by Brian Hodge
The back door opened, thumped shut. For an instant Erika hoped it was her mother and then took it back, and when she saw her brother Cal, she relaxed. With him she was safe. So far.
“What happened between you and Mom?” he asked. “She hardly noticed I was alive when I saw her in the living room.”
Erika shrugged, widening the sway of the hammock. “I don’t know what happened. It just did.”
“Oh. Okay.” That was all, but Erika read in the tone of his voice that he understood well enough. If not what actually transpired, then at least the root causes. And he wouldn’t press further.
Cal was barely sixteen, his prized possession a month-old driver’s license. As of late he spent interminable stretches of time in the bathroom performing mysterious rites with Clearasil and Brut and Lavoris, and his idea of a culturally stimulating experience was to hang out with his friends inside the nearest shopping mall. But you at least accept me for what I am, she thought. In him ran a sensitive, observant streak that might someday turn him into a very thoughtful and loving man who’d make some girl very lucky.
With a wry grin, she realized she’d never thought of him in that way before.
“Did I do something funny?” he asked, his unruly dark hair (buzzed too short on the sides, she thought) ruffling in the breeze.
“No,” she said, then tried to turn onto her elbow to face him, a move that nearly caused the hammock to pitch her into the lawn. “No, just thinking.”
He grinned. “You’re always thinking.”
Erika smiled up at him. So much she wished she could verbalize to this brother of hers who was skinny as a rail and whose long feet gave him a profile like the letter L. So much to say, to warn, to protect, to nurture…and the words wouldn’t come.
“Cal…” she said, their eyes locking.
“You want me to be careful, don’t you?”
She nodded slowly.
Cal’s Adam’s apple bobbed nervously. He didn’t understand what she carted around upstairs either, but he believed in it, respected it. An open mind never hurt anybody. “Around anything in particular?”
“I don’t know.” Those silly tears wanted to leak out again, and she wouldn’t let them. “Just watch yourself. Be careful. Be…be well.” I sound so weird.
Cal nodded, gave her a lopsided smile. “I’ll try my best.”
They fell silent, and she heard traffic, birds, neighborhood kids, a squalling cat. “Cal, I don’t mean to be rude, but…”
“But you’ve got more thinking to do, right?”
“Exactly.”
“Okaaay,” he said, stretching, walking away. “Ole Cal knows when he’s not wanted.” His voice rose, passionate with mock regret. “No ma’am, don’t have to club me over the head twice, huh-uh. Poor unwanted Cal knows when to get gone.”
Erika laughed as he disappeared into the house, then resumed her hanging vigil. She stared up through a break in the leafy treetops, at the patch of azure sky, at the edge of a cloud that sliced across it.
She remembered Colorado from a trip with the family years ago, how the sky had been this color, only purer, if that were possible. And never before had she seen such a vast stretch of it, the first time the word infinity had been given tangible meaning. The thunder of a morning storm had echoed forever, rolling across mountains as if it had mass and weight, and would never die.
She’d known then that there were powers out there far far greater than her own, that could eclipse hers in a second’s time.
To go someplace like that again, where she knew no one, where no one knew her…
That’s what would make them even.
* *
Erika stayed up through the night into the wee hours. The catatonic hours, she sometimes called them when on a late date with the VCR. Her parents had gone to bed shortly after ten, and thereafter she moved into the family room for a movie or two. Cal was out with friends on this Sunday night, and she supposed she wanted to know when he came in safe and sound. Watchdogging him, sure. But wasn’t there something else?
The cryptic dream of last week had never returned…the latest in a series that always came attacking her in her sleep, like stealthy night fighters. And in its failure to return, she felt both a relief and a growing unease. Best to stay awake, then. At least she knew safety lay in that land.
One o’clock. Support Your Local Gunfighter, some old comedy-western with James Garner, had just ended. No Cal yet, but their parents weren’t too rough on him during the summer regarding a curfew. Lucky little twirp. When I was sixteen, could I have gotten away with dragging in this late? Noooo.
