Inside Straight

He lurched in a circle, dizzy and coughing. He remembered…he remembered the skittering thing crawling under his skin, like a rat burrowing into his body. The fear that had enveloped him. There had been a man, clad in shining white, who’d tried to kill him with a sword…wallah! Fire had danced all around him, and smoke blinded his eyes. Maybe the fire had taken his clothes—but no, that idea was ridiculous. He had no burn marks on skin or flesh.

Finally he remembered—he had run, bursting out of the house into the night. The feeling of freedom had been exhilarating, intoxicating. He had run for hours. How many hours?

How many miles? He did not know. In the end he had collapsed, exhausted. Here.

Wherever here was.

Fortune shivered. He couldn’t just sit here all night. He had to get back to Los Angeles. He was starving. He’d never been so hungry. He needed food, bad. And clothes. He couldn’t sit around butt naked in the middle of nowhere and wait for help. Help of any kind was unlikely to find him. He’d have to seek it out.

And if that thing was still in him, he really needed medical attention.

He remembered that the thing had been scuttling toward his head. Hesitantly, he put his hands on his jaw, gingerly felt his cheeks, up around his ears and across his forehead—where he felt a lump. The thing that had climbed into his body was still in his head.

John Fortune freaked and ran. Or tried to.

He clawed his way up the side of the arroyo, sliding back down several times in a rain of gravel and sand. Once he dislodged a rock near the edge of the dirt bank that would have crushed him if it had landed on him, but somehow, miraculously, it missed when they both tumbled back to the gully’s floor.

Somehow, he dragged himself up out of the arroyo. He glanced around wildly, desperately looking for something, anything that might hold a hope of aid. He was in wild, undeveloped foothills that dropped down to a plain dotted by clumps of stunted evergreens. The ground was sparsely covered by small shrubby bushes, tufts of grass and cactus, which he discovered when he brushed too near one and scratched his left leg from calf to ankle. The sudden pain acted like a pitcher of cold water thrown in his face. He tried to breathe easier. Aided by the light cast by the rising moon, he spotted a dark ribbon of what could be a road, or at least a path or trail of some kind, free of the stones that were tearing up his bare feet.

He started toward it, cautiously but quickly, eager to find some human contact, someone who could tell him what had happened to him and assure him that he’d be all right. …

He was thirsty, and his hunger was so great that his stomach cramped like it did before his monthly blood came. The moon rising above the foothills was gigantic in the night sky. The jackals who laired in the wadis greeted it, howling. Fortune’s head throbbed in rhythm with their cries. The hunger was bad, but he was used to it. He had often gone without food, when that meant that his children could be fed. Not that his sacrifices had helped much in the long run. He had lost them all, one by one. Jamal burning with fever, clutched hopelessly to his breast, nothing to feed him but the salt tears dripping from his cheeks.

The road was more of a dirt track than a highway, but it was smooth and soft on his bruised feet. The jackals didn’t follow him on it, but the flies did. They weren’t as bad as the flies in the marketplace, but they bothered him as they buzzed around his head, whispering, leading him perhaps back to the temple where there was shade and water and blessed rest, and …

What was he thinking?!

These were not his thoughts, these memories of a life he’d never led. Jackals? Children? A temple? John Fortune’s hands rose to his forehead, then dropped down, afraid to touch that thing that had burrowed beneath his skin and climbed to his brain. These weird memories had to be coming from it, athough…they were human memories, and that thing had been…a thing. An amulet-size bug that had been nesting in his mother’s chest of drawers since before he’d been born. A scarab, a beetle, not…not a person!