P N Elrod Omnibus

by P. N. Elrod

  While Ellie faced the beach, I hurried over the open ground, throwing glances over one shoulder along the way. The first sign of her swinging in my direction and I’d have to drop flat. At night she’d see a moving object more easily than a still one.

  I made the trees, ducking gratefully into their cover. Evergreens, thank God, with dark, obscuring snow-trimmed branches between me and Ellie’s flashlight. I blundered through them, looking for the girl.

  She was curled up all right, just as I’d imagined, but not asleep yet. Her legs were drawn tight to her chest, and she shivered like a dozen earthquakes. When she heard me, her breath caught halfway between a sob and a moan.

  “It’s all right,” I told her, just loud enough so she could hear my voice and know I wasn’t Lloyd. “I’m here to help.” I was afraid she might bolt again, but she looked too cold to move.

  Her face was marred by sheer pain. I yanked off my hat tossed it at her. It landed by her feet and she stared, unable to understand.

  “Put it on, honey,” I said, unbuttoning my coat.

  She stiffly obeyed. I shrugged the coat off and got it around her shoulders, threading her thin arms through the sleeves. She didn’t say a thing when I rocked her back and swept it under her feet to put the cloth between herself and the ground. It was like hugging a block of ice. I had a wool neck scarf as well and wrapped it around her head to tie the hat down. She looked like a child playing dress up.

  “Better,” she whispered, the word coming out with difficulty, but laced with gratitude.

  “You’re Susan? I heard them talking.”

  A shivering nod.

  “Lloyd’s your husband?”

  Another nod.

  “Who’s Ellie?”

  “His sister.”

  Nice family. “They want to kill you?”

  She moaned again, an affirmative as far as I could tell.

  “You know why?”

  “Money for me,” she murmured cryptically. Then like a child added, “I want to go home.”

  “As soon as possible. I have to take care of Lloyd and Ellie before I can get to my car.”

  “I can walk.”

  “It’s too far.” I didn’t feel good about walking, either. After that dash, my head was ready to float off and explode.

  “Won’t there be a house?”

  “Nothing’s close enough. You sit tight and I’ll get us a ride. On second thought, move around. Can you do that?”

  “Think so.”

  There was liquor on her breath. Whatever false warmth a drink might have given would have worn off by now. The alcohol would do more harm than good in this cold.

  “They try and get you drunk?” I asked, helping her up. She was small; the hem of my coat dragged on the ground.

  “Yeah. We went out. Said it was a party for me. Made me drink, but I didn’t like it.” She couldn’t have been more than seventeen, if that much.

  “They wanted you to conk out, huh?’ I took a few steps with her to keep her steady.

  “Guess so. I got sleepy. Didn’t wanna drink no more. Kept telling Lloyd I wanted to go home. He wouldn’t listen, just laughed.”

  “What about Elle?’

  “She laughed too, but said we should leave. People were staring.”

  “Then they drove out here?”

  “Don’t remember. Ellie said I had to take my coat off to get ready for bed. But I was in the truck, not home. Woke up some. Knew something was wrong.”

  That’s for damn sure. We paced and turned, paced and turned. Even when slowed by the trees and the advantages that toughened my body, the icy wind was at last getting to me. “Then you ran away?”

  “Pretended to be worse than I was. Told ’em I was gonna be sick. They took me out of the truck. I asked Lloyd for my coat, but he said I’d just mess it up and to hurry. Didn’t know where I was, just somewhere by the lake. Somewhere quiet. No lights. No people.”

  So convenient for Lloyd and Ellie. Get the girl drunk, let her pass out, and eventually she’d freeze to death. Tragic, but understandable in this weather. I could have thrown up again.

  “I ran. Lost ’em in the dark. It was so cold.”

  “I saw you on the beach.”

  “Thought you were Lloyd, then he come up behind you.”

  “Yeah, I know all about that part.”

  “You hurt bad?”

  “I’ll get by. You said they’d get money for you?”

  “Insurance. Lloyd has a thousand dollar policy on me.”

  “A thousand? He’s trying to kill you for—” I bit the rest off. A thousand or a million, it didn’t matter.

