From a Buick 8

  Anyway, I didn't think Eddie yelling was important, and I went out back to the hutch where we kept our supplies without bothering to check on him. I was more than half-convinced the Puff-Pak would be gone, but it was still on the shelf, wedged between the box of blank videotapes and a pile of Field & Stream magazines. Some tidy soul had even tucked it into a plastic evidence-bag to keep the dust off. Taking it down, I remembered how crazy Curt had looked on the day I first saw him wearing this gadget, Curt also wearing a plastic barber's smock and a blue bathing cap and red galoshes. You're beautiful, wave to your adoring fans, I'd told him.

  I put the mask to my mouth and nose, almost sure that what came out of it would be unbreathable, but it was air, all right--stale as week-old bread but not actually moldy, if you know what I mean. Better than the stench in the shed, certainly. I grabbed the battered old Polaroid One-Shot from the nail where it was hanging by the strap. I backed out of the hutch, and--this could be nothing but hindsight, I'll be the first to admit it--I think I saw movement. Just a flash of movement. Not from the vicinity of the shed, though, because I was looking right at that and this was more a corner-of-the-eye phenomenon. Something in our back field. In the high grass. I probably thought it was Mister Dillon, maybe rolling around and trying to get that thing's smell off. Well, it wasn't. Mister Dillon wasn't up to any rolling around by then. By then poor old D was busy dying.

  I went back into the shed, breathing through the mask. And although I hadn't felt what Eddie was talking about before, this time it came through loud and clear. It was like being outside the shed for a few moments had freshened me for it, or attuned me to it. The Buick wasn't flashing purple lightning or glowing or humming, it was only sitting there, but there was a sense of liveliness to it that was unmistakable. You could feel it hovering just over your skin, like the lightest touch of a breeze huffing at the hairs on your forearms. And I thought . . . this is crazy, but I thought, What if the Buick's nothing but another version of what I'm wearing on my face right now? What if it's nothing but a Puff-Pak? What if the thing wearing it has exhaled and now its chest is lying flat but in a second or two--

  Even with the Puff-Pak, the smell of the dead creature was enough to make my eyes water. Brian Cole and Jackie O'Hara, two of the handier build-em-and-fix-em fellows on the roster back then, had installed an overhead fan the year before, and I flipped the switch as I passed it.

  I took three pictures, and then the One-Shot was out of film--I'd never even checked the load. Stupid. I tucked the photos into my back pocket, put the camera down on the floor, then went to get the tarp. As I bent and grabbed it, I realized that I'd taken the camera but walked out of the hutch right past the looped length of bright yellow rope. I should have taken it and cinched the loop in the end of it around my waist. Tied the other end to the big old hook Curtis had mounted to the left of Shed B's side door for just that purpose. But I didn't do that. The rope was too goddam bright to miss, but I missed it anyway. Funny, huh? And there I was where I had no business to be on my own, but I was on my own. I wasn't wearing a security line, either. Had walked right past it, maybe because something wanted me to walk right past it. There was a dead E.T. on the floor and the air was full of a lively, chilly, gathering feeling. I think it crossed my mind that if I disappeared, my wife arid Ennis Rafferty's sister could join up forces. I think I might have laughed out loud at that. I can't remember for sure, but I do remember being struck humorous by something. The global absurdity of the situation, maybe.

  The thing we'd killed had turned entirely white. It was steaming like dry ice. The eyes on the severed piece still seemed to be staring at me, even though by then they'd started to melt and run. I was as afraid as I've ever been in my life, afraid the way you are when you're in a situation where you could really die and you know it. That sense of something about to breathe, to suck in, was so strong it made my skin crawl. But I was grinning, too. Big old grin. Not quite laughing, but almost. Feeling humorous. I tossed the tarp over Mr. E.T. and started backing out of the shed. Forgot the Polaroid entirely. Left it sitting there on the concrete.

  I was almost at the door when I looked at the Buick. And some force pulled me toward it. Am I sure it was its force? Actually, I'm not. It might have just been the fascination deadly things have for us: the edge and the drop, how the muzzle of a gun looks back at us like an eye if we turn it this way and that. Even the point of a knife starts to look different if the hour's late and everyone else in the house has gone to sleep.

