by K. W. Jeter
“I don’t know.” Despite the sun pressing down on my neck, a rash of gooseflesh tingled over my arms. “I was expecting something, at least.” Maybe the explanation was that D’s reality was so low-rent it couldn’t afford a full complement of extras to fill out the scenes. Maybe the only ones moving around in this landscape were the featured players. Right offhand, I didn’t know whether that would make plugging Identrope more or less complicated. I trudged on, thinking about it, as the first dropped leaves from the orange groves blew against our feet.
As it turned out, we did get a welcoming committee. I heard them before I saw them. A rasp of motorcycle engines, nicely tuned and mufflered, sounding more like the voices of authority than Rasty Mike and the Stone Units’ rolling TB ward.
The motorcycles—whoever they were; it only sounded like a couple of them—were heading our way. As they got closer, they definitely sounded like cop bikes. A little frisson of apprehension sank small teeth into my heart. I remembered now, from my rooting around in the archives, that there could be some unpleasant encounters with officialdom in the Joad world.
My apprehension paid off in black chips. Soon as I saw the cops come around the next bend in the road, astride classic old Harley-Davidsons with sprung seats and every surface that wasn’t chrome painted black or white, I knew we were in for a bad time.
The police motorcycles sputtered to a stop right in front of us. Dust settled as the cops pushed their goggles up onto their foreheads. They didn’t have on helmets, but old-style peaked caps with their department emblem over the visors. Their high boots, polished obsidian under the road grime, looked like standard Third Reich issue.
“You boys been walking awhile?” The lead cop squinted at us as he peeled off his heavy gloves. He didn’t have a happy face on. “You look kind of tired.”
I nodded. “Yeah, we’ve covered a little bit of ground.” I glanced over at D standing beside me. His face looked heavy and dully resentful, eyes narrowed down to slits. I turned back to the cops and smiled. “We started out this morning.”
The lead cop’s partner leaned over his motorcycle’s handlebars. He looked like the type who was born with jowls, the baby who just got uglier as he grew up. “So you’re not from around these parts, then?”
D spoke up. “Nope.” He pointed a thumb over his shoulder toward the hills and the bleak territory beyond them. “We come from way yonder.”
That got a grisly smile from the lead cop. “Boy, we don’t care where you’re from. If you’re not from here, none of you tramps is much of a pile of shit far as we’re concerned.”
This conversation wasn’t going well. “Uh . . . look, Officer. We’re not really planning on staying around here. We’re really just sort of passing through. We’ve got an appointment in Los Angeles. And actually, we’re late for it already. The only reason we’re walking is that our car broke down.” That much was true; the poor old Hudson had been broken down in every part when we’d left it behind. “So if it’s all right by you, we’ll just be on our way. And you won’t see us again.”
The grisly smile vanished, along with the lead cop’s eyes behind glowering folds. “Son, there ain’t nothing all right by me. At least not from a couple trashy Okie hoboes like you two.”
“Officer . . .” I held my hands up, palm outward, the usual placating gesture. “We don’t want any trouble . . .”
They both laughed, sounding like red-eyed dogs behind a fence topped with barbed wire. The lead cop smiled wide enough to expose tobacco-yellow teeth. “Listen, shit-for-brains. You already got trouble.” Wet spots appeared at the corners of that lipless mouth, as though he were sinking his discolored teeth into a raw steak. “You got trouble soon as you came over the state border. We already got enough of you Okie dee-generates taking a crap out in the woods and making cock-headed rude remarks to women coming out of church, to suit us. We don’t need any more of your kind around, especially when it ain’t even gonna be picking season for another month or so. You boys should’ve gone on up to Salinas with the rest of your raggedy-ass kinfolk to work the cotton.”
D’s face was dark enough for thunder. He spoke in a low voice. “You got no call to be talking to us like that . . .”
“Well, that’s where you’re wrong, boy. Wrong again. That’s exactly how we’re supposed to talk to trash like you. Folks around here pay us to give you trouble. Trouble enough that ’boes like you will think twice before you come through these parts again, looking to steal chickens and rape sweet little girls.”
