Twelve O'Clock Tales

by Felice Picano

  He cleared the front seat, reached the glove compartment where he found a piece of chamois to help him do the job better, and used that to wrap around the still hot, partly fused steering wheel. Would it work? It turned normally. There was still dangerous-looking glass left in the windshield and side vents. He knocked them out.

  When he was done, Bay sat in the driver’s seat wondering for a minute whether instinct would tell him what to do next. He gunned the engine. It worked. It whined, but it worked.

  “I’ll go north,” he said, aloud. “North.”

  He moved the lever from park into drive and the car whined, then leapt forward.

  *

  Two hours later he ran out of gas.

  He’d been surprised, even a little alarmed that there were so few cars on the road. Where had everyone gone to? Were they all dead? In hiding? Where? The further away he drove, the less there seemed to be damage, even signs of what happened. But everything seemed abandoned. Everything meaning the few clapboard roadside diners and brick gas stations he’d passed. If he’d only thought to stop and get gas…

  He left the car on the shoulder of the highway and began walking, again north—always north. Every once in a while, Bay would turn around and look behind, seeing the sky still pink, with clouds of ashes falling in the distance, and one area to the southeast—could it be Boston?—bright red and orange, as though the air itself were consumed by flames.

  He reached a weathered wood-shake house off the side of the road, behind a picket fence and gate. Several sedans and a pickup truck were parked on the grassy side road. There had to be someone inside. Maybe they had gasoline. Or would be able to drive him to the next gas station.

  Aside from the blown-in windows all about, the house didn’t seem at all damaged. The front door swung open. Bay called “hello,” and when he received no response, he walked in.

  It seemed deserted. The kitchen had been in use recently: Food was half-cooked in pots on the big double range—two cups of coffee were set out on an old table, untasted. Bay called out again. Still no answer. He half-absently picked up a coffee cup.

  Would it be all right to drink it? Would it be radioactive?

  He went to the sink instead, an old-fashioned metal pump and basin, and pumped himself out a glass of water. It was cool, slightly mineral, but good. He had another glassful.

  Was that a sound behind that door? Voices? Or one voice maybe droning on?

  “Hello,” he called out to whoever would be on the other side of the door. “Anyone there? My car ran out of gas down the road!”

  No answer. But the droning seemed to go on.

  Bay went to the door and tried its handle. It opened. He carefully turned the knob and stepped aside, not knowing what to expect to come charging out at him.

  A steep, well-lighted stairway, leading up.

  As he ascended, the hard, cracked old voice he’d first heard became clearer. Bay thought he heard the words, “And behold! There came up out of the river seven well-favored kine,” followed by a pause and what seemed to be the shuffling of several pairs of shoes upon bare wood.

  At the top of the stairs, he found himself in a long corridor with closed doors, and on the floor itself, a worn, multicolored knitted oval rug, looking like a faded rainbow.

  One door was ajar. Beyond it, the old voice took up again. Bay approached and slowly pushed open the door wide enough to look in.

  His first impression was a room filled with people: men, women, children, old folks, all sitting or standing behind wooden dining room chairs or leaning against the side of the room where, because of the angle of the light all but blinding him, all Bay could make out was the shadowed figure of what was an elderly man.

  Bay stepped into the room silently. The old man was still in obscurity, although now Bay could make out a dark leather-bound, frayed-edge book, open on a lectern in front of the man, and in full view.

  “So Pharaoh slept and dreamed a second time,” the old voice went on, toneless. Neither the reader nor anyone else in the room turned to look at Bay.

  The old man paused again, and there was a murmur from the assembled group. One little boy, no longer able to hold back his curiosity, peeked back at Bay from behind the protection of a woman’s shoulder. As Bay noticed him, the lad darted back into hiding, then timidly edged back into sight.

  Half of the child’s pale blond hair was gone. The remaining scalp, a purple splotch with large brown blisters and smaller broken-pus pink sores, looked as though he’d been raked from the crown of his head down over the single closed, congealed eye and red-black chin with an acetylene torch. It took Bay a great effort to look away from the boy and to fix his sight upon the worn natural grain of the wood floor.

