by Keith Laumer
I pushed it aside, tottered to my feet. Joel stared at me, dazed. I listened, heard the slap of running beast-hands.
"Into the cell, Joel-" I pushed him inside, slammed and locked the door.
"You'll be safe there-they won't bother with you," I called. "When you get ashore, go home, stay there. No matter what-stay in Jacksonville. You understand?"
He nodded dumbly. The feet were close now.
I turned, ran along the passage, took a cross-corridor, nearly fell over Runt, lying sprawled on the deck. A patch of evening sky showed at the top of the companionway. I went up, leaped out on the open deck, almost awash in the still sea. I caught a glimpse of two demons standing with raised heads, listening, while beyond them a third crouched over a fallen crewman. Three steps took me to the rail; I leaped over it and dived into the dark water.
***
I came to shore in a tangle of water hyacinth rooted in the soft mud of a river's edge. For a long time I lay flat on my face, waiting for the sickness to drain away. There were far-off sounds of life: the rumble of a monorail, the hoot of a tug out in the harbor. Nearer, a dog barked. Mosquitoes whined insistently.
I turned on my back. Giant stars blazed across a sky like charred velvet. The air was hot, heavy, oppressive. There was an odor of river muck and decayed vegetation. I got to my feet, staggering a little. I waded out, washed the mud off me. The bandages were sodden weights; I removed them, splashed water on the wounds. The left arm worried me; even in the near-total darkness I could see that it was grossly swollen, the cuts gaping wide. It was not so painful now, though; whatever Doc had given me was doing its work.
I turned and made my way to higher ground. A sandy road cut across the edge of a planted field before me, a strip of lesser black against the darkness. I squinted, trying to bring my night-vision into play. For a moment the scene flicked from black to gray; then pain clamped on my head like a vise. I gave it up.
A light was shining through moss-laden live oaks in the distance. I started off, stumbling in the loose sand. Once I fell, slammed my face hard. I lay for minutes, spitting sand feebly and trying out some of Carboni's Sicilian curses. They seemed to help. After a while I got up and went on.
***
It was a cabin sided with corrugated aluminum panels, a sagging structure supported mainly by a towering Tri-D antenna. A gleaming, late-model Mercette ground car stood in the yard. I crept up to it, glanced in, saw the glint of keys in the starter switch.
The light in the house came from an unshaded glare-lamp on a table by the window. I saw a tall man cross the room, come back a moment later with a glass in his hand. He seemed to be the only one in the house.
I studied the lay of the land. The ungrassed yard slanted down to the edge of the road, which ran level into the darkness. I opened the driver's door carefully, checked the brake, released it. A slight push started the car rolling backwards. I padded beside it, guiding it for the first few yards; then I slid into the seat, cut the wheel, rolled out onto the road. I switched on, let out the clutch; I moved off with the engine purring as softly as a spoon stirring thick cream.
I looked back; the cabin was peaceful. There would be a bad scene when the car was missed, but an anonymous cashier's check would remedy the pain.
Coffeyville, Kansas, Felix had said. Box 1742, the Franklin Street Postal Station. It was a long drive for an invalid, and what I would find at the end of it I didn't know-but it was something that Felix had thought important enough to lock in the final strongbox in his subconscious.
I drove slowly for half a mile, then switched on my lights, swung into a paved highway, and headed north.
Chapter Nine
I followed secondary roads, skirting towns, driving at a carefully legal speed. At the first light of dawn I pulled into a run-down motel near the Georgia line with a wan glare sign indicating VAC NCY. From behind a screened door, an aging woman in a dirty housecoat and curlers blinked eyes like burned-out coals nested in putty-colored wrinkles.
"Take number six," she whined. "That's ten cees-in advance, seein's you got no luggage." A hand like a croupier's rake poked the key at me, accepted payment.
