Duel (34 page)

Authors: Richard Matheson

BOOK: Duel

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“
My insides!
” she gasped.

“Ann!”

She was half sitting now, her body shaking, a wild, despairing groan starting up in her throat. He grabbed her shoulders and tried to steady her. The Martian!âthe thought clutched at his mindâit doesn't like her angry!

“It's all right baby, all r â¦”

“He's hurting me!” she cried. “He's hurting me, David!
Oh God!
”

“He can't hurt you,” he heard himself say.

“No, no, no, I can't stand it,” she said between clenched teeth.
“I can't stand it.”

Then, as abruptly as the attack had come, her face relaxed utterly. Not so much with actual relaxation as with a complete absence of all feeling. She looked dizzily at David.

“I'm numb,” she said quietly, “I â¦ can't â¦ feel â¦ a â¦”

Slowly she sank back on the pillow and lay there a second with her eyes open. Then she smiled drowsily at Collier.

“Good night, David,” she said.

And closed her eyes.

Kleinman stood beside the bed.

“She is in perfect coma,” he said, quietly. “More accurately I should say under hypnotic trance. Her body functions normally but her brain has been â¦ frozen.”

Johnny looked at him.

“Suspended animation?”

“No, her body functions. She is just asleep. I cannot wake her.”

They went downstairs to the living room.

“In a sense,” Kleinman said, “she is better off. There will be no upsets now. Her body will function painlessly, effortlessly.”

“The Martian must have done it,” Johnny said, “to safeguard its â¦ home.”

Collier shuddered.

“I'm sorry, Dave,” Johnny said.

They sat silent a moment.

“It must realize we know about it,” Johnny said.

“Why?” asked Collier.

“It wouldn't be tipping off its hand completely if it thought there was still a chance of secrecy.”

“Maybe it could not stand the pain,” said Kleinman.

Johnny nodded. “Yes, maybe.”

Collier sat there, his heart beating strainedly. Suddenly he clenched his fists and drove them down on his legs.

“Meanwhile, what are we supposed to do!” he said. “Are we helpless before this â¦ this
trespasser?
”

“We can't take risks with Ann,” was all Johnny said and Kleinman nodded once.

Collier sank back in the chair. He sat staring at the kewpie doll on the mantel.
Coney Island
read the doll's dress and on the beltâ
Happy
Days.

“Rhyuio Gklemmo Fglwo!”

Ann writhed in unconscious labor on the hospital bed. Collier stood rigidly beside her, his eyes fastened to her sweat-streaked face. He wanted to run for Kleinman but he knew he shouldn't. She'd been like this twenty hours nowâtwenty hours of twisting, teeth-clenching agony. When it had started he'd cut his classes completely to stay with her.

He reached down trembling fingers to hold her damp hand. Her fingers clamped on his until the grip almost hurt. And, as he watched in numbed horror, he saw the face of the Earth-formed Martian passing across his wife's featuresâthe slitted eyes, the thin, drawn-back lips, the white skin pulled rigidly over facial bones.

“Pain! Pain! Spare me, fathers of my fathers, send me not to â¦ I”

There was a clicking in her throat, then silence. Her face suddenly
relaxed and she lay there shivering weakly. He began to pat her face with a towel.

“In the yard, David,” she muttered, still unconscious.

He bent over suddenly, his heart jolting.

“In the yard, David,” she said. “I heard a sound and I went out. The stars were bright and there was a crescent moon. While I stood there I saw a white light come over the yard. I started to run back to the house but something hit me. Like a needle going into my back and my stomach. I cried out but then it was black and I couldn't remember. Anything. I tried to tell you David, but I couldn't remember, I couldn't remember, I couldn't â¦”

A hospital. In the corridor the father paces, his eyes feverish and haunted. The hall is hot and silent in the early August morning. He walks back and forth restlessly and his hands are white fists at his sides.

A door opens. The father whirls as a doctor comes out. The doctor draws down the cloth which has covered his mouth and nose. He looks at the man.

“Your wife is well,” says the doctor.

The father grabs the doctor's arm.

“And the baby?” he asks.

“The baby is dead.”

“Thank God,” the father says.

Still wondering if in Africa, in Asia â¦

BEING

In darkness hovering. A soundless shell of metals glistening paleâheld aloft by threads of anti-gravity. Below, the planet, shrouded with night, turning from the moon. On its blackswept face, an animal staring up with bright-eyed panic at the dully phosphorescent globe suspended overhead. A twitch of muscle. The hard earth drums delicately beneath fleeing pawbeats. Silence again, wind-soughed and lone. Hours. Black hours passing into gray, then mottled pink. Sunlight sprays across the metal globe. It shimmers with unearthly light.

IT WAS LIKE PUTTING HIS HAND INTO A SCORCHING oven.

“Oh my
God,
it's hot,” he said, grimacing, jerking back his hand and closing it once more, gingerly, over the sweat-stained steering wheel.

