Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan (14 page)

Chris turns out to be a pleasant sort of driver, the kind of man who picks up
a hitchhiker not because he wants something, but because he doesn't want to see
a girl walking alone along the highways of America. He makes polite conversation
and halfway funny jokes, the kind that get funnier the longer you think about
them. I realize after we've been driving for about half an hour that I like him.
That's rare, these days, when hitchhikers are viewed as either predators or
victims looking for a wolf to take them down.

"So what brings you this way?" asks Chris--a question with no good answer,
since "I'm trying to reach a diner that's only accessible to the dead, so I can
grill a bean sidhe named 'Emma' on what the hell is wrong with me" isn't likely
to go over well.

"I was visiting friends," I say, as vaguely as I can. The idea of calling the
Queen of the North American Routewitches a friend is ludicrous, but it's easier
than telling the truth. "I'm just heading home."

"No car?"

"Not for a long, long time." Oh, I miss driving; miss the feeling of my own
wheels burning down those miles, turning those roads into history and those
horizons into possibilities...I shake myself out of it, saying, "Not this trip."

"Hitching's not exactly safe."

That's a line I've heard before. I flash him a smile that's more sincere than
it might be, and ask, "What is, anymore?"

He laughs. He's still laughing when we go around a bend in the highway and I
forget all humor; forget the sweet chill of the air conditioning, forget the
itching in my back. All I can remember--all I can think about or know--is the
taste of lilies and ashes, overwhelming the world of the living in a veil of
mourning yet-to-be. It's too thick to be coming on this fast, like a hurricane
blowing out of nowhere and turning a blue sky black with bruises. But here it
is, heavy and hard and thick enough that for a moment, I can't breathe.

There's only one thing in my world that can bring the taste of inevitable
tragedy on this fast, and it's the one thing I'm not prepared to deal with. Not
now, with the ink still drying underneath my skin and a man I like enough to
save in the driver's seat beside me.

"What's wrong?" asks Chris, seeing the sudden tension in my face, the sudden
whiteness of my complexion.

"N-nothing," I say, taking shallow breaths to filter the cloying lily air.
"Nothing at all."

The sky on the ghostroads is black with the shadow of an onrushing storm, and
there's nothing I can do to get out of its path.

Bobby Cross is coming.

***

I've been on the ghostroads for three years. I know how to take substance
from a borrowed coat, how to beg a ride from a stranger, how to fall from the
daylight into the twilight. I can't control my movement from the twilight to the
daylight--it happens or it doesn't, according to some pattern of forces I don't
understand--but the older hitchers assure me I'll learn, if I can keep to the
roads for long enough.

That's the big concern, the one that's shared by every hitcher I meet:
the fear that I won't last enough to learn the things I need to know. I'm dead.
I should be nineteen years old, I should be burning rubber out of Buckley,
heading for a future too big and wide to even imagine. But I'm not. I'm sweet
sixteen and cold in the ground, and the last thing I should be worried about is
dying. And still...I am afraid.

The man who ran me off the road is named Bobby Cross; he's not dead, but
he runs the ghostroads just like we do. They say he can cross between levels
with a thought, burn rubber from the midnight to the daylight without making any
of the usual stops or customary payments. They say he doesn't follow the rules
of the living or the dead--and they say he eats ghosts, rips us out of the world
and turns us into nothing but the distant scent of incense on the wind. That's
why he ran me off the road to begin with. He was hungry, and he looked into my
living heart and saw a meal that just needed preparation.

He has my scent, knows the shape of my soul and the nature of my death.
I'm the ghost that got away, and he'll take me if he can. That's what the older
hitchers tell me, and I believe them. I don't know who listens to the prayers of
the dead--Hades or Persephone or some other screwed-up ghost god I didn't pay
attention to in English class--but I pray a lot these days. O Lord who art
probably not in Heaven, deliver me from men who've killed me once and would kill
me again, if I gave them the chance. O Lady, hallowed be thy name, get me the
hell out of here.

Please. Deliver me from evil and deliver me from darkness, and leave me
on the ghostroads for a thousand years if that's what it takes to pay for my
sins, but please. Deliver me from the arms of Bobby Cross.

