The Suicide Motor Club

by Christopher Buehlman

  “Resolved,” he said, “that leaving a prisoner in her own filth is a violation of the Geneva Convention and a breach of basic etiquette. I shall let her make water while it is still dark enough for me to chaperone her.”

  He got out of the car and walked to the trunk, surprising himself with his schoolboyish desire to see her again. He hesitated with the key at the lock, preparing himself for the possibility that the girl might have died without bothering to consult him.

  “No, blue eyes,” he said quietly, “I should not like to find you dead.”

  —

  JUDITH HEARD THE KEY CRUNCH INTO THE LOCK, HEARD THE MECHANISM SPRING as the trunk popped. She lay folded around herself, slitting one eye like a child cheating during grace. Weak, tree-filtered predawn light flooded into her steel coffin, blotted in the middle by the figure of a man in silhouette. A dead man with bright eyes. The new one. It frowned down at her.

  “Is there a tenant in that body?” it said. “Or have you gone home to your reward?”

  She lay still, the spare tire digging into her throbbing back.

  “I quite admired your pluck back at that defunct hotel. If you consider yourself my adversary, I may be in trouble.”

  It reached down now, touched its cold hand to her face. She repressed a shudder. Instead she opened her eyes halfway and reached one hand up to take the dead hand at her cheek. She squeezed it gently, forced a smile. It smiled in return. She rolled over just a little to free what she was lying on. The monster bent slightly, inclining toward her hand, though whether to kiss or bite it she did not know.

  A curious thing happened then, and it happened fast. She met the thing’s eyes and did not find them hateful. Their unnatural light diminished. The vampire’s face seemed to form a double image now, the true image dead and repellent, the false one live and attractive. She did something very like focusing her eyes and chose the true image. The one with the dark, dead skin and the sharp, off-white teeth.

  That was the one she swung the crowbar at.

  —

  CLAYTON SAW THE NUN’S BODY MOVE AS SHE INITIATED VIOLENCE AGAINST HIM. He saw the hand that had been hidden arc up with the iron bar in it, saw in her face the resolve to do him harm, but he did not move. He realized he was watching the whole thing as a spectator, genuinely interested in the drama of the woman in the trunk lashing out at her supernatural adversary. The impact hurt, of course, rather badly. His vision twinned for an instant; he found himself inadvertently stumbling backward, sitting down hard, aware that his right fang and one other tooth had been knocked half out. His own sluggish, black blood had slimed his cheek; one eye felt wrong in its socket. And here she came again! She had some difficulty freeing herself from the trunk—doubtless her own head injury had left her dizzy—but once she found her feet, she sank into her hips and swung that bar at him again with such force that it occurred to him his head might actually come off. Instinct took over at last. He wrapped his arm around his head and let himself fall with the blow, shunting much of its power. He balled up defensively now, absorbing three more strokes, each weaker than the last. Then she threw the crowbar at him and ran.

  —

  ONE SHOE ON AND ONE SHOE OFF WAS NO GOOD WAY TO RUN, BUT ADRENALINE softened the pain. Judith knew she hadn’t killed it, knew she didn’t have the strength left in her arms to knock its head off. She didn’t even know if that would work. She didn’t know how fast they could run. She didn’t know if sunlight really hurt them. But now she saw weak sunlight painting the east-facing sides of tree trunks near a stream up ahead. She ran for that with all her waning strength, pounding the brambled ground, pistoning her arms for momentum, her gallops seeming to come in threes, keeping time with the shouted locomotive chant in her mind.

  please God please

  please God please

  please God please

  The light on the tree trunks ahead grew stronger, took on an orange glow. It looked like heaven to her. God had put it there for her and she would reach it because he was with her and desired her to live.

  That was when she felt the hand slip under the back of her belt.

  —

  “YOU CERTAINLY RUN FAST FOR A PERSON WITH A CONCUSSION,” CLAYTON SAID, sitting in front of Judith under a rock overhang, painting a nasty scratch on the sole of her foot with antiseptic that stained her skin red. Judith winced at the sting, seethed at her helplessness. He looked up as she scanned the trees past him. He noticed this.

  “I don’t intend to harm you, or anyone else, but I will kill to protect myself. Please keep that in mind before you think to involve any fellow campers you should chance to see.”

  Her bound hands drifted toward her neck.

  “I haven’t fed from you.”

  “Why?”

  He furrowed his brow while putting the lid back on the disinfectant. He began bandaging her foot.

  “I don’t know.”

  He worked in silence for some time.

  She put her hands on her lap, looked at the fresh, new rope there.

  She didn’t understand why he was ministering to her wounds. Why waste his time if he was going to kill her?

  “What now?” she said.

  “Now we look each other in the eye and I say things to you.”

  He put her doctored foot down.

  He looked her in the eye.

  She met his gaze.

  “I don’t think I can be hypnotized.”

  “We call it charming.”

  “I don’t think you’re very charming,” she said, almost smiling. If she didn’t know better, she would think she actually enjoyed the thing’s company.

  “I wish that were mutual.”

