by Barry, Mike
All right, the auditor nodded, satisfied, and began to dissolve into the background of the room, apparently having found Carlin’s argument unanswerable. I see what you’re saying, and Carlin alone again, some naked woman crouched up against the wall in a fetal position now, flanks touching, looking at him with bright, demanding eyes.
She was just another one of the sons of bitches out to get him, that was all. Here was yet another who was part of the enemy; the enemy was cunning and came in many guises, but underneath the amateurish mask that you could cut away like ribbons to show the living heart beneath the face was clear, the features cool and appraising. It would always be the enemy and had never been anything but, and Carlin saw it then, saw it in one burst that might have been flame but then again might only have been the defeating maneuver of the enemy as trapped it begged for escape by throwing up clouds of incense. Then he had leveled the gun in and it was exploding in his hand like a big prick, all depth, all recoil, plunging and plunging into the rotten center, and the enemy fell away, ribbons now flowing stripes, celebration in halo around the enemy’s head as she fell, the auditor drifting into the sudden gloom to give an approving wink and a circle with a hand to indicate that the job had been done.
Well, of course the job had been done. Carlin had never ducked to a challenge yet, that was why he had gotten as far in the world as he had. You didn’t get anywhere by fleeing, you had to take your ground and defend it, stand upon it until the very end and make that ground yours.
Giggling, he hurled the gun from him. It bounced once off the form in the room and then fell away.
Then he left the room to begin his solitary but important flight.
No one asked him anything at all. There was no reason why they should. He was utterly in command and Janice, like the rest of them, would do exactly as she was ordered and never anything else but. That was what the rest of them thought, anyway.
VIII
It wasn’t a bad impact at all. Ten miles per hour head-on is enough to kill a child or unsettle a housewife. Ten miles per hour head-on is enough to shake the average surburban driver who has no sense of true speeds all the way down to his soul. But for an experienced driver who is used to driving on the edge of possibility, who knows exactly what impact is like and how to protect himself against it, ten miles per hour is manageable. Certainly it is a survivable impact, if you are fully prepared to take it. If you understand all the way to the ground exactly what it means, you can go even farther than that. You can come out of it untouched, at maximum alertness increased by the impact and ready to fight.
Wulff came clear of the Cadillac even as it was still plowing through the Bonneville, fenders crumpling, the scream of the engine trying to whip the big Fleetwood through space that no longer truly existed. Rolling from the door, the gun drawn against him, he survived that one terrible instant in any crash where the possibility exists that the gas tank might go up. Rolling clear desperately, he concentrated upon nothing so much as simply putting enough space between himself and the ruined car to give him a chance on explosion. Then, in the long aching instant when he cleared, he knew that he was home free, at least in terms of the explosion. Coming out of his tumble he allowed only a blur of the landscape to whip by him, then he leveled the gun and fired, placing the assassin by instinct rather than by sight.
Combat training. That was all it was; you got a good glimpse of the terrain, internalized the terrain so that it became part of your psychic landscape—that was the way the training sergeant had talked, anyway. Wulff had had a wild man for an infantry instructor, but the son of a bitch even with his rather Eastern orientation and rather private way of describing genitals and certain acts was a hell of a good teacher. You could move around in that landscape the way you could move around in your own head. As a matter of fact, all of the world became merely an extension of your psyche, that was the key, so that you had to control only yourself and if you did that then the landscape would take care of itself. Rolling and firing, Wulff had placed the assassin somewhere downrange and to the left of him, the only place he could have been at the moment of impact to stand clear of the gas tank. As he came up, rolling, the fire was returned. A bullet went somewhere to his left, then the next shot came in high and somehow he got under it, the bullet over him before he had really understood his gesture. That was what they said about fire, it was the same as lightning, if you heard the bullet and knew what had happened to you then they must have missed. That was the only way to look at it. He fired again, taking his third shot out of the.45 and there was a scream some yards down and to his right. Contact. He did not even check it, only pushed another shot down there and the scream arced higher, turned into a bubbling sound of rage. Wulff put one last shot down there and there was silence.
Only then did he open his eyes fully, let the landscape come into him again. He had performed all of this in a high concentration so absolute and so sealed off from the desert that it might have happened in that private place that the instructor sergeant had always urged them to use and rely upon in the same way that they would use their weapons. The two vehicles had intersected, the Bonneville and the Fleetwood meshed at an odd angle like lovers who had started an entrance but had failed of completion in a hurried ejaculation, a tumble of limbs, emptiness and open space flooding their juxtaposition then. Owens body lay crumped high in the seat. He had taken an impact that had pushed him back, and then he had reared forward, tumbled against the windshield and fallen hunched near a pane. If he hadn’t been a dead man he might have been dead all over again. A ten-mile-per-hour impact could kill; Owens’s attitude was evidence of exactly what could happen if you did not know how to move with a crash. There was a light stink of gasoline in the air, in the point of juxtaposition—left rear bumper of the Fleetwood, right front quarter-panel of the Bonneville. There was a rainbow streak of marks torn from the uncompounded metal that dazzled in the sun, a scheme more beautiful than anything the designers might have conceived. Neither car, Wulff suspected, would ever run again.