***

The second shock of Bobby's approach comes hard on the heels of the first
one, the smell of wormwood and gasoline laying itself across the lilies and
ashes until it almost washes them away. My teeth snap shut, back arching in a
shocked, involuntary motion that makes my tattoo burn like fire. Bobby isn't
just coming, he's here, he's here, he's within a mile of us, and the power of
his presence is enough to blur the lines of the accident ahead--I can't see the
shape of it, can't see whether there's a way to avoid it. He's too big and too
loud, and too damn strong. Right now, I can't tell the victims from the
bystanders, and the fact of my failure burns.

Chris all but radiates concern as he tries to watch me and the road at the
same time, only a lifetime of good driving habits keeping him from veering onto
the shoulder. Poor bastard. He tried to do a favor for a pretty girl on the
highway, and what does he get? Some chick having what looks like a seizure in
his passenger seat. He can't know that I'm fighting my own urge to flee, to drop
down to the deepest levels of the twilight and let him handle what's ahead of us
alone. The coat I'm wearing gives me life, until I choose to give that life
away, and for his sake--because he was kind to me--I won't let go. Not until I
know what Bobby's here for.

Not until I know whether Chris can be saved.

"Rose?" It isn't the first time he's said my name, but it's the first time
I've
heard
it, and hearing is enough to snap me back into my own head,
the lure of the ghostroads fading. "Rose, are you okay? Do we need to stop?"

We need to run, run so far and fast that Bobby Cross will never find us. But
I can't say that. So I swallow the words, force myself to settle in my seat, and
answer, "No. I mean no, I'm not okay, and no, I don't need you to stop. Not yet.
Next time there's a rest area? I think I need some water." Some water, an
exorcism kit, and a priest or two would be more like it. They don't sell those
at the Gas-N-Go.

"Deal," says Chris--and he sounds like he means it, like he'll go inside with
me instead of promising to wait in the car and then blazing out of the parking
lot the second my back is turned. He's a nice guy. That somehow makes it worse,
and I find myself hoping, hoping hard, that Bobby is ahead because he, like any
natural disaster, sometimes strikes without warning, and not because he's on my
trail again.

The first shock is past; I'm beginning to feel my way into the accident
ahead. It's a big one; eight cars, at the very least, and death enough to keep
the
bean sidhe
and the doom-crows satiated for years. That must be why
Bobby's here. An accident this large is like an all-you-can-eat buffet for him,
and the menu will feature all the finest dishes. Not everyone who dies on the
road leaves a ghost behind, but enough do...and enough of those ghosts are
shaped by the road to make them his chosen fuel.

I take a breath, hold it until my lungs ache, and let it slowly out again,
digging deeper into the accident. We're five miles out, which is good. It's
between us and the next exit, which isn't. If Chris were less of a nice guy,
this is where I'd say something lewd, suggest he pull off and take me into the
trees to pay for my passage--but I know his type well enough to know that won't
work. If I try it, he might leave me by the side of the road, which solves the
question of how we're getting me away from Bobby, but leaves him undefended. He
won't stand a chance if he drives alone into what's ahead. He's a part of it, my
nice guy; I can smell it now. The car is filled with the scent of lilies, too
strong to be nothing but a warning. Maybe I can stop Chris from dying, and maybe
I can't, but if I leave him here, nothing will protect him from Bobby.

There won't be any rest stop; the accident is too close, and the taste of
ashes is too strong. "Could we maybe slow down a little?" I ask, doing my best
to look sick but-not-that-sick, unsettled by the heat and the speed and the
road, but not quite into the territory of serious illness. It's a difficult
masquerade, and not one I have much familiarity with.

Maybe it helps that it's not entirely a lie; I really
am
feeling
sick to my stomach, and the pain in my back is bad enough that it feels like my
tattoo is trying to burrow all the way into my flesh. Chris nods, easing back on
the gas. "Sure, Rose," he says. "Just let me know when you're feeling better,
okay? Are you sure we don't need to stop?"

"Not yet," I say, and smile wanly. It's the smile that does it.

