Essex

By Victor Allen

The abandoned mining camp of Essex doesn't lie nestled in its picturesque valley; it is more accurately laid to
rest there, out of sight and mind of decent people who would never want to know the unspeakable things that
happened in its dark and hidden buildings and streets. Atrocities so appalling that the mind would break simply to contemplate them. Like all sinister places, it has a history, and when those who have held that history in living memory pass on, history has a habit of repeating itself.
Austen Jenkins knows this, but doesn't care. His eye is fixed on a larger prize: A hit TV show. When Joanna and her luckless son and daughter, Robert and Truman, are settled in the abandoned town with cameras watching their every move, no good thing can come of it. Evil never dies, but only sleeps. And when it awakes, the hunger and the madness comes with it, multiplied to killing force by its long exile.
So come along and take a gory romp down a dark memory lane as we learn what poison flows through the black heart of Essex...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Victor Allen
• Release date: May 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311321701

Victor Allen

Born in North Carolina in 1961, Victor Allen has lived a charmed, black and white, and almost disreputable life. Turned down by the military at age seventeen because of a bad heart (We would take, his recruiter told him, the women and children before we would take you), he spent a wasted year at NCSU, where he augmented his scant college funds by working part-time as a stripper (what the heck? Everybody looks good when they're eighteen), a pastime he quickly gave up one night when he discovered -to his mortification- his divorced, middle-aged mother sitting in the audience. Giving NCSU the good old college miss, he satisfied his adventurous spirit and wanderlust by moving out West in his late teens, first to Colorado and later, Wyoming, and working in the construction trades. Uprooted from his small town upbringing and thrust into a world of real Cowboys and Indians, oil field roughnecks, biker gangs and pool sharks, he spent his youth travelling the country, following the work, settling at various times in Texas, Alabama, South Carolina, Florida, Colorado, and Wyoming. Along the way he met a myriad of interesting people including Hollywood, a young, Native American man, so called because he wore his sunglasses all the time, even at night; Cinderella K from Owensville, Missouri (the nice laundry lady who turned his shorts into pinkies); Lori P., the Colorado snake lady and her pet boa constrictor, Amanda; the pool hustler par excellence, Johnny M.; TJ, Moon, and Roundman, good folks, but bikers, all; his little blond girlfriend, Lisa; Maureen, the very funny lady from London with the very proper English accent, who he met while living outside of Shaw Air Force Base in Sumter, SC, and her daughter, Marie, with her practically incomprehensible cockney twang; the ever bubbly Samantha from FLA; and all the (well, never mind). :-). Plus way too many others too numerous to list. He has weathered gunfire, barroom brawls (I didn't get this crooked nose and all these scars on my face from kissin), a three-day mechanical breakdown in the heart of the Louisiana bayous, drunken riots- complete with car burnings and overturnings, Budweiser, bonfires and shootin' irons (it was all in good fun, though,)- ; a hundred year blizzard, floods, two direct lightning strikes, a hurricane which sent a tree crashing through his roof, and an unnerving late night encounter with a man who subsequently proved to be a murderer, surviving it all with a rather uncom...

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Essex

by

Victor Allen

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2006 all rights reserved

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

#Apocrypha

#1955

#1961

#1963

#1969

#1978

#1983

#1985

#Is Horror dead

#2005

#First Day

#8 pm

#Second Day

#Third Day

#6th Day

#5th Day

#4th Day

#3rd Day

#Nighttime

#2nd Day

#Morning

#Noon

#Evening

#Bedtime

#Night

#Last Day

#Miles Away

#Afternoon

#The Last Act

#Loopholes

#The Final Curtain

Excerpts from other Books by Victor Allen

#A-Sides

#The Lost Village

#Wandil Land

#We are the Dead

#Xeno Sapiens

#Katerina Cheplik

Apocrypha

1955

Essex Pass lies buried between Pisgah Park and Bald Head mountain in the southern Appalachians of western North Carolina. At 5500 feet it is a shorter and older sibling to the high mountain passes of the Rockies, and a lifeline to the seven hundred people who inhabit the mostly anonymous towns erected on the cold broadsides: towns like Judas Point and Prairie's End. Snow chokes the roads for six months of the year and the tracks laid 150 years ago by the N and S railroad are the only commercial artery that flows to the towns as winter's slow heartbeat pulses at the edge of life.

