The Suicide Motor Club

Titles by Christopher Buehlman

THOSE ACROSS THE RIVER

BETWEEN TWO FIRES

THE NECROMANCER'S HOUSE

THE LESSER DEAD

THE SUICIDE MOTOR CLUB

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

This book is an original publication of Penguin Random House LLC.

Copyright © 2016 by Christopher Buehlman.

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eBook ISBN: 9781101988749

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Buehlman, Christopher, author.

Title: The suicide motor club / Christopher Buehlman.

Description: First Edition. | New York, NY : Berkley Books, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015050513 | ISBN 9781101988732 (hardback)

Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Horror. | FICTION / Fantasy / General. | GSAFD: Horror fiction. | Fantasy fiction.

Classification: LCC PS3602.U3395 S85 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015050513

FIRST EDITION:
June 2016

Cover photographs: car © Michael Krinke / iStockphoto; sunset © Clint Spencer / iStockphoto; tree © hutchinsonphotos/Shutterstock.

Cover design by Judith Lagerman.

Interior art: Road © Maciej Bledowski / Shutterstock; Vertical tire track © Denys Tokar / Shutterstock; Horizontal tire track © LongQuattro/Shutterstock.

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

For
Jade

Judith

May–September
1967

“DID YOU SEE THE MOON?” JUDITH LAMB SAID, HALF TURNING HER FACE TO LOOK
at her boy in the backseat. Glendon continued coloring, not out of rascality, she knew, but because he would want to finish whatever task he had set himself. His aunt Patsy, an expert colorist, had lately taught him how to outline, and he was probably laying down some border or other with the stubby blue crayon he bore down on. Outlining was what kept the colors apart, made the picture look grown-up. Scribbling was for small children, not five-year-olds like him.
Five and a half
he would say; he was still at an age where half years mattered, and his birthday in December seemed impossibly far away.

“Glendon, I'm talking to you,” she said, affection sweetening her voice even in rebuke. That she would spoil him seemed a foregone conclusion. He furrowed his brow and kept on; this was not a boy who suffered interruption gladly. It was easy to mistake Glendon Lamb for an entirely serious child, his father's child, watching him like this, but Judith knew better.

“Major Nelson, this is mission control. Do you see the moon? Over.”

“I'm coloring, Mom. Over,” he said, but he smiled. She had him. He
loved
I Dream of Jeannie
so much that she could get him to do almost anything if she crossed her arms and nodded decisively like Barbara Eden issuing a spell.

“It's okay,” she said. “You look at your book. It's just that the moon's a color like the milk in Apple Jacks, and it won't be for much longer. In fact, it never will be exactly that color again.”

“Won't it never?”

“Won't it
ever
.”

“Won't it ever?”

“Never, Master!” she said.

He laughed and looked up. If he had his father's worry lines, the boy had her eyes, cornflower blue and tilted handsomely down at the corners. His eyes resembled hers so closely, in fact, that finding them handsome struck her as a species of vanity.

She put her arm out the window, into the warm dusk air blowing hard against it, and aimed her finger at the just-past-full moon where it shone faintly against a lavender sky rapidly filling with dark. The moon itself glowed just a bit less pink, just a bit more yellow than it had when she first called the boy to look at it, but it still held magic. Glendon Lamb put his arm out the window like a smaller shadow of his mother's, pointing his finger where hers pointed.

The sun had been down perhaps fifteen minutes.

Judith glanced at her husband.

If Robert Lamb noticed the operations of the dusk sky, he gave no sign beyond pulling out the headlamp switch, frowning at the road before him like a man working at some equation. The '65 Falcon he washed and waxed every Sunday purred east on I-40, gobbling up New Mexico on its way to the Amarillo motel he'd called ahead for.

“Wow,” Glendon said. “Wowee!”

Judith withdrew her arm, fished a cigarette from her purse, and lit
it. Rob looked now, saw the moon, and lit his own cigarette, a Lucky Strike. Judith smiled at him. She was no fool. She knew something ominous moved in the waters past the shallows of his eyes, but she preferred to let him tell her in his own time. If she was lucky, it would have to do with his bid to become junior partner at his firm. If not? That was too dark to think about. Perhaps it would go away on its own. Perhaps she would be lucky enough for him never to tell her. At least he had made an effort to be present on their vacation: at the Alamo on their way west, but especially at Dodge City, where he had faked death so extravagantly at a freckly boy's “Ka-pow!” and finger-shot that Glendon had giggled for a full minute after. If Robert submerged within himself on the return trip, at least his son had a bag of little plastic cowboys to play with now.

