The Missing Boatman.

By Keith C. Blackmore.

For Kate Anne Jack (I owe you several), Rod Redden (for reading it first), and Cathy Ryan (for pointing things out).

Chapter 1.

Combing his thinning but still black hair with his fingers, Samuel Tobbler drove his well-preserved 1995 Colony Park station wagon on the Trans-Canada highway, heading northeast on a wintry Sat.u.r.day night. He wanted to be home in his native New Brunswick before dawn, and, having no family or wife, the decision to drive out into the night was an easy one. The office would call him a fool for not waiting until morning, but he didn't care. Sam had stopped at a Tim Hortons before setting out that evening and had, to this point, devoured half a box of Timbits. The bite-sized doughnuts were made for driving and snacking and Sam's fingers kept finding their take-out box.

Peering ahead at the black velvet strip of highway illuminated by his headlights, Sam saw the road had only been partially cleared and salted. His eyes never left the gum-diseased blackness of the asphalt, and twice he caught himself drifting off, into the dangerous blur between consciousness and hypnosis. Drifting snow snaked across his path and attacked his headlights. It was only 10:42 and Sam figured on being in his own bed with a good five to six hours of sleep behind him at this time in the morning. He had burned some music onto a CD, all the noisiest industrial metal he could get his hands on, but he wasn't really listening to the mix. The noise was there to keep him awake.

Sam was a robust forty-two and, at one time, had had his own radio show during his university days in Nova Scotia. His taste for a wide spread of music had never lessened, and while he thought there was plenty of garbage put out during the mid-nineties, the new century had grown a modest crop of interesting contemporary music. He didn't want anything soft on his night drive. It would be too relaxing, too lulling, even though the war drums of the metal music had almost failed him twice this night. The noise was also there to help keep him from feeling lonely. It was a long, cold, black tongue of highway, even longer at night, and deep into the scream of winter. Very seldom did he see the red eyes of another car ahead of him, or the blind whites of oncoming traffic. When he did, they were only there for a few minutes before arching off onto a ramp and disappearing into the night, swallowed and gone.

His thoughts were currently on the month of February and how he could raise his sales just a few margins more. He knew of a youth counselor, perhaps twenty seven or so; a young buck in his s.e.xual prime. Pressed softly enough-Sam never thought of it as a hard sell, but rather steady convincing-he could make the youngster aware of his own mortality. Especially if he could lock the counselor into a permanent policy guaranteed to stick with him even in the advent of something worse than HIV or any other G.o.d-awful s.e.xual disease. Sam believed that if he called the policy a lifelong license to f.u.c.k, he'd have no trouble at all selling the plans.

Wayne. The guy's name was Wayne. Sam would have to pay Wayne a visit tomorrow, or at least give the man a call, and try to set up a first meeting. He would never discuss money during that first consultation. That was too coa.r.s.e and the mark of a newbie. Sam was smooth. He would plant the seeds of need in his prospect's mind. On the second meeting, however, he would talk policies and money. He had an eighty-five percent-success rate when it came to signing clients up if he met them a second time. And so they should. Making potential clients aware of their own mortality and what could become of their families if, for some dreadful reason, they were suddenly taken by death was a n.o.ble cause in Sam's opinion.

Stowing away that name for tomorrow, Sam reached into the box of Timbits with his right hand. He felt the remainder of the holeless mouth-sized dough b.a.l.l.s. The chocolate glazed ones had disappeared about twenty minutes ago. Those were his favorite. He fumbled around in the box. There might be one or two left on the bottom that he might have missed. Little b.a.s.t.a.r.ds had a way of doing that to him sometimes. In his eagerness to find something no longer there, he flipped the box and its remaining contents onto the floor of his wagon.

"s.h.i.t," Sam muttered, eyes flicking back and forth now, from the night road ahead to the shadows below the car's red and green glowing instrument panel. There were Timbits down there. G.o.d forbid any to land on the seat. Oh no, the little sugar s.h.i.ts had to drop to the floor. Murphy's Law, he supposed, and stretched his arm to reach beneath the gas pedal. His eyes peeped over the dash. Sam briefly imagined he would be this close to the steering wheel when he was eighty.

