The Wrong Goodbye

by Chris F. Holm

  The man-thing squeezed, and what I felt was so awful it made all the pain I'd ever experienced seem like a fucking spa treatment. Death itself was but child's play compared to this. To being swallowed whole by Nothing.

  A horrid emptiness pressed in on me – chilling, absolute. The muted colors of the pre-dawn desert seemed a thousand rainbows strong compared to the terrible void that engulfed me. My thoughts were stripped away – my very sensations – until I found myself longing for the agony of my broken and bloodied physical self.

  Until I longed to feel anything at all.

  As I plunged ever deeper into the abyss, cast alive into the creature's unholy In-Between, I heard its voice as if from somewhere high above.

  Three days, it said, so quiet I could barely make it out. Though the words were as light as the last scraps of Being that surrounded me, and my self was but a fading memory, I knew exactly what the creature meant.

  And just like that, the Nothingness lifted.

  I was in the desert.

  I was in the desert, and I was alone.

  14.

  "Sam!"

  A single, barked syllable. Urgent, it seemed, but I couldn't make sense of what it meant, and anyways, it was so very far away. My eyes fluttered open for a moment, only to be assaulted by grit and wind and morning light. Then my lids came tumbling down. I didn't see the point of stopping them.

  "Goddamn it, Sam, stay with me!"

  I felt a slap across my face. The words seemed louder now, their meaning more apparent. I recognized my name, at least, if not the person saying it.

  "I swear to Christ, Sam, if you die, I'm gonna fuckin' kill you."

  Gio. Right. The tough-guy cadence was a dead giveaway. What I didn't know was why he was making such a fuss.

  And then it all came back. The desert road. The sudden stop. My little chat with the old man.

  No, that wasn't quite right. That thing was old, but not a man. It was a monster, a horror-show, a walking abomination – a wretched beast that claimed it was a god.

  God or not, that thing had plunged me into Nothingness – horrid, empty, complete – and given me an ultimatum. Three days, it had said. Three days to find the soul that Danny had stolen from me and lay it to rest.

  Three days before the Nothing was forever.

  That last thought got me moving. I sat up, or tried. It didn't take. Gio was saying something, but I was having trouble hearing him. I once more opened my eyes. The world was kind of blurry, and a little gray around the edges, but at least this time they stayed open. Seemed like progress to me.

  A sudden lurch, and I was off the ground. Gio wheezed and grunted as he hauled me over to the ruined Fiesta, cursing all the while. My head lolled back, and I spied the patch of dirt that I'd been sprawled out on. The desert sand was darker there.

  Dark like rust.

  Like blood.

  We reached the car. He tossed me in. Like the plot of land I'd left behind, his hands and shirt were slick with blood – my blood. Gio's face was a mask of concern. I tried to tell him not to worry, that I'd be all right, but the words died on my lips. I couldn't find the breath to speak, and my chest hurt like crazy – a sharp, burny sort of pain. After a couple minutes of struggling to speak, I forgot what I was trying to say in the first place. And a minute after that, it didn't matter.

  I was once more asleep.

  A prickle in my sinuses, a sudden burning in my throat. My eyes fluttered open, and consciousness returned. Gio sat, expectant, beside me, a vial of smelling salts cracked open in his hand. The backseat of the Fiesta was littered with gauze and tape and spent tubes of ointment. I think a good half of that ointment wound up on my face, slathered over my numerous contusions and leaving me a sticky mess. My ribs were now taped, and though it still hurt like hell to breathe, the pain was of a more manageable sort. My right arm was in a sling – the shoulder back in place, it seemed – and the wrist the creature'd squeezed throbbed in time with the beating of my heart. No big, I thought, this meat-suit was a lefty anyway.

  "Wh-where…" My voice sounded thick and wet and wrong. Gio must've thought so, too, because he frowned.

  "Round back of a twenty-four-hour pharmacy." He caught me eyeing the gaping hole in the Fiesta's windshield, and smiled. "Don't worry; nobody saw us pull in, and I didn't steal this shit or nothin' – I bought it with cash outta the morgue dude's wallet. How you feelin'?"

