Odd Apocalypse (44 page)

In 480
B.C.
, three hundred Spartans under the command of Leonidas had for a while held at bay 200,000 Persians under Xerxes in the battle of Thermopylae, before being slaughtered. I failed to see the similarity between my modest shopping expedition and one of the fiercest military engagements in history.

Even though it is always fruitless to seek an explanation from Annamaria when she makes such baffling statements, I considered asking for amplification. But she had opened the door for me, had waved me out of the kitchen, followed me onto the porch, and stood smiling at me as I looked back at her from the bottom of the steps. The moment to press her for elucidation seemed to have passed.

Annamaria’s smile is so comforting that, in its radiance, you can almost believe that this world offers nothing more threatening than what you’d find in Pooh Corner—in spite of references to the slaughter of the Spartans.

I said, “The bell rang last night.”

“Yes, I know.”

I didn’t think she could have heard it from her room, through two closed doors.

Previously she had told me that if the bell rang in the night, we would soon thereafter move on to a new place.

She said, “I’ll see you again when the wind blows the water white and black,” and she turned away, retreating into the cottage.

Beyond the beach, the sea spread blue to the horizon. The day remained still and mild, and the sky was so clear that it seemed I should be able to discern the stars in spite of the sunshine that concealed them.

Not mystified but certainly bewildered, I walked north half a mile to the heart of the village, with a wariness that I hadn’t felt minutes earlier. Shaded by ancient California live oaks, the downtown shopping area was a three-lane street flanked by just six blocks of stores, restaurants, and quaint inns. If you wanted a real town, you had to go up the coast to Santa Barbara.

I didn’t know that a guy would soon offer to neuter me or that he would be carrying a pistol fitted with a sound suppressor. I have a psychic gift that occasionally includes a prophetic dream, but when awake, I do not see moments of the future.

When I first noticed the truck that pricked my curiosity, I did not realize that a formidable enemy was behind the steering wheel. I didn’t even get a glimpse of the driver.

My unrelenting curiosity has gotten me in big trouble. It has also saved my butt a lot of times. On balance, it’s a plus. And it isn’t true that curiosity killed the cat. Usually, cats are done in by coyotes or Peterbilts.

Anyway, my curiosity is part of my gift, my sixth sense. I am compelled to indulge it.

The truck was an eighteen-wheel ProStar+. The cool-looking, aerodynamic tractor with the massive grille and lizard-eye headlights was painted red and black with sparkly silver striping. The black trailer bore no corporate logo or advertising.

As I reached the shopping district, the eighteen-wheeler cruised past me, into the heart of the village, heading north. Without realizing what I was doing, I picked up my pace to a race walk. When the ProStar+ braked at a stop sign, I almost caught up with it.

As the behemoth accelerated across the intersection, I began to run, which was when I realized that I knew intuitively something about the truck must be evil.

Well, not the ProStar+ itself. I’m not one who believes that a vehicle can be possessed by a demonic spirit and, driverless, speed around town to run down people for the thrill of tasting blood with its tires, any more than I believe that Herbie, the Volkswagen in that series of Disney movies, had a mind of its own with a desire to bring lovers together and to thwart villains. If you believe the former, you have to believe the latter, and the next thing you know, you’ll be taking your Ford, with its sexy GPS voice, to the car wash just to see her naked and soapy.

I fell rapidly behind the truck, but then, near the northern end of the village, it turned left off the street, toward a supermarket. If the driver had been making a delivery, he would have gone behind the building to the loading dock. Instead, he pulled to a stop across several parking spaces at the end of the lot nearest to the street.

By the time I reached the eighteen-wheeler, where it stood in the trembling shade of a row of breeze-stirred eucalypti, it was unattended. Catching my breath, I walked slowly around the vehicle, looking it over.

My intuition bristled like the hackles on a dog. Heightened intuition is part of my sixth sense.

The day was mild, the breeze mellow, but the area immediately around the truck felt colder than could be explained by eucalyptus shade alone. When I put the palm of one hand against the sidewall of the trailer, it felt as though the driver had pulled off the road to wait out a blinding snow squall at high elevation.

This wasn’t what truckers called a “reefer” that hauled frozen food. No refrigeration unit was mounted on the front wall of the trailer, behind the tractor.

I stood on the step beside the fuel tank to peer through a side window of the cab. Leather seats, wood panels and trim, an angled middle console with CD player and GPS, and a roomy sleeping box behind the cockpit provided a cozy environment.

From the overhead citizens-band radio with the drop-down microphone hung a string of red beads onto which were threaded five white skulls the size of plums. They appeared to have been carved by hand, perhaps from bone.

People decorated the driver’s compartments of their vehicles with all manner of items. Miniature skulls no more proved this driver dangerous than a dangling figurine of the Little Mermaid would have proved him to be an innocent dreamer.

Nevertheless, I went around to the back of the rig to study the rear doors of the trailer. Maybe I needed a key, maybe not.

Before I could ascertain how the long latch bolts worked, a low silky voice asked, “Do you like my truck, dirtbag?”

He stood about six feet two, which gave him a few inches on me. Although he looked perhaps thirty-five, his spiky hair was white, as were his eyebrows. He had Nordic features and a melanoma-doesn’t-scare-me tanning-booth glow. His eyes were the precise blue of the water in a toilet bowl equipped with one of those sanitizers—and just as appealing.

Ever hopeful that even a situation that seemed fraught with the potential for violence might turn out to be an occasion for mutual understanding and camaraderie, I pretended not to have heard the
dirtbag
part.

I said, “Yes, sir, she’s a beauty.”

“You want to know what I’m hauling? Curious, are you?”

“No, sir. Not me. Just an admirer of trucks.”

His teeth were so unnaturally white that I felt in danger of sustaining a radiation burn from his smile.

“Are you a believer?” he asked.

In the circumstances, the question seemed so loaded that any too-specific answer might offend. “Well, sir, I guess we all believe in one thing or another.”

He looked as though he believed in rhinestone-cowboy clothing. His custom, pointy-toed black boots were inlaid with patterns of white snakeskin. Black jeans with scarlet stitching along the hems, inseams, and pockets. Red silk shirt with black stitching. A black bolo tie with what might have been a carved bone slide in the form of a serpent’s head and matching bone aglets. His black sports coat featured scarlet lapels and a collar peppered with sequins.

“If you’re a believer,” he said, “how many steps are there in the stairway to Heaven?”

“Well, sir, I’m no theologist. Just a fry cook out of work.”

“There are just two steps in the stairway to Heaven, dirtbag. The first step is touching my truck. The second is not explaining yourself to my satisfaction.”

“Sir, the truth is, she’s a beauty and I’ve always wanted to be a long-haul trucker.”

“You never wanted to be a long-haul trucker.”

“I will admit that’s a stretch, but she is a beauty.”

The .45 Sig Sauer with silencer appeared in his hand the way a dove appears in the hand of a good magician, as if it materialized out of thin air. Worse, the pistol was aimed point-blank at my crotch, which wouldn’t have worried me so much if it had been a dove.

“How would you like to be a eunuch, never be troubled again by performance anxiety?”

He fried me with his bright smile, and I was like an easy-over egg on the griddle, waiting for the spatula.

“I wouldn’t much like that, sir.”

The line of eucalyptus trees largely screened us from passing traffic in the street. People came and went from the supermarket parking lot, but they were all much closer to the building than to us. They weren’t interested in a couple of truckers, and the cowboy’s body prevented them from seeing the gun.

“You think I won’t do it right here in the open. But you’d be surprised what people don’t see. They won’t hear the shot. You’ll drop before you get the breath to scream. The instant you drop, I’ll stomp your throat, crush your windpipe. Then I’ll handle you like you were a drunk, prop you against one of those trees, like you’re a hobo sleeping off a bender. Nobody wants to check out a piss-drunk hobo. And I guarantee, no one will remember me. No one will have seen me.”

I recognized sincerity in his toilet-water eyes, and I knew that, as crazy as it sounded, he might flush me out of this world.

Being as I’m a low-key guy and as ordinary-looking as any other unemployed fry cook, considering also how genuinely terrified I must have looked, he didn’t expect me to seize his wrist in both of my hands. I forced the muzzle of the Sig Sauer away from my dangly things, farther down between my legs.