She made popcorn to sustain her through the next movie, which ended at two-thirty, and then Channel 5 rebroadcast the night’s last local news program. One of the highlights was the cleanup following the sixth annual Veiled Prophet Fair—America’s biggest birthday party, it had become billed as—which had begun during the middle of last week and had culminated on Saturday on the Fourth of July with one of the most grandiose fireworks displays ever seen by human eyes. Over three-quarters of a million people had jammed onto the riverfront and around the Arch and at the Landing, and if you didn’t think that many hungry, thirsty, sweaty people left an epic mess in their wake, you had another thing coming.
The phone jangled at ten ’til three. She answered before it got off a second ring.
“Hi. It’s, uh, it’s me.” The voice was male and unmistakably juvenile.
“Cal?”
“Who else?”
“Okay, dweeb, what’s wrong?”
He cleared his throat, then did it again. Stalling, of course. One of her own tactics. “Ummm, I went out tonight with Jerry and Kevin and Cliff, you know, to the movies. The new Schwarzenegger movie, Predator. You gotta see this one…”
“Skip the reviews, okay? Get to the important stuff.”
“Okay, okay. Anyway, we’ve been over at Cliff’s house messing around most of the rest of the night, ’cause his parents went away for the Fourth, and, uh…you know I was the only one driving and all…and my set of keys sort of got locked in the trunk.”
Erika sighed. “I see. And how did this happen?”
Silence, though she thought she could hear muffled laughter in the background.
“Cal.”
“How’d it happen?” he repeated.
“I think I asked something like that, yes.”
“Well, they were sort of in Kevin’s pocket at the time.” More laughter in the background. Near hysterical, truth be told.
“So what you’re trying so hard not to say is that Kevin’s in the trunk with the keys, and you need me to come bail you delinquents out of trouble.”
He snickered. “Now you’re catching on.”
Erika grabbed a pencil and notepad by the phone. “Where does Cliff live?”
“Not too far, just west of us, in Hazelwood.” He gave her the address, some quick directions. “Uh, one more thing.”
“You’re pushing your luck as it is.”
“I know, I know. But…well, we sort of drank some of Cliff’s parents’ beer, and…could you hurry? Kevin says he really has to piss.” Uproarious laughter in the background.
Erika laughed in spite of herself. “Tell him to tie a knot in it and I’ll get there when I can.”
She hung up, then clicked off the TV just before the final story came on. Had she seen it, she would have had considerably more to worry about than just her brother. It dealt with a quarantine on the entire little town of Potosi, almost forty miles southwest of St. Louis. Officials weren’t yet identifying the disease causing the quarantine, although sources had said it could possibly be a new strain of viral meningitis. The names of one family, all now dead, were released…the father, the mother, infant daughter, their eleven-year-old son named Chuck.
Erika tiptoed through the house, clo
se to her parents’ room, where the sound of slow, deep breathing filtered into the hall. She eased open the door to the linen closet, where her mom kept her purse when not using it, and searched until she found the other set of car keys. She pocketed them, grabbed the bowl of popcorn, and left.
Erika took I-270 west into Hazelwood, one of St. Louis’s endless suburbs, exited onto Howdershell Road. It was dead out here. St. Louis itself might never sleep, but the suburbs sure did.
Erika checked her scrap of paper once more. The turnoff was coming up shortly, she was sure of it. She reached for another fistful of popcorn.
It hit before her fingers closed inside the bowl.
Erika found herself staring at two converging realities. While still inside the car, she was also standing at what she took to be a roadside, at the shoulder of some unknown stretch of highway. Even though she knew, somewhere within the mental sliver that was firmly clinging to reality, that this was the dead of night, she could nevertheless see an enormous blue sky overhead. Could feel the burning of an angry sun.
