PART THREE: NECROPOLIS

September 29th, 1998

Prologue: Overnight Drive

I know you should have woken up earlier, Bill could hear Bridget harp. Granted, she wouldn't be wrong. It was already dark and Bill was already thirty minutes behind. As usual, just had to have that extra beer, didn't you? Now you have a load of unleaded gas big enough to blow up a city block and have a little over an hour to make a two-hour run. What a big man you are—

"Shut up, will you?" Bill grunted. They had been officially divorced for nine months but her voice still rang loud and clear in his mind. To think, he had to fight off her bloodthirsty lawyer and pay alimony only to still hear that incessantly nagging voice. Talk about irony.

He didn't even have scenery to distract himself with—Just the sound of his semi's engine revving up to seventy, his windshield wipers clearing away the rain, and the ghost of his ex-wife (the ghost of bitch past, Bill thought, chortling). He snatched his hamburger from the dashboard and took a bite. It was cold, as expected, but he didn't mind. Food was food, wasn't it?

Fat and stupid, Bridget criticized. You know the kind of diseases you can get—

Bill switched on the radio. Maybe some NPR would do the trick…

His headlights reflected off a green sign—

Raccoon City 5

St. Louis 140

Maybe he could stop in Raccoon for the night, call the folks in St. Louis and make an excuse. Flat tire or some other inconvenience. Get up early tomorrow morning and make the rest of the trip—

"Look man, I'm serious, okay?" A young man's voice came through his rig's stereo. Something about the panic in the kid's voice, like he was on the verge of pissing himself, made Bill turn the volume up. "I saw this with my own eyes."

"Oh, I believe you, buddy. I believe you," the host replied in a tone that conveyed the opposite. "Just tell us a story, tell us a story."

A snicker tinged the host's words and Bill couldn't help but follow suit.

"Oh, well, it was last Friday night—I was walking home from the bar…This woman starts coming toward me. She was staggering, you know…So I, I figured she was drunk."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay," the host interrupted, the snickering graduating to full-out laughter. Come on, enough with the foreplay, Bill thought, taking another bite of the cold hamburger. Get to the point! "Tell us, be honest now, how many drinks did you have?"

"No man, I, I barely had a buzz on," the kid replied, indignant.

"Oh, c'mon!"

"No, just listen, alright? She got closer, I got a good look at her…You had to see her eyes, her nose…Her whole face…looked like it was rotting! She looked like a corpse—like a walking corpse, man!"

"Sounds like my wife," Bill chortled.

Ex-wife, he had to remind himself. Old habits die hard, even when they do concern an old harpy.

"I've never seen anything like it," the radio kid went on. "I haven't been able to sleep since that night."

"Alright, calm down, buddy, calm down. Just…hey, you gotta stay strong. Okay? Don't give in to fear out there, right?"

"Yeah, well you got that right."

Talk about creepy, Bill thought. A lot of bull but still creepy. Just like the Lockness Monster or Bigfoot. He had been driving rigs for a good thirty years now and had driven just about every highway from California to Maine. He'd heard a lot of stories in that time, but there was nothing like stories told by folk who lived near the mountains. Bill had once heard a story about a group of cannibalistic highwaymen from an old-timer in Tennessee. Like the young man on the radio, the old man spoke with such conviction that you couldn't help believe it. At least, for as long as the story was being told.

"If you freeze up around those things…they'll sink their teeth into you. I saw it attack somebody—"

Static cut the kid off.

"Come on," Bill muttered, replacing his burger on the dash. "Just gettin' good."

He giggled the knob and hoped the station stabilized. Much like the story he heard all those years in Tennessee, he was too invested to stop. Had the goosebumps on his arms to prove it. Didn't need to sleep anyway, he thought. Now, he'd probably lay up all night in his cot, thinking the damn story over and over. If he just knew how it ended, to hear the host dismiss the kid, maybe that would rob the story of its authenticity—

Someone lumbered onto the road.

Panic coursed through Bill.

He slammed a foot on the break. The seatbelt bit into his chest and though the breaks locked, the momentum and the wet road propelled the truck forward. There was a muffled bump against the hull and his heart sank when. A high-pitched squee filled the cabin, accompanied by the stench of burning rubber.

Bill had never considered himself a religious man—far from it—but, at that moment, he prayed with every ounce of his being.

Oh, sweet Mary and Jesus, please oh please let it be a deer, a bear, anything but…

The truck finally came to a halt and a figure flew off the grill. It tumbled a few feet away, just outside the beams of Bill's headlights. Bill gripped the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles turned white.

Get out there, he told himself. See for yourself. It's just an animal.

It still took him several seconds to pry the seatbelt off and open the truck's door. The rain chilled his skin and mattered his beard. Another stench intermingled with the crisp rain. Like meat left out in the sun for too long. He trudged around to the front of the truck—

"Oh God!," he moaned, a cold chill running up his spine. Bill yanked the cap off his head and wrung it in his hands.

A young woman lay in the road. She wore a simple white blouse and jeans and her long dark hair obscured her face.

Go check her, you dumb shit, Bridget commanded. Like a donkey prodded with a stick, Bill darted forward. The closer he drew the stronger the stench became.

As though she had been dead for several days.

Some part of Bill's brain registered that, but like a whisper in a hurricane, it was lost amid his confusion.

Bill grasped her slender wrist to check for a pulse but instantly dropped it. It was ice cold. Dead cold.

What would he do? He could drive up the road, find a rest area or a gas station to call 911. But he couldn't leave her. Then, I'll take her with me.

Caught in a crisis and you turn into a sniveling coward., his ex-wife moaned.

"Oh God," he said once again—to the big man upstairs or Bridget, he wasn't sure. All he could do was stare into his headlights, his clothes already soaked through and his cap a twisted mass in his grip.

Had Bill bothered to turn around, he would have found that all of his worries would have been put to bed only to raise new ones.

The young woman stood back up.