Something Magic This Way Comes (8 page)

Ten thousand cats howled, disconsolate, at the unreachable stars.

“L
IGHTHOUSE, shmighthouse,” Ten-Speed said one night after the three of us’d gotten a few beers in us and weren’t thinking much. “It’s probably the safest place to go if there’s a freakin’ tsunami. Hell, if the wave knocks it over, you can
surf
the freakin’ lighthouse to land!” Ten-Speed drained his beer can and tossed the empty into the dark, away from the blazing car headlights. “But there won’t be no tsunami. Hasn’t been one anywhere around here since my freakin’
mom
was born. Before, even. Sixtyfour, I think. Freakin’ forty-some-years ago.”

We nodded and gulped our own beers. Hell, what did we know? A trio of country boys from Carolina—

Charlotte, that is—vacationing on the wrong coast. An ocean’s an ocean, right? The waves at Myrtle Beach can get pretty nasty, too. How much different could it be out here? Ten-Speed’d been coming to
Orygun
(that’s how the locals say it) every damn year since he was a kid. And he knew how to surf better’n anyone.

My beer was empty, too, so I flung it toward the sound of the surf and hopped up to grab another. The beer was cheap and tasted a bit rancid, but there was lots of it, so why not? Ten-Speed always said that part of the fun of vacations in Oregon was that you could drive out onto the beach and get drunk off your ass.

Maybe not at every beach, but at least at Sea Cove, you could. And Ten-Speed was the Oregon guy, right?

So there we were, three good ole boys getting drunk off their asses.

The beach was empty except for us, ’cause it was two, three in the damn morning, and nobody else with a lick of sense was out there. The shore was a good hundred feet away—or at least Ten-Speed said it was.

The moon went missing, so I couldn’t see shit out that way. Something big and black loomed there, slinging enough salt into the air that it stung my throat and made me thirsty just taking a deep breath. Whether it was the damn ocean or Bigfoot, I had no idea.

Ten-Speed’s daddy’s ’74 Ford Bronco with the cutoff top idled nearby, spitting sparks out the tailpipe every five minutes like clockwork, just after it made a weird choking sound, stalled and sputtered for a few seconds before catching again all by itself. Like a damn possessed car.

As I snagged another cold one off the ice chest on the open tailgate, the Bronco started to stall again, right on time, and the lights flickered off, throwing the homeys into the dark—again—and then the headlights blazed, blinding everyone but me, and the Bronco idled normally—again. Burning oil wafted along behind me as I trudged back to the group, dripping freezing water on my salt-sticky legs as I went.

We sat on a couple of huge, rough logs, each one about four feet thick and filled with enough chewedup sharp edges to make a guy start singing like a choir boy. They were stuck in the damn beach javelin-like, angled up into the air like huge tent stakes that’d been left behind after the Jolly Green Giant got done camping here. If we’d been thinking, we’d’ve wondered how they got there.

“Shit,” Jimmy Teeth said, spitting in the sand and flashing his famous overbite. “Ain’t no lighthouse, Speed.”

Jimmy Teeth wore denim cut-offs and sandals, nothing else. His high school varsity letter days still showed in his muscles, which he took every opportunity to flex, so nobody’d notice his teeth. He had short blond hair and beady little blue eyes—and these huge front teeth, like a damn rabbit, about as white as you could get without glowing in the dark, and the worst overbite his dentist’d ever seen. Even after two tries at correcting it, Teeth still had an overbite any rabbit’d envy.

Ten-Speed launched a half-full can of beer at Jimmy’s head. “It’s freakin’ there,” he yelled, beer spewing out the back to soak Ten-Speed’s throwing arm, but barely spattering Jimmy as the can sailed over his ducked head and plonked into the sand behind us.

Ten-Speed looked mad, which in the dimming lights from the Bronco, was damn scary. Speed was already going bald at nineteen, and his forehead was looking bigger than ever. His dark red hair started way up at the top of his head—well above his hard, green eyes— and continued way down the back, past his shoulders.

He always wore a muscle shirt everywhere, even at home, always in the water (he claimed he burned crispy in the sun), even though he didn’t have the damn muscles to fill it out. We were on the beach, so he had on long swim trunks, the kind the California boys wore when they weren’t surfing. Black and white high tops dangled from his bare toes as he swung his legs from his perch on the log, his heels pulled free of the shoes.

