Deathbird Stories Part 19

The car: a 1951 Packard, sea-green, huge as a Tyrannosaurus, bought late the day before, for thirty-two dollars, all she had had in her purse {all she had been able to take off his body) from a street-corner used-car lot in the filthy Negro section of Fredericksburg, Virginia.

The destination: Florida. Getaway. Hideaway.

Her eyes slid quickly guillotine closed. The uneven ratcheting of gravel under the front tires brought her sharply awake again. She pulled the car back onto the road. Over the edge, out through the right-side windows, she knew there was a sheer drop into the valley below. It was too deep and too black even to estimate the fall. Enough to kill a car, and its driver.

The road twisted back and around, heading up and up, always up and up. Fog slithered toothlessly across the road at every minor dip, and the center line had been dimmed to headlights many years before by wheels and weather. The lanes were one each way, and too narrow for a compact, much less the behemoth she spun through the turns. It smelled of vomit in the back seat. Thirty-two dollars. A dead man lying face-up on a linoleum floor, a corkscrew still in his hand.

There was no guard railing or built-up shoulder over there on her right. It ended with frost-chipped road edge, thin rut of dirt, and the drop into the abyss. Her eyes closed slowly, flickering, drooping lids over dull film of sleep...

...and woke suddenly as the right front tire left the road, skimmed across the dirt, and rode in empty air...

...her eyes snapped open, and instinctively she wrenched the wheel back hard left.

The right front tire spun against the edge, still clawing emptiness, but the Packard lurched left and forward as she hit the accelerator, and the tire chewed its way through loose topsoil and regained the road, the car now plunging hard left, suddenly rus.h.i.+ng up the short incline at the base of the rock wall, tilting, and running along the side of the wall almost horizontally.

The car struck an outcropping with a monstrous clang, and Selena was thrown against the steering wheel, crus.h.i.+ng her b.r.e.a.s.t.s against the ungiving circle. Sudden gray washed over her and she fell back, feet flopping off the pedals, arms limp at her sides.

The car rebounded, suddenly stalled, and in the North Carolina night there was only silence...

...and the sound of a storm, far off in the mountains...

Nowhere is North Carolina. Nowhere is the land of fear. Nowhere is flight without destination, only a looming back there, where all flights begin.

Selena, in fog gray, lived it again....

Three years at Duke University had taught Selena all she needed to know: that college was a dead end for her. The degree of cunning that she brought to her academic life was more than she needed to get a steady 3.2 average. It was tantamount to hunting a flea with an elephant gun. She had been fascinated briefly by some of the experimental studies done by Rhine and others in the parapsychology labs, but even that had palled quickly; they were fools, tinkering with improbabilities. Selena doted on reality.

Reality for Selena took essential form in one word: manipulation.

Hidden deep in the entrails of that word was its power-source, the word: power.

There was an electrical fascination for her in getting people to do what she wanted them to do. Often it was to their advantage, occasionally not. But they were gambited, and that was the essence of the relations.h.i.+p. After which, Selena vanished in mist and memory.

She had been the most beautiful girl in Minneapolis. From high school on, she had always had her way. It became a constant, an accepted thing--she would date the most eligible boys, she would win the queens.h.i.+p of the senior prom, she would take first- place honors on the debating team. And it became a way of life--they came to her to find out what the theme of the annual school fair should be, they came to her to find out if the new girl should be asked into the sorority, they came to her to be maneuvered, to have their decisions made for them--and it finally pa.s.sed into the realm of an unnoticed seventh sense. Selena could see and hear and smell and touch and taste and remember and...

Order people to her will. Almost unconsciously after her teens. She no longer had to work at it. They came to her and gave her what she wanted, and Selena took it as her due. And when she had left Minneapolis far behind her; when she had left Chicago behind her; when she had left New York behind her; then she no longer needed to ask people to do what she wanted them to do, to enter the regimented little ranks of her life, and march to the intricate route-step she had set for them.

College, and two brief marriages, and a modeling career, and boredom. Oh G.o.d, deadly boredom. The end result of getting whomever and whatever she wanted.

Boredom...scintillant, murk-deep boredom, that drove her to Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. Where there were men who ordered entire nations to their will. In that city, she would find the ones who could compete with her on her own level.

