From a Buick 8

  "Open the door at the end of the hall," Curt said.

  "You told me--"

  "Go on, do what he says," Tony told him, and so Sandy did. When he came back, Tony was asking Curt if Curt thought snipping the bone arch had sped up the decomposition process.

  "No," Curt said. "I think touching the spongy stuff with the tip of the shears is what did it. The things that come out of that car don't seem to get along with us very well, do they?"

  Neither Tony nor Sandy had any wish to argue that. The green sponge didn't look like a brain or a lung or anything else recognizable by then; it was just a pustulant, decomposing sac in the corpse's open chest.

  Curt glanced toward Sandy. "If that green thing was its brain, what do you suppose is in its head? Inquiring minds want to know." And before either of them completely realized what he was doing, Curt reached out with the smaller of his scalpels and poked the blade into the thing's glazed eye.

  There was a sound like a man popping his finger in his cheek. The eye collapsed and slid out of its socket whole, like a hideous shed tear. Tony gave an involuntary shout of horror. Sandy uttered a low scream. The collapsed eye struck the thing's furry shoulder and then plopped into the drip-gutter. A moment later it began to hiss and turn white.

  "Stop it," Sandy heard himself saying. "This is pointless. We're not going to learn anything from it, Curtis. There's nothing to learn."

  Curtis, so far as Sandy could tell, didn't even hear him. "Holy shit," he was whispering. "Holy fucking shit."

  Fibrous pink stuff began to bulge from the vacant eyesocket. It looked like cotton candy, or the insulation people use in their attics. It came out, formed an amorphous node, then turned white and began to liquefy, like the green thing.

  "Was that shit alive?" Tony asked. "Was that shit alive when it--"

  "No, that was only depressurization," Curt said. "I'm sure of it. It's no more alive than shaving cream when it comes out of the can. Did you get it on tape, Sandy?"

  "Oh yeah. For what it's worth."

  "Okay. Let's look in the lower gut and then we're done."

  What came out next killed any real sleep for at least a month. What Sandy was left with were those short dozes from which one wakes, gasping, sure that something one can't quite see has been crouching on one's chest and stealing one's breath.

  Curt retracted the hide from the abdominal area and asked Tony to pin it, first on the left and then on the right. Tony managed, although not without difficulty; the work had become very fine and both of them had their faces close to the incision. The reek in that close must have been tremendous, Sandy thought.

  Without turning his head Curt groped out, found one of the Tensor lamps, and turned it slightly, intensifying the light pouring into the incision. Sandy saw a folded rope of dark liverish red stuff--intestines--piled on top of a bluish-gray sac.

  "Cutting," Curt murmured, and caressed the edge of his scalpel down the sac's lumpy, bulging surface. It split open and black ichor shot out directly into Curt's face, painting his cheeks and splashing his mask. More of it splattered Tony's gloves. Both men recoiled, crying out, while Sandy stood frozen behind the video camera with his jaw hung down. Pouring out of the rapidly deflating sac was a flood of rough black pellets, each of them wrapped in a swaddle of gray membrane. To Sandy they looked like spider-snacks which had been put up in cobweb shrouds. Then he saw that each pellet had an open glazed eye and that each eye seemed to be staring at him, marking him, and that was when his nerve broke. He backed away from the camera, screaming. The screams were replaced by a gagging sound. A moment later he vomited down the front of his shirt. Sandy himself remembered almost none of that; the five minutes or so following Curt's final incision were pretty much burned out of his memory, and he counted that a mercy.

  The first thing he remembered on the other side of that cigarette-burn in the surface of his memory was Tony saying, "Go on, now, you hear? You guys go on back upstairs. Everything here is under control." And, close to his left ear, Curt was murmuring another version of the same thing, telling Sandy he was all right, totally cool, fi'-by-fi'.

  Five-by-five: that was what lured Sandy back from his brief vacation in the land of hysteria. But if everything was five-by, why was Curt breathing so fast? And why was the hand on Sandy's arm so cold? Even through the rubber membrane of the glove (which he had so far neglected to take off), Curt's hand was cold.

