From a Buick 8

Hey, y'big dumb Swede - why don't you try breathing again? See if that helps any?

Arky took two big dry gasps of air, not caring much for the sound of them. His old man had sounded like that when he was having his heart attack, lying on the sofa and waiting for the ambulance to come.

He stepped away from the roll-up door, patting the center of his chest with the side of a closed fist. 'Come on, honey. Take up d'slack, now.'

The sun, going down in a cauldron of blood, glared in his eyes. His stomach had continued to drop, making him feel on the verge of vomiting. The barracks all at once looked two, maybe even three miles away. He set off in that direction, reminding himself to breathe and concentrating on taking big, even steps. Part of him wanted to break into a run, and part of him understood that if he tried doing that, he really might faint.

'Guys'd never let you hear the end of dat, and you know it.'

But it wasn't really teasing he was concerned about. Mostly he didn't want to go in looking all wild-eyed and pushing the panic-button like any John Q. in off the road with a tale to tell.

And by the time he got inside, Arky actually did feel a little better. Still scared, but no longer like he was going to puke or just go bolting away from Shed B any old whichway. By then he'd also had an idea which had eased his mind a bit. Maybe it was just a trick. A prank. Troopers were always pulling stuff on him, and hadn't he told Orville Garrett he might come back that evening for a little looky-see at that old Buick? He had. And maybe Orv had decided to give him the business. Bunch of comedians he worked with, someone was always giving him the business.

The thought served to calm him, but in his heart of hearts, Arky didn't believe it. Orv Garrett was a practical joker, all right, liked to have his fun just like the next guy, but he wouldn't make that thing in the shed part of a gag. None of them would. Not with Sergeant Schoondist so hopped up about it.

Ah, but the Sarge wasn't there. His door was shut and the frosted glass panel was dark. The light was on in the kitchenette, though, and music was coming out through the door: Joan Baez, singing about the night they drove old Dixie down. Arky went in and there was Huddie Royer, just dropping a monster chunk of oleo into a pot of noodles. Your heart ain't gonna thank you for dat shit, Arky thought. Huddie's radio - a little one on a strap that he took everyplace - was sitting on the counter next to the toaster.

'Hey, Arky!' he said. 'What're you doing here? As if I didn't know?'

'Is Orv here?' Arky asked.

'Nope. He's got three days off, starting tomorrow. Lucky sucker went fishing. You want a bowl of this?' Huddie held the pot out, took a really good look at him, and realized he was looking at a man who was scared just about to death. 'Arky? What the hell's wrong with you? Are you sick?'

Arky sat down heavily in one of the kitchen chairs, hands dangling between his thighs. He looked up at Huddie and opened his mouth, but at first nothing came out.

'What is it?' Huddie slung the pot of macaroni on to the counter without a second look. 'The Buick?'

'You da d-o tonight, Hud?'

'Yeah. Until eleven.'

'Who else here?'

'Couple of guys upstairs. Maybe. If you're thinking about the brass, you can stop. I'm the closest you're going to get tonight. So spill it.'

'You come out back,' Arky told him. 'Take a look for yourself. And bring some binoculars.'

Huddie snagged a pair of binocs from the supply room, but they turned out to be no help. The thing in the corner of Shed B was actually too close - in the glasses it was just a blur. After two or three minutes of fiddling with the focus-knob, Huddie gave up. 'I'm going in there.'

Arky gripped his wrist. 'Cheesus, no! Call the Sarge! Let him decide!'

Huddie, who could be stubborn, shook his head. 'Sarge is sleeping. His wife called and said so. You know what it means when she does that - no one hadn't ought to wake him up unless it's World War III.'

'What if dat t'ing in dere is World War III?'

'I'm not worried,' Huddie said. Which was, judging from his face, the lie of the decade, if not the century. He looked in again, hands cupped to the sides of his face, the useless binoculars standing on the pavement beside his left foot. 'It's dead.'

'Maybe,' Arky said. 'And maybe it's just playin possum.'

Huddie looked around at him. 'You don't mean that.' A pause. 'Do you?'

'I dunno what I mean and what I don't mean. I dunno if dat t'ing's over for good or just restin up. Neither do you. What if it wants someone t'go in dere? You t'ought about dat? What if it's waitin for you?'

Huddie thought it over, then said: 'I guess in that case, it'll get what it wants.'

He stepped back from the door, looking every bit as scared as Arky had looked when he came into the kitchen, but also looking set. Meaning it. Just a stubborn old Dutchman.

'Arky, listen to me.'

'Yeah.'

'Carl Brundage is upstairs in the common room. Also Mark Rushing - I think, anyway. Don't bother Loving in dispatch, I don't trust him. Too wet behind the ears. But you go on and tell the other two what's up. Arid get that look off your face. This is probably nothing, but a little backup wouldn't hurt.'

'Just in case it ain't nothin.'

'Right.'

