The road was empty, and when the rear tires hit the blacktop, the wheel spun in Nathan’s hands, whirring so fast it burned his palms and he had to let go. The Wraith snapped around, ninety degrees to the right, and Nathan Demeter was flipped across the front seat and into the left-hand door, bashed headfirst into the iron frame.
For a time he didn’t know how badly he was hurt. He sprawled on the front seat, blinking at the ceiling. Through the passenger-side window, he could see the late-afternoon sky, a profoundly deep blue, with a feathering of cirrus clouds in the upper atmosphere. He touched a tender spot on his forehead, and when his hand came away he was looking at blood on his fingertips, as a flute began to play the opening bars of “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”
The car was moving, had clunked down through the gears to fifth all on its own. He knew the roads around his house, felt they were moving east along Route 1638 to the Dixie Highway. Another minute and they would reach the intersection and—and what? Blow right through it, maybe catch a truck coming north and be torn apart? The thought crossed his mind as a possibility, but he couldn’t feel any urgency attached to it, didn’t think the car was on a kamikaze mission now. He had in some dazed way accepted that the Wraith was operating of its own agency. It had business and meant to do it. It had no use for him, was maybe not even really aware of him, any more than a dog might be aware of the tick stuck in its fur.
He climbed up onto one elbow, swayed, sat up the rest of the way, and looked at himself in the rearview mirror.
He wore a red mask of blood. When he touched his forehead again, he could feel a six-inch gash traversing the upper curve of his scalp. He probed it lightly with his fingers and felt the bone beneath.
The Wraith began to slow for the stop sign at the intersection with the Dixie Highway. He watched, mesmerized, as the gearshift dropped from fourth to third, clunked down into second. He began to scream again.
There was a station wagon ahead of him, waiting at the stop. Three towheaded, chubby-faced, dimple-cheeked children were crammed into the backseat. They twisted around to look at the Wraith.
He slapped his hands on the windshield, smearing rusty red prints on the glass.
“HELP!” he screamed, while warm blood leaked down his brow into his face. “HELP HELP HELP ME HELP ME HELP!”
The children inexplicably grinned as if he were being quite silly and waved furiously. He began to scream incoherently—the sound of a cow in the abattoir, slipping in the steaming blood of those who went before.
The station wagon turned right at the first break in traffic. The Wraith turned left, accelerating so quickly that Nathan Demeter felt as if an invisible hand were pressing him back into his seat.
Even with the windows up, he could smell the clean, late-spring odors of mown grass, could smell smoke from backyard barbecues and the green fragrance of new-budding trees.
The sky reddened, as if it, too, were bleeding. The clouds were like tatters of gold foil stamped into it.
Absentmindedly, Nathan Demeter noted that the Wraith was handling like a dream. The engine had never sounded so good. So strong. He thought it was safe to say the beautiful bitch was fully restored.
HE WAS SURE HE DOZED, SITTING UP BEHIND THE WHEEL, BUT HE DID not remember nodding off. He only knew that at some point before it was fully dark, he closed his eyes, and when he opened them, the Wraith was racing through a tunnel of whirling snow, a tunnel of December night. The front windows were blurred with his own bloody handprints, but through them he could see snow devils unspooling across the black asphalt of a two-lane highway that he didn’t recognize. Skeins of snow moving like living silk, like ghosts.
He tried to think if they could’ve gone far enough north while he slept to catch a freak spring snowstorm. He discarded the idea as idiotic. He weighed the cold night and the unfamiliar road and told himself he was dreaming, but he did not believe it. His own moment-by-moment tally of tactile experiences—throbbing head, face tight and sticky with blood, back stiff from sitting too long behind the wheel—was too convincing in its depiction of wakefulness. The car held the road like a panzer, never slipping, never wobbling, never slowing below sixty.
The songs played on: “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” “Silver Bells,” “Joy to the World,” “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” Sometimes Demeter was aware of the music. Sometimes he wasn’t. No ads, no news, just holy choirs giving thanks to the Lord and Eartha Kitt promising she could be a very good girl if Santa checked off her Christmas list.
