Full Throttle

by Joe Hill

  “Bobby,” says the big man’s wife, the little woman with the adoring eyes. “Don’t.”

  A Ra lets out a long, slow breath and says, “No one is going to report anything to police in Fargo.”

  “You’re wrong about that,” Fidelman says, his voice shaking. His legs are shaking, too.

  “No,” A Ra says, “I’m not. I’m sure of it.”

  “Why are you so sure?” asks Bobby’s wife. She has bright, birdlike eyes and quick, birdlike gestures.

  “Because we aren’t landing in Fargo. The plane stopped circling the airport a few minutes after the missiles launched. Didn’t you notice? We left our holding pattern some time ago. Now we’re headed north.”

  “How do you know that?” asks the little woman.

  “The sun is on the left side of the plane. Hence we go north.”

  Bobby and his wife look out the window. The wife makes a low hum of interest and appreciation.

  “What’s north of Fargo?” the wife asks. “And why would we go there?”

  Bobby slowly lifts a hand to his mouth, a gesture that might indicate he’s giving the matter his consideration but which A Ra sees as Freudian. He already knows why they aren’t landing in Fargo and has no intention of saying.

  A Ra needs only to close her eyes to see in her mind exactly where the warheads must be now, well outside the earth’s atmosphere, already past the crest of their deadly parabola and dropping back into gravity’s well. There is perhaps less than ten minutes before they strike the other side of the planet. A Ra saw at least thirty missiles launch, which is twenty more than are needed to destroy a nation smaller than New England. And the thirty they have all witnessed rising into the sky are certainly only a fraction of the arsenal that has been unleashed. Such an onslaught can only be met with a proportional response, and no doubt America’s ICBMs have crossed paths with hundreds of rockets sailing the other way. Something has gone horribly wrong, as was inevitable when the fuse was lit on this string of geopolitical firecrackers.

  But A Ra does not close her eyes to picture strike and counterstrike. She prefers instead to return to Jeju. Carp riot in the river. The fragrant evening smells of lusty blossoms. Her father puts his elbows on the stone wall of the bridge and grins mischievously.

  “This guy—” says Fidelman. “This guy and his goddamn wife. Calls Asians ‘Orientals.’ Talks about how your people are ants. Bullies people by throwing beer at them. This guy and his goddamn wife put reckless, stupid people just like themselves in charge of this country, and now here we are. The missiles are flying.” His voice cracks with strain, and A Ra senses how close he is to crying.

  She opens her eyes once more. “This guy and his goddamn wife are on the plane with us. We’re all on this plane.” She looks over at Bobby and his wife, who are listening to her. “However we got here, we’re all on this plane now. In the air. In trouble. Running as hard as we can.” She smiles. It feels like her father’s smile. “Next time you feel like throwing a beer, give it to me instead. I could use something to drink.”

  Bobby stares at her for an instant with thoughtful, fascinated eyes—then laughs.

  Bobby’s wife looks up at him and says, “Why are we running north? Do you really think Fargo could be hit? Do you really think we could be hit here? Over the middle of the United States?” Her husband doesn’t reply, so she looks back at A Ra.

  A Ra weighs in her heart whether the truth would be a mercy or yet another assault. Her silence, however, is answer enough.

  The woman’s mouth tightens. She looks at her husband and says, “If we’re going to die, I want you to know I’m glad I’ll be next to you when it happens. You were good to me, Robert Jeremy Slate.”

  He turns to his wife and kisses her and draws back and says, “Are you kidding me? I can’t believe a fat man like me wound up married to a knockout like you. It’d be easier to draw a million-dollar lottery ticket.”

  Fidelman stares at them and then turns away. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Don’t start being human on me now.” He crumples up a beery paper towel and throws it at Bob Slate.

  It bounces off Bobby’s temple. The big man turns his head and looks at Fidelman—and laughs. Warmly.

  A Ra closes her eyes, puts her head against the back of her seat.

  Her father watches her approach the bridge, through the silky spring night.

  As she steps up onto the stone arch, he reaches out to take her hand and lead her on to an orchard, where people are dancing.

