by Joe Hill
“I’ll give you something to think about. Think about this: You can’t drive forever. Sooner or later you’ll have to pull over. Sooner or later you’re going to stop somewhere to close your eyes for a while. And when you open them, I’ll be there. Your friend Bing got off easy, Charlie. I am one mean, degenerate cunt, and I will fucking burn you to death in your car and take my son back.”
“I am sure you will try, Victoria,” he said. “But have you stopped to think what you will do if you finally catch up to us and he doesn’t want to go with you?”
The phone went dead.
AFTER MANX HUNG UP, VIC BENT OVER, GASPING, AS IF SHE HAD JUST finished a long and furious run. Her weeping was an angry thing, as physical and exhausting as vomiting. It was in her heart to take the receiver and begin smashing it into the wall, but a colder part of her stayed her hand.
If you’re going to be mad, she heard her father say, then use it, and don’t be used by it.
Had he ever actually said such a thing? She didn’t know, only that she heard his voice in her head.
When she was done crying, her eyes were sore and her face burned. She started to walk to the sink, felt something tug at her hand, and realized she was still holding the receiver, which was attached to the wall phone by a long black coiled line.
Vic walked it back to its cradle, then stood looking at the rotary dial. She felt empty and sore, yet now that her crying jag was past, she also felt, for the first time in days, a kind of peace, much like the calm she felt when she was sketching one of her Search Engine illustrations.
There were people to call. There were choices to make.
In a Search Engine puzzle, there was always a lot of distracting visual information, a lot of noise. The first book had culminated inside an alien spaceship. Search Engine had to find his way through a cross section of the craft, flipping various self-destruct switches as he went and arriving finally at the escape pod. Between him and freedom, there were lasers, locked doors, radiation-filled compartments, and angry extraterrestrials that looked like big cubes of coconut jelly. Adults had a harder time with it than children did, and Vic had gradually realized that this was because grown-ups were always trying to see their way through to the end, and they couldn’t do it because there was too much information. There was too much to look at, too much to think about. Children, though, didn’t stand back from the puzzle and look at the whole thing. They pretended they were Search Engine, the hero of the story, down inside the puzzle itself, and they looked at only the little bit he could see, each step of the way. The difference between childhood and adulthood, Vic had come to believe, was the difference between imagination and resignation. You traded one for the other and lost your way.
Vic saw—already—that she didn’t really need to find Manx at all. It was as hopeless as trying to hit one flying arrow with another. He thought—she had let him think—that she was going to try to use the bridge to catch up to him. But she didn’t need to do that. She knew where he was going. Where he had to go. She could head there anytime she liked.
But that was jumping ahead of herself. Christmasland was down the road a ways, both figuratively and actually.
She had to be ready to fight when she saw Manx again. She thought it would come to killing him, and she needed to know how to do it. More than that: There was the question of Wayne. She had to know if Wayne would still be himself by the time he got to Christmasland, if what was happening to him was reversible.
Vic knew someone who could tell her about Wayne, and she knew someone else who could tell her how to fight. Someone who could even get her the weapons she’d need to threaten the only thing Manx obviously cared about. But both of those people were down the road, too. She would see each of them in turn. Soon.
First, though. There was a girl named Michelle Demeter who had lost her father and who needed to know what had happened to him. She had been wondering long enough.
Vic cast a measuring glance at the angle of the light out the kitchen window, judged it to be late afternoon. The sky was a deep blue dome; the storm that had been rolling in when she’d arrived must have blown through. If anyone had heard the tank of sevoflurane exploding and tearing Bing Partridge in two, they had likely thought it just a roll of thunder. She supposed she’d been unconscious for three, maybe four hours. She had a look at the stack of envelopes on the kitchen counter. The Gasmask Man’s mail was addressed to:
BING PARTRIDGE
25 BLOCH LANE
SUGARCREEK, PENNSYLVANIA 16323
That was going to be a hard one to explain. Four hours was not enough time to get to Pennsylvania from New Hampshire, not even with the hammer down all the way. Then it occurred to her that she didn’t need to explain it. Other people could worry about explanations.
