Thalo Blue

by Jason McIntyre

  “I want...you...” It was an equally pitched response.

  Malin had regained her senses. The shock had either dissipated or simply lessened enough for her to regain some clarity. Or perhaps it was now a loss of clarity from which she suffered. As those words, I want YOU, rolled out of the stained spot of the Druid’s mouth, she leaned forward in one gesture and pressed her fists down on the steering wheel’s horn, sounding it in one long screeching blast. The Druid was stunned. Zeb a little also. The Druid squinted his eyes and shook his head ever so slightly. She began screaming for help and Zeb found himself joining her, though somewhere deep below his throat he knew it to be nearly useless. Other houses on large lots thick with foliage were much too far away. And tucked neatly away inside this garage, within the cab of a rather well-built sport coupe—the notion that someone may hear them at all seemed entirely implausible.

  The Druid slid backwards across the hood and then came at them pummeling fists once again on the coupe’s casing and across its front window. He was screaming for her to stop. She wouldn’t. She changed her cries for help to swears at him and she kept firing off small blasts of the horn, then long ones, then more and more. He hammered at the spot on the window above her face until she either realized the uselessness of the yelling and the horn-blowing or found herself intimidated. Zeb knew it was likely not the latter.

  But panic was rising in her. He could feel it. Just as he could feel the closeness of the coupe’s cab again. There was a choking sensation rising in his throat too. And it only got worse.

  The Druid slid from the car’s hood again, and his grimace of disgust was lost for a moment as he turned away. He removed the brown drop cloth which lay sloppily over the R65 motorcycle at the front of the car. Malin let out a worried question that was echoing inside Zeb, “...what’s he doing...?”

  Not a chance. Zeb shut his eyes and tried to imagine that key hook by the telephone. Oh no. Not a chance. Please tell me—Was the motorcycle key there with the ones for the Beemer? He couldn’t remember. He didn’t know.

  But as the brown cloth came from its spot shrouding the R65 he saw in that moment what he had hoped not to see: the key, gleaming on its small rabbit foot chain. Sitting already in the ignition of the bike.

  “...It’s touchy, Malin,” he tried to reassure. “He won’t get it started...”

  He could hear the panic in his own voice.

  After eying the machine, the Druid turned the key and pressed a finger against the starter button. Nothing.

  Zeb heard a small breath of relief escape from Malin. Both of them were leaning forward. His hands were still gripping the wheel.

  But the Druid wouldn’t give up so easily. He mounted the bike awkwardly with his nuisance leg barely able to bend. He straddled it, and tried the kick start in a contorting downward fall. Zeb stopped breathing. But the attempt was limp, weak, useless. He still had that brace on his leg and it was hindering him. Still no response from the bike.

  The Druid leapt off. And this time, balancing the bike with his left arm, he jumped on the starter bar with his left foot. The engine roared to life.

  That throttle wasn’t set though. Oliver could never get it to behave and, like those summer days, the engine’s revs soared. It was an ear-splitting howl, particularly in the small closed space of the garage. Even behind the glass of the coupe, Malin and Zeb shrunk back, clapping their hands to their ears.

  But the roar didn’t seem to bother the Druid

  He resettled on the bike, removed the kickstand, and eased it backwards a short distance, so the tail pipes where pointing directly at the grill of the Ci coupe. They poured out gray clouds of billowing starkness.

  “...He’s trying to smoke us out...,” Zeb finally said.

  But over the engine’s bawl, Malin couldn’t hear him.

  <> <> <>

  Zeb’s initial worry was that their leather coffin was going to get cold for them before too long. He already saw opaque breath from his own lips and from Malin’s. He took her hand and felt that it was freezing. She was shivering, though whether that was from shock or the cold could be up for debate.

  Out of the blue, however, the temperature seemed like a far-off threat now. Nearly as though it was the least of their worries. Even a laughable consideration.

