Johnny Halloween (9 page)

Familiar road now. Familiar moonlight, too. And through the cracked window, the familiar scent of the river and that dirt road still wet with rain that cut through farmland. And then that other smell—that crisp, tart apple smell that reminded Johnny of Elena’s father.

It sliced straight through him like a knife. Johnny rolled up the window. Now all he could smell were the roses—the bouquet of white ones he’d managed to grab at the florist shop before Barnes showed up. He tried to settle in on it, but he had a hard time.

Johnny couldn’t finish the Snickers bar. He tossed it back in the bag Barnes had stolen from a kid. Then he noticed something else in there. A monster mask, some kind of rattlesnake man with great big fangs. Johnny pulled it out and looked it over. Ran his hand over those scales. Rattlers were cold-blooded; they’d sleep through a night like this. They’d sleep through a whole damn winter. Johnny wished he could be that way, but he was sweating something fierce.

Barnes turned onto the little dirt road that led to Elena’s house, and Johnny’s heart started thundering. He was thinking about Elena’s father, thinking how things would play out once the old man answered that door.

Barnes pulled to a stop.

Johnny swallowed hard.

He crumpled up that monster mask, shoved it into his coat pocket like a snakeskin charm.

He grabbed the white roses in his good hand.

He got out of the car and walked to the door.

He knocked.

It took a while before the door opened, but it did. And there stood Elena’s father, his eyes tired, his heart heavy. Johnny told him what he wanted. But somehow, Johnny’s words didn’t seem to matter to the old man any more than Johnny’s mojo hand mattered. Because Elena’s father didn’t have any more left in his heart or his house than he did in his words, and though he spoke them under the sway of Johnny’s magic hand, they were words that did not rise above a whisper, and they were the same words that had knocked hard on Johnny’s heart when he’d come home from the war three months before.

****

Johnny had denied those words entrance then, but he couldn’t deny them now. Not as the three of them drove to the cemetery across the road from the apple orchard gone wild. The crisp, tart scent sawed at Johnny as he got out of the cruiser, and he remembered the things Elena’s father had told him that day three months ago, and he recalled the details of a death that had come quietly while he was half a world away.

And now he remembered about the cemetery. And the smell of apples. And the scent of roses, too, for there were roses on Elena’s grave. White roses…just like the ones he’d stolen from the florist shop. And suddenly Johnny felt like he was coming apart, felt like a busted puppet ready to topple among the tombstones.

He reached into his coat pocket. He squeezed that rattlesnake face in his good hand. Then he took the mask out of his pocket and put it on. He knew what he had to do.

Of course, a one-handed man couldn’t use a shovel. Johnny didn’t have time for that, anyway. So he started up the backhoe the gravediggers used and he set to work, digging like a combat knife in a tin of rations. Elena’s father watched without a word. Ray Barnes watched too, chewing on a Snickers bar while he sat on a tombstone. And while Johnny worked the backhoe’s gears, his stump of a wrist sweated inside the sleeve of his magic prosthetic hand, and his tears lined the inner skin of that rattlesnake mask.

But none of it mattered anymore. Not the mojo hand, not the white roses chewed under the teeth of the backhoe’s bucket. Not what Johnny remembered, and not what he’d forgotten. That’s what he thought as he emptied out that hole, and that’s what he thought as he climbed down onto the lid of Elena’s coffin with a dozen crushed roses and a rubber hand that had started off the evening swollen with the promise of three magic knocks.

One or none—how many magic knocks were left in that hand didn’t matter at all. Johnny knew that deep inside, even as he held that rubber hand poised above the metal casket, even as he cried inside that rattlesnake mask.

Even as he brought his fist down on that lid.

****

And here’s your kicker, folks—Johnny was right.

Because it doesn’t really matter what happened next, any more than it matters why Johnny’s hand was charged up with those three magic knocks in the first place. That’s not what this story’s about, because knocking on his dead love’s coffin wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to Johnny Meyers. Not by a longshot.

