Текст книги "Supernatural Noir "

Автор книги: Paul Tremblay

Соавторы: Caitlin Rebekah Kiernan,Brian Evenson,Joe R. Lansdale,Lucius Shepard,Laird Barron,Nate Southard,Gregory Frost,John Langan,Richard Bowes,Tom Piccirilli
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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

“Am I?” she said.

“Can’t you tell? I thought you were onto me.”

“Quit teasing!”

“I’m not teasing,” he said. “Can’t you tell?”

He pulled her atop him, nuzzled her breasts. He thought he could taste her resilience, her fragility, the lesser hopelessness she might call hope, all braided together in the chewy plugs of her nipples.

“It’s me you want?” she asked, tremulous, a virgin asking for proof. “It’s really me and not just . . . things?”

“You,” he said with such a wealth of solemnity that his mood was broken, but then she pushed his hand between her legs, saying, “See . . . see how much I want you, see . . . ,” and he was with her again, nearly breathless, easing two fingers inside her. Her ass churned, her tongue was in his mouth and she moaned at the same time. They rolled and tossed, the dim mirror filling with their thrashing shadows, the walls billowing, fiery specks jiggling in midair, all locked into the rhythm of the tumbling bed. He had a feeling of liberation and unfamiliarity, as if this were something more powerful and involving than the sex he remembered, but when he sat up, braced on one hand, preparing to enter her, he froze, a cocaine freeze that left him dead and empty, like a machine whose current had been stopped. He felt isolated, embedded in miles of darkness, and he thought if he were to shift his head an inch, the wires holding it in place would snap. His elbow ached from the strain of supporting his weight, and his forearm began to tremble.

“What’s wrong?” she said, urgency burring her voice, trying to guide him between her legs.

Thoughts poured from his head like dirty water down a drain. He was poisoned, out of his element, unable to speak. His erection wilted. The girl took him in her mouth again and that did the trick that sent a jolt of current flowing through the dead machine. But when he entered her, when she lifted her legs, her heels digging into his calves, and she cried out, “Oh God, God . . . ahh God,” her speech had the rushed monotonous cadence and impersonal fervor of somebody calling a horse race, and he remained distant, never losing himself in the turns of her body, fucking her with mechanical ferocity and never once speaking her name.

–

Years before, a couple of years after he ran away from home, he and a girl named Chess had fled LA, planning to live as one in some lush, secret paradise, to produce children and art, and think the eloquent thoughts of the Awakened. Instead, they wandered around Mexico, stealing and fucking other people for drugs and food. He had believed he loved her and in a sense he had. The problem had been that they, too, were the same people and he had loved her with the same malignant intensity with which he loved himself. In the end he pimped her to a prosperous middle-aged German for a quantity of Mexican mud, and Chess and the German guy flew off together for what was supposed to be a week in Valparaiso, never to be heard from again.

He talked about Chess a great deal over the ensuing years; he told their story of squandered love to friends, to marks, to Charlie. The story became his big-ticket item, the heartbreakingly honest confessional he used to impress people with his depth, his soulfulness, convincing them to let him get close enough so he could take advantage of them in some way; but the more he talked, the less he remembered of what he had felt, as if each word was carrying off a fragment of experience, until he could no longer recall how it had actually been between them. He could summon up her face, but it was a dead face, a police sketch of a face, devoid of nuance, of energy.

This girl now, lying with her pale back to him, dozy from sex . . . no way he felt about her as he had about Chess. That is, if what he recalled wasn’t total bullshit. But this girl . . . What was her fucking name? Tammy, Trudy . . . something like that. Tracy. He couldn’t deny she had a certain appeal. Maybe it was her ignorance, the sheer doggedness of it—maybe that bespoke a measure of innocence. Innocence was a quality he could use to delude himself into believing there was more to the relationship. He ran a hand along the curve of her waist and hip, and she stirred to the touch. No, he decided. He didn’t need any complications.

“Hey, Tracy.”

He nudged her and she made a complaining noise. He flicked on the bedside lamp and said again, “Tracy!”

“Oh, Lord! I forgot.” She squinted up at him. “When I hitchhike I never use my real name. It makes me feel safer out there. I know it’s silly. I meant to tell you, but . . .” She flashed a lopsided grin. “We got a little busy.”

She scooted up to a sitting position and gave him a peck on the cheek and said, “Sorry.”

He caught a whiff of Elfland Hospitality Pak Shampoo.

