Flesh Wounds, page 24
“And you were always the butcher. Let the woman go.”
Brennus shrugged and shoved her aside. He leveled the gun at the boy’s face. “It ends here, my friend. Centuries of conflict between us. Acres of corpses left rotting in the sun to get at you.”
“All because I ran you out of Rome over two thousand years ago?”
“Pah! What did I care about Rome? That’s just where all the blood was being shed at the time. Did I care when they killed Hitler and forced me to move on? Did I care when they pulled the troops out of Nam? Inconveniences. Nothing more. No, I want you dead because you keep me from being unique.”
“Then you’d better be certain.”
“A slug through your brain will be certain. No one will touch you as you die.”
The boy smiled for the first time. “What if I don’t need physical contact to transfer?”
“You can bluff better than that, Cam. Of all our kind that I’ve met—”
“And slain.”
“—I’ve never seen one who could make the jump without physical contact.”
“The legends—”
“Children’s stories. You know that as well as I.”
“You’d better be certain,” the boy repeated. “And there’s only one battleground where you can be one hundred percent certain.”
“You’re an anachronistic bastard, aren’t you?”
“Scared?”
Brennus bared his teeth in a feral grin. He extended his free hand, fingers extended and splayed. “Bring the boy with you, Cam. I’ll show him what a real master’s like.”
Gil took the offered hand, fingers interlacing with the bigger man’s. “I’ll bring them all, butcher.”
Brennus’ grin faltered.
“All of them. They’ve been with me down through the centuries. Every last one.”
Brennus tried to pull his hand away. The boy’s coat flapped about his ankles as the larger man jerked him off his feet, but the boy hung on. Though the gun was trained on the boy’s face, Brennus didn’t fire.
Gil twisted his free hand in his opponent’s hair and pulled their faces together. “You’re right, Brennus. I suffer the same limitations as you. I can’t transfer without physical contact and I can’t leave a body unless it’s dying. But unlike you, I’ve never subjugated a host. I’ve never discarded any of them either. They’re all here within me, every last one.”
“Let go of me!”
“Shoot me, Brennus. Take us in and let’s see who’s stronger, you or them.”
Brennus dropped the gun so he could get a better grip on the clinging boy. With a great heave, he tore Gil from him and hurled him against the counter.
Carol watched the gun clatter across the floor. She wondered fleetingly if she’d know how to use it, then she scrambled out from under the booth on her hands and knees. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Brennus plant a kick into Gil’s side, slamming him against the counter again. Her fingers closed on the handle of the gun, but another hand batted hers away.
Brennus turned from the dazed boy to find the gun he’d dropped.
The mother whose children had been threatened pointed the weapon at the madman’s chest. Her hands were shaking and from her trembling lips came a low keening.
Brennus held out a hand. “Give me the gun, lady.” He took a step towards her.
“Don’t...” Gil tried to say, but he couldn’t get his breath.
Carol understood. “Don’t let him get close!”
Brennus took another step. One more and he’d be within reach of the woman.
“No,” she whimpered.
“Just give me—”
The roar of the .45 cut him off. He stumbled back against the counter, his black leather jacket suddenly slick with blood. Red saliva bubbled from his mouth and ran down his chin. He caught the edge of the counter and used it to stay on his feet. Blood pumped from the hole in his chest and splattered Gil where he lay on the floor below him.
“Shoot him again!” Carol screamed, but the pistol’s recoil had startled the woman and she’d dropped it.
Brennus pushed himself away from the counter and took one wobbling step towards the two women and the pistol on the floor. It was obvious he’d never make it. He dropped to his knees and smiled at the boy. “Looks like we’ll do it your way after all.”
He fell across the boy, wrapping him in a crimson hug. By the time Carol reached the two of them, Brennus was dead and the boy was struggling to get out from under him.
She helped him up. “Are you alright?”
He nodded, but his eyes were glazed. In the distance there were sirens. “Got to go.” He turned towards the kitchen.
“Wait!”
“No time.” He pushed through the swinging doors, stepped across the dead waitress and cook, and started for the back door. She followed.
