Oasis

by Brian Hodge

  The ice-white moon was playing hide-and-seek with skimming clouds, and when it sailed into unobstructed view, I prayed Aaron wouldn’t look up. He was in the front yard now, looking, following the same path I’d taken around the side of the house as a dog follows a weak scent.

  I hugged the chimney and gulped the chilly air.

  And remembered what he’d said a few days before down at Giant City: It’s my fight, Chris. You don’t understand.

  He may not have known what was coming, but he still felt it on its way.

  The moon ducked behind a cloud again when Aaron made it into the backyard, little more than a dark shape prowling about. He worked his way around to the woodpile, and when the moon broke free again, my heart skipped a beat or two when I saw what he’d found: the firewood axe.

  Just as Joshua Crighton’s sister-in-law had done. Just as the Aaron of my dad’s hallucination had done.

  Only this time he couldn’t find me, and from the increasingly frantic path he stalked around the backyard, hacking divots out of the trees we’d spent so many autumns cleaning up after, I knew he was increasingly agitated about it. Finally he went running toward the back of the house, and although I couldn’t see it, I could tell that he’d just emptied the patio doors of their glass. The panes shattered with a tremendous jangling sound, and next there came the crunching footsteps as he entered the house.

  Inside now … don’t let him hear you up here, or he’ll figure it out, and Olaf will win. And then he’ll probably keep on killing Andersons as long as he can. Until he’s dead, or until there aren’t any more Andersons left to kill.

  A dismal thought. And probably no exaggeration.

  No, not Andersons, I thought. Handorrssons. Because if there was ever a time I should cling true to my roots, this was it.

  I was startled back to the here and now by a couple more familiar sounds: the slamming of a car door and the grind of an engine. It caught, and after a moment, I saw Mom’s car backing a speedy path down the driveway. Aaron cornered too sharply at the end, slicing across a corner of the lawn and then over the sidewalk, and then he was screeching down the street and out of sight.

  Silence.

  And then I groaned with the realization.

  Since he couldn’t find me, he’d draw me out to follow him. Because he knew I would never abandon him. And if I was to follow, even though I might lag behind by several minutes, there was only one place on earth I’d be assured of finding him.

  Tri-Lakes.

  I scuttled back to the edge of the roof, then eased down to the ground along the antenna. I ran in through the devastated patio doors, and grabbed a paring knife from the kitchen and my car keys from my room. I limped outside through the front and opened my Malibu’s trunk. Unwrapped the blanket-bound runestone and battle-axe, then lugged them out. I had no idea yet how I might exploit them, but Crighton had said the runes were used for magic and curses, and so I’d have to keep these items beside me.

  Next I unlatched the hood, because I knew there was only one way to get at Tri-Lakes now. No way would Aaron allow me to take my time up there while emptying five or ten gallons of gasoline around the trees. Considering what happened to Rick, I wasn’t sure that would work even if Aaron weren’t there.

  Now there was only one choice, one recourse: turning my car into a torpedo.

  I poked around the carburetor until I found the gas line, and used the knife to punch a small slit in the rubber. Hope this does the trick.

  Then, for better or for worse, I was behind the wheel and rolling. My knee hurt the least, especially by comparison with my wrist and head. My wrist — now there was a gruesome sight. It had swelled up to baseball size, and if it went much more, I figured it would pop like a fleshy balloon. The bulge reminded me of a python after a heavy meal, and it hurt more just to look at it.

  So I watched the town shoot past my windows, and I could’ve found it easy to hate everyone I saw, because they were safe, and free of pain, and in a few hours they would tuck themselves into warm beds with no more worries than whether they’d be able to make ends meet again this Christmas. I wanted to be one of them so badly it ached.

