Martin got into the driver’s seat one last time. Did he need anything from the truck? The XM radio? Rick’s luggage? The Garmin GPS? The last five years of his life? No more road lay ahead for the Screwmobile, only pipes and conduits leading into a labyrinth of tanks and immense machines—hopefully the engine room, the central plant, or something equally vital.
Martin put the key in the ignition and turned it over. The Screwmobile’s engine roared to life. He pushed himself out of the cab and right into Jeffrey.
“Going somewhere, Screw Man?” Jeffrey drew Martin close with several unforgiving tentacles. His torso had been wrapped with a swath of blue-gray bandage, but pink goo oozed from the gaps. Was the knife still inside, cutting Jeffrey deeper with every movement? “I’d hate for you to miss what I’m going to do to your planet.”
Martin stifled a cry of pain when Jeffrey jammed the staple gun against his temple. He didn’t want Cheryl coming back for any reason.
“I never got the chance to thank you for the recipe,” said Jeffrey, his usual smarm sounding a bit strained. The tentacles tightened, and Martin groaned. “It’s a bit nasty though, isn’t it?” Keep talking, Martin thought. He resisted the urge to check down the tunnel and give away Cheryl and Lee’s escape. “Secondhand cigarette smoke. Incredible. We never even considered it. But it’s blindingly obvious now that I think about it. We’ll call it ‘natural flavors’ on the packaging, of course.”
“What will you do when the truth leaks out? Your customers will be furious,” said Martin.
“We may have to settle a lawsuit and pay off some journalists. Maybe hire some nutrition scientists to prove it’s actually healthier this way. This isn’t difficult stuff, Martin.”
“You’ll be the one held responsible,” said Martin.
Jeffrey laughed, then glurked in pain. The tentacles loosened for a moment, and Martin shifted his hands closer to his back.
“Is something wrong?” asked Martin.
“The company will be making too much money to care. And even if they try to make an example of me, some other company will snatch me up. I’ll be able to write my own ticket after this.”
“You’re delusional,” said Martin. He strained his wrist to reach his back pocket, but his stupid endoskeleton didn’t bend that way.
“Think what you want,” said Jeffrey. “It won’t matter for long.” Martin yanked hard. His hand slipped a little against Jeffrey’s suckers. His fingertips brushed against a knife handle, and he strained as if they might grow longer.
“Do you hear that?” Jeffrey asked. Martin hadn’t, but he stopped straining for a moment to listen. A vibrating rumble, oddly high pitched, reverberated through the structure. “The engines are coming online. We’ll be through the portal in a few minutes.” There came a whoosh, like the sound of a thousand college kids flushing every toilet in a new stadium at the same time, and then the rumble thundered into a screaming roar.
As Jeffrey marveled at the ignition, Martin got a knife between two helpless fingertips. It wasn’t enough.
“So Mart—” Martin headbutted Jeffrey, right in the bandage. It felt like plopping on a pillow full of eels. Jeffrey squalled. The tentacles loosened. Martin grabbed the knife and hoped it was a big one. He twisted his wrist and sawed into tentacle flesh. Fluid squirted on his hand, and Martin flew free. Jeffrey snarled and flailed as Martin hacked at the grabbing tentacles.
An appendage connected hard against his chest. Martin sailed backward and crashed painfully through the remains of a wall. Jeffrey scrambled through the hole after him. Martin pushed away, disoriented, shattering a pipe with his forehead to make it through a narrow gap. He found himself on the roof of the Screwmobile. Behind him, Jeffrey tore at the ragged opening; in seconds it’d be large enough.
Martin knew he’d never make it down the tunnel. He found a grip and pulled himself toward the cab. He swung in and clawed for the handle. He yanked, but a tentacle caught the door midswing. Martin pulled again, but another tentacle pad slapped down and then another. The suckers held firm against the metal and glass. Martin squirmed across the bench seat. Jeffrey’s eye poked into view, and more tentacles sprayed in. Martin hacked at them with his knife.
