The Suicide Motor Club

by Christopher Buehlman

  He grabbed the gun.

  It didn’t want to come out.

  He heard another car coming, squealing all the way, fishtailing, clipping something.

  He pulled the shotgun harder.

  It came out.

  Cole yelled, “Holy fuck!”

  Calcutta screamed as the car went squealing by.

  He heard a vicious, rolling wreck in the distance, the screech of a car grinding to a stop on its roof or side, a moan of pain.

  Cole said, “Let’s get this one first.”

  —

  JUDITH PULLED OUT FROM HER HIDING SPOT BEHIND THE BUS, THE TIRES SPITTING gravel behind her as the powerful car jerked forward, scratching up against a creosote bush, running over yellow grass and clumps of ephedra. She careened onto Interstate 40 dark, knowing they could probably see her anyway, but knowing even a split second of surprise could make a difference. Not long after she pulled out, she saw motion up ahead, heard the sound of a devastating wreck, yelped and jerked the wheel as a piece of camper shell hit her windshield, chipping it and spinning away. She flicked on her headlights just in time to avoid a huge piece of bumper flipping at her as clothes, paint cans, and other flotsam showered down. The pickup truck Rob had been driving had all but exploded on impact, and the van hadn’t fared better. She swerved to avoid the two hulks even as they rocked or spun to their final positions, a small pool of fire flaring to her right. Cole’s lamed ’69 had gone into the scrub and was now fighting its way back onto the road. Judith was already too far past it to hit it on this pass, and anyway it wasn’t the Beta driver she wanted.

  Luther I’m coming Luther

  She got clear and launched herself forward, scanning the road for him. A pair of lights came on several hundred yards ahead, floated to straddle the center line and accelerated. She punched the gas as well, shifting jerkily all the way up, biting her lower lip in concentration. Time slowed down. Her vision tunneled. Everything was the road and the enemy’s headlamps.

  Thou preparest a table

  I surrender my body

  I surrender

  The road between the cars flashed away to almost nothing.

  The headlights speeding at her were hot, lethal moons.

  She imagined she could feel the sway of all that gasoline in the Camaro’s hips.

  The other car came on.

  Close.

  Closer.

  She could hear its motor roaring in a suicidal duet with hers.

  A Mustang

  I’m going to be killed by a Mustang

  Judith closed her eyes at the end.

  —

  LUTHER’S YELL BOUNCED AROUND IN THE SPEEDING MUSTANG.

  Neck Brace had his mouth open in excitement or fear or both, looking for all the world like a mandrill yawning.

  Luther was ready to hit but at the last second anticipated massive pain and maybe even death and suddenly hoped she’d turn.

  Turn witch-bitch turn, he thought, and still she came on.

  Then Luther saw her.

  Her mouth open in a keening wail, her eyes wet with tears, her hands white on the wheel.

  He understood in a flash.

  This witch-bitch wasn’t going to turn.

  Not for him.

  Not for the devil on an ICBM.

  Shes ready to die goddamn if she aint turn TURN

  “TURN! TURN!” Luther yelled, and rocked at the wheel.

  But she didn’t.

  So he did.

  He jogged right.

  If she had been watching she could have turned into him and caught him, but her eyes were closed now and the Mach 1’s bumper shot past the wedgelike nose of the ’67 SS without a playing card’s breadth to spare. Luther corrected left, but his car was already eating dirt, bucking in grama grass and rocks. He fishtailed, caught the road again, but bucked on a rock so hard it brought him up to bounce his head on the ceiling and when he came down, in his confusion and unfamiliarity with the new car he hit the gas instead of the brake. Luther and Neck Brace rocketed at the wrecked truck and van, sparks flying behind his trailing muffler. To his credit, he threaded that wreck brilliantly—a lesser driver would have caught the truck where it lay twisted and smoking on its side or wiped out on the torn skin of the step van, crushing Cole and Calcutta where they crouched down looking for the inverted van’s driver, but he missed them all, though closely enough for Cole to yell “Holy fuck!” as Luther screamed by him.

