J.M. Dillard - War of Worlds: The Resurrection (16 page)

Doc didn't mind, really. So long as Orel was gone before the customers got there, and didn't piss or upchuck in any of the cars, it was no problem. Doc had made it plenty clear that the night Orel puked in a customer's car would be his last.

"Doc," Orel panted, arriving at last, and grasped the old man's upper arms. Orel was a short, weasel-faced little guy, with a round nose and shiny eyes the color of the American flag—red, white, and blue— and he smelled worse than a wet dog. His overalls and the holey white T-shirt he wore beneath them were filthy, as was the greasy red-brown hair he brushed forward in an attempt to hide a receding hairline. "Doc, how are you?" His breath was sour from beer.

"You're early tonight, Orel." Doc pried Orel's dirty hands loose and put an arm under his shoulders to prop him up. "C'mon over this way. I got a nice '79 Ford LTD with some real cushy seats."

Orel balked. "Don't wanna sleep," he slurred. "Ain't tired. How 'bout you bringing us a coupla beers?"

He was referring to the cooler Doe kept hidden behind the counter in the office. Doc kept it stocked with Pabst Blue Ribbon in the can, or Coors, if it was on special that week at the Brewster Safeway. Sometimes, when things got too slow, Doc would pop open a can for himself and sometimes, if he was feeling especially generous, for the part-time mechanic, Luis Ortega. 'Course, he never dreamed of doing it when there were customers around.

"Cooler's empty," Doc lied, though he knew there were a couple of Pabsts still left in the melted ice. "C'mon, Orel, let's check out that LTD."

Orel yielded and wobbled along with Doc's help over to the four-door LTD. It was unlocked, of course; in forty years, Doc had never locked a car or truck on his property, and none of them had ever been stolen or vandalized. The LTD was white with a black vinyl top that was starting to peel away from the metal in a couple of places; otherwise, it looked pretty good for a '79, though Doc couldn't say the same for the transmission.

Doc opened the heavy rear door—Lord, they didn't make 'em like this anymore; now they had those little tinfoil Japanese cars that crumpled if you looked cross-eyed at 'em—and eased Orel inside.

Orel curled up on the rear seat—real leather, nice and cushy—with a contented sigh. Doc had parked it in the shade and kept the windows cracked so the air inside would be fresh and not too hot. Luis had given him a hard time about it that morning, but Doc felt sorry for old Orel.

Orel's seventeen-year-old daughter Sally had died of leukemia four years ago, and afterward, Orel's wife, Minnie, had gone off the deep end. They said she was still in some kind of mental hospital off in Riverside or somewhere, but Orel wouldn't talk about it anymore. A lot of kids had died of leukemia around here, and the old folks of one kind or another of cancer— enough to make folks suspicious. AH that nuclear testing back in the fifties, everyone said, and when that group of families decided to sue the U.S. government, people in Brewster talked of joining the suit, or starting their own. Of course, after those folks lost the case, people here gave up talking about it.

Doc's own wife, Lucy, had died of breast cancer twelve years before, when she was only fifty-one and he was fifty-eight. Since then he'd just been marking time, minding the station and having an occasional
beer when the waiting got to weigh heavy on him. Just his damn luck he turned out to be long-lived. Without Lucy, life seemed flat and dry and endless, like the desert.

He made sure Orel was clear of the door, then closed it and headed back to the office to lock up. He'd just turned the key in the lock when he heard the tractor-trailer rumbling down the exit ramp.

"Shit," Doc sighed, but he opened the door, switched on the lights, then walked around the counter to switch on the diesel pump. Business wasn't so good that he could afford to turn down big rigs like the one pulling into the station. Shiny and new it was, not a scratch on it. No writing on the sign, neither, and when Doc saw the guy in the white coverall climb out and start pumping diesel into one of the tanks, he became a tad suspicious. A worker at one of them nuclear dump places, for sure; he bet if somebody took a Geiger counter and aimed it at that rig, the needle would go clear off the scale. Doc hated those places, and the people from them who stopped by; in the back of his mind he blamed them for Lucy's death.

