He held the stained mug in both shaking hands as he drank. Two other men, truck drivers, stared at him as they might have stared at a raccoon that had wandered in for a pack of Luckies. Nobody asked him what had happened, as if they knew the answer would be impossible to reconcile.
He drank a second cup before he set down the mug and headed out. The Delaware River Bridge wasn’t far. He took the footpath up alongside the cars passing from New Jersey to Pennsylvania. Every few feet he was compelled to glance back to confirm that the dingus wasn’t pursuing him. Dingus. That’s right. He laughed at the word, making a joke of the horror, and the fact that he’d escaped it.
The events rolled around in his head like marbles. The woman had created it, called it into being somehow. He’d seen it with his own eyes. Some kind of witch. She would’ve done the same at the roadhouse. Those coins, buttons, whatever they were. How many did she throw at Cody? Why was he wondering this? It was crazy. Coins that brought trash to life.
He was cold and tired, and he’d just escaped from a goddamn dingus that nobody was ever going to believe in.
Back in Philly, he rode the Third Street Trolley to Fairmount Avenue and caught the Fairmount Trolley up past the prison. He sat away at the back of both by himself. It was coming up on seven in the morning. He smelled like the river; his clothes were damp; his hair was crazy. He looked like someone who’d gotten falling-down drunk in a fountain.
He was never so happy to see his cab as that morning. Tumbling into it, he spent a moment breathing in the stale, wonderful smell of Rosario’s cigars. A fit of laughter burst from him. He pounded the steering wheel and yelled and yelled until he’d worn out the terror. Then he started the cab, drove back to the depot and parked.
Rosie would be showing up any minute for the day shift, but Meyers didn’t wait. He walked the few blocks home, stripped out of the wet clothes, and then, in dry shorts and undershirt, he opened a tin of beans, heated them up on the stove, and ate ravenously out of the pan, mopping up the red sauce with a hunk of bread. He wanted a pot of coffee and a steak.
The night’s events were bending into some warped dream. Meyers furiously scratched his cheek. He kept turning it all over in his head. Had everyone been killed? He tried to remember, but he wasn’t sure. Maybe one of the goons had escaped into the warehouse. And the woman, the witch, she’d gotten away, oh, yeah.
Getting away seemed like a very good idea. If any of Drozdov’s guys were still loose, they’d come after him to find her. Or maybe think he was part of it, in with her from the beginning. Sure. He’d been out for revenge for Kid. They’d think that, wouldn’t they? And what about the cops? The one he’d punched. He couldn’t be sure he hadn’t been recognized. And Bulbitch—imagine trying to sell him this story: a dingus that killed four armed men? Twice? Bulbitch had warned him to stay out of it, and unless the cops could buy into witches and papier-mвchй monsters conjured from coins and buttons and crap, they’d hang this on him. If he hadn’t been there, hadn’t seen it himself . . .
San Francisco sounded awfully good. Bound to be a morning bus—get him as far as Pittsburgh before anyone knew to look for him. Arnie Slocum had moved out to Frisco to train fighters two years ago. Arnie would hand him a job right away.
As he collected his whirling thoughts, he moved about the apartment, got out his suitcase, filled it with clothes. He needed a bath, but maybe not right now. Some clothes, some cash from the bank on the way. He grabbed his tip box out of the back of the closet and tossed two rolls of bills into the suitcase under the clothes. He’d call Rosie from the bus depot, tell him to hang onto the cab, he’d be in touch to work out the details later. Rosie’d find somebody to take the night shift for now.
Winter in California, that wasn’t such a bad fate. Let everything blow over and all the monsters wash out to sea.
That was the plan congealing as he hauled the suitcase into the foyer. He paused to pull on his pea jacket, then grabbed the door handle in the same moment he heard his feet splash and looked down to see dark dirty river water pooling as it trickled in over the threshold. Meyers thought of Red in his roadhouse reaching for a brass knob, blood soaking into the sawdust below him, as the door of the apartment came off the latch.
——
Gregory Frost is a writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction who has been publishing steadily for more than two decades.
His latest work is the fantasy duology Shadowbridge and Lord Tophet, published by Del Rey Books. His earlier novels include Fitcher’s Brides, a World Fantasy Award and International Horror Guild Award finalist for Best Novel; Tain; Lyrec; and Nebula-nominated science-fiction work The Pure Cold Light. His short-story collection Attack of the Jazz Giants and Other Stories was called by Publishers Weekly “one of the best fantasy collections of the year.”
He is one of the Fiction Writing Workshop directors at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and has thrice taught the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop.
His website is GregoryFrost.com; his blog, Frostbites, lurks at Frostokovich.LiveJournal.com.
Paul G. Tremblay
—
There’s this thing about living in Wormtown that my older brother Joe doesn’t get, or he does get it and doesn’t want to admit it. We live in Worcester, stuck like a dart in the middle of Massachusetts. This isn’t Boston. No ocean, just a river. No quaint historical bullshit that attracts tourists. Just hills, colleges, hospitals, and churches, making the urban decay look a little prettier. It’s not a good place to be, right? But Joe and the rest of the local artsy types, so desperate for the recognition they’ll never get, they pump up and promote the nickname Wormtown like it means Worcester is some legit big city that people would actually choose to live in, like Worcester is somehow important or any less damaged than it is because of a fucking name change. They brand themselves Wormtowners like they aren’t as doomed as the rest of us. So I still use their fun little nickname, but only because it makes me bust a gut laughing.
It’s five a.m. I’m sitting in the driver’s seat of Henry’s rusty Ford Explorer, tucked behind Ace’s Pawn Shop, which is on the corner of Main and Wellington. Engine on, tailgate up, interior lights off. Sitting here waiting for what’s next.
Joe always says I never think ahead, that I only use my lizard brain. Right. He’s a thirty-year-old painter who doesn’t sell any paintings. But he’s really a busboy at some restaurant over by Clark U, a trendy place that just opened and will probably close within the year. He cleans tables and gets no tips from the rich college kids and their yuppie professors. Joe has two maxed-out credit cards and lives with a between-jobs girlfriend and her five-year-old kid in a one-bedroom apartment. So much for thinking ahead, Joe. I’m the one pointed somewhere with both hands on the goddamn steering wheel.
My window is down when it doesn’t need to be. There’s nothing that I can’t see from behind the glass. Mike asked me to do it. He said pretty please before leaving the SUV and going inside.