by Brian Hodge
"At first they thought it was murder, but nobody had any idea why. They still haven't come up with a motive, but the label still sticks, I guess. I didn't buy it at the start of the investigation and I don't buy it now, though it looks like I'll have to since I haven't come up with anything better. Needless to say, all four men had been screened by probably the most complete battery of psychological tests and interviews in the history of the planet. But when contact was finally resumed only one man—McCabe—was alive. The other three, McReynolds, Armbruster and…I can't remember the other man's name, but—"
"It was Willard, wasn't it?"
"Ye-es, I think so. Yes. They were all dead. Just like that. Some vital nerve." The reporter reached around to touch a spot high between his shoulder blades, and had to squint as the sweat ran into his eyes. "Right here, at the base of the neck. Something to do with the medulla. Actually that part isn't as weird as it sounds. Nerves, pressure points, all that stuff was part of the hand-to-hand training for the men who served in Special Forces in the war in Asia then, which includes McCabe, of course. He had seen duty in Danang and Phnom Penh."
"Let me ask you one thing," interjected the driver, bearing straight across the sands toward a point he had fixed on. "Why wasn't he charged?"
"Well, there wasn't time. Washington was red-faced, naturally. Kept him under wraps and shipped him off to San Diego, where he apparently put on an orderly's clothes one day and just walked out the front gate. And he hasn't been seen since. Vanished. That," sighed the reporter, "is about as far as I've been able to get with the story. Which is about exactly nowhere."
"They still think he murdered them, then," said the driver, his voice distant.
"What else? The big question still is: why? By the way," said the now curious passenger, "where the hell are we? If you don't mind my asking. Seems to me my car's over that way somewhere. Or there…."
The truck crunched on over pale, porous rocks and sand, farther and farther away from anything remotely man-made. Downshifting, the driver took them in a short arc between clumps of white sage and salt brush and pulled up short. He lurched back on the hand brake and closed his tanned fingers over the key ring.
"Wo-ow," puffed the reporter. "Listen to that." He suctioned his hands over his ears, pulled them loose with a pop. Now, the engine stilled, there was only the water in the radiator bubbling and settling. Finally that, too, was stilled.
"What is it?"
"Nothing," said the reporter, surprised. "That's what's so groovy. And the air! Man, it's clean, empty. Except for the dust back there, when we hit the sand, there's nothing. My sinus cavities never had it so good."
"Yes, clean, but not really empty." The driver leaned back and flared his nostrils distastefully. "Take a deep breath, if you can stand it. Gypsum. Caliche. Limestone. Even the damned silica."
"You can tell all that?"
He looked at the reporter with one hawk eye, not turning his head. "What I'm really interested in is your friend."
"Yeah. Well, you know, I think I'd better get—"
"Murder is an absolute term. You have to be absolutely sure before you use it."
"Oh, I wasn't accusing—"
"Imagine for a minute," bristled the driver, "that he wasn't responsible for their deaths."
The reporter puzzled.
"Suppose they were gone already."
"What, then? I'm sure the autopsy—"
"They were looking for something to substantiate the obvious, nothing more—and that's giving them the benefit of the doubt; you remember the Kennedys; at least you've read about them."
"Man, you're blowing my head! You know that?"
The driver darkened. He hoisted his pack from the boot and rifled carefully through the contents: a Kelty backpack, a sleeping bag, a smaller, open pack with emergency supplies like nylon rope, canned water, halazone, vitamins, biscuits, pep pills, Pemmican and salt, an eight-blade Army knife, a Mallory pocket flashlight, a light nylon-over-steel shovel. A compass. And a long Bowie knife. This he unsheathed, examined the fine burnished blade of Swedish steel, resheathed and snapped it to his belt.
There was a tense pause as the reporter lay his head back and squeezed his eyes shut. "Let me have a little of that water, would you?"
The driver complied.
There was another silence, all but unbearable this time. There was no breeze in the air, seemed as if there never had been.
