Riders in the Sky - [Millennium Quartet 04]

by Charles L. Grant

  The fog settled, and his legs slowly lowered him to the cool tile floor.

  I was hurt.

  He crawled back to his bed. It might have taken him all night for all he knew, but when he awoke at dawn, there was a powerful thirst and his bladder screamed at him, so he half crawled, half walked back to the bathroom, closed the door and took one more look in the mirror.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  * * * *

  5

  “Son of a bitch!”

  He looked at the date on the Atlanta Journal someone, probably Mrs. Baylor, had left at the foot of the bed.

  It was Monday. Only five days until Christmas.

  Three weeks, maybe a few days more, of living in that damnable fog.

  Five days.

  Enough time for all that to heal, vanish, as if it had never existed?

  I don’t know.

  No.

  * * * *

  6

  Hector called his name as he came up the stairs, and Casey was ready, sitting on the edge of the mattress, bathrobe draped over his legs.

  “I’ll bring you breakfast,” Hector said, surprised to see him up. “You don’t—”

  “I’ll come down,” Casey told him with what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “Just give me a hand here.”

  “I don’t know. I—”

  Casey grabbed the robe. “I’m coming down. Just make sure I don’t fall on my face.”

  “Gloria’s gonna kill me.”

  Casey smiled, and with the man’s hand on his arm, managed to get to the kitchen without stumbling. It took a while, the fog was thin but there, but he made it. When he sat at the table, it was like sitting on a throne.

  Hector fussed, worrying about what his sister would say, every so often glancing at Casey’s face, puzzled but too polite to ask any questions.

  Casey lifted his shoulders in an exaggerated sigh. “Man, I am starving.”

  That pleased the cook. “A good sign. Good sign.” He made a large meal; and Casey ate it all—the eggs, the toast, the cereal, the bacon. His stomach suggested it was too much too soon; he didn’t care. He needed strength, and what he usually received wouldn’t do it.

  After he finished, he sat back and sighed, loudly. “You are a genius, Mr. Nazario, a pure genius.”

  “Gracias,” Hector said as he washed the dishes. “I get your pills in a moment.”

  “I’ll take them later.”

  “But the doctor—”

  “I’ll take them later, Hector, don’t worry about it. Soon as I get back upstairs.”

  Hector shrugged. “Okay. Then I—”

  “By myself.”

  A few seconds passed before Hector turned slowly, dish towel in one hand.

  “You have no idea how grateful I am,” Casey said. “Without you and Gloria, the others ...”

  It was a gamble, and he knew it. Offense could be easily taken.

  Hector studied him for a long time before dropping the towel onto the counter. “It is difficult, I know, for a man who has been alone to suddenly have all these people.”

  Casey nodded.

  “It would be nice to be alone again. At least for a little while.”

  Casey thanked him without a word.

  “Gloria,” the man said, “is still going to kill me, though.”

  They grinned at each other before Nazario, in silence, insisted on finishing his cleaning. When it was over, Casey asked him if he could get in touch with Rick, there was something that needed done. Again Hector studied him, shrugged, and nodded. Didn’t leave until Casey assured him a dozen times that he could indeed get back upstairs on his own and that if anything went wrong he’d get in touch immediately.

  “How?” the man asked. “You don’t got a phone.”

  “I’ll tie a message to a sea gull.”

  Hector almost laughed, then picked up his coat and left without looking back.

  It took a while before Casey realized he was truly alone that the silence was a comfort, that he was finally on his own. Almost. Then, weak-legged and slightly nauseous, he made his way back upstairs. An hour later he was on the living room couch, in jeans and shirt; he hadn’t bothered with shoes or socks, he wasn’t going anywhere and the house was warm. He was proud of himself. He had managed to dress without falling over, to shave without slitting his throat, and to get back down the stairs without breaking his neck.

  He kept a small towel beside him, every so often mopping the sweat from his face and neck, sometimes his arms. It wasn’t the furnace, he finally decided, it was the last of the medication slipping from his system. Not fast enough, though; not nearly fast enough. He still felt as if he were a ghost in his own house, insubstantial and incapable of thinking in a straight line for very long.

  He figured patience, in this case, was the greatest virtue he had.

  The greatest gift, right now, was the silence that told him the house was empty. He had no idea why, suddenly, all those people had volunteered to care for him. Maybe it was his standing up to the Teagues, maybe it was the us-against-them feeling they seemed to have. It didn’t matter. It had been welcome. For a while. Now it was not. One last thing, and it would be time to put up the walls again. Not quite so high, maybe, but high enough.

  One last thing, and he could return to what he had been.

  No; to what he had become.

  * * * *

  He dozed.

  He dreamed.

  He woke up with a start, face covered in sweat, legs trembling as if they had run a long way.

