Текст книги "The Sacrifice Game"

Автор книги: Брайан Д'Амато

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 45 страниц)

(12)

– but it wasn’t fog, it was semisolid, and I couldn’t get my arms around it to reach the wheel. Instinctively I stepped on the brake-I brake with my left foot-and the brake was engaging, but I could feel that the car wasn’t quite stopping and at about this time I figured out that the gray stuff was the driver’s-side airbag. There was a rumbling in the belly underneath me and a string of metallic pops as we slid over the line of flexible reflector posts. I could feel my testicles retracting. Cowards. One whiff of trouble and they go skittering back to the inguinal canal. The airbag was already deflating but the car was tipping alarmingly to the right, even though I thought it was totally flat around here, like one inch above sea level, but it was still just tipping and tipping and then there was all this scraping like it was driving over shrubbery and then it was just STOP, an instant absolute stop, and my right hand crunched against the lip of the dash screen and my forehead CHUNKED through the limpening vinyl into the lip of the dashboard with a blue flash of detaching retinas.

“Your ballroom days are over,” Jim sang. “Your airbag has engaged and you have sustained impact,” the ’Cuda gloated in its Maleficent purr, for some reason neglecting to cut off the music. “Exit this vehicle and seek emergency help immediately.” An alarm preeped. PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP, it preeped.

“Mr. DeLanda, are you injured?” Grgur’s rasp asked. I didn’t answer. The most worrisome thing, I thought, with that sort of pedantic clarity that sometimes kicks in during a high-stress event, was that they hit me with the bag instead of just overriding the gearshift and putting the car into neutral, which would have brought the car to a gradual stop. Maybe they hadn’t been able to spend enough time with the car to develop that capability. Or maybe whatever software they were using to run the car had just screwed up. But that didn’t seem like them. By them I mean Executive Solutions. They were one of the ten biggest military-services vendors out there and certainly one of the two or three classiest, and they were usually very strong on detail. Except if it was just Grgur, maybe he’s not so smart as the rest of them-well, you don’t have to figure it all out right “Mr. DeLanda?”

“Fuck you, I’m in great shape,” I almost said. Resist that impulse, I thought. If, I mean when, you get away, it’s better if they think you’re still dead in the car. Except if they’d wanted to kill me they could have, right? So maybe the deal is that they’re nearby already and they wanted to mess me up enough so that I wouldn’t be able to get away. So they crashed the thing delicately enough not to kill me but to keep me here. Well, if that was true they’d grab me pretty soon and I wouldn’t be able to do much about it. And if the Executive Solutions goons got hold of me-hell. Even if I, say, killed a few people right now to get the cops to put me in the state prison, Boyle-I mean, Laurence Boyle, whom among ourselves we called Lance Boil, and who was one of Lindsay Warren’s younger let’s-say cardinal nephews-would find a way to get people in and give me a going-over. And it wouldn’t take long. Lately there’s been a media disinformation campaign about torture, trying to convince the public that it doesn’t work and how you’re liable to get false information, but the fact is that torture works just fine. Even if you’ve read only one or two manuals on the subject, these days, with just a recorder, some conductant, and a modified stun gun, you can basically get anything out of anyone in a couple of hours. Although I do still have that dirt on Lindsay Warren, I thought. Or actually it wasn’t dirt on him, it was dirt that he and the other eighty Church elders had been hiding for more than a hundred and fifty years, scans of old letters by somebody named Sampson Avard, who was a founding elder of the Church of Latter-day Saints. No Way had dug it up months ago, before the downloading-I guessed from one of his antimissionary comrades in Ixcan, one of the CPR communities, which by the way is not the same place as the ruins of Ix-but he’d sent it to me on paper, to a FedEx store in Tampa that I used once in a purple moon, so I’d only just gotten and scanned in the folder a week ago. Just offhand it looked like dynamite stuff, really incriminating revelations, but it might take a while to use that sort of thing to threaten him. And I hadn’t set up an automatic post. So it wasn’t something I could do while I was being interrogated. If anything, they’d just get me to give it up. Hell, hell.

Hell.

