Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan (29 page)

"Why us?" asks the star-necked woman. She sounds distraught, like nothing
about this makes any sense at all. Smart lady. "I didn't do anything!"

"Because you're road ghosts," says Matthew, not unkindly. He's trying to be
gentle with them, trying to get them ready to run. The hunters are here for a
hunt; they tell themselves that shooting a man who runs is somehow more
honorable than shooting one who stands his ground. Maybe they're right. How the
hell would I know? I've never felt the need to shoot anyone. "This is how you
earn the right to stay on the road, instead of moving on."

Heaven, Hell, or Halloween: those are the choices, when you get right down to
it. Move on to whatever waits for you where the road runs out, or show up in
this field once a year—this field, or another like it, tended by a family like
the Barrowmans, who know their duty, and do it, year after unending year—and run
for the right to stay the thing that you are. Every road has tolls. Willow
Barrowman knew that as well as anybody. That's why she only lingered for one
Halloween before she moved on to the unknown.

"Tell them about the other option," says a voice, and it's mine again. I keep
speaking up when I have no business speaking.

It's really been one hell of a year.

"There are weapons hidden around the farm," says Matthew. "No guns,
but...other things. If you find them, you can choose to stand and fight the
hunters. Kill one, and you get a year among the living."

"What's the catch?" asks our new dead football star, with a look on his face
that says this is just too good to be true. "I kill some homicidal asshole and I
get my life back?"

"If you kill on Halloween, you give up your place on the ghostroads," says
Matthew, earnestly. "You'll get a year, and then you'll have to come back here,
and kill again, or else you'll end."

"We'll die?" asks the girl with the stars on her skin.

"No," says Matthew, "you'll
end
. Dying implies that you'll go on to
something, back to the ghostroads or on to the other side, and that won't happen
for you. Not if you take a life on Halloween. You'll just
end
."

She looks at him, big doe-eyes wide and solemn, and nods like she
understands. I have to fight the sudden urge to slap the stars off her skin.
"You don't get your life back if you do this," I say, sharply. Maybe a little
too sharply. Every head turns in my direction, and only the long dead look like
they know what I'm trying to say. "Your family
buried
you. Or they
cremated you, or they donated your body to science, but whatever. You've been
recycled, you're
gone
. If you fight, if you do this, you're buying your
way back into the world of the living, but you're not buying your way back into
your life. That's over."

"Rose always runs," says the phantom rider, a small smirk on his lips. Like
it's something shameful. Like I should play Russian roulette with, for lack of a
better word, my soul.

"Shove it up your ass, Alan," I snap.

Around the front of the barn, the hunters are cheering. One of the Barrowman
kids—one of the ones in the middle, the ones that change so fast that I can't
keep them straight anymore—comes quick-stepping around the corner, a candle in
one hand, the fingers of the other hand curled protectively around the flame.
"Mama says it's time," he says, breathlessly, as he hurries to his father's
side.

"That's the bell, folks," says Matthew, and takes the candle from his son's
hand (his son, who should have died in his cradle, three days old and already
lost, but death wouldn't have him; that's what families like the Barrowmans get
out of this arrangement, long life and health and every death a peaceful one).
"Good luck out there."

I don't stick around to see him place the candle in the mouth of the waiting
jack-o-lantern. I'm already turning, borrowed shoes pinching at my feet, and
diving into the corn like a mermaid fleeing back into the sea. Halloween is here
again, and all I have to do to stay dead is make it through the night alive.

***

My first Halloween, I was disoriented and upset as only the truly new dead
can be. I ran because I was too scared to do anything else, and I escaped thanks
to nothing more admirable than luck. It was luck that made me trip over the
buried well cover, and fear that made me crawl inside the well, where none of
the hunters thought to look for me. If I stay on the ghostroads for another
hundred years, I'll never forget the sound of my heart slamming against my ribs
on that first terrifying Halloween night. Sometimes I think I still have the
bruises.