  “Mister, that’s all the money in the world,” she told me with awed conviction.

  To people like Lloyd and Ellie, that was true. Last summer Roosevelt had announced that the depression was over. Maybe for him, but the rest of us weren’t seeing much evidence.

  “Wish Lloyd hadn’t done it,” Susan continued, talking more to herself than to me. “Things were getting better. He hadn’t hit me for a good week; I thought he’d changed. Even Ellie was being nice. They were going to buy a store, they said, set up a real business. I’d ask where they were going to get the money and they’d just laugh, funnin’ me. Then Ellie’d say, ’We’re laughing with you, not at you, Susie.’ But I didn’t know what the joke was. I do now. Wish he hadn’t done it.”

  He was going to wish so too after I got through with him.

  “Susan. . .has Lloyd been married before?” The question popped out of nowhere. Some part of my mind was turning things over, trying to draw sense from the brief, but intense, impressions gained from Lloyd and Ellie.

  It surprised Susan enough to stop her pacing. “Yeah. He didn’t talk about her. He only said. . .said. . .she drowned. A stupid accident when they went fishing.”

  Or another murder. Or a real accident that inspired him to try repeating it for profit. Had there been other wives?

  Susan looked up at me. “How’d you know?”

  Then she got it and the realization was the same as if I’d smacked her with a brick. Why hadn’t I kicked myself, instead?

  “Oh, God,” she groaned. “Oh, God.”

  I pulled her tight. She shuddered, went still, and shuddered some more. No tears. Maybe later, but not now.

  “You going to be all right waiting here for a while?” I asked.

  “Can’t we just walk back to town?” Her voice was dull, thick.

  “Not in this weather. I’ll go for my car and come for you.”

  “But he’s got his gun.”

  That was a problem I would try to avoid. “Where’s this truck of theirs?” I hadn’t noticed it on the road.

  “Off the beach. Don’t know where. I kept goin’ for I donno how long.”

  “Don’t stop. Keep moving here. I’ll come back as soon as I can.” Real soon. The wind was chewing through my suit like a rabid animal.

  She nodded numbly, and I slipped away, pausing at the edge of the trees to check ahead.

  Ellie was no longer in sight. She could be with her brother helping his search or sitting in my car, taking advantage of its shelter. I hadn’t locked it. Reflections off the windows obscured the interior. I was too much a pessimist to hope she and Lloyd had given up and left.

  Damn the lack of cover. All I had were the trees, car, and a line of telephone poles marching grimly out from the city.

  I tried to vanish, just as an experiment.

  Bad idea. Though I felt an encouraging flutter within, it was overwhelmed by the slam of fresh pain in the back of my head. At some point the scales would shift, and I could relinquish solidity and heal, but not yet.

  Susan didn’t have time for my recovering body to catch up with the situation and even I was starting to feel the cold. Only one way to fix that.

  I dashed straight for my Buick like a ball player for home base, moving faster than any normal man. The best thing for Susan was to get her out quietly then deal with the others some other time. />
  My car was empty of lurking killers, but I winced opening the door. The keys were still in my overcoat pocket.

  Damnation.

  A setback, but not a total disaster. I fumbled under the dashboard, intent on making this the fastest hotwiring job in history.

  Motion and light in the corner of my eye—some kind of vehicle was coming up fast from the south, headlamps bobbing. They belonged to a battered, open-bed truck. Behind the wheel I recognized the sleek shape of Ellie’s scarf-covered head.

  Hell. I couldn’t get the car started before she reached me. She’d have seen the door hanging open and think it was Susan.

  I’d have to confront them sooner or later. Better it’s sooner and one at a time. I got out.

  Ellie didn’t slow until the last second, bringing the truck to a long, sliding halt on its bald tires. The brakes squealed like dying pigs. Her front bumper stopped a foot short of my back fender. Leaving the lights on and the engine running, she hurtled out the door, her expression tense.

  She honestly didn’t know me at first. I was without my bulky overcoat and standing up, after all.

  And I was alive.

