I had the distinct feeling that I had taken it as far as I could. I didn't bother to respond. There was only one thing for me to do and I did it. The door swung shut behind me.
The fog was worse, only now I had to contend with the pitch-black darkness and the penetrating chill of the ghostly Chambers Bay night.
On the journey back to Percy's pickup, every movement of every branch, every snap of every twig, every unidentified sound made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. The black, featureless darkness of the northern night was never worse.
It was a stumbling, groping trek and took no more than ten minutes, but seemed like an eternity. The flashlight was virtually useless, and my fingers ached from the death grip I maintained on the old Mauser. When I finally stumbled into the side panel of Percy's truck, I uttered a sincere prayer of gratitude.
Having to drive five miles an hour with the window open so I could hear the crunch of the sometimes gravel under the tires was equally disconcerting. If anything, it was worse than the journey from the old woman's house to the truck, and it seemed both slower and longer.
My mind was racing. I fished the the voice recorder out of the survival kit, inserted a new tape cartridge and started tumbling a litany of random thoughts, observations and questions into the little device.
Click. Who is this so-called Emissary? One of the locals? An out-of-towner? Is there such a thing, or am I dealing with some kind of cult hysteria? About the Emissary, what does he, she or it do? Click.
Click. Why doesn't old Glenna trust young Kelto? Better yet, do I trust Kelto? Is Kelto's version of things as they really are or how his Battle-Harbor-twisted mind perceives them? Click.
I lingered for a moment on the so-called Book of Comprehensions, wondering if the library back at Saint Francis had or could get hold of one for me. Maybe it was too late to help me sort through this mess, but the old girl had tweaked my curiosity. Click. Call Lucy and see if she can hustle up this so-called Bible of Sate. Click.
The gravel had quit crunching. Damn!
I sucked up my gut, held my breath and cautiously opened the door. With a firm grip on the Mauser, I crawled out and my feet hit the solid surface of the asphalt blacktop. Percy's truck was sitting crosswise in the middle of the road and clear of the gravel lane.
I jumped back in, hoping against hope that some other clown wasn't foolish enough to be out driving in this soup and about to plow blindly into my exposed flank. I could already see it in big print in the Saint Francis daily student newspaper: "E.G. Wages Dies on Fog Shrouded Canadian Highway." Then I had a second, even more disconcerting thought. What if my flaming final moments didn't even make the student newspaper at all?
I jumped back in, jammed the clunker in reverse, slid momentarily back on the gravel, inched back out on the highway and turned east toward Chambers Bay.
It didn't take long to lapse back into thinking about what the widow had said. "The hour is at hand. The time has come. Eleven times eleven. A one hundred and twenty-one year cycle." Click. "Lucy, my dearest research resource, find out what's so special about this particular emergence. Is this one destined to be even worse than the others? Does that explain why this particular event seems to be so strung out and the others all appeared to be one day shots?" Up until now, up until Chambers Bay, these tragedies seemed to be confined to one event, one massacre, one episode of monumental proportions. Now, thinking about it, there were a great many aspects of this whole affair that were markedly different from previous ones. Click.
There was a light ahead, not well defined, but blurry, vague and uncertain. A streetlight? Was I at the edge of town? Had I made it?
The impact stopped the pickup cold.
For the second time in two days, my face ricocheted off the steering wheel, and again the old vision went cloudy. A salty hot fluid began trickling down my throat and out my nose, but most of that was immediately forgotten. I had another problem, more immediate and a great deal more monumental.
My unexpected impediment had rolled up over the hood and crashed into the windshield with a sickening thud. Fracture lines now raced across my field of vision like a crazed jigsaw puzzle, and for the briefest of moments, I was face to face with a hideous, bloated prehistoric face, twisted in rage. The thing rolled backward, regained its equilibrium and sat hunched like a brooding gargoyle on the crumpled hood; its long, black, apelike arms were outstretched, while it belched out a kind of putrid, black, oily substance.
My brain was short-circuiting.
It was pure survivalist instinct. The Mauser had a mind of its own. It was out, and I was firing point-blank. The decimated windshield was no barrier. Despite the shattered, diffused glass, despite the blurry vision, despite 101 other reasons why the torrent of shots could have gone astray, I was right on target.
The beast took the first slug in the right side of its face, erupting tissue and a thick black liquid like a volcano. One of its massive, two-thumb, three-finger paws groped at the missing part of its head like it was belatedly swatting at a mosquito. The second shot caught him in the ugly hairless expanse of the chest, and the third assaulted the lower part of his face. Each bullet destroyed something, yet no single shot seemed to do the job. It lurched forward again, outraged, slamming its angry bulk up against the shattered windshield. One of the ponderous fists crushed the glass, penetrating it, blindly groping in the darkness of the cab, inches from my face.
The fourth shot blasted another hole through the glass. It caught the monster in the left temple and created a hole the size of a golf ball. Again the head seemed to erupt, and another geyser of the black fluids began to gush down the side of the twisted face. This time the beast cried out, a terrifying sound that somehow reached back into the nothingness before time itself.
I twisted the ignition key and the engine sputtered back to life. Then I slammed the gear shift lever straight down, and the truck leaped forward. The beast catapulted forward, up and onto the roof. The sheet of steel separating us buckled under the impact, and I heard it roll into the bed of the pickup and out, the unreal sound of its bulk tumbling out onto the pavement behind me.
Almost instantly the temperature gauge rocketed past the red line into the danger zone; pieces of twisted body panels began bending back and slapping violently as the pickup hurtled through the darkness like a wounded bull. There was an explosion under the hood and then another. Fragments of disintegrating engine spewed out of the chamber that bad once housed it and flames began leaping out from under the dash panel, scorching my legs, pumping a torrent of blistering heat into the cab. The wiring caught on fire and acrid, choking smoke engulfed me.
When you can't see, you can't breathe, and you're hurtling blindly into a dense fog bank at something close to 50 miles an hour in a truck that's belching out flames and smoke from what was once called the hood and cab — you need a plan. My standard repertoire does not happen to include one that covers this type of situation, so I reverted to my baser instincts and decided to get the hell out of there. What little bits of logic that were managing to filter through told me that that foul-smelling, antisocial mountain of hostility that had twice tried to rearrange my face was sprawled somewhere, dazed and full of big ugly holes, three blocks or more down the highway. If that was the case (and even if it wasn't) my options were still limited; get the hell out or barbecue my long-cherished main frame.
I slammed on the brakes and felt Percy's pathetic pile of mangled metal rattle to a halt, tires squealing.