  "Peachy," I croaked.

  "Yeah, you look it. You wanna tell me what the hell happened back there?"

  "Long story."

  "Seems to me, we got a while."

  No, I thought, we don't. But what I said was, "You remember the bug back at the mortuary?" My Ms sounded like Bs. My Gs rattled like phlegm in the back of my throat.

  "Yeah?"

  "I just tangled with a few thousand of his friends."

  "Wait – you're telling me bugs did this to you?"

  "More like a bug monster, but yeah."

  "A bug monster? As in, a monster made of bugs?"

  "Pretty much."

  "Shit." He looked stricken, and cast a furtive glance from side to side. "This bug monster – you think it's comin' back?"

  "If we don't track down what Danny took, and soon, you can count on it."

  He swallowed hard, and did his best to put on a brave face. It wasn't terribly convincing. "Guess it's a good thing I patched you up then. You gotta be in tip-top shape so you can kick its insect ass the second time around."

  I laughed. It hurt.

  "Listen," he said, "speaking of patching you up, I got some good news and I got some bad news."

  "OK," I said, wary. "What's the bad news?" The way I was talking, it sounded more like Wazzabanooze?

  "The bad news is the trip through the windshield broke your nose. I was hoping when you came to that you'd be able to muddle through as is, but to be honest, you don't sound so good. Which means I'm gonna hafta straighten it – and that is gonna smart like hell."

  "Then what the hell's the good news?"

  "The good news is, you ain't gonna be conscious long to feel it."

  Before I could reply, he grabbed my head in both hands, his thumbs on either side of my nose. Then he jerked them to one side. I heard a sickening crunch, and let out a wail. Then, for a while, I didn't hear anything at all.

  When I next came to, the sun was getting high overhead, and I was surprised to find myself peering through an unmarred windshield at a good acre of gleaming candy-apple red. A quick look around, and I realized I was sitting in the passenger seat of a classic Cadillac convertible – '58 or '59, I think – complete with red leather interior, sparkly paint-job, and chromed-out tailfins. The ragtop was down, but the old girl wasn't going anywhere; she was just sitting in what, apparently, was a mostly empty strip club parking lot. (Sorry, gentleman's club, according to the awning over the front door – though if the airbrushed mural of a pair of legs extending outward on either side of the entryway was any indication, it didn't look like the sort of place in which a gentleman had ever actually set foot.) Gio was trying his best to rectify that – he'd popped the steering column with the Fiesta's tire iron, and was currently trying to strip a couple wires with his teeth. The mangled heap of the Fiesta sat beneath the strip club's darkened neon sign a good twenty spots to my right. Every once and a while, Gio glanced over at it, as one might toward a jungle cat on the verge of pouncing.

  "Gio," I said, noting as I did that my voice had lost some of its thick, wet quality of earlier this morning, "you want to tell me what the hell you think you're doing?"

  "What's it look like I'm doing? When you had your little tangle with the bug monster, the Fiesta took a fucking beating. Now, that don't really bother me none, on account of she ain't mine, and she was a piece of shit to begin with. But if I had to guess, I'd say our good pal Ethan's probably reported her stolen by now, which means we gotta steer clear of any legal entanglements – and it seems to me a giant fucking hole in our windshield is the sort of
thing the five-oh might notice. Bottom line is, you wanna make it to Las Cruces, you and me are gonna need another ride."

  "Yeah," I said, eyeing the Caddy's sparkle and shine and eye-catching lines, "it'd suck to attract any undue attention to ourselves."

  "Look, make your smart-ass jokes all you want. But it's almost nine in the morning, and this place's been closed for hours. Which means whoever owns this beauty was drunk enough he probably cabbed it home. I bet he spends half the day sleeping off his hangover. That gives us plenty of time to get the hell outta Dodge 'fore he wakes up. By the time he realizes this baby's missing, we ain't even gonna be in the same state. And you gotta admit, Sam – this Caddy is a work of art. We'd be nuts not to take it."

