Grim Tidings (11 page)

KANSAS, HIGHWAY 21

MARCH 1951

Ride the highways long enough and you lose all sense of time. Days turn into weeks turn into months. One exit after another, one mile compounds on the next until there's nothing except the lines in the center of the pavement and the horizon beyond. You can chase it, but you'll never catch it.

I'd been riding this particular stretch for a few weeks. I hadn't gotten to that place yet, where you feel like you'll cease to exist if you stop rolling along, but I could feel it creeping up with every mile, every cup of sour coffee, and every lumpy motel mattress.

I'd tried to escape him a dozen times. Really tried, and the farthest
I'd ever made it was across the road. As the ice turned to mud and then to tender green blooms, I stopped trying.

He'd never told me his name. The Walking Man rarely talked, but sometimes, as we watched the miles roll by, he'd place his heavy hand over mine, on my shoulder, on my cheek. And I fought to keep still and not scream, because when you scream and panic, the predator looking you in the eye opens its jaws and eats you.

He made more of those things like Lady. At least as many bodies as my escape attempts. I always prayed that Tanner was coming behind us, cleaning up the mess. He'd followed me, that much was for sure, and I saw him once outside a diner in Oklahoma City. He looked so sad, so desperate, and my voice welled up in my throat to scream at him to get away, get away before he was killed.

But nothing happened. That was the Walking Man's real power—you could be a wailing wreck inside your own head but strangely, when he was close nothing really seemed to matter except the next mile, the next set of headlights flagged down, the next brutalized body that began to twitch and moan after the last of the life had fluttered away into the warm currents drifting in the wake of passing trucks. A thrall, but something far stronger than the kind warlocks could weave with spells and far more precise than the warm, woozy intoxication of vamp venom. Sometimes, when he was away from me for a scant few hours, I started to think about what he was, how he could do this to me when I wasn't even human, what he was trying to do over and over by making those things that would infect others like him.

Once, just as the snow was melting, I ran from him and the silent miles we shared on the driverless bus and stood on the train tracks, feeling the oncoming rumble of the Wichita line through
the soles of my feet. I spread my arms when the screaming whistle filled up my ears and I waited, overjoyed, for it to be over.

But he'd grabbed me, slammed me into the half-thawed mud and gravel next to the track, wrapped those giant hands around my throat, and let me think for a second that I'd still managed it, that he'd kill me and I'd finally be able to escape.

Then he'd taken a deep breath and stroked his muddy hand down my face. “Why can you not understand that we are the same thing?” he purred in that strange flat voice. “Both creatures carved from unnatural clay. Why can you not see this is where you belong, not with Hell's dogs? Why can you not accept me and help me?”

I screamed then, and kept screaming until I vomited.

That was the last time I tried to escape. I complied, I sat by him, I watched the highway until my eyes burned. The only thing I wouldn't do was help him. I wouldn't lure the cars into stopping and I wouldn't try to help his creations find other human beings to feed on.

His rage was towering, especially when the epidemic he'd envisioned never started. I knew the forces against us were getting stronger as he got bolder and more desperate. One time, it was a family, two kids and parents, who stopped and he turned them all out into the night to feed. That time, dozens were affected and he shook the newspapers from the next day in my face, then picked me up and spun me around like we were newly married.

That lasted until the next morning, when an enormous grain elevator fire covered the front page with a picture of smoke and burned, twisted bodies that covered my hands in ink as the Walking Man raged and shouted on the shoulder of the road.

I said a silent thanks to Don and whoever was helping him. I prayed they'd never find us, because the Walking Man would hurt him and twist him so violently before he died his soul would just be a ruined thing screaming into the afterlife.

Then, it was spring and the green was so violent it covered everything in a haze of pollen and new life. And the next time Tanner found us, parked by the side of the road with our fake broken-down car, he had brought a companion of his own.

She was tall and slender, redheaded with the wide cheekbones and a narrow chin that gave her face a catlike cast. She hurt him, the Walking Man. He reeled like he'd run into a wall, like he hadn't moved since Jacob had hit him with the spell, back in the camps.

