The Revenant Road (2 page)

2

The Good Die Young, but Critics Live Forever

This is a chronicle that no one will ever believe.

I’m writing it anyway, so that when the monsters come for me, someone, perhaps you, dear reader, will know what really happened. What’s happening even as you read these words.

But first: A little about me.

By day, I’m a writer, the author of several commercially successful “Hardboiled” novels. You may have read my latest,
The River’s Edge.
Toby Bernardi, the critic for the
New York Times
called it “unfiltered Crap of the lowest order.” The critic for the
Village Voice
called it “…the most violent piece of dog shit this reporter has ever been forced to swallow.”

The critic for the
African-American
simply vomited on his
Barnes and Noble
receipt and submitted it for publication. I framed that one. It adds a splash of color to the black walls of my
Brooklyn
apartment.

To date,
The River’s Edge
has sold two-million copies.    

I’m rich, black, thirty-eight years old, six-feet-two inches tall. My build has been described as “gaunt” by my fans. My
other
job doesn’t allow me the time to cultivate a decent middle-aged spread.

But enough about me.

Let me tell you about a demon I once met.

* * * *

May 13
^th
,
 
7:16 PM
,
Chinatown
.

Chen Mao Liu had been in
Seattle
for six months the night Jeannie Montgomery was murdered. He’d come West from
China
’s
Guangxi
Province
looking for a better life. He was learning English, and even did a passable Two-Step down at the local
Hooters
on Wednesday nights.

After working an eighty-hour week at the
Golden Fortune
restaurant Chen was exhausted. Worse, he was deathly ill: Men like him, illegal aliens without passports or health insurance, typically avoid any encounter with American authority, fearing deportation. That includes hospitals.

The
Golden Fortune
was humming that night. A steady crowd kept the wait staff jumping. Past the swinging double doors the kitchen was a cacophony of Mandarin, Spanish and English: pick-up orders shouted over a hip-hop remix of Sting’s latest. Another
American Date Night in
Chinatown
.

At
7:16 PM
, Chen Mao Liu was hauling a pot of boiling water across the kitchen toward one of the smaller stoves near the alley entrance. Head chef Glen Hong stood waiting at the stove. He was squeezing two live lobsters.

The owner’s brother, a master chef newly arrived from
Hong Kong
, was working the “Big Stove,” the one normally manned by Hong. Hong had objected strenuously to his boss, a pig-like creature from
Taipei
named Sammy Chow. Chow had offered Hong two viable options: Acquiescence to the New Order, or unemployment.

“Faster, idiot!” Hong screamed.

Chen moved faster, the boiling water he carried sloshing with each step. A tablespoon-sized dollop lapped over the lip of the big pot and drizzled down the front of his shirt: He barely noticed. His guts were on fire and his brain felt as if someone were dissecting it from the inside.

“Coming,” he said.

Chen reached the small stove and set the big pot down.

“Move out of my way,” Hong snapped. “Stupid asshole.”

Hong tossed the lobsters into the boiling water and slammed the cover down over the pot.

Clang

Chen jumped, startled. He wiped his face with the back of his forearm and bent over to catch his breath. An autopsy might have confirmed that Chen was suffering from dehydration, malnutrition and third-degree burns to his hands and chest.

But Chen’s true affliction lay beyond the scope of any traditional medicine.

“You’re not paid to stand around, fool!” Hong yelled.

To emphasize his point, Hong slapped Chen’s face, once, twice, three times, each slap landing sharply enough to turn heads. Those same heads turned away, pretending not to see. 

Dazed, Chen raised his arms to ward off Hong’s attack. He stumbled and his hip struck the big pot and knocked it off the stove. Boiling water splashed over the floor. Busboys jumped to avoid scalding and one of the waitresses yelped as burning drops spackled her bare calves.

“Idiot!” Hong shrieked.

As Chen bent to grab the half-boiled lobsters, Hong hit him again. “You bastards from the Provinces, coming over here,” Hong shouted, his words accented by blows. “Half of you should have drowned...at...
sea
!”

Finally, Hong relented. Disgusted, he stormed off, berating the staff as he went.

Chen picked up the lobsters and threw them into the pot. Eyewitnesses would later report that he appeared perfectly calm. He told one of the busboys that the pain in his scalded hands helped him ignore the churning in his guts.