So-well, hell. Might as well just sit back and wait. Just settle down to the big sleep. It’s nothing. I’ll get colder, I’ll get woozier, and my thoughts will drift, and then, without even a click of the tongue to mark the spot, I’ll lose my train of thought and I won’t get it back, and that’ll have been the end of everything of me, oh, God, the end, the end No, my other side said. No, no, no. Focus. “Open the doors,” I said, slowly and clearly, but either the car didn’t have good voice recognition or this was all starting to form a bit of a pattern. That’s what happens when you let your gadgets get too smart. Other people can tell your stuff to do stuff. I pulled at the door handle but it was holding itself shut and the little peg just wouldn’t go up. My face was hot. I pushed all the window-down thingies but of course those didn’t work, and then finally I found the moon-roof button but that didn’t work, either, even though everything else in the car was still merrily running along. I brushed a hair out of my face and felt a tiny, discreet spurt above my left eye, like there was a little kid there with an old plastic squirt gun filled with hot water. I looked at my hand. Blood. I felt a brush of THE FEAR, a stroke out of the reservoir of terror that all hemophiliacs carry with them always, which wasn’t rational since I was doing away with myself and everything else anyway in fifty-two days, but of course rationality has nothing to do with it, or with a lot of things. I put my hand up again. The kid squirted me again. Another squirt. One of the supraorbital arteries. Oh, hell. Slip the juice to me, Bruce. Still, I’m factor IX’d up. In fact my clotting was at two and a half last time. Right? So it’s not life-threatening. I found the overhead light and hit it and that at least turned on. The dashboard and the seats and door upholstery-which were all new tan real top-grain natural Napa buckskin and ungodly-ly expensive-were blotched and streaked and spattered with red that looked as shiny and opaque as enamel. I felt down my face and blood was running out of my nose in streams like wet snot. I rubbed some of the blood between my fingers. It’s hard to tell, but it didn’t feel sticky enough. Maybe the last batch of factor-IX I’d gotten was defective. Except that never happens these days. Does it? There was a larger, wetter stroke of THE FEAR. Head wounds are a big problem. There’s never been much you can do about them, especially if they’re internal, like in the nose. You can’t tie a tourniquet around your neck.

Wound kit, I thought. In the, the thingie, the thingie between the seats.

Oof. Nnnnk. Ah. Got the thingie’s padded lid open. PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP…

Hell. Junk in here. Too much crap. I scooped out handfuls of crumpled Post-its, low-denomination bills, used and fresh Purell wipes, coins, used and fresh Kleenex, pens, pen caps, rubber bands, wadded up fast-food receipts. Out, out, out.

No wound kit. No loose pads either. At least there was the Thrombostat spray and Surgicel pads in my jacket. Left inner utility pocket. Right. Hah. I got my hand on the little plastic spray bottle. I got it out. Medique Brand Blood Clotter, it said.. 2 % Benzethonium Chloride. Okay. Pads. They were the new kind, made out of shrimp cartilage, and they could pretty much patch you up by themselves, even if you were nonclotting. Gotta be in here.

Left patch pocket. No, not there. Right. No. Okay, wait.

Be systematic. Left lapel pocket. No.

Right lapel pocket. No.

Specially ordered inner utility pocket. No.

Other specially ordered inner utility pocket. No.

Key pocket. No.

Handkerchief pocket. No.

Left patch pocket. No.

Right patch pocket. No.

Silk-pocket-thingie-inside-right-patch-pocket.

No.

PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP.

Hell.

On the seat. No. In the crack of the seat. No.

Under the seat. I found my little flashlight and bent double and rooted around. It was all just sandy carpet and rubber mats and wadded Kleenex and metal seat thingies like cave formations in the red light. No. Not there. They took them. Not there. They really want to kill me. The Warren people really want to kill me. I was the Man Who Didn’t Know Too Much, But Could Certainly Find Out Too Much, and they-except, then, why, if they went through the jacket while my car was sitting in Marena’s driveway, why would they take out the pads and leave the spray? Or else-well, patch up first. Then worry.

I gathered some clean Kleenex, sprayed Medique onto two sheets, and packed one into each nostril. Woooffffff. This’d better clot. If you don’t clot, packing doesn’t do enough, the paper’ll just keep capillarying up with your unviscous blood until you’re the Scarlet Mummy. Okay. I wiped my forehead, sprayed up another Kleenex, and pushed it into the wound in my forehead with the heel of my hand. Yeoww. Huge juicy bruise there too. Okay. Hold on. Hold on. This isn’t right.

