Earthquake Weather (73 page)

Pete and Plumtree both leaned over so that he could grasp their wrists, while their free hands extended back to Angelica, who clasped them firmly and braced herself. With a heave from above, Cochran was able to walk up the side of the grave and take two balance-catching steps out across the grass.

I don’t feel any different, he thought cautiously. I swear I don’t. If the god’s riding on me now, he’s riding lightly.

Pete had bent to pick up Mavranos’s knife, and now he twisted the cork off the corkscrew and held the cork out to Plumtree, who shoved it into the open mouth of the bottle as if hoping to stifle some shrill sound.

But in fact it was the
silence
that Cochran wished would stop. The plywood sheets thumped underfoot as he followed Plumtree and the Sullivans to the gravel road and hurried down it toward the distant front gate, but the sound of their footsteps seemed to agitate the air only very close by. No rain fell, and Cochran couldn’t shake the notion that all the raindrops were hanging suspended under the clouds, like rocks in a Magritte painting.

As he reeled past the Snow White and the Seven Dwarves statues, Cochran was nervously ransacking his memory. He had forgotten something here today—he had known the wine would make him forget it. But what had it been? Then he remembered saying to Cody,
My dead wife;
and,
my wife was more married to the god than to me.
Apparently he had been married, and the wife was dead. He had to concentrate to keep the idea from sliding out of his mind, like thoughts that occur late at night in bed when the light has been turned out. I was, he thought—what? Somebody was more married to the god than to me. When was anybody ever married to me …? Married to the god—to Dionysus? I must have been thinking of the woman in that strange version of
A Tale of Two Cities,
Ariachne. Something about a Dickens novel …? I can’t remember.

Finally he was just aware that he had forgotten something; but the awareness carried no anxiety. It didn’t have the mental flavor of importance. If it was important, he thought, I’ll no doubt be reminded of it.

He remembered vividly the climb down the chimney in the Winchester House, and the supernatural black man in the wine cellar, and Mrs. Winchester’s occupation of Plumtree’s body, and her insistence that they perform the resurrection soon, today, now.

Twice—once as they passed under the stone gate, and once as Pete pulled open the driver’s-side door of the red truck—Cochran got the impression that Mrs. Winchester had come on; both times Plumtree gasped, and blinked around in a terror that was not Cody’s, and then only a moment later recognizably
was
Cody, catching her balance and gripping the bottle and counting her companions.

They had all got into the truck and pulled the doors closed, but Pete was still fumbling with the key ring, when the engine roared to life. Pete stared at the empty ignition keyhole, then stared at Angelica beside him. With a shrug he put the key into the ignition anyway, and turned the switch into the on position.

Slowly he clanked it into reverse gear, and then tugged at the wheel as he backed out of the parking space; the truck wobbled obediently. “I was afraid it was going to drive itself again,” he muttered, “like it did when Arky got shot.”

“Don’t speak,” choked Angelica. “Get us—out of here.”

Pete steered the truck in a back-and-fill star pattern to drive back down to El Camino Real. A car going north squealed to a halt and honked twice as Pete turned south, and the brake lights flared redly at the back of the shiny new white car in front of the truck.

“What are these white Saturns,” said Pete.

Cochran was already frightened—the wine he had drunk was making him dizzy, and he had the crazy impression that the action and speech around him were subtly happening at the wrong speed, as if somebody had filmed cars and actors moving and speaking too rapidly, and then projected it at a slowed-down speed to make it all appear normal—but with the gaps between the frames subliminally perceptible now—and Pete’s remark about Saturns seemed to carry huge portent.

“There’s another,” said Angelica, her finger repeatedly bumping the windshield as she pointed toward the oncoming lane; and though her voice was if anything shriller than normal, Cochran thought he could hear every click and release of her vocal cords.

“This flop is all face-down,” said Plumtree hoarsely—her voice too was muffled and fragmented, and even though he was sitting right beside her in the back seat Cochran could hardly make out her words—

Abruptly a harsh animal roaring shattered the stale air inside the truck, and the physical shock of it peeled Cochran’s lips back from his teeth and jerked his right hand to the small of his back, where his revolver was holstered. Squinting against the stunning noise, Angelica fumbled the stuffed toy pig up from the front seat—and Cochran realized that the bestial clamor was coming from the pig. But, he thought in real, angry protest, it hasn’t even got a battery in it!