The pain forced him to listen to the voice in his head. As Chen went to boil more water, he smiled.  He even sang to himself while he worked.                         

* * * *

10:30 PM
. 

Glenn Hong and Sammy Chow, the owner of the Golden Fortune, were smoking out back when they noticed the smell.

“What the hell is that?” Sammy sniffed. “Smells like something died back here.”

Hong shrugged. “I don’t smell anything,” he said. “Except for the crap your brother’s taking all over my kitchen.”

“Hey, screw you,” Chow snarled. “Ronnie’s got a right to work as much as you do.”

Hong blew a waft of smoke into Chow’s face.        

“Ronnie doesn’t even speak English, you moron.”

“Hey!”

“Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie and Mitsubishi, baby,” Hong said in his best ‘coolie’ accent. “You no speak a’ de Engleesh you no get respect in
USA
.”

Chow stormed off, swearing all the way back to the kitchen. Hong was a good chef (better, in fact, than Chow’s brother). Chow couldn’t afford to lose the kind of talent he wielded. On the other hand, Hong was an arrogant asshole. Everyone in the restaurant knew of his hatred for his less assimilated countrymen: Glen Hong looked down on men like Chen Mao Liu.

“Idiot,” Hong snarled.

Something in the alley snarled back.

Hong spun toward the sound.

“Hello?” he said. “Who’s there?”

Hong’s eyes strained to pierce the darkness but saw only shadows: No doped-up Mexican drag queen hungry for a fix; no angry black pimp looking to rob him.

He reached into the armpit of his chef’s jacket and yanked his Beretta 92F from its custom-made shoulder holster. It was the same gun Mel Gibson used in the
Lethal Weapon
movies that Hong adored.

At home, sometimes, Hong practiced his quick draw in front of a full-length mirror, mentally blasting away entire continents filled with ethnic rabble-rousers.

“You fuck wit’ the Hong-dog you gon’ get a face full o’ lead, biaaatch,” Hong drawled. He twirled the Beretta for effect and cursed the fates for making him Asian. He’d often complained to the staff that if he’d been born white or even
black
he would have been a star by now.

The thing that had been watching him stepped out of the shadows. Hong screamed. The creature growled again: A sound like boulders being ground to powder filled the alley.

Hong managed to get off five shots with the Beretta. Then the thing rushed toward him, one huge hand upraised, claws like black sabers gleaming in the glare from the street lamps.  

Hong pissed his pants.

The first swing severed his right arm at the elbow.

The second swing disemboweled him where he stood. The third one knocked him twelve feet through the air. Hong landed in a pile of his own intestines.

The growling thing fell upon Hong’s remains. The alley echoed with its screams of pleasure as it fed.   

Two busboys who witnessed the attack would report seeing something inexplicable in the alley that night; a man-like creature, nearly nine feet tall, covered with thick black fur; a monster that glared at them with burning yellow eyes before it disappeared into the shadows. Later, each of the eyewitnesses would suffer the worst nightmares of their lives.

No one in
Seattle
ever saw Chen Mao Liu alive again.

The creature was reported heading north.

3

Family Matters

1979 

My parents were fighters.

My mother, Lenore, was the first African-American model to grace the cover of a Western fashion magazine, British Vogue, back in 1966. Later, she taught school, until the government gutted the carcass of the
New York
public school system. Lenore fought the school board until she retired and moved to
Bronxville
,
New York
.

My father—well, that’s a little more complicated.

They’d been married for fifteen years the day it all came crashing down around us.  We were driving back from
Martha’s Vineyard
after visiting my aunt Selena. My mother’s older sister had married an attorney and moved to the Vineyard from Bronxville five years earlier, a fact that she’d never grown tired of reminding her “little sister.”

 I was sitting in the back seat with Doctor Necropolis  and Black Murray, the garter snake I’d liberated from my second-grade classroom. Black Murray lived in the glass geranium I kept on the windowsill in my bedroom. I’d taken him along on the trip to Oak Bluffs thinking (inexplicably) that he might enjoy the beach.

