by Hal Johnson
Myron apologized for giving away his secret, but I told him not to worry about it. He was just too honest, was all.
I went fast—everyone goes fast on this highway, there’s nothing to slow down for—and I would have gone faster except the Bug was pretty old. We hit Salt Lake City at nightfall, and I kept on driving. It was dawn, an hour outside of Reno, when a bat came down and buzzed the windshield. I knew what such auspices augured, so I pulled over. The bat wheeled around and landed next to the car and became a scrawny, naked, middle-aged man with a face like a leather mask. I rolled down the window. It was Allambee.
“I’ve got a message from Angel, mate. It’s about the car,” Allambee said. He always started any dialogue with a mate or two, to remind you he was Australian.
“Tell him if it was a gift, I thank him for it; and if it was a loaner, I’m not done with it yet,” I said.
“He wants it back. I don’t think he’s cranky, mate, he just wants it back. He said to drive it to Campanile, and he’ll meet you there, probably tomorrow.”
“Where’s Campanile again?” I asked, although I knew perfectly well. It was a few miles north, past the reservoir, along a road we’d already passed—just where Allambee said it was. “He’ll be there tomorrow, then?” I asked. “No need for me to go right away?”
“Nah, mate. You might catch some drama if you go on, though. There’s a whole fleet of bullymen up ahead.”
“What’s a bullyman?” Myron asked. Allambee ignored him.
“He means there’re a lot of cops up ahead,” I explained. “Maybe I’ll go right to Campanile now. I don’t know where the registration for this heap is, and I wouldn’t want anything to get impounded,” I said, “before I can deliver the car in Campanile.”
Allambee just shrugged. “No worries,” he said. “Mate.” And then he was flying away.
“Are the cops after us?” Myron asked when he was gone.
“It’s plausible,” I said. I’d cut a few corners in my life.
“And is this guy really going to meet you in Campanile?”
“It’s plausible,” I said.
“So you think it’s safe?”
“No, I think it’s a trap, but it’s a plausible one.”
“I think it’s a trap, too,” Myron said. “He never even looked at me. Everyone always looks at me.” Before, he didn’t add, looking away.
I was testing the wind with my hand, and it was blowing strong, maybe even strong enough to cover our tracks behind us. “I think it’s a trap,” I said, “because I always think it’s a trap. But here’s the plan. We’ll go off the road and drive across the desert, along the reservoir spillway. This has the advantage of being the most direct route to Campanile, in case there’s a bat watching us start off. I doubt if he’ll follow us far, though, he must be tired out from flying around all night looking for us. After we get to the reservoir, we drive the car right in. Then we spend the next three or four days underwater, breathing through this cardboard tube, until the whole thing gets called off. Then we walk to Campanile and get something to eat. It’s the last place they’d expect us to be.”
“There’s only one tube,” Myron said.
I gunned the engine. “We’ll take turns,” I said. I realize what I was proposing sounded crazy, but I’d gotten out of many a scrape before by simply waiting someplace extremely uncomfortable, like a refrigerator or the bottom of an outhouse, until everyone else got bored with looking. The worse the place was, the less likely anyone would think you could spend any time, let alone the month I spent under the outhouse, there. “Anyway, it’s not like we can actually drown.”
This was my plan, and it turned out to be a terrible one. Driving across the desert I had to roll up all the windows, because the wind was kicking dust and sand into the car, and with the windows up—there was no air conditioning—the car became unbearably stifling.
“Is that the reservoir?” Myron asked, looking out his window. “There’s no water in it.”
“That’s just some kind of secondary reservoir. If the first one fills up, they can send the runoff down the spillway, and it fills up this one. Don’t worry, there’ll be plenty of water when we get there.”
