by Joe Hill
“We need to go,” he said to her. “Now.”
He closed his arms around her waist, and in the next instant the Triumph was under way and the night was lit up with the thunderous rattle of machine-gun fire.
Out Back
THE SOUND OF THE GUNS SHOOK THE DARKNESS ITSELF. VIC FELT ALL that noise tearing through her, mistook it for the impact of bullets, and reflexively grabbed the throttle. The back tire smoked and slipped across the wet earth, peeled up a long, soggy strip of grass. Then the Triumph jumped forward, into the darkness.
A part of her was still looking back, watching her father double over, reaching for his own throat, hair falling across his eyes. His mouth open as if he were trying to vomit.
A part of her was catching him before he could sink to his knees, was holding him in her arms.
A part of her was kissing his face. I’m right here, Dad, she told him. I’m right here with you. She was so close to him she could smell the fresh-poured-copper smell of his blood.
Lou’s soft, bristly cheek was pressed to the side of her neck. He was spooned against her, the backpack full of explosives crushed between their bodies.
“Just ride,” he said. “Get us where we have to go. Don’t look, just ride.”
Dirt flew up on her right as she twisted the bike around, pointing it upslope, toward the trees. Her ears registered the sound of bullets smacking into the soil behind them. Through the racket of gunfire, she picked out Tabitha Hutter’s voice, wavering with strain:
“STOP SHOOTING, STOP SHOOTING!”
Vic couldn’t think and didn’t need to. Her hands and feet knew what to do, her right foot kicking up into second gear, then third. The bike scrambled up the wet hill. The pines rose in a dark wall before them. She lowered her head as they cut in between the tree trunks. A branch swatted her across the mouth, stung her lips. They broke through the brush, and the tires found the boards of the Shorter Way Bridge and began to clatter over them.
“What the fuck?” Lou cried.
She hadn’t entered straight on, and her head was still down, and her shoulder hit the wall. The arm went dead, and she was shoved back into Lou.
In her mind her father was falling into her arms again.
Vic pulled on the handlebars, veering to the left, getting them away from the wall.
In her mind she was saying, I’m right here, while the two of them sank together to the ground.
One of the floorboards cracked under the front tire, and the handlebars were wrenched out of her hands.
She kissed her father’s temple. I’m right here, Dad.
The Triumph careened into the left-hand wall. Lou’s left arm was smashed against it, and he grunted. The force of him striking the wall made the whole bridge shudder.
Vic could smell the scalpy odor of her father’s hair. She wanted to ask him how long he had been alone, why there was no woman in the house. She wanted to know how he kept himself, what he did to pass his evenings. She wanted to tell him she was sorry and that she still loved him; for all the bad, she still loved him.
Then Chris McQueen was gone. She had to let him go, let him slide free from her arms. She had to ride on without him.
Bats shrilled in the dark. There was a sound like someone riffling through a deck of cards, only vastly amplified. Lou twisted his head to look up between the rafters. Big, gentle, unshakable Lou did not scream, hardly made a sound at all, but he took a great sharp breath of air and ducked as dozens, perhaps hundreds, of bats, disturbed from their rest, dropped from the ceiling and rained upon them, whirling through the dank space. They were everywhere, brushing against their arms, their legs. One of them whisked by Vic’s head, and she felt its wing graze her cheek and caught a glimpse of its face as it flitted past: small, pink, deformed, yet oddly human. She was looking at her own face, of course. It was all that Vic could do to stop herself from shrieking as she struggled to keep the Triumph on course.
The bike was almost to the far end of the bridge now. A few of the bats darted lazily out into the night, and Vic thought, There goes part of my mind.
Her old Raleigh Tuff Burner appeared before her. It seemed to race toward her, the headlight rushing over it. She realized, a half instant too late, that she was going to hit it and that the consequences would be brutal. The front tire smacked the Raleigh dead-on.