“It's your imagination.” Marian lay slumped against the warm, plastic-covered seat. A mile behind, she'd stuck her sandaled feet out the window. Her eyes were closed, breath fell in fitful gasps from her drying lips. Across her face, the hot wind fanned bluntly, ruffling the short blonde hair.

“It's not hot,” she said, squirming uncomfortably, tugging at the narrow belt on her shorts. “It's cool. As a cucumber.”

“Ha,” Les grunted. He leaned forward a little and clenched his teeth. at the feel of his sport shirt clinging damply to his back. “What a month for driving,” he growled.

They'd left Los Angeles three days before on their way to visit Marian's family in New York. The weather had been equatorial from the start, three days of blazing sun that had drained them of energy.

The schedule they were attempting to maintain made things even worse. On paper, four hundred miles a day didn't seem like much. Converted into practical traveling it was brutalizing. Traveling over dirt cutoffs that sent up spinning, choking dust clouds. Traveling over rutpocked stretches of highway under repair; afraid to hit more than twenty miles an hour on them for fear of snapping an axle or shaking their brains loose.

Worst of all, traveling up twenty to thirty mile grades that sent the radiator into boiling frenzies every half hour or so. Then sitting for long, sweltering minutes, waiting for the motor to cool off, pouring in fresh water from the water bag, sitting and waiting in the middle of an oven.

“I'm done on one side,” Les said, breathlessly. “Turn me.”

“And ha to you,” Marian sotto voced.

“Any water left?”

Marian reached down her left hand and tugged off the heavy top of the portable ice box. Feeling inside its coolish interior, she pulled up the thermos bottle. She shook it.

“Empty,” she said, shaking her head.

“As my
head
,” he finished in a disgusted voice, “for ever letting you talk me into driving to New York in August.”

“Now, now,” she said, her cajoling a trifle worn, “don't get heated up.”

“
Damn!
” he snapped irritably. “When is this damn cutoff going to get back to the damn highway?”

“Damn,” she muttered lightly. “Damn damn.”

He said no more. His hands gripped tighter on the wheel. HWY.
66, ALT. RTE.âthey'd been on the damn thing for hours now, shunted aside by a section of the main highway undergoing repair. For that matter, he wasn't even sure they were on the alternate route. There had been five crossroads in the past two hours. In speeding along to get out of the desert, he hadn't looked too carefully at the crossroad signs.

“Honey, there's a station,” Marian said, “let's see if we can get some water.”

“And some gas,” he added, glancing at the gauge, “
and
some instructions on how to get back to the highway.”

“The damn highway,” she said.

A faint smile tugged at Les's mouth corners as he pulled the Ford off the road and braked up beside the two paint-chipped pumps that stood before an old sagging shack.

“This is a hot looking spot,” he said dispassionately. “Ripe for development.”

“For the right party.” Marian's eyes closed again. She drew in a heavy breath through her open mouth.

No one came out of the shack.

“Oh, don't tell me it's
deserted,
” Les said disgustedly, looking around.

Marian drew down her long legs. “Isn't there anybody here?” she asked, opening her eyes.

“Doesn't look like it.”

Les pushed open the door and slid out. As he stood, an involuntary grunt twitched his body and his knees almost buckled. It felt as if someone had dropped a mountain of heat on his head.

“
God!
” He blinked away the waves of blackness lapping at his ankles.

“What is it?”

“This
heat
.” He stepped between the two rusty-handled pumps and crunched over the hot, flaky ground for the doorway of the shack.

“And we're not even a third of the way,” he muttered grimly to himself. Behind him, he heard the car door slam on Marian's side and her loose sandals flopping on the ground.

Dimness gave the illusion of coolness only for a second. Then the muggy, sodden air in the shack pressed down on Les and he hissed in displeasure.

There was no one in the shack. He looked around its small confines at the uneven-legged table with the scarred surface, the backless chair, the cobwebbed coke machine, the price lists and calendars on the wall, the threadbare shade on the small window, drawn down to the sill, shafts of burnished light impaling the many rents.

The wooden floor creaked as he stepped back out into the heavy sunlight.

“No one?” Marian asked and he shook his head. They looked at each other without expression a moment and she patted at her forehead with a damp handkerchief.

“Well, onward,” she said wryly.

That was when they heard the car come rattling down the rutted lane that led off the road into the desert. They walked to the edge of the shack and watched the old, home-made tow truck make its wobbling, noisy approach toward the station. Far back from the road was the low form of the house it had come from.

“To the rescue,” Marian said. “I hope he has water.”

As the truck groaned to a halt beside the shack, they could see the heavily tanned face of the man behind the wheel. He was somewhere in his thirties, a dour looking individual in a T-shirt and patched and faded blue overalls. Lank hair protruded from beneath the brim of his grease-stained Stetson.

It wasn't a smile he gave them as he slid out of the truck. It was more like a reflex twitching of his lean, humorless mouth. He moved up to them with jerky boot strides, his dark eyes moving from one to the other of them.