  It was a pleasure to watch the changes flowing over her face. First the suspicion reserved for any unexpected and unpleasant surprise, then puzzlement, swiftly replaced by sick shock. Finally she showed the dawning that comes when one realizes something has gone really, really wrong with one’s world.

  She backed a step in reflex, then held her ground, not quite ready to accept that final impossibility. I was—I had to be—a stranger come out of the darkness, maybe a tramp, someone inconvenient who needed to leave. Quickly.

  She yelled Lloyd’s name, her voice strange and high with imperfectly suppressed alarm. She yelled again. No answer. She gave a little jump when I slammed my half-open door, not once taking my gaze from her. None of this helped my tender head or stirred-up gut. I wanted to be someplace warm and quiet, away from crazy people with their ugly, greedy plans.

  Ellie pulled a little revolver from her coat pocket. Her hand shook. She steadied it with her other hand. Wish I’d thought to bring a gun, but I’d not anticipated the need for one just for a walk on the damn beach.

  “W-who are you?” she asked, the words dribbling out shaky and not sounding right.

  I started grinning. Couldn’t help myself, it was too good. “Hello, Ellie. Let’s have another kiss.”

  Her jaw dropped, but nothing audible came out, and that made it much more awful.

  I hoped she’d turn and run but instead the gun’s muzzle flared and jumped. The explosion was almost too loud to hear. Astonishingly, I felt nothing. Ellie was so spooked that from ten feet away, she completely missed me.

  She wouldn’t get a second chance.

  I ducked around the front of my car, keeping low. Ellie followed, but I moved too fast, preventing her from getting a clear shot. Damn, if I could just vanish.

  Five more misses and I could end this. Lloyd would certainly have heard something and be on his way from whatever rock he’d crawled under. Susan didn’t have time to spare while I played squirrel tag with her sick sister-in-law.

  Ellie wasn’t wasting bullets, though. She was smart enough to wait for a clear target.

  Skulking around the rear bumper, I glanced across the field. Lloyd shambled toward us. In one hand was his rifle, the other had Susan by the scruff of the neck. She stumbled along, her feet tangling in the flapping hem of my coat. Whenever she fell, Lloyd dragged her up again, hardly slowing his pace, like an adult dealing with a balky child. Her cries sliced the air.

  He’d gotten clever and investigated the trees, probably sneaking up while I’d been sidetracked by Susan.

  Ellie yelled at him from her cover behind the front fender of the car, waving him closer. He spotted me in the wash of light from the truck’s headlamps and sprinted forward. For the moment he’d only see a new threat to be neutralized, not the corpse he’d left on the beach.

  Ellie screamed at him to shoot me.

  That made him pause, but he must have been used to doing what she told him. He closed up the distance to only twenty feet, released Susan—who immediately scrambled off—and brought up the rifle. I looked straight down the gun barrel. His aim was steady.

  I dropped back to put the car between us, remembering Ellie a fraction too late.

  I dodged, but not quick enough.

  Her shot slammed into my ribs like a train.

  I staggered from the impact, dimly hearing Ellie’s crow of victory. The gravel shoulder of the road rushed up, but it missed hitting me as gray fog swept over my sight.

  Vanishing, finally—

  A fiery wrenching turned me inside out—

  It’s never been painful before.

  Too soon after the head injury. No screaming allowed.

  Ellie’s triumph abruptly departed. She went silent.

  Lloyd came up, but could get no reply from her about what had happened.

  The wind threatened to carry my otherwise incorporeal self off like a scrap of paper. I reached out with a pseudopod of something that should be my hand and wrapped it around the car’s bumper. I craved solidity, but was afraid to re-form. The sharp memory of hot nerve being ripped from muscle and bone had me writhing unseen in the air.

  I held in place, fighting that memory.

  Lloyd and Ellie began to argue, swearing at each other. She couldn’t bully her way back to the comfortable world she was used to, the one where dead men don’t return then disappear like switching off a light.

  Better to deal with a more easily solved problem. Ellie ordered Lloyd to go after Susan. The girl had headed back to the trees and their false safety.

