Blind Panic

by Graham Masterton

  She hauled herself back into the cab. Before she closed the door, she looked back down the street, and she could still see the bright flashes of white light—the lights that Auntie Ammy called devils. She wondered what they really were.

  “Okay,” she said. She adjusted her seat with the foot pedal, and then she started up the Titan’s engine. “Let’s see what this baby can do.”

  She slowly drove the tractor unit forward until it was clear from its trailer. Then she put her foot down, and the Titan bellowed up South La Brea toward the intersection with West Slauson. The traffic signals were out, so Jasmine slowed down. A single SUV with darkened windows appeared from the left, but it stopped for them and flashed its lights. The driver obviously didn’t want to get into an argument with a sixteen-liter, ten-wheeled truck that weighed more than nine and a half tons.

  Jasmine took a right and headed east toward Maywood. She had never driven a Titan before, and at any other time she would have found it exhilarating. It was hugely powerful, its engine producing over six hundred horsepower, and now that it was bobtail, without a hundred tons of steel girders to pull around, the tractor unit surged forward eagerly every time her foot touched the gas pedal.

  “I’ll tell you something, Auntie Ammy. If we ever get out of this mess, I’m going to save up and buy me one of these.”

  It took them less than twenty minutes to reach Maywood, although East Slauson was littered with abandoned vehicles, several of them burning. South La Brea had been almost deserted, but as they drove farther east, they came across more and more people wandering blindly around the streets.

  “Jesus,” said Jasmine. “It’s Day of the Dead.”

  Again and again she had to slow down and let out a deafening blast with the Titan’s double air horns. Some people stumbled out of their way, but others milled around in the middle of the road, their arms lifted in a vain appeal for help.

  One man stood right in front of them, holding up a little curly-headed girl “She can still see!” he shouted. “She can still see! Please—take care of her for me!”

  Jasmine blew the Titan’s horns again and again, until the little girl was screaming with fright. At last the man clutched the little girl tightly against his chest and weaved his way back to the sidewalk, almost tripping on the curb as he did so.

  “God, I hate myself,” said Jasmine.

  Auntie Ammy reached over and touched her arm. “Don’t you feel bad, Jazz. You didn’t have no alternative. The saints will forgive you when you get to heaven.”

  “Well, I hope that’s not too soon.”

  They turned north toward East Fifty-sixth Street, where Hubie lived. It was a scrubby area of small one-story houses, close to the railroad line, but most of the fences and front yards were well-kept, with roses intertwined into trellises, and brick pathways, and concrete garden statues.

  They were still a block away from Hubie’s house when Auntie Ammy pointed ahead of them and said, “Look!”

  Dense black smoke was rolling across the street. Jasmine put her foot down and pulled up in front of Hubie’s house so hard that the Titan’s wheels locked. Through the smoke she could see that the house was burning fiercely, with flames dancing inside the living room like some hellish house party. The house next door was beginning to burn, too, with smoke pouring out from under its shingles.

  “Where’s Hubie?” asked Auntie Ammy. “I can’t see Hubie nowhere!”

  The baby sensed her anxiety and started to cry. Jasmine said, “Wait here. I’ll see if I can find out where he’s at.”

  “Oh, Changó, pertect him,” said Auntie Ammy, fingering her necklace of red and white beads. “Oh, Changó, please pertect him.”

  Jasmine jumped down from the Titan’s cab. She opened Hubie’s front gate and stepped into his concrete-paved yard. His Toyota was still parked in front of the garage, although its windshield had been cracked and its yellow paint was blistering. As she approached the front porch, she had to lift her arm to protect her face. The heat was overwhelming, and she couldn’t get close. Blazing fabric from the living room drapes was flying up into the darkness, and even the wooden swing seat was alight.

  She looked up and down the street. About a hundred yards away an elderly man and a woman were shuffling along the sidewalk, but the man was touching every fence and every wall to guide him, and the woman was holding onto his belt. It was no use asking them where Hubie was. They probably didn’t even know where they were.

