Tales from the Crypt - Demon Knight Read online

  He went to the nearest car and shined his light inside. He had seen incinerated bodies before but it was never pleasant. Considering the amount of heat still pressing out from the debris, the temperature must have been upward of two-thousand degrees at its peak. But whoever had been inside wouldn’t have minded one bit; these bodies would be found in chunks and pieces that had nothing to do with the fire.

  Martel wandered over. “Suppose we ought to call an ambulance?”

  Tupper looked at him. Below his mirror sunglasses Martel was grinning like a baboon. He loved this kind of stuff, being the eager beaver and all that. It was probably the closest thing to a war he had ever seen. Tupper had heard all his tales about the artillery. There could never be enough bombs in the world for Bob Martel.

  “Call for a wrecker,” Tupper told him. “Tell them there’s no hurry, though—this mess is going to be hot for another hour or two. Have you done your diagram?”

  “Diagram?” Martel quit grinning. “I have to diagram this?”

  “How about the accident report? Done that yet?”

  He shifted uneasily. “I been directing traffic. I’ll do them later.”

  “Any witnesses to this?”

  Martel shrugged. “Just me, I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  He squared his shoulders. “Just me. I was chasing them down.”

  “So you were involved. You’ll need a form 286.”

  “No problem.”

  Tupper nodded. “Any luck finding body parts? Anything ejected? We don’t want the coyotes dragging some guy’s head away.”

  “Well now,” Martel said, frowning, “there was some kind of ejection. The guy in the convertible”—he pointed to it—“jumped out just before impact. I think he rolled down into the ditch there.”

  Tupper looked. “So where’s he at now?”

  “Burned up, I guess. At least, there ain’t nothing down there anymore.”

  “What do you mean, nothing? Bodies don’t just burn up. The skeleton can’t vanish. Go look some more.”

  Martel heaved out a sigh. “Fine, I got nothing else to do. I don’t get off at midnight or nothing.” He stomped away.

  “Keep an eye out for parts of other people,” Tupper called after him. “We want to keep this tidy.”

  “Ain’t going to be no others,” Martel said over his shoulder. “The guy in the Cadillac already headed east.”

  Tupper almost choked. “Come again?”

  Deputy Martel turned. He scratched his hat, looking befuddled. “That’s funny. I almost forgot all about it.” He ambled back, frowning, looking suddenly groggy. “This guy comes out of the wreck, and he asks me which way the other guy went, so I says east, and he says thank you, and he walks away.”

  Now Tupper frowned. Martel was no bomb-dropping wannabe war hero. This wreck had put him straight into shock. He took him by the arm. “Come on, Bob, we better sit down a minute.”

  Martel let himself be led. “Whuffor?”

  “I’ve got a bottle of water in my car, straighten you right out. You say a man walked away from the crash?”

  “Uh-huh. He was all smoky and his hair was still on fire, but he was real nice. That’s why I can’t figure out why the other fella was shooting at him.”

  Tupper took a long breath as he walked. Iron-Man Martel had watched one too many war movie. “You looky here,” he said. “You did a good job on the flares and we can leave for a while. What you need now is a lot of rest, maybe a nice cool shower.”

  “My shift’s about over anyway,” Martel said. “I do feel kinda funny all of a sudden. I’ll just drive straight home.”

  “No driving for you,” Tupper said. He passed the old Galaxy that was all lit up red and blue and white, enough warning for any traffic tonight that this was official police business, and fed Martel into the passenger seat of his own cruiser. He got in behind the wheel and deliberated for a moment. Take Bob all the way back to Junction City? That would be almost a whole hour down the drain. Wormwood was only a mile or two away, but jeez . . . Wormwood? The only place to bed down Bob’s screwball self there was the Mission Inn, which was barely one step up from a camping trailer in a junkyard. But he could rest there, take a bath there, sleep off the stress of his first real crash.

  “Ah, why the hell not,” he muttered, and drove away hoping Bob Martel wouldn’t flip out totally and start thinking he was a chicken or Napoleon or something.

