“Okay! Let’s go!”
Didi caught her arm. “One other thing! She could be waiting for us in there!” She nodded toward the monsters of the Dinosaur Gardens. “Watch your ass!”
They went on, following Mary Terror’s tracks through mounds of snow as high as their knees. The brutal wind howled into their faces and stung them with bits of ice. They passed between dinosaurs, snow caught on the curves of the mountainous spines and foot-long icicles hanging from the jaws like vampire fangs. It had occurred to Didi that she didn’t know how many bullets remained in the Magnum automatic. Two had been fired in the inn; the gun probably held four or five if the magazine had been full. But shooting at Mary would be playing Russian roulette with David, a fact that Laura already feared. Even a shot at Mary’s legs might go wild and hit him. If I were Mary, Didi thought, I’d find a place to set up an ambush. We’ve got the inn’s lights behind us and the wind in our faces. But there was no choice but to follow the trail, and both Didi and Laura saw black spots of blood on the snow.
The furrow Mary had left behind her curved toward a tableau of dinosaurs frozen in an attitude of combat, fangs bared and claws swiping the air. The road wasn’t too far beyond it. There was no sign of Mary but the trail, and snow was already blowing over it. Didi didn’t like the looks of the dinosaur tableau; Mary could be hiding behind any one of the statues. She stopped, and grabbed Laura’s shoulder to stop her, too. “I don’t want to go through here!” she said. “Go around it!”
Laura nodded and started walking to the right of the monsters, heading for the road. Didi was two paces behind, her shoulders hunched against the wind and her body starting to shiver uncontrollably. Ice chips struck her cheeks, and she turned her head slightly to the left to protect her eyes.
That was when she saw the figure stand up from behind the tail of one of the thunder lizards, about a dozen feet away.
The big woman’s face was ghastly white, snowflakes snagged in her hair. Didi could see the shine of the Silver Cloud Inn’s lights in her eyes, a glint of light leaping like an electric spark from the yellow Smiley Face button on her sweater. Mary held a bundle in the crook of her left arm, her right arm outstretched and the revolver at the end of it. The gun was pointed at Laura, who hadn’t yet seen the danger.
Didi had an instant of gut-wrenching terror, and she realized exactly how Mary had earned her name. Mary’s expression was a white blank, without triumph or anger: just the sure knowledge of who held the upper hand.
Didi’s shout would be lost in the wind. There was no time for anything else. She threw herself at Laura, hitting her with a solid shoulderblock, and at the same instant she heard Mary’s gun go off: crackcrack.
Laura went down on her stomach into the snow. Didi felt the bite of a bullet at her throat, and something hit her in the chest like the kick of a mule. The pain choked her, her finger spasming on the Magnum’s trigger and the bullet going up into the sky. Then Laura had twisted her body, and as Mary fired again, snow kicked up where she’d been a second before. Laura saw the woman standing there, behind the dinosaur’s tail, and she had an instant to make her decision. She took aim and pulled the automatic’s trigger.
The bullet hit its mark: not Mary Terror, but the larger target of the dinosaur’s gray-scaled hip. Chips of concrete flew up, and Mary dodged behind the monster’s body. Laura got up and threw herself against the shelter of a stegosaurus’s concrete-plated back. She looked at Didi, who lay on her side. Darkness was spreading around her. Laura started to crawl back to her friend, but she was stopped short when a bullet hit one of the dinosaur’s spine plates next to her head and ricocheted off with a scream.
On her knees, Mary fumbled in her shoulder bag for the box of .38 shells she’d taken from the dead man’s gun cabinet. Her fingers were stiffening up and slick with icy blood. She got two more bullets into the revolver and lost two into the snow. But she was freezing, her strength going fast, and she knew she couldn’t stay out in this cold much longer. Benedict Bedelia was down, the other bitch behind cover. Getting to the Cherokee was going to be tough, but it had to be done. There was no other way out.
It was time to get moving, before her legs were useless. She fired another shot at Laura, the bullet knocking a second chunk off the stegosaurus’s hide, and then she stood up with Drummer and began to struggle toward the road again.
