The Tommyknockers (91 page)

He tried the ignition key once more. Still nothing.

He got his camera, hooked the strap over his shoulder, and got out. He stood looking uneasily at the woods on the right side of the road. He thought he heard something behind him—a shuffling sound—and whirled quickly, lips pulled up in a dry grin of fear.

Nothing . . . nothing he could
see.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep . . .

Get moving. You're just standing here using up your air.

He opened the door again, leaned in, and got the gun out of the glove compartment. He loaded it, then tried to put it in his right front pocket. It was too big. He was afraid it would fall out and go off if he left it there. He pulled up his new T-shirt, stuck it in his belt, then pulled the shirt down over it.

He looked at the woods again, then bitterly at the car. He could take pictures, he supposed, but what would they show? Nothing but a deserted country road. You could see those all over the state, even at the height of the summer tourist season. The pictures wouldn't convey the lack of woods sounds; the pictures would not show that the air had been poisoned.

There goes your scoop, Johnny. Oh, you'll write plenty of stories about it, and I've got a feeling you'll be telling a
lot of network-news filming crews which is your good side, but your picture on the cover of
Newsweek?
The Pulitzer Prize? Forget it.

Part of him—a more adult part—insisted that was dumb, that half a loaf was better than none, that most of the reporters in the world would kill to get just a slice from
this
loaf, whatever it turned out to be.

But John Leandro was a man younger than his twenty-four years. When David Bright believed he had seen a generous helping of twerp in Leandro, he hadn't been wrong. There were reasons, of course, but the reasons didn't change the fact. He felt like a rookie who gets a fat pitch during his first at-bat in the majors and hits an opposite-field triple. Not bad . . . but in his heart a voice cries out:
Hey, God, if you was gonna give me a fat one, why didn't You let me get it
all?

Haven Village was less than a mile away. He could walk it in fifteen minutes . . . but then he would never get out of the poison belt before the air in the flat-pack ran out, and he knew it.

If only I'd rented two of these goddam things.

Even if you'd thought of it, you didn't have cash enough to pay the frigging security deposit on two. The question is, Johnny, do you want to die for your scoop or not?

He didn't. If his picture was going to be on the cover of
Newsweek,
he didn't want there to be a black border around it.

He began to trudge back toward the Troy town line. He got five dozen steps before realizing he could hear engines—a lot of them, very faint.

Something going on over on the other side of town.

Might as well be something happening on the dark side of the moon. Forget it.

With another uneasy glance at the woods, he started walking again. Got another dozen steps and realized he could hear another sound: a low, approaching hum from behind him.

He turned. His jaw dropped. In Haven, most of July had been Municipal Gadget Month. As the “becoming” progressed, most Havenites had lost interest in such things . . . but the gadgets were still there, strange white elephants such as the ones Gardener had seen in Bobbi's shed. Many had been pressed into service as border guards. Hazel McCready sat in her townhall office before a bank
of earphones, monitoring each briefly in turn. She was furious at being left behind to do this duty while the future of
everything
hung in the balance out at Bobbi's farm. But now . . . someone
had
entered town after all.

Glad of the diversion, Hazel moved to take care of the intruder.

It was the Coke machine which had been in front of Cooder's market. Leandro stood frozen with amazement, watching it approach: a jolly red-and-white rectangle six and a half feet high and four wide. It was slicing rapidly through the air toward him, its bottom about eighteen inches over the road.

I've fallen into an ad,
Leandro thought.
Some kind of weird ad. In a second or two the door of that thing will open and O. J. Simpson is going to come flying out.

It was a funny idea. Leandro started to laugh. Even as he was laughing, it occurred to him that here was the picture . . . oh God, here was the picture, here was a Coca-Cola vending machine floating up a rural stretch of two-lane blacktop!

He grabbed for the Nikon. The Coke machine, humming to itself, banked around Leandro's stalled car and came on. It looked like a madman's hallucination, but the front of the machine proclaimed that, however much one might want to believe the contrary, this was
THE REAL THING.

