The Astral

by V. J. Banis

  Grumbling, Colley climbed out, letting a gust of frigid air sweep through the van, and limped toward the rear. Chains rattled as he dragged them out and dropped them to the ground.

  Paterson knelt on the front seat and kept his eyes glued to Catherine, the gun propped on the seat back. She looked steadily away from him, at the snow blowing fiercely past the windows. For a moment she hoped that someone would pull into the turn off, but as soon as she thought that, she changed her mind. Paterson would almost certainly kill any unfortunate passerby who stopped. She wanted no more blood on her hands.

  Colley went by the window, still grumbling, and knelt out of sight. After a moment, he yelled, “Pull up about two feet.”

  Paterson turned away from Catherine to fire up the engine again. For a moment she was unwatched. She eyed the forest outside the van and briefly considered trying to make a run for it. If she could only get into those trees he would have a hard time taking a shot at her.

  Which, she quickly concluded, would leave her alone and helpless, and handcuffed, in the woods, at night, in the middle of a near blizzard, and God only knew how far the nearest cabin might be. Even if Paterson and Colley didn’t come after her and catch her, she would likely freeze to death before she found anyone who could help her.

  She closed her eyes and tried to send herself swiftly to Jack and Chang. She had a brief glimpse through the windshield of Chang’s Bronco, saw the freeway sign for Redlands. They were gaining ground. She opened her eyes back in the van, and suppressed a smile.

  Paterson yanked his head around, his eyes narrowed. “What are you doing?” he demanded. He closed his own eyes for a second. “Somebody’s following us, ain’t they? You’ve tipped ’em off, haven’t you? I ought to....” He lifted the gun as if to strike her with it, and she cringed, but the blow did not come. “Let ’em try to find us,” he said with a smug expression. “You can’t talk to them, can you? You can’t steer the car for them. All I care, you can go sit on his lap, that won’t tell them diddly.”

  She looked directly into his eyes. Surely even this man must have some spark of humanity in him. If only she could find a way to appeal to that. Wasn’t that what they said a hostage should do, bond with your captors?

  “How did you...how did you get into all this?” she asked.

  “This?” He looked genuinely surprised by the question. “What do you mean?”

  “The children. The sex, violence, all of it?”

  He laughed. “Everything I know I learned from my daddy. Daddy got me off to an early start.”

  She could not conceal her horror. “You can’t possibly mean that he, that your own father molested you?”

  He sneered. “Hell, he was just making sure he got the cream off the top. Same as he did with my sister, wanted to be the first. What, you think that was something horrible, like? It wasn’t. I got her after him, or between times, anyway. Hell, same time other boys were wishing they knew how to get themselves some I had it steady, and I didn’t even have to go out of the house to get it. Pretty good way to grow up, you ask me.”

  Despite her disgust for the man she could not altogether escape a feeling of pity as well. Her dark angel, Gabronski had called him. A demon, even, who destroyed families, violated children. Yet he was once a child himself, and innocent. Innocence corrupted, the corrupted becoming the corrupter.

  “Your sister...is she...?”

  His grin faded. “She’s dead,” he said, voice flat. “Stupid bitch killed herself. Killed the old man, too. She’d have taken me with them if I had come home that day like she told me. What do you need to know all this shit for anyway?” he snapped, suddenly angry. “Colley, get your ass in gear, we ain’t got all night.”

  “They’re on,” Colley said. He stood up and came around to the van’s door, brushing snow off himself.

  “Get the blanket out of the back,” Paterson told him. He looked at Catherine again. “Something warned me not to come home that day, though. I always did have me a guardian angel, looking out for me. That’s something you ought to know: she’s never failed me yet.”

  Colley got the blanket from the back, letting another gust of frigid air into the van and climbed in again beside Catherine, tossing the blanket on the seat between them. Paterson passed the gun to him and drove back onto the road, the chains clacking rhythmically and loudly.