Laura peered out from her refuge and saw Mary limping through the snow. “Stop!” she shouted. “STOP!” The wind took her voice, and she stepped out from cover and aimed her pistol at the other woman’s back.
She had a vision of the bullet passing through Mary’s body and ripping into David. She lifted her gun and fired it into the air. “STOP!” she screamed, her throat raw. Mary didn’t look back; she kept going with a crippled but determined stride through the white drifts.
Laura started after her. Three strides and she stopped, the gun hanging at her side. She looked at Didi, lying in a black pool. Then at Mary again, the figure drawing steadily away. Back to Didi, steam swirling up from the blood.
She turned toward Didi, walked to her side, and knelt down.
Didi’s eyes were open. A creeper of blood spilled from her mouth, her face plastered with snow. She was still breathing, but it was a terrible sound. Laura looked at Mary, limping away with Drummer in her arms, about to leave the Dinosaur Gardens and reach the road.
One of Didi’s hands rose up like a dying bird, and clutched the front of Laura’s shoplifted sweater.
Didi’s mouth moved. A soft groan emerged, taken quickly by the wind. Laura saw Didi’s other hand twitch, the fingers grasping at the pocket of her jeans. There was a message in Didi’s pain-shocked eyes, something she wanted Laura to understand. Didi’s fingers kept clawing at the pocket with fading strength.
The pocket. Something in Didi’s pocket.
Laura carefully worked her hand into it. She found the car keys and a folded piece of paper, and she brought them out together. Unfolding the paper, she made out the cracked bell of the Liberty Motor Lodge. The distant lights of the Silver Cloud Inn helped her see the names of the three men written on it, above a Smiley Face.
Didi pulled her close, and Laura bent her head down.
“Remember,” Didi whispered. “He’s…mine, too.”
Didi’s hand let go of the sweater.
Laura knelt in the snow, beside her sister. At last she lifted her head, and looked toward the road.
Mary Terror was gone.
Perhaps two minutes passed. Laura realized Didi was no longer breathing. Her eyes were filling up with snow, and Laura closed them. It wasn’t a hard thing to do.
Somewhere the bells of freedom were ringing.
Laura put the piece of paper into her pocket and stood up, the gun and keys in her hand. Streaks of ice were on her face, but her heart was an inferno. She began to trudge away from the dead woman, after the walking dead who had her baby. The wind hit her, tried to knock her legs out from under her, spat snow in her face, and wrenched her hair.
She walked faster, pushing through the snow like a hard-eyed engine. In another moment she roused up everything within her that could still pump out heat and she began to run. The snow grabbed at her ankles, tripped her up, and sent her sprawling. Pain tore through her broken hand, the bandages dangling down. Laura got up again, fresh tears on her face. There was no one left to hear her crying. Her companion now was agony.
She kept going, plowing the snow aside, her body shivering and her jeans and sweater and face wet, her hair white beyond her years, and the beginnings of new lines at the corners of her eyes.
She kept going because there was no going back.
Laura left the snowfield and the Dinosaur Gardens, where the prehistoric creatures were frozen for all time, and she started down the road to the car that would now carry a solitary traveler.
5
Fight the Furies
IN THE WARMTH OF THE CHEROKEE, MARY’S BLADDER LET GO.
The wet heat
soaked into the seat beneath her hips and thighs. All she could think of was another song from the memory vault: “MacArthur Park,” and all that sweet green icing flowing down. She was backing the Cherokee down the mountain road, the tires skidding left and right. The feeling was returning to her hands now, the prickling of a thousand hot needles. Her face felt as if several layers of flesh had been flayed off, and the blood on her jeans had frozen into a shine. Her right hand was streaked with crimson, the fingers twitching their nerve-damage dance. Drummer was still crying, but she let him sing; he was alive, and he was hers.
The Cherokee’s rear end bashed into one of the abandoned cars on the roadside. She got the vehicle straightened out again, and in another moment metal shrieked as the Cherokee skidded over to the right and grazed a station wagon. Then she had reached the bottom of the road, and she turned the Cherokee toward I-80, the heater buzzing but the cold still latched deep in her lungs. She found a sign that pointed to I-80 West, and she turned onto the entrance ramp, the snow swirling like underwater silt before her lights. Blocking her way was another big flashing sign: STOP ROAD CLOSED. But there was no pig car this time, and Mary plowed the Cherokee through the snow on the right shoulder and got back on the ramp.
