Air Force One, Part Two (4)
"If I had to pick," the ghost tells him, "You're the one I would've picked." He looks at the floor, knowing that he ought to think about this. He believes that, by looking down in this way, by shutting out some of the ongoing explosion around him, he'll be able to concentrate enough mental energy for contemplation. But then it turns out that the wooden floor itself is interesting: much more so than he would have expected. The boards, the worn wood grain, the dirt ground into it; all of this material carries impressions of the people who have been here, the people who made it, maybe everything that ever happened to it. Eventually, he recalls that his purpose in looking at the floor was indeed to think, but not just to think about the floor. He looks up again, but Mick's ghost is gone. ... The bathroom is crowded too, but not as noisy. It's not the original one. Mick explained this to him once: how he wasn't able to use the plumbing from the original rest stop that he converted and added on to until it became the Wolverine. But of course he was able to use the big beautiful white urinals. Those are priceless relics: beyond the skills of the fallen world to produce. When it's finally his turn and he leans forward with one hand on the wall to insure acceptable stability, that clean white porcelain is the most beautiful color in the world. There's a handle on top that you just turn to let some water through to flush it. That's not how these things used to be. He remembers from when he was a teenager how you used to sort of push a little handle that did some magic thing. The water was pressurized or something, it was metered out: just enough and not much more, and then it would shut off by itself. It was beautiful, in the way that so many things from the lost world were beautiful. Beautiful in its cleverness and brashness, like the brilliance of an immature kid who might have great things in his future but whom you can't really trust to be careful, to watch what he's doing, and to get it right. Then you would walk over to the sink and it would have a whole wall of mirrors in front of it — not like these dingy ones that look like they're made out of metal or something — they’d be glorious, effortlessly perfect glass mirrors that made images so perfect you’d sometimes mistake the damn thing for another room. Then you would put your hands under the faucet and it would just turn on magically by itself, and then magically off again the moment you withdrew. They had some kind of sensor knew that knew when your hands were under there. They used’em so that you wouldn't have to touch anything, so that you wouldn't have to get germs. And man, Mick just loves stuff like that. He misses that shit. But it's no goddamned good! What did that world do Mick? The world that used gleaming clever silver sensors to keep your hands safe and gleaming and germ-free? It made the goddamned War Flu! What did the world do, the world that made those beautiful hand-dryers that blew the hot air so that you wouldn't have to use paper towels so you could save a tree and help the environment? It bombed the nuclear plants in China and made thirty Chernobyls and poisoned the goddamned sky! You shouldn't care for a world like that, Mick. A world like that — you can't trust it. It doesn't deserve to be trusted. It's got to grow up first. It's got to go through some real hard times. Then you can trust it. Then it won't be like some goddamn showoff smartass kid who doesn’t know any better than to be an idiot and get his whole family killed. And how in the hell does an idiot like that deserve to ever have another family? No, you’ve gotta have the hard times. And it’s what comes after the hard times, that's what you can count on. That's what matters. That's the one that'll come through for you. "Hey, man?" he feels a hand on his shoulder and realizes that he's monopolizing the sink, leaning over it. He stands up and looks at a man who’s looking at him with some concern. "You OK?” the man asks. Standing up straight he can feel the air, and tears, on his face. "Nobody ever trusted me before," he tells the stranger. He walks out again to get away, into the short hallway that leads back into the dining room and its greater tumult and anonymity. It is just as he is reentering the dining room that he hears the sound of the truck's engine from outside. Mick is pouring beer all around at a table of five and has just about emptied one of the glass gallon jugs that he brews it in, when the engine sound becomes audible even above the general uproar. The innkeeper looks up, holding the jug still. The men at the table are attentive also. One of them glances at Mick. It's a large engine, and — "Runaway," the innkeeper says. He’s heard ten thousand trucks pull up to his place, decelerating down the off-ramp toward the parking lot. This one isn't slowing down fast enough. It's not down slowing at all. "It's a fucking runaway!" a man at another table shouts almost simultaneously, and then chairs are flying backwards, falling onto the floor and bouncing off each other with a sound like thunder. A runaway rig, coming uncontrolled into the Wolverine's lot, could destroy the livelihoods of a dozen men in the space of a few seconds. Bob Hewitt is one of the first out the front doors, propelled by the force of the crowd behind him as much as leading the way. Storm wind swirls fiercely around the entryway, slowing him, and another man collides with his back. The asphalt