I pulled the car under the overhang, as nearly out of sight from the road as possible. I crossed a cracked concrete porch, and stepped into a stifling hot room as slatternly as its owner. In the stale-smelling dark, I pulled off my coat, found the bath cubicle, splashed cold water on my face at the orange-stained china sink. I dried myself on a stiff towel the size of a place-mat.
I showered and washed out my clothes, hung them on the curtain rail, and stretched out on the hard mattress. My fever was still high. I dozed fitfully for a few hours, went through a seizure of chills followed by violent nausea.
Late in the afternoon I took a second shower, dressed in my stained but dry clothes, and went across the highway to the Paradise Eat, an adobe-like rectangle of peeling light-blue paint crusted with beer signs.
A thin girl with hollow eyes stared at me, silently served me leathery pancakes with watered syrup and a massive mug of boiled coffee, then sat on a stool as far from me as possible and used a toothpick. Her eyes ran over me like mice.
I finished and offered her a five-cee bill. "How's the road to Jackson?" I asked, more to find out if she had a voice than anything else. It didn't work. She looked at me suspiciously, handed over my change, went back to her stool.
Back across the road, I started the car up, pulled across to the one-pump service station. While I filled the tank, a heavy-bellied, sly-faced man in a coverall looked the car over.
"Goin' far?" he inquired.
"Just up Bogalusa way," I said.
He studied the pump gauge as I topped off and clamped the cap in place. He seemed to take a long time about it.
"How's 'at transmission fluid?" he asked. His eyes slipped past mine; heavy-lidded eyes, as guileless as a stud dealer with aces wired.
I handed him his money, added a cee note. "Better check it."
He pocketed the money, made a production of lifting the access panel, wiping the stick, squinting at it.
"Full up," he allowed. He replaced the stick, closed the panel. "Nice car," he said. "How long since you been in Bogalusa?"
"Quite a time," I said. "I've been overseas."
"Plant closed down a year ago," he said. "If you was looking for work." He cocked his head, studying my arm. His expression was shrewdly complacent now, like a clever dealer about to get his price.
"You in one of them wars?" he inquired.
"I fell off a bar-stool."
He shot me a look like a knife-thrust.
"Just tryin' to be friendly…" His gaze went to the call-screen inside the station. He took a tire gauge from a breast pocket. "Better check them tars," he grunted.
"Never mind; they're okay."
He walked past me to the front of the car, lifted the inspection plate, reached in, and plucked the power fuse from its base.
"What are you doing?"
"Better check this here out, too." He went across to the station. I followed him; he was whistling uneasily, watching me from the corner of an eye. I went over to the screen, got a good grip on the power lead, and yanked it from the back of the set.
He yelled, dived for the counter, came up with a tire iron. I stepped aside, caught his arm, slammed him against the wall. The iron clanged to the floor. I hauled him to a chair and threw him into it.
"The fuse," I snapped.
"Over there." He jerked his head sullenly.
"Don't get up." I went behind the counter, recovered the fuse.
"Who were you going to call?"
He began to bluster. I kicked him in the shin, gently. He howled.
"I don't have time to waste," I snapped. "The whole story-fast!"
"They's a call out on you," he bleated. "I seen the tag number. You won't get far."
"Why not?"
He stared at me, slumped in the chair. I kicked the other leg. "Sheriff's got a road-block two,
three miles north," he yelped.
"How good a description?"
"Said you had a bad arm, scar on your face; 'scribed them clothes, too." He pulled himself up. "You ain't got a chance, mister."
I went over and picked up a roll of friction tape from the counter, came back and pulled him to his feet, reached for his arms. He tugged against me feebly, his mouth was suddenly loose with fear.
"Here, what are you gonna-"
"I haven't decided yet. It depends on your cooperation." I set to work taping his hands behind him. "What's the best way around the road-block?"
"Looky here, mister, you want to slip past that road-block, you just take your next left, half a mile up the road…" He was babbling in his eagerness to please. "Hell, they'll never figger you to know about that. Jist a farm road. Comes out at Reform, twelve mile west."