Still giggling, Leandro realized it wasn't stopping—it was, in fact, speeding up. And what was a soda machine, really? A refrigerator with ads on it. And refrigerators were
heavy.
The Coke machine, a red-and-white guided missile, slid through the air at Leandro. The wind made a tiny hollow hooting noise in the coin return.

Leandro forgot the picture. He leapt to the left. The Coke machine struck his right shin and broke it. For a moment his leg was nothing but a bolt of pure white pain. He screamed into the gold cup as he landed on his stomach at the side of the road, tearing his shirt open. The Nikon flew to the end of its strap and hit the gravelly soft shoulder with a crunch.

Oh you son of a bitch that camera cost four hundred dollars!

He got to his knees and turned around, shirt torn open, chest bleeding, leg screaming.

The Coke machine banked back. It hung in the air for a moment, its front turning back and forth in small arcs that reminded Leandro of the sweeps of a radar dish. The sun flashed off its glass door. Leandro could see bottles of Coke and Fanta inside.

Suddenly it pointed at him—and accelerated toward him.

Found me, Christ
—

He got up and tried to hop toward his car on his left foot. The soda machine bore down on him, coin return hooting dismally.

Shrieking, Leandro threw himself forward and rolled. The Coke machine missed him by perhaps four inches. He landed in the road. Pain bellowed up his broken leg. Leandro screamed.

The machine turned, paused, found him, and started back again.

Leandro groped for the pistol in his belt and brought it out. He fired four times, balanced on his knees. Each bullet went home. The third shattered the machine's glass door.

The last thing Leandro saw before the machine—which weighed just a bit over six hundred pounds—hit him was various soft drinks foaming and dripping from the broken necks of the bottles his bullets had shattered.

Broken bottle-necks coming at him at forty miles an hour.

Mama!
Leandro's mind shrieked, and he threw his arms up in front of his face in a crisscross.

He didn't have to worry about jagged bottle-necks after all, or the microbes which might have been in the cheeseburgers from the Burger Ranch, for that matter. One of life's great truths is this: when one is about to be struck by a speeding six-hundred-pound Coke machine, one need worry about nothing else.

There was a thudding, crunching sound. The front of Leandro's skull shattered like a Ming vase hurled onto the floor. A split second later his spine snapped. For a moment the machine carried him along, plastered to it like a very large bug plastered to the windshield of a
fast-moving car. His splayed legs dragged on the road, the white line unreeling between them. The heels of his loafers eroded to smoking rubber nodules. One fell off.

Then he slid down the front of the vending machine and flopped onto the road.

The Coke machine started back toward Haven Village. Its coin-holder had been jarred when the machine hit Leandro, and as it moved rapidly through the air, humming, a steady stream of quarters, nickels, and dimes spewed out of the coin return and went rolling about on the road.

Gardener knew that Bobbi would make her move soon—the old Bobbi had fulfilled what the New and Improved Bobbi saw as its last obligation to good old Jim Gardener, who had come to save his friend and who had stayed on to whitewash one hell of a strange fence.

He thought, in fact, that it would be the sling—that Bobbi would want to go up first, and, once up, would simply not send it back down. There he'd be, down by the hatch, and there he'd die, next to that strange symbol. Bobbi wouldn't even have to deal with the messy reality of murder. There would be no need to think about good old Gard dying slowly and miserably of starvation, either. Good old Gard would die of multiple hemorrhages very quickly.

But Bobbi insisted that Gard go up first, and the sardonic cut of her eyes told Gardener that Bobbi knew exactly what he had been thinking . . . and she hadn't had to read his mind to do it, either.

