I saw Dennis’ hand settle on the butt of his revolver. His fingers unsnapped the fold of leather that secured the gun in the holster. I stared at him numbly. My God, I thought. What’s goin’ on? My heart had started pounding so hard I was sure everybody could hear it. Ray and Lindy were watching, and Cheryl was backing away behind the counter.
Price and Dennis faced each other for a moment, as the rain whipped against the windows and thunder boomed like shellfire. Then Price sighed, as if resigning himself to something. He said, “I think I want a t-bone steak. Extra-rare. How ’bout it?” He looked at me.
“A steak?” My voice was shaking. “We don’t have any t-bone—”
Price’s gaze shifted to the counter right in front of me. I heard a sizzle. The aroma of cooking meat drifted up to me.
“Oh . . . wow,” Cheryl whispered.
A large t-bone steak lay on the countertop, pink and oozing blood. You could’ve fanned a menu in my face and I would’ve keeled over. Wisps of smoke were rising from the steak.
The steak began to fade, until it was only an outline on the counter. The lines of oozing blood vanished. After the mirage was gone, I could still smell the meat—and that’s how I knew I wasn’t crazy.
Dennis’ mouth hung open. Ray had stood up from the booth to look, and his wife’s face was the color of spoiled milk. The whole world seemed to be balanced on a point of silence—until the wail of the wind jarred me back to my senses.
“I’m getting good at it,” Price said softly. “I’m getting very, very good. Didn’t start happening to me until about a year ago. I’ve found four other ’Nam vets who can do the same thing. What’s in your head comes true—as simple as that. Of course, the images only last for a few seconds—as long as I’m awake. 1 mean, I’ve found out that those other men were drenched by a chemical spray we call Howdy Doody—because it made you stiffen up and jerk like you were hanging on strings. I got hit with it near Khe Sahn. That shit almost suffocated me. It fell like black tar, and it burned the land down to a paved parking lot.” He stared at Dennis. “You don’t want me around here, Mr. Trooper. Not with the body count I’ve still got in my head.”
“You . . . were at . . . that motel, near Daytona Beach?”
Price closed his eyes. A vein had begun beating at his right temple, royal blue against the pallor of his flesh. “Oh Jesus,” he whispered. “I fell asleep, and I couldn’t wake myself up. I was having the nightmare. The same one. I was locked in it, and I was trying to scream myself awake.” He shuddered, and two tears ran slowly down his cheeks. “Oh,” he said, and flinched as if remembering something horrible. “They . . . they were coming through the door when I woke up. Tearing the door right off its hinges. I woke up . . . just as one of them was pointing his rifle at me. And I saw his face. I saw his muddy, misshapen face.” His eyes suddenly jerked open. “I didn’t know they’d come so fast.”
“Who?” I asked him. “Who came so fast?”
“The Nightcrawlers,” Price said, his face void of expression, masklike. “Dear God . . . maybe if I’d stayed asleep a second more. But I ran again, and I left those people dead in that motel.”
“You’re gonna come with me.” Dennis started pulling his gun from the holster. Price’s head snapped toward him. “I don’t know what kinda fool game you’re—”
He stopped, staring at the gun he held.
It wasn’t a gun anymore. It was an oozing mass of hot rubber. Dennis cried out and slung the thing from his hand. The molten mess hit the floor with a pulpy splat.
“I’m leaving now.” Price’s voice was calm. “Thank you for the coffee.” He walked past Dennis, toward the door.
Dennis grasped a bottle of ketchup from the counter. Cheryl cried out, “Don’t!” but it was too late. Dennis was already swinging the bottle. It hit the back of Price’s skull and burst open, spewing ketchup everywhere. Price staggered forward, his knees buckling. When he went down, his skull hit the floor with a noise like a watermelon being dropped. His body began jerking involuntarily.
“Got him!” Dennis shouted triumphantly. “Got that crazy bastard, didn’t I?”
Lindy was holding the little girl in her arms. The boy craned his neck to see. Ray said nervously, “You didn’t kill him, did you?”
