Destinations Unknown Read online

  DESTINATIONS UNKNOWN

  By Gary A. Braunbeck

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Copyright 2013 / Gary A. Braunbeck

  Copy-edited by: Rebecca Gates

  Cover artwork provided by: Deena Warner

  LICENSE NOTES

  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 person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  Gary A. Braunbeck is a prolific author who writes mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mainstream literature. He is the author of 19 books; his fiction has been translated into Japanese, French, Italian, Russian and German. Nearly 200 of his short stories have appeared in various publications. Some of his most popular stories are mysteries that have appeared in the Cat Crimes anthology series.

  He was born in Newark, Ohio; this city that serves as the model for the fictitious Cedar Hill in many of his stories. The Cedar Hill stories are collected in Graveyard People and Home Before Dark.

  His fiction has received several awards, including the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction in 2003 for “Duty” and in 2005 for “We Now Pause for Station Identification”; his collection Destinations Unknown won a Stoker in 2006. His novella “Kiss of the Mudman” received the International Horror Guild Award for Long Fiction in 2005.

  As an editor, Gary completed the latest installment of the Masques anthology series created by Jerry Williamson, Masques V, after Jerry became too ill to continue.

  He also served a term as president of the Horror Writers Association. He is married to Lucy Snyder, a science fiction/fantasy writer, and they reside together in Columbus, Ohio.

  Gary is an adjunct professor at Seton Hill University, Pennsylvania, where he teaches in an innovative Master’s degree program in Writing Popular Fiction.

  His nonfiction writing book Fear In A Handful Of Dust: Horror As A Way Of Life has been used as a text by several college writing classes. Gary has taught writing seminars and workshops around the country on topics such as short story writing, characterization, and dialogue.

  Book List

  Novels

  Time Was:Isaac Asimov’s I-Bots (co-written with Steve Perry)

  The Indifference of Heaven

  Dark Matter 1: In Hollow Houses

  This Flesh Unknown

  In Silent Graves

  In the Midnight Museum

  Keepers

  Prodigal Blues

  Mr. Hands

  Coffin County

  Far Dark Fields

  Collections

  Things Left Behind

  Escaping Purgatory

  Sorties, Cathexes, and Personal Effects

  Graveyard People: The Collected Cedar Hill Stories, Volume 1

  X3 (contains three science fiction novellas: “One Brown Mouse,” “At Eternity’s Gate,” and “Palimpest Day”).

  A Little Orange Book Of Odd Stories

  From Beneath these Fields of Blood

  Home Before Dark: The Collected Cedar Hill Stories, Volume 2

  Destinations Unknown

  Nonfiction

  Fear In A Handful Of Dust: Horror As A Way Of Life

  To Each Their Darkness

  http://www.garybraunbeck.com

  [email protected]

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  Dedication:

  To everyone who has suffered through the cruel and unusual punishment of having me for a passenger during a road trip.

  I’m really sorry.

  Really sorry.

  A special thanks to my personal major domo of proofreaders, Mark Lancaster, for his unflinching (and often merciless) eye used on an early draft of this concoction.

  “Well it’s a winding highway that never seems to end…”

  —Rory Gallagher, “Lonesome Highway”

  “…Abe said, ‘Where you want this killin’ done?’

  God said, ‘Out on Highway 61…’“

  —Bob Dylan, “Highway 61 Revisited”

  CONTENTS

  The Ballad of Road Mama and Daddy Bliss

  The Box Man

  Congestion

  Merge Right

  A Preview of PRODIGAL BLUES

  The Ballad of Road Mama and Daddy Bliss

  It could have been a scene from any drive-in B-feature from the 1950s or early 60s featuring juvenile delinquents as Everyman and drag racing as heavy-handed social metaphor:

  FADE IN: a seemingly endless stretch of smooth two-lane blacktop emptying into shadows. Crowds of people line both sides of the road, the men looking tough while clutching at their bottles of beer, the women looking anxious while clutching at the filtered tips of their cigarettes, and the kids—especially the really young ones—looking like they aren’t sure how they should be feeling while they clutch at the hands or coats of the tough beer drinkers and anxious cigarette smokers.

  There are dozens of cars parked at haphazard angles off to the side, their headlights illuminating two vehicles that crouch rumbling in the center of the strip, rabid animals straining at the leash. A YOUNG GIRL, early twenties (if that), dressed in a skirt and tight short-sleeved sweater, blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail, a scarf tied around her neck, stands a few dozen feet from the front of the cars, raising her arms above her head with a slow dramatic relish, a bright red kerchief clutched in each of her hands…

  I was trying very hard to imagine all of this as being a scene from a movie that I was watching, half-expecting one of the SUPPORTING CHARACTERS to scream something profound like, “Burn rubber, Daddy-O!” so I could smile at all the clichés being firmly in place. If I could achieve some kind of half-assed Zen state, if I could convince myself that I wasn’t really a part of all this, if I could delude myself into believing that I was just viewing it from a safe distance, then I might be able to survive the next two minutes with mind and body in one piece—providing I could force myself to overlook the physical appearance of most of the spectators, or the thing that was driving the car I was about to race against. I could try focusing on the blonde girl who was about to signal the start of the race, but that would mean looking at her arms, both of which were easily a foot longer than a normal arm is supposed to be, her elbows having been replaced by the type of steel hinges used to fasten car hoods to their vehicles; what sinew, veins, and muscle remained to connect her forearms to her biceps wound through and around the hinges like vines, all of it kept functional with a combination of machine grease and petroleum jelly.

