Awake Page 30

  “What the fuck?” Ben said, but Lee could hear him and Stella fumbling to sit up and get their belts on.

  He was a quarter of a mile away from the demon. The RV was up to seventy. He kept the gas pedal jammed down to the floor and started to creep towards seventy-five.

  The last dozen seconds seemed like minutes. He saw the demon’s face getting closer and closer, the stupid grin still plastered onto its face. It slowly raised an arm and pointed at the RV. Lee aimed the RV at the grin, hoping he would be able to vaporize it.

  Ben saw what was going on at the last minute. “What are you doing? Swerve!”

  “We’d tip and be trapped. That’s what it wants,” Lee said.

  He hit seventy-five just as the engine sputtered and gave out for lack of fuel. Undaunted, Lee kept pressing the now useless gas pedal to the floor anyway, willing the vehicle forwards on momentum and sheer willpower alone. Stella screamed.

  Right before impact, he saw the demon’s hateful, cocky grin slip into something that almost looked like fear. Smiling, Lee closed his eyes.

  There was a tremendous boom, louder than anything Lee had ever heard before, and he felt a sudden immense pressure on his chest and then another boom as something smashed into him. There was a bright flash of light and then there was darkness.

  30

  Mike Rowan had gotten the call for a lot of crashes in his time working in the Maine State Patrol, but he had never gotten used to the ones that came at night. Crashes during the day were, more often than not, harmless. They were fender-benders and minor ding-ups that didn’t even require his attention, but he almost always got called out anyway because one or both of the parties wanted a police report for the insurance company.

  Night crashes were another creature altogether. Night crashes were when people died, where they got mangled. They were crashes by drunks who’d smashed into medians, gone the wrong way on the interstate, ran vans full of families off the road because they weren’t going fast enough for the drunk’s taste. Crashes by meth addicts that were on their second, third, or fourth night without sleep, speeding to their dealer to get their next fix; high school kids who were out late and fucking around, only to find out that they weren’t as infallible or immortal as they’d so foolishly thought.

  So when the call came from Jan at the dispatch that there was a crash ten miles back on the turnpike, he’d cursed to himself, knowing it would be bad. He’d been sitting in his regular speed trap, hoping to have a quiet night. A crash at midnight almost never turned out well.

  “Fucking people,” he said, and pulled his car out of the hidden driveway he loved to sit in, one that speeders never spotted until it was too late. Checking to make sure he didn’t pull out into anyone, he hit his bar flashers and drove out onto the turnpike.

  He had to drive half a mile in the opposite direction from the accident before he found the nearest turnout. “NO U-Turn”, a sign beside it said. Unless you’re a cop of course, he thought. He flipped around in it as fast as his car would go without flipping over and sped off towards the accident.

  A few cars had to pull over to let him by, but for the most part the roads were deserted. He drove towards the accident at ninety, staying in the passing lane.

  When the accident came into view he saw that it was an RV. Oh Jesus, someone’s dead for sure, Officer Rowan thought with regret.

  The RV’s front end was crumpled and it was sitting in the middle of the road like it had hit another vehicle head-on, he’d seen enough accidents to know what had happened at a glance. When he got closer though, he couldn’t make out the vehicle that the RV had collided with. “Where the hell is the other car?” he muttered.

  He had to drive another half-mile past the accident to find another turnaround so he could get on the same side of the turnpike as the accident. He drove as fast as he could.

  There were a few cars stopped behind the accident when he got to it, the drivers out and standing by the RV, presumably offering assistance. Officer Rowan parked his car in the breakdown lane, behind the other cars.

  He keyed his car radio as he put the car into park. “Officer Rowan here, looks like we’re going to need some more cars down here Jan, as well as an ambulance and a fire truck.”

  “They’re already on their way,” Jan’s voice crackled back. “They should be there in five to ten minutes.”