Neal McAlister stood up in the cab of the loco. At age twenty, with a six months' pregnant wife at home, he had remained mostly silent on his first run after eight weeks of training in Atlanta as a fireman, a mostly useless position perpetuated by union rules and held over from the not too distant days when locomotives had been fired by coal. He was relegated to the front of the train with the engineer while the brakeman and conductor tried to catch forty winks in the caboose at the far end of the one hundred car freight train.

His initial anxiety had been subdued by the constant, low key thrumming of the diesel engines which were, in reality, generators that powered the electric motors which actually moved the locomotive. After a time the powerful, steady vibrations became less cacophonous than soothing, but his uneasiness at being the new guy remained.

He wasn't yet seasoned enough to have a colorful nickname and his picture tacked up on the bulletin board at the depot in Stella, NC. Not like the conductor, who was called Bobo for no apparent reason that Neal had been able to figure out. Neal's companion in the engineer's cab was an easier study. His fleshy jowls and ruddy features lent themselves to his own affectionate nickname of Hogjaw. The brakeman, a middle aged man with a U of red hair and a leonine head was Hub, a simple variation of his given name, Herbert.

They hadn't been distinctly unfriendly to him. A little distant, a little doubtful of the new guy who came to them from a succession of menial, low paying jobs. Railroading was still dangerous work and the old crew weren't yet ready to believe in the new guy until he proved himself in some fashion or another. Neal had grimly resolved to make this work. He had more to think about than himself.

The train had been making a steady thirty five miles per hour on a fairly level grade for the past thirty minutes. The snow-covered plains of the desolate landscape had been long unscarred by buildings, electric lights, or even natural features. All was blameless white glory, glowing heraldic blue in the cold light of the full moon. The clatter and clank of the steel wheels on the rails and the perpetual swaying of the freight cars were sleepily hypnotic in the wasteland.

Neal peered out of the tiny window at the side of the locomotive. Picked out in the brilliant beam of the locomotive's headlight was a white on green metal sign mounted on standard Highway department steel posts. The reflective sign glowed with an unaccountable brightness. Drifts of snow had piled up against the robotic legs of the sign and the occasional capricious wind blew sprays of snow from the tops of the drifts.

Essex Pass

3 Miles.

Best sit back down, Neal.

Neal looked at Hogjaw. It was the first time he had spoken in an hour. His face in the feeble bulbs of the cabin had taken on a tense, drawn look that seemed impossible in so much flesh. His pressure on the throttle eased and the steady thrumming of the electric motors spun down. The cascading effect of thousands of tons of freight avalanching behind them shook the locomotive and Neal quickly sat down as the inertia threatened to spill his legs from beneath him.

Hogjaw applied the brakes with an ogre's hiss of compressed air. The train began to glide to a stately halt, taking a full half mile to ease into motionlessness.

Hogjaw stood and wrapped himself in a heavy coat, leaving the locomotive's massive diesel generators at a rattling idle. He pushed past Neal and stepped off the engine, down the steel steps of the locomotive and onto the snow covered ground before Neal even had a chance to ask what was up. He stared out the window, unsure whether to get up and follow, or stay put.

Hogjaw stood just off the tracks in a foot of snow, a blue hued blob in the moonlight, blowing on his cupped hands with hot breath that condensed into a cold mist on contact with the subfreezing air. Neal wondered why he hadn't put on his gloves.

Neal stood and swung around the steel pole that connected the cab's floor to its ceiling next to the steps. As he descended he looked toward the rear of the train and saw two dark figures floundering through the snow toward Hogjaw.