"Man," the reporter broke, "this is really too far out. In more ways than one." He got out and stood looking around with his soft white hands half-hidden in his back pockets. "Anyway." He squinted and adjusted his dark glasses, as though they magnified the sun beyond endurance. "What'd you expect me to find out here?"
The driver swung down and led him a few yards past a sagging, stickled juniper palm.
There, just beyond, sat a huge rock, six, eight feet across, pitted by a thousand patternless holes, like a mound of termite-ridden wood, or the surface of a burned out tubercular brain mercifully relieved of its skull case.
The reporter shuffled around it, leaving a snake pattern in the sand with his chukka boots.
"Whew. Looks like this baby got caught in a sandstorm for a million years, huh? Hey, dig this." He bent and slipped inside, found room to sit.
After a minute the man from the diner said, "I don't give a damn about the rock, you know."
The reporter said nothing.
"But I know what you came looking for."
The reporter, straining to hear, said, "What?"
The man stepped closer. "You don't fool me."
"Well, thanks," said the reporter, not hearing. "Think I'll drive over here and take some pictures after my car's fixed. How far are we?"
"Don't move."
"You think you can fix it? Just sort of went off the road. Lost control. Not my fault, though. Something—"
"I said don't move!"
"What?"
The man took the knife slowly from his belt. He held it pointing forward, its tip honed as sharp as a broken piece of razor. He stepped closer, moving only his feet.
The reporter tensed, his trousers stretched shiny over his locked knees.
"You don't have to," he said weakly. "I only wanted to talk to you…"
The man laughed. He hit it, a small coral snake, swiftly and silently as it lay coiled in the dark by the reporter's foot. A quick spinning flicker of afterlife sent the young man from the opening in a paroxysm as intense as the dead snake's. He glanced down at his leg, at a flowing run of thick reptile blood, and instantly lost his balance. The knife blade had nearly split the slender head from the triangulate, yellow-black-and-red-striped body but the tail continued to writhe, jerking an S through its own blood drying on the heat of the rock.
The man from the diner wiped the blade on the sole of his boot.
"Might have been a ground snake, harmless, but I couldn't be sure. Out here you learn not to take chances."
"Jeezus," whispered the reporter.
"He shouldn't have been out here. Worm around where you don't belong and you're playing loose with your life."
The reporter, grinning in a confused rictus, said simply, "Hey, you don't want to kill me!"
"I'm no murderer," spat the man from the diner. "Get that straight, you nosy son of a bitch."
"It was my job," gestured the reporter helplessly.
"Is it your job, too, to understand?"
"I think I could. You know?"
"Like it was their job to understand something they'd never come up against before. Sure. Maybe you would," he snapped suddenly. "But what about the rest? They have names for what I did, their own terms. Because they've never seen real suffering and had to pull together enough guts to help another human being through the misery of dying."
He stood. "I'm sorry, kid. Sorrier than you know. But that's a feeling I've had to live with for years and years."
He started to walk away. He stopped. He poked at the bloody remains of the still-quivering
snake on the rock. He stirred it with his knife blade. A strong whiff drifted up to him, and he angled his face away from it.
"Is it dead?" asked the reporter, because he couldn't think of anything else to say but knew he ought to go on talking. Nervously he smoothed his hair back from his face and drew his hand back quickly, his hair so hot and shining it stung his hand.
"It's dead, all right," said Raven, his stomach churning. "I'd know that smell anywhere."
A half-hour later Raven was back on the highway. He found the car on the shoulder of an ill-paved detour that would cut several miles through the roughest terrain before reaching Alamagosa. The reporter must have read the map incorrectly, as a few unlucky tourists did from time to time; the broken line seemed to intersect the highway at a point just before the rest stop but in fact bypassed it by more than a mile.
