In For A Dime

John Jantunen

Description

'The post-apocalyptic love child of Stephen King and Cormac McCarthy Ten years after the calamitous events set in motion by Dylan Cleary in his attempt to bring George Cleary s last novel to life, Deacon Riis has settled back into the rather sedate life of a small-town reporter. That is, until he s invited to a New Year s Eve Party by Dylan s sister Crystal, who s now a successful writer/producer behind a wildly popular horror movie franchise and for her next big budget slasher flick she s chosen to adapt one of her grandfather s apocalyptic thrillers. On the drive up to his sister s retreat in northern Ontario, Deacon receives a text that reads, It has begun again. D. True to his word, Dylan is even then orchestrating an apparently random and increasingly savage series of attacks culled from his grandfather s last fiction and Deacon s only hope of avoiding a similar climax as the one that saw much of Mesaquakee reduced to ash will be to go all-in like Dylan,

Sujets

• Science fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 31 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781773059167
• Langue: English

Extrait

In for a Dime A Novel
John Jantunen





Contents Epigraph 1 2 3 4 Jody 5 6 7 Crystal 8 9 10 11 Jody 12 13 14 15 16 Crystal 17 18 19 20 21 Dedication About the Author Copyright


Epigraph
Dear camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with me, and still urge you, without the least idea what is our destination, Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell’d and defeated.
— Walt Whitman


