The Visible Man and Other Stories (23 page)

“. . . lieve it?” his mother was saying.

“. . . don’t know what . . . now . . . but if . . .” said Mrs. Spinnato.

“. . . we do? . . . how . . .”

“. . . what
can
we . . . if it’s . . . that . . .”

“. . . pray, that’s . . .”

Unenlightened, the boy returned to his bedroom. The note of fear was in Mrs. Spinnato’s voice, too, and she was a powerful, strong-willed woman, ordinarily afraid of nothing.

The boy went to his window and stood looking out at the storm. It was raining hard. The trees were lashing violently back and forth as if they had gone mad with pain. Dislodged slate roofing and shingles were flying and swirling around in the air like confetti. The sky was a mad luminescent indigo, except when lightning turned it a searing white. Some power lines were already down, writhing and spitting blue sparks in the street, and trees were beginning to have their branches torn off. There was a sudden high-pitched tearing sound over his head, and something scraped heavily across the roof before it tumbled down into the yard. That was their television antenna being blown away. A moment later the light in the hall flickered and went out. All their lights were gone. He stood in the dark, looking out the window—excited, exalted, and terrified.

That was when the real storm front hit.

The boy sensed the blow coming, an irresistible onrush of fire-shot darkness, and instinctively dropped flat to the floor. The window exploded inward in a fountain of shattered glass. There was a series of flat explosions, and wood chips sprayed and geysered from the wall opposite the window, exactly as if someone was raking the room with a heavy-caliber machine gun. The boy would never know it, but the damage was being done by chestnuts from the horse-chestnut trees outside, stripped from their branches by a 150 m.p.h. gust and whipped into the room with all the shattering force of heavy-caliber bullets.

The wind struck again. This time the window-frame was splintered and pulverized, and the house itself screeched, rocked, and seemed to strain up toward the sky for a moment before it settled back down. A jagged crack shot the length of one wall. The boy hugged the floor while bits of plaster and lathing came down on his back. He wasn’t even particularly afraid. What was happening was too huge and immediate and overwhelming to leave any room in his mind for fear. During a lull in the wind he could hear his mother and Mrs. Spinnato screaming downstairs. He himself was making a little dry panting noise that he wasn’t even aware of,
ahnnn, ahnnn, ahnnn,
like a winded animal.

The lull seemed as if it was going to last for a while. The boy tried to get to his feet and was knocked flat again by wind and water. He had forgotten that this was a “lull” only by comparison with the unbelievable gust that had struck a minute before. He pulled himself up again, hanging on to the shattered window frame and not lifting his head much higher than the window ledge. In a heartbeat he was drenched to the bone. If the rain had been hard before, it was now like a horizontal waterfall driving against the house. But by keeping his head close to the frame and squinting he found that he could see a little. He got his vision right just in time to see another tremendous gust destroy Mr. Leidy’s house, a gust that was fortunately blowing in a different direction. Fortunately for the boy anyway. Leidy’s place was built on a rise, denying it even the minimum shelter that the small hills to the southeast afforded the boy’s house. One moment the Leidy house was there, a solid three-story structure, and the next moment—in an eyeblink—it was gone, demolished, smashed to flinders, turned into a monstrous welter of flying debris that looked for all the world like a Gargantuan dust devil.

Somewhere on the other side of the house he could very faintly hear his mother calling desperately for him. Probably she was trying to make it up the stairs to his bedroom.

She didn’t make it, because at that moment, unbelievably, the earthquake struck.

At first the boy thought it was the wind again, but then the entire house began to rattle and buck and plunge, and there was a rumbling freight-train sound that was even louder than the storm. Terrified and helpless, the boy could do nothing but cling like a burr to the windowsill while the room around him bounced and jigged and staggered. Hairline cracks shot out across the walls and ceiling and floor, widened, spread. A section of the far wall suddenly slid away, leaving a ragged five-foot gap. The house
whammed
the ground once with finality, bounced again, and settled. The ground stopped moving. Nothing happened for perhaps a minute, and then the entire front half of the house collapsed. Plaster powder and brick dust were puffed from all the windows on the boy’s side of the house, like steam from a bellows. For a heartbeat the boy was coated with dust and powder from head to foot, and then the rain came rushing back in the window and washed him clean again.

Another lull, the most complete one yet, as though the universe had taken a deep, deep breath.

In that abrupt hush the boy could hear someone close at hand screaming and sobbing. He realized with surprise that it was himself. Almost casually, the portion of his mind not occupied with terror noticed a sudden rush of sea-water sweeping in across the ground. Mrs. Spinnato’s house had been determinedly smouldering in spite of the rain but it went out in a hissing welter of steam when the wave inundated it. That first wave had been a fake, only waist-deep and made mostly of spume, but there were a whole series of other waves marching in behind it—storm waves, tsunami, maybe actual tidal waves, who knows?—and some of them were pale horrors twelve, twenty, thirty feet high.

