The Suicide Motor Club

by Christopher Buehlman

  Neck Brace worked most of his chest free from the wreck of the Mustang.

  Sirens wailed in the distance.

  The sky was lighter now.

  Judith spoke.

  “Peace to this house and all who dwell therein.”

  She moved forward with the crucifix.

  Luther stopped.

  “So, anyway, Glendon, that’s his name, right?”

  “Cleanse me of sin with hyssop, Lord, that I may be purified; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”

  They spoke over each other now.

  “So that kid. You know, scared blood tastes best, and that kid literally shit himself when we got him in that car.”

  “Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy great mercy. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost.”

  She moved closer.

  Neck Brace was out all the way to the navel.

  Clayton was holding Rob’s head down with his elbow, gouging his neck with his fangs.

  “We drank him out while he yelled, ‘Mommy, Mommy.’ How does that make you feel? You still his mommy with all that ridiculous shit on?”

  “Our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth. Oh Lord hear my prayer and let my cry come to thee.”

  “All that penguin-lookin’ shit you wear. Ain’t gonna help you. I’m gonna flipside you. You know what that is?”

  “Hear us, and be pleased to send thy holy angel from heaven to guard, cherish, and defend all that dwell in this house.”

  The pain in her belly was all but gone.

  “Maybe you don’t ’cause I made it up.”

  Rob groaned as Clayton sucked hard from him.

  Neck Brace started working his hip bone through. Judith saw him emerging naked and pale and hairy from the car, but she kept on.

  “In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,”

  “But flipsidin’ means I’m gonna fuck you livin’ and dead. Once each. Don’t that sound fun?”

  “let there be extinguished in you all power of the devil by the imposition of our hands,”

  She came closer. She was no more than five yards away.

  Rob started to shudder, said, “He’s killing me.”

  “and by the invocation of the glorious and holy Mother of God, the Virgin Mary,”

  The bullet came out of her stomach, fell squat and mushroomed on the asphalt.

  “Anyway, Glenny-glen.”

  Neck Brace was out now.

  “and of her illustrious Spouse, St. Joseph,”

  “After we drank him all up, he died, a’ course.”

  “and of all the holy Angels,”

  “Wasn’t much in him, little as he was.”

  “Archangels, Patriarchs,”

  “But I brought him back.”

  “Prophets, Apostles, Martyrs,”

  Clayton vomited black blood on the street to clear his stomach so he could finish draining Rob.

  Neck Brace picked up his brace, put it back on.

  “I turned that cute little motherfucker just for fun.”

  “Confessors, Virgins, and of all the saints together.”

  Neck Brace stomped toward Rob and Clayton.

  “Left him in a desert town to burn up.”

  “Lord God, who said by thy apostle James,”

  “Like I’m gonna turn your retard sister, too. For fun.”

  “Is any man sick among you?”

  “Killin’ your mom and dad’ll just be on principle.”

  She came within three yards of him.

  “But that ain’t all.”

  The lights of a police car loomed a mile away, coming closer.

  “Thy mercy restore him.”

  “There’s something you need to know.”

  Two yards.

  “Is any man sick?”

  “Somethin’ I been savin’ back to tell you.”

  One yard.

  “Is any man?”

  “’Cause it’s funny.”

  “Infirmátur quis ín vobis?”

  “Do you want to know?”

  She stopped.

  “It’s somethin’ you really oughta know. Somethin’ that happened. With your boy you couldn’t save.”

  “What?” she said, a tear rolling down her eye. The arm holding the cross weakened, dipped lower.

  Neck Brace grabbed Clayton, lifted him up in the air, and threw him down on his head.

  “What?” she said again, her voice even smaller.

  Neck Brace put his foot on Clayton’s head, pulled his arms up behind him. Clayton yelled. Then he whimpered. His head started to come off.

  “This,” Luther said.