  KATE BRONSON IN THE COCKPIT

  By the time Kate finishes field-dressing Vorstenbosch’s head injury, the flight attendant is groaning, stretched out on the cockpit floor. She tucks his glasses into his shirt pocket. The left lens was cracked in the fall.

  “I have never, ever lost my footing,” Vorstenbosch says, “in twenty years of doing this. I am the Fred Effing Astaire of the skies. No. The Ginger Effing Rogers. I can do the work of all other flight attendants, but backward and in heels.”

  Kate says, “I’ve never seen a Fred Astaire film. I was always more of a Sly Stallone girl.”

  “Serf,” Vorstenbosch says.

  “Right to the bone,” Kate agrees, and squeezes his hand. “Don’t try to get up. Not yet.”

  Kate springs lightly to her feet and slips into the chair beside Waters. When the missiles launched, the imaging system lit up with bogeys, a hundred red pinpricks and more, but there’s nothing now except the other planes in the immediate vicinity. Most of the other aircraft are behind them, still circling Fargo. Captain Waters turned them to a new heading while Kate tended to Vorstenbosch.

  “What’s going on?” she asks.

  His face alarms her. He’s so waxy he’s almost colorless.

  “It’s all happening,” he says. “The president has been moved to a secure location. The cable news says Russia launched.”

  “Why?” she asks, as if it matters.

  He shrugs helplessly but then replies, “Russia, or China, or both put defenders in the air to turn back our bombers before they could get to Korea. A sub in the South Pacific responded by striking a Russian aircraft carrier. And then. And then.”

  “So,” Kate says.

  “No Fargo.”

  “Where?” Kate can’t seem to load more than a single word at a time. There is an airless, tight sensation behind her breastbone.

  “There must be somewhere north we can land, away from—from what’s coming down behind us. There must be somewhere that isn’t a threat to anyone. Nunavut maybe? They landed a 777 at Iqaluit last year. Short little runway at the end of the world, but it’s technically possible, and we might have enough fuel to make it.”

  “Silly me,” Kate says. “I didn’t think to pack a winter coat.”

  He says, “You must be new to long-haul flying. You never know where they’re going to send you, so you always make sure to have a swimsuit and mittens in your bag.”

  She is new to long-haul flying—she attained her 777 rating just six months ago—but she doesn’t think Waters’s tip is worth taking to heart. Kate doesn’t think she’ll ever fly another commercial aircraft. Neither will Waters. There won’t be anywhere to fly to.

  Kate isn’t going to see her mother, who lives in Pennsyltucky, ever again, but that’s no loss. Her mother will bake, along with the stepfather who tried to put a hand down the front of Kate’s Wranglers when she was fourteen. When Kate told her mom what he’d tried to do, her mother said it was her own fault for dressing like a slut.

  Kate will also never see her twelve-year-old half brother again, and that does make her sad. Liam is sweet, peaceful, and autistic. Kate got him a drone for Christmas, and his favorite thing in the world is to send it aloft to take aerial photographs. She understands the appeal. It has always been her favorite part of getting airborne, too, that moment when the houses shrink to the size of models on a train set. Trucks the size of ladybugs gleam and flash as they slide, frictionless, along the highways. Altitude reduces lakes to the siz
e of flashing silver hand mirrors. From a mile up, a whole town is small enough to fit in the cup of your palm. Her half brother Liam says he wants to be little, like the people in the pictures he takes with his drone. He says if he were as small as they are, Kate could put him in her pocket and take him with her.

  They soar over the northernmost edge of North Dakota, gliding in the way she once sliced through the bathwater-warm water off Fai Fai Beach, through the glassy bright green of the Pacific. How good that felt, to sail as if weightless above the oceanworld beneath. To be free of gravity is, she thinks, to feel what it must be like to be pure spirit, to escape the flesh itself.

  Minneapolis calls out to them. “Delta 236, you are off course. You are about to vacate our airspace. What’s your heading?”

  “Minneapolis,” Waters says, “our heading is zero-six-zero, permission to redirect to Yankee Foxtrot Bravo, Iqaluit Airport.”

  “Delta 236, why can’t you land at Fargo?”