  All this was below the level of thinking, though. On the level of thinking I just decided I couldn't go out and leave the Buick with its trunk open. It just looked too . . . I don't know, too getting ready to breathe. Or to bite. Something like that. I was still smiling. Might even have laughed a little.

  I took eight steps--or maybe it was a dozen, I guess it could have been as many as a dozen. I was telling myself there was nothing foolish about what I was doing, Eddie J. was nothing but an old lady mistaking feelings for facts. I reached for the trunk-lid. I meant to just slam it and scat (or so I told myself), but then I looked inside and I said one of those things you say when you're surprised, I can't remember which one, it might have been Well I be dog or I'll be switched. Because there was something in there, lying on the trunk's plain brown carpeting. It looked like a transistor radio from the late fifties or early sixties. There was even a shiny stub of what could have been an antenna sticking up from it.

  I reached into the trunk and picked the gizmo up. Had a good laugh over it, too. I felt like I was in a dream, or tripping on some chemical. And all the time I knew it was closing in one me, getting ready to take me. I didn't know if it got Ennis the same way, but probably, yeah. And I didn't care. I was standing in front of that open trunk, no rope on me and no one to pull me back, and something was getting ready to pull me in, to breathe me like cigarette smoke. And I didn't give Shit One. All I cared about was what I'd found in the trunk.

  It might have been some sort of communication device--that's what it looked like--but it might have been something else entirely: where the monster kept its prescription drugs, some sort of musical instrument, maybe even a weapon. It was the size of a cigarette-pack but a lot heavier. Heavier than a transistor radio or a Walkman, too. There were no dials or knobs or levers on it. The stuff it was made of didn't look or feel like either metal or plastic. It had a fine-grained texture, not exactly unpleasant but organic, like cured cowhide. I touched the rod sticking out of it and it retracted into a hole on top. I touched the hole and the rod came back out. Touched the rod again and this time nothing happened. Not then, not ever. Although ever for what we called "the radio" wasn't very long; after a week or so, the surface of it began to pit and corrode. It was in an evidence bag with a zip-lock top, but that didn't matter. A month later the "radio" looked like something that's been left out in the wind and rain for about eighty years. And by the following spring it was nothing but a bunch of gray fragments lying at the bottom of a plastic baggie. The antenna, if that's what it was, never moved again. Not so much as a silly millimeter.

  I thought of Shirley saying We killed a thinking being and George saying that was bullshit. Except it wasn't bullshit. The bat and the fish hadn't come equipped with things that looked like transistor radios because they had been animals. Today's visitor--which we'd hacked to pieces with tools we'd taken from the pegboard--had been something quite different. However loathsome it had seemed to us, no matter how instinctively we"d--what was that word?--we'd repudiated it, Shirley was right: it had been a thinking being. We'd killed it nevertheless, hacked it to pieces even as it lay on the concrete, holding out the severed stump of its trunk in surrender and screaming for the mercy it must have known we'd never give it. Couldn't give it. And that didn't horrify me. What did was a vision of the shoe on the other foot. Of Ennis Rafferty falling into the midst of other creatures like this, things with yellow knobs for heads under tangled masses of pink ropes that might have been hair. I saw him dying
beneath their flailing, acid-lined trunks and hooking talons, trying to scream for mercy and choking on air he could barely breathe, and when he lay dead before them, dead and already beginning to rot, had one of them worked his weapon out of its holster? Had they stood there looking at it under an alien sky of some unimaginable color? As puzzled by the gun as I had been by the "radio"? Had one of them said We just killed a thinking being to which another had responded That's bullshit? And as I thought these things, I also thought I ought to get out of there right away. Unless I wanted to investigate such questions in person, that was. So what did I do? What did I do next? I've never told anyone that, but I might as well tell now; seems foolish to come this far and then hold back.

  I decided to get in the trunk.

  I could see myself doing it. There would be plenty of space; you know how big the trunks of those old cars were. When I was a kid we used to joke that Buicks and Cadillacs and Chryslers were mob cars because there was room enough for either two polacks or three guineas in the trunk. Plenty of space. Old Huddie Royer would get in, and lie on his side, and reach up, and pull the trunk closed. Softly. So it made just the faintest click. Then he'd lie there in the dark, breathing stale air from the Puff-Pak and holding the "radio" to his chest. There wouldn't be much air left in the little tank, but there'd be enough. Old Huddie would just curl up and lie there and keep smilin and then . . . pretty soon . . .

