Ghost Hunters (3 page)

D
ick rolled back the van’s sliding side door and gestured at Nancy with the pistol. “Get in, driver’s seat. And your sister in the passenger’s seat. Don’t get stupid.”

The crew stirred as the cold autumn air whistled into the van. Dick jumped into the van and slammed the door behind him, keeping the gun aimed at Nancy. He flopped down on the first bench seat next to his snoring co-host.

Nancy turned to look back at Dick, eyes cold with contempt. “Now what?”

Dick smiled, trying to match his captive’s bravado. “I just wanted to talk—”

“A gun makes a shitty conversation piece.”

Dick’s smile turned brittle and hard. “
You
were the one who decided a friendly conversation was out of the question. Now we have to do it the hard way.”

Amy stirred next to Dick. She blinked away the sleep and yawned. “What’s going on?”

Nancy smirked at Dick in the rearview. “Your boyfriend decided to stick a gun in my face since he couldn’t get what he wanted by sweet talking. He ever try that with you?”

Dick’s finger tightened on the trigger. He didn’t have the energy to deal with Nancy and Amy at the same time. “Shut up. Drive us out to the farm where all the crazy shit happened last week.”

Liz turned in the passenger’s seat, worry lines creasing her forehead. “You don’t want to go there.”

“Shut up, Lizzie.” Nancy glared at her sister. “Don’t tell ‘em shit.”

Dick tapped the gun on the headrest just behind Nancy’s ear. “She already told me all I need to know. Drive.”

Nancy cranked the ignition and rested her hands on the wheel. Her eyes met Dick’s in the mirror. She looked concerned, almost worried, with her lip pinched between her front teeth. “I don’t know what your friend Lonny told you, or who the fuck told him about that mess, but this is not something you want to be dicking around with.”

The concern in her voice was so convincing, Dick almost bought it. Almost. There was just too much on the line to be swayed by chickenshit warnings. “This isn’t a request. We’re going to go out there, get our footage, and get the hell out of this shitty hole. If you do what you’re told, we’ll drop you somewhere on our way out.”

Nancy slammed the van into gear and punched the gas. She ran over the curb, jerking the crew around in their seats so hard Dick nearly lost his grip on the pistol. As the van bounced onto the street, Dick lunged forward and mashed the gun into Nancy’s ribs.

“That was your one and only stunt.” He kept pushing until Nancy flinched away from the pain of the gun digging into her side. “If you do anything like that again, we’re going to find out if your sister can find this place for us.”

Dick sat back and buckled up his seatbelt. Nothing could ever be simple, assholes had to fight him every step of the way. He tapped the gun’s barrel against his knee and watched Nancy for any sign she was getting up to no good. He didn’t want to shoot Nancy, but he was ready to do whatever had to be done. He hoped she understood and did as she was told. A few more hours, and all this would be behind them. People just had to behave.

Something touched Dick’s cheek, and he flinched, swinging the gun toward the touch.

Amy’s eyes bulged in their sockets, and her hands flew to her mouth. “Oh, my god,” she whispered, “you almost shot me in the face.”

She chomped her gum for emphasis, and Dick thought maybe he should just go ahead and shoot her as an example to the others. He took a deep breath and tried to ignore her smacking gum. “I didn’t almost shoot you. You startled me.”

Her mouth was right next to his ear, sending every bubble gum pop and snap and gooey slobbery chew straight into his eardrum. “What the fuck are you doing, Dick? You kidnapped your source
and
her freaky twin sister?”

Dick turned his mouth to her ear and whispered, “You’re gonna have to trust me on this, all right? She needed some convincing. We
need
this, Amy. This is our shot. I wasn’t going to let some washed-up barkeep from Bumfuck, Missouri derail our careers.”

Amy pulled back, looked Dick dead in the eye. “You better not fuck this up, Dick.”

“Just get back there and keep the rest of the crew on an even keel. I don’t know what they saw or what they think—convince them it’s all good.”

She raised an eyebrow, but did as he asked and scrambled around him to get to the back of the van. Dick just had to trust she could handle her end of things because he needed to keep his eyes on his hostages. He heard raised voices then Amy’s calm, cool tone slicing through the thrum of the van’s wheels on asphalt.

“You’re gonna die out here.” Nancy said the words like she was explaining that it was November, and therefore apt to be chilly at this time of night. “I’m not even tryin’ to scare you out of this dumbfuck idea of yours, but you are definitely gonna die out here. It would be nice if you’d cut me and my sister loose once we deliver you, so we don’t have to die along with you.”

Dick did his best to look like a badass, like one of those movie villains who no longer has any fucks to give about what he’s being told. “All this oogeyboogey talk just revs my engines. We came out here looking for scary shit to film.”