  Now it was the scent of engine exhaust. And with the throttle so high on the R65, and the Druid making no attempt to adjust it, the little monster was pouring thick, acrid death from its guts at an obscene pace. It was already so dense inside the garage, beyond the windows, that Zeb could hardly make out where the man had gone. But he caught sight of him again, standing at the doorway which was now open. He had his light colored shirt pulled up over his nose and mouth and his head hung on that broken swivel. But his eyes were settled on Zeb through the fog. They seemed like glowing bulbs in the dark.

  At the front corner of the car, the bike’s lithe body shook and bucked. It was a quaking animal, trying to break out of itself. The roar of it was inside their heads, irrepressible.

  “...How much gas do you think it has...?” Malin yelled at him.

  “...I’m sorry, Malin...I have no idea...” His neck and shoulder where bruising stood out prominently had begun to ache and the torn muscles again held the constant burning he first felt when the curtains of his hospital room beamed orange in the middle of the darkness. His heart was still striking his insides like it was trying to get out and now it actually felt like it was hurting as well. Even his ankle where the Druid had latched on to him felt like a stricture of hot metal was wrapped around it. He searched in his pocket for the small paper bag which held his little white pain pills. He tore it open when he found it, popped the vial’s plastic cap and downed three of them. He didn’t know how much good they would do. Both he and Malin could already smell the exhaust inside the cab. They would die with warm bodies.

  The tank of the BMW bike could have been empty or full or somewhere in between. He didn’t have a decent guess. There could be a full tank of gas and a full reserve too, for all he knew. There was a red canister in the shed that Oliver would occasionally carry to the gas station and refill and presumably he would add it to the R65’s tank when it was needy. To wonder if the man topped it off each time was to sit and count useless variables while a clock ticked in an ear without mercy.

  He wished, among the billowing cloud and the howling engine of the jittering creature, that it would just quit. That maybe a piece would snap somewhere inside and the thing would die. But, no, Oliver was much too thorough. Along with his meticulous numbers, he was scrupulous with all other things. That engine would survive until it was starved of fuel. Another wretched and unforgiving variable.

  The haze looked yellow now and he shut his eyes for a moment, anticipating that it would not be that color when they opened. But it was. And it swirled around itself with patches of pale orange. The two colors where lovers, wrestling as one.

  Zeb was not sure, but he thought he could actually see miniature furls of exhaust seeping from the dashboard vents. And like the miasma beyond the glass, these creepy crawlers were a shade of putrid yellow as well. He reached out his hands and snapped all the vents on the dash closed—or as tightly closed as they went. That disintegrated the lot of them. For a moment.

  Then he pulled his own shirt up over his nose and mouth, partly to cover the stench and partly, he thought, to filter some of the actual poison out. He again looked through the windshield at the Druid who still stood at the doorway, but now a little further back. Malin began to cough. It worsened and he too was caught in horrible wracking hacks. His attention was caught again by the Druid who had now stepped entirely into the yard and shut the door in front of him. Now the only part of him visible through door’s pane of glass were his shoulders and face, making him appear as a floating deity among the swelling whirl of noxious gas spinning in nonsensical funhouse shades.

  The roar of the engine, it was apple cobbler at a summer picnic. And the smell of the exhaust, it w
as trumpets, lots of trumpets, in Vaughan Collegiate’s auditorium. The fall band performance.

  Strange to imagine, Zeb thought to himself. The lunacy was real, yet it made no sense. Like his bedroom before, there really was no way out of the garage. Yet he had still not given up hope.

  <> <> <>

  Malin Holmsund couldn’t taste the baked apples, couldn’t hear the melancholy of the brass. But she could still reason soundly. It was either the sight of the Druid standing a little further away or the knowledge that they would each pass out before long that had forced her upon her new inspiration. Like Zeb, she had not given up. It was a stubbornness they shared but neither one knew about. With the howling of the motorcycle, they could barely think, let alone communicate to each other.

  They had been looking to one another among cough-riddled breathing and their expressions through peering eyes said something similar to, what can we do?

