Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (16 page)

“Very good!” Mr. Breeze said. “Wonderful!”

And then Mr. Breeze said, “Where are they now, Peter? Do you know where your parents are?”

M
r. Breeze pulls back from the barricade of Laramie and the gravel sputters out from their tires and in the rearview mirror Peter can see the men with their guns in the red taillights and dust.

“Damn it,” Mr. Breeze says, and slaps his hand against the dashboard. “Damn it! I knew I should have put you in the trunk!” And Peter says nothing. He has never seen Mr. Breeze angry in this way, and it frightens him—the red splotches on Mr. Breeze’s skin, the scent of adult rage—though he is also relieved to be moving away from those big halogen lights. He keeps his eyes straight ahead and his hands folded in his lap, and he listens to the silence of Mr. Breeze unraveling, he listens to the highway moving beneath them, and watches as the yellow dotted lines at the center of the road are pulled endlessly beneath the car. For a while, Peter pretends that they are eating the yellow lines.

After a time, Mr. Breeze seems to calm. “Peter,” he says. “Two plus two.”

“Four,” Peter says softly.

“Four and four.”

“Eight.”

“Eight and eight.”

“Sixteen,” Peter says, and he can see Mr. Breeze’s face in the bluish light that glows from the speedometer. It is the cold profile of a portrait, like the pictures of people that are on money. There is the sound of the tires, the sound of velocity.

“You know,” Mr. Breeze says at last. “I don’t believe that you’re not human.”

“Hm,” Peter says.

He thinks this over. It’s a complicated sentence, more complicated than math, and he’s not sure he knows what it means. His hands rest in his lap, and he can feel his poor clipped nails tingling as if they were still there. Mr. Breeze said that after a while he will hardly remember them, but Peter doesn’t think this is true.

“When we have children,” Mr. Breeze says, “they don’t come out like us. They come out like you, Peter, and some of them even less like us than you are. It’s been that way for a few years now. But I have to believe that these children—at least
some
of these children—aren’t really so different, because they are a part of us, aren’t they? They feel things. They experience emotions. They are capable of learning and reason.”

“I guess,” Peter says, because he isn’t sure what to say. There is a kind of look an adult will give you when they want you to agree with them, and it is like a collar they put on you with their eyes, and you can feel the little nubs against your neck, where the electricity will come out. Of course, he is not like Mr. Breeze, nor the men that held the guns at the gates of Laramie; it would be silly to pretend, but this is what Mr. Breeze seems to want. “Maybe,” Peter says, and he watches as they pass a green luminescent sign with a white arrow that says
EXIT.

He can remember the time that his first tooth came out, and he put it under his pillow in a tiny bag that his mother had made for him which said
Tooth Fairy
, but then the teeth began to come out very quickly after that and the sharp ones came in. Not like Mother or Father’s teeth. And the fingernails began to thicken, and the hairs on his forearms and chin and back, and his eyes changed color.

“Tell me,” says Mr. Breeze. “You didn’t hurt your parents, did you? You loved them, right? Your mom and dad?”

A
fter that, they are quiet again. They are driving and driving and the darkness of the mountain roads closes in around them. The shadows of pine trees, fussing with their raiments. The grim shadows of solid, staring boulders. The shadows of clouds lapping across the moon.

You loved them, right?

Peter leans his head against the passenger window and closes his eyes for a moment, listening to the radio as Mr. Breeze moves the knob slowly across the dial: static. Static—static—man crying—static—static—very distant Mexican music fading in and out—static—man preaching fervidly—static—static
.
And then silence as Mr. Breeze turns it off, and Peter keeps his eyes closed, tries to breathe slow and heavy like a sleeping person does.

You loved them, right?

And Mr. Breeze is whispering under his breath. A long stream of whisps, nothing recognizable.

