Deathbed

Part Five

I had no idea how long we had ridden the road. Hours, perhaps, or only a few moments that dragged out to eternity. Most of the time, I had kept my eyes tightly closed, cradled in the rider’s lap like a child, neither of us speaking a word.

Slowly I revived from the spell he had put me under, but I was swept up in events and felt unable to influence my fate. All around us, the dark night pressed in like a conscious entity; the roar of the bike seemed to cut through a palpable blackness, opening a passage that closed again behind it.

I shut my eyes after a brief look into the featureless void, still unable to raise my head from its resting place against Deadman’s open shirt. The rider lightly touched my face, his fingers brushing my ear and scalp, as if he were ascertaining whether I was awake. I rolled my head away from his caress, for a caress it was. Under my cheek the hair on his chest made a crisp sound. He touched me again, and I made a stronger move to avoid him, lurching slightly to the side. Immediately the rider’s arms clasped me and set me upright. His coat fell around me, and the scent of his body welled up in a surrounding blur.

Where were we? I could not even see the stars now, and the headlight shone on a road with no markings, no signs. The surface was black and oddly glassy as if wet, though the air was hot and dry. Strange sounds whispered on all sides like inhuman voices, parting on each side to let us pass. Once or twice I thought I felt phantom claws touching my arm or thigh or hair, grasps that slipped away with the inexorable forward movement of the bike. I could feel no road vibration, and the bike never turned right or left. The broad straight road to hell? Rattlesnake, for all his belligerence and insulting manner, had been the only person to stand up to Deadman or try to save me, and the only one to give me much idea of what was happening. The rider’s name, or title, was the Undertaker. What was an undertaker? Someone who had charge of the dead. Someone who took the dead into his care: prepared them, transported them to their final destination.

That almost made sense, strangely, considering what the bartender had said--that I had no choice but to go with Deadman, that the place he wanted to take me to was the place I should go. If I had been dead, that was, it would have made sense. I wasn’t dead and the rider knew it. So what did he want with me? I could not know the answer.

Oddly, I was grateful for the rider’s strength and determination, his body half wrapped around mine and protecting me. I knew somehow that this road was one I had to travel--no matter which way I had gone, I would have had to take this road, and a guide was a necessity. Even a guide whose mysterious nature and frightening ferocity filled me with horror, because I felt the presence of things far more horrible than he, to which I would inevitably have fallen prey if not for him.

Suddenly the glassy texture of the road changed. Again it looked like asphalt in the headlight’s glare, though the sky still had no stars. I saw trees and bushes and a state highway department sign reading “Hanging Crick”. We passed a mailbox and turned up a dirt driveway. Another handmade sign at the bottom of the drive said ‘No Trespassing--This Means You--Violators Will Be Shot.” The rider passed the sign and roared up the driveway for about a hundred yards, then curved around a large clump of bushes and slowed in a yard.

At the end of the drive stood a large white farmhouse with a circling veranda, the sort of house common to the part of the country through which I had been driving. Set back some distance from the house was a big garage that had once been a stable, a battered Firebird and a John Deere tractor parked in front of it. Dimly behind that loomed a decrepit barn. A few bright floodlights on house and garage lit up the yard and driveway. The house had two stories and a shingled roof with a few decorative curved boards along the sloped eaves, and was visibly in need of a paint job. On the veranda sat a moldering sofa, a few cheap folding patio chairs and a two-seat swing. Four or five large, mangy dogs lay around the dusty yard.

As the bike entered the yard, the dogs sprang up as one and raced to chase it, barking and howling like wolves. Deadman parked by the steps that led to the kitchen door at the side of the house and took the keys out of the ignition. The dogs ran to the back yard, still barking, and circled around again. Lifting me off the bike, Deadman dismounted as I began to walk to the front of the house.

The dogs ringed me, snarling, and I froze. The rider spoke sharply and their attention turned to him. Passing me, they approached him with hackles raised, growling in their throats. He spoke again and kicked one of them. To my surprise, the dogs didn’t spring; they cringed at his feet, whining. The rider raised a hand and they leaped back. He grinned at them, the sort of grin that’s meant mostly to show the teeth, and the dogs whined again. Two or three of them slunk under the veranda.