She dialed. She knew the number by heart.
“Yes?” Lou said.
She had not been sure that Lou would answer—she had expected Hutter. Or possibly the other one, the ugly cop with the bushy white eyebrows, Daltry. She could tell him where to find his lighter.
The sound of Lou’s voice made her feel a little weak, robbed her momentarily of her certainty. She felt she had never loved him the way he deserved—and that he had always loved her more than she deserved.
“It’s me,” she said. “Are they listening?”
“Ah, shit, Vic,” Lou said. “What do you think?”
Tabitha Hutter said, “I’m here, Vic.” Jumping onto the line and into the conversation. “You’ve got a lot of people here pretty upset. Do you want to talk about why you ran away?”
“I went to go get my kid.”
“I know there are things you haven’t told me. Maybe things you were afraid to tell me. But I need to hear them, Vic. Whatever you’ve been doing for the last twenty-four hours, I’m sure you think you had to do it. I’m sure you thought it was right—”
“Twenty-four hours? What do you mean . . . twenty-four hours?”
“That’s how long we’ve been looking for you. You pulled one heck of a disappearing act. We’ll have to talk about how you did that sometime. Why don’t you tell me where—”
“It’s been twenty-four hours?” Vic cried again. The idea that she had lost a whole day seemed, in its own way, as incredible as a car that ran on human souls instead of unleaded.
Hutter said, quietly, patiently, “Vic, I want you to stay where you are.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You have to—”
“No. Shut up. Just listen. You need to locate a girl named Michelle Demeter. She lives in Brandenburg, Kentucky. Her father has been missing for a while. She’s probably out of her mind with worry. He’s here. Downstairs. In the basement. He’s dead. Been dead for a few days, I think. Do you have that?”
“Yes, I—”
“You treat him well, goddamn it. Don’t just stick him in a drawer in some fucking morgue. Get someone to sit with him until his daughter shows up. He’s been alone long enough.”
“What happened to him?”
“He was killed by a man named Bing Partridge. Bing was the guy in the gasmask who shot at me. The man you didn’t think existed. He was working with Manx. I think they have a long history together.”
“Vic. Charlie Manx is dead.”
“No. He isn’t. I saw him, and so did Nathan Demeter. Demeter will back up my story.”
“Vic,” Tabitha said. “You just told me Nathan Demeter is dead. How is he going to back up your story? I want you to slow down. You’ve been through a lot. I think you’ve had a—”
“I have not had a fucking break with reality. I have not been having imaginary conversations with a dead man. Demeter left a note, all right? A note naming Manx. Lou! Lou, are you still on the line?”
“Yeah, Vic. I’m here. Are you okay?”
“I talked to Wayne this morning, Lou. He’s alive. He’s still alive, and I’m going to get him back.”
“Oh, Jesus,” he said, and his voice went rough with emotion, and she
knew he was trying not to cry. “Oh, Jesus. What did he say?”
“He hasn’t been hurt,” she said.
“Victoria,” Tabitha Hutter said. “When did you—”
“Hang on!” Lou cried. “Vic, dude. You can’t do this alone. You can’t cross this bridge alone.”
Vic readied herself, as if she were aiming a rifle on a distant target, and said, as calmly and clearly as she could manage, “Listen to me, Lou. I have to make one stop, and then I’m going to see a man who can get some ANFO for me. With the right ANFO, I can blow Manx’s world right off the map.”
“What info?” Tabitha Hutter said. “Victoria, Lou is right. You can’t deal with this on your own. Come in. Come in and talk to us. What man are you going to see? What is this information you need?”
Lou’s voice was slow and ragged with emotion. “Get out of there, Vic. We can horseshit around some other time. They’re coming for you. Get out of there and go do what you have to do.”