  Something interesting would happen.

  I haven't thought of this in years, unless it was in the kind of dreams you can't remember when you wake up, the ones you just know were bad because your heart is pounding and your mouth is dry and your tongue tastes like a burnt fuse. The last time I thought consciously about standing there in front of the Buick Roadmaster's trunk was when I heard George Morgan had taken his own life. I thought of him out there in his garage, sitting down on the floor, maybe listening to the kids playing baseball under the lights over on McClurg Field around the other side of the block and then with his can of beer finished taking up the gun and looking at it. We might have switched over to the Beretta by then, but George kept his Ruger. Said it just felt right in his hand. I thought of him turning it this way and that, looking into its eye. Every gun has an eye. Anyone who's ever looked into one knows that. I thought of him putting the barrel between his teeth and feeling the hard little bump of the gunsight against the roof of his mouth. Tasting the oil. Maybe even poking into the muzzle with the tip of his tongue, the way you might tongue the mouthpiece of a trumpet -when you're getting ready to blow. Sitting there in the corner of the garage, still tasting that last can of beer, also tasting the gun-oil and the steel, licking the hole in the muzzle, the eye the slug comes out of at twice the speed of sound, riding a pad of hot expanding gases. Sitting there smelling the grass caked under the Lawnboy and a little spilled gasoline. Hearing kids cheer across the block. Thinking of how it felt to hit a woman with two tons of Ford police cruiser, the thud and slew of it, seeing drops of blood appear on the windshield like the debut of a Biblical curse and hearing the dry gourdlike rattle of something caught in one of the wheelwells, what turned out to be one of her sneakers. I thought of all that and I think it was how it was for him because I know it's how it was for me. I knew it was going to be horrible but I didn't care because it would be kind of funny, too. That's why I was smiling. I didn't want to get away. I don't think George did, either. In the end, when you really decide to do it, it's like falling in love. It's like your wedding night. And I had decided to do it.

  Saved by the bell, that's the saying, but I was saved by a scream: Shirley's. At first it was just a high shriek, and then there were words. "Help! Please! Help me! Please, please help me!"

  It was like being slapped out of a trance. I took two big steps away from the Buick's trunk, wavering like a drunk, hardly able to believe what I'd been on the verge of. Then Shirley screamed again and I heard Eddie yell: " What's wrong with him, George? What's happening to him?"

  I turned and ran out the shed door.

  Yeah, saved by the scream. That's me.

  Eddie

  It was better outside, so much better I almost felt, as I hurried along after George, that the whole thing in Shed B had been a dream. Surely there were no monsters with pink strings growing out of their heads and trunks with eyes in them and talons with hair growing out of them. Reality was our subject in the back seat of Unit 6, that debonair, girlfriend-punching puke, let's give him a great big hand, ladies and gentlemen, Brian Lippy. I was still afraid of the Buick--afraid as I'd never been before or have been since--and I was sure there was a perfectly good reason to feel that way, but I could no longer remember what it was. Which was a relief.

  I trotted to catch up with George. "Hey, man, I might have gotten a little carried away in there. If I did--"

  "Shit," he said in a flat, disgusted voice, stopping so quick I almost ran into his back. He was standing at the edge of the parking lot with his hands curled into fists that were planted on his hips. "Look at that." Then he called, "Shirley! You all right?"

  "Fine," she called back. "But Mister D . . . aw sugar, there goes the radio. I have to get that."

  "Doesn't this bite," George said in a low voice.

  I stepped up beside him and saw why he was upset. 6's right rear window had been broken clean out to the doorframe, undoubtedly by a pair of cowboy boots with stacked heels. Two or three kicks wouldn't have done that, maybe not even a dozen, but we'd given my old school chum Brian plenty of time to go to town. Rowdy-dow and a hot-cha-cha, as my old mother used to say. The sun was reflecting fire off a thousand crumbles of glass lying heaped on the hottop. Of Monsieur Brian Lippy himself, there was no sign. "FUCK! I shouted, and actually shook my fists at Unit 6.