Someone banged the front door open and came out--a young man with dark hair, and right behind him a fiftyish, greying man. They were obviously father and son. With a distinct resemblance to each other, both had beady eyes and sloping chins, and both were short and scrawny in comparison with Deadman, though they might have been less insignificant on their own. “Hey! You there! This is private property--that sign’s there for a reason!” bawled the father, pointing at me. He had a double-barreled shotgun in the crook of his arm. “We don’t hold with trespassing in these parts! Shane, hustle your ass and get her out’ve here!”

“Get your ass off this property, bitch!” echoed Shane.

Deadman came around the corner of the house and grinned at the pair, who stopped dead at the bottom of the steps to the yard. “Fuck,” said Shane. “It’s him!” His weak chin wobbled.

“’Taker?” gasped the father, his mouth hanging open in a round O.

The rider cocked his head and looked at them. “Thought I warned you fellows to clear out of the house while I was here. You need reminding again, Vince?”

“It’s my house,” said Vince, drawing himself up to his full five feet ten. “Damn, it IS MY house! What gives you the goddamn right to walk in like you own the place?”

“Yeah!” shrilled a trashily dressed young woman who had just emerged onto the veranda. “We’re sick of you coming here and making trouble! Get off my family’s land, ‘Taker!”

“Guess we got to go over all that again,” said Deadman with a rueful shake of the head, but he was smiling. He shrugged off his coat and threw it over the Harley’s saddle, then walked past me and toward the steps. His sleeveless shirt exposed his huge arms, covered from shoulders to wrists with intricate tattoos. I saw a wise, demonic face, a castle wreathed with a dragon, an eyed skull, a fallen soul shrieking in the abyss; all written on his skin like a history.

“I got me a twelve-gauge here!” yelled Vince, significantly patting the shotgun. “I don’t care who you are, ‘Taker! I’m the lawful owner of this property, you’re trespassing, and I’m gonna give you a damn double buck load in the face if you don’t get back on that bike this damn minute!”

Vince lifted the shotgun, but before he could level it a giant fist shot out and took him straight on his receding chin. He flew eight or ten feet backwards, collapsing against the steps, and the shotgun went in the opposite direction. Deadman picked it up, bent the barrels with a stomp of his boot, flexed his fingers and looked at Shane.

The young woman screamed, hands to her cheeks. “Daddy!” She scrambled to his side, bending so far over her breasts nearly fell out of her brief, backless halter top. “Aaahh! You hit my Daddy!”

“Son of a bitch!” yelled Shane. He leaped up on the veranda and grabbed a folding chair, swinging it at the rider’s head. Deadman blocked the blow with one hand and seized the son by the throat with the other, lifting him straight up and clear of the veranda over the high railing.

For a moment he dangled nine feet in the air, gurgling and choking, and then Deadman slammed him to the ground with a resounding thump and a puff of dust. Shane lay flat and didn’t move; wisely, I thought. The daughter turned on me, nails held like claws and her over-mascaraed eyes flashing. I backed up with my purse held defensively in front of me. She grabbed the front of my jacket and swung at my face with the nails of the other hand. Deadman caught her wrist in midair.

“Don’t you go exercising your crap on my woman, you little bitch,” he said. “Get in there and cook something to eat.”

“Your *woman*? My ass! You ugly bastard--” She broke off, because Deadman had twisted her arm up behind her and pushed her toward the house. “Ow! Owwh! You sadist! My husband’s gonna kick your ass!” Deadman, dragging the daughter, went up the steps past the inert Vince and jumped up to the narrow railing of the veranda, walking along it and propelling her by the upraised and twisted arm, his sense of balance extraordinary for such a large man.

“Ow!” the daughter wailed, stumbling along the veranda to the kitchen door. The rider jumped down from the railing and gave her arm a good wrench; she clutched her shoulder and scuttled into the kitchen, yelling. The father and son lay where they had fallen, moaning, and Deadman kicked Shane’s legs aside from his path and came to me. What had he meant by ‘my woman’? Even the daughter had been incredulous, and I was no less so. One of the dogs sniffed around Vince’s feet.

“OK, you whipped the shit out’ve ‘em,” said someone else. The rider had been about to speak to me, but stopped and rolled his eyes. A man came around the corner of the house, a big man with blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. He wasn’t as tall as Deadman, but he had large shoulders and a protruberant nose and jaw, and his voice was loud and pugnacious. “You ain’t gonna do the same to me, asshole! Stand right there and get your ugly face kicked in!”

