EYESHOT: The most gripping suspense thriller you will ever read (3 page)

He cranked the Toyota into park.

Elle’s jaw dropped. “James—”

“I have to know he’s okay.”

“
Seriously
?”

He unbuckled his seatbelt. “Seriously.”

“I’m glad I married the last idealist left on earth,” she muttered.

“There were more idealists like me,” he said. “They just all died stopping to help stranded motorists who turned out to be serial killers.”

“You’re not going to flip him off, right?”

“Got your pepper spray?”

She fished it from her purse – a thin, black canister with a red button.

“Okay, Elle. I’m going to talk to him but I’m going to leave the engine running.” He studied the man through the bug-splattered windshield and reminded himself, again, that it would be morally wrong not to check. The guy’s safety wasn’t even on his mind anymore. It was more selfish than that – stubborn curiosity. Too many little hints had been dropped today, and now he just had to know what was going on out here.

He opened the door. “If . . . if anything happens to me, Elle, don’t stay. Just drive.”

“Wait,” she said.

He stood half-in, half-out. “Yeah?”

“I just have to get this off my chest, in case you die.”

“What?”

“James, I have had . . .
so many
affairs . . .”

He closed the door.

He’d heard that one before. That was a sure sign Elle was getting anxious – when she started repeating her jokes.

He started walking, and his footsteps on the packed dirt sounded like breaking eggshells. The air was tiring to breathe. It felt strangely dense, over-pressurized, but he was certain this valley couldn’t be far below sea level, if it was below sea level at all. His right eardrum popped juicily, and he felt his wife’s eyes on his back. A few paces ahead, the man sensed him and halted on crooked legs.

Silence.

James found it oddly chilling that they were both now aware of each other. This was a milestone. There was no turning back. The man bowed his head, showing bristled gray hair around a bald patch the size of a poker chip, burnt lobster red by the sun. He wobbled as if he was turning around to face James, and then didn’t.

He just stood there. Like a department store mannequin facing a wall.

Great idea, James.

He noticed a small bulge on the man’s right hip and wondered if it was a holstered firearm. With his luck, it would be. James hated guns. He hated everything about them. The mechanical efficiency of their designs, their springs and pistons and calibrated clicks, snicks, and snaps, even their elegant Porsche curves – he hated it all because guns illustrated better than anything else mankind’s myopic genius for engineering death. As he saw it, his father had been killed by a gun and nothing else.

Five feet away, the man exhaled through his mouth.

James had lost all momentum now. He knew he could still turn around, climb back into his car with his loving wife and few remaining possessions, and race on past this mystery to a new life in Tulsa. This would be a distraction, a few lost minutes and nothing more, no worse than that damn pointless Gore Museum that had pulled them off the interstate earlier at Elle’s puppy-eyed insistence. That had been . . . well, exactly what the brochure promised. Wax dummies posed in dioramas of medieval agony – racks, swinging blades, an imaginative way to keep rapist recidivism rates at zero – and Elle had lapped it all up like the self-identified “gore hound” that she was. James had spent most of his time in the lobby, reading an old People magazine and sipping a four-dollar Diet Coke.

He wanted badly now to be a worse person so he could walk away and leave this MPR man alone in the crater. Or a less curious one. Either way, he couldn’t.

He took a small step forward. Another eggshell crunch punctured the quiet, as sharp as a slamming door. Then the other ambiences came seeping back – the hot air stirring, low grass tensing and flexing, sand hissing in the wind. Crickets that sounded like flies buzzing over bad meat. Elle said something from the Rav4, but it was muffled by glass and congested air.

The man just stood there. Back turned. James noticed with an uncomfortable jolt that the back of the guy’s neck was also cooked by the sun, scorched bright red just like his bald patch. It was bad; bad enough to start peeling off in crispy sheets soon. This old man had been walking in the Mojave for some time and had clearly been unprepared for it.
Why did he leave his truck?

James cleared his throat, dry as paper. “You okay?”

No response.

“You need water?”

Nothing.

“Hello?”

Nope.

James whistled a sharp note.
Maybe he’s deaf.

Then the man moved suddenly, like a puppet on tangled strings. His head rolled on his shoulders, first one way, then the other. His joints popped like firewood. He let out a sigh and his left hand dropped stiffly to his side, and a red smartphone fell into view – the one that had occupied his attention this entire time. The screen was black.