  Waters bends over the controls for a long time. A drop of sweat plinks on the dash. His gaze shifts briefly, and Kate sees him looking at the photograph of his wife. “Minneapolis, Fargo is a first-strike location. We’ll have a better chance north. There are two hundred and forty-seven souls onboard.”

  The radio crackles. Minneapolis considers.

  There is a snap of intense brightness, almost blinding, as if a flashbulb the size of the sun has gone off somewhere in the sky, behind the plane. Kate turns her head away from the windows and shuts her eyes. There is a deep muffled whump, felt more than heard, a kind of existential shudder in the frame of the aircraft. When Kate looks up again, there are blotchy green afterimages drifting in front of her eyeballs.

  Kate leans forward and cranes her neck. Something is glowing under the cloud cover, possibly as much as a hundred miles away behind them. The cloud itself is beginning to deform and expand, bulging upward.

  As she settles back into her seat, there is another deep, jarring, muffled crunch, another burst of light. The inside of the cockpit momentarily becomes a negative image of itself. This time she feels a flash of heat against the right side of her face, as if someone has switched a sunlamp on and off.

  Minneapolis says, “Copy, Delta 236. Contact Winnipeg Center one-two-seven-point-three.” The air traffic controller speaks with an almost casual indifference.

  Vorstenbosch sits up. “I’m seeing flashes.”

  “Us, too,” Kate says.

  “Oh, my God,” Waters says. His voice cracks. “I should’ve tried to call my wife. Why didn’t I try to call my wife? She’s five months pregnant, and she’s all alone.”

  “You can’t,” Kate says. “You couldn’t.”

  “Why didn’t I call and tell her?” Waters says, as if he hasn’t heard.

  “She knows,” Kate tells him. “She already knows.” Whether they are talking about love or the apocalypse, Kate couldn’t say.

  Another flash. Another deep, resonant, meaningful thump.

  “Call now Winnipeg FIR,” says Minneapolis. “Call now Nav Canada. Delta 236, you are released.”

  “Copy, Minneapolis,” Kate says, because Waters has his face in his hands and is making tiny anguished sounds and can’t speak. “Thank you. Take care of yourselves, boys. This is Delta 236. We’re gone.”

  Story Notes and Acknowledgments

  IN THE INTRODUCTION I TALKED about some of the artists who most influenced me. One I left out was the novelist Bernard Malamud, author of The Fixer and The Assistant, who once suggested that a corpse in a coffin might be the perfect work of art, because “you got form, but you also got content.”

  The first good short story I ever wrote, “Pop Art,” was heavily influenced by Malamud’s “The Jewbird,” and my ideas about collections were shaped by his. A book of stories isn’t a novel and can’t have the simple narrative drive of a novel. I think it should still try to have a feeling of progression, of connectedness. It’s like a road trip. You’re staying in a different inn every night: One evening it’s a romantic Victorian B&B with a supposedly haunted gazebo out back, the next it’s a cruddy Motel 6 with what looks like old bloodstains on the ceiling. The places where you stop to rest and dream are unique—but the road is the same, always waiting to carry you on to whatever’s next. And when it’s over, you’ve arrived someplace new, someplace (you hope) with a good view. A place to breathe deep and take it all in.

  I hope it was a brisk, fun road trip for you. I hope you roared along at full throttle. It took a little longer for me: I wrote the oldest of these tales in 2006, while the most recent was finished a few scant months before we went to press. That’s slightly more than a decade, which is also roughly how long I took to write the tales in my last collection of short stories, 20th Century Ghosts. At that rate, barring tragedy (and can anyone bar tragedy?), I hope to write somewhere between thirty and fifty more short stories before I’m done.

  That might be morbid, but if you’ve read this far, it’s kind of late to complain.

  Some readers are always curious to learn how a story got written and what was on the writer’s mind when he wrote it. How did those bloodstains get on the ceiling in Room 217? And is there any proof that a pale woman in a lilac dress haunts the old gazebo in the yard? I don’t have all the answers, but maybe I have a few. The interested should proceed. Those who are satisfied with the stories alone, thanks for riding with me this far. I hope you had a thrill. Let’s do it again sometime.

  INTRODUCTION: WHO’S YOUR DADDY?

