God Is a Bullet (38 page)

Gabi starts to rock like a child blithering out one word: “Him …”

Case steps back toward Bob, and kneels beside the girl. Bob looks at Case. “Cyrus?”

“Got to be,” she says.

They wait through the falling away of the sun. Beyond their grasp, the stone-backed foothills give up the day’s heat like dying coals at a fire, their gray skin going cooler with the advance of the dark blue icing of night.

Bob has the hood up, is checking the wires and hoses and
bolts making sure that what needs to be locked and loaded for a hard run across the flats is dead on.

Gabi sits inside the Dakota, huddled up in one of her father’s workshirts. The great rush of freedom has given way to stunning exhaustion. A mind-staring emptiness. Case sits beside Gabi. She’s seen this all before, in a mural of junkie faces and rehab breakdowns whose systems are eighty-proof Thorazine.

The sun is great shocks of blown gold and orange coming through the clouded summer sky, and in a moment of half-clarity Gabi looks up at Case and whispers, “I know you.”

Case looks down into that filthy ragdoll face. “Me?”

“I saw you in Mexico.”

Case’s face wans at the hideous connection.

“I was in the back of the van. The door was bent funny, and sometimes when I was alone I could look out. I saw when Cyrus hit you. And when they dragged you into that field. I saw them rape you …”

Case runs a finger up Gabi’s arm. Along the small purple beetle-back dots left from the needle.

“I thought about you,” says Gabi. She looks up as if her father might hear what she is about to say. Her eyes press over the top of the dashboard. “I don’t want my father hurt.”

It is a deplorable moment. The innocent and absurd reticence of the wounded.

“I thought about you. When they were doing it to me …”

Case can feel that curdling tremor throughout Gabi’s body, knows it full well. The very sensory touch of it goes back down her own dungeon steps through heart-mind fragments.

“They used to talk about you. And I thought, If I could be like that, like someone they hated, feared, like someone, you know … And thought, I could live maybe. I could just zone in on that. So I would pretend. I would close my eyes and think …” She sees her father moving around the engine
hood, stops on the chance he comes over. When he disappears again behind the blue hoodsheet, she goes on: “You know what I mean? Not that I didn’t think about my father. But … later. Later. I don’t know. I needed something else. And I was afraid … he’d hate me.”

Gabi curls up inside the lean angle of Case’s shoulder. Whole blind moments of creation pull at Case. She feels those trigger pains for this raw thing of childhood that’s been devoured out. For a moment she feels a wish coming, but she knows better. And for a moment she hates herself for knowing better than to wish.

“I don’t feel well,” says Gabi. “My whole body hurts.”

In dusk, Case and Bob stand at the back of the pickup and talk through the facts that beset them. And on top of it all they’ve got a kid who’s gut-surfing through the first hits of withdrawal. Case sits on the tailgate, her hands bundled up inside the pockets of her buckskin coat. Bob paces, occasionally glancing through the rear window of the Dakota at Gabi. Her head lies back against the glass. The night wind has started up. The light is going fast, the mountains are already black.

“We go north,” he says, pointing, “or east, we got nothing. Nothing. Just miles of Death Valley. We go south, maybe. There’s the China Lake Weapon Center. But that’s not shit for miles, and I’ve never been that way.”

He stops, runs his boot along the sand, leaving a clean mark. “Going back the way we came is still the closest.”

“Trona’s that way.”

“Yeah. We might eventually see some lights on the horizon. Make a run at ’em.”

“We can’t stay here.”

“I know.”

“Come dark, they’ll swarm us.”

He nods. “There’s fire stations in the hills. We could try to make a run for them. There’s people there.”

“Yeah. But do you know exactly where they are?”

“No. But we could pick a direction. Get as far as we get. If they jump us, we blow the truck. That extra gas will kick up some huge flame.”

He reaches into his canvas coat for a cigarette.

“Are you counting on the search and rescue helicopters?”

He lights the cigarette, shrugs a bit at the prospect. “Counting on them is a reach, but … If those rangers pick up on the flames they’ll have the choppers out fast.”

“If they pick up the flames.”

“If,” he says.

“Could they get here quick enough?”

“I don’t know, Case, I just don’t know.”

“If they don’t, we’d have lost the truck. We’d be on foot.”

“They’d be on us anyway by then.”

