No Direction Home

by Norman Spinrad

  He remounted, started the engine, put her in gear, and started to move out of the station. That was when he noticed the heap of bones just beyond the pumps. When he got a real dose look, he broke into a cold sweat.

  The bones were scattered around a burned-out fire. Some of them had been cracked open for the marrow, and all of them were picked pretty clean. But swarms of ants were crawling all over them, gobbling the tiny scraps of meat that still clung to the greasy bones. And there were two human skulls lying close to the fire. Their tops had been smashed open and the brains eaten out.

  Doug slammed the Harley into gear and cranked on the throttle, tearing ass and shooting gravel as if the hounds of hell were after him. And from the looks of that bone pile, something even worse might show up at any moment. The sun was just about setting, and this was sure no place to spend the night!

  Doug roared out of the gas station making forty-five, which was really moving considering the condition of the surface. He zipped past a couple of gutted stores and a few burned-out houses, and that was just about all there was of the little town.

  Then the road bent to the right around a little hill, and when Doug came out of the curve he saw that the road ahead was blocked by three of the skankiest dudes on three of the most ridiculous-looking bikes he had ever ever heard of.

  The bikes looked like they had started as little 125 cc Yamahas or something similar. They weren’t chopped at all, but every scrap of non-essential metal had been removed from the frames, making them look almost like bicycles. They mounted knobby tires front and rear, and huge oversized gas tanks. But the craziest things about them were the outriggers that sprouted on both sides behind the single bicycle-type seats. Lengths of pipe about three feet long were pivot-mounted on frame-members, the play restricted both up and down by sets of springs that might have been scavenged from the forks of mopeds. At the ends of these lengths of pipe, each outrigger had a fat-tired little wheel off a kid’s trail bike mounted on bicycle forks. When the bikes were moving in an upright position, the outrigger wheels would ride about a foot off the ground. Now, at rest, the left outrigger-wheels were on the ground, doubling as instant stands. The bikes were the second ugliest and the second weirdest things Doug Allard had ever seen.

  The ugliest and weirdest things he had ever seen were the three creeps riding them.

  They looked like basketball centers that hadn’t eaten for a month: about seven feet tall, thin as skeletons, long, awkward arms and legs that made them, seem to be perching on their spindly little scoots like praying mantises. They wore greasy leather pants, black sleeveless vests, and long scabbards at their belts. In the deep shadows of the setting sun, their hairless skin seemed to glisten a pale, waxy green.

  But it was their faces that made Doug reach behind him and uncoil the length of chain he kept wrapped around a frame-member as he brought up the Harley about ten feet from the things. They were as bald as green apples, and they had weak little chins under wide, almost lipless, mouths which hung open stupidly, showing rows of long, yellow, doglike teeth. Their eyes were crazy and bloodshot, sunk deep in their sockets under apelike hairless brows. They did not look like folks you could trust.

  Doug let the three-foot length of chain dangle from his left hand, clanging loudly against the frame of the Harley as it snaked to the ground. “I’d appreciate it if you boys would clear the road,” he said. “You’d appreciate it, too.”

  The creep in the middle sniffed the air. “Gas!” he hissed. “I smell much gas in the strange machine.”

  “And much meat on his bones!”

  They laughed shrilly, and drew long, sharp-looking swords from their scabbards.

  “You named it, mothers!” Doug shouted, as the three spindly bikes came wobbling toward him like awkward insects, their gawky riders having some trouble steering and trying to hold onto their swords at the same time. He shifted into first, gave her a little throttle, and veered off to the right, so that the green creep on the left closed with him about two feet from his chain hand, thrusting clumsily with his sword.

  Doug whipped the chain through the air and caught him square across the back of the skull as the outrigger buzzed by. Surprisingly, the thing’s head burst like a rotten watermelon, spewing thin splinters of bone and gray-green slime. The out-of-control bike slammed into the scoot next to it—the big geek riding it seemed incredibly clumsy as he tried to avoid the collision—and knocked the rider sprawling to the ground.