“My name’s Carole,” she said. “Carole with e on the end.”

For some reason it seemed harder to dump a Carole than a Tracy, and he was tempted to relent. Then she began to prattle like she had in the car, wondering if there was a place open where they could get some food, probably not, it must be two o’clock already, and she couldn’t hardly wait to hit Seattle, she bet the seafood there was awesome . . .

“Listen, Carole,” he said. “I don’t think we should travel together.”

Uncomprehending, she gaped at him.

“I’ll give you money for the bus,” he said. “And enough so you can get situated in Seattle. But that’s it.”

She made a weak, half-completed gesture toward her brow. “What do you mean?” she asked. “I thought . . .”

“I don’t want to argue,” he said.

She seemed prettier than she had earlier, the sharpness of her face less evident. “But we were . . .”

“And don’t be telling me how wonderful it can be,” he went on. “If we stay together, all that’ll happen is one of us will rip the other off.”

She started to object and he said, “I’ll give you a thousand dollars,” seeing this as a stroke of moral genius, charity abolishing the sin of theft, saving himself grief and at the same time giving the girl a shot. He would still have six thousand left.

“I don’t give a damn about your money!” she said tearfully. “I want to be with you!”

“It’s not going to happen.”

She let out a thin cry and clasped her hands to the side of her head.

“It’s for the best,” he said. “If you stay calm and think about it, you’ll see that.”

She hugged her knees, rocking back and forth, doing her mad-girl impression, singing tunelessly, breathily, the song of a fly buzzing in an asylum window, drunk on sunlight.

“Stop that!” he said.

Her keening rose in pitch.

“What are you . . . fucking nuts? Talk to me.”

He expected her to start blubbering, but she didn’t leak a single tear and kept on with her broken-teakettle noise.

“That’s not going to get it,” he said. “Acting all crazy and shit. I’ve seen crazy, I know crazy. You can’t sell that shit here.”

Her eyelids drooped so that slits of white were visible beneath them.

Fed up with her, he pulled on his pants, shrugged into his shirt and stepped out into the breezeway, slamming the door behind him. The Dodge minivan he had parked beside was gone. He wished that he hadn’t left his car keys in the room. He could have booked. A thousand dollars? Christ, what was he thinking? She was likely used to selling her ass for fifty, a hundred tops. The cool air soothed him, tuned his anger lower. He dug the loose change from his pocket and went padding barefoot along the breezeway toward the vending machines next to the office. If he got her something to eat, that might placate her. It might be worth driving somewhere—that pancake house back on the interstate might still be serving. Once she was loaded with carbs and sugar he could talk her down from hysteria, open a dialogue, reason with her, and in the end they would share a hug, a semichaste kiss, alas, alack, adios, adieu, we’ll always have the Elfland.

He selected a bag of chips and a Snickers from the vending machines, and then noticed particles of glass on the sidewalk in front of the office—the door had been blown inward and glass shards strewn across the carpeting, as if something had struck it with explosive force. The lights were on, but the night man was nowhere in sight.

Michael stuck his head inside and called out. No reply. He picked his way across the carpet, walking on his toes, and peered behind the desk, half expecting to find the night man’s bullet-riddled corpse, but saw only an overturned office chair and what might have been a dusting of Doritos crumbs on the counter. Going back outside, he surveyed the parking lot, an acreage of blacktop divided by concrete islands and the occasional patch of shrubbery, slots demarked by diagonal white lines, luminous under the arc lights. His sense of unease spiked. There had been at least six or seven cars in the lot, not counting the minivan, and now there were none. What were the odds that their owners had all checked out between midnight and two a.m.? Not inconceivable, he told himself. The Elfland might be a no-tell motel. He scanned the faзade of the building. Yellow lights sprayed from the open door of a second-floor room, silhouetting a short, squat figure no larger than a child. Whoever it was didn’t move a muscle. Michael waved, but the wave was not returned. The figure might have been stone . . . or wood. It looked to be wearing some sort of hat. Like a Santa hat.

Oh, no you don’t, he said to himself.

You’re not going there, you are definitely not buying into the Carole-induced premise that magical Nazi elves have taken over a motel in Bumfuck, Oregon.

“Hey!” he shouted at the motionless figure. “What’s going on?”

Silence.

“Somebody broke into the office! Did you see anything?”

A clattering sounded behind him—like someone running in wooden shoes.

