From a Buick 8 (24 page)

Up until then, what I'd mostly felt was sorry for him. Everything I'd done since he started showing up at the barracks had been based on that comfortable pity. Because all that time when he'd been washing windows and raking leaves and snowblowing his way through the drifts in the back parking lot, all that time he'd kept his head down. Meekly down. You didn't have to contend with his eyes. You didn't have to ask yourself any questions, because pity is comfortable. Isn't it? Pity puts you right up on top. Now he had lifted his head, he was using my own words back at me, and there was nothing meek in his eyes. He thought he had a right, and that made me mad. He thought I had a responsibility - that what was being
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said out here wasn't a gift being given but a debt being repaid - and that made me madder. That he was right made me maddest of all. I felt like shoving the heel of my hand up into the shelf of his chin and knocking him spang off the bench. He thought he had a right and I wanted to make him sorry. Our feelings toward the young never much change in this regard, I suppose. I don't have kids of my own. I've never been married - like Shirley, I guess I married Troop D. But I've got plenty of experience when it comes to the young, both inside and outside the barracks. I've had them in my face plenty of times. It seems to me that when we can no longer pity them, when they reject our pity (not with indignation but with impatience), we pity ourselves instead. We want to know where they went, our comfy little ones, our baby buntings. Didn't we give them piano lessons and show them how to throw the curveball? Didn't we read them
Where the Wild Things Are
and help them search for Waldo? How dare they raise their eyes to ours and ask their rash and stupid questions? How dare they want more than we want to give?

'Sandy? What happened when you guys dissected the - '

'Not what
you
want to hear,' I said, and when his eyes widened a little at the coldness he heard in my voice, I was not exactly displeased. 'Not what your father wanted to see. Or Tony, either. Not some answer. There never was an answer. Everything to do with the Buick was a shimmer-mirage, like the ones you see on I-87 when it's hot and bright. Except that's not quite true, either. If it had been, I think we could have dismissed the Buick eventually. The way you dismiss a murder when six months go by and you all just kind of realize you're not going to catch whoever did it, that the guyis going to slide. With the Buick and the things that came out of the Buick, there was always something you could catch hold of. Something you could touch or hear. Or something you could

'Oi,' Sandy Dearborn said. 'That
smell,'

He put his hand up to his face but couldn't actually touch his skin because of the plastic breathing cup he was wearing over his mouth and nose - the kind dentists put on before going prospecting. Sandy
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didn't know how it was on germs, but the mask did nothing to stop the smell. It was that cabbagey aroma, and it choked the air of the storage closet as soon as Curt opened the stomach of the bat-thing.

'We'll get used to it,' Curt said, his own breathing cup bobbing up and down on his face. His and Sandy's were blue; the Sergeant's was a rather cute shade of candy-pink. Curtis Wilcox was a smart guy, right about a lot of things, but he was wrong about the smell. They didn't get used to it. No one ever did.

Sandy couldn't fault Trooper Wilcox's preparation, how-ever; it seemed perfect. Curt had swung home at the end of his shift and picked up his dissection kit. To this he had added a good microscope (borrowed from a friend at the university), several packets of surgical gloves, and a pair of extremely bright Tensor lamps. He told his wife he intended to examine a fox someone had shot behind the barracks.

'You be careful,' she said. 'They can have rabies.'

Curt promised her he'd glove up, and it was a promise he meant to keep. Meant for all three of them to keep. Because the bat-thing might have something a lot worse than rabies, something which remained virulent long after its original host was dead. If Tony Schoondist and Sandy Dearborn had needed a reminder of this (they probably didn't), they got it when Curt first closed the door at the foot of the stairs and then bolted it.

'I'm in charge as long as that door's locked,' he said. His voice was flat and absolutely sure of itself. It was mostly Tony he was speaking to, because Tony was twice his age, and if anyone was his partner in this, it was the SC. Sandy was just along for the ride, and knew it. 'Is that understood and agreed?