Okay. Grgur’ll be here any second. Got to get out of here. Take stock. Any other lacerations, contusions, or third-degree bruising? I wriggled and flexed and patted myself down with my right hand. Nothing apparent. Headlamp light slid upstream through the interior, and its source car zoomed past, and then another. Not stopping to help. Although of course they weren’t supposed to anymore because of all the carjack kidnappings they did that way, in fact there’d been a whole campaign in Florida to get people to just call it in and if possible not even slow down, but of course now with police and fire stretched beyond the limit, calling did nothing. In the Loose Union of Socialist Banana Republics of America, one was basically on one’s own. Cars passed. No cops. No good Samaritans. No ES goons. No Grgur. Keep up the pressure. I still had the bottle with my free hand and sprayed a little backward into my palm. I rubbed it between my fingers. Medique has a specific calone-ish smell to it. Hmm. I sniffed again. There was some of that smell there, but was there much of it? And there was alcohol in there, I could tell from the temperature, but wasn’t there usually more? And as that evaporated the real thing had a milky texture and this maybe, well, I guess it did, or maybe it didn’t… I mean, I’d been relying on the stuff for years…

No. This isn’t it. Oh, hell. Oh, hell. They’d replaced the stuff with, I guess, just rubbing alcohol. Rubbing alcohol. Mean. Meanies, I thought, regressing. There was an upwelling of bullied-on-the-playground emotion like a flavored burp from a thirty-year-old meal. Mean ’n’ cruel. Except I shouldn’t talk (EOE), I guess. I took my hand away. The Kleenex was heavy with blood and slid off. Not sticky. Definitely not clotting the way it should. Oh, Christ. I was normal, for crying out loud. Hell. THE FEAR was crawling all over my body and through my mouth and down into my lower intestine. I was normal. I licked my lips but you can’t really tell from the taste. I was normal -

Dr. Lisuarte, I thought.

She must have given me bad factor IX. I’d seen her only weeks ago, and she’d topped me up. Maybe she’d slipped me some-or what if it wasn’t her, what if it was just ES? Then they’d had to have been slipping me some oral anticoagulant? Enoxaparin, maybe? Except that would take a few doses, and it had a pretty strong chalky taste that you’d think I would have-and anyway, why? Had that been the first part of a plan to kill me and make it look like my death was caused by my own old medical problem? Or had they just wanted to get me into a hospital where it was easy to keep an eye on me? Or was the anticlotting stuff some exotic preparation that only they had the antidote for so that I’d be dependent on them-no, that’s ridiculous. Maybe Wait. Whatever they did, you don’t have time to think about it. At this rate I’ll bleed out in less than ten minutes. We had a professional-level situation here. I needed paramedics, at least, and really I needed an ER. Except then I’d be in Warren’s evil clutches and that would be it. Anyway, there’s hardly enough time for paramedics to deal with it even if they were right here. They don’t usually carry thrombogen with them anyway, they’d just pack the wounds and put shock inflators around my legs, and that might not be enough. And anyway, I can’t go to a hospital. Hospital = identification = police involvement. And police = Warren = torture.

Okay, go to Plan X. I hadn’t seen any matches and I hadn’t remembered packing any. So much for the survival jacket. Even Rambo’s knife handle has matches. You dimwit. This is it. No. Okay. Think.

The lighter.

I fumbled and found the regular twelve-volt outlet and I pressed the thingie down, but it didn’t stay down for a second and then pop out the way they’re supposed to, so I tried just pressing it against the gash in my forehead but it turned out there wasn’t any coil in it so it wouldn’t heat up. Damn. Defeated by the Health Stasi.

Probably. Okay.

Okay. Got to get out. Gotta get out get out get out getout getoutgetoutgetout.

“Five to one, baby, one in five,” the Lizard King was still moaning, with what seemed like Christine – ish aptness. Blood was still streaming out of my nose like it was out of a fog nozzle. I swallowed. Glulg. Spurt. Gurgr. Spurt. Getoutgetoutgetout. No, don’t panic. Chill, I thought. Just go to Plan Y. I wriggled into my jacket. Oof. Okay.

Huh.

PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP.

I couldn’t get a good angle on the window on my side, so I powered the seat all the way back-at least that worked-and braced myself against the seat back and blasted both legs up against the glass of the soi-disant moon roof. It just popped out of the rubber seal, without breaking-a nice minor blessing-and I stood on the seat, untangled myself from the we’re-strapping-you-down-whether-you-like-it-or-not shoulder belts, and wriggled up out of the moon roof. Whoa. Dizzy. Really dizzy, I’d stood up too suddenly without enough blood. Hang on. Okay. I got my legs out and sat on the roof for a second. The night had gotten cold. No. It wasn’t the air. I was losing juice. Finally I let myself slide down over the rear windshield and the waxy shell of the hood. I got my hands on the grapefruit tree that had stopped the car, let my feet down, and melted over the grille onto the centipede grass.

PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP, PREEEP. Cars roorshed by. A siren. I looked around. Nothing. Just wishful imagination magnifying the tinnitus in my cochlea. Okay. Stick to the factuals.

I heaved myself up. Okay. I waddled over the bent-down wire-and-lathe fence and wobbled onto the gravel shoulder. Okay. Bye, bye, Barracuda. Step, step. My feet felt asphalt.

Where? What?

What now? Get out in front of a car and wave and make it stop? No, not likely to work. People are too paranoid. As well they should be. They’ll just keep the doors locked and run me over and then tell me they’ve called Officer Friendly and that he’ll be here any hour. Got to hoof it. Huh. I’d passed a Walgreens four minutes ago but that was way too far. Okay, Plan Yuzz. Have to do fast food.

I started lurching toward the exit ramp. Down to the McDonald’s. It was farther away than I’d thought. An eighth of a mile, maybe? About three hundred steps. And if you figure you’ll bleed out in fifteen minutes, that’s-no, don’t figure. Just do it. Step. Step. Ow. Ankles ache. Feeling woozy. In a few minutes I’ll be thinking so unclearly that I’ll forget why I was doing this, and I’ll sit down for a second to rest and that’ll be about it. Oh, God, oh, God. My fingertips were numbing. Numbening? Oh, fuck, I was fucked, I was fucked. As I got under the first of the tall sodium lamps of the sort of rest-stop area I noticed my right foot was leaving a bloody footprint. A literal one, for once. Brrrdrrrrdrrrr. Cold. I’ve had it. Dun 4. I’ve had it. It’s over, it’s all No. Press onward, Lemmiwinks. You might make it. Stranger things have happened. Frogs have lived a hundred years cast in cement. And not just Michigan J. Frog. Ninety-year-old ladies have survived shit that’d kill a wild yak. I kept lurching toward the big M solar-path glyph, dragging my osmium feet through the clotting air. Step. Step. Come on.

Step.

Step. I found the little Ziploc of green OxyContin 80mg tablets in my watch pocket, popped eight of them into my mouth, and chewed them up. Ick.

Step. Step.

Better take a few Adderalls, too, I thought. I did. Four. I chewed them up and gooked the paste under my tongue. Okay.

Step.

Cold. Step. I can’t make it, I thought. No effing way. Anyway, why bother? It’s only another seven weeks. That’s nothing. You might as well just pack it in now. Except you don’t want to give them the satisfaction. You just want to be the last one out the door so you can turn off the lights yourself. And how dumb is that? Step. I washed down the Oxy ’n’ speed dust with a swig of blood. Step. Step. O Christ Jesus on the Cross, just let me get through this, O Jesus Resurrected, O Lord of the Flail, Lord of the Spear, O Baby Jesus, O studly thirtysomething Jesus, just give me a break, O Black Jesus, O female Jesus, O phosphorescent polystyrene Jesus of the Dashboard, O any Jesus…

Step.

Step.

Step.

It took forever to get to the McDonald’s, and then I remembered that what I really wanted was Burger King. I looked up. There. It was a little farther away-too far away-on the other side of the big rest-area lot. Still, it was worth the extra effort. McDonald’s fries their hamburgers, but Burger King flame-broils.

(13)

The glass door opened itself, welcoming me into the cheerful golds and reds of the “restaurant”’s sit-down area. It was as bright and frigid as high noon at the South Pole. I counted ten patrons sitting in four groups, although since one of the groups had five people and nobody was sitting alone, there must have been something wrong with my math. I decided not to let it bother me. They were of varying ages but all of them were paste-white, overweight, and dressed up for Halloween as-among other things-Warcraft orcs, Dormammu from the Doctor Strange movie, Little Fat Mermaids, Seven Death from the Neo-Teo game, and hydrocephalic vampires. At least it was the best possible night of the year to be a fugitive. Most of them looked up, stared, and then went back to chewing their cuds. The Force is with me, I thought. On my way to the counter I tried to disguise my limp and nearly stepped on a discarded plastic fork. Watch yer step, I thought. Fork in the road. The sort of boy behind the counter looked just like Kaspar Hauser, Animal Boy of Nuremberg. He had slow sloe eyes, a pretty big spatter of acne, and a tag in his ear with a barely visible microphone wire curling out of it toward his mouth. There was a black chunky woman in the back, by the drive-by window, who didn’t even look up.

