The Dead Man: Hell in Heaven (3 page)

The bed in Joan’s guest room was surprisingly comfortable, and after so many nights in lumpy sleeping bags on the ground, Matt fell into a deep sleep almost before his head was on the pillow.

But not so deep he didn’t hear the door creak open.

He opened his eyes and saw Joan standing over him. Even in the dark he could see the flush that covered her cheeks when she realized he was awake.

“I shouldn’t be here,” she said. “It’s just that …”

“You’re thinking about him?” Matt said.

She flushed even deeper. “I should be, I know that,” she said. “But I can’t stop thinking about you.”

Matt sat up. “Me?”

“You’re the first man I’ve been really attracted to since my husband died years ago,” she said, then turned away. “I’m sorry. It’s ridiculous for me to be in here. You’re a young, beautiful man. You must think I’m some hideous old crone.”

She fled for the door, but before she reached it—before he knew what he was doing—Matt was out the bed. He touched her shoulder and she turned to him. He could see tears glinting in the moonlight that streamed in through the window.

“I think you’re beautiful,” he said.

“Just don’t turn on the light.”

He did.

She buried her face in her hands, hiding from him. Gently he eased her fingers away and tilted her chin up to the light.

There were lines in her skin. Matt knew that, because he had seen them when they were outside. But in the soft glow from the room’s only sconce they melted away. She was dressed in a sheer white nightgown, and the light streamed through the fabric, revealing the silhouette of a body any woman under thirty would kill for.

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

“No.”

He tugged the nightgown away from her shoulders and let it pool on the ground around her feet. “Beautiful,” he said.

Her no this time was little more than a whisper.

Matt dropped slowly to his knees, kissing down her body as he went. Her skin was unbelievably smooth and firm, and he could feel her muscles rippling in pleasure under his tongue.

Her legs moved slightly apart as his kisses dropped below her waist. She moaned and shifted forward, pressing her pelvis against his face. His tongue searched and found the opening, and she moaned louder.

Joan grabbed his hair, pressing his face further against her. Matt pulled back a little. He couldn’t breathe. And he was becoming aware of something. A smell. It was like the raccoons that used to crawl under his parents’ house to die, a scent of rot. Of death.

It was coming from her.

Matt gagged. The stench was becoming unbearable. He wanted to shove her away, scramble to his feet and get as far from her as he could. Had to stop himself, keep rooted to the floor. He couldn’t hurt her like that.

Did she know she was dying inside? What kind of cancer could rot her insides like this without sending her screaming into pain?

The stench was so foul it blocked out the rest of his senses, but he gradually became aware of her voice floating on the air above his head. “I knew you’d come for me,” she was saying. “I knew you’d come.”

Now he did push himself away from her. She didn’t seem to notice. Her head hung back over her shoulders, long hair streaming down her back, eyes closed. Only her mouth was moving, murmuring the same phrase over and over.

“They told me you would come,” she said, eyes still closed. “The warrior who would rule by my side.”

The words were strange, but Matt hardly noticed. Because now he was seeing her body, and it was changing. The skin that had been so smooth and clear was now rippled with lumps. The cancers covered her body, pressing up through the flesh, some stretching her skin so tightly they looked like they would break through in bloody sores.

“What’s happening to you?” Matt said. “I’ve got to get you help.”

Her head snapped forward with the speed of a crane. Her eyes flashed open. “You were sent here for me,” she said. “They promised I wouldn’t have to be alone anymore.” Her voice cragged and croaked; Matthew could almost feel the tumor growing in her throat.

“I wasn’t sent,” Matt stuttered, the absurdity of his words ringing in his ears. “I just came here.”

The tumors were multiplying, new archipelagos of cancer spreading under her skin, joining to form solid masses. And they were moving. Rippling like a weightlifter’s muscles.

“Join me,” she whispered.

She reached out a hand to him, although it was barely recognizable as human anymore. There was a pinprick of a tumor pulsing under the nail of her ring finger. Matt watched in horror as the growth pounded against the nail and then retreated to pound again. Then the nail popped off and it was free. It oozed out across her flesh. A string of moles grew up wherever it touched.

She took a step toward him, both hands extended. Matt shrunk back in horror. He wanted to scream, wanted to run from the room, jump on his motorcycle and get away from this house as fast as he could. But underneath that pulsating mound of diseased flesh he could still see traces of the woman who had taken him into her home.