  "Gio, no. This car's too damn pretty not to be missed, and too rare not to be noticed. Pick something else – like maybe that nice, nondescript Civic over there."

  "Hey, you got to pick the last one, remember? And if you got a thing for penny racers, that's your deal. But I barely fit into that fucking thing, so there's no way I'm gonna help you steal another one exactly like it – not when there's a ride this cherry just sittin' here waiting to be picked."

  "Seriously, Gio – stop this, now."

  But Gio didn't listen. He just glanced over at the Fiesta yet again, and redoubled his efforts to get the Caddy running.

  "Did you hear me? You are not to boost this car!"

  "Damn it, Sam, I ain't your fucking sidekick, OK? Truth is, you need me, and I say this Caddy is ours! The way I see it, any douchebag who'll leave a ride this fine sitting in a strip club parking lot is askin' to be taken down a peg. And it ain't like it's gonna kill you to loosen up and live a little – hell, you're the one who told me I should enjoy what little time I had left. So if you want my help on this little revenge-trip of yours, you're gonna hafta shut up a sec so I can concentrate!"

  "I think you misunderstand the nature of our relationship," I said, unintentionally echoing the creature's words to me last night. I opened the Caddy's massive door and stepped unsteadily out onto the blacktop of the parking lot. "You don't get to call the shots. You want to go it alone, maybe steal yourself a shiny ride, hole up somewhere, and wait to see if hell forgets to hunt you down, that's your business – and I promise you it won't end well. But if you want to come with me and make the guy who killed you pay, you'll do as I say and pick another fucking car."

  I leveled my gaze at Gio, trying to imbue it with as much bad-ass as I could muster. At the time, I was pretty pleased with the result, because he was staring back at me in wide-eyed terror. Of course, I didn't realize it then, but that terror had nothing whatsoever to do with me.

  "Look, Sam, I get what you're saying – really, I do. But this really ain't the time to discuss it. How 'bout you get in the car, and we can talk about it on the road?"

  "Are you even listening to me? That's the last place we're going to talk about it! Get it through your fucking head – I am not leaving this parking lot until you pick another car!"

  "You won't be saying that in a minute," he mumbled, more to himself than to me.

  Something clicked with me then. His jangled nerves. His furtive glances. His sudden desire to leave. At first, I'd chalked it up to the rush of stealing such a cherry ride, but it was something more than that.

  "Gio," I said, "what'd you do?"

  "Look, can we just go?"

  "Not until you tell me what you did."

  "Well, I figured we can't ditch the Fiesta without people taking notice – it's all beat to hell and fulla blood. The cops are bound to think some serious shit went down, and we don't need that kind of attention. So I handled it."

  "Handled it? Handled it how?"

  But before Gio could answer, the morning calm was torn apart by an explosion that set the Fiesta soaring skyward, and threw me ass-over-teakettle into the waiting Cadillac. I wound up wedged headfirst into the passenger-side footwell, my torso pinned between the seat and dash. It was hell on my ribs, but at least it kept my face from scraping against the floor mat. I tried in vain to catch my breath, but the force of the blast had knocked the wind from my chest and left me gasping like a fish on a trawler's deck. I must've been flopping like one too, as I struggled to right myself – but at that, at least, I had some success. After a moment's thrashing about, I wound up sitting sideways across the bench seat, one foot braced against Gio's pudgy face, and my back against the passenger door. You'd think a shoe against your cheek is the kind of thing you might take notice of, but if Gio did, he didn't show it. He was too busy staring at the pillar of thick black smoke that spiraled skyward from the twisted remains of Ethan's Fiesta.

  Charred bits of scrap and glass rained down upon us from above, but still, Gio just sat there, stunned. Through sheer force of will, I drew a breath – as hot and thick as tar – and barked a single, desperate syllable.

  "GO!"

  My voice sounded tinny and far away to my ears, which still rang from the crack of the blast, but that single syllable was enough to goad Gio into action. He sparked the ignition to life and threw the Caddy into gear. Then he laid on the gas and we squealed out of the parking lot, the scent of our tires against the blacktop lost in the charred stench of the twisted wreck we left behind.