“We’come to Burger King, we’re cookin’ up s’m grea’ Vegatamales™ today, may I ta’ y’r order, plees?” Kaspar asked, not giving my gory “costume” much of a look. His voice was like Butt-Head’s without the wit.

I managed to flop my torso onto the counter and drag my legs up after it.

“Uh, I’m sorry, you cain’t go back thur, guy,” Kaspar stammered out.

“I’ve been severely injured,” I said. “You’d better call the police and paramedics.” I let myself down on the other side, leaving five thick red drops on the counter, and half walked and half fell into the food-prep zone.

Hefty Black Woman didn’t look around. “Any Vegatamales™ with that for today?” I heard her ask into her microphone.

“Uh, sir? ’Scuse me!” Kaspar said.

“I have to perform an emergency medical procedure,” I said. Remember, he’s probably illiterate, I thought, noticing that he had a pictoglyphic keyboard like the ones they make for lab chimps. Use short phrases and simple action words. “I’m a doctor. I’ve been in an accident.”

He stared.

“Please call nine-one-one,” I said, just to give him something to do.

I looked around. Two prep tables, steamer, chopper station, refrigerator, freezers, sinks, combi oven, mixer station. Nice layout. Reflexively, I took two blood-sticky steps toward the first-aid kit, which was hanging in its undoubtedly OSHA-mandated spot on the wall over the first worktable, but then I remembered I was past that stage. Go to Plan Wum. Fast methods for fast times. I got some napkins out of a dispenser and blew my nose into it as hard as I could. From the way the blood sprayed out I guessed the wound was on the right side. Good. There was a straw dispenser by the mixer station and I dispensed two. Luckily for me they’d switched from plastic straws back to presumably greener paper ones.

“Sir, I cain’t let yuh back here,” Kaspar said. He was pressing a button that he must have been told to press if anything happened outside his competence zone. I staggered forward to the big deep fryer, pulled off my hat, and set it down on the control panel. The unit had four wide bins, one with a big drift of French fries tanning under a red lamp, two others holding big empty frying cages with detachable handles, and one covered with a square lid with a big knob in the center. I lifted it off. It was full of about six inches of polyunsaturated vegetable oil that I figured would be around three hundred and fifty degrees. A Panthalassa-size ocean of pain.

The deal about cautery is that even though it’s too tricky to recommend generally, it’s always been effective. If you just stick a hot poker in an arrow wound like in a John Wayne western, all you’ll do is burn away the healthy skin from around the hole and make things worse. It’s more something you use for interior wounds, on organs like the liver that can’t be stitched. Or you use liquids, like in the American Civil War, they used hot tar. Obviously there are better options now, and the instruments that do still come in military field medical packs are a lot more advanced. Still, even these days, in Pakistan, for instance, a lot of Marines, and maybe most of them, carry about ten sets of strike-anywhere matches in their Bug Out Bags, duct-taped together in bunches of ten and twenty. And if the worst case comes to pass in the absence of a medic, they light up a bundle, stuff it into the wound-even a bullet entrance or exit-and, if they’re still conscious after that much pain, pull it out when the heat’s gone. This has saved a lot of lives by controlling bleeding when the medics were a long way off, or when, like I did, one had a reason not to go to the hospital.

Okay. Entering the World of Pain. It’s always just an angstrom away, on the other side of the Carrollian looking-glass.

“Uh, I’m sorry,” Kaspar said, “we’re not allowed to let cus’mers behin’ the cou’er, um, even for emer’e’cies.”

“Just give me a second,” I said. I screwed the straw as far as I could up into my right nostril. “Don’t upset yourself.”

“Sir? Sorry, I cain’t let yuh do that.”

“Did you get nine-one-one?” I asked. I took a deep breath, bent down, and snorted a blast of hot oil up into my sinuses. It was like a Grucci chrysanthemum shell went off in my head, those same silver brocades and the water-drum boom from the report component, while I, or rather not so much I but my more basic selves, my amphibian and insect brains and the flatworm brain way down in the gut, were all sure that that I was dead. People think stubbing a toe or breaking an arm or getting zapped by a stun gun is painful, but it’s not in the same league, game, arena, or continent. You stay sane through those things. With this, for some time it wasn’t me there at all, just a mad snarling vicious thing, and then when it was me again, there wasn’t room for any thought other than the surprise that I was alive. At some point I noticed I was still screaming, and after I’d made myself stop I noticed I was writhing around on the floor. Some of the oil had dripped back into my throat and I thought my throat would swell up so that I couldn’t breathe. I should order a milkshake, I thought. Later.