  She climbed back into the cab. The baby was still crying and Auntie Ammy was rocking him and shushing him.

  “Hubie’s not there?”

  “I’m sorry, Auntie Ammy. But you know Hubie. He’s a survivor. Remember that time at Venice Beach when he almost drowned? And that time he rolled his Jeep over? I’ll bet you whatever you like that he got himself out of there.”

  Auntie Ammy said, “His car’s still here. He wouldn’t never have gone noplace on foot. Not Hubie.”

  “You don’t know that for sure. He could be with one of his friends. Or—I don’t know—”

  “Or he could have been blinded and gotten himself lost?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Maybe you didn’t, but you thunk it.”

  They sat for a while, watching the roof of Hubie’s house collapse. The single stone chimney was left standing, with smoke pouring out of it, in a grim parody of a happy home.

  The baby had stopped crying. He, too, was watching the house burning, with one hand held out, opening and closing his fingers as if he were trying to catch hold of the flames that were reflected on the window. “A gah,” he said. “A wum wum.”

  “So what do we do now?” asked Auntie Ammy. “Do you think we should drive around for a while, see if we can find Hubie someplace?”

  “Don’t think there’s a whole lot of point,” said Jasmine. “We’d only be wasting diesel, and if the power’s still out, none of the gas station pumps are going to be working.”

  “But if we don’t go looking for Hubie, where else are we going to go?”

  “I don’t know. I guess we could try going back to my place but it sure didn’t look too healthy around Inglewood, with all those planes crashing. I don’t know if anyplace is safe.”

  She was still thinking what to do next when—behind the dark brown smoke that was rolling across the street—she glimpsed three or four bright flashes. Only a few seconds later, she saw at least six more, much clearer this time.

  “Hey—lookit!” she said. “There’s those lights again.”

  Gradually, the flashes grew faster and faster, and Jasmine could see that they were coming nearer, too. She could also make out the silhouette of somebody walking toward them.

  “I don’t like this,” said Auntie Ammy. “I don’t like this one teensy little bit.”

  The baby twisted around and pointed at the flashes in excitement. “A gah!” he said, excitedly. “A gah!”

  Out of the smoke, a stockily built man appeared. Jasmine flicked on the Titan’s full halogen headlights. The man stopped, dazzled. On his head he carried a strange lumpy hat that looked as if it had been sewn together out of half-a-dozen squirrel skins, complete with dangling tails. A dark red blanket was fastened across his shoulders with a long pin that looked like a bone, and underneath it he was wearing a yellowish leather jerkin and leggings that were bound around with leather thongs.

  In one hand he held a stick decorated with feathers and beads and birds’ skulls.

  He squinted at the headlights with his brow furrowed, but he didn’t make any attempt to shield his eyes. He looked irritated and full of contempt, rather than angry.

  “So who the hell is this whacko?” said Jasmine. “Look at him—he looks like Geronimo.”

  But Auntie Ammy pulled at her sleeve in a breathless panic. “Jazz—get us out of here, quick!”

  “Come on, what’s the matter? He’s probably escaped from some nuthouse.”

  “Get us out of here!” Auntie Ammy screamed at her
. She sounded terrified. “I’m serious! Get us out of here now!”

  “Okay! Okay! Keep your darn wool on!” Jasmine started the Titan’s engine, and gunned it. As it roared into life, three more figures emerged from the smoke and assembled around the man in the squirrel-tail hat, and then another two.

  “Whoa,” said Jasmine. The five figures were very tall, with dead white faces—more like masks than faces—and bodies like rectangular wooden boxes, crudely hammered together and painted black. For some reason Jasmine couldn’t work out how near they were or how far away, or even whether there were only five of them. One second they seemed to be clustered close to the man in the squirrel-tail hat, but when she blinked they seemed to have jumped away, to stand ten feet in front of him, almost close enough to touch the Titan’s front bumper. Another blink, and they were standing behind him, half hidden by smoke. She blinked again and she could see seven or eight of them, or even more.

