Everyone is still. Velma leans forward a little, greedily waiting for… something.
Yet nothing happens. The little round thing—which appears to be a skull—slowly rises up as if it is being brought closer to a set of invisible eyes.
THE TRICKY THING ABOUT THESE TOTEMS, says the voice, IS THAT THEY CAN REALLY ONLY BE USED ONCE.
“W-what?” says Velma.
ONCE THEY’VE TAKEN SOMEONE WHEREVER THEY’RE SUPPOSED TO—IN THIS CASE, TO THE WILDLING, I PRESUME—NO ONE ELSE CAN USE IT AGAIN. IT’S A BIT LIKE A ONE-WAY TICKET. BUT YOU WOULDN’T KNOW WHAT THOSE ARE.
“No,” says Velma. “No! I… I can’t believe it! Who could have used it already?”
THE GIRL, says the voice. WHO ELSE?
“So… it killed her instead of you?” asks Velma, perplexed.
OH NO. IT LET HER LIVE. SHE IS QUITE SPECIAL.
Velma drops the box. “It’s not fair. It’s not fair. Why do you always get away with everything?”
I AM SORRY. I DID NOT KNOW IT HURT YOU SO MUCH.
“You did. Don’t say that. You did.” There is something brittle and pained in Velma’s face: there is nothing worse than an opponent who is suddenly revealed to be understanding and compassionate.
YOU KNOW SHE WILL NEVER WORK AS A HOST. YOU CANNOT USE HER TO BRING BACK MOTHER.
Velma grows eerily calm. “You think so, do you,” she says softly.
I KNOW.
“That’s nothing special. I found that out long ago. I tried to show her Mother—tried to open her eyes to where She lay sleeping. But she resisted. She is quite strong. But there are other ways.” She turns and starts to walk back down the canyon.
WHAT WILL YOU DO? asks the voice. I TOLD YOU SHE WOULD NEVER WORK FOR YOU.
“She won’t,” says Velma. “But she was once a mother in her own right. Or she could have been. I know. I saw it, when I touched her.”
EVEN IF YOU WERE TO TRY… I WOULD STOP YOU. SHE CANNOT COME BACK. SHE CANNOT.
“You would fight? They think you a monster here, you know. And what you have done here is pathetic and wrong.”
I KNOW. BUT DO YOU NOT SEE… THAT IS WHY I AM WILLING TO FIGHT?
“No.”
I HAVE DONE WRONG, SIBLING. I WILL NOT DO MORE.
“How sad you’ve become. Maybe, when She comes, She’ll spare you out of pity.” Velma reaches into her coat pocket and takes out something dark. As she maneuvers it in her hands, Gracie sees it is a snub-nosed .38. Velma looks toward the end of the canyon, and attempts a smile—a crooked, awkward, mangled version of a smile—and, with a, “See you around, Brother,” she holds the pistol to her head.
Oh my God, thinks Gracie, but before she can move there is a small (really just amazingly small) pop.
Something dark burbles up from Velma’s head. It pools in the brim of her white hat for a moment. Then she tips forward, toward the end of the canyon, and blood begins to course out of her skull to soak into the gravel. Then she is still.
Gracie covers her eyes with her hands. The air fills with that low, low hum, and she hears a quiet, soft voice in her ear:
I’m sorry you had to see that.
Gracie lowers her hands, but keeps her eyes shut. She thinks, You never told me you could talk out loud.
It’s very uncomfortable for me. And this is more intimate. More private.
Where’s Mona? Is she safe?
She is… away, says the voice in her ear. But I do not think she is safe, no. Not… after that. I tried to protect her, but it seems I underestimated the resolve of my opponents.
How could Velma… do something like that? Why?
It wasn’t the girl you knew. Not inside. I think whatever was inside her has found a loophole in the way things work here. Probably a lot of loopholes. Perhaps ones that were intentionally put there.
What was it trying to do to you? thinks Gracie. What’s the wildling?
Another one of the loopholes. The wildling is… my big brother.
