The Brotherhood of the Wheel (37 page)

“Let's play, asshole,” Heck muttered. He slipped his large combat knife out of the belt sheath with his left hand and twirled it, grinning behind his demon mask. The Pagan's reaction was hidden behind the black mirror of his helmet's visor, but he hefted his own bone-handled hunting knife and prepared to meet Heck's charge.

They were side by side, less than a foot apart, both traveling over two hundred miles an hour, both bikes shuddering with each flaw in the highway. The Huntsman flashed out with his blade, still wet with the dead driver's blood, toward Heck's throat. Heck parried it, and the two riders parted a few feet, only to swerve closer again for another pass. Heck slashed down, toward the madman's shoulder, and found the Pagan's blade blocking his own.

The two riders pushed against each other, then swerved hard apart to avoid a massive swarm of merging and jockeying vehicles that suddenly appeared on the highway as they reached the concrete octopus of the I-285 intersection. For several long seconds, both huntsman and outlaw biker did nothing but struggle to maintain speed and avoid crashes. A symphony of horns surrounded them. Heck struggled to maintain control; at this speed, every motion was exaggerated and any mistake was fatal. Then, as the traffic finally thinned, they were back together, grappling, blades flashing, sparking, with the force and speed of each strike. Their arms, their knives, moved almost as fast as their bikes were hurtling down the highway, blurring, showering sparks. Both bikes were pushing well past their limits, whining and shaking. Another flurry of strikes, each parried and returned, steel biting steel, again and again.

The Pagan lifted his leg off the peg, driving a powerful kick into Heck's side. Heck felt sharp pain blossom in his chest, and felt more than heard a sickening crunch as the steel-toed boot connected. Almost without thinking, he jabbed with his clenched knife hand, striking a jarring blow to the Huntsman's helmeted head. The black visor shattered, and he felt soft flesh and hard bone yield under his leather-gloved fist. Both bikes—both men, extensions of their machines—veered away and nearly wiped out from the force of their traded blows. Heck grabbed both handles, his knife still clutched. He glanced over at the Pagan. The killer's face was now partly exposed beneath the shattered visor, and Heck saw alien yellow-green eyes, almost glowing, full of hate, glaring at him. The Master of the Hunt's nose slowly reset itself, shifting back to its original shape, and the small cuts near his eyes sealed and vanished, like the bruises under his eyes. The Pagan pointed his knife at Heck, and Heck returned the salute with a wave, and the British two-finger salute that was the equivalent of a middle finger.

There was the bellow of a semi's horn, and both riders glanced back. Jimmie's rig and Lovina's Charger were coming up fast on the two riders.

Heck saw worry, maybe even fear, for just a second in the unearthly eyes, then the Master of the Hunt slipped his knife away and accelerated even more, his bike making a sick whine with the exertion. Heck holstered his blade and hunkered down on the pegs to push his own bike to its very last ounce of horsepower.

There were a couple of miles of clear highway ahead. The chase had already taken the hunted and the hunters out to where I-20 crosses the Chattahoochee River, near Six Flags. Heck was closing, less than half a mile between them, as the bikes crossed the river and continued heading west. Heck felt a strange sensation in his belly and spine, as he had just before the Huntsman kicked in Mark Stolar's hotel-room door—a feeling of fundamental wrongness, as if the air itself had become unbreathable, and gravity were cutting in and out. It was a quick sensation, in the blink of an eye, but Heck's instincts screamed, and he became very aware, very on edge. Something was wrong.

The road, the space in front of the Master of the Hunt, began to pucker, stretching inward toward an unseen point, as if the three-dimensional reality there were being sucked into a funnel, narrowed and compressed to a vanishing point. Even the sound, the howling tunnel of the road at two hundred-plus miles an hour, was distorting along with the space in front of the Pagan. Stolar had said something about “teleporting,” and, as Heck watched the surreal landscape ahead of him, he suddenly recalled the dead man's words.

“No, no, no!” Heck shouted. “Fucking, no!”

The Pagan and his bike began to stretch, to elongate, as they were pulled into the narrowing, invisible vortex, as if the light painting them were being pulled into an impossibly small pinhole, along with the matter that composed the rider and his machine.

