Blackteeth Page 10

  “We’re on a road that runs parallel with the interstate,” he said. “We can cut over to the nearest town and head east. Isn’t that what you said?”

  His voice sounded as if his mouth was full of ashes. His father had just been murdered by something out of a horror movie, and he was simply driving away. None of that sounded proper or upright in any scenario.

  “Yes,” Hesper said. “Away from water. Especially fresh running water. I’m thinking about Arizona right now or some major desert.” Not Arizona. It’s too close to my mother and sister. Maybe Nevada or Utah. Great Salt Lake and all that.

  “Why—” Moss started to speak and then stopped. He swallowed and then started again, “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

  “What makes you think I didn’t tell anyone?” Hesper sighed. “Of course, I told someone.” She faltered and added, “He didn’t believe me.” Each of the last four words were spoken slowly and clearly, gritted out between her clenched teeth. “No one wants to know that some…thing…was responsible for stealing their children. And believe you me, no one wants to know what happened to those children.”

  Moss glanced at Hesper. “You mean Olivia.”

  “I mean all of them,” Hesper said slowly. “Do you really think there were only six?”

  “‘They don’t have a need for their clothing,’” Moss quoted. “You meant there was someplace where all their clothing was left, and you grabbed some for yourself.”

  “Do you really want to hear all of it right now?” Hesper asked tiredly. “It’s not a fairy tale with a happily-ever-after ending.”

  The road opened up as it crossed over a small stream and hit a large intersection. Moss came to a lurching stop at the red light. He jerked when a Honda CR-V appeared on their right with music blaring through the closed windows. A young man no older than seventeen bopped his head in time with the music, unmindful of anything but the music blasting out of his car. He gunned the Honda and drove on. Hesper realized the light had changed.

  Moss went, too, following the Honda at a slower pace. “Let’s get safe first,” he said. “I also need to call the police.”

  “His body will be gone,” Hesper said dully. “They won’t leave evidence.”

  “They’ll leave blood. They won’t take the truck, right?”

  Hesper thought about it. “They have humans who do things for them. Sick people who feed off of what the things do for them in return. I don’t know if they’ll have one close, but there’s probably one in Portland. The truck might still be there. The blood? Maybe.”

  Moss veered left and entered the freeway. “We’re on 84 now. We’re running along the river. Is that a problem?”

  “Not if we don’t stop.”

  “We won’t until we’re up on the side of a mountain.” Moss’s eyes flashed toward his dash for a moment. “And I’ve got almost a full tank of gas.”

  “The police will come after you,” Hesper said. “You’re the last one seen with me. Then there’s the rental truck.”

  “Rented under an assumed name,” Moss said.

  “Fingerprints? DNA from his blood?”

  “I’ve never been printed. I don’t think my father has been.” He frowned at the road before them. “Had been. Jesus, what am I going to tell my mother?”

  That you shouldn’t have been meddling in things you didn’t understand, Hesper thought. “I can mitigate some of it by calling June, my landlady, and my shrink. Tell them I had to get away. That’ll keep the authorities off you.” She groaned. “You didn’t really text June, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Of course not.” Hesper looked at her lap. There was a can of hairspray, a Zippo lighter, a Taser, and a cellphone. None of them belonged to her. Furthermore, she was wearing a Trail Blazers jersey that she’d never seen before. Moss had taken her bloody hoody and shirt as well as his bloody shirt and dumped them by the road right next to where his father had parked the rental van. “So, your father put me in the back of the truck and drove me to where we were stopped. You followed in your Jeep. Then you fixed all my boo boos?”

  “Yeah.”

  Hesper supposed she really feel sorry for Moss. His loss wasn’t just mundane. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do. Like she had practiced with the espresso machine, she could repeat her actions until she was doing it the way the instructors told her was correct. It didn’t work that way with people. Baring her teeth at Moss was the wrong response. Telling him that their plan was next to useless wouldn’t help. She’d said she was sorry about his father, and she did truly regret the loss of a parent. God knew she’d effectively lost both of her parents. “Did your mother know what you were doing?”

