The Skunge (26 page)

"Hey, buddy, where do you keep the headache stuff?" Arneson said. No answer. He turned and found himself facing the sawed-off end of a 12-gauge Mossberg shotgun. The owner had tipped back his smudged orange cap, and the harsh light of the overhead fluorescents made him look like a reanimated corpse. His name tag said BILL.

"Get the fuck back in your car and get gone. I don't want you in here."

"Take it easy, Bill. I'll pay, you unlock the pump, I'll get my gas and leave."

"No. Get going now." A tremor ran through his hands, and a bead of sweat rolled down the side of his unshaven face. "If I don't see your tail-lights heading down that road in thirty seconds, you're dogmeat."

"I'm not leaving without my Funyuns," Arneson said. He kept his hands down and loose. "Can't have a road trip without them, right?"

"What the fuck're you talking about? I told you, get out—"

Arneson took a brisk step forward, thrusting the palm of his right hand, not aiming for the barrel of the gun, but for the center of the man's body. His palm clapped over the clerk's hand where it gripped the slide, and Arneson's forward momentum pinned the gun against Bill's body. When the old man pulled away, trying to wrest back the gun, Arneson stepped forward again and sent a fast rising fist under his chin. Bill collapsed like a straw dummy, leaving Arneson holding the shotgun.

"You should have just sold me the Funyuns." He stared down at Bill, and a wave of unreasoning rage crashed over him like a breaker. He found himself wondering what it would be like to stomp Bill's face into strawberry jelly. He turned the thought over in his mind, savoring it. Satisfying—that's how it would feel. Like a hungry man stumbling on a turkey dinner, or a drunk knocking back the first drink of the day. The sheer, exhilarating joy he would feel when he brought down his boot—or better yet, the stock of the Mossberg—and pounded away until the man's skull cracked like an eggshell, spilling out those juicy, bloody brains. He could write his name in the blood and meningeal fluid. And he would laugh while he did it.

He placed the butt of the shotgun on the man's face, and pushed. The skin there bunched up, turning red. Arneson felt the Skunge uncurling in the dark centers of his body, reaching for the surface like tropical plants unfurling to drink the rain. A shock of delicious pleasure ran through his body, and he pushed harder. His senses lit up; he could see every single whisker on the man's stubbled chin, could hear the minute crackling of the bones in the man's face as he leaned his weight on the gun.

The bell over the door jangled again, and a lanky boy of about twelve walked in, holding a grease-spotted brown-paper bag. Lunch time for Bill. The boy stopped, eyes wide, and dropped the bag. Arneson and the boy regarded each other in the cold white light.

"Mister, is my dad dead?"

Not yet, but give me a minute, kid
, Arneson thought, then shook his head like a dog coming up from cold water.
Hold it together, man. If you could hold it together in Mainstake, you can sure as fuck hold it together here.

He let off on the shotgun, his skin suddenly cold. Had he been ready to
kill
this guy?

"You're fucking losing it, man." The shaky sound of his own voice was shocking in the store's humming stillness. The kid said nothing, but his eyes spoke, broadcasting on an urgent frequency. Arneson bent and set the shotgun down, his eyes locked on the kid's. He checked the man's pulse. Then, hands still raised, he stood and moved past the boy to the front door. The kid didn't back off an inch, and Arneson admired him for that. As soon as Arneson was at the door, the boy broke and rushed to his dad's side.

"He'll be OK. Call an ambulance, though—he might have hit his head on the way down."

The kid spoke with quiet dignity. "We don't have insurance. Dad would skin me if I called for one."

"Is there anyone you can call?" Arneson hung there, hating himself, wanting to try and help in the hope of erasing what he had done. He felt the kid's gaze like dusty stones on his skin, and in that moment he knew that the past was distant and immutable, and could never be undone. No amount of I-wish-I-hadn't or please-forgive-me would change the things he'd done. They were as much him as his bones.

