“Got what he deserved,” Frank murmured from the car speakers. “Stupid fucker. Thinks his shit don’t stink.”
It took me a moment to understand he had to be talking about Officer Piss Lips. An old police academy rival, perhaps.
“Good job, boy,” he said in a tone so warm it was almost fatherly.
I waited for him to scream something terrible like, “See you in hell, wife fucker.”
But he had nothing more to say that night.
The next afternoon, I decided to go see Connie. But I didn’t get to see her that day. Something else came up.
On the way to her place, I stopped at a candy store called Sweets for the Sweet to buy her a box of chocolates. It wasn’t like she was my girlfriend, but she was good company, so I thought she deserved a little present.
“Got yourself a lady friend, bucko?” the chubby, bald man behind the counter asked.
Bucko? Why do guys that age or older always call younger guys by a condescending impromptu nickname? Lad. Kid. Boy. Sport. Bucko.
“I guess so,” I said. “She’s a lady. She’s a friend.”
“Lady, huh? Older?” He raised an eyebrow. “A little Mrs. Robinson action?”
What the hell did he want me to tell him? Why, yes, Mr. Pervo Total Stranger. Allow me to tell you every single thing she does with my penis. First, she does this crazy thing with a jar of hand cream and three rubber bands that she learned from a holy man in Bangkok. She never does it with her husband, though, since he’s such a boring, stupid old fart. Hey, you may know her—she’s your wife.
I just said, “Yeah, sure. Whatever. Thanks.”
“Go get ’er, bucko,” he called as I walked away.
I got into Monster, started the engine, drove up to the street, and waited for a spot to open so I could get back on the road.
Red-hot balls of pain welled up within my temples. The sensation lasted for only a few seconds, but afterward I felt just like that web-slinging comic book guy. Uh-oh. My spider sense is tingling.
I looked out into traffic and saw an old, massive front-grill Dodge hit a two-toned Thunderbird right in front of me. The T-bird went out of control, striking a third car—an Edsel of all things—in the next lane. A man in that car launched through the windshield, face and shoulders shredded by glass. Unfortunately, the car had been made before they began installing safety glass. The classic convoy must have been headed to an antique car show.
I screamed, sure one of them was going to crash down right on top of me. It would have been fitting, since I was driving a classic car, too. What elevated loser status would another batch of injuries grant me?
I watched as a Camaro swerved, crunching into the concrete divider. A door popped open, and a pregnant woman rolled out when her seat belt snapped. She got up, began to stagger, then was thrown into the car by a Ranger pickup. When she hit the side of a brown–and–tan station wagon, her abdomen burst.
The horrors weren’t over. Suddenly it was sleeting, ice coating the road. Not that this could be happening in the summer in triple-digit temperatures. But there it was. A winter storm, such as most of us only saw a few times in our entire lives down here. A fuel truck skidded and jackknifed, its tank striking a Toyota and sending it spinning like a top into a Pontiac Grand Am. Leaking fuel sprayed the roadway, and four more cars hit each other simply trying to avoid it.
Then it was raining—what happened to the sleet?—coming down in thick silver sheets. A BMW and a Cadillac tore chunks out of each other, like two grand mythological creatures battling for supremacy. The BMW bounced back into traffic, its front right fender smashed, the driver pursuing the Caddy to spray it with bullets. With the Caddy driver slumped over the bloody steering wheel, it rear-ended a school bus that ended up sideways across three lanes. I could see the kids’ faces in the windows, crying in terror at the sight of more oncoming traffic.
In dense fog—fog? what happened to the rain?—a Tercel, overdriving its headlights, smacked into an SUV. This started a chain reaction that piled up fifteen cars. A GM truck somewhere in the middle had its gas tank explode, the occupants shrieking as they burned to death, unable to even open their doors. The entire mist lit up with it, turning the highway eerie with a ghoulish orange glow.