'Cause it might be sumptin.'

Huddie nodded.

'You sure?'

'Uh-huh.'

'Okay.'

Huddie walked along the front of the roll-up door, turned the corner, and stood in front of the smaller door on the side. He took a deep breath, held it in for a five-count, let it out. Then he unsnapped the strap over the butt of his pistol - a .357 Ruger, back in those days.

'Huddie?'

Huddie jumped. If his finger had been on the trigger instead of outside the guard, he might have blown off his own foot. He spun around and saw Arky standing there at the corner of the shed, his big dark eyes swimming in his pinched face.

'Lord Jesus Christ!' Huddie cried. 'Why the fuck're you creeping after me?'

'I wasn't creepin, Troop -just walkin like normal.'

'Go inside! Get Carl and Mark, like I told you.'

Arky shook his head. Scared or not, he had decided he wanted to be a part of what was going down. Huddie supposed he could understand. Trooper gray did have a way of rubbing off.

'All right, ya dumb Swede. Let's go.'

Huddie opened the door and stepped into the shed, which was still cooler than the outside . . .

although just how cool it might have been was impossible for either man to tell, because they were both sweating like pigs. Huddie was holding his gun up beside his right cheekbone. Arky grabbed a rake from the pegs close by the door. It clanged against a shovel and both of them jumped. To Arky, the look of their shadows on the wall was even worse than the sound: they seemed to leap from place to place, like the shadows of nimble goblins.

'Huddie - ' he began.

'Shhh!'

'If it's dead, why you go shhh?'

'Don't be a smartass!' Huddie whispered back. He started across the cement floor toward the Buick. Arky followed with the rake-handle gripped tight in his sweaty hands, his heart pounding.

His mouth tasted dry and somehow burnt. He had never been so scared in his life, and the fact that he didn't know exactly what he was scared of only made it worse.

Huddie got to the rear of the Buick and peeped into the open trunk. His back was so broad Arky couldn't see around it. 'What's in there, Hud?'

'Nothing. It's clean.'

Huddie reached for the trunk-lid, hesitated, then shrugged and slammed it down. They both jumped at the sound and looked at the thing in the corner. It didn't stir. Huddie started toward it, gun once more held up by the side of his head. The sound of his feet shuffling on the concrete was very loud.

The thing was indeed dead, the two men became more and more sure of it as they approached, but that didn't make things better because neither of them had ever seen anything like it. Not in the woods of western Pennsylvania, not in a zoo, not in a wildlife magazine. It was just different. So goddam different. Huddie found himself thinking of horror movies he'd seen, but the thing huddled up in the angle where the shed walls met wasn't really like something from those, either.

Goddam different was what he kept coming back to. What they both kept coming back to.

Everything about it screamed that it wasn't from here, here meaning not just the Short Hills but all of Planet Earth. Maybe the entire universe, at least as C-students in science such as themselves understood that concept. It was as if some warning circuit buried deep in their heads had suddenly awakened and begun to wail.

Arky was thinking of spiders. Not because the thing in the corner looked like a spider, but because . . . well . . . spiders were different. All those legs - and you had no idea what they might be thinking, or how they could even exist. This thing was like that, only worse. It made him sick just to look at it, to try and make sense of what his eyes said they were seeing. His skin had gone clammy, his heart was missing beats, and his guts seemed to have gained weight. He wanted to run. To just turn tail and stampede out of there.

'Christ,' Huddie said in a little moan of a voice. 'Ohhhh, Christ.' It was as if he were pleading for it to go away. His gun sagged downward and outward until the barrel was pointed at the floor. It was only two pounds, but his arm could no longer support even that paltry weight.

The muscles of his face also sagged, pulling his eyes wide and dropping his jaw down until his mouth opened. Arky never forgot the way Huddie's teeth gleamed in the shadows. At the same time he began to shiver all over, and Arky became aware he was shivering, too.

The thing in the corner was the size of a very large bat, like the ones that roosted in Miracle Caves over in Lassburg or the so-called Wonder Cavern (guided tours three dollars a head, special family rates available) in Pogus City. Its wings hid most of its body. They weren't folded but lay in messy overlapping crumples, as if it had tried to fold them - and failed - before it died. The wings were either black or a very dark mottled green. What they could see of the creature's back was a lighter green. The stomach area was a cheesy whitish shade, like the gut of a rotted stump or the throat of a decaying swamp-lily. The triangular head was cocked to one side. A bony thing that might have been a nose or a beak jutted from the eyeless face. Below it, the creature's mouth hung open. A yellowish rope of tissue dangled from it, as if the thing had been regurgitating its last meal as it died. Huddie took one look and knew he wouldn't be eating any more macaroni and cheese for awhile.

Beneath the corpse, spread around its hindquarters, was a thin puddle of congealing black goo.

The idea that any such substance could serve as blood made Huddie feel like crying out. He thought: I won't touch it. I'd kill my own mother before I'd touch that thing.