I’m stuck in it
, said a voice in the boy’s head that was the boy’s voice and yet somehow not the boy’s voice.
I can’t stop it. I can’t get out.

I didn’t know it would be like this
, the voice said.

The universe let out that deep, deep breath.

The wind came back.

This time it gusted to 220 mph and it flattened everything.

It uprooted one of the huge chestnut trees in the boy’s yard and hurled it like a giant’s javelin right at the window where the boy was crouching.

The boy had a timeless moment to himself before the tree smashed him into pulp, and he used it to wonder what it would have been like to live in Ohio.

The boy had a timeless moment to himself before the tree smashed him into pulp, and he used it to wonder why he was thinking of feathers and soot.

The boy had a timeless moment to himself before the tree smashed him into pulp, and he used it to wonder who the man was who was crying inside his head.

Where No Sun Shines

ROBINSON HAD BEEN driving for nearly two days, across Pennsylvania, up through the sooty barrens of New Jersey, pushing both the car and himself with desperation. Exhaustion had stopped him once in a small, rotting coast town, filled with disintegrating clapboard buildings and frightened pale faces peering from behind tight-closed shutters. He had moved slowly through empty streets washed by a tide of crumpled newspapers and dirty candy wrappers that rolled and rustled in the bitter sea wind. On the edge of town he’d found a deserted filling station and gone to sleep there with doors locked and windows rolled up, watching moonlight glint from a rusting gas pump and clutching a tire iron in his hands. He had dreamed of sharks with legs, and once banged his head sharply on the roof as he lunged up out of sleep and away from ripping teeth, pausing and blinking afterward in the hot, sweat-drenched stuffiness of the closed car, listening to the darkness.

In the drab, pale clarity of morning, a ragged wave of refugees had washed through town and swept him along. He had driven all day by the side of the restless sea, oily and cinder flecked as a tattered gray rug, drifting through one frightened shuttered town after another, watching the peeling billboards and the boarded-up store fronts.

It was late evening now, and he was just beginning to really believe what had happened, accept it with his bowels as well as his mind, the hard reality jabbing his stomach like a knifeblade. The secondary highway he was following narrowed, banked, and Robinson slowed to take the curve, wincing at the scream of gears as he shifted. The road straightened and he stamped on the accelerator again, feeling the shuddering whine of the car’s response. How long will this crate hold up, he thought numbly. How long will my gas last? How many more miles? Exhaustion was creeping up on him again; a sledgehammer wrapped in felt, isolating him even from the aching reality of his own nerves.

There was a wreck ahead, on his side, and he drifted out into the other lane to avoid it. Coming past Philadelphia the highway had been choked with a honking, aimless mass of cars, but he knew the net of secondary roads better than most of them and had outstripped the herd. Now the roads were mostly empty. Sane people had gone to ground.

He pulled even with the wreck, passed it. It was a light pickup truck, tipped on its side, gutted by fire. A man was lying in the road face down, across the white dividing line. Except for the pale gleam of face and hands, it might have been a discarded bundle of rags. There were bloodstains on the worn asphalt. Robinson let his car slide more to the left to keep from running over the man, started to skid slightly, corrected it. Beyond the wreck he swerved back into his own lane and speeded up again. The truck and the man slid backward, lingered in his rear-view mirror for a second, washed by his taillights, and were swallowed by darkness.

A few miles down the road, Robinson began to fall asleep at the wheel, blacking out in split-second dozes, nodding and blinking. He cursed, strained his eyes wide open and rolled his window down. Wind screamed through the crack. The air was muggy, sodden with coal smoke and chemical reeks, the miasma of the industrial nightmare that choked upper New Jersey.

Automatically, Robinson reached for the radio, switched it on, and began turning the selector-knob with one hand, groping blindly through the invisible world for something to keep him company. Static rasped at him. Almost all the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh stations were off the air now; they’d been hit hard down there. The last Chicago station had sputtered off the air at dusk, after an outbreak of fighting had been reported outside the studio. For a while, some of the announcers had been referring to “rebel forces,” but this had evidently been judged to be bad PR, because they were calling them “rioters” and “scattered anarchists” again.

