Last Gasp

by Trevor Hoyle

  Yes, much worse, like a direct reproach from God. The planet had been entrusted to mankind, given into its care, and in just a few thousand years out of a four-and-a-half-billion-year history the species had succeeded brilliantly in transforming a paradise into a cesspool.

  They were on highway 50 in the heart of the Humboldt Forest. Up ahead a white-lettered green sign announced a small town, and Chase pointed it out with a grin. The town was called Ruth.

  After studying the route, Chase had provisionally picked out a spot to camp overnight between Austin and Frenchman, somewhere along Railroad Pass. If possible he wanted to keep clear of towns, in fact any places of habitation. With the continuing exodus northward he guessed that the locals would be suspicious and perhaps hostile to strangers. Neither could he rule out the possibility that there were shanty settlements of immigrants from the southern states.

  But most of all he wanted to avoid Reno, the only place of any size between them and Goose Lake. Apart from its reputation as a vacation resort and onetime divorce capital, he knew nothing about the city. But he mistrusted all cities, suspecting that that was where the frayed edges of civilization began to show first. In the backwoods there was only nature in the raw to contend with, whereas cities compressed the madness and hysteria into a volatile mixture that could explode at any moment with unpredictable results.

  Thus far on the journey they had seen only a few other vehicles, so presumably the main interstate highways running due north were carrying the bulk of the traffic.

  A couple of miles past Eureka (one of dozens of remote outposts with that name west of Kansas City, he supposed), they ran into the first real sign of trouble. It was midafternoon and Chase was silently congratulating himself on their unhindered progress when they came down a long sweeping curve out of the shadow of Pinto Summit into bright sunshine to find a truck, farm tractor and two patched-up cars with smeared windshields strung across the road.

  Ruth got a grip on the rifle and was about to hoist it when Chase motioned with the palm of his hand, warning her not to make any sudden moves that might be misinterpreted.

  He shifted down into second and brought the jeep to a halt about ten yards away. There were five men lounging about, all clad in farmer’s dungarees, two of them cradling shotguns in their brawny arms. One of the others was holding a thick pine stave in his right hand, which he thwacked menacingly into his left.

  As casually as he could Chase unzipped the pocket of his Wind-breaker. The butt of the automatic was hidden but within easy reach.

  The men were rough-looking, unshaven, their eyes slitted against the sunlight. Hard to tell whether they were God-fearing, public-spirited citizens or mean sons of bitches with something nasty in mind. The two men with shotguns ambled to either side of the road to cover the jeep while the man with the stave came forward, a grimy Stetson-style straw hat tipped forward so that the curled brim almost rested on his sunburned nose.

  Chase took off his dark glasses, feeling that more amicable contact could be made if the man could see his eyes.

  “Real pleasant day fer a ride.” The man had stopped a few feet away, his scratched red boots spread in an indolent stance on the blacktop. The greeting might have been innocuous enough, though Chase was uneasily aware of the double meaning it contained. “What ya got back yonder?” The soiled hat brim nodding toward the back of the jeep.

  “Camping gear.” Chase hesitated and then said, “We’re driving up to Oregon. This lady is a doctor. We’re on our way to treat a sick friend.” The man tapped his palm with the stave jerkily, as if to the beat of a metronome that only he could hear. “What kind of speech d’ya call that?”

  “Speech?” Chase frowned.

  “That—what ya call it?—ack-cent of your’n. Where ya from, mister?”

  “I’m English.”

  “An’ you’re goin’ up to Oregon,” the man said in a mocking tone, “to help a sick friend.”

  Chase moved his hands from the wheel and placed them, fingers spread, on his thighs. Ruth was sitting tensely in the seat beside him, her fingers wrapped around the burnished blue gun barrel.

  “Would you mind telling us why you’ve blocked the road?” Chase said.

  “Jest passin’ the time of day.” The man smiled without opening his lips. “Never know who’ll happen along.”

  “Are you from around here?”

  The man grinned, revealing a sliver of red gums. “I really dig that ack-cent. It’s right dandy. Ain’t that what you English say?”