A breeze hit James and felt shockingly, bracingly cold. The sweat on his skin felt like ice.

The old man spoke: “I lost it.”

“What?”

“I lost it.”

James felt his other eardrum pop like a crushed grape.

I lost it?

“I . . . almost had it. But I lost it.” The man drawled his syllables, testing and exploring each one in ponderous monotone. Then finally, he turned around.

James saw his face and tasted raw oysters in the back of his mouth.

* * *

“James!”

She called his name three times as he returned to their car. Her husband said nothing – eyes busy, jaw set, cheeks bloodless. She knew that face. She had only seen it once or twice in nine years, but by God, she remembered it.

He missed a step and stumbled.

“James, what did he say to you?” She looked back at the strange man, who was still standing where her husband had left him down the road. She couldn’t tell how much they had actually spoken. The man was still facing away, staring down at his cell phone. He wavered a bit, like a scarecrow nailed to a wobbly post. Then her photographer’s eye noticed an . . . an odd darkness, a shadow that wasn’t quite correct, peering gremlin-like around the crown of his skull.

The driver door screeched open. Her husband leaned inside with sweat beading on his forehead. “We’re getting him to a hospital right now. Start the car.”

“What happened?”

“Start the goddamn car.”

Wasn’t the engine running a minute ago?

She scooted into the driver seat and grabbed the chattering keys, but morbid curiosity seized her and she chanced one more peek over the dashboard, through the windshield streaked with insect guts, and by coincidence, the man turned around and looked at her at the same moment.

At first she didn’t know what it was that disturbed her. Her stomach knotted up and her spine chilled at the blatant wrongness of what she was seeing, but she couldn’t knuckle down on why, exactly, it was wrong. Then she had it. The silhouette of the man’s head was incorrect. A small v-shaped pie slice of his skull was gone, torn away from his temple to just above his right ear. There was surprisingly little blood, just a thin peel of scalp hanging off like a loose flap of wallpaper and underneath it an absence of matter, negative space, shadowed black in the sunlight.

Her mouth opened.

“Don’t scream,” James whispered.

A strangled squeak escaped her lips.

“Don’t stare at it.”

The man had a grandfatherly face, doughy J. Edgar Hoover jowls, and a dusting of silver stubble. He reminded her of someone she knew; she couldn’t recall whom. He read her bug-eyed face –
He’s looking right at me
– and his own eyes narrowed into slits. He glanced over his shoulder, then back to her, and his lips moved, as if to say: “What’s wrong?”

Oh, God.

She nodded politely. Faked a smile.

Oh, God, he doesn’t know he’s hurt.

“We can’t let him see his reflection. We need to cover the mirrors.” James grabbed her hand, squeezed her fingers, and turned the key. The Rav4 coughed and something twanged loosely under the hood, like a weed-whacker wire slapping a fence. He tried twice more as her slackening fingers slipped from his and the engine made no sound at all, just a dry electric tick.

“Elle,” he said blankly. “We have a huge problem.”

3

James Eversman could do many things well, and some things exceptionally well. He could speed-read with remarkable recall. He could operate a sailboat tiller. He could roll sushi and had briefly dabbled in beekeeping. He spoke Spanish and had a grasp of German.

He knew exactly nothing about cars.

But he was a quick learner, so he relied on that. He popped the hood release and raced to the front of the Toyota, trying to ignore the heartbeat in his neck. His legs were numb, his knees jellied – he tripped on a rock and hoped Elle hadn’t seen.

She rocked in her seat, her legs to her chest. “What happened to him?”

“I don’t know.”

“He has no idea he’s . . .”

“He’s not all there.” James winced at the awful, accidental pun and opened the hood. He could see immediately that the fan belt was torn and knotted up in gristly strips like discarded snakeskin. Worse, the entire engine, from the radiator to the edge of the dash compartment, was splashed with wetness. Dark wetness, stained with desert dust kicked up through the undercarriage. He touched slimed grit on the belt and recognized oil. “No signal,” he said faintly. “Right?”

She checked again. “No bars.”

Shit.

“Try 911 anyway,” he said. “An emergency tower might ping us.” He snapped his hand to flick the oil against the underside of the hood and saw it was already splattered, shotgun-peppered with running droplets. Like the Jackson Pollock painting of bug guts on his windshield. Yellow, orange, green, black, all gummed up with sand. It hadn’t just leaked –
leak
was too delicate of a word.