For a moment he picked up a strong Boston station, broadcasting a placating speech by some official, but it faded in a burst of static and was slowly replaced by a Philadelphia station relaying emergency ham messages. There were no small local stations anymore. Television was probably out too, not that he missed it very much. He hadn’t seen a live broadcast or a documentary for months now, and even in Harrisburg, days before the final flareup, they’d stopped showing any newcasts at all and broadcast nothing but taped situation comedies and old 1920s musicals. (The happy figures dancing in tails on top of pianos, unreal as delirium tremens in the flickering wavering white glow of the television’s eyes, as tinny music echoed and canned laughter filled the room like the crying of mechanical birds. Outside, there was occasional gunfire. . . .)

Finally he settled for a station that was playing uninterrupted classical music, mostly Mozart and Johann Strauss.

He drove on with automatic skill, listening to a bit of Dvorák that had somehow slipped in between Haydn and “The Blue Danube.” Absorbed in the music, his already fuzzy mind lulled by the steady rolling lap of asphalt slipping under his wheels, Robinson almost succeeded in forgetting—

A tiny red star appeared on the horizon.

Robinson gazed absently at it for a while before he noticed it was steadily growing larger, blinked at it for a moment more before he figured out what it was and the bottom dropped out of his stomach.

He cursed, soft and scared. The gears screamed, the car lurched, slowed. He pumped the brakes to cut his speed still more. A spotlight blinked on just under the red star, turned the night white, blinded him. He whispered an obscenity, feeling his stomach flatten and his thighs tighten in fear.

Robinson cut the engine and let the car roll slowly to a stop. The spotlight followed him, keeping its beam focused on his windshield. He squinted against the glare, blinking. His eyes watered, blurred, and the spotlight blossomed into a Star of David, radiating white lances of light. Robinson winced and looked down, trying to blink his eyes back into focus, not daring to raise a hand. The car sighed to a stop.

He sat motionless, hands locked on the wheel, listening to the shrill hissing and metallic clicks as his engine cooled. There was the sound of a car door slamming somewhere, an unintelligible shouted order, a brief reply. Robinson squinted up sideways, trying to see around the miniature nova that was the spotlight. Feet crunched through gravel. A figure approached the car, becoming a burly, indistinct silhouette in front of the windshield, a blob of dough in roughly human shape. Something glinted, a shaft of starlight twisting in the doughy hands, trying to escape. Robinson felt the pressure of eyes. He sat very still, blinking. . . .

The dough-figure grunted and half-turned back toward the spotlight, its outlines tumbling and bulging. “Okay,” it shouted in a dough-voice. A clang, and the spotlight dulled to a quarter of its former intensity, becoming a glazed orange eye. Detail and color washed back into the world, dappled by a dancing overlay of blue-white afterimages. The dough-figure resolved itself into a middle-aged police sergeant, dumpy, unshaven, graying. He held a heavy-gauge shotgun in his hands, and highlights blinked off and on along the barrel, making the blued steel seem to ripple. The muzzle was pointed loosely in the direction of Robinson’s throat.

Robinson risked a sly glance around, not moving his head. The red star was the slowly pulsing crashlight on the roof of a big police prowlcar parked across the road. A younger policeman (still rookie enough to care; spit-polished boots; see the light shimmer from the ebony toes) stood by the smoldering spotlight that was mounted near the junction of windshield and hood. He was trying to look grim and implacable, the big regulation revolver awkward in his hand.

Motion on the far side of the road. Robinson swiveled his eyes up, squinted, and then bit the inside of his lip. A mud-caked MARC jeep was parked halfway up the grassy embankment. There were three men in it. As he watched, the tall man in the passenger’s seat said something to the driver, swung his legs over the side and slid down the embankment on his heels in a tiny avalanche of dirt and gravel. The driver slipped his hands inside his field jacket for warmth and propped his elbows against the steering wheel, eyes slitted and bored. The third man, a grimy corporal, was sitting in the back of the jeep, manning a .50 caliber machinegun bolted to the vehicle. The corporal grinned at Robinson down the machinegun barrel, his hands fidgeting on the triggers.

The tall man emerged slowly from the shadow of the road shoulder, walked past the nervous rookie without looking at him and entered the pool of light. As he walked toward Robinson’s car, he slowly metamorphosed from a tall shadow into a MARC lieutenant in a glistening weatherproofed parka, hood thrown back. A brown leather patch on his shoulder read MOVEMENT AND REGIONAL CONTROL in frayed red capitals. He held a submachine gun slung under one arm.

The police sergeant glanced back as the lieutenant drew even with the hood. The muzzle of the shotgun didn’t waver from Robinson’s chest. “Looks okay,” he said. The lieutenant grunted, passed behind the sergeant, came up to the window on the driver’s side. He looked at Robinson for a second, expressionless, then unslung his submachine gun and held it in the crook of his right arm. His other hand reached out slowly and he tapped once on the window.