In the center of the cavernous roaring, Angelica was frenziedly bashing the toy against the dashboard, to no apparent effect—the toy pig was smoking, and Cochran could see bright dots of tiny burning coals in its pink nylon fur—

Out one of the windows—in the confusion Cochran somehow couldn’t tell if it was through one of the side windows or through the windshield—Cochran glimpsed a glittering golden vehicle, and in it a carved wooden mask; and an instant later he was deafened by a tremendous metallic crash, and the truck was halted, rocking violently as its passengers rebounded from seat-back and dashboard.

Cochran had wrenched open the door and reeled out onto the pavement, and the smoking pig bounced past him, rolling toward the gutter. The rain was coming down again like a battering avalanche, and the car behind the truck—a white Saturn—had stopped, and a portly white-haired man had opened the passenger-side door and stepped out.

Cochran waved at him.
“Cet ivrogne m’est rentre dedans!”
he shouted over the roar of the rain. He stopped speaking, wanting desperately to run to the side of the road and throw himself down on the wet grass; what he had just said was French, meaning,
This drunkard crashed into me.
“Do you,” he shouted, listening to his own words to be sure he was speaking English, “have a cellular—”

The man standing by the other car was staring at him, in obvious surprised recognition. Cochran cuffed rain water from his eyes and peered at the man … and with a sudden cold hollowness in his chest recognized Dr. Armentrout.

Someone was tugging at Cochran’s sleeve, and shouting; he turned and saw that it was Cody, and that she didn’t seem to be injured. “The truck started again!” she was yelling. “It’s not hurt, nobody’s hurt, we didn’t even hit anything—get back in!”

She hadn’t noticed Armentrout. Cochran nodded at her and put one foot up on the truck floor as she climbed back inside—but he saw Armentrout getting back into the Saturn.

The truck was shaking as Pete gunned the engine; it did seem to be capable of driving.

But so was the Saturn. And all Cochran could remember now was Armentrout saying to him three weeks ago,
I will heal you, Sid. That’s a promise.
Still perceiving all the motions and sounds as discrete fragments, Cochran fumbled under the back of his sopping windbreaker and pulled out his muddy revolver; and he aimed it at the white hood of the Saturn, between and just behind the headlights, and pulled the trigger.

The flare was dazzling, but the noise of the gunshot was just a thud against his abused eardrums. He fired again, and then Plumtree had leaned out of the truck and closed her fist in the fabric of his shirt. The truck was moving, slowly. Cochran flailingly pulled the trigger again, and one of the Saturn’s headlights exploded; and then he threw the gun onto the truck floor and lunged inside.

Pete must have floored the accelerator then, for Cochran was tumbled into the seat half across Plumtree’s lap, and the door slammed shut without his help. The interior of the truck was dark in the renewed rainstorm.

“—the fuck were you doing—!”
Pete was shouting, and Cochran yelled back, overriding him,
“It was Dr. Armentrout!”
In the instant of silence this news caused, Cochran sat up and added, “In that car. He would have followed us. He shot Kootie, remember?”

The roar of the engine rose and fell as Pete swerved from lane to lane to pass slower-moving cars. He had switched on the headlights, and the road ahead was only dimly visible behind a glittering curtain of rain.

“Good,” panted Angelica, “that was good, you were right to shoot him.” She was glancing around wildly, wide-eyed. “What the fuck
hit
us, Pete? How can the truck be running? We should be—”

“The god hit you,” said Mrs. Winchester from the shadows beside Cochran, in a quavering voice that seemed to carry a trace of satisfaction, “a good deal less hard than he hit my house in 1906.”

“I didn’t shoot
him
,” said Cochran loudly, “I shot the
car,
the
radiator
.”

“We’ve got to cross the 280 and pick up Kootie and Arky,” said Pete.

“No,” said Angelica, “there were other white Saturns driving around back there, and Armentrout’s still fucking alive. We might lead them to Kootie—and this truck’s a beacon, magically and plain-old visually. And turn off your headlights.”

“These are sorcerous bad guys, Angie,” said Pete, nevertheless reaching forward to switch off the lights. “What do you think they were
doing
down here? Following
us
? I bet they were tracking the new king, which is Kootie. They might be zeroing in on Cochran’s house right now.”

