Night Road

by A. M. Jenkins

  But that would be pointless. Painful for him, and nothing at all to her.

  He decided he would not stop by the downstairs apartment on the way out either. Sandor was big on good-byes, and hellos too, but Cole and Johnny were alike in not caring much about either. Cole knew he would see everyone again. They might have different haircuts or hair colors, different clothes, different things to talk about (except Frederick). But, aside from superficial details, everyone had always been the same, and always would be.

  That’s just the way it was. Nothing changed, not even in the apartment on the fifth floor. No more change than a rock. Except that a rock got to melt sometimes and turn into lava—or be eroded to bits, into sand. Rocks got to make islands and mountains.

  Even a rock, Cole thought as the doors opened before him and he stepped into the elevator for the interminable ride down, has it over us.

  PART TWO

  The Road

  CHAPTER TEN

  COLE wanted to do all the driving. He didn’t want to be a passenger; he was used to being behind the wheel—used to watching the road, keeping track of the maps, checking signs, making decisions.

  So they took Cole’s Accord.

  Gordon hadn’t said a word the whole way to the park-and-ride. Once they were on the road, he politely answered any questions asked of him. But mostly he just sat.

  That was good. Wasn’t it? Sure. The quieter the kid was, the better. Because the less he talked, the more he could listen.

  Now that they were out of the Building they were in no hurry, having no destination, and stopped for the day after only a few hours, at a motel on the highway. Sandor and Gordon shared a room—after all, Gordon couldn’t be left alone—but Cole asked for a single at the desk. He was on edge. He’d been around people for two whole nights now. He craved solitude.

  He made himself wait to see Sandor and Gordon safely into their room. When their door clicked shut behind them and he heard Sandor slide the bolt into place, he turned and went to his own room.

  Finally he was by himself. He flipped on the light by the door, then turned the dead bolt and pushed the hinged lock into position. He had his suitcase now and was ready to switch everything over from his backpack. But—first things first—he set the backpack on the bed by the window and pulled the drapes closed. Then he unzipped a side pocket and pulled out a small travel bag. Inside were the duct tape and scissors. Carefully he set about sealing the edges of the curtains to the walls, shutting out the sky.

  Next, he grabbed the inevitable hotel pad of paper by the phone and wrote down the name of the city: Springfield, New Jersey. Sometimes, on the road, the towns would run together into a blur. It was disorienting to wake up and not know where he was. And it was awkward—drew attention—when he had to ask.

  Now he moved everything over to the suitcase. When that was done, he dropped onto the hard boxlike mattress, locked his hands behind his head, and stared at the ceiling. He did not want the TV on; he wanted quiet.

  He lay there for a while, trying to let the silence soak into his bones. But he couldn’t seem to relax.

  The hotel felt even blander than hotels usually did, after the eccentricities of the Building and its occupants. This place seemed exactly like what it was, a stopover for people on their way to other places.

  He got up to take a shower and came out in shorts and a T-shirt, hair damp. He didn’t bother to comb his hair but shuffled through the ever-changing collection of paperback books he always had with him. He read almost every night into the morning; reading was his comfort and his companion. Lately he was on a Mount Everest kick. He had no desire to go there himself, but he liked reading about it.

  Tonight, though, his thoughts seemed to skitter around, unable to find a place to rest. He didn’t feel like reading.

  He set aside the books. He knew he should probably start planning for the worst. He always made plans for worse-case scenarios—made a plan, then tucked it away, feeling safer in the knowledge that it lay ready for use if need be: What would he do if an omni saw him feeding and confronted him? What if his car broke down, and he was stuck by the side of the road with dawn coming? The worst case almost never happened, but having a plan was what kept one from having to scramble, panicked, at the last second.

