by P. N. Elrod
“You going to be all right waiting here for a while?” I asked.
“Can’t we just walk back to town?” Her voice was dull, thick.
“Not in this weather. I’ll go for my car and come for you.”
“But he’s got his gun.”
That was a problem I would try to avoid. “Where’s this truck of theirs?” I hadn’t noticed it on the road.
“Off the beach. Don’t know where. I kept goin’ for I donno how long.”
“Don’t stop. Keep moving here. I’ll come back as soon as I can.” Real soon. The wind was chewing through my suit like a rabid animal.
She nodded numbly, and I slipped away, pausing at the edge of the trees to check ahead.
Ellie was no longer in sight. She could be with her brother helping his search or sitting in my car, taking advantage of its shelter. I hadn’t locked it. Reflections off the windows obscured the interior. I was too much a pessimist to hope she and Lloyd had given up and left.
Damn the lack of cover. All I had were the trees, car, and a line of telephone poles marching grimly out from the city.
I tried to vanish, just as an experiment.
Bad idea. Though I felt an encouraging flutter within, it was overwhelmed by the slam of fresh pain in the back of my head. At some point the scales would shift, and I could relinquish solidity and heal, but not yet.
Susan didn’t have time for my recovering body to catch up with the situation and even I was starting to feel the cold. Only one way to fix that.
I dashed straight for my Buick like a ball player for home base, moving faster than any normal man. The best thing for Susan was to get her out quietly then deal with the others some other time.
My car was empty of lurking killers, but I winced opening the door. The keys were still in my overcoat pocket.
Damnation.
A setback, but not a total disaster. I fumbled under the dashboard, intent on making this the fastest hotwiring job in history.
Motion and light in the corner of my eye—some kind of vehicle was coming up fast from the south, headlamps bobbing. They belonged to a battered, open-bed truck. Behind the wheel I recognized the sleek shape of Ellie’s scarf-covered head.
Hell. I couldn’t get the car started before she reached me. She’d have seen the door hanging open and think it was Susan.
I’d have to confront them sooner or later. Better it’s sooner and one at a time. I got out.
Ellie didn’t slow until the last second, bringing the truck to a long, sliding halt on its bald tires. The brakes squealed like dying pigs. Her front bumper stopped a foot short of my back fender. Leaving the lights on and the engine running, she hurtled out the door, her expression tense.
She honestly didn’t know me at first. I was without my bulky overcoat and standing up, after all.
And I was alive.
It was a pleasure to watch the changes flowing over her face. First the suspicion reserved for any unexpected and unpleasant surprise, then puzzlement, swiftly replaced by sick shock. Finally she showed the dawning that comes when one realizes something has gone really, really wrong with one’s world.
She backed a step in reflex, then held her ground, not quite ready to accept that final impossibility. I was—I had to be—a stranger come out of the darkness, maybe a tramp, someone inconvenient who needed to leave. Quickly.
She yelled Lloyd’s name, her voice strange and high with imperfectly suppressed alarm. She yelled again. No answer. She gave a little jump when I slammed my half-open door, not once taking my gaze from her. None of this helped my tender head or stirred-up gut. I wanted to be someplace warm and quiet, away from crazy people with their ugly, greedy plans.
Ellie pulled a little revolver from her coat pocket. Her hand shook. She steadied it with her other hand. Wish I’d thought to bring a gun, but I’d not anticipated the need for one just for a walk on the damn beach.
“W-who are you?” she asked, the words dribbling out shaky and not sounding right.
I started grinning. Couldn’t help myself, it was too good. “Hello, Ellie. Let’s have another kiss.”
Her jaw dropped, but nothing audible came out, and that made it much more awful.
I hoped she’d turn and run but instead the gun’s muzzle flared and jumped. The explosion was almost too loud to hear. Astonishingly, I felt nothing. Ellie was so spooked that from ten feet away, she completely missed me.
She wouldn’t get a second chance.
