Grim Tidings (13 page)

“You're Ava,” he said. He jumped topics with no regard for verbal niceties. It was like trying to follow a hyperactive squirrel from one branch to the next. “I'm Henry,” he said, extending his hand. “Hank. Most people call me Hank.”

I regarded his hand. “Are you going to start speaking in tongues if I touch you, Hank?”

He shrugged. “I don't know. I mostly have dreams, and sometimes I can see a spirit, if it's very strong. I'm not very good with objects or people. My grandmother was better at picking up information from people and objects. She was a reader. I'm a visitor. I visit—”

“You visit other people's minds, I get it,” I said. “That's cute.”

“It's not really all that extraordinary when you think about it,” he said. “The science of it. There are frequencies we can't hear, so why not other frequencies most people can't sense, but psychics can? I'm just open on more channels than the average person. There's really nothing mystical about it.”

“Fascinating,” I said.

“You and the Walking Man,” Hank said. “I got that much from what I've been seeing. You're looking for him?”

“You're very perceptive in that not-at-all way,” I said. “Do you have something for me or do you just invade people's REM cycles as a hobby?”

Hank took a deep breath. “I can tell you where he's going to be.
I can point you toward the outbreak his next victim will cause. But then I need you to leave.”

I blinked. “Excuse me?” I'd been expecting a sales pitch, or at least a well-laid trap. This guy had to be shilling for Cain—there wasn't any other reason I could think of why he was all over me to validate his psychic visions. Telling me to get the fuck out didn't jibe.

“Let the Walking Man go. He won't be any more trouble,” Hank insisted. “I'll keep tabs on him for you. No more of those zompire things will rise after this next one.”

“Zompire?” I said.

“Zombie-slash-vampire. That's what they are, near as I can tell from reading about the last outbreak. Like I said, I'll keep an eye on him and take care of the problem.”

“Thanks, guy I just met and have no reason to trust.” I pulled the fork out of the table. “I guess I can just go home now.”

“You don't understand!” Hank hissed, grabbing my wrist. “The Walking Man has to stay alive. I don't know why, but that's what everything is showing me. He lives, you live. He dies . . . and I can't see anything after that. And that's bad. So you kill the zompire, but you leave
him
alone, understand?”

My jaw set. I didn't like it when people tried to drag me into their shit, and I liked it even less when it involved somebody like the Walking Man. “Thanks for the advice, Hank,” I said, turning my hand so I was holding his wrist, bending his fingers backward toward his forearm. “But I didn't come here to clean up his messes. I came to send him back to Hell.”

He whimpered. “Why are you getting violent with me? I'm on your side! Just trying to make you understand.”

“You think my problem right now is you
touching
me?” I said. “Get up or I'm going to break your hand.”

He almost jumped up, and I pulled him next to me, like we were a couple. “Walk out of here with me and if you so much as let a bead of sweat roll off that square chin of yours I am going to snap you in half.” I shoved us forward. “Nod if you understand.”

He nodded. We walked. I shoved him into the front seat of Ronnie's truck. Hank cried out when I swerved into traffic, scrambling for his seat belt. “Why are you doing this to me? I thought you were somebody I could trust, Ava!”

“Stop talking to me like you know me,” I said, hanging a U-turn and heading back toward the interstate. “Matter of fact, while we drive to wherever the Walking Man's next victim is you're going to tell me exactly how you know so much about me.”

“I'm psychic?” Hank said, so dry he could have chapped my skin.

I shot a glance at him as I passed up a tractor trailer. I was going up past eighty, partly because I was angry and partly because I didn't want Hank to do something stupid like try to tuck and roll when he realized I wasn't going to obey his order to stand down like a good dog.

Hank's face was tight in response to my look. “I'm not setting you up, if that's what you're thinking.”

“Funny, that's exactly what I was thinking,” I said. “You really do have psychic powers.”

“Look, all I know is that the Walking Man has to keep doing what he's doing, or bad things are gonna happen.”

“I don't know if you've looked outside lately, but bad things are happening.” I said. “They have happened and they continue
to happen and they'll keep on happening no matter how many women you follow into diners.”