“Don’t I get some sort of explanation?” she asked as they stepped out into a field behind the diner. The sun was just beginning to grey the horizon.
“Best you keep your distance.”
“Why?”
He turned and she saw the pain on his face. “Because he’s still here you know.” He struck his chest with one gnarled fist. “In me.”
“And just who are you? Should I call you Camillus?”
“Call me what you will. The boy, Gil, is here. Just like every other personality I’ve given immortality these past two thousand years.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We’re not mortal, lady. From one host to the next, we hop-scotch through time. Normal procedure is to subdue—hell, with Brennus’ kind, it’s more like destroy the resident personality during a transfer. If the resident personality’s too strong, it’s normally abandoned and left to die when the next transfer’s made. I never do either. Every soul I’ve occupied is with me.”
“Dear God.”
“That’s why Brennus feared to kill me while we were touching. He knew I’d transfer to his mind, bringing all of them with me. He couldn’t have withstood it.”
“But he transferred to you?”
“It was that or die. He couldn’t reach anyone else.” The boy turned and ran out into the field. “Stay away from me, lady. I’ve got to come to terms with this new voice inside me.”
Carol let him go.
When the police finished their questioning and released her, Carol got in her car and started north. She made a note to check her bank balance in the next town. The money from her husband’s life insurance must be nearly depleted. She had no idea what she’d do when it was gone. Maybe it was time to go home.
But there were still so many Andys out there.
* * *
Lyrics to “Sheep” written by Roger Waters, copyright © 1977 Pink Floyd Music Publishers, Inc. (BMI), from Pink Floyd’s Animals.
* * *
Shrovetide
Shrove Sunday.
Bill Morgan found the Trans Am on his way to the cemetery.
The car sat amid a host of wrecks at a body shop on Lorraine Road. Its paint had languished in the sun: no longer bright red, more the scabrous color of rust. With her decorator’s eye, Kim might have described the color as burnt claret or brown garnet, but to Bill it looked like ancient blood. The Trans Am jogged memories he’d purposely forgotten, interrupting all thoughts of his destination. His foot came up off the accelerator. He pulled off the road and got out to peer through the chain-link fence.
A featureless grey lay like scar tissue across the hood, marking where the eagle decal had peeled away. Faded lettering on the scoop bragged of the 6.6 liter V-8 caged beneath the hood, an engine the likes of which hadn’t been seen outside of racing circuits since America surrendered her horsepower to Japanese imports. The left rear quarter panel had that primer grey, recently-replaced look, lacking the dings and gouges prevalent on the rest of the car. The windshield was cracked, the fiberglass airdam was pulverized, and the trunk was tied shut with wire.
But it was definitely Martin Culpepper’s old Trans Am. Bill couldn’t say how he knew, but he knew.
“Hep ya wit something?”
Bill jumped. He hadn’t seen the man stooped under the hood of a nearby Lincoln. “Just looking.”
The man wiped his hands on already greasy coveralls. “Didn’t mean to startle ya.” Grease smeared below one eye lent him the profile of a football player.
“I wasn’t expecting anyone on Sunday.”
“I’m Charlie Saucier, da owner. I come out here in my spare time and work on my collection.” He made a sweeping gesture that encompassed the line of wrecks. “One day all dese babies’ll look like new.” When Bill made no comment, Saucier pointed at Bill’s eye. “Nice shiner.”
Bill scowled at mention of the black eye, but didn’t answer. For a moment they stood in silence, Saucier sizing up his unexpected visitor, Bill subdued by the enigmatic appearance of the car.
“Where’d you get it?” Bill finally asked.
“Get what?”
“The T.A.”
“Salvage yard,” Saucier replied. His southern drawl made salvage sound like savage. “Why?”
Bill shrugged. “Just partial to Trans Ams.”
“Ya ain’t from aroun’ here, are ya?”
“Sorta. I’ve lived in Chicago the last ten years, but I grew up here in Gulfport. Graduated from Harrison Central in ‘79.”
