by Ellen Datlow
And if he closed his own eyes, as if he were sharing the same furious pillow of air with her …
Not a good idea. He didn’t even see the patch of gravel, dropped on the asphalt by some construction truck. His eyes snapped open when the rear wheel started to skid out from beneath him. He yanked the ’Busa straight from the curve he’d banked into. The bike felt awkward and top-heavy with her weight perched a couple inches higher than his own. He steered into the skid, wrestling the bike back under control, his knee clearing the guardrail as he trod down on the rear brake.
That all took about one second. But that was enough to have shifted his cold passenger around on the seat behind him. The handcuffs rode up under his armpit, her face with its closed, sleeping eyes no longer close to his ear but now pushed into the opposite sleeve of his jacket, down below his shoulder. One of the boots that Edwin had worked back onto her ivory, blue-nailed feet had popped loose from the rear peg. Her denim-clad leg trailed behind the bike, the boot’s stacked heel skittering on the road. The body slewed around even more as he squeezed the front brake tight. By the time he brought the ’Busa to a halt, she was almost perpendicular on the seat behind him, her hair dangerously close to snagging in the wheel’s hub.
“God damn.” Edwin and his stupid ideas—this whole job was becoming more of an annoyance than it was worth. He levered the kickstand down and leaned the bike’s weight onto it. Her hair swept a circle in the roadside debris. He was annoyed at her as well. If she had still been alive, he would have figured she was doing it on purpose. Drunk and screwing around again. Her weight toppled him over as he swung his own leg off the bike.
Now she was underneath him. As though she had brought him down in a wrestling hold—back when they had lived together, he had taught her a couple of moves he remembered from the junior varsity squad. Above him, the stars of the desert sky spun, wobbled, then held in place. If he rolled his eyes back, he could just see her face, somewhere by his ribs. If she had opened her eyes, she could’ve seen the stars, too.
His thin gloves scuffed on the sharp-edged rocks as he rolled onto his hands and knees, pulling her up on top of himself. That much effort winded him. It wasn’t that she was so heavy, but every part of her seemed to have cooked up its own escape plan, as though none of her wanted to get dumped off at another funeral parlor. Her legs sprawled on his other side, the boots twisting at the ankles.
The handcuffs had been an even dumber idea. Edwin probably got some thrill out of the notion. It would’ve worked better if they had dug up a roll of duct tape and strapped her tight to his body. This way, she had just enough of a hold on him to be a nuisance. In that, not much had changed from when she had been alive. He rooted around in his jacket pocket for the key; couldn’t find it. It must’ve popped out, somewhere on the ground.
He tried standing up, and couldn’t make it. He toppled forward and grabbed the bike to keep his balance. The near-vertical angle rolled her weight forward, the handcuffs sliding onto his shoulderblade, her head lolling in front of him. The bike gave way, the kickstand scything through the loose dirt. The hot engine burned through his trouser knee as he fell.
The three of them—corpse, motorcycle, and its rider—hit the side of the road hard. He could smell gasoline leaking from the tank’s filler cap. The links of the handcuffs gouged the middle of his spine. She was sandwiched between him and the toppled bike, her face upturned toward him, as though waiting for a kiss, one denimed leg wedged into his groin.
He pushed himself away from the bike, dragging her up with him. The handcuffs slithered down to the small of his back as he managed to stand upright at last. That brought her face down to his belt level.
Well, that’s sweet. He stroked her tangled, dusty hair back from her brow. Just like old times. Memory tripped through his head, strong enough to screw him up worse.
“Come on,” he spoke aloud. “Nice and all, but we gotta get going.”
He reached down, grabbed her above the elbows and lifted. She only came up a few inches before he realized he was pulling up his trousers as well, the frayed denim cuffs sliding above the tops of his own boots.
“What the—” He looked down. His eyes had adjusted enough to the slivered moonlight, that he could see her hair had snagged in the trousers’ zip.