“I was hoping it would be dry,” pouted Myron, but I ignored him. I eased over now to drive along the edge of the spillway, along the concrete lip where our tracks were hardest to see in the thin spray of shifting sand. We were only a couple hundred yards from the reservoir and our aquatic adventure, and the ground was sloping upward gently, when suddenly my nose twitched, and something behind a bush up ahead, in the shadow of the bush, something that I had thought was a rock, turned out to be a man hiding under a gray duster. He threw the duster off and took a step and turned into an enormous bison, which charged forward. I stepped on the gas, but the car, the car was not so fast, and its wheels were still spinning for traction in the dusting of sand when two thousand pounds of bison crashed inexorably into the side of the car, right behind my seat. We skidded sideways over the steep edge of the spillway, which was, of course, dry, so our tumble down was very painful. I dragged myself painfully and a little bloodily out the shattered driver’s side window of the upside-down car, reached in for my duffle bag, and then helped Myron crawl across and avoid the glass. He was still holding his duffle bag, its cloth handle gripped tightly and probably unconsciously in one hand.
The spillway was festooned with foot-high concrete cones sticking up from the ground. As I understand it, water coming into the spillway from the reservoir would hit the cones, which was supposed to dissipate the kinetic energy of the flood. The spillway was only fifteen feet deep, but the car, after flipping over, had landed on the field of concrete cones, and they had punched right through the roof, battering the two of us. Myron had gotten it worse; he was bleeding rather badly from his head and wasn’t making much sense.
“Kid, we’ve got to get going,” I said. I pulled him over to the far side of the spillway, his duffle bag dragging behind him, to where there was a metal ladder in a shallow recess. But when I grabbed the lowest rung the whole ladder came free and fell over backwards, breaking apart into three pieces on the ground. The trap was a good one. I looked around quickly: there were other ladders every fifty feet or so, but they were probably also rigged. As a binturong I could climb the walls, of course—binturongs can climb anything red pandas can climb, and red pandas can climb anything—but there was no way to bring Myron with me. Our only hope, I figured, was to head toward the reservoir and climb the stepped embankment to the release gate; we should be able to clamber out from there. It was when I turned in that direction that I saw her. Ten feet away. The rising sun was striking her left side, casting deep shadows across half her face. She was wearing a white cotton dress, and even at the bottom of the spillway there was enough wind to billow it out and blow her short hair back and forth in her face. It was Mignon Emanuel.
“Myron,” I whispered, suddenly thinking of something I wished I had thought of days ago. “This tube hasn’t left your sight since you got it, right? No one could have pulled a switcheroo on us, right?”
But Myron was too dazed to say anything coherent. He kept babbling and making horrible groaning sounds. Then Mignon Emanuel spoke.
“Myron. Arthur,” she said, with a nod for each.
It was disconcerting, even after hearing what Myron had told me about her abilities, to be in the presence of a therianthrope and feel nothing, no comforting or warning tingle. It was like she wasn’t there at all. “Angel’s expecting us,” I told her, just in case that would do some good.
At Mignon Emanuel’s side was a purse, and she reached in and removed a furry severed head.
“Is that a dog?” Myron asked at last, shaking his head.
“It’s a coyote,” I said. “It’s Angel Sanchez.”
“Angel Sanchez is a coyote?” Myron asked. Like I said, he’d hurt his head and wasn’t thinking straight.
“Is the lion here?” I asked. I admit I was terrified.
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“No. Benson has left his employ and is assisting me now.”
I let out a sigh of relief. Lynch was the one I was really worried about.
“I would first like to say that I’m sorry all this was necessary,” Mignon Emanuel said. “I hope you understand that I bear you no personal animosity, Arthur.”
“Bear?” Myron said, suddenly remembering where he was. “Watch out, she can turn into a bear.” The blood was flowing so freely from his head that it completely covered one eye. It got into his mouth as he talked, and he had to spit it out.
“I know,” I said.
“And, Myron, I do apologize that it has come to this.”
“Are you going to kill us?” Myron asked.
“What? Why, of course not, Myron. I’m here to help you, just as I always have been. I make no claims to altruism, although I am personally fond of you. You understand that I am in need of you, just as I flatter myself that you are in need of me.” She took a step forward.
“You killed Spenser!” Myron shouted at her.
“Spenser and I had a feud of long standing. That had little to do with you, Myron. There are things you don’t know about Alces alces, the moose. You would not blame me if you knew all I knew.”