The Triumph seemed to snag and catch on the rusted, cobwebbed bicycle and was already turning sideways and toppling over as it exited the covered bridge. A dozen bats poured out with them.
The tires tore raggedly at dirt, then grass. Vic saw the ground fall away, saw they were about to tip over an embankment. She had a glimpse of pine trees, decorated with angels and snowflakes.
Then they went over a steep drop. The bike turned, dumping them off the side. It followed them down, crashing onto the both of them in an avalanche of hot iron. The world cracked open, and they fell into darkness.
The Sleigh House
LOU WAS AWAKE FOR CLOSE TO AN HOUR BEFORE HE HEARD A DRY, quiet crackling and saw little white flakes dropping into the dead leaves around him. He tipped his head back and squinted into the night. It had begun to snow.
“Lou?” Vic asked.
His neck was stiffening up, and it hurt to lower his chin. He looked over at Vic, lying on the ground to his right. She had been asleep a moment ago, but now she was with him, eyes open wide.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Is my mother still here?”
“Your mother’s with the angels, babe,” he said.
“The angels,” Vic said. “There’s angels in the trees.” Then: “It’s snowing.”
“I know. In July. I’ve lived in the mountains my whole life. I know spots where the snow stays year-round, but I’ve never seen the snow fall this time of year. Not even up here.”
“Where?” she asked.
“Right above Gunbarrel. Where it all started.”
“It started in Terry’s Primo Subs when my mother left her bracelet in the bathroom. Where’d she go?”
“She wasn’t here. She’s dead, Vic. Remember?”
“She was sitting with us for a while. Over there.” Vic lifted her right arm and pointed at the embankment above them. The tires from the motorcycle had torn deep gouges in the slope, long, muddy trenches. “She said something about Wayne. She said Wayne will still have a little time when he gets to Christmasland, because he’s been running himself backward. Two steps back for every two miles forward. He won’t be one of those things. Not yet.”
She was stretched out on her back, arms at her sides, ankles together. Lou had put his flannel-lined coat over her; it was so big it covered her to her knees, as if it were a child’s blanket. Vic turned her head to look at him. She had a vacuity of expression that scared him.
“Oh, Lou,” she said, almost tonelessly. “Your poor face.”
He touched his right cheek, tender and swollen from the corner of his mouth to the edge of his eye socket. He didn’t remember how he got that one. The back of his left hand was badly burned, a steady throb of pain—when they came to rest, the hand had been caught under the bike, a hot pipe pressed against it. He couldn’t stand to look at it. The skin was black and cracked and glistening. He kept it down by his side, where Vic couldn’t see it either.
It didn’t matter about his hand. He didn’t think he had much time left. That sensation of ache and pressure in his throat and left temple was constant now. His blood felt as heavy as liquid iron. He was walking around with a gun to his head, and he thought at some point, before the night was over, it would go off. He wanted to see Wayne again before that happened.
He had pulled her from the bike as they went over the embankment, managed to roll so she was under him. The bike glanced off his back. If the Triumph had hit Vic—who probably weighed a hundred and five pounds with a brick in each pocket—it probably would’ve snapped her spine like a dry twig.
“You believe this snow?” Lou asked.
She blinked and wiggle
d her jaw and stared into the night. Flecks of snow dropped onto her face. “It means he’s almost here.”
Lou nodded. That was what he thought it meant.
“Some of the bats got out,” she said. “They came out of the bridge with us.”
He suppressed a shiver, couldn’t suppress the feeling of his skin crawling. He wished she hadn’t mentioned the bats. He had caught a glimpse of one, brushing past him, its mouth open in a barely audible shriek. As soon as he looked at it, he wished he had not seen it, wished he could unsee it. Its shriveled pink face had been horribly like Vic’s own.
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess they did.”
“Those things are . . . me. The stuff in my head. When I use the bridge, there’s always a chance some of them will escape.” She rolled her head on her neck to look at him again. “That’s the toll. There’s always a toll. Maggie had a stutter that got worse and worse the more she used her Scrabble tiles. Manx had a soul once, probably, but his car used it up. Do you understand?”
