Just After Sunset, Page 28

  He snapped his head back, and cried out in agony--he must have sustained a whiplash when the Plymouth hit. But the cat hadn't been expecting the reverse and it flew off. Halston heard it thud down in the backseat.

  A trickle of blood ran in his eye. He tried again to move his hands, to raise one of them and wipe the blood away.

  They trembled in his lap, but he was still unable to actually move them. He thought of the .45 special in its holster under his left arm.

  If I can get to my piece, kitty, the rest of your nine lives are going in a lump sum.

  More tingles now. Dull throbs of pain from his feet, buried and surely shattered under the engine block, zips and tingles from his legs--it felt exactly the way a limb that you've slept on does when it's starting to wake up. At that moment Halston didn't care about his feet. It was enough to know that his spine wasn't severed, that he wasn't going to finish out his life as a dead lump of body attached to a talking head.

  Maybe I had a few lives left myself.

  Take care of the cat. That was the first thing. Then get out of the wreck--maybe someone would come along, that would solve both problems at once. Not likely at 4:30 in the morning on a back road like this one, but barely possible. And--

  And what was the cat doing back there?

  He didn't like having it on his face, but he didn't like having it behind him and out of sight, either. He tried the rear-view mirror, but that was useless. The crash had knocked it awry and all it reflected was the grassy ravine he had finished up in.

  A sound from behind him, like low, ripping cloth.

  Purring.

  Hellcat my ass. It's gone to sleep back there.

  And even if it hadn't, even if it was somehow planning murder, what could it do? It was a skinny little thing, probably weighed all of four pounds soaking wet. And soon...soon he would be able to move his hands enough to get his gun. He was sure of it.

  Halston sat and waited. Feeling continued to flood back into his body in a series of pins-and-needles incursions. Absurdly (or maybe in instinctive reaction to his close brush with death) he got an erection for a minute or so. Be kind of hard to beat off under present circumstances, he thought.

  A dawn-line was appearing in the eastern sky. Somewhere a bird sang.

  Halston tried his hands again and got them to move an eighth of an inch before they fell back.

  Not yet. But soon.

  A soft thud on the seatback beside him. Halston turned his head and looked into the black-white face, the glowing eyes with their huge dark pupils.

  Halston spoke to it.

  "I have never blown a hit once I took it on, kitty. This could be a first. I'm getting my hands back. Five minutes, ten at most. You want my advice? Go out the window. They're all open. Go out and take your tail with you."

  The cat stared at him.

  Halston tried his hands again. They came up, trembling wildly. Half an inch. An inch. He let them fall back limply. They slipped off his lap and thudded to the Plymouth's seat. They glimmered there palely, like large tropical spiders.

  The cat was grinning at him.

  Did I make a mistake? he wondered confusedly. He was a creature of hunch, and the feeling that he had made one was suddenly overwhelming. Then the cat's body tensed, and even as it leaped, Halston knew what it was going to do and he opened his mouth to scream.

  The cat landed on Halston's crotch, claws out, digging.

  At that moment, Halston wished he had been paralyzed. The pain was gigantic, terrible. He had never suspected that there could be such pain in the world. The cat was a spitting coiled spring of fury, clawing at his balls.

  Halston did scream, his mouth yawning open, and that was when the cat changed direction and leaped at his face, leaped at his mouth. And at that moment Halston knew that it was something more than a cat. It was something possessed of a malign, murderous intent.

  He caught one last glimpse of that black-and-white face below the flattened ears, its eyes enormous and filled with lunatic hate. It had gotten rid of the three old people and now it was going to get rid of John Halston.

  It rammed into his mouth, a furry projectile. He gagged on it. Its front claws pinwheeled, tattering his tongue like a piece of liver. His stomach recoiled and he vomited. The vomit ran down into his windpipe, clogging it, and he began to choke.

  In this extremity, his will to survive overcame the last of the impact paralysis. He brought his hands up slowly to grasp the cat. Oh my God, he thought.