They passed a hitchhiker, a young Negro wearing a dirty white T-shirt, greasy jeans stuffed down into combat boots that he might or might not have marched in recently. It was getting harder to tell the counterculture folks from the ex-soldiers, the ones who wore fatigues ironically from those who owned little more than their government-issued clothes. Robert thought about stopping, his father's knee-jerk bigotry skirmishing with his desire never to be his father. He might have stopped if he hadn't had his family with him; he had done some hitchhiking on summer trips while he was in college and knew what it was to rely on kindness. Judith loved it that she knew those stories, loved it that she knew he was tempted to stop for the man as well as why he didn't. She put her hand on his knee, turned her wild blue eyes to search for his, caught them, got a smile from him. Was every marriage a seesaw of joy and disappointment? She thought so.

If marriages didn't need divine assistance to survive, weddings wouldn't be held in churches.

We'll be okay,
she thought.

I'm imagining things.

The little boy was alone with the moon, his hand now planing the air up and down, a dolphin riding waves of wind.

—

THE BLACK CAMARO CAME FROM THE CLINES CORNERS EXIT WHERE ROUTE 285
intercepted Interstate 40. Santa Fe lay to the north on 285, but this car nosed its way onto the ramp that came from the south, from the scrublands leading up from Encino. Just half an hour earlier, its driver and two passengers had been sleeping in an abandoned gas station off 285, wild with weeds and painted with rust, as had the occupants of the red GTO racing to catch up with it. Well, one of those two had slept in the gas station. The driver had been sleeping in the trunk.

The first car opened up when it hit the highway, its 350 V-8 growling high and pushing it toward the rising moon. The second car followed after.

The Camaro's taillights flashed when the driver saw the hitchhiker, but the driver said “Dirty” and kept on. The Pontiac slowed too but didn't stop, its driver too proud to take the first car's leavings.

The highway, relatively new, yawned east with little traffic on it, and the two muscle cars plowed on at better than ninety, unafraid of patrolmen, unconcerned that a javelina or armadillo might wander out laterally from the scrub. They passed a pickup truck full of sad-eyed Mexicans, this going so slowly it seemed to be standing still when the twin comets streaked by it, the driver of the red car flicking his glowing cigarette behind him as he passed, the butt erupting in a shower of sparks against the pickup's windshield, earning a bird finger from the driver, a fellow with a nearly formless cowboy hat and a road map of wrinkles. The gesture seemed so funny coming from such a wizened figure that the GTO's driver laughed, as did the man riding shotgun, a very large, very pale individual with a filthy neck brace.

The next car they crept up on was doing a fair clip itself, perched in the fast lane like nobody would ever want to pass. A newish Ford Falcon, bone white, its perfectly round taillights looking to the driver of the Camaro less like a raptor and more like the wide-set eyes of a disinterested fish. He was fairly sure the Falcon's driver wasn't even aware of them yet.

The Camaro's headlights were still off, sleeping behind the hideaway doors in the grille; the tiniest bit of light remained in the sky to the west, though the sun was twenty minutes down.

A young boy's arm jutted out from the Falcon's rear passenger-side window.

“Lookee-lookee,” said the Camaro's driver, a small, boyish man with a blond James Dean cut, licking his lips. He slid into the right lane without signaling, backed off his speed, eased up into the Falcon's blind spot. He said “Feel like fishin'?”

“Yeah,” the tall man in the back said.

The driver pulled his seat all the way forward, hugging the wheel almost against his chest under his chin. The tall man in the back crouched, ready. The prettyish young woman in the passenger seat drooled all over her shirt.

—

JUDITH HAD ONLY BEEN PERIPHERALLY AWARE OF THE CAR SNOUTING UP BESIDE
them on their right. Now she looked over, caught a gasp in her throat. Her first feeling was concern—the other driver, a smallish figure crowded up against the steering wheel, looked too pale to be well. He offered her a cordial “Evenin', miss.”

At that instant, Glendon yelled.

A man had him by the arm.

A long, lean man hunching forward from the backseat of the other vehicle.

The man was
pulling him out of the car
.

“NO! NO!” Judith screamed, grabbing his left leg before the boy disappeared entirely, though he was mostly in the other car now. She had her hips against the door, yanking so hard on the boy's leg that her nails dug tracks in it, the nail of her little finger tearing half off.

“ROB!” she screamed.

Her husband stared, uncomprehending at first, shouting, “What the FUCK! HEY!”

