The Devil's Graveyard (4 page)

‘Well, I’ll just have to make sure I don’t let you out of my sight then, won’t I? Don’t worry, honey – I’ll make sure you don’t get lost.’ Once again, Sanchez felt her hand squeeze his thigh, and inwardly shuddered. Unlike him, she hadn’t heeded the advice about the warm weather, and had swaddled herself in a long black dress beneath two cardigans. One of these was dark blue and worn underneath a hideous flea-infested dark green one. Much of her long grey hair hung down over the front of these fetching garments, no doubt acting as a ladder for fleas to climb up and down from head to clothes. Sanchez would have swatted her hand away from his thigh, but the sight of her yellow fingernails and wrinkly hands repelled him. They would, he thought, have shamed a leper. Fortunately, after an inappropriately long time, she removed her hand herself and pointed through the window at something ahead, close to the road’s edge.

‘Oh look,’ she said excitedly. ‘There’s a road sign. See what it says.’

They had been on the bus for two hours. On their arrival at an airport named Goodman’s Field, Sanchez had been surprised to find that there were no tour guides; in fact no one to tell them where they were headed. He’d asked around, but none of the other passengers was any the wiser. Even the Mystic Lady, with her dubious talent for seeing into the future, had no idea. And everyone was complaining that there was no signal for their cell phones. So a signpost truly was worth a look.

Since leaving the airport, they had been driven along a deserted highway through an arid and almost featureless desert. The bus driver had spoken to no one and refused to acknowledge, let alone answer, any questions concerning their destination. Rude indeed, but he was a big bastard so no one was inclined to make an issue of it. And up to this point in the journey there hadn’t been a single signpost to tell them where the fuck they were.

As the roadside billboard drew closer, Sanchez peered through the window to see what it said. The sign stood out in front of the miles of desert wasteland, framed by a distant vista of orange-coloured mesas and cliffs. It was a big black sign at least ten feet high and twenty feet wide. Five words painted in a dark red colour across became visible as they neared. The sign read
‘
WELCOME TO THE DEVIL’S GRAVEYARD’
.

‘Nice,’ Sanchez thought out loud. ‘Ain’t exactly the fuckin’ Bahamas, is it?’ Annabel, certainly more excited than him, showed it by squeezing his thigh playfully again with one hand and slapping her own thigh with the other.

‘Aren’t you just thrilled?’ she asked. ‘I haven’t been out of Santa Mondega for years. Isn’t this fun? Boy, I could use a drink to calm my nerves.’

Sanchez sighed, then reached inside his jacket. He pulled out a small silver hip flask.

‘Here,’ he offered glumly, unscrewing the stopper and handing the flask over to Annabel.

‘Oh my! What’s this then?’ she asked, her eyes lighting up with alcoholic glee at the possibility of some liquor.

‘It’s my own homebrew. Been saving it for a special occasion.’

‘Oh Sanchez, you are such a gentleman.’

‘Don’t mention it.’

Annabel took the flask and poured a mouthful down her throat. A second or two later she began choking. She pulled a hideous face (even by her standards).

‘
Ugh!
That’s
horrible
! What on earth is it?’ she asked, retching.

‘It’s kinda an acquired taste. You gotta persevere with it. By the time we get where we’re goin’ you’ll be addicted to it.’

The Mystic Lady didn’t look convinced. Within ten minutes of her first sip of Sanchez’s finest, she had locked herself in the confined space of the bus’s lone restroom. Her alleged ability to predict the future had not helped her to foresee that Sanchez might serve up a flask full of his own piss.

Even more importantly, she hadn’t foreseen the evil that lay ahead for their brief stay in the Devil’s Graveyard. A place with an even greater undead problem than Santa Mondega.