It must’ve happened while he and the corpse had been wrestling on top of the fallen motorcycle. Every stupid, annoying thing was happening tonight. That brought back memories as well.
Her cold face was caught so close to him, he couldn’t even slide his hands down between her cheek and the front of the trousers. Not without undoing his buckle first; the loose ends of his belt flapped down beside her shoulders. He sucked in his gut and managed—barely—to pinch the zipper’s metal tag. “Damn,” he muttered. “Come on, you bastard.” Half-inch by reluctant half-inch, he worked the zipper open, his knuckles chilled against her brow. Loosened, the trousers slid partway down his hips.
The world lit up. Headlight beams raked across him, a car rounding the road’s curve. He shielded his eyes from the probing glare. His shadow, and hers, spilled back across the empty landscape.
He could see the silhouettes of the people inside. The driver, his wife beside him, a couple of little kids in the backseat, their faces pugnosing against the side windows as they got a better look. He glanced down and saw how perfectly the white, shifting light caught her profile. Or at least the part of it that wasn’t shadowed by his open fly.
Then the headlight beams swung away from him and down the length of road farther on. The car was right next to him; he could have let go of her arm and rubbed his hand across the car’s flank as it sped past. Close enough that the people in the car didn’t need the headlights to see what was going on, or think they saw. There was enough moonlight to glisten on the handcuffs’ links as the driver looked up to his rearview mirror, the wife and kids gaping through the rear window.
My life’s complete now. He had been there when some tourist yokels from Idaho or some other numb-nut locale had caught a glimpse of another world, where other stuff happened. Like the tightly rolled-up windows of their rental car had been the inch-thick glass of some darkened aquarium that you could push your nose up hard against and witness sharks copulating with jellyfish, all blurry and wet. It would give them something to talk about when they got back to Boise, especially the bit about the poor ravaged girl being handcuffed around the guy’s waist.
Two streaks of red pulsed down the asphalt. The car had hit its brakes. Worse; he turned, looked over his shoulder and saw another red light come on, above the car. It flashed and wavered, with blue-white strobes on either side. They weren’t tourists from out of state; he saw that now. He watched as a Metro patrol car threw a U-turn, one front wheel crunching across the gravel, then bouncing the suspension as it climbed back onto the road.
“Shit.” The headlights pinned him again. He looked down and saw, as if for the first time, how luminous pale her skin was. They could tell, he thought in dismay. One thing to be spotted getting skulled on the side of the road, even with the handcuffs involved—that was probably happening all over this town at any given moment, not worth the police’s attention. But with a corpse—was that a felony or just a misdemeanor? It didn’t matter, what with him still being on parole for things he couldn’t even remember when he was straight.
He lifted harder this time, his hands clamped to her ribcage, hard enough to snap free a lock of her hair and leave it tangled in his zipper. Her arms still encircled him; that actually made it easier to sling her against one hip, his other hand tugging his trousers back in place. The difficult part was getting the bike upright again, but somehow he managed, even as the patrol car’s siren wailed closer. Red flashes bounced off the tank and the inside of the windscreen, as he lugged her onto the seat behind him, the cuffs slipping across the front of his jacket once more.
The ’Busa coughed to life. As he kicked it down to first and let off the clutch, the cop car slewed a yard in fron
t of him, spattering road grit against the front fender. He yanked the bike hard to the right, bootsole scraping the asphalt, then wrenched it straight again, pouring on the throttle. Something loose—maybe her boot?—clipped the patrol car’s taillight as he jammed past.
He was already into fourth, redlining the tach, by the time he heard the siren coming up behind him. Fifth, and the yowl faded for a moment, then just as loud again as the driver cop stood on the accelerator pedal. Hitting the nitrous button wouldn’t do him any good. The road was too straight; if they had been up in the mountains with some tight twisties to slalom through, he could’ve left the cops way behind. Out here in the flat desert, though, they could just keep hammering on top of him, long after the nitrous canister was exhausted, until he either gave up or sliced a curve’s guardrail too close. The first would leave him on the ground, but alive at least, with a tactical boot on his throat and a two-handed forty-four pointed between his eyes. The second would probably leave two corpses on the ground, one freshly bleeding from the impact.
