Roadkill

By Richard Sanford

In the time of no time, in a year without number, a Chukchi shaman sees a vision in smoke. It causes him to tremble.

A hot young lawyer in heels and hose daydreaming about her playtime, a professor and his brood on an overdue vacation, a former star running back pushing sporting goods, a big rig driver on a last chance run—accidental travelers are sharing the same road in their ordinary lives. They aren’t going where they think. Soon they will share a nightmare.

In the Oregon backwoods, survivalist crazies swing pickaxes and sledges, hammering out their cave in the foothills. They go too far. Now there is something wheeling above them in the darkening sky. Something terrible.

On a godforsaken twisting strip of Oregon blacktop, the travelers are converging. A long-haul truck driver haunted by the bottle is trying his damnedest to stay dry. Somehow a young school girl is there like a vision in his rearview mirror, dropped into his personal circle of hell. The slick foggy road is climbing.
The nightmare is dropping from the cloud. It picks out motion, senses blood.

Kill, it knows. Nothing on that road will be the same. Kill. There is a shuddering drum beat of wings. The last chance run for all the travelers is only beginning.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Sanford
• Release date: Mar 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9780985165628

Richard Sanford

Richard Sanford came of age in a small town in the Deep South suspended in time and haunted with stories. In Chicago, he was an editor of Banyan Press, which published and hosted readings by Charles Wright, Sandra Cisneros, Galway Kinnell, and many others. He is the author of four published novels, poetry, short stories, and a play. Today he makes his home in the Pacific Northwest, east of Seattle. Novels • The Soul Snatchers • Ring of Stars • Long Time Gone • Roadkill • The Calling

Book preview

ROADKILL

by

Richard Sanford

Copyright 1994, 2012 by Richard Sanford

Published by Odeon Press at Smashwords

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All that exists lives. The lamp walks around. The walls of the house have voices of their own. Even the chamber vessel has a separate land and house. The skins sleeping in the bags talk at night. The antlers lying on the tombs arise at night and walk in procession around the mounds, while the deceased get up to visit the living.

Chukchi shaman

Contents

Friday evening, south of Portland, Oregon

Chapter 1

The morning before, Deuce Creek, Oregon, below Portland

Chapter 2

Friday morning, the Oregon forest

Chapter 3

Saturday, 6:30 a.m., Portland

Chapter 4

Saturday, 7:00 a.m., Scotts Bend, south of Portland

Chapter 5

Saturday, 8:00 a.m., Arcata, a long commute from Portland

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Friday evening

South of Portland, Oregon

Chapter 1

Sabotage.

Jamie Delaney knew it wasn't but that was how it felt. Or maybe it was just the tendency of certain lousy things to happen together. It had been that kind of day.

She held her breath and listened, and in the pause, the bumping got steadily and undeniably worse. It was not the front; she was fairly sure of that because the steering felt steady. The dirt shoulder looked reasonably level, and even though there was a nasty trench between it and the hillside, there was room to pull over if she was careful.

The Isuzu Trooper II rolled off the blacktop and halted in a churn of dust and pebbles. Jamie just sat. She wanted to hear the end of the cut that played over the dumb, smoothly idling engine of the four-wheeler. But the longer she sat, the later she would be. Why did it have to happen now? She felt singled out by fate, not a fate that was clever or high-minded or tragic, but a fate with nothing more to do on a lovely August evening than poke holes in tires. Derail dreams.

She felt victimized, not just because she had a far better thing to do than change a flat, but because she had been in the groove. She had been coasting smoothly on the downhill side, lazily turned on by thoughts of rendezvous, opened and soothed by the sound of the music and the familiar voice, warm but strong: Joan Armatrading, Living for You. She hated to stop that tape, but she couldn't afford to blow a good thing either. It was not intended to be a late date.

Jamie clicked off the tape, killed the engine, and climbed down. The door slamming made a loud concussion between the towering firs and hemlock that walled the road. She checked the driver's side. Those two were okay. Could it have been her imagination? Just maybe? She stepped slowly around to the back. She spat.

There it was, on the passenger side in the rear, flat as an old football. Jamie looked down. Her spit was a solitary white dome in the inhospitable sand.

Her hands came off her square hips and went to work. She dropped the spare from its rack and assembled the two-piece jack. It could have been worse, she realized. The downgrade was slight, a few degrees. Tipping wouldn't be a problem.

She went down on one knee to position the jack but pulled up instinctively and brushed her pants. To arrive looking like a grease monkey might not be the best idea. Just because they had hit it off once, it didn't mean her date wouldn't be offended. Meg was divorced, had lived in a tri-level with an automatic garage door for twelve years, had used Endust and Renuzit.