“Stay away from me,” he said. “I’ll do what I can to help, but please don’t touch me.”

She didn’t move, but somehow her hands were closer to him. They were growing. The tumors were pushing forward, boneless talons of flesh. And they reeked of death.

“You are mine,” she sighed. “They told me you would come. I’ve been waiting for so long.”

One of her shapeless hands reached out for his. Before he could pull back, a tendril of the tumorous slime dripped from her nail-less finger onto his wrist. It burned into his skin; he could feel it fighting for purchase, trying to send down roots into his flesh. And as it grew under his skin, he felt a rage, blacker than he’d ever known, building in his mind. He slapped at his wrist with his other hand, and the thing flew off onto the floor. The rage passed as quickly as it had come.

“Don’t fight it,” she whispered. “We can rule together. I will love and obey you forever.”

He needed to get out, but she was blocking the door. He couldn’t risk pushing her aside; putting his hands on that festering mass of tumors could engulf him in her cancer.

He took a step backward and another. Then he nearly fell as his bare feet hit something. His pack. He’d left it on the floor by the bed.

The thing that had been Joan Delaney was nearly on him. There was black slime dripping from all its fingers now, the nails all gone. It reached a hand toward his throat.

Matt ducked and swiveled, grabbing his pack and letting its weight pull him around. He released it and heard glass shattering as it smashed through the window.

He couldn’t remember what was outside that window, only knew it couldn’t be any worse than what he faced in here. He took two long steps and hurled himself through the air, praying he wouldn’t miss his target.

Matt flew through the empty window frame and landed hard on the pile of wood he’d chopped an eternity ago. The logs skittered out from under him as he tried to get to his feet, sending him sprawling. He caught himself on one hand, and then that arm plunged through into the hole that served to cache the animal bones. He stifled a scream of pain as a jagged bone fragment slashed through his palm and tried to pull free. But the pile of logs had collapsed in on itself, and his arm was trapped under the weight of the wood.

As he struggled to free himself, he caught a glimpse of movement coming around the side of the house.
How did she get here so fast?
he thought.
How can she even move?

Her legs were gone, swallowed by a mass of tumors. All over her body the growths had burst through the skin, which peeled and rotted around them. Blood and pus oozed out from the open wounds, leaving a trail of slime behind her. What had been a beautiful woman was now a quivering mound of rotting flesh.

And it was coming toward him.

He could still hear her voice. “You have to join me,” she said, although he could see no mouth to utter the words, no throat to shape the air into sounds. “This is why you were sent here. You’re
mine
.”

The thing that had been Joan didn’t have arms, but as it got closer he could see it was sending out something that looked like a limb, a pulsating cancerous growth that reached out for him.

He scrambled back as far as he could, but he couldn’t get his arm free. With his other hand he felt desperately for some kind of weapon. There were the small logs he had split, but he was certain they’d disappear into that pulsating mass with no effect at all.

And then his fingers brushed against something cool and smooth. His body recognized it before his mind did and his hand closed greedily around the axe handle. It was swinging through the air before Matt realized what he was doing. The blade flashed in the moonlight, and then came down on the Joan-thing’s outstretched tentacle.

The axe cut through the tumors like butter and thunked into the dirt. The Joan-thing let out a scream of pain and rage and pulled her dripping stump back into the pulsating mound of her body. The severed piece flopped on the ground twice and then began to decay into a black ooze.

The Joan-thing was coming for him again. Matt tried to pull his arm free, but it was still held fast by the weight of the wood. He yanked the axe out of the dirt and swung it backhand as hard as he could, aiming for where the thing’s throat should have been. There was a flash of light as the blade caught the moon again, and then it was gone as the axe-head buried itself into the shambling pile of flesh.

Matt tried to pull the axe back for another swing, but he couldn’t get it loose. And then it came free, sending chunks of diseased flesh flying into the night. Matt swung again, landing a solid blow on what should have been the crown of its head.

The axe might have been cutting through water, it moved so easily through the thing, splitting it in two. Matt pulled out the axe and for a moment expected the sides of the gaping wound to come together, bind themselves back into one. Instead, they both wavered for a moment, and then collapsed on the ground.