The worst thing that ever happened to Johnny was ending up down in that hole at all.

The worst thing that happened was falling that deep, and that hard.

So…that’s where Johnny is.

That’s how he got there.

And that’s where we’ll leave him…tonight.

THE JACK

O’ LANTERN:

A DARK HARVEST TALE

Cornstalks crackle as the October Boy shoulders into a small clearing. Moonlight fills that scooped hunk of the world, where stalks are rat-gnawed nubs trampled by a larger predator…a predator the Boy scents.

The scent is immediate. It hangs heavy as a shroud. The cool north wind combing the fields this Halloween night cannot banish it. The Boy’s viney fingers twine tightly around the hilt of the butcher knife that fills his hand, as if he’ll have to cut himself free of the stink before he can move so much as an inch.

But hesitation—real or imagined—is not a quality contained within the growing armature of the October Boy’s body. He steps forward, his carved pumpkin head twisting on its braided-vine neck, beams of orange light spilling from his triangular eyes as he examines the shorn clearing.

There’s a thing on the ground in the center of the circle. Another carved head, but one not like his own. Lanternlike, it burns. Flickering in the darkness, tongues of fire licking moisture within its hollowed confines. Casting a grinning shadowface that stretches across trampled stalks to the the Boy’s severed-root feet. Spilling those predatory scents in this territory marked as his own, a stench that is nothing like the wild October scents of cool fall nights and cinnamon-laced gunpowder that have marked his birth and will mark his death.

The candy heart trapped in the Boy’s woven chest beats faster as he travels the grinning map cast at his feet. He closes on the thing in the center of the circle. The shadowface gleams, its reflection contained on the polished surface of his blade as the Boy bends low. Yes, fire lives inside this carved head. Yes, the hollowed mouth spits moist crackles. Yes, a rabid grin spreads wider than any mouth can stretch, and its eyes are wells roiling with flame, and it is both exhibit and proof of a madman’s art. But this strange Jack o’ Lantern is nothing like a brother to the pumpkin-headed creature that holds the knife. This face—what remains of it—is not a carved product of the dark earth. It is a construct of flesh and bone. A human head, cored and hollowed—a half-dozen candles flickering within scraped red confines. Grinning a lipless grin over purple gums, a grin with bloodstained teeth rooted in a mouth that laughs no more.

But somewhere out there in the darkness, the October Boy hears laughter.

It lingers until it is eclipsed by another sound.

The sound of gunfire.

****

The Boy whirls away from the flickering Jack o’ Lantern, but there’s nothing out there to see but night, and stars, and the dull glow of the town waiting beyond.

He is alone in this clearing. The predator who lurked in this place is gone. Only the killer’s trophy remains. In the end, this matters little to the October Boy, for tonight he too is a trophy. One that travels on two legs, destined to be slain if he makes a single misstep. One that knows this clearing is but a brief stop on a run that is a dead heat, with odds that never fall in his favor.

Another booming blast beckons him. And another. The October Boy cannot linger here, not if he wants a chance at staying alive. He is built for movement. This is what he must do to survive the human gauntlet that waits ahead in the night.

So the Boy turns his back, following his shadow away from the light cast by the mangled skull.

The black road waits.

A whisper through the corn, and he is on it.

****

Officer Dan Kehoe’s scattergun barks, and lead shot clips the branches of an old cemetery oak. Barbed twigs and splinters rain down on a dozen boys fighting among the tombstones. They freeze, and Kehoe closes on them. They’re bloody, rolling around among the granite slabs. Scratches and bruises and cuts on their faces. Ballbats and hammers and switchblades in their hands. Locked up and starved for five days. Mad with hunger. Free at last to hunt the October Boy, a scarecrow monster that hasn’t even crossed the town limits yet.

In absence of that target, the boys turn on the only prey handy: each other. Kehoe understands that. Once, a long time ago, he was in their place—just another kid with dreams of winning the Run and escaping this nowhere town by killing a two-legged nightmare. Once, a long time ago, Kehoe’s heart was a cage for the same fury that drives every young man between the ages of sixteen and nineteen this night.