His fingers nudged a gathering of Timbits, pushing them away.

"s.h.i.t again," he swore, his nose practically on the rim of the steering wheel, his dim reflection in the speedometer and the windshield above. The needle held steady at one hundred kilometers an hour.

And again he pushed the elusive dough bits away.

"Gawddammit," he said, exasperated, and chanced a look downwards to spot the snacks. He took his eyes off the road, and his car began to drift to the side. The tires out of alignment just enough to take the vehicle off its straight course.

Only a second later did his right tire strike a patch of thick slush. The car slipped further to the right, the tire cutting though a stiff drift of snow. The snow gripped the tire, twisting it enough to jerk the steering column and wheel.

Then it was all ice.

"JESUS!"

Sam's Colony Park whirled across the highway and shot off into a snow-gorged trench. The car flipped over, crash-landing on its roof. Snow exploded against the windshield with a dull whump! and a dark spider-web of cracks appeared across its entire length. The seatbelt held him, and, as he was leaning forward, it did what it could to save him. Sam cracked his nose violently into the flashing dash, releasing a gout of blood like a broken faucet. His face was thrown into the steering column a split second after his nose was broken, crushing a cheek and sending bone fragments into his sinus cavity with the force of an industrial nail gun. Sam's teeth clamped shut on part of his tongue, scissoring through the muscle as clean as sheet metal cutters and causing a jet of blood to spray out forcefully on impact. A stereo k.n.o.b broke the orbital bone protecting his left eye, puncturing the white of his eye a microsecond later. His body jerked, stopped from going any further by his seatbelt, but his upper body snapped forward like a frayed steel cable. His knees went into the lower dashboard and split skin underneath. His shoulder popped out of its socket. The seatbelt went tight across his abdominal area, purpling his waistline in an instant. For a brief second, Sam's world rained Timbits, but he could have cared less for any of them, even if they were chocolate. He felt as if he had let go enough homemade chocolate in the seat of his trousers to forever cure him of the affliction.

In the quiet stillness of the aftermath, Sam hung against his seat belt, upside down, breathing as if he were in a natural birth cla.s.s. Everything above his dash was black. Snow pushed against his windshield. Blood dripped to his roof. His shoulder did not respond but screamed at his brain. His entire face buzzed. He was fortunate. Shock dampened much of his agony.

"Sweet gawd," Sam breathed, his words coming out strange and his mouth stinging as if he were chewing on broken gla.s.s. "Sweet jaysus. I'm alive."

Sam's breath slowed a bit as he began to get a grasp of the situation. His breath chilled in the air, and he felt something very wrong in his mouth. He weakly spat and drooled a long dark length of something out of his mouth, and wiped it with one hand. He didn't want to look at it. Crashing had been sudden and terrifying enough for him. It was like something had grabbed the tire and steering wheel at the same time. But if he was going to pick a season, thank the Lord for winter. The snow had cushioned the impact and damage considerably. Probably d.a.m.ned well saved his life. He would call the offices of the Department of Transportation in the morning and chew them out a new a.s.shole for their ineffective highway clearing. And what happened to his airbag?

Unbuckling his belt, he eased himself onto his roof. He slowly got a hold of his predicament. He was alive with most limbs working. He gingerly touched his mouth and winced. His eye stung like f.u.c.k, as did his shoulder. Perhaps he had a mild concussion. Whiplash even.

Then there was the rest of him, as he became aware of his hurts.

Sam groaned in growing pain as he reached, slowly, for the dash on the pa.s.senger's side. He searched for the cell phone in the glove compartment and the roadside a.s.sistance number. A thirty minute wait tops and someone would- There was a sharp rapping on his door.

Sam's head slowly came about. All he could see was snow and blackness.

"You okay in there?" a m.u.f.fled voice called out anxiously.

"Yeah, fine. Just fine!" Sam shouted back, and grimaced. "I think I s.h.i.t myself, but I'm fine!"

"Really?" the voice was amused. "How about getting you out of there?"

"Yeah, love to! How?"

"Well, you're in the snow just deep enough to cover--"hands scooped away a section of snow on Sam's door, and he could see a dark face looking in, "-your windows. Hey. How you doing?"