I finished trussing him, looking around the room; there was a smudged, white-painted door marked MEN. Inside, I found soap and water on the shelf above a black-ringed bowl. I took five minutes to run the electroshave over my face.
There were plastic bandages in a small box in the cabinet; I covered the cut along my jaw as well as I could, then combed my hair back. I looked better now-like someone who'd been hurriedly worked over by a bargain mortician, rather than just a corpse carelessly thrown into a ditch.
I dragged the owner into the john, left him on the floor, taped and gagged; I hung the CLOSED sign on the outer door and shut it behind me.
There was a mud-spattered pickup parked beside the station. The fuel gauge read full. I drove my Mercette onto the grease rack, ran it up high. There was a blue Navy weather jacket, not too dirty, hanging by the rack. I put it on, leaving the bad arm out of the sleeve. I waited a moment for the dizziness to pass, then climbed into the pickup and eased out onto the highway, ignoring the nagging feeling that hidden eyes were watching.
***
The night was a bad dream without an end; hour after hour of droning tires, the whine of the turbine, the highway unwinding out of darkness while I clung to the wheel, fighting off the cycle of fever blackout, nausea, chills, and fever again.
Just before dawn, ten miles south of the Oklahoma-Kansas border, a police cruiser pulled in alongside me as I swung the wide curve of an intermix. A cop with coldly handsome features and soot-black eyes looked me over expressionlessly. I gave him a foolish grin, waved, then slowed; the cruiser gunned ahead, swung off onto the expressway.
I reduced speed, turned off on the first single-lane track I saw, bumped along past decaying farmhouses and collapsed barns for six miles, then pulled back onto my route at a town called Cherokee Farm. There were lights on in the Transport Cafй. I parked, went in, and took a corner table with a view of the door, and ordered hot cereal. I ate it slowly, concentrating on keeping it down. My head was getting bad again, and the pain in my swollen arm made my teeth ache. I was traveling on raw nerve-power and drugs now; without the artificial reservoir of strength that my PAPA gear gave me, I would have collapsed hours before.
As it was, I was able to peer through the film of gray that hung before my eyes, swallow the food mechanically, walk to the cashier without excessive wavering, pay up, and go back out into the icy night to my pickup, with no more inconvenience than a sensation of deathly illness and a nagging fear that I was dreaming everything.
***
An hour later, I steered the pickup to the curb on a snow-frosted side street of sagging, cavernous houses that had been the culminating achievements of rich farmers a century before. Now they looked as bleak and empty as abandoned funeral homes.
I got out of the car, waited until the pavement settled down, then walked back two blocks to a structure in red-brick Gothic bearing the legend:
RAILROAD MENS YMCA
Coffeyville, Kansas, 1965
Inside, a bored-looking youngish man with thinning hair and a pursed mouth watched me from behind the peeling veneer of a kidney-shaped desk with a faded sign reading: WELCOME BROTHER, and another, hand-lettered, announcing: SHOWER-FIFTY DOLLARS.
I ignored the sea of gray jello in which his face seemed to float, got a hand on the desk, leaned more or less upright, and heard somebody say, "I'd like a room for tonight."
His mouth was moving. It was hot in the room. I pulled at my collar. The jello had closed over the clerk now, but a voice with an edge like a meat-saw went on:
"… drunks in the place. You'll have to clear out of here. This is a Christian organization."
"Unfortunately, I'm not drunk." I heard myself pronouncing the words quite distinctly. "I'm a bit off my feed; touch of an old malaria, possibly…"
He was swimming back into focus. My feet seemed to be swinging in a slow arc over my head. I kept both hands on the counter and tried to convince myself that I was standing solidly on the rubber mat that covered the worn place in the rug. I let go long enough to get out my wallet, put money on the counter.
"Well…" His hand covered the bill. "You do look a little flushed. Chinese flu, maybe. Maybe you'd better see a doctor. And that's a nasty cut on your face."
"Not used to these new-fangled razors," I said. "I'll be all right." The floor was sliding back to where it belonged. The jello had thinned out sufficiently to show me the registration book and a finger with a hangnail indicating where I should sign.
