by Alan Rodgers
It was too much. Too much. Bill almost turned back, headed into the shelling and the sound of gunfire in the distance. Would have done it, too, but he had a duty to the boy — had it because the boy was a boy and Bill was a full-grown man — and heading back into the shelling was sure death, and Bill knew it. And not just death: getting hit by one of those shells would give them the dead policeman’s fate. Whatever it was that had brought them back to life would bring them back again. Even if there was nothing but a mindless mass of flesh to restore.
There were only three yards left to go when the boy froze up. Stopped dead in his tracks with one foot on a dead captain’s face and another in the groin of an enlisted man. He didn’t scream, he didn’t shout. When Bill turned back to see him he wasn’t sweating or trembling or crying; his face wasn’t a mask of fear or disgust. The only thing in his eyes was a sort of dead-eyed shock — and that was just maybe the worst possible thing, because it made the boy look so much like the vegetal policeman. . . .
Who hadn’t changed at all. For all the difference in the policeman’s face, they could have been in Oz, walking through the field of poppies. Bill stole a glance back at the woman, expecting her to be the same, or nearly so — but she wasn’t. She stood behind the cop, and her face was a sweat-slick mask of disgust and self-loathing, and seeing her so beautiful, so deep in agony, Bill almost lost what little determination and self-control he had left to him, only barely managed to keep himself from turning tail and running into the sound of blasting death on the far side of the mountain.
But he didn’t. At the very heart of things, he couldn’t. For all that he’d have denied it any day that anyone cared to ask him, at his deepest root Bill had too much backbone in his soul to fold under pressure when others depended on him. And instead of turning tail and surrendering to death, Bill reached over, lifted the boy in his arms. And carried him the last ten feet to the bulldozed trail that led into the forest.
The woman and the dead policeman followed, only a couple steps behind them.
It went quickly after that; Bill felt only a moment or two pass in the time it took to follow the trail into the forest through the shattered barricade. The last of the corpses wasn’t more than a dozen yards beyond it. A little father and he let out the breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding back. Set the boy back on his feet. Turned to the woman to be certain that she hadn’t lost her mind.
“Are you okay?” he asked her, though he didn’t really expect an answer. He got one that surprised him.
The woman nodded. “I will be,” she said. She said it in English, spoke with an accent so American that to Bill’s ear it sounded like no accent at all. She lifted her hand to her forehead, wiped away the sweat that was trying to run into her eyes.
“You’re sure?”
She hesitated, nodded again. “Yes.”
The boy was trembling, now — which Bill supposed was for the best, since it wasn’t like being froze up with shock. Bill stooped, took a good long look into his eyes. There were tears in them, now, big fat wet ones that rolled wide down the boy’s cheeks. “How about you? You going to make it, Jerry-boy?”
“Nothing wrong with me, Corporal Bill.” Which was a lie, plain and simple. Bill reckoned as how it was a brave lie, and he didn’t challenge it.
“Think you’re up to walking?”
“Uh-huh.”
So Bill patted him on the back, and told that boy that he was a trooper straight out of hell, and they started off again down that path. Which was actually more of a dirt road, when you got right down to it.
He led them about a half mile, far enough to get clear of the stink of death, before he headed off the trail, into the woods. A couple minutes’ walk, there — far enough to keep them from being spotted from the road — and he found a clearing where there was time and room to sit and rest and lick the wounds inside their hearts. And he had them sit, and they rested there on the grass in the warm afternoon sun for half an hour, listening to the sound of rocket shells in the distance.
³ ³ ³
Chapter Thirty-Three
I-70— NOT FAR FROM ZANESVILLE, OHIO
Luke and Christine were in Ohio already when Andy pressed the back seat of the car out of joint and poked his head out of the trunk.
“So,” he said, “when are we going to stop for lunch? I am seriously hungry.”
The racket and the sound of the boy’s voice were sudden enough that Luke swerved out of his lane and very nearly ran up onto the median. When he had the car under control again he shook his head and glanced back at the boy sternly. “What are you doing here?” he asked. Not that he needed an answer. “You stowed away in there? Dear God, your mother must be hysterical. We need to get to a pay phone, call her. Let her know you’re all right.”
Andy sighed theatrically; Christine, in the front seat beside Luke, looked as though she were trying to choke off a fit of hysterical laughter. “Momma knows,” he said. “You think I’d just take off without telling her?”
“What?”
“You heard me. Are we going to get some lunch or not?” The boy’s voice was definitely impatient. Stubborn, too.
This is ridiculous. A small boy stows himself away in the trunk of my car, announces his presence once we’ve gone too far to turn around and take him home. And then he starts making demands. If I had any good sense I’d ignore him. He wasn’t ignoring him. Over there on the left was a small green sign that said Gas-Food-Lodging and after all, wouldn’t it be nice to get off the road for a bit. A cup of coffee, some lunch — yes, he thought, it’d be nice. Besides, it’d give him a chance to decide what to do with the boy before they got any farther from his home.
“So?”
Luke turned on his blinker. “Okay, okay — let’s get some lunch. And while we eat you can tell me what you’re doing here.”