  “No, it’s what you Americans say. Listen, we have to move on. What I’m telling you is the—”

  But the man ignored him and walked around to Ruth’s side of the jeep and stood looking at her from underneath the brim of his hat. It was difficult to see his eyes properly, but they could tell that he was taking everything in: her dark windblown hair and thickly lashed eyes, the wrinkled open vee of her shirt exposing her white throat and the slopes of her breasts swelling and falling as she tried to control her breathing, the blue denims molded to hips and thighs.

  After his inspection he moved his eyes lazily up to her face again. “So you’re a lady doctor, huh?”

  “That’s right. And my friend has just asked you why you’re blocking the road. Would you mind telling us why? This isn’t some kind of game. Please move those vehicles so that we can drive on.”

  The man settled himself more firmly on the blacktop, legs wide apart. “Well, since you ask so polite, lady, I’ll tell ya,” he said conversationally. “We stop all kinds along this here stretch. Weirdos, acid-heads, crazies, mutes, the halt, the lame, and the blind. An’ what we do is this: We take what we find an’ have a little fun at the same time—harmless fun, that is, nuthin’ to it. But as you can see we’re simple folks and we like to enjoy ourselves once in a while with all the human dung that passes by. All them that’ve used up their own sweet air and fresh water. We reckon as how we’ve a right to do that, seem’ as how they’ve muddied their own drinkin’ hole and want to do the same to our’n. You dig me, lady?”

  “You have no right,” Ruth said coldly. “This is a public highway and everyone is free to use it without hindrance. You’re breaking the law.” While Chase endorsed her sentiments he felt that Ruth’s psychological reading of the situation left something to be desired. These men weren’t playing games, neither were they going to be pushed into an accommodating frame of mind by accusations and threats.

  The man cocked his head to one side and squinted at her. “Where you bin livin’ these past five years, lady? Backside of the moon? If you don’t already know it—and it sure sounds like you don’t—this ball of mud is cornin’ apart at the seams.” He leaned forward from the waist and held up the stave between his fingertips. “You talk about rights? Law? This thing I’m a-holding is the law and rights is what every man can get for hisself by usin’ it. Next you’ll be tellin’ me that the fine huntin’ piece between you knees is jest to get you an’ yer friend a rabbit supper.”

  Chase said, “We’ve only got camping gear with us, that’s the truth. Nothing of any real value. Nothing that would be of any use to you.”

  “Well now,” said the man craftily. “Wouldn’t be too sure ’bout that. Not at all sure.” His eyes under the brim glinted with sly amusement.

  The knuckles of Ruth’s hands were white. Chase rested his right elbow on the back of the seat, his hand hanging slackly.

  Grinning with his red gums the man reached out with the stave and parted the vee of Ruth’s shirt. Her jaw went rigid as the raw end of the stave, jagged with tiny splinters, snagged her flesh and drew a red line with droplets strung along it like ruby beads.

  “Not at all sure,” repeated the man softly.

  Chase slipped his hand into the pocket of his Windbreaker. “You’re the best piece of ass I’ve seen in a long while,” the man remarked, pressing the stave against her unsupported right breast through the plaid shirt. “I do reckon Oregon’s gonna havta wait till we’ve done w
hat has to be done. I guess you can take five of us, lady doctor, an’ as you’re in such a hurry we’ll make it right quick.”

  He lowered the stave and with his other hand rummaged about his baggy groin and pulled out his erect cock, white and sluglike against his soiled dungarees, the purple crown like a blind creature seeking the light. He grasped it and began slowly to masturbate, his eyes never leaving Ruth’s face. “Two at a time, how’s that? One in your cunt, the other in your pretty mouth.” The grin widened on red gums and black stumps of teeth.

  Chase’s sweating thumb slipped over the safety catch. He had to keep the gun in his pocket, hidden from the others. There was the faintest of clicks as the catch moved, sounding to Chase like a hammer striking an anvil. His grip on the butt felt greasy. He curled his finger through the trigger guard.