Gracie sits in shock for a moment. I thought you didn’t have anyone older than you?
I do. I thought it was lost, or dead. Mother abandoned it when it was very young. But it appears it has survived, and even followed us here. But because Mother did not help it come here, did not deliver it as She did all of us, its transport was… marred. It is here, but it is trapped. Yet it seems someone has figured out how to give it entry to our lives. And since it never promised Her anything…
It can do what it likes, thinks Gracie.
Yes. And it is… incredibly powerful. The older we are, the more we’re like Her.
So what will you do?
A pause.
Gracie says, out loud, “Anything?”
The quiet voice says, I will do what I must. I never raised a hand to Her. No one did. But maybe I should have.
Gracie thinks, What do you mean?
Come here. Down the canyon. To me. Do you see me?
No, thinks Gracie. There is a fluting sound again, like a pipe organ, and something appears to form in the air. Yes. Now I do.
Come to me. I will make you ready.
Gracie stands and makes her way down the canyon, stepping around the reddened spots of gravel. For what?
Your departure. I just have one last question.
Yes?
Do you know how to drive a car?
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
People tend to assume consciousness is a single, unified act. You just are: there’s you, being alive, and you knowing you’re being alive, and that’s really all there is to it.
But that’s not really all there is to it.
Consciousness (like, some would eagerly point out, pandimensional space) has levels: your mind is not one whole, but a wild variety of systems layered on top of one another and, in some key places, blended together. A person, a consciousness, is many, many moving parts, all clamoring to eat up information or transport information, or, in some cases (such as Mona’s for the years before her arrival in Wink), angrily trying to block any information altogether.
And though Mona—or at least the overarching consciousness referred to as “Mona”—sees and experiences nothing but darkness as she is instantaneously transported through physical space (with mountain walls becoming permeable, like great walls of soft, rippling water), there are parts of her that are not only aware of themselves, but are also aware of their distant, separated parts, which are being transported alongside one another.
It is in this moment (which really isn’t a moment, of course, because all this is happening instantaneously) that Mona could, if she wished, experience blissful and total self-examination. For there is no better time to examine and understand one’s selfhood than when it is dissected and hurtling through darkness.
But Mona does not do this. Because there is one part of her that cannot be broken down into any smaller parts, and it occupies the whole of whatever attention she has left.
Mostly because it is a part of her she never knew was there.
It is a piece of awareness, a piece of perception, a piece of her that can observe and see and know; yet it is independent of all her normal faculties, independent of her eyes and conventional sight, capable of looking into and perceiving a world (or even worlds) unapproachable to her physical self.
She remembers, as Parson said, that light is mere radiation—there are other ways of seeing. It is as if she has a tiny lens of her own inside her.
Though Mona is in no way fully conscious, or even self-aware, she immediately imagines this ability as a black, cold, bead-like eye planted on the surface of her beating heart, buried deep within her but by no means limited or blind: this thing, this part of her, can peer through her ribs and sternum and flesh, past solid walls and the very earth to glimpse…
Elsewhere.
Home.
Where it—and she—belongs.
Her systems all begin crashing back together, reassembling themselves somewhere quite far away from where she started. Yet as her nervo
us system blends back into her musculature, and her self-awareness melds with her instincts, she wonders about that black eye, like the eye of a squid or some undersea horror, and wonders what it has seen inside her. Then she sleeps.
“No offense to anyone in the car,” says Dord, “but this is maybe the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever done, and I’ve done some pretty dumb shit in my day.”
“Shut the fuck up, Dord,” says Bolan.
But he silently agrees. Bolan has the distinction of never having done a dumb thing in his life, up until a few years ago, when he bought in with the spook in the hat. But at the time it didn’t seem that dumb. Yet this seems dumb, so very, very dumb: they are all piled into Bolan’s shit-ass Honda Civic, which is straining to carry their weight (especially Dord’s, which is ample) up the incline of one of Wink’s Picturesque New Mexican Mountains. They are here, as Bolan heroically phrased it, to complete a rescue mission: they are going to get this bitch with the rifle out of town, because, for whatever reason, the spook in the hat needs her to do something pretty fucking bad, and they don’t want him to do that.