The face smiled, glad Sam was all right, but it glanced anxiously this way and that, almost as if looking for others.

"It's just... just me in here. Just me. Got a little busted up, but...I think... nothing serious... considering everything."

"Yeah," the smiling face agreed. "Nothing at all..." the voice trailed off. "Lucky for me you're not dead. I don't think I could handle that."

Sam chuckled at that and grimaced at the pain. He couldn't handle dying either.

"Can you open the door?"

"I think so," Sam moved around and tried the latch. The door opened with a cranky groan. Cold winter wind stung Sam's face, and he was grateful for it.

"Let's get you out of there." The man reached in with two large hands and gripped Sam's winter parka. Effortlessly, the stranger pulled Sam from the car and tossed him like a sack of sand onto the snow. The salesman landed on his back with a yelp. His neck and body flared with pain, bright and unmistakable.

"Christ! Why'd you do that for?" Sam grated. "I didn't live through the crash to be killed by you! Could've broken my d.a.m.n neck."

His savior turned out to be a big man with a shaven head. He laughed unexpectedly at the remarks, as if he had just h.o.a.rked into the teacher's water gla.s.s without getting caught. It was a high pitched sound that reached over the cold singing of the wind.

Sam's eyes slowly narrowed in disbelief.

"Relax," the man finally got out. "I ain't here to kill you. The last thing on my mind, really."

Sam saw, but he had trouble wrestling his mind around the image of his rescuer producing a tire iron at arm's length. As out of place as it seemed, Sam also realized that the guy before him was only wearing a thin denim jacket, open to the waist and exposing a red checked shirt underneath. A smile split the man's dark features, and Sam thought briefly of the human skeleton standing at attention in his old high school's laboratory. There was nothing friendly in that grin, just an unspoken confidence that, though things were fine now, they would be changing shortly.

And then the expression morphed into one of sympathy.

"I am gonna make things a mite bit more... uncomfortable."

The dark figure reared up the tire iron as if it were a baseball bat. He gave it a test swing, once, twice, and then stepped up to the plate.

Except there was no plate.

There was only a paralyzed Sam.

"Now, don't you worry. I'm an old hand at this kinda thing. A professional. You'll hurt there, but I promise you, you will live to see tomorrow."

Sam watched in disbelief as the head of the iron tapped his right knee. It kicked out in reflex. Then the iron rose up.

Sam staggered to his feet, ignoring the pain in his knees and shoulder. He meant to run, but the tire iron flew into his face instead. It crunched into the wreckage of his nose and drove him back to the snow. Sam cupped his buzzing nose with both hands. Blood flowed freely, refusing to be turned off.

"How's that feel?" came a nearby voice.

"Waid," Sam said through his red palms. "Waid," he repeated breathlessly, "I hab money... I can pay... I hab money."

"Not interested in coin, son. Sorry."

The tire iron wound up again. Sam didn't have the strength in his legs to run and didn't know where to run even if he had had the strength. Insurance. He had plenty of different policies on himself but realized with a start he didn't have any on personal injury.

"Wa-" he began to say.

But the tire iron was already flying at his head. It hit his jaw and shards of teeth sprayed across and lost themselves in the gathering snow. Sam fell over like a tree, landing heavily on his chest. The pain of his nose was a whisper in the roar of his mouth and jaw. It was broken. Never had he experienced a broken jaw-or a broken nose for that matter-but the sensation of his bones being actually broken made him gasp for air. Whirling stars filled his vision, and, for a moment, the night never looked clearer.

And somewhere, while he was in s.p.a.ce, his right leg blossomed in agony. The unexpected jolt of pain brought him crashing back to reality.

"WAID!" Sam spat out, not seeing but sensing his attacker closing in yet again.

His scream brought his vision into focus. He was on his back now, framed in ivory white and staring up into blackness.

"Pluh...pluh..." his jaw worked as muscles tried to obey and only made the pain that much more intense. But he had to talk this lunatic down before he got killed.

"Shhh...shhh...relax..." came the mellow voice. But there was something terrifying in the tone. There was a breathless eagerness to it. Like a hunter watching and praying for the deer to take that final clarifying step into his line of fire. Then Sam saw the man's eyes above the skeleton grin. He saw the eager gleam in them.