Still, business was business. Doc walked out of the office and ambled on over to the island. The guy in the coverall had his back to him and didn't notice him.

"Whyn'cha let me do that, fella?" Doc inquired cheerfully as soon as he was in earshot. "This here's a full-service station."

Without turning around, the man shook his head very slowly.

"Have it your way," Doc replied pleasantly. "Where ya headed?"

The man still didn't speak, but inclined his head back toward Route 15, going east.

Luis came in four mornings a week, and was gone after lunch; the rest of the time Doc spent pretty much by himself, especially the evenings at home, which sometimes got rough. He enjoyed talking with his customers every chance he got—felt it was his right. He refused to be discouraged into silence. "I see. Where ya comin' from?"

The man nodded west.

"Talkative, ain't ya?" Doc said, a little disgusted. "Here, I'll finish that up." He crossed over the island and reached out for the nozzle. Startled, the man turned toward him. Doc caught a whiff of something rotten.

"Jesus H. Christ on a raft," he whispered, feeling a sudden strange tingle of fear. The man's face was deathly pale, a sick, graying color, and there was a huge oozing sore on his cheek that for some reason made him think of Lucy. Cancer, Doc thought, horrified; the poor fool's face was eaten away by it. And such a young man too.

"Son," he said kindly, "you best start being a heap more careful standin' out in the sun like this without no hat."

As he spoke, two others—a man and a woman— stepped down out of the cab. As they moved closer, Doc was struck by that same cloying, sickly sweet smell of vomit and decay and things too abominable to mention. There was puke down the front of their white coveralls, he realized, and dark streaks down the legs that he didn't even want to guess at. Their

faces were covered with weeping sores, just like the guy at the pump, but it couldn't be that they all had the same type of cancer progressed to the same stage; Doc had had enough experience with the disease to realize it wasn't contagious. No, there was something else wrong with them, something even more horrible than the big C. Nervously, Doc took a big step backward.

"You folks got some type of commutable disease or somethin'?"

No answer. Maybe they
couldn't
talk, Doc thought frantically, because their tongues had rotted off in there. Silently, the two began to move toward him while the third continued to fill the big rig's tanks. The vile stench grew stronger; there was an evil purpose-fulness in the movements of the two that made him tremble. In a brilliant, horrifying flash, Doc realized they were
corpses . . .
walking corpses, much as Lucy had been in those awful final days.

"No," he cried feebly, raising his hands in a pitiful attempt to ward off death. "Not like this." True, he took no joy in living anymore, but he'd planned on going quietly—dying in his sleep in his own bed, or maybe slumping over one day at the station—and the thought of joining these three, of becoming as they were,
here, now,
terrified him.

They kept coming, and he kept shrinking away, until at last he stepped back against something firm and moist and inhumanly strong.

Orel stirred inside the big LTD. He was powerfully thirsty, and the drunk was beginning to wear off a bit,

so that he remembered where he was. He grabbed onto the top of the backseat—really was nice leather, some far away part of his brain realized; there was no better, kinder person in the world than ole Doc Waller—and pulled himself up. Eyes still closed, he slowly peeled his cottony tongue away from the inside of his cheek—damn, he was dry; but no point in asking for water, which would just sober him up again—and croaked: "Hey, Doc, what say we head over to Jed's for some moonshine?"

Doc had actually gone with him once, not long after Lucy died, and they'd both gotten stinky drunk. Orel's memory wasn't too good these days, but he never forgot a detail when it came to drinking.

It didn't come out loud enough for anyone to hear, so Orel cleared his throat and tried louder.

"Doc?"

He opened his eyes, forced them to focus, and peered out the back windshield. What he saw sobered him up fast. Orel blinked and shook his head to clear it, but the horrible scene remained.