  “You’re not going to kill me, are you?”

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  “I’m sorry I hit you. With the crowbar.”

  “I know what you hit me with.”

  “Anyway, I’m sorry.”

  “And I’m sorry a professional baseball career is not open to you.”

  She almost laughed.

  “You’ve done nothing but help me. You stitched and bandaged me,” she said. “You knocked the woman out of the car and stole it, but you didn’t want that car. You did it for me. You’re not like them,” she said.

  “No.”

  “You’re older?”

  He nodded.

  “You got old because you’re not a killer.”

  “I’ve killed.”

  “You’ve been spared for a reason.”

  “Let’s not start all that.”

  “All what?”

  “All that Calvinist predestination claptrap.”

  “I’m Catholic.”

  “I noticed. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Calvinism, Catholicism, they’re just two outhouse seats over the same hole.”

  She opened her mouth in shock, then closed it.

  “I suppose blasphemy’s the least of your worries.”

  Her eyes narrowed just a bit as she considered him. That rare shade of blue, with just a hint of lavender to it. Was it possible to become addicted to someone’s eyes? He wanted always to see them.

  “Do you know why I’m here?” she said. “Why I came after these murderers?”

  “I do not.”

  “I had a son,” she said.

  She told him about Glendon.

  —

  WHEN SHE FINISHED SPEAKING, HER ROPES LAY COILED AT HER FEET. CLAYTON did not remember taking them off her. Afternoon had come, the sun probing odd fingers of light here and there through the forest’s murk. Hunger and exhaustion took turns leaning on him.

  “I need to sleep,” he said.

  “What happens if you don’t?”

  “I get weak.”

  “We can’t have that,” she said.

  “Why not?”


  “You’re going to help me kill them.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  She weighed her next words before she said them.

  “Because you love me.”

  He considered this.

  “Yes.”

  They looked at one another.

  “Are you toying with me?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Do you share my affection for you?”

  “No.”

  “Could you?”

  “I see you as you are.”

  “Ah,” he said. The cosmetic charm a vampire unconsciously ran to mask his true appearance even worked on that vampire—most of the time. Clayton, however, had seen his own true image enough times to know that it would kindle no affection in a living woman’s bosom. He had glimpsed himself from time to time in moments of fear or trauma, thinking each time that he looked a little worse, a little more wasted and dark. His shadow had gotten thinner, and it stayed that way. “So we’re back to ‘Why would I do this for you?’”

  She took his cold hand in her warm one and stood.

  They were the same height.

  “What is your name?” she said.

  He told her.

  “Clayton Birch,” she said, “I cannot love you as a woman loves a man. I cannot allow myself to see you falsely and be deceived into intimacy—I am still a novice sister with vows to uphold. But I can promise not to betray you or hurt you, at least not on purpose. Not until the others are dead.”

  “And then?”

  “I could do something for you.”

  “Oh, I don’t think I like the sound of this.”

  “Don’t you?”

  He said nothing.

  “How long has it been since you’ve felt sunlight on your face?”

  He watched her. He opened his mouth to voice outrage at her suggestion, but nothing came out.

  “If you help me destroy them, if you let yourself be an instrument for good, just maybe you can rest. Don’t you want to?”

  “No.”

  “And if there is something up there . . .”

  “You have no right.”

  “. . . as I know there is with a knowledge that it is beyond my power to communicate, if there is a God above us, and you serve him, even now, and I bless you and pray for you . . .”

  “Stop it.”

  “. . . and end this false afterlife, this curse, maybe then you can go to your maker and be welcomed by him.”

  “You should sell bridges.”

  “I am offering you a bridge.”

  “Well, I won’t help you.”

  “You won’t?”

  “Have you ever watched anything rot?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Have you observed the decomposition of an animal, by the roadside, perhaps?”

  “Observed.”

  “Observed, yes. Noted its decomposition day by day, over time.”

  “Yes.”

  “What was it? The particular thing you thought of when I asked.”

  “It was a raccoon.”

  “Did anything strike you as especially uplifting about the process?”

  “That’s an animal.”

  “Do you think a man looks so different?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Allow me to assure you that he does not. I killed a man in 1870, with cause, and looked in on him again in 1913. Macabre, I know, but I was born curious. In any event, there he was, just as I left him, only skinnier. So, if a man rots himself flat and gray into the ground and stays there, his meat eaten by beetles, his bones no more than stick piles, how is he different than your raccoon? Why should we think the one has a soul and the other does not?”

  “If it were explainable, we wouldn’t need faith.”

  “Trust me. That’s a liar’s evasion.”

  “Do you forget what you are? I don’t—I can see it. You’re a corpse, and yet here you are talking to me. If there’s no mystery in the world and no God running it, how did you manage this?”

  “Well, that is a poser, I admit. Are you saying that God claims by default everything that lies beyond the reach of science? Does God then shrink as science grows? We read by lamplight when I was a child. The only men who flew did so in hot air balloons. And now we’re going to the moon, where I suspect we’ll find more rocks than angels. How long must God retreat with no clear sign of himself before you admit he isn’t there at all?”