  Well. Of course he was going to make damn sure to do right by Gordon. But…if worse did come to worst…

  Locking someone in a shed wouldn’t work anymore. People lived so close together these days, screams would be heard. You’d have to get a heme away from the towns and the omnis. Maybe a field? Wouldn’t you have to immobilize the heme—and how would you do that? Well, you’d have to…have to…

  He thought of his own burned skin, hanging in whitened shreds.

  Stop it, he told himself. This sort of thinking distracted from the problem at hand.

  But…if he did what he was supposed to do, there wouldn’t be any problem. All he had to do was remain focused on his task. All he had to do was his job.

  He had the knowledge to make it so, and he certainly had the determination.

  So he deliberately put the thought away and stretched out on the floor at the foot of the bed. He did some sit-ups, some crunches, and various kinds of push-ups—not too many though. It drew attention if you were overly bulked up. He only needed strength enough to correct a feeding gone wrong.

  When that was done he sat on the carpeted floor and stared at his toes for a bit.

  Perhaps I should have gone to see her.

  He had seen her for one moment, right after Johnny brought her back. She’d been in bad shape—sun damage in hemes took longer to heal than other injuries, and Bess had been so badly burned that it actually left scars. The bones hadn’t been set before they healed. And her eyes! The pupils were permanently dilated, and the irises that used to be expressive brown had stretched to mere rims around clear black. They had become empty, flat. Inhuman as two marbles. She had no idea whether anyone else was in the room or not.

  Seeing her that way had stricken him to the heart—a physical pain, a stone that lodged in his chest. Even now, a hundred and twenty years later, the lump still hadn’t melted away.

  It wouldn’t have made any difference even if I’d visited her, he reminded himself. It was true, an incontrovertible fact. There was no point in going over and over it in his mind. He hadn’t been able to connect with her even when he’d wanted to desperately and she’d still been capable of it. Now it was pointless—she was an empty shell, and he didn’t want to connect with anybody at all.

  He got up and went over to his suitcase. He unzipped the outer pocket and took out his leather file case, then sat down on the floor again to open it.

  He ran one hand over the smooth black surface. He had not looked at his photos in a while; but the events of the past two days had made him feel like too many thoughts were battering at his brain, trying to break him into pieces.

  It was better to be disconnected. It was easier to maintain control, to live in moderation, when you kept at a distance. The only difficulty with that was a blurring of the years; just like Johnny had said, everlasting life tended to bring with it a loss of feeling. Any being that cannot die must eventually struggle to keep from being dead inside.

  One had to keep feeling something.

  Reading was for losing oneself, for forgetting. His photos were for connecting, but safely, without running any risks.

  Cole opened the leather case and, digging into a pocket, pulled out one of the many stacks. He would thin out the files a bit. Now was a good time.

  Soon black-and-white photos lay scattered around him, like tiles in a mosaic. It had been a while since he’d taken any; if he picked up the habit again, he knew he probably ought to go digital. Then this file case would go into the basement where the sketchbooks were now—the ones that had survived the years anyway. Time had a way of turning pages into dust.

  He shuffled through the stack of photos in his hand. There was one of a little boy in a small whi
te coffin. He remembered that one—early 1900s? He’d set himself up as a photographer, and the boy’s mother had wanted a picture. People dealt with death head-on back then; they’d had to. Now it was so sanitized; people died in some nice clean hospital bed, and the body was carted off to be fixed up in private, and a lot of the time no one was there to watch it go into the ground.

  Cole looked again at the hollow-cheeked toddler, thin in his white sailor suit, very final, lying in his white box; and he thought he’d keep this one, not for the picture itself, but because of the mother. It was the same urge that had driven him to look back at the lady disappearing down the subway stairs two nights ago. The omnis went away so fast, leaving few traces—and those disappearing so quickly that the only things about them that remained were whatever Cole could hold on to in his own head.

  The mother of the boy in this picture was certainly dead herself by now, but as long as he could still look at this photo and remember, then her encounter with adamant and unyielding death still mattered. Without Cole, it would have long ago been lost in the overwhelming current of tragedies and joys that disappeared every day, every hour, every minute.