He spun about. Something darted behind a shrub about fifty feet away. Something quick and approximately elf sized. He couldn’t be certain of it—he would have liked third-party corroboration. He was exhausted, coming down from a coke binge, and his eyes were playing tricks.

“Is anybody there?” he called in a shaky voice.

The shrub quivered, as if being shaken. He shot a glance toward the second-floor room. The figure in the doorway was gone.

Michael’s balls tightened. He eased toward the parking-lot exit, choosing a path that led well away from the suspicious shrub, intending to put some distance between himself and the motel, cross the road to the Boron station and take stock. Let his nerves settle and then head back to 120, because it had become clear he was under the influence of the coke and of that nut bag Carole-with-an-e-on-the-end, and he needed to gain perspective. That was all. He’d pull it together, return to the room, grab his keys, and drive. Thinking this made him feel steadier. He’d go as far as Portland and find a motel not named the Elfland, a Comfort Inn, a Travelodge or Best Western, a good old American franchise free of Black Forest statuary and street meat . . .

The lights went out.

Not just the lights of the motel and the parking lot, but also those of the Boron station, the shops, and the winking traffic signal. The darkness was unrelieved. It was as if a dense black cloud had lowered over the town, reducing visibility to almost zero. Power failure. He waited for the lights to come back. When they did not, he moved forward, groping, shuffling along, making for the exit, determined to follow through on his plan of taking stock, pulling it together.

He heard the clattering again. It was louder, closer, issuing from every direction—lots of diminutive wooden feet darting near. As he turned this way and that, tracking the noise, something snagged his shirttail and nearly succeeded in dragging him down. Panic put a charge in him and he ran blindly, his arms pumping. Pieces of gravel stuck in the soles of his feet. He ignored the discomfort and kept running until he crashed into the hedge bordering the lot. Twigs tore at his sides, dug into his chest. He fought to break through the hedge, tearing away handfuls of leaves, but it was impenetrable—he hung there, supported by the bushes. The clattering had stopped, and, but for the wheezing of his breath, the silence was absolute. No semis grinding on the interstate, no barking dogs, no ambient noise whatsoever. He pictured the town cut off from the universe of light and life, adrift on an infinite ocean of nothingness, monsters with mile-wide mouths rising toward the surface, lured by this tasty morsel, and panic took him a second time. He struggled free of the hedge, lost his balance, and fell backward, smacking his head on the asphalt. Splinters of white light lanced through his skull. Dazed, he rolled over onto his side, preparing to sit up.

Overhead, the Elfland’s sign switched on, humming, buzzing, painting on the asphalt a ragged island of illumination upon which he was marooned. The leprechaun on the sign mocked him with a knowing leer. Michael’s instincts prompted him to flee, but he was too enfeebled to do anything other than scrabble at the pavement. He waited for the leprechaun to leap down from the sign, for whatever form the next shock might take.

“Who’s there?” he shouted, and then: “Quit fucking with me!”

Darkness swallowed his words.

He remained lying there, alert for the least sound and hearing none. Moths came to whirl whitely like windblown snowflakes about the sign, and this emblem of normalcy helped restore his capacity for thought. No other lights showed, either in the motel or the town, and that did not make sense, that the sign was the sole source of radiance, unless he were to believe in a reality he wanted to reject . . . And yet he couldn’t reject it. The girl, Carole, she’d never denied being a witch. She must be orchestrating this somehow. That funky singing she did now and again, it could be part of a spell, a retarded Tennessee mantra that helped her focus. She was the only person who had reason to screw with him. Except for Charlie, maybe. Except for Chess. Except for damn near every fucking person he had ever met, everyone he had used and abused while working out his parental issues. Perhaps that’s what was happening here: karmic retribution.

He laughed off the possibility and then had the urge to cry out for help; but even if things were normal, if everyone was safe in their beds and the town was not the empty, abandoned-by-God place he envisioned, there was nobody within earshot. And if help arrived, what would he say then? This redneck bitch I picked up hitchhiking, goes about a hundred five, hundred ten pounds, IQ of a snail, she’s a freak, man, she’s tripping me out, animating the elf population of Whidby Bay. Sure, son, the cops would say. Let’s put you into the nice holding tank where you’ll be protected from her unnatural power. Hey, where’d you get the seven grand? You suppose this white powder might be an illegal substance? Got a pink slip for the Caddy?

