Helltown (6 page)

“Or like you’re a pompous asshole.” He thought for a moment. “You’ll learn that for almost any set of symptoms the answer could be diabetes, pregnancy, SLE, or thyroid problems.”

Jenny nodded. “Good one. Okay. At least once a week a professor will think fifty minutes is long enough to get through one hundred slides.”

“And fail.”

“Miserably.”

Just then movement in the vegetation caused Steve to start. He pushed himself off the car, wired. A moment later Jeff appeared, tall and lean, clawing through the shrubbery lining the bank.

Steve relaxed.

“Thanks for the wild goose chase, you two!” Jeff called, crossing the road toward them.

Noah and Austin and the girls appeared behind him, one after the other, single file.

“You didn’t see the shoes?” Steve said.

“We checked everywhere, mate,” Austin said, tossing his empty beer bottle over his shoulder into the trees. Glass shattered. “But I did smell something foul down there.”

“Something dead,” Mandy said.

“A chipmunk,” Cherry said.

Steve looked from Jeff to Austin to the others. “Are you guys having me on?”

“You don’t know when to give up, do you?” Jeff said. “But I gotta say, I appreciate the effort.”

Steve chuffed to himself, shaking his head. Then he started away from the car.

“What are you doing?” Jenny asked him.

“Getting the shoes to convert the unbelievers.”

Steve made his way down the bank, keeping to the path they’d already forged through the chokecherries and bracken fern. At the bottom he stopped in the center of the riverbed and faced the vacuous blackness that had gathered beneath the bridge. It seemed somehow blacker than it had earlier, threatening even.

It’s all in your head, Steve. Now get on with it
.

He lit a match off his thumb, picked out his and Jenny’s original footprints among all the others, and followed them beneath the bridge to the baby shoes—or where the baby shoes had been.

Because now they were gone.

Frowning, he turned in a circle, searching the sand—and heard a noise behind him. He jerked around and squinted into the darkness. Nothing there. He wondered if it had been the wind. Only right then there was no wind. The night was tomb-still. Besides, since when did wind sound like chattering teeth?

Chattering teeth…or a baby’s rattle?

This thought raised the hackles on the back of his neck.

“Hello?” he said, though he didn’t wait for a reply. He scurried out from beneath the bridge and up the bank, irrationally convinced a rotting baby corpse was going to latch onto his legs and drag him back down to the riverbed, where the sand and the silt and the clay would swallow him whole just as it had swallowed the baby shoes.

This didn’t happen, of course, and when he was on the road again, the night sky above him, he chided himself for spooking so easily.

Everybody was back inside the two vehicles. Headlights pierced the omnipresent fog, turning it iridescent so that it seemed to glow with a radiance of its own. Jeff honked the BMW’s horn impatiently.

“Yeah, yeah,” Steve mumbled, swallowing the lump in his throat. “I’m coming.”

CHAPTER 3

“You know that part in scary movies when somebody does something really stupid and everyone hates them for it? This is it.”

Jeepers Creepers
(2001)

As soon as Steve climbed into the front passenger seat, the cool leather crackling beneath his weight, Jeff said, “Well?”

Steve looked at him. “Well what?”

“Show me the shoes.”

“Did you take them?”

“Take them?” Jeff said. He was chewing a shoot of beard grass, which dangled from his mouth like a long, limp cigarette.

“Are you really going to play dumb?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“The baby shoes,” Steve said patiently. “You took them.”

“They weren’t there?” Jenny said.

Steve shook his head. “They took them.”

“Whatever you say, li’l buddy.” Jeff tossed the beard grass in the foot well, swallowed a belt of vodka from the bottle in his hand, then tucked the bottle neatly into his jacket’s inner pocket. He turned the key in the ignition slot. The engine vroomed to life. Hot air roared from the vents. “Need You Tonight” by INXS blasted from the speakers.

“I like these guys!” Mandy said. “They’re from the UK or Scotland, I think.”

Jeff snorted laughter.

“Australia,” Steve told her, deciding not to point out that the UK included Scotland. He turned down the volume. “Anyway, I’m serious. Let me see them.”

Jeff seemed pleasantly exasperated. “There were no fucking baby shoes, bro,” he said. “Mandy—tell him.”

“We didn’t see them,” she said.

Steve shook his head; he didn’t care. He knew they were having him on. In fact, now that he thought about it, he wouldn’t be surprised if one of them had leaned over the side of the bridge and made that noise he’d heard.

He was about to mention this when a black car thundered past them so fast it left a wake of air that rattled the BMW.

“Fucking hell!” Jeff said, the curse drowned out by Mandy and Jenny’s exclamations of surprise.

“Asshole!” Mandy said.

“That was a hearse,” Steve said, noting the vehicle’s distinctive quarter panels.

“Bloody kids!” Jeff said.

“It was a hearse!” Steve repeated.

In the distance the red taillights flashed, angry red eyes in the eddying fog.

“Look, it’s stopping,” Mandy said.

The brake lights disappeared, replaced by the sweep of the headlights as the vehicle turned to face them. Two small, bright orbs glowed malevolently.

