Walk a Mile

  Mike tried to smile his understanding. “I know.”

  “But then,” she shrugged. “I finally got myself together and got Daddy’s rifle from in the house. When I came out, he was getting in the truck. I couldn’t believe it was me, or wasn’t me.” She shook her head. “I tried to get him to stop, but he wouldn’t. He just looked at me. I’ve never seen myself look like that. And then he started the truck. It was all I could do to shoot out the one tire before he was gone.”

  “So who is he?”

  She shrugged. “I found his car back there.” She pointed down the road behind her. “Looks like he ran out of gas just past the road to our farm. Left the keys in it and the trunk open.”

  “The trunk?”

  She nodded.

  “Anything in it?”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “Okay,” Mike said. “So where were you going with the gun?”

  She smiled. “After him. I guess I wasn’t thinking too clearly. I just wanted to find him and make him give me back . . . myself. I guess.”

  Mike nodded. “I was thinking the same thing. Only I—”

  He stopped short. He could hear a motor. A vehicle was approaching. And Mike knew the sound of it.

  “That’s him!” he said.

  Ronnie bent down to pick up the gun as the distant headlights drew nearer.

  Mike put a hand on her arm. “What are you going to do?”

  “Stop him.”

  He shook his head. “You can’t,” he said just above a whisper. He nodded toward the gun. “Not with that.”

  Ronnie looked quizzically at him.

  “He’s still got my body,” Mike went on. “You can’t shoot him. You can’t even . . . shoot at him. How will I ever get back?” Trapped inside the stranger’s body, Ronnie just nodded and let Mike lead her farther off the road. On the other side of the eucalyptus trees was an old fence made of stones and wood; beyond that, an orange grove spread into the darkness.

  “You think you can get back?” Ronnie asked.

  Mike shrugged Ronnie’s shoulders. “I don’t know. But I’ll never know if you shoot him.”

  Seconds later, the truck sped past them so fast that Mike could not see his body behind the wheel. He could, however, see that the truck hauled something. The tow winch took up much of the space on the truck’s bed, but lashed to the winch and barely able to fit on the truck was what looked like a silver cylinder, not much bigger than a refrigerator.

  “He’s going back to the gas station,” Mike said. “Come on!”

  He started running after the truck, ignoring the breasts’ bouncing and not looking back to see if Ronnie followed.

  “How do you know?” he heard her say, the man’s voice just behind him.

  “That thing on the back of the truck. That’s what he wanted the tools for. He’s got my uncle’s welding tools all laid out at the station. He wants to fix it.”

  “But what do we do when we get there? If we can’t shoot him . . .”

  “I don’t know,” Mike said. He was starting to breathe hard now. “We’ll have to figure it out.”

  They ran on in silence. Ronnie caught up to him easily, and they ran side by side. His lungs ached, and his thighs burned. When he saw the light of the service station ahead, he put a hand on Ronnie’s arm and thudded to a stop along the road. They stood together, bent forward with hands on their knees as they tried to catch their breath. Ronnie laid the rifle on the asphalt. Mike had barely been sweating while they ran, but now that they had stopped he felt the sweat running down his forehead and arms and chest. He never sweated there, but he knew now that Ronnie did.

  After several seconds, Ronnie said, “Oh my God.”

  “You’ll feel okay in a minute,” Mike said.

  She shook her head. “It’s not that.”

  He looked closely at her. “What is it?”

  Again she shook her head, but now it was as though she was trying to shake something off, to force herself to stop thinking of something. He was about to ask her again what was going on when she said, “I’m starting to remember things.”

  “Things?”

  She nodded and wiped at the sweat beading on her forehead. “About Milton Stubbs. How could I?” She looked on the edge of panic, and tears began streaming down her face. “Mike? How could I know things about Milton Stubbs? I’ve never met the man before tonight.”

  “I don’t know,” Mike said, trying to think of something to calm her down, but failing. “What kinds of things?”

  “He’s a salesman,” she said. “He’s been on a trip selling. There’s a sample case in his car. Estelle Peters is his cousin. He stopped in there this afternoon and had dinner with them, and then he was heading home. He was on his way to your station for gas.” She paused, horror on her face. “Oh God.”