He pulled over and braked, relieved again by the absolute silence. In a few hours, as night enshrouded the desert, the silence would deepen till it reached all the way from the blaze of the Milky Way down to the lonely sentinel arms of the saguaros scattered on the horizon. Then the cold would cut through the crystal air like a guillotine.
Raven started to work.
He loosened the chain on the winch at the truck's tailgate. Then it occurred to him that the boy might be lying about the car, too. But he dismissed the notion, considering the heat and the location. The young man had been lucky, all right. He must have had to walk the quarter-mile back to the highway, another two miles on to the diner.
That was less than a fourth the distance he would try to walk today. Without a compass.
Raven got down on his back and sidled under the car, an old station wagon. The trouble was in the front end. The right tie-rod end had been snapped loose, probably by the impact of running off the road, or maybe by a bump that had sent the car off the road.
So he would have to tow it in.
He knew what he would say. That he found it abandoned on the roadside, that he went looking for the owner and had finally to give up. By that time—
That was just the part that made him sick. It was the first time that he had had to do this to, to leave a man to die to ensure his own safety. Not like that time years ago. Something had gone wrong with the air system; some kind of bacterial contamination in the diatom filters, that had been his guess. It got to Jack, to Rob and even to Willard, and for hours he sat next to them as they died by the most painful progressions, until he could bear it no longer. It was unmistakable. He had read an article something like that once, about a nurse in a terminal cancer ward who swore she could predict which ones would die the following day; she said there was an odor given off by the dying, which once smelled was never forgotten. He had shrugged at the article then, of course. Then came the test. The filters—why didn't it affect him? For hours he sat strapped in, hearing the agony of the dying around him, filling the capsule until it filled his head, driving him almost mad with waiting. But it never hit him. Antibodies, genetics, some damned advantage or other he happened to possess. Or maybe it was the others, perhaps they had had trouble with the inoculations, like smallpox vaccinations that don't always take the first time, though that seemed almost too ludicrously simple to believe. But the infection got them and when it did he had to give them the only peace it was in his power to give. Once he had known for sure. And he had known. It was unmistakable.
Tell them that part of it when you write your damned—But this was one story that would never get written. It was too late for him to face the accusations, the questions, the disbelief; too late to live steeped in the rankness of city life ever again.
He wrapped the rubber guard over the bumper, wound the chain through the frame and locked it, reached in the cab of the truck and threw the lever that activated the winch.
The car nosed up a foot, two feet. It stopped abruptly as the winch shivered, overloaded, and shut itself off.
He knelt and peered under. He saw nothing. He dropped to his back and hunched underneath again.
Crawling farther back, he twisted sideways on his shoulders. The frame was still good, near as he could see.
He crept on. There, the rear axle, straddling the edge of the ditch, the left wheel caught awkwardly on a chunk of granite. So. He'd have to lower the car, push it back with the truck and try again. Back out like a sidewinder, trying not to think of anything but—
Wait. The car creaked over his body. Hold it hold it—He saw the frame tipping. He had forgotten to set the hand brake on the car. But too late too late—He jerked his head to the side. The rear wheel broke free of the rock and the car slipped halfway down the ditch.
He screamed as the car crunched to a stop, crushing his left arm deep in the gravel. His cry was muffled and lost. His head lolled from side to side, his face knocking loose bits of dried mud cake and grease into the corners of his eyes.
Seconds passed. He felt his ruptured life seeping into the ground.
Then, very slowly, he turned his head a last time to look at the remains of the arm pinned beneath the chassis.
Slowly, very slowly he reached his right hand to his belt, found the sheath. Grasping the handle decisively he drew up the burnished blade. It trembled briefly, its sharp point scratching the oil pan. More fragments of dry underseal fell onto his body.
He smelled oil and gasoline. He smelled burned axle grease. He smelled the stuffed upholstery up inside the car. He smelled no other person near and knew he would not.
Pinned in shadow, it seemed as if night had already fallen here.
