Bullets of Rain (23 page)

    Bryan would not have doubled back, so Art proceeded south along the shoulder. Rain worked him over, then sprayed off his coat to the east without touching the ground, to updraft and soar around to strafe him anew. Just moving through the air had become a lot like trodding snowpack, with the same frustrating measure of retardation. He had to wipe down his goggles once every fifteen seconds; his own exertion was fogging the plastic.

    There was an excellent likelihood that Suzanne had crawled onto the beach and her own grave had blown over her. Had Bryan jettisoned her conscious or unconscious? Was she already dead, killed for some unfathomable betrayal? Unless she was close to the road, she might be no more than another pathetic missing-person statistic.

    After bulling against the storm for several interminable minutes more, he spotted her hair, spin-cycling in the blow like a dandelion hoarding its fibers in a wind tunnel. He found her clinging to an uprooted pine trunk four feet in diameter. She was naked from the waist down, knees skinned, legs streaked with mud. Her left eye was swollen shut and purple, cheekbone thickly confused. Her teeth were intact, maybe loosened in front, and she had a fat lip. She had crawled about thirty yards before giving up, but was still breathing.

    
Stupid little party cooze
, he thought.
What have we learned?
He pried her loose and turned her over. Her functional eye flinched as the rain slashed it. Maybe if he just left her here, her tiny mind might be soiled by the passage of an actual thought.

    It was too goddamned cold for ratiocination, anyway.

    At best, visibility held at a fast boil of twilight. Dense pewter clouds shrouded the sky and the downpour was darkly claustrophobic. He hefted Suzanne into a fireman's carry, mostly because if he abandoned her, that would make him exactly like Bryan, his opponent, his enemy. She wasn't that big overall, but lifting her was unexpectedly difficult for Art, who faulted the conditions and his own lack of meaningful exercise. She groaned as she was rearranged, and grip and gravity redistributed her aches.

    "Shut up," Art muttered.

    The storm thrashed around like a wounded reptile, mindlessly stinging and biting Art's legs and face. His goggles made the road blurry, an iron-colored swatch of runny paste. He had to stop every few yards and fight to siphon breath from the wind, his parka a bulky, movement-restricting spacesuit as he tried to freight the limp burden of her weight, which actually helped him lean against the air masses intent on pushing him back. His heart was still ramming along at ninety per. Stop, breathe, check to see if she's alive, press onward. Finding her had taken fifteen minutes. Dragging her home consumed another hour.

    Blitz had devoted himself to his guard post admirably, breaking his nine-foot perimeter only to take a modest dump on the entertainment section of Friday's Examiner. Bryan was still as unconscious as a minimum-wage watchman, respiration thin and wisping up from the cavity of his muscle-bound stomach. Blood was congealed to a shiny spray-paint layer on his arm and shoulder, the wound garish but manageable. Once, Art had swallowed more of his own blood than Bryan had lost in the last hour. Fucking wimp.

    He resisted the urge to smash Blitz's fastidious turd into Bryan 's face. It was a funny thought, though. Unlike the regular Art.

    

    

    The temperature in the house had dropped twenty degrees during his absence. He powered up the heat, thankful that Bryan 's destructive entrance hadn't taken out the generator.

    Suzanne made a few incoherent noises as Art deposited her in the guest tub and left her to simmer in hot water that quickly turned pink. He sliced off the remnants of her clothing with Bryan 's knife. Her tits were as cold as iced fruit. He balled her crap into a plastic garbage bag. She'd lost her purse again.

    In the kitchen Art poured two more beers down his neck, leaving the empties alongside the first. He was as parched as a mummy, and knew alcohol would not quench his thirst. Like he gave a shit.

    His two guests just irritated him. They weren't worth the linen, the towels, the time or the hassle.

    When Suzanne woke up, she began sobbing in deep, husking hitches of air. The hot water hurt. Every inch of her was edged in different volumes of pain. She sloshed around clumsily, her arms and legs incorrectly interpreting her brain's instruction. Art thought of a schizophrenic, suddenly waking to find herself neck-deep in a therapy basin, to ask what, where, how? He didn't want an interview, and felt fed up and spiky. He grabbed her hair and fixed her head so she would see nothing but him.