  "I threw up," Sandy said, and felt the dull heat hit his cheeks as the blood rose there. He couldn't remember ever feeling so ashamed and demoralized. "Christ Jesus, I threw up all over myself."

  "Yeah," Curt said, "you hurled like a hero. Don't worry about it."

  Sandy took a breath and then grimaced as his stomach knotted and almost betrayed him again. They were in the corridor, but even out here that cabbagey reek was almost overpowering. At the same time he realized exactly where in the hallway he was: standing in front of the rickrack cabinet from which he had scrounged the extension cord. The cabinet's door was open. Sandy wasn't sure, but he had an idea he'd fled down here from the supply room, perhaps with the idea of crawling into the cabinet, pulling the door shut behind him, and just curling up in the dark. This struck him funny and he voiced a single shrill chuckle.

  "There, that's better," Curt said, sounding as pleased as a mother whose child has just managed to tinkle in the potty for the first time. He gave Sandy a pat and looked shocked when Sandy shrank away from his touch.

  "Not you," Sandy said. "That mung . . . that goo--"

  He couldn't finish; his throat had locked up. He pointed at Curt's hand, instead. The slime which had come out of the bat-thing's pregnant dead uterus was smeared all over Curt's gloves, and some of it was now on Sandy's arm as well. Curt's mask, pulled down so it hung against his neck, was also streaked and stained. There was a black crust like a scab on his cheek.

  At the other end of the hall, past the open supply room door, Tony stood at the foot of the stairs, talking to four or five gawking, nervous State Troopers. He was making shooing gestures, trying to get them to go back up, but they weren't quite ready to do that.

  Sandy walked back down the hall as far as the supply room door, stopping where they could all get a good look at him. "I'm okay, fellas--I'm okay, you're okay, everybody's okay. Go upstairs and chill out. After we get squared away, you can all look at the video."

  "Will we want to?" Orville Garrett asked.

  "Probably not," Sandy said.

  The Troopers went upstairs. Tony, his cheeks as pale as glass, turned to Sandy and gave him a little nod. "Thanks."

  "Least I could do. I panicked, boss. I'm sorry as hell."

  Curtis clapped him on the shoulder this time instead of just patting. Sandy almost shrank away again before seeing that the kid had pulled off his stained gloves. So that was all right. Better, anyway.

  "You weren't alone," Curt said. "Tony and I were right behind you. You were just too freaked to notice. We knocked over Huddie's videocam in the stampede. Hope it's okay. If it's not, I guess we'll be passing the hat to buy him a replacement. Come on, let's look."

  The three of them returned to the supply room resolutely enough, but at first none of them was able to go inside. Part of it was the smell, like rotten soup. Most of it was just knowing the bat-thing was still in there, pinned to the corkboard, flayed open and needing to be cleaned up like the weekend road accidents where when you got there the smell of blood and busted guts and spilled gasoline and boiled rubber was like some hideous old acquaintance who would never move out of town; you smelled it and knew that somebody was dead or almost dead, that somebody else would be crying and screaming, that you were going to find a shoe--hopefully not a child's, but all too often it was--lying in the road. For Sandy it was like that. You found them in the road or on the side of the road with the bodies God gave them saying Here, get through life with it just as best you can tortured into new shapes: bones bursting out through pants and shirts, heads twisted halfway around the neck bu
t still talking (and screaming), eyes hanging loose, a bleeding mother holding out a bleeding child like a broken doll and saying Is she still alive? Please, would you check? I can't, I don't dare. There was always blood on the seats in pools and fingerprints of blood on what remained of the windows. When the blood was on the road it was also in pools and it turned purple in the pulse of the red bubblegum lights and you needed to clean it up, the blood and the shit and the broken glass, oh yes, because John Q. and his family didn't want to be looking at it on their way to church come Sunday morning. And John Q. paid the bills.

  "We have to take care of this," the Sarge said. "You boys know that."

  They knew it. And still none of them moved.

