Elvendude (24 page)

Li said little during the ride, apparently cooked by the rock. Daryl glanced down at the gas gauge, which read E.

"Shit," Daryl said. "I need to pull over and fill up."

"Okay," Li said, grinning at something. Or nothing.

Daryl pulled the 'Vette off at the next ramp. In the distance he saw an Exxon station, but he would have to drive a ways to get to it. The ramp and the streets it led to were in the process of being resurfaced and widened. Fluorescent orange and yellow plastic drums lined the road on either side. The only visible light was the Exxon station, still about a mile away, and a billboard advertising a motel ten miles away.

"Hey," Li said. "You're still going about sixty. How fast
can
you drive this thing?"

Daryl grinned.
Does he really want to know?
he thought.
Maybe's he's never been in a 'Vette before. Well, if that's what he wants . . .

Daryl floored it, and the hand of God pressed them back in their seats. The orange and yellow barrels became a blur, the white striped line now a solid one. The motor sang as he shifted back up into fifth, the eight cylinders protesting little, wanting to go faster.

He wasn't expecting the orange and yellow barrels to veer across his lane, forcing him to switch abruptly over to the other side of the road. Even as he started the turn, he knew he wasn't going to make it.

For a moment the universe was eerily silent as the car left the pavement; on impact, everything went black.

Hissing steam woke him, then pain, searing pain, as hot metal burned his right side.

He opened his eyes, and when he blinked a hot fluid that smelled like Prestone dripped into them. He didn't know where he was, or what had happened.

Antifreeze soaked his shirt and face. Daryl squirmed, finding himself wedged into an impossibly small space, his head crammed into a bent steering wheel. Something large and hot and smelling like gasoline now sat in the passenger's seat. Once his eyes adjusted, he saw that it was the car's engine.

A slow, creeping dread spread over him as he began to comprehend that he'd wrecked his 'Vette but good. It still felt like a bad dream that he would wake from any moment. But instead of waking up, his body began talking to him in vague and disturbing ways. His right leg was somewhere under a twisted mass of plastic and a spaghetti tangle of multicolored wires, plastic hoses, and the startling clarity of an exposed CD, shimmering with rainbow colors in the dim, reflected light of a nearby billboard. The windshield was gone, neatly popped out and nowhere in sight. His ruined 'Vette continued to hiss and sputter, the horrid death noises of a car mortally wounded.

A strong stench of gasoline reached his nostrils.

I've got to get out of this thing,
he realized. And Daryl discovered how much fear was possible in a human being when he imagined the car engulfed in flames.

As he struggled to free himself from the car, he lost control of his bowels.

Please oh God don't let me burn to death in this thing!
his mind screamed. His teeth clenched against the pain in his right leg, his mouth refused to let him moan. He reached over to the driver's door, which still seemed to be intact, sort of. He pulled on the handle and the door popped violently, then gave a few inches when he pushed. Metal screamed as he pushed harder, and a sharp pain shot through his right leg.

Daryl crawled through the foot or so of clearance between door and car. A jagged piece of metal caught him in the middle of his chest and carved an incision to his waist as he wriggled through; he hardly felt it in his panic to get out. Outside the gasoline scent was stronger; when he put his hand down on the ground, he found a puddle of it.

Oh God oh God oh God get me outta here I'll never smoke crack again. . . . 
he prayed.
I'll make it up to you. I'll—

The ground was not ground, but concrete. The car had struck a retaining wall, and from the crumpled condition of the roof, he figured it must have rolled a few times. His right leg refused to work, but he got up halfway anyway, hobbling away from the wreck, finding a network of steel reinforcement rods sticking up irregularly from the edge of the concrete road.

Daryl had crawled and hobbled about seven yards from the car before it burst into flames.

The heat and brightness brought a scream from Daryl's mouth. He dropped to the pavement and covered his head with his arms, waiting for the fireball to engulf him.

He felt only a wave of heat, no more, and sat up to regard his burning car.

I'm alive. For now. But how long will I live after Father finds out?

Then, another thought.

Li.

He was still in the car. Or was he . . . There was a motor there, where Li had sat.