  In the dream he had run from window to window, peering out at a night that had no business being as dark as it was, looking for the source of the hoofbeats he heard. Slow and measured, they circled the house, as slow and measured he had heard them on the beach that night last summer.

  They didn’t stop until the dream did.

  “I’m not yours,” he whispered harshly, rubbing the towel roughly over his face, turning his skin pink. “Damnit, I’m not yours. Leave me alone.”

  He reached for the television’s remote control, figuring it might be a good idea to catch up on what he had missed. No one had filled him in except for comments about the weather. Of course, there was always the chance they had, in fact, talked to him, but he’d be damned if he could remember anything. Pretty much anything at all.

  The set snapped on to an incomprehensible commercial just as a pickup drew up in front of the house. He watched the truck, tense, until Rick climbed out of the cab, hitched up his jeans, and trotted up the walk.

  He knocked.

  Casey loved him for it.

  “Open,” he called.

  The younger man pushed the door open slowly without entering, and when he finally stepped in, Casey laughed and said, “You expecting me to jump you?”

  Rick grinned and ducked his head, embarrassed. “Sorry. Hector didn’t tell me what you wanted, I didn’t...” He grinned again. “Sorry.”

  “No problem.” He cleared his throat, wished he had brought something to drink from the kitchen. “Look... look, I have no right to ask you, but I need a favor.”

  Rick shrugged. “Sure.”

  Careful, Case; careful.

  “I, uh... it’s got to be between you and me. No one else.”

  Rick looked around the room, at the ceiling briefly, and shrugged. “No sweat.”

  When Casey explained what he wanted, Rick thought for a moment and suggested a better way. It was as if he did this sort of thing every day, and Casey had to restrain himself from asking why the unquestioned agreement. He didn’t want to blow it, to say something wrong.

  After a brief argument about payment—”It’s a favor, Mr. Chisholm, let’s leave it at that, okay?”—Jordan left, and Casey switched to a news station, turned up the volume.

  Not that he needed to.

  The images were sufficient to tell him that little had changed. What made him groan aloud, however, was the rumor that Australia, faced with the possibility th
at China might enter her conflict with Indonesia, had raised the flag of nuclear weaponry. The newsman suggested it was only a stand-back-this-isn’t-your-fight warning, and it was, after all, only a rumor. What he didn’t have to say was that China wasn’t a nation that took well to bluffing.

  Meanwhile, in San Francisco, another gang war had ended at the intervention of the National Guard.

  Meanwhile, in Athens...

  My God, Casey thought; my God, it’s really starting.

  He turned the set off and stared out the window.

  Not me, he thought.

  Not me.

  Leave me alone.

  * * * *

  2

  1

  T

  he Lighthouse Hut was just shy of seventeen miles east of Savannah. In its day it had been a fun place to travel to, to get fine lobster, a decent steak, halfway good small combo jazz, and drinks that were generous to a fault. In its day its side parking lot was always full from sunset to past midnight, and drivers heading south along the coast couldn’t help but listen to the music that refused to stay confined within its uneven clapboard walls. It wasn’t even close to resembling a lighthouse, and it didn’t have such a great view of the ocean because the land it was on was lower than the road that passed in front of it, but no one minded because after the sun went down there was nothing out there to see anyway.

  A new highway killed it. With no nearby exit ramp, drivers could only look and wonder as they went by, and only the faithful made the effort to get off. But even they eventually gave up, and the paint peeled and the parking lot tarmac cracked and the signboard on the roof quickly faded and, during a hurricane in ‘88, was blown to the ground.

  The only thing that remained, really, of the old Hut was the large and gaudy, somewhat comical plaster statue of a gull on the wing that stood near the entrance.

  It was the first thing Reed Turner had seen when John got lost trying to find the entrance to the Camoret Causeway.

  “That’s it!” he had yelled, practically deafening everyone in the car. “Cora, look, there’s the giant bird!”

  John had asked no questions. He pulled into the lot and parked, facing east, hadn’t even taken his hands off the steering wheel before Reed was out of the car and moving stiffly toward the road. His left arm and shoulder were still swollen from a slam it had taken when he’d fallen over a table during the fighting.

  He stood there until the others joined him, then pointed toward the sea. “Look,” he said quietly. “That truck, you see it?”

  Despite the low clouds, the dim light, John saw it. Not much of a truck in the distance, a pickup whose color was as dull as the air around it, but because of the angle and the low pitch of the land, it looked for all the world as if it were riding on water.

  Reed took Cora’s arm and tugged on it. “That’s it,” he insisted. “That’s what I saw. Remember? The dream? That’s where he is.” His face was flushed, his forehead slick with sweat, and when she put an arm around his waist, he sagged gratefully against her. “I know it, Cor. I know he’s out there.”