  What if some of them are still alive? That was what Sandy was thinking. It was a ridiculous idea, the bat-thing had been in a plastic evidence bag which had been in a sealed Eskimo cooler for six weeks or more, but knowing such an idea was ridiculous wasn't enough. Logic had lost its power, at least for awhile. When you were dealing with a one-eyed thing that had its brain (its green brain) in its chest, the very idea of logic seemed laughable. Sandy could all too easily imagine those black pellets in their gauzy overwrappings starting to pulse and move about like lethargic jumping-beans on the little desk as the fierce glow from the Tensor lamps warmed them back to vitality. Sure, that was easy to imagine. And sounds coming from them. High little mewling noises. The sounds of baby birds or baby rats working to be born. But he had been the first one out, goddammit. He could be the first one back in, at least he could do that much.

  "Come on," Sandy said, and stepped over the threshold. "Let's get this done. Then I'm going to spend the rest of the night in the shower."

  "You'll have to wait in line," Tony said.

  So they cleaned the mess up as they had cleaned up so many on the highway. It took about an hour, all told, and although getting started was hard, they were almost themselves by the rime the job was finished. The biggest help in getting back on an even keel was the fan. With the Tensor lamps turned off, they could run it with no worries about popping a breaker. Curt never said another word about keeping the supply room's door shut, either. Sandy guessed he'd figured any poor quarantine they might have managed had been breached to a faretheewell.

  The fan couldn't clear that sallow stench of cabbage and bitter peppermint entirely, but it drove enough of it out into the hall so that their stomachs settled. Tony checked the videocam and said it appeared to be fine.

  "I remember when Japanese stuff used to break," he said. "Curt, do you want to look at anything under the microscope? We can hang in a little longer if you do. Right, Sandy?"

  Although not enthusiastic, Sandy nodded his head. He was still deeply ashamed of the way he had puked and run; felt he hadn't made up for that yet, not quite.

  "No," Curt said. He sounded tired and dispirited. "The damn Gummi Bears that fell out of it were its litter. The black stuff was probably its blood. As for the rest? I wouldn't know what I was seeing."

  Not just dispirit but something close to despair, although neither Tony nor Sandy would realize that until later. It came to Sandy on one of those sleepless nights he had just bought and paid for. Lying in the bedroom of his small home in East Statler Heights with his hands behind his head and the lamp on the nighttable burning and the radio on low, sleep a thousand miles away. Realizing what Curt had come face to face with for the first time since the Buick showed up, and maybe for the first time in his life: that he was almost certainly never going to know what he wanted to know. What he'd told himself he needed to know. His ambition had been to discover and uncover, but so what? Spit on that, Jack, as they used to say when they were kids. All over the United States there were scrambling shirttail grammar school kids who'd tell you their ambition was to play in the NBA. Their futures in almost all cases would turn out to be more mundane. There comes a time when most folks see the big picture and realize they're puckered up not to kiss smiling fate on the mouth because life just slipped them a pill, and it tastes bitter. Wasn't that where Curtis Wilcox was now? Sandy thought yeah. His interest in the Buick was likely to continue, but with each passing year that interest would look more and more like what it really was--ordinary police work. Stakeout and surveillance, writing reports (in journals his wife would later burn), cleaning up the occasional mess when the Buick gave birth to another monstrosity which would struggle briefly and then die.

  Oh, and living through the occasional sleepless night. But they came with the territory, didn't they?

  Curt and Tony unpinned the monstrosity from the corkboard. They put it back in the evidence bag. All but two of the black pellets followed, swept into the evidence bag with a fingerprint brush. This time Curt made sure the seal on the bag was tight all the way across the top. "Is Arky still around?" he asked.

  Tony said, "No. He wanted to stay, but I sent him home."

  "Then would one of you go upstairs and ask Orv or Buck to start a fire in the incinerator out back? Also, someone needs to put a pot of water on the stove. A big one."

  "I'll do it," Sandy said, and after ejecting the tape from Huddie's videocam, he did.

  While he was gone, Curt took swabs of the viscid black stuff which had come out of the thing's gut and uterus; he also swabbed the thinner white fluid from the chest organ. He covered each swab with Saran Wrap and put them into another evidence bag. The two remaining unborn creatures with their tiny wings wrapped around them (and their unsettling one-eyed stares) went into a third evidence bag. Curt worked competently, but with no zest, much as he would have worked a cold crime-scene.