At length he got to his feet, feeling stronger for the effort, and began walking toward the motel, its unlit faзade melting up from the dark. He was in rotten shape, his head throbbing, vision fluttering, feet and torso bleeding, but bottom line, he had to get the keys. Arguments occurred to him as he went. Explanations. The Elfland’s sign must be on some weird separate circuit. The night man had blundered into the door, shattered the glass, and run away. Vandals had set the elf in the second-floor doorway, or else it was a kid wearing a funny hat. He had been unsteady on his feet and imagined the tug on his shirttail. The clattering . . . Well, he’d have to work on that one. None of this held water, but neither did any less-rational explanation, and he allowed it to satisfy a need for some logical ground, however flimsy, on which to stand.

On reaching the rear of the motel he was blind again, and virtually deaf. The breezeway lights had not come back on, and the crash of the surf drowned out lesser sounds. He moved out onto the grass, cool, dewy, and easier on his feet, and shuffled along, waving an arm before him to feel for obstructions. His instep came down on some hard, sharp thing. He yelped and sprawled on the ground, squeezing his foot to stifle the pain. Once the pain had subsided, he groped about in the grass and found a sprinkler head. He twisted the thing angrily, trying in vain to uproot it, and then clutched at his foot again, rubbing away the soreness. Suddenly weary, he hung his head and closed his eyes. He could have nodded off, no problem, but he remembered that this sort of sleepiness was a symptom of concussion and forced himself to stand. His thoughts narrowed to keys, car, drive.

He must have gotten turned around, because after a couple of steps he came up against the wall at the edge of the cliff. He clung to it for an instant, getting his bearings, and made a beeline for the breezeway—he estimated that no more than fifteen or twenty steps would carry him there. But he took twenty-five steps, then thirty, and still was walking on grass. Thinking he might have gone off on a diagonal, he altered his path by a few degrees and continued. He went another twenty steps. The lawn hadn’t been this extensive—he should have hit concrete by now. He decided to return to the wall, get his bearings again, and start over; but he walked until, by his reckoning, he was somewhere out over the Pacific and did not encounter the wall. He tamped down his anxiety, telling himself to stay calm . . . And then he saw that the character of the darkness had changed. Whereas before it had been dead black, now the air had acquired a distinct shine, a gloss that reminded him of obsidian or polished ebony, and appeared to be circulating around him, as if he were at the center of a slow whirlpool. Behind the currents of the whirlpool he could see the elves. Not clearly and not for long, but they were gathered around him, cutting off every avenue of escape, fading out and reappearing closer to hand and in different postures—like watching a streaming video with gaps in the continuity. Fear seeped into the corners of his mind, but did not flood and overflow it. It was fear tempered by doubt and disbelief, by a degree of acceptance, and by one thing more. He wanted the elves to be real. Death at their hands would be preferable to the ignominy of an overdose, hepatitis, any of the protracted stand-ins for suicide toward which he was inexorably bound. This would be death by punch line. Suicide by elf.

“Bring it, bitches,” he said, slurring the words.

On Sleazy, on Spongehead, on Ratfuck and Groper.

He gave an amused grunt. Now this was some funny shit. I mean, really. Elves. They were almost in striking distance, cudgels lifted, knives at ready, their scowling faces knotted in fury. In their original context, they might have been seen as brave and resolute, the defenders of a helpless village. Rambos among elves. Forest guerrillas. Hardy little fuckers. Here they could only be misunderstood.

At the last second fear eroded his intention to meet death head on, and he made a panic move, stumbling forward in an attempt to break through their defenses. Something cracked the top of his head, and he found himself gazing into the depths of the whirlpool, into a funnel of blackness at whose blacker-than-black bottom a convulsed flower revolved, a bloom with a thousand petals that rippled and undulated like those of some vast and complicated sea creature sucking him down into its nothing-colored maw.

–

An orange glow penetrated his lids and his first thought was that the breezeway lights had come back on, but on opening his eyes he realized it was the early sun. He lay at the base of the wall and everything ached, especially his head. His clothes were soaked with dew. Laboriously, he made it to his knees and saw over the top of the wall other cliffs, stratifications of reddish sediment towering above the ocean. Beneath the shadows of high cumulus the water was dark purple, and among the cloud shadows lay swatches of glittering orange. The soft crush of the surf was constant and serene. He touched the crown of his head and couldn’t tell whether he felt his scalp or the pads of his fingers.

