Captain Quad (40 page)

He closed his eyes—

And when he opened them again the smelter was gone and Kelly was there on the windshield, like a film projected on a movie screen. She had her back to him, and she was naked, her long hair loose, her head rolling erotically on the glistening shelf of her shoulders. This bizarre mind-camera panned down her back, and Will saw that she was not alone. There was a man beneath her, and she was riding him. He had time to think that the mind was a remarkable thing, throwing up such twisted images in this moment that was probably his last. Then the camera zoomed in on her partner's face. It was emaciated and pale—and it was looking straight at him, its yellow smile openly triumphant.

"She's mine now, asshole," the image said in an echo of Sully's words, and Will heard them not in the cab but in his head.

"Forever."

And in that instant Will knew it was him. It was the quad, and somehow he had made this happen. As if to confirm this awareness, the mind-camera pulled back, and Will saw his decrepit body, saw Kelly's lovely rump riding up and down on the ropy stump of his penis.

Forever, Will heard him say again.

Then the image vanished and the smelter was there. The train stormed into the narrow loading bay at eighty-three miles an hour. Braked and bolstered, the next eight slag pots stood directly in its path.

And they were full.

The locomotive's blunt metal snout struck the coupling bar of the first railcar, the impact ramming the line of pots twenty feet farther down the track. Slag sloshed out in fiery combers, splattering the tracks and the steel-beamed ceiling, causing flashfires all up and down the platform. Still screaming, Will shot forward to the limits of his seat belt. In the instant of collision he believed it would hold, and he enjoyed a fleeting moment of hope—

Then the worn fabric gave with a dry farting sound, and he was bursting through the windshield. He struck it head first, and the shower of glass turned to stars in the tunnel of his vision. Semiconscious, he flipped once in the air and landed on his back by the tracks. There was pain and steely thunder, and he felt like a bug in a rolling barrel—but he was alive. The ground was beneath him and he was raw with pain and he thought, Ha! You didn't get me you crazy cunt quad. You didn't get me!!

The world stopped reeling, and Will sat up. He'd been thrown about eighteen feet. Something knifed him in the side—busted ribs—and his neck creaked unstably as he swiveled it around to look.

The train was still moving, the empty pots piling up one on top of the next, the entire row twisting from back to front.

If he didn't get up and get moving, he'd be crushed.

He scrambled to his feet, aware that his left leg was broken but no longer feeling the pain. In hobbled strides he started away. Men were appearing on the opposite side of the tracks, rushing toward him to help. He threw out his arms to them.

But suddenly they were shrinking back, their white eyes darting from Will to a point above and behind him.

A pocket of scalding air struck Will Chatam from behind—and then he knew why the men had backed away.

The whine of sprung gears filled the narrow aisle, muting the thunder of the train. Will lurched forward, his mind white with panic, managing barely a step before the first meteorites of slag sizzled through the back of his work coat. The pain, exquisite beyond the capacity of his mind to comprehend it, cranked the white of his panic to a blinding, sun-blasted chromium.

There was no thought.

No time.

The lip of a curling wave of slag struck Will Chatam in the back of the neck and seemed to freeze him there. He opened his mouth to scream, and a column of liquid fire boiled out. His eyes fixed for a blank instant on the unbelieving eyes of Hector Witty, a crane operator who had rushed out to witness the commotion. At the Ledo later that night Hector would tell a spellbound circle of listeners that those eyes had glowed hellfire red before running like half-congealed egg white down the doomed trainman's cheeks. It was as if, before erupting in a grisly lava burst, his skull had filled up with slag.

A split second later Will Chatam was gone, a toppling pillar of fire.

THIRTY-SIX

The candles had burned themselves down to stubs, and now Kelly snuffed them out, the act somehow doubling her worry. Will was an hour late. Not a long time in ordinary terms, and there were at least a dozen harmless explanations for his tardiness. Maybe his relief had been late, or there had been some trouble with the train. Will often complained about the antique equipment they were forced to work with. Or maybe he'd had a problem with his truck.

