And hadn’t events proved him right? No one had expected this visitation in the dark, this whisper in the ear about Life Eternal.
Certainly Kindle had never guessed that tiny machines in his nervous tissue would ask him whether he wanted to give up his body and certain habits of mind and grow beyond Kindle into something that was both Kindle and much more than Kindle.
His answer had been immediate. No, by God. He had clung to his aging body and intemperate ego all these years and he wasn’t eager to give them up. He disliked the idea of his soul mingling with other souls. He was alone by choice and by nature, and he wanted to keep it that way.
But he wanted to live, too. It was not a love of dying that made him turn down the offer. He wanted desperately to survive. But on his own terms.
He wanted to live, and that was why he was here, prostrate at the door of his thirteen-year-old Ford pickup truck, singing “The Streets of Laredo” in a faint raw voice and wondering how to endure the thing he must do next.
To enter a vehicle one must stand up.
Even a one-legged man can stand, Kindle thought.
Unless his pain prevents him.
Unless the act of pulling himself up by the door handle of an old pickup truck grinds bone against ragged bone and causes him to stop singing and makes him scream again instead.
Unless he passes out.
But Kindle remained conscious even as the landscape performed a pirouette around the fiery axis of his spine.
His useless leg, bound and curled at the knee like the leg of a dead fly, flopped against the door of the truck.
Key! Kindle shrieked to himself.
He carried his keys with him always. He braced himself with his right hand and fished in his pocket with his left. Maybe it was stupid to lock up his truck when he lived this far from people. Who would come out here to steal such a wreck? But it was his habit to lock up the things he owned: his truck, his boat, his cabin.
He found the key, transferred it to his right hand, somehow fumbled it into the lock without moving the rest of his body.
Then he took a deep breath, slid away from the door and opened it a crack.
Good work.
But his left leg was splinted, and he dared not tamper with the splint—so how was he supposed to cram himself behind the wheel? Once behind the wheel—what then?
He took the key from the door and clasped it tight in his right hand. “Tom,” he said in a hoarse whisper, “this is the hard part. That other part was easy. This is the hard part.”
Easier still to lie down and go to sleep. Drive in the morning. Or die before dawn.
More likely that second possibility, Kindle thought. Dying would be the easiest thing of all. Maybe he could even drag himself to the cabin and die on his own sofa, which would at least lend some dignity to the event. People would find him after a while. Maybe they would find his worm-track leading down from the mountain. Goddamn, they would say, look at what this man did! What an admirable man whose corpse is lying on this sofa!
Was this his sofa? Nope, Kindle realized: This was the front seat of the old Ford pickup, and he was stretched out across the length of it.
These memory lapses were disturbing, but he imagined he could hear the echo of his own screams fading down the hillside. So perhaps it was better not to dwell on the past.
He pulled himself into a sitting position with his back against the driver’s-side door and both legs stretched out across the seat. He could see over the dash well enough. But there was no way to get a foot down to the floor pedals.
At least he was out of the wind. That was no mean accomplishment. He looked around for a way to push the pedals. His resources were meager. Within reach: an empty styrofoam cup, a snow brush, and a copy of Guns and Ammo. Not too helpful.
Oh, and one other thing. The walking stick he had used to splint his leg. The leg had swollen enormously. From crotch to knee, it looked like a cased sausage. The rags he had used to bind the splint were deeply embedded, the knots pulled tight by the pressure.
Don’t make me do this, Kindle thought. No, this is too much. I can’t even begin to do this.
But his traitorous hands were already fumbling against the feverish flesh down there.
When he came to himself again, he found the walking stick clutched in his trembling left hand.
It was still nighttime, though the Artifact had set. Maybe it was coming on toward morning. Kindle didn’t know; he didn’t wear a watch. The stars looked like morning stars.
He was shaking like a sick animal. This shaking was a bad thing, it seemed to him. Made it hard to keep the broad end of his walking stick secure against the floor pedals. And it would only get harder when the truck was moving.
He put the key into the ignition, pumped the gas pedal twice and turned the key.
The engine coughed but didn’t catch.
That was normal. Kindle sometimes thought of this old Ford as his “hiccup truck” for the way its engine fought him. It would catch, run, stall; or nearly stall, misfire, rattle and bounce for a time before it settled down. “Come on, you sack of shit,” Kindle whispered. “Come on, you lazy turd.”
The engine caught and lurched and Kindle screamed as the truck jogged on its ancient shocks. His broken leg was braced against the seat, but there was nothing to hold it and no way to prevent it flopping around in that sickening, loose way.
Kindle tried to sing “The Streets of Laredo” as he put the truck into gear and pressed the gas—a terrible stagger forward—and steered out of this dirt turnoff away from the cabin toward the logging road.
He switched on the lights. The pines crowding the roadside loomed in eerie grids of shadow.
He was sitting sideways and a little low. He wasn’t accustomed to steering with his left hand and his reflexes were shot, but he managed to aim the Ford approximately midway down this column of spooky-looking trees. God help anybody coming uphill, but who would be, at this hour?
From here into the outskirts of Buchanan was mainly a downhill ride, and Kindle found he didn’t have to work the gas pedal much; it was struggle enough to keep the walking stick pressed against the brake to impede the acceleration of the truck. It occurred to him he’d be in some profound trouble if he passed out again. “So stay awake,” he told himself. He remembered that a Place Had Been Prepared For Him in the regional hospital as long as he didn’t run his hiccup truck off the Streets of Laredo.
He passed two other cabins—the property of men as solitary as himself—but he didn’t stop. If he stopped, nobody might be home; and Kindle did not relish the prospect of starting up this truck again. Better to drive as far as possible toward Buchanan, or at least down to where the streetlights began.
But then—in a wash of fear that took him by surprise—Kindle remembered that Buchanan might not be the Buchanan he remembered.
Last week, the monsters had come to Buchanan.
Curious ambulatory sponge-things who had infected everybody’s blood.
Was this a real memory or some kind of trauma hallucination? Well, Kindle thought, it sure felt like a real memory.
Stilclass="underline" Monsters?
And if that was true…
He did not summon the images, but here they came: Monsters out of comic books, tentacle-headed things unloading from a flying saucer; or the zombie-eyed human eunuchs out of a dozen movies, slaves of the Overmasters and hungry for human flesh. They had Prepared a Place For Him on the communal barbecue.