He sucked back a sob and sank soundlessly down, out of sight.

Griff Kelsey slipped his shoes off and sat down in the black leather La-Z-Boy recliner—the one Elaine had bought him for his fiftieth birthday two years ago—in front of the television set. From the TV tray beside him Griff removed the small plastic square marked "physician's sample" and pushed two Empirin number four through the foil, put them on his tongue, tilted his head back, and washed them

down with a sip from the large old-fashioned glass filled three-quarters of the way with Jack Daniel's.

Years of alcoholism had left their mark in the broken veins on his nose and cheeks, in the extra weight. He still took two number fours every evening around this time, even though the migraines he started taking them for had stopped nine months before when Elaine left him for that lawyer in Palm Springs.

Now he took them because the money was gone and there was some young bastard over in Cadiz who'd set up what they called a "family practice" nowadays and was stealing all his patients. He also took them because Elaine had taken the Lincoln Towne Car and the poodle (good riddance, actually) and the entire goddamn savings account. She'd left him only the Grand Wagoneer (though he never used it for house calls anymore) and the house.

It was a nice house, the ritziest one in Brewster, a sprawling Spanish villa with an authentic red tile roof and two dying palm trees out front. It was near the center of town, and he kept his shingle prominently displayed.

Griffith W. Kjelsey, M.D.
General Practitioner

The arrow pointed around to the side, where the office entrance was.

Used to be Griff was the only doctor for miles around, unless you wanted to drive the forty-five

minutes or so to Barstow or Hinkley. When he was growing up in Brewster, that's exactly what people had to do if they needed to see the doctor. Griff vowed to change all that. He went off to Arizona State, then to medical school—which he barely made it through, graduating dead last in his class—and came right back to Brewster the minute he finished his residency at a Las Vegas hospital. After all, he figured the only doctor for thirty miles around was bound to make potfuls of money. Which was exactly what he did until Elaine took him to the cleaners and that new doctor in Cadiz stole all his patients.

On bad days, when there were no patients or only one or two, he took a Valium along with the Empirins. But today actually hadn't gone too badly. Nine patients, and all but one paid cash. Griff celebrated by putting his favorite Swanson's in the oven: turkey with dressing and apple crunch for dessert, though he wished there were some way to keep the cranberries from getting so hot they burned his tongue.

Waiting for the kitchen timer to go off, he settled back in the recliner and pulled the lever so the footrest came out, then picked up the remote control on the padded armrest and flicked the TV on to the cable news channel. He sipped the Jack and listened with vague interest. An item from Atlanta: blood mysteriously seeping up through the floorboards in an elderly widow's home. Police mystified . . . Three more Palestinians killed on the West Bank. Slow news day.

They were talking about the bond market rally when he heard the noise. Not the kind where you have to ask yourself if you really heard something or not, but a
boom,
the sound of someone breaking the door down, and it had come from the other side of the house, where the office was.

Griff pushed the footrest back and struggled to his feet, spilling Jack down the front of his white professional smock. He set the glass down on the tray. His heart was thumping so wildly in his chest that he couldn't catch his breath. Someone had broken into the office.

The fear was nauseating in its intensity. It was a possibility that had always worried him: a thief or an addict searching for drugs. A few years back he'd talked to Elaine about getting a fancy security system for the house, especially the office. She'd scoffed at him.
There aren't any junkies in Brewster-—present company excepted.

No, he'd answered, but there were plenty of them traveling between L.A. and Vegas.

And they're going to bother to take the exit and come all the way out here, to the middle of goddamn nowhere to look for excitement? Dream on . . .

She talked him out of it, of course. The money he would have spent on the expensive system now belonged to her and her precious attorney. It was just one more reason to hate her.

Griff ran softly back to the bedroom and pulled the .44 Magnum out from under an unfolded pile of underwear in his top dresser drawer. He always kept it loaded; now he took the safety off and held it close to him as he picked up the phone and dialed 911.