Bolan had to keep asking them that on the way up here. Did they want the spook to do something pretty fucking bad? And Mallory and Dord would mumble no, of course not, of course we don’t want that. And Bolan would say, each time, “Well, all fucking right, then,” and they’d all drive on for several minutes in silence before Mallory or Dord would voice some reservations again.
Bolan isn’t sure where she’ll be. Just somewhere around that barren canyon next to the mesa (which seems to be the source of a hell of a lot of traffic tonight). His plan is 100 percent improvisation: if he’d actually sat down and planned this out, he would’ve realized how impossible it all was, and given up.
So he is totally and utterly astonished when the ghostly form of a woman lying on the ground with a rifle in her arms comes sliding out of the predawn darkness, as if she is being carried to him on the reflective paint on the asphalt.
Everyone in the car goes dead silent. Bolan slowly, slowly brings it to a halt about ten feet from the unconscious woman.
“Holy shit,” says Dord. “Is that her?”
Bolan is about to say yes, but he really has no idea what this woman looks like: he only knows she has a red car, which she has inconveniently chosen not to bring along for identification.
“It’s got to be,” says Bolan.
“Maybe it’s a trick,” says Mallory.
At first Bolan scoffs, but then he realizes Mal could be right. Who could possibly guess at the minds of these people, these things?
“Let’s just get her into the car,” says Bolan.
They pile out and slowly circle the unconscious woman.
“She’s pretty,” says Dord appreciatively.
“Jesus,” says Bolan. “Get her legs, for God’s sake.”
They pick her up and start hauling her toward the Civic. Bolan points her at the back door, but Dord keeps walking, tugging her ankles right by.
“Where the hell are you going?” says Bolan.
“The trunk. Are we… not putting her in the trunk?”
“Why the fuck would we put her in the trunk?” says Mallory.
“Well, that’s usually where I put unconscious people,” says Dord.
Mal and Bolan glance at one another. Mal shrugs.
“Let’s put her in the fucking trunk,” says Bolan.
The trunk of a Honda Civic is not made to accommodate the supine form of an unconscious human comfortably, but Bolan and company do their best (mostly by removing the tire iron and putting a blanket over the spare). “What about the gun?” asks Dord.
Bolan looks back. He is surprised to see that the gun is none other than the goddamn cannon Dee sometimes brought into the Roadhouse. “How the fuck did she…” says Bolan, before shaking his head. “Never mind. Get that too. But don’t put it in the trunk with her! Throw it in the backseat, or something.”
Then they pile back into the car, throw it in reverse, and haul ass back down the mountain.
That, thinks Bolan, was a little too easy.
His suspicion does not abate when Dord chipperly says, “Well, that was easy!”
“Did you know she’d be there, Tom?” asks Mal.
“No.”
“So do you think it’s a trap?” she asks.
Bolan is silent.
“Do you think so, Tom?”
“I guess we’ll find out if we get down this fucking mountain, okay?” he says.
Which, to everyone’s relief, they do: their trip down is entirely uneventful, save for a deer who peers at them from the side of the road, eyes flashing a fluorescent orange, before withdrawing into the dark.
“Are we out?” asks Dord. “Are we done?”
“Quiet,” snaps Bolan, as if they are a submarine crew trying to slip past sonar.
The street blocks of Wink swell up on their left, then gradually float away. There is a gray-pink hue in the east: dawn is coming, and this long, long night is finally done.
Done. They are Going. They are Out. They are almost Gone. This strange town, with its strange inhabitants and their catatonic stares, will hopefully become just an unpleasant memory, just a “can you fucking believe that happened” story they will all share one day.
Which is when they hear a crackle up in the skies.
“Is that thunder?” asks Dord. He presses his head up against the window glass to see up.
“It can’t be,” says Mallory. “There’s not a cloud in the—”
Then everything goes blue-white.