Pretty soon there was a bright line of flares from other burning cars, acting as a beacon to emergency vehicles. And once the fog lifted, the smoke rose into the heavens, an offering to the gods of death, chaos, madness, whatever. Of course, it must have taken an hour or more for that fog to lift, but time was compressing into seconds for me. Time was sure doing something . . .
Sirens screamed in my ears. I shuddered with each concussion of steel on steel in various weather conditions, tragedies already happened and yet to be unraveling all around me. I trembled as CareFlite helicopters circled overhead. I wept as I lost count of past and future broken lives.
The radio came on without my touching it. It was playing The Beatles song “I’m a Loser.” I switched it to another channel and the Beck song “Loser” was on, taunting me. I switched it again and Tom Petty was singing, “Even the losers get lucky sometimes.”
A voice growled below the music, “Cock-suckin’, wife-fuckin’, sonofabitchin’ loser.”
So much for Frank’s fatherly side.
I went home and ate the chocolates myself.
PART FOUR
THE ROAD TO NOWHERE
ROAD FLASHES (PART ONE)
Drive on, drive on
for the night is filled with wind,
it burns inward from the edges
of a raspy particulate prophecy
which the whisperers utter
in mangled mesons and quarter-time protons,
infiltrating the snatches of “Johnny B. Goode”
you desperately struggle to hum
like the hymn of all hymns
for drivers who must hang on to a vision
of empty roadway that has ceased to exist
and which may never have existed
—Charlee Jacob
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE RETURN OF THE CROWS
There weren’t any cars driving down Suicide Highway.
Not even mine. I was on foot.
“That’s odd,” I told myself, because this expressway was always busy. Always.
There was no vibration of the ground from the omnipresent, subtle tremors of the constant traffic earthquake. There was no construction being done, no orange Caution signs or blinking red lights or arrows anywhere. There were no sirens, shrieks of inarticulate road rage, blowing horns, or screeching tires peeling back hides of black rubber.
It was quiet. You could have heard the hair-padded feet of a single tarantula as it scuttled across the blacktop.
Except there weren’t any of those, either.
I had been walking down Suicide Highway for most of the last twenty minutes, and I hadn’t seen so much as one vehicle. Nor were there any in evidence on the service roads or any of the streets visible from the expressway.
There were no oil streaks anywhere. No gas dribbles. No dust. No tossed-out-the-window trash: beer bottles, cola cans, hamburger wrappers, wrinkled condom worms, snot rags, greasy baseball caps, dirty diapers.
As if the prisoners assigned to pick up the garbage had decided to lick the paving clean.
It gave me the creepy, please-say-it-isn’t-clairvoyant sensation that the world had ended and I’d somehow missed it. But how could one miss the end of the world? Wasn’t it supposed to end with a bang, not a whimper?
Could have been a biological weapon. Something I was immune to but which took out everybody else. Or it was a neutron bomb, and I was saved because somehow my bone-rattling accident had subtly rearranged my atoms so I couldn’t be zapped. But something had happened; that was for shittin’ sure. No, all the world’s terrorists hadn’t been beaten into weak submission. No, the Russians hadn’t really dismantled those weapons. No, those kinky space aliens weren’t content to simply stick pr
obes up our butts.
“If the world ended, shouldn’t there be dead bodies all over the place?” I asked, afraid to ponder why I would bother to say it out loud.
I knew it was because talking made it seem more normal. We’re geared to believe that the sound of a human voice supplied an anchor to an otherwise frightening quiet.
The grave was that sort of quiet. Hence the creation of the rhetorical question, posed to no one in particular. Not really expecting an answer, because if a reply did resound out of the blue with no one else around, it might provide the worst kind of shock.
It was just nice to hear a friendly, familiar voice. My own.
At least I didn’t answer myself.
But still, I did hear something. Faint. Distant. A drone. Nonononononononononononononononono.
Now where had I heard that before?
It didn’t shock me, just rather annoyed me. Was that the answer to my rhetorical question?
How Apocalypse Zen.