Screw it, Jamie thought. There was going to be dirt, dirt on her hands. Grease. No way around it. It was life. She knelt down and started to pump the jack.

The first nut was easy. It made a pleasant ping as she dropped it into the wheel cover. A mosquito buzzed her ear. The second nut stuck. She put her weight on the tire iron and drove down.

Goddamn it!

She jumped up shaking the hand then watched the blood rising in the barked knuckle. As she sucked it, a raw, ripping sound started up the hill in the direction she had come.

It advanced quickly, and in a moment it was on her, black and startlingly loud, vibrating along the bone. The rider of the big bike was black too in his jacket and boots and shiny helmet that streaked along like a nose cone, rocket-powered a few feet above the pavement. The blast from the tailpipe reverberated between the walls of trees and echoed up into the wooded hills.

Then it was past her, howling around the bend and down. Jamie was half-expecting the rider to turn back to help, but she didn't want him to. She stood a moment and listened as the ripping sound receded. It was relief she began to feel when she was sure she wouldn't have to deal with him and silence had returned to the empty road.

She was also feeling suddenly cool. The thin film that had risen to her skin was part of the reason, but the evening had begun to settle too. It was the time of day when it came on quickly, settling over the narrow roads as the sun dipped below the treetops. Charcoal shadows slipped in beneath the pearly light. Mist hung like a shoji screen in the green hills.

When she knelt down again and refitted the end of the tire iron to the nut, Jamie noticed that her ears were funny, not ringing exactly but holding a buzz, the aftermath of the motorcycle. The bad nut was loose, and after two more turns she could work it with her fingers. One by one, the others pinged into the wheel cover. She squatted low, and with one hand on the bottom of the dusty rubber and one on top, pulled the tire off. As it toppled over in the dust, the wheel made a dull ring. Because of that sound, she doubted for a moment that she had even heard the other.

It was behind her back, up above her on the hill, like a quick rustle in the thicket. She glanced up at the tangle of shrubs around a huge, spreading maple. The thick trunk was patched with moss, and the limbs were heavy with broad leaves.

Jamie's eyes travelled up the branches until she lost her balance and dropped one hand on the tire for support. Leaves like open hands shifting in the light breeze. A gentle soughing far up.

It was nothing, probably a cone dropping swiftly through pine bows into the leaf mat. Far above the maple, a jet was drawing a line in the evening sky, like a fingernail on skin. Jamie thought of Meg again, and then she was remembering the long, elegant slope of her back, the inviting curve that ran like a soft shadow around her hip and down her thigh. Deep red fingernails. Humid skin.

She was smiling to herself as she dragged the spare to the axle. She righted the tire, rolled it a bit, slid it back, aligned the holes with the bolts. It wouldn't be long. She slipped her hands under the tire and prepared to lift, but she did not lift. Breath stalled in her lungs.

Behind her on the hill again, louder this time and coming down, coming.

Jamie spun, grabbing the tire iron from the dirt. As she stood up, the tire tilted against her leg but she didn't feel it. There was crashing in the floor of leaves, and when it broke through the bushes, the leaves around it seemed to shimmer. The way it moved sickened her, the quick jerks. Coming. Blundering down. And the sound in its mouth—

Not Daddy. She knew it was not, but as it closed in, he flashed into memory: framed in her door, dim light surrounding him, his sour breathing like a snarl pulling her from sleep, hands on her again, the first rough slap on her teeth before she could raise a hand. Before she could raise the tire iron or know for certain deep inside that what was coming was not daddy, as much as she might have preferred it to be, she was shutting down. Jamie's brain was a cold blur, and inside, she was failing. She would not have time to sort it out. In the next moment, it did not matter.

Paul Moffett was surprised at himself, but he felt compelled to pull over. The postman's route was finished, and ordinarily he would not have stopped. Normally he would have cruised on, and it wasn't that he was eager to be a Samaritan this time, but there was something about the disabled four-wheeler.

Fifty yards past it, he pulled over, and as he got out and started walking back, he tried to recall what he had seen in the half-light rolling down on the vehicle from behind. The back tire was bad, he was sure of that, but he remembered nothing else in particular.

At the door on the driver's side, he peered in through the open window. A set of keys hung motionlessly from the ignition.

Hello?

Paul's own thin voice surprised him and he cleared his throat.

Anybody here?

The back seat was empty. He did not want to check the floor, but he forced himself to look around the headrest. A few pages of the Portland Oregonian, a box of eight-track tapes, and a paperback novel—The American Book of the Dead—behind the driver's seat; nothing behind the other.

That left only the back, where the corner of the four-wheeler was low.

