Full Throttle

by Joe Hill

  “Everyone is dead in the other car,” Saunders said, feeling curiously removed from himself, from his own voice.

  The wolf grunted.

  “Why not me?”

  The wolf didn’t look at him, seemed to be losing interest in the conversation. “This is first class. If you can’t get civility here, where can you get it? Besides. I’m wearing a Gieves & Hawkes. This suit set me back five hundred quid. Wouldn’t do to stain it. And what’s the point of riding first class if you have to chase down your own grub? They bring a trolley through for us.” He leafed to the next page of his Times. “At least they’re supposed to. They’re taking their fucking time about it, aren’t they?” He paused, then added, “Please pardon my language. The thing about civility—it’s hard to maintain when you’re barking mad with hunger.”

  The conductor said something in a choked, wolfish voice on the intercom, but Saunders couldn’t hear him over what his own wolf was saying to him and above the roar of blood in his ears. But he didn’t need to hear the conductor anyway, because Saunders knew what he was saying. They had arrived at the station at last. The train was slamming ungently to rest. Saunders grabbed the seat in front of him and lurched to his feet. Outside, he had a glimpse of a concrete platform, a brick breezeway, a glowing old-fashioned clock stuck up on the station wall. He began walking swiftly for the front of the car.

  “’Ey,” laughed the wolf. “Don’t you want your coat? Come on back and get it.”

  Saunders kept walking. He reached the door at the end of the cabin in five long strides and hit the DOOR OPEN button. The wolf barked a last laugh at Saunders’s back, and Saunders dared a final glance over his shoulder. The businesswolf was disappearing behind his paper once more.

  “Microsoft shares are down,” the wolf said, in a tone that somehow combined disappointment with a certain rueful satisfaction. “Nike shares are down. This isn’t a recession, you know. This is reality. You people are finding out the actual worth of the things you make: your sneakers, your software, your coffee, your myths. You people are finding out now what it’s like when you push too far into the deep, dark woods.”

  Then Saunders was out the door and on the platform. He had thought it was raining, but what came down was more of a weak, cold mist, a fine-grained moisture suspended in the air. The station exit was across the platform, a flight of stairs to the road below.

  He had gone no more than five paces before he heard loud, derisive yipping behind him and looked back to see two wolves descending from coach. Not the wolves in suits but the one in the Wolfgang Amadeus T-shirt and the other dressed for a Manchester United match. Manchester United clapped Wolfgang on the shoulder and jerked his snout in Saunders’s direction.

  Saunders ran. He had been fast once, on his track team in high school, but that had been fifty years and five thousand Whoppers ago. He didn’t need to look back to know they were behind him, loping across the concrete, and that they were faster than him. He reached the staircase and leaped down it, three, four stairs in each step, a kind of controlled falling. His breath screamed in his throat. He heard one of the wolves make a low, purring growl at the top of the stairs. (And how could they be at the top of the stairs already? It wasn’t possible that they could’ve closed so much distance so quickly, it wasn’t.)

  At the bottom of the steps was the line of gates, and the street beyond, and a taxi waiting, a black English taxi straight out of a Hitchcock movie. Saunders picked a gate and ran straight at it. The gates: a row of chrome dividers, with waist-high black Plexiglas shutters between them. You were supposed to stick your ticket into a slot on the top of the chrome dividers and the shutters would swing open, but Saunders wasn’t going to fuck with it. When he reached the Plexiglas shutters, he went right over them, in a graceless scramble, followed by a tumble to the ground.

  He sprawled onto his stomach, facedown on the rain-spattered concrete. Then he was up again. It was like a skip in a piece of film, so it hardly seemed he had gone down at all. He had never in his life imagined he could recover so quickly from a spill.

  Someone yelled behind him. Every set of gates in every train station in the UK had an officer to watch over them and take tickets manually, and Saunders thought this had to be who that was. He could even see him out of the corner of his left eye, a guy in an orange safety vest, white-haired and bearded. Saunders didn’t slow down or look over. A joke floated unbidden to his mind: Two hikers in the woods come across a bear. One of them bends over to lace his sneakers. The other hiker says, “Why tie your sneakers? You can’t outrun a bear.” And the first hiker says, “No shit, asshole. I only need to outrun you.” Pretty funny. Saunders would remind himself to laugh about it later.