  “If you’ll jest give that to me,” the man said, letting go of his cock and taking hold of the rifle barrel. Ruth hung on. The man half-raised the stave. “You heard what I said. Jest do it and nobody’ll get hurt.” Chase said, “You’d better let go of the rifle and listen to me very carefully. ” The words seemed too big for his mouth. His back was stuck to the seat. “I have a gun and I’m pointing it straight at you and if you don’t do exactly as I say I’m going to blow a hole in your chest. At this range it’ll take your backbone with it. Do you understand my English ack-cent okay?”

  The man was standing perfectly still, the stave arrested in midair. He was staring at the outline of the gun in Chase’s Windbreaker.

  “Step up on the running board and tell your friends to move the truck. If you don’t do as I say or if they don’t, I’ll kill you. So whatever happens you’ll be the first.”

  The creased, grimy face, burned dark by the sun, was an immobile mask under the sweat-ringed straw Stetson. With astonishing speed the purple crown faded to pink and sagged meekly until it was pointing at the ground. The man released his hold on the rifle and tucked his naked flesh away as if it didn’t belong to him.

  “Step up and tell them to move the truck,” Chase ordered, hardly moving his lips. “Also tell them that if they try anything you won’t be around to see it.”

  The man got onto the running board, still holding the stave in his right hand. “Move the truck!” he shouted, turning his head but keeping his eyes on Chase. “He’s got a gun on me, better do as he says. I reckon he means it.”

  “I mean it all right. Drop the weapon.”

  The man tossed the stave aside and it clattered onto the black asphalt. The two men with the shotguns hadn’t budged an inch, and it occurred to Chase that once the jeep started to move, with his attention occupied with driving, they had only to raise their shotguns and pick him off. He was trying to figure out a way around this dilemma when Ruth neatly resolved it by thrusting the barrel of the hunting rifle into the man’s stomach. Her voice was low and flat. “I mean it too, you bastard.” She pulled the bolt back and curled her finger around the trigger. “As you just pointed out, this is the law and I happen to be holding it.”

  There was a billowing of blue smoke as the truck roared into life, followed by a hideous grating of gears. It backed off the road, rear wheels sinking into the dry red soil, tailboard pushing through the brush.

  Chase laid the Browning on the seat between his legs, revved the engine, and pulled sharply away, the man grabbing hold of the metal frame of the windshield for support. The end of the rifle made an indentation in his dungarees, right between the slanting doublestitched pockets.

  Any second now, Chase thought. If a shot was going to come, it was going to come now. He steered for the gap and had a blurred impression of a round fat shiny face in the cab of the truck, fleshy lips puckered up beneath a flattened nose in an expression of pure venomous hate. No shot came. In the rearview mirror he glimpsed the fat man climbing down from the cab and the others running forward to cluster around him. Chase kept his eye on this receding image, distorted by the shimmering waves of heat rising from the blacktop, which soon vanished as a bend cut it off from view.

  Chase drove steadily and carefully so that Ruth could keep the rifle pressed home. What next? While they held the man hostage they were safe, but they couldn’t hold him forever. In their favor was the fact that his friends wouldn’t know when he’d been released. What they’d probably do would be to follow at a safe distance, ready to pick him up, and then come after the jeep with the killer instinct fanned to white heat.

  They could kill the man and dump his body off the road. Could they? No, he couldn’t commit such an act in cold blood and he doubted whether Ruth, for all her pent-up fury, was capable of it. There was also a strictly practical reason why not: The others would hear the shot and know at once what it signified. Then there’d be no stopping them.

  “What are we going to do with him?” Ruth said, preoccupied with the same problem. “The minute we get rid of him—”

  “I know,” Chase snapped, “I know,” irked by the knowledge that they had escaped and yet were still trapped.

  The man knew they wouldn’t kill him. Despite the rifle barrel in his belly he seemed unconcerned. His lips spread in a grin across his gums. “I guess you’re ’tween the devil and the deep blue sea—you got me but they’ve got you. How d’ya like that?”

  The grin thinned only slightly when Ruth rammed the barrel deeper. “Don’t tempt me,” she said acidly. “I’ve seen decent people die, so it wouldn’t bother me one bit to get rid of scum like you.”

  “Maybe so, lady doctor. But if I go your lives sure as damnation ain’t worth bird spit, and you both know it.”

