Helltown - Jeremy Bates Page 0,12

back.

“For real!”

“Blow me!” Austin said.

Jeff slapped him on the back of the head. “Don’t be so crass.”

Austin frowned. “What’s your damage?”

“You barely know her. None of us do. Show a bit more class.”

“Why do you care?”

“It’s called respect, dickweed.” Jeff turned to the others. “So, what do you guys think? Wanna take a look under the bridge for these shoes?”

“It’s pitch black,” Cherry said.

“You’ll be fine,” Jeff told her. “You won’t even have to crouch.”

She glared at him.

Austin said, “Respect, huh?”

“Hey,” Jeff said to Cherry, “where’s your costume?”

Cherry was wearing an everyday fluorescent green blouse, denim miniskirt, and pink leg warmers.

Austin scowled. “She wouldn’t do it.”

“Do what?” Jeff asked.

“She didn’t bring a costume, so on the ride down here—”

“He told me to take off my clothes and wear my underwear around,” Cherry finished.

“Right,” Austin said. “A lingerie model.”

“Hey, that’s not a bad idea,” Jeff said, looking at Cherry with X-ray eyes.

Mandy harrumphed and Jeff pulled his eyes away and said, “Well, whatever, Mighty Mouse, if you’re too scared to come, stay here. No skin off my back. Noah, Mandy, Austin, let’s roll.” Without waiting for a response, he turned and ducked-walked into the darkness beneath the bridge.

While waiting at the BMW for the others to return from the riverbed, Steve and Jenny were playing a tongue-in-cheek game which involved one-upping the experiences they’d had thus far at med school.

“Pathology is snooze-worthy,” Steve said. He was leaning against the hood of the car, his arms folded across his chest to ward off the chill, studying the trees and thinking about those cutthroats Jeff had mentioned. Although he knew Jeff was only trying to scare them, he couldn’t help being on edge, his eyes trying to pick out anything moving in the dark that shouldn’t be moving.

“You used that last time,” Jenny said.

“Fine…don’t ask others about their grades.”

“I know! I hate gunners,” she said. “Okay. Umm…you’ll at some point walk down the street still wearing your stethoscope and people will look at you like you’re crazy.”

“Or like you’re a pompous asshole.” He thought for a moment. “You’ll learn that for almost any set of symptoms the answer could be diabetes, pregnancy, SLE, or thyroid problems.”

Jenny nodded. “Good one. Okay. At least once a week a professor will think fifty minutes is long enough to get through one hundred slides.”

“And fail.”

“Miserably.”

Just then movement in the vegetation caused Steve to start. He pushed himself off the car, wired. A moment later Jeff appeared, tall and lean, clawing through the shrubbery lining the bank.

Steve relaxed.

“Thanks for the wild goose chase, you two!” Jeff called, crossing the road toward them.

Noah and Austin and the girls appeared behind him, one after the other, single file.

“You didn’t see the shoes?” Steve said.

“We checked everywhere, mate,” Austin said, tossing his empty beer bottle over his shoulder into the trees. Glass shattered. “But I did smell something foul down there.”

“Something dead,” Mandy said.

“A chipmunk,” Cherry said.

Steve looked from Jeff to Austin to the others. “Are you guys having me on?”

“You don’t know when to give up, do you?” Jeff said. “But I gotta say, I appreciate the effort.”

Steve chuffed to himself, shaking his head. Then he started away from the car.

“What are you doing?” Jenny asked him.

“Getting the shoes to convert the unbelievers.”

Steve made his way down the bank, keeping to the path they’d already forged through the chokecherries and bracken fern. At the bottom he stopped in the center of the riverbed and faced the vacuous blackness that had gathered beneath the bridge. It seemed somehow blacker than it had earlier, threatening even.

It’s all in your head, Steve. Now get on with it.

He lit a match off his thumb, picked out his and Jenny’s original footprints among all the others, and followed them beneath the bridge to the baby shoes—or where the baby shoes had been.

Because now they were gone.

Frowning, he turned in a circle, searching the sand—and heard a noise behind him. He jerked around and squinted into the darkness. Nothing there. He wondered if it had been the wind. Only right then there was no wind. The night was tomb-still. Besides, since when did wind sound like chattering teeth?

Chattering teeth…or a baby’s rattle?

This thought raised the hackles on the back of his neck.

“Hello?” he said, though he didn’t wait for a reply. He scurried out from beneath the bridge and up the bank, irrationally convinced a rotting baby corpse was going to latch onto his legs and drag him back down to the riverbed, where the sand