  And she was one of the more normal-looking spectators here tonight. Those who were still alive and mobile, anyway.

  “On your marks,” she shouted, her arms now raised to their full height, the crowd silent, wide-eyed, leaning forward.

  The other vehicle gunned its engine, its driver letting fly with a phlegm-clogged laugh from a throat equal parts metal and meat.

  Tightening my grip on the steering wheel, I wondered if I squeezed hard enough, would my knuckles just rip through my skin. Maybe they’d postpone the race if I were injured.

  One quick look at my opponent answered that question in short order.

  The blonde girl was smiling a smile that
might have been radiant in any other place, under any other circumstances. “Get set…”

  Her grip tightened on the kerchiefs in her hands. In a moment, she’d swing down those impossible arms in a swift, decisive arc, and off we’d go.

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, wondering how long I’d be missing and dead before anyone took serious notice of my absence. It was quite the revelation, it was, to realize that out of all my friends…I didn’t really have any.

  Have to move that to the top of your “To Do” list right away, I thought. Numero uno: make some friends…and try to keep them this time. Abso-freakin-lutely.

  Oh, yeah—I was so boned.

  The other vehicle gunned its engine once more, snapping me out of my maudlin reverie with an earsplitting glasspack reminder that very likely I would be dead one-hundred-and-thirty seconds from now.

  The blonde-haired girl stood frozen, ready to snap down her arms.

  The spectators leaned farther forward, still and silent.

  I took a deep breath and without consciously trying achieved the elusive faux-Zen state I’d been hoping for, only I wasn’t watching this scene from a distance, no; I was watching the me of roughly forty hours ago, the me who’d been safe and sound in the world he knew well enough to take for granted, the me who was about to learn that

  1

  “…sometimes the bodies leak.”

  I looked over at the man driving the meat wagon in which I was currently a court-required passenger and said, ever the fellow armed with a witty retort: “Huh?”

  The driver—a fifty-something guy named Fred Dobbs (I’m not kidding; just like the character Bogart played in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, swear to God), a man built like a walk-in freezer who was also a twenty-two-year veteran driver for the County Coroner’s Office—nodded his head and sighed as if empathizing, though he was trying hard to conceal a grin. “Yeah, whenever we get a call like this one—y’know, when the folks have been dead a day or two—sometimes you’re gonna find that the bodies have been laying in the bed or on the floor, and if the weather’s all hot and humid like it’s been and they ain’t got air-conditioning, the internal gasses build up a whole lot faster and then things start to strain and tear and rupture and the bodies, well…sometimes they leak when you move ‘em.” He cleared his throat, and when he spoke again his tone was much lighter, as if telling a joke: “I once had so much trouble trying to get this one old gal out of her bed—her bedsores were so bad that I thought her skin was gonna peel off and dump her guts right on my shoes—I finally just had to wrap her up in the sheets she’d died in before transferring her to the bag. If it’s bad, then we let the wizards in the doc’s office do the peeling. Our job is to just get in there and remove the bodies.”

  “Which sometimes leak.”

  Another nod: the teacher pleased that the student wasn’t as dim as he’d feared. “I’m not trying to make you sick or nothing, understand, but I figured maybe you ought to prepare yourself for the possibility.” He shrugged, honked the horn for reasons I’d never know at someone or something I couldn’t see, then removed one of his hands from the steering wheel and flexed his fingers, the bones crackling like dry twigs on a campfire.

  I reached out to turn down the radio; the news had been talking about a massive (what they called “…spectacular”) eight-car accident in Columbus on the I-71 loop last night that so far had left five people dead. The radio station had someone broadcasting live from the scene which still hadn’t been cleared. It appeared the accident had been caused when someone driving a Hummer cut across all four lanes without signaling and slammed into a Ford Gargantua or some other four-wheeled yuppie tank that in turn hit a semi...and I didn’t want to hear about it. There’s only so much death and destruction I can take when the sun is shining and there’s still the possibility of having a nice day.

  “‘Course, now,” said Dobbs, “if the bodies’re on a rug or carpeting, that makes it a bit easier in some ways. If they’re leaking all over a rug, we just roll ‘em up in it and save the county the cost of a bag.”

