The Dead Woman

CHAPTER ONE

With fear shooting through his veins and his pulse hammering in his head, Matt Cahill twisted the key and tromped the gas, hoping he wouldn't flood the engine of the big two-and-a-half-ton truck. It cranked a couple of times with a maddening lack of results, then caught with a rumbling growl.

Horrific, decaying figures that had been normal people only a short time earlier swarmed around the vehicle, howling in rage and blood lust. Several of them lunged in front of it, trying to cut off Matt's escape route.

Matt didn't hesitate. He slammed the truck into gear and sent it lurching forward. The woman on the seat beside him screamed as the rotting creatures caught in front of the truck scrambled to get out of its way.

Some of them made it, but one man wasn't fast enough. He threw up his arms and shrieked as the truck ran him down. Matt felt the bump as the heavy wheels passed over the body. Nothing could survive that.

And just like that, Matt was a killer again, through no fault of his own, and he had to ask himself if it would ever stop.

But it wouldn't, he knew, as long as he was a player in this game with no rules, this endless bloody chess match against the nightmarish figure that haunted him.

Mr. Dark.

# # #

One day earlier

Matt remembered a time, not so long ago, really, when it seemed like he would never be warm again.

Spending three months buried under an avalanche, tons and tons of snow and ice, probably accounted for that. Once you'd survived something like that – somehow – you had to expect to be pretty chilled.

But now all it had taken to convince him that, yes, indeed, he could be warm again, was a summer day in New Mexico, in the high, dry desert country of the Four Corners region.

More than warm. Hot as blazes, actually.

The heat came up from the asphalt of the highway's narrow shoulder through the soles of his boots and seemed to bake his toes. Pigs in a blanket, he thought.

The trucker had dropped him off a couple miles south of here, where the two-lane state blacktop crossed the interstate. Matt had intended to ride all the way to Gallup with the man, but when he had seen the red sandstone mesa rising from the desert to the north, something had told him that was the direction he needed to head. He had grown accustomed to following his hunches, even though they often led him into trouble.

"Not much up that way," the trucker had warned him, "and not much traffic on that road."

"I can walk," Matt had said, feeling confident that he could. Ever since he had returned to life after being frozen for three months under the avalanche, he had felt stronger and more vital than ever. "I want to take a closer look at that mesa."

The trucker had given him a sideways look but hadn't asked for an explanation, which was good because Matt couldn't have given him one.

What Matt hadn't reckoned on was how fast the blazing sun would leech all the juices and all the energy from a man. A dozen times while he was trudging along the blacktop, he had asked himself if he was crazy to be doing this.

And the answer, of course, was yes. He was crazy. But not just because he was walking up a New Mexico highway in the hot sun with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder that seemed to increase in weight with every step he took.

He was crazy because he saw things that couldn't be there, like the laughing, maniacal face of his personal nemesis, the creature he had dubbed Mr. Dark. He saw the rotting horror of evil on the faces of those touched by Mr. Dark.

Crazy or not, he knew in his heart those visions were real. They had led him to leave his native Pacific Northwest and wander the country. He didn't know why or how he had been brought back from death, but his instincts told him it had to have something to do with fighting Mr. Dark, doing his best to ruin the hideous creature's plans.

So that's what he had been doing for months now, following his instincts, and when they told him to check out that majestic mesa in the distance, he didn't try to talk himself out of it. He just started walking.

And scorching in the pitiless sun. He was used to nearly unending rain and cool, piney woods, not this . . . this oven that called itself a state.

He slowed as he spotted something on the side of the highway up ahead and realized it was a truck of some kind. The heat-distorted scene seemed to swim in front of Matt's eyes for a second. Distances expanded crazily, stretching out so that it was a mile to the truck, a mile he could never cover, the shape he was in.

He had been out in the sun too long. That was all there was to it.

The truck offered some shade, anyway, and maybe the driver had some water he'd be willing to share. Matt forced his feet to keep going, telling himself that it wasn't as far as it looked.

When he came closer, he saw that the truck's hood was open. Somebody else was having some bad luck today.

As Matt approached, somebody stepped away from the front of the truck. The sun's glare made it hard to distinguish details, but the figure's shape told Matt it was a woman. When he finally stepped into the blessed shade cast by the tall, canvas cover over the truck's bed, Matt paused to let his half-blinded eyes adjust.

The woman was in her thirties, good-looking, with honey-blond hair pulled back into a ponytail. She wore jeans and a t-shirt with a university logo on it.

And she was watching Matt with the wary look that any woman would display if a stranger came walking up to her in the middle of nowhere, miles from any help.

Matt stopped beside the rear of the truck, not wanting to crowd her and make any more suspicious than she already was. He lowered his duffel bag to the ground and asked, "Having trouble?"

"Something's wrong with the truck," she replied, "although I suppose that goes without saying. Do you know anything about engines?"

"A little," Matt said. "I'd be glad to take a look at it for you."

She hesitated, clearly still unsure whether to trust him completely, but the idea of being stuck out here must have overcome her nervousness. She turned her head and said, "Andrew, why don't you let this man take a look at it?"

So she wasn't alone after all. The man she called Andrew muttered something and stepped around the front of the truck where Matt could see him.

The man was about forty, broad-shouldered and sandy-haired, wearing a khaki shirt and blue jeans. Rotting skin peeled away from his broad forehead, and where his nose should have been was only a festering, oozing hole in his face.