    "Hey. Listen to me. Fart around and your ass gets ejected. Do you understand me?"

    "Nuhh," she said, her eyes rolled up and stayed there.

    His mind lunged against propriety like a leashed bobcat. It took hardcore effort to keep from punching her face until she died.

    Instead, he stored her under comforters in the guest room. Pain in the butt; if he didn't restrain her, he'd have to keep checking. He wished he owned handcuffs. She did not move or make a sound when he gathered her out of the tub. Bruises all over her body had bulged and ripened to a sooty violet with coronas of poisonous ocher. Burst blood vessels had caused impact patterns to surface on her skin in serious crimson. Bad idea, to feed her painkillers in such a state. Her lower lip was swollen, split, and crusting. Her eye was congealed into a slit as tight as the line between two knuckles in a fist. If she woke up, she'd cause trouble. Half an hour after he had put her down, he looked in, mostly out of irrational fear. The covers were still pulled up to her chin and her position had not changed; her breathing was slow and steady, congested into a soft snore.

    In the last half hour his racing heart had calmed and his blood had stopped percolating.

    Another beer. He could do society a favor and put one more bullet, just one, into the center of Bryan 's brain. Leave him ditched on the roadside in his Buick. Maybe stuff him in the trunk and lose the car altogether. Or dump it into the drink, Bry-Guy and all, several miles north at the cliff provided by the Point Pitt Overlook. Or tape the corpse up in the plastic sheet-neatness counts-and deep-six him off the jetty in the middle of the night, when the weather relaxed. Then what? Every time Art stared into those formerly mystic depths, Bryan would be staring right back at him. He was thinking like a murderer.

    "Fuck!'' He hurled the empty bottle across the kitchen. It bounced off the fridge door, leaving a crescent moon dent, and shattered on the floor. Lorelle had always been so neat in "her" kitchen; it was spiteful fun to slob things up, for once. Blitz jolted, unsure of what to do. "Sit your ugly ass back down," Art told the dog. "
Platz! Aber soijort jetzt, du Scheisskoter!
"

    How could Lorelle have been so inconsiderate as to just subtract herself from his life? Love was supposed to transcend everything; if she was dead, why no ghostly visitations or signals from beyond? Art did not feel aggrieved so much as abandoned and unloved. What about his fucking needs, the deal they'd made for their life together? Lorelle had died bravely. Maybe that was because escaping him, even through death, was enough to make her happy. She had bailed right out of the world, leaving Art to fend for himself and clean up after her memory. Why, if she was here, right now…

    "Bitch," he mumbled, uncapping another beer. How dare she leave him like this?

    Suzanne, however, had come back. Art's temples pulsed-maybe this was payment for gulping those salt-and-pepper capsules. He felt unmoored and confused, not exactly certain of the focus of his anger. He was mad, but at whom, precisely? And how had he come to be this enraged? Was he finally boiling over?

    Was this the "harmless" effect worked by Price's house mix?

    The storm might bring others. This house was the only secure location, excepting perhaps the bunker of missile-silo-grade concrete that held up the Sundial dish, which was inaccessible. Other people might try to get into where Art was. They'd see what he'd done to Bryan, in the garage. He needed a plan. Or he could pile up bullet-holed trespassers in the carport until he ran out of ammo. He tried to dope out a plan over a few more beers…

    Sure enough, pounding on the front door woke him up. Blitz commenced his
achtung
bark.

    

    

    Art's eyes bleared open. He was sprawled on the sofa in the living room and his neck felt permanently sprung to the left. His nerve endings were effervescent and tender, snapping like Pop Rocks; when he moved his body, it felt distant and alien, a robot remote-controlled by a novice on the stick. The heat was still on, pulsing from the vents, and had swaddled him into a sleeping delirium. He had to thump the wall panel twice before his knuckle hit the comm button.

    "What?'' He waved the dog back. "Shut up a minute, kiddo."

    The speaker crackled with wind distortion. "My name is Captain Willowmore; could we please have a word with whoever is in there? It's colder than Eskimo Hell out here."