  “What?”

  “He saw it. That thing on the back of the truck. He was going down the road and saw that thing come out of the sky. It . . . it crashed in an orange grove back . . . back that way.” She pointed behind herself. “Milton . . . he pulled off the road and ran into the grove and he found it. A section broke open. And there was a . . . thing inside. It’s, it’s some sort of . . . monster. It was hurt. It wore some kind of a helmet, like a diver’s helmet? Milton leaned over it and the face covering slid up. Oh my God, Mike. It had the most disgusting face. And it was bleeding. And Milton . . . Milton just sat there and looked at it, and then it reached up and grabbed him by the neck.”

  “And kissed him.”

  Ronnie nodded. “But it’s not a kiss. It’s . . . it’s how it moves from one body to another. Who knows what it started as?”

  “And Milton?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. That’s all I remember. I think . . . I think if the thing in the cylinder was hurt, or dying, and Milton passed into it . . .”

  Mike finished her thought. “Then Milton died when the body died. And whatever it was managed to stay alive in Milton’s body.”

  “It took Milton’s car, but he ran out of gas where I found it. And then he came to me.”

  “And took your father’s truck.” Mike turned away from her and pointed toward the station. “And there it is.”

  The thing with his body had backed the tow truck up to the service bay, where the lights had been turned on again. The bay’s door must have been opened and closed again, as the cylinder they had seen on the truck was now gone, no doubt moved into the building.

  “What do we do?” Ronnie asked.

  Mike shrugged. “Let’s go see. Quiet though.”

  Without another word, they crossed to the station and crouched at one of the many windows in the bay’s roll-up door. Inside, the cylinder was on the floor beside Chester West’s Ford. It looked completely smooth. If it could fly in the way Ronnie had described, Mike could see no means of propulsion. Neither could he discern the door that Ronnie had recalled from Milton Stubbs’ memory, nor what damage the creature with his body tried to repair. All he could do was watch as it worked his uncle’s welding torch on the opposite side of the cylinder and tremble at the sight of his body moving so freely without him.

  When Ronnie nudged him, he pulled his eyes from the window to shoot her a questioning glance. She nodded toward the road and started stepping away from the door; he followed.

  Under the floodlight, Mike could more clearly see Milton Stubbs’ face for the first time. He supposed Milton was an average enough looking man, probably close to forty, with light brown hair and blue eyes. He had the beginnings of crow’s feet around his eyes, and his skin was slightly tanned; he looked kind, and his expression made Mike’s heart beat rapidly. Though he had gotten somewhat used to the idea of Ronnie being in this man’s body, Mike felt a new sense of disorientation when he looked at Milton Stubbs in the bright circle of light. And now the sensation made Mike want to cry; it was all too strange, made the world feel suddenly as though it were someone else’s, as though everything he had ever kno
wn had just slipped into nothingness.

  Ronnie did not appear to be examining him in the same way even though she stood there looking at someone else in her body. She squinted Milton’s eyes a bit, as though trying to read Mike’s thoughts. Then, matter-of-factly, she said, “We need to kill him.”

  “What?” Mike gasped.

  “We need to kill him. Step in there with this rifle and shoot him in the head.”

  “My God, Ronnie. Do you know what you’re saying?”

  “That it’s your body?” she asked, nodding. “I know. But there’s nothing else we can do.”

  Mike could do nothing more than shake his head. Until now, he had thought there could be some way to get out of Ronnie’s body and back into his own. The initial shift had been so easy and smooth; shifting back should be just as effortless. Fighting back tears, he said, “You don’t know that. We can call the police. We can . . .”

  “What’ll we tell them, Mike? The truth? That thing in there will say it’s you and that we’re crazy. Who’s Bill Wilkes going to believe?”

  Again, Mike shook his head, silently pleading with Ronnie. Then he said, “But maybe we can convince him, tell the sheriff that thing in there is from the Nazis or the Japs, that it’s a secret attack. If it gets that machine fixed, who knows what’ll happen. More could come.”

