The Car (3 page)

Then it died.

But before it died it turned over six or seven times. It was enough to turn on the water pump and get the antifreeze moving through the system, and it also worked the fuel pump and brought gas up from the tank to fill the line to the carburetor.

Terry took the soda bottle and dripped a bit of gas into the top of the carburetor throat, then sat in the seat again and reached for the key.

He crossed his fingers. “Come on—there's almost nothing left in the battery. One time.”

He turned the key to start.

Another low growl, the battery dying, the engine turning, grinding, and Terry started to shake his head, knowing it wouldn't go.

It fired again, shot flames out the top of the carburetor as it had at first, but this time it sucked gas from the line back down in, pulled air in, and the motor started with a bellowing roar out the glass-packed, straight-line muffler.

“Yes!” Terry said, his foot on the accelerator. He revved the engine gently a couple of times, then remembered he had the garage door closed and he was about to gas himself. He left the car running and opened the garage door and discovered it was starting to turn gray in the east. Early morning. It must be about four, he thought, or maybe three-thirty.

He went back to the car—he thought of it always as the Cat now—and checked the gauges. Oil was running at 60 psi, battery charging—he had had no idea if the alternator would work or not and was glad it seemed to be all right—and the tachometer showed the car to be idling at about 700 rpm. Just a hair slow, according to the instruction book, but he would adjust it later.

Everything seemed to be working right, and he shook his head. It couldn't be that easy to build a car. Something had to be wrong.

He pushed the clutch down, put the Cat in reverse, and remembered he'd never driven a straight-stick car before. In fact he'd only driven a car three times—when his friend Thor's father had let them both drive out in the country on a dirt road.

He let the clutch out and the car jerked backward once and stalled and died.

“Come on, Cat. . . .”

He put it in neutral and started it again, pleased when it kicked right off. Once more the clutch in, the stick to reverse—he eased the clutch out and gave it a little gas and it slid backward half a car length before dying again, the rear end of the car hanging out of the garage.

“Damn.”

One more try,
he thought.
How hard can it be? People do it all the time.

Neutral, restart, clutch in, reverse, and more gas this time, lots of gas, run the tach up to almost 2000 rpm—he thought of it as two grand—and he popped the clutch.

Too fast.

The car hesitated, seemed almost to die once more, then caught the gas and overcame the inertia of sitting still and went for it.

He was doing almost thirty miles an hour, in reverse, when he hit the street.

He had been watching to the rear over the trunk lid, but the sudden lurch whipped his head around and for a critical second he was looking forward while moving backward at a high rate of speed.

When he swung his head back around to the rear he was in the street and perfectly lined up on a Toyota pickup parked along the curb, the Cat's rear end aimed at the dead center of the Toyota's door.

Terry pulled the wheel over to the left, hitting the brakes at the same time. The Cat responded instantly—the steering was less than one to one; three-quarters of a turn on the wheel turned the front wheels all the way over. The front end slewed around like it was on ice. With a screeching sound loud enough to wake people three blocks away, the Cat slid sideways and stopped just four inches from the pickup, nose to tail, hung there for half a second while Terry slammed the clutch in, jerked the stick into first, tromped the accelerator down—what magazine article had taught him
that?
—and popped the clutch.

The Cat held half a beat, then the gas caught and the rear wheels squealed, just a squeak, and Terry was moving forward like he'd been driving all his life.

It was a shade soft in the back. The jerk forward changed the center of gravity and threw some of the weight back, and the Cat began to fishtail. Terry started to correct but the direct steering was fast, too fast, and it worsened the situation until within fifty feet the Cat threatened to swerve violently.

He let up on the gas—unconsciously selecting the right corrective technique—and the Cat lined out, headed up the middle of the street.

He wrapped it up to twenty or so—the pipes were really loud in the still morning between the rows of houses—worked the clutch and caught second (he was already getting smoother on it), and let the Cat line out while he gave it a little gas.

It did more than turn fast. According to the manuals, the car weighed only 1800 pounds. The 2300 cc motor in it was made for a vehicle that came in at 2600 pounds or better, and the light weight of the Cat coupled with the high compression of the newly rebuilt engine and the direct linkage of the straight stick made it almost leap forward.

He hit forty almost at once, saw the tach nudging 3500 rpm—the manual said to keep it below 3000 rpm for five hundred miles—and shifted into third. But he was still in a residential district and he didn't want to go too fast, so he backed down and drove around two blocks in third gear, hardly above an idle.

The Cat drove like a dream. It was tight and low and rode hard—even little cracks in the road seemed to come up through the car into his seat—but it cornered absolutely flat and was so responsive it seemed to be tied to his mind. He could think about turning and it started to go, or so it seemed, and he decided almost at once he didn't care if he ever did anything but drive this car.

Halfway around the second block he heard a hissing sound over the engine noise and the crackling pipes and suddenly smoke came boiling back from beneath the hood, obscuring the windshield. At the same time the engine started to miss and the Cat began to jerk and nearly stopped.

“What the . . . ?”

He shifted down, almost lost it as the Cat stopped, dead. Then it surged again as the engine caught some more life, and he limped back to the garage in low gear, at five miles an hour or less, smoke pouring out of the hood, Terry leaning out the side to see around the windshield, the engine sputtering and threatening to die altogether at any moment He was intensely glad that nobody seemed to be up yet.

He opened the hood and the garage filled with a cloud, and in the mist he smelled it and knew it wasn't smoke but antifreeze.

There was a leak somewhere and it had spewed antifreeze all over the engine. The heat immediately turned it to steam and the cooling relief opening around the back of the hood that sucked air over the engine pulled the steam back and out over the windshield along with the heat, and it seemed much worse than it was.

