Everything's Eventual

   Don't be stupid, he told himself. All you hear is the shower. The rest is only imagination. Your stupid, overtrained imagination.

   Except it wasn't.

   Kinnell reached out and turned off the water.

   The rumbling sound continued. Low and powerful. Coming from outside.

   He got out of the shower and walked, dripping, across his bedroom on the second floor. There was still enough shampoo in his hair to make him look as if it had turned white while he was dozing—as if his dream of Judy Diment had turned it white.

   Why did I ever stop at that yard sale? he asked himself, but for this he had no answer. He supposed no one ever did.

   The rumbling sound grew louder as he approached the window overlooking the driveway—the driveway that glimmered in the summer moonlight like something out of an Alfred Noyes poem.

   As he brushed aside the curtain and looked out, he found himself thinking of his ex-wife, Sally, whom he had met at the World Fantasy Convention in 1978. Sally, who now published two newsletters out of her trailer home, one called Survivors, one called Visitors. Looking down at the driveway, these two titles came together in Kinnell's mind like a double image in a stereopticon.

   He had a visitor who was definitely a survivor.

   The Grand Am idled in front of the house, the white haze from its twin chromed tailpipes rising in the still night air. The Old English letters on the back deck were perfectly readable. The driver's-side door stood open, and that wasn't all; the light spilling down the porch steps suggested that Kinnell's front door was also open.

   Forgot to lock it, Kinnell thought, wiping soap off his forehead with a hand he could no longer feel. Forgot to reset the burglar alarm, too . . . not that it would have made much difference to this guy.

   Well, he might have caused it to detour around Aunt Trudy, and that was something, but just now the thought brought him no comfort.

   Survivors.

   The soft rumble of the big engine, probably at least a 442 with a four-barrel carb, reground valves, fuel injection.

   He turned slowly on legs that had lost all feeling, a naked man with a headful of soap, and saw the picture over his bed, just as he'd known he would. In it, the Grand Am stood in his driveway with the driver's door open and two plumes of exhaust rising from the chromed tailpipes. From this angle he could also see his own front door, standing open, and a long man-shaped shadow stretching down the hall.

   Survivors.

Survivors and visitors.

   Now he could hear feet ascending the stairs. It was a heavy tread, and he knew without having to see that the blond kid was wearing motorcycle boots. People with DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR tattooed on their arms always wore motorcycle boots, just as they always smoked unfiltered Camels. These things were like a national law.

   And the knife. He would be carrying a long, sharp knife—more of a machete, actually, the sort of knife that could strike off a person's head in a single stroke.

   And he would be grinning, showing those filed cannibal teeth.

   Kinnell knew these things. He was an imaginative guy, after all.

   He didn't need anyone to draw him a picture.

   "No," he whispered, suddenly conscious of his global nakedness, suddenly freezing all the way around his skin. "No, please, go away." But the footfalls kept coming, of course they did. You couldn't tell a guy like this to go away. It didn't work; it wasn't the way the story was supposed to end.

   Kinnell could hear him nearing the top of the stairs. Outside, the Grand Am went on rumbling in the moonlight.

   The feet coming down the hall now, worn bootheels rapping on polished hardwood.

   A terrible paralysis had gripped Kinnell. He threw it off with an effort and bolted toward the bedroom door, wanting to lock it before the thing could get in here, but he slipped in a puddle of soapy water and this time he did go down, flat on his back on the oak planks, and what he saw as the door clicked open and the motorcycle boots crossed the room toward where he lay, naked and with his hair full of Prell, was the picture hanging on the wall over his bed, the picture of the Road Virus idling in front of his house with the driver's-side door open.

   The driver's-side bucket seat, he saw, was full of blood. I'm going outside, I think, Kinnell thought, and closed his eyes.

Lunch at the Gotham Café