  Her thoughts were consumed with that cell phone of hers laying in the living room. She had paraphrased before. It had been in her purse, but she removed it to call her department head in Houston as she and Zeb were standing there surveying the damage. That had been not twenty-five minutes earlier. But, holding the phone to her ear, she quickly remembered that it was Sunday and the supervisor would not be in his office. She laid it down, absently, on top of her purse which rested on the seat of a deep tan recliner in the front corner of the room nearest the plywood sheet of the front door. She would only need to reach it—that was the trick. Getting to it before the Druid got to her. After that life became considerably easier. Stored in the memory function of it was an autodial for 9-1-1. All she had to do was get to it and hit two keys, the memory button, and the number one and help would be on the way.

  But what really got her attention were the contents of her purse. The phone was vital, but the other items of which she now thought of would save her life when the Druid inevitably stormed after her.

  She moved a little closer to Zeb, suppressing her coughs as best she could. Zeb detected the Druid stepping closer to the door as she did so, perhaps even resting his hand on the knob.

  Being closer didn’t necessitate yelling as loud. Neither she nor Zeb had much air left to do that. But if the Druid thought they were concocting a scheme it removed any added touch of convenience they once had.

  She shared her plan. He said he should be the one to make the attempt. And she insisted that if they traded spots inside the car so he could jump out the passenger side door, that would give the Druid extra time to realize they were getting ready to try something. Plus, he was still recovering from his last encounter with this attacker. With his condition, she believed she could get to the cell faster and was more familiar with it. The kitchen telephone would have been closer by about seven paces but it lay in plastic shards on the linoleum. And the only other land lines upstairs were in the bedroom and the back den—both of which were further away than hers, which was in the living room.

  He agreed, tortured by the agony consuming his chest. They were both gasping and sputtering between exchanges and Malin found her eyes were stinging. Zeb’s were red and began closing involuntarily. He wanted her to be careful but bit himself back from being overly protective; she was her own woman. And clearly a strong one. Perhaps she was stronger than him. He might not have even dared this plan...He made her promise him just the same that she would grab the cell and head directly for the rear kitchen door. Sprint as fast as you can, he said. Across the yard there’s a break in the back fence in the east corner into Mr. and Mrs. Johnson’s yard. Hit the ground running. And don’t you look back.

  She promised.

  And she left.

  <> <> <>

  Shaking uncontrollably, Malin couldn’t get breath into her lungs. The moment the passenger door swung open she thought the world would fall away from her vision. This was already more difficult than she had anticipated.

  She was on the first step when the garage’s back door sprang open. The passenger door of the coup dropped closed again with its familiar latching sound. Both she and Zeb had decided he would probably try to get at him in lieu of grabbing hold of her, but would move into the house after her once he was certain that Zeb remained inside the car. He couldn’t let police arrive before he had what he...wanted.

  Malin burst through the door, letting it fall flimsily behind her. To her, it felt like an excruciatingly slow movement and her lungs ached. The Druid, full up with more or less clean air, caught her straight away. Through the garage’s doorway, the noise and the haste, and to the set of wooden steps he came. He fell across the steps reaching out after her and, like he had done to Zeb, managed to latch a revolting grope on to an ankle. She tumbled down the hall, her arms outstretched, across the stack of metal paint tubes and brushes and three or four stretched canvases. The acrid smoke spilled into the house above her and she found herself, breathless, clawing forward.

  Zeb had launched himself into the passenger seat when Malin had jumped forth into the cloudy air of the garage. In his sight a shot of purplish-black spun around and he thought he was about to pass out. The vision of the Druid coming through that door, and the clownish fog parting around him, was lost for a second. He put his head down and let out a few rough hacks.

  When he looked back up through the passenger window, the hazy view was of the Druid laying face first across the steps, across the threshold and halfway into the hallway. His arm was snapped tight at Malin’s ankle. With instinct overpowering logic, Zeb threw open the door of the coupe, letting the lip of it smash violently against the Druid’s braced leg. Druid let out a yowl that registered nearly as silence compared to the swarm in Zeb’s head—still provided by the jerking R65 in front of the car’s hood. But it caused the Druid to lose his clench on Malin, whom Zeb saw through the haze, leaping back to her feet and racing down the hall out of view. The Druid turned round and seized upon the door behind which Zeb sat hacking and wheezing. He had pulled it closed quicker than he thought himself capable of, and the Druid only banged against it powerless. His open hand smacked the glass and Zeb could see in his face in exasperated, passionless pain. A look of dreadful condemnation was emblazoned upon him as he turned back toward the house’s doorway. Back towards Malin yet again.