Because if it isn't, we can stop right n - '

'It's understood,' Tony said. 'In here you're the general. Sandy and I are just a couple of buck privates. I have no problem with that. Just for Chrissake let's get it over with.'

Curt opened his kit, which was almost the size of an Army footlocker. The interior was packed with stainless steel instruments wrapped in chamois. On top of them were the dental masks, each in its own sealed plastic bag.

'You really think these are necessary?' Sandy asked.

Curt shrugged. 'Better safe than sorry. Not that those things are worth much. We should probably be wearing respirators.'

'I sort of wish we had Bibi Roth here,' Tony said.

Curt made no verbal reply to that, but the flash of his eyes suggested that was the last thing in the world
he
wanted. The Buick belonged to the Troop. And anything that came out of it belonged to the Troop.

Curt opened the door of the storage closet and went in, pulling the chain that turned on the little room's green-shaded hanging lamp. Tony followed. There was a table not much bigger than a grade-schooler's desk under the light. Small as the closet was, there was barely room for two, let alone three. That was fine with Sandy; he never stepped over the threshold at all that night. Shelves heaped with old files crowded in on three sides. Curt put his microscope on the little desk and
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plugged itslight-source into the closet's one outlet. Sandy, meanwhile, was setting up Huddie Royer's videocam on its sticks. In the video of that peculiar postmortem, one can sometimes see a hand reach into the picture, holding out whatever instrument Curt has called for. It's Sandy Dearborn's hand. And one can hear the sound of vomiting at the end of the tape, loud and clear. That is also Sandy Dearborn.

'Let's see the leaves first,' Curt said, snapping on a pair of the surgical gloves. Tony had a bunch of them in a small evidence bag. He handed it over. Curt opened it and took out the remains of the leaves with a small pair of tongs. There was no way to get just one; by now they were all semi-transparent and stuck together like clumps of Saran Wrap. They were seeping little trickles of fluid, and the men could smell their aroma - that uneasy mix of cabbage and peppermint - immediately. It was not nice, but it was a long way from unbearable. Unbearable was at that point still ten minutes in the future.

Sandy used the zoom in order to get a good image of Curt separating a fragment of the mass from the whole, using the pincers deftly. He'd treated himself to a lot of practice over the last few weeks, and here was the payoff.

He transferred the fragment directly to the stage of the microscope, not attempting to make a slide. Phil Candleton's leaves were just the Coming Attractions reel. Curtis wanted to get to the feature presentation as soon as possible.

He bent over the twin eyepieces for a good long time nevertheless, then beckoned Tony for a look.

'What're the black things that look like threads?' Tony asked after several seconds of study. His voice was slightly muffled by his pink mask.

'I don't know,' Curt said. 'Sandy, give me that gadget that looks like a Viewmaster. It has a couple of cords wrapped around it andproperty h.u. biology department Dymotaped on the side.'

Sandy passed it to him over the top of the videocam, which was pretty much blocking the doorway. Curt plugged one of the cords into the wall and the other into the base of the microscope. He checked something, nodded, and pushed a button on the side of the Viewmaster thing three times, presumably taking pictures of the leaf fragments on the microscope's stage.

'Those black things aren't moving,' Tony said. He was still peering into the microscope.

'No.'

Tony finally raised his head. His eyes had a dazed, slightly awed look. 'Is it ... could it be like, I don't know, DNA?'

Curt's mask bobbed slightly on his face as he smiled. This is a great scope, Sarge, but we couldn't see DNA with it. Now, if you wanted to go up to Horlicks with me after midnight and pull a bag-job, they've got this really beautiful electron microscope in the Evelyn Silver Physics Building, never been driven except by a little old lady on her way to church and her weekly - '

'What's the white stuff?' Tony asked. The stuff the black threads are floating in?'

'Nutrient, maybe.'

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'But you don't know.'

'Of
course
I don't know.'

'The black threads, the white goo, why the leaves are melting, what that smell is. We don't know dick about any of those things.'

'No.'

Tony gave him a level look. 'We're crazy to be fucking with this, aren't we?'

