The Suicide Motor Club (14 page)

SITTING ON THE FLOOR OF THE VAN WAS NOT EASY FOR JUDE. SHE HAD LITTLE TO
hold on to in the Chevy's spartan interior save the wheel well she rested her tailbone against, hunching forward to hold her knees. The absence of windows had left her mildly carsick. She wore her habit, as instructed, but it was hot and constricting. Worse, she felt like an impostor. It might as well have been a Halloween costume for as much as she felt like a “holy vessel.”

I'm lost I can't do this I'm on a fool's errand.

The motion of the van and the hum of the motor lulled her nearly to sleep, but every time she got close she started awake as she feared the van was rolling, in the desert, under the moon. “Huh!” she would say, and lurch this way or that, but still the van hummed on under the stars, through and past the intermittent glow of oncoming headlights, the floor ever harder under her ass. Lettuce was having no difficulties, snoring in that distressing, hitching way particular to the stout and middle-aged. His leg touched hers, but it was not awkward. After the call had come in, something had changed in him. Something had opened. He was no longer a gruff, prickly bear defending abstract lines of authority; now he was a soldier and she, irrespective of her sex, rode with him into the valley of death. The very little bit of
talking done in the closeness of the van had been between the two of them.

“Know how I lost my back choppers?” he had said.

“Tell me.”

“Bit down hard and cracked them on a bad landing, same one that gave me the limp. Korea, '52. I had been flying a C-47 transport ship. I really wanted to do fighters, everybody did, but that wasn't what I pulled. So I flew me a gooney bird and dumped flares for night bombing or hauled supplies, mostly hauled supplies. One night an engine flamed out, no reason, just old. But it was raining. That, plus her pulling with the dead engine gave me a bad pitch coming in—I put down on the strip and wham-bang, hit and bounced, skidded, ended up off the runway half in the mud. Broke five teeth, three leg bones, a foot, plus had to get two vertebrae fused. I'd'a got dentures, but I still had enough teeth to chew, and they were in the back anyway. VA takes care of me all right, though. Honestly, I was glad to get home. I didn't feel much one way or the other about the Koreans. Or the Chinese. I liked flying, but I haven't done it since. I guess they had me pegged. Never took fire. Couldn't even land an old prop-job gooney bird in a thunderstorm. I wouldn't have made a great jet pilot. Jet pilot would have got back in the cockpit. Me, I was done. I never wanted to see that ground coming up at me wrong again.”

“I can't imagine being a pilot. I don't think I could even drive a car,” Judith said. “After my wreck, I didn't want to. Nobody made me.”

Now Lettuce was sleeping and Shane was awake, stealing glances at her when he thought her eyes were closed. She knew she had some physical beauty, but for most of her life it had seemed a burden. Now she envied older women their invisibility to men.

I'm not for that anymore Shane don't think about me keep focused what we're doing is dangerous so very dangerous.

Even Wicklow had gone white when the phone rang. He had picked
up the receiver, stuck it between shoulder and ear, scribbled notes on a steno pad hanging from a nail nearby.

“It's Missouri,” he had said. “You drive in one hour.”

And so they had.

Near dawn, she finally slept, though not for long. She woke up just past the Missouri border, soaked in sweat, making guttural noises that were building up to a scream. Lettuce grasped her shoulder.

Before she knew what she was saying, she looked up at him with mad, wide eyes.

“Don't touch me!” she said. “You're dead! You're dead! You're dead!”

—

THE CHEVY VAN DROVE WEST ON ROUTE 66, SLOWING JUST A LITTLE AS IT PASSED
the Avalon Garden motel. The time was shortly after two
P.M.
Lettuce, who had moved up to the passenger seat, scanned the brush not far from the building, though his eyes were drawn back to the Sabre jet decaying near the ruin of the greenhouse. He snapped his eyes back to the brush, said, “I see the Alpha car.” Hank nodded. The Pontiac GTO had been poorly hidden, its solar-red paint showing through gaps in the young trees it sat behind. “Holy shit, that's really it,” Lettuce said, his hands starting to shake.

“Keep it together,” Hank said. “We can't have two people freaking out.”

