Ghost Hunters

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any person, living or dead, business establishments, or locales is entirely coincidental.

GHOST HUNTERS

All rights reserved.

Published by Pitchfork Press

Copyright © 2015 by Sam Witt

Cover art by KPGS

This e-book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the author.

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First Edition: March, 2015

Dick Mars has just one goal in life: capture real ghosts on film. But when his hunt for the supernatural brings him to Pitchfork County, he bites off more than he can chew.

To get what he wants, Dick will have to go toe-to-toe with the Woodhawk sisters and ride herd on a reluctant film crew.

But getting to the haunting is the easy part.

Soon enough, Dick finds himself fighting to survive, as the ghosts of Pitchfork begin hunting him…

A
bar of white-hot pain smashed across Gary’s chest. One moment, he was tooling through some wicked twisties and enjoying the Ozarks on the back of his Harley. The next, he was sliding across the winding road with half his ribs broken and a mouthful of blood. An errant rock smashed off the side of his helmet, cracking the shell and peeling the face shield away like a torn fingernail. The asphalt curved away from Gary, turning left as he rocketed straight ahead. A tree caught his bike somewhere ahead of him, smashing it apart with a nightmare symphony of twisting metal and shattered glass. Then his boot heel caught in the loose gravel at the edge of the road and dug in, flipping Gary up and over. He slammed into the dirt and flopped around in a wide circle that ended when his riding chaps caught in the snatching vines of a wild blackberry bush.

Should’ve told someone where I was going
, he thought. The sun hid behind the mountains, little more than a faint yellow smudge spreading across the sky. Gary tried to catch his breath, but a brutal stabbing pain in his ribs and the feel of blood climbing up the back of his throat cut his gasp short. He would die here, three hours from home, all alone on a cold fall morning. He hoped it wouldn’t hurt any worse than it did right now, that his breath would just become shallower and shallower until everything went cold and dark and he drifted off. At least he’d go out the way he’d wanted—riding his bike, living life on two wheels. Gary closed his eyes and waited for the end.

A shadow fell over his face. “Not lookin’ so good, man.”

Gary opened his eyes and tried to crack a smartass smile, but all he managed was a blood-soaked grimace. “Something in the road,” he croaked, but he wasn’t sure that was right. He’d seen a thin flicker in the air before the pain slammed him to the asphalt. A rope? His memories slid in and out of focus, foggy and disjointed.

The girl crouched down next to him and brushed the hair away from her face. She had eyes like chips of ice, cold and blue, but thick streaks of blood marred their whites. There was something off about her face, but Gary couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing. His thoughts were loose and jumbled, and he couldn’t fit any two of them together.

She reached down and drew a fingertip down his cheek. She showed him his own blood smeared over the pad of her finger, then licked it off with a guttural groan. “Not bad for an old guy,” she grinned. “This next part, it’s not going to be much fun.”

Bands of pain wrapped around Gary’s ankles, and he felt himself leaving the ground. He couldn’t turn his head to see what was happening, the broken edges of his helmet had flared out like wings and caught on his shoulders. Someone bent his legs and the pain turned his world red. Gary bellowed until his hoarse voice trailed off and the red leeched out of his vision.

When Gary came back around, he was hanging upside down and moving. The pain in his legs had faded to nothing; the numbness was more terrifying than being hurt. He saw the girl, skipping along after him, her eyes bright and cheerful. “Hey there, sleepy.”

Can’t she see how fucked up I am?
Gary tried to be mad at the girl, but his rage slipped through his fingers. Maybe she was slow and didn’t understand the extent of his injuries. “Help,” he gasped, then blood flowed down from his punctured lung, and he had to stop and spit blood out of his mouth before he choked on it.

The girl came closer, crouching down and duck-walking so their eyes were level. “This’ll be over before long. Don’t ya worry none about that.”

“Don’t talk to him.” The voice was deep and thick and sticky, like the man had a mouthful of half-chewed meat. The speaker was out of Gary’s sight, but the words vibrating against his back told him the man was carrying him. “It ain’ nice.”

The girl winked at Gary. “Not like he can do nothin’ about it. Lookit him.”