I sniffed the air.
Not only were there no bodies around but no stench of death, either—that sickly sweet odor of old shit and bad peach brandy.
This had to be a dream. Yeah, that made sense. One of those archetypal dreams like falling from the sky. Or appearing naked at school. The stereotypical vision of terror without sense.
I hadn’t seen a cadaver or a mushroom cloud or anything, but I still had an underlying queasiness, bonded with nervous jittering, that waited for the horror to commence.
No problemo. Just a dream.
Ha. These days, every dream was a problem.
I kept walking and sweating. I realized I was wearing a three-piece seersucker suit and a straw hat. Christ almighty, Carl Kolchak, the Night Stalker, was my tailor. I caught that show on the SyFy channel late at night whenever I suffered bouts of insomnia. I could even hear the main character’s signature whistling past the graveyard. It might explain why I was soaked in perspiration: my attire was definitely not suitable for the sweltering Texas heat. Seersucker might have been designed as a lightweight, breathable summer fabric, but the only guy wearing a three-piece suit of anything in this weather was the smilin’ undertaker.
I felt like a planter’s wart between the thighs of an overweight stiff doing rotisserie in a crematorium, courtesy of a really cheap funeral plan.
I kept walking. I tried to take off the coat and vest, but the buttons had melted. They were fused into the fabric. I might as well have been encased in chain mail.
Then I saw my first sign of life. Several crows were perched above the overpass. Those dirty black birds were staring down at me, surveying my every move with their lethal eyes. They let out a well-orchestrated raucous group caw.
More crows circled overhead.
Very Hitchcock. Very The Birds.
Had I seen the movie recently, and that was why they’d flown into my dream?
In the hollow background echoed, Nonononononononononono.
I tried not to look at the crows as they leaned forward on that craggy overpass perch. But out of the corners of my eyes, they looked like a gang of thugs in black leather jackets, a resemblance I’d noticed before. The ruffling of their feathers seemed to be the turning up of collars, adjusting the shoulders, posturing to appear even meaner. Made you think they had knives in there, guns in there.
They let out another simultaneous caw.
Something about their well-timed screeching creeped me out. I decided it was time to get the hell out of Dodge.
I ran for it. I started making tracks down Suicide Highway as fast as my feet could take me.
More crows appeared and swirled like mold-covered leaves in the sky, turning the bright, sunny heaven black. It was almost biblical.
Then the birds swooped at me. I heard the deafening fluttering of their wings beating in unison, the shrillness of their caws. Hundreds of beaks and claws were all over me.
I peed my seersucker pants. I crossed my arms in front of my face, trying to protect my eyes. And yet somehow I could see wetness seeping through the thin fabric at my crotch, scalding as hot coffee. How could I see this through my arms and all those crows?
Part of my mentality remained detached, saying, “It’s a dream. That’s how. I perceive from more than one level.” Part of me is scared shitless. Make that pissless.
And another part sits back and says, “It’s a dream, no problemo.”
Nonononononononononononono. I watched the urine darken until it resembled blood and then go even darker until it turned black, lying against my leg like a shadow. Then it peeled itself off me, dry as cellophane, plumped into three dimensions in the air, and became another crow.
A dream, right. No problemo.
I thrashed, waiting for the bits and pieces to come off me, for the scissor snips of flesh to be gouged out of my scalp and arms and back. I think I screamed. But if I did, I sure couldn’t hear it over the din they made.
Yet the crows didn’t want to tear me apart.
They plucked me up, lifted me into the air. Straight up, then out.
Nausea. Popping ears. Vertigo. Oops, another Hitchcock film.
Hot winds and itchy bird feathers kept blasting against my face. We soared through clouds, chilling and wet. At least it wasn’t smog.
The sky suddenly turned crimson.
No problemo . . . no problemo . . . no problemo . . . just naked at school . . . hope like hell this doesn’t turn out to be the falling dream . . .