I ducked around the front of my car, keeping low. Ellie followed, but I moved too fast, preventing her from getting a clear shot. Damn, if I could just vanish.
Five more misses and I could end this. Lloyd would certainly have heard something and be on his way from whatever rock he’d crawled under. Susan didn’t have time to spare while I played squirrel tag with her sick sister-in-law.
Ellie wasn’t wasting bullets, though. She was smart enough to wait for a clear target.
Skulking around the rear bumper, I glanced across the field. Lloyd shambled toward us. In one hand was his rifle, the other had Susan by the scruff of the neck. She stumbled along, her feet tangling in the flapping hem of my coat. Whenever she fell, Lloyd dragged her up again, hardly slowing his pace, like an adult dealing with a balky child. Her cries sliced the air.
He’d gotten clever and investigated the trees, probably sneaking up while I’d been sidetracked by Susan.
Ellie yelled at him from her cover behind the front fender of the car, waving him closer. He spotted me in the wash of light from the truck’s headlamps and sprinted forward. For the moment he’d only see a new threat to be neutralized, not the corpse he’d left on the beach.
Ellie screamed at him to shoot me.
That made him pause, but he must have been used to doing what she told him. He closed up the distance to only twenty feet, released Susan—who immediately scrambled off—and brought up the rifle. I looked straight down the gun barrel. His aim was steady.
I dropped back to put the car between us, remembering Ellie a fraction too late.
I dodged, but not quick enough.
Her shot slammed into my ribs like a train.
I staggered from the impact, dimly hearing Ellie’s crow of victory. The gravel shoulder of the road rushed up, but it missed hitting me as gray fog swept over my sight.
Vanishing, finally—
A fiery wrenching turned me inside out—
It’s never been painful before.
Too soon after the head injury. No screaming allowed.
Ellie’s triumph abruptly departed. She went silent.
Lloyd came up, but could get no reply from her about what had happened.
The wind threatened to carry my otherwise incorporeal self off like a scrap of paper. I reached out with a pseudopod of something that should be my hand and wrapped it around the car’s bumper. I craved solidity, but was afraid to re-form. The sharp memory of hot nerve being ripped from muscle and bone had me writhing unseen in the air.
I held in place, fighting that memory.
Lloyd and Ellie began to argue, swearing at each other. She couldn’t bully her way back to the comfortable world she was used to, the one where dead men don’t return then disappear like switching off a light.
Better to deal with a more easily solved problem. Ellie ordered Lloyd to go after Susan. The girl had headed back to the trees and their false safety.
He was reluctant, but Ellie grasped that they could finish the job more easily in that spot. Somewhere quiet. No lights. No people to stop them. No one to take Susan’s part.
“They won’t find her right away,” Ellie told him. “We tell people she got drunk and run off. This’ll work better.”
That was a world more to her liking, where it’s perfectly okay to murder a young girl.
Like skinning a rabbit, they’d strip my coat from Susan’s small body and begin the killing process once more. Pain or no pain, I had to help her.
I cautiously eased toward solidi
ty only to find the barrier I expected to hit wasn’t there after all.
The grayness resolved into the recognizable shapes of normal reality. Sky, earth, and water mixed with the hard lines of human artifacts. . .and the humans, too.
I paused in the process, holding to a semi-transparent state until I got my bearings.
Lying on the damp gravel, I sat up, my hand gripping the bumper. I was ghostlike, able to see through myself.
So could Ellie and Lloyd.
Their bloodless faces stared down like the world ending.
Ellie brought her gun up and fired, but I felt nothing, only the wind. Unlike a bullet, which drilled through one small spot, wind hit me all over like a sail on a ship.
Ellie fired again. I grinned back and winked. Her confidence visibly collapsed; she blundered against Lloyd trying to get away. Her touch struck him like an electric shock, and now they couldn’t move fast enough. They piled into the truck.
I checked across the field for Susan, but the headlight glare blinded my view.
