Night Road

by A. M. Jenkins

  Cole looked at them over his shoulder. Sandor would win, he knew. Gordon didn’t know it though; the boy frowned at his hand, planning his strategy.

  “I didn’t know you wanted to see the pig,” Cole told Sandor.

  “I didn’t then. But now I think maybe I wish we had. When will we again get the opportunity to see a swimming pig?”

  “It was somewhere in south Texas. Next time we’re down that way we can keep an eye out for it.”

  “It’s been so long,” Sandor said. “The pig is probably dead. But,” he said, brightening, “maybe he’s like Shamu, and they merely bring in a new swimming pig and call him Ralph as well.”

  No one answered. The slap of cards was the only sound. Cole watched them: Gordon’s brow beginning to furrow in concentration, Sandor seemingly inattentive. “It’s worse now, with the days so long,” Sandor said, glancing at the clock on the bedside table. “So many fun places are closed by the time it’s dark. In the winter there’s more to do.”

  “What about bars?” Gordon asked.

  “Bars get boring very fast, my friend.”

  “I guess so, if you can’t drink.”

  Instead of replying, Sandor laid his cards out on the table with a flourish. “Gin.”

  “Already?” Gordon peered at his hand, then at Sandor’s, on the table. After a reluctant moment, he laid down his own cards, spreading them out.

  Sandor began to add them up. “I started with a good hand,” he said vaguely.

  “Don’t believe him, Gordon,” Cole said. “And never, ever play poker with him.”

  “Forty-one, forty-two. I get forty-two; does that seem right to you?” Sandor didn’t wait for an answer but wrote down the number. “Cole, are you ready to play yet?”

  “No.”

  Sandor started shuffling again.

  “Sandor,” Gordon asked, “how come sometimes you have an accent and sometimes you don’t?”

  “Hmm. Very observant of you, Gordon. Sometimes it’s wiser to appear to be from nowhere. But when I am free, when I am among friends, I choose not to lose sight of where I came from. Cole, now, Cole dropped his heritage as soon as humanly possible. Oh ho, you know it’s true, Cole! Gordon, Cole used to say things like, By hokey day, and let me see, there was varmint and critter, and of course there was my favorite, I’ll be jiggered.” Sandor began to deal the cards. “I feel it was a terrible shame to let such a descriptive dialect slip away.”

  “It didn’t slip away,” Cole told him. “You can still hear some of it down South.”

  “Where it is dying in this age of satellite dishes and worldwide webs.”

  “Dialects are living things, Sandor. They evolve; they die. That’s the way it goes.”

  “Not as long as I am here to keep them alive. It’s like you and your photos. Did you know Cole is a photographer, Gordon?”

  “No.”

  “Count your cards and make sure you have ten. Not only does he take photos, but Cole used to draw, too. And he painted when he had the chance. There was a time we traveled together, as we are doing now, and when we stayed for a while in—Where was it, Cole?”

  “South Carolina.”

  “Yes, in South Carolina, Cole painted.”

  “What did he paint?”

  “You go first, Gordon, since you lost. He painted people mostly. Always omnis. He never painted me, that’s for certain!”

  “Why would I want to paint you, Sandor? I can look at you anytime I want.”

  “To capture a moment in time, of course. Isn’t that what you do with your photos?”

  “I don’t really do that anymore.”

  “No? Now that you mention it, I haven’t seen your camera, this trip. Are you back to your sketches?”

  “No.”

  “I always thought drawing must be more fun than pointing a camera and pushing a button. Put a little of your own sweat into it.”

  “Well, if as you say the point is to capture a moment, then photos are going to be more accurate. A painting or drawing is always going to be distorted, because the image passes through the artist’s eyes and hands.”

  “Distortion? I would call it style. It’s what gives the whole thing feeling.”

  “In any case,” Cole said, “I think I’m going to bow out of any card games for now. There’s a pool here, and I’m going for a swim.”

