14
Roger Askew was a mean son of a bitch.
He’d just told that busybody, dried-out old fruit Millie Westerbrook at the general store to stick it where the sun don’t shine, and then added that since nothing had been stuck there in ages for her, she’d probably enjoy it.
Millie had been giving Roger a hard time because he smelled like whisky and dropped the F-bomb in front of some little kids. Why couldn’t the bitch just mind her own business?
So Roger had just paid for his pack of smokes and slammed out of that goddamn place.
As he trudged through the path in the woods, he realized the reason he was in such a foul mood was all because of Tammy.
His girlfriend.
Rather, his ex-girlfriend. At least she would be, after today.
She was a lazy, good-for-nothing bitch. Roger had asked her to do one simple favor for him. Run down to the store and get him some cigarettes. And she’d said she had to pick up that brat of hers, Jessica, from school. Like the kid couldn’t have waited five minutes? Tammy was just so goddamn selfish. She never did anything for Roger.
She hadn’t even been putting out lately.
He stopped on the path, tore open the pack of cigarettes, shook one out, placed it between his lips, and lit it.
He sucked in the smoke. Ah, yes. He’d needed that.
Roger was going to be twenty-nine in a couple of weeks. It was time he made a clean break. He needed to give Tammy the old heave-ho. He deserved a girlfriend who appreciated him.
Not one who bitched at him all the time to find a job.
He’d had no choice but to quit the last one. The manager of the Jiffy Lube was a fucking prick. He’d had it out for Roger. Always on his case, making him take the worst of the freaking lemons that people drove into the place, the cars that were literally ready to die, and Roger was somehow supposed to get them purring smoothly again. Finally, he’d told his asshole manager to go fuck himself, and added that, since it had obviously been a long time since anyone had fucked his scaly self, he’d probably enjoy it.
That was one of Roger’s favorite insults.
Up ahead on the path, he saw someone walking toward him.
Roger hoped it wasn’t anyone he knew. He was in no mood to say hello to anyone. All he wanted to do, in fact, was punch someone. He had a temper. He knew that. He’d served time for beating up a few people, and Tammy had threatened to have him arrested the last time he’d hauled off and whacked her across the head. So far he had yet to smack that brat of hers, not that Jessica didn’t have it coming. But Roger knew if he ever hit the kid, he’d have to deal with the freaking banshee her mother would become.
He hated kids. Even his own. His daughter was probably eight or nine years old by now. She lived with her mother up in Pittsfield. Roger hadn’t seen her in three years, but still her bitch of a mother kept demanding he pay child support, and Roger was damned if he was going to fork over the little bit of cash he had to a kid he never saw and who he had doubts was really his, anyway. So now the mother-bitch had offered him a deal. Give up all parental rights for all time and she’d stop hounding him for money.
Roger figured that was a deal. Tomorrow morning he was heading up to Great Barrington to make that all legal.
He looked up the path again. Whoever he’d seen there was gone.
Where the fuck did they go? There was one straight path through these woods, from the store to the apartments along the river, where Roger lived. Must have been some goddamn nature explorer, heading off into the woods to scrounge for mushrooms or something freaky like that.
Above him, a crow in the bare tree branches suddenly screeched, making Roger jump a little.
He wished he could shoot the thing. Roger hated everyone and everything. Ever since he’d been born in this godforsaken little town, everyone had been against him. His parents. His teachers. The cops. That bitch who’d seduced him into getting her pregnant and then having his kid. Roger had told her to abort the thing, but she wouldn’t.
Someday, really, he ought to just give in to his rage and get a gun and start shooting. Like those guys who finally snapped and mowed down theaters full of people or kindergarten classrooms. Roger could relate. They had just had enough of all the crap that they were dealt on a daily basis. If people only weren’t so goddamn nosy—
Behind him, Roger heard a twig break.
He looked over his shoulder.
No, the sound hadn’t come from behind him. It had come from off in the woods somewhere.
It was whoever had been on the path ahead of him, now moving among the trees.
The woods were a pale blue this time of day. The sun was low in the sky, hidden by clouds, and the cold, bare trees seemed to shiver before the coming darkness. The ground was hard. There wasn’t a speck of green that Roger could make out anywhere.
Just blue. Deep blue shadows.
He took the last drag on his cigarette and dropped the butt to the ground. He picked up his pace a little.
From the other side of him, he heard another twig snap in two.
Why did his flesh crawl?
He’d been on this path hundreds, maybe thousands, of times. It was as familiar to him as his own living room. And Roger didn’t scare easily. Rather, he scared other people. That had always been the way it was.
He was a big guy. Five-eleven, one-hundred-eighty-five. He was strong. He wore his hair long, down over his shoulders, and he brandished blue, red, and purple tattoos up and down his arms. Skulls and arrows and lightning bolts. When people saw Roger Askew coming, they didn’t mess with him.
So why was he suddenly creeped out? Why did he want to get off this path as soon as he could?
The crow in the trees suddenly took off into flight, the sound of its giant wings flapping echoing down through the skeletal trees.
Roger began to walk even faster.
Up ahead, whoever he’d seen earlier stepped back onto the path from the woods.
“It’s just a woman,” Roger whispered to himself, instantly relieved, and even a little embarrassed that he’d been afraid.
A woman dressed in white. With long gray hair.
Who could be afraid of some old lady?
She stood there in the middle of the path, waiting for him.
Roger felt the fear return, flooding his body like a shot of Novocain. His limbs froze. His heart began to echo in his ears.
He wanted to turn back and run the other way.
But this was just some old bitch! Why should he fear walking past her?
Roger forced his numb legs to continue walking.
As he drew closer to the woman, he noticed a few things about her. She was watching him intently. Her face was dirty, caked with something. And she wasn’t really that old at all.
When he was just a couple of feet away from her, the woman spoke.
“Are you from around here?” she asked.
“Yes,” he told her.
“I seem to have lost my way,” the woman told him.
Roger was now standing directly opposite her. Not only wasn’t she old, but she wasn’t half bad-looking, either. Out here in the middle of the woods, Roger realized he could do anything he wanted to her. He began to get excited.
A smile started to make its way across his face, like a worm.
He never even saw the knife, but he felt it. And the warm cascade of blood that flowed from his gut down over his groin and legs. He felt that, too.
Roger looked up in disbelief at the woman.
But she was gone.
His legs crumpled beneath him. And then everything went dark.