by Jack Ketchum
Outside again, that thundery feeling was heavier. The boy was close. McNichols scanned for him, but saw nothing. Just folk coming and going, a bus backing out, pigeons squabbling high up in the iron roof rafters.
He looked back at the bus. It was nosing forward now, swinging towards the white glare of the exit.
Was the boy on it? No. The bus was leaving but the feeling remained.
He scanned again, turning a slow circle. And something happened then that was the boy's doing...and he knew he'd been seen.
"Daddy?" someone called out—someone sounding so much like Ricky that McNichols had to close his eyes. It wasn't Ricky, of course. Ricky was dead these fifteen years. And how was his dead son supposed to call to him from somewhere up by the roof anyway, among the ironwork and the pigeons?
Not Ricky.
McNichols was about to look up—could feel the stiff wires and ratchets in his old neck getting ready to move his head—when he caught sight of the boy through the plate glass of the ticket office.
Ventriloquism. An old trick. To unsettle and confuse. It had happened before—voices from the TV, voices from the full moon, from the mouths of the dead. But the boy had never used Ricky's voice before. A vile new twist.
The boy was standing second from the desk in a queue of ten or so. The two desk clerks were working hard in their heavy-looking TransAm uniforms. They were trying for happy helpfulness but only managing sweaty doggedness. A desk fan turned its head.
The boy looked straight at him through the glass, and smiled. It was a beautiful smile, open and warm. Like the boy was overjoyed to see him. And because the smile was his son's, because it was Ricky's, the sight of that smile made him feel damned.
The moment passed. The flabby couple at the head of the queue turned away from the desk and the boy broke eye contact with him and stepped up. The top of his sandy-blond head barely cleared the desktop. The ticket seller had to boost herself off her stool to look down at him.
McNichols watched the boy buy a bus ticket with cash, the bills dug from his jeans pocket in a crumpled ball. He watched how the boy melted the desk clerk's heart. He had a ticket in seconds, no problem. The clerk just handed it over. McNichols suspected something was at work here—some trick of suggestion. The clerk hadn't stood a chance.
It occurred to him that he could attempt the assassination now. To hell with Academy laws stipulating deep isolation and zero witnesses...laws to which he had, long ago, put his signature and made his pledge.
It couldn't be here. Too public.
The boy turned away from the desk and made for the door with his newly-purchased ticket in his small fist and McNichols felt it. The fear about which all hunters were warned. Desert fear. Because it was a likelihood that the last struggle would have a desert setting. Ancient place of temptation and bone.
He stepped forward and met the boy square-on coming out of the office. Both stopped on their own side of the door threshold, the boy looking up, McNichols looking down.
The boy's face was tender and beautiful. And McNichols felt his heart clench with vast love and unendurable shame despite the years since Ricky had lived and laughed.
The boy's face lit up. He gulped with delight.
"Look, Daddy!" he cried suddenly. "I got me a ticket! Can we go on vacation, Daddy? Can we? Pleeeease?" The boy waved the ticket between them like a small flag.
McNichols shut his eyes. In the cave of his head he did what he could against the heartbreak. But he was still pierced.
"Sure we can," he said, opening his eyes again, playing along. "Where we going? What does it say on that ticket there?"
The grin became a frown. The boy held the ticket up so that McNichols could read what was printed on it. A sham, of course. The boy could read.
"It says Tonloose," McNichols said, his mouth suddenly dry as ashes. So. Here it was. The desert.
"Tonloooose?" the boy echoed, pulling the word into something charmingly puzzled. And McNichols was pierced all over again.
"Say, Daddy!" the boy sing-songed, his grin back. "I know Tonloose! Sure I do! That's in Arizoner! Am I right, Daddy?"
"Don't call me that," McNichols said.
The boy went on like he hadn't heard.
"Arizoner's hot, ain't it, Daddy? Real hot! There's desert there, Daddy! Cactuses and rattlers and rock!"
