Dead Souls (23 page)

That was when he saw the girl.

Head faced down, arms hanging limply at her sides, she walked out of the wheat fields like a zombie in
Night Of The Living Dead
. Eddie realized that if he had decided to take the Mustang's speed up instead of down, he wouldn't have had time to stop. Even now, cruising at fifty, the tires screeched and the car spun out when he slammed down on the brakes, sending up a thick cloud of dust. His body jerked sideways, one hand slipping from the wheel. His eyes darted left and right, trying to focus in on the sudden upheaval. There was a heavy jolt, as if a tire had plunged into a deep pothole. After what seemed an eternity but was only a few seconds, the car came to a jarring stop at the side of the road.

He sat motionless, breathing heavily, both hands back on the steering wheel, gripping it tightly. Dust and dirt buried the scene, and he had to wait for it to settle before determining any sort of outcome—fatal or not. He shot a bullet of a glance forward, and was immediately thankful to have narrowly missed the girl who stood just feet away in the middle of the road, oblivious to the fact that she'd almost been killed.

He opened the door and got out, coughing away the dust entering his lungs. Despite the heat of the day, a shiver marched across his spine. His heart thudded like a drum, and he could only spread his arms in question and study the girl in disbelieving silence.
   

He was as amazed by her beauty as he was her obscene state. The girl remained motionless, staring at the ground, a ghostly figure enveloped by the settling cloud of dust. Eddie glanced left and right to see if any cars were approaching, but the scene was deserted. Harried thoughts warred in his head, and he came very close to leaping back into the car and hightailing it home, certain the girl, who seemed to be in some sort of blank daze, hadn't even seen him.

Instead, he stepped toward her, treading the cracked pavement hesitantly, wondering if he himself should be scared; after all, something
did
this to her. In the distance, a passing diesel engine chugged and blew its whistle. Closer by, a bird cawed loudly.

Moving only her neck, the girl glimpsed up at him. Eddie didn't recognize her, but thought her to be about his own age, seventeen, eighteen tops. She wore only a bathrobe, stained with mud and brambles. It hung open, revealing a filthy, naked body, rivulets of dried blood zigzagging down her trembling legs to her bare feet. Her blond hair was wet and matted, muddy strands dissecting her wavering gaze. Her eyes, dark and glossed, were threaded with stitches of red.

"Hey," Eddie called to her, one arm stretched out and waving as if testing her sight. "Hey there…you need some help?"

Moving only her lips, she replied feebly, "Yes," her voice seeming to come from someplace far away.

Eddie examined her closely, his heart running fast in his chest. He could smell a horrid stench upon her, of cigarettes and beer, of body odor and of something foul.
What the hell happened to her?
Stepping alongside her, he grabbed her bicep gently, the terrycloth material of her robe feeling grimy-stiff beneath his grasp. "I think you better come with me—I'll take you to the hospital—"

"No!" The girl jerked back, as though suddenly repulsed, her face a sullen mask, rife with fear.

Eddie flinched, the girl's shout wrenching a dismayed cry from him. He held his palms up, an instinctual gesture attempting set calm into the situation. "Hey…okay, look, I'm just trying to help you…" He struggled to make sense of her predicament, but his thoughts flitted inside his head like butterflies. "Good god, what's happened to you?"

The girl shook her head gently and closed her eyes tightly as if anticipating a blow. She began to sob uncontrollably, teeth beating through a taut grimace, wet with saliva. "I…I don't know."

Again Eddie looked up and down the road. He shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other, his eyes returning to her grime-coated breasts, which trembled beneath the weight of her sobs; he noticed an oddly shaped birthmark on her sternum that looked like a Greek letter, and found himself more awkwardly conscious of it than her exposed breasts.

He pulled his gaze away and immediately found himself drawn to the streaks of blood on her legs, which he guessed to be the product of an unbound period. All this time, his emotions responded to the images meeting his ricocheting gaze: looking at her breasts, he felt strangely allured; her legs, revulsion. He forced himself to turn away, loath to react to either. He wished for another driver to come along, to take control of the situation so he wouldn't have to bear this burden all by himself. Of course, he'd driven along Mill Pond Road enough times in the past to know that unless you were traveling east to the dairy farms, or were out for a little rubber-burning, you had no real reason to be here.

So he motioned with his arm for her to follow, making an effort to keep his gaze away from her exposed body. "If you don't want to go to the hospital, then maybe you should let me take you home. Do you live around here?"

At last she wrapped the robe around her body, then motioned east, over the wheat fields. "Pine Oak," she whispered huskily.

Eddie peered off into the bustling field. "Pine Oak Road? Off Breton?"

She nodded.

Holy!
A flash of recognition hit him at once: a sudden revelation exposed like a magician revealing the secret to his best trick. He knew who this girl was, which now made the sudden circumstances even more mysterious—and alluring. "You're the minister's daughter."

She trembled and looked away, her sobs tapering down into whimpers.

He thought,
Man, I…I've heard some crazy stories about him…but this here takes the cake.
She remained silent, staring down at the cracked, weedy road, seemingly unable to help herself at all. Gently, Eddie grabbed her by the arm and this time she followed him to the car. In her current state she would
soil
the Mustang's seats, which in turn would piss his father off, and when Harry Carlson got pissed off, it meant no more Mustang privileges for Eddie. So he reached into the back seat and yanked out his football jersey, weighted beneath his helmet so the wind wouldn't take it away (and damn, he just got it this afternoon too, his name 'Carlson' nice and clean across the back). "Here," he said. He placed it down on the front seat and gently guided Elizabeth inside.