His hand landed on the Thermos on the floor, and he threw it. It bounced back ineffectually, so he ripped the lid off and shook the steaming liquid over bare gray skin. Tentacles whirled in a panic, and Jeffrey let out a chilling skree. Doris made a mean cup of coffee.
A tentacle ripped the steering wheel cover off and snapped the cup holder. Another mangled the back support and tore it out. The GPS almost broke through the windshield as it shattered. Martin scrabbled for the passenger door handle and kicked his homemade radio box in the tentacles’ path. They smashed it to splinters against the dash. Martin spilled out of the passenger door just as Jeffrey squashed his bulk in from the driver’s side. Martin’s feet found some purchase. He almost rebounded into the squid-filled truck but caught himself on the door. A tentacle swiped at him. Martin pushed with all the force he could muster against the door and the protruding tentacle.
Jeffrey screeched and Martin readied to do it again, but the door had latched. The pad of the tentacle flailed and grasped at air, each angry sucker gasping like a vicious little mouth. In the air, a few inches away from Martin, hung the staple gun.
Jeffrey fell still as Martin made his way carefully and deliberately around the front of the truck, keeping the FastNCo. 25-C pointed between the wide black eyes behind the windshield.
“Killing me won’t stop anything,” Jeffrey said over the engine’s roar.
“It’ll stop you,” said Martin.
“I’m the only one who can abort the manufacturing process now.”
“Sorry, Jeffrey. I’m not taking any more chances with you.”
Jeffrey’s body appeared still, but Martin sensed him trying to free his trapped appendage.
“If you open that door, I will shoot you,” said Martin.
“What are you waiting for?” said Jeffrey. “Pull the trigger. I don’t think you can do it.”
“Maybe not,” said Martin. He pulled out the Pall Malls.
“What are you doing, Martin?”
“Thought I’d have a smoke.” With one hand, Martin opened the pack, shook the tip of a bent cigarette out, put it to his lips, and tossed the pack away.
“You’re disgusting. Your whole planet is disgusting,” Jeffrey snarled.
“Maybe,” said Martin. “But we have really good pie.”
Martin found the lighter in his front pocket. Jeffrey blinked once, and then his eye followed Martin’s to the wick of FastNCo. shirts, still intact.
Martin flicked the lighter.
It sparked but didn’t light. He flicked again. In Martin’s brief inattention, Jeffrey struggled to free his trapped limb, but Martin re-aimed the staple gun and Jeffrey froze.
“I guess you’ll have to shoot me after all,” said Jeffrey.
Martin flicked one more time. Nothing. Nothing again. He didn’t want to die of embarrassment.
Jeffrey laughed cruelly.
Zip. Click. A narrow, blue flame spiraled out of the lighter to the ceiling. Jeffrey’s eyes flared wide. Martin leaned his head to the flame and lit the cigarette.
“Martin?” said Jeffrey.
“See you around, Candy Man.” Martin blew out a smoky breath and touched the cigarette to the end of his gas-soaked FastNCo. shirt. It took the flames in an instant.
Jeffrey’s bellows followed Martin into the chewed tunnel, until the explosion.
Martin tumbled end over end in an unbearable heat. He wrapped his arms over his head as he crashed through surface after painful surface. Hot nicks scraped his skin. Just when he thought the pain would never stop, he was floating free in cool air. He opened his eyes to find himself skimming across the hangar a few feet off the floor.
“Martin!” Cheryl screamed.
Martin twisted around and felt a dozen pinching twinges on the skin of his back
. His clothes were shredded. His arms bled from countless scrapes. An acrid smell had taken up permanent residence in his nose. Cheryl and Lee stood near Chumpdark’s ship a few degrees off his line of travel. He tried to swim toward her, to painful avail.
Cheryl crossed the hangar floor with wide, strange strides.
“What’s happening?” Lee shouted. Smoking punctures riddled the hangar wall. The hangar shuddered with a thunderous boom.
Martin strained to reach Cheryl’s outstretched hand. She lunged and their fingers locked for a moment, but slipped apart. He hit the floor and rolled, the floor tugging at his clothes and skin.