But it had been the same for Selena. The same as it had been in Minneapolis, when she had challenged Teddy to climb through the old, broken culvert pipe, and he had done it, though s.h.i.+vering with fear; and a rusted nail protruding from a block of sc.r.a.p wood had torn his thigh, and he had gotten lockjaw. But had done it. For her. The same as it had been at Duke, when she had seduced the a.s.sistant professor of psychology, to get the final term mark that would continue her scholars.h.i.+p, and he had done it, though cursing himself for his weakness; and he had been sacked the following year, when it had come to light, but that didn't matter to Selena for by then she had moved on. But he had done it. For her. The same as it had been in Chicago when she had befuddled the poor h.o.m.os.e.xual art director of a men's magazine, and gotten him to choose her for their centerfold, thereby making three thousand dollars for her. What had happened to him had been unpleasant, but Selena never heard about it; she had moved on. It had been the same in New York. And in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. The same. Always the same. Selena always got her way, s.h.i.+vered with delight at making these movers-&-shakers move and shake to her designs.

Until she had met the man from the government department.

He had been stronger than she had expected. And he had not thought of it as a game. What Selena had not realized in time was that he was a male counterpart of her.

He was used to winning.

The contention had been a sheaf of papers, light blue in color, that had come from a sealed file in his department. What each of them had wanted to do with those papers became unimportant the moment he stole them. Became less than unimportant in the motel, when the showdown came, and each planned on winning. Selena had used all of her standard gambits--those that had worked on the best, and the worst. None of the gambits had any effect. But then, neither had his...on her. They had jousted with one another for an hour, in all the subtle, mysterious ways of the manipulators, and in the end he had come for her with the vicious corkscrew in his hand. The corkscrew he had used less than an hour before to open the magnum of champagne.

She had struggled with him, and he had slipped on a spear of melted ice on the linoleum floor, and flailed backward, and smashed his head on the edge of the sink. At that particularly vulnerable juncture of neck and cranium; she had heard the ugly crack, like rotten wood, and he had slid sidewise, onto his back, his eyes wide open and staring, the corkscrew in his hand. And she had rifled his body, taken all the money on him, and fled....

The veil of gray tore away like mist before a storm, and Selena felt her arms hanging straight down on either side of the steering wheel, terribly heavy. She tried to move, to lever herself back into an upright position, but her upper body was without muscular control, lying against the wheel. Her long auburn hair was over her face, and she could not open her eyes.

The sound of the storm was not in her head.

Outside the Packard the mountain night had opened; black rain, thick as lava, thundered down over the silent car. Her window was open. Rain was pattering off the sill, onto her left cheek. She tried to lurch farther to the left, and succeeded in getting her head to 1011 back and to the side.

Blessed cool wetness cascaded over her hot face, and she opened her eyes.

Stringy moist strands of auburn hair hung across her face, and she moved her head idly, shaking them back with difficulty. Then she tried using her arms. They were limp from having been in that bloodless position for SO long. But agonizingly...she drew her left hand up onto her lap. Her dress was soaked through, on the left side. The Pucci c.o.c.ktail dress she had worn to aid her manipulation of the man from the government department.

It was cold and flat against her side and her left breast. She wore no underwear.

Selena rolled her body back against the seat, and a surf-crash of sickness broke over her. She pulled the door handle and barely managed to swing the door out and up, realizing the car was tilted. The door was incredibly heavy. But she threw her weight against it, and fell from the car. The slamming door barely missed her legs.

The rain helped. In a few moments she was able to stand, leaning against the side of the car. Her knees were filthy with road mud. The storm beat against her. Lightning exploded all around the mountains, chain-reacting like lunacy in a cyclotron. Thunder boomed inside the stones of the hills. Bursting outward on waves of muscularity that promised the ground beneath her would shatter in a moment.

Selena looked up into the rain, and it washed over her, plastering the thin silk c.o.c.ktail dress to the lines of her body. In a short time, a time without duration, she was able to climb into the Packard again and start the engine. She backed it off the incline, and turned on the lights. They cast fitful light across the desolate Carolina nowhere. Rain slanted through the shafts.

She let the clutch out slowly and the car moved forward, as though testing itself: a wounded creature waiting to feel the sting of pain in one of its appendages.

She drove blindly, pain in her chest and the s.h.i.+vering chill of wet clothes against her flesh keeping her alert. The road went up and around, doubling back on itself as it threaded its way through softly lit pa.s.sages in the rain-choked darkness.

Somewhere along the way, she took a wrong turn.

In that night, any turn would have been a wrong turn.

It didn't matter until the Packard began chewing itself to pieces.

At first the sound was a soft ting! as of a paper clip hitting a revolving fan. She did not realize she was hearing it for some time, until the irregularity of its occurrence struck her. Selena's brow drew down, and she bit her lip. As if the machine had been waiting for this reaction from her, the tingling sharply changed to a harsh metallic clank that came again and again, then ceased for fifteen minutes till she was lulled that it had cured itself...and then clanked again.