I spoke before D could say anything to make it worse. “Officer. Let’s be reasonable about this.” I didn’t have anything to prove with these jerkwater small-town cops. I just wanted to get around them and keep on heading for L.A. Save whatever hassling I could engineer for Identrope. “We’re not here to do any of that shit. Like I said before, we’re just passing through. You blink, and we’ll be gone. You won’t even see our backs.” All the time I was laying out my spiel, I was trying to spot a fallen tree branch or anything else I could use to get a lick in on these bastards, in case sweet-talking them didn’t work. Leave it to that jerk D to call into existence the absolute worst aspects of that whole Joadoid milieu. Why couldn’t he have pulled up something like a roadhouse with cold beer on credit and a jukebox stuffed with only slightly anachronistic Hank Williams songs?
The lead cop smiled at me. “That’s the way it really is?”
“No question about it.”
The smile soured. “Shut up. The only question we got is just how far my boot’s gonna fit up your ass, you sorry sonuvabitch.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw that D had balled up his fists hanging by his side; he squeezed them so hard that the knuckles looked as though they’d burst through the skin. He spoke through clenched teeth. “Mister, I’m telling ya . . . don’t talk to us like that . . .”
Both cops smiled as they got off their motorcycles. The lead cop’s partner pulled out a nightstick from a holder bolted underneath the tank, and slapped it across his palm.
I could see how this was shaping up. I stepped backward, debating in my head about when to break and run. The trick would be to find some place in this flat territory where these guys wouldn’t be able to catch up with us on their machines. Catch up with me, if I couldn’t grab D and get him to come along with me. He looked pissed off enough to take the cops on, but I couldn’t give him very good odds. If he got past the nightsticks, the cops still had the pieces strapped to their hips.
That was the last thing I wanted, for these two redneck enforcers to whip out and start firing. Getting the shit kicked out of me was one thing; I might always regain my power to shuffle bodies, and find a new one that still had most of its teeth and wasn’t pissing blood from fractured kidneys. Getting shot was a whole other matter. Out here, where nobody could see them, the cops could do what they wanted. If they wanted to tack up our perforated corpses on the nearest fence post as a warning to other transients, there wasn’t anyone to stop them.
The second cop grinned and advanced on me.
“Officer—I think there’s been a terrible misunderstanding here . . .” My heel caught on a tree root and I fell backward, landing hard against my shoulder blades, knocking the wind out of me. The cop loomed up huge in the dancing black spots of my vision.
“Hey!” D called out. “Get away from my buddy!”
I heard the lead cop’s sneering voice. “Just who the hell do you think you’re giving orders to?”
Pushing myself up on my elbows, I was able to raise my head; I raised my forearm, expecting the nightstick to come crashing down on it. Instead, I heard a strangled cry. I lowered my arm and saw the cop pawing at his suddenly bloodless face. His fingertips curved in as though he were trying to dig through to the bone underneath. His eyes were wide with fright.
I looked to the side and saw D standing rigid in place, head tilted back, the tendons in his neck straining. His wild gaze was locked on the second cop.
“Je
sus fucking Christ!” The lead cop’s shout broke the silence.
Something with tiny barbs dropped on my hand. I saw a black beetle crawling across the skin and convulsively flung it away.
Another beetle crawled out of the corner of the cop’s mouth. I watched it hang on his lip, before a flood of more insects swarmed over his tongue.
The cop dropped to his hands and knees in front of me as I scrabbled away. He lifted one hand to claw at his face; the flesh came apart like rotting cloth. His exposed teeth broke, splintering out of his gums.
His gut heaved as he vomited up more creatures, segmented worms writhing in the scattered pool of crawling things beneath him. His stomach hollowed back to his spine as the last of his internal organs blossomed in new scuttling forms from his mouth.
The cop rolled onto his back, hands fluttering above his half-skulled face. The lidless eyes watched as the fingers cracked at the joints, the tendons drawing into their own blind life.