A bloodred sky? I knew I had to be above the Land of the Dead.
From this aerial view, I could see the domain had well and truly earned its name; everything looked dead. It resembled a landscape where a war had been fought and lost, or where a major fire had swept through, turning an entire city extra crispy. Most of the buildings were badly burned, houses turned into skeletal structures, siding and bricks stripped or blasted away. Everything else was completely leveled to the ground, leaving piles of blackened wood and mortar.
There was little or no grass or even weeds growing here. The sidewalks were an obstacle course of buckled concrete. The streets were covered in blood.
Then there was the body of water. It was smaller than the Gulf of Mexico but larger than Lake Ray Hubbard. There was no blue water, only a sickly scarlet, thick as transmission fluid and chunky as the contents of a bait bucket. Every now and then, something huge and indescribable splashed on its waves, surfacing in sections only to disappear again, roiling the water until it matched the rhythmic surging in my guts.
As the birds flew lower, I could make out a commotion on the streets below. I squinted, but up that high, the movements resembled an ant rave.
Once the crows took me farther down—stomach lurching, yeah, that falling dream all right, no problemo—the movements came into focus. I could finally understand what was going on.
It was a parade.
A goddamn zombie parade.
At most parades, people may act like zombies, but these were the real deal, the 100 percent undead kind of zombies.
I ought to have been used to them by now. But that’s like saying you can get used to still-twitching roadkill, babies without skin, maggots as companions for a Sunday brunch.
An army of human carcasses marched down a main thoroughfare carrying scythes and sickles and wearing colorful robes of yellow, red, green, black, or purple.
The cadavers were followed by a marching band performing a dirge. I recognized it as the “Funeral March of a Marionette,” also known as the theme music to Alfred Hitchcock Presents. An appropriate soundtrack for me being carried aloft like Tippi Hedren in a newly discovered scene from a director’s cut of The Birds.
Through all this insanity, the crowd kept shouting, “Nononononononononononono.” Yet they didn’t seem to be protesting anything or trying to stop the festivities.
Papier-mâché floats slithered down the streets at a snail’s pace, slogging through the wash of blood like wads of tissue across the surface of a sewer. One float was made from stac
ks of steel drums of toxic waste. A scabby old man bathed in the sludge of one of the tubs. Another resembled a giant outdoor grill on which a family of four was being barbecued alive—or was that not quite alive? Yet a third had a doctor with a patch over his left eye performing surgery on a midget man as the nurses threw his organs and body parts—and party favors—out to hungry kids on the sidewalks. Hungry kids who chanted, “Nononononononononononononono.”
On the distant horizon were giant holiday parade balloons. But instead of being shaped like cartoon characters, they’d been made to look like serial killers. Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and John Wayne Gacy were among a host of celebrity favorites. Even these faces cried, “Nononononononononononono.” With gusto. With manic determination.
Hey, I’d taken a psychology course in college. I understood that this was a subconscious negation of all the madness I’d been through lately. This was my id denying the possible ramifications of karma and life lesson. This was my soul demanding that enough be enough. It was my rational ego trying to form an articulate denial of the irrationality of my situation in the real, waking world.
Why, maybe this was what the Land of the Dead had been all along. Oh, thank you, Freud and Jung and all you beardy headshrinkers. Thank you for allowing me to see my way through the jungle of my own tortured psyche.
Yeah, right.
The floats were followed by a procession of smashed-up cars and trucks. Each vehicle seemed as if it had been totaled in a fatal accident. Some of them could barely be driven in a straight line. A few steered off to the sides of the street and ran over spectators.
People cheered and laughed, throwing confetti, tossing rolling heads and wheels toward the parade. They sang out, “Nononononononononono.”
Even the heads severed in the crashes were shouting, “Nononononononononono.”
Coming up from the back of the parade were skeletal Shriners circling on mopeds. They wore shiny red outfits and funny monkey fez hats bouncing on the fronts of their skulls. They spat red and green confetti.
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