Hogjaw gave Neal an offhand glance, equal parts distrustful and impatient as Neal swung down into the crunching snow. Neal ignored the look and wished only that he hadn't left his coat on the seat of the engineer's cabin. He stood his ground amid the hostile glances as Bobo and Hub trudged up.

As boss of the freight, it was Bobo's place to give Neal an approving look.

You want to get your coat, or do you want no part of this?

Nervous and awkward amidst these hardened, middle aged men with bristly faces and dark, fleshy circles beneath their eyes, Neal forced a steady reply.

What's going on?

Hub made a derisive, blowing sound.

He ain't got the beans for this, Hub said. He looked at Neal. His expression was earnest and past condescending. He emphasized his points by shaking a finger the size of a Polish sausage in Neal's face.

This is likely gonna be your first and last trip. You best go on up in the cab and hide. Let the menfolk do what has to be done. There was no challenge in Hub's eyes, only inflexible belief.

Don't count me out yet. All I want is a clue.

Hub sighed heavily and only the ghost of a look passed between the three men. Without another word Bobo opened his satchel and began pulling out cloth wrapped bundles. Hub and Hogjaw each took a bundle and waited. Bobo took a bundle for himself and offered a parcel to Neal. Neal took it in slightly trembling hands and unfolded the cloth.

The cold dampened down the smell of oil as Neal unfolded the cloth. He knew even before he saw it that the steel of a handgun would be glinting up at him, glistening cold black and blue in the moon and snow-slashed night. He shook from the cold and a new unease dried the spit from his throat. Minutes ago he had been warm and mostly comfortable, whiling away his time in the workaday world. Now he shivered in the cold and snow-ravaged night only minutes later, among armed strangers who were secretive and hostile and wouldn't tell him what was going on. He laughed shakily.

What's the gun for?

Dangerous times, Hogjaw said hollowly. Dangerous places.

Neal looked around at the white nothing.

"Here?"

Bobo pointed ahead of them at the brightly lit tracks slowly moving up the steep grade before perspective narrowed them to a converging point in the distance.

Up yonder. Essex Pass.

Neal looked from face to face, trying to find a trace of humor or some sign that this was an elaborate prank. Finding neither, he stared down at the gun. A good one, a 9MM he reckoned, though he had never held or fired a gun in his life.

You really expect me to use this?

If you have to, Bobo said.

For what?

You'll see, Hub promised. And once you see, you can never say. That's just the way it is. If you can't live with that, you can leave us after the end of the run. It's just the luck of the draw, kid. You got the short end. If you're with us, you're with us. If you're not, just keep out of the way and try to stay alive. Keep your trap shut about things you don't understand.

Don't be so hard on the kid, Hogjaw said. Hard enough times ahead tonight.

Hub looked disgusted. This guy's just like old Bird Cole. He ain't never been nowhere and don't know nothin'.

Take this, Neal said, re-wrapping the gun and handing it back to Bobo. Some bad business was up ahead. He didn't stop to think what he had counted himself out of, only that his knees knocked with cold and fright at the thought of some unknown dangerous doings that were well out of his league. He kept his eyes averted from Hub, expecting some crisp jibe at his lack of manhood, but Hub remained silent. He had bigger fish to fry.

Cold out here, Bobo said. Go on and get back in the cabin.

Neal climbed back up the metal stairs, thinking that if he were a real man his booted feet would make the metal clang. But in the cold his tread didn't even make them squeak. He sat back down in the cab amid the mocking silence of the stairs.

He sat on one of the thinly cushioned benches as the men outside talked. They spoke for a few minutes, their icy breath pluming bright and shiny in the crackling cold.

Whatchoo wanna put the kid up here with us for, Bobo, Hub complained. He ain't gonna be worth a tin cup bailing out a battleship.

Kid alone in the caboose, Bobo mused. A man alone would be easy pickings. Just make sure he stays out of the way.