“He’s the only person I’ve met in the last six months who didn’t just lie to me all the time!” Myron was crying now. He was so upset that he forgot to add what he had clearly meant to, which was except for Arthur or present company excluded.
“Myron, I only lied to you for your own good. I need you to help me to bring an end to all this violence. We spoke before of unifying our people. We can unify them under your banner. Even if we know you’re not the chosen one, no one else knows that.”
“Why can’t you leave me alone? Why can’t all of you leave me alone?”
Up ahead I could see someone naked, probably Benson, standing up at the reservoir. Doubtless, if anything went wrong here, he could open the floodgates and fill the spillway with a wall of water. Anyone in the path of the flood would be pulped. It wouldn’t kill us, of course, but it would be easy for Benson to follow the spillway down to the second reservoir and fish the bodies out to finish us off. A thirty-pound binturong stands little chance against a bear, but Benson’s hand on the trigger made sure even any mismatched combat that took place wouldn’t be a fair fight.
Mignon Emanuel, meanwhile, said, “You’re too special to be left alone.” She took another step forward and held out her hand, bending forward at the waist. “Your friend Arthur can leave, no harm will come to him.”
Myron was sniffling beside me. I liked the sound of some of this, but just to be safe, I had reached into my duffle bag. Assuming no one had pulled a switcheroo—assuming the maneuver I had practiced years ago I was still proficient at—I had pried off the cap at one end of the tube, and I could feel the wadded-up tinfoil inside.
“I’m not the only one who needs you, Myron,” Mignon Emanuel said. “Don’t let us all down.”
“I don’t believe you anymore,” Myron screamed, and punched her in the face.
For a moment we all stood frozen. It was not a very good punch—Myron would never have strong arms, and he didn’t really know what he was doing—but he did catch Mignon Emanuel completely by surprise. Finally, very slowly and deliberately, Mignon Emanuel said, “No one in a thousand years has struck me with impunity. I hope you will take it as a token of my esteem that I am willing to forget this has happened.”
“I hate you,” Myron screamed, and punched her again, more confidently this time, and right in the nose, from which descended a trickle of red.
Mignon Emanuel’s face darkened into something truly terrifying. Rearing up, she roared, “If you have drawn blood, the binturong will die.”
At that moment my senses became clouded—or, better, overwhelmed. I was ready for it, of course, or thought I was, but it was still a bit of a surprise, the powerful emanation from the tube. It was the emanation of death, the stench emitted from the bones of an immortal when his life has fled. I had counted on this stench, when the time came, paralyzing my opponent, but Myron and Mignon Emanuel both turned their heads immediately toward me as, in a great rustling of tinfoil, I drew out of the tube the bones of a tiger’s forearm and front paw, bleached a beautiful white and bound together with silver wire. If Mignon Emanuel, still drawn up to her full height, paused a moment there, it was not from terror or surprise at the miasma that filled the spillway; it was rather from the paralysis that accompanies a sudden realization. What she had realized just then I do not pretend to know.
And the bones were moving. Theoretically, when I had practiced this maneuver, the strike came smoothly as I drew the skeletal arm from the tube, like a samurai’s quick-draw iaijutsu strike, but the tube had been shaken around so much, things had shifted around inside, and I bobbled the draw, and even dropped the tube. But I was committed, and I swung the bones forward, holding the elbow like a club.
Mignon Emanuel murmured, out loud, “So that’s where that went,” just as the five claws struck her throat. Very few things are sharper than a tiger’s claws, and Mignon Emanuel’s neck exploded in a spray of red. Her face darkened again, just before it blanched, and I worried for a moment that she would be able to turn into a bear before she died—bears, as everyone knows, can keep fighting and killing even after they die. But her eyes rolled back, and she flopped over onto the cement ground. In death, as we always do, she assumed her true form, and her clothing exploded into scraps. From a distance, the wind brought me the sound of Benson’s startled cry.