He nodded. “I think.”
“If I say some things that don’t make sense,” she said, “you have to let me know. If I start to seem confused, you straighten me out. Do you hear me, Lou Carmody? Charlie Manx will be here soon. I need to know you’ve got my back.”
“Always,” he said.
She licked her lips, swallowed. “Good. That’s good. Good as gold. What’s gold stays gold forever, you know? That’s why Wayne is going to be okay.”
A snowflake caught in one of her eyelashes. The sight of it struck him as almost heartbreaking in its beauty. He doubted he would ever see anything so beautiful again in his life. To be fair, he was not anticipating living beyond the evening.
“The bike,” she said, and blinked again. Alarm rose upon her features. She sat up, elbows resting on the ground behind her. “The bike has to be all right.”
Lou had pried it out of the dirt and leaned it against the trunk of a red pine. The headlight hung from its socket. The right-hand mirror had been torn off. It was missing both mirrors now.
“Oh,” she said. “It’s all right.”
“Well. I don’t know. I haven’t tried starting it. We don’t know what might’ve come loose. You want me to—”
“No. It’s okay,” she said. “It’ll start.”
The breeze blew the dusting of snow at a slant. The night filled with soft chiming sounds.
Vic lifted her chin, looked into the branches above them, filled with angels, Santas, snowflakes, globes of silver and gold.
“I wonder why they don’t smash,” Lou said.
“They’re horcruxes,” Vic said.
Lou shot a look at her, hard, worried. “You mean like in Harry Potter?”
She laughed—a frightening, unhappy sound. “Look at all of them. There is more gold and there are more rubies in these trees than there were in all of Ophir. And it will end the same here as it did there.”
“‘Oh, fear’?” he asked. “You’re not making sense, Vic. Come back to me.”
She lowered her head, shook it as if to clear it, then put a hand against her neck, grimaced in pain.
Vic looked up at him from beneath her hair. It shocked him—how suddenly like herself she seemed. She had that Vic smirk on her face and that look of mischief in her eyes that had always turned him on.
She said, “You’re a good man, Lou Carmody. I may be one crazy bitch, but I love you. I’m sorry about a lot of things I put you through, and I wish like hell you’d met someone better than me. But I am not sorry we had a kid together. He’s got my looks and your heart. I know which one is worth more.”
He put his fists on the ground and slid on his butt to be next to her. He reached her side and put his arm around her and hugged her to his chest. Rested his face in her hair.
“Who says there’s better than you?” he said. “You say things about yourself I wouldn’t let anyone else in the world get away with saying.” He kissed her scalp. “We made a good boy. Time to get him back.”
She pulled away from him to look up in his face. “What happened to the timers? The explosives?”
He reached for the backpack, a few feet away. It was open.
“I started work on them,” he said. “A little while ago. Just something to do with my hands while I waited for you to wake up.” He gestured with his hands, as if to show how useless they were when they were empty. Then he put his left mitt down, hoping she hadn’t noticed how badly it was burned.
The cuffs dangled from the wrist of his other hand. Vic smiled again, tugged on them.
“We’ll do something kinky with these later,” she said. Except she said it in a tone of inexpressible weariness, a tone that suggested not erotic anticipation but the distant memory of red wine and lazy kisses.
He blushed; he had always been an easy blusher. She laughed and pecked his cheek.
“Show me what you’ve got done,” she said.
“Well,” he told her, “not much. Some of the timers are no good—they got smashed while we were making our great escape. I’ve got four of them wired up.” He reached into the sack and removed one of the slippery white packages of ANFO. The black timer dangled close to the top, connected to a pair of wires—one red and one green—that went down into the tight plastic bag containing the prepared explosive. “The timers are just little alarm clocks, really. One hand shows the hour, the other shows when they’re set to switch on. See? And you press here to start them running.”