  But as Luther dodged the back of the van, he knew he had too much swing and now he fishtailed again. His rear tire hit a length of the van’s rear axle and he rolled. Hard. The last thing he saw before he flipped was a yellowish piece of the moon where it rose in the east, and then everything spun and he was bounced and broken and cut in more places than he knew.

  The Mustang came to rest on its roof, a cloud of dust pluming around it.

  —

  “LET’S GET THIS ONE FIRST,” COLE HAD JUST SAID, TAKING HIS REVOLVER IN HAND and crouching as he cleared the inverted van’s blind spot. He peeked under its nose just in time to see Clayton Birch aiming Chuy’s gun at him. He pulled back fast, but not fast enough. The shot tore the top of his head clean off, but only the top. He fell backward, dropped his gun, blinked rapidly, and made a gagging noise as his brain tried to re-form itself.

  Calcutta stumbled backward, shocked. So shocked she didn’t register the sound of the ’67’s engine picking up steam as Judith negotiated it through the debris field. The black Camaro accelerated hard when it had Calcutta in its sights. It smacked into her at about forty miles an hour, shunting her up the hood and through the windshield.

  —

  CLAYTON, NOW STRONG ENOUGH TO STAND, SLID OUT OF THE POOL OF BLOOD AND motor oil he had been wallowing in and limped through gunsmoke toward the prone form of Cole. Judith’s car had just swept Calcutta away. He leveled the shotgun at Cole’s neck, meaning to give him the second barrel, but Rob shambled into sight, trying to yank the truck’s shifter out of the tangle of his ribs with one hand, aiming his own gun at Clayton with the other. He fired, clipping Clay’s chin, the bullet making a funny zipping noise as it spun away. Clayton wheeled and shot now, taking off half of Rob’s face, spinning him so he landed in a heap around the truck’s shifter impaling him.

  —

  CALCUTTA CAME THROUGH JUDITH’S WINDSHIELD IN A HEAP, STUNNING HER WITH one flailing arm, but equally stunned herself. Judith managed to stomp the brake and stop the car on the highway’s shoulder, braking so hard that the cross and two of the bottles joined the gun on the passenger-side floor. A headlight was coming from the east, but she had no time to concern herself with that—the car was full of broken glass and the cold, stinking muscular thing she had just collided with. She reached under the momentarily bewildered monster half in her lap and grabbed one of the vials of Lourdes holy water from beneath her haunch. But now Calcutta turned. She lunged at Judith, meaning to bite her face, but Judith got her left arm up. A fang punctured her forearm, made it blaze with pain. She struggled to get that arm across her body, awkwardly protecting her face from Calcutta’s teeth by hunching her shoulder and writhing her face away. At last she got her left hand to where her right one held the bottle, pulled the cap off. At that moment Calcutta pulled Jude’s veil and coif half off and yanked her head back by her hair. She managed to get her face past Jude’s shoulder and bit her savagely on the jaw. Jude made a gagging yell but, despite her bad angle, managed to splash a drop of the water on Calcutta’s back. The effect was astonishing.

  Calcutta bowed her back and reared her head up, shuddering. A drop of Jude’s blood fell from one fang onto Jude’s white scapular. Something hissed and smoked; the roof of the car was briefly illuminated as if by a sparkler. Jude tried to empty the rest of the bottle on her, but now the thing knew what was happening. She turned cat-quick and grabbed the wr
ist that held the bottle, forced it up the seat and away, cranked Jude’s wrist back toward her so the contents of the bottle spilled into Jude’s eyes and all over her white veil and wimple. She flung Jude’s wrist so the bottle flew out the window and broke on the street. Now she punched Jude’s face, knocking her back. The angle had been too awkward for her to break Jude’s jaw or stave in her skull, as she had intended, so she instinctively reached for Jude’s chest to push herself up and get good striking distance. When the palm of her hand touched the wet veil, however, she screamed. Upon contact with the holy water, Calcutta’s hand burned blue-white as though it were some flammable metal ignited by a welder’s torch. She scrambled away from Jude and out the passenger door, shaking her now-smoking hand to try to put it out, but Jude was up and grabbing the gun and a fresh bottle of holy water. She followed Calcutta out the open door. She wanted to shoot her, but that was animal fury and she needed something else for this. She tossed the gun down on the shoulder of the highway. She crossed herself, opened the bottle, and splashed it on Calcutta. The vampire burned as before, though now on her face and breast, and on a patch of her scalp, screaming, “Stop! It hurts! It hurts so much!” Judith splashed her again in three cruciform gouts, shouting, “In nomine Patris et Fili et Spiritu Sancti!” even as the vampire flared and shrieked and shook, at last crumpling into a heap at Judith’s feet and smoldering like a pile of burning leaves.