  “That thing’s no Nazi,” Ronnie said, an incredulous expression on Milton Stubbs’ face. “It’s not anything we can imagine. You haven’t seen it, Mike, but I have. In Milton’s memory, remember? And I’ve been thinking about something else.” She turned toward her father’s truck. “How it left the trunk open on Milton’s car. When it was pulling away from our house, before I shot out the tire, I saw that it had thrown one of Daddy’s tarps in the back.”

  Mike followed her to the truck bed where a green tarp was spread out with a lump the size of a small person under it. Without saying anything, Ronnie pulled the tarp back. Mike’s hands flew to his face, covering his mouth as tears again streamed down his cheeks.

  The thing was still clothed in its uniform, loose fitting and white. When Ronnie had described the creature’s attack on Milton Stubbs, she had said the visor of its helmet was pulled up, and it still was now, so that the face was the only part of the thing Mike could see. Its skin was orange; it looked fleshy and moist, like a frog’s. It had bulbous eyes that were closed now, and a wide mouth, also like a frog’s.

  “Look like a Nazi to you, Mikey?”

  He shook his head.

  “Or a Jap? This isn’t anything from here. No secret weapon.”

  His voice shaky, Mike made himself look away from the body and said, “And if we kill it, and there’s more. From . . .” He looked up at the clear night sky. The moon had moved toward the west during the time he had been with Ronnie, and the stars that peppered the sky no longer had the magical quality they’d always had. They concealed something, cruelly.

  Ronnie shrugged. “We can’t know. We can just hope this one was alone. That there aren’t more. That it was just passing and ran into trouble with its vehicle. And crashed. And now it knows we’re here and what it can do with us.”

  “And if we kill it,” Mike said, “then what? The sheriff finds Mike Parker dead and that machine in there with him? And a bullet from your daddy’s gun in the body?”

  She reached into Milton’s pants pocket and pulled out a Zippo. “We burn the place to the ground.”

  “You’re crazy! We can’t burn this place down!”

  “Why?” She looked at him unwaveringly.

  He returned her gaze, his eyes wide with fear.

  “Because it’s your uncle’s?” she said. “He’s insured, ain’t he?”

  “I suppose,” he said, barely audible. Then he spoke up, “But then what? My body’s dead and burned up. And I’m left in yours, and you’re in this other guy’s?”

  She shook her head. “Don’t you think I’ve thought of this, Mike? What choice do we have?”

  Mike wiped at tears of frustration. “So what do we do?”

  She shrugged and then nodded toward the tow truck. “We get that gas can off the back of the tow. Take Milton’s car down to 66 and fill it all the way up.” She sighed. “And then just light out of here. You and me.”

  At any point in the last few years, if someone had told Mike that Ronnie Clark would suggest they steal a car and run away together, he would first have laughed at the absurdity of it, and then would have seriously considered whether he’d take her up on it. And he most likely would have told whomever he was talking to that he would go off with Ronnie Clark in a heartbeat. Now she was actually suggesting it, but in a man’s body, and Mike in hers, not much more than a passenger in the whole situation. It was more absurd than he ever could have dreamed.

  It made him smile, ridiculously. Then he nodded and said, “Okay. But I want to do it.”

  “You sure?”

  He said nothing, but reached for the rifle.

  *****

  It was surprisingly easy for Mike to shoot himself in the chest. He left Ronnie beside the Coke machine and stepped into the office. For a moment, he stood there and looked into the service bay at the being in his body. It had the welding mask on and worked intently with the torch, bent over the cylinder. When Mike flung the door open, the thing looked up abruptly. In one fluid motion, it stood up straight and flipped up the mask, showing Mike his own face for the last time. He had never looked at himself except in the mirror, and seeing himself this way, as others had seen him his whole life, gave Mike a strange feeling of alienation. The version of himself he had always imagined was not the same person others had seen. And without thinking about it further, he pulled the trigger.