  He flashed his arm out fast, meaning to bat the cross away and then knock the nun out. Put her in the trunk of some car, maybe this police car coming. Flipside her. Leave her body out for the buzzards. Then go to Fresno and finish the job with her family.

  But that wasn’t what happened.

  52

  THE CROSS JUDITH HELD HAD BEEN MADE IN 1873 FOR THE CHURCH OF SANTA Maria Maddalena Sopra Fontana just outside Cisterna di Latina in central Italy. The craftsman who made it, Gian Carlo Orpeggio, was a devout man who had been considered the best carpenter in the village by his twenty-second birthday. He was also a gifted painter. He made the cross of rosewood painted with gold leaf, and to very specific dimensions, as it was to fit snugly into the hand of a plaster angel. This angel had formerly been holding a gas lamp but had so struck an opera singer born in Cisterna that he purchased it from a dealer in Paris and gifted it to his boyhood church. The cross was blessed by Pope Pius XI on July 22, 1874, for the Feast of Maria Maddalena, when Father Luca Morandi brought it to Rome for exactly that purpose. While cross and priest were gone, the angel’s hand offered a bouquet of sunflowers and red poppies picked by young girls of the parish.

  When war came to Cisterna in the next century, occupying Germans were impressed with the beauty of the angel, whom they called Magda. One rabidly Catholic young soldier, a Breisgau paratrooper and explosives expert named Karl Gerber, had become so smitten with her that he told other members of the Fallschirmjäger that he would become a priest after the war if they would let him take Magda to whatever church he was assigned to. Their laughter bristled him, but not so much as the news that the American army was coming in force to avenge the several hundred rangers they had caught in an open field and massacred, and that a northern retreat was likely imminent. The idea of Americans, with their farmers’ hands and watered-down colonial Catholicism, flooding into this church and worshipping beneath Magda’s gaze when he could not, filled him with such hatred that he decided to take measures.

  His idea was to wire the rosewood cross to an eighty-eight-millimeter shell.

  His reasoning was that anyone who would steal a cross must be a communist or an atheist, and that such vermin deserved what they got. He had already written a letter to the priest explaining how to deactivate the booby trap, and he would mail this later, once the main American army had left. The obvious moral and logistic flaws with this plan escaped Karl and his commanding officer because the first was half mad and the second suffered crippling insomnia since the fight with the rangers. The shell went in the platform supporting the angel and aimed into the pews, where flying wood splinters would shred personnel but, God willing, leave Magda mostly unharmed.

  It was into this church that PFC Luther Nixon and three other American soldiers of the third infantry division ventured in May 1944.

  That this same cross made its way into a Vatican storehouse and across the Atlantic at the request of one Phillip Wicklow is a phenomenon some would see as massive coincidence.

  Others would see it differently.

  If Judith somewhat resembled the dark-hai
red angel of the Maddalena, with her sad, pretty eyes and her fair skin, only Luther could have said. Only he saw them both. Once living, once dead. And the same thing happened both times.

  When Luther touched the Cisterna cross for the second time, it was as though something even more furious than an eighty-eight-millimeter German artillery round exploded near him, and near the others. Luther took the worst of it, followed by Clayton and Rob. To catalog their injuries would be exhaustive; let us just say that they were swept aside and broken so badly that they were as formless as scarecrows. Judith, much like her plaster counterpart in Cisterna di Latina, largely escaped injury, although the concussion temporarily deafened her and she lost consciousness for several moments. The blast threw great hunks of asphalt that shredded the tires and broke the windshield of the approaching deputy’s vehicle such that he skidded into the remains of Rob’s truck and bounced his head on the driver’s-side window hard enough to star it and black out for half an hour. A ripple in the asphalt jolted all the vehicles into the air, breaking the glass jars of gasoline in the trunk of the ’67 Camaro and dropping it close enough to a worm-shaped pool of fire for the fumes to catch. It exploded with a huge, hollow THRUMP! that bucked the husk of the vehicle a second time, causing it to collide with and burn the ’69 COPO. A mushroom-shaped cloud of fire and black smoke ascended into the still-dark sky, illuminating the debris field scattered along I-40, and all the injured and undead whose fates were soon to be determined.