The man relaxed, as if mentioning the high school indicated Bill could be trusted. “Trans Am’s a ‘79.”
“I know,” Bill all but whispered.
Saucier didn’t seem to notice. “My boy went to Harrison Central. Graduated in ‘84. He works up to Hattiesburg in some chemical plant.” He dug a wad of keys out of his coveralls. “Ya wanta hear da car turn over? I know she ain’t much to look at yet, but I got ’er engine runnin’ better’un new.” Saucier opened the door and slid in behind the wheel. Bill caught a brief glimpse of tattered black vinyl before the big man filled the seat.
“I really need to be going.”
“Hang on a sec. I gen’ally start ’em every other day or so anyway. Worst thin’ for a car is to let ’er sit idle alla time.” The big engine growled and came to life like a bear at winter’s end.
Bill felt the deep-throated rumble through the soles of his feet. His knees quivered with sudden memories: the puissance of the engine echoing up through the floorboards, inertia like a giant’s fist shoving him deep into the clammy vinyl seat... impact.
Saucier revved the engine a few times, a boyish smile pasted on his greasy face. “I put dem new tires on ’er last weekend and ran ’er up to Wiggins—kids wanted to go swimmin’ at Flint Creek, ya know. Man, can dis car fly!”
Martin had said something very similar that night on the interstate coming back from Pontchartrain Beach.
“You okay?” Saucier had shut off the motor and was staring at Bill through the cracked windshield.
“Uh, yeah. Fine. Just fine. Listen, thanks alot. I really didn’t mean to take up so much of your time.”
Saucier said something else, but Bill wasn’t listening. He slid back into the cramped little rental car and drove off.
He’d forgotten how mild southern winters could be. Sitting in the cemetery, wearing the windbreaker he’d borrowed from his dad, it was hard to believe that it was mid February. Sunshine and new grass like this equated to May in Chicago, and even then the incessant wind would have carried a chill.
The sun had desiccated the fresh-turned earth over Kimber’s grave and warmed the callous face of her tombstone. When he rested his hand atop the stone, he found the backside cold beneath his fingertips. It struck him as paradoxical that the two sides of the stone should disagree—a situation as abstruse as he sitting here and her buried. Ten years of marriage and three of high school dating added up to thirteen years in which Kimber had been an integral part of his life. Where was he to go from here?
“Mom talked me into going to the reunion last night,” Bill told the somber stone. He looked around nervously, but the other visitors were distantly involved with their own dead.
He and Kimber had originally decided to skip their ten year reunion. Kimber said she had no desire to destroy her memories by seeing how everyone really turned out. Besides, winter was the busiest season for interior decorators. Bill had also been glad to skip the reunion. He felt he’d left that part of his life behind. But the world, she does turn—evil, convoluted, twisting turns that are as apt to tear out your throat as show you something you never even knew you wanted to see. Bill had attended the reunion after all.
Funny that his first trip home in several years and his first attempt at reuniting with high school friends came as a result of Kimber’s death.
He’d only come home to bury her.
“You were right about staying away, Kim. They’re all a bunch of overweight assholes. Rhonda the Beauty Queen, she’s got three kids and looks like a sow.”
Absently, he touched the darkening bruise beneath his left eye. “I still don’t like Mike Ford.
“The McCormick twins are still sickeningly cute; they have a furniture store out on Pass Road. One of them told me that Bruce Varnado’s gay. Chris Flynn’s acting career never paid off; he’s selling used cars up in Jackson. You remember Sheri Thrasher, the girl that slept with damn near every senior our junior year? She’s a model now and evidently doing pretty good. But God, Kim, she looks so... used.”
Bill sighed deeply and wondered if he looked as world-weary as Sheri—Rabbit the seniors had dubbed her. She’d laughed at the nickname, too dumb to make the connection.
“Nobody seems to know what happened to Martin Culpepper. After school, things went bad for him. He was drinking quite a bit and lost his job. If I’d been here maybe I could have helped him, but—well, you remember the falling out we had.” He dropped his eyes. “And you never did like him.”