“He’s not dead,” I told him. I looked over at the gun; it was solid again. Dennis scooped it up and aimed it at Price, whose body continued to jerk. Just like Howdy Doody, I thought. Then Price stopped moving. “He’s dead!” Cheryl’s voice was near frantic. “Oh God, you killed him, Dennis!”
Dennis prodded the body with the toe of his boot, then bent down. “Naw. His eyes are movin’ back and forth behind the lids.” Dennis touched his wrist to check the pulse, then abruptly pulled his own hand away. “Jesus Christ! He’s as cold as a meat-locker!” He took Price’s pulse and whistled. “Goin’ like a racehorse at the Derby.”
I touched the place on the counter where the mirage-steak had been. My fingers came away slightly greasy, and I could smell the cooked meat on them. At that instant, Price twitched. Dennis scuttled away from him like a crab. Price made a gasping, choking noise.
“What’d he say?” Cheryl asked. “He said something!”
“No he didn’t.” Dennis stuck him in the ribs with his pistol. “Come on. Get up.”
“Get him out of here,” I said. “I don’t want him—” Cheryl shushed me. “Listen. Can you hear that?”
I heard only the roar and crash of the storm.
“Don’t you hear it?” she asked me. Her eyes were getting scared and glassy.
“Yes!” Ray said. “Yes! Listen!”
Then I did hear something, over the noise of the keening wind. It was a distant chuk-chuk-chuk, steadily growing louder and closer. The wind covered the noise for a minute, then it came back: CHUK-CHUK-CHUK, almost overhead.
“It’s a helicopter!” Ray peered through the window. “Somebody’s got a helicopter out there!”
“Ain’t nobody can fly a chopper in a storm!” Dennis told him. The noise of the rotors swelled and faded, swelled and faded . . . and stopped.
On the floor, Price shivered and began to contort into a fetal position. His mouth opened, his face twisted in what appeared to be agony.
Thunder spoke. A red fireball rose up from the woods across the road and hung lazily in the sky for a few seconds before it descended toward the diner. As it fell, the fireball exploded soundlessly into a white, glaring eye of light that almost blinded me.
Price said something in a garbled, panicked voice. His eyes were tightly closed, and he had squeezed up with his arms around his knees.
Dennis rose to his feet; he squinted as the eye of light fell toward the parking-lot and winked out in a puddle of water. Another fireball floated up from the woods, and again blossomed into painful glare.
Dennis turned toward me. “I heard him.” His voice was raspy. “He said . . . ‘Charlie’s in the light.’”
As the second flare fell to the ground and illuminated the parking-lot, I thought I saw figures crossing the road. They walked stiff-legged, in an eerie cadence. The flare went out.
“Wake him up,” I heard myself whisper. “Dennis . . . dear God . . . wake him up”
IV
Dennis stared stupidly at me, and I started to jump across the counter to get to Price myself.
A gout of flame leaped in the parking-lot. Sparks marched across the concrete. I shouted, “Get down!” and twisted around to push Cheryl back behind the shelter of the counter.
“What the hell—” Dennis said.
He didn’t finish. There was a metallic thumping of bullets hitting the gas pumps and the cars. I knew if that gas blew we were all dead. My truck shuddered with the impact of slugs, and I saw the whole thing explode as I ducked behind the counter. Then the windows blew inward with a Godawful crash, and the diner was full of flying glass, swirling wind and sheets of rain. I heard Lindy scream, and both the kids were crying and I think I was shouting something my
self.
The lights had gone out, and the only illumination was the reflection of red neon off the concrete and the glow of the fluorescents over the gas pumps. Bullets whacked into the wall, and crockery shattered as if it had been hit with a hammer. Napkins and sugar packets were flying everywhere.
Cheryl was holding onto me as if her fingers were nails sunk to my bones. Her eyes were wide and dazed, and she kept trying to speak. Her mouth was working, but nothing came out.
There was another explosion as one of the other cars blew. The whole place shook, and I almost puked with fear.
Another hail of bullets hit the wall. They were tracers, and they jumped and ricocheted like white-hot cigarette butts. One of them sang off the edge of a shelf and fell to the floor about three feet away from me. The glowing slug began to fade, like the beer can and the mirage-steak. I put my hand out to find it, but all I felt was splinters of glass and crockery. A phantom bullet, I thought. Real enough to cause damage and death—and then gone.