Bolan’s ears don’t register an explosion so much as they do a huge, rather fartish flapping sound, like someone has just crushed a massive, inflated ziplock bag right beside his head. It throws him toward the side of the car, his head cracking up against the window while his foot, over which he still retains some amount of control, stabs out at the brake. The car immediately fills with smoke, and not wood smoke or anything so pleasant, but a smoke that is acrid and fumy and somehow electric.
He can’t see out, but Bolan is pretty sure he’s stopped the car. “What the fuck was that!” he shouts.
He hears Dord coughing in the passenger seat to his right. Mallory, however, is silent, so he turns to look, not quite sure what he’ll see but expecting carnage of a most horrific sort.
The entire backseat has been burned black. He can see bits of the wire frame showing through the charred fabric, like ribs. The back and right side windows have both melted, leaving viscous, drooping holes in the frames.
But Mallory… Mallory seems completely fine. There’s not a mark on her.
She looks at Bolan as if just slightly surprised. Then she glances around the smoke-filled car.
She opens her mouth and says, in a curiously nasal voice, “Ah. I’ve been here before. Haven’t I?”
“What?” says Bolan. His voice is a little hoarse from the smoke. “Mal, are you all right?”
Mallory looks down. There’s something at her feet: the huge rifle the girl had with her.
Mallory picks it up and turns it over in her hands, as if she’s a little unsure of it. “This is big,” she says.
Dord continues groaning and coughing in the passenger seat. “Fuck,” he says. “Fuck, man. It burned the hair off the back of my head.”
Mal looks at Dord, who is turned away. Then she points the rifle at the back of the seat and turns off the safety.
“Mal?” says Bolan. “Mal, what the—”
She pulls the trigger.
The shot punches through the seat, as well as most of Dord and what’s left of the windshield. The top of his belly bursts open, and the smoke whips around the bullet’s now-vacant trajectory.
Dord chokes and struggles against his seat belt. The gaping hole in his chest brims with blood, then overflows, dribbling down his white-shirted belly. Bolan is trying to shout, “Mallory, what the fuck!” when she cocks the rifle with a harsh click-clack, raises it a little higher, and fires again
.
This time the bullet goes through Dord’s upper chest, and part of his neck. He slumps forward, blood running down the gray, slick seat belt, and goes still.
Mallory looks at Bolan. There’s something wrong with her eyes: something fluttering or flickering, as if her eyes were lamps filled with moths.
“Mal?” says Bolan.
She cocks the rife, then raises it toward him.
And that’s the last thing he sees: just the dark eye of the rifle, and her hand, and the curl of the smoke.
Mona wakes up when she hears the blast. She thinks it might be part of whatever the hell it is that First did to her when she hears people screaming and coughing. Whatever just happened to her, or whatever First meant to happen to her, something’s gone wrong.
She wonders where the hell she is. It’s dark, wherever it is. She feels around, finds something hard and circular hidden under a blanket below her. She knows what it is almost immediately.
All right, she thinks. I’m in the trunk of a car. This is… not good.
Everything gets spectacularly less good when she hears the gun start going off. And there’s no mistaking that sound: it’s a .30-06 rifle, probably hers, she’s guessing, since it’s nowhere in the trunk. Someone starts screaming at a much higher register, which means he got tagged. Then the gun goes off again, and the screaming stops, which is really, really quite bad.
Someone asks a question. And the gun goes off one final time.
Silence. Mona waits for a good noise. Maybe—praise God—a siren.
But this is Wink. She can’t remember the last time she heard a siren, or even saw a cruiser.
The car’s shocks creak very slightly as someone shifts from one end of the car to the other. Seat springs cluck like chickens; the nasal thunk of a car handle; then feet on asphalt, coming her way.
Mona has no idea how it could help, but she feigns unconsciousness.
A vein of light erupts above her. She cracks an eye, just barely, and sees a rather pretty but questionably dressed woman looking down on her. Mona’s never seen her before, but she knows that fluttering in the woman’s eye, the suggestion of movement where there should be none.
American Elsewhere Page 53