The sling rose in the air and Gardener clung tightly to the cable, fighting a need to vomit—that need, he thought, was quickly going to become impossible to deny, but Bobbi had sent him a thought which came through loud and clear as soon as they wriggled out through the hatch again:
Don't take the mask off until you get topside.
Were Bobbi's thoughts clearer, or was it his imagination? No. Not imagination. They had both gotten another boost
inside the ship. His nose was still bleeding and his shirt was sopping with it; the air mask was filling up. It was by far the worst nosebleed he'd had since Bobbi first brought him out here.

Why not?
he had sent back, trying to be very careful and send only that top thought—nothing below it.

Most of the machines we heard were air-exchangers. Breathing what's in the trench now would do you in just as quick as breathing what was in the ship when we first opened it. The two won't equalize for the rest of the day, maybe longer.

Not the sort of thinking one would usually suspect in a woman who wanted to kill you—but that look was still in Bobbi's eyes, and the
feel
of it colored all of Bobbi's thoughts.

Hanging on to the cable for dear life, biting at the rubber pegs, Gardener fought to hold on to his stomach.

The sling reached the top. He wandered away on legs that felt as if they were made of rubber bands and paper clips, barely seeing the Electrolux and the length of cable manipulating the buttons;
Count ten,
he thought.
Count ten, get as far from the trench as you can, then take off the mask and take what comes. I think I'd rather die than feel like this, anyway.

He got as far as five and could hold back no longer. Crazy images danced before his eyes: dumping the drink down Patricia McCardle's dress, seeing Bobbi reeling off her porch to greet him when he finally arrived; the big man with the gold cup over his mouth and nose turning to look at him from the passenger window of a four-wheel-drive as Gardener lay drunk on the porch.

If I'd dug in a few different places out at that gravel pit, why, I just might have found that one too!
he thought, and that was when his stomach finally rebelled.

He tore the mouthpiece off and threw up, groping for a pine tree at the edge of the clearing and clinging to it for support.

He did it again, and realized he had never experienced this sort of vomiting in his entire life. He had read about it, however. He was ejecting stuff—most of it bloody—in wads that flew like bullets. And bullets were almost what they were. He was having a seizure of projectile vomiting. This was not considered a sign of good health in medical circles.

Gray veils drifted over his sight. His knees buckled.

Oh fuck I'm dying,
he thought, but the idea seemed to have no emotional gradient. It was dreary news, no more, no less. He felt his hand slipping down the rough bark of the pine. He felt tarry sap. Faintly he was aware that the air smelled foul and yellow and sulfuric—it was the way a paper mill smells after a week of still, overcast weather. He didn't care. Whether there were Elysian fields or just a big black nothing, there would not be that stink. So maybe he would come out a winner anyway. Best to just let go. To just—

No! No, you will not just let go! You came back to save Bobbi, and Bobbi was maybe already beyond saving, but that kid's around and he might not be. Please, Gard, at least try!

“Don't let it be for nothing,” he said in a cracked, wavering voice. “Jesus Christ, please don't let it be for nothing.”

The wavering gray mists cleared a little. The vomiting subsided. He raised a hand to his face and flung away a sheet of blood with it.

A hand touched the back of his neck as he did, and Gardener's flesh pebbled with goosebumps. A hand . . . Bobbi's hand . . . but not a
human
hand, not anymore.

Gard, are you all right?

“All right,” he answered aloud, and managed to get to his feet.

The world wavered, then came back into focus. The first thing he saw in it was Bobbi. The look on Bobbi's face was one of cold, cheerless calculation. He saw no love there, not even a counterfeit of concern. Bobbi had become beyond such things.

“Let's go,” Gardener said hoarsely. “You drive. I'm feeling . . .” He stumbled and had to grab at Bobbi's bunched, strange shoulder to keep from falling. “. . . a little under the weather.”

By the time they got back to the farm, Gardener was better. The bleeding from his nose had subsided to a trickle. He had swallowed a fair amount of blood while
wearing the mouthpiece, and a lot of the blood he had seen in his vomit must have been that. He hoped.

He had lost a total of nine teeth.