Erika could still see Howdershell Road, past the sun, through it, a pair of overlapping images, like two photographic negatives laid one over another. She cried out while fighting to maintain control of the car; so much sensory overkill was hell on concentration. She’d swerved across into the wrong lane. White lines crisscrossed in front of her, blending in and out of the rays of this false sun. She aimed back across the road.
This wasn’t right…this wasn’t right at all. It had never happened like this before.
NOT WHILE I’M AWAKE!
She was dimly aware of screeching tires, and Erika instinctively knew that, given the force with which this was coming in, she’d tapped into something as important as she ever had before, maybe even more so. It had invaded her waking world, punched a hole through the safety net she’d always believed that consciousness provided.
A horn blared, a pair of huge twin suns grew nearer, and she dodged to the right to miss them. Trees and buildings and gas stations and 7-Elevens were out there, flashing quickly past, flashing too quickly past. For one terrifying moment, she couldn’t remember which of two places she was.
As she looked about in this pseudo-daylight world, this transplanted reality, she saw a puny line of trees near the highway. A brutal summer sun had been unkind to them. Erika felt the emotional resonance of others around her, a small group of people, a small handful, no more. Faces? Numbers? No good. They’d been kept from her. But fear was the common denominator, a panic barely kept from growing out of control. And maybe, just maybe, she felt…love. Unquestioned and unconditional, the kind of love that says You’re the reason I live, you’re the reason I’ll die…
She saw another twin sun in the distance, a pair of falling stars heading straight for her.
Erika looked to the left, saw a huge green sign, a flock of birds roosting atop its edge. An interstate sign, its silver reflective lettering hidden from her mind’s eye, though she believed the important word or words began with N, and then the birds exploded upward in flight as if possessed of a singular mind and will, soaring into the blue, and through the maelstrom of their wings she heard a furious wail that sounded unnervingly like braking tires and a panicked horn, and for one endless moment she feared that these two wildly disparate worlds were going to tear her in two and each would claim half.
Impact.
The other car struck her grill on the driver’s side, bashing it in and ripping away the fender to skid sparking in the street. Erika’s car swung to the right, tossing her across the front seat and into the passenger door. That burning daylight roadside receded far, far away, leaving her very much in the here and now. Popcorn showered past her face; a moment later came glass. The car spun like the worst carnival ride she could imagine, the kind where you know you’re going to toss your junk food as soon as you step off.
Yet everything felt in slow motion. Amplified.
She heard thunder, more grinding metal, felt the world tilt beneath her. Erika pressed her hands to her eyes and screamed, and the next thing she knew she was crawling around on the underside of the car’s roof, feeling the dome light jamming into her ribs.
The carnival ride was over. Everyone please exit to your left.
She found a window open. Driver’s side? Passenger side? That was a toughie. Erika wriggled through an opening that hadn’t been quite so tight moments before, and sprawled onto the pavement. Her horn was blaring eerily, a dying voice that refused to be silenced. Just like a thousand car wrecks she’d seen in a thousand movies, only now she was living it, fantasy had become reality.
It hurt to stand, hurt to walk, hurt to cry, hurt to breathe. She got a few steps away and gave up, tumbling into the street and feeling warm asphalt against her cheek. She heard other voices, other car doors, but these were far away, beyond even dreams.
She heard something coming toward her. No, not heard, exactly, felt it more than anything. Something wet and warm and snuffling caressed her upturned cheek.
And she thought wouldn’t it be funny if the last thing on earth to comfort her was that dog licking her face.
11
He lived for the arena.
When he stepped into the ring that night, he knew it was going to be a special evening. He felt it in the air, its electric taste. In the crowd. In the canvas and ropes of the wrestling ring itself.
The crowd booed when Pit Bull Pearson stomped from the locker rooms on his way toward the ring. He was, in a word, hated. Pit Bull was known to fans as one of the infamous rulebreakers, a dirty fighter who wouldn’t think twice about jabbing the eye, elbowing the groin, dislocating the knee.