Hello, he said, stepping softly to the rear. Hello. Hello, he was repeating as his hand slipped instinctively to the anti-canine Mace aerosol on his belt.

Hell—

He heard buzzing first, before he even saw the leg, and the buzzing was like a whisper drawing him closer. The excited fly, and then another, landed on the leg that came into view stretched out straight on the ground beyond the right-rear corner of the vehicle. A dark stain covered the trousers almost to the knee. Paul's stomach wasn't good. He didn't really want to see more, but he heard more buzzing, furious crazy buzzing, and his feet were moving closer. He did see more.

Light-headed and getting lighter fast, tripping on his own heel, scrambling up and trying to run back to his car, he flashed first on the fender of the four-wheeler—not scratched but gouged and spattered. And then the rest. The stain like an island in the dirt. The shirt soaked, blackened belt leather, the blue coil spilling on the ground. Throat ripped like a junk mail envelope.

But the image he couldn't shake, the one that brought him to his knees beside the door of his own car, was the arm: rotated fully backwards, pinned at the shoulder by the wheel when the jack fell, tire iron tight in the fist. When his body took over, that was the picture it was trying to rid itself of, as it bent Paul over and drove him down at the edge of the woods, retching mercilessly into the steaming leaves.

The morning before

Deuce Creek, Oregon, below Portland

Chapter 2

Charlie Hardin was not a violent man. He would swear to it on any honesty game show with sensors pasted to his synapses and digital readouts of the true and the false. Yet it was violence that was causing him to stand frozen like a replica of himself, staring at the kitchen telephone.

It was not uncertainty. He was perfectly sure when he heard the first shots. It wasn't hunting and it wasn't target practice. An AK-47 would chew a target to bits—you only had to get it in the neighborhood. It could have been an AKM. It had been a while and Charlie didn't keep current on the artillery, but he did know that what he heard on the far side of the hills could throw more hell than the old M16 he had used in the Mekong.

The phone stared back at him from the orange counter top, daring him to pick it up. He was seeing it as an invitation to trouble, at the same time knowing that made no sense. A telephone was a dumb machine, a bearer of tidings, inherently neither good nor evil. Not so different from a gun, in the hands of somebody rational. What are you going to have, phone control laws? He should simply lift the receiver and turn them in.

They were maniacs, not hunters or anything of the kind, and they made him tired very quickly. Out there, like vermin but lacking the natural integrity of vermin, mad dogs were popping off, frying their brains, cooking crystal meth over propane, slamming crystal in mobile homes tucked into pockets in the hills like it was going out of style. When really, if you wanted to get it, you could get it at any truck stop. Every lot lizard had some tucked in her jeans.

Maniacs. They caused him to smolder within. That was why he had stopped in the midst of flushing the radiator on the El Camino and jogged back inside, letting the screen door slam. He wanted to get the coolant in there and adjust the idle before he went away so that he wouldn't worry about Jerri. When he heard the gunfire and Rodney started barking, it felt like a mission, and he had dropped everything.

Now he had to admit he was feeling a little funny. It wouldn't hurt to listen again, to be sure.

Rodney!

The black Labrador stopped barking but continued to stare from the back of the porch into the trees that rose over the hill behind the yard. It seemed too perfect to contain gunfire. The portion of mist that had not burned off completely hung suspended around the heads of the Douglas firs and the elegant cedars. Even below, the tangle of wild blackberry and ferns and devil’s club seemed delicately balanced. Charlie could see a patch of leaves where filtered sun caught the lingering dew.

Nothing. Quiet out there. If it was truly over, he was thinking, then calling made no sense. At the same time, he would welcome any excuse not to. He was avoiding the phone because he had a reason. He thought of it with the word the therapist had used: episode.

To anyone who had the sorry opportunity to understand what violence was, the episode wasn't very violent at all. When he thought about it, it was mainly the trophy case that came to mind. The ignorants never should have put the thing there at the end of the bar where the back of any hard head that was momentarily out of commission could pop into it like a wrecking ball. The trophies had jumped like bowling pins. Charlie remembered only snapshots of the scuffle and the three of them dragging him by his ankles into the parking lot. Then he was on his knees by the dumpster, folded over the dull ache in his middle that he knew was no worse than ones he had felt before. Finally the red and white lights were flashing all over and around him, as big as billboards.

Even as he was reaching for the phone, he was beginning to sweat—because the episode was not the only episode and because he had done enough talking with the police for any one lifetime. Morons or maniacs: take your pick. It made you go fishing into your soul. It made you tired. Sick and tired was how Charlie felt, and he wanted to wipe it all away and go back. Back