It made a long, snow-slick curve onto I-80 that Mary took at a crawl. And then she was on the interstate, the pig car at the McFadden exit a quarter mile behind her. She slowly let the speed wind up to forty miles an hour, the highway ascending under her wheels. Snow was still coming down hard, the wind a fierce beast. She was on her way across the Rockies.
Less than ten minutes after Mary had turned onto I-80, a rust-eaten Cutlass with one eye made the ramp’s curve and came after her.
The icy tears were thawing on Laura’s face. She was wired, her pulse racing. One hand was clenched firmly on the wheel, the elbow of her other arm helping steer. The single working wiper was making a shrill whining noise as it pushed the snow away, and Laura feared the wiper motor might be about to burn out. The Cutlass was climbing, the highway ahead waxy with ice. She kept her speed between thirty and thirty-five, and she prayed to God that Mary was still alert enough not to go off the road. Mary was badly hurt and half frozen, just like her. Under the bandages, Laura’s mangled hand was a swollen blaze. Her body had reached and passed its threshold of pain, and now she was going on sheer willpower and Black Cats. She was still going because tears wouldn’t get David back, and neither would she get her son by crawling into a corner and surrendering. She had come too far now to give up. She’d left her friend behind, in the snow. Mary Terror had another sin to pay for.
The wind thrashed at the Cutlass, and the car’s frame moaned like a human voice. Laura stared straight ahead, unblinking, into the storm. She was looking for red tail-lights, but there was nothing but snow and darkness beyond. The highway was curving to the right, still ascending. The tires slid over a sheet of ice and Laura’s heart stuttered, but then the tires gripped pavement again. The wiper motor’s whine had gotten louder, and that frightened Laura more than the ice. If the wiper failed, she was finished until the storm ended. Now the road began to descend and curve to the left, and Laura had to ease on the brake. The tires slipped once more, the Cutlass sliding over almost to the median’s ice-crusted guardrail before she regained control. Sheets of snow that looked solid were flailing at the windshield, and again the highway climbed. A gust of wind hit the Cutlass like a punch from the left, the wheel shivering in her grip.
She had to go on even if she was making only ten miles an hour. She had to go on until the wiper motor burned out and the snow closed in. The only thing in her life that mattered worth a damn anymore was holding her son in her arms, and she would fight the furies every mile of the way if that’s what had to be done.
Ahead, Mary had slowed the Cherokee. The road had leveled off, and snowdrifts four and five feet high stood on this section of I-80. The winds were beating at the Cherokee from both sides, their noise like banshee wails. Mary threaded a path between the drifts, her tires spinning on ice and then catching again. The Cherokee suddenly got away from her and fishtailed, and she fought the wheel, but there was nothing she could do. The entire vehicle made a slow spin and crunched into a snowdrift. She powered the Cherokee through it, the engine straining. Thirty more yards, and the drifts were all around her, some of them sculpted to eight feet high. She kept going, trying to find a path through them, but she had to stop again because the snowdrifts were up to the hood and would not be bullied.
She looked in the rearview mirror. Darkness upon darkness. Where was the bitch? Still back at the Silver Cloud Inn? Or on the highway? The bitch was a fighter, but she wasn’t crazy enough to try to cross the Rockies in a blizzard. No, that kind of insanity was Mary’s domain.
She wasn’t going anywhere for a while. There was plenty of gas in the tank. The heater was all right. In a couple of hours dawn would break. Maybe in the light she could find a way out of this.
Mary pulled up the emergency brake, then switched off the headlights and the wipers. Within seconds the windshield was covered over. She let the engine idle, and she picked up Drummer. He was through crying, but now he was making mewling hungry noises. She reached for her bag and the baby’s formula. The acidic smell of urine drifted to her: Drummer had joined her in wetting himself. Hell of a place to change a diaper, she thought, but she was a mother now, and such things had to be done. She glanced in the rearview mirror again. Still nothing. The bitch had stayed at the Silver Cloud with Benedict Bedelia. The shots would’ve hit Laura Clayhead if Didi hadn’t gotten in the way. They’d been good shots, the both of them. She didn’t know exactly where Didi had been hit, but she didn’t think Didi was going to be chasing anybody for a while.
