The Suicide Motor Club

by Christopher Buehlman

  She was coming.

  He felt the sun crown outside, felt himself get wobbly.

  The rooster crowed again.

  “Just sit down and don’t get up again,” he told the blind, moist-lipped old man.

  “Jupiter,” the man said. “You kilt Jupiter.”

  “Yep. Kill you, too, in a bit. Got a gun in here?”

  “Nuh.”

  “Oh, right. Blind. Got a big knife?”

  “Drawer,” the old man slurred.

  Dock Boggs sang on the radio. Rob turned it up. Then he got a big knife.

  He wanted to check on the woman, but the light outside would be misery and he had no sunglasses; he’d lost them in the wreck. He plucked up a deflated-looking straw cowboy hat from a shelf by the door. He put this over his face to make a sort of screen for his eyes. He peeked out the window. In the blaze of early, orangey sun, filtered to an agonizing pointillism by the hat, he saw her silhouette. She walked around the house to where he couldn’t see, holding the gun. Rob sank back into the shadows and waited.

  “Jupiter,” the old man said.

  Rob expected her to come in the door or window at any moment, but she didn’t. Finally, he saw her peek in quickly, then move away.

  “Come on in,” he yelled at her. “We’re just listening to the radio.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  Nothing happened for several very long minutes.

  “The fuck’s she doing?” Rob asked nobody.

  Nobody answered.

  Several more minutes passed, the light outside getting stronger and hotter.

  “I’m gonna die,” he said.

  “Yuh,” said the old blind man in the chair.

  The charmed couldn’t help what they said and Rob knew that, but the truth of that one syllable made Rob angry. His hand flashed like the head of a striking snake.

  —

  JUDITH SAT IN THE YELLOW GRASS IN THE HOUSE’S BLIND SPOT, WATCHING HER shadow grow shorter and the ground around it grow brighter. The vampire inside had called out to her, but her ears were ringing so badly from the explosion she couldn’t make out what he had said.

  It didn’t matter what he said.

  She had stolen a glimpse inside, seen an old man with blood on his shirt sitting in a chair, looking stoned. She saw emergency vehicles and tow trucks heading east on the interstate; the wrecks were only a mile or so away. Two plumes of smoke rose up from that direction, though she had to crane her head behind her to see.

  The vampire said something else.

  She wanted this done before police came looking for witnesses to the explosion and fire.

  How long until then? Half an hour.

  Every minute she sat here, she got a little stronger.

  Ten more minutes, give or take, and she would act.

  She looked at her belly, where she had been shot, but all she saw was a shallow purple pit, like a scar. As if she had been shot and healed from it years ago.

  A miracle.

  She tried to pray but she was out of words, so she sat silently, hoping that was a kind of prayer, too.

  She looked at the gun.

  She had the impression that she was on her own this time, that she was no longer God’s instrument.

  Which might mean God was hunting on his own, too.

  It was 6:10 A.M.

  54

  A WOODEN INDIAN STOOD OUTSIDE THE WAGON HORSE GROCERY AND FILLING STATION, but it wasn’t the usual cigar store statuary, a mock-noble chief with a dour frown and a feather bonnet, one hand up to cover his eyes as he scanned the horizon for buffalo or long-knife cavalry. This was a brave, not a chief, and he stood not in calm observation but in the middle of battle. One hand clenched in a fist before him, while the other held a tomahawk high over his head, prepared to bring it down on the crown of a hapless enemy. His eyes were painted so the whites were prominent. An astute observer would guess the artist responsible for this figure was himself an Indian, and that observation would be correct. At 5:25 A.M., Daniel Otter Shirt sat in his wheelchair, his body a withered counterpoint to the athletic brave he himself had carved in 1943, shortly before going into the army. His nephews John and Sam ran the shop now. If his body was withered, his eyes were still sharp, and they locked on the Ford Falcon that raced to a diagonal stop in the parking lot, and on the two vile-looking men who got out.