“Thank goodness,” said the girl’s voice behind him. “I thought I was going to have to call nine-one-one. What happened?”

Her hand fell to his shoulder and in a reflex of fright he knocked it away and scrambled to his feet. She retreated, bewilderment plain on her face. At her rear, a couple of yards distant, stood the elves—an evil Walt Disney platoon prepared to follow their hillbilly Snow White ditsy queen into battle. He was fairly certain they were grouped and posed differently from when he had initially seen them. Dizzy, he sank down in the grass and leaned against the wall.

“You got blood all over you,” she said, and held out a packet of tissues. “I bought you some wipes.”

If she were a witch, if she had almost killed him and was gaming him now, she had a smooth fucking act.

“Did you know the office door’s busted out?” she said. “That have anything to do with how you got bloody?”

“You tell me.”

She took to running her mouth, saying there was so many criminals these days, why, even in a piddly place like her hometown, people were always breaking into Coulters, this big old department store, and robbing the Dairy Queen and all. His paranoia ebbed and, though with half his mind he believed that her asinine rap was designed to put him at ease, make him let down his guard, he permitted her to kneel beside him and dab at his injuries with the wipes. The astringent stung, but it felt better than it hurt. He kept an eye on the elves. Sunlight glistened on their caved-in faces, charged the tips of their weapons. Their scowls seemed diminished. They approved of this union between Magic Girl and Action Lad. What the fuck, Michael said to himself. If you believe what you think you believe, you should render her ass unconscious and beat it—but he wasn’t sure he could drive.

“You’re wrong to be doing this,” said the girl as she finished her cleanup.

“Doing what?”

“Breaking up with me.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, if you don’t think so, there’s nothing to say, ’cause when you go and think something you’re bound to believe it. I may not know much about you, but I know that.”

He rested his head on his knees. “I don’t want to talk.”

After a while the girl said, “I’m sorry.”

He cocked an eye toward her. “What for? Did you do something to me?”

“That wasn’t my meaning. I’m just sorry about everything.”

The wind gusted, flattening the grass; a thin tide of light raced across the lawn and from somewhere below the rim of the cliff came the crying of gulls. Michael felt weak and lazy in the sun.

“You really going to give me a thousand dollars?” she asked.

“I meant it when I said it.”

She plucked a handful of grass and let the wind take it from her palm. “I been trying to think how to convince you we’d be good together. I know what I was feeling last night. It was just a start—I understand that. But it was real, and if you can’t remember how it was, if it got knocked out of you or whatever, maybe you should hunt up what you felt and take a chance on it. ’Cause that’s all feelings are—things you catch and ride as far as they’ll take you. It’s sorta like hitchhiking.”

That Tennessee mountain homily, pure as moonshine trickling from a rock.

I hear you, Sonnet darling, but things got a tad too freaky for me.

“That’s not the point,” he said. “I . . .”

“Let me talk, all right? I ain’t asking for nothing.”

She tugged at the crotch of her cutoffs; her face was calm.

“When you said you’d give me a thousand dollars,” she went on, “I was angry. I thought you was treating me like a whore. Then I got to wondering why you’re giving me so much.”

Impatient with analysis, he said, “You don’t have to explain this shit.”

“It won’t take a minute.” She peered at him. “You feeling okay? You don’t look too good.”

The time has come for solicitude, he thought. After passion, after anger and despair, after the fear and the trembling, a little friendly concern: the cheese tray of the romantic supper.

“I’ll live,” he said.

Actually, lover, I’m in tiptop shape. I’m sitting here communing with my peeps, the Mojo Demon Elves, the Kamikaze Hellfighter Elves, while you and I discuss, among other subjects, Sexual Politics in the Theater of the Real.

“I told myself, he can’t be giving me all that money just to make hisself feel better,” she went on. “I guess that showed me you wasn’t trying to deny that something happened. And it made me see things your way. Like maybe you were right about us.”

“Uh-huh, yeah,” he said listlessly.

“I don’t understand why it’s okay to split up,” she said. “But I guess it is. I never thought I’d say that after last night. I suppose the money helps make it okay. I ain’t a total fool—I know that’s part of it. But I keep wanting to say for us to give it a try. And I keep thinking it’s me who’s right.”

She looked him straight in the eye, a strong look, something certain behind it. The wind strayed a few strands of hair across her cheek, touching the corner of her mouth—she didn’t bother to brush them aside.