The years lay like crestfallen snow on his shoulders, impossibly heavy with burdens untold. He suddenly regretted all the things he’d never shared with her, things that would have allowed her to understand. “I never told you about the night he and I went to Pontchartrain Beach...” For a moment, the breeze seemed to carry the growl of Saucier’s (Martin’s?) Trans Am. He shivered, told himself he was just cold, but the sun was warm on his back. “Hell, no sense telling you now.”
He dug a hand into the intervening dirt. It came up in hard-packed, unfeeling clods. “Nothing’s the same, Kim. Gulfport’s a different place. I don’t even recognize our old friends. You were right, there’s no coming home. Home doesn’t exist.
“But I can’t go back to Chicago. That’d kill me for sure.” He wiped his eyes again, leaving streaks of dirt across his cheeks, and tried to erase the unbidden image of holes in a white wall leaking a fine mist of plaster, blood on a beige carpet, sirens... the smell of gunpowder. “If I could take it all back—make things the way they were... I’m so sorry, Kim...”
Saucier was still working beneath the hood of the Lincoln when Bill returned.
“Mr. Saucier, I want to buy that Trans Am.”
The big man tossed his wrench on the Lincoln’s breather cap and swung out from under the hood. “She ain’t for sale.”
“It means a lot to me.”
“Means a lot to me too. I got ’er pretty cheap out da salvage yard, but I done put nearly a thousand bucks into ’er engine and drive-train, plus them there new tires. Nother thousand in body work and I’ll have ’er lookin’ pretty sharp.”
“I’ll give you five thousand dollars.”
Saucier’s head came up. “Five thousand? Hell, son, that car ain’t worth no damn five thousand dollars. When I’m done, she might fetch three, three anna half, but—”
“I said it means a lot to me.”
Saucier studied Bill’s face for a minute, noting the dark streaks of dirt, the red eyes and unshaven jawline. Finally he sighed, “I reckon it does at that, son.”
Shrove Monday.
Where a radio should have been, where Martin Culpepper had once installed a hundred watt Pioneer AM/FM cassette, there was only a gaping wound in the dash. No more Pink Floyd chanting “We don’t need no ed-u-cation” as they cruised through the high school parking lot. No more Van Halen, Boston, Steve Miller or Peter Frampton blaring from the T.A.’s four triacs.
Without a radio, Bill found himself hypnotized by the hum of Interstate 10 passing beneath the wide tires. It wasn’t until the Long Beach exit whipped past him and the Wolf River bridge was coming up fast that he realized he’d driven nearly seven miles in a daze. As the bridge loomed nearer, Bill’s foot came up off the pedal and the car began to coast.
“New Orleans!” his father had exclaimed that morning. “What the hell are you gonna do in New Orleans?”
Bill didn’t have an answer he thought his father would understand. Eugene Morgan asked three more times before he switched from trying to learn why to trying to talk his son out of it. That continued until Betty Morgan glared over her needlepoint and whispered at him to stop. “He needs some time alone, Gene. Time to put this behind him.”
“But New Orleans? What’s he gonna do, go to the Mardi Gras?”
“He and Kim spent their honeymoon there; you know that. And remember all the fun they used to have at the amusement park at Pontchartrain Beach?”
“Hell, they closed that place years ago.”
“That ain’t the point, Gene, and you know it. Now leave the boy alone.”
Eugene said nothing more until Bill asked if he’d follow to Hertz to dump the rental car, then drive him out on Lorraine Road to pick up the Trans Am. He asked quite a few questions about that, but Bill had no explanation for the intuition fueling his actions.
Gravel crunched like the hollow bones of dead birds beneath the tires as the T.A. rolled to a halt on the shoulder of the interstate. Bill shut off the engine and got out, his eyes scanning the tea-colored ribbon of Wolf River where it meandered through the tall pines.
There was a chain stretched across the dirt road that lead down to the river. The chain was locked to squat concrete buttresses that sat sentry-like on either side of the road. A sign on the chain swung silently in the breeze, its red block letters warning that SWIMMING, DIVING, and FISHING were PROHIBITED.