Two sets of footsteps fall in beside mine, and I know almost before I look
who it's going to be: the football player and the star-necked girl, both of them
doing their best to keep up. He's doing it easily, she's stumbling, but they're
giving it the old college try. "What are you doing?" I hiss.

"Please," whispers the star-necked girl, gasping a little, already running
out of wind. "Please, don't leave me."

Halloween is no time to feel sympathy; it's a time to run, and to hide, and
to shove anyone who gets in your way into the line of fire, because at the end
of the night, only so many of you are going to walk away. Every hunter who makes
a kill is one more hunter who isn't gunning for me. There's no Halloween bonus
for bringing in the greatest haul. So there's no good reason for me to slow
down, to step into the shadow of a tall row of corn, and ask, "What are your
names?" No reason at all. I do it anyway.

"S-Salem," says the star-necked girl, hair not quite so perfect anymore,
pulse jumping in her pale-skinned throat.

"Jimmy," says the football star. He smiles at me, confident and cocky, and I
realize he thinks I stopped because of him, because he's always been the kind of
boy who's catnip for the kind of girl I used to be. He doesn't understand how
much too young for me he is. "It's Rose, right? You've done this before?"

For more years than your parents have been alive
, I think, and nod,
and say, "Yeah, once or twice. I'm running, and I'm hiding. If you've got other
ideas, this is where you get the hell out of my way."

"So you must know where they hide the weapons, right?" Jimmy's smile gets
wider, little boy playing at being a predator. "We could win this thing."

"There's no winner on Halloween," I snap. "You want to 'win this thing,' you
can go and do it without me. If you want to keep yourself safe, come with me. If
not, stay here, and find your own damn weapons." I turn and start walking again,
building up to a slow jog. We're in the corn. That's a start. I hear footsteps
behind me, both Salem and Jimmy following, and speed up a little. They'll keep
up, or they won't. Either way, I don't intend to die tonight.

I come back to the Barrowman farm year after year because it's familiar—more
so to me than to any of the hunters, unless old Oscar's out there. He ran this
ground as quarry before he became a killer, almost by accident, cornered and
striking back because he didn't know what else he was supposed to do. Every
year, I wake up in the pumpkin patch, sometimes in the hayrick, sometimes on the
ground. Every year, they take us to the barn, clothe us, feed us, and set us to
run like rabbits through the fields. They change things every year, because
that, too, is a part of the rules...but there's only so much you can change,
when geography and climate combine to limit your options. The orchards will
always be in the same place; the marsh is sometimes frozen and sometimes not,
but it's always on the other side of the irrigation ditch. These are the things
that help. These are the things that keep me alive, year after year after year.

Once I'm in the corn, I can get to the corn maze. Not the interior, where the
shape of the harvest labyrinth changes every year, but the channel around the
back that the Barrowmans use for maintenance. The short-cut. From there, it's a
straight shot to the apple orchard, and to the old barn beyond, where there are
places a canny ghost could hide for a hundred years. I don't need that kind of
time. I just need a single Halloween. Signaling Salem and Jimmy to stay quiet, I
point right, and break back into a run.

***

Gunshots in the distance mark the progress of the hunters. They aren't
constant—not yet. This early in the game, only the truly desperate will be
seriously working to make their kills. Everyone else will be enjoying the day,
looking for their prey amongst the panicked throng of the dead. And there are
always a few who won't hunt the unarmed, men and women who wait for the dead to
arm themselves before closing in. Never mind that they have guns, and the best
we have is old farm tools and rusty knives. It's the principle that matters to
them, not the actual potential to be defeated. They want to be hunters, not
killers.

Fuck them and their fragile justifications. If it were up to me, no one would
go armed at all. You'd have to beat your victims to death with your fists, feel
their blood on your fingers, feel their teeth breaking your skin, and truly
understand
that your life was coming at the expense of someone's eternity.
So it's probably a good thing for everyone that I'm not the one in charge.

