Risen (51 page)

He awoke at midnight, lying by the side of the road in a puddle of his own blood, feeling like a million bucks. He stood, gripping the shotgun tight. He gazed into the distance in the direction the BMW had taken hours before.

"You beat me this time," he said, "but I can do this over and over. Over and over until I get it right."

He headed home to make plans for the following night.

***

His mistake, obviously, had been to get within the young man's reach. He would be more careful tonight. He'd keep his distance. And he'd be choosier about the victim, maybe hold out for someone older, someone who wouldn't be likely to know karate or nintendo or whatever it was the young man had pulled on him.

The branch barricade had been a partial success, but Waylon needed a more refined technique for stopping travelers, something that would let him discriminate. He parked his pickup on the shoulder at dark, got out the flares and waited.

Headlights appeared down the highway. Waylon stepped out of the truck and lit a flare. He stood in the middle of the road and waved the burning torch, conscious that he might be driven over but fearless in the knowledge of his immortality.

The headlights slowed and the vehicle revealed itself as a fifteen-passenger van. Stenciled on the side was the name of a Baptist Church. The driver stopped. As he opened the door, the lights in the van came on and Waylon could see that it was packed to the gills with teenagers.

Waylon felt his head go light with the prospect of stalking terrified teenagers through the woods, picking off his victims like huckleberries from a shrub. As giddy-inducing as the thought was, however, he realized that it was too much. Too much, too soon. Another night, maybe, if he was lucky.

"You need help?" the driver asked.

Waylon waved him away. He turned his back on the embarrassment of victims like an overeater prying himself from a smorgasbord of desserts. "No, no," Waylon said. "I'm fine."

The driver shook his head, and soon the Baptist van was a pair of red taillights disappearing over the horizon.

Waylon waited and waited. He gradually lost his patience with the notion of selecting a proper victim. Whoever he could lure into his trap tonight would be good enough. He should have gone with the teenagers, ready or not. He'd have gotten some sport out of it, and if they eventually overwhelmed him, who cared? He'd come back, killing himself if he had to to avoid being taken alive.

Once he dozed, only to awaken as an eighteen-wheeler roared past, its deep horn blaring. His heart practically stopped, and Waylon fretted that he'd just slept through his last chance of the night. He turned to look back down the road. Like a miracle, another set of headlights was coming his way.

He pulled out a handful of flares and lit them one by one. He dropped them in a line across the highway and took up his position in the ditch. He'd had time to reconsider his
modus operandi
and didn't want to waste an evening being run down by some clown over-driving his headlights.

A black Lincoln Continental coasted to a halt in front of the flares. The driver leaned forward to peer into the glare, then he shut off the Lincoln's engine and stepped out.

Waylon was on him in an instant. The driver was middle-aged and obviously well-to-do. His suit was hand-tailored silk, his hair dyed jet black, his shoes Italian and shiny and spotless. He was a man of character, a man who did not frighten easily, one who was used to issuing orders, not obeying them. It would be an enormous pleasure to see him brought sniveling to his knees.

"You have twenty minutes," Waylon said, and he laid out the rules of the game. The man did not reveal a glimmer of emotion. Apparently, years of boardroom combat had taught him to conceal his fear. But he would break, Waylon knew. He would break when the game was up and Waylon had him at the point of the Browning. The man would muddy the knees of that silk suit as he fell to the ground to beg for his life. He'd offer Waylon anything
—
his money, his car, his fancy shoes. But Waylon would just smile and pull the trigger.

"Don't I get a weapon?" the man asked.

"I'm not stupid," Waylon said.

"No. I can see that." Was the man smirking ever so slightly?

"Twenty minutes," said Waylon. He gestured with the shotgun. "Clock's tickin'."

The man turned his back on Waylon and strode into the woods. The way he walked with confidence, as if he had all the time in the world, ticked Waylon off. The man vanished into the darkness between the trees.

"Cocky bastard," Waylon muttered. The more he thought about the man, the madder he got. Five minutes later he set out.

Waylon paused as he entered the forest. The night was still. He should be able to hear the man's footsteps crackling in the dark. No sound came his way. If anything, the air was uncommonly quiet. Then there was a hiss, a spitting sound from behind Waylon's ear. Bits of skull flew out of his forehead and landed with a patter in the grass. His body hit the ground with a thud.

"Amateur," the man said. He unscrewed the silencer from the Ruger Mark II favored by many in his profession and replaced the .22 in the holster slung under his arm. He smiled. The boys at Luigi's would get a kick out of this one. He brushed a smudge from his lapel. Then he drove on to Kansas City where the boss had a job waiting for him.

***

Waylon was leaving nothing to chance tonight. He still hadn’t figured out what happened the night before and he knew that it was pointless for him to spend any time trying to puzzle it out. As the great Ted Williams once said, "If you don’t think too good, don’t think too much."

He started before dawn and spent the day preparing the woods for his next—well, make that his
first—
victim. He set leg traps designed for coyotes, not that they'd kill a man but they'd slow him down, sure enough. He fashioned snares and chopped out a tree fall that would crush a man flat. He dug a pit and fitted it with pointed stakes, then covered it with loose branches and leaves. He rigged a log to swing down from the trees on a rope and smash a man's skull. He mashed down a trail that led straight to the traps, and at dusk, just beyond the traps, he hung a gas lantern, pumped it up and lit it. His victim would see the light through the trees and surely run in that direction.

"Over and over," Waylon said as he laid his traps. "If they don't work this time, I can make 'em better. I can learn, I can. I just have to do things..." he grunted with exertion as he positioned a dead log across the trail, "...over and over."

Night fell and Waylon waited by the road. He was learning patience, and he'd learned to bring a Thermos of coffee along to keep himself awake. He was relieving himself of two hours' worth of caffeine when the headlights appeared.