  The cat was forcing its way into his mouth, flattening its body, squirming, working itself further and further in. He could feel his jaws creaking wider and wider to admit it.

  He reached to grab it, yank it out, destroy it...and his hands clasped only the cat's tail.

  Somehow it had gotten its entire body into his mouth. Its strange, black-and-white face must be crammed into his very throat.

  A terrible thick gagging sound came from Halston's throat, which was swelling like a flexible length of garden hose.

  His body twitched. His hands fell back into his lap and the fingers drummed senselessly on his thighs. His eyes sheened over, then glazed. They stared out through the Plymouth's windshield blankly at the coming dawn.

  Protruding from his open mouth was two inches of bushy tail...half-black, half-white. It switched lazily back and forth.

  It disappeared.

  A bird cried somewhere again. Dawn came in breathless silence then, over the frost-rimmed fields of rural Connecticut.

  The farmer's name was Will Reuss.

  He was on his way to Placer's Glen to get the inspection sticker renewed on his farm truck when he saw the late morning sun twinkle on something in the ravine beside the road. He pulled over and saw the Plymouth lying at a drunken, canted angle in the ditch, barbed wire tangled in its grille like a snarl of steel knitting.

  He worked his way down, and then sucked in his breath sharply. "Holy moley," he muttered to the bright November day. There was a guy sitting bolt upright behind the wheel, eyes open and glaring emptily into eternity. The Roper organization was never going to include him in its presidential poll again. His face was smeared with blood. He was still wearing his seat belt.

  The driver's door had been crimped shut, but Reuss managed to get it open by yanking with both hands. He leaned in and unstrapped the seat belt, planning to check for ID. He was reaching for the coat when he noticed that the dead guy's shirt was rippling, just above the belt buckle. Rippling...and bulging. Splotches of blood began to bloom there like sinister roses.

  "What the Christ?" He reached out, grasped the dead man's shirt, and pulled it up.

  Will Reuss looked--and screamed.

  Above Halston's navel, a ragged hole had been clawed in his flesh. Looking out was the gore-streaked black-and-white face of a cat, its eyes huge and glaring.

  Reuss staggered back, shrieking, hands clapped to his face. A score of crows took cawing wing from a nearby field.

  The cat forced its body out and stretched in obscene languor.

  Then it leaped out the open window. Reuss caught sight of it moving through the high dead grass and then it was gone.

  It seemed to be in a hurry, he later told a reporter from the local paper.

  As if it had unfinished business.

  The New York Times

  at Special Bargain Rates

  She's fresh out of the shower when the phone begins to ring, but although the house is still full of relatives--she can hear them downstairs, it seems they will never go away, it seems she never had so many--no one picks up. Nor does the answering machine, as James programmed it to do after the fifth ring.

  Anne goes to the extension on the bed-table, wrapping a towel around her, her wet hair thwacking unpleasantly on the back of her neck and bare shoulders. She picks it up, she says hello, and then he says her name. It's James. They had thirty years together, and one word is all she needs. He says Annie like no one else, always did.

  For a moment she can't
speak or even breathe. He has caught her on the exhale and her lungs feel as flat as sheets of paper. Then, as he says her name again (sounding uncharacteristically hesitant and unsure of himself), the strength slips from her legs. They turn to sand and she sits on the bed, the towel falling off her, her wet bottom dampening the sheet beneath her. If the bed hadn't been there, she would have gone to the floor.

  Her teeth click together and that starts her breathing again.

  "James? Where are you? What happened?" In her normal voice, this might have come out sounding shrewish--a mother scolding her wayward eleven-year-old who's come late to the supper-table yet again--but now it emerges in a kind of horrified growl. The murmuring relatives below her are, after all, planning his funeral.

  James chuckles. It is a bewildered sound. "Well, I tell you what," he says. "I don't exactly know where I am."

  Her first confused thought is that he must have missed the plane in London, even though he called her from Heathrow not long before it took off. Then a clearer idea comes: although both the Times and the TV news say there were no survivors, there was at least one. Her husband crawled from the wreckage of the burning plane (and the burning apartment building the plane hit, don't forget that, twenty-four more dead on the ground and the number apt to rise before the world moved on to the next tragedy) and has been wandering around Brooklyn ever since, in a state of shock.