“Wanna go?” Ten-Speed said, kicking his high tops off accidentally while hopping down off the log. “I’ll
show
you the freakin’ lighthouse right now.” He jammed his feet into the fallen high tops, kicking gritty sand on me.

Teeth and I looked at each other. Searching for a lighthouse in the damn dark seemed pretty easy, but I still didn’t see anything but black out there.

“Teeth?” Ten-Speed said, “you coming, man?”

Speed stalked over to the Bronco, flung open the door and jumped in the driver’s seat.

“Shit,” Jimmy Teeth muttered, shaking his head and slipping unharmed off the monster log. He kept muttering and shaking his head all the way to the truck.

“Hook!” Ten-Speed barked. “You coming or not, you freakin’ wuss?”

“Coming,” I yelled and climbed down carefully to preserve my jewels. Damn, damn, damn. Why did something like this always happen after we’d had a few beers?

* * *

The worst thing about being called Hook in high school is that the girls expected me to have a big hook instead of one of my hands. It was that damn movie that did it. Made the girls run away faster’n a jackrabbit grazed with birdshot.

No, Ten-Speed came up with the name, on account of my tendency to miss the rim in basketball. Kind of short for a basketball guy, 5’6” on a good day with my lucky red high tops—which I wore
everywhere
, even the beach—but I was fast on the court. See the little white streak with flying black hair steal your ball, that was me. Some guy ran under your giraffe legs and wound up with the ball at the other end of the court in five seconds flat, I was that man.

But I couldn’t hit the damn basket to save my life.

No, that’s not true. I could
hit
it, I just couldn’t seem to get it to stay there and drop through the net. Always bounced off, usually on the left side. After my first game, Speed said I hooked it like a golf ball and the name stuck.

The Bronco bounced around on the pavement, swerving like a son of a bitch, tossing me around and pounding my ass sore on the hard back seat. Teeth had a white-knuckled grip on an aluminum handle Speed’d screwed into the dashboard, so I guess the front seat ride wasn’t much better.

Ten-Speed screeched to a halt without warning, slamming Teeth and me forward. My head whacked the front seat and I tasted blood. Speed threw the Bronco into neutral and stood up on the driver’s seat, right in the middle of the road. He thrust out an arm dramatically and yelled, “There. Freakin’ there. See?”

Speed looked down at us, his eyes wild and feral.

The truck’s burned oil smoke blew past, choking me, making my eyes water.

I followed his outstretched hand to the horizon over the sea and saw a faint light flickering—somewhere.

Clearly, Ten-Speed thought it was a damn lighthouse.

As for me, I couldn’t swear it wasn’t a Bigfoot eye. I squinted, but it didn’t help. It still could’ve been the Big guy. “So what, Speed?” I said, sucking on my cut lip. “Probably a boat.”

“Nope,” Ten-Speed said, real calm, and that worried me.

Speed is pretty excitable most of the time. Seeing him calm like that was just plain creepy.

“It’s the freakin’ lighthouse, Hook.” He thumbed off the ignition, leaving the keys dangling, and killed the lights on the Bronco. Swinging the door open with a rusty screech, Ten-Speed hopped out, slamming the door behind him. “C’mon,” he called. “We’re going.”

Teeth looked at me sideways, more scared’n a dog that knows he’s getting his ’nads cut off. I shrugged.

What could we do? It was Ten-Speed, right? If we didn’t go after him, he’d kill himself for sure. And you had to watch your homey’s backs, or what was the point?

“I’m going after him, Teeth. He’s gone bonkers, yeah, but I don’t want him hurt. He’s
our
homey, you know?”

“His life, man,” Jimmy said, hugging his arms to his chest, that scared rabbit look still jumping around his eyes. “What you gonna do? Shit.” He looked away, staring after Speed, who was about to disappear into Bigfoot’s big mouth.

“Yeah,” I said, and climbed out without using the door.

I hadn’t gotten more’n a few steps before I heard Speed whooping and splashing in the damn water. I stepped up my pace and scanned the surf frantically, trying to figure out where he went, but I just couldn’t see, even though my eyes were starting to get used to the dark. I ran on, heading for the biggest splashing I could hear. Sure enough, I ran right into the ocean, getting myself sprayed with salt water from head to toe, stinging my bleeding lip and drenching my lucky red high tops. Damn. They’d be a bitch to clean after they dried stiff with the salt soaked into them.