Hank was quiet for a long time. I let him stew, let him wonder whether or not I'd really sussed out that he was the Walking Man's stooge.

“I usually see things I can actually fix,” he said at last. “Missing kids. Guys planning to rob liquor stores. I have an okay relationship with a few cops I trust. Most of the time this is more like a second job than a calling. I don't know why my impressions don't give me winning lottery numbers or tell me where to find high-ranking terrorists. I figured it was a range thing. I don't pick up on stuff I can't prevent.” He gulped. “But I've been having the same dream over and over. You stand above the Walking Man. You kill him. And then everything ends. Not like the dream ends—the world ends. Nuclear bombs, rains of fire, those zompire things dotting the entire landscape. I don't know why, but you killing the Walking Man starts something that ends with me and everyone I love dead.”

He held up his planner, riffling the pages. I saw it wasn't a planner but a notebook, every sheet lined with meticulous handwriting. “I record my dreams and stuff in here. I've met a few other people like me and over the last year or so we've all been having this dream.” He tapped the open page, deliberate instead of nervous. “I don't mean similar dreams. I mean the
exact same dream.
Except none of them knew who you were. Just me. Figured it was my job to get in touch.”

I pulled over into a rest stop, putting the truck in park and gripping the wheel. “And how do you know who I am, Hank?” I was poised to do something violent, if I had to. Kill him, shut down
the hotline to the Walking Man, at the very least leave him on the side of the road.

He sighed, rubbing his forehead. His perfect hair went askew. “My grandfather had abilities too. Not mine, but similar. He said if I ever ran into trouble like this, I should find you. That you could help. He said you'd know who he was because in 1945 you saved his life.”

I felt all the indignation flow out of me, sure as if I'd been punched. Hank looked slightly afraid as I sagged back against the seat and put my hand over my mouth. “I'm sorry, I . . .” He reached for me, then pulled his hand back when I sucked in air. I was trying not to sob, and I was doing a crappy job.

“What was your grandfather's name?” I whispered. Hank looked at his hands.

“Jacob Gottlieb.”

After that I couldn't help myself. Everything awful that had happened in the last week, all the dreams I'd had of Jacob, piled up like a car wreck. I buried my face in my hands and started to cry, big ugly sobs that ripped out of me like screams.

I felt a hand on my back after a few seconds, rubbing in gentle circles. Hank offered me a crumpled packet of tissues when I looked up. “Allergies,” he said. “I always have tissues.”

“Jacob . . . Jacob survived?” I choked out. Hank nodded.

“He made it through the woods and after a couple days he found a forward detachment of the Third Army,” Hank said. “He was frostbitten pretty bad and his ankle was never right. He had a cane—he used to let me play with it. But he lived. Thanks to you.”

I blew my nose hard. Hank looked out the window at the cars
whipping past us on the highway. “He never talked much about what happened to him in the camp. He just talked about you.”

“Was he okay? After?” I said. “Was he . . . happy?”

Hank smiled. “He came here in '52 and he met my grandmother. He got his medical license again and he was a surgeon in Kansas City for decades. Everyone loved Dr. Gottlieb. There's even an OR suite named after him at his hospital.”

“He was a good man,” I said. “He deserved that life.”

Hank handed me more tissues. “He taught us well, me and my dad both. He became a rabbi like my great-grandfather after what you and he went through. Never saw any problem with being a mystic and a surgeon. But the psychic thing was all me.” He flashed an ID badge. “I'm a city engineer. Never got to the rabbi part. Guess I don't have the patience to learn all the stuff I needed to be a real live golem-making, demon-banishing badass.”

I started the truck again and pulled out onto the highway. “Tell me where to find the Walking Man,” I said. “Tell me everything and don't lie and maybe I'll consider listening to your
insane
suggestion I don't end him.”

“You
have
to listen,” Hank said. “Do you have any idea how rare it is for half a dozen psychics to have the same dream? Killing the Walking Man will touch off something catastrophic.”

“I doubt that,” I said grimly, pressing the accelerator down to the floor as Jacob directed me onto the southbound interchange.

“Why?” he said. “You of all people know there are forces out there capable of ending the world as we know it.”

“Because I killed him once already,” I said. “And the world did not end. In fact, it was a far better place without his poison in it.”