Gary studied the girl as she followed along behind him, puzzling over what it was about her face that bothered him. She walked through a bar of golden sunlight, and in that moment he saw her clearly. Where most folks had a nose, she had a pair of slits. They were dark and small, the edges puffy and red. No scars marked her face, and she had no signs of any injury. It was as if she’d been born without a nose. Her mouth was too wide, the edges curling back past the plane of her cheeks, leading his eyes to her ears. Their pointed tips jutted from her greasy golden hair, the interiors filled with ridged whorls. He reckoned the crash had scrambled his brains more than he’d thought because no one looked like that girl. He let himself drift away again, easing into the bobbing rhythm of being carried.

Pop. Pop. Pop.

Something tapped against his forehead, a steady, annoying drumming. Gary’s eyes fluttered open, though it was so dark he was sure he’d gone blind.

His nose worked fine; he could tell the girl was close to him by the ripe, yeasty stink of her unwashed skin. Her breath brushed his cheek as she spoke, a gust of earthy warmth. “Good deal. This is better if you’re awake.”

“Stop talkin’ to him,” the gruff voice admonished, and Gary heard the girl grunt in response. She was shuffling around, moving around Gary, fiddling with something that creaked and scraped.

Gary felt something tugging on his worthless legs, dragging him up from the dirt, lifting him until he was off the ground and his head filled with blood rushing down from the rest of his body. As he was lifted higher, his fingers dragged across the stone floor, until they dangled below his head.

Someone was moving around behind him, making busy noises. Metal clanked, and crockery banged and thumped. It reminded Gary of the time he’d spent working as a dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant.

There was a heavy, metallic clang below his head, followed by a hollow ringing that made his ears tingle. He flinched when cold fingers caressed his cheek. “This’ll sting like a motherfucker, hon.”

Her breath, hot and stinking of raw meat, traveled over his face, to his ear, along the stretch of his neck. He thought of her noseless face so close to him and flailed his arms to ward her off. Gary’s hands struck her, and he clawed at her, desperate to keep her away from him.

The girl yelped and darted away, leaving Gary’s hands waving in the empty air. The aches and pains of his accident were creeping back in, the subtle agony of survival. Blood trickled into his mouth, and he spat. “Come here, you little bitch. I’ll punch your goddamned head off your shoulders.”

Air rushed past Gary’s face, and a bolt of pain speared him through the guts. His lungs emptied, air rushing out of his nose and mouth along with a gout of frothy blood.

Strong fingers twined in Gary’s hair, pulling his head back until his neck ached. Her breath was hot and angry in his ear. “Now I’m gonna make it last.”

Something hot and slick wound its way around Gary’s throat. It sawed against the sides of his neck, chewing through his flesh. It burned like a band of fire around his neck, choking off his screams. He heard water splashing into a bowl, a few droplets at first, then a steady stream.

The stink hit him, filled his nose with the scent of rust and his own mortality. It wasn’t water, it was blood,
his blood
, gushing into the bowl the girl had put under his head.

“Ya think it’s enough?”

The man’s rough voice rumbled in the darkness. “We need more. At least five. Enough to fill the tanks and get us the fuck out of Pitchfork.”

The girl grunted in agreement. “Before that asshole catches on to the fact that we didn’t all die down here.”

Gary choked against the constricting band of pain around his throat. Blood filled his nose and mouth, a choking stream of it.

The stream became a dribble.

Then sporadic droplets.

And then it stopped.

T
he gun was a heavy weight in his mind. Even when Dick wasn’t holding the gun, it pulled at his thoughts from inside the case hidden beneath the van’s driver’s seat. He watched the shitty rural highway roll under his wheels, thinking,
I’m driving into the ass end of nowhere with a whole TV crew. And, oh, I’ve got an unlicensed pistol under my seat that is going to be really hard to explain to the cops if I get pulled over.

He hadn’t even wanted the gun, but fucking Lonny just kept pushing it on him. “You are going into
Deliverance
territory, my friend. You are going to thank me for that gun later. Trust me.”

Because Lonny was his last friend at the network, the last person who would still take his calls and still believed that Dick had the skill and instincts to turn in the high-quality footage you could hang a show on, Dick took the gun.

“Are we there yet?”