W
hen Peter wakes, it’s almost daylight. They are parked at a rest stop—Peter can see the sign that says
WAGONHOUND REST AREA
sitting in a pile of white rocks, he can see the outlines of the little buildings, one for
MEN,
one for
WOMEN,
and there is some graffiti painted against the brick,
FOR GOD SO LOVED THE WOLRD HE GAVE HIS ONLY BEGONTEN SON
,
and the garbage cans tipped over and strewn about, the many fast-food bags ripped open and torn apart and licked clean, and then the remnants licked again later, hopefully, and the openings of the crushed soda cans tasted, hopefully, and the other detritus examined, sniffed though, scattered.

There is a sound nearby. Sounds. A few of them creeping closer.

An old plastic container is being nosed along the asphalt, prodded for whatever dried bit of sugar might still adhere to the interior. Peter hears it. It rolls—
thok thok thok
—then stops. One has picked it up, one is eyeing it, the hardened bit of cola at the bottom. He hears the crunch of teeth against the plastic bottle, and then the sound of loud licking and mastication.

And then one is coming near to the car, where he and Mr. Breeze are supposed to be sleeping.

One leaps up onto the front of the Cadillac, naked, on all fours, and lets out a long stream of pee onto the hood of the car. The car bounces as the boy lands on it, and there is the thick splattering sound, and then the culprit bounds away.

That shakes Mr. Breeze awake! He jerks up, scrabbling, and briefly Peter can see Mr. Breeze’s real face, hard-eyed and teeth bared—nothing kindly, nothing from television, nothing like a friendly puppet—and Mr. Breeze clutches his gun and swings it in a circle around the car.

“What the fuck!” Mr. Breeze says.

For a minute he breathes like an animal, in tight, short gasps. He points his gun at the windows: Front. Back. Both sides. Peter makes himself small in the passenger seat.

Afterward, Mr. Breeze is unnerved. They start driving again right away, but Mr. Breeze doesn’t put his gun in the glove box. He keeps it in his lap and pats it from time to time, like it is a baby he wants to stay asleep.

It takes him a while to compose himself.

“Well!” he says at last, and he gives Peter his thin-lipped smile. “That was a bad idea, wasn’t it?”

“I suppose so,” Peter says. He watches as Mr. Breeze gives the gun a slow, comforting stroke.
Shhhhhhh. There, there.
Mr. Breeze’s friendly face is back on now, but Peter can see how the fingertips are trembling.

“You should have said something to me, Peter,” Mr. Breeze says in a kindly but reproachful voice.

Mr. Breeze raises an eyebrow.

He frowns with mild disappointment.

“You were asleep,” Peter says, and clears his throat. “I didn’t want to wake you up.”

“That was very thoughtful of you,” Mr. Breeze says, and Peter glances down at his map. He looks at the dots: Wamsutter. Bitter Creek. Rock Springs. Little America. Evanston.

“How many of them were there, do you think, Peter?” Mr. Breeze says. “A dozen?”

Peter shrugs.

“A dozen means twelve,” Mr. Breeze says.

“I know.”

“So—do you think there were twelve of them? Or more than twelve of them?”

“I don’t know,” Peter says. “More than twelve?”

“I should say so,” Mr. Breeze says. “I would venture to guess that there were about fifteen of them, Peter.” And he is quiet for a little while, as if thinking about the numbers, and Peter thinks about them too. When he thinks about
one dozen
, he can picture a container of eggs. When he thinks about
fifteen
, he can picture a 1 and a 5 standing together, side by side, holding hands like brother and sister.

“You’re not like them, Peter,” Mr. Breeze whispers. “I know you know that. You’re not one of
them.
Are you?”

What is there to say?

Peter stares down at his hands, at his sore, shaved fingernails; he runs his tongue along the points of his teeth; he feels the hard, broad muscles of his shoulders flex, the bristled hairs on his back rubbing uncomfortably against his T-shirt.

“Listen to me,” says Mr. Breeze, his voice soft and stern and deliberate. “Listen to me, Peter. You are a special boy. People like me travel all over the country, looking for children just like you. You’re different, you know you are. Those
things
back there at the rest stop? You’re not like them, you know that, don’t you?”