  We had a burning chemical tanker over in Pogus County, we had a dead monster rotting in our back shed, and now we also had one escaped neo-Nazi asshole. Plus a broken cruiser window. You might think that's not much compared to the rest, kid, but that's because you've never had to fill out the forms, beginning with 24-A-24, Damaged Property, PSP and ending with Complete Incident Report, Fill Out All Appropriate Fields. One thing I'd like to know is why you never have a series of good days in which one thing goes wrong. Because it's not that way, at least not in my experience. In my experience the bad shit gets saved up until you have a day when everything comes due at once. That was one of those days. The granddaddy of them all, maybe.

  George started walking toward 6. I walked beside him. He hunkered down, took the walkie out of its holster on his hip, and stirred through the strew of broken Saf-T-Glas with the rubber antenna. Then he picked something up. It was our pal's cruicifix earring. He must have lost it when he climbed through the broken window.

  "Fuck," I said again, but in a lower voice. "Where do you think he went?"

  "Well, he's not in with Shirley, she sounds too chirpy. Which is good. Otherwise? Down the road, up the road, across the road, across the back field and into the woods. One of those. Take your pick." He got up and looked into the empty back seat. "This could be bad, Eddie. This could be a real fuckarow. You know that, don't you?"

  Losing a prisoner was never good, but Brian Lippy wasn't exactly John Dillinger, and I said so.

  George shook his head as if I didn't get it. "We don't know what he saw. Do we?"

  "Huh?"

  "Maybe nothing," he went on, and dragged a shoe through the broken glass. The little pieces clicked and scritched. There were droplets of blood on some of them. "Maybe he hightailed it away from the shed. But of course going that way'd take him to the road, and even if he was as high as an elephant's eye he might not've wanted to go that way, in case some cop 20-base should see him--a guy covered with blood, busted glass in his hair--and arrest him all over again."

  I was slow that day and I admit it. Or maybe I was still in shock. "I don't see what you're--"

  George was standing with his head down and his arms folded across his chest. He was still dragging his foot back and forth, stirring
that broken glass like stew. "Me, I'd head for the back field. I'd want to cut around to the highway through the woods, maybe wash up in one of the streams back there, then try to hitch a ride. Only what if I get distracted while I'm making my escape? What if I hear a lot of screaming and thrashing coming from inside that shed?"

  "Oh," I said. "Oh my God. You don't think he'd really stop what he was doing to check on what we. were doing, do you?"

  "Probably not. But is it possible? Hell, yes. Curiosity's a powerful thing."

  That made me think of what Curt liked to say about the curious cat. "Yeah, but who on God's earth would ever believe him.?"

  "If it ever got into the American," George said heavily, "Ennis's sister might. And that would be a start. Wouldn't it?"

  "Shit," I said. I thought it over. "We better have Shirley put out an all-points on Brian Lippy."

  "First let's let folks get the mess in Poteenville picked up a little. Then, when he gets here, we'll tell the Sarge everything--including what Lippy might have seen--and show him what's left in Shed B. If Huddie gets some half-decent pictures . . ." He glanced back over his shoulder. "Say, where is Huddie? He should've been out of there by now. Christ, I hope--"

  He got that far and then Shirley started screaming. "Help! Please! Help me! Please, please help me!"

  Before either of us could take a step toward the barracks, Mister Dillon came out through the hole he'd already put in the screen door. He was staggering from side to side like a drunk, and his head was down. Smoke was rising from his fur. More seemed to be coming out of his head, although at first I couldn't see where it was coming from; everywhere was my first impression. He got his forepaws on the first of the three steps going down from the back stoop to the parking lot, then lost his balance and fell on his side. When he did, he twisted his head in a series of jerks. It was the way people move in those oldtime silent movies. I saw smoke coming out of his nostrils in twin streams. It made me think of the woman sitting there in Lippy's bigfoot truck, the smoke from her cigarette rising in a ribbon that seemed to disappear before it got to the roof. More smoke was coming from his eyes, which had gone a strange, knitted white. He vomited out a spew of smoky blood, half-dissolved tissue, and triangular white things. After a moment or two I realized they were his teeth.