  "Jimmy, are you all right? Are you...are you burned?" The truth of what that would mean occurs after the question, thumping down with the heavy weight of a dropped book on a bare foot, and she begins to cry. "Are you in the hospital?"

  "Hush," he says, and at his old kindness--and at that old word, just one small piece of their marriage's furniture--she begins to cry harder. "Honey, hush."

  "But I don't understand!"

  "I'm all right," he says. "Most of us are."

  "Most--? There are others?"

  "Not the pilot," he says. "He's not so good. Or maybe it's the co-pilot. He keeps screaming. 'We're going down, there's no power, oh my God.' Also 'This isn't my fault, don't let them blame it on me.' He says that, too."

  She's cold all over. "Who is this really? Why are you being so horrible? I just lost my husband, you asshole!"

  "Honey--"

  "Don't call me that!" There's a clear strand of mucus hanging from one of her nostrils. She wipes it away with the back of her hand and then flings it into the wherever, a thing she hasn't done since she was a child. "Listen, mister--I'm going to star-sixty-nine this call and the police will come and slam your ass...your ignorant, unfeeling ass..."

  But she can go no farther. It's his voice. There's no denying it. The way the call rang right through--no pickup downstairs, no answering machine--suggests this call was just for her. And...honey, hush. Like in the old Carl Perkins song.

  He has remained quiet, as if letting her work these things through for herself. But before she can speak again, there's a beep on the line.

  "James? Jimmy? Are you still there?"

  "Yeah, but I can't talk long. I was trying to call you when we went down, and I guess that's the only reason I was able to get through at all. Lots of others have been trying, we're lousy with cell phones, but no luck." That beep again. "Only now my phone's almost out of juice."

  "Jimmy, did you know?" This idea has been the hardest and most terrible part for her--that he might have known, if only for an endless minute or two. Others might picture burned bodies or dismembered heads with grinning teeth; even light-fingered first responders filching wedding rings and diamond ear-clips, but what has robbed Annie Driscoll's sleep is the image of Jimmy looking out his window as the streets and cars and the brown apartment buildings of Brooklyn swell closer. The useless masks flopping down like the corpses of small yellow animals. The overhead bins popping open, carry-ons starting to fly, someone's Norelco razor rolling up the tilted aisle.

  "Did you know you were going down?"

  "Not really," he says. "Everything seemed all right until the very end--maybe the last thirty seconds. Although it's hard to keep track of time in situations like that, I always think."

  Situations like that. And even more telling: I always think. As if he has been aboard half a dozen crashing 767s instead of just the one.

  "In any case," he goes on, "I was just calling to say we'd be early, so be sure to get the FedEx man out of bed before I got there."

  Her absurd attraction for the FedEx man has been a joke between them for years. She begins to cry again. His cell utters another of those beeps, as if scolding her for it.

  "I think I died just a second or two before it rang the first time. I think that's why I was able to get through to you. But this thing's gonna give up the ghost pretty soon."

  He chuckles as if this is funny. She supposes that in a way it is. She may see the humor in it herself, eventually. Give me ten years or so, she thinks.

  Then, in that just-talking-to-myself voice she knows so well: "Why didn't I put the tiresome motherfucker on charge last night? Just forgot, that's all. Just forgot."

  "James...honey...the plane crashed two days ago."

  A pause. Mercifully with no beep to fill it. Then: "Really? Mrs. Corey said time was funny here. Some of us agreed, some of us disagreed. I was a disagreer, but looks like she was right."

  "Hearts?" Annie asks. She feels now as if she is floating outside and slightly above her plump damp middle-aged body, but she hasn't forgotten Jimmy's old habits. On a long flight he was always looking for a game. Cribbage or canasta would do, but hearts was his true love.

  "Hearts," he agrees. The phone beeps again, as if seconding that.