  Moved by something that felt outside herself, she knelt and made the sign of the cross on Calcutta’s dry, smoking forehead, saying, “Sublata est maledictio. Memoret Deus misericordiam tuam.”

  A motorcycle rushed past her, its driver turning his head at the sight of her in her habit, the smoldering corpse nearby, but she could do nothing for him.

  She didn’t even look when she heard him crash behind her.

  She grabbed the cross and another bottle and walked east toward the wreck of Luther’s car.

  —

  CLAYTON SAW THE SMOKE AND BLAZE OF CALCUTTA’S ENDING. HE SAW JUDE MAKING her way toward the wrecked Mustang and knew she needed him. He saw the blinding single light of a motorcycle approaching, heard its insectile buzz. At that instant he felt Cole’s hand on him. He turned his head, saw Cole, his head mostly healed, preparing to bite him. Instead of engaging, Clayton sprang right, past a bright oncoming headlamp and toward the wreckage of the van.

  The motorcycle jogged to its right to avoid Clayton, making a wet thump and skid as it plowed into Cole and dragged him on the road, its driver vaulting headfirst into what was left of the truck and breaking his neck.

  Clayton lunged forward, grabbed a bent door from the truck, and moved toward Cole.

  Cole, dragged half out of his clothes, stared up at Clayton, too injured to do more than try to cover his exposed breast. He had taken great pains this evening, as every evening, to wind his breasts beneath a sheet, flatten them against his body so the others wouldn’t see. Except Calcutta. Calcutta knew. And Luther knew.

  The vampire once known as Dolores Cole, the pretty ash-blond Georgia girl who had been Blitz Nixon’s lover when he raced cars as a man, the one for whom Luther returned as a vampire, didn’t try to move his broken limbs.

  Clayton just looked, holding the door up over his head.

  Cole met his gaze and sneered, angered by how slowly his limbs were healing, angered by the contempt he imagined in the other vampire’s hesitation.

  “You’d just better,” Cole said.

  Clayton did.

  He used the door like a blunt cleaver and mashed Cole’s head off at the neck.

  Cole’s dying body arched its back and gathered its ragged knees to its chest, and then it moved no more.

  The truck caught fire now.

  Clayton saw that Jude had almost made it to the wrecked Mustang.

  He ran to her.

  It was 5:06 A.M.

  51

  LUTHER AND NECK BRACE HAD CRACKED THEIR HEADS AGAINST ONE ANOTHER IN the Mustang’s dying tumble, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Neck Brace, stretched flat over the broken bucket seat, half gutted by a piece of the roof, gathered himself together as best he could, feeling the parts of himself that had come out now running backward through his slick fingers to retake their proper places. Luther’s head had been twisted all the way around but had held. He made a very wet repetitive sound with his mouth that was certainly some vulgarity, but his brain had been so knocked about even he didn’t know what he was saying. Then he did and he stopped. His mouth hurt too much. Luther righted his head, crawled bloodily from the upside-down wreck, bewildered as much by the impact he had just absorbed as by the sight of the nun walking toward them with fire behind her. She held a cross before her as though she believed with all her being in its power to protect her.