The Walking Man's wooden face shifted when this happened, and I saw the evil spirit living inside, the
dubbyuk
Jacob had spoken of.

“Ava!” Tanner shouted, holding out his hand. “Come to me, right now!”

I could have moved, but I didn't. I didn't
want
to be there; I wanted this nightmare to end so badly that I couldn't believe it was actually over.

“Ava!” Tanner shouted again. His friend's face twisted in concern, sweat working down her temples, her willowy body bending at the invisible wind stirred up by her fight against the Walking Man.

“If she's gone, you can't help her and I can't hold him off much longer!” she shouted.

“She's not gone!” Tanner screamed. “
Ava!
Move!”

A truck horn sounded from down the highway, and that snapped
me into motion. I ran toward Tanner. The Walking Man screamed and grabbed for me, snatching my wrist and arresting my flight. I felt the joint pop, but his grip loosened as Tanner's friend redoubled her efforts, blood starting to trickle from her nostrils.

I swung around as the truck drew even with us, and struggled with all of my might. I'd pretty much stopped eating, and I was weak as the little bird he always claimed I was.

With the last of my strength, I yanked, he pulled in the opposite direction . . . and then I leaned toward him and let go.

He stumbled back, right into the path of the truck. His body hit the grille and was sucked under the wheels. The air brakes pumped, the truck jackknifed, and the scent of burning rubber filled my nostrils.

I fell, spent, the last of me wrung out.

When I got up, my two rescuers found nothing under the wheels of the truck, except a lot of blood—all the blood inside a person, Tanner would tell me later.

I didn't let them take me anywhere. I closed the hood of the lure car and drove to the nearest bar. All through the summer, through the wheat harvest and the first snow and the gray, stubbled fields of a new year, I took a drink as often as I breathed, and I took everything else that was offered me too. Circular bruises blossomed and grew inside the crooks of my elbows and knees like I was doing target practice with syringes of morphine. Pills burned up my gut. All of it barely kept the nightmare of my time with the Walking Man at bay, but it did—barely.

Nobody picked me up off the road that time—eventually, the faces and the screams faded just enough that I could be awake for
a while without wanting to stand in front of another train. Eventually, I sweated through the withdrawals, looked in a mirror long enough to cut my hair and paint over the circles under my eyes, scraped together money for a new dress and discovered that another spring was coming on.

Now it was summer. I'd had four years to straighten up and fly right. After that day I'd cleaned myself up and gotten on a bus back to Wichita. I'd found Gary, I'd taken the beating Gary had meted out. I'd taken all the scut collections work he'd given me. I'd played the dutiful servant.

And as I'd crisscrossed the country collecting on warlocks and conjurers looking for a little more power than their share, I'd kept an eye on the newspapers. I'd befriended reporters on the crime beat, cops in every state between Kansas and California. Medical examiners, emergency room doctors, even the guys who scrape roadkill off the highways.

Every so often—not more than one or two times a year—a body would come up, beaten and mutilated and marked. He'd gotten smarter about crossing state lines so it was harder to draw a line between kills. He'd gotten better at turning them into killing machines too, at making them hungrier and more aggressive.

And every time, I'd called Tanner and he'd put another pin in the map he kept in his office. As far as the state police were concerned, the Walking Man was a cold case. As far as anyone besides Tanner and I knew, he'd disappeared as mysteriously as he'd started murdering people.

Sometimes Tanner came with me to help put down the ravenous bodies that he left in his wake, and sometimes I was on my own. But we always managed before it spread out of control. Whether it
was cutting the head off a mailman in Missouri or burning down an entire trailer park full of his walking corpses in northern Texas, we kept the Walking Man's gifts to us from spreading out into the world.

But now Tanner had left word for me instead of the other way around. I was up in Idaho, tracking down a warlock with a gift for transmutation and a propensity for using that gift to pass counterfeit bills and bad checks. To my way of thinking, Gary had only himself to blame when this particular specimen tried to weasel out of his deal.

