Shaking his head, he said, ‘No. No. Stop it. It’s too far away. You’re just upset. Get hold of yourself. This just confirms it. That’s all. This is nothing new.’ He sat down, his heart racing, until his pulse slowed and the dizziness passed.
Upstairs, he stole a nylon backpack from the hallway closet. In the bedroom, he took several pairs of wool socks, two neutral-coloured sweaters, as many pairs of gloves as he could find, two cigarette lighters from the bedside table and a lined Gore-tex jacket. Over one arm he carried a second jacket for Mark. They had used their stolen silver to outfit themselves in Orindale, and the sailboat Mark and Brynne had repaired was well stocked with essentials, but socks and coats from home would be welcome, for Mark too.
He struggled into the backpack and ran down the stairs, stopping short at the bottom. ‘A watch, damn it,’ he cursed and pushed past the door into the living room. Apart from a large recliner that Howard always treated with all the deference of a holy relic, the room looked like a bomb had hit it. Books, newspapers, dirty dishes, an errant shoe, orphan socks – even a pair of forgotten boxer shorts – lay scattered about. There was a teetering pile of out-of-date TV Guides against one wall. Steven whistled. ‘Holy Vicksburg,’ he said, ‘Howard, how the hell do you live in this?’
Ignoring the mess, Steven bravely ploughed his way towards the baby grand piano, which was decorated with a half-empty bottle of beer and a gnawed pizza crust atop a wrinkled dishcloth. Behind, on the large bookshelf, was Steven’s prize: an old wristwatch lying forgotten on a pile of creased paperbacks.
He grabbed it: off by an hour, so it had obviously been up there since before the clocks had gone back some months before, but the second hand was sweeping round inexorably. ‘Okay, 9.22,’ he said, adjusting the watch back sixty minutes. ‘Now it really is time to get going-’ He stopped, remembering a promise he had made months earlier, then peered around, grinning as he appropriated one final item from Howard Griffin’s living room. ‘Vicksburg,’ he said softly.
His stomach growled, but Howard’s refrigerator offered only beer, a suspicious-smelling bottle of milk and a box of muesli bars. Howard was the only person Steven knew who would follow a healthy breakfast of orange juice, dry wheat toast and a healthy grain and dried fruit bar with a three-beer-grilled-beef-and-onion-ring lunch and think he was eating well. He grinned in remembrance as he stuffed a handful of the bars into his pack, followed by several cans of beer. In the freezer he found a full can of ground French roast coffee, which he appropriated, together with a packet of filters lying on the counter.
‘That ought to do it,’ he murmured. ‘Thanks, Howard. I’ll pay you back.’ Steven carefully wrapped the scarf around his face, pulled up his collar and left the house, relocking the door and stashing the key where he’d found it.
The city dump was a long way out, so Steven decided to borrow Howard’s dilapidated 1977 Thunderbird, a powder-blue, long-nosed sedan the size of a small whale. It sat rusting in the driveway with the keys dangling from the ignition, exactly where he expected them to be.
‘No one’s going to steal my car, are they?’ Howard had laughed when Steven had borrowed the behemoth once before, ‘their family and friends might see them in it!’
And now, a year or more later, there they still were, hanging by the steering wheel. Steven was almost shocked when the engine immediately roared into life. Thank you, Howard, he thought as he backed out of the drive. I really will pay you back one day.
He turned towards Chicago Creek Road and the Idaho Springs City Dump.
Nerak tossed the gun onto the passenger seat of David Mantegna’s car, then extracted a large pinch of chewing tobacco from the red, white and blue packet and pushed it into his mouth – and gagged violently, spitting the wad onto the floor. He swore: the girl had apparently not developed any taste for tobacco.
‘Too bad, my dear,’ Nerak said silkily, his voice a sinister echo in Myrna’s dying mind. ‘You’ll just have to get used to it.’ He retrieved the clump of tobacco, then, ignoring the bits of dirt that had stuck to it, popped it back into his – Myrna’s – mouth. ‘I love this stuff,’ he told the dying spirit, glad of Mantegna’s nicotine addiction; he so enjoyed that warm buzz. ‘If I had more time in this tired old world, I might harvest a season’s worth.’
He glanced over at the pistol and grinned. He had enjoyed that too – in fact, the carnage had almost made this annoying side-trip worthwhile.
Nerak could have made Idaho Springs from Charleston in eighteen hours if he had driven Mantegna’s Mustang nonstop at top speed, but he had taken some unplanned – most entertaining – detours. Somewhere in Kentucky he had stopped to refuel and to satisfy his – and Mantegna’s – craving for tobacco. When the hapless clerk demanded payment for the fuel and the distinctively coloured pouches of Confederate Son, Mantegna’s favourite, Nerak shot him. What an ingenious invention, Nerak told Mantegna; much easier to handle than his first guns, more than a hundred years before, and so much more efficient than the unwieldy weapons in Eldarn.
He turned from the bloody remains of the clerk and squeezed the trigger again, this time firing into the glass doors of the cool cabinets, and bottles shattered, spilling multi-coloured liquids onto the floor. The cash register was next, then a beer advertisement hanging on the back wall, where several half-naked women were playing a game in the sand – volleyball, the word appeared in his mind. Nerak fired once through the ball and once through the broad forehead of a muscular young man watching, a beer bottle dangling from one hand.
Finally, curious, Nerak fired into Mantegna’s hand, his own hand, just to experience the weapon himself – and as the bullet blew most of it off, an excruciating arrow of white-hot pain raced up his arm. ‘Outstanding!’ Nerak screamed as his ruined hand dripped gore.
Nerak collected his chewing tobacco, stopped the blood spurting from his wound with a thought and stepped outside to continue his journey. Three fingers and half of his palm lay abandoned on the floor behind him.
As he crossed the parking lot, the dark prince waved his hand and changed the car from blue to red, jumped in and sped off, laughing hysterically. He drove at breakneck speed through Missouri, chasing the fleeing sun and taking pot-shots out the window at anything that took his fancy – passing cars, livestock, backpackers he spotted outside St Louis. The police officer had been an enthusiastic member of the NRA and Nerak found three boxes of ammunition beneath the front seat. He turned the car yellow, the colour of pus, to celebrate.
Kansas had been the highlight of his journey as he’d cruised across the flatlands at one hundred and thirty miles per hour, pursued by the regional militia, or state troopers, in Mantegna’s lexicon of law enforcement. They had come after him on two-wheeled motorised vehicles of some sort – motorcycles, Mantegna interjected dully – and two-tone, heavy-bodied sedans with clamorous sirens and sparkling red and blue lights whirling about overhead. Best of all, they had tracked him with a wonderful flying helichopper-copter-whirlybird thing. Mantegna had so many words for this glorious contraption that Nerak was not sure which was the common term.
With a wave of his hand he had flattened the front tyres of the motorised cycles, chuckling in high good humour as the riders had spun off into the air.
The helichopper-copter had reacted aggressively, dropping from the sky to force Nerak off the road. It scraped the side of the Mustang with one of its landing rails, and though he could have crashed the whirlybird with a gesture, instead, relishing the challenge, he had taken aim and fired Mantegna’s weapon several times into the shining belly. The helichopper-copter reeled away, banking like a frightened plover in a gale and Nerak watched the man inside wrestling with some sort of control, trying to save the giant bird’s life.