  "Jimmy..." She hesitates long enough to ask herself if this is information she really wants, then plunges with that question still unanswered. "Where are you, exactly?"

  "Looks like Grand Central Station," he says. "Only bigger. And emptier. As if it wasn't really Grand Central at all but only...mmm...a movie-set of Grand Central. Do you know what I'm trying to say?"

  "I...I think so..."

  "There certainly aren't any trains...and we can't hear any in the distance...but there are doors going everywhere. Oh, and there's an escalator, but it's broken. All dusty, and some of the treads are broken." He pauses, and when he speaks again he does so in a lower voice, as if afraid of being overheard. "People are leaving. Some climbed the escalator--I saw them--but most are using the doors. I guess I'll have to leave, too. For one thing, there's nothing to eat. There's a candy machine, but that's broken, too."

  "Are you...honey, are you hungry?"

  "A little. Mostly what I'd like is some water. I'd kill for a cold bottle of Dasani."

  Annie looks guiltily down at her own legs, still beaded with water. She imagines him licking off those beads and is horrified to feel a sexual stirring.

  "I'm all right, though," he adds hastily. "For now, anyway. But there's no sense staying here. Only..."

  "What? What, Jimmy?"

  "I don't know which door to use."

  Another beep.

  "I wish I knew which one Mrs. Corey took. She's got my damn cards."

  "Are you..." She wipes her face with the towel she wore out of the shower; then she was fresh, now she's all tears and snot. "Are you scared?"

  "Scared?" he asks thoughtfully. "No. A little worried, that's all. Mostly about which door to use."

  Find your way home, she almost says. Find the right door and find your way home. But if he did, would she want to see him? A ghost might be all right, but what if she opened the door on a smoking cinder with red eyes and the remains of jeans (he always traveled in jeans) melted into his legs? And what if Mrs. Corey was with him, his baked deck of cards in one twisted hand?

  Beep.

  "I don't need to tell you to be careful about the FedEx man anymore," he says. "If you really want him, he's all yours."

  She shocks herself by laughing.

  "But I did want to say I love you--"

  "Oh honey I love you t--"

 
"--and not to let the McCormack kid do the gutters this fall, he works hard but he's a risk-taker, last year he almost broke his fucking neck. And don't go to the bakery anymore on Sundays. Something's going to happen there, and I know it's going to be on a Sunday, but I don't know which Sunday. Time really is funny here."

  The McCormack kid he's talking about must be the son of the guy who used to be their caretaker in Vermont...only they sold that place ten years ago, and the kid must be in his mid-twenties by now. And the bakery? She supposes he's talking about Zoltan's, but what on earth--

  Beep.

  "Some of the people here were on the ground, I guess. That's very tough, because they don't have a clue how they got here. And the pilot keeps screaming. Or maybe it's the co-pilot. I think he's going to be here for quite awhile. He just wanders around. He's very confused."

  The beeps are coming closer together now.

  "I have to go, Annie. I can't stay here, and the phone's going to shit the bed any second now, anyway." Once more in that I'm-scolding-myself voice (impossible to believe she will never hear it again after today; impossible not to believe) he mutters, "It would have been so simple just to...well, never mind. I love you, sweetheart."

  "Wait! Don't go!"

  "I c--"

  "I love you, too! Don't go!"

  But he already has. In her ear there is only black silence.

  She sits there with the dead phone to her ear for a minute or more, then breaks the connection. The non-connection. When she opens the line again and gets a perfectly normal dial tone, she touches star-sixty-nine after all. According to the robot who answers her page, the last incoming call was at nine o'clock that morning. She knows who that one was: her sister Nell, calling from New Mexico. Nell called to tell Annie that her plane had been delayed and she wouldn't be in until tonight. Nell told her to be strong.

  All the relatives who live at a distance--James's, Annie's--flew in. Apparently they feel that James used up all the family's Destruction Points, at least for the time being.

  There is no record of an incoming call at--she glances at the bedside clock and sees it's now 3:17 P.M.--at about ten past three, on the third afternoon of her widowhood.