is wet with rain that has fallen during dinner, but Bob catches himself by skipping sideways and comes to a halt just as he sees the oncoming truck. Its lights flash as it crashes over the first of the off-ramp's speed bumps. Behind it, as though supplying motive power for the behemoth, lightning flashes all across the dark sky. And it is huge. It's what people call a snow-and-tow: a tow truck half the size of a rig with an engine that looks like it could pull three trucks sideways, with a foldable snow blade attached to the front. Just a few guys make their living this way — organizing big convoys for the winter and charging each truck in the bunch a healthy percentage. Most of the time, of course, you pay for the bastards and then you don't end up needing them because it doesn’t snow. But then again, if you decide you're going to chance a winter run by yourself, you'd better make sure you’re lucky. If you ever get caught in Bumfuck, Nebraska after a real good blizzard — nothing good's going to happen for you after that. It isn't easy to buy one of these snow-and-tow rigs, or to run the business that goes with it. The men who manage it are pretty damn steady, and pretty damn careful: not the kind to fall asleep with their foot on the gas or neglect their maintenance to the point where a break line fails. As Bob stares open-mouthed at the oncoming juggernaut, the point of its plow aimed straight at him and five seconds away, he just has time to realize — from what combination of cues he would never be able to say — that the truck is not a runaway at all. The driver is in control, if barely. He's coming up the off-ramp straight at the Wolverine's front door driving like a madman because that's exactly what he wants to do. So — maybe that's exactly what he is. Four seconds. Bob's body gears up to flee and save his life, leg muscles tensing, heart rate accelerating rapidly. There's a flicker of movement to his right, and he sees Mick raising his shotgun to point straight at the unseen driver's head. In the same instant, they hear the screech of brakes. Eyes wide, Mick checks himself, easing off the trigger, and steps back. The big truck is braking hard, skidding a little to the left. He can easily imagine what fifteen tons of truck would do to his inn, impacting the entryway area with that pointed snow plow at forty miles an hour. He blows out air, inhales hugely, and the mental images of his plan are already fading: one shot for the driver, watch how the truck starts to turn, and then use the four remaining shots trying to blow out the front tires from whichever side is skidding away from him. Blow them out and try to get them to pull the him right around sideways — maybe even roll the bastard. And, with him coming straight on like this, very possibly die trying. A long second passes before the innkeeper knows that his building is safe. The truck will stop, and with a good twenty or thirty yards to spare. Before another second passes, though, fear is rapidly giving way to anger. What kind of a crazy son of a bitch thinks he can drive like that up the Wolverine's ramp? As the big truck skids to a halt, lightning arcs again, half hidden in a towering wall of thunderheads not much more than a mile away. The sound of an earlier flash, reduced by distance to low rumbles, rolls past them. Another shower is starting, riding ahead of the big storm. Wind whips the first light drops of rain across the faces and shirts of men who, less than a minute before, had no thought among them for the world beyond the walls of their inn, nor for a time beyond the next round of drinks. Now they instinctively array themselves so that each one has a clear line of sight on the intruding vehicle. Not a man there is unarmed, and each one is ready, if necessary, to defend his rig and his Inn. The truck's door opens and the driver comes out of it fast, slipping on the wet steps and saving himself from a fall only by grabbing the hand bars. Momentum carries him a few steps toward the waiting crowd before he stops himself and faces them, breathing hard as he sizes them up. Before any of them think to speak, he raises one arm to point toward the sky behind him. "It's coming!" he shouts at them over the wind. "The airplane is comin' right this way!" And he has outrun it, but not by much. The sound starts as a distant hum, under all other sounds, as though one rumble of thunder has stretched out and smoothed into a single deep note. It builds its strength through subtlety. Rather than simply strengthening, this sound seems to reducing others: until the rush of wind is muted to nearly nothing and men's voices, even shouting, are thinned almost to inaudibility. The sound becomes a pressure, felt in the chest as much as heard. The earth throbs with it, and echoes it back to the resonant sky. They look up, past the tree line some hundred yards distant. The world-filling hum transmutes itself into the roar of turbines, and it comes. Above the silhouetted trees a dim shape materializes. At first no more than a darker region of the clouds, it solidifies slowly into a triangle of perfect darkness jutting like the prow of a ship magically caught in the tossing treetops. Without seeming to move, the black angle grows as if magnifying itself in the night sky. Details become visible around its edges: outthrust spars and half-glimpsed cowlings in the sharpening outline. At last, when the sky can bear its burden no longer, the great craft's expansion reveals itself as motion. Then