  While it was no easy task driving this fast with one hand, I was doing all right, if sometimes shaky about keeping it in one lane. But I almost lost it when I veered onto Tenth Street, which would soon morph into Route 37. I took it too wide, swerving across three lanes and into the far right, into the side of an Oldsmobile coming up on the outside. I wrestled the wheel and tried to recover, tires screaming beneath me, but the momentum was too much to overcome, and the next thing I knew our doors were grinding each other into junk and I was looking over into another face a few feet away. Our cars swayed together, parted for a second, then clashed again and left a spill of glass and metal littering the street behind us.

  The people in the other car were a couple about my parents’ age. Once they got a good look at me, bloody me, the guy locked up his brakes and bounced half onto the sidewalk over the curb and came to a noisy halt.

  I stomped the gas and kept going, sailing through a yellow light turning to red. The folks in the Olds would be fine. Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.

  Cold sweat was running into my eyes by the time the town fell behind me. Ahead, there beckoned nothing but countryside. And the closest thing to medieval Iceland that I would ever know.

  Chapter 44

  She was working late and alone that night, Shelly Potter was. I’ll always wonder if whoever was looking down from above had added a subtle touch of intervention and seen to that. Because as I look back, I see that the fact she was working late probably ended up saving my life.

  At last the dreaded day had come. The IBM Selectric that had been her livelihood for so long had become her enemy. Sitting there, humming merrily away, mocking her inability to concentrate.

  Work had been an all-day rocky road. Yesterday, well, no work to be done then, being Thanksgiving, but it had been a long and depressing holiday. She’d baked a Cornish hen and opened a can of green beans and kept the football games on for company. Case closed.

  Come to think of it, work hadn’t been going well since Wednesday. Coincidentally enough, it started right after Chris’s abrupt termination of their last conversation. She hadn’t known whether to be offended by his brusqueness or flattered by his conviction that he was protecting her from what he’d discovered.

  Whatever.

  Shelly switched off the IBM, planted an elbow to either side of it, and held her head in her palms. The only sound in the newsroom, which at this time of evening seemed much larger and lonelier than during the day, was the police scanner. The thing was never turned off, even when it played to an empty room, and she’d long ago learned to tune it into the background, along with the roar of the furnace.

  Chris — altruistic, or stupidly macho?

  A couple weeks before, Shelly had managed to lay her hands on last spring’s high school yearbook. And there he was, Chris Anderson, page 117. Light-colored jacket, dark shirt, a tie shaded between the two. He was smiling, with more than a hint of mischief in his smile, and most girls would no doubt regard that face as a good-looking one. Everyone would call it carefree.

  Poor guy. He’d lost that happy-go-lucky look somewhere. Life had kicked him in the teeth since the picture had been snapped, and he’d kept coming back for more. And more. And more. You could see it in his eyes, in the tiny lines around them that may have been stress and may have been lack of sleep, but that shouldn’t have been there at all.

  Was he really seven years younger than she? Last fall, when that yearbook photo had been taken, he was. But now? Now he was plugged into something that was aging him a lot faster than those around him. But at least Chris wasn’t rolling over and playing dead. He was fighting back, staring it in the face and getting back up again every time it hammered him over the head.

  Maybe he was young, but she thought she could learn a few things from him.

  And when a nasal
voice from the police scanner mentioned his name, she sat up in her chair as if she’d been shocked.

  “Hit and run,” the voice said. “License plates are registered to a Christopher Anderson. He made no effort to stop. The last they saw of him, he was driving north on Tenth Street at a high rate of speed.”

  North, she thought. And Tenth turns into 37, and that leads...

  Shelly was on her feet and slinging on her jacket before she was even sure what she was doing. And by the time she was, she’d already locked the building door behind her.

  Chapter 45

  The journey to Tri-Lakes had never seemed so long. As the trees and houses and mailboxes flashed by, the events of the past several months replayed through my mind. Kind of like watching your life pass before your eyes.