Kill Sawtooth Jack and be the one guy to get out of here this year, or stay in this nowhere burg ’til your life rusts away to nothing.
He remembers that promise as well as he understands it, and that is good. For even though every one of the kids in front of him is in twice the shape he is, and every one of them is a hundred times hungrier for a sweet piece of a life they can barely imagine, it’s his job to direct their fury until the October Boy is brought down.

So Kehoe starts where the danger is, pile-driving the biggest kid into a tombstone. The boy is a straw-haired wideload armed with a pitchfork, and the dead man’s marker catches him behind the knees and topples him like a dropped casket. The pitchfork flies out of the kid’s hands as he falls. Quickly, Dan steps around the tombstone. His Winchester drives down as the boy tries to rise, butt plate digging into Wideload’s thick muscled belly hard enough to jolt the kid’s spine.

Guts, nerves, and muscle react. Wideload pukes up a bellyful of nothing on the cemetery lawn. But Kehoe isn’t finished. A second later, the smoking shotgun barrel jams against the kid’s cheek. Kehoe grabs Wideload’s blond hair, jerking flushed skin tight against that hot steel so it’s sure to leave a brand.

The boy whimpers, but Dan doesn’t let go.

He’s sending a message now.

He frosts the other boys with quick glances, one by one.

They stare at him, a man with close-cropped hair gone to gray. All those boys standing there, brains notching the distance between the reality they’ve just witnessed, the possible reactions it can trigger, and the likely price of those reactions. And then comes that one second. The only one Kehoe fears. The one where the boys might realize the odds aren’t quite stacked in his favor. When they realized that Dan Kehoe is just one guy—an old guy, at that. And, sure, he wears a badge and he’s armed with a shotgun, but there are a lot more of them than there are of him.

Dan studies their eyes, searching for a glimmer of that realization or the slightest twitch of muscle once it sparks. He sees neither. He’s got them now, and he knows it. So he releases Wideload, chambering another shell before the kid moves so much as an inch.

Down on the ground, Wideload reaches for the scalded circle on his cheek. He swears under his breath, but he doesn’t look Kehoe in the eye. Instead, he looks down, as if he’s found a particularly interesting blade of grass planted between his knees.

That means one thing: it’s over now. Kehoe knows it. He picks up the pitchfork, nudges it into the Wideload’s hands. Then he points the shotgun at the cemetery gates.

“The Run’s out there,” Dan says. “So is the October Boy. Go get him, or I’ll get you.”

One blink, and the boys start moving.

Another, and they’re already gone.

****

And that’s when Dan Kehoe hears it. The squawk of the police radio, over in the prowl car parked by the cemetery gates. It’s the chief. “Sounds like thunder out there,” Steve Marlowe says. “That you, Dan?”

“Yeah. My shotgun, anyway. I just broke up a rumble in the cemetery. A bunch of kids trying to take each other apart instead of the Boy. Only one way to get those youngbloods on track.”

“Twenty years ago, you wouldn’t have needed the gun.”

“Twenty years ago, I would have been kicking your ass, youngster.”

Steve Marlowe laughs. The chief’s pushing forty, but not too hard. And Kehoe’s fifty-five.

“You seen Jack?” Marlowe asks.

“No,” Kehoe says, because he has no idea where the other cop working the Run is. “What’s up?”

“He said he was going to check the Line. That was more than an hour ago. Someone called in a tip about some jumpers. I’ve been trying to raise him for the last half hour, but all I get on the radio is dead air.”

“Damn.”

“How about you take a look out there?”

Kehoe swallows. The mic’s right there in his hand. Open channel. His finger’s perched over the button, but he can’t think anything to say. He doesn’t know why…or maybe he does. Maybe that moment is still eating at him—the moment when he waited for those youngblood’s to react. Or maybe it’s the sudden quiet that’s fallen over the cemetery. Maybe it’s the simple fact that he’s sitting here, all alone among the tombstones in the quietest place in town. Knowing what’s right here, six feet under his boot heels.

