NIGHT CRUISING

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  He reached up with his left hand and touched his right arm where he saw now a river of fluid that soaked him. Jesus God. The muscles of his upper arm were slashed to the bone. Blood pumped over the lip of the slash and covered his hand the moment he touched open flesh.

  He grunted and went to his knees. "Molly...Molly..."

  She was frantic, crying, making gibbering noises. Gone crazy.

  "Molly! Tear up your shirt. Tie it around my arm, make a tourniquet. Quick!"

  He felt light-headed. He began to sway on his knees. He said again, "Molly, hurry."

  She rushed to him, tearing at the shirt she wore, ripping it from the neck across the shoulder and down the side. He hung his head wondering how he was going to get them out of the maze of rocks if he couldn't get back his strength. It left him with each pint of blood that streamed down his useless arm.

  He barely remembered hearing the screech of tearing cloth, the painful clutch of her hands as she wrapped the shirt around his upper arm above the cut and began to tie it off.

  He felt along the ground with his left hand for the tire iron. Goddammit, where was it? Why was everything so goddamned fuzzy and unreal? The ground was a mile away, his hand elongated as the rubber fingers felt along the rocky earth, his head spinning. He slumped into his daughter's arms as he passed out. His last thought was, I'm going to brain that bastard for this.

  #

  It was too much work to cut the intruder a second time. He knew he had opened his arm with one slice, and that should be enough. Let them both die out here from exposure for all he fucking cared. He was taking the truck and leaving. Right now.

  He stood at the cab, feeling in his pockets for the key. Where was the fucking key?

  He had the knife in one hand and that hindered the search. But the knife was bloody. His hand was drenched. His arm. One of the legs of his slacks.

  Shit. Couldn't stand the blood. Needed to bathe. Needed some water. Left it in the trunk of the Chrysler.

  Shit.

  Where was the key to the truck? What had he done with it? He had to leave now.

  #

  Molly tied off her father's bleeding arm, caught him before he fell, and lowered him to the dirt. She put her hand to his heart and felt the beat. He could live. He needed a doctor soon, but he wouldn't die if... She stood up, shaking.

  Where was...?

  The truck! If Cruise took it, she might never get help in time to save her father from death.

  He couldn't take it. She wouldn't let him.

  She grabbed a strip of her torn shirt and tied it around The Nubs.

  She picked up the tire iron where her father had dropped it and stalked down the canyons toward where they had left the truck parked.

  Daddy had done all that he knew how.

  Now it was up to her. Oh yeah, it was up to her now.

  #

  In his agitated state, Cruise didn't remember that he had never taken the truck keys from the ignition. They dangled from the keyhole in the cab while he spent valuable time feeling his pockets, not believing the key wasn't there, and feeling the same pockets over again like a man who is being lied to by his senses.

  His arms were jumping and throbbing, live wires jolted by bolts of electricity. He had to do something soon, soon. Take off his shirt, that's what he had to do, get the bandages free. Then he'd find the key and leave the bitch and the man behind.

  He broke open the front of his shirt, buttons popping, some of them pinging off the metal door of the truck. He shucked out of it, and began immediately to tear at the bandages over his arms. He felt the wounds weeping great bloody tears as the last of the cloth slipped free and was thrown onto the ground around his feet.

  He dropped the knife, sick of the slippery feel of it in his hand. He caught his arms with both hands, pushing, pulling at the flesh as his chest heaved up and down like an engine pushed to the limitation of its power.

  Had that been Boots back there trying to ambush him? He wasn't sure. How could he be sure?

  Had he really struck Boots a killing blow and ripped open his arm?

  Fuck, fuck, he hadn't wanted to do that, not to the only friend he ever had.

  #

  Molly came into the lane where the truck was parked and sneaked behind where Cruise stood tearing at himself like a madman, his back to her.

  She didn't pause to reflect on what she was about to do.

  There was no turning back.

  She had been left no choice.

  Cruise felt the blow glance off his collarbone with a sharp crack that seemed to explode his eardrum. He howled and went to his knees from the impact. Bone fragments drove into his muscle and scraped against open nerve ends. He rolled onto his back, hands up to his chest like a man having a heart attack. His scream echoed off the rock face.

  He saw Molly bending. He saw her leaping onto him. She straddled his middle and in her hand glinted the knife blade. His knife!

  He tried to turn aside as she fell forward, both hands clasped around the knife hilt. The blade slashed into the tender area between shoulder blade and arm. He threw her off and groped for the knife.

  A growling that rose like a hundred wolves baying at the moon made him crouch, the found knife clutched in his hand. He turned his head, listening. It was coming across the desert from the direction of the highway.

  What?

  Molly had sprinted away during the scuffle. He didn't even see in which direction she went.

  His attention came back to the sound coming off the desert.

  What?

  He got to his feet, every movement a torment as bone and muscle tore and ripped at him.

  It sounded like an earthquake. Even the earth beneath his feet shook to the deep-throated rumble.

