Authors: James W. Hall
He tucked the phone in his pocket and waited some more.
No Millie. And the fry cook and vegetable kid had also disappeared.
Thorn called out a hello.
He got down from the stool, called out Millie’s name.
When he got no response, he went around the counter and pushed through the swinging doors and came into the kitchen. A knife and a half-cut celery stalk lay on a wooden cutting board. A pot of collard greens was simmering on the stove, the blue flame extinguished beneath it.
Maybe everyone was taking a smoke break. He was turning to go back to his stool when he heard a hiss from the far side of the kitchen. Thorn headed in that direction, toward the stainless-steel door of the walk-in cooler. The linoleum creaked behind him.
He swung around. But there was no one there and no one in the diner he could see, no one in the tiny kitchen. The only movement in the area was a cloud of steam rising above the pot of collard greens.
The hiss came again from behind a half-open door beside the cooler. An office, or maybe a broom closet.
Thorn flattened his back against the wall, edged forward until he arrived at the door. He reached out and nudged it open. Stepped in front of it, raising his fists.
At the sight of him Millie stepped back. She’d changed out of her waitress smock and was in her street clothes. A navy turtleneck, old jeans, with silver running shoes.
“They’re coming for you. You’ve got to go.”
“Coming for me. Who?”
“They mean you harm, I can tell you that much. It was Rodrigo, the kitchen boy, he’s the one who alerted them. Don’t blame him. Everyone’s scared. He did what he was told, that’s all. What everyone was told.”
“Who’s coming?”
“I’ve got to go,” she said. “You too. Right now. They gave you something. A drug. Rodrigo crumbled up a pill and slipped it in your sandwich. I didn’t know about it until a minute ago. It hasn’t hit you yet, but it will soon. You need to get somewhere safe. Quick.”
“What pill?”
She shook her head, not going there.
“Have you seen the young man I described?”
She sighed in resignation, and nodded yes.
“Before Thanksgiving. Just a fleeting glance. But it was him. That’s how it started.”
“How what started?”
“I’ve got to get out of here. I’m sorry. I’ve done all I can. I have to live in this town. You’re on your own now. Get somewhere safe and stay there. It could last for hours. Go on.”
“Is he injured, the boy you saw? I was told he was shot and seriously injured? You hear anything about that?”
“It may be true, I don’t know. All I know is all the others disappeared.”
“What others?”
“The ones he was with. Protestors, like you said, environmentalists. They were around for a couple of weeks, trying to organize people, asking questions, sticking their nose into things. They had a camp in the woods back of Belmont Heights, then they were gone. All at once, overnight. People said things, but I don’t know what to believe.”
“What things did people say?”
“Now look, I’ve got to go.”
He blocked her path.
“When did this happen, the night they disappeared?”
“I don’t know, before Thanksgiving, a couple of days. Something like that.”
“Almost two weeks ago.”
She hesitated, then stiff-armed him, pressing her hand flat against his chest, leaving it there for a moment as if feeling for a heartbeat.
“Okay, listen,” she said, her hand softening. “The drug’s called Devil’s Breath. The dose he slipped you, it works like roofies only it won’t knock you unconscious, but it steals your free will. You do whatever you’re told. You’re powerless, there could be hallucinations. Till it’s out of your system, you need to hide somewhere quick, stay there.”
She shoved past him and was across the kitchen, heading to the back door when Thorn said, “You have a daughter. Emma.”
She stopped and flung him a hopeless look.
“The young man I’m looking for, Flynn. He’s my son.”
“I know he is,” Millie said.
“You’d do anything to protect Emma, wouldn’t you?”
She swallowed, held her ground but didn’t reply.
“I’m the same,” Thorn said. “Anything it takes, I’ll do it. Anything.”
“You stay here much longer,” she said, “you’ll get your chance.”
And she was out the door.
Thorn went back out the swinging doors and headed to the Taurus. He felt fine. Maybe he was immune to whatever they’d slipped him. But he’d decided to take Millie’s advice and drive the Taurus out of town, find a side road somewhere, and park until he was sure he was okay.
He was in the middle of Main Street when the wide and cloudless sky began to wobble. He stopped and looked up just as the heavens started to rotate counterclockwise. Then the sky turned a bright flickering crimson and cracked apart in a dozen fragments like the shell of a giant egg going to pieces.
Thorn looked down quickly, focusing on the ground in front of him, and continued to plod across the street. It was wider than he remembered, seemed like half a mile of asphalt between him and the car. As he watched, the street expanded, becoming a black ocean of asphalt where sailing ships set forth long ago and were never heard from again. Where mythological creatures rose from waves of black asphalt and sucked down all voyagers foolish enough to attempt a crossing.
He stopped and looked back at the restaurant. Maybe he should go back. It was an impossibly long way to the car. It might be quicker to return to the diner, take back his squeaky swivel seat. Just wait this out. Maybe order more water, try something else on the menu.
The Happy Biscuit logo was smiling at him. The flaky lips were spread wide, and as he watched they spread wider. The Happy Biscuit thought Thorn was hilarious. He was stranded in the middle of Main Street in Pine Haven, not sure where to go, and his plight was making that biscuit even happier than usual.
Thorn turned back to the Taurus. He ducked his eyes again, focused on the asphalt as he plodded on across the endless black surface until at last he made it to the car. He steadied himself with a hand on the door handle. He was breathing hard. He could feel his heart working. He ventured another look skyward. As he watched, the giant red egg turned black, became a perfect midnight sky, then began to fill up with the brightest stars he’d ever seen.