  At the outskirts of Wormwood, home of the worms and not much else (to Tupper’s way of thinking), while rattling along the gravel road dodging chuckholes and collapsed barbed-wire fences, the sheriff spotted something else out of the ordinary. Under the glare of his headlights, walking determinedly at the left of the road and looking quite the cowboy, was a tall man wearing a long yellow duster coat and a classic Stetson. The heels of his snakeskin boots gleamed like oiled glass as he walked. In one hand he held a small case of some sort, perhaps his toilet items if he needed to stop and freshen up before continuing to hike the remaining five-hundred miles across the desert toward Mexico.

  Bob Martel, who had been drowsing, perked up. “Naw, it ain’t him,” he said after a beat. “Maybe it’s the other one.”

  Tupper had no idea which was supposed to be which, but flashed the overhead light bar on and off a couple times anyway. The man stopped and turned. Tupper idled up and rolled his window down a few more inches. “How do,” he said by way of greeting when the dust had settled.

  “Have you seen him?” the man asked immediately. He had a long, somewhat triangular face, dark hair, generic eyes, no apparent criminal intent—just another tall guy wearing eight-hundred bucks worth of cowboy clothes, hiking through the night on the outskirts of Wormwood. Happened all the time.

  “Seen who?” Tupper ventured.

  Bob Martel perked up again. “It is you,” he said, leaning across the seat and sticking his face an inch away from Tupper’s ear. “You, except . . . where’d you get the clothes?”

  Sheriff Tupper and the stranger made eye contact again. Silent agreement ensued: the deputy was bonkers. Tupper pushed Martel back with a shove of his elbow. “Let me do this,” he snapped. To the stranger: “Did you witness a car wreck about a half hour ago? Out on the highway?”

  He nodded. “I did.”

  “Did you see anyone jump out at the last minute?”

  He nodded again. “That would be the man I’m looking for.”

  “You saw this man jump out? You were close enough to see?”

  The stranger put a hand on the top of the car and began to drum his fingers there, thumpa-thumpa-thumpa. “Of course I was. I was in the Cadillac.”

  Tupper looked at Martel, who was gnawing on a fingernail now, and back to the cowboy. “You came out of that explosion alive?”

  “That would be impossible. I was able to get out before the gas tanks exploded.”

  “But your car was totaled. Worse than totaled.”

  “I explained this to your partner already. Rather than ask me why I’m not as dead as you’d like, ask me why I have to find Brayker, and find him tonight.”

  Tupper blinked. “Baker?”

  “Brayker. B-R-A-Y-K-E-R.”

  “Yeah, okay, I got it.” Tupper ran a hand over his face, feeling worse than he had when Mavis rang his telephone to fire the starter-gun for this stupid night. “Hop on in, we can clear this up in town.”

  The stranger opened the back door and climbed in. Bob Martel turned and eyed him up and down, mumbling to himself, until Tupper poked a finger hard against his thigh and mouthed a couple shutups.

  The stranger leaned forward to speak to the back of Tupper’s head as the sheriff gave gas for the last leg to Wormwood. “He’s a very dangerous man, Brayker is,” he said. “He’s a murderer and a thief.”

  Tupper ducked a little as he drove. The man’s breath wafting around his head smelled a lot like burnt rubber. Eight hundred bucks worth of clothes, Tupper thought, and he can’t afford a breath mint. “Plea
se don’t be telling me you’re a cop,” Tupper groaned. “Please don’t tell me you’re some kind of New York detective chasing the Mafia into Diamond County.”

  “Actually, I’m just a salesman.”

  “Salesman, eh? Okay, Mister Salesman, what drove you all the way from the east coast into New Mexico?” And if he says “My Cadillac drove me”, Tupper thought darkly, I will be forced to arrest him.

  “Mr. Brayker stole something of great value,” he said instead. “A valuable antique that is worth an enormous amount to me, and if he is anywhere near one of your quaint little towns, bad things will begin to happen. Dangerous things.”

  Tupper let his eyes drift shut for a moment. Thieves, murderers, salesmen—what’s the difference?