“It’s sticky,” Martin said, finding his feet, not with gravity, but a treatment on the hangar floor.
“What happened?” asked Cheryl.
“I think I blew up the engines,” said Martin.
“We can’t get into the ship,” said Cheryl.
“I’d like to get out of here,” said Lee. As if to make Lee’s point, another shudder shook the floor, and a large section of the back wall exploded across the hangar in a fiery black ball.
“Jeffrey’s car!” Martin yelled.
They lurched wildly, prying each footstep free and swinging their legs forward as far as possible. A few feet from the car, they were peppered with a shower of debris. Martin prepared to smash a window, but Jeffrey had kindly left it unlocked.
“Can you hotwire…?” Martin asked, and then laughed. “Never mind.” The keys swung in the ignition. A crash sounded from the direction of the Screwmobile’s tunnel.
“Someone else drive,” Martin said, pointing the staple gun toward the hole.
“Is he coming?” asked Cheryl.
“Start the car,” said Martin.
Cheryl got behind the wheel. The Lincoln’s engine purred as quietly and coolly as in any convenience store parking lot.
Martin sensed movement in the crumbling truck hole, and fired. The staple gun clicked and debris exploded, doubling the size of the hole, but leaving solid, not gooey, destruction. Martin felt his hair stand on end as if he were back in physics class touching a Van der Graaf generator.
“Get in,” Cheryl screamed. Martin backed up and opened the back door. He fired a few more times, and more of the wall exploded.
“Was that the air bubble I felt?” Martin asked.
“Yes, get in,” said Cheryl.
“We’re pressing this hangar button now,” shouted Lee.
Martin closed the door but rolled down the window, if the staple gun shot through the force field, he couldn’t stop now. He aimed at the hole, wreaking more and more damage. As Cheryl reversed and turned them, he fired at anything intact.
“Oh my god,” said Lee.
“Martin?” Cheryl wailed.
The hangar door was rising, but no sun, no stars, awaited them at the end of the alien canyon—only a swirling, widening blue-and-black abyss rendered fractally terrifying by the shattered windshield. Plasma flashed silently from point to point. The Lincoln idled.
“Go. Go. Go,” said Martin.
Cheryl jammed the car into drive and stomped on the gas. The floor grabbed at the tires like fresh tar, but they accelerated. Cheryl screamed. Martin and Lee screamed, and a few yards from the edge, Lee found the presence of mind to reach over and tap the portal icon.
And then they popped out.
Martin opened his door for a better shot back into the hangar, and stood with one hand gripping the handhold over the door. “Get back in here,” Cheryl screamed. He squeezed the trigger over and over. Chumpdark’s double-hulled ship exploded. Cheryl screamed his name again. Then blue enveloped him and drew reality into fate’s fine thread.
~ * * * ~
A moment later, Martin tumbled, crunching and scraping, rolling under his own painful weight and velocity on a very hard surface. He floundered one last time and found himself under a bright blue sky. Crumbling rock rose up on the edge of his peripheral vision. An electric-blue swirl spun silently above him, and then bloomed across the sky like the second Big Bang. Everything hurt, but Martin sensed no agony except the certainty of being too late.
A bristle of long antennas emerged overhead, followed by a black, blunt hulk blotting out the sun. One logo, and then another, and then thousands.
Martin raised his arm, relieved to find the staple gun still in his hand, and fired, once, twice—he stopped counting. Every logo was an easy target. Every shot burst some part of the ship.
The factory continued to slip from the vortex. Each ker-chunk of the staple gun was unsatisfying, but dozens, maybe hundreds, of fires now spurted from the hull. Martin’s hand stung from the spring’s concussion, over and over, against his palm. The ship kept coming and coming.
Martin didn’t remember getting to his feet, but he stumbled forward, still firing, and almost collapsed, unprepared for the pain in one knee, and again as he tripped over a state trooper on the side of the road. People had fallen everywhere, presumably asleep from the portal and not yet neurotoxined. The Lincoln had come to a stop sideways, mostly intact, against a National Guard truck.
