The Brotherhood of the Wheel (23 page)

Ava had walked long enough to sing all the Katy Perry songs she knew when she heard the engine. She stepped to the side of the road, uncertain of exactly where it was coming from. The echo of the engine got louder, and Ava suddenly knew. She knew it was from behind her, from Four Houses, and she knew that it was a motorcycle. Before she could try to find a place to hide, the black bike rolled into view, banking into the curve, then straightening to run down the center of the road. It was the same old World War II–looking bike that had driven Gerry off the road, the same rider, clad in black, head to toe, who had stopped after the wreck and looked at them as if they were insects. The rider slowed as he saw Ava on the side of the road and came to a stop, seemingly with no care for oncoming traffic. He looked at Ava through his mirrored black helmet visor.

“You!” Ava shouted, suddenly more angry than fearful. “You caused all this! Are you from Four Houses? Why did you run us off the road? Who are you?”

The rider said nothing. Off in the distance, Ava heard a dog howl as if it was in pain. Another dog took up the cry, then another, and another. There was a crunching sound, like dry sticks snapping. From the biker's black helmet, antlers began to sprout on either side of the visor, thick, heavy, and intricate. The antlers branched and grew faster, stretching out like the branches of a bone tree. When they stopped, they extended a good three feet out and up from the driver's head, made of dark bone, as if they were stained with old blood.

Ava felt a slight warm trickle as she began to lose control of her bladder at the sight of the rider, but she controlled herself and held the fear at bay, barely. Her legs were shaking—her whole body was. The rider looked at her and began to rev his motorcycle. Dogs were screaming, howling, above the sound of the angry engine. He pointed a leather gloved finger at her. Ava felt as if her heart were being gripped, stilled, by a leather glove full of ice. The rider knew her, had marked her.

The rider accelerated, and the rear tire screeched as it spun against the asphalt. The rider raised his leg to the peg and aimed the bike down the road south—back the way he had come, swerving, straightening. He rode away, his grisly crown steady, as he topped the next hill on the road, and then disappeared from view. The dogs' howling faded away. The sound of the bike's engine diminished and then was gone.

Ava ran. She ran for all she had in her, as if the Devil was behind her, as if he was going to come back and devour her. Running north, in the opposite direction he had sped off toward, into the unknown frightened her, but not finding help, staying in Four Houses with whatever that … thing was—that frightened her more.

She ran, her satchel slapping against her hip, the purple high-tops rising and falling, their rubber soles slapping against the warm pavement of the road. Her arms flew back and forth as she sprinted; tears burned her eyes. She knew she was running for her life. She knew he, it, whatever it was, would come back for her, claim her, and end her. She had no choice now—she had to run, to escape, or die. Ava thought she had run as fast as she was capable of running the other night, with the shadow people chasing her. She was wrong.

She finally stopped when her body refused to run anymore. Her lungs were full of acid, and she gasped at ragged mouthfuls of air. Her legs twitched with cramps and strained muscles; she staggered and doubled over, losing her glasses and finally clutching them in her hand as she staggered forward. She vomited—the cheeseburger, the fries, the Cokes. She cried and screamed, hugging herself, as she stumbled forward. This wasn't real, none of this was real. She couldn't be here, no. There were no monsters. Her mind found no haven in her desperate clutching at reason; she trusted her senses too much. The disconnection of her mind and body, divorced by numbing fear, didn't keep her legs from moving forward, toward help, some kind of help. She was a robot now, walking, because it was all she could do.

Ahead she saw dark, heavy forests appear on either side of the road, but far off, half a mile or more away, easy. The sun dimmed. She guessed it was about four; the sun was starting to crawl lower, and a panic returned to her exhausted body.
Be home before dark.
…

Time passed, miles. She was beginning to calm down again. Ahead, on the left, was a gravel road, a private drive. She began to walk toward the road to find the house, the farm it joined to. To beg to use their phone to call the police, to call her mom and dad. She noticed that there was no mailbox, and then she saw it and she stopped. Beside the beginning of the gravel road was a tree, and nailed to it were a set of large deer antlers. At the base of the antler tree were baskets of bread and fruit, butcher-paper packages dark-stained with blood, and small, lit candles, guttering in the cold wind. If she could have vomited again, she would have. Instead, she began to limp-walk faster as the sun began to drown at the terminator of the forest's canopy.