Andy harrumphed and finished crawling up out of the trunk. Once he was clear he reassembled the back seat and made himself comfortable.
As he pulled off the interstate, Luke tried to figure out how the boy had managed to stow himself away in the trunk, and why. The last time he’d seen Andy was . . . he’d been there in the crowd that had said good-bye to Luke and Christine, hadn’t he? Or had he? So many faces all crowded around; it was hard to be sure of anything. He’d definitely seen him a few minutes before that, when his mother had decided that she had to call out the entire neighborhood to see them off. And there hadn’t been a moment after that when either he or Christine hadn’t been right there in the car. . . .
No wonder she was laughing. She’d known the boy was in the trunk all along — she’d just been waiting for him to show himself.
Luke shook his head; he felt more than a little stupid. He turned to Andy. “How do you feel about Denny’s?”
Turned back, to watch the road, and saw through the rear-view mirror when Andy raised an eyebrow. “Who’s Denny?”
“Denny’s is a coffee shop. A whole chain of them, kind of like McDonald’s — only with waitresses. And a bigger menu. They have them all over the country.”
“Not in Brooklyn they don’t. It sounds okay, long as you think it’s an okay place to eat. And anyhow, when’d you start remembering so much? Just two days ago I had to tell you what a McDonald’s was. Now you sound like an authority on the subject.”
“I —” Suddenly, and for no reason he wanted to name, Luke felt his gut press hard against itself. He didn’t want to cope with that question. Didn’t want to think about it. “Yesterday, I guess. After the museum.”
After the dream.
“Well! Doesn’t that just go to show you? Getting yourself killed in a place full of monsters is good for something.”
Luke didn’t respond — he didn’t want to encourage the boy to drag them into anything like that again, even if it did seem as though he might have a point.
Instead, he tried to s
ort out the events since he’d woke in that museum. Luke had woke from the dead for the second time there in the Museum of Natural History — woke up clear-headed and remembering things about himself that he’d thought lost forever. Human things: the apartment where he’d lived for the last seven years. The way his father smiled when they all sat down for dinner on a holiday. His first big date, back in high school. Work was still a fuzzy thing, and so were all sorts of small details — the banister in the museum’s stairwell had seemed an incredible and intricate device. He remembered college clearly, and graduate school, too — though if he’d learned a thing in either place he had no clue of it. But he woke that afternoon without the feeling that he was about to walk into the sort of commonplace trouble that toddlers learn to avoid, and there’d been few moments since his first resurrection that Luke hadn’t felt that peculiar dread hanging over him.
Christine and the boy had both begun to stir by the time Luke was sitting up. He looked around, remembering where he was as the last bits of his strange dream faded away from him. He tried to focus on that dream; it was only moments away from him in time, but it was already fading away from him in the familiar way that all dreams do. There was a comfort, there, even if it was another loss — if only because it was so familiar.
One thing was with him, clear and unquestionable and demanding. The need to go. To move on — westward. There was an image attached to the need, too: the image of a vast lake made of flame and magma.
“Hey,” Andy said. He looked groggy, as though his eyes couldn’t quite yet focus on the world around them. “That was fun. You want to do it again?”
Luke groaned and shook his head. “No,” he said, “don’t even think about it. We’ve got to get you back home to your folks, and then I’ve got to head on. There isn’t time for me to stay here any more — there’s something I need to do.”
The groggy look in Andy’s eyes went away very suddenly. “Oh yeah? What’s that? You want some company?”
Christine was looking at Luke uneasily. Had she had a dream like Luke’s? Or was she afraid that he meant to leave her behind? There wasn’t any need for that, Luke thought — if she wanted to come along with him, certainly she was welcome. Andy was another matter altogether. He was young enough that he needed looking after, and besides, Luke couldn’t really take him away from his parents. And even if he could have, he wouldn’t have wanted to. He was a good kid. But he was a lightning rod for trouble. Luke didn’t know what it was his dream was sending him toward, but he knew in his gut that it would be dangerous — dangerous enough that he couldn’t expose the boy to it in good conscience, let alone allow him to run headlong into the worst of whatever waited for them, dragging Luke and Christine with him.
“No,” he said. “You’ve got to stay here with your folks.”
Andy started to protest, but Luke shook his head and frowned, and that had quieted him. And Luke had actually believed that that had been the last of it. Looking back, he decided, he should have known better.
Luke stood up, brushed the dust from his slacks. Noticed the bullet hole in his shirt, crusted with dried blood. Shrugged because there was nothing he could do about it.
“So,” the boy said, “how you going to get where you’re going? Airports are all still shut down, you know. Trains, too — not even the buses in the Port Authority are running.”
Luke turned, looked down at the boy. Shrugged. “I hadn’t thought that far, to tell you the truth.”
“You want to buy a car? My Uncle Tim’s got an old junker he’s been trying to sell for months. I bet he’d give you a real good price.”
They were going downstairs, now; just ahead was a painted steel door that looked as though it led out of the building.
“You think the car’ll hold up to cross-country driving?”