Nancy glanced at Liz then looked up to meet Dick’s eyes in the mirror. “You know how stupid that sounds? What are you going to do when you find the
really
scary shit? Shove a camera in its face and hope that it’s been waitin’ all along for a chance to be on fucking television? By the time you see the bad things, they’re gonna be chewin’ you a new asshole.”

“So you’ve seen this place?”

“Since it burned down? Hell, no.” She licked her lips and caught his eye in the rearview again. “No one comes out here, because it’s
dangerous
. People, a lot of people, died. Any ghosts out here are gonna be more
Evil Dead
than
Casper
.”

After Lonny had clued him in on this massacre, he’d tried to find any trace of information on it. There was nothing. No police reports, no death certificates filed with the state, not even a single column in their shitty little excuse for a newspaper. But Lonny’s source, who Dick was pretty sure was
not
Nancy given how she’d treated him, had insisted that a few dozen people had been killed by some sort of monster. “What happened?”

Liz turned in her seat again, chin perched on the headrest. “It was, like, I dunno. A seance or something. A bunch of people that were part of this bad news religion set up shop at the farm. They were prayin’ to their god, you know, for it to answer their prayers. They did their thing, and eventually, somethin’ answered their prayers. It killed a shit ton of ‘em. Would’ve killed more, except—”

Nancy shot her sister an evil glare then finished the story. “Except sometimes, when somethin’ hears your prayers, it ain’ what you thought it was. Something came through that night, crawled into a world it shoulda never set foot in. It went crazy, killed most of them people.”

Dick smirked. He’d heard variations on this theme all over the country. A swamp rat voodoo renegade once claimed he’d called up an alligator god during Hurricane Katrina. Dick had spent a week crawling through the bayou with that crazy fuck and never saw anything weird except for a herd of albino deer that no gator would touch. Weird, but not spooky weird. A Baptist preacher had even lured Dick out to the deserts of West Texas with a promise that he had a real angel on tap, said it came right down out of the sky and blessed his congregation with holy manna for their sacrament. Another week wasted on that trip, and Dick didn’t even get to see a single white deer. “Nothing answers prayers. There’s no god or devil, no heaven or hell. It’s all lies people tell themselves to make sense of whatever scares them.”

Nancy smirked right back. “I guess we’ll see, city boy. I hope you’re right.”

Dick rolled his eyes.

Nancy turned off on a gravel farm road. “But I know you’re wrong, you stupid fucker.”

T
he van’s headlights blazed over the wide bowl of a desolate valley. The van faced an irregular rectangle of scorched earth covered by blackened soil rimed with a hint of frost. Off to the left, Dick saw the skeletal remnants of a few trees and beyond that he thought he saw the scorched shell of a barn. There was no house here, much less a haunted one. He drew the hammer back on the pistol. “What the fuck, Nancy? I thought you understood how serious I was.”

She ducked her head away from the gun. “Put the gun away, fucker. This is where it happened.”

“There’s nothing
here.
” Dick forced the words through clenched teeth.

Nancy sighed. “Get out of the van. I’ll show you.”

Dick grumbled and got out of his seat. He leaned back at Amy as he left the van and whispered, “Get everyone ready to roll. If this isn’t a bust, I want to get the footage and get out of here.”

The truth was, Dick didn’t feel great about the place. There was something off about the whole county and this patch of blackened ground, in particular. It was like a bad smell he couldn’t identify, clinging to the back of his throat like the remnants of a bad hangover. Nancy hopped out of the van and walked toward the center of the patch of scorched ground, shivering and rubbing her arms. Dick didn’t blame her—it was getting colder than expected and he didn’t have a coat. The sooner they wrapped this shit up, the better off they’d all be.

He followed Nancy onto the scorched earth and grimaced at the low clouds of black ash they stirred up. It was fine as baby powder and greasy; with every step it painted his tennis shoes and the bottoms of his jeans with grungy black. He didn’t think he’d even try to clean this shit off, he’d just replace his pants and sneakers and burn the old ones. He didn’t want to bring home anything from this county if he could help it.

Nancy stopped and spread her arms. “Here we are.”

Dick stopped, looked around. They were twenty feet out into the ash, and it all looked the same to him. “I’m going to be really sad if we came all this way and I have to shoot you for jerking my chain.”

Nancy pointed at the ground in front of her. “Watch where you’re walking.”

Dick took an involuntary step back. There was a hole in the ground, its edge hidden by the ash. A cold chill settled in his gut when he realized how close he’d come to death. Nancy could have led him over here and given him a shove, she could have killed him if she wanted. That she hadn’t made Dick wonder what she was up to. “Great. How do we get down there?”

She shrugged. “I don’t think we should. I think we should all get back into the van and drive out of here before it’s too late. Can’t you
feel
that?”