  I can hear you saying wh-a-a-aaaaaat, the introduction gets its own story note? It does, but only to mention that it’s the expression of some thoughts I’ve been thinking for a few years now. Elements of “Who’s Your Daddy?” have appeared in somewhat different form, in essays such as “The Truck” (from Road Rage, IDW Publishing) and “Bring On the Bad Guys” (which first appeared on Goodreads). I’m sure I’ve also talked about Tom Savini’s influence on my work elsewhere. It’s probably just as well that I stick with fiction—I’ve got only so many stories to tell about myself and only so many different ways to tell them.

  THROTTLE

  Richard Matheson came home from World War II, sat down at his typewriter, and rattled off several spare, savage masterpieces of suspense: I Am Legend, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and The Legend of Hell House among them. Although he was genre-fluid—he wrote crime, westerns, war, and sci-fi, including one of the very best episodes of the original Star Trek—he left the deepest imprint on the horror genre. A good Richard Matheson story moves like an eighteen-wheeler, thundering downhill with no brakes, and God help anything in the way.

  In fact, one of Matheson’s most famous stories, “Duel,” featured a runaway tanker trunk as the antagonist and was the inspiration for that Spielberg film we discussed back in the introduction.

  In 2008 I was asked if I wanted to write a story for an anthology honoring Matheson’s work. The idea was that each contributing writer would take one of Matheson’s concepts and reinvent it, take it in a new, unexpected direction. No one had to twist my arm. I had hardly finished reading the e-mail before I knew what I wanted to do. I had instantly imagined a short story about a faceless trucker taking on a gang of outlaw bikers, in a chase that would soon devolve into a war in the sand.

  I saw pretty quickly that I was going to have one problem writing the story, which is that I had never ridden a motorcycle in my life. But my dad had—he’d been hauling around on hogs since he was a teenager. So I pitched him my idea and asked if he wanted to write it with me. He said yes. And there we were, playing Truck again, twenty-six years after our last game.

  The summer after we wrote “Throttle,” I got my motorcycle license and wound up buying a Triumph Bonneville. My dad is more of a Harley guy. One summer we went out for a ride together, me on my Bonnie and him on his Fat Boy. That was a good afternoon. When we got back, he said, “You got a decent set of wheels there—even if the engine does sound like a sewing machine.”

  DARK CAROUSEL />
  A book of stories can’t be a novel, but as I said, I think it should have a sense of progression, of one thing flowing naturally into the next. So I guess it makes sense to go from the first story I ever wrote with my father to “Dark Carousel,” which is probably the most shamelessly Stephen King thing I’ve ever put down on paper. It’s practically a cover of “Riding the Bullet” or “The Road Virus Heads North.” I didn’t try to run from the kinds of stories that inspired it—I just let it be what it wanted to be. I even named my tragic brother and sister the Renshaws, after Renshaw, the steely hit man, in my father’s story “Battleground,” and I see echoes of that story in “Dark Carousel” as well.

  Musicians can do cover songs by the artists they admire. The Black Crowes can cover “Hard to Handle” by Otis Redding, and the Beatles could do Buddy Holly whenever they wanted. But writers don’t have the same privilege (when you “cover” another writer line for line, it’s called plagiarism, and the author you admire will be contacting you through his lawyer). This is the next-best thing, an act of literary mimicry—maybe less like a cover and more like an actor performing a well-known real-life figure (Oldman doing Churchill, Malek doing Mercury).

  “Dark Carousel” was first released as an audiobook on vinyl, as a double fuckin’ album, read by Nate Corddry. How cool is that, man? And while we’re talking about rock-n-rollas covering other artists, the “Dark Carousel” album included a sensational cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses” by an American guitar-slinger by the name of Matthew Ryan. It’s worth hunting down a copy and dusting off your old turntable to give it a listen: Matt cut right to the emotional core of the Stones song, and my story, in one fell swoop.

  WOLVERTON STATION

  I wrote “Wolverton Station” while I was trekking around the United Kingdom to support the publication of Horns. I spent those days in the company of Jon Weir, a witty, self-effacing PR man who yanked me out of the way of a double-decker bus on the first morning of our tour. He was so shaken by the near miss he had to sit on the curb to get back his breath.