You don’t want me around here, Mr. Trooper, Price had warned. Not with the body count I’ve got in my head.
The firing stopped. I got free of Cheryl and said, “You stay right here.” Then I looked up over the counter and saw my truck and the station-wagon on fire, the flames being whipped by the wind. Rain slapped me across the face as it swept in where the windowglass used to be. I saw Price lying still huddled on the floor, with pieces of glass all around him. His hands were clawing the air, and in the flickering red neon his face was contorted, his eyes still closed. The pool of ketchup around his head made him look like his skull had been split open. He was peering into Hell, and I averted my eyes before I lost my own mind.
Ray and Lindy and the two children had huddled under the table of their booth. The woman was sobbing brokenly. I looked at Dennis, lying a few feet from Price: he was sprawled on his face, and there were four holes punched through his back. It was not ketchup that ran in rivulets around Dennis’ body. His right arm was outflung, and the fingers twitched around the gun he gripped.
Another flare sailed up from the woods like a Fourth-of-July sparkler.
When the light brightened, I saw them: at least five figures, maybe more. They were crouched over, coming across the parking-lot—but slowly, the speed of nightmares. Their clothes flapped and hung around them, and the flare’s light glanced off their helmets. They were carrying weapons—rifles, I guessed. I couldn’t see their faces, and that was for the best.
On the floor, Price moaned. I heard him say “light . . . in the light . . .”
The flare hung right over the diner. And then I knew what was going on. We were in the light. We were all caught in Price’s nightmare, and the Nightcrawlers that Price had left in the mud were fighting the battle again—the same way it had been fought at the Pines Haven Motor Inn. The Nightcrawlers had come back to life, powered by Price’s guilt and whatever that Howdy Doody shit had done to him.
And we were in the light, where Charlie had been out in that rice paddy.
There was a noise like castanets clicking. Dots of fire arced through the broken windows and thudded into the counter. The stools squealed as they were hit and spun. The cash register rang and the drawer popped open, and then the entire register blew apart and bills and coins scattered. I ducked my head, but a wasp of fire—I don’t know what, a bit of metal or glass maybe—sliced my left cheek open from ear to upper lip. I fell to the floor behind the counter with blood running down my face.
A blast shook the rest of the cups, saucers, plates and glasses off the shelves. The whole roof buckled inward, throwing loose ceiling tiles, light fixtures and pieces of metal framework.
We were all going to die. I knew it, right then. Those things were going to destroy us. But I thought of the pistol in Dennis’ hand, and of Price lying near the door. If we were caught in Price’s nightmare and the blow from the ketchup bottle had broken something in his skull, then the only way to stop his dream was to kill him.
I’m no hero. I was about to piss in my pants, but I knew I was the only one who could move. I jumped up and scrambled over the counter, falling beside Dennis and wrenching at that pistol. Even in death, Dennis had a strong grip. Another blast came, along the wall to my right. The heat of it scorched me, and the shockwave skidded me across the floor through glass and rain and blood.
But I had that pistol in my hand.
I heard Ray shout, “Look out!”
In the doorway, silhouetted by flames, was a skeletal thing wearing muddy green rags. It wore a dented-in helmet and carried a corroded, slime-covered rifle. Its face was gaunt and shadowy, the features hidden behind a scum of rice-paddy muck. It began to lift the rifle to fire at me—slowly, slowly . . .
I got the safety off the pistol and fired twice, without aiming. A spark leapt off the helmet as one of the bullets was deflected, but the figure staggered backward and into the conflagration of the station-wagon, where it seemed to melt into ooze before it vanished.
More tracers were coming in. Cheryl’s Volkswagen shuddered, the tires blowing out almost in unison. The state trooper car was already bullet-riddled and sitting on flats.
Another Nightcrawler, this one without a helmet and with slime covering the skull where the hair had been, rose up beyond the window and fired its rifle. I heard the bullet whine past my ear, and as I took aim I saw its bony finger tightening on the trigger again.