“Ah, you’re right, you’re right,” said Angelica desperately. “Get on the freeway, get right over in the fast lane to draw any pursuit, and then cut off hard at the first off-ramp, hard enough to send ’em on past it, if they are following us. We’ll call Kootie from a pay phone.”

“It’s getting late, you must let this
Kootie
person fend for himself,” said Mrs. Winchester’s voice. “I
heard
that!” added Cody; “they’d surely kill the boy, and anyway we need his help, and Arky’s, to get this thing done.” And then Valorie’s flat voice said, “O, what form of prayer can serve my turn? ‘Forgive me my foul murder.’ ”

“A pay phone at a gas station,” said Pete, his wet shoe sole squeaking from the gas pedal to the brake and back. “We’re gonna need gas.”

Pete followed Angelica’s directions so exactly that Cochran thought they were all going to be killed. From the fast far left-hand lane of the northbound 280, while a scatter of anonymous headlight-pairs bobbed behind them at hard-to-judge distances, Pete cut the wheel sharply to the right, and the truck veered across the shiny black lanes like a banking surfboard, booming over the lane-divider dots in brief staccato bursts, finally half-missing the exit and throwing Cochran onto Plumtree again as the two left wheels slewed on the shoulder.

Then he had straightened the wheel, braked down to about twenty miles per hour without quite making the tires squeal, and pulled sedately into a Chevron gas station, steering the truck around to the back by the rest rooms and pay phones. The headlights were still switched off.

He pushed the gearshift lever over into neutral.
“No
—
”
he began, but his voice was squeaky; “nobody’s followed us here,” he said in a deeper tone.

“Guess not,” said Angelica faintly. Then she stirred herself and pushed open the door. “Let’s call …”

She froze with one leg extended out into the rain, and Cochran followed the direction of her gaze to the cone of light around the pay telephone.

At first glance he thought the light was full of moths; then he saw that the fluttering streaks of light were rain-gleams on transparent figures: the streak of a contorted jawline here, the squiggle of a flexed limb there, invisible wet lips working in imbecilic grimaces.

“Something’s got all the ghosts worked up this evening,” Angelica said. “They’re drawn by the magnets in the phone, or they each want to call somebody and haven’t got any quarters.” She gave Pete a stricken look over her shoulder. “I’m not masked enough for this. Breathing,
talking on the phone,
in that stew? My voice—and Arky might say my name! I couldn’t hide my—my psychic locators, my name, my birthday—from all of them. At least a couple of them would be into my head like piranhas in five seconds.”

“ ‘These same thoughts people this little world,’ ” said Mrs. Winchester confidently out of Plumtree’s mouth; to which Cody added, “All us kids on the bus got bogus birth-dates and somebody else’s picture on our IDs,” and the flat voice of Valorie said, “I shall play it in a mask, and you may speak as small as you will.”

“Oh, thank you—!” said Angelica to Plumtree, clearly at a loss as to what name to use. “Give her a quarter, Pete,” she added as Cochran opened the truck’s back door and stepped down into the rain. “Speak this: tell Kootie and Arky to get out of there,” she told Plumtree urgently. “Tell ’em don’t take the Granada, we were driving that when I shot at the bikers out at the yacht club, they might remember it. Tell ’em to take the old Torino out back.”

“And bad guys might be out in front of the house, nervous about our guns and waiting for reinforcements,” added Pete. “Tell Arky to drive right out
through
the greenhouse, like Cochran said this morning—there’s apparently a mud road that leads down the backyard slope right to the 280.”

Cochran could see that Plumtree had to do this, but after she had stepped wearily down out of the truck he grabbed her unbandaged hand and said, “Would it help to have another person beside you? I can concentrate on
you,
and not pay attention to the ghosts.”

The tired lines in her face lifted in a wan smile. “I’d like that, Sid. Yeah, you’ll be safe enough if you just don’t speak a word, and look nowhere but at me.”

“That’s my plan.” He was nervously pleased to be speaking coherently, after having drunk the
pagadebiti;
and he was reminded of a time an unidentified snake had bitten him on a hike, and how he had monitored himself for the rest of the day, watching for slurred speech or numbness or any other symptoms of poisoning.