  “Thanks, Jan,” Rowan said. She was always on top of her stuff. Mike had become quite fond of her in the two years she had been working for the State Patrol. He kept trying to build up the confidence to ask her out on a date, but he had a hard time convincing himself that a creature as pretty as Jan Piper would have anything to do with him.

  He got out of his car and walked up to the side of the RV, where the bystanders were waiting.

  “I’ve got the situation under control everyone, you need to get back in your cars and head out so that we have room for the ambulance,” he said to the bystanders. There were three men and a woman, all of them wearing concerned looks.

  “They’ve got the door locked, we told them we were trying to help but they won’t come out,” the woman said.

  “I said I’ve got it under control, you all need to leave right now,” he said, switching to his most authoritative officer voice.

  “Well watch out, they might be crazy,” one of the men said, before he headed off with the woman to one of the cars. The other two men left without a word. One of them looked a bit drunk, but Rowan had more pressing matters to attend to.

  Officer Rowan walked around the RV, wanting to take in the scene before going into the vehicle, in case he found anything suspicious. He knew the people inside needed help, but his years of working the roads had taught him to be cautious.

  Around this time two years back, his friend and fellow officer Bryce Johnson had made a stop at an accident like this one. As soon as Johnson walked up to the window to check on the driver, the crazy bastard put a round right between Johnson’s eyes, spraying what had made up the man Rowan worked with and admired out the back of his skull, splattering it on the pavement in a gooey paste. Rowan had been in the group of officers who had chased the shooter down and put him down in a hail of gunfire. Live by the sword and die by the sword, he always said, but it had been little consolation. The one good thing he’d gotten out of the ordeal of his friend and fellow officer’s death was the lesson to never let his guard down.

  All of the damage was to the front of the vehicle, it had hit something head-on, and from the look of the skid marks, something that had been parked. He’d seen a similar accident the past Christmas, when a young man driving through heavy fog to visit family had overdriven his headlights and plowed straight into a truck that had been stopped in the middle of the road after hitting a deer. The truck’s driver had been fine, but what had been left of the young man had looked more like something out of a butcher shop than a person.

  But he couldn’t find any debris from the other vehicle, much less the vehicle itself. He noticed the RV had a large scrape along its side where it had kissed the guard rail, presumably after the initial impact. Something was leaking out of the bottom of it, near the front.

  Having taken in the damage, Rowan gave the area one last look over for the other car. Seeing nothing, he walked over to the side door of the RV, puzzled. He briefly entertained the idea of pulling out his weapon, but then decided that people in a half-million dollar RV probably wouldn’t be the types to go shooting at cops. He had a kind of sixth sense when he was in danger, from his years of patrol, and it wasn’t ringing any alarm bells now. There was something going on though…something odd.

  He knocked on the RV’s door cautiously but authoritatively. “All of you in there, if you’re able to walk, I need everybody to come out to wait for the ambulance to arrive, just to be safe. This vehicle could be a fire hazard,” he said. “There are fluids leaking out of the bottom of the vehicle.”

  “Who is it?” a frightened female voice called from the other side of the
door.

  “Maine State Patrol, I’m opening the door,” he said.

  He grabbed the handle and opened the door. Even though he’d announced himself, a pretty blonde woman screamed and ran back from the door. “Please stay where I can see you miss, I’m trying to help. There’s an ambulance and a fire truck on the way,” Officer Rowan said, putting his hand lightly on his holster.

  He walked up the stairs, and looked over to the diver’s area. The windshield was shattered, and the entire console bulged towards the driver and front passenger seats. The radio had partially ejected, and was dangling from its wires. Both airbags had deployed, and there was a man lying face-down on the driver’s side bag. He looked almost like he had suddenly decided to pop a pillow out of the steering wheel and had slouched down for a nap. A brunette woman was crouched next to the man, crying.

  Rowan keyed the radio on his chest. “Better tell that ambulance to hurry,” he said.