  “And behold! Seven ears of corn came upon one stalk,” the old man read on, “fat and good.”

  Everyone murmured their approval. Bay looked at the boy again. But now he was hidden by the bulk of the woman, his mother perhaps, who turned out of profile toward Bay. She too was burned and mispigmented, as though a swath of intense fire had been whipped across her face and torso.

  Bay backed up against the door he’d come in through, holding tightly to the dry wooden molding behind, spreading his feet apart for support as he surveyed the others in the room.

  Everyone else he saw was blasted, burned, discolored, bleeding, or suppurating.

  “And behold! Seven thin ears of corn, blasted by the east wind, sprung up after the others,” the old man intoned, voice as dry as the planking Bay gripped so hard it was beginning to flake off under his fingernails.

  A woman closest to Bay, her arms crossed over her cotton-print housedress, turned to him as though first noticing him. Purple splotches mantled all but a tiny central triangle of her face. Her lips were charred lines. Her teeth almost glowed green as she smiled. Only a few clumps of glossy auburn hair still flowed, held in place by a blackened hair-band.

  Bay had to look down at the floor again, but he also couldn’t stop himself from looking up again, now at one, then at another of the listeners, all of them quietly, attentively, listening to the man reading, monstrously ignoring what happened to them.

  “And the seven thin ears of corn devoured the seven fat and full ones.”

  The people seemed animated by these words, moving about unsettled in their seats, gesturing, and in doing so revealing new facets of their horror. One scabrous-faced man with only a projected bone of nose left leaned over to whisper into the blasted shell of what should have been another’s ear.

  Bay shut his eyes, fighting down what was in front of him, declaring he wouldn’t open his eyes.

  He was out in the corridor now.

  “And it came to pass in the morning,” the old man went on, “that Pharaoh’s spirit was greatly troubled by what he’d beheld in his sleep.”

  Bay shut the door, held it shut, knowing they could jump up from their chairs and smash it open on him. His skin felt as though every pore were bursting with poisonous filth and infection.

  When nothing happened, and the voice went on droning behind the door, Bay fled, leaping down the stairs, stumbling over his own feet to get down, almost tearing the stairway’s bottom door off its hinges as he careened out, fleeing the house onto the roadway, running.

  When he stopped running, his body aching with the sudden exertion, he was far from the house. No one had followed him. Ahead, over rolling country, he couldn’t see any other hamlet within sight. What was the difference if the people there would be as mutilated and as oddly unconcerned with their fate as this group?

  Past a stand of trees on the road, he came upon a local bread delivery van parked. No driver, the key still in the ignition. Had this driver been struck by the blinding glare, burned to the bones of his skull, and staggered off, maimed, into the high grass, or worse, back into that house?

  When Bay turned the van’s key, the tank light on the dashboard showed half-full. Should he siphon it off? Or just take the van?

  Before he
could really make up his mind, his hands had done it for him. The ignition was switched on and he’d thrown the clutch. All around him, he smelled fresh bread. He reached for a loaf of pumpernickel, tore the plastic wrapper off and ate three pieces, gulping them down. He threw the van into gear and took off.

  He hadn’t realized how hungry he was. He ate the entire loaf of bread as he drove.

  The van couldn’t go anywhere near as fast as the sports coupe had gone, but it was taking him north all the same. He couldn’t help but think that there were going to be more bombs, more trouble, and that he’d be safer the further north he got.

  He’d reached the deep humps of the Green Mountains when he realized that the buzzing he’d been semi-hearing ever since he’d gotten into the van must be coming from the radio. The driver must have left it on when he’d stopped.

  Bay tried tuning it. For a few minutes all he got was cracking and popping. Universal static. Then he managed to capture a voice, distant, faint, high-pitched.

  “…to report to their local distribute…eleven oh seven two four…all battalions followed by codes J as in Jester, H as in Happy, R as in Rebel, S as in Standing…”

  Then it was gone, no matter how much he turned the dial to tune it.