  “No,” Moss was succinct. Hesper didn’t say anything and hoped that watching Kisho had given her a little clue about waiting for the silence to be filled in. About a minute later he said, “They weren’t divorced, but Dad didn’t want to live in the same house that Olivia had been raised in. So, Mom stayed there waiting for the phone to ring, but it never did. Then there was a fire, and she had to be forcibly evicted. She lives with my aunt, but she’s got the old phone number hooked up there. Just in case Olivia calls her.”

  “Do you have brothers or sisters?”

  “Just Olivia,” he said, and she wished she hadn’t asked. Of course, he had a sister; she had vanished, and her disappearance had led to all of this.

  “And you’ve been working on your little plan for a while.”

  “A while,” he agreed.

  “What were you going to do with me?”

  “Keep you in a basement. Force you to talk. Drug you. Make you share the information.”

  “Well,” Hesper said stiffly, “that’s not at all creepy. I survived, so I must know something. You’re not the first ones to think that. Some of the police did too. I think their reasoning was that no one survives without having sacrificed something.”

  Moss glanced at her, and she saw that his expression was bitter. “I think I can say that we’ve sacrificed, too.”

  Hesper had to swallow a laugh. His decade of hell didn’t mean doodley squat balls compared to hers, but there wasn’t a point in arguing the differences. “What are you going to tell the police?”

  “I’m going to—” he cut himself off as it obviously registered with him how absurd he was going to sound telling this particular story to the authorities.

  “Yeah,” Hesper agreed. “That’s what I thought after the first time I told it.”

  The young woman knew if she truthfully answered the questions, they would doubtless lock her in a padded room and throw away the key. That had been what her father always half-jokingly said about her mother’s side of the family. They were “certifiable,” and they needed to be locked up in a padded room with the key thrown away. The young woman didn’t know where the padded room was located, but she knew going there wouldn’t be a good thing. But Hesper was all too human. When a psychiatrist spoke to her and offered to keep everything to himself, Hesper had been tempted. She told the truth.

  And the truth had been used against her.

  The truth, as one might have guessed, was vastly overrated.

  “I call them Blackteeth,” she said.

  Moss hesitated before he said, “Yeah, I remember their teeth.”

  Chapter Nine

  Blow not on dead embers.

  – Irish proverb

  Using Moss’s phone, Hesper texted June, her landlady, and Kisho. She didn’t mince words but said she had to get away. She added that she didn’t know if she would be back. She told June to keep her bicycle and her landlady to keep her stuff but asked her landlady to please turn in the pile of library books on her nightstand and to keep the deposit. She told Kisho the same story less the library books and the deposit. There was more in the text to the doctor about change being good for the soul.

  Hesper didn’t know how long the Blackteeth would hang out around Portland, chasing down her scent again and again until it rained, or they dec
ided she was no longer there. In any case, it was best that she didn’t return.

  The two Blackteeth that had attacked the rental truck would know that Hesper was no longer in Portland, but Hesper didn’t know how they would treat the information. They must be aware that she was running from them, but they couldn’t know how to track her in a human manner. She’d read stories about tall, skinny women with black hair and black eyes being sighted out near the Tennessee River in the Huntsville area for months after she’d escaped their clutches. The stories had died away, and the psychiatrist she’d told hadn’t made the connection.

  It had been her observation that the Blackteeth were like very clever animals. They were like monkeys or dolphins except psychopathic and sadistic. They hunted their prey, they took their quarry, and they never forgot a slight. Most notably, Hesper had slighted them and in no little manner. Moreover, injuring the two Blackteeth would be another mark against her. Hesper wished she had killed them instead, so there wouldn’t be stories carried back to the others.