  He thought Sandor would make some comment about Ralph the pig, but Sandor just looked up at him, amused. “Why, Cole, I am shocked at you,” he said. “It’s two in the morning. You know the pool must be closed.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Take note, Gordon. The end of the world must be near if Cole deliberately intends to flout a rule.”

  “They don’t even know, if you’re quiet,” Cole pointed out.

  “If he ever decides to go skinny-dipping, then we will know that the apocalypse is upon us. Anyway, I have something regrettable to tell you,” Sandor said to Gordon.

  “Aw, no.”

  “Yes. Gin.”

  Cole eased into the pool area, holding the metal gate so that it wouldn’t clang and announce his presence. He sat on a plastic chair and pulled off his sneakers. He’d already changed in his room, already had a white hotel towel. When he took off his T-shirt in one quick, practiced movement, he felt as if he were shedding the last of a binding skin.

  Of course, he could not dive. That would make noise. He sat on the side of the pool and slipped quietly into the water. His one vice: swimming in hotel pools at night. When they caught you, they didn’t do anything—only reminded you that you weren’t supposed to be there. The only times he had been caught were when omnis had come in after him—usually noisy, splashing, sometimes drunk. Then the other guests called the desk to complain. But when Cole was alone, he was silent, and mostly underwater. He liked the eerie cool feeling of floating in another atmosphere.

  Sometimes he wondered what would happen if he just stayed under the water, if he stayed past the point where he could hold his breath. What would it feel like to run out of air, lose consciousness? He knew he could not die, but he was curious how it would feel to drown. Probably it would hurt. It would certainly be very intense. He’d read a description once of what happened, second by second, when a person drowned. It sounded as if it would be frightening and painful, until your brain started shutting down—and then, he thought, it might be peaceful. He wondered if someone like him—someone whose soul was permanently welded to his body—could have a near-death experience.

  What would happen to his mind when he appeared to be dead? Were the thoughts of the hemes underground as empty as the expressions on their apparently dead faces? What lay behind eyes that were empty, like marbles?

  No point in thinking about it. If he held his breath, all that would happen is that he’d pass out and lie on the bottom of the pool until someone found him and called an ambulance. Then there would be trouble.

  Now, floating under the surface in nine feet of water, he kept his eyes open and looked at the darkness. Here, in the water, darkness had form and meaning. It was thick, you could touch it. When you waved your hand, you could feel it. Out in the air, in the real world, darkness was merely an absence of light.

  His chest was growing tight. He did not test the edges of his breath-holding abilities. He kicked his way up, popping through the water’s surface with a gasp.

  Then he began, as soundlessly as possible, to swim laps. It felt good after the hours behind the wheel.

  He couldn’t have said how late it was when he finally eased himself out of the water. He didn’t towel off but sat in a plastic chair to drip-dry in the cool air, tilting his head back to look at the stars. It was as Sandor had said: The stars in the city had to fight to be seen. The few he could make out now were faded and weak. Still, it was all good—the silence, the air chilling his wet skin.

  He heard the faint clink of the gate behind him and turned to see Gordon slouching over, hands in pockets. “Hey,” Gordon greeted him.


  Cole nodded but said nothing. He did not ask the kid if he was here for a swim, because he obviously wasn’t—he was still fully dressed, in his jeans. Most likely there was something on his mind, something he wanted to talk about. Probably something about himself. He was still almost omni, and that’s what omnis did—they talked about themselves.

  That was okay; the cocoonlike water, the labored trance and rhythmic breath of lap swimming had done their work, had unwound the restless feeling into nothingness. Listening to the boy would only take time—and time was the one thing Cole had in abundance.

  He settled back in his chair and waited for the kid to work around to it.

  “Is this what you do all the time?” Gordon asked, looking at the water, which still rippled slightly from Cole’s presence. “I mean, go from hotel to hotel, room to room, night after night after night?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Doesn’t it get…old?”

  “Yes. But there are worse things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Getting complacent and decadent, like you would if you lived in the Building all the time. Or getting attached to an omni, if you stay too long in one place.”

  “Why is it bad to get attached to…to someone?”