Once she was seated, he shut the door, then circled around the front of the car, looking in at her and deciding that his first impression of her had been correct: despite her wretched state, she was quite beautiful.
Prince charming rescues the fair maiden
, he thought smugly, interpreting this chance encounter as an unanticipated product of fate: a gray sketch of some bigger, colorful picture.
Things have been going my way
, he thought.
So why not let them continue?

He slid into the front seat behind the wheel, then looked over at her trembling form; her feet were curled up on the seat, heels touching rear. "My name's Eddie."

"Eddie…" she muttered, then faced out the windshield. "Please, take me home now."

"The Conroy house?"

She nodded.

"I'll have you there in no time…" he said, then added, "Elizabeth Conroy."

Everyone in
Wellfield
knew about the Conroy family. The minister and his wife who'd educated their kids at home and put them to work on the farm that the local council had fought hard for in their attempt to expand downtown. He'd seen the mother and a young boy a number of times, but had only seen Elizabeth once before, and that was from a distance while driving past their house on Pine Oak. Regardless, she'd made a few rare appearances at Ewing's Food Emporium of late, and word had gotten around that she'd matured into quite the beauty—an untouchable one, nevertheless, kept under lock and key by her parents.
 

When she didn't respond to his use of her name, he nodded, then turned the car around and started back up Mill Pond Road, for the first time in his life keeping the car at the speed limit. They rode in silence, the wheat fields soon segueing into green pastures, extensive beneath the blue sky. He kept his eyes on the road, wanting to look at her—at her frail, demure posture, at her buried femininity shivering with nameless fear. The question,
Were you raped?
, danced on the tip of his tongue, but he managed to choke it back, where it remained lodged in his throat like an impenetrable stone. Only once did he peek in her direction, her hair wilding in the breeze, releasing its soiled stench.

"Here we are," he announced, pulling the car into the long gravel driveway. He came to a stop alongside the walkway circumventing the house. "Are your parents home?" He looked around but didn't see any other vehicles.

"Pull forward," she said. "Front door's always locked."

He nodded, then shifted the car back into drive and pulled up another fifty feet to the rear of the house. The late afternoon sun slouched in the multi-colored sky, the house's shadow spread across an expanse of overgrown grass in the back; farther along, a lofted barn abutted an expanse of dense woodland, its once-red paint faded to a cracked, faded pink. Eddie could see five wooden steps leading up to a screen door in the house; just beyond that, a rusted basement well lay amid a tangle of goldenrod.

Elizabeth, in a sudden panic, fought with the car door handle before getting it to pop open. She nearly dropped out onto the driveway, which caused her to cry out. She caught her footing and staggered away, her stained robe billowing behind her like a cape.

"Hey, Elizabeth…wait…" Eddie felt an immediate flux of emotions—a selfishness telling him to just let her be, drive away and consider his good deed done. But selflessly, he wondered:
what if there is no one at home to help her
? He exited the car, realizing that his concerns of her well-being were incongruous—they didn't outweigh his desire to continue his role of Prince Charming endeavoring to impress the injured beauty.

Not once looking back, Elizabeth quickly stumbled up the five steps and disappeared into the house, allowing the door to slam loudly behind her. Eddie raced forward and stopped at the bottom of the steps, uprooting a patch of chickweed with the toe of his left sneaker. He gazed up at the screen door through which he could see a kitchen table sitting beneath a veil of near-darkness. Heart pounding, he grabbed onto the iron handrail, his palm scraping against the chipped surface of black paint and rust. Slowly he climbed the steps, one at a time, looking back over his shoulder in the process, and seeing nothing.

He reached the landing, heard a dense buzzing of flies.

He swept his gaze around.

And with a sinking heart, he halted, at once finding no strength in his legs to move. He gripped the handrail bone-tight, fighting a rapid panic, his head reeling with the realization of having unwittingly entered a much larger picture than his mind could frame.

Lying in the soil against the cement foundation of the house was a young boy and his dog. A puddle of blood seeped out from beneath them like a dark, motionless shadow. The dog, despite its wounds, was still alive, but barely, tongue lolling idly, body heaving painstakingly. The boy, on the other hand, lay eerily motionless across the dog's front paws, a deep meaty slash running the length of his colorless torso from which blood still oozed. Dust and soil and bits of grass coated his shirtless girth, evidence of having spent a good deal of time writhing on the ground before succumbing to his injuries.

There were hundreds of horseflies covering them.

Eddie remained petrified, staring as panic slipped its menacing cloak over him. A profound need to scream clawed at his fraying mind. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

From inside the house came a woman's terror-filled scream.

Elizabeth!

A split moment passed where he struggled with his choices: help the boy, help Elizabeth who was now seemingly caught beneath the threat of the boy's punisher inside the house…or, simply flee this house of terror and allow the police to do their work. Jesus—how long would that take? Elizabeth would be as dead as the boy by then.

Under these grave circumstances, making such a quick, critical decision seemed ludicrous to Eddie. Still, at the same time, he could not question the
sane
logic motivating him: there was a life to save, and he was the only one on hand to do it.

Without allowing himself a moment to second-guess his decision, he tore his gaze away from the picture of death on the ground, then yanked open the screen door and raced into the house to save Elizabeth Conroy's life.

September 8
^th
, 2005

9:56 AM

"I
ts location is prime," Judson said, loosening his tie. "The mayor, along with the
Wellfield
Council, has a number of deep-pocketed
Orono
businessmen lined up, the blueprints to construct more than a dozen commercial buildings signed, sealed, and delivered. They're also planning a gated community of homes, which will cater exclusively to those over the age of fifty-five; it's their way of convincing the locals to spend their Social Security checks here instead of sunny Florida, something I plan to do myself in a few years." He paused, then added, "Johnny, it's my duty to tell you that your land is worth a good deal more than what they're planning to offer you."