Lloyd tortuously shifted gears; the truck lurched forward. I vanished again, letting the wind take me for a single second. Slamming into the hard metal of the truck’s sides, I slid up, over, and tumbled into the open bed behind the cab.
The gears growled as Lloyd abused them; we picked up speed. There was nothing to hold onto; I worked toward the cab, sensing the small rectangle of smooth glass of the back window. More permeable than the metal of the truck’s body, I slipped through.
The opening was small, and I hate sieving through glass. It always seems about to break and then doesn’t. I pressed beyond its bitter barrier, rolling around like an invisible ball in the jouncing cab, then settling into an upright posture on the creaking seat.
They were on either side of me: Lloyd driving, Ellie tense on my right. She urged him to go faster. Again, he obeyed, struggling with the sluggish gears. Neither noticed the increased chill in the cab, which is a side effect I have in this form.
“You told me he was dead.” Lloyd was close to tears.
“He was dead. I know he was dead!”
“What was that? You tell me! Oh, God. Oh, goddamn it.”
“Just shut up!”
“Shut up yourself. What about Susan? What’ll we do about her?”
“Leave her.”
“But she’ll—”
“It don’t matter. We don’t go back. The hell with her.”
“Oh, goddamn it. Oh. shit. What was that?”
A maniac’s grin sprouted again on my invisible face. This wasn’t the vampire in me wanting payback—this was wholly human. It was dark, and it felt just fine.
I was still grinning when I partially materialized between them. Their panicked yells filled the tight space, their fighting brutal but ineffective. Lloyd’s grip on the wheel slipped as he tried to hit me with a poorly aimed fist. Ellie tried to use her gun. Lloyd shrieked at her not to, struggling with the steering. I labored to hold myself in place, their flailing arms passing right through me. The truck went into a long skid as Lloyd jammed the brakes.
Bald tires useless on the slick road, we careened into a sudden patch of deadly silence: a patch of road ice that slewed us like a circus ride. The slender black shape of a telephone pole charged out of the night.
Lloyd hauled the wheel around. The truck slid madly, swayed, bumped, and abruptly spun free. I saw the ground and sky swap places with surprising speed and violence.
Instinct took me away in time, there, but not there, as everything flipped wildly over and over. Their bodies were thrown around, making heavy, meaty thumps. Glass shattered, there was a scream of tearing, crimping steel, the cracking of wood and bones, and with hideous speed it came slamming to a abrupt stop when we struck the pole.
Distantly, I felt the impact. Lloyd’s body slammed into mine. . .or where mine should have been had I been solid. I shot clear, wanting no part of this.
The truck motor grunted and died.
Silence.
The wind wailed in my ears like an echo from a seashell.
I was solid, staring at the wreckage from the outside. I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten there. Sheer terror, probably.
It was cold. That was why I shivered so hard.
The truck had folded sideways around the stump of the broken pole. The pole’s top half lay over the back of the flatbed, lines snapped and trailing on the ground. Shattered glass glinted like new ice.
I did not have to breathe much to get a whiff of it, the bloodsmell. It was everywhere, mixed with the stink of gasoline, which was also everywhere. I kept a prudent distance, in case there was a spark.
Through the twisted frame of the back window I saw the shape of a head. Or it could have been a shoulder. No need to check. I did not want to know.
It moved. Someone inside moaned and coughed. I did not want to, but walked around to the front, glass grinding and snapping into smaller pieces under my shoes.
I hated what I saw through the spider web cracks of the windshield.
Ellie was smashed against the passenger door, her scarf pushed back. I noticed for the first and last time that she had dark hair—or maybe that was the blood making it dark. One of her eyes looked normal, apparently alive and aware and staring at me. The other was lost in a pulpy mess that went through the window.
She shifted a little and the hair shot up on my neck until I realized the motion was not her own but another’s. Lloyd was trying to pry free. He couldn’t open the driver’s door. Desperation gave him inspiration. He brought up a leg and kicked at the cracked windshield.