Matt stayed absolutely still, axe poised to strike, for a minute, then two, then five. It didn’t move, except for the steady decay of the fleshy mound into a black, evil ooze. At first he had decided to stay no longer than it took to dig his arm out of the pile of logs. Once he was free, he told himself he was waiting to make sure it didn’t rise back to life. But he knew that was a lie. He was watching in dread, fearing that, like the werewolf at the end of so many horror movies he’d seen as a kid, it would in death regain its original human form. Its beautiful, haunted form.

He needed to know that what he’d killed hadn’t been a human being. That it had been some kind of monster, not a needy, lonely woman stricken by a terrible disease.

Matt had killed before. He murdered his own best friend when Andy, possessed by evil from the Dark Man’s touch, had gone on a murder spree. But that had been his duty, his responsibility. He did it to save lives. This time he was just protecting his own ass.

The thought of Andy brought up images of his face, rotted and decaying as Mr. Dark’s evil consumed his soul. He tried to push the picture out of his head, but it kept pounding back. Finally Matt realized why.

There had been tumors in Andy’s rotting face. Maybe they’d been the agent that caused the decay. They were small … but they were the same things that had devoured Joan.

Matt realized that it didn’t matter if Joan had been human or not. There was evil in her, evil so massive it dwarfed the hate that had sent Andy to murder everyone who got in his way.

And it was contagious. He brushed at the back of his hand where the droplet of cancer had tried to send its roots deep into his skin, knowing that if it had gained purchase he would have turned into something as horrible as she had. That rage he had felt, that burning hate for everyone and everything, that must have been what Andy felt when he pushed some kid’s face into a deep fryer.

If that was the case, then what about the other people in Heaven? Were they all possessed the same way Joan had been? Joan might easily have infected them all. But if so, what had infected her? Could it have been Mr. Dark? Or was there a greater force that controlled both of the monsters?

Since the moment he’d come back to life on the coroner’s slab, Matt had found nothing but questions. And here he had more puzzles, and still not a single answer. Especially to the most pressing one in his head—what had brought him to Heaven? He’d assumed he’d been acting on his own whim. But the Joan-thing claimed he’d been sent to her. And as he thought through the events of the night, he realized that she had never had a son. That was all a ruse to soften him up before the invitation to become something like her.

That welcome banner was for him.

That thought was enough to propel Matt to his feet. This was one welcome he was going to decline.

The thing on the ground—the two things, since his axe had split it completely into halves—was never going to change back to a person. Whatever humanity might once have been inside that ball of cancer was long gone. The remaining lumps of flesh were turning black, and then sloughing off into a watery ooze, soaking into the ground.

Matt grabbed his axe and yanked it out of the ground. The blade dripped black slime, and he knew he should take the time to clean if off. But that could wait. Everything could wait. The only thing that mattered now was to get the hell out of Heaven.

He picked up his pack and brushed off the shards of glass, then strapped it across the back of his Buell Blast. Lashing the axe across the top of the pack, he swung onto the seat and kicked the bike into life.

Matt slipped the bike into gear and rode slowly over the decaying tarmac of the side street. He allowed himself a little more gas and sped up. Matt had never felt anything so glorious as the fresh wind blowing in his face. He twisted the throttle and let the bike take off. He leaned into a curve and saw the most beautiful sight he’d ever come across in his life.

The long black ribbon of road.

It was the road that ran through Heaven. The road back to the highway. To reality.

Matt gunned the engine and let the bike fly. One hundred yards, fifty, ten. He was almost there.

He screamed up to the intersection, leaning hard right to take the turn onto the blessed road.

Then heard the blasting horn and screaming engine before he could turn his head left to see where the sound was coming from.

The logging truck, tearing down the one-lane road at ninety miles per hour.

The logging truck that was feet away from him.

There was no room to get over. The truck filled every inch of the roadway. The shoulder was a steep berm of dirt and rocks.

Matt could see the grillwork bearing down on him. Count the bugs splattered over the H symbol.

H for Harvester? Or for Heaven?

Matt twisted the handlebars sharply to the right. The bike’s front tire cut into the rubble of the berm, and for a moment he thought he’d make it over the top.

Then he hit a rock.

Matt threw himself off the bike, wrenching himself sideways before the momentum could hurl him into the truck’s path.

Matt rose in the air for so long he felt he’d learned to fly. Then he realized he wasn’t soaring. He was falling. He slammed into the hard earth with a whoompf as the air was pounded out of his lungs. His head came down on a rock and everything went black.

Then there was a shriek of tearing metal as the truck slammed into the Buell Blast, smashing it into fragments.

But Matt didn’t hear it.