The men climbed the stairs into the loco's cabin, the steel steps ringing out as if in a cheer.

They pushed past Neal with barely a glance. Hogjaw took his customary position at the throttle. Bobo sat at the left side of the cabin, staring resolutely from the window on that side. Hub sat on the bench next to Neal. Neal sneaked a glance at him. A tight little smile crimped Hub's face, but not one of good humor. It was full of a deep unease. A short, tense tic jerked at the corner of his right eye, causing him to look almost as if he were winking. All three men had their sidearms within easy reach.

The air brakes snapped and hissed as they were released. There was no sound of conversation for the electric motors to muffle as they loudly spun up. The rapid, throaty, rum, rum, rum of the electric motors torquing up and the metallic rattling of the diesel generators joined in screeching chorus with the clank and crash of cast iron drawheads losing their slack and accordioning out as the locomotive began to inch forward. Steel wheels bit against steel rails, striking orange sparks into the white night.

Hogjaw had the throttle pushed to maximum, urging the behemoth forward. Against all prudence, he seemed to be urging the metal monster to accelerate up the steep incline to Essex Pass. The engines grumbled and complained but tried valiantly to comply like an iron horse under his master's whip.

Rum rum rum rum.

The control panel voltage meters had danced up to 610 volts, nosing in and out of the red, danger zone. The already muted bulbs of the cabin burned down even more as the train improbably gained speed up the incline. Shadowed faces became darker and grimmer as the train snaked between the bulking mountains straddling either side of the pass. An ominous shadow fell over the train as the moon was wiped from the sky by the hostile mass of the mountain.

The pass was less than a mile away now as the train passed twenty-five miles per hour. Craggy, black rock faces peered out from ledges of white snow drawn above them like aged eyebrows. Some of the snow showered down in shallow spills triggered by the vibrations of the passing train. The freight cars swayed dangerously from side to side behind the locomotive, their massive springs squeaking. The wheels clattered rapidly over the expansion joints in the rails and angry sparks spat from rough spots in the steel ribbons.

The train entered a wide bend to the left, still accelerating. Thousands of tons of freight hastened through the black heart of the night at forty mph, the contained kinetic energy of a small, nuclear explosion held in check only by the thin ribs of rails. The stink of diesel fuel and burnt ozone drifted through the cab. The electric meters stood riveted to the far right, past the danger zone. Neal felt the viscera-rattling vibrations through his feet and legs and rear, so strong that a wave of nausea gripped him.

The mountain on the right suddenly dipped and Neal saw the faint glow of a dozen or so lights nestled down in the dark valley. Orange light, not like electric lighting. More like oil or kerosene lamps. Kerosene lamps shining dimly from some tiny little village swallowed in the dark belly of the mountains.

The train cleared the bend. Directly ahead of them, no more than five hundred yards away, a ten foot high barricade of flaming, creosote-soaked cross ties lay across the tracks. Thick, roiling billows of greasy, black smoke boiled angrily into the night. Twenty foot towers of orange and yellow flames raged and screamed their hot fury. Oil bubbled and festered from the cross ties while gases boiled and hissed and flared. Within seconds the roar of the flames would be enough to drown out the onrushing train. Thirty seconds more would take then crashing directly into the flaming mass, yet Hogjaw hinted at no intention of slowing down. If anything, he pushed harder on the already maxed out hand throttle, trying to urge just a little more juice out of the engines.

Neal gripped the rail next to the steps and held on.

What the hell... he began.

"Shut up!" Hub snapped. Sit down and stay out of the way. Hub looked tensely at Bobo.

Ready?

Bobo nodded.

Eyes shining with singular purpose, Hogjaw sat steady at his post, one meaty hand on the throttle, the other on the pistol in his lap. Bobo opened the door on the left hand side of the cabin and stepped down onto the second step. Hub did the same thing on the opposite side. Frigid air whistled into the naked cabin like a hurricane, flapping the pages of the engineer's log and flipping the brim of Hogjaw's engineer's cap up. Snow churned into the cabin and stung Neal's eyes like icy grains of sand.