"You're one of them, huh. Them Skungers," the boy said.

Arneson felt a dam break inside himself. He was a Skunger. He had been infected by some God-knew-what outer-space hoodoo zombie plant, and now… here he was, driving to some destiny he couldn't imagine, with a woman who didn't even know his real name. And he had almost taken the life of a random man who had just been trying to protect his kid.

"Yeah, I'm afraid so."

"Does it hurt?"

"Sometimes. Not usually."

"Oh."

"Are you sure about that ambulance, kid?"

"Yeah. My dad would have a kitten."

"Alright. Do me a favor and keep an eye on him, yeah?"

"I know first aid well enough. Now I got to ask you to leave. I don't have anything in particular against Skungers—my friend Billy Carmichael, he's got a wicked bad case—but my dad…"

"I know. Try and give me a head start before you call the cops, what do you say? We're just passing through."

"OK." The kid drew himself up to his full height, and swallowed like it hurt him. But his eyes were clear, and sure. "Thanks for not killing my dad. Sometimes he can be a real asshole."

Arneson resisted the urge to laugh and instead sketched a small salute to the kid. "You're welcome. Seeya, kid."

The bell jangled on his way out.

He trudged, head down, until some intuition made him look up. The passenger-side door hung open. Sugar was gone.

CHAPTER FORTY NINE

He threw open the back doors. Nothing. Nothing underneath the Jeep. His eyes roved around the area.

He sprinted to the nearest treeline, head ratcheting back and forth. "Sugar!" Nothing responded except the murmur of the wind, speaking through the gnarled forest of Juniper and Ponderosa pine that hemmed the gas station's lot. If she had gone into the pines, she would be lost within minutes.

The forest was a nightmare. Jagged basalt rocks, left over from ancient lava flows, lurked every few feet, waiting to trip you or break an ankle. The morning sun sent spears of piss-yellow light through the trees, but beyond twenty feet, the land land dropped down into a dark ravine. He turned back, tripping over several rocks, cursing as the hoary needles of a Western Larch raked his face.

He stopped at the edge of the gas station tarmac, and concentrated. Every sense straining outward, pulling in raw information.

He heard something. Not a sound,
per se,
but more an emanation; something that arrived in waves like the lapping of water on the shore of his mind. He turned his head back and forth, feeling for where it was strongest, and followed the signal.

"Sugar?" He crunched over the gravel approach, peering at the building. There. A dirty mechanic-yellow steel door. The signal pulsed from behind that door.

He burst in. Nothing. The bathroom was empty, desperately filthy, and graffitied across every square inch of the walls. The entire room was no more than five by five. He checked behind the door, then something on the floor caught his eye. He knelt to examine a tight circle of red droplets. Fresh blood. He felt a drop of something warm land on the back of his neck. As he looked up, his neck creaked in the silence.

Sugar hung above him, swinging from the ceiling on thick ropes of Skunge. She looked like she had been crucified. Her arms were splayed, her legs held together with loops of the stuff. Vines sprouted from beneath her clothes, and one appeared to have grown from the back of her neck. Her mouth was open, and a long string of bloody drool hung from her mouth, trembling with each movement of the Skunge. As he stared, it broke and splashed to the floor. Her eyes were closed, her pale face serene in the flyspecked glow of the light fixture above the mirror. The Skunge twined and untwined like restless snakes.

"Jesus, no." Arneson had known anger that burned so deep it had hollowed him out. He had experienced sadness so deep he had lost himself in it, for a long time. But now, for the first time in his life, the slippery disk of sanity tilted under him, and Arneson had to scrabble to stay upright before he tipped into an abyss of madness. "Sugar?"