Amy, chewing bubble gum, popping it like a mouthful of firecrackers, snapped Dick out of his gunpowder meditation.

Dick didn’t
like
Amy, but he respected her skills and knew her gigawatt smile was more than half the reason he even had a shot at getting a network gig. He
needed
her to see this through. He bit back a smartass response and forced himself to keep his tone light. “No, Amy. We’re not there yet. Another hour.”

Amy slumped back in the van’s bench seat and cracked her gum. “Okay.”

Truth was, it was more like two hours, and Amy asked him, “Are we there yet?” again and again and again. Every time she opened her mouth, Dick thought of the gun under his seat.

She changed her tune when they finally
were
there yet. “This is a fucking dump.”

She wasn’t wrong. The Hanging Rooster, a shitty bar on the edge of a shitty little town called Ironton, was the kind of place where lives dead ended in puddles of cheap whiskey. “Inside that bar,” Dick told his co-host, “is our best shot at getting on with the network.”

Amy snapped her gum and wrinkled her nose. “I’m not going in there.”

Dick threw open the van’s door and hopped out into the brisk fall air. “Nobody asked you to go in there.”

The chilly air bit at the end of Dick’s nose until it started to run. He wiped at it as he walked, sniffing angrily. It was awfully hard to look professional with snot on your upper lip.

And how he looked was important. The right appearance did wonders in these dirtholes. The locals were leery of outsiders, wouldn’t talk, but if you showed them you were the boss, the big man from beyond their narrow borders, you got what you wanted. “Show ‘em who’s boss, Dick,” he whispered as he walked to the front door, “you can do this.”

The inside of the bar was worse than the outside. It was cramped and dark, lit by orange and purple rope lights along the perimeter of the floor and the flaring cherries of the patrons’ cigarettes. The air reeked of nicotine, cheap booze, and despair.

“Talk to Nancy,” Lonny had told Dick. “Her and Liz, her sister, run a bar in Ironton, Missouri. Bring cash. Be nice.”

Because Lonny had people everywhere, Dick believed him. If Lonny said Nancy could guide Dick and his crew to a prime place to get the footage they needed, then Dick had every confidence that’s how things were going to go down. Because Dick really needed things to work out this time.

A dark-haired woman rested her hands on the bar and stared at Dick with flinty eyes. “Whattaya after?”

It wasn’t a question, it was a warning. Dick did his best to ignore it. He settled on a stool and leaned his elbows on the bar. “I’m looking for Nancy.”

The bartender narrowed her eyes. “You don’t look like someone Nancy wants to talk to.”

Flop sweat sprouted from Dick’s skin, coating his spine with a greasy chill. The rest of the team didn’t know it, not yet, but this trip was their very last chance. Dick had racked up debt to his eyeballs financing their earlier outings. This was their last time at bat. He had to make this work, or all their dreams would crumble. “Lonny said I should talk to her.”

Her eyebrows raised, along with Dick’s hopes. She leaned in close, crooked a finger at him. Dick leaned in until their noses were just a few inches apart. “Someone’s jerking your chain, buddy. Nancy don’t know any Lonny. Now get the fuck out of here.”

Dick recoiled as if she’d spat in his face. Rage stained his vision red, mirroring the rush of blood to his face. He’d driven two thousand miles, listened to Amy’s gum snapping for thirty fucking hours, and this hillbilly bitch wanted to shut him down?
No fucking way
.

“I’m not leaving until I talk to Nancy. How do you know she doesn’t know Lonny? Because he said—”

Her hand snaked out and curled in the front of Dick’s shirt. She jerked him close so fast their foreheads bumped before she shoved him back an inch. This close, he saw the raw, feral anger in her eyes. “I know, because I
am
Nancy, you fuckwit. Now get out of my place.”

Her push knocked Dick off his bar stool, and he only just caught himself before he went spilling onto his ass. He stared at the bartender, at Nancy, and hated her. She had the smug look of every asshole who’d ever closed the door in Dick’s face, the satisfied half smirk of every critic who’d ripped his work up one side and down the other.

Dick backed away, cheeks flushed, breath pumping in and out of his lungs like a bellows. Panic and rage pinned Dick’s thoughts between their crushing extremes. He stomped out of the bar, mind racing.

He had no idea what to do now.