Martin found himself stopped by the guardrail and began to shout, forcing his numb hand to squeeze again and again. There was now no sky but the ship.
Martin ducked when finally an inert, pyramid-sized engine bell, one of a dozen, passed overhead and the sky over the gap cleared. Plasma sputtered from only two of the bells, but still the ship inched north, stretching out over the northern horizon toward Brixton. Martin kept firing at the still-working engines. If the neurotoxin came, he wanted to die as part of the solution, and not part of the problem.
And then Big Thunder Valley earned its name.
The concussion hit his chest; the road, his back. And his consciousness went out for a smoke break.
Chapter 30
Martin sat in his usual chair by the window. The one with the good view of the pantry and the breakfast bar. No one had set out breakfast this morning, only a hand-lettered sign that read, “Out of Food—Sorry for the Inconvenience.” Brenda had left the first aid kit on the table, having pretty much exhausted its supply of bandages, gauze, tape, ointments, and expired analgesics in individual packets.
Behind Martin, Highway 15 drained Brixton of the flood of once exuberant, now shocked and beleaguered, Wakers. A few milled in the lobby, waiting to check out or for the traffic to thin, speaking in quiet voices—or maybe it was that Martin’s ears were still ringing from the explosion. They showed one another video taken on cameras and phones. A few had artifacts, bits and pieces taken from the wreckage before the National Guard had cordoned off the area. Despite their tales, Martin sensed a disappointment, as if the truth wasn’t good enough.
The Lincoln waited in the carport outside the lobby doors like a smoking gun, with its smashed windshield and mangled front corner. The passenger side had been scraped up in the landing, and the rearview mirror dangled by a wire. After the factory had exploded, Lee and Cheryl had dragged him to the car, and had picked their way down the hill and into the field on the other side of the bridge before the crowd awoke.
Martin had awoken in the back seat a few miles south of Doris Solberg’s place. He had groaned, and Cheryl had given him a weak, pained, smile in the rearview mirror. Lee had stared ahead. Questions had arisen, but lost their way.
Lee, Brian, and X-Ray wandered into the lobby, spoke conspiratorially for a moment, and then Lee joined Martin. His arm had been rebandaged with materials a little more human, and he wore a baseball cap low over his face.
“You okay?” asked Lee.
“How’s Cheryl?” Martin asked.
“She’s with him now, but…” Lee said, and shook his head.
Martin sighed. What did he expect? To be sitting hand in hand, comforting Cheryl in Stewart’s dying minutes? That she’d cry on his shoulder, longing for a comforting kiss?
A few minutes later, the lobby door chimed, and Brenda called Cheryl’s name. Martin stood, but Cheryl crossed the lobby, weeping. She
ducked behind the counter and disappeared into the housekeeping room. Brenda followed, abandoning her customers.
Martin stuck out a hand to Lee. “Thank you,” he said.
“No, thank you,” Lee replied. “You’re not going to…?” He nodded toward the counter.
“No,” said Martin.
Martin left the Brixton Inn on foot. Even if he’d had the keys to the Town Car, the Highway Patrol wasn’t letting anyone turn anywhere but out of town. He walked against the flow of the crowd, ignoring them and their plight, all the way across Brixton and out of it again.
The roadblock at the junction had been hardened and reinforced by the National Guard. A colossal wall of smoke billowed from the southern horizon behind the endless line of stunned Wakers streaming north on foot.
Scotch-taped bits of paper fluttered in the breeze on the gas pumps at Herbert’s Corner. “No gas,” each read.
In the half-lit diner, the chairs had been flipped upside down on tables. Martin feared to talk over the hush of the silent jukebox.
“Martin?” Eileen asked, setting aside a magazine. “Lorie, get out here.”
Martin stumbled to a stool and sat heavily.
“My goodness,” said Lorie, coming out from the kitchen. “What’s happened to you?”
“I don’t know,” said Martin.
“I don’t have anything to give you, ’cept for a glass of water,” Eileen said. “We’re cleaned out.”
“There’s still those packs of black licorice in the store,” said Lorie.
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