  Doug was easily by them now, and his hog could surely outrun their silly machines, but his blood was boiling, and he figured the proper thing to do was to finish the job. These creeps were lame pushovers—finishing off the two remaining ones shouldn’t even raise a decent sweat.

  He whipped his chop around and came back at the one on the ground, who seemed to be having trouble getting to his feet. As Doug passed by, bringing the chain down across the creature’s back, he screamed but managed to slash Doug harmlessly on his boot. By the time Doug had turned his bike again for another pass, the greenie had managed to scramble shakily to his feet. Eyes rolling, teeth bared, mouth drooling, he stood woozily slashing his sword through the air as Doug bore down on him.

  At the last moment, Doug veered slightly to the right, ducked under the whistling sword, and caught him across the kneecaps with the chain. The greenie screamed, buckled, and fell on his face.

  Doug saw that the last outrigger bike was high-tailing it up the road away from him. The cowardly bastard was running out on his partners!

  “That won’t do you no good, you son-of-a-bitch!” he shouted as he cranked on his throttle in pursuit. Boy, that crud had to be really stupid to think he could outrun a Harley on a puny little bike like that!

  It was getting dark, so Doug turned on his headlight as he chased the greenie over the torturous surface of the ruined road. About thirty yards ahead, the spindly little outrigger bike with its skeletonlike rider wobbled and bounced crazily in his high beam like a lurching spider. The geek on the outrigger seemed a piss-poor rider, hitting half the potholes and rocks in the road, as if he had the reflexes of someone’s grandfather. Doug saw what those outrigger wheels were for as now the left, now the right, touched ground for a moment as the bike hit a pothole or a rock and heeled over suddenly. They were like the training wheels on a little kid’s first bicycle; without them, the incompetent slob on the outrigger bike would’ve gone down every couple of minutes on a killer road like this.

  In fact, it took all of Doug’s skill, reflexes, and arm-strength to keep from going down himself on this so-called road. He’d been chasing the outrigger for maybe five minutes, he realized, and he wasn’t gaining any ground. Imagine, a 125 cc mouse of a bike holding its own against a high-balling chopper! But forty or at most forty-five was as fast as Doug could go on this torture-track road without creaming himself out. At that speed, the outrigger bike was probably going flat out while he still had more than half his throttle left. But a lot of good that did him.

  He realized that, crazy as it looked, the outrigger bike design made some sense under these conditions. Road condition imposed forty-five as top speed anyway, so all his big engine did for him was use up more gas per mile at the same speed. That son-of-a-bitch up there could pace him all night, and guess who would run out of gas first!

  It really burned Doug to think of that creep outrunning his big scoot on that little bug of his! Man, what would the Avengers say, if he ever got to see their beautiful ugly faces again? The lip-action would be murder!

  Up ahead, the outrigger bike disappeared for a moment around a righthand curve…

  Suddenly, Doug heard a high-pitched roar, shouts from more or less human throats, a long shrill scream. Then the outrigger bike reappeared, weaving crazily all over the road in his general direction. The rider was missing his left arm, and quarts of green goo were gushing out of the stump. The outrigger slid off the road entirely and shattered against a tree, sending the dying rider flying off into the underbrush.


  And then, rushing straight at him, Doug saw the headlights of something over a dozen motorcycles. An instant later, he made them out sharp and clear: over a dozen of the outrigger bikes, each one ridden by one of the tall green skeletons, eyes glowing and swords flashing in the gleam of the headlights.

  Doug didn’t have time to do any heavy thinking. He cranked on all the throttle he had, hunched his body as low over the tank as he could, prayed he wouldn’t hit a hole or a rock in the next thirty feet, and tried to steer for the empty spaces in the crowd of devil-bikes hearing down on him.

  Still accelerating, he zipped in between two bikes, taking an outrigger wheel on his left thigh as sharp steel passed over his head, caught his front wheel in a crack in the road, felt his rear wheel going out as he fought for control. He skidded sideways a foot or two, glancing off the front wheel of an outrigger bike, regained control as the outrigger bounced into the bike next to it, ducked another sword stroke that was way off the mark, and then he was through, hauling ass up the dark winding road while all was confusion and shouting behind him.