He's still looking at me when we come around the bend, moving slower than we
were, but not slow enough, and the taste of ashes and lilies takes everything
away even before Chris starts swearing, hauling hard on the steering wheel,
tires finding no traction on asphalt slick with oil and rough with bits of
broken glass and broken futures. He's shouting, and the air stinks like burning
rubber, and someone's screaming, and I think it's me--

And he's lost control of the car, he doesn't know it yet, but the car does.
She's trying to help, tires straining for purchase, engine screaming with the
effort of survival. She's too young, the bond between them too fragile, and in
the end, she's just a machine, barely aware enough to know that she's about to--

And the smell of wormwood is heavy over everything, the stink of it, like a
corpse unembalmed and left to rot by the side of the road, but that's what he
is, isn't it? Just a corpse that won't lie still, a corpse that makes more
corpses, zombie dragster, bastard son of the silver screen. Bobby Cross is here,
Bobby Cross is
coming
--

And I'm wearing a coat, and I realize too late what that means, what the
onrushing wall of twisted steel that used to be cars means if we hit it while I
have this coat on--

--and we slam, hard, into the segmented body of the single beast called
"accident," and everything is blackness, and the smell of burning.

***

I've been on the ghostroads for eight years. Long enough to see my
classmates marry, start families of their own, put the yearbooks on the shelf
and forget the girl who starred on her very own page in her Junior Year, the one
titled "In Memoriam." Long enough to see my boyfriend graduate. He saw me once,
when I was young and careless, and it broke something deep inside of him, in the
space where mourning lives.

Long enough to learn to slip between the twilight and the daylight like a
bride slips between the sheets on her wedding night; long enough to learn what
it means when I touch a trucker's hand and taste ashes, when I flag down a ride
and smell lilies on the wind. Hitchers aren't death omens, but we're
psychopomps, if we want to be. "It can make you crazy," says one of the older
hitchers, a lanky man who goes by "Texas Bill," whose eyes contain a million
miles of desert road. "All those lives, all those deaths--leave them. Find
another ride, and keep your sanity."

Emma at the Last Dance (which is the Last Chance sometimes, they tell me,
and those are the times where you need to be wary and beware) says something
different. "By the time they hear me singing, it's too late," she says, and she
sounds sadder than any living soul should sound--but she's not really living, is
she? The rules are different for the bean sidhe, and I don't know quite how they
apply to her. "You get an early warning. You get a chance. That's just this side
of a miracle, Rose. You should treat it like one."

I listen to them both, but I've made up my mind, and not because of
anything either of them said. No; what made up my mind was a white-haired old
trucker who bought me a grilled cheese sandwich and showed me pictures of his
sister, of her little house in Florida, the place he was going when he retired.
Just four more cross-country runs, he said, and his skin smelled like lilies and
ashes, and I knew, even if he didn't, that he was never going to see his
sister's little house on the beach. And I didn't help him. I didn't even try. I
told him I didn't feel good, ran for the bathroom, and fell back down to the
ghostroads, where the dead are the dead, and the living don't look at us that
way.

His truck crashed on I-5, blind curve, bad driving conditions, a perfect
storm of bad luck and bad decisions. Word in the truck stops is that his body
wasn't even recognizable when they pulled it from the cab. That doesn't bother
me as much as it should--being dead for eight years has given me a very
different outlook on death--but what came after is another story. One of the
trainspotters was near the place where the crash happened, riding the rails from
San Diego to Vancouver, and he came looking for me as soon as he figured out
what rail line I was closest to. That's the trouble with trainspotters. They can
see the future (sometimes, when they're looking in the right direction), but
they're limited in more ways even than the hitchers.

"He came in the stink of wormwood and soured gasoline," said the
trainspotter, grabbing my hands. I wasn't wearing a coat. He caught them anyway.
Damn wizards. "He came like the wind out of the west, like a crow to the
battlefield. He came on black wings of burning rubber and shadow, and he drove
his victim as a wolf drives a fawn. He has claimed another soul, Rose Marshall,
and you might have stopped him, had you cared enough to rouse yourself to
action. Shame, shame on you, shame and a thousand nights of wandering lonely.
Shame, and all the sorrows of the road."