Shards flew, struck the hood, and skittered off. He made a big enough hole and hunched forward to creep through it. He was covered in blood and lost more as he crawled out. His breathing was harsh, and he favored his ribs. He wheezed and cried and clutched his left arm. The sleeve from his woolen hunting jacket was torn. Most of the blood came from there.
He wormed over the hood, lost balance, and rolled off, hitting the ground like a sandbag. When his breath returned, he started whimpering for help.
I could not bring myself to move toward him.
Footsteps. Another set of lungs. Susan came up, small in my coat. She brushed hair from her eyes.
“No need to see this,” I said, stepping between her and the wreck.
She kept coming, not to her husband lying on the shoulder of the road, but to me. I put my arm around her, selfishly glad of her company.
“They dead?” she asked in a clear and quiet voice.
“Ellie’s dead. Lloyd needs help. He’s bleeding bad.” The bloodsmell teased me. “I should make a tourniquet.”
“No.” she said hollowly.
The belt on my pants would do. I gently pulled from her and started to unbuckle it. Susan’s hands fell strongly onto mine.
“I said no, mister.”
“But—” Then I read the look on her face. I read her bitter and bright eyes, that crystalline awareness transmitting right into me. Taking a life does that to a person. Despite rules and conscience, there is a terrible primitive joy in payback. I recognized it. She might feel bad later, but for this moment it was right and justified.
Wholly human.
“No,” she said. “We don’t do nothin’.” Her gaze darted from me to the weakly shivering figure of the husband who had betrayed her and no telling how many others.
I sighed. “You sure?’
“Ain’t you?” She read my face in turn and looked okay with the answer.
She walked over to her husband, stopping just close enough so he could see her, know her. She seemed taller—or he’d shrunk. “Wish you hadn’t done it, Lloyd,” she told him. “I was good to you, more’n what you were to me.”
Through the pain he looked genuinely puzzled. He could have been too far gone to know what was going on, but my thought was that he had a certain kind of stupidity, the sort that made him incapable of understanding he’d done anything wrong.
“Help me,” he whispered.
<
br /> “You go to hell. You an’ her both.”
Susan walked back, seeming to diminish with each step until she was normal again, a small young woman, barely past girlhood. She looked up. “Can I go home, now?”
In answer, I took her arm, leading her to my car. It seemed a long walk. My hands were numb. The wind keened harshly, drowning out any small cries Lloyd might have made.
Hell, the way he was bleeding, he wouldn’t make it to a hospital. That’s what I told myself. That’s what I’d tell Susan if she had second thoughts on the drive back.
I got the Buick’s door open and hustled her in. The air was cold, but blissfully still, and the interior smelled comfortably of stale tobacco smoke and damp leather, not blood and gasoline. Susan huddled deep in my coat, her thin face tired but peaceful.
“The keys are in the right pocket,” I said, almost apologetically.
“Oh.” She dug for them, gave them over.
I let the motor run, then got the heater going. Cool, warm, then hot air blew on us.
My hands tingled from it.
The wreck was out of range of the headlights, but I could see it. Lloyd’s insignificant figure no longer moved.
Someone would come by, find and clear the mess, break the news to the widow. I’d done my part. Overdone it. I’d not meant to get them killed, just scare them, but things went out of control just that quick.
Cruelty, suffering, stupidity, and senseless death: there was always more where that came from. Push me and I push back ten times harder, and it won’t bother me as much as it should. I wasn’t sorry for those two and this time I’d salvaged something out of the horror.
I put my car into reverse, turning the wheel. We backed up, facing the lake now. Its shifting black surface went on forever, horizon merging seamlessly with the sky. There was an awful lot of it.
Susan’s white lips compressed. “You know something?”
“Tell me.”
“When Lloyd took out that insurance policy, he took one out on himself. I guess it was so it wouldn’t look funny later on.”
“Guess so.” I agreed.
“You know something else? He told me that if one of us died in an accident, the insurance would be twice as much.”
