7
It was the Coke machine which had been in front of Cooder's market. Leandro stood frozen with amazement, watching it approach: a jolly red-and-white rectangle six and a half feet high and four wide. It was slicing rapidly through the air toward him, its bottom about eighteen inches over the road.
I've fallen into an ad, Leandro thought. Some kind of weird ad. In a second or two the door of that thing will open and 0. J. Simpson is going to come flying out.
It was a funny idea. Leandro started to laugh. Even as he was laughing, it occurred to him that here was the picture ... oh God, here was the picture, here was a Coca-Cola vending machine floating up a rural stretch of two-lane blacktop!
He grabbed for the Nikon. The Coke machine, humming to itself, banked around Leandro's stalled car and came on. It looked like a madman's hallucination, but the front of the machine proclaimed that, however much one might want to believe the contrary, this was THE REAL THING.
Still giggling, Leandro realized it wasn't stopping - it was, in fact, speeding up. And what was a soda machine, really? A refrigerator with ads on it. And refrigerators were heavy. The Coke machine, a red-and-white guided missile, slid through the air at Leandro. The wind made a tiny hollow hooting noise in the coin return.
Leandro forgot the picture. He leapt to the left. The Coke machine struck his right shin and broke it. For a moment his leg was nothing but a bolt of pure white pain. He screamed into the gold cup as he landed on his stomach at the side of the road, tearing his shirt open. The Nikon flew to the end of its strap and hit the gravelly soft shoulder with a crunch.
Oh you son of a bitch that camera cost four hundred dollars!
He got to his knees and turned around, shirt torn open, chest bleeding, leg screaming.
The Coke machine banked back. It hung in the air for a moment, its front turning back and forth in small arcs that reminded Leandro of the sweeps of a radar dish. The sun flashed off its glass door. Leandro could see bottles of Coke and Fanta inside.
Suddenly it pointed at him - and accelerated toward him.
Found me, Christ
He got up and tried to hop toward his car on his left foot. The soda machine bore down on him, coin return hooting dismally.
Shrieking, Leandro threw himself forward and rolled. The Coke machine missed him by perhaps four inches. He landed in the road. Pain bellowed up his broken leg. Leandro screamed.
The machine turned, paused, found him, and started back again.
Leandro groped for the pistol in his belt and brought it out. He fired four times, balanced on his knees. Each bullet went home. The third shattered the machine's glass door.
The last thing Leandro saw before the machine - which weighed just a bit over six hundred pounds - hit him was various soft drinks foaming and dripping from the broken necks of the bottles his bullets had shattered.
Broken bottle-necks coming at him at forty miles an hour.
Mama! Leandro's mind shrieked, and he threw his arms up in front of his face in a crisscross.
He didn't have to worry about jagged bottle-necks after all, or the microbes which might have been in the cheeseburgers from the Burger Ranch, for that matter. One of life's great truths is this: when one is about to be struck by a speeding six-hundred-pound Coke machine, one need worry about nothing else.
There was a thudding, crunching sound. The front of Leandro's skull shattered like a Ming vase hurled onto the floor. A split second later his spine snapped. For a moment the machine carried him along, plastered to it like a very large bug plastered to the windshield of a fast-moving car. His splayed legs dragged on the road, the white line unreeling between them. The heels of his loafers eroded to smoking rubber nodules. One fell off.
Then he slid down the front of the vending machine and flopped onto the road.
The Coke machine started back toward Haven Village. Its coin-holder had been jarred when the machine hit Leandro, and as it moved rapidly through the air, humming, a steady stream of quarters, nickels, and dimes spewed out of the coin return and went rolling about on the road.
Chapter 8. Gard and Bobbi
1
Gardener knew that Bobbi would make her move soon - the old Bobbi had fulfilled what the New and Improved Bobbi saw as its last obligation to good old Jim Gardener, who had come to save his friend and who had stayed on to whitewash one hell of a strange fence.
He thought, in fact, that it would be the sling - that Bobbi would want to go up first, and, once up, would simply not send it back down. There he'd be, down by the hatch, and there he'd die, next to that strange symbol. Bobbi wouldn't even have to deal with the messy reality of murder; there would be no need to think about good old Gard dying slowly and miserably of starvation, either. Good old Gard would die of multiple hemorrhages very quickly.
But Bobbi insisted that Gard go up first, and the sardonic cut of her eyes told Gardener that Bobbi knew exactly what he had been thinking ... and she hadn't had to read his mind to do it, either.
The sling rose in the air and Gardener clung tightly to the cable, fighting a need to vomit - that need, he thought, was quickly going to become impossible to deny, but Bobbi had sent him a thought which came through loud and clear as soon as they wriggled out through the hatch again: Don't take the mask off until you get topside. Were Bobbi's thoughts clearer, or was it his imagination? No. Not imagination. They had both gotten another boost inside the ship. His nose was still bleeding and his shirt was sopping with it; the air mask was filling up. It was by far the worst nosebleed he'd had since Bobbi first brought him out here.
Why not? he had sent back, trying to be very careful and send only that top thought - nothing below it.