“Sure. It may be a junker, but it’s a great old junker. Uncle Tim’s handy with a wrench — kept it up real good.”
What am I doing — buying a used car from a twelve-year-old boy. It’s ridiculous. And stupid.
“Come on, I’ll show it to you once we get back home. Maybe Uncle Tim’ll even loan it to you if you promise to bring it back. He ain’t been doing anything with it lately but moving it from one side of the block to the other so they can sweep the streets.”
Luke had ended up buying the car — Andy’s uncle had only wanted a few hundred dollars for it, and there was enough in Luke’s account that even a few hundred dollars didn’t make much of a dent. Even so, Luke wasn’t sure he was getting much of a bargain; the car looked as though it might not have the three thousand miles of life in it that he needed. Well, he’d thought, regardless: this is what’s available. And he’d bought the car. Three hours later he’d gathered up the clothes he’d bought two days before, and he and Christine were getting in the car and heading off as the crowd waved to them.
He and Christine had never even discussed whether or not she was coming, and she never asked why he felt the need to go. There were a few moments when he hadn’t been certain whether she meant to come or not, and he meant to ask her if she wanted to but there wasn’t time and they weren’t alone and the question was just too damned awkward anyway. And in the end, when he was ready to leave, she’d been in the car, waiting for him. And even if he hadn’t understood why he’d been glad she was there.
Now it turned out that Andy had stowed away with them, too. It wasn’t even remotely a thing he was glad of. He was worried for the boy, and worried about him. What he had to do, he decided, was . . . what, drive him all the way back to New York? There wasn’t time for that. There’d been too much urgency about his dream. He could try to send the boy back to his folks. Or try to, most likely with no result; even if he’d known of a handy airport or bus station where he could take the boy to send him back, the buses and the planes were still out of service.
It was a problem. Enough of a problem that Luke was still working it over and over in his mind when he pulled into a parking spot in front of the restaurant and turned off the old car’s ignition.
When they were inside sitting in a wide booth, waiting to place their orders, Andy had looked up from the menu (he had it turned to the page with the ice-cream sundaes) and he’d said, “So, where’re we going?” And he’d grinned eagerly, mischievously.
“We” aren’t going anywhere, Luke had wanted to say. That wasn’t the thing to say — or it wasn’t anything he wanted to say before he’d actually decided what he was going to do. And besides, he didn’t have an answer to where he was going. So far something deep in his gut had guided him at every turn. First through that confusing webwork of wide, crowded highways that surrounded New York; now for hundreds of miles along Interstate 70. There was a map of some kind in the glove box, but there hadn’t yet been any need to consult it.
Whatever it was guided him purposely — Luke was certain of that. He hadn’t driven this part of the country since he’d been in college, and even with the memory that had come back to him his recollection of driving this area was very dim. He did remember enough geography to know that he was heading toward Kansas from New York about as directly as was possible.
“Hey, Luke Munsen — why don’t you wake up and tell me where we’re going?”
“I’m not honestly sure. All I know is that I’ve got to get there.”
Andy giggled and rolled his eyes up toward the ceiling. “What kind of an answer is that? I tell you, Luke Munsen, you’re pretty darned strange sometimes.”
Luke felt himself smile in spite of himself. “I guess I am.”
There was one other alternative — an alternative he hadn’t even considered. He could just leave the boy behind, let him find his own way back to Brooklyn. Right. Abandon a twelve-year-old boy in the middle of nowhere. Luke felt a guilty inward shudder for even letting himself think about the idea. No matter what they were heading into, it was better than letting the poor kid try to shift
for himself five hundred miles from home.
“How’re you going to get anyplace if you don’t know where you’re going? I don’t know about you sometimes, Mr. Luke Munsen.”
Luke looked up and saw their waitress standing at the edge of the booth where they sat, waiting to take their order. She was a relief, in a way, since she gave him a good excuse to duck out of the conversation. And at the same time he found himself a little embarrassed at the idea that she might have overheard them.
“We’re having a little trouble with the meat this week,” she said. “You might want to order fish. Or cheese.”
Luke looked at the woman carefully, tried to figure out what she meant by trouble. There wasn’t any clue in her expression.
“That’s okay. I want a banana split.” Andy said. “With extra whip cream and chocolate. And an extra large Coca-Cola, too.”
The waitress turned to Luke, raised an eyebrow as if to ask whether he thought it was wise to let the boy order that much dessert without a meal beforehand. Luke shrugged; it didn’t seem to him that a banana split and a soft drink could do much harm to a child who’d already lived through death. He ordered a cup of coffee and a grilled cheese sandwich for himself, and Christine asked for a sandwich of some kind or another — the names on the menu were all silly enough that it was hard to tell what some of the sandwiches were without reading the descriptions.
When the waitress was gone Luke looked out the window beside him, at the parking lot, and tapped his fingers softly on the wood-grain formica of the table top. He didn’t know what he was heading toward, didn’t know what would happen when he reached it, but there was a deep feeling in his gut — a certainty, almost — that it would be very bad. And since the boy had appeared that foreboding had become even worse — darker and more certain.