It must have crushed him. He was under the motor. He must already be dead.

The flames leaped higher. Then the car exploded, showering the ground with falling, burning fiberglass and plastic.

I hope he was already dead.

The explosion cast a wider circle of light. Daryl looked down the road, saw the bend he failed to negotiate a considerable distance from him. He must have rolled more than twice; the bend was a quarter of a mile away.

Li's dead. But why am I alive?
he wondered. Daryl knew he shouldn't be alive, not after a wreck like that. Nobody would live, much less walk, or even crawl away.

From somewhere off to his right, a moan.

Li?

Hope flared. Peering down the road, Daryl sought the source of the moan.

"Li," he called out, wiping antifreeze from his eyes. But the boy's name came out as a croak, which he hardly heard himself.

He got up on his good left leg, dragging his right, and started down the road.
It came from down here somewhere,
he thought as he put distance between himself and his burning car. The night became colder and darker as the flames receded behind him, and his shadow became a tall slender giant, passing over a white sea of new concrete, punctuated with skid marks and broken glass.

When he saw Li, Daryl wished he
had
died in the fire.

The Cardinals uniform was a bloody rag, wrapped around a limp body, lying on his back. Li moaned again. Daryl hobbled closer and looked down at him.

He had no face.

Daryl recoiled, tried to scramble away, succeeding only in falling back, sprawling on the new concrete. He began to whimper, the horror of what he saw now showering him with grief.

I killed him,
he thought.

Li moaned again.

I might as well have killed him,
he corrected himself.
All that blood . . . how is he still alive?

Daryl sat there for an eternity, afraid to move, afraid to stay where he was. The flames of his burning car died down, casting a lambent, orange light over the area. When he looked down at his right leg, he saw a bone sticking through the shredded jeans.

"No wonder it doesn't work," he whispered.
This must be what shock feels like. Lots of nothing.

A flame flared suddenly from the car, then was gone. The acrid stench of burning tires washed over him. He straightened his leg with his right hand, and watched the bone disappear into the flesh.

I'm in hell,
Daryl thought, and screamed.

Someone kicked him in his side. When he opened his eyes, he was looking up at Li, who stood over him, holding the glass crack pipe. He still had no face.

"Come on.
Get up,
" Li said, kicking him again. "How are we supposed to keep this little trip going if you don't stay high?"

Daryl sat up, and Li sat down next to him. The billboard cast a bit of light even at this distance. His car was now a burning ember, barely visible down the road.

"Me first," Li said. Daryl watched passively as Li held the glass pipe to his head, approximately where the mouth used to be, and lit it. The light from the lighter revealed a grisly pulp where his face once resided, with bits of teeth and skull poking through.

The pipe hissed and popped, reminding Daryl of his dead car.

Without complaint, Daryl took the pipe and inhaled as Li lit it for him. He took an especially long hit, which he felt he deserved, under the circumstances.

"You know, we were going about a hundred and ten when we flipped," Li said conversationally. Despite his injuries, his voice came through loudly and clearly. "Looks like you banged yourself up a bit. Don't worry, smoke that and you'll feel better."

Daryl handed the pipe back. "How long have we been here?" he said absently.

"Oh, a couple of hours, something like that."

Daryl looked up at the highway, saw no cars, no lights.

"We're alone here, you know. Look," Li said, pointing to a point beyond the burning car. "Even the Exxon station's closed."

"Terrific," Daryl said. "Maybe we better just . . ."

"Just what?"

What? Call a taxi? Just start walking?

"This can't be real," he finally said. "Are you dead? Are you a ghost?"

The head turned toward him. Remaining bits of muscle contorted enough to mimic a smile, revealing white, undamaged teeth. Daryl's stomach threatened to turn inside out.

"Does it matter?" Li said, lighting the pipe again. When he was through he passed it back to Daryl. "We have enough rock here to last at least a few days."

Daryl tried to find fault with the logic and gave up.