  Doug felt as if he had been riding for days, though it couldn’t have been more than an hour or two. Ahead of him, everything was inky black except for the cone of light that his headlamp cut out of the darkness. The road, as full of cracks and potholes as ever, climbed higher into the Rockies, and it was all he could do to keep his scoot upright at forty. Both arms ached from the prolonged effort and tension, and his left leg hurt like hell where the outrigger wheel had caught it. He was starting to see things that weren’t there, and not see things that were. A couple of times he started to lean into left turns that were really rights, as the trees and the bouncing beam of the headlight played tricks with his eyes. He longed to stop, if only to take five.

  But all he had to do was glance back over his shoulder and see those fourteen headlights about a hundred yards behind to know that a five-minute rest would be the last five minutes he’d ever see. One hundred yards. He had opened up the gap in the confusion of his dash through them, and he hadn’t been able to gain any more ground since, though at least they hadn’t been able to close in on him.

  It was the damnedest bike race he had ever heard of. A couple of miles of straight road, or even a few miles of decently paved bends, and his big chop would leave the mothers in the dust. But on this cow-track, it didn’t matter that he had three times the bike they did, that he was three times the rider they were; with all his skill and power, all he could average was about forty, and those little Mickey Mouse machines just buzzed along flat out, flopping around on their outriggers, matching his speed on half the gas consumption.

  And that was what really scared him.

  With those king-sized tanks and pint-sized engines, those monsters had at least twice his range. Unless they had started this chase more than half empty, he’d run out of gas first, and then it would be his chain against fourteen of those swords. Four or five of the mothers wouldn’t have scared him, but fourteen? They’d suck the marrow from his bones and eat the brains out of his skull.

  Doug took another glance behind, and, as he did, a bolt of lightning lit up the scene like a strobe. Down in the hollow behind him, he saw the fourteen outrigger bikes hopping and jouncing in pursuit like army ants, the flesh of their mantislike riders gleaming with a sickly green wetness. Darkness and a roll of thunder, then another flash of lightning.

  Oh, no! Not another goddamned electrical storm. And as he thought it, three quick sheets of lightning pealed across the sky one after the other, as if electricity, his old enemy, had shown up to gloat over his bones. A long, slow ramble of thunder shook his guts.

  “Not yet, you mother, not yet!” he shouted at the sky.

  Feeling fury surge through him, he cranked on more throttle, hit a little rock, slid sideways, and had to use his pained left leg to keep from going down. He winced, cursed, and saw that the slip had cost him a few yards on his pursuers. Lightning touched a ridge off to his right.

  And his engine broke up for a few beats.

  Another bolt of lightning hit of to his left, closer this time. Again his engine coughed and hesitated. Man, all he had to do was stall out now! He saw that he had lost another yard or two.

  Slam! Bang! He was bracketed on both sides by bolts of lightning, deafened by the thunder. The chop’s engine coughed, sputtered, and died.

  He could hear the scream of those fourteen flat-out little engines coming up behind him like a swarm of giant wasps. Howling wordlessly, he craned his neck around to see the green demons on their outrigger bikes outlined in another flash of lightning not ten yards behind as he tromped down on the starter with all of his might. The engine caught; he slammed the chopper into gear and cranked it on.

  He opened the gap up to twenty yards before he skidded over a crack in the road, sliding sideways just enough to lose back the distance he had gained.

  He crested a hill and came roaring down into a little valley around a mild left turn with the devil bikes thirty feet behind him and lightning cracking through the sky overhead. His engine broke up again, hesitated, almost died, but recaught. The green creeps gained another few feet in the process. They were so close now that he could hear the bloodcurdling cries coming from their throats as they sensed the kill.

  Another bolt of lightning, another cough from his engine, and a sword whistled over his head, burying its point three inches deep in a tree beside the road. A second sword clanged off his sissybar, looped high in the air, and just missed his back on the way down, A third sword sent a thin sting through his left shoulder as it sliced through his colors.

