Читать книгу Alice Isn’t Dead - Joseph Fink, Joseph Fink - Страница 20

Her mind was in a race with her heart and both were losing. If there was another Thistle Man, then he was not a monster but a species. How many of these Thistle Men were out there? How many families with a quiet space where once a life had been lived among them? How many people died looking into dull eyes and a gaping yellow mouth, rimmed with sagging flesh? Keisha couldn’t put her jumbled thoughts together. Her heart pumped blood madly through her shivering body.

“Uh, no,” the kid at the register said, his voice lost in a quaver. “You’re right, no. Definitely no one asked about any other town.”

This new Thistle Man was silent for a long while. From where she crouched, Keisha couldn’t tell what was happening. She could only see the strange crooked posture of the creature, as though gravity for him was slightly up and to the left of the rest of the world. She could only see the deep fear in the teenager’s eyes as it occurred to him, maybe for the first time in his life, that no breath came guaranteed.

But the next breath came, both for the kid and for her.

“Pfft,” the Thistle Man said. “Whaff. Narn.” His wet lips smacked. Then this other Thistle Man turned and ambled crookedly out of the store. Keisha waited until she was sure he was gone and came out.

“Thank you.”

“Just get out of here,” said the kid.

She did, and despite everything both mind and heart were telling her, she followed after this new Thistle Man. He crossed the empty road, desert wind blowing hot down the street divided by a planter of yellow flowers and waxy leaves grown with borrowed water, and the Thistle Man stomped over them. The two of them crossed a massive parking lot, almost completely empty, and entered a Vons.

The swish of the door opening, the swish of the door closing. Quiet warm darkness replaced by blaring light and air-conditioning, and the murmur of music designed to shop to. There was no sign at all of her quarry. Or perhaps she should think of him as her hunter. Cautiously she walked past the aisles. There were no customers, only the lines of logos receding into a vanishing point of dairy refrigerators. Back again along the aisles. Where were the customers? Where, even, was the staff?

She turned a corner in frozen foods and there he was, only a few feet away. Back turned. His shoulders bouncing like he was laughing, but the sound was more like a man drowning, thick, desperate gasps. He shouted, no words, just sound, then back to gasping. A Vons employee, the first other person she had seen, turned the corner on the other end of the aisle, saw the man, and immediately walked away. Keisha retreated a few aisles down, trying to stay out of sight.

Now that she had caught up to him, she realized that she didn’t have any clear idea of what her plan had been. Once again, she had pointed herself in the direction of trouble without thinking through the consequences of finding it.

But the Thistle Man did not turn. He stopped gasping and thrashing and started walking again. Every few feet his right leg would give, like it had no muscle or bone, and his entire body would stoop to the side and then unsteadily lurch its way back up with his next step. She stayed on the opposite ends of the aisles, tracking his movement. He circled the store once and then went back out the exit, never looking around him, although she didn’t know whether that meant that he hadn’t seen her or that he didn’t need to.

Out in the parking lot, he got into a car, a silver Toyota a few years old, relatively clean. As it had happened, she had left her car in this same lot, because it was central to a number of the businesses she had been going to. But the lot was big enough that she still had to sprint at least a quarter of a mile, trying to reach her car in time to follow him. Keisha turned the key and only a faint cough happened and she thought, No, no, no, I’ve come this far and I won’t have the world fail me, and she turned the key again, relieved to hear the unsteady whine of the starting engine.

The Toyota turned left out of the shopping center and she followed. She tried to keep a distance between them, but few cars were out in a town as quiet as Victorville, and so it was hard not to be visible. At first they were surrounded by strip malls, but then the right-hand side of the road fell away to desert, where the darkness was near total. In the distance, some sort of factory, all glow and smoke. Sweating, breathing human beings on a night shift inside that factory, and on every side of them, darkness and sand.

They hit a T intersection and made a left, past the bus station. A bus was pulling out, on late-night departure to who knows where. On the other side of the road was the Route 66 museum. A museum to road tripping, to distance, to how big and spread out America is. As Keisha drove, in order to distract her nervous mind from what she was actually doing, she thought about how her country was a place defined as much by its distance as its culture.

Sand drifts on the road. They were fully outside of town now. Stacks of boxcars. An outpost of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Wires emanating from it, almost invisible against the sky, carrying the lights to Hollywood, the air-conditioning to Malibu. Here there was no glamour, only the machine.

They turned again. A road called Gas Line Road that intersected a block away with Powerline Road.

And finally, a military airport. Barbed wire and hangars. They drove along the fences. The road was completely empty, and so Keisha switched off her headlights and drove only by watching his car and trying to mirror its movements. It felt dangerous, but also somehow restful and quiet, like swimming underwater. In the dark, with the thrum of the engines, she could almost let her natural anxiety fade into an undercurrent that wouldn’t intrude on her thoughts.

The Toyota slowed, put on a blinker (signaling to whom?) then turned through a hole in the fence into the airport. The hole was rough, with wire hanging loose around it, looking innocently accidental, but was also exactly wide enough for a car.

A small plane came in for landing, and as she drove toward the entrance, she watched the entire landing happen. Red lights blinking their way down, and then finally touching earth and she realized she hadn’t been breathing, and then she hit the curb and screamed.