  Used to be, he felt like a weird distorted god, a chronicler of life cycles he could never be part of, a keeper of memories and feelings that everyone else had forgotten.

  But more and more, he merely felt as if he were playing solitaire.

  He tucked the photo back into the file and looked at the next picture—a farm girl with flyaway hair and tired eyes. He felt nothing when he looked at her and couldn’t remember anything about taking the picture, so into the discard pile it went.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE next evening Cole opened his eyes to the familiar chink of fluorescent light coming under the door from the hallway. He blinked, and squinted across the white expanse of sheet. Then he raised his head. Sat up. Swung his feet to the floor. Got up. Pulled the duct tape from the curtains. Outside it was dark.

  And so it began again.

  Sandor opened the door to Cole’s knock. The windows were unsealed, the heavy drapes opened to reveal sheer curtains, and through those were the parking lot and streets beyond—halos of lights amid still pools of dark.

  Sandor was fully dressed, his suitcase packed and standing near the door. Gordon’s suitcase was open on one of the beds, and from the closed bathroom door Cole could hear the shower running.

  “Have a seat, Cole.” Sandor plopped himself on the bed and leaned back against the headboard, legs stretched out before him. The TV was on a news program.

  “Want me to take your bag out to the car?”

  Sandor shrugged. “We’ll be going out ourselves in a bit. Sit down, relax. There’s no hurry.”

  Cole rolled his suitcase over by Sandor’s and sat in the spindly hard-backed chair by the desk.

  “Mm. Earthquake in Turkey,” Sandor said, eyes on the TV. “Terrible tragedy.”

  The sound of the shower stopped. “Good.” Cole stood up. “He’s done.”

  Sandor didn’t move. “Don’t count on it.”

  After a few moments, a blow-dryer started up in the bathroom. Cole sat down again. He wondered how the kid had slept last night, his first real night on the road. Not that Cole was concerned. It was just that if Gordon were tired, it would show in his eyes—it might make him look ill, which was not conducive to luring omnis close.

  The TV blared an ad for a prime-time drama. “Oh, I mustn’t miss that,” Sandor said. “Lindsay is going to tell Justin that she doesn’t love him anymore.”

  “How can you stand this stuff?” Cole asked. “Those are supposed to be teenagers, right? But you can tell that not one of them is under twenty-five. Look at that receding hairline!”

  “If you watched it, you would get caught up in the story and not notice such things.”

  “I can’t get caught up in it. Real people don’t talk like that, in semicolons. And all those people cry so beautifully, without sniffling.”

  “And how do you cry, Cole?”

  “I don’t. Listen, there’s something I wanted to ask you, Sandor. What was Gordon’s first feed? How did that go?”

  “It was…” Sandor found the remote beside him and clicked off the television. The blow-dryer whined on behind the bathroom door. “It was most unfortunate. I was not quick enough—I was unwell, you see, from being drained, and then the surfeit. He got away from me.”

  “And what happened?”

  “I think he had been going to see his girlfriend, and that’s where he was heading when the Thirst hit. I caught up to him at her apartment door, and he had already started feeding. It wasn’t pretty. I had to punch him in the head several times to get him to release her.”

  “And the girl?”

  “It was a bit of a mess, but she was alive. I carried her inside. She was…quite messy. He tore at her; you know how it is. Fortunately the bleeding stopped as soon as I knocked him away. Otherwise we would have been in real trouble. As it was we left her there, and I got him away. He was covered in blood, you know. All over his face, his shirt, his hands. And his girlfriend half dead. Poor boy. I don’t blame him for being a bit shell-shocked.”

  Shell-shocked indeed. Poor boy was right.

  “Do you think she was okay?” Cole asked.

