Fathom (22 page)

It had been an easy guess. They were right where he expected to find them: in the ignition, where they, too, were collecting dust. When they swayed under Sam’s hand, they kicked up a small cloud. He wrinkled his nose and fought a sneeze. He felt around the dashboard and looked for the choke, located the gearshift, and positioned his feet on the appropriate pedals.

The big machine gagged and objected, with a gurgling metal grumble like a train being strangled. And then, once Sam stumbled upon the correct sequence of commands, kicks, lever pulls, and key turns, the great engine turned over and the slow, heavy pistons began to fire.

That’s when Sam realized he had forgotten to open the double doors that secured the garage.

They swung out on giant wooden arms, but if Sam got out of the seat and tried to open them now, he was sure that the truck would die and never restart. Besides, what did it matter if he damaged a little civic property in the midst of stealing some?

He eased the clutch, jammed the gas, almost stalled the truck, and then lurched forward into the doors, which buckled outward and flopped down to the ground.

The truck rolled out over them, jumping the edges and snapping the boards with its terrible weight. It crawled into the yard, over a small tree, and around the corner of the courthouse.

Once he made it into the street, Sam began to feel pretty good about the whole thing. The road was mostly empty, and he was going at a pretty good, pretty loud clip—or so it felt. In reality, he figured that anyone capable of sustaining a steady jog could have caught up and climbed aboard, but who would bother? The truck shambled and jangled along with a momentum that felt unbeatable
and a noise level that would surely prove off-putting to all but the most dedicated pursuer.

And who was there to give chase?

Even if anyone realized that Sam was stealing the truck, there was no good way to get it off the island, so where would he take it?

He took it back to the courtyard, or as close to the courtyard as he could get. The machine bounced and rolled, bumbled and recoiled at top volume over the half-paved road. It hung up in the sandier places and resisted the thicker gravel patches, but since it wasn’t carrying a load of water, it wasn’t so heavy as it could be, and its own inertia pushed it forward.

The seat squeaked and strained beneath Sam with every bump.

He coaxed the truck as close to the edge of the private drive as he dared, knowing that the sand would bog it down. He let the engine idle in its low, coughing rhythm and scanned the trees for the massive creature whose commands he followed because he did not know what else to do.

“Here,” the thing called, and the voice sounded terrifically close, though the monster itself was yards away—three-quarters of the way between the courtyard wall and the unpaved drive. It was carrying the statue, but carrying it slowly, with intense strain.

“Come and help me,” it suggested.

Sam wasn’t sure. If he let go of the clutch, or if he released any one of the precariously balanced pedals and the truck’s engine were to stop . . . could he fire it up again?

“Come
here
,” the thing commanded.

“But I’m not—”

“You’re better than nothing.”

Sam leaped down from the truck’s seat and the engine sputtered to a halt. He was certain that he should’ve left it in park, or left something braked or braced, but he didn’t know enough about the way the truck moved to get very technical with his operation.

He ran across the yard and met the beast in the middle, where it was half-carrying, half-dragging the unwieldy girl in her frozen pose.

“Take her leg, take her thigh. Hold her from that end.”

Sam did as he was told and shuddered beneath the sudden, sharp weight of her body. His feet sank and his hands slipped, but he squeezed and clutched, and he held up his section as best he could.

“Now,
walk
.”

“I’m trying,” he insisted.

“Try faster. In a matter of seconds, we will no longer be alone.”

“I don’t understand,” Sam tried to say, but the girl’s weight smothered his protests.

“Later,” the creature answered. “Once we’re on our way.”

The creature was wilting beneath the load; it was coming apart in small pieces—fragmenting and snapping with a sound like a tree limb being twisted from a trunk. Whatever the monster had used to make itself, the materials weren’t strong enough to transport stone . . . at least, they weren’t strong enough to move it very far.

When they reached the truck, Sam and the monster were forced to set the girl down in order to unlatch the truck’s back gate. It unfastened with a clang and dropped hard on its hinges.