  She yanked the Titan’s gearshift into reverse and backed up faster than she had ever backed up before. Instantly, a dazzling array of lights came flickering out of the figures’ eye-slits, but Auntie Ammy kept her head turned away, and covered the baby’s face with her hand.

  “Don’t you turn around and look at them!” she warned Jasmine. “You look at them just once, that’ll be the last-ever thing you ever get to see!”

  Jasmine kept her eyes fixed on the Titan’s rearview TV monitor, and sped back nearly three blocks. Then she spun the wheel and the tractor slewed around, its ten tires howling in a rubbery chorus.

  She jammed her foot on the gas and they roared away, turning south. At speed, the bobtail tractor was much more difficult to handle than a tractor with a loaded trailer, and when Jasmine reached the intersection with East Slauson, it went into a wide sliding skid and sideswiped a parked car with a thunderous bang. She straightened it out and headed east toward the Long Beach Freeway.

  “Those things,” she said. “What were they?”

  “I don’t rightfully know,” Auntie Ammy told her. “But I know that they’re evil and I know that they ain’t of this world. I also know that they can strike you stone blind.”

  “So who told you that?”

  “My orisha told me—Changó. He was taking real good care of me. I take real good care of him, with offerin’s, and with sacrifices, and I call him with invocations, and in return he speaks to me, and warns me of any danger, and ‘splains in a way what it is.”

  “Maybe I should convert to Santeria.”

  “It’s what you truly believe, girl. That’s what counts.”

  They reached the Long Beach Freeway, which crossed over the Maywood district on grimy concrete pillars. The left-hand side of the on-ramp was cluttered with burned-out cars and SUVs, but Jasmine drove up the right-hand side, with the Titan’s wheel-arch panel scraping against the retaining wall and throwing up fountains of orange sparks. In low gear, the Titan was powerful enough to push aside any vehicles that obstructed them, with a loud crunching and squealing of metal.

  The freeway itself was deserted, although a few cars and vans had been left abandoned in the middle of the road, including a police squad car and a burning ambulance.

  “Where we headed?” asked Auntie Ammy. “I think this little fella is getting hungry.”

  “I don’t know,” said Jasmine. “But I think we need to get away from LA, don’t you? We’re heading north, so let’s keep on heading north.”

  They drove for a few minutes in silence, and then Jasmine turned to Auntie Ammy and said, “That was an Indian, wasn’t it? Like a real cowboys-and-Indians Indian.”

  “I don’t know how real he was.”

  “What do you mean by that? He was just wearing fancy dress?”

  Auntie Ammy looked across at her with a strange expression that Jasmine couldn’t read.

  “No, I don’t mean that. I mean he had no aché. No power in him, no life.”

  “I still don’t understand what you mean.”

  Auntie Ammy held the baby closer, as if she didn’t want him to hear what she was going to say next.

  “I mean, girl, that he was long-dead. I mean that he was what you might call a spirit, of sorts. But he was wearing a disguise. He wasn’t wearin’ the face that he wore when he was alive. He was wearin’ somebody else’s face. Like as if you looked in the lookin’ mirror one morning and saw that you was me.”

  She gave a deep, dry sniff, and then she said, “I could tell by his eyes, Jazz. The eyes that were lookin’ out of that face didn’t rightfully belong to that face at all. And there was so much hate in those eyes. That was the scariest man that I ever saw, ever.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Washington, DC

  The president was asleep, and he was dreaming about his parent’s house in Cincinnati. He could see the orange, beady-eyed cicadas crawling out of the soil in his parent’s backyard and clustering in the trees, endlessly chirruping. They had always frightened him when he was a child. They had been like alien invaders, thousands of insects struggling out of the earth and nothing that anybody could do to stop them.

  His mother had driven him to school and there had been so many dead cicadas on her windshield that the wipers had eventually stuck, and she could barely see where she was going because of the beige cicada slime and broken wings.

  He felt a cicada on his cheek. He jerked his hand up and tried to flick it away. But it wasn’t a cicada, it was a man’s fingertips, touching him. Cold, dry fingertips.

  “Have you decided?” the man whispered, so close to his ear that he could feel his chilly breath.