'No,' Curt said. 'Curiosity killed the cat, satisfaction made him fat. You want to come in and take a peek, Sandy?'

'You took photos, right?'

'I did if this thing worked the way it's s'posed to.'

'Then I'll take a pass.'

'Okay, let's move on to the main event,' Curt said. 'Maybe we'll actually find something.'

The gobbet of leaves went back into the evidence bag and the evidence bag went back into a file cabinet in the corner. That battered green cabinet would become quite the reposi-tory of the weird and strange over the next two decades.

In another corner of the closet was an orange Eskimo cooler. Inside, under two of those blue chemical ice packets people sometimes take on camping trips, was a green garbage bag. Tony lifted it out and then waited while Curt finished getting ready. It didn't take long. The only real delay was finding an extension cord so they could plug in both of the Tensor lamps without disturbing the microscope or the attached still camera. Sandy went to get a cord from the cabinet of odds and ends at the far end of the hall. While he was doing that, Curt placed his borrowed microscope on a nearby shelf. (of course, in those close quarters, everything was nearby) and set up an easel on the desktop. On this he mounted a square of tan corkboard. Beneath it he placed a small metal trough of the sort found on the more elaborate barbecue setups, where they are used to catch drippings. Off to one side he put a jar-top filled with Push-pins.

Sandy came back with the extension cord. Curt plugged in the lamps so they shone on the corkboard from either side, illuminating his work-surface with a fierce, even glow that eliminated every shadow. It was obvious he'd thought all of this out, step by step. Sandy wondered how many nights he'd lain awake long after Michelle had gone to sleep beside him. Just lying there and looking up at the ceiling and going over the procedure in his mind. Reminding himself he'd just have the one shot. Or how many afternoons there had been, Curt parked a little way up some farmer's lane with the Genesis radar gun pointed at an empty stretch of highway, calculating how many practice bats he'd have to go through before he dared tackle the real thing.

'Sandy, are you getting glare from these lights?'

He checked the viewfinder. 'No. With white I probably would, but tan is great.'

'Okay.'

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Tony unwound the yellow tie holding the neck of the garbage bag shut. The moment he opened it, the smell got stronger. 'Whew, Jesus!' he said, waving a gloved hand. Then he reached in and pulled out another evidence bag, this one a large.

Sandy was watching over the top of the camera. The thing in the bag looked like a shopworn freak show monstrosity. One of the dark wings was folded over the lower body, the other pressed against the clear plastic of the evidence bag, making him think of a hand pressed against a pane of glass. Sometimes when you collared a drunk and shut him in the back of the cruiser he'd put his hands on the glass and look out at the world from between them, a dazed dark face framed by starfish. This was a little like that, somehow.

'Seal's open in the middle,' Curt said, and nodded dis-approvingly at the evidence bag. 'That explains the smell.'

Nothingexplained it, in Sandy's opinion.

Curt opened the bag completely and reached inside. Sandy felt his stomach knot into a sick ball and wondered if he could have forced himself to do what Curt was doing. He didn't think so. Trooper Wilcox never hesitated, however. When his gloved fingers touched the corpse in the bag, Tony recoiled a little. His feet stayed put but his upper body swayed backward, as if to avoid a punch. And he made an involuntary sound of disgust behind his cute pink mask.

'You okay?' Curt asked.

'Yes,' Tony said.

'Good. I'll mount it. You pin it.'

'Okay.'

'Are you sure you're all right?'

'Yes, goddammit.'

'Because I feel queasy, too.' Sandy could see sweat running down the side of Curl's face, dampening the elastic that held his mask.

'Let's save the sensitivity-training session for later and just get it done, what do you say?'

Curt lifted the bat-thing to the corkboard. Sandy could hear an odd and rather terrible sound as he did so. It might have been only the combination of overstrained ears and the quiet rustle of clothes and gloves, but Sandy didn't actually believe that. It was dead skin rubbing against dead skin, creating a sound that was somehow like words spoken very low in an alien tongue. It made Sandy want to cover his ears.