“Yeah, you’re right about that, Coyote.”

Things look pretty bad all the way around. He sits beside Case. They form a sullen, hope-lost pair. She leans back for a canteen lying in the bed of the truck. Earlier they’d poured the last water from both jugs into it. She shakes the canteen, uncorks it, takes a drink. She then offers him the canteen. As he takes it, he passes her the cigarette. Going through this simple ritual, they stare south toward an unspeakable creeping darkness. She passes him back the cigarette, he the canteen to her. She lays it stone-flat across her lap, runs her fingers along the smooth metal plate of its belly.

Case looks back into the truck cab. Gabi is now just the barest of shadows. Her head moves listlessly.

We are asked to do things that logic leaves us incapable of. Case goes through the checklist of her failings. Out there, out there in the country grafted from a thousand riddles and a thousand koans, where all things are completely exposed, she knows the Lord of Misrule is waiting. Filing his teeth. Getting ready to come at them twelve months out of the year, leading a host of warped goodies to take them down. Happy holidays from the dead, child. Dyin’ time starts early
tonight. And she knows they’re only worth what they’re worth dead.

“Why don’t we pack the brush right here?” she says. “Leave me with enough gas. I’ll start a fire. This will draw them. You take off with the truck.”

Bob looks at her, knowing full well what that means. He looks back at Gabi. Her head jerks slightly. Inside him is a stinging bedlam. A nightmare that can’t be slept through.

“I can do it,” she says.

Bob’s eyes are full of fatigue and pain as he climbs down from the tailgate and stands. Even against the roiling night, feelings he has for Case speak to her in the tenderness of his features. “We’ll go home together,” he says, “or we’ll perish here together. Let’s start back.”

He heads for the driver’s side of the truck and Case is up quick and stops him with the tug of an arm.

“Thank you,” she says.

The careful turn of his head. “For what?”

“For considering me … that valuable.”

They move hard across the desert floor. No headlights. Gabi sits like petrified wood between her father, who drives, and Case. She is already suffering from the night sweats, ’cause she’s gone well beyond her required feeding. A shotgun is wedged between her leg and Case’s, just inches from where she holds Case’s hand.

Every hole and hard spot they hit drives them like rivets toward the roof before they come slamming down. Gabi winces a cry with every hit.

“It’ll be alright, baby,” hushes Bob.

Then the black night explodes with electric fire. A white burning lance missiles toward them.

Gabi screams and ducks down. Case braces herself against the dashboard. Bob armlocks the steering wheel.

The flare rams the windshield. Sends out a phosphorous rain of thistles, blinding them. The truck goes out of control. Bob sees Stick rushing out of the circlet of darkness, firing his Luger. He sees Gutter charging the front end. Bob cuts hard right but keeps going.

Gabi slides down on the floor, wailing. Bob hits the gas, trying to make a run out of it. The ground ahead is going by so fast it’s impossible to react to the nooks and rises. The Dakota takes a beating but the shots are getting more distant. Suddenly the bridge of railroad ties rises up out of the darkness at a hard angle.

Bob tries to right the wheels and hit the brakes at the same time, but it’s too little too late. The tires trundle across the flat ties at a forty-degree cut, and going that fast the Dakota can’t make it. The tires on one side of the truck instantly spin air and the pickup does a nosedive straight into the ravine. It hits hard ten feet down, hangs a second ass-end up, then dips against the incline in a thudding powder-bomb of sand.

Dazed and cut with broken glass, Case stumbles out of the truck. Bob has to kick at his jammed door till it gives way in a croaking sigh. He grabs his daughter out behind him. Case scrambles back for their weapons. The gas pedal has stuck to the floor and the engine whines away, the front tires burning holes in the briny ground.

They try to collect themselves in the darkness for the fight to come. They hunker at the edge of the ravine. Gabi lies on the ground in a fetal position. She has become just a gibbering thing. Case and Bob look out across the flats. It is silent and dark as a sacred island of the dead.

They look at each other, fighting for their breath, fighting
to compose themselves. A fierce psychic energy moves between the two.

“Get Gabi out of the way. Find someplace to put her. Farther up the ravine. I’m gonna blow the truck!”