The train churned toward the barricade, keening through the night, motors whirring and wheels pounding. To his right and below, Neal heard the misplaced, ululating whinny of a horse. He snapped his head around and looked down.

Riding parallel to the train, half a dozen riders dressed in black capes and cloaks kept pace with the speeding train. Long snakes of tangled hair streamed out behind the riders. Ghost white faces shone like blank bone above tangled black beards. Eyes glinted like coal chips in black-shadowed eye sockets. Galloping hoof beats thundered in the night.

Hogjaw laid on the air horn and added its long, ear slitting bray to the roar. He held the cord tight, no sign of let up forthcoming.

"My side! My side!" Hub cried.

Bobo reeled across the cabin and stood by Hub, crowding onto the step with him.

Shocked by this skewed re-enactment of an 1880's train robbery where the Indians and bandits had been replaced by black clad cossacks and the steam engine supplanted by a three hundred ton, high tech diesel-electric monster, Neal watched in slow disbelief as one of the riders swung toward the train. There was a rattling clatter not five feet away from him and a now riderless horse peeled away from the train.

"To your right! To your right," Bobo yelled over the screaming of the wind. Hub spun to his right and fell backward against Bobo. A crackling shot rang out. A high pitched yell was cut off in mid shriek and a black shape went tumbling across the open doorway and plummeted to the ground, tumbling through the snow and plowing gouges in its unsullied white.

Neal watched the man's body bounce and skid and roll away from the train in a bone-breaking tumble. If the shot hadn't killed him, the subsequent fall would. He snapped his head back front and saw the flaming barricade looming in front of the train. This close he could feel the heat from the flames blowing into the open doors, mixed hot and cold. The smoke smelled thick and cringing and oily. Orange flame glow flared in the engine's cabin, overwhelming the already dim lights and painting stroboscopic shadows of men in a life and death struggle splashing on the inner walls of the cabin.

Bobo and Hub struggled to right themselves from the attack and keep from falling to the ground themselves. Bobo hugged the railing like the last, providential handhold on a precipice, his feet dangling inches above the ground speeding by below him. Hub had hold of Bobo's heavy coat, his red face colored an impossible purple by the orange of the fire. Bobo's legs air-danced in a mad dash and he was finally able to swing himself back up onto the step.

Neal stood without thought to grab onto Bobo and Hub. His eyes fixed on the doorway on the opposite side of the cabin. A wild figure swung into the wind split chasm. A pale, unhealthy face glowed sallowly in the fire glow. The man grinned a sickly grin and Neal saw in the erratic light that the man's teeth had been filed into points. The figure held onto the doorway with his left hand. In his right he held a long, thick bladed knife.

Forgetting about Hub and Bobo, Neal lunged for the gun in Hogjaw's lap at the same instant the train crashed through the barricade in a tornado of orange sparks and splintering wood.

The mass of the barricade was too pitifully insignificant to slow the train an inch, but enough to knock everyone off their feet. Hub and Bobo fell in a new, interlocked tangle on the loco's step. Hogjaw pitched forward in his seat, completely oblivious to the threat on his left. The unwelcome boarder stumbled but remained upright, shielding his eyes from the tumbling timbers and flying sparks with his left hand.

Neal lunged forward on his hands and knees, scratching for the gun in Hogjaw's lap. He cried out a garbled, nonsensical warning from deep in his throat and Hogjaw finally looked to his right. His eyes widened in surprise and curiosity as he saw Neal on his hands and knees, his right arm stretched toward him.

Neal snatched the pistol from Hogjaw's lap and used both hands on Hogjaw's right shoulder to push himself up and away. He skidded backward until his back hit the bench. Hogjaw pitched sideways off his seat, just in time for the intruder's arcing knife blow to hiss through only empty air over his head.

The train careened through the night, leaving the demolished barricade burning in exploded fragments behind it. The intruder gathered himself for another blow.

