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He didn’t bother with the map. On a journey to hell you don’t much care how you get there. Ignoring traffic lights and speed limits Kyle blundered through the streets of Chicago’s south side until he found his way onto an expressway. Then he just kept driving until the big green and white signs directed him north on 94 to Milwaukee. He drove with a total lack of caution, accelerator to the floor, whipping from lane to lane, blasting the horn at anyone who was slow getting out of his way. From somewhere in the front end of the jeep a vibration began. He ignored it and sped on.

There was no reaction from Marianne. She sat beside him, a foul-smelling bundle of rags and moldering flesh. Her eyes, he thanked God, were so deeply shadowed they were invisible. Her thoughts were unknowable.

It was after nine o’clock, the night was cold and starless when they hit Milwaukee. Kyle pulled off the highway only long enough to refuel, piled back into the Jeep and drove grimly on, following signs directing him to Fond Du Lac and Appleton.

By the time he left the divided highway north of Lake Winnebago, Kyle’s head was pounding from his unaccustomed intake of alcohol and lack of sleep. His muscles screamed from fatigue. He was seeing four headlights for each approaching car. A fog that was only in his mind obscured long patches of road. The thumping vibration of the Jeep got worse.

“You’re driving on the wrong side of the road,” Marianne whispered hoarsely. It was her first comment since they left Chicago.

“Who gives a shit.” The slurred sound of his own words surprised him. Shaking his head in an attempt to clear the fog, he steered the Jeep back over to the right.

“You really think you’re being used badly, don’t you,” she said.

He cackled wildly in near hysteria. “Used badly? Oh, no. Hell no. All you’ve done is blackmail me into hauling you all over the country so you can kill people. You’ve only messed up my life and stolen my future, that’s all. Used badly? Where would I get a crazy idea like that?”

Marianne shifted in the seat to face him. He could feel the unblinking gaze of her one working eye. With chilling intensity she said, “You listen to me, lover. I had a life too. I was every bit as happy with mine as you were with yours. I had a nice home, parents who loved me, a good guy who wanted to marry me. I had a future too. I lost all that in one night because I went out with you.”

He groped for a defense, but his clouded mind would not come up with one. “Hey, it was an accident. I didn’t roll the car on purpose.”

“I’m not talking about the accident,” she said. “Accidents can’t be helped. It’s what you did to me afterwards. I was dead. D-e-a-d, you understand? I can see you don’t like talking about it. Well, neither do I. It’s a hateful idea. But it happened to me. It happens to everybody, right? So I was dead, and whatever it is that happens afterward was going to happen to me. I never got a chance to find out what that was, because you, you and that filthy Gypsy brought me back.” She ripped off the Marlboro cap, pulled back the stringy red hair on both sides of her head, and thrust her ruined face close to his. “Back to
this
.”

“I didn’t know what he was going to do,” Kyle said. “I went a little crazy when I saw you lying there and I couldn’t hear any heartbeat. I didn’t know what I was saying.”

“Bullshit!” The expletive was a lash across his face. “You knew exactly what you were saying. And the Gypsy did exactly what you asked him to. Bring her back, you told him.
Bring her back!
Well, he did it, Kyle. He brought me back. Here I am.”

She leaned closer to him. He felt the cold rubbery lips on his ear, the crusted tongue. The stink of rot brought tears to his eyes. “And I’m
yours!
”

He jerked violently away. “Don’t!”

“You asked for me to be brought back, and now you don’t want me. That’s no way to be.”

“Stop it, Marianne.”

Her voice deepened into a growl. “But you didn’t do it for me, did you, Kyle? You didn’t give one little fuck about me. You had that Gypsy bring me back to save your own sweet ass, didn’t you. It would have been inconvenient for you if I was killed in an accident and you were driving with a skin full of whiskey. That’s what you were thinking of, and that’s
all
you were thinking of. Why you might even have had to go to jail. To save yourself you did this to me. Look over here at what you did, Kyle.
Look!”

Slowly he turned his head, taking his eyes from the road to look at the girl. One eye stared fiercely. The other was like the bottom end of an overripe hardboiled egg. With a grimy thumb and two fingers she took hold of her upper lip and pulled. As he watched in horror the rotting flesh of the lip stretched and ripped away with a sucking sound, exposing her upper teeth and mottled gums. She held the scrap of lip before him like a dead minnow and grinned in a death’s head grimace.

“Ssseee what I can do.” The bared teeth gave her a lisp to go with the growly voice.

Kyle groaned from the depths of his soul. He snapped his eyes back front just in time to keep from swerving off the pavement.

