“Kid, come here,” the man said, taking a quick step into the living room. He was reaching for Kootie with his right hand—because his left hand, his whole left arm, was gone, with just an empty sleeve folded and pinned-up there.
Kootie bolted to the left into the green-lit atrium, skidding and almost falling on the sudden smooth marble floor, and though he clearly saw the two figures who were sitting in chairs against the lattice wall he didn’t stop running; he had seen the figures vividly but he hit the backyard door with all his weight—it slammed open and he was running across the dark grass so fast that he seemed to be falling straight down from a height.
His hands and feet found the crossboards in the back fence and he was over it and tearing through ivy in darkness, getting up before he even knew he had fallen—he scrambled over a redwood fence and then was just running away full tilt down some quiet street.
His eyes must have been guiding his feet on automatic pilot, for he didn’t fall; but in his head all he could see was the two figures sitting in the chairs in the atrium, duct-taped into the chairs at neck and wrist and ankle—his overweight mother and his gray-haired father, mouths gaping and toothless, eyes just empty blood-streaked sockets, hands clawed and clutching the chair arms in obvious death.
CHAPTER THREE
“…Just look along the road, and tell me if you can see either of them.”
“I see nobody on the road,” said Alice.
“I only wish I had such eyes,” the. King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!”
—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass
PETE Sullivan opened his eyes after the flash, but seconds went by as he watched a patch of sky through the screened window of the van, and he didn’t hear any thunder. He sat up in the narrow bed and wondered whether silent flashes behind one’s eyes were a symptom of impending stroke; he had been unaccountably jumpy tonight, and he had played a terrible game of pool in the bar here after work, flinching and clumsy with the cue stick.
The thought of incipient stroke wasn’t alarming him, and he realized that he didn’t really believe it. He swung his bare feet to the carpeted floorboards and stood up—years ago he had replaced the van’s stock roof with a camper top that raised the ceiling two and a half feet, so he was able to stand without bumping the top of his head—and he leaned on the little sink counter and stared out through the open window at the Arizona night.
Tonto Basin was down inside a ring of towering cumulus clouds tonight, and as he watched, one of the clouds was lit for an instant from inside; and a moment later a vivid fork of lightning flashed to the east, over the southern peaks of the Mogollon Rim.
Sullivan waited, but no thunder followed.
The breeze through the screen smelled like the autumn evenings of his boyhood in California, a cool smell of rain-wet rocks, and suddenly the stale old-clothes and propane-refrigerator air inside the van was confining by contrast—he pulled on a pair of jeans and some socks, stepped into his steel-toed black shoes, and slid the door open.
When he was outside and standing on the gravel of O’Hara’s back parking lot, he could hear the noise from the bar’s open back door—Garth Brooks on the jukebox and the click of pool shots and the shaking racket of drink and talk.
He had taken a couple of steps out across the lot, looking up vainly for stars in the cloudy night sky, when a Honda station wagon spoke to him.
“Warning”, it said. The bar’s bright back-door light gleamed on the car’s hood. “You are too close to the vehicle-step back.” Sullivan stepped back. “Thank you”, said the car.
The thing’s voice had been just barely civil.
Sullivan plodded back to the van for cigarettes and a lighter. When he was back out on the gravel, the Honda was quiet until he clicked his lighter; then the car again warned him that he was too close to the vehicle.
He inhaled on the cigarette and blew out a plume of smoke that trailed away on the breeze. “Too close for what?” he asked.
“Step back,” said the car.
“What vehicle?” Sullivan asked. “You? Or is there somebody else around? Maybe we both ought to step back:”
“Warning,” the thing was saying, speaking over him. “You are too close to the vehicle. Step back.”
“What’ll you do if I don’t?”
“It’ll go off like a fire siren, Pete,” came a voice from behind Sullivan. “What are you teasing a car for?”
It was Morrie the bartender, and out here in the fresh air Sullivan thought he could smell the beer stains on the man’s apron. “He started it, Morrie.”
“It started it. It’s a car. You’ve got a call.”
Sullivan imagined picking up the bar phone and hearing the flat mechanical voice telling him that he was standing too close to a vehicle. “The power station?”
“Didn’t say. Maybe it’s some local dad pissed about his daughter being messed with.”
Morrie had turned and was crunching back toward the lit doorway, and Sullivan tucked in his T-shirt and followed him. It wouldn’t be some citizen of this little desert town—Sullivan was one of the apparently few tramp electricians who didn’t get drunk every night and use his eight-hundred-a-week paycheck to sway the local girls.
Besides, he’d only been in town this season for a week. Last Friday he’d been bending conduit pipe and pulling wires at the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station a hundred miles west of here—and during this last week at the Roosevelt Station, outside of town, there had been too much overtime for him to do anything more than work, come back here to gulp a couple of Cokes and shoot a couple of games of pool, and sleep.
The noise of conversation increased when he walked in through the back door after Morrie, and Sullivan squinted in the sudden glare of overhead lights and neon beer signs. He walked to the bar, and Morrie was already behind it and tilting a plastic cup under the Coke tap. The telephone was on the bar with the receiver lying beside it.
Sullivan picked it up. “Hello.”
“Pete? God, you’re a creature of habit—every year working the same places at the same seasons.” She sounded angry.
It was his twin sister, and his hand tightened on the receiver. “Sukie, what—”
“Shut up and listen. I’m at a hotel in Delaware, and the front desk just called me. They say somebody hit my car in the lot, and they want me to go down and give ’em insurance information. I—”
“Sukie, I don’t—”
“Shut up! I woke up on bar-time, Pete! I was bolt upright a second before the phone rang, and then I felt the plastic of the receiver before my hand hit it! I could feel my pupils tighten up a second before I turned on the lamp! Nobody hit my car, I’ll bet my life on it! She’s found me, and she’ll find you—she’ll have people at the desk here waiting for me, and she’s got people out there where you are, you know she does. And you know what she wants us for, too, unless you’ve managed to forget everything. I’m looking Commander Hold-’Em in the eye right now, if you care; this is for you. Go straight out of there, right now, and drive and—this call is through the goddamn front desk, I know they’re listening—go to the place where we hid—a thing, some things, okay? In a garage? It’s what you’re gonna need if she’s—wanting us again. For any purpose.”