Case grabs Gabi against her will and shakes her hard. Bob runs up onto the trestled parapet and hears Case yelling, “Come on! Come on!” He kneels, looks between the thick lattice pylons, sees Case dragging Gabi along the ridge-backed ravine floor under the bridge, sees the bumping shocks finally rattle Gabi’s legs into some kind of order.

He stands, pumps a shell into the shotgun’s chamber. He waits till Case and Gabi are clear.

A short way down that warped and eroded channelway they come upon the remains of a drainage pipe almost tall enough for a man to walk through. Case tugs Gabi hard, stumbling into the twenty-foot-long cement corridor. She gets Gabi down on the ground.

Bob hears Case scream to him to blow the truck. He takes aim at the gas tank and fires.

There is a depth-charge blow skyward that rocks Bob back-assed from the bridge into the sand. It’s followed in fast order by a raw burst of flames that geyser up and leap and lick at the thick trestle ties. The draft below the bridge sucks in the flames that shoot across its underbelly.

Case looks out through that cement portal to where the ground is a fever of flames and fast filling with hard black-gray smoke. She looks toward the other end of the drainage pipe. There’s access from both sides.

She straddles Gabi, who sits backed against the curving wall. “I have to go back up on top.”

Gabi’s got the ice-cold shakes and grabs Case’s coat so she can’t leave.

“Listen to me. Listen to me,” says Case.

Gabi snaps her head from side to side, not wanting to hear.

Case takes the pistol from her belt. Tries to force-feed it into Gabi’s hand. “Listen,” she screams. Then, lower, “Listen. We’ve done this before, Gabi. You and me. We’ve done this.”

Gabi stares into that bare face. Spartan in its calculated wrath and enmity. A fierce sound rockpoint, holding fast as death itself.

“Hear me. Think of me now. Be me now. Take this gun … Take it. Look through the fuckin’ back door of that van when they dragged me out into that field. It was me, you … Okay. When they dry-humped you. It was you, me, okay. Okay.”

The fingers give a little and Case gets them spread enough to press the handle of the gun in. “We’ve done this before. Oh, yeah. When I shot Granny Boy down. It was me, you. When I put one blast right into that prick’s face. It was
us
. We did it. You understand?”

Case’s voice has the lulling cadence of the killer. The sharp cut-sounds of the knife doing its death-quick evisceration.

“We’ve done this before. We’ve broken into them just like they broke into you. You hear me. We’ve done this. And we’re going to do it again. Now. You, me.”

Gabi’s hand trembles around the spherical brushing and Case sees she may not hold up even yet. But there’s no more time.

“I got to go back up on top. If they come …”

Case slams back the hammer, and Gabi’s eyes flinch. “You hold it close with both hands. You, me. And you, me … do them. You, me. You, me. Do them. Just pull the trigger. And keep pulling.”

Case runs through the choking smoke, calling to Bob. A great wall of white fire rises from the burning truck, heaven-bound on the night wind. She hears Bob yelling and turns to find him at the edge of the bridge where teardrops of fire tongue through gaps between the wood pylons.

They meet at the crest of the ravine upward from the molten wreckage. The flames streak a hundred feet straight up amid whorls of ground smoke.

“Where’d you put Gabi?”

“In the drainage pipe. She has my gun.”

Bob nods. The sweat on his face is being speckled with charred ash. He and Case try to stare through the blackening air.

A sound jacks across the desert night. They look back across the ravine. Was it a human voice, or just the fire snapping apart the plastic dashboard?

“The fuck is out there gettin’ off on this,” Case whispers. She turns to Bob. There is a fury in her eyes. “He’s out there with his dick gettin’ hard thinkin’ about—”

The air is broken by a host of screams. A ghost-charge of voices from black redoubts on both sides of the ravine. A clan of spiked-hair derelicts and chick bull-studs, clean-skinned nasty boys and black blood-kill disciples.

Bob and Case get low to the ground. Case drops her shotgun, peels off her buckskin coat. Bob scans the darkness for where the first hit will come. He turns to Case. She’s taken out her knife and is cutting a long thin line down the inside of her right arm.

“What the fuck are you doing? Case!”

She starts down the left, leaving a dark red tracer bleeding out onto the white flesh. He grabs her arm. “Case! What are you doing?”

She looks up. She has made out of her face a death mask to the call of the horribles. “I’m gettin’ a blood rush up for the crossing over!”