  53

  NECK BRACE WAS THE FIRST TO REGAIN HIS FEET.

  He saw the nun lying prone and moved toward her, but Clayton crawled in front of her and bared his teeth. Neck Brace, too weak to fight, looked to Luther to see what he should do. His mouth hung open in an idiot’s gape when he saw what remained of Luther. He shambled to him and gathered him up like firewood, picking up one limb he might have to hold next to Luther’s trunk if he was too weak to regenerate. He loped into the dying night, off the road but following the interstate west.

  Exhausted from the effort of dragging himself, Clayton lost consciousness at just the moment Judith woke. She looked around for Luther. She saw a limping figure silhouetted against the eastern sky but noted it was too tall to be Luther. Damaged and mutable as it was, it looked almost like an El Greco character stamped out of pitch and held up against the cobalt and lavender of first light. It stopped and picked something up from the pavement, folded it into its pocket, then loped away.

  Rob

  How’d you know my name

  That his name too

  This was the one who grabbed Glendon’s arm as he innocently planed it on the warm desert air that evening so recently, and so very long ago.

  This was the one who pulled her screaming child out of her grip and into the death car—the one against whom she had lost the most important contest she would ever face.

  As a novice in the service of God, she should go after Luther Nixon, the most dangerous one, the most canny and cruel. The leader.

  But deep in her heart and her womb she wanted to watch the tall one die.

  If it could only be one of them, she would take this one.

  Rob, then.

  You still his mommy with all that ridiculous shit on?

  I don’t know.

  I don’t.

  She stripped off the veil, coif, and scapular so that she stood in her jeans, T-shirt, and combat boots. She ran as best she could back to where she remembered throwing the gun.

  —

  THE DRIVER OF A BLUE ’68 FALCON HAD STOPPED AT THE SITE OF THE WRECK TO offer assistance. His name was Bennett Evans, and he was a thirty-four-year-old air traffic controller on his way back to Albuquerque from the home of a recently divorced Amarillo nurse. Bennett himself had lost his wife two years ago and loved the nurse with colors his marriage had been blind to. He had resisted the temptation to keep driving past the disaster, which had engulfed several cars in flames and cratered the south shoulder of the highway, despite his thirty-six hours without anything resembling sleep. The huge, pale man with the neck brace carrying his dead friend had roused such pathos in him there had been no question of driving on. When he pulled over and leaned to push his passenger door open, the big ruin of a man had dumped the small ruin of a man into the seat without a word.

  “Get in the back, buddy, I’ll take you both to a hospital. What happened?”

  The big man stumble-ran around the Falcon’s front. When he reappeared at the driver’s-side window, Bennett smelled rot and gas and something unpleasantly insectile.

  “Is there anybody else hurt?” he said.

  The big man ignored this. He put his hand to his mouth and then moved it forward, as if blowing Bennett a kiss, but his red lips had not puckered.

  Bennett recognized this as Thank you in sign language.

  Two things happened simultaneously. The big man drew back his arm, as if about to slap a bug against a wall, and the driver gestured in ASL.

  He signed You’re welcome back at the big man, whose eyes sparkled with sudden joy at finding someone he could speak to, then clouded over as he remembered the unfortunate circumstances they found themselves in. He grabbed Bennett by the shirt and wrenched him slowly but irresistibly out of the car, but then pushed him down on the ground almost gently.

  “The fuck’re you doin?” the bald, half-flayed corpse in the passenger seat croaked. “We need that blood, we’re dyin’.”

  The big man kissed at the tips of his fingers, then waved.

  Good-bye.

  Bennett watched his Falcon recede west as sirens sounded in the east.

  He couldn’t help thinking that his deaf sister had just saved his life.

  —

  5:40 A.M.