But Pit Bull didn’t give two hoots. He had a job to do, and it didn’t include being loved. He strained at his leash, its other end wrapped tightly around the scarred fist of his manager, Allen Steiner. The thick leather of his spiked collar dug into his neck. He snarled at the crowd, bared his teeth. Took a swipe at a jeering spectator who got too close.
“Down boy, down!” cried Steiner, raring back with the leash. You milked the theatrics until they ran dry. Give them a good show for their money.
A hailstorm of greasy popcorn showered from the smokebank above, several kernels pelting Pit Bull’s bald head. He wiped angrily at his scalp, flailed his arms at the screaming crowd, howled at them. Tonight, oh tonight he was wired.
They mounted the steps to the ring, and Pit Bull tried to hurdle the ropes. Steiner kept a tight rein on him, marveling at just how deeply into character Carl Pearson had immersed himself tonight. So long as Steiner had known him, Carl had never been a sedate individual, but tonight the guy was living on the razor’s edge. Steiner planted himself at the ring’s outer corner and looped Pit Bull’s leash around the top rope, which thrummed around the entire circumference with Pit Bull’s struggles to tear loose.
The tide of favor within the crowd abruptly shifted—Pit Bull’s opponent had entered. Opponent, and they would all be hoping, his demise…the blond, suntanned prettyboy Strong Jack Armstrong. His white trunks were coated with silver and gold sparkles, and he flexed his muscles for the crowd…biceps, deltoids, hairless pectorals. His smile was nothing short of dazzling.
And the crowd ate it up.
They cheered, they applauded, they frantically waved their arms. Women screamed promises of undying passion. Had the crowd been clad in the finest silks and linens, they gladly would’ve cast them down before Jack Armstrong so he wouldn’t sully his feet on the way into the ring.
Steiner drew one arm back, keeping a taut line on the leash. With the other hand he massaged Pit Bull’s tightly bunched shoulders, bent in close to talk in his ear.
“Keep your high going in. But ease back down in about five minutes.” Steiner slapped his hand down on Pit Bull’s shoulder and massaged harder.
The referee came to center-ring to make his announcements about th
is next battle. Strong Jack Armstrong was of course the favored wrestler in the match. The official ratings in Wrestling Today magazine listed him as the number four athlete in the Missouri Division. Pit Bull didn’t even make the top ten, but he was considered strong contender material.
“Give ’em a good show, about twenty minutes’ worth,” Steiner said into Pit Bull’s ear. “All you’ve gotta remember, this isn’t your night.”
He unhooked the spiked collar, holding it and the leash in his hand while Pit Bull sprang toward the center of the ring, and the match began.
Pit Bull put Jack Armstrong to the canvas with a diving clothesline. And knew it was going to be an electric night to remember.
* *
Wisconsin: Milwaukee and Green Bay.
Creepy Carl, Creepy Carl.
Iowa: Cedar Rapids.
Creepy Carl, Creepy Carl.
Illinois: Peoria and Springfield.
Creepy Carl, Creepy Carl.
Missouri: Columbia, Jefferson City, and finally, St. Louis.
Creepy Carl, Creepy Carl.
The chant had seemed to follow him everywhere he went. The other kids had picked it up from the kids who’d known him before without ever having met them, as if by a process of diffusion. On and on down the line, and he feared the litany would be eternal.
It had followed him through a seemingly endless gauntlet of state-run homes. Why hadn’t they liked him? He spent long hours before the mirror puzzling that one over. He’d always been taller than the others his age. And while he hadn’t started to fill out until his mid-teens, he’d never looked awkward. Even as a child he’d looked strong. His face? Maybe there lay the problem. His jaw was crooked, for one thing, a souvenir from some long-ago, forgotten altercation with his father, whoever that had been. It was a strong jaw, firm and often clenched, but crooked. And his eyes…maybe they were the biggest problem. Deep-set and blacker than midnight, like two huge irises, they peered out with what appeared to be a barely held lunacy, ringed by heavy ridges of bone.