I tried to let Tanner know where I was, and even though we lost touch for months at a time, we always found each other again. But he never called on me, never made me take a detour and help him and the other humans like him. Until a few weeks ago.

The state police barracks where Tanner worked had stood shiny and new behind a big parking lot with a big flag snapping in the hot wind. I shielded my eyes from the blowing grit blooming in the field across the road. The Depression might be behind us, but this was still the Dust Bowl.

“He ain't here,” the cop working the desk said when I asked for Tanner. “Out on a call. Probably won't be back until tomorrow.”

“Okay, can you tell me where?” I said. The cop looked me up and down.

“Why?” he asked. “You his side piece? Didn't take him for the type.”

I reached into my purse. Next to my knife and lipstick and wallet was a banded collection of cards I'd accumulated in the last four years of my side job. I picked out one for Joan Cartwright, a stringer for a paper in Nebraska. She'd been smart and a hell of a
drinker—I'd liked her. If you were pretending to be someone, it helped to be somebody who wasn't repulsive.

I slid the card across to the desk cop and he raised an eyebrow. “Reporter, huh? Don't see too many dames on the crime beat.”

“Well, now you've seen at least one,” I said brightly. “Detective Tanner agreed to be profiled for a feature I'm doing on state policing across state lines.”

I practically saw the cop's eyes glaze over, and he reached for a pad to write down Tanner's hotel address. “Knock yourself out,” he said, and went back to his newspaper. The headline blared in type almost as high as my thumbprint. HITCHHIKING HORROR. In smaller type,
Has the Walking Man Returned to Kansas?

“You have no idea,” I muttered, jogging outside to catch the taxi before he drove away.

Another small town,
this one almost on the Nebraska border rather than the Oklahoma one. At least this one had a train station, and somewhere to eat other than a greasy Automat.

Tanner pushed a small white plate across the table when I sat down. “I ordered you some pie.”

“You're handling this pretty well,” I said, taking a polite bite. I wasn't going to be tucking into any sweets. We'd been back on the trail for two weeks and there were twice as many bodies as of this morning, if you believed the cop's paper.

“Right back atcha,” Tanner said. “You look . . . healthy. Healthier than you've been in a while.” The first time Tanner had seen me after I'd crawled back out of the bottle, his face had told me exactly how bad I looked. For a cop, he was a bad liar. I'd gained back the weight, my scars had healed, and my skin was no longer
the same shade of gray as the empty wheat fields. In contrast, Tanner had aged a decade in four years. His hair was going white at the temples and deep wrinkles that hadn't existed when I met him creased beside his mouth. Sun and stress and smoke and bad food would do that to any heartland cop, and Tanner wasn't special. Just different.

I tapped my fork on the edge of my plate. “So what do you hear?”

Tanner checked his watch. “There's another body,” he said. “But that's actually not why I wanted you to come in today.” He pushed back from the little cafe table. “I gotta make a call,” he said. “Hang tight.”

I waited, watching the train I'd been on pull out of the station across the street. There was something hanging in the air here, like the smoke from the diesel engine. It vibrated under my feet the same as the cars picking up speed as the whistle blasted a goodbye.

This was where I'd find the Walking Man again. This was where it'd finally end.

“Sorry,” Tanner said, sliding back into his seat and picking up the remains of his Monte Cristo sandwich.

“Who is she?” I said, finishing off the pie. It wasn't half-bad.

“Who?” Tanner feigned confusion.

“Your wife,” I said. He turned a little pink around the edges.

“That obvious, huh?”

“Well, it hasn't been long enough for a tan line on your ring finger,” I said. “But the desk guy back at your barracks did ask me if I was a side piece. Implying there's a main piece somewhere.”

Tanner snorted. “Six months, maybe a little more. Her name is Joyce. She's a nurse.”

“Good for you,” I said. “You need someone who's around to do more than help you fight off the undead.”