  The stars were gone now, the moon a chip of white ice melting in the east. A very small town crouched close to the terra-cotta ground not half a mile away, but it slept. The vampire known as Rob, not healed yet but getting a little stronger with each step, steered for an isolated house set well back from the highway. A rooster crowed in its yard beneath a rusty windmill barely turning in the scant breeze. He was aware of the woman behind him. When he got into shade he would make her wish she had not followed him, or at least that was what he told himself to push down other, less optimistic thoughts. He just barely managed to believe himself thanks to a sophisticated formula in which he subtracted the habit from the nun who had decimated them and arrived at the lesser sum of the ordinarily dressed woman stalking him. He had seen the pistol at one point when she had gotten close, but he didn’t fear it. Truth was, he was mostly just tired of getting shot. He still hurt from the shotgun blast he’d absorbed at the wreck. The tattooed man at the Missouri hotel had given him quite a headache with a pistol, but that had passed. He wondered what happened to that pistol, correctly guessed that it was the very one the nun was holding. Anyway, he had put distance between them since. He had hoped to get some speed back while it was still dark enough to hide him, but that prick Boston vampire had drained him, made him weaker. It was taking longer. He wasn’t fully himself.

  When she did catch up with him, he had a surprise to show her. Near the wreck of the truck, not far from the busted sign warning Explosives in use, Risk of death! he had seen a spill of papers from the file cabinet the old geezer had in Florida. Documents, handwritten notes, photographs, some of them burning. One of the photographs, lying faceup near a monkey’s tail of fire, had caught his attention. When he saw what it was, he barked out a laugh despite the danger he found himself in. He folded it and put it away just in case.

  Rob glanced behind him to see where the woman was. Still hundreds of yards behind him, stalking toward him. He could outrun her easily now that he felt stronger, but he needed shelter. The sun was close.

  Now a big dog on a rope barked at him.

  He had maybe ten minutes until the sun came up.

  The house had
few windows, so he approached at a blind angle.

  He yipped a few times, gaining speed.

  He ran to the dog, still yipping, the chickens scattering before him. When he got close, the dog gave up barking and ran up against the house to whimper and growl, jerking at the limit of his tether. Rob followed it there. The fight was brief but loud. The big dog hurt him more than it might have, but even at half strength Rob was just too strong and cold-blooded.

  “Jupiter?” a voice said. “Jupiter, you get another coyote?”

  The radio was on inside, playing country.

  Now he took the limp dog up, a big, mostly black shepherd mix. His hand hurt where the dog had almost severed two fingers; they were already knitting on again, but slower than normal.

  “Shit! Ow, damn it! Go on, git out of here!” Rob said, yipping again, kicking up dirt, and then he said, “Oh no.”

  “What? Who is it?” the voice from before said. An elderly voice.

  “Mister, your dog’s hurt.”

  Now he stepped into sight of a window, expecting to see a face there. No face appeared.

  “Jupiter?”

  “Coyotes got him, a whole pack of ’em.”

  “No.”

  “I think he’s dead.”

  “No.”

  “Let me bring him in,” Rob said.

  Still no face at the window.

  A sad, granular voice said, “Put him on the table.”

  Rob grinned and, invited, went into the cool darkness of the house.

  A man stood at the far end of the open house, his face contorted with pain and wariness. He knew something was wrong.

  Rob put the dog on a short, uneven table that looked like it belonged in a school and crossed to the man. He looked into his eyes, saw filmy white cataracts.

  “Who . . .” the old man started to say. “That didn’t sound like no coyotes.”

  “Just relax and don’t talk,” Rob said. “Hold still.” The charm was harder without eye contact. Harder still with the sun so close, and him so weak, but at last it took. He bit punctures in the old man’s tough neck and drank. The old man made little retching hitches in his stomach and grabbed weak fistfuls of Rob’s shirt but didn’t say anything. Rob felt better with the warm blood in his stomach, and a good thing, too.