“I think we’ve got enough gas,” Holden said coolly.
“Enough to get you there,” the attendant said, removing the nozzle. “Gettin’ back’s your own concern.” The girls came over behind the old guy and climbed back into the Rambler. Curt threw a twenty at the old man’s feet, aiming for and hitting the slick of tobacco juice. He glanced at Holden, then nodded at the Rambler. Time to go.
Holden couldn’t have agreed more.
Marty was the last one to climb back into the vehicle. The old man was still standing beside the fuel pump, apparently dismissing the money at his feet, still chewing, still staring at them with one good eye and one flushed with blood.
“Good luck with your business,” Marty said, climbing the steps. “I know the railroad’s comin’ through here any day now, gonna be big. Streets paved with… actual street.” And as he started swinging the door shut, Holden heard him mutter, “Fucker.”
Curt was already firing the engine, and even in a vehicle so large he managed to leave a wheel-spin in their wake. Now will come the joking, Holden thought. An unpleasant situation cast aside with bravado, mocking, and rude quips.
But they drove away in silence, none of them catching another’s eye, and it was only as they turned a bend and started the long climb into the hills that the tension started to filter away.
THREE
Marty lit up a spliff, offering his pre-rolled joints around to everyone else. No one took him up on it, though he thought for a second Holden was going to. They smiled awkwardly at each other.
Yeah, Marty thought, he knows too. He knows that was super-weird and fucked up back there. Like, how the hell does that dude stay in business? And where the hell did he just pop up from? And why was he…?
“Why was he looking at Jules like that?” Marty whispered. Across the small table from him, Dana and Holden heard the question but did not respond. Probably because they’d been thinking the same thing themselves, and there was no comfortable answer.
Bland rock played from the radio, Jules hummed in the front passenger seat, Curt cut in now and then with a few badly-sung lines from some song or another. Feigning normality.
“Don’t give up the day job, dude,” Marty said. “At least I’ll have a day job!” Curt said. “I won’t spend my days stoned, wandering the woods, being at one with nature, and wondering how amazing it is that I’m actually alive.”
There was silence for a few seconds, and then Marty responded, “I pity you, man.” And everyone laughed.
That’s better, Marty thought. That’s much better. Laughter’s the second-best medicine. He took another drag on his joint and held the smoke down, breathing out slowly. He was relaxed again now, leaning back in his chair with his head resting against the window. The sun caressed his scalp, and it was good. Holden had fetched them another beer each, and he felt a warm glow, starting at the center of him and reaching all the way to his fingertips and the ends of his toes.
Dana and Holden were sitting close, and though they affected indifference, Marty could see that each time the swaying Rambler nudged them into each other it sent a thrill through them.
Lucky guy, he thought. Dana was cute as hell and a lovely girl. A beautiful girl. They’d been friends for over a year, and to begin with he’d believed that she viewed him as some sort of a joke. Many people did, mostly the shallow types—the plastic people, he called them—who spent more time concerned with what the outsides of their heads looked like, rather than bothering to care for the insides. But he’d soon come to realize that, though gorgeous, Dana was not like that at all. An intelligent girl, both deep and somewhat mysterious, she kept a distance from him rather than regarding him as a joke.
Maybe her parents had had a thing about drugs of any kind, and it was a hangover from that, or perhaps… but no, he’d stopped thinking that long ago. Perhaps it was because she felt something for him and was afraid to grow too close? Yeah, right. Looking at Holden and Dana now, he could see how distant she kept from guys she liked.
But out of their awkward beginning had emerged a strange, close relationship. Marty was sure that Dana knew what he felt about her, and how intense was the first impression she’d made upon him. And Marty was getting to know her more and more every day. Of all the friendships he’d made at college, this one felt as if it would last longer than all the others.
Lucky guy, he thought again, and when Dana caught his eye he glanced away.
“Guys, take a look,” Jules said.
Marty sat up and, with the others, leaned to look out the front windshield. To their right was a steep ravine, and ahead of them loomed the dark mouth of a tunnel set in the mountainside. It looked impossibly small. The ravine ended in a sheer, bare cliff face, above which rose a steeply wooded hillside, boulders, and rock spurs protruding between greenery like boils on a craggy face. And across the other side of the ravine, another tunnel mouth emerged onto a road ledge.
Must curve through the mountain, he thought, and he wondered who would have built such a tunnel instead of a simple bridge. “Hey,” Marty said, “do we really have to go—”
“Yep,” Curt said. He slowed the Rambler as they approached, concentrating, and turned on the headlights. The darkness was pushed back as they entered the tunnel, and to Marty it felt as if they were being swallowed by the mountain. It seemed like an incredibly tight fit, but there was no scraping or crunching, and Curt steered confidently into the darkness.
Marty closed and opened his eyes again several times, enjoying the brash contrast between darkness and the artificial lights of the Rambler’s dashboard. His friends were mere shadows in the barely lit cabin, and he knew that he’d look the same to them.
Halfway through the tunnel, when the faint glow of daylight started to show ahead of them, he suddenly sat up as the hairs on his forearms and neck stood on end. A shiver went though him, like a subtle electric shock, tingling his balls and tickling the insides of his nostrils. He immediately sniffed the joint, wondering if some alien substance had found its way in, and—
Above the mountainside and ravine, a small bird’s free will took it along the route of the rough mountain track. It swept above the wooded mountainside, unconsciously following the tunnel as it rode thermals. Singing as it flew, stomach full from a recent feed, it struck something in mid-air, something that flashed into view for a second like a vast blue, pulsing grid, and with a shower of fiery sparks the bird plummeted, dead. Its wings were scorched, its insides fried. Its brain had been carbonized, and any thoughts it once held were more remote and immaterial than shadows.
Nothing made the bird fly this way, nothing urged it north instead of east or south or west, but it died nonetheless. Free will was, perhaps, its undoing.
“Oh… oh!” Marty heard someone say, and he thought it was Dana. No one else spoke, but he felt the brief, intense level of discomfort in the Rambler; people shifted in their seats, and the silence grew heavier.
Then they were out the other end and heading across the mountainside, the steep drop still to their right, and the glaring sun cleared away any dregs of darkness.
What was that? Marty wanted to say. Weird magnetic field? Radiation from the rocks? Someone walking over my grave? But when he looked around at the others he saw smiling faces, and a growing excitement that they were getting closer to their destination. Curt and Jules were singing badly again, Holden was drinking, and Dana stared dreamily from the window.