  The report made his ears ring and his shoulder ache. He stumbled against the doorjamb and watched as his body flew back against the workbench, wrenches and car parts clanging to the floor. The creature in his body looked shocked, a red stain spreading on its chest as it slumped against the bench and then dropped to the floor. It did not attempt to speak.

  Mike wanted to step forward and check to see if it was dead, but Ronnie had warned him against it. The last thing they wanted was for the thing to enter Ronnie’s body again, leaving Mike to die just as Milton Stubbs had succumbed in the body outside in the pick-up.

  Instead, Mike just nodded and turned away, taking the gun with him to rejoin Ronnie. They ran to the gas pumps, lifted the nozzles, and started the gas flowing. Ronnie doused the tarp in her father’s truck and then let gas flow on the ground underneath while Mike filled the gas can from the tow truck. He ran to the service bay door and began emptying the can, making sure the gas flowed into the garage. He repeated this three times while Ronnie used one of the other nozzles to shoot gasoline into the air, spraying the ground as though she were using a water hose in a garden.

  Mike filled the can one last time and then went to stand beside Ronnie. She gave him an uneasy smile and then set the nozzle down. While he had been inside the station, she had gathered a couple of rocks. Now she used one to keep the trigger pressed on the nozzle so that gasoline continued flowing onto the ground. Their eyes burned at the overpowering smell. “You okay?” she asked.

  He nodded grimly.

  “All right then.”

  They walked away from the pumps. Ronnie tore off a piece of Milton’s shirt tail and tied it around her remaining rock, fixing the knot so that a long piece of cloth hung down like a wick. She set it on the ground, and Mike poured gas over it. They were a good twenty feet from the pumps now. She handed Mike the lighter and held out the rock. The flame hadn’t even touched the soaked material when it caught fire, and before it could travel down to Ronnie’s hand she heaved it toward the pumps.

  They were running before it hit the ground, but both glanced back after a few seconds to make sure the flame hadn’t gone out. A little lake of fire spread across the ground around the pumps and Ben Clark’s pick-up. Soon it would spread, engulfing the tow truck and the service station. Mike won
dered if the flame would follow down the nozzle into the underground tanks. He hoped it did, hoped the explosion left a hole in the ground deep enough to hide everything.

  The thought made him want to cry again, and he sobbed as they ran. Everything he had ever hoped or wanted or dreamed of as Mike Parker was dead in the garage behind him, about to be reduced to ash, and for a few seconds he feared he would throw up again. He saw Ronnie glance toward him as they ran, and he was about to wave her off, but the first explosion rocked them before he could.

  The force of the blast pitched them to the ground. Mike had been running with the gas can in one hand, and it flew out of his grip as he fell forward, a wave of heat passing over their backs. “Jesus Christ,” Ronnie said as she rolled over and sat up. Mike also turned to look. The service station was a ball of fire. He could make out the outlines of the building and the shape of Ben Clark’s truck through the waves of heat and flame, but he could tell it wouldn’t be long before everything disintegrated into an indescribable blur.

  “Come on,” Ronnie said, getting to her feet and offering Mike a hand. After they had dusted themselves off, she picked up the gas can, making no motion to hand it back to Mike. “That probably won’t be the only explosion,” she said. “We need to get off this road before the fire trucks come.”

  They heard three more explosions before they reached Milton Stubbs’ car. The gravel road to the Clark farm was just ahead of them. Ronnie shut the trunk on Milton’s Plymouth and loosened the gas cap. Mike felt strange watching her pour the gas into the tank; it was the kind of thing he should be doing, the kind of thing Mike Clark would have done for Ronnie Sparks.

  As the gas gurgled into the tank, he said, “Ronnie?”

  “Mm-hmm?”

  “I’m . . . I’m starting to remember things. About you.”

  She turned her gaze from the gas can to give Mike a piercing look. Then she nodded. “I’ve been getting more and more things about Milton.”

  He looked at the ground, ashamed at the images in his memory now. It felt as though he was suddenly able to spy on Ronnie, to know everything about her—from what she’d gotten for Christmas when she was six to when she’d first had her heart broken. “I know what you did on graduation night. With Sam Evans in his car.”