Terry pulled the hood up and all the way over, letting it hang out to the front on the two pivot arms, his forehead frowning in worry.

He had taken the engine for granted. After reading the letter from the machinist he just assumed everything would be all right.

It was a mistake he wouldn't make again.

He used the last of the paper towels—the house was beginning to seem like nobody lived there; everything was running out—to damp-dry the engine, then ate the last of the lunch meat while it cooled.

When the engine and radiator and hoses had cooled to the touch he started searching. He grabbed and tried to wiggle each connection on the line and within moments had found it. The thermostat housing was loose—the bolts only finger-tight—and the gasket had broken away.

It wasn't hard to fix. He used rubber gasket material to cut a new one, using the old one as a pattern, then smeared both sides with nonhardening gasket sealer before putting it back and bolting it down tightly.

But it made all the other connections and fittings suspect and he started over. He found loose bolts on the valve-cover gasket and a small oil leak had developed. He tightened them, then crawled underneath and checked the pan bolts, found three of them loose as well and tightened them.

He went over the motor four times, checked every bolt and nut, tightened the loose ones, then covered the car end to end twice more and found three others.

At last he was done, and by this time it was late afternoon. He had finished putting on the trunk (the “boot”) lid and happened to be standing near the rear of the car when he saw a potential problem.

There was no license plate.

It threw him. He didn't have a driver's license because he was too young, and because of that he couldn't get a plate and couldn't be legal.

He smiled ruefully and shrugged.
Actually,
he thought,
I can't be legal anyway without a license. But with a plate there's a chance I won't be stopped when I drive. . . .

West.

The word slipped in, just happened, but when it came he realized he'd been thinking of it all the time he'd been working on the car.

He wanted to see the West. His parents wouldn't be checking on him, and if they did they would just assume the other one had him—at least for a while. Until he was gone. Neither of them wanted him much, and if the truth were known he was much happier being alone than with them. And if he went to the authorities it would just be a foster home or something.

He didn't want that.

And it wasn't like he was hitting the streets. He had some money, he could work.

And he had the car.

The Cat.

Maybe they would go out and see the uncle he barely remembered. He touched the car on the front fender and smiled as he realized he thought of himself and the car in terms of
we.

Yeah. We'll go out and see the uncle.

We'll head west.

But there was this little problem with the plate to work out first.

Up the small stream, making absolutely no sound as the stream grew narrower and narrower—it took them an hour to reach their destination.

Without speaking they both stopped paddling at the same time, let the canoe come to the shore next to the hamlet.

In truth not even a hamlet. During the intelligence briefing it was called a hamlet but that was a misnomer. Really it was a collection of grass-and-leaf shacks along a river with no electricity, no water, no sewers, and exactly thirty-one people who spent the force of their entire lives trying to make a living out of nearby rice paddies.

It was not possible. The rains came wrong or didn't come at all, the war came wrong all the time, disease hit the rice and the people, babies kept coming, and there was never enough rice to keep them anything other than thin.

The team had come to kill two of the people in the collection of shacks.

That was its job, the team. To kill people. Village leaders who were working for the Communists, selected men and women who were suspected of working for the Communist cadre, people that somebody didn't like or approve of—the team killed them.

They were called the Phoenix Teams and that was their job, to kill people.

This night there were two men in the team just as there were two men to kill, but they were not to split up. They would both be at the killing of each man.

The killing was a simple thing, a stupid thing to have so much importance given to it. The two-man team came up the river in a wooden canoe, paddling themselves three miles from where they had been dropped by a river gunboat. Each man carried a small knife sharpened on both sides with a straight point and a .22 automatic pistol with a silencer attached.

They had memorized maps of the river and the layout of the huts and knew where their targets—they didn't think of them as men but as targets, didn't speak of them as men but as targets—were sleeping with their families.

The plan was simple. That was best. The very best plans were simple. Go into each hut, find the target by using an infrared light and special glasses they had brought, put two rounds in the head of each target, and then back into the canoe and dawn the river to the waiting patrol boat.

Simple.

They had done it before and they would probably do it again.

But an earlier visitor—a virus—had come to change things, change them dramatically. The virus had come in four
days before, entered the children of the targets, and after four days of internal battling, the virus had won and the children had colds. They coughed and fretted and this night, the night the team was to hit, the children were at their worst.

The team could hear the coughing yards from the nearest tent. Then the soft voice of a woman comforting a child.

The team froze, waited for silence to resume, then made its way to the first target hut, where the coughing had been the worst.

They did not pause at the door to silhouette themselves, but stood to the side and rolled quickly in, using the light and glasses to locate the right sleeping pallet.

One of the team covered the rest of the sleepers and the other leaned down and fired twice into the temple of the sleeping target. The .22 made a sound like somebody clapping underwater and the target stiffened, the target's legs trembled, then the target became still.

They left the hut as they had come in, nobody awakened, no sounds.

In the second hut it was different. The team moved in, scanned with the infrared light and found the target, moved to the side of the target, and one of the team members leaned down to terminate, began to squeeze the trigger on the Colt Woodsman .22 automatic, when there was a sound.

The team functioned in darkness, silence. Any light, any sound was a threat to be dealt with, and the team member who was covering the security of the operation spun to handle the sound, spun and released two silenced rounds at the source of the sound to quiet it, to bring back the needed silence, while the first member of the team went ahead and terminated the target as they had terminated the first target. It was called sanctioning, the act of termination. When a target was
terminated, in the code of reporting it was said to have been sanctioned.