False Memory

Finally Martie moved closer, crouched, and gingerly pressed her freezing fingers to his throat, as she had done with Zachary. If he was still alive, she couldn’t walk away and leave him to die alone. She wasn’t able to bring help in time to save him, and even if help could have been gotten, she didn’t dare seek it under these circumstances, with possible charges of murder hanging over her. She could stand witness to his death, however, a vigil, because no one, even such a man as this, ought to die alone.

An arrhythmic pulse. A flush of hot breath across the back of her hand.

Like a spring-loaded trap, his hand flew up, seized her wrist.

She fell out of her squat, onto her back, squeezing the trigger. The pistol leaped with recoil in her hand, and bullets tore uselessly into the high branches of a nearby cottonwood.

Time out of whack, seconds as long as minutes, minutes as long as hours, here in the trunk of the BMW.

Martie had told Dusty to wait, to be quiet, because she needed to hear movement out there. One down, she had said. One down, and maybe two.

The maybe was the source of his terror. This little maybe was like the culturing medium in a petri dish, breeding fear rather than bacteria, and Dusty was already sick half to death with what it had bred.

From the moment they had put him in the trunk, he had blindly explored the space, especially along the bottom of the lid, searching for a latch release. He couldn’t find one.

In a side well, a few tools. A combination lug wrench, jack handle, and pry bar. But even if the locked lid could be pried open, the leverage would have to be applied from outside, not from within.

The thought of her alone with them, and then the gunfire, and now the silence. Just the ticking of the engine, a low vibration in the floor of the trunk. Waiting, waiting, feverish with terror. Waiting, until finally the waiting was unendurable.

Lying on his side, he worked the blade end of the crowbar along the edges of the carpeted panel on the forward wall of the trunk, popped staples, bent the edges of the panel, got his fingers around it, and with considerable effort tore it out of the way, flattened it on the floor.

He put the crowbar aside, rolled onto his back, drew his knees toward his chest as far as the cramped space would allow, and jackhammered his feet into the forward wall of the trunk, which was formed by the backseat of the car. And again, again, and a fourth time, a fifth, gasping for breath, his heart booming — but not booming so loud that he failed to hear another burst of gunfire, the hard ugly chatter of a fully automatic weapon, in the distance, tat — tat — tat — tat — tat — tat.

Maybe two down. Maybe not.

Martie didn’t have a machine pistol The creeps had them.

He held his breath, listening, but there was not immediately another burst of fire.

Again, he kicked, kicked, kicked, until he heard plastic or fiberboard crack, felt something shift. A ribbon-thin line of pale light in the blackness. Light from the passenger compartment. He swiveled around, pressing with his hands, putting his shoulder to it, heaving.

The dying man expended the last of his strength when he clutched Martie’s wrist, perhaps not with the intention of harming her, but to get her keen attention. When she fell out of her squat and onto her back, squeezing off eight or ten rounds into the tree, Kevin’s hand let go and dropped away from her.

As pieces of branches rattled down through the huge cottonwood, clicked off the kiva wall, and plopped in the snow, Martie scrambled backward and then onto her knees, gripping the machine pistol with both hands again. She trained the weapon on Kevin but didn’t squeeze the trigger.

The last bits of cottonwood descended as Martie managed to stop gasping, and in the returning quiet, the man wheezed, “Who are you?”

She thought he must be delirious in these last moments of his life, his mind cloudy from the loss of so much blood.

“Better make your peace,” she advised gently, because she could think of nothing else to say. This would have been the only valuable counsel anyone could have given even if this man had been a saint, and it was only more apt considering how far removed from saintliness he was.

When he summoned enough breath to speak again, the judgment of delirium seemed hasty. His voice as thready as any cloth that had been woven millennia ago: “Who are you, really?” She could barely see the faint shine of his eyes. “What were we… dealing with… in you?”

A chill passed through Martie, unrelated to the cold night or to the snow, for she was reminded of the similar questions that Dusty had asked about Dr. Ahriman, just before they rounded the turn in the ranch road and ran over the spike strip.

“Who… are you… really?” Kevin asked once more.

He choked and then gagged on a thickness rising in his throat. The crisp air became brittle with a coppery scent that steamed out of him with his last breath, and blood flooded from his mouth.