“I’d advise you to move to one side,” Deadman said to me. To the newcomer he said, “You certain about that, Aitch? Are you that damn good?”

“Damn straight I am,” the blond man said, and sprang at him.

Part Six

“Get him, Aitch!” the daughter yelled from the kitchen door. Deadman and Aitch collided like a couple of bighorn rams; the impact knocked me back a step and I retreated further. They traded punches, right hands slamming into skulls, but neither seemed to feel much from the other’s blows. Aitch backed off a few paces and took a running start, leaping into the air and planting a knee on Deadman’s chest.

The rider staggered, but didn’t fall; Aitch landed on his feet and whipped an arm around Deadman’s neck, flinging himself backwards. They both landed hard on their shoulder blades, the ground shaking under my feet. The rider rolled up and met Aitch’s kick, countering with one of his own, and they bounced back from each other, panting.

They ran to meet with a thunderous shock again, each connecting with blows to the midsection, and again traded punches in a flurry. Deadman got Aitch by the throat and squeezed. The muscles rippled under his pale tattooed skin as he heaved. The blond man’s toes left the ground and he grabbed the rider’s wrist with both hands.

“Aitch!” screamed the daughter. The blond man rose in the air at the end of the rider’s arm, described a high arc and slammed to the ground. Deadman kicked him hard in the chest and bent to grab his head. Aitch writhed from his grip and seized his legs, knocking Deadman’s feet out from under him.

The rider went down like a cut tree. Aitch leaped up and backed off, running up and falling hard elbow-first, aiming the blow at Deadman’s sternum. The rider let out a pained grunt; Aitch grappled with him on the ground, then rose to his feet and clamped the rider’s head between his knees. Grabbing his arms, Aitch pulled them up behind his back and jumped, landing on his bent knees and viciously propelling the rider’s face into the ground.

Deadman jerked and lay still, his hair spread in the dust. Aitch got up and kicked him several times, the rider’s body reacting sluggishly. He looked half unconscious, his forehead bloody. I couldn’t stay here to be beaten by these psychopaths myself! My heart beating fast, I began to edge down the driveway.

“Get her!” screamed the daughter, pointing at me with avid cruelty in her face. “She’s running, Aitch! Get the bitch!” The blond man looked around and headed for me, his big nose wrinkled up in a snarl. I fumbled for my gun.

But before I could get the revolver out, Deadman rose, shaking his head and flinging back his hair with a snap of his neck, and hit Aitch from behind with a flying tackle.

The two big bodies nearly knocked me down. I backpedaled to avoid them and ran along the edge of the yard, heading for the veranda. Behind me the fight had resumed full force. The combatants rolled up to the steps and struggled on the ground, Deadman bouncing Aitch’s head off the lowest step.

I grabbed the railing and climbed it, propelled by adrenaline alone, and seized a folding chair. Deadman had just risen to his feet, wobbling a little; he spotted me and beckoned. I tossed him the chair; he caught it out of the air and brought it down with a crash over Aitch’s head as he tried to get up.

When he collapsed, Deadman grabbed his hair and shoved his head between his knees just as Aitch had done to him. I expected the same maneuver, but Deadman seized the blond man’s legs and lifted them straight up, grabbing him around the waist. Even with the burden of a man who must have weighed two hundred and fifty pounds, the rider sprang two feet into the air before coming down on his knees like a earthquake, Aitch’s head and neck taking the full weight of both men. He collapsed like a rubber doll, sprawling prone in the yard and bleeding from nose and mouth.

“You bastard, ‘Taker!” screeched the daughter, running to the fallen man. “Aitch, honey! Speak to me!”

Deadman took a couple of steps backwards and leaned up against the veranda, putting his elbows on it for support. He was breathing hard, his face and clothes smeared with dust and blood. I could see that he had won; Aitch was entirely out of it and would be for some time. Vince began to stir, as did Shane, but their faces showed only cringing fear as they looked at Deadman. They were as whipped as the dogs.

“Get your asses back in the damn garage,” said the rider, straightening up. “Don’t let me catch you sneakin’ round the house. Stephanie can do the cooking and cleaning, but keep your damn family out of my vicinity.” He hawked and spat on the ground next to Vince’s shoes. Father and son looked at each other and departed up the driveway, dragging the limp Aitch between them. Stephanie trailed behind them in the tracks of her husband’s feet, crying and cursing.