He squeezed off a shot, which made less noise than did the slug ricocheting off the pavement near my left foot.

Maybe I couldn’t have twisted his wrist hard enough to make him drop the weapon, but something extraordinary happened. When I touched him, even as the bullet left the sound suppressor with a soft
thup
, the parking lot went away, and for a few seconds a vision in my mind’s eye swelled outward to encircle me.

I seemed to be standing in a moonless night, before a stainless-steel platform on steel legs, a round stage, lit by a halo of small spotlights hovering above. On the stage, in straight-backed chairs sat three children: a boy of about eight, a girl of perhaps six, and an older girl who might have been ten. Something was wrong with them. They sat wide-eyed but slack-mouthed, their hands limp in their laps. Emotionless. Drugged. A white-haired man in a blood-red suit, black shirt, and black mask ascended to the stage on steel steps. He was carrying a flamethrower. He torched the children.

The vision burst like a bubble, reality returned, and the cowboy and I staggered backward from each other, the pistol on the pavement between us. His stunned expression and a wildness in his eyes told me two things: First, he’d seen the same vision that I had seen; second, he was the masked man in the red suit, and he already intended at some future date to set helpless children afire in an insane act of homicidal performance art.

I had just experienced my first portent of the future that did not come in the form of a prophetic dream.

He went for the dropped pistol, but I was able to kick it under the eighteen-wheeler even as his fingers were an inch from the prize.

As if from a forearm sheath, a knife slid into his right hand, and a thin six-inch blade sprang out of the yellow handle.

I dislike guns, but I’m no fan of knives, and I carry neither. I turned away from him and ran across the parking lot, toward the market, where he wouldn’t dare slash at me in front of witnesses.

Suddenly the entire world seemed to have turned hostile, as if the spirit of ultimate darkness had arrived to rule, his hour come ’round at last. Even my morning shadow, following as I ran westward, seemed to have ill intentions toward me, as if it would catch me and drag me down.

When I glanced back, the cowboy trucker wasn’t coming after me. I couldn’t see him anywhere. I slowed to a fast walk, so as not to draw attention to myself, and when the automatic door slid aside, I went into the coolness of the market.

If I had been in Pico Mundo, my hometown, I would have known what to do. The chief of police there, Wyatt Porter, understood me and believed in me. On my say-so, he would have detained the cowboy and searched the truck.

But I had been on the road for some time now, going where my unusual talents were most needed, drawn by siren songs that I could not hear but to which my blood responded. Nobody in this place knew me, and I would sound like just another drug-addled paranoid, another piece of sad human wreckage of the kind that littered the landscape of an America that seemed to be rapidly fading out of history in a world growing darker by the day.

In the market, I stood at a closed check-out station, pretending to be searching for a particular magazine among the many offered, but in fact watching the customer doors at the north and south ends of the building.

Little more than a month earlier, in a town called Magic Beach, I had for the first time, by touch, recognized a potential murderer.

On that occasion, into my mind’s eye—and into his—had erupted a scene from a nightmare of nuclear Armageddon that I’d dreamed the previous night, and I had known that he must be part of a conspiracy to atomize American cities. But I had not dreamed of these children set afire upon a stage.

I didn’t expect the cowboy to follow me. I expected him instead to board his big rig and head for whatever highway to Hell might be programmed into his GPS. The vision surely rattled him as much as it did me. But as I long ago learned, expectations are fragile and easily shattered.

The cowboy came through the north doors, spotted me at once, and approached purposefully. He looked like a star in some parallel-world version of Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry, one that featured maniac country singers.

I hurried down the cereal aisle, turned right, and crossed the big store to the produce section, buying time to think.

Even if I could find a sympathetic shopper or a credulous clerk or an off-duty police officer picking through the McIntosh apples, I couldn’t seek help from anyone because of the aftermath of my few weeks in Magic Beach. Bad people were in jail in that town, and other bad people were dead. Homeland Security and the FBI had been brought in at the end of those events by an anonymous phone call that I placed; and now they were seeking someone fitting my description, though they had no name. I dared not attract the attention of the police in this smaller town, which was little more than a hundred miles farther along the coast from Magic Beach.