“Speed!” I yelled between gagging gulps of water, and waded in up to my waist, trying to ignore the numbingly cold water. Each time a damn wave came in, I bowled over, scraping the sand below and taking in another mouthful of salt water that stung my wound. I choked and snorted the seawater back out my nose and tried again. After maybe two minutes in the water (although it felt like two
hours
), I was beat. My gut twisted with about a gallon of damn salt water, and I thought I was going to spew. I was scratched and scraped raw, and my eyeballs felt like they’d been sandpapered.

Double-zero fine, maybe, but still sandpaper.

I tried once more. “Speed!”

There was nothing.

I waded back to shore and dragged my soggy, beaten self back to the Bronco. Teeth was still there.

He looked my sorry, soggy ass up and down and grinned.

“Lost him,” I said. “Damn.”

“Shit,” Jimmy said. Sometimes Teeth really had a way with words.

Sirens went off, up, down, up, down, up, down. They sounded like air-raid sirens, but the damn cold war was over back when I was
born
, wasn’t it?

I had no idea what was going on with those sirens.

Neither did Teeth. It was Ten-Speed that was the Oregon guy, see? Not us. And he was off swimming to that lighthouse or boat or whatever was stuck in Bigfoot’s eye.

Lights switched on all in houses all around. Surprisingly, the houses were so close, we could see people running around inside through their windows. I’d thought we were out in the middle of nowhere, not in the middle of a damn neighborhood. They streamed out of those houses faster’n salmon, looking terrified as shit, and some of them weren’t even wearing all their clothes! It was like someone’d lit their asses with a fuse, and they needed to take to the hills before they’d blow up.

Teeth—in a moment of sobriety—switched on the radio.

“—tsunami along the Oregon coast. Residents of Sea Cove—”

The air raid sirens kept on going, up, down, up, down, up, down.

My heart pounded in my chest and my ears, and bile rose in my throat. I’d figured these damn tsunami things were pretty harmless, but all these people were jumping house like they were sinking—or something like that. It was all so screwy it didn’t make any sense.

What did they think was going to happen? They’d drown in their own houses?

“Ain’t nothing like this ever happened at Myrtle Beach,” Teeth said, his voice shaking. “ ’Cept maybe when Myrtle Beach got hit by Hugo back in the ’80’s.”

I scanned the ocean. With the light of all those houses, I could see now—and there wasn’t any ocean in sight. The beach went a lot farther’n I remembered, like someone’d taken out the Pacific Ocean drain plug, and it was emptying out.

“Damn, Teeth, will you look at that?”

I swear the ground shook and the rumble filled the air. Maybe it was just me, but I don’t know, ’cause Teeth yelled out, “Shit!” right in my ear.

That was a scary ass rumble, and I didn’t figure on sticking around to find out what it was. Turning over Speed’s Bronco, I squealed the tires turning her around. We peeled out of there with the pedal floored, but we didn’t get very far before we ran into all those damn people running away on foot. Pretty soon we were crawling along, no faster than the people.

But none of them stayed on the road very long.

Some of them were scrambling up hillsides, others were huffing and puffing up winding private roads, and they all seemed to be trying to get higher as fast as possible.

“Get out!” some middle-aged, paunchy guy in a yellow bathrobe yelled, and grabbed at my arm in passing, his fingernails biting into me. He crossed in front of the Bronco, headed for a wooded hillside.

“Leave the car, you idiot!” an enormous woman with curlers in her hair screamed. She waddled past and disappeared up a tiny side road.

A balding man with a business suit top jerked Teeth out of the car and swung him to his feet. “Higher ground!” he bellowed, glancing back at me. “Stop the car and run!” He dragged Teeth away. The dude wasn’t even wearing any pants, just his underwear.

Teeth limped after him, willingly or not I never did find out.

I switched off the Bronco and pocketed the keys, just in case, jumped out and tried to follow Teeth.

There’s an old expression: When in Rome, Do Like the Romans Do. Ten-Speed may’ve been my homey, but these people
lived
here. I figured it was best to go where they went, so I did.

After we’d climbed as high as we could, I looked back, just to see what’d happened back there. And there was the biggest damn wave I’d ever seen, maybe thirty or forty feet high, crashing down on top of Ten-Speed’s Bronco. We were a good hundred feet higher, I think, but I swear we got splashed with ice water all the way up there. There was so much salt in the air by then I was itchy.