“Uh, sorry, sir, but I can’t let you back here. There’s a public telephone by the restroom.” Kaspar had his hand on my shoulder. I took it and used it to pull myself up. I looked at him. My vision must have tunneled in because I had to move my head to see his name tag, which said his real name was Herb.

“Herb, I appreciate your concern,” I rasped. My voice sounded like Karl Malden playing Satan. “And I know you have to follow proper management procedure to run this restaurant efficiently.”

Okay, next item. Head wound. I eased toward the back of the kitchen. The grill. “But if you get in my way, as soon as my team of security professionals get here, and that’ll be in about two minutes, they’ll torture you and your co-worker to death with a Makita cordless circular sander. After that they’ll take your IDs and look up your families and kill them, too, if they live anywhere in the area.” I got a quarter-inch of paper napkins out of a dispenser and folded it into a mitt in my right hand. “So, Herb, seriously, please, make this easy for me. My way right away. Right?”

I stood in front of the flame broiler. There were two big iron grates, with patties charring on the right one. The left one didn’t look hot, so I just whisked the burgers away and lifted up on the iron grate. Too heavy. Takes two hands to handle. I folded a second paper mitt, crouched, and pushed up. The grate rose up. I stood up and poked through the layer of volcanic rocks that covered the heating elements. The bigger the better. I picked up the largest lava stone I could find in my left hand. The napkins smoked but didn’t catch fire. I pressed the smoother side of the rock into the wound in my forehead. This was a different order of pain, colder, more like diving into liquid nitrogen. It wasn’t easier to deal with, though. My body knew it had to get away, so much so that I thought it would split into two pieces like it was tied to two cars going in different directions. I could hear my head sizzling like Canadian bacon. I screamed again, I think even louder.

“Sir? Are you hurt?”

No, I thought. I’m fine, can’t you tell? I turned. I could only see a little bit of him, just his face and hat, like I was looking through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. I pushed past him and staggered to the exit door on the side with the drive-thru window. There was gray stuff around him and a smell that shouldn’t be there. Oh, hair, I thought. Yes. The front section of my hair, short as it was, was on fire. Evidently I’d spattered oil on it and the rock had ignited it. No problem. I patted it and it went out, I think. The pain rose again and I screamed again. Whoa. Okay. It’s out of my system. Damn, that was a whopper freakout. I took a quick look back over the counter at the eating area, expecting to see Grgur walk in the front door. He wasn’t there. Neither were any other new visitors. ES must be having problems, I thought. Well, don’t fuck a gift horse in the mouth, et cetera. Okay. As I’d learned from No Way back in the day, drive-throughs are the fugitive’s best friend. Let’s go car shopping.

Side door. EXIT. Right.

Step, step Whoa. Who are you?

A dude-who I guessed was the Manager on Duty, finally alerted by the panic button-had strode in from somewhere in the back and was blocking my exit. He was big, blond, about thirty, and, as seemed to be de rigueur, somewhat overweight. I noticed I still had the lava rock in my left hand. He said something about how I had to stay where I was and wait for the police.

“Thank you, sir,” I said, keeping my eyes on his eyes. I pressed the rock into his paunch. It sizzled. He emitted a high, shrill scream, almost louder than the ones I’d just produced myself, and his body recoiled, although, I guess reflexively, his right arm threw a sort of halfhearted haymaker punch. I just crouched under it-it wasn’t coming fast enough for me to claim that I ducked-and I edged around him. There was a three-AA flashlight hanging in its own OSHA-mandated spot next to the first-aid kit, and I took it as I left the food prep area. Damn, if I’d known pain like this existed I would have crawled back into the womb and lived there for the next eighty years. Although it had made me forget about the cold.

“Sir, excuse me?” Herb asked somewhere behind me. I looked around. My vision seemed to have opened out a bit, and I could see that he was still back at the grill station.

“You’ve been great, Herb,” I said. I went out. The patrons looked up to watch me leave, but only one or two of them stopped chewing.