Waylon zipped up hurriedly and laid out the flares and hid in the ditch. The car came to a stop. A Miata. Out stepped a pair of shapely legs followed a year or two later by the shortest skirt Waylon had ever seen in real life. Boyish hips gave way to a thin waist nestled below a promontory of breasts. The woman's lips were full, the eyes darkly outlined, the hair swirled around her head like a tempest. Waylon felt a stirring in his undershorts.

A woman! The notion had never entered Waylon's mind that his prey might be a woman. He turned the idea around inside his head and decided that it appealed to him, but considering the question consumed valuable time. The woman was already inserting herself back into the car when Waylon emerged from the ditch and introduced himself with the shotgun. He explained the woman's situation to her.

"I still don't get it," she said after Waylon had finished going over the rules for a second time. "I mean, like, what's in it for me? I run through the woods pursued by a madman, no offense, and for what? What's the pay-out?"

"You get to live," Waylon said. "It's simple. You run, I chase. You escape, you live. You don't escape, you die."

"So this is, like, a stalker thing?"

"Yeah. It's a stalker thing."

"Well,” she said, glancing at her watch, “I guess we'd better get started then."

"Yeah. I guess so."

Waylon watched the woman's buttocks contend with one another as she ran for the woods. Her spiked heels would leave an unmistakable trail. Waylon wondered if the game might prove to be a disappointment after all, like shooting deer from a Barcalounger. He toyed with giving her the full twenty minutes' head start he'd promised, but after five minutes he grew restless and gave chase.

He hadn't gone far before he encountered the shoes with the spiked heels. Maybe the woman wasn't as dumb as she seemed. She'd had the sense to kick off her shoes. The trail grew fainter but Waylon realized that all he had to do, really, was to follow the scent of the woman's perfume.

"Follow the scent," he said. The very thought made his organ stir. As it doubled in size, he doubled his speed.

Ahead of him, something waved in the breeze. It wasn't the woman, but something about it struck Waylon as decidedly feminine. As he drew closer he realized what it was: the woman's shirt hung on a low branch where it fluttered like a flag of surrender. He glanced around, alert for an ambush like the one that had done him in the night before, but he heard and saw nothing. He pressed on.

One by one the objects presented themselves on the trail like offerings: the tiny skirt, the bra, the panties. Waylon could not believe his extraordinary fortune. The woman was panicking, tossing off every last vestige of her humanity, reverting to the primitive state of a savage, albeit a savage wearing perfume and sporting silicone breasts.

Waylon's member was already stiff as a soldier when he spied her a short distance away. She leaned against a tree, breathing heavily, her perfect breasts heaving. Her legs were scratched and bleeding. Her hair was a tangle of knots and twigs. She glared at him with pure animal hatred, and Waylon glared back with pure animal lust.

He raised the Browning to his shoulder and took aim. His hand shook. Sweat trickled into his eye. He couldn't do it. Not yet. Not until he had a piece of the splendid forest creature before him. He lowered the shotgun and stepped forward, bridging the dead log in his path.

He felt the trip wire and looked up to see the log swinging at him from the tree above. An unwary victim would have hesitated, trying to make sense of the dark, impending shape, but Waylon realized immediately that he'd stumbled into his own trap.

He leaped aside as the log flew past his head. He was congratulating himself on his uncharacteristically quick thinking when he landed on the ground with a crash. The loose branches and dry leaves gave way and Waylon plummeted into the pit. Stakes pierced his torso and legs. A stake penetrated his right bicep. He lay on his back, pinned, and felt his consciousness drain away with his blood. The last thing he saw was the woman looking down at him from the edge of the pit, naked, hands on her knees, laughing until tears flowed down her cheeks.

"Do over," he whispered.

For the fourth time in as many days, Waylon died.

***

Something, Waylon realized immediately, was seriously wrong.

Midnight had come, bringing with it renewed life. But before, Waylon had awoken feeling refreshed, energized. This time all he could feel was...pain. Agonizing pain. Everywhere.

He raised his head to see his body still impaled on the stakes. Stakes protruded from his chest and stomach, stakes nailed his legs and one arm just as before. He tried to free himself but found that, already, he had lost too much blood and couldn't summon the strength. He had been healed, but only for the purpose of dying again. His body began to spasm. Blood flowed from a dozen wounds.

He would die again, and the next midnight he would Rise, but only metaphorically, for his body would remain firmly in the grasp of the impaling stakes. In his brief waking moments, Waylon would know only immobility and torment. Then he would die and wake again, and die and wake again, and die and wake again.

Over and over and over.

Grandmother woke to the sight of Spider-Man swooping toward her over the rooftops of Manhattan. It could have been much worse. Had she woken on her other side, Spider-Man would have been a grimacing professional wrestler whose body odor practically oozed off the printed page.

The posters reminded her that she was only a guest in this house, sleeping in the bedroom of her nine-year-old grandson. The boy slept in the family room on the convertible sofa, but his abundance of belongings still filled Grandmother's room from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. The boy's parents refused to make any changes in the décor. The boy had a delicate sensibility, and any sign that he was being displaced would have caused irreparable damage to his fragile psyche.

So Grandmother spent her nights and most of her days surrounded by pumped-up heroes and villains, terrible lizards, robots, futuristic vehicles and items so far outside her experience, she had no words to describe them. It was like living inside the brain of a nine-year-old boy, surrounded by styrene dreams and foam rubber nightmares.

She had pleaded with her daughter, Evelyn, for a few flowers and a little lace and a piece or two from her collection of art glass, but Evelyn had held firm. Not even a bedside photo of her beloved Edgar was to be allowed in the boy's room.