  He hurried down the street to the closest exit. He had to get away, get out of the City of Rocks, make his escape before disaster was able to bring him down.

  #

  Molly wept at not killing him. She leaned against a rock wall, clinging to it with her fingernails. When the sounds came she knew what they were and her heart rejoiced.

  She began to run for the nearest exit from the City of Rocks.

  #

  Mark came to, his head trembling slightly against the hard ground. He didn't know what the sounds were but he had to find out.

  He had to find Molly. He had to save her from the killer.

  He had to get to his feet and make it to the nearest exit from the City of Rocks.

  #

  Cruise saw them coming for him as he ran jagged lines across the desert floor. There must have been dozens of them, could have been a hundred for all he knew. Headlights shining across the plain from the shaggy heads of monsters. They came from across the desert in a single sweep, side by side, bearing down on him, skirting the City of Rocks, closing ranks again, coming straight for him as he limped and staggered, his hand over the gaping fracture and the hole in his flesh where the knife had sunk. Miniature tornado trails of dust plumed behind the tons of metal bearing down on him. The trucks broke through mesquite trees and lumbered over ruts and hillocks of sand. They flattened cacti and came on, relentlessly, trailers banging across the land behind the cabs.

  He ran as far as he could, as fast as his legs would carry him, and he knew it was not enough.

  He stumbled to a stop and turned to face them. The headlights swarmed and surrounded him, forming a perfect circle. He growled deep in his throat, a cornered animal. Then they came to a standstill, engines lowering to idles, and from the cabs of the semis dropped men with mallets and baseball bats and guns and knives and lengths of pipe.

  Cruise began to smile. A mob of determined men. He had always known that about them. Hoping they'd never find out it was a fraternity he had long abused.

  They'd caught him. And so it goes. He'd get off some way. They'd send him to some institution, know he was crazy. He'd make sure they knew that.

  Even if they sent him to prison, he wouldn't stay long. Sooner or l
ater he'd be out.

  Fucking truckers thought they had won.

  They just weren't as smart as Cruise Lavanic.

  #

  Molly came behind the trucks, racing as hard as she could.

  She saw her father off to her right and veered toward him. Together they hurried across hummocks and around squashed cacti and broken mesquite.

  "What are they doing?" she yelled at her father over the harsh roar of the combined engine noise.

  He shook his head and hurried on. He held his bad arm to his side to keep from jarring it as he ran.

  They reached the back of a trailer and moved down between two of the trucks. Cab doors stood open. They had to close one to get past it and into the magic circle of lights.

  What they saw stopped them both cold. From their vantage point they saw Cruise standing in the center of the men. He was naked from the waist up, bleeding from his shoulder, blood streaming down his chest. Both his arms looked notched with cuts that ran with blood. The front of his slacks were blackly wet. He was grinning like a death's- head, his freshly shaven face gleaming with sweat in the glare of the headlights.

  He was bragging to the advancing men. His voice carried above the trucks' motors.

  "Any of you pricks heard of Minde? M-i-n-d-e? Lot Lizard out of Charlotte, North Carolina. She's off your hands for good. I buried her deep in the woods. What about Connie outta El Paso? Heard of her? You want names? I know names, faces. Never forget them, never do. There was a girl called herself Cupcake, ever hear of her? Haven't in a while, have you?"

  The silent circle grimly advanced, tightening, drawing closer around Cruise. The men gripped their bats and pipes. They took the safeties off their guns and socked clips into place with hard metallic bangs.

  "Molly back there behind you. Molly, I almost did. She was one of my best ones. I kept her around too long, though, didn't I? Sweet kid, but lots of trouble, let me tell you, she was real trouble."

  He couldn't stop talking, couldn't get his mouth closed for nothing. He knew he shouldn't be saying anything, that he was egging them on by what he said, but the words simply kept coming, refusing to stay unspoken. He hadn't this many witnesses in all of his life, and it was too good a chance to pass up.

  "I sat up during the hours when Molly slept and watched her, fantasizing about what I was going to do to her. I had it in mind to kill her here at this special place. If you hadn't all come, if Boots hadn't..."

  He paused and swiveled his head from one side to the other, watching the grim faces of the men surrounding him. He wasn't going to tell them everything.

  "I'd stay awake and watch Molly," he repeated. "I thought about dismembering her, taking off her head first, and then her arms, her legs, taking my time to watch the life run out of her eyes..."

  He kept telling them what he wanted to do to Molly and so many of the things he had done before. All about the blood and the dying, the cleansing rites and the time, way back, when he knew he wasn't going to be like the rest of the men, not like them, the ones coming to...

  Bash in his head.

  Shoot out his eyes.

  Break the bones of his legs.

  Murder him.

  They weren't going to hand him over to the cops. He realized that hard truth with a shock that ran through his chest and down into his legs. He wobbled slightly on his feet.

  And still he kept talking, despite everything, telling them what he had wanted to do to Molly, all the intimate details of his fantasy of blood.