  “I need some aspirin,” Hesper announced because everything was still hurting and thinking about it all made it hurt worse.

  “I need to go back in time,” Moss countered.

  “Okay, I need aspirin and to go back in time,” Hesper said. “I definitely wouldn’t have taken that walk by the river. And I wouldn’t have listened when someone said, ‘Little girl, you want some candy?’”

  “One of those things asked you if you wanted candy?” Moss glanced at her and then back at the interstate. It was a Thursday night and almost midnight, but there was traffic headed east and the road was busy.

  “No, but they did kind of lure me over to the river,” Hesper said. “They like the water. They lay in wait like a trapdoor spider waits for an insect to get close enough. Then they lunge out and bam!”

  Moss jolted.

  “I don’t know what happened to your sister,” Hesper said. “I wish I could tell you, but it didn’t work like that.” She closed her mouth because she’d said more on this day than she had in twelve years. She also didn’t know if she should say more. Who wanted to know that their loved one had probably died horrifically? Especially after their other loved one had just died in a similar fashion. Why, no one, dumbass, she answered herself.

  They drove for a while, and Hesper became aware that Moss’s phone was blowing up with text messages and calls. The phone was noticeably set on vibrate, and she could feel the slim object shaking in her hand. “Someone’s really wanting to talk to you,” she said. “Of course, it might be for me too, since I used your phone to text just about everyone I know in Portland.”

  Moss didn’t look away from the road. Finally, he said, “Hood River is the next exit. There’ll be stores there. A corner gas station or something. We can get you some aspirin, ibuprofen, or Tylenol if you want. I’ll make sure it’s far enough away from…running water.” The Jeep took the exit and then merged onto the road going through the town.

  “Wow, you sound like a kook,” Hesper said. It was nearly a relief to have told someone who couldn’t refute the information. It was bad enough that he’d witnessed the arm snatching her at the Willamette River and then transmogrified it in his mind, but it hadn’t been a little passing glance this time. He’d stared at the Blackteeth for an extended period of time. He’d watched them. He’d hurt one. He’d also seen their victim, his father’s corpse, who had been unmistakably dead in the road. There would be no explaining all of that away with a simple “Yeah, that was a sea lion. Sure.”

  “Food Market,” Moss said, pointing to a corner gas station/convenience store.

  “The next one,” Hesper said immediately. The place was still too close to running water in her mind. The Columbia River was probably less than a quarter mile behind them. The road didn’t go immediately to the south but headed to the east, rambling through the town, keeping a bare margin of trees and road from the dark waters that flowed down to the Pacific Ocean.

  “Walmart?” he asked as they approached a large well-lit building with enormous parking lots. “No, it’s closed. It’s after midnight now.”

  They wound through a sleepy town and found a gas station with a healthy group of customers utilizing their offerings. People waited in cars as a single attendant pumped gas for them. Several people went in and out of the store. Hesper observed them buying lottery tickets, chips, and beer, not necessarily in that order.

  Moss pulled into a parking place in the middle of other cars and looked around carefully. “It looks so normal,” he said, “like nothing ever bad happened just thirty-some miles away.”

  Hesper looked at her lap. Nothing she could think of would help him. None of Kisho’s list of things to say would make sense in the situation. However, there were more important things to consider. Moss would likely drop her off at a bus station without money, identification, or even shoes on her feet, and then he would be on his merry way, having come to some conclusion in his mind of how to explain away his father’s death and/or disappearance.

  And by the way, doesn’t that suck having two people in your family vanish? Hesper didn’t want to overly think about that. Someone was likely to notice her sudden departure, and it might even pop in the media as a how-about-that kind of human-interest story. “Former Missing Child Goes Missing Again!” or something. Her mother would be gutted. Her father would probably rub his hands together and start calling the media for exclusive interviews for the highest price.

  “You have my pack, by some chance?” Hesper asked. “My phone? My shoes?”

