His answer had been immediate. No, by God. He had clung to his aging body and intemperate ego all these years and he wasn’t eager to give them up. He disliked the idea of his soul mingling with other souls. He was alone by choice and by nature, and he wanted to keep it that way.
But he wanted to live, too. It was not a love of dying that made him turn down the offer. He wanted desperately to survive. But on his own terms.
He wanted to live, and that was why he was here, prostrate at the door of his thirteen-year-old Ford pickup truck, singing “The Streets of Laredo” in a faint raw voice and wondering how to endure the thing he must do next.
* * *
To enter a vehicle one must stand up.
Even a one-legged man can stand, Kindle thought.
Unless his pain prevents him.
Unless the act of pulling himself up by the door handle of an old pickup truck grinds bone against ragged bone and causes him to stop singing and makes him scream again instead.
Unless he passes out.
But Kindle remained conscious even as the landscape performed a pirouette around the fiery axis of his spine.
His useless leg, bound and curled at the knee like the leg of a dead fly, flopped against the door of the truck.
Key! Kindle shrieked to himself.
He carried his keys with him always. He braced himself with his right hand and fished in his pocket with his left. Maybe it was stupid to lock up his truck when he lived this far from people. Who would come out here to steal such a wreck? But it was his habit to lock up the things he owned: his truck, his boat, his cabin.
He found the key, transferred it to his right hand, somehow fumbled it into the lock without moving the rest of his body.
Then he took a deep breath, slid away from the door and opened it a crack.
Good work.
But his left leg was splinted, and he dared not tamper with the splint—so how was he supposed to cram himself behind the wheel? Once behind the wheel—what then?
He took the key from the door and clasped it tight in his right hand. “Tom,” he said in a hoarse whisper, “this is the hard part. That other part was easy. This is the hard part.”
Easier still to lie down and go to sleep. Drive in the morning. Or die before dawn.
More likely that second possibility, Kindle thought. Dying would be the easiest thing of all. Maybe he could even drag himself to the cabin and die on his own sofa, which would at least lend some dignity to the event. People would find him after a while. Maybe they would find his worm-track leading down from the mountain. Goddamn, they would say, look at what this man did! What an admirable man whose corpse is lying on this sofa!
Was this his sofa? Nope, Kindle realized: This was the front seat of the old Ford pickup, and he was stretched out across the length of it.
* * *
These memory lapses were disturbing, but he imagined he could hear the echo of his own screams fading down the hillside. So perhaps it was better not to dwell on the past.
He pulled himself into a sitting position with his back against the driver’s-side door and both legs stretched out across the seat. He could see over the dash well enough. But there was no way to get a foot down to the floor pedals.
At least he was out of the wind. That was no mean accomplishment. He looked around for a way to push the pedals. His resources were meager. Within reach: an empty styrofoam cup, a snow brush, and a copy of Guns and Ammo. Not too helpful.
Oh, and one other thing. The walking stick he had used to splint his leg. The leg had swollen enormously. From crotch to knee, it looked like a cased sausage. The rags he had used to bind the splint were deeply embedded, the knots pulled tight by the pressure.
Don’t make me do this, Kindle thought. No, this is too much. I can’t even begin to do this.
But his traitorous hands were already fumbling against the feverish flesh down there.
* * *
When he came to himself again, he found the walking stick clutched in his trembling left hand.
It was still nighttime, though the Artifact had set. Maybe it was coming on toward morning. Kindle didn’t know; he didn’t wear a watch. The stars looked like morning stars.
He was shaking like a sick animal. This shaking was a bad thing, it seemed to him. Made it hard to keep the broad end of his walking stick secure against the floor pedals. And it would only get harder when the truck was moving.
He put the key into the ignition, pumped the gas pedal twice and turned the key.
The engine coughed but didn’t catch.
That was normal. Kindle sometimes thought of this old Ford as his “hiccup truck” for the way its engine fought him. It would catch, run, stall; or nearly stall, misfire, rattle and bounce for a time before it settled down. “Come on, you sack of shit,” Kindle whispered. “Come on, you lazy turd.”
The engine caught and lurched and Kindle screamed as the truck jogged on its ancient shocks. His broken leg was braced against the seat, but there was nothing to hold it and no way to prevent it flopping around in that sickening, loose way.
Kindle tried to sing “The Streets of Laredo” as he put the truck into gear and pressed the gas—a terrible stagger forward—and steered out of this dirt turnoff away from the cabin toward the logging road.
He switched on the lights. The pines crowding the roadside loomed in eerie grids of shadow.
He was sitting sideways and a little low. He wasn’t accustomed to steering with his left hand and his reflexes were shot, but he managed to aim the Ford approximately midway down this column of spooky-looking trees. God help anybody coming uphill, but who would be, at this hour?
From here into the outskirts of Buchanan was mainly a downhill ride, and Kindle found he didn’t have to work the gas pedal much; it was struggle enough to keep the walking stick pressed against the brake to impede the acceleration of the truck. It occurred to him he’d be in some profound trouble if he passed out again. “So stay awake,” he told himself. He remembered that a Place Had Been Prepared For Him in the regional hospital as long as he didn’t run his hiccup truck off the Streets of Laredo.