  “So you don’t breathe or blink because of what? A germ?”

  “Do I not blink?”

  “Not always.”

  “I try to remember to blink.”

  “Don’t bother. What do your cells look like under a microscope?”

  “They don’t survive to the slide.”

  “So you mean they’re dead.”

  “I mean they don’t make it there at all. They dissolve and rejoin the whole.”

  “If I cut your arms off you, would they do the same thing?”

  “Please don’t. But yes.”

  “How do they do that, Mr. Birch?”

  “I don’t have a plausible theory.”

  “But you reject mine.”

  “Damn it, I don’t want to hear this.”

  She stood up, walked near him.

  He saw her bare, bandaged feet, thought it must hurt her to walk on those cut soles he had Mercurochromed. He gestured at a paper sack near the limit of the shadow.

  “I got you combat boots. I guessed your size. It’s all they had.”

  “Thank you,” she said. She touched his shoulders and looked at his face.

  “Help me, Clayton.”

  He worked his mouth around his fangs, ran his tongue over them as if to assure himself they were still there.

  At last he spoke.

  “I will. But not because of some fictional old Hebrew whitebeard.”

  “Then why?”

  “I’ll do it because they’ll kill you otherwise.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I think that’s true.”

  They looked at each other.

  “Do you trust me?” she said.

  He thought for a long moment before he spoke.

  “I do.”

  “Then sleep the rest of the day. Do you have a dime?”

  “Sure,” he said, fishing one out of his jeans. “Why?”

  She took it out of his hand, then got the combat boots out of the sack and started putting them on.

  “I have to find a phone. When I get back I’ll watch over you. After sunset, we have to go back to Missouri and find that van.”

  “Why on earth would we do that?”

  “I need the cross that’s in it.”

  36

  St. Petersburg, Florida

  TRACY CALVERT’S “ACTIVE SENIORS” APARTMENT COMPLEX NEIGHBORED A PUBLIX, separated from the rear of the supermarket by a short cinder-block wall in need of a paint job. From his second-story, screened-in back porch, Tracy could see the loading docks, the Dumpster, the coffee can the employees used as an ashtray. That told him the manager was a hard-ass, that he didn’t let people smoke in the break room. He knew the employees, the ones who smoked anyway, so well he could almost set his watch by their movements. At five after three, five after five, and five after seven, the thickset guy from the meat department sat on the stoop and smoked by himself. Too much time in the sun, that guy, but not recently. Probably served in the Pacific theater twenty-some years ago, burned himself the color of roast beef filling sandbags on Tarawa or swabbing down the deck of a destroyer. Definitely a vet, though, the way his back straightened when the fat slob of a manager poked his head out the door to lay down the law on this or that. He used to take his breaks with a gangly kid with a big Adam’s apple, a kid who wip
ed his hands on the front of his apron a lot. The meat guy would sit on the stoop, gesturing with his hands, his Timex glinting in the sun, making the cigarette dance on his lip while he jawed at the kid, who paced around him in a deferential orbit. This was a kid whose dad beat him up—he cut his eyes to the older man to make sure he liked what he was saying the few times he actually spoke. When the kid stopped coming around in April, Tracy guessed his draft number might have come up; that would explain the bonding routine with the older guy, that he was trying to figure out what he was in for. He’d seen the kid bagging in the store—respectful, fast hands, knew when to double-sack, this wasn’t a kid you’d fire. And April wasn’t a going-off-to-school month. Of course, it could have been anything, a job offer in Peoria for all Tracy knew, but it didn’t fit the story the man and the boy told with their bodies, and Tracy had spent his career filling in people’s stories.

  Now the meat man smoked alone.

  This is bullshit you’re just occupying your mind ’cause you don’t want to think about Hank.

  The meat man was just lighting up his five-after-six ciggy when Tracy approached the low wall, scooted his ass up on it, swung his legs over, taking long enough for a drop of sweat to darken the cream-colored polyester pants. The meat guy was watching him, so Tracy issued him a nod, got a wave in return. He wasn’t the only old coot who made the pilgrimage from the Bay View Apartments to the Publix. You’d think they would knock down the wall or cut a breach in it just to be sociable; he’d helped Mrs. Clarke, the woman from 318, over that wall more than once before she graduated to a walker. Maybe he would bring it up to the manager, if he could catch him between dressing down his stockboys and stuffing corned beef down his piehole.

  You goddamn coward think about Hank the mission went dark they got him the creepy-crawlers ate your sister’s kid just like your sister

  Shut up wait for the call

  Tracy walked around to the front of the store, where two kids on bikes were having a powwow, their Schwinns nose to tail like dogs at the sniff. Probably talking girls or shoplifting, the way they leaned in so nobody else could hear. They both had their shirts off, a sensible uniform given the Christ-awful wallop the July sun was packing. Sweat had dampened the creased legal pad Tracy tucked under his arm while he got over the wall, sweat from his armpit; he wouldn’t be writing any love letters on that.