  He continued to fumble at the radio, having to lean across the side of the high dashboard to do so. Finally, he reached another clear station,

  “…ime Minister and the British Parliament declared full neutrality in the startling, total conflict between the government of the United Sta…” Then it too drifted. Bay kept on trying to tune it back in, and after some time received “… participating member of the Geneva Convention, the Commonwealth of Canada has opened all borders to evacuees from the States. Emergency centers, food depots, and shelter are being offered to all…” Then it was gone again.

  So that was it, full nuclear attack on a massive scale. But Canada was neutral. There was food, shelter, safety there. He’d been right all along to head north. Bay pressed down the gas pedal as far as it would go, then tried to retune the radio.

  After fifteen minutes of nothing but hisses and words isolated in radio-drift, Bay pressed one of the buttons on the front of the set that had the word “emergency” marked on it, thinking that’s a weird thing to have, but then again maybe it would provide a direct line between the bread van driver and his home base. For a long while, nothing happened but more static. He turned it down a bit lower, but left the radio on at the emergency bandwidth, in case it might catch some signal. He drove on, thinking.

  He’d been close, but lucky. Too close, and very lucky. If he’d still been in Albany, or already reached Boston…any city, really, it would have been all over for him. That was one certainty. And he had been lucky to be this close to Canada too. He could visualize hordes of evacuees from the cities trying to reach Canada over hundreds of miles of melted and disfigured thoroughfares. Horrible. It was a lot easier for him. Only another hour or two and he would cross the border. That was the value of hanging loose, traveling light, being on your own. Nothing, no one, to hold you back. Always in the right spot when you needed to be for survival. Survival.

  He paused once on the top of a high ridge of mountains the road ascended to, and got out to look back, feeling like Lot in the Old Testament, seeing the destruction behind him. The skies south were still orange, fading to pink. The sun itself seemed to be contained, almost cradled, within a flaming new corona, one that rose from the earth. A flock of birds were rushing north over the mountains. They knew. They knew where it would be safe. He got back in the van and started off again.

  There was more static on the radio station. He raised the volume and tried catching the station. That static was unnerving, almost dizzying. There were voices behind it, he was sure of that, although he couldn’t make them out clearly or hear what they were saying. Two men talking. He turned the volume higher.

  What was really odd was that it didn’t sound like news, emergency news. But more like a private conversation he was overhearing. Had he somehow picked up two ham radio operators conversing? And if so, why were they so damned calm?

  He now shut both van windows to cut off the wind current sound and turned the radio volume up higher.

  “So far,” he heard very clearly, “the case exactly parallels our projected graph of reaction.” Then it was very clear. “Quite extraordinary. Almost classic.” The voice was so calm it was annoying. Didn’t they know what had happened?

  “And you’re quite certain,” the second, somewhat less confident voice asked, “that the sudden communication will not be too much of a shock? I mean, given the intensity of the application?”

  “That shock,” the first voice responded, “is precisely what we want. You see, by cutting the possibilities down to only two—one a total nightmare—the patient will invariably opt for the other choice—reality, compromised though it may be. He should do so voluntarily. Even willingly. The knowledge that there is a choice, when there wasn’t any chance of that moments before, should override any shock from the communication itself.”

  Static returned over the radio, and puzzled by what he was hearing and wanting to hear more, Bay fiddled with the dial. He got back onto the channel again, but now it was merely silent, no talking at all, so he left it there and continued to drive, divided now between the bizarre and bizarrely serene dialogue he’d somehow overhead, and what he could see out the windshield: the country completely destroyed, about to submit to an invasion by…by who?

  “Bay! Can you hear me?”

  He almost jumped out of the car seat. Then he realized that the voice came from the radio. It sounded like one of the two men who’d been talking. The man said:

  “Bay! This is Dr. Joralemon. Can you hear me?”

  What the hell was going on?