He was still thinking that when a long wooden rod slid into his peripheral vision. He gave a little shriek and flinched back. 'Arky, don't!' he yelled, but it was too late.

Later on, Arky was unable to say just why he had prodded the thing in the corner - it was simply some strong urge to which he had given in before he was completely aware of what he was doing.

When the end of the rake-handle touched the place where the wings were crumpled across each other, there was a sound like rustling paper and a bad smell, like old stewed cabbage. The two of them barely noticed. The top of the thing's face seemed to peel back, revealing a dead and glassy eye that looked as big as a factory ball bearing.

Arky backed away, dropping the rake with a clatter and putting both hands over his mouth.

Above the spread fingers, his eyes had begun to ooze terrified tears. Huddie simply stood where he was, locked in place.

'It was an eyelid,' he said in a low, hoarse voice. 'Just an eyelid, that's all. You joggled it with the rake, you goddam fool. You joggled it and it rolled back.'

'Christ, Huddie!'

'It's dead.'

'Christ, Jesus God - '

'It's dead, okay?'

'Ho . . . Ho-kay,' Arky said in that crazy Swedish accent of his. It was thicker than it had ever been. 'Less get oudda here.'

'You're pretty smart for a janitor.'

The two of them headed back for the door - slowly, backing up, not wanting to lose sight of the thing. Also because both of them knew they would lose control and bolt if they actually saw the door. The safety of the door. The promise of a sane world beyond the door. Getting there seemed to take forever.

Arky backed out first and began taking huge gasps of the fresh evening air. Huddie came out behind him and slammed the door. Then for a moment the two of them just looked at each other. Arky had gone past white and directly to yellow. To Huddie he looked like a cheese sandwich without the bread.

'What-choo laughin about?' Arky asked him. 'What's so funny?'

'Nothing,' Huddie said. 'I'm just trying not to be hysterical.'

'You gonna call Sergeant Schoondist now?'

Huddie nodded. He kept thinking about how the whole top half of the thing's head had seemed to peel back when Arky prodded it. He had an idea he'd be revisiting that moment in his dreams later on, and that turned out to be absolutely correct.

'What about Curtis?'

Huddie thought about it and shook his head. Curt had a young wife. Young wives liked to have their husbands home, and when they didn't get what they wanted for at least a few nights in a row, they were apt to get hurt feelings and ask questions. It was natural. As it was natural for young husbands to sometimes answer their questions, even when they knew they weren't supposed to.

'Just the Sarge, then?'

'No,' Huddie said. 'Let's get Sandy Dearborn in on this, too. Sandy's got a good head.'

Sandy was still in the parking lot at Jimmy's Diner with his radar gun in his lap when his radio spoke up. 'Unit 14, Unit 14.'

'14.' As always, Sandy had glanced at his watch when he heard his unit number. It was twenty past seven.

'Ah, could you return to base, 14? We have a D-code, say again a D-code, copy?'

'3?' Sandy asked. In most American police forces, 3 means emergency.

'No, negative, but we could use some help.'

'Roger.'

He got back about ten minutes before the Sarge arrived in his personal, which happened to be an International Harvester pickup even older than Arky's Ford. By then the word had already started to spread and Sandy saw a regular Trooper convention in front of Shed B - lots of guys at the windows, all of them peering in. Brundage and Rushing, Cole and Devoe, Huddie Royer. Arky Arkanian was pacing around in little circles behind them with his hands stuffed forearm-deep in his pants pockets and lines climbing his forehead like the rungs of a ladder. He wasn't waiting for a window, though. Arky had seen all he wanted to, at least for one night.

Huddie filled Sandy in on what had happened and then Sandy had his own good long look at the thing in the corner. He also tried to guess what the Sergeant might want when he arrived, and put the items in a cardboard box near the side door.

Tony pulled in, parked askew behind the old schoolbus, and came jogging across to Shed B. He elbowed Carl Brundage unceremoniously away from the window that was closest to the dead creature and stared at it while Huddie made his report. When Huddie was done, Tony called Arky over and listened to Arky's version of the story.

Sandy thought that Tony's methods of handling the Roadmaster were put to the test that evening and proved sound. All through his debriefing of Huddie and Arky, Troop D personnel were showing up. Most of the men were off-duty. Those few in uniform had been close enough to come in for a look-see when they heard Huddie give the code for the Buick. Yet there was no loud cross-talk, no jostling for position, no men getting in the way of Tony's investigation or gumming things up with a lot of stupid questions. Above all, there were no flaring tempers and no panic. If reporters had been there and experienced the atavistic power of that thing - a thing which remained awful and somehow threatening even though it was obviously dead - Sandy dreaded to think about what the consequences might have been. When he mentioned that to Schoondist the next day, the Sarge had laughed. 'The Cardiff Giant in hell,' he said. 'That would have been your consequence, Sandy.'