When they had gone, Deadman closed his eyes, looking weary. For a moment he looked far older; I had thought I must be only eight or nine years younger than he, but at that instant he might have had half a century on me, or more. He rolled his head around on his shoulders and opened his eyes. “Thanks for the assist,” he said. The shadow passed, and he was smiling.

“Um…I didn’t want to be alone with those people,” I said.

His teeth showed in a grin. “But back at the bar you weren’t real sure you wanted to be alone with me either.”

“No.” For some reason, helping him in the fight had given me less fear of him. He wasn’t invulnerable, though his strength and ability seemed almost superhuman. I began to shake off the almost-mystical fear that had overcome me at the Last Chance when I had seen his face transform in anger.

Of course, no matter what sort of bizarre reputation he had in this area, he was only a man, I told myself. Not a demon. A biker who liked to drink and fight and roam the roads. Not the sort of person I usually associated with; the sort of person I felt superior to in an almost unconscious way, the way I had felt superior to Cactus and Eddie. Though I had grown up in surroundings not unlike this area, I had long ago left them behind. My Papa was the only reminder I had of my origins. “I always reserve the right to change my mind.”

Deadman laughed. “Come on inside. You earned it.” He turned and headed up the steps, opening the front door and beckoning me. I hung back for a moment.

“Why did you call me ‘my woman’ when she attacked me?”

“What, did that spook ya?” He seemed particularly amused by my expression of offended dignity. “That little slut doesn’t like any competition.”

“You mean she’s your--”

“Hell, no!” It was his turn to look offended. “Stephanie McMahon? She tried it on me a couple times, but I told her she could keep it. I ain’t interested in waking up some day with my balls cut off.” The rider went into the house and I followed.

The front room was shabby, though amply furnished with some marks of former expense; the flowered carpet was faded almost to a uniform color where it wasn’t stained. Nearly every piece of furniture was covered with bedspreads and crocheted afghans to hide the holes in the upholstery. Next to the door stood an old-fashioned hall tree with a mirror and hooks; I saw a ring with keys for the Firebird and the John Deere.

A single working bulb remained in the dining room chandelier and several kerosene lamps sat on tables, providing most of the illumination. The kitchen, at the side of the house through the front room and dining room, was brighter than the dim living areas. Although all the appliances and cupboards looked at least fifty years old, the place was reasonably clean and tidy. A galvanized sink stood next to the door that led out on the veranda and Deadman stripped off his bandanna and turned on the water.

“I’m afraid I can’t stay the night here,” I said, looking around the kitchen. “It’s out of the question; I have to get going. My Papa will be coming.”

“Hm. You call him from the Last Chance?”

“Yes, I did. Is there anything to eat around here?” I opened the near-antique refrigerator.

“I dunno. Check around. Pop wasn’t home, huh?” replied Deadman from the sink, washing his bloody face with his bandanna.

“No. I left a message and told him where I was.” Nothing was in the refrigerator except beer, mayonnaise, and a few packs of batteries, so I closed it. “I hope he’ll come to pick me up soon, because I really have to go.”

“Reckon he’s calling the cops to look for you?”

“N-no. He won’t do that.” Belatedly it occurred to me that I had left a clear trail for anyone who cared to look for me: my car, my note at the bar, and more than a dozen witnesses. In the mean time, I was hungry and tired and feeling tightly strung, a headache hovering just above my eyebrows.

I hung my jacket on a chair, took the clip from my hair and shook it out of its coil. Against the back of my neck, it was sweaty and matted, but I had just washed it that morning and the silky mass rippled down over my shoulders.

It was a lot of trouble sometimes keeping my hair so long, but since it wasn’t a spectacular color and neither curly nor straight, I figured it needed some mark of distinction, so I grew it. I hadn’t cut it in years, so it was crotch-length and tapered at the ends, veiling my back and buttocks when loose. My hair was definitely my best feature, and why I was displaying it for Deadman I didn’t know.

I rubbed my scalp and turned to find the rider standing right behind me, his gaze intent. I jumped--I hadn’t heard him approach. With his bandanna off, his coppery hair fell around his high pale forehead; my eyes roamed over his face. Until that moment I hadn’t noticed that his lips were full and seductively curved. Although he wasn’t delicate-featured or pretty in any way, he was unsettlingly attractive in his over-sized fashion, his distinctive, warm coloring slightly softening the effect of angular bones and marked features.