  He fell against the back of the taxi, clawed for the door lever, found it, popped it open. He collapsed into the black leather seat.

  “Go,” he said to the driver. “Go.”

  “Where are we—” said the driver, in the thick accent of western England.

  “Town. Into town. I don’t know yet, just go. Please.”

  “Right then,” the driver said. The taxi loosened itself from the curb and pushed off down the avenue.

  Saunders twisted in his seat to look out the rear window as they left the train station. Manchester United and Wolfgang Amadeus had stopped at the gate. They crowded around the ticket taker, towering over him. Saunders didn’t know why the ticket man just stood there staring back at them, why he didn’t recoil and run, why they didn’t fall on him. The taxi carried him around the corner and out of sight of the station before he could see what happened next.

  He sat in the darkness, breathing fast and hard, incredulous at his own survival. His legs shook, the big muscles in his thighs bunching up and uncoiling helplessly. He had not shaken the whole time he was on the train, but now it was as if he had just climbed out of an ice bath.

  The cab glided down a long, gradual hill, past hedges and houses, dipping toward the lights of a town. Saunders found one of his hands feeling in his pocket for the cell phone he knew he didn’t have.

  “Phone,” he said, talking to himself. “Damn phone.”

  “Need a phone?” said the driver. “I’m sure there was one at the station.”

  Saunders glanced at the back of the driver’s head, peering at him in the dark of the car. A big man with long black hair tucked down into the collar of his coat.

  “There wasn’t time to stop and make a call there. Just take me to someplace with a public phone. Someplace else.”

  “There’s one at the Family Arms. That’s only a couple blocks.”

  “Family Arms? What’s that? Pub?” Saunders’s voice cracked, as if he were a fourteen-year-old in the throes of puberty.

  “Best’un in town. Also the only’un. But if I’d known that’s where you wanted me to drive you, I wouldn’t have taken the fare. It’s easier walking, see?”

  “I’ll pay you triple your usual rate. I’ve got plenty of money. I’m the richest man that’s ever sat in this fucking cab.”

  “Isn’t this my lucky day,” said the driver. The ignorant country moron had no idea Saunders had just almost been torn apart. “So what happened to your regular chauffeur?”

  “What?”

  Saunders didn’t understand the question; in truth, he hardly registered it, was distracted. They had stopped at a light, and Saunders happened to look out the window. Two teenagers stood necking on the corner. They had a couple dogs with them, who stood at their sides, whisking their tails nervously back and forth, waiting for the kids to get done kissing and start walking again. Only there was something wrong with those two kids. The taxi was moving again before Saunders figured out what it was. Those tails, fretfully whisking from side to side—Saunders hadn’t actually spotted the dogs attached to them. He wasn’t sure there had been any dogs there at all.

  “Where is this?” Saunders asked. “Where am I? Is this Foxham?”

  “We isn’t anywheres near Foxham, sir. Upper Wolverton, this is,�
� said the driver. “Which is what they call it because ‘The Middle of Nowhere’ don’t sound as good. Edge of the known world, really.”

  He eased the cab to the end of the next block and swung in at the curb. There was a pub on the corner, big plate-glass windows, bright squares of gold in the darkness, steamed over with condensation on the inside. Even shut into the backseat of the cab, Saunders could hear the noise from within. It sounded like an animal shelter.

  A small knot of people loitered outside the front door. A carved and painted wooden sign, bolted to the stone beside the door, showed a crowd of wolves standing on their hind legs gathered around a table. In the center of the table was a great silver platter, with an assortment of pale human arms laid upon it.

