He took her at her word, and let the darkness take him. But her last words followed him down into the shadows, and instead of bringing the fear they should have given him, they brought him comfort, and a peace he never expected.
:It’s a hell of a greeting, Herald Alberich, and a hell of a way to get here—but welcome to Valdemar, brother. Welcome . . .:
Roadkill
This odd little story was first published in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine. It’s the one I always use as an example when people ask me where I get my ideas. This one literally came as I was driving to work, saw a piece of cardboard skitter across the road in front of me as if it was alive, and thought, “Now what if it was alive?”
A gust of wind hit the side of George Randal’s van and nearly tore the steering wheel out of his hands. He cursed as the vehicle lurched sideways, and wrestled it back into his own lane.
It was a good thing there weren’t too many people on the road. It was just a damned good thing that Mingo Road was a four-lane at this point, or he’d have been in the ditch. A mile away, it wasn’t, but all the shift traffic from the airline maintenance base, the Rockwell plant and the McDonald-Douglas plant where he worked would have put an intolerable strain on a two-lane road.
The stoplight at Mingo and 163rd turned yellow, and rather than push his luck, he obeyed it, instead of doing an “Okie caution” (“Step on the gas, Fred, she’s fixin’ to turn red”). This was going to be another typical late spring Oklahoma day. Wind gusting up to 60 per, and rain off and on. Used to be, when he was a kid, it’d be dry as old bones by this late in the season, but not anymore. All the flood-control projects and water-management dams had changed the micro-climate, and it was unlikely this part of Oklahoma would ever see another Dust-Bowl.
Although with winds like this, he could certainly extrapolate what it had been like, back then during the thirties.
The habit of working a mental simulation was so ingrained it was close to a reflex; once the thought occurred, his mind took over, calculating wind-speed, type of dust, carrying capacity of the air. He was so intent on the internal calculations that he hardly noticed when the light turned green, and only the impatient honk of the car behind him jolted him out of his reverie. He pulled the van out into the intersection, and the red sports-car behind him roared around him, driver giving him the finger as he passed.
“You son of a—” he noted with satisfaction the MacDac parking permit in the corner of the rear window: the vanity plate was an easy one to remember, “HOTONE.” He’d tell a little fib to the guard at the guard shack, and have the jerk cited for reckless driving in the parking-lot. That would go on his work-record, and serve him right, too.
If it hadn’t been for the combination of the wind gust and the fool in the red IROC, he would never have noticed the strange behavior of that piece of cardboard in the median strip.
But because of the gust, he knew which direction the wind was coming from. When the IROC screamed right over the center-line, heading straight toward a piece of flattened box, and the box skittered just barely out of the way as if the wind had picked it up and moved it in time, something went off in his brain.
As he came up even to where the box had been, he saw what the thing had been covering; roadkill, a dead ’possum. At that exact moment he knew what had been wrong with the scene a second before, when the box had moved. Because it had moved against the wind.
He cast a startled glance in his rear-view mirror just in time to see the box skitter back, with the wind this time, and stop just covering the dead animal.
That brought all the little calculations going on in his head to a screeching halt. George was an orderly man, a career engineer, whose one fervent belief was that everything could be explained in terms of physics if you had enough data.
Except that this little incident was completely outside his ordered universe.
He was so preoccupied with trying to think of an explanation for the box’s anomalous behavior that he didn’t remember to report the kid in the sports-car at the guard-shack. He couldn’t even get his mind on the new canard specs he’d been so excited about yesterday. Instead he sat at his desk, playing with the CAD/CAM computer, trying to find some way for that box to have done what it did.
And coming up dry. It should not, could not, have moved that way, and the odds against it moving back to exactly the same place where it had left were unbelievable.
He finally grabbed his gym-bag, left his cubicle, and headed for the tiny locker-room MacDac kept for those employees who had taken up running or jogging on their lunch-breaks. Obviously he was not going to get anything done until he checked the site out, and he might just as well combine that with his lunch-time exercise. Today he’d run out on Mingo instead of around the base.
A couple of Air National Guard A-4s cruised by overhead, momentarily distracting him. He’d forgotten exactly where the roadkill had been, and before he was quite ready for it, he was practically on top of it. Suddenly he was no longer quite sure that he wanted to do this. It seemed silly, a fantasy born of too many late-night movies. But as long as he was out here . . .
The box was nowhere in sight. Feeling slightly foolish, he crossed to the median and took a good look at the body.
It was half-eaten, which wasn’t particularly amazing. Any roadkill that was relatively fresh was bound to get chewed on.
Except that the last time he’d seen roadkill on the median, it had stayed there until it bloated, untouched. Animals didn’t like the traffic; they wouldn’t go after carrion in the middle of the road if they could help it.
And there was something wrong with the way the bite-marks looked too. Old Boy Scout memories came back, tracking and identifying animals by signs. . . .
The flesh hadn’t been bitten off so much as carved off—as if the carcass had been chewed by something with enormous buck teeth, like some kind of carnivorous horse, or beaver. Nothing in his limited experience made marks like that.
As a cold trickle ran down his spine, a rustle in the weeds at the side of the road made him jump. He looked up.
The box was there, in the weeds. He hadn’t seen it, half-hidden there, until it had moved. It almost seemed as if the thing was watching him; the way it had a corner poked out of the weeds like a head. . . .
His reaction was stupid and irrational, and he didn’t care. He bolted, ran all the way back to the guard-shack with a chill in his stomach that all his running couldn’t warm.
He didn’t stop until he reached the guard-shack and the safety of the fenced-in MacDac compound, the sanity and rational universe of steel and measurement where nothing existed that could not be simulated on a computer screen.
He slowed to a gentle jog as he passed the shack; he’d have liked to stop, because his heart was pounding so hard he couldn’t hear anything, but if he did, the guards would ask him what was wrong. . . .