  —

  LUTHER NIXON WAS WALKING, BUT HE WAS MILES FROM WELL. NECK BRACE WAS in better shape, but not by much. The two of them staggered past the old cripple and flung open the door leading into the small grocery store looking as though they had crawled off a battlefield, tracking blood and motor oil on their shoes.

  “Hey, we’re not open till six. You guys okay?” the young Native American man said, just pouring ground coffee into the coffeemaker.

  “Yeah, Cochise, we’re great,” Luther said. “We’re fixin’ to run the decathlon. Now tell me where there’s a good dark house or a cave nearby.”

  Luther stared into his eyes while he said this.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said tell me where there’s a dark place I can hole up, and pronto, Tonto.”

  The young man broke eye contact with Luther, looked at Neck Brace, and then saw his uncle Daniel wheeling in through the door.

  “Shit,” Luther said, seeing the charm wasn’t taking.

  Neck Brace pointed back out at the car, then tucked one hand in the other, meaning trunk, as in Let’s drive somewhere quiet and crawl into the trunk.

  “No time,” Luther said, taking a shaky step forward, grabbing Sam Otter Shirt’s chin and jaw.

  His grip wasn’t very strong yet. It would never be very strong again.

  “Now tell me . . .” was as far as Luther got before the fit young man ducked out of his grasp and punched him in the nose. Luther dropped. Neck Brace charged at Sam, knocking over a shelf full of Pez dispensers, PayDay bars, and circus peanuts, but tripped over Luther and fell. He got back up fast, but Sam already had the baseball bat he kept under the counter but had never swung at anyone before.

  “Hey!” Sam said, showing him he meant to use the bat, but Neck Brace lumbered toward him. Sam cracked him in the head. Normally the big monster would have shaken this off, but at nearly daybreak after suffering a car wreck and an explosion, he felt his knees buckle. Blood from his scalp trickled to the ground.

  Sam immediately felt bad for whacking a guy with a spine condition, even if he was going apeshit in the store. But then his uncle Daniel spoke up in the slurred voice he’d used since the stroke.

  “Keep hitting them.”

  —

  LUTHER CAME TO TEN MINUTES LATER, SURPRISED TO FIND HIS ARMS OVER HIS head. He tried to move them and couldn’t. Likewise his feet. He started laughing when he realized he was actually tied to train tracks, like the damsel in some silent Mountie movie from when he was a kid. He lifted his head up and saw his feet, bound with stout rope. He cranked his head to the side and backward till he saw Neck Brace’s woolly hair. They were tied head to head on some old abandoned railway.

  He felt nauseated from all the light—there was a dangerous amount of light in the sky. The sun was going to crown at any moment, and when it did it would crown right. Over. There.

  Just past the two Indians, one sitting strokey-faced in a wheelchair, the other smoking a cigarette and squatting over a bloody baseball bat.

  The back of the store was just to his right.

  Come to think of it, the Wagon Horse Grocery did look kind of like an old railway station.

  The young Indian spoke.

  “My uncle says you’re vampires. That true?”

  “Well, I’d rather show you than tell you,” Luther said, trying to squeeze together the bones of his wrists and ankles to slither them out of the ropes, but it wasn’t working. He tri
ed to break the ropes with the strength of his arms, but he had no strength in his arms.

  “Samson with a fuckin’ haircut, huh?” he said, but it didn’t sound so funny with the big, burning sun just raring to come over that ridge and kill him. It occurred to him that he very well might be about to die for real and ever.

  “Hey, dummy,” he said to Neck Brace, “get up and do somethin’, for fuck sake.”

  “My uncle says he’s seen you before. Ten years ago. He says you beat my dad in the head with a soup can.”

  “Mighta, I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? You do this kind of thing so much you don’t remember?”

  “Vampires,” the old man said in a small, dry voice.

  “We ain’t vampires. Ain’t no such thing.”

  “I don’t believe in vampires,” Sam said. “But I do believe in assholes. My dad was never right again after the robbery, if you want to call it a robbery. All you stole was gas. You could have just drove off. Why are you such an asshole?”