  Doug Allard knew he had had it. He was beyond fear, beyond despair, beyond knowing what the hell he was doing except on an instinctive level. He was all rage—rage at the monstrosities that would be eating his flesh in a few more minutes, rage at the sparky dragon in the sky who had thrown him into this hell-world in the first place.

  Lightning blinded him as one more sword whistled past his head. In one final, defiant gesture, he ripped the headlight wire loose, and held the naked end aloft shouting at the sky: “Come and get me, you yellow motherfucker! I dare you! I d—”

  The world turned a blinding, crazy yellow. Everything seemed to happen at once and in slow motion. His body tingled, he choked on ozone, and the engine quit entirely. The chop started to go down, but he knew that if he went down in the next instant or even allowed his foot to touch the road, he had had it. Standing up on the pegs, still blinded, he threw his body to the right as hard as he could against the bank of the turn, compensating for the sudden drop in speed. The Harley wobbled crazily, there was a tremendous clap of thunder, and his vision began to clear.

  He dimly saw that he was careening across the road, thumping and bouncing toward a steep drop into a heavily wooded gully to the right. He downshifted, slammed on the brakes, the forward momentum was killed, and the scoot gently slid out from under him. He rolled away from the bike, losing a certain amount of skin in the process.

  Picking himself off the ground, he saw that the Harley was lying on its side in the tall grass by the side of the road, about three yards from having rolled into a ragged-looking little canyon. It was daylight, the trees were ordinary fir trees, the road was in good repair, there were no green demons on outrigger bikes coming up it, and the electrical storm was retreating across the sky to the east.

  Slowly, it got through to him. This was the same place he had been hit by lightning the first time, and about the same time, too, by the look of the sky. None of that crazy stuff had really happened. The lightning must’ve knocked him out of his head for a few minutes and into a crazy electricity nightmare.

  Only then did he notice the thin pain in his left shoulder, the slash in his colors, the blood underneath.

  And when he checked out the bike, he found the headlight wire hanging loose and a wad of tinfoil in the fuse-clip.

  ALL THE SOUNDS OF THE RAINBOW

  Harry Krell sprawled in a black vinyl beanbag chair n
ear the railing of the rough-hewn porch. Five yards below, the sea crashed and rumbled against convoluted black rocks that looked like a fallen shower of meteors half-buried in the warm Pacific sand. He was naked from the waist up; a white sarong fell to his shins, and he wore custom-made horsehide sandals. He was well-muscled in a fortyish way, deeply tanned, and had the long, neat, straight yellow hair of a beach bum. His blue eyes almost went with the beach bum image: clear, empty, but shattered-looking like marbles that had been carefully cracked with a ball-peen hammer.

  As phony as a Southern California guru, Bill Marvin thought as he stepped out onto the sunlit porch. Which he is. Nevertheless, Marvin shuddered as those strange eyes swept across him like radar antennae, cold, expressionless instruments gathering their private spectrum of data. “Sit down,” Krell said. “You sound awful over there.”

  Marvin gingerly lowered the seat of his brown suede pants to the edge of an aluminum-and-plastic beach chair, and stared at Krell with cold gray eyes set in a smooth angular face perfectly framed by medium-length, razor-cut, artfully styled brown hair. He had no intention of wasting any more time on this oily con-man than was absolutely necessary. “I’ll come right to the point, Krell,” he said. “You detach yourself from Karen your way, or I’ll get it done my way.”

  “Karen’s her own chick,” Krell said. “She’s not even your wife anymore.” A jet from Vandenburg suddenly roared overhead; Krell winced and rubbed at his eyes.

  “But I’m still paying her a thousand a month in alimony, and I’ll play pretty dirty before I’ll stand by and watch half of that go into your pockets.”

  Krell smiled, and a piece of chalk seemed to scratch down a blackboard in Marvin’s mind, “You can’t do a thing about it,” he said.

  “I can stop paying.”

  “And get dragged into court.”

  “And tell the judge I’m putting the money in escrow pending the outcome of a sanity hearing, seeing as how I believe that Karen is now mentally incompetent.”