  The chains gave the van’s tires more grip on the snow-covered pavement but they slowed them too. They were crawling now on their increasingly steep way up the mountain. Paterson drove in the middle of the road. Catherine glanced out the window at the sheer drop just beyond the edge of the road, and hoped they didn’t meet any oncoming traffic on one of the curves.

  “What’s that up ahead?” Colley suddenly asked, alarmed. There were people and cars in the road ahead, tail lights and hazard lights blinking. Red and blue Highway Patrol lights flashed a warning. A uniformed officer stepped into the center of the road and held up a hand as they neared.

  “It’s a road block, Trash.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “Highway Patrol,” Paterson said, peering through the fogged-over windshield. “Chain stop. Get her down on the floor and put that blanket over her.”

  The van slowed. Highway Patrol vehicles blocked the road ahead. Half a dozen cars were pulled into a turnoff and men were putting chains on them.

  “You heard the man,” Colley said, and shoved her down between the seats. He threw the blanket over her. It smelled and she had to resist the urge to sneeze.

  “Cock her if you have to,” Paterson’s muffled voice said.

  They were barely moving now. A highway Patrolman strolled in the van’s direction. Paterson rolled down his window.

  “Evening, sir,” he greeted the uniformed man with a smile, his hands gripping the wheel tensely. The officer glanced down at the tires with their chains and nodded his approval. Half the fools driving this road had to be told they needed chains.

  “Where you headed?” he asked.

  “Big Bear. Road’s still open, isn’t it?”

  “It’s open but it’s snowing over pretty quick. Drive carefully, now,” and he waved the van on through the checkpoint. The window went up. The van crept forward, picking up speed.

  “Did I know him?” the patrolman wondered, looking after it. Something teased at his memory, but another vehicle was already rolling to a stop. He forgot the van, walked up to another rolled down window. It was a cold job. He rubbed his gloved hands together. Cold and busy. He wished his shift was over.

  * * * *

  Catherine thought briefly about screaming, but under the cover of the blanket Colley pressed the gun against her head. She remained silent. She had no doubt that they would kill her, and the highway patrolman too. The van picked up speed again, and the cold air was cut off as Paterson rolled the window back up.

  “You can get up now,” Colley said, poking her with the gun, and yanking the blanket off her.

  She crawled back onto the seat and sneezed. In the brief moment under the blanket, she got another glimpse of Jack and Chang. They were through Redlands already, gaining on them, the four-wheel drive Bronco able to make better time in the weather than Paterson’s van could.

  In the mirror, Paterson shot her an evil look. Did he know? He seemed almost to read her mind. She looked away, blowing a piece of lint off her lip, and tried to look hopeless.

  * * * *

  It seemed an eternity later when the van swayed and tilted as it turned off the main road. Catherine peered intently through the windows, looking for signposts. There, a highway marker: mile thirty-one. On the opposite side of the road, a log fence with one timber fallen from its place, half buried in the snow.

  Their pace slowed even more. This road was obviously unpaved under its deep blanket of snow. They were barely crawling now, the van pitching and slewing over ruts and bumps, the body groaning. Paterson wrestled with the steering wheel and flipped the headlights to bright, but they barely penetrated th
e curtain of white.

  “Think we’ll make it?” Colley asked, bracing himself against the back of the front seat as they jarred their way over some particularly large obstacle.

  “Shut up, you fool,” Paterson snapped, “I got my hands full here. You just keep your eyes on her.”

  Colley glanced dutifully in her direction, but clearly he was more concerned with their progress, and almost instantly he leaned forward again to peer anxiously through the windshield. Catherine stared too, though there was little to see beyond the endless whiteness swirling in their headlights.

  They hit something, a rock, Catherine thought, and bounced even harder. The van came down with a crash, and stopped, wheels spinning helplessly in an effort to get traction.

  “Now see what you did,” Paterson shouted. He banged his hands on the steering wheel and gunned the motor ferociously, to no avail. The van remained stubbornly where it was, hung up on a rock.

  “We’ll have to walk,” he said. He switched off the engine and flung his door violently open. Catherine shuddered in the onslaught of icy air.

