. The inside of the church turned darker as the sky outside turned gray.

Gil suddenly felt dizzy. He gripped the sides of the pulpit to keep from falling over. He bowed his head and shut his eyes, taking a deep breath to bring back his equilibrium, and when he next looked out at the pews, a quaint country congregation stared back at him.

But there was something terribly wrong. They weren’t alive. They were all rotting corpses, mostly dismembered and in various stages of decay.

“
Leave
my pulpit,” a voice boomed from out of nowhere.

Gil swung around to look at the preacher—wild-eyed, late fifties, with gray shoulder-length hair and a hook nose—who stood beside him.

“You’ll be damned to eternal flame,” the preacher yelled, knocking Gil out of the way so he could take his place at the pulpit. “Gawwwd will have no mercy on your eeeevil sowaluh.”

The dizziness overcame Gil then. He could no longer make himself stay up on his feet. He fell backward, as if he had been pushed, and knocked his head against a floor that was shining with fresh polish. A flash of light blinded him, then everything was black.