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Alice Isn’t Dead
Joseph Fink
From the creator of the wildly popular Welcome to Night Vale podcast comes a story about loving, about searching – and about the courage you need when you find the unexpected.For fans of Stephen King, Serial, Twin Peaks and of course the eponymous number one iTunes podcast itself.Keisha Lewis mourned the loss of her wife, Alice, who disappeared two years ago. There was a search, there was grief beyond what she thought was possible. There was a funeral.But then Keisha began to see her wife, again and again, in the background of news reports from all over America.Alice isn’t dead. And she is showing up at the scene of every tragedy in the country.Keisha shrugs off her old life and hits the road as a trucker – hoping on some level that travelling the length of the country will lead her to the person she loves.What she finds are buried crimes and monsters (both human and unimaginable), government conspiracies, haunted service stations and a darkness far older than the highway system it lies beneath.Inspired by the eponymous podcast, Alice Isn’t Dead is a story about loving, about searching – and about the courage you need when what you find is terrifyingly unexpected.Cast in the fluorescent lights of midnight diner-signs, this story is as big as the open road and as intimate as the darkness of a trucker’s cab: perfect for fans of Stephen King, Serial, Twin Peaks and American Gods.
Copyright (#u458d346a-06f3-581d-b24b-c85c54e08529)
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
Published by HarperVoyager
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Copyright © Joseph Fink 2018
Jacket design by Rob Wilson © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Joseph Fink asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008323707
Ebook Edition © November 2018 ISBN: 9780008323721
Version: 2018-10-15
Dedication (#u458d346a-06f3-581d-b24b-c85c54e08529)
To Meg, who took this road trip with me. And to Jasika and Jon, who made it possible for me to share it.
This isn’t a story. It’s a road trip.
Contents
Cover (#u8b2038db-247a-549b-85ed-aea30068d528)
Title Page (#u00176f15-df45-5f5e-8a6f-0da750998bcb)
Copyright
Dedication
Part I: Thistle
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part II: Bay and Creek
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Part III: Praxis
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Acknowledgments
About the Publisher
PART I (#u458d346a-06f3-581d-b24b-c85c54e08529)
THISTLE (#u458d346a-06f3-581d-b24b-c85c54e08529)
WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD?
Because the dead return, because light reverses, because the sky is a gap, because it’s a shout, because light reverses, because the dead return, because footsteps in the basement, because footsteps on the roof, because the sky is a shout, because it’s a gap, because the grass doesn’t grow, or grows too much, or grows wrong, because the dead return, because the dead return.
1 (#u458d346a-06f3-581d-b24b-c85c54e08529)
Keisha Taylor settled back into the booth and tried to enjoy her turkey club. The turkey club did not make this easy.
A diner attached to a gas station, a couple hours outside of Bismarck. A grassy place between towns. Keisha’s main criteria for choosing the diner had been ample parking for her truck. Once upon a time people chose food based on the season, or the migration patterns of animals. She selected her meals based on the parking situation.
Her difficult relationship with what the menu called “The Chef’s Special Club” was made more complicated by a patron in the booth adjacent to hers. The man was eating an omelet, scooping big chunks of egg with long, grease-stained fingers, and shoving them into his mouth, each bite followed by a low grunt. He was a large man, with a face that sagged on one side, a lump on the top of his shoulder, and a long fold of extra skin hanging from one arm. His clothes were filthy and she could smell him from where she sat. He smelled like rot. Not bad, exactly, but earthy, like fruit disintegrating into soil. His dirty yellow polo shirt had the word Thistle on it. He was staring at Keisha with eyes that went yellow at the edges. He chewed with his mouth open, and his teeth and food were both a dull yellow.
Keisha did her best to look anywhere else. At the crowd of bystanders behind the on-location reporter on the muted televisions, a crowd she reflexively scanned for a familiar face. Or the bathroom door as the cook took his third visit since she had arrived. At a van driving by on the highway with a cartoon logo of chickens and the name praxis! in bubble font. But the man’s grunts were insistent and soon she couldn’t look anywhere else. And then, to her horror, he got up, omelet hanging from his lips, and limped toward her like his legs had no muscle, mere sacks of meat attached loosely to his torso.
“Doesn’t look much like rain,” he said, plopping himself across the table from her and licking the egg off his lips with long wet passes of his pale tongue. The smell of damp earth got stronger. Her heart was pounding, as it often did when she felt trapped, which she often did. Her life, at the best of times, was a minefield of possible triggers for her anxiety, and this was not the best of times. “Hope you don’t mind if I join you,” he said. Not a question or a request, but a joke. He laughed, and his jaw sank crookedly into his neck.