After a time, Peter nods.

You loved them, right?
Peter thinks, and he can feel his throat tighten.

He hadn’t meant to kill them. Not really.

Most of the time he forgets that it happened, and even when he
does
remember he can’t recall
why
it happened.

It was as if his mind was asleep for a while, and then when he woke up there was the disordered house, as if a burglar had turned over every object, looking for treasure. His father’s body was in the kitchen, and his mother’s was in the bedroom. A lot of blood, a lot of scratches and bites on her, and he put his nose against her hair and smelled it. He lifted her limp hand and pressed the palm of it against his cheek and made it pet him. Then he made it hit him in the nose and the mouth.

“Bad,” he had whispered. “Bad! Bad!”

“It’s going to be better once we get to Salt Lake,” Mr. Breeze says. “It’s a special school for children like you, and I know you’re going to enjoy it so much. You’re going to make a lot of new friends! And you’re going to learn so much, too, about the world! You’ll read books and work with a calculator and a computer, and you’ll do some things with art and music! And there will be counselors there who will help you with your . . . feelings. Because the feelings are just feelings. They are like weather, they come and go. They’re not
you
, Peter. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes,” Peter says. He stares out to where the towering white-yellow butte cliffs have been cut through to make room for the road; and the metal guardrail unreels beside them; and the sky is a glowing, empty blue. He blinks slowly.

If he goes to this school, will they make him tell about his mom and dad?

Maybe it will be all right, maybe he
will
like it there.

Maybe the other children will be mean to him, and the teachers won’t like him either.

Maybe he
is
special.

Will his fingernails always hurt like this? Will they always have to be cut and filed?

“Listen,” Mr. Breeze says. “We’re coming up on a tunnel. It’s called the Green River Tunnel. You can probably see it on your map. But I want to tell you that there have been some problems with these tunnels. It’s easy to block the tunnels from either end, once a car is inside it, so I’m going to speed up, and I’m going to go very, very fast when we get there. Okay? I just want you to be prepared. I don’t want you to get alarmed. Okay?”

“Okay,” Peter says, and Mr. Breeze smiles broadly and nods, and then without another word they begin to accelerate. The guardrail begins to slip by faster and faster until it is nothing but a silver river of blur, and then the mouths of the tunnels appear before them—one for the left side of the road, one for the right, maybe not mouths but instead a pair of eyes, two black sockets beneath a ridged hill, and Peter can’t help himself, he tightens his fingers against his legs even though it hurts.

When they pass beneath the concrete arches, there is a soft
whuff
sound as if they’ve gone through the membrane of something, and then suddenly there is darkness. He can sense the curved roof of the tunnel over them, a rib cage of dark against dark flicking overhead, and the echo of the car as it speeds up, faster and faster, a long crescendo as the opening in the distance grows wider and wider, and the opening behind them grows smaller.

But even as the car quickens, Peter can feel time slowing down, so that each rotation of tire is like the click of the second hand of a clock. There are kids in the tunnel. Twenty? No, thirty maybe, he can sense the warm bodies of them as they flinch and scrabble up the walls of the tunnel, as they turn and begin to chase after the car’s taillights, as they drop stones and bits of metal down from their perches somewhere in the tunnel’s concrete rafters. “Yaaah!” they call. “Yaaah!” And their voices make Peter’s fingers ache.

In front of them, the hole of daylight spreads open brighter, a corona of whiteness, and Peter can only see the blurry shadow-skeletons of the kids as they leap in front of the car.

They must be going a hundred miles an hour or more when they hit the boy. The boy may be eight or nine, Peter can’t tell. There is only the imprint of a contorted face, and the cry he lets out, a thin, wiry body leaping. Then a heavy thump as the bumper connects with him, and a burst of blood blinds the windshield, and they hear the clunking tumble of the body across the roof of the car and onto the pavement behind them.