  The specimens and the bat-thing's flayed body eventually wound up in the battered green cabinet, which George Morgan took to calling "the Troop D sideshow". Tony allowed two of the Troopers from upstairs to come clown when the pot of water on the stove had reached a boil. The five men donned heavy rubber kitchen gloves and scrubbed down everything they could reach. The unwanted organic leftovers went into a plastic bag, along with the scrub-rags, surgical gloves, dental masks, and shirts. The bag went into the incinerator and the smoke went up to the sky, God the Father, ever and ever, amen.

  Sandy, Curtis, and Tony took showers--long enough and hot enough to exhaust the tank downstairs not once but twice. After that, rosy-cheeked and freshly combed, they ended up on the smokers" bench.

  "I'm so clean I almost squeak," Sandy said.

  "Squeak this," Curt replied, but amiably enough.

  They sat and just looked at the shed for awhile, not talking.

  "A lot of that shit got on us," Tony said at last. "Lot of that shit." Overhead, a three-quarter moon hung in the sky like a polished rock. Sandy could feel a tremble in the air. He thought maybe it was the seasons getting ready to change. "If we get sick--"

  "I think if we were going to get sick, we'd be sick already," Curt said. "We were lucky. Damn lucky. Did you boys get a good look at your peepers in the bathroom mirror?"

  They had, of course. Their eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot, the eyes of men who have spent a long day fighting a brushfire.

  "I think that'll go away," Curt said, "but I believe wearing those masks was probably a damn good idea, after all. They're no protection against germs, but at least none of that black crap got in our mouths. I think the results of something like that might have been quite nasty."

  He was right.

  Now: Sandy

  The sandwiches were gone. So was the iced tea. I told Arky to get ten bucks out of the contingency fund (which was kept in ajar in the upstairs closet) and go down to Finn's Cash and Carry. I thought two sixpacks of Coke and one of root beer would probably carry us through to the end.

  "I do dat, I miss d'part about d'fish," Arky said.

  "Arky, you know the part about the fish. You know all the parts of this story. Go on and get us some cold drinks. Please."

  He went, firing up his old truck and driving out of the parking lot too fast. A man driving that way was apt to get a ticket.

  "Go
on," Ned said. "What happened next?"

  "Well," I said, "let's see. The old Sarge became a grandfather, that "was one thing. It probably happened a lot sooner than he wanted it to, baby born out of wedlock, big hooraw in the family, but everyone eventually calmed down and that girl has gone on to Smith, which is not a bad place for a young lady to get her diploma, or so I understand. George Morgan's boy hit a home run in tee-ball and George went around just about busting his buttons, he was so proud. This was I think two years before he killed the woman in the road and then killed himself. Orvie Garrett's wife got blood poisoning in her foot and lost a couple of toes. Shirley Pasternak came to work with us in 1984--"

  "1986," she murmured.

  "86 it was," I said, and patted her knee. "There was a bad fire in Lassburg around that same time, kids playing with matches in the basement of an apartment house. Just goofing. No supervision. When someone says to me that the Amish are crazy to live like they do, I think about that fire in Lassburg. Nine people killed, including all but one of the kids in the basement. The one who got out probably wishes he hadn't. He'd be sixteen now, right around the age boys are generally getting good and interested in girls, and this kid probably looks like the lead actor in a burn-ward production of Beauty and the Beast. It didn't make the national news--I have a theory that multiple-fatality apartment housefires only make the news if they happen at Christmas--but it was bad enough for these parts, thank you very much, and Jackie O'Hara got some terrible burns on his hands, helping out. Oh, and we had a Trooper--James Dockery, his name was--"

  "Docker-ty," Phil Candleton said. "T. But you're forgiven, Sarge, he wasn't here more than a month or two, then he transferred over to Lycoming."

  I nodded. "Anyhow, this Dockerty won a third prize in the Betty Crocker Bakeoff for a recipe called Golden Sausage Puffs. He got ribbed like a motherfucker, but he took it well."

  "Very well," Eddie J. agreed. "He shoulda stayed. He woulda fit in here."

  "We won the tug-of-war that year at the Fourth of July picnic, and--"

  I saw the look on the kid's face and smiled at him.