  “It’s gotta be two miles from here,” Colley said. “We’ll freeze to death before we get there.”

  “Well, we sure as hell will freeze to death sitting here, won’t we? We got to get to that cabin.”

  “If we can even find it,” Colley grumbled under his breath.

  “Shut up your griping. The cabin’s not but twenty feet off the road, we can’t miss it. Anyway, it’s a dead end road. If we miss it first pass, we just backtrack. Get her out of there.”

  “Damn it to hell,” Colley said, but he climbed out and, coming around to Catherine’s side of the van, yanked her door open and tugged her out. She sank shin deep in the snow.

  They started off, Paterson in the lead, bending into the wind that seemed to cut right through them. Colley gripped Catherine’s arm tightly and followed him, limping and trying to step in Paterson’s tracks. Catherine was grateful at least that Paterson had let her bring her jacket, but it was woefully inadequate for this kind of cold and her shoes were soaked within a few steps.

  Paterson plunged ahead but it was quickly clear that neither the wounded Colley nor Catherine could match his pace, and he was forced to stop often, glowering impatiently at them and waiting for them to catch up.

  It was impossible to judge the terrain under the snow and they all three stumbled frequently, catching themselves on the trees and shrubs hovering close on either side. Once Catherine tripped and, with her hands cuffed together, was unable to get a grip to steady herself. She fell to her knees in the snow.

  Colley jerked her roughly to her feet. “You think I’m carrying you, think again,” he snarled.

  “You’ve got to take these off.” She held up the cuffs.

  “Go ahead,” Paterson said impatiently, tossing him the keys. “She ain’t got nowhere to go. You hear me, Miss High and Mighty? Best thing for you is to stay with us, you try getting away you’ll end up freezing your tight ass off out there.”

  She didn’t bother to answer. A fresh wave of despair swept over her. He was right: she was at their mercy.

  Colley took the cuffs off and she rubbed her wrists where they had chafed. No, she told herself ferociously, I won’t think that way. The important thing for the moment was that she was still alive. So long as she was alive, she had a chance.

  “Let’s go, move it,” Paterson snapped. “You two’re slower than molasses.” He started off again in the lead. Colley gave Catherine’s arm a yank, but she needed no urging. They had a destination and that meant shelter, at least, and surviving just that much longer.

  She must concentrate on that, on staying alive. That was everything at the moment, just surviving. Paterson might suspect that someone was after them, but he couldn’t be sure. And Jack and Chang were gaining on them, that was another thing she knew that Paterson did not. It was an advantage, if only a slim one.

  She brought one foot down in front of the other, and then again, and again, and tried not to think of her toes freezing into pieces of ice.

  * * * *

  She felt as if she could go no further. Beside her, Colley was reeling and stumbling and even Paterson, who seemed to possess a supernatural energy, was beginning to flag. In the dark, in the snow, she could just make out his back ahead of them, bent over against the wind.

  He suddenly stopped in his tracks, looking around like a wild animal sniffing for a scent. Were they lost, she wondered, despite his macho-man confidence?

  After a moment, he pointed his chin to their left. “It’s over here,” he said, though she could see nothing but the relentless sheets of snow.

  “I don’t see nothing,” Colley said, but he followed in the deep prints Paterson left as he went now with a quicker pace.

  “You’re a moron,” Paterson said, but even his insults sounded more good-natured.

  He was right. Suddenly, as if by magic, a cabin loomed through the whiteness. Colley gave a little yip of excitement and even Catherine felt her spirits rise. Whatever might happen there, at least it would be a respite from the snow and the cold.

  Paterson struggled at the door with numbed fingers. Catherine dropped helplessly to her knees on a hard wooden floor, too weak for the moment even to get to her feet.

  Colley shoved the door shut behind them, a dusting of snow having already followed them in. Even without any heat, the cabin was blessedly warm after what they had just endured.