  “I don’t know. Why’re you such an injun?”

  “That’s an asshole thing to say. I’m not an ‘injun.’ I’m Comanche.”

  “Comanche’s just a kinda injun. That’s like sayin’, ‘I ain’t a bee, I’m a bumble bee.’”

  “Bumblebee is different.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Honeybee stings you once and dies. Bumblebee’s like a wasp. Can just keep stinging. You’re not that bright, are you?”

  “Fuck you, teepee nigger.”

  “Nope, not that bright at all.”

  “So, what, you’re just gonna kill us?”

  “Nope.”

  “You leave us here, you’re killin’ us.”

  “Not if you’re just an asshole.”

  “Let me up.”

  “Not yet.”

  “When?”

  “After we watch the sun rise. I think it’s already up, but there’s a low cloud. Should be over that in a minute. If you’re okay then, I’ll call the police and an ambulance. You could use both. Anyway, they’ll untie you, not me.”

  “Look at me.”

  “No.”

  “How about you, old fucker? Why don’t you look me in the eye?”

  The old man mumbled something.

  The young man passed him his cigarette and the old man took a drag.

  “What’d he say?” Luther said.

  “He says he doesn’t look in the eyes of people who have no soul.”

  “Yeah, well. How about you let me up and I send you some money. Like, a lot of money. We got it hid all over.”

  The young man didn’t talk.

  “Anyway, Comanche? What the fuck’re you doin’ out here? Thought you was all in Kansas somewhere.”

  “Oklahoma. We left the rez. Dad married Pueblo.”

  “That’s real sweet. Now how about you FUCKING UNTIE ME.”

  “Nope.”

  “It’s comin’. It’s fuckin’ comin’ for real now. I ain’t supposed to die out here. With him. I don’t even know this dummy sumbitch’s name, he just showed up one night. Untie me, you squaw motherfucker. Or I’ll gut you. Your cunt Pueblo whore mother, too.”

  “You were right, Uncle Dan.”

  “I’ll kill you. I’ll eat your fuckin’ . . . I’ll kill . . .”

  “No soul at all.”

  Luther dropped what little charm he had left and Sam and Daniel Otter Shirt saw him as he was, with his fangs and his veins and his bad skin.

  He started retching.

  5:50 A.M.

  The sun crested over a saddle of clouds.

  Yellow sunlight hit Luther on his left side.

  Luther didn’t talk anymore.

  Luther screamed.

  And Luther burned.

  Together with the one he called Neck Brace.

  Bright as magnesium.

  Smoky as a grease fire.

  And then they were gone.

  55

  JUDITH TRIED THE DOOR AND FOUND IT OPEN. A DEAD DOG LAY ON A TABLE JUST TO her right. Straight ahead, she saw the shape of an old man in a chair, barely lit by indirect sunlight bleeding in from a single window. She saw the object of her hatred now crouched behind the chair, squinting, his eyes watering even against this weak light. Metal glinted as the vampire called Rob pressed a kitchen knife up under the old man’s jaw. The knife was smeared with blood.

  “Put the gun down,” the creature said.

  “No.”

  “Aren’t you afraid I’ll cut him?”

  “No.”

  He smiled like he liked that answer, then looked her in the eye. “Now put the gun down.”

  “That doesn’t work on me,” she said.

  “No, I guess not.”

  “Come from behind that chair.”

  “What if I don’t?”

  “I’ll wait.”

  A moment passed in silence.

  “Luther told you about the boy.”

  “He’s a liar.”

  “Sometimes. But we did turn your boy. Luther did.”

  “Come out from behind the chair.”

  “Anyway, there’s a worse liar than Luther. You need to know.”

  “Just come out. Come at me.”

  “Look at this,” he said, and flicked a photograph at her like a man throwing a card into a hat. It landed facedown. “You’re working for a liar, too,” he said.