Walking, trying not to think. One foot in front of the other. About a mile up from the gravel road, she saw the beginnings of a small town. There were house trailers, and a few small shacks and cabins, some RVs parked among the wild, overgrown grass. She figured it was still a good hour or so before twilight, and she could find someplace to hole up. She slowed and a silent, shrill tone began in her mind. The garage she was approaching on the right had a sign, a grimy, rusting, sheet-metal sign hung on the roof. It read S
CODE'S
G
ARAGE
.

No, no, this wasn't possible.

A tiny sound escaped Ava's lips. For a moment, she wanted to fall down in the road, but she didn't. She looked across the street from the garage and saw the same trailers, same RVs, same trash on the side of the two-lane she had seen a few nights ago. She was on the south end of Four Houses, after walking north all afternoon. She heard the wheeze and grumble of the Scodes' tow truck and watched as the truck pulled out of the garage parking lot headed north up the road. Scowling, Wald was at the wheel, and Toby sat beside him. In the rear of the truck were two people, sitting against the back window of the cab; both had old feed-grain bags over their heads. Ava recognized the goth clothing on the girl and the preppie shirt on the boy—it was Lexi and Cole. The truck was accelerating as best it could, and Ava summoned enough strength to try to keep it in sight as it headed north. All thoughts of falling down, of screaming until her mind fluttered free of her body, were thrown in the backseat. They were alive, and they were in trouble.

Ava caught a break. The Scodes' truck stopped a little ways up the road at the high, chain-link fence to the junkyard on the left. Ava recalled Carl's and Barb's warnings about the place as she watched Wald unlock the gate and then drive the truck onto the grounds. He then went back and closed and locked the gate. Several large, dark shapes moved about the grounds and barked at Wald as he went about his work. Black dogs, huge ones.

The sun was dimming. Ava thought for a moment about how to get in there and help Cole and Lexi, and then she realized that she had to help herself first. She felt guilt again, just as she had the other night, when she ran and didn't look back. She was a selfish bitch. She had known that about herself for a long time. But if she went in there now—no plan, no backup—she'd end up like them. No, she had to do this right. She walked past the junkyard, on the opposite side of the road, just as they had all done the other night. Ava saw the Scodes leading Lexi and Cole into one of the large corrugated-tin buildings that squatted between the teetering mountains of dead cars. She noted it and headed for Agnes's house.

On the way, she made a final stop. She visited the field where the shadows had first come on them. She searched the side of the road for Gerry's body, but it was gone. She found his cap, dirty and wet. In the field, she found Alana. The bugs had gotten on her, and some bigger predators had visited the body as well. Ava knelt next to her and cried for a while.

Agnes was waiting for her on the porch as she walked up the lawn. The old woman had the same expression she had this morning as she looked out the window—sadness, an inevitable knowledge that couldn't be expressed, only experienced, shared.

“I'm so sorry, dear,” Agnes said. “I'm so terribly sorry.”

“Tomorrow,” Ava said, “I want to go get Alana. I want to bury her, if that's okay.”

“Of course it is, dear,” Agnes said, “We'll bury her next to Julia.”

 

NINE

“10-43”

“So this girl, this ghost—” Heck said into his microphone headset.

“Vanishing Hitchhiker,” Jimmie interrupted, on his mike.

“Why do you keep doing that?” Heck asked. “You keep interrupting me. It's pissing me off, man.”

They were driving up to Aurora, a city just outside Chicago, to meet a retired state cop who was a member of the Brethren. Jimmie's semi was in the lead, with Heck's motorcycle following a short distance behind. They had pulled up at one of the town-sized truck stops on I-57 and picked up a Bluetooth CB radio headset for Heck. They linked it to a portable base unit that looked like a thick brick of a walkie-talkie with a stubby rubber-covered antenna. Jimmie explained that the unit had a special chip in it that would allow them to communicate securely with each other and with other members of the Brotherhood. The base unit was now clipped to Heck's belt and tuned to Channel 23.