Heck bellowed in rage and tried to force his throttle farther forward, but it had nowhere else to go. “No, you don't, you son of a bitch!” he screamed. “You come back here!”

Lovina, Jimmie, and Max saw the phenomenon, too, as the killer began to vanish before their eyes.

“Aw, shit!” Jimmie said. “Not this. It figures.”

Lovina had the same strange sensation come over her as when she had threaded the car crash—a sense of hyperawareness. She focused intently on the Pagan, on his bike. She was gaining, and she knew that she could overtake him, knew it. “You're not getting away,” she said quietly as she focused on the Pagan. Her voice didn't sound right to her own ears. “Not from me.” The cluster of highway signs off to the side of I-20, the metal tree of plaques, each bearing numbered routes and interstates, sprang into diamond-clear focus for her. Each number, each sequence of numbers, glowed in her perception and burned themselves into her brain. The Pagan was at the end of a shimmering, streaking tunnel—a shower of photons now. The world was gone, only the tunnel of light, only the Road, made up of iridescent fire, and the numbers—slithering, shifting, adding, multiplying, dividing in her mind, enveloping Lovina's thoughts, becoming Lovina's thoughts. Each number, each sequence softly clicking into inevitable place, into the only possible place it could go—pattern, motion, sequence, velocity …
click, click, click, click,
like tumblers.

Equation solved; solution found.

Heck slid to a stop on the highway, his bike skidding sideways as he did. The Master of the Hunt vanished into nothing, with a
whoosh
of air rushing to fill the vacuum. Lovina's Charger roared past Heck, and the biker watched in amazement as her car folded up, in defiance of space and dimension, as the Huntsman had, and then vanished with an identical gasp of air. Lovina was gone.

“What the hell just happened?” Heck shouted.

 

SEVENTEEN

“10-44”

“Why?” Ava asked Agnes, almost pleading. “Why won't you help me get Cole and Lexi back?” They were in the backyard of Agnes's mansion, sitting in lawn chairs under a sun-faded tin awning. Agnes had made iced tea for the two of them. Across the yard were two graves: Julia's, covered in grass and wildflowers, and Alana's, only a day old. Ava's back still ached from digging her friend's resting place. The blisters on her hands from the shovel were still raw.

“My dear,” Agnes said, “you simply don't understand the way things work here. It's not that easy.” The old woman looked across the yard. A flock of Mississippi kites were splashing in Agnes's birdbath. She sipped her tea, the ice tinkling in the glass, and smiled slightly. “I'm glad Julia isn't alone out here anymore. She has someone to keep her company. That's lovely.”

Ava stopped in mid-sip as she took her tea and looked at the smiling wisp of an old woman who had saved her life. This woman whom the hulking Scode brothers seemed to fear and cursed, whom the faceless woman behind the locked door—the one who had refused to let Ava and her friends in—had spoken of with reverence, as a protector. What had the woman and the Scodes called Agnes? The Crone?

“Look,” Ava said, “I'm scared of that motorcycle guy, too—he grew fucking horns! I get it, but somebody has got to stop him. He's got to be behind the shadow people, too.”

“Oh, yes, dear,” Agnes said, still watching the birds. “They are the children of the entity he serves, parts of the entity he serves—I'm afraid I'm not completely sure how that all works myself.”

“Well, what do you know?” Ava asked. “What is he? What do you mean ‘he serves some entity'?
Entity?
What does that even mean?”

“As I said, it's not easy to understand,” Agnes said. “Some of what I know is from the books in the basement of this house. Other pieces come from the original citizens of the Four Houses—families, like the Scodes, that he trapped here when he gained control over the town, and whom he won't allow to leave or release. He's trapped them here, poor souls, and a few of the old-timers recall when he was just an odd, quiet boy, before he became something other, and much less than human.

“And some of what I know … some of it is hard for me to disclose to you, my dear, for I fear you will doubt my sanity.”

Ava laughed and shook her head. “Whatever,” she said. “In this fucked-up burg, you seem like one of the sanest people here. Try me, Agnes.”