  “Here you go,” said the cabdriver, turning his head to look into the rear. His snout moved close to the glass that separated the front seat from the back and breathed a filmy white mist on it. “You can make your call here, I ’spect. Have to fight your way through a bit of a crowd, I’m afraid.” He made a low chuckling sound that Saunders supposed was meant to be laughter, although it sounded more like a dog trying to cough up a hairball.

  Saunders did not reply. He sat in the black leather seat, staring at the crowd outside the door of the Family Arms. They were staring back. Some of them were walking toward the cab. Saunders decided not to make any sound when they pulled him out. He had learned in Kashmir how to hold on to silence, and if he was strong, he would only need to hold on to it for about a minute and a half, and then it would be holding on to him.

  “Good little mum-and-pop place, this is,” his driver told him. “They serve up a right fine dinner in here, they do. And you know what, mate? I think you’re just in time for it.”

  By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain

  THE ROBOT SHUFFLED CLANK-CLANK INTO the pitch-dark of the bedroom, then stood staring down at the humans.

  The female human groaned and rolled away and folded a pillow over her head.

  “Gail, honey,” said the male, licking dry lips. “Mother has a headache. Can you take that noise out of here?”

  “I CAN PROVIDE A STIMULATING CUP OF COFFEE,” boomed the robot in an emotionless voice.

  “Tell her to get out, Raymond,” said the female. “My head is exploding.”

  “Go on, Gail. You can hear Mother isn’t herself,” said the male.

  “YOU ARE INCORRECT. I HAVE SCANNED HER VITALS,” said the robot. “I HAVE IDENTIFIED HER AS SYLVIA LONDON. SHE IS HERSELF.”

  The robot tilted her head to one side, inquisitively, waiting for more data. The pot on her head fell off and hit the floor with a great steely crash.

  Mother sat up screaming. It was a wretched, anguished, inhuman sound, with no words in it, and it frightened the robot so much that for a moment she forgot she was a robot and she was just Gail again. She snatched her pot off the floor and hurried clangedy-clang-clang to the relative safety of the hall.

  She peeked back into the room. Mother was already lying down, holding the pillow over her head again.

  Raymond smiled across the darkness at his daughter.

  “Maybe the robot can formulate an antidote for martini poisoning,” he whispered, and winked.

  The robot winked back.

  For a while the robot worked on her prime directive, formulating the antidote that would drive the poison out of Sylvia London’s system. The robot stirred orange juice and lemon juice and ice cubes and butter and sugar and dish soap in a coffee mug. The resulting solution foamed and turned a lurid sci-fi green, suggestive of Venusian slime and radiation.

  Gail thought the antidote might go down better with some toast and marmalade. Only there was a programming error; the toast burned. Or maybe it was her own crossed wires beginning to smoke, shorting out the subroutines that required her to follow Asimov’s laws. With her circuit boards sizzling inside her, Gail began to malfunction. She tipped over chairs with great crashes and pushed books off the kitchen counter onto the floor. It was a terrible thing, but she couldn’t help herself.

  Gail didn’t hear her mother rushing across the room behind her, didn’t know she was there until Sylvia jerked the pot off her head and flung it into the enamel sink.

  “What are you doing?” she screamed. “What in the name of sweet Mary God? If I hear one more thing crash over, I’ll take a hatchet to someone. My own self, maybe.”

  Gail said nothing, felt silence was safest.

  “Get out of here before you burn the house down. My God, the whole kitchen stinks. This toast is ruined. And what did you pour in this goddamn mug?”

  “It will cure you,” Gail said.

  “There isn’t no cure for me,” her mother said, which was a double negative, but Gail didn’t think it wise to correct her. “I wish I had one boy. Boys are quiet. You four girls are like a tree full of sparrows, the shrill way you carry on.”

  “Ben Quarrel isn’t quiet. He never stops talking.”

  “You ought to go outside. All of you ought to go outside. I don’t want to hear any of you again until I have breakfast made.”

  Gail shuffled toward the living room.

  “Take those pots off your feet,” her mother said, reaching for the pack of cigarettes on the windowsill.

  Gail daintily removed one foot, then the other, from the pots she’d been using for robot boots.