“Really?” Hank cocked his head. “You killed him?”

“Dead as a doornail,” I said. Even as I said it, though, I felt a little flip in my stomach. My grandmother used to say it was the truth trying to fight its way past the lie.

“Are you sure?” Hank said. “Because if you did maybe there's something about my own impressions I'm not getting.”

“Maybe,” I agreed. I felt the lie again, and I swallowed it. “Because I killed him. I'm certain.”

KANSAS, HIGHWAY 30

APRIL 1951

The wig itched, and a herd of sweat droplets stampeded down the back of my neck. Even with the car windows down, it was warm and wet as a sodden wool blanket. April wasn't supposed to be this hot, and I drove toward a horizon of bruise-colored sky hemmed in by charcoal thunderheads.

The gas gauge of Tanner's Ford hovered on E and I sighed, tapping my fingers against the steering wheel. I'd been driving up and down this stretch of road for almost six hours, making passes as the world got hotter and the sky got darker, just waiting. Waiting for the broken-down car and the big man flagging me down.

In the months since we'd met and talked with Val, it'd gotten easier to accept we were dealing with something old, something monstrous that the other monsters hadn't noticed, lurking way back there in the shadows.

Maybe not Cain, the character in a Bible story, but something that was primeval. A monster who was the first of its kind.

And now I was driving around Kansas in a blond wig trying to pick a fight with him, when he'd already beaten me once before without even lifting a finger.

The wig had been Val's idea. She was the reason I was driving around now. Her impression said he was going to take someone today, and after months of chasing and falling short, Tanner and I had decided to hell with it. We weren't having any luck chasing, so we were going to turn around and let him chase me.

I was who he wanted, after all. If he thought he was getting the upper hand, that he was going to have me back in his grasp when I showed up in the stupid wig, blustering like a superhero, acting like I'd caught him, he might drop his guard. He might slip just long enough for Tanner and me to finish him.

It was that, or I'd be his again. But we didn't have any other choice.

I reached over to fiddle with the radio and try to find a station that wasn't just hissing. I couldn't be alone in this silent car, on this silent road. My company was a gun in the glove compartment and a knife resting up against my thigh, tucked into my garter.

Those weren't for him. Nothing that was a weapon could hurt him. The gun was for me, if he caught me and I could still use my limbs.

The knife was a last resort.

A snatch of Bing Crosby filtered out of the speakers, only to get interrupted by the screech of an emergency broadcast. “We interrupt this program to bring you this special weather report . . .” the announcer droned, cutting in and out through the whistle of static.

I stopped paying attention when I saw the silver of a bumper pulled onto the shoulder, under a stand of cottonwoods.

I stomped on the brake, pushing on my sunglasses. No point in making it too easy for him. I waited for two heartbeats. My fingers didn't seem to want to let go of the wheel.

“Get out of the car,” I murmured to myself as the cottonwoods bent and swayed in a wind that kicked up, almost obscuring the big hulking sedan parked under them. “You're not scared, you're not scared. Get out of the car.”

I shoved the door open and put my feet in the dirt before I could lose my nerve and drive away. “You okay, sugar?” I called out, putting the full force of my former life as a Tennessee hillbilly behind the words.

The hulking figure bent over the engine compartment straightened up, then turned. The car was a silver coupe, the same make as the one belonging to his last victim, Tom Chavez of Austin, Texas. Chavez was a traveling salesman who moved all over the Midwest fitting aluminum siding. He'd tried to help out the Walking Man a little over three weeks ago.

“That's real nice of you, miss,” he said. “You sure you're all right giving me a ride to a filling station?”

“You just try and stop me,” I said, and gave him a big, broad, stupid smile. He wiped his hands off on a rag and shut the hood,
taking his jacket from the open window. Were his black eyes flashing with amusement? Had he recognized me already?

“Looks like rain,” he said as he got in my car and shut the door.

I gunned the engine, pulling us out onto the highway and spraying gravel all over poor dead Tom Chavez's paint job.

The Walking Man reached out and gripped the dashboard. “Don't rush on account of me.”