  The president opened his eyes. Misquamacus was leaning over him, a negative black-and-white image, just as he had been yesterday evening. The president didn’t move at first, or speak, even though he could hear insects dropping onto his pillow.

  “You know that you could save countless numbers of your people, if you so chose. And perhaps, if your people learned our ways and observed our beliefs, we could live together in harmony, as children of the same gods.”

  An insect that felt like a cockroach dropped onto the president’s cheek and scuttled underneath the collar of his pajamas. Abruptly, he sat up, slapping at his neck.

  “Am I dreaming this?” he demanded. “Tell me—this can’t be for real, can it?”

  “What do you mean by ‘real’?” asked Misquamacus. “Everything that can be seen and heard and felt is real. You are real. I am real. The Great Old Ones who wait in exile beyond the limits of the stars—they are real, too, and it is time for their return, whatever you decide.”

  The president said, “What you’re asking, it’s impossible. People simply won’t do it.”

  “If they refuse, I will have no choice but to force them, and those who refuse will have to die.”

  “You can’t expect a whole nation to give up its way of life, just like that.”

  “Why not?” asked Misquamacus. “You did. Or at least your forefathers did. And they massacred all those who stood up to them. I am simply doing the same.”

  The president pressed his call button and shouted out, “Johnson! Kaminsky! Get in here!”

  “That will do you no good,” said Misquamacus. Even though he was a negative image, the president saw him smile.

  The door opened, and he heard Johnson and Kaminsky come into the room.

  “Something wrong, Mr. President?”

  “He’s here. He’s right here in front of me. Don’t you see him?”

  A lengthy pause. Then, “Who exactly do you mean, sir?”

  “The goddamned Indian! He’s right here!” The president jabbed his finger at Misquamacus, standing in the blackness of his blindness. “Him and his goddamned bugs! I can even smell him, goddammit!”

  Another pause, punctuated by a cough. “I’m sorry, sir. I can’t see anybody. Maybe I should call your doctor.”

  The president dragged back his bedcovers and swung his legs out of bed.

  “Mr. President, sir—for Christ’s sake, be c
areful!”

  But the president lunged at Misquamacus and seized the lapels of his coat. Misquamacus made no attempt to pull himself free, but looked down at the president with pity.

  “He’s here, goddammit! He’s real! I can feel him! I can feel his coat!”

  Kaminsky came up to the president and gently but firmly laid a hand on his shoulder. “There’s nobody there, sir. Why don’t you get back into bed and let me call Dr. Henry?”

  “It’s probably shock, sir,” Johnson put in. “After what happened yesterday, we talked to Dr. Cronin. I’m sorry; we didn’t mean to overstep our authority. But Dr. Cronin told us that people who suddenly lose their sight can suffer all kinds of delusions. It’s like the rest of their senses go into overdrive.”

  “Come here,” said the president, his voice trembling. “Give me your hand.”

  Kaminsky held out his hand and the president grasped his wrist. Then he lifted Kaminsky’s hand toward Misquamacus’s face, so that his fingers appeared to be touching Misquamacus’s cheek, and then his nose.

  “Don’t tell me you can’t feel him now.”

  Kaminsky said, “Sorry, Mr. President. Like Dr. Cronin said, it’s probably some kind of self-suggestion. Your brain overcompensating for your eyes.”

  “You can’t feel him? Why can’t you feel him? You’re touching him, for Christ’s sake!”

  Kaminsky guided the president back to his bed. The president sat down, and then looked up at Misquamacus, shaking his head in bitterness and bewilderment. Misquamacus was right there; the president could see him. He could hear him; he could even smell him. Why couldn’t anybody else?

  Maybe Dr. Cronin was right. Maybe Misquamacus was nothing but a delusion caused by the trauma of losing his sight. Maybe his brain was simply inventing this Native American spirit, in the absence of any input from his optic nerves. After all, amputees could still feel the ghosts of their severed limbs. They could even feel excruciating pain in a foot that was no longer there. Maybe this image of Misquamacus was the same kind of ghost.