In almost the same second, the Bourbon Kid tucked the pistol back inside his leather jacket, sliding it into a snug holster below his left shoulder. As if in slow motion, Joe’s still-vertical body began to sway. It was a sequence of events all too familiar to the Kid – the victim’s knees were about to buckle beneath him. Right on cue, after a count of three, the body wobbled a bit, then crumpled in on itself and fell to the floor like a rag doll. The old man’s face crashed into the hardwood counter on the way down. All that was left on display was his blood. An elegant spray of it speckled the long row of white mugs on the shelf behind the counter, while a few errant drops splattered a selection of candy bars by the till
. A work of art indeed.
If the Kid chose to add a signature to the piece, it could be worth a fortune.

To his left, the Kid had seen the customer in the red leather suit jump to his feet in shock at what had just happened. The guy said nothing. Instead, he walked slowly over to the counter to take a look at the dead body of the diner’s owner. Normally people tended to exit pretty quickly once the Kid started blowing people away, but this guy seemed to have forgotten that the killer was still present. The Kid watched him lean over the counter and wince at the sight of Joe’s corpse. After a few seconds of staring at the body of his friend, the guy suddenly seemed to remember that the Kid was there. As was his gun. Slowly he turned to face him. The Kid waited for his reaction. More importantly, he waited for the guy to go fetch the bottles of bourbon the Kid had asked him for shortly before shooting Joe in the throat.

‘You killed him,’ the guy said, stating the obvious.

‘You think?’

‘Why would you do that? Joe’s a good guy.’

‘Was.’

‘Huh?’

‘
Was
a good guy.
Now
he’s a dead good guy.’

‘He didn’t do anything to you.’

‘He pulled a gun on me, case you didn’t notice.’

‘You pulled
yours
first!’

‘Wanna see me do it again?’

‘Not really.’

‘What’s your name, son?’

‘Jacko.’

‘Right. Jacko, you listen up, and listen good. If you ain’t grabbed me the two bottles of bourbon I asked for by the time I count to three, my gun’s comin’ out again.’

Jacko nodded. ‘Yeah. I gotcha.’ He walked tentatively around the counter checking the floor, mostly to make sure he didn’t tread in any blood. ‘Bourbon, huh?’ he mumbled.

‘That’s right.’

‘Comin’ right up.’

‘Get me some cigarettes, too.’

‘What kind?’

‘Any kind.’

The Kid picked up a Texan chocolate bar from the display on the counter. With his forefinger, he flicked a piece of what might have been bloodied gristle off the wrapper and then ripped the bar open at one end. He took a bite and, deciding that the taste was acceptable, left Jacko to pick up the rest of his shopping list and headed back out to the car.

The Kid had strong instincts when it came to sniffing out danger. They had served him well when, from the corner of his eye, he had seen Joe reach below the counter for something. It could have been a doughnut, but there was an outside chance it was a weapon of some kind. As it turned out he’d been right, so the bullet he’d used to blow the old guy’s throat out hadn’t been wasted. Now those same instincts were telling him that an evil moon was coming. That wasn’t much of a surprise on Halloween. He’d learned that the hard way. He’d killed for the first time on Halloween, a decade earlier. Since then, he’d killed hundreds of people – some had deserved it, and some hadn’t – but not one of those killings had been as hard as the first.

Dispatching his mother with six rounds to the heart at the age of sixteen was never going to be anything other than traumatic. Even though she had been bitten by a vampire and had turned into one in front of his very eyes. True, it was only when she had attempted to kill
him
that he had realized that he had no choice but to kill her. But, unsurprisingly, it had been a defining moment in his life. One intertwined with drinking his first bottle of bourbon.

And now? Well, here he was on Halloween, ten years later, in an area of the desert known as the Devil’s Graveyard, about to give a ride to a hitchhiker dressed as one of the cast of the
Thriller
video. And he was down to his last two bullets. He still had plenty of weapons, just no ammo for the guns, having used his last 12-gauge shell on the rookie cop in the fast cruiser. His own fault for killing so many other people earlier in the day. Could just be a tough day ahead. He toyed briefly with the idea of taking Joe’s gun and whatever ammo he could find, but discarded it. He didn’t like small-calibre pistols at the best of times, and that one had looked like the definitive Saturday-night special, accurate only to about six feet and as liable to blow up in your hand as to take down a target.