  “I said I didn’t know what happened to your shoes,” Moss said. “Dad probably…I don’t know. Anyway, I’ve got your pack and your phone in the back, but your phone went in the water with you so it’s probably dead. I was supposed to dump them somewhere where they would be stolen and used elsewhere.”

  “That’s, um, that’s just wonderful,” Hesper said, the sarcasm welling up in great gouts. For a long moment she succumbed to the acrimony she felt saturating her entire being. “I’ve got about $1,000 bucks in my bank account that I can access with my debit card and the clothes on my back. Not that I don’t appreciate this glorious Trail Blazers jersey, but you all just took me away from everything I own and decided that was okay because I might know something about Olivia.”

  “I’m not going to argue with you,” Moss said flatly. “It’s done. I wouldn’t have hurt you if I’d had a choice.”

  Hesper gingerly touched her nose. “I am hurt, and I don’t mean just emotionally. Did you and your father ever stop to think about what this is going to do to my mother? To my sister? To anyone I’ve gotten close to?”

  “You don’t get close to people,” Moss stated emphatically. He paused for about thirty seconds and added, “It wasn’t ideal. We just thought there might be something you would know that would help bring Olivia home. There is something. You’re going to tell me about these things. What did you call them, these Blackteeth things? You’re going to tell me everything, and it won’t be a problem to tell me because I already do believe you.”

  What Hesper really wanted was to say, “Fuck you, Moss. I’m mad at you at the same time I pity you. But mainly, fuck you, and fuck your dipshit plan because you have hosed me royally.” She didn’t say it, but she thought it, and then she thought it again because it made her feel better.

  While Hesper ruminated, Moss went inside and got various over-the-counter meds for her. He also got food to include candy and chips, an assortment of drinks, and a reusable gel ice pack for her nose. He brought them back and sat in the driver’s seat once again, staring ahead numbly.

  She looked at the bottles of pain medication first, examining each bottle thoughtfully. “I don’t remember there being such a variety.”

  “Ibuprofen works best for me,” Moss said, “but you need to eat something with it.”

  Hesper shrugged, took two ibuprofen pills with a large guzzle of Pure Leaf iced tea and unwrapped a Kit-Kat bar. She practically swallowed
the candy bar in one gulp. “I missed candy,” she said with a full mouth, “even after two years of being back I missed candy. You don’t know what you’ve missed until you haven’t had it for ten years.” Then she swallowed.

  Hesper didn’t miss that Moss grimaced at her words. He was thinking of his sister and whether she had been missing candy for ten years. She slowed down, chewed the last bite thoroughly and swallowed again. Then she drank some more of the tea. “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Uphill,” Moss said. He showed her the navigation screen on the Jeep, spreading the map so that it covered six hundred miles in all directions. “Look. This road heads out of Hood River, then up toward Mount Hood. I can’t see those things following us on foot and up the side of a mountain. If we have to stay at Timberline Lodge, we will.”

  “They don’t do that. They don’t come on foot. At least not very far. If they travel, they use water.”

  Moss stared at the gas station as if the brightly lit glass windows had answers for him. “They’re following you.”

  “What part of ‘freaky bloodhound’ did you not understand?”

  “Jesus, Hesper,” Moss snarled, “I don’t understand any of it. You’re saying they can smell your blood, and they’re tracking you that way. Do they fly? Do they do magic? Are they like you’re Harry Potter and they’re Voldemort? What?”

  “They’re not human, Moss,” Hesper said as she crumpled up the candy wrapper. She realized her other hand was touching the chain at her neck, and she let it drop away. “They don’t think like us. They don’t order pizza like us. They don’t understand how we exist. And if you think I went around having conversations with them, then you’ve got another think coming.”

  Moss turned his head toward her. Hesper glanced at him and wished she hadn’t. What she read in his expression was ten parts pity, one part compassion, plus a dash of confusion. “Then what did you do for ten years? How did you live?”