Sugar's mouth opened, and for a moment he thought she might speak. A vine whip-cracked out of her mouth and wrapped around Arneson's throat. He managed to work two fingers between his neck and the choking vine. The Skunge yanked him off his feet, pulling him to the ceiling. He grappled at other vines that snaked around him as they tried to push into his mouth. They twined around his hand, moving with nauseating, muscular speed. He rolled his wrist, wrapping the Skunge around his own forearm to get a better grip. He realized his mistake a second too late as it bore down on his arm, squeezing so hard that the skin of his arm darkened to an alarming shade of purple within seconds. The vine around his throat crackled as it squeezed tighter, almost cutting off his ability to speak.

"Sugar. Wake up," he wheezed. That was the last of his air. He fought against the coiling vines—he yanked, twisted, and tore, but still they drew him inexorably closer to Sugar. Up close, her face was inhuman. Eyes wide but empty, mouth yawning wider than what seemed possible. Green veins throbbed and pulsed under the surface of her skin, and tendrils of Skunge wormed their way from her tear ducts, her nose, her ears.

His lungs burned. He pinwheeled his legs in the air, three feet from the floor. This time, instead of searching for her with his senses, he broadcast them. He screamed with every ounce of his being except his voice.

Every animal makes a sound as it dies; even humans are not above this base function of biology. Soul, spirit, animus; no matter what it was called, always it sent that last burst of energy into the cosmos, sending the final message:
I was here. I was here.

Sugar's eyes snapped open. She
saw
him. The Skunge thrummed, like a spasm, and one of the grasping vines wrapped itself around the light—a bare bulb. It squeezed, and the bulb exploded, throwing the room into darkness. The Skunge spasmed, as if in pain, and Sugar spasmed with it. Arneson felt her grasp on him loosen, and then he was falling.

He lost consciousness before he hit the floor.

CHAPTER FIFTY

"I don't remember any of it. I remember wandering away from the car at the filling station, and the next thing I remember was you shaking me, telling me to wake up. You know how when you're dreaming, and you get woken up, and for a minute you don't know what's real?"

"I know it."

"It was like that." Her eyes had returned to normal, but the Skunge had bloomed with a new fury. "It's still like that. This is all some kind of a dream." Her skin was lined and ridged all over with the stuff, the slithering sound of it moving filled the Jeep.

Arneson kept his eyes on the road, the dotted center line blurring together into an unbroken river.

She coughed. Her lungs made a wet burbling sound, like a pneumonia patient. "I don't want you to—" she stopped, moving her mouth as if she were tasting the words. "I don't want you to stay with me. I want you to get me to a doctor, and then leave me alone."

He didn't look around, though he felt her gaze. "These people are no more doctors than I'm an astronaut."

"You know what I mean. Whoever they are. Once we get there, I want you to go."

Arneson smiled, the same old bleak light in his eyes. "Is this the old leave-me-here-save-yourself speech? Because I've heard it before."

She started to speak, and he cut her off.

"Skip it. In my line of work we have a saying: The last guy out is the only one who gets to leave without a body over his shoulder."

"I have no idea what that means." Her eyes were dry and angry. She hacked up another cough, and specks of black ichor spattered her lips.

"It means no one gets to leave. Ever. Once you're in, you're in, until they cut you open and fill you with cotton balls."

"They don't actually do that, do they? Stuff you?"

"I don't know, I've never been killed. I'll be sure to let you know as soon as I find out."

They rode in silence after that, her hand on his thigh.

The highway twisted and turned through the high desert, passing through Old West theme towns, resort communities, sludgy lakes and mile after mile of forest. They passed through an Indian reservation. Blank-faced natives sat at either side of the road, in pickup trucks and Subaru wagons, rifles across their laps, jugs of water and sack lunches beside them. Arneson knew the look: relaxed, alert, confident. They wouldn't hesitate to use their guns on anyone who stopped. He kept driving.

They entered Junction City just after eight P.M. The sun was as red as a blood-clot behind the mountains.

"Holy shit." Arneson said. He opened his window, and the stench of acrid burning filled the car.

Sugar woke up coughing, bits of Skunge flying out of her mouth to speckle the glass on her side.