beginning to swell with bleeding under the skin. Her mouth sags open, drooling. She can't see. She can't hear. She can only feel the pain. Unconsciousness beckons her forward as seductively as any controlled substance she can imagine and she feels herself sliding toward it gratefully, almost all the way there, when a single thought cuts through her like a bullet.
Veda.
If you black out now she's dead.
If you black out now she's dead.
If you black out now she's fucking dead.
That centers her. Blind, numb, but somehow centered, she makes her lips and tongue move. It's like a guttural foreign language that, to an uncomprehending ear, sounds more like snarling than diction, Arabic or German spoken through a mouthful of stiffening rubber cement. She pushes the words out anyway until they don't sound like any language at all. They're merely sounds. Animal noises.
'…un fum…In-sluh fuh…GuhHuhn… Whuh uhmuh… ' It's such a completely debilitating effort expelling these noises and she's dizzy, fading, losing whatever's left of herself. 'Whuh…uh…muh…'
Far beyond the darkness that fills her eyes, through Phillip's lips, Isaac Hamilton is laughing, laughing. Coughing on dirt. Mimicking her feeble attempts, mocking, 'Uh-fuh-uh-fuh-uh-fuh-' She can hear the stuffy noises getting more congested as his hilarity crescendos. 'I didn't know it was fucking barnyard night, Susan. Moo, moo, cock a doodle-doo!' As he says this, her vision clears slightly, perhaps for the sheer novelty of seeing her husband's reanimated corpse-a thing with maggots in its sinuses and worm shit on its breath-making fun of her enunciation. Through swollen eye-slits she sees Phillip's head tilting itself back again, preparing to drive forward for the blow that will no doubt turn out her lights forever, rendering whatever good intentions she might still have utterly irrelevant. She cringes away with the last of her strength, and waits for it.
Then nothing happens.
'Sue…?' It's so tentative, that familiar voice. It doesn't sound like Isaac Hamilton at all. 'Honey?'
7:19A.M.
Sue raises her head, manages to peel back the lid on one eye. Phillip's corpse has fallen absolutely still and is just facing her now, what's left of his face tinged pinkish. She's not sure if this coloration is due to the blood in her own eyes, or the Expedition's taillights glowing behind his head. Whatever the cause, it makes the thing look slightly more human, less dead. He's leaning over her, and that's when she realizes she's on the ground, sprawled in the snow at the side of the road, her legs tucked underneath her. When exactly did she fall down?
'Sue,' he says, 'is that you?'
'Phillip.' His name flows from her battered windpipe in a watery whisper, zero inflection, zero strength. 'Don't hit me. Don't hurt me anymore.'
'Sue, honey, what's wrong, are you…?' Phillip stops, and her sight is good enough now that she can see the wave of realization washing across his face, a single foamy whitecap across a midnight sea. 'Oh no. Oh, Sue. Oh, baby.' His legs buckle and he slumps down on the roadside next to her, the tailpipe of the Expedition pumping exhaust out in plumes behind his head. 'I'm so sorry. I don't know what to say.' He holds out one hand and then lets it fall. 'He's in me, Sue. I can feel him.'
She nods. It hurts. Everything does.
'That's how he works.'
'I don't-'
'Listen to me, Sue. Without a vessel he's only a dismembered corpse in the ground. Regardless of what he wants you to think, he can't read minds or hunt people down by himself. That's what took him so long to find me.'
'Why?'
'He only has power over the corpses he commands. He had to send one of his vessels out to kill a private detective and bring him through the route just so he could get someone with the skills to locate me. I had to keep hiding. That's why I sent Tatum to warn you.'
Sue's mind darts back to the farm truck following her on and off over the past few months, how it had known where to find her. 'Yousent Jeff Tatum?'
'Met him…at his brother Daniel's funeral in Gray Haven three years ago. Kept in touch with him after I went to California. When Hamilton started tracking me down in August, after I called the radio station, I contacted Jeff. Asked him to keep an eye on you.'
'They got Tatum too,' Sue says.
'I know.'
'Phillip-'
'The worst part is, he never stops.' Phillip's corpse nods shakily. 'Hamilton's spirit, Sue…it's like having a fever that won't break-you can't…push through it. Always there. Always building.'
'How-' Sue pauses, wipes the blood from her mouth. She's pretty sure that the bleeding has begun to taper off, but the headache…oh, the headache is another matter. It flares up with every vibration that comes through her throat, like she's got a couple of hard cons serving time breaking granite between her eyes. She tries to focus past it, making herself look at what's left of her husband. 'How did this happen?'
'Doesn't matter now.'
Maybe not, but she's got a few ideas of her own. 'It's because we put one of his bodies, his vessels, out of commission.' Her mind swirls back to the playground, that afternoon. 'Hisfirst one.' Maybe it's the beating she just took, or the presence of Phillip's voice, or the route itself, but she can see it all clearly. 'The Engineer.'
'Yes,' Phillip says. 'You're right. Do you remember, Sue? Can you see it?'
'Yes.'
And just like that, she's back in 1983.
But it's different from the way she used to recall it, in that desolate patch of abandoned playground equipment beyond the empty outskirts of her hometown. For the first time she's actually seeing it the way it happened, not the way her memory has homogenized it over the intervening years. For the first time Sue realizes why it haunted Phillip so mercilessly ever since-because he must've remembered it this way, the way it reallywas.
In the restored memory she sees the Engineer getting out of his orange Plymouth, dressed in the bib overalls with the red handkerchief dangling from the back pocket. He's wearing a big pair of aviator-style sunglasses that cover not only his eyes but also a good part of his face above the bridge of his nose. He's sporting a workman's tan, leathery and deep, and within seconds he's already moving toward them fast, like he's on roller skates or something, Sue thinking, how can any guy move so quickly-this part is still the way she's always remembered it-and the Engineer reaches behind his back, pulling out the red handkerchief, blotting at his forehead above the sunglasses.
'My goodness,' he exclaims, in a just-folks voice that's somehow all the more shocking for its laconic intonation. 'Sure is a scorcher out here, isn't it?'
Sue just looks at him without answering. She looks at herself reflected times two in the big lenses of his shades, a little girl with wide eyes and skinny arms.
'Boy howdy.' The Engineer jerks his head toward Phillip, standing next to her, a foot or two away. 'Why, I'd think you and your friend here would be off taking a dip at the pool on a day like today, or maybe down in the creek. It's hotter than blazes out here in the sun. Enough to boil the skin right off your bones, wouldn't you say?'
'Sue, wait.' Young Phillip is standing to her right, a step or two ahead of her. He looks back at the Engineer. 'You want something, mister?'
At first the man doesn't turn his head away from Sue. When he does shift his attention toward Phillip, it happens reluctantly. He blots his head with his handkerchief again, and Sue notices how gingerly he applies the square of fabric to his skin.
'You're all by yourselves out here.' A sly smile seems to tease at the corners of his lips, where the skin is
