Fear Nothing

satisfying. It’s going to feel good. It’s going to feel so good, the power, the destruction, throwing off all the shackles they make you live with, tearing down the walls, being totally free, totally free at last. I’m going to bite her, this girl, when I get her alone, I’m going to bite her and bite her. In the dreams I lick their skin, and it’s got a salty taste, and then I bite them, and I can feel their screams vibrating in my teeth.”

Even in the dim light, I could see the manic pulse throbbing in his temples. His jaw muscles bulged, and the corner of his mouth twitched with excitement. He seemed to be more animal than human — or something less than both.

My hand clutched the Glock so ferociously that my arm ached all the way to my shoulder. Abruptly I realized that my finger had tightened on the trigger and that I was in danger of unintentionally squeezing off a shot, though I had not yet fully adjusted my position to bring the muzzle toward Stevenson. With considerable effort, I managed to ease off the trigger.

“What made you like this?” I asked.

As he turned his head to me, the transient luminosity shimmered through his eyes again. His gaze, when the eyeshine passed, was dark and murderous. “A little delivery boy,” he said cryptically. “Just a little delivery boy that wouldn’t die.”

“Why tell me about these dreams, about what you’re going to do to some girl?”

“Because, you damn freak, I’ve got to give you an ultimatum, and I want you to understand how serious it is, how dangerous I am, how little I have to lose and how much I’ll enjoy gutting you if it comes to that. There’s others who won’t touch you—”

“Because of who my mother was.”

“So you know that much already?”

“But I don’t know what it means. Who was my mother in all this?”

Instead of answering, Stevenson said, “There’s others who won’t touch you and who don’t want me to touch you, either. But if I have to, I will. You keep pushing your nose into this, and I’ll smash your skull open, scoop your brain out, and toss it in the bay for fish food. Think I won’t?”

“I believe you,” I said sincerely.

“With the book you wrote being a best-seller, you can maybe get certain media types to listen to you. If you make any calls trying to stir up trouble, I’ll get my hands on that deejay bitch first. I’ll turn her inside out in more ways than one.”

His reference to Sasha infuriated me, but it also scared me so effectively that I held my silence.

Now it was clear that Roosevelt Frost’s warning had indeed been only advice. This was the threat that Roosevelt, claiming to speak for the cat, had warned me to expect.

The pallor was gone from Stevenson’s face, and he was flushed with color — as though, the moment that he had decided to surrender to his psychotic desires, the cold and empty spaces within him had been filled with fire.

He reached to the dashboard controls and he switched off the car heater.

Nothing was surer than that he would abduct a little girl before the next sunset.

I found the confidence to push for answers only because I had shifted sufficiently in my seat to bring the pocketed pistol to bear on him. “Where’s my father’s body?”

“At Fort Wyvern. There has to be an autopsy.”

“Why?”

“You don’t need to know. But to put an end to this stupid little crusade of yours, I’ll at least tell you it was cancer that killed him. Cancer of a kind. There’s no one for you to get even with, the way you were talking to Angela Ferryman.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“Because I could kill you as easily as give you an answer — so why would I lie?”

“What’s happening in Moonlight Bay?”

The chief cracked a grin the likes of which had seldom been seen beyond the walls of an asylum. As if the prospect of catastrophe were nourishment to him, he sat up straighter and appeared to fatten as he said, “This whole town’s on a roller coaster straight to Hell, and it’s going to be an incredible ride.”

“That’s no answer.”

“It’s all you’ll get.”

“Who killed my mother?”

“It was an accident.”

“I thought so until tonight.”

His wicked grin, thin as a razor slash, became a wider wound. “All right. One more thing if you insist. Your mother was killed, like you suspect.”

My heart rolled, as heavy as a stone wheel. “Who killed her?”

“She did. She killed herself. Suicide. Cranked that Saturn of hers all the way up to a hundred and ran it head-on into the bridge abutment. There wasn’t any mechanical failure. The accelerator didn’t stick. That was all a cover story we concocted.”

“You lying son of a bitch.”

Slowly, slowly, Stevenson licked his lips, as if he found his smile to be sweet. “No lie, Snow. And you know what? If I’d known two years ago what was going to happen to me, how much everything was going to change, I’d have killed your old lady myself. Killed her because of the part she played in this. I’d have taken her somewhere, cut her heart out, filled the hole in her chest with salt, burned her at a stake — whatever you do to make sure a witch is dead. Because what difference is there between what she did and a witch’s curse? Science or magic? What’s it matter when the result is the same? But I didn’t know what was coming then, and she did, so she saved me the trouble and took a high-speed header into eighteen-inch-thick concrete.”

Oily nausea welled in me, because I could hear the truth in his voice as clearly as I had ever heard it spoken. I understood only a fraction of what he was saying, yet I understood too much.

He said, “You’ve got nothing to avenge, freak. No one killed your folks. In fact, one way you look at it, your old lady did them both — herself and your old man.”

I closed my eyes. I couldn’t bear to look at him, not merely because he took pleasure in the fact of my mother’s death but because he clearly believed — with reason? — that there had been justice in it.

“Now what I want you to do is crawl back under your rock and stay there, live the rest of your days there. We won’t allow you to blow this wide open. If the world finds out what’s happened here, if the knowledge goes beyond those at Wyvern and us, outsiders will quarantine the whole county. They’ll seal it off, kill every last one of us, burn every building to the ground, poison every bird and every coyote and every house cat — and then probably nuke the place a few times for good measure. And that would all be for nothing, anyway, because the plague has already spread far beyond this place, to the other end of the continent and beyond. We’re the original source, and the effects are more obvious here and compounding faster, but now it’ll go on spreading without us. So none of us are ready to die just so the scum-sucking politicians can claim to have taken action.”

When I opened my eyes, I discovered that he’d raised his pistol and was covering me with it. The muzzle was less than two feet from my face. Now my only advantage was that he didn’t know I was armed, and it was a useful advantage only if I was the first to pull the trigger.

Although I knew it was fruitless, I tried to argue with him — perhaps because arguing was the only way that I could distract myself from what he had revealed about my mother. “Listen, for God’s sake, only a few minutes ago, you said you had nothing to live for, anyway. Whatever’s happened here, maybe if we get help—”

“I was in a mood,” he interrupted sharply. “Weren’t you listening to me, freak? I told you I was in a mood. A seriously ugly mood. But now I’m in a different mood. A better mood. I’m in the mood to be all that I can be, to embrace what I’m becoming instead of trying to resist it. Change, little buddy. That’s what it’s all about, you know. Change, glorious change, everything changing, always and forever, change. This new world coming — it’s going to be dazzling.”

“But we can’t—”

“If you did solve your mystery and tell the world, you’d just be signing your own death warrant. You’d be killing your sexy little deejay bitch and all your friends. Now get out of the car, get on your bike, and haul your skinny ass home. Bury whatever ashes Sandy Kirk chooses to give you. Then if you can’t live with not knowing