"I'm right and you know it," Li said, with a touch of anger. "Now, tell me, how do you plan to get out of this little scrape? My father's gonna raise hell when he sees what happened to me. The cops, if and when they decide to get here, will probably not be too pleased with the situation either. Especially with all that crack in the front seat. The lunch box will probably protect most of it from the fire."

Daryl eyed Li suspiciously and frowned.

"Good thing your dad's a lawyer," Li added. "Looks like we're going to be in court a long, long time."

Daryl's suspicions strengthened.
That voice. That isn't Li. Not anymore.

That's Mort.

When the apparition handed the pipe back to Daryl, he slapped it out of his hands. It crashed and tinkled amid a small shower of sparks several feet away.

The apparition stared at him.

"You're not Li," Daryl said, crawling away from him.

"I'm not?" it said, inching closer. "Then who am I, human?"

Mort.
Transfixed on the apparition, Daryl saw the ruined body of Li shimmer briefly, surrounded by a glowing mist. The mist swirled about the bloody Cardinals uniform, slowly at first, then whirled with increasing speed, until it was cocooned with light. Then, with a brief flash, the light was gone.

Mort stood there, hands on his hips, looking down at Daryl, looking extremely disgusted.

"Get up," Mort said. "There's nothing wrong with you."

Daryl kept crawling, now with a little more urgency. Mort walked up and kicked him in the ass.

"I said
get up,
human," Mort repeated. "
There's nothing wrong with you!
"

"But my leg!"

"What about your leg?"

Daryl rubbed his eyes and examined his leg, which now appeared to be undamaged. The pain was gone, replaced by a rawness in his palms where he had rubbed them against the concrete. He felt his body, now dry except for perspiration, with no hint of antifreeze or gasoline.

He stood shakily, taller than Mort, but that made no difference. The little creature terrified him now.

Mort looked up at him and started laughing.

"Oh, my young human, you look soooo pathetic," Mort said, then doubled over with laughter. "Drugs do terrific things, don't they? If you don't like your own reality, you can trade it for something else, for less than the price of a CD."

Daryl was baffled. "How did you
do
that?"

"Do what?" he replied, between laughs. "Heal your bone?"

"Yeah, and—" He looked down toward his burning car, saw only a dark shape, and nothing else. The air had cleared of the burning smell, replaced by the ripe, fertile smell of rural countryside at night. "You put the fire out."

"What fire?" Mort shrieked, now rolling on the pavement, laughing uncontrollably.

"My car . . ." he murmured, and started walking toward the shape.

Halfway to the Corvette he saw there had never been an accident, except for the demise of one plastic barrel he'd run over, and a two-foot scratch of black his tires had left on the new pavement.

He looked inside, found his keys in the ignition, and no one sitting in the passenger's side.

He walked around the car, twice, dumbfounded. The 'Vette didn't have a scratch on it, except for a slight blemish on the nose where it connected with the barrel. And of course, the black ding left by the Mustang at Steve's.

Mort caught up with him, leaned over, and examined the blemish.

"Yep. Now,
that's
real," Mort said, running a finger along the scratch. "Shame. That's about two hundred dollars there."

Daryl wasn't paying any attention to what he was saying. His confusion now turned to anger.

"You little shit. You made the whole thing up!"

Mort looked up with mock dismay. "Would
I
do such a thing?"

Daryl reached for his neck, and Mort dashed away, quick as a bunny. Daryl dashed after him, chasing him around the 'Vette in tight rectangles.

"Oh, my. Oh, no, the human's pissed,
I'm afraid now!
" Mort cackled, doing flips and handsprings as Daryl ran after him. "I'm in trouble! I'm done for! Human's gonna kill me now!"

"That's right, I'm going to kill you, you little bastard, if you slow down long enough! I thought I was dead! Where's Li?" Daryl shouted as he ran.

"Oh, you stupid human. Don't you know an illusion when you see one? Li went home long ago. It was just little ole me, orchestrating the whole thing."

"I'll KILL YOU!"

But before Daryl killed Mort, he ran out of breath. He stopped on the passenger's side of the 'Vette, leaning on it for support.

"You will?" Mort said, over the roof of the 'Vette. "Looks like you're going to have a heart attack before you do that."