Yeah. Maybe that’s it. Because for some reason Dan Kehoe can’t quite understand, tonight he’s feeling closer to that boxed and buried stretch of real estate than he does to the streets of this town, or the kids running those streets, or the October Boy. Call it instinct if you want. Or call it premonition, maybe. But the feeling churning in Kehoe’s gut is definite if not quite definable, and—

“You still there, Dan?”

“You really want me heading out of town, Chief? If the Run hits rough water without a cop on the streets, you’re up shit creek.”

“Could be I’m already there.”

“What are you saying, boss?”

“I’m saying I want you to find my other badge before the water gets too deep…and I want you to do it now.”

****

Walking the black road is like walking a prison corridor. Dead cornstalks rise like a crop of iron bars on each side of the asphalt, leading toward the only real cage the October Boy has ever known.

The town. The Boy moves toward it, wondering if he’s walking his first mile or his last. If he beats the odds and makes it to the old brick church before midnight, then this is his first mile. If he fails, then it could be his last.

And once he crosses the Line that separates the town from the fields, every step he takes will be a hundred times more dangerous than the ones he’s taking now. He raises his head as screams rise in the distance. Howls and roars spill from the mouths of hungry boys who’ll hunt him this night. The October Boy understands his pursuers just as Dan Kehoe understands them, for he has traveled in their shoes. He knows the fate they plan for him is no different than the fate suffered by that hacked-up head in the clearing—a living thing severed from that role by a murderous hand…now no more than an object.

But the Boy cannot dwell on such things. And, when it comes to fate, he has a knife of his own—one he will use this night to carve his own quotient of same.

So he moves on, blade at the ready. The screams in the distance trail off. The road stretches ahead, a licorice whip even when washed in moonlight. Suddenly it’s quiet here…almost. Only the whisper of the October Boy’s feet on asphalt. Only the croaking of frogs in the deep ditches at the side of the road.

And now the Boy spots something just ahead…something in that ditch…something much too large that the moonlight paints the same way it paints the road. The Boy’s carved eyes narrow, and the orange glow spilling from his head brightens as Atomic Fireballs crackle in his skull. His gaze spotlights the center-line of the road until it slices over the body of a car.

The car is black.

The car is white.

It’s two-tone: a police cruiser.

The Boy freezes, remembering the severed head in the field. The predatory scent is gone, but perhaps there is a greater danger here. The prowl car door hangs open. There’s another crackle, and this one is not contained in the Boy’s skull. It’s the police radio, but no one’s there to answer it.

The Boy can see that. The cruiser’s interior fills with orange light as he draws near. He fears a trap, but the road is empty, and the cornstalks do not rustle. The wind has suddenly died. The frogs are quiet. He’s sure he is alone…at least for the moment.

The Boy ducks his misshapen head inside the prowl car. He may not have long. But no keys hang from the ignition. He exhales hard, hot breath scalding his crosscut excuse for a smile. He’ll have no shortcut into town tonight. It will not be so easy.

But there’s something else there in the car. Not the thing he thought he’d find, but something he can use.

The Boy buries his butcher knife in the driver’s seat, making a trade.

In a second, he has a Winchester Model 97 shotgun in his hands.

Quickly, he fills the pockets of his tattered coat with spare shells. A V8 guns in the distance, and the Boy senses it’s the same big block engine he’d find under the prowl car’s hood if he gave it a pop.

A half-mile away, headlights drill through the night. By the time those lights reveal the abandoned police cruiser, the October Boy is already gone.

He’s cutting through the dead corn, a shotgun in his hands.

****

Kehoe stares at the butcher knife buried at spine-level in the driver’s seat of Jack’s squad car. That familiar fear churns low in his gut, so thoroughly he doesn’t even notice the missing shotgun.