“Okay then? Any further questions? No? Okay then, listen up for your names and patrol assignments,” Ferro said loudly. “Officer Burke…?”
All through the long night and longer day they gave her sedatives and each time she tried to fight the drugs, tried to fight the tentacled pull of sleep; and each time she finally lost the battle and was pulled beneath the surface. Val Guthrie didn’t want to be down there in the darkness. Time and again she would swim upward toward the faint and distant light; time and again she would lose her way and sink back into the darkness. It hurt less in the darkness, but she wanted the light.
There in the dark Karl Ruger smiled at her from out of the shadows. He chased her endlessly though the black stalks of corn, his eyes burning with a hellfire red and his wet teeth glistening and sharp. He chased her and reached for her with impossibly long arms, tore at her with improbably sharp fingers. And as she ran, she would stagger past the bleeding and dying body of her father. No matter which route she took, no matter how far she ran, she would always find him again, lying there, broken, bleeding, face streaked with tears and rain and mud and blood. Every time she stumbled past, her father would reach imploringly for her, his voice pleading with her to stop and help him, to save him. He begged her to get him out of the cold rain, called her name with a mouth that bubbled with fresh blood.
Always she ran on, knowing that Karl Ruger was right behind her.
When she managed to get to the light, to come awake for whatever period of time fatigue and morphine would allow, the specter of Karl Ruger lagged behind, losing her in the maze of cornfields. Yet when she felt herself falling away once more in the darkness, Karl Ruger would be waiting.
It was the chime of the distant bell on City Hall Tower that woke her, a sound she shouldn’t have been able to hear through the distance and the thickness of walls and windows. With each chime, she came one increment closer to the light, one increment further from the darkness and the pursuing monster.
At the tenth chime she was fully awake. The room around her became a realness of machines beeping, tubes dripping, metal gleaming, flowers scenting the air. The tenth chime seemed to echo in her head, and for a few moments she lay there, extending her senses into her corporeal body, feeling the damage and feeling thankful for its realness and weight up there in the light.
There was a soft knock on the door, and after a few tries she managed to find her voice, still weak and hoarse from the assault on her throat.
“Come in!”
She could barely turn her head with the cervical collar, but out of the corner of her eye she could see the door swing silently open, and on the other side of it she could hear the faint scuffling of footsteps. The dragging footsteps of someone, perhaps injured or sick. Immediately she knew who it was.
“Crow?”
The footsteps paused for just the briefest moment, and then resumed. She waited as Crow shuffled into the room, shuffled around the edge of the open door, shuffled into plain view.
Everything in the world froze into a moment of absolute horror.
It was not Crow.
He stood there, grinning with wet teeth that were smeared with black mud and dark red blood, his eyes flickering as red as rat’s eyes, his hair in disarray, his skin bled white and crawling with grubs and maggots. He stood swaying at the foot of her bed, his rumpled clothes stained darkly with blood, dotted with bullet holes. With hands that were as white as headstone marble, fingernails that were curiously thick and sharp, Karl Ruger reached for her.
Val felt something heavy in her hand and looked down to see that she was holding Crow’s gun. It hadn’t been there a second ago but it didn’t matter. Fury welled up in her, matching and then overmatching her fear, and she raised the gun, holding it straight out, inches from Ruger’s chest.
“You killed my father!” she shrieked as she pulled the trigger. The bullet slammed into Ruger’s chest. She fired again and again, punching bullet after bullet through his black heart.
All he did was laugh, and when the gun was empty he lunged at her.
Val’s scream burned her damaged throat, and suddenly she was surrounded once again by the damp and swirling darkness. The darkness owned her, engulfed her, and she realized that she had never left the darkness at all, had never found the light. The darkness had simply learned how to fool her.
In the darkness, she tried to flee, but now the self that was in the darkness was as wounded and weak and helpless as the self who lay up there in the light, lay with tubes and drains and stitches.
Vic Wingate took an extended lunch break from the shop and was tooling down A-32, smoking a Hav-a- Tampa Jewel and listening to Travis Tritt as sunlight sparkled off the polished skin and chrome of his pickup. Vic felt pretty good. Last night he’d been in a foul mood because of the attention focused his way by the goddamn kid, but that matter was settled now. He had done his public duty and gone and fetched the little fucker from that faggoty hayride thing, and when he’d gotten the kid home Vic had eased his tensions by some recreation with the boy. Vic was pleased with the thought that he had “graduated” the kid from slaps and shoves to some real manly duking. It was about time, he thought. Kid had to learn sometime. But he wasn’t pleased about how the beating had ended. Just as he’d worked up a great sweat kicking the living shit out of the punk, something happened that had rattled Vic. The kid had suddenly smiled up at him, bloody lips, black eyes, bloody nose — and there he was smiling at the guy who’d just handed him the worst whipping in his life.
Not only had it taken the real pleasure out of the beating, robbing Vic of a serious high, that smile had been — weird.
He’d never seen the kid give him a look like that. It had damn near cut the legs out from under him because for a moment — just for one really twitchy moment — that smile made the kid look like…well, like Griswold. It was the way the Man used to smile after a kill. As a teenager Vic had seen that smile time and again, and he knew it well. He saw it in his dreams all the time.
He really didn’t like seeing that smile on Mike’s face, and he wanted to ask the Man about it. Frowning he stepped on the gas.
Several police cars whipped past Vic’s truck. Jim Polk was driving one and he waved to Vic, who nodded. Vic made a mental note to call Polk later on; there were some things that had to be taken care of, and Polk was a good gofer.
Four miles shy of the spot on the highway where the police had found the wrecked car, Vic made a sharp left along a narrow country lane. It was a farmer’s road and it cut through several of the major farms on the east side of town before finally branching off into the State Forest. At that point the macadam faded into gravel and then to dirt. The truck took the changes in stride; it was well used to this route.
Three miles into the woods, the road petered out and died. Vic rolled the truck to a stop and got out. Even though there was no one around, he scanned the dense forest and listened for human sounds, heard none, and nodded. He walked over to a thick clump of brush that stood in a gnarled tangle beside the end of the road. Vic looked around again, then squatted, took hold of a length of knotted rope that was cleverly hidden by weeds, and pulled on it as he stood. He backed up and a whole section of the shrubbery shifted with him, opening outward like a door and swinging on a pair of sturdy hinges. It took a lot of effort for Vic to shift the barrier, and as it moved the deception became obvious. The shrubs were actually seated in a long, low, flat-bottomed trough that was carefully camouflaged; from the outside the facade was perfect, from the inside it was clearly a kind of door. Vic pulled it wide, then got back in the truck and moved it twenty feet down the pathway revealed by the open barrier; then he went back and painstakingly pulled the foliage back into place. Anyone passing by would be fooled unless they knew exactly where to look and knew what they were looking for. Vic made sure that the shrubs were always overgrown and healthy, and he had chosen evergreens for the job because he wanted the deception to remain constant year- round, as it had for many, many years.
Back in the truck he drove a serpentine route that seemed composed of nothing but hairpin turns. The lane was just barely big enough for the truck to pass, and Vic liked it that way. Any larger and it would be too visible from the main road.
He drove for several miles, singing country along with the radio. Eventually, the tortuous route became wider as the hidden road joined with an actual lane, though one that had been left to grow wild decades ago. Vic kept it