When he shut his eyes, he could picture his cell phone, sitting on the worktable in the garage. Would Michelle have looked for him there yet? Sure—as soon as she got home and found the garage door standing open and the garage itself empty. She would be, by now, out of her mind with worry, and he wished he had his phone, not to call for help—he believed he was well beyond help—but only because he would feel better if he could hear her voice. He wanted to call and tell her that he still wanted her to go to her prom, to try to have fun. He wanted to tell her he wasn’t scared of her being a woman—if he had any true anxiety, it had been about himself getting old and being lonely without her, but he didn’t think he was going to have to worry about that now. He wanted to tell her she had been the best thing in his life. He had not said that to her lately and had never said it enough.
After six hours in the car, he felt no panic, only a kind of numb wonder. On some level he had come to view his situation as almost natural. Sooner or later a black car came for everyone. It came and took you away from your loved ones, and you never got to go back.
Perry Como warned Nathan in a chipper tone of voice that it was beginning to look a lot like Christmas.
“No shit, Perry,” Nathan said, and then, in a hoarse, cracking voice, he began to sing as he thumped on the driver’s-side door. He sang Bob Seger; sang about the old-time rock ’n’ roll, the type believed to soothe the soul. He belted it out as loud as he could, one verse and another, and when he fell quiet, he found the radio had shut itself off.
Well. That was a Christmas gift right there. Last one he’d ever get, he thought.
NEXT TIME HE OPENED HIS EYES, HIS FACE WAS PRESSED TO THE STEERING wheel and the car was idling, and there was so much light it hurt his eyes.
He squinted, the world a bright blue blur. Not at any time in the night had his head hurt as bad as it hurt now. The ache in his skull was so intense he thought he might vomit. It was behind his eyes, a somehow yellow glare of pain. All that sunlight was unfair.
He blinked at tears, and the world sharpened, began to come into focus.
A fat man in a gasmask and fatigues stared through the driver’s-side window at him, peering in past the smeared bloody handprints on the glass. It was an old gasmask, WWII era or thereabouts, a kind of mustardy green.
“Who the fuck are you?” Nathan asked.
The fat man seemed to be jiggling up and down. Nathan was unable to see the guy’s face but thought he was bouncing on his toes with excitement.
The lock on the driver’s-side door shot up with a loud, steely bang.
The fat man had something in one hand, a cylinder—it looked like an aerosol can. GINGERSNAP SPICE AIR FRESHENER, it said on the side and showed an old-fashioned painting of a cheerful mommy type pulling a pan of gingerbread men out of the oven.
“Where am I?” Nathan Demeter asked. “Where the hell is this?”
The Gasmask Man twisted the latch and opened the door onto the fragrant spring morning.
“This is where you get out,” he said.
St. Luke’s Medical Center, Denver
WHEN SOMEONE INTERESTING WAS DEAD, HICKS ALWAYS TOOK A picture with them.
There had been a local news anchor, a pretty thirty-two-year-old with splendid white-blond hair and pale blue eyes, who got wasted and choked to death on her own puke. Hicks had slipped into the morgue at 1:00 A.M., pulled her out of her drawer, and sat her up. He got an arm around her and bent down to lap at her nipple, while
holding out his cell phone to take a shot. He didn’t actually lick her, though. That would’ve been gross.
There was a rock star, too—a minor rock star anyway. He was the one in that band that had the hit from the Stallone movie. The rock star wasted out from cancer and in death looked like a withered old woman, with his feathery brown hair and long eyelashes and wide, somehow feminine lips. Hicks got him out of the drawer and bent his hand into devil’s horns, then leaned in and threw the horns himself, snapped a shot of them hanging out together. The rock star’s eyelids sagged, so he looked sleepy and cool.
Hicks’s girlfriend, Sasha, was the one who told him there was a famous serial killer down in the morgue. Sasha was a nurse in Pediatrics, eight floors up. She loved his photos with famous dead people; she was always the first person he e-mailed them to. Sasha thought Hicks was hilarious. She said he ought to be on The Daily Show. Hicks was fond of Sasha, too. She had a key to the pharmacy locker, and Saturday nights she’d filch them something good, a little oxy or some medical-grade coke, and on breaks they’d find an empty delivery room and she’d shimmy out of the bottoms of her loose nurse jammies and climb up into the stirrups.