it seems to approach suddenly, crossing the space above the wide empty field in just the time it takes a man's heart to skip a beat. As they look up, it roars overhead — a vast delta wing, swept into the form of a sea creature from some larger world, its passage filling the sky and shaking the earth. ————————————————————————————— You want me ————————————————————————————— He doesn't want to go upstairs because he knows that even in the darkness of the smallest hours of the night he will be able to see perfectly well that his wife is leaving him. He'll walk past their daughter's room, and know that Anne is in there, asleep, surrounded by cardboard boxes stacked up until they look like the beginnings of monoliths. She's sleeping in the middle of a corrugated Stonehenge, which will shortly spirit her away to a world he doesn't know. There's still some scotch left. He pours it carefully, and carefully replaces the bottle on the table's surface. Mustn’t wake the guests, you know. There are still two who didn't make it to their rooms, asleep or passed out or dead: one slumped forward at his table and the other leaning straight back and snoring. They’re all that's left. The scotch tastes like wood smoke mixed with gasoline. So, what do you do after the ghost ship from Hell flies overhead? He can answer this question now. What you do is you stand around like a herd of substandard sheep, waiting for it to come back. Or maybe for the stars to fall from the sky – something along those lines. After about ten minutes you start to talk to each other in hushed tones, light cigarettes, and mill around a little. It's a lot like some kind of wake. Eventually people filter back inside with their innkeeper tagging along obediently behind them. A beer? Sure! Have a beer. The impossible ghost ship from Hell just flew over the place. Good time for a beer! Absolutely. Here, take the pitcher. Some people get noisy and some get quiet. Some go to their rooms right away to be alone with their sobering thoughts, while others stay in the comfortable old dining room demanding the means to defend their thoughts against any hint of sobriety. Most, in the rooms or at the tables, are probably afraid to think at all. Eventually it comes down to this: two drunks and a fool, staring at a dying fire. Thinking of great roaring ghost ships, and silent stacks of boxes. He is in a hallway again, but this time he knows it's not real. The walls aren't the rough paneling of the Wolverine — they're painted, somehow. They’re painted drywall! That’s one material from the remote past, which he remembers all too well. Where, long ago, it seemed needlessly weak and messy to work with, now it seems the essence of all the gentility and innocence that has been lost. Once upon a time, this very hallway seemed a little too narrow, the eight-foot high suburban-standard ceiling a little too low to be a home to great dreams and great deeds. Now — he sees how comfortable it all is. Even the shag carpeting on the floor. It's perfect. You could have children in a house like this, and they'd be happy. You could be a child in a house like this. Indeed, the carpet seems — like a memory. As he takes another step toward the end of the hall, he begins to see the well-lit living room beyond. There is a floor lamp. He can see the corner of some old-style but newly minted end table and next to it a bulky chair covered in imitation leather — and he knows it. It is his father's reclining chair. Idiot! Another voice says to him, from light-years away in his mind. It doesn't speak, exactly. It's sort of like images. Impressions. But it is definitely angry. Idiot! it says, This is your past! If they trap you here they can create an alternative consistent history — it tapers off gradually into meaninglessness, which is a substantial relief. That was not a very nice voice. He certainly doesn't want to meet any person with a voice like that. Someone like that would never let him rest. It's nice to be in this dream. In fact — he remembers this dream as well as he remembers this house. He had it when he was a child, living in this very house! (But why does that thought send a chill like the depths of space through him?) Yes, he walked down this hall, into the living room, and turned — The house's front door is wide open and unguarded. Beyond it, in spite of the light in the room, there is nothing but absolute blackness. A void. From which issues a sudden, guttural growl. He comes awake with a start, knocking the empty bottle over and then instantly jumping half out of his seat to grab at it before it rolls off the table edge. One of the other men stirs but doesn’t quite wake up, and Mick sits breathing heavily, the bestial sound still echoing in his ears. He looks around the room, consciously calming himself, his body still reacting with real fear to threats from a dream. There’s nothing here, he tells it. The one man is still snoring occasionally, probably enough to provide the dream’s inspiration. That, plus the stress and shock of the last few days and hours. Darkening embers in the fireplace tell him he’s been out for perhaps an hour. He remembers barring the front door after the last of his guests were inside, and nothing could have come through the kitchen windows with the three of them sleeping here in the next room, drunk or not. Anyway, if anything were to come around again outside — He opens his mouth to take a calming breath and turns his head toward the front door. Far away, beyond the inn’s