  “Because you have to leave them after a few years.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you don’t age and they do.” Cole did not like this topic, but he knew Gordon couldn’t tell. He sat perfectly still, hands resting on the plastic arms of the chair.

  Thankfully, Gordon changed the subject. “Sandor sure does like to talk,” he remarked, sitting on the end of the lounge next to Cole. “He goes off on all these tangents.”

  “Yes,” Cole agreed, “but notice that while he was going off on those tangents, he was also beating you at gin.”

  Gordon nodded. He sat quietly, looking out, not at the water, but at the parking lot.

  “Something’s on your mind, Gordon,” Cole said—patiently, he thought. “What is it?”

  “Um. Okay. We’re going to be moving around for a while, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any chance we’ll be passing through Missouri?”

  “Not really.”

  “But it’s possible?”

  “Anything’s possible. But I have no intention of taking you. I don’t think it’s wise.”

  “I know I can’t call my family or anything. But I thought maybe I could just kind of see them. From far off. They wouldn’t have to see me. I’d just like to know if everybody’s—I mean, I kind of want to check on Jill,” he added.

  Jill must be the girlfriend he’d ripped up during his first feed.

  It wasn’t that Cole didn’t feel for the kid. But this was part of that slippery slope, the one that a heme shouldn’t allow himself to start down. “There wouldn’t be any point in it,” Cole told him. “Better to cut all ties with one swift stroke.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s just best,” Cole said vaguely.

  Then he reminded himself: He wasn’t here to be vague. Vagueness was neither helpful nor instructive. Nor was it necessary. All the kid needed was information; he didn’t need or want Cole’s life story.

  “It’s too painful to see them,” he admitted, his voice flat. “Because you know that they’re going to fade and die.” And because it’s too tempting to try to create a companion from someone you love. He decided not to say that though—didn’t want to put any ideas in the boy’s head.

  Gordon didn’t nod, didn’t indicate that he’d heard. Cole expected him to press the matter; but he didn’t do that either. He sat staring out over the water.

  “Your first time,” Gordon said after a moment. “Your first feed ever. What was that like?”

  Cole considered. Why did the kid want to know? “It’s been a long time,” he said carefully.

  “I mean—mine didn’t go so hot. It’s kind of hard to—I did some things…well, some things I never would’ve thought I could do. I just wondered if I was, you know. Weird. Or normal. Or what.”

  Okay, Gordon wanted some form of comparison. That was fair enough. Cole was sure Sandor had already told about his first time. “Well,” he said, cautious, “it was…crude.”

  It had been embarrassing, too—and that was with Johnny walking him through it. He tried to think it out—how much was necessary to say. He didn’t want to go into a lot of detail, didn’t want to dive into a morass of old feelings and display them for the wide-eyed perusal of this kid. But it was pertinent. The basics, at least, were fair game.

  Johnny had told him to stay put, he remembered that. And he had obeyed—he’d known something was terribly wrong inside him, but not quite what it was.

  “I think it was probably more controlled than yours,” he told Gordon.

  The first time he’d felt the Thirst—he remembered that better than anything. Not an emotion, not hunger, not sexual need, but all three wrapped into one. Thirst was an ever-expanding hole.

  He’d thought he was going insane. Weird thoughts grew in his brain, turning into pictures. Steak—he’d thought about raw steak dripping with juices, welling blood. The thoughts—the bloody pictures—had grown by the second, by leaps and bounds as he waited for Johnny. It probably hadn’t been more than a couple of minutes before Johnny had returned with the woman, but Cole remembered he was stepping from one foot to the other like a runner before a race, desire battling with disgust, his hands clenching and unclenching as disgust wavered and began to sink under the rising tide.

  He decided he wouldn’t mention the Thirst to Gordon. After all, it was a given; Gordon already knew what Thirst was like. No need to bring it up.

  “It was in the city, in an alley,” he told Gordon. “Johnny brought me a woman. Most likely she was a prostitute. I don’t know how else he could have gotten her to come back there.”

