Highways to Hell (15 page)

And yet…it
had
happened.

Correction. It was
still
happening.

Although Balika’s head was no longer twice its natural size, there was still movement around her frontal lobes that could only be described as “abnormal.” Rafe sat there and watched the impossible, the absolutely fucking absurd, continued to exist.

He felt a surge of nausea.

Those…things…had been inside his own head. Nesting there. Hibernating. Waiting for just the right moment to emerge and…feed?...migrate? Whatever. The most pertinent questions at the moment were what were they and where the hell did they come from?

Whatever they were, they were external in origin, of that he was sure.

Well.

Pretty sure, anyway.

He knew human brains didn’t normally function as nesting grounds for parasitic monster movie critters. He considered the possibility the brain worms were of extraterrestrial origin. Alien beings that subsisted on human brain matter. When they were through with one host, they simply moved on to another, as was apparently happening now.

He spotted the flaw in that theory right away.

He wasn’t dead.

In fact, despite what he’d just endured, he seemed pretty healthy.

Balika, on the other hand…

Rafe gasped as the head of his lover/captor again contorted, the nostrils swelling like plastic tubes with pork being pushed through them. He saw the eyeless heads of the brain worms emerge, twitch, and seem to sniff the air. They wriggled the rest of the way out and began oozing across the floor toward Rafe.

He shrieked and scooted away from them.

His back struck the writing desk.

He saw them streak across the floor and slither over his jeans. He clawed at them as they plunged back into his nasal passages.

Then the world went white again.

And stayed that way for a while.

Rafe regained consciousness a short while later. He touched his head, feeling for unnatural protuberances, but there was nothing. He scanned the room, but there was no sign of the brain worms.

Balika was alive.

Her eyes were wide and white, staring at nothing.

Rafe conducted a careful search of the apartment before calling the emergency number. There was no indication of brain worms or anything else of a bizarre nature. When the paramedics arrived a little later, they determined Balika had suffered some sort of massive hemorrhage. The police subsequently checked for evidence of foul play, but there was nothing to suggest anything untoward happened.

Just an unfortunate tragedy.

Sometimes fate failed to smile on the young and healthy, as Balika’s grieving mother put it during that first long night at the hospital.

His brain-fried lover’s affluent parents arranged long-term care for Balika in a facility that specialized in comatose patients. A “veggie farm,” as Rafe thought of it. Balika’s father set up a trust fund in Rafe’s name, deeming that his daughter’s one true love should receive the generous inheritance that would have been hers had tragedy not struck.

Rafe also received a generous monthly allowance from Balika’s father.

The old man called it an “investment,” a way of validating his daughter’s fervent belief in Rafe’s potential as an artist.

For his part, Rafe entered the most productive phase of his writing “career.” He turned out story after story of perfectly rendered, evocative portraits of life in India.

As viewed through the eyes of a young girl from that country.

The stories started selling.

Rafe was nominated for awards. A book contract was waiting to be signed.

Life should have been looking good.

But there was a potential wrench in the works, a complication that threatened to foul everything up. He was running on empty. If he hope to continue his career, the brain worms would have to feed again.

He knew what they were now.

Mutations.

Physical manifestations of his mind’s creative component. He acknowledged now that he had no good ideas of his own. He had technical ability, but nothing more. So his mind had compensated, evolving a system through which he could absorb the knowledge and insights of others.

Pilfered gray matter.

Soul food.

He was some kind of super man.

A new super being, a new
species
.

But he wasn’t a scientist, so he didn’t give a shit about that.

One cold night at the end of October, he went out for a walk. He scanned the faces of passerby, searching their eyes for indications of something special--of an interesting life. He encountered many candidates, but none that quite galvanized him the way poor Balika had. Then he stepped into a bar to get out of the cold, an Irish pub filled with laughter and raucous music.

He took a seat at the end of the bar, ordered a pint of stout, and cast his gaze down the length of the bar.

His mouth opened.

His breath caught in his throat.

The pretty Vietnamese girl at the other end of the bar smiled at him.

Rafe’s hand closed hard around the cold pint glass the barmaid placed in front of him.

The faint pulse at his temples made him shudder.

He picked up the beer and walked in a daze toward the other end of the bar.

Visions of rice paddies and bamboo huts danced in his head.

Yes
, he thought, smiling.

A logical new direction.

Thinking about what the critics would make of his continued explorations of eastern societies, he slid onto a stool next to the Vietnamese girl. She smiled again, and they struck up an easy, comfortable conversation.

Rafe almost felt sorry for her.

She didn’t know it yet, but her life wasn’t her own anymore.

Something flexed in his head.

He invited her to his place.

After a very brief hesitation, she accepted.

His conscience, so long ago left to atrophy and die, sputtered faintly, dimly pleading with him not to let this happen.

He almost listened to it.

Almost.

He held her coat for her as she slipped it on.

Then they left the warmth of the bar for the cold of the city street.

Ray Webber was thinking about killing Rattlehead. The guy just wouldn’t shut the fuck up.

“Have you ever really thought about this song? I mean seriously thought about it?”

The song was CCR’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain.” The oldies station Ray’s car radio was tuned to was playing it. “No.” Ray kept his voice neutral—he was in no mood to hear one of Rat’s diatribes. “Can’t say I have.”

“Listen to this bullshit.”

They listened to it.

Ray kind of liked the song. It was innocuous, just a pleasant old noise on the radio. But Rattlehead was the kind of guy who found something to bitch about in everything.