protecting walls, he hears the faintest echo of the baying of dogs. By the time the chair’s back hits the floor with a sound like a bomb going off in the quiet room, he’s already grabbed his shotgun and taken three steps toward the door. “Get everybody!” he yells to the other two who are starting to wake up as he reaches the door. This time, he knows, it’s going to be real. Peripherally he realizes that it’s too dark to be running through the tall grass. The “back” field — the one on the other side of the inn from the parking lot — has never been dragged. There are rocks in it, and holes just the right size to break an ankle in. He knows that his dogs are at the tree line on the north side. It will never occur to him that he couldn’t possibly have gotten enough information out of that ghost of a yelp to know their location so well: he’s simply running to them as fast as he can go. He’s doing it because they need him, and because it’s exactly what they would be doing if he needed them. Crashing through the edge of the grass and into the little pseudo-clearing that’s always close to the edge of the trees, he smells blood. Blood everywhere. “Hey girl,” he calls and gasps for air, shotgun ready. “Hey Banj?” The darkness under those damned trees is just the same as he saw through the door in his dream. The fear in the air is the same damned fear that he felt in the darkest nights of childhood. And boyhood. And young manhood. He always knew it would come to this! You read about it, you see it in movies, and, perversely, the more graphic, the more horrible they become, the more you know that what they’re really trying to do is convince you that it’s not all real. But it is real: it’s more real than you are. And it really is coming to get you, and it always has been. It’s been waiting for you, waiting to freeze your soul since before you were born. Waiting and waiting, and now that it’s here it’s just as though none of that time has really existed — none of all those years were real that happened in between the moments when you knew that this horror would someday come for you. And every one of the most terrifying moments of your life were mere presentiments of this moment. He sees her at his feet, a gleam of glossy black hair in the matted grass. She’s still, and as he kneels next to her he glances around at the woods to guard against some stealthy attack. Then looks down, and sees that it’s just her head. But he knew that. He catches his breath when he sees it, but he knew it would be something like that. His hand hesitates in mid-air where he was about to touch her, but then he goes through with it, gently. Of course he knew it. He could smell that it was them. Hasn’t he been one of them? Hasn’t he been one of their pack since they were puppies, abandoned by someone in the woods? Barely old enough to walk, they would all have starved within a few days if he hadn’t found them tumbling on a dirt pile in front of his new half-built truck stop. He’d been going out every morning before dawn, a shotgun in one hand and a shovel in the other, laying foundations. By the middle of June he could hardly get out of bed and he was smearing pine sap on the bandages on his palms so he’d be able to grip the shovel and keep digging. Then one morning there were these four puppies, playing on his soft dirt pile, licking his hand, climbing on him when he sat down. So he took a break and hunted rabbit that day, although his family was happy enough with corn and greens, because he wanted these four new girls — all girls, of course, since it has been his apparent fate always and only to live with girls — to have a little meat. And he had wanted to celebrate, because you should celebrate when your family grows in one June morning from three to seven. The top of her head is still warm, and just faintly dusted with blood. As he strokes it with his fingertips, a twig cracks softly in the forest. He sweeps the shotgun from the foul grass beside him, leaping up, firing before he is fully standing. Echoed back by the dense woods, the gun’s report is like a cannon. The boles of the closest trees stand out like silver pillars, lit instantaneously by the weapon’s brilliant flare. “You want me?” he yells to the forest, firing and firing. “You want my blood?” Dead leaves and pieces of small branches falling, cut from their tree by earlier blasts, frozen in a single frame of time by the violence of each new shot. “Come on and get me! I’m waiting for you! I’ll eat your fucking heart!” Then the big gun is empty and he drops it while drawing the Glock. Then it, too, is speaking and flashing its own fury into the unmoving trees. Soon it’s empty too, but by then there are people around him, again. They’re men from the inn, people he knows, and more are hurrying toward them. Some have their own weapons drawn, fearfully pointed toward the forest. Some are carrying lamps and looking aghast at the carnage that had been his girls. His pack. Anne is there and he reaches out to touch her shoulder, making some noise that’s probably only halfway to being words. He knows, vaguely, that he’s crying and incoherent. But he can’t hear himself or anything else except for the thunder of guns still echoing in his ears. A man is supporting him by one arm because he’s not standing up very well by himself, and then there’s somebody else on the other side. Then they’re all going back, picking their way slowly through the dark grass toward the silhouette of the inn.
Copyright © 2000 Michael Goulish |