He knew he had nothing else left to do. He had done almost the same thing several times since. They had been passing through. They had been truckers, problem pregnancies, fevered children with the cold sweat already sealing their eyes. He had had no choice.
He left his head turned to the side. There was no mistaking it. The arm, cracked open to infection, its systems destroyed, cells and tissues already mortifying in the dirt, would go first. Then the chill and the ache would spread up, not far, to his heart.
Quivering again, then steadying his hand with a grip of practiced resolution, he moved the sharp, curved blade toward his blood-soaked shoulder. If thine eye offend thee, he thought.
He knew what he had to do. He knew. For he had smelled it, that smell, and he knew what it was. He knew too well.
It was the smell of death.
DROP CITY
Bus let man off.
"Hey, uh, wait, I—" He squeezed frame of dark glasses in circle of mid-finger and thumb; then patted down nondescript tie strung loosely around open collar, fastened top two buttons of coat, smoothed flaps of pockets. He cleared his throat. "Right." It seemed right. "Thanks."
"Take care, pal," said the bus driver.
The man looked around. Hill, narrow road curling up the side; not many trees, dust motes dappling the air. He was reluctant to leave the bus, and afraid to say so. He left his foot on the step-up.
"Up there, is it?"
"You got it."
"Uh."
"Yeah?" The driver clocked his hands around the big steering wheel.
"Why'd you let me off here?"
"Hey, now. You said the next town, right?"
"Right." He guessed so; he could hardly remember that, even. Something about a highway. Ditch. Crawling up through tumbleweeds. He saw his hands. Cut. Not long ago, either. "Only, it seems like we came close to a couple of other stops before this. Doesn't look like much here."
The driver hit the pneumatic lever. Hiss.
"Those weren't the one. I'm not even supposed to stop for them. At all." He said it like he would have said "Move 'em out." He fixed straight ahead as the door pumped, trying to close.
"Well, thanks anyway," said the man, retrieving his foot. "Wish me luck."
"You got it," said the driver. The door hissed again and sealed and the long mud-spattered steel sides moved out.
The man started up the hill. Well, here goes, he said to himself.
Near the top, he
stood and wiped his face with a handkerchief he found in his jacket pocket. He got a look at the fields opposite: rolling acres of an unknown rust-colored crop in endless unkempt rows. Like wheat covered with dried blood, he thought.
He turned. Something had moved nearby in the dry weeds. Then again, again. He raised his face and brimmed his eyes with his hand.
The dim lights of a truck swung around the top of the hill. He realized it was getting dark fast. More gravel careened over the edge and skittered through the grass near him. Listening hard, he heard or thought he heard the motor sputter and die and the ratchety pull of a hand brake. He folded the handkerchief away and started trudging the rest of the way to the top.
When he came up, it was blue twilight. He saw a funny old town on the plateau, lots of trees and tended fields backed up all the way to the shadows under the far hills. He snorted at the dust in his nose, pulling his hair back behind his ears with his fingers and went to the building with the neon sign. THE MOONMILL, it said. The truck, an old Ford pickup, rested in front. It was the only one of the wooden buildings he could see that had a light on yet. The door, hewn from heavy planks, thumped behind him. He peered. It was pitch dark. Music played from a scratchy phonograph record.
green, green promenade in green
"Hi, hon." A woman's voice. He turned, turned again. "You just get in?" Close, by his shoulder. He felt her take his arm. He made an uncertain step with her, only to bump his knee on something. He made a sound. Reaching out, he felt a stool.
"Well, what have we got here?" said the woman. "Is it a man or a mole? Ha ha ha!" She touched his dark glasses and drew them off. "Well, well! Aren't you a sight! Hurt yourself, hon?"
He slid onto the stool. "I'm all right," he said. Reassuring himself, maybe. Reflexively he touched the knee. The fabric was torn, and he noticed other rips and frays on the suit. He left his hand over the knee.
"Harlan," she called. "A glass of dark for my friend here."