A skillet flew over my head and hit the thing’s shoulder, spoiling its aim. For an instant the skillet stuck in the Nightcrawler’s body, as if the figure itself was made out of mud. I fired once . . . twice . . . and saw pieces of matter fly from the thing’s nest. What might’ve been a mouth opened in a soundless scream, and the thing slithered out of sight.
I looked around. Cheryl was standing behind the counter, weaving on her feet, her face white with shock. “Get down!” I shouted, and she ducked for cover.
I crawled to Price, shook him hard. His eyes would not open.
“Wake up!” I begged him. “Wake up, damn you!” And then I pressed the barrel of the pistol against Price’s head. Dear God, I didn’t want to kill anybody, but I knew I was going to have to blow the Nightcrawlers right out of his brain. I hesitated—too long.
Something smashed into my left collarbone. I heard the bone snap like a broomstick being broken. The force of the shot slid me back against the counter and jammed me between two bullet-pocked stools. I lost the gun, and there was a roaring in my head that deafened me.
I don’t know how long I was out. My left arm felt like dead meat. All the cars in the lot were burning, and there was a hole in the diner’s roof that a tractor-trailer truck could’ve dropped through. Rain was sweeping into my face, and when I wiped my eyes clear I saw them, standing over Price.
There were eight of them. The two I thought I’d killed were back. They trailed weeds, and their boots and ragged clothes were covered with mud. They stood in silence, staring down at their living comrade.
I was too tired to scream. I couldn’t even whimper. I just watched.
Price’s hands lifted into the air. He reached for the Nightcrawlers, and then his eyes opened. His pupils were dead white, surrounded by scarlet.
“End it,” he whispered. “End it . . .”
One of the Nightcrawlers aimed its rifle and fired. Price jerked. Another Nightcrawler fired, and then they were all firing, point-blank, into Price’s body. Price thrashed and clutched at his head, but there was no blood; the phantom bullets weren’t hitting him.
The Nightcrawlers began to ripple and fade. I saw the flames of the burning cars through their bodies. The figures became transparent, floating in vague outlines. Price had awakened too fast at the Pines Haven Motor Inn, I realized; if he had remained asleep, the creatures of his nightmares would’ve ended it there, at that Florida motel. They were killing him in front of me—or he was allowing them to end it, and I think that’s what he must’ve wanted for a long, long time.
He shuddered, his mou
th releasing a half-moan, half-sigh.
It sounded almost like relief.
I saw his face. His eyes were closed, and I think he must’ve found peace at last.
V
A trucker hauling lumber from Mobile to Birmingham saw the burning cars. I don’t even remember what he looked like.
Ray was cut up by glass, but his wife and the kids were okay. Physically, I mean. Mentally, I couldn’t say.
Cheryl went into the hospital for awhile. I got a postcard from her with the Golden Gate Bridge on the front. She promised she’d write and let me know how she was doing, but I doubt if I’ll ever hear from her. She was the best waitress I ever had, and I wish her luck.
The police asked me a thousand questions, and I told the story the same way every time. I found out later that no bullets or shrapnel were ever dug out of the walls or the cars or Dennis’ body—just like in the case of that motel massacre. There was no bullet in me, though my collarbone was snapped clean in two.
Price had died of a massive brain hemorrhage. It looked, the police told me, as if it had exploded in his skull.
I closed the diner. Farm life is fine. Alma understands, and we don’t talk about it.
But I never showed the police what I found, and I don’t know exactly why not.
I picked up Price’s wallet in the mess. Behind a picture of a smiling young woman holding a baby there was a folded piece of paper. On that paper were the names of four men.
Beside one name, Price had written DANGEROUS.
I’ve found four other ’Nam vets who can do the same thing, Price had said.
I sit up at night a lot, thinking about that and looking at those names. Those men had gotten a dose of that Howdy Doody shit in a foreign place they hadn’t wanted to be, fighting a war that turned out to be one of those crossroads of nightmare and reality. I’ve changed my mind about ’Nam, because I understand now that the worst of the fighting is still going on, in the battlefields of memory.
Masques Page 3