Neal pointed the gun and pulled the trigger, knowing that Hogjaw's only hope was that it was primed to fire.

BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

Three quick shots echoed in the cabin. The reports slammed back and forth in the tight space, seeming to stretch the metal of the cabin with their savagery. Blood and flesh sprayed from three sudden holes in the intruder's chest. The slugs knocked the intruder backward in stuttering steps toward the open doorway. The intruder flung his arms out and slapped the door jambs, but the slipstream was too much. He held on for a split second, then slipped backward into the night like a piece of litter tossed from a car window.

Instead of rapidly returning darkness in the doorway, Neal saw something else. The gun fell from his hand and bounced on the floor. His heart hammered harder and a new kind of fear -not primitive fear for his life, but fear of a more intellectual kind- stole the last of his strength.

A towering, white body literally filled the doorway; some light being of immense proportions. An intense, diamond-fire glow radiated from the being's forehead, but the white face was hideous. A huge, hooked Indian nose stood out above the fleshy lips. The lips were okay on the thing's right hand side, but on the left they curved down grotesquely almost to the tip of its pointed chin. Eyes as pale and cold as arctic ice stared at Neal with a narrow cunning. The white light in the doorway that surrounded it seemed to shimmer liquidly as with some kind of energy. And then, as capriciously as it had appeared, it vanished. The doorway was as pitch black as it had ever been.

Hogjaw was up from the floor in an instant. He crossed the darkened cabin in a flash and knelt down by Neal. Too stupefied for immediate reaction, it took a few moments for Neal to register that Hogjaw was shaking him and screaming in his face.

Did you see it? he demanded. The wind had whipped Hogjaw's hat away and his steel gray hair swirled in the wind.

The face, Neal whispered weakly. "The white..."

"Aww, shit...," Hogjaw muttered. He seemed about to say more when a rattling and banging announced the arrival of Bobo and Hub into the cabin.

Hogjaw! Get on that throttle! Now! Bobo reached down and hoisted Hogjaw from the floor.

He seen it, Bobo, Hogjaw said and his face was as white as a ghost's. "Holy God, he seen it!" Hogjaw's trembling lips began to move in silent prayers. Bobo slowly shifted his gaze from Hogjaw's face to Neal's.

Did you see it, boy? The white star?

"White star? I don't know. Something white..."

Bobo and Hogjaw lifted Neal from the floor and sat him on the bench while Hub closed the doors. The flaming barricade was well behind them now and the entire episode of the murderous horsemen, though only seconds before, seemed like it might have happened a year ago. Bobo and Hub sat on either side of Neal on the bench while Hogjaw retook command of the train and steadied it down.

What happened back there, Neal asked shakily. "That man. I shot a man!"

That man would have killed you, Bobo said. You did nothing no other man wouldn't do. Here, let's get a blanket on you.

Neal hadn't realized it, but he was shivering openly, his body spent with cold and an adrenalin rush. Hub pulled a blanket out of an overhead compartment and draped it on Neal. Neal wanted to talk about what had just happened, but was unable to force words through his chattering teeth.

Don't, Neal, Bobo admonished. Don't even think. Don't play it over in your head.

Bobo turned to Hogjaw who was already on the radio.

How long?

Forty-five minutes, maybe, Hogjaw said. "Too late for him, though." And the oddest thing about that statement, Neal was to reflect later, was that Hogjaw had sounded sympathetic.

Hub had poured a cup of hot coffee from a thermos and Neal slurped it down gratefully. It suddenly seemed too hot in the cramped cabin and Neal tried to throw his blanket off and stand up, but the two men gently, but firmly, held him down.

Neal's eyes roved from one man to the next. Tell me what's going on, he asked in a near whisper. "I just killed a goddam man and I'll have to answer for it. I've got a wife and a kid on the way! I can't go to jail!"

The three other men exchanged a silent look.