Two miles behind the Cherokee, Laura heard a grinding noise. It went on for ten seconds, and then the wiper stopped. Snow blanked the windshield. “Damn it!” Laura shouted as she eased pressure on the brake. The car began to skid, first to the left and then back to the right, turning and sliding sideways along I-80. Laura’s nerves were screaming, but all she could do was brace herself for a collision. At last the Cutlass straightened out, began to respond to the brake, and rolled to a slippery halt.
Her traveling was over until the snow stopped. There was nothing to do but pull up the emergency brake and turn off the headlight. The heater was rattling, but it was pumping out warm air. There was a little more than a half tank of gas. She could survive for a few hours.
In the darkness Laura forced herself to breathe slowly and deeply, trying to calm down. Mary might get away from her, but she knew Mary’s destination. Mary wasn’t going to be driving very fast or far in this storm. She might even pull off I-80 and try to sleep. The important thing was to get to Freestone before Mary and find Jack Gardiner, if indeed he was one of the three men on Didi’s list.
The wind shrieked like discordant violin notes around the Cutlass. Laura leaned her head back and closed her eyes. The image of Didi’s face came to her: not the face of the woman who lay dying in the snow, but her face as she worked carefully on the splints for Laura’s hand. She saw Didi in the pottery workshop, showing the items that had been created from a tormented mind. And then she saw Didi’s face as the woman might have looked when she was much younger, a teenager in a black-and-white high school yearbook picture, something from the late sixties. Didi was smiling, her hair sprayed and flipped up on the ends and her face freckled and healthy-looking with a little farmgirl chub in her cheeks. Her eyes were clear, and they gazed toward the future from a place where murder and terror did not live.
The picture began to fade.
Laura let it go, and she slept in the arms of the storm.
The tasks of a mother done, Mary put Drummer on the passenger seat and zipped up the parka around him again. For a few minutes she brooded on the distance she had yet to go—two hundred miles across Utah, then into Nevada for more than three hundred miles, passing through Reno into California, down to Sacramento, and then through the Napa
Valley toward Oakland and San Francisco. Have to buy more diapers and formula for Drummer. Have to get some pain pills and something to keep me awake. She still had plenty of money from her mother’s ring and forty-seven dollars and some change she’d taken from Rocky Road’s house. She would have to change her jeans before she went into a store, and getting her swollen thigh into fresh denim was going to be a job. She had another pair of gloves somewhere in her belongings, so she could hide her bloodied hand. How long would it be before the pigs got on her case? Not very long, she figured. Have to haul ass when she got over the mountains, maybe find a place to lay low until the heat passed.
She couldn’t deal with these things right now. Her fever had returned, her body a raw pulse, and she realized she was fading fast. She found the baby’s face in the dark, kissed his forehead, and then reclined the driver’s seat back. She closed her eyes and listened to the wind. God’s voice was in it, singing “Love Her Madly” to her. Mary heard only the first verse, and then she was asleep.
6
A Harley Man
TAP TAP.
“Lady?”
Tap tap. “Lady, you okay?”
Laura woke up, the effort as tough as swimming through glue. She got her eyes open, and she saw the man in a hooded brown parka beside her window.
“You okay?” he asked again, his face long-jawed and ruddy in the cold.
Laura nodded. The movement made the muscles of her neck and shoulders awaken and rage.
“Got some coffee.” The man was holding a thermos. He lifted it in invitation.
Laura rolled her window down. She realized suddenly that the wind had died. A few small snowflakes were still falling. The gray sky was streaked with pearly light, and by its somber glow Laura could see the huge white mountain ranges that marched along I-80. The man poured some coffee into the thermos’s cup, gave it to her, and she downed it gratefully. In another life she might have wished for Jamaican Blue Mountain; now any pot-boiled brew was delicious if it got her engine running.
The Monster Novels: Stinger, the Wolf's Hour, and Mine Page 159