“I dreamed of this place—this house, the house Dennis and I now live in—I dreamed about it many times as a young girl,” Agnes said. “The dreams were different. Dennis was in many of them long before I ever met him. That was one of the ways I knew he was the one for me. There was a young girl, very sad, haunted, that I would dream of being here, being hunted by hounds. She always cut her own throat at the end, but we had many, many lovely talks. I always tried to stop her. She said she was going to get help for us. I saw knights in this house, oddly dressed, and they talked like Yanks, but their hearts were noble. They died in fire trying to defeat your motorcycle rider—he was the Black Knight. I didn't know his name then.

“This house was as much my home as the one I grew up in. The dreams about the basement were frightening, but when I found myself here the basement gave me the greatest comfort. It still does. This house has been calling to me, Ava, whispering things to me in dreams since I was nine years old. This is my house, my duty, and I'm not the first to own it.”

Ava started to speak, but something behind Agnes's eyes cowed her. Her words had shifted something in Ava, but there were no words to go along with the feelings. The old woman set down her tea glass and dabbed her narrow lips with a paper napkin. “If you truly wish to know the enemy, his name was Emile Chasseur, and he was born here when Four Houses was a trade camp—four wooden dwellings clustered together, like a fort, to provide protection against Native raids or attacks, a few small homesteads outlying the main trading post.”

“Native raids?” Ava said. “A fort? When was all this?”

“A very long time ago, dear,” Agnes said. “Emile Chasseur is old, much older than he appears.”

“You saying he's a vampire or something?” Ava asked, leaning forward in her chair. “Or he's an agent of Satan?”

“I don't know exactly what he is,” Agnes said. “I think he serves something that was the inspiration for the Western ideal of the Devil but is much older than Old Hob. When Chasseur was a boy, so the stories go, he was a quiet child; many thought him to be enfeebled of mind. He enjoyed his own company and the solitude of the woods. Then the animals began to die. They discovered the boy mutilating them and studying their insides, like an oracle, and drove him out of Four Houses. He retreated to his beloved woods and was thought to be dead. Emile Chasseur became a creature of myth, a bogeyman to make you walk a little faster as your path crossed the deep woods.

“Then one day—no one is sure of the exact date or even decade; it seems different depending on which citizen of Four Houses you ask—Chasseur returned to town. He burned down two of the finest homes here, damaged them terribly, and murdered the owners. The story says he tried to burn this house down, too, but he was driven away by the owner, who matched him in ferocity and will. She was a retired schoolteacher named Alma Kittridge. I found some of her journals in the basement.

“After that, Chasseur forced most of the townsfolk to serve him, almost worship him. Some families, like the Scodes, did so eagerly and came to hold power of their own, as his lapdogs. Others refused, rallying behind Miss Kittridge's example of defiance. Many of them ended up suffering a horrible price for standing up to Chasseur—a horrible price.”

Agnes raised her glass again to drink, and Ava noticed that her hand was trembling slightly. For the first time since Ava met her, Agnes seemed just a frail old woman. It frightened her a little.

“I heard about Four Houses in history class back in high school,” Ava said. “It was a trading post in Wyandotte County, in the early 1800s. It was near where Kansas City is now, they think—hundreds of miles from where we are. It was only around for a few years and then it was abandoned.”

“Yes, dear,” Agnes said.

“No one even knows exactly where it stood. It was nowhere near here, Agnes. It never became a town, it never had citizens or families, and it sure didn't last long enough to build grand houses like these. So where are we, really?”

Agnes stood with a bit of an effort. Ava jumped up to help her. “I think you need to see the basement, dear. Come along.” They walked up the rear stoop and entered the house through the kitchen door. Like all the doors in Agnes's home, it was reinforced with thick wooden planks, nailed in place, and numerous locks and chains, all unlocked in the daytime and secured tight come sundown. Agnes placed the two glasses in the sink.

“Tell me, Ava dear,” Agnes said as she rinsed the dishes. “Do you recall the home you lived in when you were a child? An infant?”

“Bits and pieces,” Ava said. “We moved a lot when I was little. I can remember flashes of rooms. I think I remember walking down a long hall with burgundy industrial carpet, holding my arms out so the walls could catch me—I was really young and had just started walking, my mom said. I think my brother was trying to get me. We were playing and laughing. I remember the walls, the carpet, but no, not really anything else. I've seen pictures of the house, of the rooms, but that's pretty much it. Why?”