It made his armpits prickle with monkey sweat, just holding one of the slick packs of explosive. A fucking Christmas-light timer was the only thing between the two of them and an explosion that wouldn’t leave even fragments.
“There’s one thing I don’t get,” he said. “When are you going to plant them? And where?”
He got to his feet and craned his head, looking either way, like a child about to cross a busy road.
They were in among trees on the sunken floor of the forest. The drive leading up to the Sleigh House was directly behind him, a gravel lane running along the embankment, a road barely wide enough to allow the passage of a single car.
To his left was the highway, where, almost exactly sixteen years before, a stringy teenage girl with coltish legs had come bursting out of the underbrush, her face blackened with soot, and been seen by a fat twenty-year-old on a Harley. At the time Lou had been riding away from a bitter argument with his father. Lou had asked for a little money, wanted to get his GED, then apply to state college and study publishing. When his father asked why, Lou said so he could start his own comic-book company. His father put on a puss and said why not use money as toilet paper, it would come to the same thing. He said if Lou wanted an education, he could do what he had done, and join the marines. Maybe lose some of the fat in the process and get a real haircut.
Lou took off on his bike so his mother wouldn’t see him crying. It had been in his mind to drive to Denver, enlist, and disappear from his father’s life, spend a couple years in the service overseas. He would not return until he was a different man, someone lean and hard and cool, someone who would allow his father to hug him but would not provide a hug in return. He would call his father “sir,” sit stiffly at attention in his chair, resist smiling. How do you like my haircut, sir? he might ask. Does it meet your high standards? He wanted to drive away and come back remade, a man his parents didn’t know. As it was, that was very much what happened, although he never got as far as Denver.
To his right was the house where Vic had nearly burned to death. Not that it was a house anymore, not by any conventional definition. All that remained was a sooty cement platform and a tangle of burned sticks. Amid the ruin was a blistered and blackened old-fashioned Frigidaire on its side, the smoked and warped frame of a bed, part of a staircase. A single wall of what had once been the garage appeared almost untouched. A door set in that wall stood open, implying an invitation to come on in, pull up some burned lumber, have a seat, and stay awhile. Broken glass silted the rubble
.
“I mean . . . this isn’t, like, Christmasland, right?”
“No,” she said. “It’s the doorway. He probably doesn’t need to come here to cross over, but it’s easiest for him here.”
Angels held trumpets to their lips, drifted and swayed in the flecks of snow.
“Your doorway—” he said. “The bridge. It’s gone. It was gone by the time we hit the bottom of the slope.”
“I can get it back when I need it,” she said.
“I wish we could’ve brought those cops through with us. Led ’em right across. Maybe they could’ve pointed all those guns at the right guy.”
She said, “I think the less weight put on the bridge, the better. It’s an avenue of last resort. I didn’t even want to bring you across.”
“Well. I’m here now.” He still held a glossy package of ANFO in one hand. He slipped it gently back in with the others and hefted the backpack. “What’s the plan now?”
She said, “The first part of the plan is that you give those to me.” She took one strap of the backpack. He stared at her for a moment, the pack between them, not sure he ought to allow her to have it, then let go. He had what he wanted; he was here now, and no way she could get rid of him. She hooked it over her shoulder.
“The second part of the plan—” she started, then turned her head and looked toward the highway.
A car slid along through the night, the light of its headlamps stammering through the trunks of the pines, casting absurdly long shadows across the gravel drive. It slowed as it approached the turnoff toward the house. Lou felt a dull throb of pain behind his left ear. The snow fell in fat goose-feather flakes, beginning to collect on the dirt road.
“Jesus,” Lou said, and he hardly recognized his own strained voice. “It’s him. We aren’t ready.”
“Get back here,” Vic said.
She grabbed him by the sleeve and backpedaled, walking him across the carpet of dry, dead leaves and pine needles. The two of them slipped into a stand of birch trees. For the first time, Lou noticed their breath smoking in the moonlit-silvered night.