“Listen, kid, we’re in real danger, he’s going to open the floodgates,” I said rapidly as I knelt by her corpse and set to work. Suddenly a battery of sirens began to sound, making it even harder to think. With the razor-sharp claws of the immortal tiger I made a cut down the bear’s belly, from sternum to navel. The guts exploded outward in a disgusting mass, and I began shoveling them away.
Myron was still standing there, sniffling.
I had to shout. “If we get swept downstream, Benson will find us at the end, battered and torn, and finish us off.” I paused a moment. Benson might not be smart enough to search the secondary reservoir, but he was probably under orders from Mignon Emanuel, and he’d be able to follow orders. Also, Florence could be down there right now, ready to dive in the water and eviscerate the bloody remains of our bodies before we could even regain consciousness. The siren’s wailing could not cover up the great mechanical whirring up ahead. I unspooled the bear’s intestines faster.
“Kid, listen, you’ve got to get inside,” I said at last.
“What? No!”
“Fifty billion tons of water”—(I may have been exaggerating)—“are about to come down this chute. The insides of this bear are the only soft thing for miles.”
I grabbed him by the shoulders and began to muscle him toward the bear’s corpse. It would have been difficult to actually force him in, but fortunately he relented and stuck his feet into the guts. At my instigation, he positioned himself so he was oriented in the opposite direction as the bear, his feet toward its head, and nestled himself lower and lower, slithering in backwards with his feet up inside the rib cage, until he was up to his shoulders in guts. He had somehow managed to wedge his duffle bag in there, too. The big holdup for him was getting his hands in—for some reason he didn’t want to do that part—but eventually he wriggled those in, too. I noticed that his head had stopped bleeding, but, of course, he now was almost completely covered in gore. I thought for a moment of turning back into a binturong and trying to worm in next to him, but, on careful consideration, I realized there would not be enough space, not with his bag in there, too, and there was no time to draw it back out.
“This is important,” I shouted at him, over the sirens and the clanking of chains, and—was that the rushing of water? “When your wild ride stops, you will still be in danger. Swim out as soon as you can, and run to the road. The road is south, you know which way is south?”
“The sun is on my left,” he said. The image must have reminded him of the terror of Mignon Emanuel standing in the rising sun five minutes ago, and he choked a little on the answer.
“Good. Don’t get caught, but if you get caught blame everything on me. I’ll wait for you in Reno for three days, and then I’ll head for Sacramento.”
“But how—” Myron started. Clearly he was worried about me.
I cut him off. “In the Del Paso Heights branch of the Sacramento Public Library, there’s a book on the care and feeding of binturongs. Inside that book, there’s an address—”
Some look in Myron’s eyes stopped me. “Why?” Myron asked, squirming in his mattress of blood. “Why are you doing this for me?”
I thought of Myron’s backpack, left in the back of Alice’s pickup truck so many months ago. “Because you liked my books,” I said. Because how could I tell him the real answer, that I envied the hell out of him? He was young—I don’t mean he was literally young, he was thousands of years old, just like the rest of us—but he was young because he had no past to haunt him. He didn’t have hundreds of murders on his conscience, he didn’t have the stupefying dullness of having seen and done everything already, so that even the promises offered by the new technologies of the future—faster cars and 3-D television—seemed like tedious variations on a tired theme. Envy was why the lion wanted to kill him, envy was why the bear wanted to use him. The memories of an endless childhood among the jungles, or the wastelands, or the savannahs, an endless childhood that finally ended, haunted us the way nostalgia haunts an old man, but our nostalgia cannot be ended by senility and a natural death. To see someone who returned, thanks to a lion’s claws passing through his brain, to the garden of that childhood—there was nothing more heartening and heartbreaking.
But there was no way to say all this. By now the roar of water was deafening. I picked up all the intestines I could in one armload and jammed them on top of Myron’s face, forcing his head down as deep into bear bowels as I could. “Watch out for the lion, the one to fear is the lion,” I shouted, perhaps futilely. Then the water was all around, and I had to leap for the side. Halfway through the leap, I turned into a binturong, and, my mass now a quarter of what it had been when I jumped, I was able to grab the side, and, my claws finding purchase in the small cracks, to scamper up it. My shaggy prehensile tail got wet.