  “Sheeee-it,” Luther drawled.

  He reached into his pocket for his gun but the pocket had been torn away, along with much of the denim in his jeans, to reveal a large, white trapezoid of thigh. Neither was the gun in his blood-filled boot. At the sound of a pathetic whistle, he looked back at the wreck, saw Neck Brace too large, hurt, and badly caught to free himself just yet, holding the gun up with his one good hand. Luther stumbled back and took it, opened the cylinder, squinted through blood to check that it was loaded, then snapped it shut.

  When he pointed it, however, his target had changed. He now saw a banged-up truck door walking at him with two pairs of legs.

  “Aw, fuck you, door,” he said, shooting. Five pops came from the gun, to no apparent effect. On the sixth shot, the door fell.

  He saw the Yankee vampire down, a neat hole just under his hairline. He saw the nun sitting on her butt, holding her stomach.

  “Why!” he shouted at her. “Why the FUCK do all this!”

  “You killed a boy,” she said.

  “I killed a lot a’ boys.”

  “Mine. You killed my boy,” she said, crawling for the cross, which lay broken on the asphalt.

  “Yeah?” he said. “Well, fuck him, and fuck you, too.”

  He pointed behind him at the steaming wreck with the large vampire making a mess out of himself trying to get free. “I loved that car.”

  He threw the empty gun at her, but it flew over her shoulder and slid on the road. He started stalking forward. Then he saw something that stopped him. When the nun grabbed the bottom half of the cross, the broken top part skittered across the road and rejoined itself to its base.

  The pain in her stomach subsided.

  She stood.

  Held the cross up.

  Started walking toward Luther.

  “Anyway, I didn’t kill him.”

  Now Judith froze.

  “Liar.”

  “I ain’t,” he said.

  He walked softly closer, staring at her, trying once again to hook her eyes.

  “You took him.”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “But you didn’t kill him.”

  “Nuh-uh.”

  He edged closer.

  From the wreck of the car, Neck Brace panted with exhaustion. Every time he tried to flatten his head and squeeze out of the aperture, his brace caught on metal and hung him up.

  Clayton sat up and held his head.

  “What did you do?”

  “You know,” he said, “that wreck musta shook me up. I don’t remember.”

  “What did you do?” she hissed.

  She felt in her heart that whatever power waited in the Italian cross weakened with her anger.

  Pain racked her belly.

  Her legs shook.

  “Somethin’, I’m sure,” he said, stepping closer.

  Clayton got shakily to his feet.

  Now Rob walked up the road toward them, coming up from behind Judith, his face pinched with rage. He held the shifter that had been through him like a schoolmaster
would hold a whipping rod.

  “They done Calcutta,” he said.

  Luther’s eyes cut to Rob.

  Judith dared not look away.

  “Clayton,” she said.

  “I see him,” Clayton said.

  “Cole?” Luther asked.

  Rob didn’t say anything.

  “This young lady I’m lookin’ at hopes you don’t tell me Cole is dead,” Luther said.

  “Cole too.”

  “Gone?”

  “Yeah. He . . . he’s gone.”

  Luther nodded.

  Closed his eyes longer than a blink.

  He drooled, then wiped his mouth.

  “You know what?” Luther said, looking hard at Judith. “I just remembered. What I did to that kid.”

  Take my anger away, God. Take it away I humbly pray thee.

  “After we put your husband’s dick in the dirt. See, I’d forgot, but I read the file on you. That husband of yours was a cheater, right?”

  I am thy humble vessel.

  Behind Luther, the sound of grinding metal rose up. Neck Brace had removed the brace from his neck and was simultaneously pushing the wrecked car open and getting small to free himself. It was working.

  “Guess he wasn’t getting enough at home, huh? Was you already practicing to be a nun, makin’ sure he didn’t get none?”

  The vampire called Rob rushed at Judith’s back.

  Clayton shot forward, grabbed his waist, rolled to the ground with him. They writhed in a knot, Clayton working his way to Rob’s neck, trying to bite.