By the time she reached the crest of the mountain, and saw the dim lights below, the noise had changed again: it was now the sound of metal chewing on metal, the sickly diseased sound of a creature eating itself alive.

She started down the twisting nightmare with the rain suddenly slackening its beat and then ceasing entirely as she threaded her way around fallen boulders lying in the oncoming lane.

Forty minutes later she pa.s.sed the blurred and weatherbeaten sign that said PETRIE, pop. 650. It was decorated with Kiwanis and Moose emblems.

She drove down the last of the mountain slopes, and grinding hideously, pulled onto the main street of Petrie, North Carolina.

Five stores. Three on the left, two on the right. And beyond them, thirty feet beyond, a gas station.

She rolled into the station. It was a brand of gasoline she did not know. There were three men lounging on straight-backed chairs, tilted up against the wall of the slatboard station, under a protective overhang. She pulled past the pumps, the Packard ratcheting and grinding, and stopped directly in front of them. She turned off the engine and stared out at them. They stared back, unmoving.

Selena got out of the car.

They still hung there, feet off the ground, chairs back against the wall, three men of indeterminate age, tanned and lined by life in the mountains. They were alive, she could ascertain that much, for two of them were chewing gum, and the third smoked a battered meerschaum, from which a curling filigree of silver-gray smoke regularly climbed into the suspiciously gentle night breeze. She was able to tell they were alive, additionally, by the looks of malicious lechery that invaded their faces. (In the mountains, far back in the hills of nowhere, the term "cool" had been invented, without having ever been named. These people were cool: they would not acknowledge their own unsettled reactions...to anything. Like mummies they would sit, until the world around them turned to ash, and the sky dripped fire, and then they would slowly turn to one another and nod.

Coolly. But Selena, dress plastered to her ripe body, could draw reaction from a lizard, from a stone, from a gallon of sea water. They registered, and their eyes brightened. But cool. They did not speak.) "I'm having some trouble with my car," Selena said.

An unspoken chain of command was established, and the youngest of the three men--perhaps thirty-five--nudged himself forward, and the chair legs. .h.i.t the wooden platform. "What seems to be the trouble?" he asked, bored.

"Something's broken inside," she said.

Slowly, almost languorously, the man slid out of the chair. Selena thought he might just settle in a pool of tired flesh, but he came toward her, hands thrust into the back pockets of his limp coveralls. "Like what?"

Selena's hands went to her hips, and her jaw thrust out. "Friend, if I knew 'like what,' I wouldn't be asking you to look at it, now would I?"

"You ain't from 'round here," he said, moving toward the car, chewing his gum furiously.

"No, I'm not."

"Where y'from?"

"Are you going to take a look at this d.a.m.ned car or aren't you?"

The gum chewer seemed startled by her language. He stopped, looked dull. On the front porch of the station, the second man--fortyish, nearly bald, wearing a filthy coverall with the gas station emblem on the breast pocket--hit the boards with his feet.

The scene had been turned over to him: the young one had come up against something he couldn't handle.

"Well, I c'n take a look at 'er," he said, and got up. The gum moved sluggishly in his mouth, and he matched pace with it toward Selena and the car.

He stood in front of the Packard for a moment, as if trying to decide which end contained the engine. Then he fumbled around the hood, looking for the latch. With exasperation, Selena moved beside him, reaching in through the front grille. "It opens from underneath."

The older man attained a tone of cool disdain that completely repudiated his obvious unfamiliarity with the business end of an automobile: "Why, thank you, ma'am."

It was a brand of sarcasm honed to perfection by four hundred years of misdirecting the outsiders.

She opened the hood, and the man leaned over the front b.u.mper, carefully not touching the mud-spattered metal with his already-filthy coverall. He stared down into the guts of the machine for long minutes.

Finally, without looking at Selena, he said, "Why don't y'all start 'er up."

Selena felt a rising tide of frustration and fury. She got in and turned the ignition key. The engine coughed to life. The sound of metal grinding and tearing came up solidly. Superimposed as the latest symptom of a disease that had been built in sixteen years before when the car had been new. It was a strange kind of testimony to the excellence of the Packard manufacturers that the car was even able to start sixteen years later; a feat far beyond the capabilities of contemporary Detroit Iron.

The gum-chewing went on apace, the staring into the innards did not change phase, the observers said nothing, the sound of thunder caromed through the mountains.

Selena leaned out through the open door. "Can you do anything...?"