“It’s like the engine exploded,” he said.

She slammed the driver door and came up on his right, her phone to her ear. “Exploded?”

“Exploded.”

“That’s impossible.” She lowered her cell. “Just dead air.”

“Try sending a text message to 911. Less bandwidth.” His tone betrayed his lack of optimism. He took a knee by the driver-side tire, winced at a migraine flash of pain, and saw a dark puddle spreading in the red soil. He saw rainbow ribbons curling in the sun and his heart sank hard. “Gasoline. Oil. I think that’s coolant over there.”

“All leaking at once?”

“Yeah.”

“Someone screwed with our car.” She rubbed her eyes and mashed keys with her thumb. “The drawing guy, the Hello Kitty man. He did it, so we would be stranded all the way out here with no help and no signal. Maybe we . . . maybe we saw something we weren’t supposed to, and . . .”

He held her shoulders. “We never left the car unattended.”

“He followed us all the way from the Gore Museum, then. He obviously liked what he saw.” She looked back at the old man – standing askew at the road’s edge, gazing further downhill into the titanic crater with his hands on his hips. From this angle they couldn’t see the hole in his head, lending the situation an undeserved calm. “How long can a person survive like that?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“It doesn’t seem possible. It’s like . . .”

“Stop.” He lowered his voice. “Stop talking about him like he’s already dead.”

She looked back at him uneasily. Words danced on her tongue. He saw traces of her from the Fuel-N-Food, marveling at him sadly like he was some sort of hopeless, emotionally retarded child –
Do you really believe all the optimistic crap you say?

“We need to make him comfortable,” James said. “We need to . . . I don’t know. Cover the wound. Give him water. Keep him upright and talking.”

She sighed. “I think someone shot him.”

He pretended not to hear.

* * *

Elle tilted the Aquafina bottle to the man’s cracked lips. At first he refused and warm water dribbled down his chin.

She had been ten when her grandfather stopped recognizing her. He progressed from early-stage to moderate with cruel speed; most of his long-term memory was gone in the two weeks her family spent building school desks in Honduras. Returning to his room, she could tell immediately that he was a different person. The hard drive of his soul had been magnetized. There was something guarded about his eyes, defensive, prickly, to the way he investigated her under the fluorescent lights. It hurt to be forgotten. She hated it. He had become a stranger, and she hated being stared at by strangers. Even thinking about it now made her strangely nauseous –
Stop looking at me. Please.

The man gagged and the water came back up. So did foamy bile, bright yellow. She turned away and breathed through her mouth.

“It’s okay,” she lied. She didn’t know what else to say, so she said it five or six more times in a cooing voice that she didn’t trust. It’s tough to sound reassuring when your stomach is a ball of coiling centipedes. She heard the Toyota’s rear door slam and James’ hurried footsteps.

The old man lowered to a crouch, and the sunlight hit his wound at such an angle that everything was suddenly exposed. She didn’t stare. The gore itself didn’t disturb her; she’d grown up on slasher flicks. What disturbed Elle was how dirty it all was, how every inch was caked black with windswept grit. It was his brain, his most personal organ, and there were handfuls of sand blown inside it. Something about that made it offensive,
awful
, in a way that a thousand exploding heads in a thousand horror movies couldn’t touch. She cringed.

She remembered sitting in the car with her mother. Hospital parking lot. She had been looking away with her cheek pressed against chilled glass, watching the rainwater bead up and bloom the streetlights. She hadn’t wanted to talk about it.
People are like machines
, her mother had said.
Machines have parts. Parts get old and wear out and break. Your legs can break. Your stomach can break. Your Grandpa Ellis – his brain is breaking.
So Elle had concluded then, at age eight, that souls don’t exist and everything we feel and love is just wet electricity inside tissue. She hit that moment earlier in life than most atheists she knew. She wasn’t sure that was a good thing.

The man looked right at her and asked, “Are we real?”

She froze.

“Is this really happening?” he asked.

She blinked away tears and saw that he had something in his hand. A leather billfold, stained a tobacco brown. He flicked it open and she glimpsed a star of some sort, gleaming hot gold in the sun, and recognized it as a badge. Then James cast a sudden shadow as he leaned in to fasten a crumpled white shirt around the man’s head.

“No way.” Her husband saw the badge, too. “He’s a
cop
?”