And crumpled to the right of the accident scene and about ten yards downrange behind the point of juxtaposition was the crumpled frame of a man now lying on his stomach, gun dangling from his fully extended fingers. As Wulff had calculated, he had used the Bonneville for cover. If Wulff had not gotten very lucky in the point of impact, if the collision had not displaced the Bonneville so that there was a wedge of light into which fire could be struck, Wulff would have been dead.
Well then. It had not been the first time he had been lucky, Wulff thought. Then again it might not be the last, although there was a point at which you had to concede that your luck might be running out. But the trouble with that, the trouble with the easy, fatalistic calculations of this sort was that you never knew it until it had happened, until you had tumbled into the cave of disaster down that trapdoor, and then it was always in surprise. Death was always a surprise; the utter cancellation of those factors which kept you however perilously alive was to be greeted in shock. That was survival. It never got any easier to yield life. Owens had been right; calling himself a dead man had merely been a rationalization so that holding on would mean less to him than it did at the heart. Owens had been surprised, too. He had died stunned, his eyes rolling into his head in horrified contemplation of the unthinkable, which was that he, Owens, a professional hunter, was dead.
Wulff spat on the ground and walked toward the dead man. His knees had cramped up slightly underneath his body so that in death the man looked as if he were humping someone, some miniscule female diminished beneath him, shriveled with the impact of his entrance or from the effort of avoiding him, and Wulff was able to grin at that; death was always like that. Death was the opposite side of a dirty joke, that was for sure; in every dirty joke there was really a scream, the scream of the toilet, the hiss of mortality. It was necessary, it had to be that way—if you did not see that comic and terrible scream in death, that rigor mortis of the frozen smile, then it would overcome you
completely and you would be unable to deal at all with a life that would casually circle itself around death, make death the inevitable termination of all of it. Death as apart of life was bullshit, death was anti-life, but death also capped all of life and every individual spirit and by refraction made those lives similarly flooded with death. Oh, it was very complicated, Wulff thought. It was very complicated if you wanted to get into that kind of thing and follow it through to its natural conclusion, but the hell with it. He had lived with death so long that he never could speculate on it, not to any depth. This, if nothing else, was what kept him sane. He walked over to the corpse carefully, nudged the cheek with his shoe, and then turned the body over slowly, his gun cocked, expecting at any moment that the body might lunge to its feet, but no, that was not going to happen, that was definitely an impossibility. If he had ever seen a dead man, this one was it.
He was a big man with a smooth, empty face. Perhaps in life the face had been full of wrinkles and response, but in death as in sleep all had been smoothed out of it. The face was as bleak and empty as the bottom of a clean frying pan. The sun came down on it and sent little pockets of light into the various crevices, but the corpse did not react to the light, nor did it cast off, merely absorbing it in that quiet way the dead have, the eyes open to the intensity of the sun, taking all light, giving back nothing. One of the hands was curled on a pistol, the fingers curved through it, one of them passing through the trigger hole, the others limply but gracefully embracing the pistol, drawing it into the dead palm, which already had a greenish sheen. The man who had held this pistol had obviously understood guns, and he had died trying to shoot. There was tension in the trigger finger; like a dead fish clinging to the line it was arced against the steel, trying to drive it through a point it would never find. The arm, too, had retained a kind of urgency. Like a boxer, the dead man had tried to put the motion down from his shoulder, hitting through rather than into the object. The man had been a skilled and graceful gunman. In a way, Wulff thought, but only in a way, it was a shame that someone so obviously professional had been killed in the act of doing what he did best, because there was little enough proficiency in the world and what little there was left had to be cherished. If the proficiency had been turned in evil directions, that in no way undercut its reality. Most people simply did not know what the hell they were doing at all. In any circumstances, in any way whatsoever, those who did know were important. He kicked the gun out of the hand. It spun against the desert floor, went behind a tire of the devastated Bonneville. He should have held onto it, Wulff thought. It was almost always a mistake to dispose of weaponry, you never knew when you could use it. But then again the Fleetwood was loaded up. There was a ton of ordnance there. He hardly knew how he was going to transport it if he could not get the car to move. He could not leave it there. And he could not carry it. Well, maybe that was life itself; it was too much to carry yet too important to lay down. Not to think about the thing too much. Not getting sidetracked into thoughts about life. That led you inevitably to thoughts of death and Wulff could not deal with that any more.
There was another body in the Bonneville. Looking up, sweeping the terrain, Wulff could see that. Counter to the body of Owens in his own car there was a corpse in there; it was lying just below the level of the windshield, just barely visible at this angle unless you knew exactly what you were looking for. Yet, in another way, glowing like a headlamp from that confined space, it would have been impossible to have missed it.