The man slowly looked up at her. His expression was one of mixed lechery and disgust. He did not have to say Lady, shut yore d.a.m.ned face, you're in awuh part of the woods now, with yore d.a.m.ned long legs and all yore d.a.m.ned pretty skin a-showin'

through that skimpy li'l dress. an' whut we want to do is whut we gonna do, so sit back an' don't be harangin' us whilst we playin' with puttin' you in yore place; he didn't have to say it. There it was, arrogant and infuriating for Selena, in his expression.

The youngest of the three ambled up beside the gum chewer, and they stared down at the machine together.

Nowhere is North Carolina. Nowhere is the land of the G.o.ds. All the G.o.ds. Not only the ancient G.o.ds who have gone to sleep, and the recent G.o.ds who are still wors.h.i.+pped, but the G.o.d of Rain, and the G.o.d of Lightning, and the G.o.d of the Hunt, who have taken on new attributes and new faces. And the newest, youngest, strongest G.o.ds: the G.o.d of Neon, the G.o.d of Smog, the G.o.d of Luck, and the Machine G.o.d. People come to wors.h.i.+p at strange altars. They place their oblations at the feet of graven images without knowing these are truly G.o.ds they have found.

The War G.o.d grows fatter each year, gorged on blood. The Love G.o.d fornicates with himself, weakening his genes, rebirthing as a thalidomide monstrosity. PainG.o.d does his work and doles out his anguish, paying no attention to the cries of those crushed beneath his millstones. But the Machine G.o.d...

The sound had grown more violent. It was an ugly sound. In final frustration, Selena shut the car down, and got out. The tableau was still the same. The little porch on the slat-walled gas station; the old man still tilted against the front wall, smoking his pipe; the two observers still looking down into the engine as though studying a slide under a microscope; the mountains looming huge and dark around the town; the sound of the storm gathering strength to hurl itself against them once more.

"All right!" Selena snapped. "Enough is enough."

The two looked at her. Then as one, they looked at the old man in the chair. And Selena realized all at once, that neither of these two fools could have done anything, had they wanted to: the old man was the mechanic. The other two were camouflage, the sportsmen who had been given Selena to toy with for a few minutes. It was the old man she should have approached.

He did not move an inch from his comfortable position as he informed her in a doughy, wheezing voice, "Can't he'p you, ma'am. Trouble you got's too big. Have t'take it on in to Shelby, or someplace, where they's 'quipped to make them kinda repairs."

"But you didn't even look at it!" Selena yelled.

"Too much. Can't fix 'er," the old man said, and closed his eyes. Smoke rose from the meerschaum once more, lazily.

The two fools stood where they were, staring once again down into the engine, as if hoping the show might resume. Selena shoved them aside and slammed the hood closed. She was speechless with fury. She strode back to the front door and started to get in. And realized...she could not go anywhere.

She needed this car in working order.

If they were tracking her, she could not afford to be without transportation.

But these fools would not--or could not--repair the engine.

She was hamstrung.

A wave of such helplessness possessed her that she almost sank down on the car seat.

The old man, without opening his eyes, said, "I s'pose you could call old Ernest...."

And the two fools fell down laughing. The youngest one rolled around on the muddy ground as though possessed by St. Vitus's Dance. The middle-aged one barked a kind of laughter Selena had not heard since she had been at the Bronx Zoo. The old man was smiling, smugly.

"Who the h.e.l.l is Ernest? And what's so funny?"

The old man opened his eyes, and looked at the middle-aged one. His laughter came under control with difficulty, but when he could speak without gasping, he wiped the tears from his eyes and said, with difficulty, "Ernest? Oh, he, uh, he r'pairs things, sometimes..."

And they fell down laughing again.

Selena watched them with incredulity. Something was funny, unquestionably. But what that something was she could not even begin to fathom. The two grown men tumbled back and forth at her feet like an unmatched set of children's toys, loose-jointed, rubber-armed, totally without control of themselves as the enormity of the joke paralyzed them. Their laughter drowned out the thunder that whipped overhead.

She had to repeat herself three times before they could hear her: "Well, all right then, why don't you just run and get 'old Ernest'!"

The youngest one sat up, suddenly. There on the ground. He looked at her. She was serious. Why the h.e.l.l shouldn't I be serious? Selena thought, interpreting his look in an instant. The young one looked over at the old one. The old one nodded with a barely perceptible movement of his head. The young one leaped to his feet and, cackling uproariously, dashed off through the town and was gone in an instant. Selena stood beside the Packard, tapping her foot. Every few seconds, the middle-aged one, now back in his chair on the porch, beside the old man, would chuckle deep in his throat, and build it till he was roaring with laughter. f.u.c.k you! thought Selena.