Sam hitched in his breath.

The man stood directly over him. He tapped Sam's shoulder with the iron, drawing his attention to it. The smile disappeared, and the anger replacing it was frightening enough for Sam's bowels to spurt again.

"I said I wasn't going to kill you. What's wrong with you? Think I'm lying?" the man scoffed into the gathering wind. "I'll prove it."

Sam watched the iron rise up.

There was plenty of time to scream, and, as the iron came humming down, he gave it his best shot.

Chapter 2.

On a Sat.u.r.day night, freezing wet snow fell out of the black heavens and frosted everything in ceramic white. In the silence of this relentless coating, New York's nightlife slowed. Thick slush, despised for soaking through pricy footwear, coated the streets and sidewalks, causing most to shuffle along like ancients feeling out every careful step. A bout of snow was nothing to the people living in that great city. They'd had their share of snow in the past, enduring and digging out from some of the worse snowstorms along the eastern s...o...b..ard. And some of those were ball-breakers. They just had to take their time and hope to get to where they were going before the damp touched their socks.

Barbara watched the 57th Street zombies shuffle by with their wet feet, heedless of smacking into each other and making little effort to get out of each other's way. The sidewalks were filled with the holiday dead foraging for last minute deals and bargain sales. Or at least she thought it was the holidays. She had doubts then. Maybe the holidays were over. She warily watched the hordes. They were an unending parade moving through each other, like two currents sharing the same river. Their faces stared off without truly seeing; their bodies pushing through each other and ankle-deep snow. She hated the snow with a pa.s.sion, even more than the zombies that shunned her.

The same as rain it was, but colder. Wet snow had a deep, bone-chilling misery to it that clung to a person. The warmth of a fire was the only real thing to shake the chill off, or the coils of an electric blanket. Barbara gazed into her shopping cart of possessions and remembered she had lost hers long ago. Years ago. And where was she now, anyway? She certainly wasn't in her neighborhood anymore. None of the streets looked familiar and there were no holes leading below ground to the abandoned subway tunnels. She needed to get back there. It was drier there, though not warmer. But she had friends there who knew how to start fires. They would let her stay near one if she showed up. And there were no zombies, no zombies that stared at her and no drunken zombies that tried to beat her. But she had no idea where she was. She had wandered out with her shopping cart of possessions and memories a little too far, and now it was dark and snowing this wet s.h.i.t. The flask of whiskey she downed earlier had taken her quite a ways from her home, and she was quickly sobering up to the snow on the ground. And the zombies.

"Can't believe I went so far from home," she muttered. 'Can't believe, can't believe. I left the kids like that, too. What'll they do? Perry isn't around to fix 'em dinner... like he can cook anyways. What'll they do? Ta, do, do, do... Ta, da, da, da ..."

With that thought, she adjusted the worn looking winter coat she ferreted out of a dumpster a year ago. It was marked with stains she couldn't quite seem to get out, and she eventually gave up trying. Barbara hunched over the shopping cart's push bar like an upside-down L. She was a tall woman, standing at an even six foot when she stood up straight. These days, however, she got dizzy when she straightened up that far. Keeping low to the ground was much better for her senses, and she didn't get the urge to throw up when she was hunched over. Nowadays, as she approached her sixties, she figured it wasn't such a bad thing to have four wheels and two feet under her.

She leaned way over the bar, and tugged down on the peppermint-green and white toque covering her fuzzy mat of grey hair. She didn't want to get frostbite-couldn't get frostbite. Frostbitten ears would have to be thawed out with gasoline and salt, and would sting like a b.i.t.c.h. She slowly turned her cart around, retreating back into the alley, away from the main drag and the slow, arterial pump of traffic. She would retrace her steps back and find the way home, entrusting all to her inner navigator. She had to get back to her kids. The two kittens she found weeks ago had both been beside the body of their crushed mother. It was a good thing Barb had happened along when she did. Had they stayed with their mother in that narrow side street, they would've been squooshed by some other Chevy. Just like their dear old momma. Or the zombies would have taken them. Lord only knew how long they would have survived before the zombies trashed them. Or devoured them. Or worse.