Wulff walked over to the car and looked at the corpse. It had been a man once but was no longer anything at all; like the body on the desert, it had a face that had been cleaned of all expression. Yet if the body on the desert had shown a clean, bright, almost perceptive aspect in its absence of emotion, then the one in the car seemed to have been brought below the level of individuation. The body on the desert had been a face cleared of expression, whereas this one looked as if it had never had any emotion whatsoever. Wulff looked at the thing, it had been five feet, seven inches in life, an average-sized man now clinging to the seat in parody of the terror that must have grabbed him when the bullets hit. And then for reasons he could not really explain, Wulff raised his pistol and put two fast shots into the face. The body bucked on the seat. Very little blood fell. With no metabolism to punch out the blood, to try and seal over the wounds in the energy of survival, the corpse accepted those pellets as a child might have taken cookies.
No satisfaction, Wulff thought, and walked away from the Bonneville reloading his gun in an absentminded way. There was no satisfaction in any of this, not that he was looking for satisfaction, not that anything mattered. It was all past tense, Wulff thought, that was the way he had to look at it; not a matter of ongoing action—which was bad enough what with all the pain connected—but action frozen in time, everything history, history even before consummation. No, Wulff thought, the presence of death made everything inconsequential; in that look of termination the faces of the dead man in the car, the dead one on the desert, and Owens there was a finality that meant that anything held by the living was unimportant.
He put his gun away. It was hot. It was ninety-five degrees and rising on the border and still no traffic, not a single car since all of this had started, barely—Wulff looked at his watch—fifteen minutes ago. Fifteen minutes and three lives, that was all it took. Fifteen minutes and no traffic, two ruined cars, no way out.
Wulff thought that if you wanted to pursue it in that direction there were edges of panic in this situation. You could not dismiss the seriousness of this, with the heat and with the car out of commission. And with the bodies. If a highway patrol car was the first to pass by, Wulff thought, he did not want to find himself in the position of explaining to the occupant exactly what the hell had gone on. He might make his case, he might not … but it would take a hell of a long time, it would involve bringing him into some wretched substation and by that time the general call information would be in their hands. No. He had to get out of here.
The Bonneville or the Fleetwood? Each was wrecked, either was as good as the other. Taking a step toward the Bonneville first, he backed off. He could not under any circumstances enter that car. The aroma of death was too strong. Even if it was his only escape from the desert, Wulff thought he could not commit himself to that space, could not touch the dead man on the seat…. Owens, at least, was his own.
Wulff went back to the Fleetwood. Owens rested in it like a mourner at a long wake catching a snooze, the tilt of his head, cock of his eye—all he needed was a little breath in his lungs to give the total illusion of life. But he was merely dead meat, meat on the rack of the car. He meant nothing whatsoever. Wulff pushed him out of the way, jacked the keys all the way into the ignition and pushed it to start. Nothing. Not a sound.
Dead solenoid? It was the only possibility on which he could work; everything else would be too complicated. Wulff got out, strained with the hood, opened it, found the ignition block and assembled the wires. Taking another set of keys out of his pocket he bridged the gap between solenoid and battery, went around to the car to make sure that the keys were at the “on” position, then tried it again.
Slowly, groaning, mumbling, the car fired. It stalled and Wulff tried it again, but the starter motor whined and it flooded. All right. Even Cadillacs were not immune to corroded engines, ruined wires, but there was life in the old bastard yet, he could give it a try. Get a Cadillac and drive a fine car. Luxury with economy. The standard of the world for more than fifty years. Another side to Cadillac. Economy plus efficiency. Four hundred seventy-two cubic inches of power. Overhead valve V-8. Turbo-hydromatic transmission with selectra shift. He bridged the solenoid again, used a hand to carefully pump the open carburetor, clearing the air-cleaner to the side. The engine started. It rumbled and then settled into low idle, rife with misses. Twelve hundred rpm but firing.
All right. He stood aside, slammed down the hood, went to the driver’s seat and pumped the gas gen
tly until the car began to idle steadily, the high whine of the carburetor balanced off against the rattling of the misplaced aircleaner. Screw it. He was not going to open that hood again under any conditions.
Wulff settled himself into the driver’s seat, had dropped the car into gear and was already crawling forward, bumpers clearing with a scream from the Bonneville until he thought of Owens. Owens was still next to him. Regardless of what he thought of the man and the circumstances in which he had died, there was no way he could convey a corpse to his destination.
He hated to do it. Owens had meant more to him than Wulff, quite possibly, was willing to admit. He did not even want to think of the pain of that revelation, shuttled it to one side, this was no time to think of Owens. Later. He might think of him later again and then he might not; it all depended. The man was dead. Dead meat. You could not sentimentalize that which was afflicted with corruption.