Just as he hit sixth, the ’Busa screaming into triple digits, the siren and the flashing red light jumped in front of him. How’d that happen? He didn’t have time to wonder. A shining white wall reared before him. The ’Busa’s headlight painted a big red X in the middle of it. That was all he saw as the brakes grabbed hold, too late to keep the bike from hitting broadside, even as it fell.
“You with us, pal? How many fingers?”
He wasn’t sure. “Two?”
“Close enough.”
He tried to turn over on his side, but couldn’t. She was still hooked up to him, arms encircling him on the cot where they lay.
The paramedic van was like the inside of his head. Eye-achingly lit up, smelling of chemicals, and filled with mysterious objects that he didn’t recognize.
“You hit us a good one.” One of the EMTs had a knotted ponytail. He pointed to a spot near the van’s floor. “You can see the dent from in here.”
“I can pay for it.” He pushed himself up on his elbow. “Not right now, but—”
“Forget that.” The other EMT, looking back from the driver’s seat, had tattoos and smoke-reddened eyes. The whole van reeked of party atmosphere. “This is not good.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” He tugged at the handcuffs but they stayed locked. “Look, just don’t hand me over to the cops—”
“Cops? What cops?” The EMTs glanced at each other, above him. “We didn’t see any cops.”
A small comfort, that he was just screwed up and not pursued. I must’ve made ’em up. Another good reason for not riding in that kind of condition—all that beer and the hit off the dip that Edwin had given him.
“I’ll just be on my way.” The van’s interior swam and tilted as he sat up, dragging her with him. “You don’t have to report this—”
“Report it? Are you kidding? This is a frickin’ fatality situation.”
“What?” Then he realized what the tattooed one was talking about. “Uhh … actually, she was this way before.”
They weren’t listening to him. “I’m not calling it in,” said Ponytail. “You call it in.”
“Screw that. I’m not filling in all that paperwork again. I did the last one we had. Remember? The coronary?”
“Guys—”
“Well, we can’t just let him walk.”
“Why not?”
They both looked at him, then at each other, then back to him. Ponytail slowly nodded. “Maybe …”
He put his weight on his left foot. The resulting bolt through his spine nearly took the top of his skull off. He collapsed backward, propped up by the dead girl.
“You’re not going anywhere in that condition, pal.”
He looked down at himself and saw how ripped-up his trousers were. The whole long seam along the left leg had been torn open, the skin beneath bruised and chewed red by a skid over asphalt. God knew what condition the bike was in.
“I don’t care.” He gripped the edge of the cot with sweating hands, trying to keep from passing out. “I gotta get out of here. I got a delivery to make.”
“Her?” Ponytail nodded toward the shackled weight, with the long dark hair and dreaming face.
“Give him something,” said the driver. “Just get him on the road. Long as I don’t have to fill out any paperwork, it’s cool.”
“Right—” Ponytail nodded as he fumbled around with the equipment shelved on either side. He spun a valve on a chrome canister, then tethered the plastic mask to his own face. He inhaled deeply, then held it out. “Here, try this.”
The van expanded and dissolved with the first hit. The blood throb in his battered leg faded, along with any other sensation of having a body. All he could feel was her pulseless hug around his chest. He pushed the mask away. The paramedic van slowly coalesced, now formed of sheets of vaguely transparent gelatin, warping beneath him and yielding to a poke of his finger.
“Off you go, pal.” Ponytail maneuvered him toward the van’s open doors, like a parade balloon. “You have a good night. Try and stay out of trouble, okay?”