  He remembered Johnny’s hand firm on his arm, the calm command of his voice. At the same time, a horrifying certainty that something was not right, something frightening and uncontrolled was swelling inside.

  It had made him cling to the very edge of obedience to the only person who seemed to know what was happening.

  “Johnny told me to hold on,” he said to Gordon. “He told me to hold on just one more minute. Johnny said that control is everything.”

  He’d almost been dancing with wanting, and, he remembered, the whole inside of his mouth felt shriveled, his tongue like a dried-up snake, and his insides were empty and shriveling, too, just like his mouth. To add to his misery, his gums had begun to itch like mad.

  Huh. He’d forgotten that, until this moment.

  No point in mentioning that either.

  “Johnny told me—very quickly, I remember—he told me what I had to do. He had some kind of tool. He pulled it out of his pocket. But it was dark, and I didn’t know what it was.”

  It had been small—likely a nail, a tack, something like that. Something sharp.

  And now Cole remembered something else: Johnny had run a hand through his hair. He’d been nervous—Johnny had been nervous!

  He didn’t tell Gordon that though. “I don’t remember what the woman looked like. Her dress, how old she was, anything.”

  He did remember that her dress had a scooped neckline. How he’d stared at that swooping curve that marked the boundary between cloth and skin! And when Johnny let go of his arm, without a word he’d grabbed her—before Johnny could get to her at all, before Johnny could get her started, Cole had pressed her back against the rough boards of the building. She’d laughed—he remembered that, she laughed—as he’d buried his face in her neck, above the curve of cloth, below the painfully sweet line of her jaw, driven by the wild urgency that he didn’t understand.

  “I fed from her,” he told Gordon matter-of-factly.

  The truth was, he’d found himself sucking desperately at her skin, rubbing his mouth on her, desperate for relief. That was the point at which she’d protested: Hey, she’d said, and
tried to push him away.

  But he couldn’t let go. It wasn’t like him to force himself on anyone, not for any reason; but his body was driven, goaded by a terrible need that he couldn’t even identify. If she’d said anything, he could no longer hear it, even though he’d felt her begin to struggle in earnest, her hands scrabbling against his chest like little bird wings, as he sucked and licked and scrubbed his teeth and lips back and forth, almost sobbing with frustration, holding her tighter and tighter, her arms pinned against him. Later, he knew that Johnny had been there all along and that he had somehow gotten his hand in, just close enough for one quick jab on her neck with whatever he was holding—she jerked back with a little cry—and the barest thread of that rich, metallic scent quivered into Cole’s nostrils. The puncture wasn’t deep enough—Johnny had been lucky to get it anywhere on her neck at all—but now Cole found the source and latched on.

  And then, then—oh, she’d gone completely still, and everything became wonderful. The salty tinge made him suck even harder, until it finally, mercifully turned into a thin trickle.

  That was when he’d swallowed his first mouthful. It wasn’t even a teaspoon’s worth, but it was glorious. It was slick, rich, and he couldn’t get it down fast enough. With his lips on her neck, she stood quiet with her hands suddenly soft against his chest.

  He’d wanted to moan. Maybe he had moaned—he’d never known for sure about that.

  He mentioned none of this to Gordon. “And that was about it,” he said. Clear. Concise. Simple.

  “How did you know to stop?” Gordon asked.

  “Johnny told me. He put a hand on my arm and told me to let go.”

  “That was it? That was all it took?”

  Cole remembered that Sandor had said he’d had to hit Gordon several times to get him to let go. “He spoke very firmly.”

  That part of it was still foggy. Cole was pretty sure he remembered Johnny’s voice in his ear; no words had sunk in, but he thought he recalled brusque syllables, the same tone you’d use with a horse that was carrying you too closely along the edge of a cliff. And, looking back, it now seemed likely that Johnny had hit him in the back of the knees, because he’d lost his balance suddenly and almost dropped the girl. Then he’d heard Johnny: That’s good, lad. Let her go now. And Cole had obeyed, because the universe had gone upside down, and Johnny was the only solid thing in it.