"Da, da, da," she went on, and then started giggling for no particular reason. She did that a lot in her current days on earth. She would be walking along pushing her cart and just start giggling her a.s.s off. There really wasn't anything to be laughing at. Nothing in her life had proven to be so G.o.dd.a.m.n funny, yet at times like these, hunched over as she was, she would just get to giggling. And giggle. She wasn't crazy. That thought made her giggle again. Then she thought of her kids again. What would they eat? It was terrible to have someone depending on you all the while. It was terrible to wonder what they would do if you didn't come home in time.

She emerged from the alleyway, peering this way and that for the zombies. There was none. In New York, that was a rare thing indeed. She was between two large slop piles of garbage bags. Snow covered the bags and made them look like black boulders. Or s...o...b..a.l.l.s, huge lumpy s...o...b..a.l.l.s just begging to be rolled over and into a child's snowman. Barb could remember when she was a child with her sisters and her only brother, laughing and teasing, and how they would make snow folks. Back then, she was the youngest, and her sisters would fret over her, making certain her tartan scarf was always tied around her neck and face just right. They always took care of her. Not like her s.h.i.t of a brother. Her sisters even helped wipe her nose when it ran. Who could ask for better than that? Brad was always hoisting her up and using her as extra weight to bulldoze into their sisters, Sam and Bethany. Yelling and charging into them...

Yelling...

Barbara looked up into the headlights of a metro bus just as the front b.u.mper connected with her left side. Bone was smashed in an instant. Barbara flew for the first time in her life, but it was backwards, through the night, across the street she had wandered out into during her memories. Her flight was cancelled by a 58th Street lamppost, and it shook in fury as she bounced off its iron girth.

Barbara did not know much. She was in the hurt over her head and her brain was numb from the incoming damage reports. All of them were bad--terribly bad. She wanted to die. She wanted death in all its blackness. She never knew the bus had slowed to a stop some fifty feet from her. She did not know that while the post had stopped her, it had dropped her back into the street on her stomach, with hooked fingers trying to get a grip on asphalt.

The metro bus's engine roared, high from a shot of diesel. If she could have heard the roar, it would have reminded her of her Brad's voice--deep as it could go, trying to growl as fiercely as possible.

The engine cleared its throat again. A double warning that the zombie driver felt more than generous, given the situation. Any other time, the driver would have simply gone and wrecked whatever was available before he came. But the driver, a man in a frayed jean jacket and red checked shirt, allowed the engine to idle a moment more. His head was shaven. The grin reflected in the lit gauges of the bus was distorted and toothy. There was no one around. The meat was not moving, and he would not be coming anytime soon. The driver in the frayed jean jacket sensed this as one sniffing the air for rain. There was no need to rush this time. There was no need to rush at all. He could take his time here. n.o.body was coming.

No one at all.

A black leather boot-he loved how they shined-pumped the accelerator once again. It was such a marvelous machine! To think people actually rode around inside of them when they were obviously built for a far better purpose. A purpose he was about to teach this one lying on the road before his wheels. He cranked the machine into gear, and the bus moved forward, a silver torpedo building up speed.

Something perverse levitates Barbara up from the depths of her blackness. A part of her senses the street thrumming but can't identify just what it is or why she should be concerned. Her bed is so cold and hard and wet. And where are her sisters?

The metro's gear shifted into high.

The grin behind the windshield shrieked laughter as chrome crashed over Barbara's barely conscious form. It was a howl of release, one for the ages. The front tires went over her, then the rear. The bus ran over Barbara and it slowed to a stop almost immediately. The gears shifted into reverse, and the metro backed up over her again. Rear wheels first, crushing more bones on pavement slick with blood. There was a muted thump, thump, as if someone had just driven over a curb or a low speed b.u.mp. Winter's snow continued to fall.

The driver pulled the bus around to drink in the sight. Her mashed form was death white in the angry headlights.

The grin became vampiric as he cranked the gear-stick into first and lined up the right wheel with her lower back.

He would take his time with this one.

The second before chrome and rubber crashed over Barbara again, the gear shifted into high and a maniacal laugh split the air; a millennium howl, a scream of mirth heard only at the rave of the century, where the background music thundered and sounded like the brazen smack of rubber against flesh.

Again.

And again.