Robinson rolled the window down. The lieutenant peered in at him, pale blue eyes that were like windows opening on nothing. Robinson glanced once down the small, cramped muzzle of the machinegun, looked back up at the lieutenant’s thin, pinched lips, white, no blood in them. Robinson felt the flesh of his stomach crawl, the thick hair on his arms and legs stir and bristle painfully against his clothing. “Let me see your card,” the lieutenant said. His voice was clipped, precise. Slowly, slowly, Robinson slid his hand inside his rumpled sports jacket, carefully withdrew it and handed his identification and travel control visa to the lieutenant. The lieutenant took the papers, stepped back and examined them with one hand, holding the submachine gun trained on Robinson with the other. The pinched mouth of the automatic weapon hung only a few inches away, bobbing slightly, tracing a quarter-inch circle on Robinson’s chest.

Robinson worked his dry tongue against his lips and tried unsuccessfully to swallow. He looked from the coolly appraising eyes of the lieutenant to the tired frown of the sergeant, to the nervously belligerent glances of the rookie, to the indifferent stare of the jeep driver, to the hooded eyes of the corporal behind the .50 caliber. They were all looking at him. He was the center of the universe. The pulsing crashlight threw long, tangled shadows through the woods, the shadows licking out and then quickly snapping back again, like a yo-yo. On the northern horizon, a smoldering red glow stained the clouds, flaring and dimming. That was Newark, burning.

The lieutenant stirred, impatiently trying to flip a tacky page of the travel visa with his free hand. He muttered, planted a boot on the side of Robinson’s hood, braced the submachine gun on his knee and used his teeth to help him open the sticky page. Robinson caught the rookie staring at the lieutenant’s big battered combat boot with prim disapproval, and started to laugh in spite of the hovering machinegun. He choked it down because it had a ragged hollow sound even inside his throat; it was hysterical laughter, and it filled his chest like crinkly dead leaves. The lieutenant removed his foot and straightened up again. The boot made a dry sucking sound as it was pulled free, and left a blurred muddy footprint on the side of the hood. You son of a bitch, Robinson thought, suddenly and irrationally furious.

A nightbird wailed somewhere among the trees. A chilly wind came up, spattering the cars with gravel, a hollow metallic wind full of cinders and deserted trainyards. The wind flapped the pages of the travel visa, rumpled the fur on the lieutenant’s parka hood, plucked futilely at his close-cropped hair. The lieutenant continued to read with deliberation, holding the rippling pages down with his thumb. You son of a bitch, Robinson raged silently, choked with fear and anger. You sadistic bastard. The long silence had become heavy as rock. The crashlight flicked its red shadows across the lieutenant’s face, turning his eyes into shallow pools of blood and draining them, turning his cheeks into gaping deathhead sockets, filling them out again. He flipped pages mechanically, expressionless.

He suddenly snapped the visa closed.

Robinson jerked. The lieutenant stared at him for a smothering heartbeat, then handed the visa back. Robinson took it, trying not to snatch. “Why’re you traveling,” the lieutenant said quietly. The words tumbled clumsily out: business trip—no planes—had to get back—wife— The lieutenant listened blankly, then turned and gestured to the rookie.

The rookie rushed forward, hurriedly checked the back seat, the trunk. Robinson heard him breathing and rustling in the back seat, the car swaying slightly as he moved. Robinson looked straight ahead and said nothing. The lieutenant was silent, holding his automatic weapon loosely in both hands. The old police sergeant fidgeted restlessly. “Nothing, sir,” the rookie said, climbing out. The lieutenant nodded, and the rookie returned smartly to the prowlcar. “Sounds okay, sir,” the sergeant said, shifting his weight with doughy impatience from one sore foot to another. He looked tired, and there was a network of blue veins on the side of his graying head. The lieutenant considered, then nodded reluctantly. “Uh-huh,” he said, slowly, then speeded up, became brisker, turned a tight parody of a smile on Robinson. “Sure. All right, mister, I guess you can go.”

Another pair of headlights bobbed over the close horizon behind.

The lieutenant’s smile dissolved. “Okay, mister,” he said, “you stay put. Don’t you do
anything
. Sarge, keep an eye on him.” He turned, strode toward the prowlcar. The headlights grew larger, bobbing. Robinson heard the lieutenant mutter something and the spotlight flicked on to full intensity again. This time it was aimed away from him, and he saw the beam stab out through the night, a solid column of light, and catch something, pinning it like a captured moth.

It was a big Volkswagen Microbus. Under the spotlight’s eye it looked grainy and unreal, a photograph with too much contrast.