  #

  Molly stood next to her father behind the closed line of men, the hair on the back of her neck standing up as Cruise talked about what he had planned for her. The mutilation. Burying her somewhere he could come visit the way Henry Lee Lucas did with the girl he had traveled with and dismembered and left beside a roadside fence in Texas during one of his murderous sprees.

  And as the hair rose on her neck, Molly felt again the humiliation Cruise had allowed to befall her. She felt again the ropes digging into her wrists and ankles. She saw clearly the way he killed the woman in the Pick 'N Save, the poor soul's eyes still begging Molly for help even in the last moments. She relived the night she ran from him across the desert toward one of the ranch houses near the Mexican border. She thought she was dying. She thought she couldn't breathe.

  She thought about how many hours of her young life she had lived in fear of dying. How close she had come to death.

  Her gaze lowered to the man in front of her, to his hand. He held a claw hammer, loosely gripped in his fingers. She heard Cruise's voice. She saw how the men stood there unmoving and suddenly she feared they would never move on him, they'd let him get away with all the crimes he listed for them. Before she knew it she had grabbed for the hammer and ripped it from the trucker's grasp.

  She was running across the circle, coming at Cruise's back, the hammer raised. She heard faintly her father calling her. She felt the circle tremble as if made of one body. Everyone stepped in closer, but they wouldn't stop her now, she was almost upon him, and still his words would not cease, the words kept coming to spew the filth of murder into the open. His very existence made the world a squalid and dangerous place to live, his madness made the night a time of terror for the innocent who died at his hands.

  She rushed behind him and landed a blow to the back of his head, but it glanced off his ear, nearly ripping it from his skull. He turned screaming and she raised the hammer again, sound far away and muted, the sound of her father's voice calling to her, the combined roar of the men as they screamed in unison a battle cry.

  The hammer claw caught him in the side and she pulled with both hands to free it. She must kill him. She must stop him for good. Forever.

  His flesh gave and an incredible spout of blood pumped out from his side even though he hunched over and tried to hold it with both hands.

  Then the circle of men had reached them, led on by her example, yelling like men at war, descending on the despicably evil human in their midst.

  She felt someone take her around the waist and haul her backward off her feet. She dropped the hammer and kicked and fought.

  Her father said into her ear, "No, Molly! No!"

  The first man to reach Cruise stove in the side of his head with a baseball bat.

  #

  Cruise didn't feel the rest. He thought--his last thought--that maybe he had made a few mistakes, but all in all it was worth it to live his life the way he chose. He was a real man.

  #

  Mark thought he hadn't seen anything, even in Vietnam, like the savaging the truckers gave Cruise Lavanic. He was horrified that it was his daughter who started it. When the men finished, there wasn't anything recognizable upon the ground. Just blood and bone jumbled together, it could have been a large animal worked over by desert scavengers.

  When the highway patrol arrived, trailing more dust across the desert into the dawning red streaks of sun to the east, the truckers were already in their cabs, tidying up logbooks, and talking on their CBs about a good place to eat off I-l0.

  Everyone agreed the killer tried to fight them, that he threatened them with a knife, that he even, by God, jumped one of them and wanted to cut his throat and would have succeeded had they not all intervened.

  One officer overheard by Mark said, "Lucky if we can get a fingerprint off the son of a bitch. Might not be enough left even for that. I hope to shit they got the right guy."

  In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, Molly sat beside him, holding on to his good hand. He smiled up at her from the gurney and she slowly smiled back. Molly.

  #

  Molly wasn't the same girl her father knew before she left him. In one week of separation she had lived a lifetime of experience. She could tell from the look in her father's eyes that it didn't matter. He was glad to have her back.

  For her part, she was glad to be back.

  She took a cloth offered to her by the ambulance attendant. She wiped her hands. He pointed to her face and she
wiped there, smearing Cruise's blood across her cheeks so that she looked like an Indian painted for the warpath. She handed back the cloth and thanked him.

  She didn't care how she looked. She was happy just to be alive and free.

  Happy just to be.

  THE END

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  BANISHED

  By

  Billie Sue Mosiman

  Copyright 20ll by Billie Sue Mosiman, All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Neil Jackson, Copyright 20ll

  "The Magician rearranges the Universe to make himself the center, the Mystic rearranges himself to find the center."

  CHAPTER l

  THE LITTLE DEATH

  She could barely breathe she was so hot. She could hear the night birds call and the rustle of her mother’s palm grass skirt as she moved about the small hut. She could see just the light from the flames of the fire in the center of the floor, but she could not make out anything beyond.

  She closed her eyes to blessed darkness and wondered when she would die. She knew she would never be well again, never stand and walk, never kiss her mother’s cheek, or feel the comfort of her mother’s loving embrace. She had not lived long, a handful of years, so there was not much to miss. Yet she knew she must fight against death. She must not willingly let it take her.

  A blanket of coolness slipped over her bare skin and it was not from the water her mother had been sponging onto her. She tried to reopen her eyes to discover the cause, but her lids were too heavy. She was so hot! The coolness that temporarily enveloped her was not helping. She wished they would carry her to the sea and float her in the waves.