A mercy when the eyes dimmed, the crest of his skull breaking open. Something crab-like peeked out, then scuttled back into the dark protection of the crumbling shell.
The empty uniform fluttered on the ground, as the last small creatures scurried from the sleeves. The leaves beneath the orange trees rustled as the beetles dug into the moist earth.
Over by D, the lead cop stood transfixed, his jaw locked open, his gaze frozen in horror.
I looked at D; his teeth were still clenched, his breath coming hard. He’d finished sucking the o-positive from the second cop, the one who’d made the mistake of pushing me around. All the cop’s reality-organizing ability had been consumed; his body hadn’t been able to maintain its encoding. It had been the n-formation disease’s multi-cancer stage compressed into a few seconds.
D had done that, and I’d never seen anything like it.
Everything I’d thought about him would have to be revised. It wasn’t a matter of whether he was powerful or not. It was a question of how powerful.
TWENTY-EIGHT
WHATEVER the extent of D’s power, there was definitely a limit to it at the moment. He’d gone pale and trembling, swaying as though he were about to pitch over.
The lead cop’s brain seemed to snap back into position. Whatever had happened to his partner, he knew who was responsible. “You fucking sonuvabitch—” He fumbled at the leather flap of his holster.
D made no attempt to defend himself. He turned an anguished face toward the cop, as though he would welcome the bullet in his chest.
That might have been fine by D, but I knew that once the cop started firing, he was likely to take out every living thing in range. And that included me. I was still kneeling a couple of feet away from where the second cop had dissolved into bugs; I dived for the holster hooked to the belt encircling the empty uniform.
The lead cop’s gaze snapped toward me as I came up with the revolver. Before he could swing the muzzle of his own gun around, I squeezed the trigger. The first shot hit him square in the breastbone, lifting him from his feet and sprawling him backward on the ground.
Blood bubbled from his mouth as I stood over him. I pumped in another round to make sure, then stepped over the body and walked over to D.
He didn’t look too good. He’d squatted down, head lowered as though to keep from passing out. His breath was heavy and labored.
“Hey, D—” I poked his shoulder with my empty hand. “How you doing?”
He glanced up at me—a little color had started to creep back into his face—and shook his head. “That was bad.” A low, mournful voice. “That was the worst it’s ever been.”
“Well, it’s over now.” I watched him sucking in one hard breath after another. He had dismayed himself with his own power. This must have been the first time he’d let it all out, his whole d-ranger ability; he’d sucked the one cop bone-dry of o-positive, and the result hadn’t been pretty. Complete cellular anarchy, all reality-organizing functions of the subject individual gone, while he’d still been alive and healthy—no wonder the bugs and planarians and other organisms he’d broken down into had been crawling around so fast. They’d still had a lot of life-force left in them; it just hadn’t been all stuck together into one human being any longer. I wondered if the cop’s crawling fragments had remained bugs and stuff, or if once out of sight, they’d broken down further into ants and sand fleas, then on into protozoa and microbes, germs and viruses. Maybe right at that moment there were preorganic molecules with the cop’s name written on them, wriggling through the leaf mulch and topsoil.
“It ain’t over.” D rubbed his pallid face. “Long as I’m alive. It’ll never be over.”
I left him to his dark mumbling and walked back over to the dead cop. It would have been a lot easier for us if D’s power hadn’t crapped out before he could have nailed this one, too. I stood looking down at the body. A corpse is always an inconvenient thing to have around; a police corpse is the ultimate in that respect. And this was one I had drilled myself. He was bound to have lots of buddies who wouldn’t be swayed much by my pleas of self-defense. They’d climb over each other to get a chance at blowing me away, and saving the local taxpayers all the expense of a trial. Cop-killing was traditionally a matter of instant justice. especially in a rural locale such as the one D and I had wandered into. If only D had been able to suck out this one’s o-positive as well; then there would have just been another empty uniform on the ground, and I’d have been off the hook.