  He was reluctant, but Ellie grasped that they could finish the job more easily in that spot. Somewhere quiet. No lights. No people to stop them. No one to take Susan’s part.

  “They won’t find her right away,” Ellie told him. “We tell people she got drunk and run off. This’ll work better.”

  That was a world more to her liking, where it’s perfectly okay to murder a young girl.

  Like skinning a rabbit, they’d strip my coat from Susan’s small body and begin the killing process once more. Pain or no pain, I had to help her.

  I cautiously eased toward solidity only to find the barrier I expected to hit wasn’t there after all.

  The grayness resolved into the recognizable shapes of normal reality. Sky, earth, and water mixed with the hard lines of human artifacts. . .and the humans, too.

  I paused in the process, holding to a semi-transparent state until I got my bearings.

  Lying on the damp gravel, I sat up, my hand gripping the bumper. I was ghostlike, able to see through myself.

  So could Ellie and Lloyd.

  Their bloodless faces stared down like the world ending.

  Ellie brought her gun up and fired, but I felt nothing, only the wind. Unlike a bullet, which drilled through one small spot, wind hit me all over like a sail on a ship.

  Ellie fired again. I grinned back and winked. Her confidence visibly collapsed; she blundered against Lloyd trying to get away. Her touch struck him like an electric shock, and now they couldn’t move fast enough. They piled into the truck.

  I checked across the field for Susan, but the headlight glare blinded my view.

  Lloyd tortuously shifted gears; the truck lurched forward. I vanished again, letting the wind take me for a single second. Slamming into the hard metal of the truck’s sides, I slid up, over, and tumbled into the open bed behind the cab.

  The gears growled as Lloyd abused them; we picked up speed. There was nothing to hold onto; I worked toward the cab, sensing the small rectangle of smooth glass of the back window. More permeable than the metal of the truck’s body, I slipped through.

  The opening was small, and I hate sieving through glass. It always seems about to break and then doesn’t. I pressed beyond its bitter barrier, rolling around like an invisible ball in the jouncing cab, then settling
into an upright posture on the creaking seat.

  They were on either side of me: Lloyd driving, Ellie tense on my right. She urged him to go faster. Again, he obeyed, struggling with the sluggish gears. Neither noticed the increased chill in the cab, which is a side effect I have in this form.

  “You told me he was dead.” Lloyd was close to tears.

  “He was dead. I know he was dead!”

  “What was that? You tell me! Oh, God. Oh, goddamn it.”

  “Just shut up!”

  “Shut up yourself. What about Susan? What’ll we do about her?”

  “Leave her.”

  “But she’ll—”

  “It don’t matter. We don’t go back. The hell with her.”

  “Oh, goddamn it. Oh. shit. What was that?”

  A maniac’s grin sprouted again on my invisible face. This wasn’t the vampire in me wanting payback—this was wholly human. It was dark, and it felt just fine.

  I was still grinning when I partially materialized between them. Their panicked yells filled the tight space, their fighting brutal but ineffective. Lloyd’s grip on the wheel slipped as he tried to hit me with a poorly aimed fist. Ellie tried to use her gun. Lloyd shrieked at her not to, struggling with the steering. I labored to hold myself in place, their flailing arms passing right through me. The truck went into a long skid as Lloyd jammed the brakes.

  Bald tires useless on the slick road, we careened into a sudden patch of deadly silence: a patch of road ice that slewed us like a circus ride. The slender black shape of a telephone pole charged out of the night.

  Lloyd hauled the wheel around. The truck slid madly, swayed, bumped, and abruptly spun free. I saw the ground and sky swap places with surprising speed and violence.

  Instinct took me away in time, there, but not there, as everything flipped wildly over and over. Their bodies were thrown around, making heavy, meaty thumps. Glass shattered, there was a scream of tearing, crimping steel, the cracking of wood and bones, and with hideous speed it came slamming to a abrupt stop when we struck the pole.

  Distantly, I felt the impact. Lloyd’s body slammed into mine. . .or where mine should have been had I been solid. I shot clear, wanting no part of this.

  The truck motor grunted and died.