“Are they coming back?” Jenny said, a tremble in her voice.

“Maybe we should turn around?” Mandy said.

The hearse high beamed them.

“Oh the little pricks!” Jeff said, grinning. “They’ve got balls!” He flashed his high beams back.

“What are you doing?” Mandy demanded. “Jeff? Answer me!”

Jeff buzzed down his window, stuck his fist out, and effed them off with his middle finger. It was a pointless gesture, considering there was no way they could see his finger through the mist.

The hearse’s engine revved, building into a chainsaw-like screech. Then the vehicle shot toward them.

Jeff released the parking brake, shoved the transmission into first, popped the clutch, and goosed the gas. The tires squealed as the car lurched forward.

“Jeff!” Mandy wailed. “Don’t you dare!”

“Stop!” Jenny cried. “Please! I want to get out!”

Jeff smashed through the gears, reaching third and sixty miles an hour in a few seconds.

The g-forces flattened Steve to his seat. He fumbled for his seatbelt, tugged it across his chest, buckled it. He wanted to tell Jeff to stop, but the girls were already shouting at him to do exactly that, and he wasn’t listening.

As soon as they shot past the end of the bridge the canopy knitted together and blotted out the sky once more, creating the sensation that they were bulleting down the bore of a pistol.

Jeff stared intensely ahead at the road, his mouth twisted into a bitter grimace, his hands gripping the steering wheel in the ten and two positions tight enough to squeeze the blood from his knuckles.

He was a man who’d just gone all in on the pot of a lifetime, and right then Steve knew that he wasn’t going to yield the road.

Steve was suddenly furious. He couldn’t believe Jeff was risking a potentially fatal head-on collision, risking all of their futures, to prove he wasn’t a chicken.

Mandy and Jenny gave up yelling and buckled their belts. A fear-soaked silence followed, magnifying the purr of the engine and the hum of the tires.

Only a handful of seconds had passed since Jeff gunned the gas, but it felt like much longer. Steve’s fear had warped his perception of time, slowed it down, and for a crazy moment some mordant part of his brain contemplated jumping out of the speeding vehicle. But it was traveling too fast. He would break his back or neck—and likely get run over by the oncoming hearse. Besides, he was frozen stiff. All he could move were his eyeballs, which he strained to the left so he could read the speedometer. The needle wavered just below seventy miles per hour.

He looked back at the road. The hearse was sixty yards away, the headlights bleeding together to form a blinding wall of shimmering white.

Fifty yards.

We’re going to die
, Steve thought.

Forty.

He braced his hands against the dash.

Thirty.

“Jeff!” Mandy shrieked.

Twenty.

“
Jeff!
”

Jeff swerved to the left. The hearse screamed past. Jeff yanked the wheel to the right but overcompensated. The car knifed across the dotted line toward the opposite shoulder. He yanked the wheel left again. Right, left, right, left, trying to regain control of the now fishtailing vehicle.

They careened off the road and plowed through a small tree, shattering bark and branches. They hit something that launched the BMW into an airborne somersault. For a moment Steve floated in zero gravity, and he was thinking this was it, this was how he was going to die, and there was nothing he could do to prevent it—

The car struck the ground nose first. The impact accordioned the engine block and slammed Steve with the force of a sledgehammer to the chest. The seatbelt strap bit into his flesh and held him suspended above the dash, which was no longer in front of him but below him. The handstanding vehicle crunched forward onto the roof, where it rocked back and forth before coming to rest in the still, silent forest.

Noah had been seconds away from getting out of the Jeep and going to talk to Jeff about the assholes in the hearse when the BMW’s rear tires squealed and literally burned rubber. Through wafts of smoke, he watched the car shoot away down the road.

“He’s playing chicken!” Austin exclaimed from beside him.

Noah didn’t know what to do, but he knew he couldn’t sit there doing nothing. He shoved the Jeep into gear and accelerated.

“He’s not going to give!” Austin said. “Jeff’s not going to give. The motherfucker’s going to get them all killed.”

“The hearse will give,” Noah said automatically.

“Don’t get too close,” Cherry said from the backseat in a borderline terrified voice. “Stay to the shoulder. Do you hear me?
Stay to the shoulder
.”

“I’m straddling the goddamn shoulder!” Noah said. In fact, he could hear loose gravel spraying the Jeep’s undercarriage.

Then, ahead, Jeff arced sharply to the left. For a moment it appeared as though the hearse had plowed straight
through
the BMW, but Noah knew that had to be a trick of the fog and the glare of the headlights. He eased fully onto the shoulder and slowed.

Two seconds later the hearse thundered past, hogging the center of the road, bovine horn moaning. Noah tried to glimpse the driver, but the hearse’s headlights had blinded him. No one turned to watch the morbid vehicle depart. No one said anything. They were all staring in horror at the slewing BMW ahead of them. In the next instant it bucketed off the left side of the road into the mix of evergreen and deciduous trees.

Cherry sobbed and screamed in the same breath.

Austin shouted: “Go!”

Noah was already accelerating again.