  A voice squawked on the police channel. Tupper got the mike and thumbed the button. “Go ahead, Mavis.”

  The radio was no top-of-the-line Motorola or RCA job, but he was used to its garbled crackling. “That’s a ten-four,” he said, and looked in the rearview mirror. Reflected from the back seat, the Salesman’s eyes were bright circles, his eyebrows arched with interest. “That was HQ,” Tupper said. “Somebody just tried to steal a car out of the Eureka Cafe parking lot.”

  The Salesman frowned. “Where might that be?”

  “Well,” Tupper said, “it might be in Wormwood. And that might be the hole-in-the-wall town just up ahead. And it might be that your thief is already doing his dirtiest. Works fast, don’t he?”

  The Salesman smiled a thin, satisfied smile. “Very fast, Sheriff. May I say the same for your driving now?”

  “You may,” Tupper replied primly, and poured on the gas.

  Uncle Willie had done some passing out in his life, and had later awakened to some hangovers that would drop an elephant like a bullet between the eyes, but this one, as he awakened from a nap of no more than twenty or thirty seconds, was right up there among the top ten. The top five, even. Aqua-Net hangovers were a special piece of hell always reserved for the topmost slots.

  He was staggering to his feet while assorted horses and mules kicked him in the head, or so it seemed. Crazy lights danced inside his eyeballs and his ears were full of steam engines chugging away and atomic bombs going off at random. When he realized he was erect, he slumped against the nearest object—the gas station—and began giving serious thought to religion, perhaps even Mormonism or Christian Science.

  A few yards away, another shape was coming to its feet. The smell of spilled gasoline was in the wind. A flicker of distant lightning exposed the scene for a millisecond: Willie cracked an eye open in time and saw a dead gas station bedecked with errant newspaper comics, tumbleweeds, and a flapping sandwich-board sign that proclaimed gas to be $1.64 a gallon.

  Propped against the wall, he opened his mouth and spit out a blot of something salty. He remembered being scared, remembered being hit by a car or falling tree. He lifted a hand and clutched his forehead against the forces that wanted it to split wide open. A car? A tree? His upper lip was torn and bleeding on the inside and a hot spot on the side of his head spoke of goose-eggs and concussions, brain hemorrhages, approaching death. Worse, his can of hair spray had rolled all the way to the street and left a long wet line of heaven behind it.

  “Shhsssmmmm . . .” he grunted. “Shsssmmm-shism-shit. Shit! My head! My head! Ow! Ow!”

  The other shape in the dark was on its feet now. Its shoes scraped on the asphalt as it wobbled upright and dragged itself, inexorably, toward Uncle Willie once more. One outstretched hand had a tiny spot on the palm that shone and winked with a hideous, greenish light of its own.

  “Devil!” Willie screamed at it. The wind tore at his ragged clothes and stood his white hair on end. “Devil!”

  The figure tottered to the right and slumped against the building a few steps away. It sagged an inch or two and said: “Didn’t see you in the dark, old fella. Sorry.”

  Uncle Willie hesitated, mentally pocketing a whole string of imprecations that might have captured him the hobo equivalent of an Emmy. He breathed easier, then clutched wildly at a pocket buried inside his wadded clothes. There was a pint of whiskey in there—and it was not broken. He fumbled it out with shaking fingers and partook of a long series of gargle-sounding swigs. “I could sue you,” he wheezed as he replaced the cap and ran his tongue over his lacerated lip, which now burned like Drano in the old eyeball. Beloved booze began immediately to wash through his system, erasing the remnants of panic. “However, I like courts and lawyers about as much as I like spiders in my shoes when I put them on. Care to drink with me?”

  The dark and frightening figure stepped close and, even in the bad light, became an ordinary man. He had a bloody nose that he swiped at with a sleeve as he took Willie’s bottle and regarded it. “Whiskey,” he said. Lightning hit the sky again and in its brief glow Uncle Willie saw deep holes for eyes, the urgent need of some shaving cream and a razor, and dark and dirty lines of soot smeared like warpaint along the lines of that face, which was not a very old face at all. The man put the spout of the bottle in his mouth and tipped his head back. One, two, three swallows, and he was done. Willie thanked the gods of mercy as it was handed back. Since the hair spray was gone this little bottle was the only thing that stood between him and death by sobriety. What a kind stranger, to have drank so little.