  “And if they’ve leaked onto the carpeting?” Pause for a moment and consider: how many people get to start their workday with conversations like this? Was I the luckiest guy on the planet, or what?

  “Then we haul out the carpet cutters and…” He mimed scissoring around a body. “But then you’ve got the added problem of some extra weight if they’ve really been leaking, and especially if it’s shag carpeting.”

  I shook my head. “Damn the shag carpeting!”

  “Oh, you got that right. Me, I think that shit makes any room look like something that belongs in a porno movie—not that I’ve seen all that many pornos, you understand, it’s just there’s something kinda…I dunno…sleazy and tacky about it.”

  Gas-ruptured bodies and home decorating tips. With lunch still hours away. My life was an embarrassment of blessings.

  I looked in the back of the wagon where a crate hand-labeled Retrieval Gear sat with its unlocked lid bouncing up and down every time we drove over a pot-hole. Symbolic thoughts of Pandora’s Box notwithstanding, the sight gave me the creeps, knowing as I did, what was inside.

  “Do you think we’ll have to use any of the science-fiction paraphernalia?”

  Dobbs seriously considered this; I knew he was considering it seriously because the right side of his face knotted up as if he were having a stroke. “Hard to say. I kinda like putting on them HazMat suits myself. Scares the hell out of people and they keep outta your way. I used to feel silly wearing that stuff until the doc explained to me that dead, leaking bodies produce their own kind of toxic waste.” He looked at me and, for the first time that morning, outright smiled; there was a lot of genuine kindness it. “Don’t you worry none. If it’s bad, I’ll walk you through it. I know this ain’t exactly what you had in mind, and I may act like a royal horse’s ass most of the time—at least according to anyone who’s known me for more than twenty minutes—but I got sympathy.”

  “You’ve had assistants like me before?”

  He barked a loud laugh. “Hell, buddy, how do you think I got started on this job?”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “If I was kidding, don’t you think I’d try to come up with something funnier than that?”

  “Good point.”

  He gave a short, sharp nod. “They got me same way as you. Had one too many before hitting the road one night and got stopped by Johnny Law. Since I’d drove an ambulance in Vietnam, judge figured that me and the meat wagon was a perfect community-service match.” He shrugged. “When my CS period was done, they offered me a permanent job.” He looked at me. “I actually kinda like it. Dead folks’re quiet, and I treat them with respect, even when I gotta roll ‘em up in sheets or rugs.”

  “Or shag carpeting.”

  He almost grinned. “I don’t make no jokes when I’m taking care of them. The doc likes that, likes my attitude, which is why I can get away with some of the shit that I pull, and whenever the city does its budget-cut dance, like they done here last quarter, I don’t have to worry about being left out of work.”

  “That explains why I wasn’t given a choice in the matter.” My lawyer had told me that the courts try to match your own individual abilities to a county department where those abilities could best be used, which is why I’d expected to find myself cleaning offices—I’m a crew manager with a local janitorial company—but Judge Walter Banks was in a bad mood, evidently being pressured to assign more defendants to CS duty (damn the budget cuts!), and said he’d had his fill of “…people who think they’ve got the constitution of an ox so they don’t think twice about getting behind the wheel while under the influence…” and slapped me with both a five hundred dollar fine and one hundred hours of community service. My lawyer argued that, by law, I was to be given a choice of assignments; Judge Banks pointed out that the matter of being offered a choice was up to the discretion of the bench, and his particular bench felt th
at I damned well ought to be exposed to the dead in order to remind me of what could have happened had I hit a pedestrian or another car.

  So I was assigned to the budget-strapped County Coroner’s Office. As Fred Dobbs’ assistant. In the passenger seat of the meat wagon. Talk about your pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

  “By the way,” I said, “I wasn’t drunk.”

  “Of course you weren’t. And every man on Death Row is innocent.”

  “I’m not trying to say I didn’t deserve my fine and the rest of it, I just want it made clear that I wasn’t drunk.”

  “But you were half-snowed on Demerol.”

  “I’d gotten slammed with a migraine, I went to the ER, they gave me a shot—”

  “—and probably told you not to drive yourself home, isn’t that right?”

  I shrugged. “I thought I could make it home before the stuff really kicked in.”

  “Appears you were mistaken.”

  I shrugged. “Hell, I was probably more dangerous driving to the hospital than I was driving home afterward.”

  “Hate to be the one to break the news to you, but ‘under the influence’ don’t just refer to drinking, you know.”

  “I do now.”

  Dobbs sighed, rubbing one of his eyes. “You’re not gonna grouse like this for the next three weeks, are you? Unless it’s the sound of my own voice—which I find soothing and not without a certain musical quality—I kinda prefer to keep the conversation upbeat.”

  “I didn’t think I was complaining.”

  “Maybe not, but you were in the neighborhood. Speaking of—double-check the address for me, would you?”