Finish your coffee, Neal, Hub said gently. Neal looked at him as if he were crazy. Hub gave Neal a hopeful look and he slowly drank the last of his coffee, looking between Bobo and Hub.

Then they told him how it was and why he could never say what had happened that night.

By the time the train chugged to a halt at the depot the next stop down the line, Neal was already off the train and running for the office. The silent patrol car sitting in the depot parking lot told the rest of the crew all they needed to know.

By the time the rest of the crew trudged in after Neal, he was in tears, the patrolman standing by him as if wanting to give comfort, but knowing his job prevented him from doing so. Neal looked at Hub, and Bobo, and Hogjaw.

"She's dead, he said. How could you know?"

The three crewmen remained silent. They had already given him his answer.

They watched him as he climbed into the passenger seat of the patrol car, a young man whose entire life had been irrevocably altered in an instant.

That's the last we'll see of him, Hub said knowingly. The other men silently agreed.

But they were wrong.

Two weeks later, after a proper period of grief and mourning, he was back. He walked slowly and deliberately into the depot with his satchel in his hand, still a twenty year old kid, but with an indefinable aging to his features, as if he had been through hell itself and made his way back not whole, but alive. He stopped by the bulletin board and looked up there, the first smile in two weeks creasing his lips. Someone had found a photograph of him and pasted it on the board right there amongst Hub, and Bobo and Hogjaw. Written on the bottom border, the nickname,Deadeye.

Condolences passed among the crew and they boarded the train. And this time, on the approach to Essex Pass, nobody had to ask Neal to take up his position.

He had brought his own gun.

1961

Doyle Rathmun couldn't believe his luck. Twenty-four hours before he had finally been pinched and locked up in a twelve-by-twelve holding cell with a bunch of drunken southern sots, now he was a free man. On the run, but free.

He'd started his Southern odyssey a week before, fleeing his home town of Boston during the first snow fall of the year, when the native Bostonites engaged in the singular Bostonian ritual of flocking to the ice cream shops. The cops had begun to get too close. A string of rape murders that had started with an eighty year old woman named Joanna Michaud and ended eleven corpses later with twelve year old Susan Kelly had somehow been tied to him.

The Boston PD had eventually netted a sad, simple minded man named Albert de Salvo for the run of murders. But even the thick, Boston cops already suspected that De Salvo, if he had committed any of the murders, certainly hadn't committed them all. The twelve stranglings had been evenly divided between strong, young women, and defenseless old women and children. De Salvo looked good for the murders of the healthy women, but the steely eyes of the law had already looked beyond De Salvo for the murderer of the elderly women and children.

Doyle knew his own mouth was to blame, recalling that he had bragged to one of his coworkers at the rubber plant, one George Nasser – a man as twisted and sadistic as he- that as long as a woman had two tits, a hole, and a heartbeat, she was within his range of acceptability. And once the cops, in their plodding, foot dragging way, had finally chased down enough leads to get a bead on a few suspects, a remark like that would likely land him in their net. They had already scooped up Nasser for questioning.

On the run from the heat in Boston, he had driven south in his '58 Chevrolet. It was the first car he'd ever owned or driven, a virtual land yacht with huge, wide-whitewall tires, automatic transmission and standard AM radio. He had no real aim or plan other than to put distance between himself and the Boston PD. He was no career criminal; had never spent a day in jail. Maybe the killing was caused by the steel plate in the back of his head, compliments of a Chinese mortar shell in Korea. The bone had never completely mended, leaving a two inch indentation that was covered only by steel and skin.

He made his way more by accident than anything else to this mountainous area of North Carolina. When the local legal beagle had put the light on him just as darkness was falling, he had remained cool. Nobody knew him here.

He watched in his rear view mirror as the heavy southern cop squeezed himself out of the cruiser and meandered up to his driver's side door. He lingered near the rear of the car, taking down the license number on a notepad.

Evening, officer, Doyle said cheerily. What seems to be the problem?

I need you to turn off your engine and step out of the car, please, sir.