Judith pulled with all she had, recognizing the danger Glen would be in even if she did wrench him from the white hands that gripped him, realizing with the animal genius that wordlessly grasps physics how fast and strong she'd have to be to keep the boy from tumbling into the road or the back wheel.

Anything would be better than letting him go into that car. That car was death, driven by the dead. She saw with true eyes, saw what they were. Saw the catlike reflection in their eyes, saw the driver's smile, his foxlike canines, the wolfish teeth on the one wrestling with her. Saw the sharp red hole that was the woman's mouth, the teeth in it the teeth of a biting gar. All in a flash.

“STOP!” she wailed. “LET HIM GO!”

The ones in the car laughed.

“ROB, DO SOMETHING!”

“How'd you know my name? That his name, too?” the one pulling her son said, massively entertained by the coincidence. Now a red car loomed up, very close to the tail of the Camaro. The Camaro accelerated, jerked forward.

“NOOOO! NOOOO! NOOOO!” she wailed as her son was wrenched from her grip, her hand clawed around his little blue Keds shoe. She shrieked, clutched the shoe to her chest. Her Rob shouted, punched the gas, gave chase.

The Camaro pulled away.

The Falcon's needle topped one hundred, one hundred ten, and still the other car receded. Now Judith spared a glance at the other car, the red one, hoping to find an ally or a witness. Its driver, a balding, pale scoundrel of a man, offered no such comfort. He grinned at her, showed her his teeth. The same killing teeth the others had. He knew she wouldn't be able to see them because almost none of the living saw them with true sight; even if she could see, he didn't mind showing her what he was because she would die soon.

Even if she didn't, nobody really believed in vampires.

The GTO now nosed up almost to the rear wheel of the Falcon, then changed lanes, pushing sideways into it, sending it into a spin that soon turned into a violent roll. The GTO moved smoothly the whole time, as if immune to the harsh kinetic laws to which it had exposed the other car. Its driver slowed, meaning to pull over and see to the occupants of the Ford, which had only just come to a rest on its roof, junked beyond recognition, dust caped behind it, but his very sharp eyes detected the twinkle of headlights coming. More than one car, more than a mile off, but he knew he had better “git.” Especially if he wanted a taste of that plump little kid.

He glanced once more at the wrecked Ford.

The one in the neck brace looked questioningly at the bald one.

“Deader'n hell,” he said.

The GTO accelerated and sped off in the direction of the moon.

The driver turned the radio on.

—

THE FIRST CAR ON THE ACCIDENT SCENE ARRIVED NINETY SECONDS AFTER THE
Falcon came to rest on its crumpled roof. The driver had just picked up a hitchhiker. The former man, a loquacious undergraduate who was likely to declare a major in anthropology, had been talking his passenger's ear off since the young colored had climbed in. The latter
man had done a tour as a combat medic with the second infantry in Vietnam, distinguishing himself in a firefight near the Michelin rubber plantation half a year before, half a world away. August Lively had only been stateside for three months, tuning out for a while, traveling light, trying to smoke and fuck some of what he had seen out of his brain before going back to school on Uncle Sam's dime.

“Holy shit,” the driver said, holding the corner of his horn-rimmed glasses as though this might help him peer through the gloaming and understand the column of dust rising in the scrubland to his right, the saffron moon echoed below by a single, occluded headlight.

“Shit, man,” Lively said, “better pull over. Yeah, pull over now, NOW.”

For the second time in five minutes, the driver found himself ambling his beat-up '59 Galaxie to the shoulder of the interstate, the first time to pick up the slightly built black man in the jungle boots, now to eject him. Lively had the door open and had started running before the Galaxie stopped moving.

“Flag somebody down, man!” he shouted behind him, sprinting the sixty yards to the hulk of the Falcon, saying
dinky dau dinky dau dinky dau
under his breath because he thought it made him run faster.

Had it been ten minutes later, the darkness might have obscured the wreck, the Galaxie might have kept on toward Amarillo, where the driver knew a girl with an ever-simmering crock of mushroom tea and a bundle of hashish in a Monopoly box. In that version of events, the Falcon's driver, whose spine had been crushed and whose left arm had been all but severed, would have almost certainly died on the spot. As it was, the hitcher managed to tourniquet his arm with strips from his own T-shirt and a loose drumstick; he then soothed the man until first the New Mexico State Police and then an ambulance arrived.

“My wife, she's dead, right?”

“No, sir, she's hurt, but I think she'll be okay. You'll be okay, too.”

“Did you see it?”

“No, sir.”

“Not the wreck. I know there was a wreck, right?”

“Yes.”

“But did you see it?”