"I'm not your daddy," McNichols said into the boy's face. "So don't fucking call me that. You understand me?"
Now there was a perfect little frown on the boy's face.
"Daddy, what's wrong? Don't be mad at me."
McNichols bore down on his rage. The boy was goading him and he hated himself for his lack of grit. If only the boy didn't look the way he looked. God, he felt old. Hollow with heartbreak.
He stepped aside and the boy trotted merrily past him, off to catch his ride. But before he disappeared in the throng, he turned back.
"Go get a ticket, Daddy! Hurry up! I'll see you on the bus!"
Then he was gone.
McNichols stood by the office door as people filed past him. This was it. After 30 years. This was it. All he'd trained for. All he'd sacrificed. A desert showdown.
He went to buy his ticket.
***
The bus rumbled up the exit ramp and into the burning day.
McNichols selected his seat—left side, towards the rear—for the solitude it gave him. The Tonloose-bound TransAm with its broken AC, greasy headrests, and 60-passenger capacity was maybe half-filled.
There was a young woman with a toddler opposite. The child was damp-haired and mewling in the heat. The woman was pretty in a worn way, wearing a simple dress and clodhopper work boots. She showed McNichols a wan smile as she stowed her daughter next to the window, planted a bottle of water in the child's hands, and settled down beside her.
She turned to McNichols as the bus rolled down Hetten Avenue, saying, "Gonna be a hot drive, I'm thinking."
He agreed with a nod. His attention went to the front of the bus. The boy had placed himself beside a right-side window, two seats back from the driver. A mountain of a woman had wedged herself in beside him, making opportune use of the bonus seat space the boy provided.
With a pinch of alarm, he saw they were already talking, their heads bent together in a chatty fashion. He wanted to do something about that, and quickly, for the woman's sake, but he couldn't think of a ruse to separate them. Yet.
"You going far?"
It took him a moment to catch up with the question. The young mother was leaning towards him across the aisle, smiling tiredly.
Her daughter looked tired too, peering at him around her mother's freckled shoulder.
"I don't rightly know, ma'am," he told her. "Depends how things work out with my youngest, Charlie."
A lie came automatically and without guilt. If she pushed for more, he could give it.
He tilted sideways in his seat and stole another glance forward. They were chatting now like regular buddies. Suddenly, chillingly, the boy laughed—a peal of bright, childish giggles that carried down the length of the bus.
"I'm leaving my husband," the young woman told him. This came with flat simplicity and no hint of emotion, as neutral as a weather comment.
"I'm sorry to hear that, ma'am," McNichols said. "Always pains me to hear families are busting up."
"Don't be sorry," she said immediately. "Wayne's a trash piece of shit. I just never woke up to it before." She laughed, but the laugh was empty. "Going to my sister's place in Tempe. Gonna be hot down there—but better for my girl and me."
"I hope it will, ma'am."
"Alice."
"I hope it will, Alice."
"Like that kiddie book," she said. "Alice in Wonderland. That's gonna be me."
She went quiet. McNichols's attention went back to the front of the bus.
***
The slow unrolling of the road eventually settled the big woman and the boy into silence. The boy turned to the window to watch the dusty suburbs
slide by. Spears of sunlight lit up his hair as the bus swung through its turns. Then the town was behind them and the long miles opened up.
McNichols turned to his own window and let the slow slide of the dry view smooth out his coils. Unlikely the boy would try anything on the bus with McNichols keeping a beady watch on him. The long engine drone was good. His guard was slipping, but that was okay. Nothing would happen yet.
One last time he leaned sideways and glanced forward. The boy's golden head was still turned to the view. The big woman looked asleep, her head back, lips parted. Through his own window he saw road signs for Mt. Taylor and Santa Fe and Albuquerque. The bus fed south through dry valleys.
He closed his eyes. He'd been hunting for so long he felt born in harness. Idly he wondered if this really was the endgame. He'd been here before, thinking this was it, the showdown, only for it to be just another leg of the journey.