I just had to get him to the mile marker Val had seen. Get him there, and get him into the binding hex that Tanner had set up. He couldn't be killed, but we could at least freeze him in place. Val had looked into the future for us and told us it had to be today, on this road, at that marker.

Just get him there. Less than two miles, and don't die in the process. Easy. Right.

“Really,” the Walking Man said. “Slow down, darlin'. We've got all the time in the world.”

I took off my sunglasses, tossing them into the backseat. I followed with the wig. “Five years is long enough for me.”

The Walking Man stared at me for a long moment. I'd expected rage, that he might attack me right there and run the car off the road. I'd expected that he might try to frighten me, since I knew most of his victims died in terror.

I never expected him to smile, and I almost threw up when he started to laugh. “All this time, little bird. I never thought I'd see your nest.”

I kept driving, the radio roaring and chirping with static the only sound besides the engine as I pushed the Ford past seventy. “I'm not your little bird. You're done. You're mine now.”

He leaned back, hooking his arm over the open window. “I don't think so, little bird. I think you're gonna stop this car.”

“Oh really,” I said. He was going to try to pull me under again, look into my eyes and strip me bare and manipulate my strings, like before. I kept staring at the road, refusing to look at him. He was just a hulking shape in my periphery. A nightmare laughing at me. If he couldn't look into your eyes, we'd figured out, he couldn't pull you close and hold you. It was taking everything I had, my entire body vibrating, but I kept my eyes on the road.

“Really,” he said. “You're out of gas.”

I gasped as the car jerked and shuddered, the steering going soft under my grip as we rolled to a stop in the middle of the empty highway. Fat raindrops splashed against the windshield and a finger of lightning jumped between the clouds on the horizon as the Walking Man continued to laugh. He'd gone for the car, since I'd smartened up, forcing us to stop short of the mile marker.

Tanner was waiting. He'd come. He would, when I didn't show.

I let that keep me from screaming as the Walking Man spoke. “You're brave, I'll give you that. Brave as a hero from a storybook. But Theseus was thrown from a cliff by his own people and Perseus fell from Pegasus when he became too proud.” His fist connected with my jaw, slamming me into the driver's window hard enough to crack it. Just as in the camp, his hands were around my neck. “And now, you are in the Minotaur's maze, except there is no thread to guide you back home. We are getting out of this car, little bird. I promised to clip your wings, and those friends you
managed to con into helping you will find your body by the side of the road.”

He leaned in close and that hot, burnt smell filled my nostrils and defiled what little air I had left. “I'll have the decency not to mark you as one of my children. I'm not the monster you think I am.”

I squeezed my eyes shut as I also laughed, hysteria bubbling its way out of me like a kettle boiling. I wasn't going to look. He could kill me right here, choke me or beat me to death, but I wasn't going to look at him. He wasn't going to possess me again.

“Look at me,” he croaked. I shook my head, still laughing, although now it just sounded like the wheeze of a dying machine, inhuman and mechanical. He grabbed my cheeks with his rough hands, crushing the flesh against my teeth. “LOOK AT ME!” he bellowed.

I would gouge out my own eyes, I thought. I would slam my own skull into the engine block and fry my eyelids shut before I'd look. The world was black and lightheaded, sounds and the smell of him, and far away the slamming of rain on the car roof.

The Walking Man reached over me with his free hand and yanked the door handle. Nothing happened, and he smashed at it more, bashing my head each time and making me see stars.

“Perseus didn't ride Pegasus,” I rasped as I felt his skin heat with the rage that always lurked just beneath the surface. “It was Bellerophon. And he didn't fall from Bellerophon's back. Zeus pushed him.”

“
What did you do,
” the Walking Man snarled, slamming my head into the door once more. I licked at the blood dribbling from
the cut inside my mouth, where my teeth had sunk into the delicate skin.

“I didn't,” I said, sliding my hands in front of my eyes. “But a friend painted a barrier spell all over this car. Up under the headliner. Door panels. Floorboards too. You can check in but you don't check out.”

Tanner hadn't wanted to—had begged me, in fact, to not trap myself with the Walking Man. But there'd always been a chance we wouldn't make it to the mile marker. And I'd decided long ago that the next time we met, he wasn't getting away.