    Panic flooded through Art's vascular system like acid. "Police?"

    "U.S. Navy-please?"

    Art switched the alarms to standby, got a grab on Blitz's collar, and unbolted the metal door. Two figures stood in the porch foyer, sealed up in insulated rain suits, goggles on their foreheads. The weather needled around them and tried to enter the house, like iron filings pulled by magnetism. The lead man had to speak over the harsh blow.

    "Man!" Cold had thickened his speech; it sounded to Art like he had said mom. He touched the bill of his cap. "Captain Willowmore. This is Corporal Brookman." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "We came here for the dish but we ran into a problem, and yours is the only light for about a mile. Please tell me that dog doesn't bite."

    "Only when he eats," said Art, lying already. He pulled Blitz back and gave the bulky men room to enter.

    "Frankly, we're amazed that you're still here," said Willowmore.

    Brookman shucked his hood and vised his forehead as though he was suffering a tension spike. "Jesus, it's cold," he said mostly to himself.

    The abrupt entry into heat caused Willowmore's eyes to water.

    He was a clean-cut, close-cropped officer with the carriage of a Bantu tribal leader; his eyes were wide set and never missed anything. Art sensed there would be trouble if he started snooping. His subordinate, Brookman, was a functionary, a driver, an assistant. He reminded Art of Solomon, the surfer dude at Price's, but with a Bourbon County accent.

    "I bet you guys could use something hot," said Art.

    "Only if you want us to be grateful to you for the rest of our lives,'' said Willowmore. "You mind if we get out of these jackets?'' He had to speak past Blitz's renewed barking.

    Art hung up their weather gear. "Pull your gloves and let him get a whiff of you, then you'll be okay." It was oddly pleasurable, to give orders to military guys. "
Blitz-Dai sind Freunde; komm, beschnuppere sie und dann sei ruhig!
"

    "Wow," said Brookman, when the dog dutifully sniffed them, then stood down.

    They skinned out of their coats. Art saw uniforms and sidearms.

    "Excuse me if I say we're surprised to find you still out here," said Willowmore.

    Art realized he was going to have to concoct a briefer and more definitive version of his story if he was going to keep encountering strangers in his own house. While he told the men the immediate essentials, he caught them exchanging sidelong looks of doubt.

    The pair gratefully accepted paper cups of instant soup, but never stopped glancing around the house like policemen. Willowmore related that their assignment had to do with manually adjusting the dish tracking for the Sundial, since remote control had been pushed to failure by the raging storm. They had arrived in a wide, flat Humvee to discover the bunker entryway submerged and the tunnel access, farther upbeach, obscured by rockfall. Mission aborted. Art told them the nature of the small avalanche-broken tombstones-and offered in trade his own story of how he had stayed to monitor the progress of his house's revolutionary design. Willowmore nodded, as though he accepted this but had further questions.

    "I'm sorry,'' said Willowmore. "You did say your name was Art, right?'' His tone was just patronizing enough to suggest that Art's entire story was casting long shadows of doubt.

    "That's right," said Art.

    "Excuse me?" said Brookman. "Do you mind if I-?''

    Art realized Brookman was speaking to him.

    "Rest room?" he clarified.

    Art pointed the way. "How can you guys just waltz back out into that?" he said, meaning the storm, wishing they would leave already.

    Willowmore ran his hands back through his close-cropped hair.

    "The Humvee is pretty good protection. It's almost a half-track, with double rear tires. Run-flats. Armored windows. The electronics are sealed. Fording kit lets it cruise through several feet of water, and it's not likely to flip because it weighs a couple of tons. Low center of gravity, high clearance. We rolled over or around nearly everything in the road. Can't say that for a lot of travelers whose cars we saw, usually tipped over. Nobody in any of them. We could crawl back north, but the base is in worse shape than this neck of the woods. No rush there."

    Did that mean they intended to hang around? Art feared that Bryan would regain consciousness and start flailing, which would cause Blitz to bark, and split open a whole rancid carcass of black possibility. He was fairly certain that these men lacked the authority to snoop around his home, but he surely did not want to contest them, let alone get into some three-way drawdown.