My stomach felt like a flush tank on the verge of starting its cycle. I grabbed the stylus, scrawled something, waded through knee-deep fog to the lift. I rode up, walked past a few miles of wallpaper that was someone's revenge for life's disappointments. I found my room, got the door open, took a step toward the bed, and passed out cold.
***
A crew of little red men was working at my arm with saws and hatchets, while another played a blowtorch over my face. I tried to yell to scare them away, and managed a weak croak. I got my eyes open, discovered that my face was against a dusty rug with a pattern of faded fruits and flowers.
I crawled as far as the wall-mounted lavatory, pulled myself up, got the cold water on, and splashed it over my head. I could hear myself moaning, like a dog begging to be let in on a cold night; it didn't seem important.
There was yellow light outside the dirt-scaled window when I tottered across to the bed. The next time I looked, it was deep twilight. Time seemed to be slipping by in large pieces, like an ice-floe breaking up. I got up on the third try, went back, and used some more cold water, then braced my feet and risked a look in the mirror. A gray-white mask with a quarter-inch beard stared at me with red, crusted eyes buried in blue-black hollows. The scars across my nose and beside my mouth from Felix's plastic surgery were vivid slashes of red. Under the curled plastic tapes, the cut along my jaw showed deep and ragged.
I made it back to the bed and fumbled out my wallet; I still had plenty of money. Now was the time to use some. I punched the screen's audio circuit, signaled the desk. The clerk came on, sounding irritated.
"Is there an all-night autoshop in town?" I asked, trying to sound sober, sincere, and financially reliable.
"Certainly. Two of them."
"Good. I'll pay someone five cees to pick up a few things for me."
In two minutes he was at my door. I handed through the list I had scribbled, along with a bundle of money.
"Yes, sir!" he said. "Won't take half an hour. Ah… sure you don't want me to fetch a doctor?"
"Christian Scientist," I mumbled. He went away, and I sprawled out on the bed to wait.
***
An hour later, with half a dozen assorted antipyretics, cortical stimulants, metabolic catalyzers, and happy pills in my stomach, I took a hot shower, shaved, put a clean tape on my jaw, and worked my arm into my new olive-drab one-piece suit. I pocketed my other supplies and went downstairs. I didn't feel much better, but the clerk nodded happily when I came up to the desk; I gathered that I now looked more like what you'd expect to find in a Christian organization.
"Ah-the nut-hammer," he said, not quite looking at me. "Was it what you
had in mind?"
"Ideal," I said. "They just don't taste the same unless you crack 'em yourself, the old-fashioned way."
He used his worried look on me.
"Maybe you hadn't ought to go out, sir," he suggested. "All those medicines you had me buy-they're just pain-killers-"
"My pains aren't dead-just wounded," I assured him. He gave me the blank look my kind of wisecrack usually nets. "By the way," I ploughed on, "where's Franklin Street?"
He gave me directions, and I went out into the chill of the late autumn night. I considered calling a cab, but decided against it. My experiences had made me wary of sharing confined spaces with strangers. Using the pickup was out, too; a hot car might attract just the attention I didn't want at the moment.
I started off at a wobbling gait that steadied as the chemicals in my bloodstream started to work. My breath was freezing into ice-crystals in the bitter air. The route the clerk had given me led me gradually toward brighter-lit streets. I scanned the people on the sidewalks for signs of interest in me; they seemed normal enough.
I spotted the post office from half a block away; it had a low, yellowish armorplast front with a glass door flanked on one side by a code-punch panel, and on the other by colorful exhortations to 'Enlist Now in the Peace Brigade and Fight for the Way of Life of Your Choice.'
I strolled on past to get the lay of the land, went on as far as the corner, then turned and came back at a medium-brisk pace. My medication was doing its job; I felt like something specially snipped out of sheet metal for the occasion: bright, and with plenty of sharp edges, but not too hard to punch a hole through.