  He turned to the back of the rig, where the blonde had run. She was in the kitchen with another male. They were holding each other and looking at Officer Rowan with a look of mixed relief and fear, as if they didn’t quite believe their eyes.

  “I need all of you to come with me out of the RV. The engine is still smoking a little and there’s the potential that it could ignite the fluids leaking out of the vehicle,” he said to the couple, making sure his voice was loud enough for the brunette behind him to hear too.

  The apprehension on the couple’s faces disappeared, as if hearing him speak proved that he was there to help him. These people are kind of nutty, Rowan thought. He wondered if they were on drugs. He’d find out, after a wreck like this he and the rest of the state patrol were going to comb every nook and cranny of the vehicle.

  The couple climbed out of the RV, with the man leading and pulling the blonde along with him. The brunette stayed where she was though, still crying.

  “Ma’am, please. An ambulance is coming to help your friend,” he said, trying to get her to relax. “He’ll be fine.” From the look of the man, Officer Rowan didn’t think he really was fine, but he needed to calm the woman down enough to get her to leave the vehicle.

  She kept sobbing, but she stood up and allowed Officer Rowan to lead her out of the RV and to the side of the road, where the other two were waiting.

  “We were in another world,” the blonde said dreamily as Rowan left the brunette with her and the uninjured man.

  Definitely drugs, he thought. Shaking his head, he turned from them and walked back to the RV to see what he could do for the other man.

  He was just about to step into the RV when something caught his eye on the outside of the vehicle, to the right, up at the front. Wanting to get a better look, he took a step back and walked towards the strange sight.

  There was something stuck in the grill. At first he couldn’t figure out what he was looking at. It was like an abstract painting; his brain couldn’t put the strange and unfamiliar together to put together the whole picture. It hurt his brain as he tried to figure out what it was.

  It was brownish-gray and covered with what he could only describe as a cross between fur and scales. Its head was buried in the grill of the RV and was surrounded by a purple smear, but the body of the thing hung out of the RV like a stray booger. It had insect-like appendages that were black and ended in sharp points. It looked a tiny bit like a giant, mutant caterpillar. He couldn’t help but imagine it stuck to his face, its claws digging deep into his skin to secure itself as it feasted on his flesh.

  He felt nauseous. He’d been in a gunfight once, and had found bodies in hot cars that had crashed down embankments and not been found for weeks or months, tens of times; still he’d experienced nothing like the fear and revulsion that the creature evoked in him. It was unlike anything he’d thought possible, and it sent wave after wave of cold shivers rushing down his spine and radiating out through his body.

  He took a step back, almost tripping over a rock, when the unimaginable happened. The creature’s claw-legs started slowly moving one-by-one, clicking across the front of the RV. Its body pulsed in a rolling way, Rowan had never seen a creature move like it before, and he spewed vomit in response as if on command.

  Still retching, he unstrapped his service pistol and un-holstered it. Without thinking, he started shooting at the creature. The first two rounds missed, but the third caught it right in the middle of its fat body. It exploded into purple chunks, a warm fluid splattering across Rowan’s face. It smelled like a mixture of fruit and rotten fish. Rowan kept shooting at what was left of the thing’s head until his pistol clicked dry.

  Epilogue

  As Ivy looked at the grave, she thought to herself what a great place they had found for it. On each side of the grave, as far as the eye could see, was immaculately manicured, dark-green grass, sitting on rolling hills, the occasional hardwood tree providing shade. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the clearness of the day combined with the green hills made the place fit for a painting.

  She didn’t know how she should feel. She had loved him so much and without condition, but he had come in and gone out of her life so quickly. Already, she couldn’t remember what his voice sounded like, and his face was slowly fading from her memory as well.

  “I loved you, why did you abandon me?” she whispered. The only answer was a cool breeze that blew across her face.

  “We’re really sorry,” Stella said, walking up next to her, Ben’s hand in hers.

