"Just you try, boy," he snarled, "just you try to get by me."
Brian felt something clinging at the back of his head. It was Derry's gum, tangled in his hair. He slipped quickly into his pants and heard Treat take a few steps forward in, the long tube of darkness. He found the other bunny slipper with his foot and tossed it off to the left. Treat made a move, then stopped.
"Can't fool me, boy. I hear you breathe. I hear your heart beat. There's no way you can hide, I hear everything."
Brian felt no desire to explain. It was beyond explaining, out of control. He tied his sneakers together and looped them over his shoulder. He eased sideways on tiptoe, reached the storage wall and began to yank the morgue drawers out, tossing handfuls of canned goods onto the floor between him and the father. Treat came forward a bit and Brian scooted to the other wall, groped to turn on the water and the can opener and the solid-waste compacter and the electric blender, and trotted back to the bed. He could see Treat dimly now. The old man had his nose up in the air and his arms spread wide, listening for all he was worth and slowly backing out of sight to the vault door again.
"I'll wait you out, boyl" he shouted over the sound of the appliances. "I can wait a day or a week if I have to, but you better give up the idea of ever seeing sky again. You walked into your own grave, boy, and there won't be no rising again."
Brian picked up the blankets and spread them in his arms. If he could net Treat and wrap him he'd have a shot at that door. He heard Derry come out behind him and stand by the instrument panel. He crept forward with the blankets held ready, probing with his toes for food cans. He could hear Treat nervously tapping the skillet on the metal door. He crept within ten feet of the exit.
"I can smell you, young fella," hissed Treat. "I'm onna kill you.,
Brian brought the blankets up high and collected his breath for his pounce and then everything cut dead. The water, the opener, the compacter, the blender, all the instruments peeping from the rear cut off stone silent and were replaced by a single high-piercing whistle. Treat's mouth popped wide open and the skillet clanged to the floor. Brian ducked and covered his head, the instinct of a hundred Hollywood war movies, but the bomb never fell. The whistle didn't deepen in pitch and Brian turned to see Derry giggling by the instrument panel, her hand on a lever and red light flashing over her face. Treat was running, falling on canned goods and smacking thigh and chest into the open morgue drawers and screaming something about spasms and the other side and the Dragon breaking loose. Brian was through the vault door and digging barefoot up the ladder with the bomb-whine chasing him, the airlock whanging shut beneath nearly chopping his legs and up, butting the trapdoor with head and shoulder to scramble to his duffel bag with the sneaker laces strangling him and Treat's voice roaring over the loudspeaker:
"YOU'LL FRY! YOU STAY UP THERE AND YOU BURN, BOY, YOU'LL LIGHT UP LIKE A MOTH IN A THOUSAND SUNS! YOU'LL BURN, BRIAN MC NEIL, YOUR EYES WILL MELT AND YOUR BRAIN WILL SIZZLE AND YOU'LL BURN IN HELL ON EARTH!"
Brian shouldered his bag and sprinted barefoot into the cold, purple night.
Breed
RIAN WOKE on the lee side of a hill with a buffalo licking his face. At first he was only aware of the tongue, sticky and thick as a baby's arm, lapping down to sample his ears and cheeks. He had laid his sleeping bag out in the dark, snuggling it at the foot of what he took to be a drift fence, to have at least some shelter from the grit-blasting Wyoming wind. If it was still Wyoming; he hadn't been awake enough during the last part of the ride to look out for signs.
As he squirmed away from whatever the big thing mopping at his face was he glimpsed through half-sleep that each of the posts in the fence was painted a different color. Cherry red, lime green, lemon yellow. He was in a carny-colored corral with a live bull bison.
No.
He tried to go back under, thinking it was only the effects of the three-day power-hitch across the country from New Jersey, all that coffee and all those miles talking with strangers. But then the rich brown smell dawned on him and he knew. He knew. He had never seen a live buffalo before but he was sure this was what they smelled like. It smelled like The West.
The buffalo retreated a few steps when Brian sat up, fixing him with swimming brown walleyes. There were bare patches worn in the wool of its flanks and hump, shiny black leather showing through. Its beard was sugared with dust and meal of some kind, and Brian could hear the flop of its tail chasing flies.
"Morning, Buffalo."
The animal snorted through its flat nose for an answer, made munching quivers with its jaw. Brian fingered matter from his eyes and peered out over the fence to where he remembered the road. There were cutout letters hung from a crossbar like the ranches he'd seen in southern Wyoming had. Brian read them backward. CODY SPRAGUE'S WILD WEST BUCKIN' BISON RIDE, it said, FOOD — GAS — SOUVENIRS. Brian didn't understand how he could have missed the sign and the flapping pennants strung from it, even in the dark. The buffalo licked its nose.
Brian pulled on his sweat-funky road clothes and packed his sleeping bag away. The buffalo had lowered its eyelids to half-mast, no longer interested. Brian stood and walked around it. A shifting cloud of tiny black flies shadowed its ass, an ass cracked and black as old inner-tube rubber. There was something not quite real about the thing, Brian felt as if stuffing or springs would pop out of the seams any moment. He eased his hands into the hump wool. Coarse and greasy, like a mat for scuffing your feet clean on. The buffalo didn't move but for the twitching of its rump skin as insects lit on it. Brian gave it a couple of gentle, open-palmed thumps on the side, feeling the solid weight like a great warm tree stump.
"Reach for the sky!"
Brian nearly jumped on the animal's back as a cold cylinder pressed the base of his neck.
"Take your mitts off my buffalo and turn around."
Brian turned himself around slowly and there was a little chicken-necked man pointing an empty Coke bottle level with his heart. "One false move and I'll fizz you to pieces." The little man cackled, showing chipped brown teeth and goosing Brian with the bottle. "Scared the piss outta you, young fella. I seen you there this morning, laid out. Didn't figure I should bother to wake you till you woke yourself, but Ishmael, he thought you was a bag a meal. He's kind of slow, Ishmael."
The buffalo swung its head around to give the man a tentative whiff, then swung back. The man was wearing a fringed buckskin jacket so stained it looked freshly ripped off the buck. He had a wrinkle-ring every other inch of his long neck, a crooked beak of a nose, and dirty white hair that shot out in little clumps. Of the three of them the buffalo seemed to have had the best sleep.
Brian introduced himself and stated his business, which was to make his way to whatever passed for a major highway out here on the lone prairie. Thumbing from East Orange to the West Coast. He had gotten a bum steer from a drunken oil-rigger the other night and was dumped out here.
"Cody Sprague," said the little man, extending his hand. "I offer my condolences and the use of my privy. Usually don't open till nine or ten," he said, "but it don't seem to make a difference either whichway."
He led Brian across the road to where there was a metal outhouse and an orange-and-black painted shack about the size of a Tastee-Freeze.
"People don't want to come," he said, "they don't want to come. Just blow by on that Interstate. That's what you'll be wantin to get to, isn't but five miles or so down the way. They finished that last stretch a couple years back and made me obsolete. That's what they want me. Obsolete."