“You want gas?” he asked Les in a hard, thick-throated voice.

“Please.”

The man looked at Les a moment as if he didn't understand. Then he grunted and headed for the Ford, reaching into his back overall
pocket for the pump key. As he walked past the front bumper, he glanced down at the license plate.

He stood looking dumbly at the tank cap for a moment, his calloused fingers trying vainly to unscrew it.

“It locks,” Les told him, walking over hurriedly with the keys. The man took them without a word and unlocked the cap. He put the cap on top of the trunk door.

“You want ethyl?” he asked, glancing up, his eyes shadowed by the wide hat brim.

“Please,” Les told him.

“How much?”

“You can fill it.”

The hood was burning hot. Les jerked back his fingers with a gasp. He took out his handkerchief, wrapped it around his hand and pulled up the hood. When he unscrewed the radiator cap, boiling water frothed out and splashed down smoking onto the parched ground.

“Oh, fine,” he muttered to himself.

The water from the hose was almost as hot. Marian came over and put one finger in the slow gush as Les held it over the radiator.

“Oh â¦
gee
,” she said in disappointment. She looked over at the overalled man. “Have you got any
cool
water?” she asked.

The man kept his head down, his mouth pressed into a thin, drooping line. She asked again, without result.

“The hair-triggered Arizonian,” she muttered to Les as she started back toward the man.

“I beg your pardon,” she said.

The man jerked up his head, startled, the pupils of his dark eyes flaring. “Ma'am?” he said quickly.

“Can we get some cool drinking water?”

The man's rough-skinned throat moved once. “Not here, ma'am,” he said, “but â¦”

His voice broke off and he looked at her blankly.

“You â¦ you're from California, ain't you?” he said.

“That's right.”

“Goin' â¦ far?”

“New York,” she said impatiently. “But what aboutâ”

The man's bleached eyebrows moved together. “New York,” he repeated. “Pretty far.”

“What about the water?” Marian asked him.

“Well,” the man said, his lips twitching into the outline of a smile, “I ain't got none here but if you want to drive back to the house, my wife'll get you some.”

“Oh.” Marian shrugged slightly. “All right.”

“You can look at my zoo while my wife gets the water,” the man offered, then crouched down quickly beside the fender to listen and hear if the tank was filling up.

“We have to go back to his house to get water,” Marian told Les as he unscrewed one of the battery caps.

“Oh? Okay.”

The man turned off the pump and replaced the cap.

“New York, haah?” he said, looking at them. Marian smiled politely and nodded.

After Les had pushed the hood back down, they got into the car to follow the man's truck back to the house.

“He has a zoo,” Marian said, expressionlessly.

“How nice,” Les said as he let up the clutch and the car rolled down off the slight rise on which the gas pumps stood.

“They make me mad,” Marian said.

They'd seen dozens of the zoos since they'd left Los Angeles. They were usually located beside gas stationsâdesigned to lure extra customers. Invariably, they were pitiful collectionsâbarren little cages in which gaunt foxes cringed, staring out with sick, glazed eyes, rattlesnakes coiled lethargically, maybe a feather-molted eagle glowered from a dark cage corner. And, usually, in the middle of the so-called zoo would be a chained-up wolf or coyote; a straggly woe-be-gone creature who paced constantly in a circle whose radius was the length of the
chain; who never looked at the people but stared straight ahead with red-rimmed eyes, pacing endlessly on thin stalks of legs.

“I hate them,” Marian said bitterly.

“I know, baby,” Les said.

“If we didn't need water, I'd never go back to his damned old house.”

Les smiled. “Okay ma,” he said quietly, trying to avoid the holes in the lane. “
Oh.
” He snapped two fingers. “I forgot to ask him how to get back to the highway.”

“Ask him when we get to his house,” she said.

The house was faded brown, a two-story wooden structure that looked a hundred years old. Behind it stood a row of low, squarish huts.

“The zoo,” Les said. “Lions 'n tigers 'n everything.”

“Nuts,” she said.

He pulled up in front of the quiet house and saw the man in the Stetson slide off the dusty seat of his truck and jump down off the running board.

“Get you the water,” he said quickly and started for the house. He stopped a moment and looked back. “Zoo's in the back,” he said, gesturing with his head.

They watched him move up the steps of the old house. Then Les stretched and blinked at the glaring sunlight.

“Shall we look at the zoo?” he asked, trying not to smile.

“No.”

“Oh, come on.”

“No, I don't want to see
that
.”

“I'm going to take a look.”

“Well â¦ all right,” she said, “but it's going to make me mad.”

They walked around the edge of the house and moved along its side in the shade.

“Oh, does that feel good,” Marian said.

“Hey, he forgot to ask for his money.”

“He will,” she said.

They approached the first cage and looked into the dim interior through the two-foot-square window that was barred with thick doweling.