  Heather sat at the dining room table, bent over her drawing pad. The twins, Miriam and Mindy, were playing wheelbarrow. Mindy would hoist Miriam up by the ankles and walk her across the room, Miriam clambering along on her hands.

  Gail stared over Heather’s shoulder at what her older sister was drawing. Then Gail got her kaleidoscope and peered at the drawing through that. It didn’t look any better.

  She lowered her kaleidoscope and said, “Do you want me to help you with your drawing? I can show you how to draw a cat’s nose.”

  “It isn’t a cat.”

  “Oh. What is it?”

  “It’s a pony.”

  “Why is it pink?”

  “I like them pink. There should be some that are pink. That’s a better color than most of the regular horse colors.”

  “I’ve never seen a horse with ears like that. It would be better if you drew whiskers on it and let it be a cat.”

  Heather crushed her drawing in one hand and stood up so quickly she knocked over her chair.

  In the exact same moment, Mindy wheelbarrowed Miriam into the edge of the coffee table with a great bang. Miriam shrieked and grabbed her head, and Mindy dropped her ankles and Miriam hit the floor so hard the whole house shook.

  “GODDAMN IT, WILL YOU STOP THROWING THE GODDAMN CHAIRS AROUND?” screamed their mother, reeling in from the kitchen. “WHY DO YOU ALL HAVE TO THROW THE GODDAMN CHAIRS? WHAT DO I HAVE TO SAY TO MAKE YOU STOP?”

  “Heather did it,” Gail said.

  “I did not!” Heather said. “It was Gail!” She did not view this as a lie. It seemed to her that somehow Gail had done it, just by standing there and being ignorant.

  Miriam sobbed, clutching her head. Mindy picked up the book about Peter Rabbit and stood there staring into it, idly turning the pages, the young scholar bent to her studies.

  Their mother grabbed Heather by the shoulders, squeezing them until her knuckles went white.

  “I want you to go outside. All of you. Take your sisters and go away. Go far away. Go down to the lake. Don’t come back until you hear me calling.”

  They spilled into the yard, Heather and Gail and Mindy and Miriam. Miriam wasn’t crying anymore. She had stopped crying the moment their mother went back into the kitchen.

  Big sister Heather told Miriam and Mindy to sit in the sandbox and play.

  “What should I do?” Gail asked.

  “You could go drown yourself in the lake.”

  “That sounds fun,” Gail said, and skipped away down the hill.

  Miriam stood in the sandbox with a little tin shovel and watched her go. Mindy was already burying her own legs
in the sand.

  It was early and cool. The mist was over the water, and the lake was like battered steel. Gail stood on her father’s dock, next to her father’s boat, watching the way the pale vapor churned and changed in the dimness. Like being inside a kaleidoscope filled with foggy gray beach glass. She still had her kaleidoscope, patted it in the pocket of her dress. On a sunny day, Gail could see the green slopes on the other side of the water, and she could look up the stony beach, to the north, all the way to Canada, but now she could not see ten feet in front of her.

  She followed the narrow ribbon of beach toward the Quarrels’ summer place. There was only a yard of rocks and sand between the water and the embankment, less in some places.

  Something caught the light, and Gail bent to find a piece of dark green glass that had been rubbed soft by the lake. It was either green glass or an emerald. She discovered a dented silver spoon not two feet away.

  Gail turned her head and stared out again at the silvered surface of the lake.

  She had an idea a ship had gone down, someone’s schooner, not far offshore, and she was discovering the treasure washed in by the tide. A spoon and an emerald couldn’t be a coincidence.

  She lowered her head and walked along, slower now, on the lookout for more salvage. Soon enough she found a tin cowboy with a tin lasso. She felt a shiver of pleasure, but also sorrow. There had been a child on the boat.

  “He’s probably dead now,” she said to herself, and looked sadly out at the water once more. “Drowned,” she decided.

  She wished she had a yellow rose to throw into the water.

  Gail went on but had trudged hardly three paces when she heard a sound from across the lake, a long, mournful lowing, like a foghorn but also not like one.