But it was unlike him not to call or to have someone at the smelter do it for him. And tonight was to have been a special night. It was the first day of the March break, and Kelly had promised him a late candlelit dinner. She'd even drawn them a hot bath, as Will had done on the night she accepted his proposal. He had said he'd be home on time even if it meant skipping his last run.

Kelly went to the kitchen window and looked out. Nothing. The hill was dark, no sign of Will's truck in the turnaround. She could see Chainsaw out there, snoozing on the stoop, but that was all.

As she turned away, a flicker of light caught her eye and she swung back. . . but it was only a distant streetlight, the illusion of movement created by the wind in the trees.

Kelly's worry turned abruptly to fear. The simple explanations fell away like dressings from a terrible wound, and she was suddenly certain that Will was hurt. Or worse.

Gooseflesh pebbled her skin as she hurried to the kitchen phone. She was wearing the mink-colored teddy Will liked so much, and now she felt naked, stupidly vulnerable and exposed. She paged through her personal directory to S, followed her finger to "smelter," then placed a hand on the phone.

It rang, and Kelly's hand flinched away. A cold sweat stood out on her arms, and her heart broke into a lurching stride that thundered in her ears. She giggled at her own raw nerves. Then she snared the receiver.

"Will?"

"No, ma'am. This is Chet Spinrad. I work with Will out here at Nickel Ridge. I got your number from his mom—"

"Is he all right?"

For a moment there was no response, and Kelly thought she might scream. Then: "There's been an accident, Miss. A terrible accident. I thought you might've heard about it already on the news. I—"

"Is he all right?"

"I'm sorry, Miss Wheeler," Spinrad said, "but Will Chatam is dead. It was a runaway train. He got caught in the slag."

Kelly looked up from the phone, her entire being screaming out a furious denial. Her gaze settled on the window—and suddenly there were headlights at the top of the hill, starting down, and a triumphant laugh escaped her, an abrupt barking sound that hurt her throat. Sick fucking joke! she wanted to holler into the phone, but relief left her mute and she slammed down the handset instead.

Kelly ran to the window. It was a Blue Line cab, and now she had her explanation. Will's truck had refused to start—he'd commented only recently that he was going to have to drop a new starter into it—and he'd grabbed a cab home. He was climbing out now, paying his fare; she could see his hunched silhouette in the porch light. She didn't know who the crackpot on the phone was, but she hoped someone kicked his lying ass.

Kelly waited until Will had started up the walk, then darted to the door. When she swung it open, swooning with relief, she found Sam Gardner standing there, blushing at her state of attire and yet solemn, so dreadfully solemn.

"I heard about it on the news," Sam said. Chainsaw was nuzzling his gloved hand. "I'm sorry, Kelly. More than you can know." He touched Kelly's arm. "Can I come in? I've got some things I need to tell you."

Kelly fainted.

The first clear message to reach Kelly's brain was that she'd had a terrible dream. She'd dozed off in Will's lap and dreamed that he'd been killed in an accident at work. Crazy. She could feel the firmness of his leg beneath her head, the gentle stroke of his fingers in her hair.

The next thing that registered was pain. She had a walloping headache that radiated outward from a single throbbing focus at the back of her head.

She opened her eyes and looked up at Sam, and for a mad instant her brain tried to rearrange his features into Will's.

Then she remembered.

"Oh," Kelly said and sat up too fast, adding a new percussion instrument to the furious ensemble in her head. She lifted a hand to the back of her skull. There was a tender, spongy knot back there. It felt as if it stuck out a mile.

"You bumped your head on the floor," Sam said. "I carried you in here." They were on the living room couch.

"Is it true?" Kelly whispered, the pieces of the evening's puzzle lumping cruelly together in her mind.

Sam nodded.

And then Kelly was in his arms, clutching him, the depth of her grief filling him with a ghastly emptiness. More than anything he wanted this girl in his arms. He could admit that now, after all these years. There was nothing more to lose. He wanted this gift in his arms. . . but not like this. Never like this.

Kelly buried her face in his neck and bawled, there was no other word for it. She bawled and shuddered and soaked his collar. Sam held her, soothing her as best he could. After a while, once the worst of the tempest had passed, she lay like a rag doll in his arms. It was like holding a beautiful child.