As quickly as he'd landed on me, the Walking Man let me go. “So what now, little bird?” he said. “You and I sit here until one of us dies of old age? Because here's a hint: it won't be me.”

“Eventually my friends will come along, we'll cut off your head, burn you down to nothing, and dissolve the ashes in sulfuric acid,” I said. “We'll put those ashes inside a barrier hex inside a hole so deep even the Devil himself can't find you, and we'll leave you there. I think that will be the end of you, old age or no.”

I wiped the blood from my lips with the back of my sleeve, pressing my face into the scratchy material of the door liner to avoid looking at him. “Are you really him?” I said. “Cain? Is that your name?”

He shook his head, his nostrils flaring with every breath. “I haven't been called that in centuries. And you have no idea what I am, what I'm capable of, what this endeavor of ours is . . .”

“There is no
us
!” I screamed. “I am not anything like you, you get it?!” I tried to squirm away from his weight and he let me go. I was surprised, but I pulled myself up, spinning sideways in my seat, burying my face in my knees. “I am a hunter,” I whispered.
“And for once, the bird is not trapped with you. You're in my cage now, and if neither of us leaves, that is just fine by me.”

Cain lunged for me again, grabbing me by the front of my blouse and pulling me close. “You listen to me, little one—you may think you are a mighty hound sworn to that vile thing that calls himself Gary, but you are not a hound, and you do not belong to anyone but me . . .”

There was an enormous crack of thunder, and the ground shuddered, rain thrumming on the car hood so hard I couldn't see ten feet in front of us. Lightning illuminated Cain's snarl in camera flashes, and I ducked my head in terror that the glance had been enough. But all at once our brief contact was broken by a roar that sounded like the big freight trains that raced by on the tracks next to Valentine's trailer. It was so loud I felt like it could suck the air out of my lungs, like it was pulling sound and sense and feeling out of everything around me.

Cain's gaze snapped to the windshield and he dropped me so the back of my skull clunked against the steering wheel. He murmured something in a language I didn't catch, one that had to have been his native tongue, then he turned to me, no longer angry. “If you can get out of this car,” he said softly. “Do it. Run. Now.”

The rain parted, as if I was watching a film running in reverse. It flew upward, and I saw the funnel cloud bearing down, chunking up the highway a few hundred yards ahead. It was the biggest I'd ever seen, so wide and black it looked like the sky had grown a mouth.

I didn't argue with the Walking Man, didn't bother to wonder why he'd suddenly let go of me. All that existed was the hound's will to survive, and it grabbed the chance in its jaws and ran.

I threw the door open and lunged for the ditch next to the highway. I'd been terrified of ending up in it not ten minutes before, and now I'd never wanted to be any place more.

Road debris and sections of the guardrail started to wobble and pull away. The car scooted forward a few inches, the springs on my door howling as they were yanked the wrong way toward the pull of the wind. I clambered for the drainpipe, half full of fetid rain water, splashing into it and curling up against one of the rusty, crenelated sides as the twister screamed above me. Mixed in with the hollow howl of the wind was a scream that I took to be the Walking Man's. It wasn't a rage sound or a pain sound—it was the sound of a lost thing, standing alone when the entire world around it has finally burned down.

The storm was so loud I was sure I'd be deaf, that the sound alone would rip me apart. I felt the massive pipe shake in its stead, fighting the grip of the earth as the twister passed overhead. I tightened my body into a ball and waited to die for the second time.

Then, just as quickly as it had come up, it was gone, the ground under me rumbling faintly like the freight had moved on past the junction, going up north toward Chicago. Rainwater rushed around me, almost up to my waist, and I crawled slowly out of the pipe to find dozens and dozens of tin cans littering the roadway. Not just cans—every type of trash and muck that could be dumped on the side of the road was scattered across it. A license plate that wasn't from my car clanged as I kicked it with my toe. Papers blew every which way and I even saw the head of a baby doll, pitted and worn by weather long before the twister snatched it lying in the chaos.

The Ford was in the field on the other side of the highway, on its roof as if an errant child had stomped on it good and hard. I broke into a run, sprinting toward the crushed bulk, my feet crunching over the glittering spray of glass lying all around the body.