Hicks had never heard of the guy, so Sasha used the computer in the nurses’ station to pull up a news story about him. The mug shot was bad enough, a bald guy with a narrow face and a mouthful of sharp, crooked teeth. His eyes were bright and round and stupid in their hollow sockets. The caption identified him as Charles Talent Manx, sent to the federal pen more than a decade before for burning some sorry motherfucker to death in front of a dozen witnesses.
“He’s not any big deal,” Hicks said. “He just killed one dude.”
“Un-uh. He’s worse than John Wayne Stacy. He killed, like, all kinds of kids. All kinds. He had a house where he did it. He hung little angels in the trees, one for ever’ one he cut up. It’s awesome. It’s like creepy symbolism. Little Christmas angels. They called the place the Sleigh House. Get it? Do you get it, Hicks?”
“No.”
“Like he slayed ’em there? But also like Santa’s sleigh? Do you get it now?” she said.
“No.” He didn’t see what Santa had to do with a guy like Manx.
“The house got burnt down, but the ornaments are still there, hanging in the trees, like a memorial.” She tugged at the drawstring of her scrubs. “Serial killers get me hot. All I can think about is all the nasty shit I’d do to keep ’em from killing me. You go take a pic with him and e-mail it to me. And, like, tell me what you’re going to do if I don’t get naked for you.”
He didn’t see any reason to argue with that kind of logic, and he had to make his rounds anyway. Besides, if the guy had killed lots of people, it might be worth taking a pic, to add to his collection. Hicks had already done several funny photographs, but he felt it would be good to have a snap with a serial killer, to demonstrate his darker, more serious side.
In the elevator, alone, Hicks drew his gun on his own reflection and said, “Either this is going in your mouth, or my big cock is.” Practicing his lines for Sasha.
It was all good till his walkie-talkie went off and his uncle said, “Hey, dumb-ass, keep playing with that gun, maybe you’ll shoot yourself and we can hire someone who can actually do this fuckin’ job.”
He had forgotten there was a camera in the elevator. Fortunately, there was no hidden microphone. Hicks pushed his .38 back into the holster and lowered his head, hoping the brim of his hat hid his face. He took ten seconds, fighting with his anger and embarrassment, then pressed the TALK button on his walkie, meaning to snap off something really fucking harsh, shut the old turd up for once. But instead all he managed was “Copy that,” in a pinched little squeak that he hated.
His Uncle Jim had gotten him the security job, glossing over Hicks’s early departure from high school and the arrest for public drunkenness. Hicks had been at the hospital for only two months and had been cited twice already, once for tardiness, once for not responding to his walkie (at the time it had been his turn in the stirrups). His Uncle Jim had already said if there was a third citation, before he had a full year under his belt, they’d have to let him go.
His Uncle Jim had a spotless record, probably because all he had to do was sit in the security office for six hours a day and watch the monitors with one eye while perusing Skinemax with the other. Thirty years of watching TV, for fourteen dollars an hour and full benefits. That was what Hicks was angling for, but if he lost the security job—if he got cited again—he might have to go back to McDonald’s. That would be bad. When he had signed on at the hospital, he had given up the glamour job at the drive-thru window, and he loathed the idea of starting from the bottom rung again. Even worse, it would probably be the end of Sasha, and Sasha’s key to the pharmacy locker, and all the fun they had taking turns in the stirrups. Sasha liked Hicks’s uniform; he didn’t think she’d feel the same way about a McDonald’s getup.
Hicks reached basement level one and slouched out. When the elevator doors were closed, he turned back, grabbed his crotch, and blew a wet kiss at them.
“Suck my balls, you homosexual fat-ass,” he said. “I bet you’d like that!”
There wasn’t a lot of action in the basement at eleven-thirty at night. Most of the lights were off, except for one bank of overhead fluorescents every fifty feet, one of the hospital’s new austerity measures. The only foot traffic was the occasional person wandering in from the parking lot across the street by way of an underground tunnel.