  “Get her on the couch,” Paterson said, and strode across to a soot-blackened fireplace where logs were already stacked waiting to be lit. He crumpled up a wad of newspaper, found a match on the mantle and lit it, and shoved it under the wood. In a minute tinder began to crackle and flame.

  Shoved onto the couch like a bag of potatoes, Catherine had a moment to look around. It was not much of a cabin, just one large room with a couch and a bed and a pair of chairs, a make-do kitchen across one end. Just at the moment, it looked like a palace.

  Having tossed her onto the couch, Colley rushed to the kitchen, snatched a can of something from one of the shelves and, hastily opening it, began to spoon the contents furiously into his mouth.

  The fire started, Paterson followed his example. He opened a can and paused to give Catherine a measuring look. He thought about killing her, but somehow that idea didn’t excite him the way it had before. He wasn’t really a killer, except when he had to be.

  The thought came to him of a sudden that the two of them had been brought together for some other reason, sucked to one another like nails to a magnet. No, couldn’t be, he shoved that thought aside. What the hell could they have to do with one another except murdering? She’d have murdered him, that was for damned sure, if he’d given her the chance.

  Still, he had been thinking on the ride up the mountain, that he hadn’t realized before what a beauty she was, even with the fatigue and all. He could see easy enough how she could bewitch a man, how she had made such a fool of that weak-sister husband of hers. That dumb sap had not been enough of a man for her, ever. This was a woman that needed a real man, a man who....

  He shook himself like a dog climbing out of water. Where in the hell had that kind of thinking come from? Jesus, she was witching him, too.

  * * * *

  The news at the chain stop-point was dispiriting. The patrolman in charge thought he recognized the pictures of Paterson and Colley. “Two men in a van,” he said. “About half an hour ago, maybe forty minutes.”

  He was sure, however, that they had been alone. “No woman,” he repeated when Chang asked him a second time.

  Had they already killed Catherine, disposed of her body somewhere between here and Los Angeles? Or simply concealed her in the van?

  “Nothing we can do at this point but go on,” she said. “And pray a lot.”

  Her phone rang. It was Conners. “Where are you?” she asked.

  “Right behind you,” he said, “Your man Renner’s on the scene, didn’t need me. I should be g
aining on you.”

  “That truck four-wheel?”

  “Yes. And mine’s bigger than yours. Anyway, it’s snowing where you’re going. You’ll need someone to keep you warm.”

  “You’re a crazy son of a bitch,” she said, but she grinned in spite of herself. She would be glad for the reinforcements. It would improve their odds.

  * * * *

  Catherine watched Paterson’s face with its odd changing landscape of expressions. This was her first opportunity to really study him in the flesh. She thought of something she had once read, about the glamour of evil. Paterson was far from handsome: ugly, actually, and his body was scrawny like an alley cat’s. Yet he had too that alley cat’s nervous vitality, an energy that even now, exhausted as he surely must also be, radiated from him like the heat from a furnace.

  She could see how women might be attracted to him, to his menace even. Why someone like Colley, hardly a softie himself, would bend to his will.

  She looked away from his face to the can of soup he was holding in his hand. For all her fatigue and numbing despair, she suddenly found herself ravenously hungry. She refused to beg, and half expected him to let her starve. To her surprise, he crossed the room in three easy strides and shoved the can and a spoon into her hands.

  “Here,” he said, in an angry voice. He went to the shelf and got himself another can and began to eat noisily, his back to her.

  She ate gratefully, hardly noticing what it was she shoveled into her mouth: some kind of soup. The most delicious soup she had ever tasted.

  She finished it, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, and pondered whether there was any point in asking for more. Probably not, she decided, and set the empty can on the table next to the couch. She supposed she ought to thank him for what she’d had, try again to bond with him. For the moment, though, she was simply too bone-weary to think of any more stratagems. She leaned back against the couch, closing her eyes.

  “Oh, no you don’t.” Paterson was there in an instant. He grabbed her shoulders and shook her hard. “You stay awake, damn you. Colley, you see to it.”