  “You’re sure?” Lisse asked him.

  He nodded, a grin more like a grimace.

  “Well, hell, why not?” John said. “It’s the only damn place we haven’t looked, right? So let’s get back in the— well, damnit!”

  A few drops at first, a brief warning before the wind rose abruptly, the clouds split, and the storm began.

  An hour later they were still in the parking lot, still in the car. John kept the engine running so the heater would work, the only light the green glow of the dashboard that lay shimmering green ghosts on the windows. Lisse was asleep; he didn’t wake her. It was, in fact, a miracle she was here at all. The blood he’d seen on her at the hotel he had immediately assumed had been Reed’s.

  It wasn’t.

  It was hers.

  A piece of the window had sliced neatly through the side of her neck. No sooner had he reached her, and reached for her, than she had collapsed, lying across Reed’s legs, while Cora knelt and screamed for help.

  He had taken off his shirt and wadded it against her wound, did his best to staunch the blood that flowed from Reed’s upper chest and back, did his best not to scream himself when, as the paramedics arrived, he became convinced they were both dead.

  Even later, at the hospital, fending off reporters while, at the same time, trying to accommodate the inquiries of the police, he was positive that when it was over, only he and Cora would be left. And for the first couple of hours, Cora in the emergency room on a gurney, sedated for her hysteria, he wasn’t so sure he wouldn’t be the only one.

  When a nurse finally grabbed him and sat him on a bed, he protested until she pointed out the dribbles and runs of blood the glass and splinters had caused.

  “You are not,” she said sternly, “going to bleed to death on my watch, mister.”

  For the better part of half an hour, she plucked wood and glass needles from his back, the back of his head, the backs of his hands and arms. She kept telling him he was lucky, all things considered, and he kept telling her she didn’t get it, that his friends were out there somewhere, probably dying.

  “Well, you’re not going to do them any good like this,” she said, slapped on disinfectant and a few bandages, and pushed him back to the overcrowded waiting room.

  He had learned rather quickly the truth of the cliché of a waking nightmare.

  The smell of blood, the smell of terror; voices raised and voices pleading; weeping and moaning, loud arguments and denunciations, hysterical laughter and not a few mordant jokes; people wandering dazed in torn clothes, in hospital gowns; the staff clearly near the end of its tether, doing its best to hold on.

  The hospital was far too small to handle all the victims. Not enough operating rooms, the staff overburdened. He found Reed just as the young man was in the process of being transferred somewhere else. Cora had insisted on going with him; John hadn’t argued. In the chaos, despite the best efforts of the increasingly harried nurses to keep track of all the admissions, all the treatments ... despite the families that refused to sit down and wait patiently, their demands growing shrill, fear feeding upon itself... despite his determination once Reed was safely on his way ...

  He lost Lisse.

  Three hours of roaming, paying no attention to suggestions and commands, sitting only when he was threatened with eviction by a cop... three hours, maybe more, he didn’t bother to note the time because it no longer had meaning, he found her in a tiny windowless room on a different floor. With no idea how she’d gotten there, and not caring at the moment, he’d stood over her, staring at her bloodless face, at the thick dressing that wrapped halfway around her neck.

  He held her hand.

  He whispered to her.

  He followed the drip of the IV attached to her right arm.

  He had listened to voices in the hallway, but couldn’t get anyone to come in and tell him how she was, how she would be, only that she had been in surgery. At the nurses’ station he was told she would be all right. Blood loss had been replaced on the operating table, the vein sutured, the sliced muscle repaired.

  Well past midnight a resident came in to check on her, told him her blood loss had indeed been severe, but it looked as if she would be left with little more than a scar on her neck.

  “You shouldn’t stay.”

  “I have to.”

  The doctor didn’t argue. He shrugged, made notations on her chart, and left.

  John never saw him again.

  The only time he left her side was when he went in search of a chair, found it in a room whose signs warned of oxygen use, and carried it back. Sometime before dawn he fell asleep. Sometime later he woke up with a startled gasp, took several seconds to understand where he was, and saw Lisse.

  Her eyes were still closed, but she was turned slightly toward him. She had moved, and that made him cry. Silently, one hand pressed to his eyes until he couldn’t stand seeing the b
ody of little Eddie with that hole in his throat anymore. Relief. And exhaustion. And a dreadful, certain feeling that he hadn’t seen the last of the blood, or the dead.

  * * * *

  Lisse’s first words had been: “He’s after us.”

  * * * *

  2

  The Morlane County prosecutor shook his head sadly and said, “Your Honor, much as I can sympathize with the young ladies’ plight, I cannot in good conscience see how we can even think of entertaining such a foolish notion, considering the seriousness of the charges and the clear risk to flight on the part of the accused.”