Most of the machines we heard were air-exchangers. Breathing what's in the trench now would do you in just as quick as breathing what was in the ship when we first opened it. The two won't equalize for the rest of the day, maybe longer.
Not the sort of thinking one would usually suspect in a woman who wanted to kill you - but that look was still in Bobbi's eyes, and the feel of it colored all of Bobbi's thoughts.
Hanging on to the cable for dear life, biting at the rubber pegs, Gardener fought to hold onto his stomach.
The sling reached the top. He wandered away on legs that felt as if they were made of rubber bands and paper clips, barely seeing the Electrolux and the length of cable manipulating the buttons; Count ten, he thought. Count ten, get as far from the trench as you can, then take off the mask and take what comes, I think I'd rather die than feel like this, anyway.
He got as far as five and could hold back no longer. Crazy images danced before his eyes: dumping the drink down Patricia McCardle's dress, seeing Bobbi reeling off her porch to greet him when he finally arrived; the big man with the gold cup over his mouth and nose turning to look at him from the passenger window of a four-wheel-drive as Gardener lay drunk on the porch.
If I'd dug in a few different places out at that gravel pit, why, I just might have found that one, too! he thought, and that was when his stomach finally rebelled.
He tore the mouthpiece off and threw up, groping for a pine tree at the edge of the clearing and clinging to it for support.
He did it again, and realized he had never experienced this sort of vomiting in his entire life. He had read about it, however. He was ejecting stuff - most of it bloody -in wads that flew like bullets. And bullets were almost what they were. He was having a seizure of projectile vomiting. This was not considered a sign of good health in medical circles.
Gray veils drifted over his sight. His knees buckled.
Oh f**k I'm dying, he thought, but the idea seemed to have no emotional gradient. It was dreary news, no more, no less. He felt his hand slipping down the rough bark of the pine. He felt tarry sap. Faintly he was aware that the air smelled foul and yellow and sulfuric - it was the way a paper mill smells after a week of still, overcast weather. He didn't care. Whether there were Elysian fields or just a big black nothing, there would not be that stink. So maybe he would come out a winner anyway. Best to just let go. To just ...
No! No, you will not just let go! You came back to save Bobbi and Bobbi was maybe already beyond saving, but that kid's around and he might not be. Please, Gard, at least try!
'Don't let it be for nothing,' he said in a cracked, wavering voice. 'Jesus Christ, please don't let it be for nothing.'
The wavering gray mists cleared a little. The vomiting subsided. He raised a hand to his face and flung away a sheet of blood with it.
A hand touched the back of his neck as he did, and Gardener's flesh pebbled with goosebumps. A hand ... Bobbi's hand . . . but not a human hand, not anymore.
Gard, are you all right?
'All right,' he answered aloud, and managed to get to his feet.
The world wavered, then came back into focus. The first thing he saw in it was Bobbi. The look on Bobbi's face was one of cold, cheerless calculation. He saw no love there, not even a counterfeit of concern. Bobbi had become beyond such things.
'Let's go,' Gardener said hoarsely. 'You drive. I'm feeling . . .'He stumbled and had to grab at Bobbi's bunched, strange shoulder to keep from falling. a little under the weather.'
2
By the time they got back to the farm, Gardener was better. The bleeding from his nose had subsided into a trickle. He had swallowed a fair amount of blood while wearing the mouthpiece, and a lot of the blood he had seen in his vomit must have been that. He hoped.
He had lost a total of nine teeth.
'I want to change my shirt,' he told Bobbi.
Bobbi nodded without much interest. 'Come on out in the kitchen after you do,' she said. 'We have to talk.'
'Yes. I suppose we do.'
In the guestroom, Gardener took off the T-shirt he had been wearing and put on a clean one. He let it hang down over his belt. He went to the foot of the bed, lifted the mattress, and got the .45. He tucked it into his pants. The T-shirt was too big; he had lost a lot of weight. The outline of the gun butt hardly showed at all if he sucked in his gut. He paused for a moment longer, wondering if he was ready for this. He supposed there was no way to tell such a thing in advance. A dull headache gnawed his temples, and the world seemed to move in and out of focus in slow, woozy cycles. His mouth hurt and his nose felt stuffed with drying blood.
This was it; as much a showdown as any Bobbi had ever written in her westerns. High noon in central Maine. Make yore play, pard.
A ghost of a smile touched his lips. All of those two-for-a-penny sophomore philosophers said life was a strange proposition, but really, this was outrageous.
He went out to the kitchen.
Bobbi was sitting at the kitchen table watching him. Strange, half-glimpsed green fluid circulated below the surface of her transparent face. Her eyes - larger, the pupils oddly misshapen - looked at Gardener somberly.
On the table was a boom-box radio. Dick Allison had brought it out to Bobbi's three days ago, at her request. It was the one Hank Buck had used to send Pits Barfield to that great repple-depple in the sky. It had taken Bobbi less than twenty, minutes to connect its circuitry to the toy photon pistol she was pointing at Gardener.
On the table were two beers and a bottle of pills. Gardener recognized the bottle. Bobbi must have gone into the bathroom and gotten it while he was changing his shirt. It was his Valium.
'Sit down, Gard,' Bobbi said.