  “Dr. Elbert is here with me too. You remember Dr. Elbert, don’t you, Bay? If you can hear us and understand me, and if for some reason you can’t answer, then shake your head from left to right. Do you understand? Left to right, slowly.”

  Bay did as he was told.

  “Very good!” Enthusiasm and a little relief too in the voice. “Now, Bay, do you remember who I am? Dr. Joralemon. If you remember me, shake your head again.”

  The name wasn’t familiar. The voice was. Or was it?

  “Bay? Did you hear what I just said?”

  This time Bay did nod from left to right, thinking, what the hell am I doing that for? Where are these voices coming from? The radio? He opened the window and flipped the back mirror all over the road behind to see if anyone was following him. No. No one there. Nothing but forest now, sparse, mountainous forest.

  “Now, Bay, do you remember Dr. Elbert?”

  “Bay?” The other voice came on. “This is Jim Elbert. I’m your doctor. Or at least I was. Do you hear me?”

  Yes, yes, Jim, Bay thought. “Jim,” Bay said. “How can I hear you through the radio? It doesn’t look like a short-wave.”

  “Bay,” Elbert’s voice interrupted his own. “If you remember who I am, then shake your head as you did before. I see that you’re trying to talk, but I can’t hear you.”

  Bay nodded vigorously. What the hell was Elbert doing on the radio? Where was he? And how had he managed to locate Bay?

  “Do you remember me, Bay?” It was the other voice. The one that called himself Dr. Joralemon. And now Bay did recall the voice. But not the way he recalled Elbert, which was pleasant, like a friend, like growing up and playing stickball and going around driving together as a teenager. That’s how he remembered Jim Elbert. But not how he remembered Dr. Joralemon.

  Dr. Joralemon repeated his question, and Bay heard rooms in his voice, rooms and doors. Far-away rooms in pastel colors. Venetian blinds half-closed all the time. The constant, insistent murmur of someone’s muffled groans and sobs.

  Bay nodded much more slowly in answer.

  “Good,” Joralemon said.

  “Bay?” It was Jim Elbert again. “Now that we’ve made contact an
d communicated, you must understand that what I’m going to tell you is the truth. I’ve never lied to you before and I’m not lying now. Do you understand that? Do you believe me? Do you have any reason not to believe me?”

  No, Bay thought, I don’t have any reason to not believe you, Jim. He nodded, then reversed the motion of his nodding.

  “All right, I’m taking that to mean we’re okay,” Elbert said. “Now, listen, some twelve hours ago, you underwent a brand-new approach that’s been developed in cerebral surgery. It’s only indicated in the most hopeful of…well, to be honest, of extreme cases. Dr. Joralemon invented the procedure. He calls it Trans-Morphing. It’s a sort of active interference into the dreaming state. A kind of probe.”

  “So far,” Joralemon interrupted, “We’ve had close to one hundred percent effectiveness with Trans-Morphing.”

  “What it does, Bay,” Elbert went on, “I mean what it is actually is a combination of a psychotropic drug that operates within the cerebral cortex at a precisely specific given area, and with it a series of carefully calibrated electrical shocks to the brain. Its purpose is to channel your fears and anxieties into one major fear and anxiety. Sort of like dumping it all into one box. And that process builds up and builds up into an experience you fully believe you are having. Generally, and from what our previous cases have said, this is a tremendously catastrophic experience.”

  Bay heard the words and understood them well enough. He just didn’t really understand what Elbert was getting at.

  “What I’m saying,” Elbert went on, “is that whatever you are doing and wherever you think you are, it’s not so. You’re actually in a semi-comatose state, close to a somewhat overstimulated R.E.M. sleep. You may think you’re awake. But you’re not.”

  Bay gripped the steering wheel. Sleeping? Who was he kidding?! The trees were whizzing by on either side of the van, clumps of Scotch and blue pine at a time. Still no vehicles behind him, but the air was scented with pine. Of course, he’d not seen a car or truck in a while. Still, he hit the dashboard hard, and it impacted his hand, making it throb. That was real enough.