Unknown (23 page)

She looks away.

Somewhere behind her Sue hears the final moments of the collision, imagines what’s left of the entire crate of 151 flying forward to slam into the burning backseat. Alcohol igniting, bottles bursting like bombshells inside the Expedition, until with one shrill, earringing blast, the gas tank finally explodes, shooting a tower of orange flame and black smoke straight up into the sky.

Sue raises her head, her hands pressed over Veda’s ears as she looks back at the street behind her. The smoke is too thick to see through. It burns her eyes, siphons through her lungs, makes her choke. Lifting Veda up, she carries her away, down toward the waterfront. Somewhere between the street and the harbor she realizes that the sound of the pounding heart has stopped.

They get to the water, the wooden boardwalk leading to a series of docks. The air is clearer here and Sue holds Veda at eye level, the girl no longer screaming, just crying steadily, the intensity of her panic having drained her.

Sue hugs her daughter tightly, as tightly as she dares, kissing away her tears. “Shhh, it’s okay,” she says. Over Veda’s shoulder, Sue can see the smoke rising, catching in the wind and being pulled eastward, out to sea.

And as the air slowly clears, she sees the statue is still there atop its stone pillar, the front end of the wrecked Expedition wrapped around it, burning.

Sue looks out at the hillside leading down to the water. Through the dissipating smoke she glimpses the streets, the little houses and narrow storefronts of White’s Cove, and eventually she can see the bodies of the children, so many children, sprawled motionless in the snow.

She turns her daughter’s head away.

8:29A.M.

Down by the water, a burning scrap of paper blows across her feet, caught in the wind. Holding Veda close to her chest, Sue leans over and lifts it by the edge that isn’t on fire.

It’s the map, or what’s left of it. She’s not sure how it got here, but in light of last night’s events, the map’s sudden reappearance doesn’t seem the least bit surprising or strange. As charred as it is, Sue can barely make out some of the names of the towns. The first odd thing she notices is that there is no more jagged line running across it. She finds Gray Haven and tries to follow the route east but can’t find the next town. At the moment she can’t even remember what it was called. As the flame inches upward toward the top of the map the town names are consumed one by one, and she doesn’t see any that sound like they were on the route. Now she’s squinting at it, and as she does, the last of the names—White’s Cove—also disappears, just a second or two before the nearby towns that surround it. Spectral images fading along with the memory of the route, vanishing down the pipeline of the night.

The route created the towns, she thinks. They’re still here but the route is gone.

Up at the top of the hill she sees the lights of emergency vehicles flashing red and blue against the steadily illuminating sky.

Chasing the Dead
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2006 by Joe Schreiber

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

BALLANTINEand colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to HarperCollins Publishers for permission to reprint an excerpt from
Big Red Barn
by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Felicia Bond, text copyright © 1956, 1984, 1989 by Roberta Brown Raunch. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schreiber, Joe.

Chasing the dead : a novel / Joe Schreiber.

    p. cm.

eISBN-13: 978-0-345-49560-0

eISBN-10: 0-345-49560-8

1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. Kidnapping—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3619.C4635C47 2006

813'.6—dc22   2006047713

www.ballantinebooks.com

v1.0

To Christina, who had to know how it ended

PROLOGUE

1983

The man on the ground has finally stopped moving. The boy looks down at him and uncurls his fingers, allowing the knife to slip from his hand. The blade strikes the packed dirt with a dull thud. The girl next to him hears the noise and flinches. Above them the shadows of late August hang low in the damp air.

The girl looks down at the man. “Is he dead?”

The boy is breathing hard, staring at the knife on the ground. He still feels as if he’s ramming it home, over and over, through the shredded denim of the man’s bib overalls and deep into the hollow of the man’s chest. He can’t imagine now where he found the strength to do that. The muscles in his arms are as limp as wet towels, barely capable of supporting the weight of his own hands.

“Is he—”

“Yeah,” the boy says. “He’s dead.”

The girl’s eyes widen a fraction, showing extra white along the rims. She has dark blond hair and a pretty face that finds its center in her eyes, green and bright. But the remains of baby fat in her cheeks and the size of her lips have other kids making fun of her at school, calling her Duck-girl or Fat Ass or worse. “What do we do? Should we call the cops?”

The boy doesn’t move, staring down at the body below him. He’s eleven years old, an age when such focused immobility still seems out of place, even in a kid with such a slight build and intense eyes. “No way,” he says quietly. “No cops.”

“We can explain it to them. They’ll see it and they’ll understand.”

He shakes his head. “We can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Look at it.” He points with his chin. “I mean, jeez, look what I just did. What if we were wrong? What if—what if it wasn’t him?”

“It is him,” the girl says. “It’s him. It’s gotta be. You know it is.”

“Yeah, but the
cops…
?” His voice dribbles away and he just looks at her helplessly, wanting to make her agree with him but unable to find the words. “This isn’t what I thought was gonna happen,” he says finally. “I mean, you saw it, didn’t you? Didn’t you see what just
happened
?”

The girl stares back at him, tilting her head down a little to meet his eyes, her gaze steadier. They are the same age, in the same grade, but she is almost two inches taller than he is this summer. It will be another year before he catches up with her. After that he’ll sprout up, putting on weight and muscle, and she’ll be looking up at him for the rest of their lives.

“All right,” she says. “Okay, no cops. But what are we going to do?”

The boy glances up at the plastic garbage bags that line the steel mesh trash receptacles along the empty stretch of dirt. He turns slowly, as if in a dream, to the long country road beyond it. Town is a good four miles away, to the north. A hundred yards down the road and to the west, the outline of the old covered bridge rises into the muggy air. The river that runs beneath it, he knows, is as slow and dozy as the August afternoon itself.

“I have an idea,” he says.

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PROLOGUE

BEGIN READING

EPILOGUE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT