Starman (5 page)

Which didn’t explain the intense glow that was lighting up the front porch.

She got on her knees and crawled toward the nearest window. Halfway across the floor she remembered that she didn’t have anything on below the waist except a pair of panties and that her knees weren’t exactly callused. Carefully she climbed to her feet and walked the rest of the way.

Maybe this was all part of the nightmare. Maybe she’d just left the porch light on when she’d come inside to reminisce, just reminisce and get good and drunk.

She pressed her face against the glass, looked to her left, and sucked in her breath. The Scott who wasn’t Scott was standing next to the railing. His hair was flowing skyward, as though he was standing on a powerful fan. Floating just above his outstretched right palm was a tiny burning globe. A strange musical sound came from the naked figure and the globe seemed to respond to it. All her fears returned tenfold. But she couldn’t stop staring.

“Rendezvous third dawn-break, original retrieval area. Emergency transmission concluded.”

The musical emanation stopped. The glowing sphere began to rise, slowly at first. When it reached a point some hundred feet or so above the calm water of the bay, it suddenly accelerated. Save for the miniature sonic boom it produced as it shot heavenward, she would have thought it had simply disappeared.

The sound broke her paralysis and she was able to start backing toward the bedroom, feeling her way as she retreated through the bedroom doorway, her eyes never leaving the front entrance until she was safely inside. She closed the door behind her, locked it, and began searching through her clothing. When she didn’t find what she was looking for there she moved on to her purse, then her jacket. She finally found the car keys in a side pocket, right where she’d left them. She held them as tightly as she would have the forty-five.

Without pausing to slip on her pants, which she tossed over an arm, she opened the bedroom window and climbed over the sill. It was only a short drop to the ground.

There was gas in the tank. She’d filled up before turning off the highway, not wanting to find herself stuck at the cabin without a quick way out. Her intention had been to be ready to flee from unbearable memories. Now she found herself running from something much worse.

Surely she could get the car started and backed out of the carport before he could react! It was an older car but it was as finely tuned as a Tina Turner song. Scott had always kept it tuned perfectly. Scott had always . . .

She turned the corner toward the carport and felt strong hands on her shoulders.

No more fainting, not now, not again. That wouldn’t make the nightmare go away. So she started screaming instead. If he’d slapped her, or yelled at her to stop it, or thrown her to the ground, she would have quit. But he did none of those things. He just stood there holding onto her and staring at her out of those strangely deep eyes.

Her hysteria was washed out by the rumble of a forestry service helicopter as it thumped past overhead. It was on its way to join its brethren in fighting the fire across the lake. Now the man who looked like Scott but wasn’t a man shook her. Not hard, but sufficient to choke off her screams.

She gagged, caught her breath enough to choke out, “Who are you?
What
are you? What do you want with me? Please, let me alone.”

“We go,” he said. It was Scott’s voice this time, just slightly different. Just as the man holding her was slightly different.

Another helicopter trundled past. She waved frantically at it but the pilot wasn’t looking downward. His attention was on the fiery destination ahead. He was talking to his copilot, estimating how many minutes remained before they reached the flames and trying to decide from a combination of visual observations and radio reports where best to dump the load of fire retardant chemicals they carried in the chopper’s belly.

The man who looked like Scott turned and pointed toward the carport. “We go,” he said again. He headed back into the house, pulling her along with him. Inside she watched as he dressed himself in the chinos, checkered shirt, and a windbreaker. After a moment’s thought he added socks and loafers. Underwear he ignored.

Then he escorted her back to the car, watched carefully as she slid behind the wheel, and climbed in next to her. He gave her no chance to lock him out. Not that she would have considered doing so anyway. Not while he still had the gun.

He watched closely as she turned the key in the ignition. Her hand was shaking and she made a bad job of what ordinarily was a simple task. The battery ran down despite her best efforts to get the engine to turn over. Maybe Scott had kept the engine tuned up, but the battery was old and probably in need of replacement.

“It’s been sitting here for days,” she told him. “And the motor’s cold. And the battery needs replacing, and I . . .”

She broke off. He was staring at her uncomprehendingly. “What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong?” She muttered to herself. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong. Two downers and a jug of wine.” She slapped herself. It worked in cartoons. Maybe it would work now.

“Jenny, dammit, wake up.”

No luck. He was still there, staring at her. As she waited he raised an arm and gestured toward the dirt road that led away from the lake. There was a halting insistence in his voice.

“We must go. Now.”

She tried the key again. The engine growled. She was frightened and tired and dazed and she wasn’t thinking her actions through. The end result was that she flooded the engine. When it died this time it sounded final. The thin sharp smell of gasoline filled the car.

His hand dropped to the automatic resting in his lap. She was near collapse from panic.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I can’t get it started. I tried, but I can’t. Can’t you smell it? It’s flooded. We’ll have to wait.” Her eyes were darting rapidly from his face to the hand now cradling the forty-five.

Suddenly he leaned over and touched the ignition key. Or maybe he didn’t touch it. Maybe he only touched the ignition plate. She was never certain, then or afterward.

The engine rumbled, turned over once, twice. It caught on the third try, the big 387 under the hood coming to loud life. It idled smoothly as she threw her companion an uncertain look, then turned resolutely away from him. If she didn’t pay attention to her driving she’d like as not end up killing them both.

Still feeling his eyes on her she backed out, shifted gears and sent them bouncing down the narrow access road that led away from the bay.

They worked their way through mud and over potholes until they finally came to the intersection where the access lane met blacktop. Jenny slowed to a halt. She was glad of the solid, unyielding plastic of the steering wheel beneath her fingers. It gave her something to hold onto, and she badly needed something to hold onto. Reality was a half-memory. She was trapped in a persistent nightmare that was solidifying around her like stale Jell-o. It was hard to breathe, harder still to remain calm. If anything even slightly out of the ordinary had happened to that steering wheel, if it had turned suddenly soft and rubbery in her hands or sported a couple of leering eyes or gone floating off skyward like a small gray sphere she’d recently seen do just that, she was absolutely certain she would have gone quite insane.

It did none of those things. It stayed a steering wheel, the familiar smooth plastic curve cool inside the curl of her fingers. The engine purred softly beneath the hood, the leather seat was warm against her back. Everything was as it should be. Everything, except the character sitting next to her cradling the deadly automatic in his lap.

“Why do you stop?”

Compared to what her keeper had said so far, the question amounted to a veritable speech.

She gestured at the intersection. “Which way do you want to go? Left or right? East or west? Does it matter? Should I just drive?” Silently she prayed that he’d leave the decision up to her. It would amount to a confession of ignorance of his surroundings—though she already suspected he wasn’t a local. If he just wanted to drive aimlessly she would turn left and head for the nearest big town.

He appeared to be debating with himself. Finally, and with obvious reluctance, he reached into one of the windbreaker’s pockets and withdrew another of the mysterious gray spheres. She wondered if it, too, was going to vanish into the night sky.

“What’s that?” she asked, unable to restrain her curiosity. As usual, he ignored her question. Not that she expected an answer, but the sound of her own voice was better than complete silence.

He was staring at it intently. It began to hum, a purely mechanical noise but not an unpleasant one. Like the one she’d seen him holding on the porch, it also started to glow, though not nearly as intensely. It did not rise out of his hands.

Instead, it exploded.

She threw up both hands in front of her face, trying to shield her eyes. There was no need. The explosion produced neither sound, heat, radiation, or damaging light. When she lowered her hands she found herself gaping at an image splashed across the inside of the windshield. It was so realistic she momentarily had to grab the wheel to steady herself. Then she realized they hadn’t been suddenly transported to a point in space hundreds of miles up.

The windshield had been replaced by a holographic projection of startling depth and realism. She recognized the image instantly. It was the continent of North America, rendered in every perfect detail. It was not a map, but rather a reproduction of some kind of miraculous photograph.

As she stared the image shrank until it encompassed only the continental United States, swerved and compressed still further until it showed the Southwest. She gulped and hung onto the wheel anyway. Watching the shifting image was like falling.

Specific geographic features were brought into sharp relief with the aid of superimposed bright colors. There was an isolated, exceptionally high mountain, a series of descending plateaus, and in the center of the projection an odd circular canyon—no, a crater. She was sure it was some kind of crater.

The image enlarged slightly but remained focused on the brightly outlined crater. She wished she’d studied her geography better in school.

Her keeper reached up, into the projection itself. The outline of the crater pulsed when his finger touched it. “Here.”

She gaped at him. “You wanna be driven to that place? Is that it?” And she’d been hoping he’d ask to be dropped off somewhere nearby.

“Yes. That place.” He looked relieved at having made his point. “Wanna be driven that place. You know where that place is?”

She forced herself to consider the projection. “Well, if that’s Baja California down there, and up there’s Salt Lake, then over here,” she reached up to touch the image and was inordinately pleased with herself for not twitching when her finger passed into and through the seemingly solid surface, “this has to be the Grand Canyon. The place you want to go is further east, but it’s still got to be in—it’s hard to tell without state lines on your map. I’m not real good at this.”

“State lines?”

“Never mind. What you’re pointing to is, like, Arizona maybe.”

He nodded vigorously. “Yes, wanna be driven there. Arizona-maybe.”

“Why Arizona?”

“Driven there. Now.”

She sighed tiredly. Some of the fear was beginning to give way to curiosity. You couldn’t stay terrified forever, after all. For one thing, it was too exhausting. And it seemed like as long as she did as he asked, he wasn’t going to hurt her. If his original motive had been robbery he already would have taken what he wanted, including the car, and left. If rape, there was no need to drive all the way to Arizona to perpetrate the act. That left only kidnapping, but that didn’t make much sense either. And why haul her all the way to Arizona, when she might have a dozen chances to escape during the long drive?

And there was his manner. She didn’t know what else to call it. What at first she’d taken for brusqueness now seemed more like plain ignorance. Ignorance of the language, of local customs, of the simplest things. She decided he had to be a foreigner of some kind—but weird. And what about the glowing spheres, and this incredible photomap, and the hair blowing straight up into the air?

What about his face? Scott’s face.

She followed his instructions and took a right out onto the blacktop, still worried but no longer petrified with fear. She’d always considered herself a sensible woman, and none of the events of the past hour made the slightest bit of sense.

“If this isn’t a dream,” she muttered aloud, “then I’m in big trouble.” He might have been expected to comment on that, to say something to the effect that she was right and it wasn’t a dream. But as with everything else she said he ignored it. He just sat there, holding onto the gun, staring out at the road and drinking in the scenery. Often he would turn sharply, as though he saw something in the black wall of the forest, and she had the feeling he could see just as well in the dark as he could during the day.

The army helicopter was an S-76: big, clumsy, slow, reliable. It went thrashing along above the forest, disturbing the peaceful Wisconsin dawn and sending a flock of startled geese splashing in panic across the mirrorlike surface of the lake.

Its pilot studied his electronic coordinator, which relieved him of personal responsibility for finding out where the hell he was, and compared the readings with what he could see of the terrain ahead. He turned to his copilot.

“Ten minutes.”

“What say?” The copilot was bouncing and jerking about in his seat like someone possessed by an incurable muscular disease. The pilot, who did not approve of the cause of this seated version of Saint Vitus’s dance, would have been more likely to compare it to a mental deficiency.

He cured it by reaching across and yanking the stereo earphones off the copilot’s head. “I said, ten minutes!” He nodded toward the back of the chopper. “Better wake the cargo.”

“Right.” The copilot set his tape player aside, along with more official sound equipment, and headed toward the back of the helicopter.