He passed two other cabins—the property of men as solitary as himself—but he didn’t stop. If he stopped, nobody might be home; and Kindle did not relish the prospect of starting up this truck again. Better to drive as far as possible toward Buchanan, or at least down to where the streetlights began.
But then—in a wash of fear that took him by surprise—Kindle remembered that Buchanan might not be the Buchanan he remembered.
Last week, the monsters had come to Buchanan.
Curious ambulatory sponge-things who had infected everybody’s blood.
Was this a real memory or some kind of trauma hallucination? Well, Kindle thought, it sure felt like a real memory.
Still: Monsters?
And if that was true…
He did not summon the images, but here they came: Monsters out of comic books, tentacle-headed things unloading from a flying saucer; or the zombie-eyed human eunuchs out of a dozen movies, slaves of the Overmasters and hungry for human flesh. They had Prepared a Place For Him on the communal barbecue.
Kindle shook his head. He couldn’t decide whether this was funny or scary. Maybe it would be smart just to press on the brakes and die in the dark up this mountain.
(He did, in fact, apply a sudden pressure there, because the truck had picked up a great deal of speed without his noticing.)
No, Kindle told himself sternly. No dying allowed. Go for help. Follow the plan.
See the monsters if you must.
The truck rattled on.
* * *
He had reached the suburban margin of the town just inside the city-limits sign when his pain and fatigue crested, and the truck rolled into an embankment and came to rest with its headlights pointed at Orion.
The impact dashed Kindle against the steering wheel, causing the horn to emit a squawk; then he rolled back, semiconscious, into the s
eat. The truck’s motor rumbled on.
The sound of the horn and the grinding engine woke a thirty-year-old insurance investigator named Buddy Winkler, who had recently become immortal but who still liked to get a good night’s sleep. He went to the window of his two-year-old tract house and gazed with sleepy astonishment at the semivertical Ford riding a dirt bank in the vacant lot next door. Then he phoned 911. He gathered up a blanket and hurried out to the accident, where he quickly surmised there was nothing he could do to help the injured man inside—a screaming and broken mortal man whose eyes rolled wildly at the sight of him.
Monsters, Kindle thought—dimly, when he thought at all.
Monsters leering down at him.
He screamed until he was mute.
* * *
And after a dark time he recognized hospital corridors, and understood for one lucid moment that he was lying on a gurney cart with medical staff bustling around him.
A frowning face lofted into proximity, and Kindle reached up with what remained of his strength and took this person by the collar of his gown.
“Get me,” Kindle gasped, “a human doctor.”
“Relax,” the entity pronounced. “I am human.”
“You know what I mean, you alien shitsack! Get me a human doctor, you monster!”
Kindle fell back gasping.
The man looming over him turned away. “Can we have some sedation here? The patient’s hysterical. Oh, and somebody call Matt Wheeler.”
Now I think maybe I am safe, Kindle thought, and embarked upon a sleep that would last for two days running.
* * *
Giddy light-headedness and fog. Kindle awoke once again.
He was in bed. His leg was bound and in traction. It hurt, but only a little. Kindle guessed he was sedated and that right now nothing would hurt very much.
He felt distant and vague, and he supposed if you tore off his arm and beat him with it that would be okay, too. Probably a nice opiate drip on that IV.
But the main thing was that he had made it to the hospital. He took a certain pride in that. His memory was fuzzy, but he recalled that it had been a long and harrowing journey.
A man in medical whites approached. Kindle watched this process with languorous detachment. He managed, “You must be the doctor.”
“That’s right, Mr. Kindle.”
“I asked for a human being.”
“You got one. My name is Matt Wheeler.”
Matthew Wheeler was an ordinary-looking man with a woebegone face. He’s too young, Kindle thought idly, for all those frown lines. “You’re human, Dr. Wheeler?”
“As human as you are, Mr. Kindle.”
“Not one of them?”
“No. But they can treat you as well as I can. There’s no need to worry.”
“Maybe,” Kindle said. “Has the town changed much? I’ve been up in the hills since, since—” Since what was it called? Contact.
“Not much.” Dr. Wheeler looked uncomfortable. “Not yet.”
“How’s my leg?”
“It should mend reasonably well. In time. May I ask how you broke it?”
“Walking out back of my cabin. Fell in the fuckin’ mud.”
“How did you get into town?”
“Dragged my ass down to my truck.” The memory was a little clearer now. “Then I drove.” He shrugged.
“That’s remarkable. That’s quite an accomplishment.”
Kindle was alert enough to recognize a compliment. “I guess I’m hard to kill, huh?”
“I guess you are. You were a sorry mess when the ambulance brought you in, or so I’m told. The leg will heal, Mr. Kindle, but you’re going to be here for a while.” The doctor made a notation on his clipboard. “I understand your attitude about… human beings. But I can’t be in the room twenty-four hours a day. You’ll have to cooperate with the hospital staff. Will you do that for me?”
“You’ll be around, though?”
“I’ll be around. I’ll make a point of it.”
Kindle nodded agreement.