  15.

  We were twenty minutes from Las Cruces when I realized we were not alone.

  The strip club was a good half hour behind us, though between the heated bickering, the withering silences, and the bouts of justifiable paranoia that flared up with every speed trap that we'd passed, it felt like twice that long. It was a good thing Gio got the Caddy running when he did – a fire engine and a couple of squad cars went screaming past us in the oncoming lane before we'd gone four blocks from the strip club parking lot, and by the time we reached the highway, a column of smoke a mile high cleaved the morning sky and no doubt drew the attention of every law-enforcement type the city over.

  I'll admit, as near as I could tell from the passenger seat, the Cadillac handled like a dream, and as the sun crested overhead, sending the temperature into the seventies, cruising with the top down was a little slice of heaven. The stretch of highway leading upward from West Texas to Las Cruces runs alongside the Mesilla Valley – a fertile floodplain four miles wide, blanketed with lush green farmland and dotted here and there with fragrant pecan groves. It was a pleasant respite from the hostile no man's land we'd been driving through, but I was so damn furious at Gio for the attention he'd drawn our way – and so damn worried about getting snagged by the cops before we managed to track down Varela's soul – I couldn't properly enjoy it. So instead, I sat there needling him, oblivious to the danger lurking a couple feet behind us.

  "Seriously, Gio, what the hell were you thinking?"

  Gio said nothing. He just grit his teeth and drove, his fingers white-knuckled on the wheel. I wasn't surprised; I'd asked him that at least a dozen times in the past half hour.

  "What, you're not talking now? Come on, Smart Guy – I'd love for you to fill me in on your master plan."

  At that, he wheeled toward me, his eyes glinting with anger. "Fuck you, Sam. If it wasn't for me, you'd be bleeding to death in the fucking desert right now. And has it even occurred to you that if you hadn't decided to hold your impromptu little Q-andA back there instead of letting me do my thing, we'da been long gone by the time the Fiesta blew? So don't go crapping on my plan – you're the one who went and screwed it up."

  "You think the fact that we were there when it happened was the only flaw in your otherwise genius plan? You're even dumber than I thought. Unless you somehow managed to vaporize the Fiesta, they're going to eventually get the VIN off of it, which means they'll be able to track it back to Ethan and to Illinois. Ethan's no doubt smart enough to leave out the whole walking-dead angle, but you can be damn sure he'll give them our descriptions, and once they know we crossed state lines, the Feds'll get involved. Next thing you know, every cop from here to California's got eyes out for us. And here we are, cruising around
in a bright red stolen car the size of a fucking aircraft carrier. You know what? My bad. In retrospect, it was an awesome plan."

  Gio's borrowed face went red with rage, and he lobbed back a profanity-laced retort, but I didn't pay him any mind. I was preoccupied by the strangest sensation at the nape of my neck – a sudden niggling intuition that something was not quite right.

  At first, I had trouble putting my finger on exactly what it was. Not a tingle, to be sure, and not a sudden chill. But as a Collector, I've learned to trust my instincts, and in that moment, my instincts were insisting we were not alone. And in retrospect, that insistence felt not unlike a cowboy boot to the back of the head.

  When the kick connected, I pitched forward, and smacked my face into the dash. It hurt like hell, and my vision went spotty, but at least I remained conscious, and my nose stayed where Gio'd put it.

  I saw a blur of snake skin out of the corner of my eye, this time heading in Gio's direction. He yelped, and the Cadillac swerved left. Beside us, a car horn blared.

  Gio tried to correct, and went too far. We barreled toward the barbed wire fence that separated the dirt shoulder from the green-tinged farmland beyond. Shit, I thought – two cars in one day? You've got to be kidding me.

  But this time, it wasn't meant to be. I heard a string of curses, delivered in a drawn-out Texan twang, and then an arm shot out from the back seat and grabbed the wheel, yanking it to the left. Our bumper missed the fence post by scant inches, and then Gio slammed the brakes, bringing the Caddy to a skidding halt on the shoulder.