“Up,” the creature said, grasping the girl’s torso and hoisting one arm underneath her chin.

“Up,” Sam agreed. He reached for her foot and seized it. With one hand under her knee and one wrapped around her ankle, he helped maneuver her onto the truck’s back bed between the metal tanks and rubber-coated canvas hoses.

There wasn’t much room, but there was enough to hold her and to hold the creature, too. It jammed itself into a cubby beside her and hunkered down low while Sam climbed back into the driver’s seat.

“Hurry,” it said again.

“I’m
working
on it.”

His knees twitched as he wrestled with the keys and the levers, the knobs and the pedals. The engine resisted restarting, but Sam was determined, and he yanked the clutch in and out, forward and back.

It retched to life with a curdled hiccup and jumped forward, only to retreat. Sam punched his foot against the gas, and the truck surged again, then settled back onto its wheels.

“Shit!”

“What? What have you done?” the creature asked. It sat up and peered nervously over the tanks, at the edge of the courtyard perhaps five hundred feet away. “You
must
make this machine move.”

“We’re stuck,” Sam explained with a whine. “The truck’s too heavy, with you and the . . . and her, and the tanks. It’s stuck in the sand.”

“They’re
coming
.”

“Then get out and
push
,” Sam snapped back. “I can’t help, I’ve got to drive. If you want this thing to move, get out and give it a shove!”

It understood enough to agree, so it abandoned the stone girl and slipped down off the back of the truck. It pushed the tailgate closed and began to thrust with its weight in fast pulses.

The truck began to rock, and Sam tried to match the monster’s stride with extra gas on the upswing.

The noise was enough to wake the dead or draw a crowd, and the engine’s stink as it billowed smoke and fuel made Sam’s eyes water. He was glad he wasn’t the one pushing, back there by the exhaust, but he hoped that the creature would really put its goddamned back into the effort, please, because over the engine’s ear-popping, pounding song, even Sam could hear people coming.

The vehicle rocked back and forth on its wheels and the monster rocked back and forth on its knees, and finally, just as a black-robed man came to stand in the archway, the truck sprang up out of its rut and pitched forward.

The engine’s strain lightened as the truck started to move, and the monster continued to push behind it until they reached the firmer, packed street at the edge of the block. And Sam was glad for the extra assistance, because the man in the archway had started to run—and he was not alone.

The minister had thrown back his hood and was closing in at top speed, followed by half a dozen others in various stages of covering themselves with the long, dark garments.

“Idiots,” the creature complained as he gave the truck one more encouraging heave and leaped into the back.

Sam gave the truck as much gas as it could stand, and it began to pick up speed.

“What did you say?” he yelled over his shoulder.

“Faster!” it ordered, failing to answer the question, while offering a suggestion that Sam would’ve been thrilled to act upon.

“It won’t
go
any faster!” he swore. “We’re too heavy!”

The furious passenger almost took a swat at Sam’s head from pure malice, but the man’s objection had given it an idea. “All right,” it said. “I think I can help.”

Between furtive glances over his shoulder and back at the road, Sam watched the creature as it yanked at the water tanks. “Oh no
way
. You couldn’t carry her by yourself, but you can throw those things around?”

“I can’t . . . throw them . . . around.” It shook the tank until the brass-fitted hinges that held it to the truck’s bed stretched and snapped. The hinges peeled away, and the monster used all its bulk to tip the tank forward.

The tank teetered and fell, smashing down onto the tailgate
and shattering it. The gate popped off and slammed into the street, tripping the nearest pursuer—a man whose long legs gave him enough advantage to send him ahead, but no extra reflexes to dodge an incoming gate.

It cracked him across the chest and knocked him to the ground.

The creature sat down behind the tank, which rolled from left to right between the edge of the truck’s bed and the supine statue, which was faceup and contorted. Every time the tank revolved toward the girl, the creature would jam its own body between them to absorb the worst of the impact. Every time the tank collided with the thing’s makeshift body, it made a sound like a lead pipe hitting a dead oak.