He slept.
***
And woke suddenly.
Not with alarm. Just a bleary surfacing. His surroundings slotting into place around him.
There was a small circle of tender scalp above his left ear that had taken the full weight of his head against the window. Now the window was still. So was the stuffy air. The seat. The whole bus. The engine, too. What was this? A rest-stop? How long had he slept?
Long enough to turn noon into late-afternoon, judging by the low slant of the sunlight.
He sat up straight and felt the warmth steal out of his blood. There was no rest-stop outside. No roadside diner. No gas station. Nothing but a twisted root of tan mountain trailing away into desert. Rock and furious heat shimmer. It looked like they'd even left the road behind.
The truth crashed into him. He'd been duped. Proved slow and old. It had happened before, but never so neatly. So calamitously.
The interior of the bus was an abattoir. It looked like an attempt had been made to paint every window with blood. As McNichols cursed the dumb fact of his age, he tottered from his seat and stood giddily in the aisle.
Was everyone dead? He should have done a head-count as soon as the bus rolled. He flogged himself with this thought as he wavered there in the silence of carnage. Because he had no way now of making sure all the passengers were accounted for. The bus was stacked with corpses. Maybe the boy had dragged a few off—for sport, for meat. But maybe some had escaped. No way of knowing.
The bus windows were so liberally daubed it seemed like the desert was obscured from view behind tattered red curtains. The interior of the bus had a pinkish tinge. The air was both meat-sweet and sour with cesspit gas.
He went down the aisle counting bodies...knowing it was a redundant exercise, but doing it anyway, high-stepping over pools of blood, strings of gore hanging from the ceiling like wet bunting. The big woman to whom the boy had spoken was unrecognisable as human from the waist up, a gaping sack of meat and bone. The reek of leakages, the drips and sighs of settling corpses—it was all familiar to him, but the proximity of savage death never got easier to endure. Like the sight of Alice there, and her daughter: faceless, handless, bloodless. The bus door was open and the sand flies had found the bodies. There were flies basking on the dry islands of Alice's teeth. Mother and daughter were holding hands. McNichols knew the boy had arranged them that way after death—gently pressing the palms together and knitting the fingers. Ironic tenderness after the fury of slaughter.
He ignored the horror of the driver behind the wheel until he was outside and the heat was hammering his scalp and face, and then he glanced back.
It looked like the man had been dynamited. Hardly anything left but his hands. One of them lay fingers-up in the centre of the steering wheel, caught on the spokes. The other lay on the dashboard like a bled crab. There was a wedding band on the third finger and the nails were chewed.
The bus had come to a stop on a shallow bank. A slow river of blood was crawling down the steps and pattering into the dust, thick as soup. McNichols stepped back before it reached his shoes.
He was right: the bus was no longer on the road. There wasn't even a road in sight. Just desert nowhere. Table-rocks and dust lagoons and ravines. Mountains to the west at vast remove.
He squinted into the heat. The idea of hiking through this shimmering kiln made him feel broken before he'd begun. He wouldn't get five miles.
The boy was out there somewhere. The stage was set. He wished he could wait in the shade of the bus for the boy to come to him. But that wasn't the way it worked. The long hunt had old rules.
McNichols walked into the desert.
***
He saw lightning ahead and knew he was getting close. The sky was cloudless. Yet there it was again—definite lightning, stabbing up from the ground in silver zig-zag branches. A flickering tree of light.
He staggered towards it like he was drunk on heat.
The first thing the boy said was: "For the love of Christ, John, why not take that coat off? This heat'll kill you, you know."
It was tempting, of course. But his coat was his protection. There were weapons in its lining.
"I'll keep it on, I think."
The boy shrugged. "Suit yourself."
He was sitting crossed-legged on a slab of rock and smiling up at John with his sweet angel's face. His lime-green backpack was off to one side. A nick of curiosity appeared in that perfect forehead.
"John? Do I upset you, looking like your poor dead Ricky?"