  What a clever, cunning bastard Olaf was. He’d spiraled everything in toward Aaron and me with the sure touch of a master. First catching my attention by throwing Dennis Lawton’s body at me, to scratch out that ominous message. Then eroding our personal lives, wrecking relationships and killing off our friends so we’d finally have nowhere else to turn for support. Rick, Bobby, Mitch, Mary … they’d done nothing but care for the wrong people at the wrong time. Next, sacrificing Hurdles, a simple pawn in his plan, so that we would fear anybody and everybody, not knowing whose form he’d be coming in next time. Finally saving the biggest surprise of all for the end: brother against brother. We’d played along, into his hands, every step of the way.

  But it occurred to me that Olaf himself had created his own worst enemy, in me. Had he tried to compress all this carnage and sorrow into a few days five or six months back, he could’ve wiped me out at his leisure. But he’d toyed with me too much, played his cat-and-mouse games too long. He’d toughened me up like nothing else could’ve. I was ready to meet him on his own terms … and force him to meet me on a few of mine, as well.

  A couple of miles short of county road 1250N, I realized how strong the smell of gasoline was becoming within the car. No surprise, considering it had been drizzling all over the manifold since I’d left. And the time had come. It was play or pay now.

  I rammed the accelerator to the floor, bringing a whine from the engine and a jump of the speedometer. The pitch of the motor rose ever higher, a single note climbing an endless scale, and the car began to shudder a little. I hoped, prayed, that my luck would hold out just a bit longer. And then, finally, another sound, unheard since that long-ago trip from Chicago: the engine backfiring through the carb.

  Flameout.

  Soon I caught the promising aromas of scorching metal and burning rubber, and the temperature gauge’s needle strained into the red zone. I hoped that the Malibu, which had itself become a friend over the past couple years, wouldn’t give out before finishing this last, most important road trip.

  Come on, you bitch, you can take it.

  A millennium of history weighed on me. The gulf of time had been spanned, and I was one with my ancestor. Our destinies, separated by a thousand years, were now entwined. And we would not fail. The green reflection of the 1250N sign shone in my headlights. The interior of my car had grown very warm, and by the time I swerved off Route 37 in a scream of rubber, orange flames were dancing beneath the dash. Clouds of acrid smoke billowed from the defroster vent. I coughed and rolled down my window, letting in a frigid blast of fresh air and shivering for my troubles.

  I veered onto Tri-Lakes’s entrance road, slinging gravel and fishtailing, fighting the steering wheel with one hand. And then the car rolled straight and true, back into the world that had first sheltered us, then turned on us with savage fury.

  As I coursed down the straightaway, I reached over to wrestle the runestone onto the floor. It landed with a heavy thud beneath my legs, and I shoved it forward, wedging the gas pedal to the floor.

  Turning Olaf’s own memorial against him.

  I steered the car through a right curve, riding the brake the whole time, then another right, a left, then a final left that put me on the road leading down to our favorite spot by the pond. The spot where we’d spent idle summer nights contemplating our lives and futures and vowing that we would always be there for each other, no matter what.

  The spot where Aaron’s car was parked.

  He was in the clearing to my left, standing in the grass, a lone, shadowed figure under the light of the moon. Waiting. Holding the firewood axe across the front of his body like a guardian at a gate.

  I clenched my teeth and jogged the car left, bouncing over a shallow ditch and onto open ground. My foot came down heavy on the runestone as I sought to drive it even harder against the pedal, and I set the car on a straight vector toward the grove, down the incline leading into the midst of the trees.

  I saw the trees move, and frowned a moment, wondering.

  Then I broke into a huge, hopeful smile despite the pain, because the trees had moved, and it took Olaf in them to do it. He’d left Aaron — I could see that by the newly relaxed stance of my brother’s body.

  Even Olaf, with all he could do, couldn’t be in two places at the same time. And Aaron couldn’t stop a car.

  I saw the trees move, and something hurtled toward the car like an image from a 3-D movie. The windshield fractured into a starburst on the passenger’s side as a limb three inches thick punched through and into the seat like a spear. Glass sprayed onto the dash and seat, and cracks spread across my field of vision, and half the hood was covered with foliage, but none of that mattered. I could still see the grove looming closer, closer, its ancient resident helpless for perhaps the very first time.