The Firebird’s seat was still warm when he sat back in it and peered out through the dirt-covered windshield. The wipers had cleared enough of the muck away so that he could see where he was going, but the areas of the windshield outside of the range of the wipers were caked in sand, dirt and mud. Undeniably, the chase through the desert had taken its toll, but the car hadn’t let him down. It never did. The custom-built engine was not only powerful enough to outrun most other road vehicles, it was also very dependable.

He turned the key and fired up the engine. As he did so, Jacko came out of the diner carrying a few bottles he had snagged from behind the counter. The Kid leaned over and part-opened the passenger-side door. His new travelling companion climbed in and placed two bottles of Sam Cougar and two bottles of Shitting Monkey beer on the floor by his feet. Pulling the door shut, he opened the glove-box in front of him and tossed two packs of cigarettes in before closing it again. The Kid was impressed. Not many people had the guts to get into his car. Not willingly, at least. And to do so after he had just seen the Kid gun down an old man in cold blood – well, that took some nerve. Jacko did look like a total jerk in his red leather outfit, though.

The Kid stared at Jacko from behind his sunglasses, waiting for him to offer up some directions to the Hotel Pasadena. Instead, the Michael Jackson wannabe started with some questions of his own.

‘Reckon you’re the Bourbon Kid, ain’tcha?’

‘What gave it away?’

‘I have a real sixth sense for these things.’

‘Good. Your sixth sense had better be workin’ real good from here on, too. ’Cause, make no mistake, we take one wrong turn, I’ll kill you.’

‘Okay. When you get to the crossroads up ahead, take a right.’

The Kid released the parking brake and slammed his foot down on the gas pedal. The car raced away from Sleepy Joe’s and back on to the highway. The wheel-spin from the screeching rear tyres created an almighty kick-up of sand and dust. By the time it had settled, the diner-cum-gas station was long out of sight.

At a crossroads half a mile down the road, the Kid slid the Firebird into a right turn as Jacko had instructed. The car was half-covered in dirt already from the journey thus far, and this particular shitty concrete road, with its gravelly surface and frequent potholes, wasn’t going to improve things any time soon.

‘So whatcha doin’ round these parts anyway?’ Jacko asked.

‘Mindin’ my own fuckin’ business. It strike you that you should do the same?’

From his response it shouldn’t have been difficult to work out that the Kid didn’t have much use for small talk. Jacko, however, seemed oblivious to this.

‘I’m hopin’ to enter that singing contest at the hotel, he continued. ‘Y’know, the
Back From the Dead
show?’

The Kid didn’t respond or even take his eyes off the road ahead. Jacko carried on regardless. ‘Y’see, I’m a Michael Jackson impersonator.’

The Kid took a deep breath through his nostrils, held it for a few moments then breathed out slowly. He was trying to keep himself calm, something that he often struggled with, never more so than on Halloween. At last he took his eyes off the road and glanced over at Jacko. His words, when he finally spoke, were surprisingly reasonable.

‘Seein’ as how he’s dead, there’s gonna be thousands of Michael Jackson impersonators at this show. All tryin’ to cash in on his fame. Why’n’t you just be yourself?’

‘You gotta be impersonatin’ a famous dead singer. And in case you ain’t noticed, I ain’t dead… or famous.’

‘I can make you both of those things.’ The gravelly edge had returned to the other’s voice.

Jacko raised an eyebrow. ‘Guess you don’t really mix too well with others, do you?’

‘Got no need to.’

‘Yeah? Well, you’re gonna meet lots of people like me at this hotel, and they tend to be friendly sorts. You might wanna brush up on your social skills.’

There was a profound silence. Even the Firebird seemed to hold its breath, until the Kid grated, ‘And you might wanna practise keepin’ your mouth shut.’

‘I would,’ Jacko replied happily, ‘but I need to be tunin’ up my voice.’

‘Not in my car you don’t.’