“It's together.”

Hank eyed Lettuce for a moment longer, then wheeled the van around to make a U-turn.

Judith sat in the back, her arms folded, trying to look strong.

“I'll go,” she said.

“No,” Hank said, “You won't. You'll watch the van and
I'll
go.”

She didn't say anything.

—

LETTUCE MIGHT HAVE BEEN IN CHARGE, BUT HANK WAS THE STRONG ONE. WICKLOW
had recruited Hank through his uncle Tracy, a former FBI man, even though Hank had grown up on the other side of the badge.

He had been convicted of robbing a movie theater, a vacuum cleaner repair shop, two banks, and a used-car lot before he was twenty. His lawyer hadn't been able to make the insanity plea stick, but the jury clearly had doubts about the faculties of a boy who claimed the devil used to visit his momma in her bed and finally took her out the window with him. That his accomplice, a hardened criminal, had been able to manipulate such a weak-minded boy was no surprise. He was out in six years, even though it might have been his bullet that paralyzed the car salesman who tried to defend his cash box with a hammer. Hank was a good getaway driver, but an even better shot. In prison, a Mexican tattoo artist of some talent had covered him in religious tattoos, the most striking of which portrayed a somewhat Mexican-looking Jesus praying at Gethsemane, a circle of crosses around him. This was on his angular, rather bony chest. Wicklow had come to him the day before his release.

After Judith woke from her dream, she had tearfully done everything in her power to explain to Hank and Lettuce that the mission was doomed, that some if not all of them would die. Shane listened in silence.

“I know how I sound, but you have to believe me. Look at the sweat on me; when I sweat like this the dreams I have come true. How can you believe in
them
and not believe in other things that shouldn't be?”

“Bad dreams aren't enough to scrub the whole mission,” Lettuce had said. “They give me bad dreams too, every night, but I still say we go after them.”

“Call it off, please,” she had said, hating how weak and tremulous her voice sounded, hating that she couldn't cut the dream from her
own mind and graft it into theirs. Nothing short of that would turn them, but it was beyond her power.

“Listen,” Hank had said. “You know how many times I made this drive, trying to find this group? Three. You know how many times we actually found them sitting? One.
This
one. You saw the files.
That's Luther Nixon's fucking car.
You don't want to go, that's fine. I don't want you to. I had my doubts about bringing a woman along anyway. Especially you. What with your kid . . .”

Lettuce shot him a warning glance.

“Yeah. Oops. But if you think I'm turning my happy ass around and letting them get away because
you
remembered you had a pussy, you're wrong. You stay in the van. Just give me the fucking holy water.”

THEY EASED THE VAN OFF THE ROAD AND INTO A COPSE OF TREES A HUNDRED
yards west of the motel. They sat now, the engine ticking, watching the building for movement. They took in the scene.

“Cloudy,” Shane said.

Lettuce nodded.

“Can't be helped. This is our shot.”

Hank said “Look over there. Patch a' sunshine coming.”

“More clouds behind it,” Lettuce said.

“Yeah, and more sunshine behind that. Probably be like this all day. What do you say? Go now and try to torch it before the sun hits? Or wait and see if we get a bigger break?”

“I don't feel good sitting here. They could see us.”

“They sleep.”

“Maybe they get restless. Do you sleep the whole night?”

“Actually, I do.”

“They could look out the window.”

“The big windows are in the front; all they got on this side are the little bathroom windows.”

“They could look out those windows.”

“What are they doing in the bathroom?”

“I don't know. Do they use the bathroom?”

“How the fuck should I know?”

They sat and watched the motel. A little breeze blew up, rustling the leaves in the poplar and juvenile maple trees. One car on the Ferris wheel rocked.

Shane, trembling a little, tied a sheaf of stakes to his belt. Hank checked the load in his revolver.

“Can they come outside when it's cloudy?”

“Yes,” Jude said.

“No,” Lettuce said, louder. “It makes them sick, even when there's clouds.”

“I say we go when the sun hits.”

“That's soon.”

“Yeah.”

“All right, gear up. We go in two minutes.”

Hank went into the back of the van, moving around Judith like she wasn't even there. He slipped the handle of a mallet through the back of his belt, just next to the wickedly sharp Ka-Bar knife and the little pouch of tools that never left his belt. He tucked a box of stove matches into one pocket, and into his other pocket he slipped a vial of the Guadalupe holy water. He held his .45 in his hand. Lettuce wore his shotgun on a strap, carried a jug of gasoline. Shane took kerosene, matches, and stakes, holstered a pistol. Then he picked up the Geiger counter.

Judith watched him do it, remembering perhaps the most surprising thing Wicklow had said during his several lectures in the barn.

It is believed that some of their favorite lairs are in abandoned underground uranium mines and near uranium tailing ponds, where people will be unlikely to bother them. There is no reason to believe radiation harms them. Fences are no obstacle. Any personnel onsite may be mesmerized into forgetting them, even helping them. We believe the undead, like many predators,
have cycles of feeding and rest; that they gorge themselves more some months and less other months. We believe one of their favorite lairs is a very dangerous abandoned site near Albuquerque containing both tunnels and radioactive sludge pools. They spent daylight hours there, sheltering in the mines themselves or in shelters near the tailings, just this last March. It is also probable they were on their way to or from this site when they happened upon Judith's family farther east, near Moriarty. Some of these sites are radioactive enough that anything they brought with them—shoes, personal effects, perhaps even their physical matter—will have absorbed enough for a Geiger counter to pick up. Not enough to harm anyone, at least not in the short term, but enough to make our little friend tick and crackle. Should you find a lair with many possible hiding places, you may locate them in this way. It's the stuff of drive-in movies, don't you think? “Radioactive Vampires from Planet X.” But this movie has been playing for a very long time, and will continue to play until brave men and women end it.

ONCE THE MEN IN THE VAN HAD ARMED THEMSELVES, THEY WAITED IN THE REAR
for Hank, who had climbed back in the driver's seat, to signal them. He watched the bright patch of sunlight make its way toward them, a lake of gold flooding the brambly woods and foothills. He raised his hand, had almost flicked a pistol finger at the squat form of the motel when he hissed, “Wait!”

The sun hit the road just as the cruiser drifted east, light winking on the chrome and glancing off the windshield. The Jasper County sheriff turned his head to look at Hank, his mirrored shades revealing nothing of what he made of the parked van, the tattooed man behind the wheel. Hank felt the weight of the pistol on his lap like the devil's hoof, ready to press him and his prior convictions right through the van seat and asphalt straight into twenty years of hell. He didn't tell the others why they were waiting any more than he told them that if the cop had stopped, he would have shot him in the face. The cruiser rolled east, around the curve in the road but still visible, small, smaller, gone.

“Now,” he said, pointing. He slid out the driver's door while the others chunked open the rear doors, making Judith blink as light flooded the cargo area. Shane was the last one out, and he hesitated before he shut the doors.

“Come on! Now!” Lettuce said from outside. Shane slid his .38 revolver along the van's floor to Judith, who dropped the cross she had absently held and took up the gun. The doors shut, obliterating Shane's silhouette and throwing her back into darkness. She crawled into the driver's seat to watch Shane and the other men file across the road, crouch down in the brush opposite while a station wagon rolled by, its driver oblivious, a child in the backseat turning his head toward the van, or slightly behind it. Judith's left hand crossed over her body; the fingers drifted down to make sure the keys were in the ignition. Her right hand, out of sight, clutched Shane's gun. Her eyes stayed fixed on the Avalon Garden motel.

She nearly jumped out of her seat when the strange man stepped up to the window.

A young man, baby-faced even,

Shoot him

wearing an ersatz Indian bonnet, sunlight blazing on the white feathers,

Shoot him!

holding something in his hands.

She thought she should raise her right hand, point it at the man, but couldn't.

He's not one of them

“Are you really a nun?” he said, squinting in the strong July sunlight.

He's a human being

NO shoot him now now NOW!

She started raising her right hand

Too slow

but he was already moving, his question just a distraction

this is going to hurt

and he jabbed the stock of his rifle up at her with the speed and violence of one new to manhood. It caught her on the right eyebrow,
and she thought she smelled rubber, but maybe she was mixing that up with the time an older boy threw a basketball into her head and knocked her down, and then she saw the floor of the van, fuzzy, out of focus, and then she saw nothing.

—

WOODROW FULK HAD BEEN JERKING OFF IN HIS TENT, LESS BECAUSE HE WAS
horny than because he needed to sleep. It was a hot day, at least when the sun was out, but he had stayed up too late with his friends. Staying up with them always meant losing half the next day, but it would still give him time to scout ahead and find them a safe roost, provided he could catch some sleep now. He was too tired to drive and scan the fields for overgrown buildings. He was too tired to do anything but fish around in his boxers and fondle it, thinking about women who didn't blink and seawater gushing out of drowned wombs and other things that would turn most men's stomachs. He thought about the one he had enjoyed just last night, how her butt and the bottoms of her limbs had darkened where the blood pooled, how the little muscles of her hands and feet had locked but her legs had still opened. Then of course he got fully charged and the play turned earnest. There was nothing like a sweaty, hot nap after sexual release, and this was the only kind of release he was going to get during daylight hours. That was when he heard the gentle squeal of brakes on his side of the road. Woods had always had keen hearing.

“Oh shit,” he said, tucking himself back into his shorts and writhing into his jeans. He left the shirt but donned the Indian headdress, this to bewilder his enemies and give him power. He took up the Garand and slinked off from his tent's position behind a small rise and through a stand of young maples, wishing he had put his boots on, as a thorn or maybe broken glass found the tender sole of his foot. He heard doors shut and hurried his pace.

A van!

Shit, shit, shit!

He saw nobody in the driver's seat when he came up on the van's passenger side, but someone was moving in there, and by the time he limped around its rear to the left window, a woman had taken position behind the steering wheel. Sort of a pretty, beat-up-looking woman with a scar across her nose and cheek. Funny that he noticed her looks before he noticed she was a nun, if she was a nun. What was a nun doing in a van out in the middle of nowhere? Fuck him if this was a nun, he wanted to shoot her in the chest (not the face, her face was nice to look at and Luther might let him keep her), but it wouldn't be smart to fire off a gun until he found her friends.

Coldcock her, that's the ticket.

She blinked at him.

Shoot her and come in her chest hole later.

The sun, which had just come out, made him squint.

“Are you really a nun?” he said.

She started to raise her far arm

Bitch has a gun!

but he cracked her in the forehead with the Garand's stock real hard—the thing weighed almost ten pounds; she lurched back on her seat and stared at the ceiling before she dove for the floor, it was kind of funny, it reminded him of a dolphin. He peeked in. She shifted once, couldn't seem to get up, then lay still. Blood pooled under her. Good.

Hit her again to make sure? Take too long.

Now he went around the front of the van, looking at the hotel. Three men broke from the brush and trees across the road, making for the motel. He saw that one had a gas can, another had a gun.

Oh God this is it this is it.

His heart hammering, he ran back into the maple trees, his injured foot forgotten. He cut left and ascended the short rise, dropped down
on his belly behind the tall grass, exactly the place he had chosen to cover the motel. Now he saw the men crouched near the doors; the big one was splashing gasoline.

He'll burn them up oh no can't have that can't have that

Woods watched him through the scope now,

can't burn my friends fat boy

pressed the safety catch away from the trigger guard

can't burn my cold pretty Calcutta

settled the crosshairs between his target's shoulder blades

fuck your back I'll fuck

started to squeeze the trigger, saw a flash of motion,

cars!

waited while a line of three cars flashed by in the sun, close enough to suggest they were caravanning

picnic lazy fucks off on a picnic

and then they were gone. He looked left and right to make sure nobody else was coming, then peeped through the scope again

fat boy find fat boy

lined up the crosshairs,

you'll die one shot get the tattooed one next

squeezed

BANG

Felt the kick on his shoulder, saw the man jerk backward, drop the gas can, grab his left hip and ass

missed his vitals how'd I miss okay again this shot this shot this

but now the man was moving.

They all were.