“Have I ever seen the rain?” Rat’s voice was tinged with sarcasm. “Yes John, I have seen the rain. I’ve seen the snow and the fucking ice too. What about it, pinhead?”

Ray sighed. “I think it’s about Vietnam. The social upheaval of the sixties. Like a metaphor.”

Rat groaned. “Metaphor, shmetaphor. You’re thinking about the other one, where’s he’s asking who’ll stop the shit.”

“Whatever.”

Ray turned the volume up when a station promo segued into a Stone’s song. The urge to kill Rat was beginning to move out of the realm of pure fantasy, acquiring more of the weight of reality every time the fucker opened his mouth. He thought about the aluminum baseball bat in the trunk. A few blows to the head ought to do the job. Rat would never know what hit him.

“This song’s a load of shit!” Rat yelled, pitching his voice at a level much higher than the music. “Just your nineteenth nervous breakdown! The language belies the seriousness of mental illness!”

His real name was Sloan Walker. He was a man who had no tolerance for the dead spaces in conversations. He labored to fill every spare second of silence, never failing to voice an opinion on anything that entered his warped sphere of experience. A self-anointed ultimate arbiter of the Final Word on anything that mattered, he viewed the world with an unblinking wide-angle lens.

He was a pain in the ass.

His friends called him Rattlehead because of all the useless bits of information that were rattling about in his head. Some shortened the nickname, calling him Rat. This wasn’t a term of endearment.

Ray strove to remember a time when he’d genuinely liked Rat. Maybe when they had been kids, back in the days when they had shared with their friends a penchant for getting into trouble. Pranksters with a sense of humor, they had been the scourge of the community. People back home still talked about the time some goddamn vandals stole a huge Budweiser balloon from a convenience store and deposited it on the mayor’s lawn.

Rat’s idea, of course.

That kind of thing had been mucho fun in those bygone adolescent halcyon days. Now, though, all their old running mates were certified grown-ups. Ray himself was on the verge of crossing the three-oh threshold, and he hoped to achieve a state of dignified adulthood someday soon. But Rat was content to maintain a state of arrested adolescence indefinitely.

Look at what he’d done in that Nashville bar last night. The crazy fucker downed a few beers, went to the bathroom, and emerged moments later stark naked. To the disbelief of the shocked patrons, Rat thumped his chest, emitted a Johnny Weismuller-like bellow, and then bolted through the dining area and out the front door. A girl at the bar remarked on the possible significance of the old Ted Nugent lyrics he had been hollering on his way out

“Wasn’t that the “Great White Buffalo?” Ya think he’s making some kinda statement?”

Ray hadn’t known what to say to that.

Rat latter explained that he’d decided to do his part to make streaking popular again. “This AIDS shit has people so goddamn uptight. I’m tired of being so desperate for a safe piece of ass. So I had an epiphany. I realized life is too goddamn short to worry about disease and bad shit like that. I figured people need to start having fun again. Loosen up, hence my decision to bring back streaking.”

It made a twisted kind of sense. Ray was frightened to have found even the thinnest thread of logic in anything Rat said. The guy was a maniac. Certifiable.

So why did he still hang out with him?

Inertia.

Maybe that was it. Ray had always been content to just be. He didn’t strive to understand the nature of things. He didn’t need explanations. Things just were. Rat was just the opposite. But they were alike in one important way—neither had ever accomplished anything of significance.

Inertia.

Probably.

So Ray was beginning to think maybe things should change. Maybe he should get a real job. Go back to school. Work toward building a solid future. To do that, though, he would have to jettison some excess baggage.

Kill him.

If he told the guy to take a permanent hike, he’d disappear for a few weeks before eventually showing up again. Ray knew this from sad experience. The guy was like a damn yo-yo, always bouncing back.

Inertia.

Ray was sick of the bastard.

Sick of his own go-nowhere life.

Sick to death of listening to this kind of shit: “Have you ever noticed how people don’t really fight in bars? They push and shove, they throw shit, but you almost never see anybody actually beat the living shit out of anybody. Like that time you—”

“FUCK IT!”

Rat glanced at him. “Something wrong, Raymond?”

Ray cupped the back of Rat’s head with his right hand, stepped hard on the brake pedal, and gave the pest a shove. Rat’s forehead smacked the windshield, cracking the glass and opening a gash above one eye. Blood streamed sideways down his face as his unconscious form slumped against the door. He looked like the loser of a heavyweight title bout.

Ray drove without thinking for a few minutes. A Doors song played on the radio.

Ray listened.

People are strange.

No kidding.

Ray made sure the odometer needle stayed a hair over sixty-five. Traffic was light on this lonely stretch of rural interstate—and he was certain there had been no witnesses—but he knew a heightened sense of caution would enhance his chances of getting away with this.

He needed to assess the situations, formulate step by careful step a plan that would bring about a successful resolution to this crisis.

Take him to a hospital.

Maybe.

He could tell the authorities he’d panicked when a dog had darted into the road. Rat’s recollection of the incident would be clouded by the trauma he’d endured. He might not remember anything. Maybe everything could be safely returned to normality. Maybe…

Maybe a lot of things.

Especially this—maybe Ray didn’t want things returned to normal. Maybe he favored the part of himself that saw what he had done as a bold first step in the right direction. Stagnant Ray wasn’t capable of momentous acts. Life-changing acts. Maybe it was time Bold Ray excised his sickly other half for good.

He glanced at Rat.