  “Oh yes. Eventually, she would be. Nothing nature couldn’t cure. After a while,” Sandor added, but he didn’t sound too sure. “Do you know, Cole, I think that omni girl in the Building really upset him, the one he took too much from. I think perhaps it reminded him of what happened with his girlfriend.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. I thought he was almost adjusting, up till then. Yes, I’m sure it reminded him of that first time.” Sandor was still sitting with his legs outstretched, but now he crossed his arms in front of him. “The whole thing got out of hand so quickly. I’m sure it was difficult for his girlfriend when she woke up. I did change her blouse. I debated about that, Cole, because I thought perhaps it was wrong to undress a voluptuous young lady while she was out cold. But I decided it was better that she not wake up to a bloody mess all over her front. Besides, it would have ruined her bedspread. So I took the ruined blouse and put it in a Dumpster on the way back to Gordon’s dorm.”

  “Did Gordon help you with all this?”

  “Oh no, he was crouched in a corner. He was not quite all there, if you know what I mean. I can’t even imagine what he must have felt. One moment a carefree boy, the next tearing chunks out of a loved one’s flesh with your nails and teeth. It makes you feel for him, doesn’t it? But I got to him as fast as I could, Cole. I feel terrible about it, but I really did do my best under the circumstances.”

  “It was a difficult situation,” Cole agreed.

  “I felt I had to get him out of there quickly,” Sandor fretted. “She was out cold, they were both bloody, and he told me that she had a roommate.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Sandor. You did the right thing. He wouldn’t have been in any shape to talk to the police.”

  “Yes, they came looking for him, right off the bat. It was in the newspapers for a few days, until they picked up that incident in Florida—did you see that? The man who killed his boss and served him at the corporate banquet? He fried the fingers up like chicken wings. Anyway, I felt bad for leaving the girl in such a condition, but—ah, well.”

  “What did you do about his first feed after that?”

  In the bathroom, the blow-dryer stopped abruptly.

  “A prostitute,” Sandor whispered, as he turned to sit on the side of the bed. “I felt it would be easiest.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Sandor frowned in the general direction of his feet. “Cole,” he said quickly, “I never asked if he loved her. His girlfriend, I mean. Do you think I should have?”

  Marble-blank eyes. Skin crisscrossed with old scars.

  “No,” Cole said firmly. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “It’ll be harder for him to adjust if he’s gri
eving over a lost love.”

  “He’s not going to be doing any grieving on my watch. He’s got to stay focused on the present.”

  “If he’s sad, he’s sad. Grief is the price one pays for love.”

  “Not for Gordon,” Cole said. “Not anymore.”

  At that moment Gordon emerged from the bathroom. He was completely dried and dressed, holding a bundle of dirty clothes and hair care products. He had on nondescript khaki pants and a white T-shirt.

  He gave Cole a brief nod as he walked over and dumped everything into his suitcase. He wasn’t tidy, but he seemed to know what to do. He zipped his bag, sealing the disarray inside, and was ready to go in less than a minute.

  “All right.” Cole stood and pushed the chair back under the desk. “Let’s try again,” he told Gordon. Some other time he’d explain it to Sandor: Grief and love were the same thing because they both led to mistakes. Therefore they were luxuries no heme could afford.

  Gordon finally managed to get an independent feed at a billiard hall–arcade somewhere between Springfield and Berkeley Heights.

  Cole and Sandor had already taken care of themselves, although Cole did not care for his omni, having accidentally gotten hold of a smoker. He did not like the way nicotine affected the flavor of a feed, and he hated the way smokers smelled, the way their odors seeped into his clothes and hair. He did not let it stop him from getting his evening feed though. The whole place smelled like smoke anyway.

  Gordon was learning to use his smile and his eyes. After a couple of abortive attempts, he managed to get into a game of pool with a girl he’d never seen before. He got her when she paused, leaning on her cue stick, waiting for him to pass behind her to get to his shot. He leaned over, his hand swiftly at her neck. She gave a brief yelp of surprise, but it was cut off almost instantly by Gordon’s mouth.