Ghost Road Blues (Pine Deep 1)

When the beating had started Mike had pleaded, and begged…and wept. Usually the tears stopped the beatings, as if it was a prize Vic sought and was satisfied with. This time there was no stopping, and if anything the tears made Vic hit harder.

The beating had started in the foyer but when Mike’s mind was able to take some sort of stock of what was happening he found that he was crammed into the corner of the kitchen with no clear memory of having crawled there, squeezed as far back as he could into the narrow slot between refrigerator and cabinet, his forearms crossed over his face. Vic stood over him, chest heaving from his exertions, sweat running down his face.

“You little piece of shit. Do you have any fucking idea how much trouble you put me to? Do you have any fucking idea how embarrassing it was to have to come out and fetch you like that? Do you have any fucking idea how embarrassing it was to have the fucking mayor of the fucking town call us up to tell us to go get you? It makes your mom and me look like bad parents. Letting you out till all fucking hours of the night. Do you know how much fucking trouble you are, you pissant little turd?”

“Please…” Mike whimpered. Tears streamed from his eyes.

“What the hell are you crying for, you little pussy? I ain’t begun to hit you yet!”

It began anew. Vic dragged Mike out of the corner and rained down punches and kicks and slaps until that was all that existed in Mike’s world.

But then something happened.

One minute his mind was filled wi

th pain and terror and shock, and as if some hand had punched a button on a remote control everything switched. All at once Mike’s mind stepped out of itself. It was the weirdest feeling in his life, and he was fully aware of it. He could feel an actual physical shift as his consciousness just lifted and moved to another place. Not far off, but not in the body that was being beaten. It was like the out-?of-?body experiences Mike had read about in articles on people who had died and were later revived. He could see Vic standing there, straddling the body that Mike’s consciousness knew was his own, but he was just not in that body. Somehow—impossibly—he’d left. Just got up and left.

He didn’t know how, and he didn’t know why, but without meaning to his thinking mind had stepped out of the body. None of the blows that rained down mattered now. He didn’t feel them—at least he didn’t care about them. He was aware of a kind of sensation, almost like a vibration, or an echo, as if when each blow landed it sent a tremor through his flesh that only vibrated against his separate self, but it was just that. A vibration without the corresponding pain. Like the tremble from the TV speakers when something in a movie blew up. Only that and nothing more.

Mike had one brief moment of panic when he thought that this meant that he was dead, that one of Vic’s punches had done something to him. Burst something, knocked something loose, and that his body was dying as he floated there watching. Was he having a near-?death experience? If so, there was no team of doctors waiting to zap him with a defibrillator unit.

The fear faded, though, as if his spirit could not hold such an intense emotion for very long. Or, perhaps, emotion was merely chemical, as his science teacher said it was. Out of the body there were no chemicals to mix to provoke or sustain emotions.

Mike felt the panic quickly replaced with a kind of bland peacefulness. Or, perhaps, a lack of caring.

He watched Vic and saw the man’s muscles bunch and roll, saw his hands move up and down, saw him shift to put power behind each blow. It was fascinating, like watching a machine, and he could study it with a total lack of emotional involvement. The hands rose and snapped down, sometimes as slaps, sometimes as punches.

As he watched, Mike saw something else, too. He saw Vic’s face grow steadily more red, saw sweat burst from his pores, saw his hands redden with tissue damage each time a blow struck one of Mike’s elbows or his forehead, saw the labored heave of his chest as the beating took its toll of Vic.

That was very, very interesting. It was a revelation that focused his mind like a laser passing through crystal. In that moment he was able to think more clearly, reason more incisively that his mind burst open with new possibilities. He could look at Vic and see him more clearly and more completely than he ever had before. In that moment, for the very first time, he was seeing the man Vic Wingate. The man. It was something that Mike, for all his intelligence, had never once really considered, and it was something that was of immeasurable importance. Even without a body or muscles or lips, Mike smiled. His spirit smiled.

Vic, it turned out, was human.

He was flesh, and blood, and breath. He was meat and bone and muscle. He could be hurt, he could tire. He was merely human and because of that it was not possible for him to be either invincible or invulnerable.

Mike had always believed that Vic was both, but Vic was really only human.

Despite the lack of chemical triggers Mike’s spirit was becoming supercharged by this amazing knowledge. It was the most important thing that Mike had ever learned, so obvious and yet Mike had never seen it. Never even suspected it.

Vic was human.

Mike considered this. Vic was forty-?seven years old. Vic was middle-?aged. No matter how strong he was, no matter how much he worked out, he was middle-?aged and every day forward would take him a day further from his youth and peak strength. Mike was fourteen. In ten years Mike would be twenty-?four and Vic would be fifty-?seven.

Unless Vic actually killed Mike—and even Mike did not believe that Vic would go that far—then one day Mike would be a fully grown adult man and Vic would be—old.

All Mike had to do was endure.

Vic was human.

Mike felt pain. Instant and overwhelming. It was everywhere in his body, and in that flash of awareness he realized that he was back in his body. He was no longer a hovering spirit, no longer detached from the bruised flesh and violated nerve endings. No longer a bystander witnessing horror but the subject of it. His mouth and nose were bleeding. One eye was puffed nearly shut—the other peered through a red haze of blood. Mike’s broken ribs were worse now, and every muscle felt mashed and ruined. He tasted blood on his thick tongue.

Vic stood above him, impossibly tall and powerful, his arms knotted with muscle, his hands clenched in fists. Gasping for air from his exertions he stared down at Mike, a smile of triumph half formed on his mouth.

But only half formed.

Above the crooked smile Vic’s eyes were slowly clouding with doubt, and double vertical lines deepened between his brows.

“You had enough, you little shit?”