He drove grimly onward through the night, the pavement wavering to his blurred vision like the surface of a pond. The thumping vibration increased and the steering wheel felt sluggish in his grip. Dark shapes burst from the shadowy trees at the side of the road only to dissolve into fragments as he plowed the Jeep into them. He recognized the onset of delirium, but the knowledge did nothing to make the shapes less real.

Sleep. God, how he wanted to sleep. Just close his eyes, let his head drop, and find oblivion. He could sleep for days. Then when he woke up he would find this was all a dream. Everything. Marianne, the Gerstner brothers, the Gypsy, the rot. In the bright golden light of morning the nightmare would quickly fade from his unconsciousness and he would be back in California, on the beach, with his buddies.

His head jerked up in a reflex action. It was not morning, he was not in California, and none of this was a dream. He squeezed the leather-wrapped steering wheel, breathed in the stench of rotted flesh, and let the tears roll unchecked down into the stubble of his beard. This had to be the bottom of the pit. Nothing could be worse than this. Nothing.

The headlights of the Jeep picked out a pale shape far up ahead in the road. Blocking the road. Not one shape. Three. Three human shapes. Coming toward him. Fabian Gerstner, obscenely naked with a screwdriver jammed into his belly. Jesse Gerstner, his face bloated and black, the belt cinched into the puffy flesh of his neck. And Lloyd, a ragged, gaping wound leaking body fluids down between his legs.

In surreal slow motion they marched toward him ranged across the highway. Their mouths gaped wide in silent anguish.

As he was almost upon them, Kyle yanked the steering wheel to the right. There was a bang under the right front fender. In a flash of recollection Kyle saw the boy in the Bulls jacket working at the wheel with a lug wrench.

The free wheel rolled serenely ahead of them down the dark road. The jeep dipped to the right and with a screech of metal on concrete veered off course. The faces of the three Gerstners slid past the open window at his elbow, and Kyle could hear the rustle of their dry, dead laughter.

He saw the telephone pole, thick and sturdy in the wash of the headlights. Then it slid into darkness as the Jeep spun and skidded. And skidded.

His brain exploded in bright white light. And the cacophonous sound of rending metal. And blinding pain. And finally, darkness.

The Jeep broadsided the telephone pole with explosive force. For many minutes the only sound was the hiss of steam from the ruptured radiator and the drip of fluids from the torn underside of the Jeep. Gradually the night creatures, startled into silence by the crash, resumed their chittering and chirping. Then there was movement.

A door of the Jeep shuddered, creaked, and at last burst open. A body tumbled out, gathered itself, and pulled erect on shaky legs. Marianne steadied herself, then crouched to peer into the wreck at the young man in the driver’s seat. His hands still gripped the steering wheel. His body was skewed to the right by the force of the impact. The top left part of his skull was gone, torn away by the iron climbing spike of the telephone pole. His face was a dark crimson mask. The yellow-gray jelly of the exposed brain quivered in the night air.

Moving slowly and deliberately, Marianne crawled back into the passenger’s compartment. She worked her hands under Kyle’s lifeless arms and pulled. He was caught in the seat, jammed there by the bashed-in side of the vehicle. She tugged and twisted and heaved at the body until at last it pulled free. She backed out, dragging Kyle with her. His shattered head left a trail of blood and brain matter.

Outside she lay him on the ground on his back. With a ragged sleeve of her sweater she mopped away the blood where it had pooled in his eyes. He stared sightlessly at the empty sky. His mouth hung open as though frozen in an ultimate howl.

She rose and walked unsteadily to the side of the road. There she stood, a ragged, reeking figure … and waited.

Her wait was not a long one. Headlights approached from the direction in which they had come. Rattling and wheezing from the trip, the battered camper of The Mysterious Dorando rolled to a stop where she stood.

The tall Gypsy stepped down, walked past Marianne to where the corpse lay.

“I see I am too late to help him,” he said. “In his ignorance and his youth, he asked for the wrong thing.”

He turned and walked back to Marianne. “In paying my debt to the boy I have done you grievous wrong, young woman. I am now released from that debt. Say the word and I will give you the peace that has been denied you.”

“No,” she whispered.

“What, then? If there is some way I can atone for causing you pain, ask and it is yours.”

“Anything?”

“Anything that is in my power.”

Marianne walked over to the corpse, then turned and looked back at the Gypsy. The empty white eyeball gleamed in the wash of the camper’s headlights.

“Bring him back,” she said.

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The Players
The Boiling Pool
Walkers
The Sterling Standard
Offshore
A Rage in Paradise

This edition published by
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Copyright © 1999 by Gary Brandner
All rights reserved.

Cover image © iStockphoto/miller3181

Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 10: 1-4405-4649-5
ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4649-5
eISBN 10: 1-4405-4443-3
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4443-9