McNichols said nothing. He glanced off into the furious haze to settle himself.
"30 years I've been on the road after you—"
"31 last month. Answer the question, John. Do I upset you like this?"
"The man who set out to hunt you down isn't the man standing here now. So no, to answer your question. How you look doesn't upset me anymore."
The boy's hands delved into the small pit formed by his crossed legs. Up they came again...and now there was a rattlesnake looped from fist to fist. The boy was smiling at him and shaking his head.
"How right you are, John. You've changed. Not half the man you were. A shadow of your former self. How're those gritty old hips?"
"Sometimes okay, sometimes not. Okay today."
"And the migraines?"
"They come and go."
"At least they go, John, yes?"
McNichols nodded and unfastened his coat—two buttons, three. The boy reached over and placed the snake in a flexing coil by his leg. Then he fished in his lap again and pulled up a second one. This snake he placed across his thighs and stroked like it was a cat.
"What's under that coat, John?" the boy said, then giggled suddenly, like he'd been tickled.
McNichols said nothing. He unfastened the last two buttons and the wings of his coat settled open.
The boy went on. "I took everything from you, didn't I, John? Piece by piece. Did the Academy prepare you for that?"
"As well as it could."
"Bet it kept a few things to itself, though, didn't it? Bet it kept some secrets, that old place. The loneliness. The loss. Am I right, John? Loss of faith. Of family. Of time. Am I right?"
"I never did have much faith."
"But family, John. You had a family, didn't you?"
"A long time ago."
"I ate Vanessa, John. Most of her, anyway. Remind me—how long were you married?"
"Ten years."
"And little Ricky...what was he? Seven? Eight?"
"He was eight."
"Doesn't it upset you at all, John, seeing me like this? Doesn't it touch you—seeing me made in your dead son's image?"
McNichols looked at the boy and took his time. "Once. Not now."
"Ah, yes. Once. You lost it for a while, didn't you? After I took little Ricky. Wandered in the wilderness. I had to hang around until you were well enough in your head to come after me again. Remember that winter in Vancouver? How long did it take you to kick the junk?"
"Two years."
"Are you sure it doesn't bother you—seeing little
Ricky in front of you now, playing with snakes?"
"You're not Ricky."
"True. But not a pang? A twinge?"
"Not anymore. It's all gone."
"You've forgotten your son, John."
"No. He's just untouchable now." McNichols showed the boy his palms. "Beyond all this. Beyond you."
"What's under your coat, John?"
"You'll see."
"Gonna kill me, John? You got a gun under there? Gonna shoot me down?"
"I'm going to kill you, yes. That's the task I swore to undertake. But not with a gun."
"With what, then? What you got under there?" The boy's face was all sweet curiosity. His smile was gently guarded, like he suspected he was being teased. "You got a gun under your coat?"
"I told you. No gun."
"The Academy must have armed you with something."
McNichols shrugged and waited. Maybe fear would peep through a crack in all this giggly good humour. The boy lifted the snake off his lap and twirled it down next to the first. With a new twist of life, another snake appeared.
"What have you brought, John?" the boy said. "Hammer and silver nails? Sulphuric acid? Plastic explosive?"
"Nothing like that."
"Then what? I'm curious. I want to know what I'm facing. Don't tell me they loaned you Carmichael's needles! Surely the Holy Provost wouldn't trust you with those."
"The needles aren't used against things like you."
"Like me, John? And what am I, exactly?"
"A demon," he said, and the rest came by rote: "Lower denomination. Maybe a krillion. Non-hellborn. Probably mewk."
"Mewk?"
"Academy slang. One of twins."
The boy regarded him blankly. For the first time the smile was gone. "Someone's been doing their homework."
"So you are?"
"What?"
"One of twins?"
"Very sly of you, John. Next you'll be using my kin against me and asking what my real name is..."
"So there is a brother. Or a sister. You just said as much." McNichols sighed. "Anyway, I already know your name."
"Bullshit, John."