  “NICE TRY, ASSHOLE!” I screamed.

  I bailed out with less than thirty yards to spare, throwing the door wide open and flinging first the axe, then myself, clear. I landed in a bad roll, banging knee, head, wrist, bringing new vistas of pain. Being turned inside out couldn’t have been much worse.

  My roll came to a skidding halt in some shaggy grass, just as the Malibu plowed into the grove, flames licking out along the hood. It bulldozed through a few spindly young trees and then demolished itself against the granddaddy of them all, buckling the hood into an accordion and lifting the back end clear off the ground. Metal crunched, glass shattered, and my car flipped around onto its side. With a secondary bursting of glass, the runestone came crashing out a side window to thud heavily onto the ground.

  And there the car lay, wounded and dying. It wasn’t going to blow.

  Seconds passed, eerily silent except for the delicate tinkling of glass.

  “I didn’t mean it, Chris!” Aaron called over to me. He sounded every bit as miserable as I felt, and had sagged to his knees.

  I couldn’t even answer, not yet. And then all was still again, except for the distant rumbling of thunder. Flat on my back, I saw the dark clouds converging overhead, racing toward a central point from every direction. A meteorological impossibility. They formed a thick canopy overhead, low and sullen, and then I felt the first drops of rain spatter onto my face.

  “Oh come on!” I bellowed to the sky, finally finding my voice.

  It was rumored that be could pray to Thor, Crighton had said, to send down lightning and fire to consume his enemies.

  I scrabbled like a crab back to where the battle-axe had landed, the axe engraved with those strange runic inscriptions, and grasped it with my good hand.

  Magic. Curses.

  I pushed up to my feet again and stood under the bruised-looking sky as rain pelted down around me, the drops getting bigger by the moment, and screamed toward the clouds with such force that it pained my lungs.

  “If you were ever there,” I cried out to Thor, “you don’t have to help me! BUT DAMN YOU, DON’T FIGHT AGAINST ME!”

  And more than ever, holding the axe felt good. Better than good, it felt right.

  Just as had happened earlier in the fall, Tri-Lakes and I were transported to another time. There were no asphalt lots to fret about, and no cars, no Aaron. Only a lonely grove of trees, the fjo
rd, the craggy hills … and me, bloodied, with long blond hair hanging toward my shoulders.

  The gulf of time had been spanned, and everything in two worlds had come full circle at last.

  I knew then that the axe in my hand had never been a warning from Olaf. It had been a gift, forged in fires not of this earth, a weapon that could be used to win the battle if only I could get close enough, if only I could use it properly. If only my courage would hold out. If only I proved myself noble enough, worthy.

  I began to move forward, not yet knowing what to do but knowing that movement was a start, because no way could I simply stand there and watch it rain and let everything collapse back down on our heads again.

  So I began to move…

  And suddenly all was back in the twentieth century again, and not a moment too soon. Because Olaf was on the move again too, and he’d crossed back over into my brother once more. Aaron rose slowly, shaking with tremors, and with him he carried the axe I’d hoped he would leave on the ground. No such luck.

  From the look in his eyes as he faced me, he meant to use it, too. He adjusted his grip to let him swing it with bad intentions.

  Showdown.

  I matched his fierce gaze moment by moment, and held a steady pace as I limped toward him, caressing the handle of my own axe. And, as axes go, mine suddenly looked a lot more intimidating.

  No more running, not from me. We’d run as far as we were going to. Now we were where we belonged. Where it would finish.

  Aaron lunged forward, his axe slicing a broad arc whose apex would reach near my neck. I leaned into it with a one-handed swing of my own, bringing my weapon up to block his. It was the most beautiful move I could’ve hoped for. The razored edge of my battle-axe sheared through the handle of Aaron’s, the hickory handle, with a dry splintering sound. The head fell into the grass, and Aaron was left holding a truncated length of handle.