* * *

“His name is Glen Floyd,” he heard Elle say while he wrapped the shirt around the man’s head like a sloppy bandana. Over, under, through. He tried not to touch the wound, but when he accidentally brushed an upturned cornflake of bone with his thumb, the old man didn’t even seem to notice. “He’s . . . okay, he’s Fish and Wildlife for Clements County.”

“Where’s that?”

“His driver’s license is . . .” She steadied the wallet in the man’s trembling hand. “Montana. Pictures of kids, grandkids . . .”

Montana Park Ranger,
James thought suddenly.
MPR.

“So he’s a long way from home.” He met both sleeves on Mr. Floyd’s forehead, tying a square knot and tugging it tight. The wound outlined itself in the fabric with a thin perimeter of soaking blood. That bone chip raised the cloth like a broken fingernail. He was bothered that there wasn’t more blood, aside from a thin trickle behind the man’s left ear that stained his collar like spilled coffee. Bad Situations 101: there’s always either much less blood than you expect, or much more. Mortal injuries are strange in that way.

God, I wish I was a paramedic.

He tried to tell himself it didn’t matter. It was too late already. Glen’s head, his exposed cranial vault, was already so packed with foreign matter that the surgeon would need a hand vacuum to get it all out.

“I was driving on the freeway,” Glen said abruptly.

James froze. So did Elle.

The old man licked his lips and squinted up at them. “I . . . I see the man next to me. He’s in a little Subaru with one window rolled down a little.”

A growl of wind passed between them.

“And he’s got a comb-over.” He smiled, all wrong, like the muscles in his face were operating independently of each other. It reminded James of how small children smile for photographs – all horse teeth, no eyes, like mummies with their skin drawn tight. “And the breeze is tugging his long hair right off his head, and he’s too busy driving to notice, and his comb-over . . . it’s racing around inside the car with him like a trapped muskrat. Just . . . flapping around in there.” He choked on two wheezy laughs and drew a firm point with his finger. “That was the day I decided I’d embrace baldness. Like a man.”

“What day was this?” Elle asked, grasping for a lead.

Glen’s eyes clouded. “I don’t remember.”

“But you remember it.”

“I have . . . some things,” the man said ponderously. “Like . . . friction between colliding thoughts. I don’t know whose they are.”

Elle’s voice broke. “We’re going to help you. I promise.”

This road gets three cars a day,
James remembered grimly. He wondered if they could hike back up the crater slope to the rockslide detour at the highway. It was at least three miles back, up and over rough foothills. And then another six or seven to that Fuel-N-Food in Mosby. On foot, they wouldn’t make it until nightfall – not good enough. Maybe they could walk until they caught enough cell reception for a 911 call? His phone had less than a quarter of its battery, but Elle had charged hers last night in the motel.

Still, every option would cost time, and how much of that did Glen have left? How far could he walk before collapsing? James supposed he could take a few bottled waters and run it faster on his own, but he couldn’t stand to leave Glen – and especially Elle – alone in this crater. Something was wrong here. Something felt strangely purgatorial about this valley – the fishbowl horizons, the starkness of the open land and sky – and he felt as if just by being here, he was being judged. The sun was a spotlight. He was on stage.

“Grab more water,” he said quietly. “Sunscreen. Anything you think we’ll need for a few hours. We can’t wait here. We’re leaving the car, all of us, and walking back to the highway. Then Mosby.”

Elle agreed, surprising him. “Anywhere but here.”

“Exactly.”

It occurred to James that he had never actually seen the landslide behind the roadblock. The road had just curved on beyond the orange highway barrels. It was crazy to think this, downright Zionist-conspiracy-paranoid, but . . . what if there was no actual rockslide on the pass? What if the roadblock was a ruse, to get them out here, with poor Mr. Floyd?

A chill crawled up his spine and lingered between his shoulder blades. If it had been a ruse, it had worked beautifully. These two California liberals were out in the wilderness now. Red rock and prairie under an unsympathetic sun. Spiny plants and animals with fangs and stingers. Salty wind and gunpowder rock. No phones, no weapons, and a two-man local sheriff’s department apparently in the business of employing nineteen-year-olds. If anything, anything at all, seeing another car out here would be a bad thing because, to use Deputy Doogie Howser’s own math, it would most likely be driven by whoever blew that hole in Glen’s head.

So in that case
, he thought,
thank God we haven’t seen anyone.

She tapped his shoulder. “A car’s coming. Fast.”