  “So,” Willie said, now that a bond of friendship was established, “what brings a young man like yourself here to Wormwood? And at such speed?”

  The man touched his nose again. “Wormwood, eh? Quaint. Real quaint. Gimme that bottle.”

  Willie started to protest, but the unwritten law among professional scavengers dictated that a man may drink twice of your bottle when offered it once, but no more. Willie handed the bottle over without enthusiasm, and watched while a good inch of it went down the other man’s gullet.

  “I need a place to bed down,” the man said after lowering the bottle to the height of his belt. “Know any place I could do that?”

  “Bed down?” Willie’s eyes were locked onto the bottle. Barely three, maybe four inches left. Did this man know what he was doing? Was he King of the Road enough to know the rules? “There’s but one public house left in Wormwood,” Willie said. “It’s called the Mission Inn. I can direct you to it from here.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes.” Willie began pointing around. A hint of thunder crawled across the tossing sky as if unsure which way it should go; more lightning erected tiny ladders far out on the prairie beyond the town. “You see that sign? It used to be a grocery store. One block past it is the building that used to be a motel before they re-routed the highway and put us off the beaten track. There you would take a left and look for Mission Street in about six, maybe seven blocks. The street signs have mostly fallen but you can tell Mission Street because . . .”

  His voice trailed off. The dark stranger with the weird shiny dot on his palm had hoisted the bottle to his lips in a sudden move and was drinking again. “See here,” Willie snapped. “I offered you a drink in the name of friendship, yet here you stand swilling my liquor like root beer.”

  The man lowered the bottle and eyed Willie. “Take me there,” he said.

  Willie straightened. “What?”

  “Take me there.” He gripped the bottle by the neck and waved it in front of Willie’s face, sloshing its delicate innards. “Take me to your godforsaken hotel. Let me close my eyes and sleep until I die.”

  Willie took a backward step. “Sir, you only have to walk nine or ten blocks from where we stand and you will be there.”

  “Be where?” he shouted, advancing a step. “Where it might be safe? Where I can rest? Where I do not have to deal with this every moment of my life?”

  His free hand swung up and stopped a few inches in front of Willie’s face. The one dot of green light pulsated, pulsated, then shifted slightly. It went out.

  “And I,” the man said wearily as he dropped his hand and looked at it, “must once again fight unto the dea
th.”

  Willie stood mute. This was a lunatic facing him here, a young man carrying a host of demons in his soul. Many hobos finally went senile or insane after years of bad booze and lousy nutrition he knew, but for this poor fellow the time had come far too early. Overdoses of hair spray could well be the culprit.

  “Okay,” Willie said, straightening his shoulders. “I will take you to the Mission. They know me there, and you will get a bed.”

  With a sudden move of his arm, the man gave up possession of the bottle of whiskey by thumping it against Willie’s chest. “I only ask for one night’s sleep,” he muttered, hanging his head. “One night’s sleep before we all die.”

  Willie took the bottle. He put one gnarled hand on the stranger’s shoulder but immediately felt sheepish and let it fall. “Oh, just follow me,” he said. “You got a name I can use?”

  “Brayker,” he said. “There’s a Y in it. Brayker with a Y. And for God’s sake, it isn’t Baker. I swear it isn’t Baker. Don’t ever call me Baker.”

  “Never have and never will,” Uncle Willie said, and aimed himself toward the abandoned grocery store that would lead to the abandoned motel, which would lead to Mission Street, where the sign that proclaimed its name had long ago fallen down and would never rise again.

  They walked. For lack of anything to say, Willie told him tales of his olden days as an investor in silver mines, up to the part where the truth got blurry and the booze took over, but this guy Brayker—and don’t ever call him Baker—didn’t seem to be listening, so when the rain began to drizzle down, Willie decided to shut up and went to work on his last few inches of whiskey.