We run through the corn in silence, Jimmy hanging back to pace me, Salem
pushing herself harder than she ever did in life. As long as those gunshots stay
distant, I'm not worried. It's a rare year that anyone comes out this far, this
fast. The mouth of the rear channel is almost a surprise, looming out of the
gray-and-green stalks like a mirage. Grabbing Salem by the elbow, I turn, and
keep on running. She yelps, managing not to stumble as I haul her along.

"So where are we going?" asks Jimmy, pulling up alongside me again. He's not
even breathing hard.

"Out of the corn," I snap, using as little air as possible. God, I wish this
shit counted. With as much time as I've spent incarnate and running for my life
in the last year, you'd think I'd be able to work my way into
slightly
better shape. "Apple orchard. Old barn." And the marsh behind it, but I don't
want to tell him that, not yet. There's too much of a chance that he'll be a
liability, and I'll need a route he doesn't know about.

Salem's already a liability, too slow, too visible against the corn, little
Snow White tattoo girl, like a naughty fairy tale running from the hand that
holds the apple. But at least she's trying. Jimmy looks like this is all a joke,
and I don't have a clue how I can get it through his head that this is anything
but funny.

We run until the corn gives way, our feet pounding against the hard-baked
earth. The apple orchard looms ahead of us, trees groaning under the weight of
the fruit that's waiting for the harvest. The Barrowmans always get a good crop;
it's part of the same bargain that keeps them healthy and alive for as many
years as human frailty allows. "This way," I snap, still hauling Salem in my
wake.

"I thought we wanted to stay under cover," says Jimmy, still too damn amused
for anyone's good.

"If you've got a better idea, you can just be my guest." I'm too annoyed by
his attitude to stop the words from getting out. Halloween is serious business,
and here he is, treating it like it's all just another game.

"I think I will," he says. Putting two fingers in his mouth, he whistles
shrilly. There's a click in the trees to the left, and then—almost before I hear
the gunshot—Salem is wobbling, a comic look of surprise distorting her features.
A bloody red rose is blooming on her chest, Snow White felled in the presence of
a hundred unpicked apples. Her hand pulls free of mine as she falls, crumpling
to the ground.

"What did you
do
?!" I demand, dropping to my knees. It's too late, I
know that even before I see Salem's open, glazed-over eyes; she's gone. For the
second time, she's gone, and this time, she won't wake up in the dubious safety
of the twilight, won't have any second chances. I stare at the red blood
staining her borrowed clothes, realizing numbly that I don't even know what she
was. Hitcher, phantom rider, yuki-onna, wraith...the choices are endless, and
Salem wasn't.

Salem ended.

Salem ended, but I haven't. That thought gets me back to my feet, poised to
run, run away from this little boy who brought the hunters down on a stupid
little fairy tale princess. Let him face the rest of this long night alone. I'm
done.

Instead, I find myself looking at a man in hunter's green, with a shotgun
pointed square at the middle of my chest. Jimmy is smiling like he's just won
himself the world.

"See, Anton?" he says. "I told you I could break some of them away from the
rest of the herd."

The man with the shotgun has Jimmy's eyes. This can't possibly be good.

***

I raise my hands, trying to look innocent and young. Everyone who comes here
to hunt knows they'll be shooting ghosts to ransom their own lives, but some of
them still have trouble killing kids. "Please don't shoot, mister," I say. "I'll
do anything you want."

"Brave one," the man snorts. He walks to Salem, nudging her with his boot.
"If they're all this accommodating, I should've let the goth chick be yours.
Goth chicks'll do some freaky stuff if they think it'll get them somewhere."

Hate uncurls hot and liquid in my belly. "Her name was Salem," I say,
dropping the act as swiftly as I adopted it. It's clear that it won't work here.
"I don't know how she died the first time. I never had the opportunity to ask."

"Probably an overdose," says the man dismissively, and smiles at me. It's the
coldest smile I've ever seen on a living man. "You tell my baby brother all
about the holidays?"

"What makes you think I know what's going on here? I'm just as confused by
all of this as he is."

"She's lying," says Jimmy, still easy, still treating all this like a game.
"She explained the whole thing while we were running. All I have to do is kill
her and I can be alive again."