“It’s funny how when you’re surest about things, at the same time you’re scaredest that you’re fooling yourself,” she said.

She poked a finger into the black dirt beneath the grass, digging up a clump. Michael was enthralled. There was a new tension in her delivery and he believed she was building toward something important, something that would punctuate or define.

“It may not make sense,” she said. “But the way I see it, maybe we’re both wrong.”

Disappointed, his thoughts shifted miles and hours ahead to Seattle in the rain, new night streets, new opportunities for failure, for fuckup.

“Know what I’m saying?” she asked.

“Yeah, well,” said Michael. “It’d be sort of hard not to know.”

–

The girl drove past the shattered office door and the empty parking lot, past the shops, none of them open, no one in the streets, not a stray cat or a loose dog. Sitting beside her, Michael was spooked but too wasted to react. They had seen only one person in Whidby Bay and now even he was gone. Someone should be up and about, putting out the trash, opening for business.

“I don’t see a hospital,” the girl said.

“I don’t want a hospital. Drive.”

“You should get yourself checked out!”

“There’d be too many questions. They might call the cops. All manner of shit could go wrong. Just drive. I’ll get myself checked out later.”

“You want me to drive anywhere special? Some other hospital?”

“Seattle.”

“That mean we’re sticking together?” she asked in a chirpy tone.

It might add some zest to his latest downward spiral to hang with a chick who possibly could animate elves or transform him into a lizard, and herself as well, and they’d go scampering along the ditches and make scaly, tail-lashing love underneath a yucca plant . . . Or she’d set a fire with her eyes in a trash alley and they’d lean out a window with a cardboard flap for a curtain and toast marshmallows, until one day she got super pissed and crushed underfoot the teensy spider into which she’d implanted his soul. Not knowing about her would be exhilarating. Inspiring. And how could this bizarre uncertainty be worse than what he’d been through already? Or worse than where he was ultimately headed. It was a tough call. Regular Death or Premium? Two blocks slid by before he said, “I don’t care.”

She slowed the car. “What do you mean, you don’t care? I don’t know what that means.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s all good,” he said. “Just keep driving . . . And make sure I don’t go to sleep.”

She stepped on the gas and after another block she said, “How am I supposed to do that?”

“Talk. Engage me in conversation.”

She pulled out onto the interstate. It too was empty, devoid of traffic. “What you want I should talk about?”

“Fuck, I don’t know! Tell me why there’s no people around, no cars. Where the fuck are we? Limbo? You’re a goddamn motor mouth—it should be easy.”

“Limbo? That some place in Oregon?”

Naw, it’s over in Moontana, Suzi Belle.

“Well, is it? Say.”

“Never mind.”

She sang her tuneless tune and before long a car passed, traveling in the opposite direction.

“See,” she said. “There’s a car.”

“Yeah. Quite a coincidence.” He shifted in the seat, half-turned toward her. “What’s that singing thing about?”

She gave him a quizzical look, and he did a poor imitation of her.

“Oh, that!” she said. “It’s just something I do, you know, when I’m concentrating on stuff . . . or when I get emotional. ’Bout half the time I don’t know I’m doing it.” She punched him playfully on the shoulder. “But I don’t sound nothing like that. You make me sound awful!”

Gray clouds obscured the sun and the world grew increasingly gloomy as they drove. Traffic picked up, but he didn’t see people moving about in the food marts and gas stations along the highway. The sun was a tinny glare without apparent vitality or warmth that leached the evergreens and billboard images of color. The girl began to sing again and Michael noticed that she had an erratic, glowing silhouette—the light dimming and brightening around her ever so slightly with the rhythm of the tune. His vision still wasn’t right, flickering at the edges, but he chose to accept that what he’d noticed was not the product of a concussion. That’s my girl, he thought. My special Jesus groupie, my Mary Magdalene. He settled into the ride, stretching out his legs, unkinking his neck, and said, “This country’s deader than shit. I hope Seattle’s got some fucking people in it.”

The girl’s singing trailed off—she kept her eyes straight ahead and said, “It’s a big city, dummy. There’s bound to be people.” She hadn’t spoken to him this way before, flat and disaffected, like a woman disappointed in a man she had once held high hopes for. Then, with a lilt in her voice, a distinct hint of sly merriment, she added, “Course, you just can’t never predict what kind of people they’re going to be.”

–

Lucius Shepard’s short fiction has won the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the National Magazine Award, the Locus Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, and the World Fantasy Award.