1
They’d been following the flashing blue light atop a snowplough driving north on Highway 60 for over an hour. The signs passing by at intervals placed the speed limit at 90 kph , though the plough had rarely topped sixty. The highway’s two lanes had just opened up into a third to allow for passing and the incessant fidget of Crystal’s fingers on the steering wheel was giving Deacon every indication that she was at least considering making a move but was deterred from this by the three-foot-tall windrow churned up in the plough’s wake. A billowy mist all but engulfed the truck and whorls of spiralling white battered the Land Rover’s windshield, resembling not so much snowflakes as an endless barrage of powdered sugar.
For most of the drive Deacon had been inching his way through the film script Crystal had thrust into his lap just after they’d passed the We Already Miss You! billboard Tildon’s Chamber of Commerce had erected on the side of the road to complement the Your Gateway To Summer sign they’d placed ten kilometres to the south. It was a film adaptation of A Precious Few , the ninth of George Cleary’s fictions and a book that Crystal and her husband, Ward Swanson, had been trying to bring to life on the silver screen practically since the day they’d met, some eight years earlier. Reading in the car always made Deacon queasy and the blue light strobing across the page wasn’t much helping matters. Nor, for that matter, was the script itself. He’d only managed to get to page 36 but that was enough for him to glean that the only similarity between it and the novel was the title, the setting and a few of the characters’ names. All in all it was reading like some cheap horror flick, heavy on the cheese, and from what Deacon had read thus far it was making the film based on George’s A Bad Man’s Son look like a cinematic masterpiece, though Der Wüstling was anything but.
There was no doubt in Deacon’s mind that if George knew what his granddaughter and her husband were up to, he’d be rolling over in his proverbial grave. That thought as much as the motion sickness was making Deacon feel like he was going to hurl at any moment and so when he felt his Samsung S10 vibrating in his jacket pocket he took that as a more than welcome excuse to take a break.
The text on the phone’s screen read: It has begun again. D.
The caller was Unknown but the D. left little doubt in Deacon’s mind that Dylan had sent it and he was overcome with the same creeping dread as he’d had sitting in the church’s front pew before George’s funeral, some ten years previous. He’d only been staring at the text for a moment before Crystal asked, “What’s the matter, Deacon?”
He looked up from his phone, expecting to hear sirens. But the only sounds were the seesaw squeak of windshield wipers and the musical saw, like something out of an old horror movie, warbling out of the SUV’s speakers — the latest track on a playlist of demos Ward had sent her from a half-dozen composers he was considering for the film.
It was three hours past sunset and the sky, darkened by clouds, resided above them as a fathomless expanse of charcoal black. Aside from the intermittent spot of flashing blue, Deacon couldn’t see anything beyond the glare refracting from the Land Rover’s headlights. In its fluorescent sheen, Crystal’s expression betrayed a tremulous concern in perfect sync with Deacon’s mood and the music, though from the way her right hand kept wandering to the bump pressing out from within the folds of her unzipped parka, Deacon supposed she was more concerned for the safety of her unborn child than with anything he’d just read.
“You okay?” Crystal prodded when he hadn’t answered within a couple of breaths. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
It was a question begging for an answer, but he hadn’t the faintest idea of how to explain why it seemed like maybe he had, so instead he answered, “It’s nothing. Just work.”
“Work? But it’s New Year’s Eve.”
Plenty of answers to that sprung to mind. The foremost among them was, “The truth never takes a night off,” a line from a movie he’d once seen, said by some hotshot investigative journalist to his girlfriend when he’d begged off dinner with her parents. The journalist was on the trail of a corrupt cop, or maybe it was a serial killer, Deacon couldn’t remember which. Both could have equally applied to the text but hardly to Deacon’s position as the lead reporter, and owner, at a small-town newspaper and he held his tongue, instead looking back at the screen.
There were thirty-two unanswered messages below Dylan’s. The second-to-most-recent was from Gabe, the Chronicle ’s newly appointed Managing Editor, and simply asked, Deacon? It was from 7:52 — an hour and a half ago. Deacon had ignored it at the time because he hadn’t been able to summon the will to explain why he’d just up and disappeared in the middle of snow-blowing the driveway of George’s old house on Baker Street, which Gabe and his wife, Cheryl, rented from Deacon. He thumbed the snapshot of Gabe’s cherubic face beside the message, as much to distract himself from Dylan’s text as it was so that he could assure Gabe he was all right.
While he was waiting out four rings, Crystal was back to casting him fleeting glances, less skittish now than slightly amused, as if this was yet another ruse to get out of going with her, the subtle implication being that nothing short of an avalanche could possibly warrant their turning back now.
“There you are,” Gabe answered in lieu of his usual “What’s up, boss?” (itself a refinement of “What’s up, chief?”; a habit Cheryl had cured him of within a few short weeks of his taking over the paper, chastising him for cultural insensitivity though it was clear he’d only ever meant it in the journalistic sense). “I was about to send out a search party.”
“I’m with Crystal,” Deacon answered.
“Crystal?” Gabe asked, momentarily confused. Then: “You’re actually going to that thing?”
“It’s not like I had much of a choice.”
He threw a scornful glance Crystal’s way but she was bent forward, straining for any sign of the blue light, which had since vanished into the billowing haze, and didn’t notice.
There was a pause on the other end of the line, Gabe considering that, and then:
“Well, you did say you always wanted to see the place.” That much was true, since George had used the Swanson family’s northern retreat as the setting for A Precious Few , though that seemed of little consolation to Deacon now. “And who knows, you might actually have fun.”
“Stranger things have happened, for sure.”
“It’ll be good for you to get out of town for a few days, anyway.”
It was exactly what Crystal herself had said when she’d shown up at the house, enticing him to come along after he’d used every excuse he could think of not to, all sweet and cajoling, smiling and batting her eyes in playful self-mockery of the way she used to act whenever she invited him to a party back in high school: “It’ll be good for you to get out of town for a few days. It’ll be fun, I promise.”
He’d answered, “Really, I can’t,” firmly enough that he hoped it would put an end to the matter.
“You say so.”
In hindsight it was hard not to hear in that an inflection of her brother, who’d often said the same thing when Deacon had been on the wrong side of a losing argument with him. And there she was, wearing a carbon copy of Dylan’s shit-eating grin as she lashed out her hand, snatching at the drape of his hair, grabbing a fistful and winding two fingers’ worth around her knuckles almost to his scalp, dragging him wincing and cursing towards the Land Rover parked on the road.
It might make a funny story someday but he wasn’t quite ready to laugh at it yet and, by way of changing the subject, asked, “How’s things on your end?”
“Well, the town’s still buried under ten feet of snow . . .” Gabe answered.
“Nothing odd just happen?”
“Odd?”
“I don’t know. Out of place.”
“Aside from you up and vanishing . . .”
Deacon could hardly argue with that.
“What about the power?” he asked, sidestepping. “Has it come back on yet?”
“Nope. And that is a little odd. They always make sure we get back on right quick, since we’re on the same grid as the hospital. Storm of the Century, we sure got that right, huh?”
It had been the headline on the front page of last week’s paper, what the Environment Canada meteorologist Deacon had spoken to called the confluence of weather fronts tracking in from the north, east and west, dumping snow at a rate of almost two feet a day for six days straight and spreading its reach as far as the Texas panhandle. The meteorologist, as he often did whenever Deacon spoke to him, had then gone into his prophet-of-doom routine, warning that they could expect the frequency of these kinds of “weather events” to increase exponentially over the next few decades and since it was already too late to do anything about that, then maybe it was best we accepted the fact and started preparing for the worst. He wa