 My parents had waged a silent war since leaving New York: silent because my mother remained adamant that Aunt Selena never hear her and my father arguing, thereby adding fuel to a fire that was ignited the day my mother was born. As a result, I’d spent the summer of ‘79 ignoring hissed accusations and dodging thinly-veiled glares. I was only 9, but I wasn’t stupid.

 Doctor Necropolis giggled:
Toil and trouble
m’boy, he whispered.
Toil and trouble
.

 Doctor Necropolis was the mortal nemesis of
The Time Rangers,
a ragtag bunch of time-traveling marionette soldiers who haunted the UHF arm of
Chicago
’s TV galaxy for nearly a decade. He was the second-hottest seller in the
FADCO
line of action figures and games from 1967 until 1974, surpassed in popularity only by Captain Radion, the lantern-jawed Commander of the ‘Fighting 509
^th
.’

He’d made the trip from
Chicago
, where we’d lived until 1973, to
New York
, largely because my parents had only allowed me to take one toy with me during a hastily organized move conducted in the dead of night.

The black-clad Doctor Necropolis wielded a ‘Flying Death-ray Lazer Pocket Watch,’ ‘
Perfect
Karate-chop Action’
and a ‘Time-Grenade’ that could blast his enemies into the distant future or the forgotten past.

My
Doctor Necropolis knew when people were going to die.   

He’d begun speaking to me sometime after my sixth birthday, an item he’d instructed me never to share with either of my parents.

Newsflash from Futureville
,
O-dog
,” Necropolis chuckled.     

My father was fiddling with the radio as we drove along the
Merritt Parkway
toward
New York
while Lenore sat staring out of the passenger window, her jaw muscles clenching as she gnawed the bone of her discontent. Finally, the bone broke. Always consistent, Lenore went for the marrow.

“When we left
Chicago
you promised me that it was over, Marcus.”

Marcus took a deep breath and kept his eyes fixed upon the road.

“They’re breathing down my neck, Lenore,” he said.

Briefly, our eyes met in the rear-view mirror.

“Let’s talk about this later,” he said.

My father took pains never to argue with Lenore in front of me. Sometimes this made him appear weak before the juggernaut that was (and is) my mother: Lenore suffered from no such compunction.

“
I don’t care
,” she hissed. “I don’t
care
if he knows. You spend more time with Kowalski than you do with him anyway, so don’t pretend that you care.”

“Lenore, when Kowalski calls...”    

“You jump,” she said savagely. “You jump up and run to him like his little black lapdog every time.”    

When angered, Marcus could bellow like a general commanding troops under heavy fire. Marcus worked nights. A
lot
of nights.  Often, I’d heard them arguing when they thought I was at school. I’d sit on the front porch until the screaming stopped, too angry to open the door and scream at them to shut up shut up just
shut...up
.

But the finality I heard in my father’s voice that afternoon scared me more than the loudest shout.

Party’s over, O-dog,
Doctor Necropolis whispered.

“You have no idea what’s happening out there, Lenore,” Marcus said, “and I’m tired of explaining it to you.”

My mother actually gasped. She was (and is) a woman unaccustomed to being thwarted.

“You arrogant son-of-a bitch,” she snarled. “Don’t you
dare
talk down to me.”

“Dad?” I interrupted.

Marcus looked up at me in the rear-view mirror again.

“Quiet, son,” he said.

I returned his smile. They were rare and I wanted to make this one last.

May 19th
, O-dog,
Doctor Necropolis whispered.
Wanna know what year?

Shut up, you bastard,
I thought.

Part of me hoped that I was crazy; that a twelve-dollar bundle of balsa wood and string couldn’t really predict when a man would die.

The problem was that four months earlier, Necropolis had predicted the death of Tubby the Wonder Cat, my Aunt Selena’s Siamese surrogate child. He’d correctly forecast the fatal heart attack of our next-door neighbor, Mr. Grant, as well as the abduction and murder of my kindergarten-teacher Mrs. Reagan.

The problem was that Doctor Necropolis was
never
wrong.

Marcus and Lenore loved each other, for the most part, but some unuttered resentment clouded the air between them. For my whole life we’d lived under that cloud the way prairie dogs live beneath the shadow of a circling hawk. We completed the drive back to
New York
shrouded in the kind of silence you find at the better funerals.

Marcus moved out the next day.