“You’ll probably want some more sleep.” The doctor turned to leave the room.
Kindle closed his eyes, then opened them. “Dr. Wheeler?”
“Yes, Mr. Kindle?”
“How many of us are there? I mean—there are more of us in town, aren’t there?”
The doctor looked even wearier. “A few. I want to get us all together in a couple of weeks. Kind of a town meeting. Maybe you can be there. If you lie still and let that bone mend.”
Kindle nodded, but vaguely; he had already forgotten the question, was already easing back into sleep.
Chapter 12
Brookside (II)
For the memorial service Miriam picked out what she still thought of as her church clothes, though she hadn’t been to church for years: black dress and hat, white gloves, an unscuffed pair of orthopedic shoes.
She adjusted the hat a final time in the mirror by the front door, then stepped out into a hazy summer morning.
More than two weeks had passed since the night she was touched by the Thing.
No longer the Eye of God—what a mistake that had been! It was, Miriam supposed, still the agency of God, as a plague of locusts might be His agency; but it was alien, insinuating, false, and quite un-Godlike in its offer of unconditional absolution. Miriam supposed she would recognize God easily enough when she faced Him: God was Justice, and carried a sword. The Thing, contrarily, had spoken in the plangent and intimate voice of a lover. It offered too much and did not hate sufficiently.
But the world was a different place for its coming. Even over the course of two weeks, Miriam had seen the changes.
The news, for instance. The news wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on or the time it displaced on TV. In a handful of days, the Buchanan Observer had shrunk to a few negligible pages—mostly cooking columns, gardening tips, and a few syndicated columns. Large stories had made small headlines: undeclared but universal ceasefire in all the world’s wars, presidents and premiers unavailable for comment, no film at eleven. What they ought to have, Miriam thought, is a generic headline. NOTHING HAPPENS. NOBODY CARES.
At least the memorial service was still on schedule. Her father’s body had been committed to the earth a day before Contact, but the service had been postponed to allow Miriam’s uncle, a man she had never met, to fly in from Norway, where he worked. Naturally, the flight had been canceled—there had been something in the news about civilian aircraft commandeered for relief flights into the African famine zones. So the service would go on this afternoon with or without Uncle Edward.
Or so Miriam hoped. Was anything certain these days?
Dr. Ackroyd had been willing to go ahead with the service, but even the Rector had changed. Last week, Simon Ackroyd had confessed to being one of them. The Rector was engaged in the same transformation that had overtaken the rest of the world, and Miriam was not at all sure she would like what the man had turned into, or that he would like her, or that she would be safe at the end of the world’s strange new evolution.
* * *
She didn’t think of herself as an Episcopalian, but her father had called himself that even though he seldom attended services. She suspected he’d picked the Episcopalians because they were the most upscale congregation in town; barring the Catholics, whom Daddy had regarded as a fanatical sect, like Shiites or Communists.
The Episcopal Church squatted like a gray stone bulldog on its acre of lawn and peered across a long slope of rooftops to the sea. Miriam parked and climbed the stairs to the parish office. Dr. Ackroyd had said he would meet her here and they would drive together to Brookside Cemetery.
The Rector was waiting in his office with a concerned expression on his homely face. “Sit down, Miriam,” he said.
She listened as he explained how the memorial service would proceed, though they had arranged all this in advance. Does he think I’m senile? Miriam wondered. Or had the ministry lowered his expectations?
Perhaps he often dealt with stupid people.
The ceremony would be outdoors, at the graveside. It was to be simple and brief. Above all, Miriam hoped, brief. She hated all mumbling over the dead and would never have agreed even to this much if Uncle Edward, the hypocrite, hadn’t insisted.
“I didn’t know your father very well,” the Rector was saying, “but there are people in my congregation who did, and they tell me he was a good man. A loss like this is never easy. I know you’re going through a difficult time, Miriam—for this and other reasons. I want you to know I’m here if you need to talk.”
The offer struck Miriam as both laughable and strange. Her response was spontaneous: “All I want to know is—how you can do this?” Tm sorry?”
“After what happened that night. You know what I mean.”
He drew back. “This is my job. That hasn’t changed.”
“You were touched by the Thing.”
He looked bewildered. “You mean Contact?”
“Nobody calls anything by its right name. Doesn’t matter. I’m a Christian woman, Rector. When the Thing touched me I knew it was nothing a Christian should have anything to do with, and I gave it a Christian response. I don’t see the point of immortality outside the Throne of God. But you. You shook hands with it—am I right? And yet, there you sit. Prepared to read Scripture over the body of my father. How can you do that?”
Dr. Ackroyd seemed dismayed; he took a long time answering.
“Miriam,” he said finally, “you may be right.” He paused as if to summon thoughts. “I’m not sure I know what a Christian is. I’ve thought about this a great deal since Contact. The harder I look for Christianity, Miriam, the more it evaporates before my eyes. Is it Martin Luther or is it Johann Eck? Is it Augustine, or is it John Chrysostom? Is it Constantine? Is it Matthew and Mark and Luke, and did they write the Scriptures we call by their names? Or was Christianity buried along with the apocrypha at Nag Hammadi?”
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