“I'm trying to teach you,” Jimmie said with a sigh. It was like talking to his own teenage daughter. “There are all kinds of ghosts, but this was a particular kind—a Vanishing Hitchhiker.”

“What difference does it make?” Heck said.

“Vanishers are an urban myth,” Jimmie said. “One of the ones that's real. You pick up some poor woman or girl on the side of the road. She's usually dressed in white. She asks you to take her somewhere, and you do, and then she vanishes right out of your car or truck. Sometimes she may say a few words about her death or the loved ones she misses. It's the ghost trying to get closure, to get home. As one of the Brethren, it's our duty to help shepherd them home. You need to know what they are, recognize them, and know how you can help them. That's what I'm trying to teach you, Heck. This Vanisher, this girl, Karen, she was different from the usual Vanishing Hitchhiker, though. She gave me a warning about something hunting kids. She knew me, by name, and she had known this was coming a long time before she disappeared, before she died.”

“Sorry,” Heck said. “Look, man, most of the creepy-crawlies I've hunted with the Jocks didn't want to talk; they just wanted to rip your head off and lay eggs down your neck hole.”

“You're not hunting anymore,” Jimmie said. “You're one of the Brotherhood. It's different. We protect, not hunt, not unless we have to.”

“So Ale was a member of this Brotherhood, and my grandfather, too?” Heck said. They were starting to hit the tail end of the Chicago morning rush hour. The truck and the bike slowed and drifted into the lines of sluggish traffic creeping through the suburbs.

“Yep,” Jimmie said. “Like I said, I used to ride with the Blue Jocks back in the early days. It was about the same time I was squiring to my dad. There are lots of secret clubs, societies, orders out there that eventually lead back to the Brethren. The Jocks is one of them, and the roots between the two run pretty deep.”

“So what, exactly, did I join up with?” Heck said. “Like I asked before, what is this Brotherhood, Jimmie?”

“You're impatient as hell, boy,” Jimmie said. “Like I just said, we protect people on the highways, on the roads. We guard the pathways of civilization.
A cultu vivit, nec moritur a viis suis salutem
.” His accent was pure Mason-Dixon, but his pronunciation was flawless.

“Where the hell did you learn Latin?” Heck asked. “And what does that mean?”

“The same place you're gonna learn it, boy,” Jimmie said. “Your first homework is to work out what what I just said means. Now, get your head back in the game. We're almost there.”

Aurora was miles of strip malls, movie Googleplexes, fast-food chains, and subdivisions—grids of neat little suburban life. Looming over it all was the big bad wolf of Chicago—close enough to entice but far enough away from the gunshots to feel safe. Gil Turla, the retired Illinois state trooper, opened the door to his modest Cape Cod on Bangs Street when Jimmie and Heck knocked. Heck was impressed by the ex-cop's taste in cars—there was a cherry '57 Chevy Bel Air ragtop, powder blue, in pristine condition, parked in the driveway.

Turla still looked like a trooper—tall, broad shoulders, and in pretty good shape for his age. He kept his gray, thinning hair in a tight military cut, and he still sported the cop “micro 'stache”—the only facial hair regs allowed. Turla was wearing a wrinkled button-down oxford and equally rumpled chinos.

“Mr. Turla?” Jimmie asked. Turla nodded, giving Heck a quick threat assessment of a glance. It was the look every cop had given him since he was sixteen; he was used to it. Old habits died hard, Heck figured.

“Yeah,” Turla said.

“The wheel turns,” Jimmie said.

“The wheel turns,” Turla replied, with a wary smile, and offered his hand to Jimmie. They shook. “You Don Aussapile's kid? Pleasure to meet you. You got a hell of an old man. Who's your, uh, friend?”

Jimmie smiled and nodded. “This is Heck Sinclair; he's my squire.”

Turla's smile dimmed. He offered Heck his hand.

“I got all my shots,” Heck said, shaking the ex-trooper's hand, “and I'm mostly housebroken.”

“Mostly,” Jimmie said. “You mind if we come in? We're here about the missing-persons report—those kids. Karen Collie? I was told you could help us.”

“Come in, please,” Turla said, stepping inside. “Get you fellas a cup o' mud? It's awful, but it's free.”