  Zeb thought he was going to puke. That he was going to puke, then pass out, and that would be then end of it.

  Summoning from somewhere deep down inside, maybe the same bright dime-sized particle that had pulled him out of the icy precipice-spot the last time this creature had threatened to steal him away, Zeb forced a fine line of focus back into sight. At the moment he knew for certain that the Druid was in the house, he took one last weak gasp of sickening air, closed his eyes, and launched himself back out the driver’s side of the car. He reached clumsily and flicked the motorcycle’s ignition key to stop, silencing the riotous brute instantaneously. Emptiness filled his ears and it felt like a furor. He tucked himself between the hot engine and the coupe and lunged for the back doorway.

  Bursting through it, half-expecting the Druid to be on the other side, his eyes made contact with the far corner of the yard where the path to the Johnson’s was. But his knees buckled four or five steps out, just beyond the edge of shadow dropped by the roofline of the house. In his tumbling sight the great oak tree looked on with an ostensible stillness—even a mocking chagrin—and the sun—and all-touching, all-demanding presence—gazed from a point far lower in the west than when they had arrived at the house. How much time had they been trapped inside the mouth of the Beemer coupe?

  With cold feet inside shoes that felt like hard blocks of plaster, he lost grip on the patchy track-laden snow where forms of footsteps from weeks before had congealed to icy ridges. He collapsed to the snow, kicking up crystal-white powder, and feeling the sting of it on his face and hands.

  As a clamor rose from beyond the walls of the house he thought he would pass out for certain. Malin had not made it to the corner of the yard. The kitchen’s door stood clo
sed.

  <> <> <>

  When Malin had announced by e-mail to her childhood friend, Alexa, that she had gotten a position with a division of the Houston Police Department, Alexa had sent her friend a package by airmail. A congratulatory card outlining several lewd uses for a prophylactic was accompanied by an absurd and ridiculous collection of gifts more suited to a ladies’ stagette than a new position with the police. But that was Alexa’s style. Her sense of humor could be considered, at best, off-color.

  Every item in the present, however, had a relevance to their friendship. Alexa and Malin had a running in-joke through high school that each of them would lope off and marry a handsome police or naval officer and the gag grew into its own living being, getting carried further and further away. Eventually, as if to top its own hilarity, the story was that both girls would be so engrossed in their work that they wouldn’t have time to date that tall dark and handsome man in uniform. Once they found a suitable candidate—which, in itself seemed laborious and impossible—they would have to settle for ignoring the usual courtship, cuffing him, reading him his Miranda rights, and having an ordained man of the cloth paged to begin the ceremony by way of a forced signature from the groom.

  In Malin’s box of loot from dear Alexa was a petite set of official police handcuffs with a note attached reading, Go get him, girl...in Swedish.

  And for some reason, Malin—who was not so much fearful as she was distantly wary of being accosted in the dark streets of downtown Houston—had tossed the metal cuffs into her purse. And there they had stayed. Under the leather wall of it they sat now, beneath the cell phone, and beside a can of once-tried pepper spray. A girl has got to look out for herself.

  As the Druid came through the mouth of the west hallway like a train jumping a set of tracks, Malin was near the entry to the kitchen. She let fly a pungent stream of the spray can directly into his face, just as the comprehension of what she was holding became clear to him. The bellow of pain, as it streaked through his eyes and in his nostrils, united with his false steps to fashion a forward blind stagger in the direction of where he thought she was still standing. In his confusion and maddeningly loud cry of anguish, the heels of his hands went directly to his eyes in search of relief from the burn and sting. He hit the wall to his left, bashing a hole in the dry wall, and as a flailing wrist went instinctively to his face she managed to clasp one loop of Alexa’s handcuffs around it. She dragged him by the solitary hand, closed-eyed, tearing and red in the face, three steps forward into the kitchen. He stumbled and fell forward, still shouting at her.