“What did you do to him?” Bill asked. “What is it? Judo?”
She took his wrist. “Just this.”
He shrugged. “I don’t feel anything special. You are a big strong girl, though.”
“Shut up, please.”
The ambulance with Mrs. Thompson therein wailed off toward Bell City. Three tow trucks competed for the truck job. The new bus arrived. Shirley, Bill and Mr. McGoran stared frankly at the odd stance and posture of Jennilou. Jennilou’s face was flame. She scuttled up into the waiting bus. The driver came back and said, “The crate quit on you, Stan?”
“No. I just got tired of driving it.”
“Now I’ll laugh. What’s wrong?”
“It’s melting. Look.” Stan did the finger trick.
The other driver licked his lips and tried. He pushed and pushed. Nothing happened except that his knuckle cracked.
“Do that again.”
Stan shrugged and did it again. Once again the other driver tried. Bill, watching them, began to have an impossible and incredible hunch. He found a fifty cent piece in his pocket. He pressed his thumb firmly into the middle of it and turned it into a soup bowl for a set of toy silver dishes. He shuddered and put it back in his pocket. He caught Shirley just as she was about to board the bus.
“Get off,” he said firmly.
“Look, are you...”
“Please, whatever your name is. It’s important.”
She got off. “The name is Shirley Sanger.”
“Bill Dorvan. Look. Can you bend this back?” He handed her the coin. She bent it back.
He took it over to the new driver. “Bud, can you bend this coin?”
“I got no time for jokes, Mister.”
Stan Weaver took the coin, held it on edge between thumb and finger and bent it double. He gave Bill Dorvan an odd look. He handed it to the new driver. The man couldn’t pry it apart.
Dorvan turned quickly to Shirley and said, “Come on. We walk for awhile.” She fell in stride beside him without protest.
Chapter III
Eating Cobwebs
The interne looked at Mrs. Thompson with a skeptic’s eye. Her wrist was amazingly hard for the wrist of an old woman. The pulse felt strong and normal.
“Shock, maybe,” he said. “Plasma, just in case.”
The bottle was rigged. He bared the old arm, took the needle and slid it expertly against the blue vein in the bend of the elbow. The needle slipped off. He grunted and tried again. Once again it slipped. He examined the point. It looked all right. He tried to get it in at right angles.
He pressed down. He could see a tiny indentation in the skin. No more. The needle suddenly bent back on itself. The skin blunted the edge of the scalpel he tried next. He began to perspire. He tried the other arm. Only then did he call the resident.
In half an hour both men were perspiring freely. They went over to the far corner of the emergency ward.
The resident said, “Entirely new to me. Obscure disease of some sort. I can’t even scratch her!”
Mrs. Thompson sat up. “Stop mumbling.”
The two men gave her nervous smiles. “Everything is fine, Mrs. Thomas.”
“Thompson.”
The interne whispered, “Let’s put her under and get a diamond drill.”
The resident flinched, thought it over, said, “Get hold of the anaesthetist and have her wheeled upstairs.”
Benny Farr didn’t see the cop until he got up on his front porch. By then it was too late to make a run for it.
“You Benjamin Farr?”
Inside the house he could hear the sound of his mother weeping. Always looking for an excuse to turn on the flood. “What if I am?”
“We got a friend of yours down at the station. He’s been giving us quite a story.”
“Louie!” Benny gasped.
“Right, lad. Now come along quiet.”
He grabbed Benny’s wrist. Benny twisted away and released himself with surprising ease. “Getcha hands offa me!”
The cop lunged and grabbed him by the shoulders. Benny caught a thick wrist in his two skinny hands and twisted it. The cop yelled and fell heavily. He came up fast, his arm hanging oddly twisted. Benny turned and ran.
He heard his mother scream and there was a terrific blow between his shoulder blades. Synchronous with the blow was the sound of a shot. He fell, rolled, got to his feet and continued running. Another shot and a whirr by his ear. Benny kept running, rounding the corner, cutting over behind the Reilly house and across the new lots.
McGoran sold three can openers on the street before he arrived at the Breem house. His suave tone masked a dozen petty annoyances. The handle had come off the sample case and the latch had somehow become badly bent. He had broken two doorbells without meaning to. He had to hold the case under his arm.
Halfway up the sidewalk of the Breem house he heard the scream of tires. He whirled, slapping at his armpit.
“Don’t touch it, McGoran,” a cold voice said. “We’ve been expecting you any day.”
“My name isn’t McGoran.”
“Fingerprints will prove that. Walk slowly toward the car. Lock your fingers at the nape of your neck. That’s right.”
There were three men in dark suits in the car. They watched him approach with heavy amusement.
There were two in the front seat, one in the back. The one in the back opened the car door. McGoran grabbed the man’s wrist and pulled him out of the car, dodging around behind it and pulling his own gun. It was an automatic and to make certain there was a shell in the chamber he yanked hard on the slide. The slide pulled off in his hand.
He turned to run, knowing he was too late. The burst of shots, striking his back, staggered him. He turned to lift his hands, forgetting that he still held the broken automatic in his hands. The man fifteen feet away pumped four slow shots into McGoran’s cheat. He stood, waiting for the black mist of death, waiting for the ground to come up and hit him.
As he moved a slug shifted down, rolled down inside his pant leg and across the pavement. The three men stared at him. McGoran turned and ran again. Two sharp blows against the back of his head half dazed him but he kept running.
Jennilou Caswell collapsed onto her bed. It was so wonderful to be alone in the apartment at last. Later she would get the superintendent to replace the key which had twisted off in the lock as she had opened the door.
She ruefully examined the ruined dress. It tore as she lifted it over her head. The girdle ripped as she peeled it off. She frowned. Probably, without knowing it, she had walked through an acid mist of some sort. She remembered reading about some city where chemical dust in the air had ruined nylons.
She took a shower, tore one of her favorite towels afterward. Slowly she was learning to handle things more delicately. But no matter how hard she tried she could not get back into another girdle. She weighed herself, found that her weight was exactly the same as before.
When she tried to comb her hair the teeth shredded out of the comb. She gave up, tried to file her nails. Her nails wore the burr off the file. She tried nail scissors and the blades bent like wax.
Close to hysteria she opened her own typewriter. Typing exercises always soothed her. Feeling better, she rattled off the first line. “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy red dog.” Machine-gun speed. At the end of the line her hand flicked up and slammed the carriage return back for the next line. The carriage slammed completely out of the end of the typewriter carrying the paper with it, and crashed on the floor beside her desk.