“Mr. Carmody?” Tabitha said. There was a sudden note of tension underlying her voice. “Mr. Carmody?”
“I’m gone, Lou. I love you.”
“Back atcha,” he said. He sounded choked with emotion, barely hanging on.
She set the phone gently in its cradle.
She thought he understood what she was telling him. He had said, We can horseshit around some other time, a sentence that almost made sense in context. Almost but not quite. There was a second meaning there, but no one besides Vic would have been able to detect it. Horseshit: a principal component of ANFO, the substance her father had been using to blow up shelf rock for decades.
She limped on her bad left leg to the sink and ran some cool water, splashed it onto her face and hands. Blood and grime circled the drain in pretty pink swirls. Vic had bits of Gasmask Man all over her, drops of liquefied Bing dripping down her shirt, splattered up her arms, probably in her hair. In the distance she heard the wail of a police siren. The thought crossed her mind that she should’ve had a shower before calling Lou. Or searched the house for a gun. She probably needed a gun more than she needed a shampoo.
She pushed open the screen door and went carefully down the back steps, keeping the weight off her left knee. She would have to keep it extended while she rode. She had a bad moment, wondering how she would shift gears with the left foot—then remembered it was a British bike. Right. The gearshift was on the right side of the bike, a configuration that hadn’t been legal in the United States since before she was born.
Vic walked up the hill, face turned to the sun. She closed her eyes, to concentrate her senses on the good warmth against her skin. The sound of the siren grew louder and louder behind her, the Doppler effect causing the shriek to rise and fall, swell and collapse. Tabitha Hutter would lop off heads when she found out they had approached the house with their sirens blaring, giving Vic plenty of advance notice they were coming.
At the top of the hill, as she lurched into the parking lot of the New American Faith Tabernacle, she looked back and saw a police car swerving onto Bloch Lane, sliding to a stop in front of Bing’s house. The cop didn’t even swing into the driveway, just slewed to a halt with the car at an angle, blocking half the road. The cop behind the wheel flung himself out so quickly his head bumped the doorframe and his hat was knocked into the road. He was so young. Vic couldn’t imagine dating him, let alone being arrested by him.
She continued on and in three more steps could no longer see the house below. She had a moment to wonder what she would do if her bike wasn’t there, if some kids had discovered it with the keys in the ignition and taken it for a ride. But the Triumph was right where she had left it, tilted over on its rusted kickstand.
It wasn’t easy to stand it up. Vic made a small sobbing sound of pain, pushing with her left leg to straighten it.
She turned the key over, flipped the switch to RUN, and stomped on the gas.
The bike had been rained on and sat out all night, and it would’ve been no surprise to her if it didn’t want to start, but the Triumph boomed right away, seemed almost impatient to go.
“I’m glad one of us is ready,” she said.
She turned it in a circle and rolled it out of the shadows. She took it around the ruin of the church, and as she glided along, it began to rain. Water fell glittering and brilliant from the sunlit sky, raindrops as cold as October. It felt good on her skin, in her dry, bloody, dirty hair.
“Rain, rain,” she said softly. “Come again and wash this mess away.”
The Triumph and the woman upon it inscribed a great hoop around the charred sticks that had once been a house of worship.
When she had returned to the place where she started, the bridge was there, set back in the woods, just as it had been the day before. Only it had turned itself around, so as she drove onto it, she entered from what she thought of as the eastern side. There was green spray paint on the wall to her left.
HERE it said.
She rolled onto the old rotten boards. Planks rattled beneath her tires. As the sound of the engine faded in the distance, a crow landed at the entrance to the bridge and stared into its dark mouth.
When the bridge disappeared two minutes later, it went all at once, popped out of existence like a balloon pricked by a pin. It even banged like a balloon and emitted a clear, shimmering shockwave that hit the crow like a speeding car, blew off half its feathers, and threw it twenty feet. It was dead by the time it hit the ground—just another piece of roadkill.