Doyle's cheerful exterior wilted a little.

Officer, I...

Do it now, please, sir.

The look in the officer's eyes left no room for argument. Doyle switched off the engine and stepped out of the car.

Somethin' I need to show you, the officer said. Step to the rear of the car, please, sir.

Doyle accompanied the officer to the rear of the vehicle.

You've got a taillight busted out.

The unbroken lens of the taillight gleamed at Doyle even in the growing twilight. He turned to face the officer and saw that he had his pistol drawn. Before he could react, the officer swung the heavy butt end of the pistol against the taillight lens and it crashed out with a sad tinkle. It was so cliché it would have been funny had Doyle not realized his chances of getting out of this were becoming extremely remote.

You got Massachusetts plates, the officer said. They let folks in Massachusetts drive around with a broken taillight?

Officer, we can work something out... but before he could finish, the cop had interrupted him.

That's gonna cost you, son.

So now they came down to it.

How much?

How much you got?

Oh, hey, now, Doyle protested with a cadaverous smile. You have to leave me something so I can get out of here. Never darken your lovely state with my presence again.

You makin' fun of the great state of North Carolina?

Doyle backpedaled. This cop was no weak old woman with a heart condition or a little girl without the strength to resist him.

Look, he said. I've got thirty-five bucks. It's yours.

Goddam right it's mine, the cop said.

Doyle pulled his battered wallet from his back pocket and extracted three tens and a five. The cop took the bills and tucked them in the breast pocket of his uniform.

You know what I think, the cop said. I think you're one of them northern boys come down South to stir up trouble with the darkies. Get 'em riled up so's decent folks can't feel safe at night while you go back home where you got 'em all penned up in the middle of your cities.

Nothing like that. I'm just passing through.

Well, tonight you'll pass through a holding cell, enjoy some Southern hospitality, courtesy of Castonmeyer county. The cop wandered over to the other side of the car and smashed out the second set of taillights. We can't have you drivin' around with no taillights, even if you are from Massachusetts. I'll have Royce Reid come up here, haul your vehicle in. Tomorrow, you'll be in front of the magistrate, trying to figure out how to pay the tow bill, the fine, and the repair bill for your taillights.

He'd been handcuffed and shoved into the back of the cruiser to await a hearing before the magistrate the next morning. And the cop had told him if he couldn't raise the needed money, he'd likely be a guest of the state of North Carolina for the next month. Doyle had been issued his prison blues and escorted to a holding cell filled with greasy haired southern thugs and more real, live black people than he'd ever seen in his life anywhere besides the television. He'd been taciturn in the cell, unwilling to speak for fear his heavy New England accent would mark him for even more special attention.

Before dawn the next morning, a screw came around to the holding cell with a list and began calling out names.

Darrow, DeBerry, Herrick, Nichols... The call out continued until the guard got to Doyle's name.

Rathman, he called out.

Blinking, scared, and uncertain of what to do, Doyle filed out of the cell with the rest of the call out.

They trudged into the cafeteria and had a dreary breakfast of oatmeal, toast and fatty sausage. Falling in line as the roll was called again, Doyle puppy-dogged the line as they loaded onto a bus and drove off to parts unknown. Mountains and fields rolled by outside the lightening windows. Farmland mostly, lots of barns and a few grimy cinder block and brick buildings. Even as a first time prisoner, Doyle thought it odd that only one armed guard rode on the bus with them. Twenty minutes later, the bus rolled into the small town of Prairie's End and the bus hissed to a halt at the corner of two fairly large streets.

The cons, unshackled, filed out the door and stood at the corner of Garner and Qualls streets. After the last con filed out, the bus door shut and the bus pulled away with a roar, leaving the cons in the backwash.

Looking around with wide eyes and finding no shotgun toting guards, Doyle turned to Crispin Cyrus, one of his erstwhile cell mates.

This is a setup, right, he asked, thinking of the venomous act that had landed him in the cooler. "They