Standing next to the hole and looking into its midnight depths, Dick
could
feel it. There was a darkness rising from that hole, the breath of something wicked and dangerous. Real fear stiffened Dick’s spine and triggered his fight-or-flight response, and it took everything he had to stand his ground. “This is what I came for. We’re going down.”

Dick kept the gun trained on Nancy while he fumbled his cell phone out of his pants pocket. There was no service, but he was only after the flashlight. He flicked the icon with his thumb and shone the light into the depths before him. The hole was straight sided and lined with heavy, smooth stones. It reminded Dick of an old, dry well he’d once seen on his grandfather’s farm. It shot down into the earth well beyond the range of his light, but he saw what he needed. A rope ladder swung from a pair of spikes driven into the side of the well, and black footprints marred the pale stones. “Looks like someone
has
been out here since this place burned down.”

Nancy shrugged. “It’s not anyone you want to meet. I hope to hell they aren’t down there, right now.”

Dick grinned. “I guess we’re about to find out.”

He flashed his phone’s light at the van. While the crew unpacked their gear, he stomped his feet against the chill and counted heads. Mickey was the first member of the crew to reach Dick. She eyeballed the gun in his hand but didn’t say anything else as she got him mic’d up. Randall, their cameraman, shuffled around in the ashes, mounting an assortment of GoPro cameras on spindly tripods. He was too invested in getting his gear set up to worry about what Dick was doing.

Troy, their gadget wrangler, wasn’t quite as laid back about the whole experience. He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw Dick’s weapon, and his eyes widened. He waved the thin wand of the EMF detector in Dick’s direction. “What the fuck, man? That some kind of joke?”

Dick shrugged. “Settle down. Our guide needed some convincing.”

Troy paced, kicking up little clouds of black ash with every step. “You can’t do that kind of shit, man. You know where we are, right? This is fucking
Deliverance
territory, man. Someone catches you pulling a gun on a local, a local
woman
, we’re going to end up with the whole county pulling a train on our asses.”

Nancy cleared her throat. “He’s right. The local law finds out what you’re up to, they’re going to string the lot of you up.”

Dick raised the gun to Nancy’s face. “Shut. The fuck. Up.”

Troy stopped his pacing and jabbed the EMF detector at Dick. “You have lost it, man. You are fucking around the goddamned bend. This is crazy.”

Dick’s breath stuck in his throat. He was doing this for
all of them
, couldn’t they see that? They were in this deep now, they had to get onboard and see this through to the end. He had to make Troy see. “Look, I know this seems extreme—”

Troy stepped back, eyes widening even further. His voice went up three octaves and cut through the cold knife like a siren. “Don’t you point that fucking gun at me.”

Every eye turned in Dick’s direction. His whole crew stared at him, and he realized with horror that the gun
was
pointed in Troy’s general direction. He wasn’t pointing it
at
the gadget man, but it was definitely pointing toward him. “Shit, Troy, look—”

Randall hefted one of his camera tripods, an industrial model with a five-pound aluminum stabilizing head. His panic was buried under a thick layer of fat boy stoner indifference, but Dick could sense the violence beginning to surface. “We gonna have a problem here?”

Silence hung thick over the scorched earth, deafening in its intensity. Dick could see the betrayal on the faces of his crew. They were freaking out, losing their nerve. He could feel everything unraveling; his plan to salvage their careers,
their lives
, was coming apart at the seams. Dick knew if he didn’t get them headed in the right direction in the next few seconds, he was going to have a mutiny on his hands.

He tried to catch Amy’s eye, get her to pitch in on this, but she looked away. It was just like her to wait to see where the coin was going to land before she picked a side. Dick brushed his hair out of his eyes, smearing cold sweat across his forehead. “Listen, just listen. We need this, you guys. This is our big chance. I couldn’t let these two,” he waved the gun at Nancy and Liz, “wreck everything we’ve worked for so hard. There’s something here. I can feel it. I know
you
can feel it.”

As if to lend credence to his words, a cold wind moaned over the hills and swept around their ankles. It carried whorls of ash with it, like dirty shadows. “We can do this, guys. We can fucking
nail
this piece and make our careers. Right here, right now.”

Amy was smacking her gum, and Dick could see the light in her eyes. He was winning her over. “I get it, the gun is pretty extreme. But we need this, you guys. I did this for all of us.”

Troy fidgeted with the EMF detector and adjusted the pack full of electronic ghost-hunting gear on his shoulder. “It’s just—fuck, man, you can’t pull this kind of crazy shit on us. We need to
discuss
our plans, right?”

Dick grinned. He’d hauled the rabbit out of the hat and turned the whole mess around. “I get it, I fucked up. Won’t happen again.”

The gadget wrangler stepped up to Dick and peered over the edge of the hole. “Fuck me. We’re really going down there?”

It took all the self-control Dick could muster to keep from punching the air in victory. “Yeah, it looks like we are.”