He found himself standing in the middle of an empty road, his wavering legs straddling a long scrape mark gouged out of the pavement. At its end, the ’Busa leaned on its kickstand. The EMTs must have picked it up after he T-boned their van. He wanted to thank them, but they were already gone.
He pulled his passenger along with himself, over toward the bike. She seemed weightless as well, the handcuffs the only thing keeping her from floating away into the glittering night sky. The toes of her boots seemed to barely trail across the earth’s surface.
“That was nice of them.” He laid his hands on the tank. He could smell gasoline, but the bike didn’t seem in too bad of a shape. The left fairing was a total write-off; that must have been the side he laid it down on. The pegs and bits of engine on that flank were scraped gleaming and raw. It could probably be ridden, if he could figure a way of holding on to it without getting blown away by the wind, like roadside scrap paper.
Whatever the EMTs had given him, he was still way slammed by it. The chemical tides in his bloodstream would have to roll out a bit—or a lot—before he’d be able to climb on the ’Busa again. Sleep it off , he told himself. Maybe he could just curl up at the side of the road, wrap her tighter around himself, spooning like old times … .
Better not. A soft voice whispered at his ear. I can’t keep you warm anymore. Not like this.
That was when he knew exactly how screwed up he was. And not by whatever was still percolating in his brain. That you could get over. The past, you never did.
He looked around and spotted, if not refuge, at least a waiting room. One that both of them were familiar with. How had he wound up in this part of town?
It didn’t matter. He gripped her arms and brought her up higher on his back, her cheek close beside his, and stumbled toward the bar’s sputtering neon.
“The problem’s not Hallowe’en,” said Ernie. “It’s you.”
Don’t listen to this guy.
He didn’t know if the bartender could hear what she said. Maybe the dead spoke only in private whispers. Like lovers. He knocked back the latest beer that had been placed in front of him. “Why is it me?”
Like I said. Her voice again. This one was always full of crap.
“You really want to know why?”
He shrugged. “Do I have a choice?”
“You don’t even want one.” Ernie wiped his sodden towel across the bar. “Here’s the deal. You’re blaming the world for what happened to you. That’s all backwards.”
Right now, the world consisted of this bar and its tacky, orange ’n’ black decorations, courtesy of the beer distributors. He looked around at the dangling pasteboard junk, then back to Ernie. “I didn’t do this.” He pointed to the grinning, long-legged witches. “You can’t blame me.”
Yes, he can. You just wait.
The bar had emptied. He was the only one left inside, after Ernie
the bartender had switched off the outside neon. While he had nursed one of the string of beers, Ernie had started stacking the chairs up on the tables. Then he had come back behind the bar to finish sorting out the world’s problems.
“Just hear me out,” said Ernie. “I mean, it’s cool that you came here with your iced old lady cuffed to you. That shows some effort on your part.”
“Hey. We broke up, remember?”
Did we?
He ignored her whisper. “Long time ago,” he told the bartender.
Not long enough.
“Whatever.” Ernie seemed not to have heard anything she said. “But that doesn’t suffice. You gotta look inside yourself. It’s not what Hallowe’en did to you. It’s what you did to Hallowe’en.”
He wished Ernie hadn’t said that. Not because the bartender was wrong. But because he knew—standing at the edge of a vast, lightless abyss inside himself, looking down into it—he knew that the bartender might be right. About too much.
“You can’t expect things to stay the same,” said Ernie, “and you just get to change all you want. Like there’s no connection between the two.” Ernie uncapped another beer and set it on the bar. “But there is.”
“He knows that,” said another voice. “But he’s got it backward. Like usual with him.”
He turned and saw, a little farther down the bar, Buzz Cut taking a pull at a half-empty bottle. The other motorhead, the one with the red hair, sat on the next stool over, drinking and nodding slowly in agreement.
“You should’ve heard him before,” continued Buzz Cut. “With his whole Hallowe’en rap. Boo hoo hoo. It’s all so frickin’ sad.”
He had thought the bar had all cleared out. Where’d these guys come from?