The truck dropped heavily into a pothole and then yanked itself up and over, which rattled the tank enough that the creature could wedge one arm and leg behind it. Then the creature steadily levered the metal cylinder forward, and out the back of the truck—which had no more barrier to hold its cargo in place.

Leaving long drag-marks in the painted metal of the truck bed, the tank went over the side and into the face of an angry woman.

Sam swallowed hard and kept driving.

When the first shot rang out, he almost fell out of the truck.

“Ignore it!” the creature ordered, but Sam wasn’t concerned about the creature getting shot—he was worried about getting himself shot, which was another thing entirely.

He held his head down, hunkered it tight over the big round steering wheel, and did his best to guide the truck down the half-paved, half-packed road.

“Someone is shooting at me . . . ,” he whimpered quietly, but the creature heard him anyway.

“Keep going.”

“I
am
,” he said. And then he added to himself,
Because once the
shooting starts, there’s no good reason to slow down and let them catch up, now, is there?
The stakes had gone from arrest and disgrace to death, and Sam wasn’t entirely sure how he’d traveled that spectrum in the span of an hour, but he didn’t like it very much. And the creature could quit telling him to keep going any day now, because there was no chance in hell that Sam was going to do anything else.

All of this only raised the question of where exactly he thought he was going with this old truck and its cargo.

Behind him, Sam heard the tearing, rending squeal of metal being yanked and stripped. Encouraged by a fearsome shove from the enormous and increasingly battered-looking creature, the tank crashed to the truck’s bed and rolled swiftly out the back, where it collided with another running, robed pursuer.

Sam ground the full weight of his leg down onto the gas pedal and ducked his head between his shoulders as he drove, and the truck gave a happy leap forward.

Pleased by this—since it was the first truly good sign he’d seen all afternoon—Sam lifted his head a fraction and glanced over his shoulder again.

The creature stood behind him, at almost its full height.

It leaned down and over so that its head was next to Sam’s. “How far is it to the ferry?”

“The ferry,” Sam repeated, feeling silly because of
course
that’s where they were going. “It’s—”

But before he could finish, another loud report sounded, and the creature’s left eye was blown out of its head.

The thing’s neck bobbed, and it lifted one hand to feel the hole the bullet had left.

“Too bad we’re out of those tanks,” it griped.

“Are you . . .”

While Sam tried to divide his attention fairly between the road and the huge, misshapen face that loomed a few inches to his right, he saw (more closely than he would’ve liked) how the creature’s moldering skin rearranged itself.

It was restoring the spot, filling the gaping, bloodless wound with maggots and mulch. Within seconds, a new pupil was fashioned from the hull of an acorn, and the terrible face was no more terrible than it had been to begin with—though the eyes no longer matched.

“That’s . . . that’s . . .” Sam wanted to say “disgusting,” but he restrained himself and returned his attention to the road. He glanced down at the mirror on the truck’s side. In it, he could see that the minister was shrinking in the distance. He wasn’t even bothering to shoot anymore.

“How much farther to the ferry? How long until we can get her off this island?”

“Not very far, I don’t think. It’s hard to tell. It’s getting dark,” he pointed out.

The creature looked up at the sky, a reflex or a habit left over from some unknown tic. “Yes,” it agreed.

“Is that good or bad?” Sam asked.

The creature shrugged, and winked its new eye to adjust it. “Neither. It is only dark. But,” it added, “I imagine that it will be good for
me
. It’s better if no one sees me.”

Shutters and shades were snapping up inside every home and store they passed. The rambling, rattling fire truck and its fugitive passengers were attracting attention, but that was mostly because they were peeling along the main drag at twenty-five or thirty miles an hour. In a town that still relied mostly on horses or feet for transportation, a speeding truck was a sight to behold.

It occurred to Sam that this was why the minister had put his gun away. He had followed them almost into town. Even though
it was late in the day, there were still people present . . . and even though the minister was obviously not alone in his wicked plans, the entire population was not allied beside him.