I dragged the cop’s body off into the nearest stand of orange trees, and covered it with dry leaves. The other cop’s empty uniform I wadded up and stuffed into an irrigation pipe. Two motorcycles; I could handle one, but I was reasonably sure D wouldn’t know how. I rolled one into the orange grove and toppled it over.
The police-issue revolvers were another matter. Good to have a working piece handy again. Hard choice as to which of them was the more incriminating: the one that had belonged to the corpse under the trees or the one I’d killed him with. By the time I thought of that, though, there had been so much shuffling around that I’d lost track of which was which. For a moment I considered giving one of them to D, then decided against it. He was already enough of a loose cannon without piling on more firepower. I looked over my shoulder to make sure he wasn’t watching, then pitched the extra gun into the trees.
“Come on.” I pulled D up by the arm. “Let’s get going.”
The motorcycle’s seat was big enough for both of us, if I sat all the way forward. The engine coughed into life on the third kick. I shouted over the sputtering roar for D to climb on; he looked dubious for a moment, then did as he was told. I paddled the bike in a wide circle onto the road, then gunned it, heading west. D wrapped his arms around my waist, locking his fists together against my stomach.
We made good time, the miles rolling beneath us. But I started to get worried. The road led into increasing signs of civilization. The orange groves clustered thick to the asphalt’s edge were interspersed with telephone poles and a few entrance gates with mailboxes, dirt lanes leading back to houses of varying sizes. We hadn’t seen any cars or other vehicles yet, but we shot past one old woman weeding a knee-high garden with a hoe. She gave us a fish-eyed examination as we went by, then dropped the hoe—I could see her in the bike’s mirror—and headed toward her house. Probably to make a call, which meant trouble.
It was the motorcycle, I realized. With me and D on top of it. The black and white Harley-Davidson with the police department emblem on the side of the tank was a dead giveaway. It struck me now that I should have peeled the uniform off the dead cop—the other’s uniform had been already empty and ready to go, if it’d been given a shake to clear any remaining bugs out of the trousers—and disguised myself and D in them. Nobody would have taken much notice of two uniformed motorcycle cops flashing by, even riding double the way we were.
We’d have to ditch the bike. I hated to do that, but if the old lady had put the word out on us, it’d have to be done. And soon, b
efore we got into whatever small town lay up ahead of us. We’d probably also have to get off the road, where we could be spotted. I didn’t relish the notion of trying to cut cross-country, on foot through the orange groves, but I didn’t see any other choice.
Just as I was getting ready to slow down and stop, I spotted the solution. Some distance away, a freight train was moving along parallel to the road. I found a cutoff and went bouncing over the rough ground, D holding even more tightly to me, until I’d gained the smoother right-of-way alongside the railroad track. Gravel stones pinged against the motorcycle’s underside as I matched speed with the train.
“Listen up!” I shouted over the combined noise of the bike and the train engine up ahead. D craned his head forward so he could hear what I was saying. “Here’s what you gotta do. See the freight car next to us?”
I had pulled the bike alongside an empty car rattling along. D glanced over at it, then shouted into my ear. “Yeah—”
“I’m going to get as close as I can to it. You’re going to have to let go of me, then reach up there and grab those iron handholds by the door. Then pull yourself up and swing on inside the car.”
“What—? You’re out of your fuckin’ mind, fella!”
I jabbed my elbow back into his ribs. “Just do it. If you want to get your ass out of here—it’s the only way.” I swerved the bike closer to the train. “Goddamn it, get up there!”
In the bike’s mirror, I could see D reach for the lowest handhold. The bike tilted, nearly falling under the train’s wheels as D shifted his weight. With a sudden lurch, he sprawled himself against the side of the car. He kicked and managed to swing his feet up into the open door. He let go of the handholds and rolled into the car’s darkness. A moment later, he crawled out to the edge of the opening. “Now what?”
I took one hand from the bars and reached toward him. “Grab my hand. When I say, you pull me in. And don’t let go!” I stood up on the bike’s pegs. “Okay, now!”