  Her heart beat fast. He spoke then. He told her what he had to tell. She shook her head, even though the words he said had a ring of awful truth.

  “Look,” he said, pointing at the facedown picture with his knife. “Just look.”

  It was when she reached down that he came at her.

  —

  SHE SHOT THE VAMPIRE WHO TOOK HER SON, SHOT HIM HIGH ON THE FOREHEAD. She grabbed him by the heels and dragged him toward the door. He started coming to, so she shot him again. Dragged him some more. And so it went all the way out the door and up to the frontier of sunlight pushing at the shadow of the poor old blind man’s house. BANG! Drag. BANG! Drag. At the end, not five feet from the edge of sunlight blazing on the ground, the gun clicked dry and he started to grab for her. So she beat him with the butt of the big pistol. She beat him like Riley Eberhart’s daughter, beat him like Glendon Lamb’s mother, beat him so hard she knocked the eyes out of him, wrecked his skull without a bullet, and, while the pieces tried to right themselves, she grabbed his bootheels and dragged his legs into the sun and his legs burned hot. But he didn’t go easy. He scurried back on his elbows, yelling, throwing dirt and rocks first at her, and then on his jeans trying to put himself out. In the end she dragged him into the sunshine by his hair, her silence a grim counterpoint to his dying scream. When he caught fire, she caught fire too, but she rolled in the dirt and put herself out while he just burned and burned until there was nothing left of him but echo.

  She said the words then, even for him.

  “Your curse is lifted. May God remember your former kindnesses. And may he one day relieve me of the hatred I bear you.”

  The house sat quiet, the door cracked open.

  When Judith went inside, she confirmed her suspicion that Rob had cut the old man’s throat. She put the dog in his lap, crossed herself, then went to the sink. She hissed as she ran her burned hands under the tap water, and she drank, and washed the smoke out of her eyes.

  At last, as sirens wailed in the east, she picked up the photograph the monster had flicked at her and ran into the rocky labyrinth of foothills past a plain of tawny grass. She saw twin plumes of smoke in the west and understood Luther Nixon and the big one had died as well. When at last she felt far enough away from the business of police and fire trucks she heard behind her, she let herself look at the photo.

  She immed
iately wished she hadn’t.

  She wanted to collapse but didn’t let herself.

  Not yet.

  She had one more job to do.

  —

  BETHANY ROAD RAN NORTH TO SOUTH ACROSS THE INTERSTATE, BUT IT WAS TOO small to warrant its own exit or overpass; instead, one had to follow a feeder road to Clines Corners and then double back. By the time she found the abandoned rail car Clayton had described, it was nearly noon and her fair skin was badly sunburned. The car had been a caboose at one time. She stepped warily into the blackness offered by the tall, narrow rear door and walked into the heat of the interior, which stank of age and ancient tobacco. Numerous cigarette butts and one pair of old, soiled boxer shorts attested to the car’s occasional use as a habitation, though exactly when the last squatters had squatted was not apparent. The once-white interior paint had long been flaking away to show the dry wood beneath, and the floorboards were gapped here and there by missing slats.

  In the middle of everything sat a toolbox that looked large enough to hold a smallish man. She liked how slight Clayton was; he came from a time before overeating was so common, when men were considered normal at five-six. She smiled to think of the pleasant economy of his body, but then that smile faded. That he came from another time was the problem at hand. He was undead, his life unnaturally prolonged. However pleasant he was to talk to, and however helpful he had been, he was an abomination before God. Maybe he wasn’t in the box at all. She gripped the end handle, hissing with pain when her raw, burned hand touched iron, then pulling up on it to test its weight.

  Heavy.

  She wanted to talk to Clayton, to tell him how sorry she was, but she couldn’t have him waking up. How would he react? Would he harm her? God knew she had no fight left in her; she was bruised, burned, half deafened, half dying of thirst.

  Had Clayton told her where he would be because he wanted her to do this? Or just because he wanted to see her again?

  Did God want this of her?

  What God? God isn’t dead. He just . . . isn’t.