  The light caught the diamond set in Stella’s engagement ring and bounced into Ivy’s eye. “It’s okay,” she said. “I didn’t really know him for very long.”

  “Well I’m sure it still hurts,” Stella said sympathetically.

  “It does, but I feel like focusing on it only makes it worse.”

  “For me it helps me feel better,” Stella said. “Helps me come to terms with things.”

  “Well, everyone deals with things in their own way,” Ben said.

  She felt Lee’s arms wrap around her from behind, and she placed her own arms on top of them. “I love you,” he whispered in her ear.

  “I love you too,” she said.

  She stood there for a few more minutes, looking at the grave. The others didn’t say anything else. When she felt satisfied, she turned to Stella and Ben, Lee’s arms still around her. “We should get going. I haven’t eaten anything today still, and the doctor says I need to make sure I don’t miss meals.” She rubbed her belly, which was just beginning to bulge.

  “Whatever you want, are we going to stay in town tonight or start heading back to New York right away?” Stella asked.

  “Whatever everyone else wants is fine by me.”

  “We should eat here then head out,” Ben said, he and Stella turning to walk to the rental SUV the four of them were using. “I want to try pizza from that Hotlips place you guys keep saying is the best pizza in the west, maybe it’ll tide me over until I can get back to Pizza Suprema.”

  “You eat like I would have if I’d been able to pick whatever I wanted for dinner every night when I was five and wanted to be a Ninja Turtle,” Lee said, shifting his hold on Ivy from around the waist to around the shoulder. Though he could get around pretty well in his walking cast he preferred using Ivy as a crutch on that side. She was always glad to help.

  Stella laughed. “He does, doesn’t he?”

  “Screw you, Ninja Turtles were cool when we were kids and they’re still cool today.”

  As the others went on bantering, Ivy thanked God for Lee. When he’d been limp and unresponsive after the crash, she’d been certain he was dead. And he had been too, for a minute or two; before the ambulance had arrived, his heart had stopped, the doctors had said later.

  A lifelong atheist, she’d prayed and prayed at the hospital for him to pull through. When the doctors came and told her that he was going to make it, she thought her prayers had been answered. “We’re giving him drugs to keep him in a coma right now, but we’re going to ease off
them gradually, and he should be awake in a day or two,” a doctor had told her.

  But then that relief had quickly dissipated into worry again, when she realized that they still didn’t know if he had the insomnia disease. She talked to the doctors about it, and after consulting his medical records and making a call to his doctor back in Seattle, they’d agreed to do yet another test to see if he had FFI.

  Lee regained conciousness shortly after that. The doctors would only allow one visitor in the room at a time, so Ivy would sit in the room and watch TV with Lee to keep him company, while Ben and Stella waited patiently in the waiting room, occasionally going back to the nearby Augusta Hotel, where they were staying, to get some rest.

  She never said anything to Lee about it at the time, but each day she would agonize about the test results, wondering if God had given Lee back to her only for them to be told that he’d soon be taken away again. She told him she loved him every chance she could get, got the hospital to let her bring him in food he liked instead of the crap that the hospital served, spent every moment possible with him. She did everything she could for him, hoping that somehow she could convince the universe that he was too important to her to be taken away.

  She kept an eye out for the demon too, but it never showed up again. For either of them. Lee’s hallucinations didn’t come back either.

  “You’re the greatest thing that ever happened to me,” he’d said one day, and that had meant the world to her.

  Even when the doctor had come in smiling and saying he had good news, some part of her expected it to be a joke; she’d expected the doctor to say “…just kidding.”

  But he didn’t, he told them that the initial diagnosis had been a mistake. Lee didn’t have FFI. Apparently, he never had.

  The next week was a blur of happiness and waiting impatiently for Lee to get out of the hospital so they could start the rest of their lives together. Lee had some rehabilitation to do, but he was recovering quickly. “I’ve never seen someone improve so fast,” the physical therapist had said during Lee’s last session.