Laconia, New Hampshire
HUTTER SAW IT BEFORE ANYONE ELSE DID, EVEN THOUGH IT WAS HAPPENING right in front of all of them. Lou Carmody began to go down. His right knee buckled, and he put a hand against the big oval table in the conference room.
“Mr. Carmody,” she said.
He sank into one of the rolling office chairs, fell into it with a soft crash. His color had changed, his big grizzled face taking on a milky pallor, a sweat shining greasily on his forehead. He put one wrist to his brow as if feeling for a fever.
“Mr. Carmody,” Hutter said again, calling down the table and across the room to him.
There were men all around him; Hutter didn’t understand how they could stand there and not see that the guy was having a heart attack.
“I’m gone, Lou,” Vic McQueen said, her voice coming through the Bluetooth headset in Hutter’s ear. “I love you.”
“Back atcha,” Carmody said. He wore a headpiece identical to Tabitha Hutter’s own; almost everyone in the room was wearing one, the whole team listening in on the conversation.
They were in a conference room at the state police headquarters outside Laconia. It could’ve been the conference room at a Hilton or a Courtyard Marriott: a big, bland space with a long, oval central table and windows looking out on an expanse of parking lot.
McQueen hung up. Hutter tore out her earpiece.
Cundy, her lead tech, was on his laptop, looking at Google Maps. It was zoomed in on Sugarcreek, Pennsylvania, to show Bloch Lane. Cundy rolled his eyes up to look at Hutter. “We’ll have cars there in three minutes. Maybe less. I just spoke with the locals, and they’re on the way with sirens blasting.”
Hutter opened her mouth, meant to say, Tell them to turn their fucking sirens off. You didn’t warn a federal fugitive that the cops were closing in. That was fundamental.
But then Lou Carmody leaned all the way forward, so his face was resting on the table, his nose squashed to the wood. He grunted softly and clutched at the tabletop as if he were at sea and clinging to a great chunk of driftwood.
And so what Hutter said instead was, “Ambulance. Now.”
“You want . . . an ambulance to go to Bloch Lane?” Cundy asked.
“No. I want an ambulance to come here,” she said, moving swiftly away from him and around the table. She raised her voice, “Gentlemen, give Mr. Carmody some air, please. Step back. Step back, please.”
Lou Carmody’s office chair had been slowly rolling backward, and at that exact moment
it slid out from beneath him and Carmody went straight down, as if dropped through a trapdoor.
Daltry was the closest to him, standing just behind the chair with a mug that said WORLD’S BEST GRANDDAD. He leaped aside and slopped black coffee down his pink shirt.
“The fuck hit him?” Daltry asked.
Hutter went down on one knee next to Carmody, who was half under the table. She put her hands on one big sloping shoulder and pushed. It was like trying to flip a mattress. He slumped onto his back, his right hand grabbing his Iron Man T-shirt, twisting it into a knot between his man tits. His cheeks were loose, and his lips were gray. He let out a long, ragged gasp. His gaze darted here and there, as if he were trying to get his bearings.
“Stay with us, Lou,” she said. “Help will be here soon.”
She snapped her fingers, and his gaze found her at last. He blinked and smiled uncertainly. “I like your earrings. Supergirl. I would’ve never figured you for Supergirl.”
“No? Who would you have figured me for?” she asked, just trying to keep him talking. Her fingers closed on his wrist. There was nothing for a long moment, and then his pulse whapped, a single big kick, and then another stillness, and then a flurry of rapid beats.
“Velma,” he said. “You know? From Scooby-Doo.”
“Why? Because we’re both dumpy?” Hutter asked.
“No,” he said. “Because you’re both smart. I’m scared. Will you hold my hand?”
She took his hand in hers. He gently moved his thumb back and forth over her knuckles.
“I know you don’t believe anything Vic told you about Manx,” he said to her in a sudden, fierce whisper. “I know you think she’s out of her mind. You can’t let facts get in the way of the truth.”