Hicks’s prized possession was parked over there, a black Trans Am with zebra upholstery and blue neon lights set in the undercarriage, so when it roared down the road, it looked like a UFO right out of E.T. Something else he’d have to give up if he lost this job. No way could he make the payments flipping burgers. Sasha loved to fuck him in the Trans Am. She was crazy for animals, and the faux-zebra seat covers brought out her wild side.
Hicks thought the serial killer would be in the morgue, but it turned out he was already in the autopsy theater. One of the docs had started in on him, then abandoned him there to finish tomorrow. Hicks flipped on the lights over the tables but left the rest of the room in darkness. He pulled the curtain across the window in the door. There was no bolt, but he pushed the chock in under the door as far as it would go, to make it impossible for anyone to wander in casually.
Whoever had been working on Charlie Manx had covered him with a sheet before going. He was the only body in the theater tonight, his gurney parked under a plaque that said HIC LOCUS EST UBI MORS GAUDET SUCCURRERE VITAE. Someday Hicks was going to Google that one, find out what the hell it meant.
He snapped the sheet down to Manx’s ankles, had himself a look. The chest had been sawed open, then stitched back together with coarse black thread. It was a Y-shaped cut and extended all the way down to the pelvic bone. Charlie Manx’s wang was as long and skinny as a Hebrew National. He had a ghastly overbite, so his crooked brown teeth stuck out into his lower lip. His eyes were open, and he seemed to be staring at Hicks with a kind of blank fascination.
Hicks didn’t like that much. He had seen his share of deaders, but they usually had their eyes closed. And if their eyes weren’t closed, there was a kind of milky look to them, as if something in them had curdled—life itself, perhaps. But these eyes seemed bright and alert, the eyes of the living, not the dead. They had in them an avid, birdlike curiosity. No; Hicks didn’t care for that at all.
For the most part, however, Hicks had no anxieties about the dead. He wasn’t scared of the dark either. He was a little scared of his Uncle Jim, he worried about Sasha poking a finger up his ass (something she insisted he would like), and he had recurring nightmares about finding himself at work with no pants on, wandering the halls with his cock slapping between his thighs, people turning to stare. That was about it for fears and phobias.
He wasn’t sure why they hadn’t put Manx back in his drawer, because it looked like they were done with the chest cavity. But when Hicks got him
sat up—he propped him against the wall, with his long, skinny hands in his lap—he saw a dotted line curving around the back of his skull, drawn in Sharpie. Right. Hicks had seen in Sasha’s newspaper article that Manx had been in and out of a coma for more than a decade, so naturally the docs would want to poke around in his head. Besides, who didn’t want to peek at a serial killer’s brain? There was probably a medical paper in that.
The autopsy tools—the saw, the forceps, the rib cutters, the bone mallet—were on a wheeled steel tray by the corpse. At first Hicks thought he’d give Manx the scalpel, which looked pretty serial-killerish. But it was too small. He could tell just by looking at it, it wouldn’t show up good in the picture he snapped with his shitty camera phone.
The bone mallet was a different story. It was a big silver hammer, with a head shaped like a brick but pointed at one end, the back edge as sharp as a meat cleaver. At the other end of the handle was a hook, what they used to dig under the edge of the skull and pull it off, like a cap from a bottle. The bone mallet was hardcore.
Hicks took a minute to fit it into Manx’s hand. He pulled a face at the sight of Manx’s nasty-long fingernails, split at the ends and as yellow as the guy’s fuckin’ teeth. He looked like that actor from the Alien movie, Lance Henriksen, if someone had shaved Henriksen’s head, then smashed him a couple times with the ugly stick. Manx also had thin, pinkish white, saggy tits that reminded Hicks, horribly, of what his own mother had under her bra.
Hicks picked out the bone saw for himself and stuck an arm around Manx’s shoulders. Manx sagged, his big bald head resting against Hicks’s chest. That was all right. Now they looked like drinking buddies who’d had a few. Hicks dug his cell phone from its holster and held it out from his body. He narrowed his eyes, struck a menacing grimace, and took the shot.