And the whole time he held her, a shattering truth bored deeper inside him: his brother was a murderer, an assassin, the perfect criminal.

And now he had to convince Kelly Wheeler.

He would do it tonight. There was no reason to wait. The sooner he released Kelly from the prison of her body, the sooner they could enter eternity as one.

An hour earlier, still glowing from the rush of the kill, Peter had debated trying to explain his intentions to Kelly, to describe to her the glorious future that awaited them both in that awesome nebula in the sky. Once he was inside her, it would be a simple matter of thinking, his thoughts thus becoming her own. But as the trance came on, he decided against it. She might not understand. She might be afraid, and that fear might make her balky. She was a strong-willed girl, and he needed her pliable. If she fought him he might not succeed. He would have to take advantage of her puny grief, turn it against her. He would try to make her death painless and quick. But if she had to suffer, little matter. What price immortality? What price a marriage of the gods?

As he quit his body, Peter remembered the sensation of the slag striking his back, the agony that was both hellish and blackly exquisite. He'd been forced to reenter Will's mind in the instant of that agony, for in that last split second it had appeared as if the bastard might throw himself clear of the spill. Peter had bound him there the way a rope bound a hanged man to his fate. And he had felt it.

So hot, so final. . .

He took his time traveling to Kelly's place. The night was sweet, his last on this impermanent plane, and he savored it. His only regret was that he would be unable to say good-bye to Sam.

He entered the house through the big picture window, its molecules tickling his form.

And when he saw them there on the couch, the two people he cherished most in the world, locked together in a cheating embrace, rage ripped into his heart like the hack of a dull blade and he roared, roared and reeled back the way he'd come, the molecules in the glass not tickling him this time but mincing him like meat in a grinder.

He awoke in his bed and that roar found a voice.

He screamed in fury, the sound insane.

Sam twisted on the couch and scanned the room. He had felt something, a frigid draft. . . but it had been more than that. The air had twitched, and for just an instant Sam had caught a whiff of an animal's den, a thick smell of pelt and a rampant, beastly rage.

Peter.

The clammy hand of terror squeezed Sam's balls. All the muscles in his body turned to taut steel cables, and he groaned, sickened that he should feel such withering fear of the person he loved most in the world.

His gaze ricocheted wildly around the room. . .

But there was nothing. The feeling or illusion or whatever it had been was gone, vanished as quickly as Sam had sensed it, and he was left to wonder if it wasn't only his nerves. When he'd heard about Will Chatam's death on the news, every nerve in his body had begun to twist and spit like a live wire.

He returned his attention to Kelly. You've got to get on with this, he urged himself. It's for real and you've got to tell her.

But a yearning part of him did not want to move, choosing instead to linger in a fantasy of its own. Kelly's weeping had subsided, the only indication that she wasn't just resting the occasional hitch in her breathing, or a sob. Sam was painfully aware of her scent, her skin, and her scanty attire.

Then her face stirred against his neck, her moist lips brushing his skin, and Sam felt a thrill snake hotly through his body. Under the circumstances, he felt ashamed.

"Oh, Sam," she moaned in a voice without life, without hope. "What am I going to do?"

"It's Peter," Sam blurted, not knowing how else to begin, throwing himself into it before he could change his mind.

He felt Kelly stiffen against him.

"What do you mean?" She lifted her head and regarded him with puffy eyes; they looked bruised in the low light of the living room.

"My brother," Sam said. "He did this. He killed our mother and Dr. Lowe and Kiley and those other bastards. . . and he killed your friend."

Kelly pushed herself away. Aware suddenly of her near nudity, she grabbed a pillow and clutched it to her chest. "I think you should leave, Sam," she said, her voice shaky and shrill. "I. . . I can't take this. This madness. Why are you here, anyway? You'd better go." She buried her chin in the pillow and started to rock.

Kelly was in shock—that much was plain—but he couldn't leave her now. His brother might strike at any time.

"Listen, Kelly," Sam persisted. "You've got to believe me. Peter can leave his body; he's some kind of freaking ghost and he can hurt you. He can make you hurt yourself. He killed your friend. I don't know how, but I know that he did. He said he would. I read it in—"