  They were now winding upward toward Hickison Summit. On their left the rock face rose vertically, sheared away in broad swathes like orange-yellow cheese sliced by an uneven hand. On their right, beyond a narrow fringe of grass, the valley dropped steeply away, strewn with large fractured boulders and fragments of rock, remnants of the road’s construction. Chase looked to the left and then to the right. He stopped the jeep, applied the hand brake but left the engine running, tucked the gun in his pocket, and swung himself out.

  “If he so much as moves an eyelid, shoot him.”

  “I might do it anyway,” Ruth said.

  The road, being impassable on either side, had given Chase the idea. He hoisted one of the jerry cans from its rack on the back of the jeep and sloshed a pale amber stream across the road, right to the edges, shaking out every drop, then dropped the empty can into its cradle. Gasoline fumes drifted in a throat-catching mist off the hot blacktop. Pray to God it wouldn’t all evaporate before it had a chance to ignite.

  Crouching down, he tossed a lighted match and there was a gentle boom as a wall of flames sprang up. He retreated a few paces, watching anxiously in case the fire should burn itself out too quickly. He smiled, catching a whiff of a gorgeous rich aroma: the tar itself was alight, bubbling and frothing and giving off a blanket of dense black smoke that rose sluggishly to form an impenetrable smoke screen.

  “That should hold them long enough,” Chase said, climbing in. He put the jeep into gear and looked at the man. “Here’s where we part company.”

  The man opened his mouth to say something but never got the chance. Even Chase was taken aback at the savagery with which Ruth thrust the barrel hard into the man’s groin. He shrieked and clutched himself, falling doubled-up onto the road and moaning.

  They didn’t speak for a long time, eyes fixed on the road ahead, as if words might break the spell of flight. When at last Chase looked at her, Ruth was slumped in her seat, ashen-faced, her lower lip visibly trembling, still clutching the rifle with hands that might have been locked in rigor mortis.

  “It’s all right, we’re safe,” he reassured her. “They won’t get past that for at least an hour. We’re safe.” When she didn’t respond, he said with genuine admiration, “You were fantastic. You really had me believing that you’d have killed him.”

  Ruth cleared her throat as if she’d swallowed a ton of sawdust. “I would have, I mean
I really would have,” she said in a hoarse fluttery voice. “Except I forgot to put any bullets in.”

  “You mean,” Chase said staring through the windshield, “it wasn’t loaded?”

  He gripped the wheel and his shoulders began to shake. He could hardly see where he was going because of the tears filling his eyes. They rolled down his cheeks.

  Ruth gazed at him dumbly, and her stomach started to tremble, and then she too was afflicted by helpless hysterical laughter. For the next ten miles they were like two giddy kids.

  General Madden listened to the slurping sounds of lovemaking. When the man began to speak in a low, barely audible voice the rage boiled up inside him. His jaws ached from the pressure of his clamped teeth.

  Col. Travis Murch, senior security officer, pressed the tab, stilling the taped voice. “I have a transcript you can look at. They met on a number of occasions”—Murch glanced down at the open file—“eleven that we know of for certain. But I’d say this was the first time he’d passed sensitive information, in my opinion.”

  “You didn’t tape all the meetings. How can you be sure?” Madden asked stolidly.

  “I’m not,” Murch admitted. “But how does it sound to you? He was briefing her from zero. Then when she says, ‘I can’t believe this is happening, not here, not on the island,’ doesn’t that suggest she was hearing it for the first time? I’d say so.”

  “She could have been faking.”

  “Possibly,” Murch nodded, thumbing tobacco into his ceramic pipe. “The important thing, however, is that we know for a fact that Skrote has divulged classified material to an agent of a foreign power.” He struck a match and spoke around the stem of his pipe. “How do you want us to proceed?”

  “What’s the woman’s name?”

  “Natassya Pavlovitch. Biochemist according to her accreditation. We’ve had her under surveillance since the day she arrived. The Soviets are so simpleminded it’s unbelievable. They send this knockout dame to penetrate our security—and she is built—and expect us not to smell a rat.” He blew smoke toward the ceiling. “Pathetic amateurs.”