Thorn swallowed back the gob of nausea clogging his chest. He’d been stoned plenty of times, been drunk more than that, about as drunk as it was possible to get. A few times when he was younger, he’d experimented with LSD and mescaline, so he’d seen this heavenly highlight reel before, observed a few gaudy hallucinations, brick walls melting like hot wax, the air dense with spirit orbs and auras and sparkling dragonflies zipping at light speed.
He opened the car door and looked inside. There was woman in the passenger seat. He didn’t recognize her. She might not have been there at all. He straightened up, took another look at the sky. Which was a mistake, for now it was a sphere of stained glass, and it was gyrating, thousands and thousands of bright broken pieces of red, green, and blue glass twirling. He didn’t feel euphoric. There was no rush, no exhilaration. And he didn’t feel frightened or anxious or the least bit mystical. The world was erupting all around him, spinning off its dizzy orbit, but he felt quiet inside. Mildly interested in the weird events, but not particularly alarmed.
He looked back into the car. The driver’s seat was empty. But he was uncertain how to enter the vehicle. The geometry and physics of getting inside seemed ridiculously complex. He was too big to fit. The space was tiny and a steering wheel blocked his way. Where was he supposed to put his feet? Which hand went where? He stood looking into the baffling car. The woman was still in the passenger seat, leaning down to watch him, and grinning like a hungry wolf. She wasn’t anyone he knew, wasn’t anyone he wanted to know.
He shouldn’t drive. Not in his condition. Not with the sky the way it was. He decided to go sit somewhere. Find a shady patch of grass and sleep this off. He was about to slam the door and seek out a grassy plot when a powerful hand gripped his right biceps and spun him around.
He was face-to-face with a reddish-haired man with beefy arms and a belly that hung over the waistband of his camo pants. His black T-shirt was tight across his wide chest; whatever muscles he had were buried beneath layers of flab.
“Your name Thorn?”
“It was,” he said. “A while ago.”
“For a lowlife he’s sort of cute,” came a woman’s voice from behind him. “What shall we do with him?”
The meaty hand held Thorn in place.
The man considered her question, staring into Thorn’s face with a mix of rage and bewilderment as if Thorn was only a stand-in for what was truly pissing him off.
This guy was a heavyweight, a gamecock by the look of him, but he’d gotten sedentary and gone to seed during his journey to middle age and he looked like a one-punch wonder who would never make the second round of any match without getting so winded and red-faced he’d trip over his own feet. Thorn was fairly sure his most threatening trait was his murderous scowl. He decided to make a fist and take a swing at the man’s big face, but when he tried, he couldn’t locate his hands.
The man’s face turned ugly—so strangely, cartoonishly, grotesquely deformed it made Thorn titter. Like Ladarius’s daughter had tittered earlier. He remembered her titter. It was sweet and innocent. Thorn couldn’t recall the last time he’d tittered himself. Maybe never. It was a little sad to think he’d never tittered in his life, sad but also amusing. So amusing he tittered again.
From behind him the woman said, “Let’s get started.”
“She’ll be here soon,” the man said. “Let her handle this.”
“We don’t need Cruz,” the woman said. “His eyes are spinning. The asshole is ours. Let’s put him to work. Introduce him to Pine Haven. Start getting the word out.”
The woman floated in front of Thorn. More ginger hair. This woman was very thin, very hard. A grin that made Thorn’s stomach knot harder than it was already knotted.
“So, Thorn,” she said. “My name is Laurie.”
“Laurie,” Thorn said. “Laurie.”
“And this is my brother, Webb.”
“Webb,” said Thorn. “Laurie and Webb.”
“That’s right. Now I want you to go across the street, throw a rock through the window of that pool hall. Say hello to the fellows inside. They’d like to meet a man like you. Tell them your name, tell them you’re looking for someone. How does that sound to you?”
“Like fun,” he said. Or someone did. He felt the words rise from within, but couldn’t take credit for them.
“Do you like breaking things, Thorn?” Laurie asked him.
“Breaking things, sure.”
“Good, good. You’re going to have a chance to break a lot of things. We’re going to write your name in the sky so everyone can see you’re here, everyone for miles around.”
“Start a ruckus.”
At that moment his head had grown top heavy and he was having trouble stabilizing it on his neck. It wanted to tip forward, chin to his chest. He had to lift the entire thing just to see the woman, lift it again, lift it. Very hard to keep the thing upright, like balancing a bowling ball on a broomstick.
He tried to remember who these people were. Were they friends of his from somewhere? They seemed to know him. That was good. In his present state he needed friends looking out for him. But he wasn’t sure exactly who they were. His head was fuzzy, full of smoke, nothing much of consequence seemed to be going on inside his skull at the moment. Laurie and Webb. They must be his friends although he couldn’t place them. Lately, he’d been seeing people he’d known most of his life, and their connection to him slipping just beyond reach. It didn’t matter. He’d remember these people later when the sky was back to normal, when the smoke cleared.
“Thorn wants to break some things and start a ruckus,” Laurie said. “Find him a rock, Webb. Find him a great big rock.”
NINETEEN
THORN BROKE A WINDOW, A
plate-glass window with the name of the pool hall painted in white letters. It wasn’t the first window he’d broken in his life. He could remember at least one other from long ago, a window he’d smashed by driving a lucky golf ball into it when he was trying to save Sugarman, trying to draw the attention of a bad guy who was holed up in his condo at Ocean Reef Yacht Club, lure the bad guy out in the open. He remembered that window very clearly as he stood on the street in Pine Haven with a crowd of men pouring out of the pool hall and surrounding him.
Thorn was holding another rock in his hand. He’d been encouraged by his old friends—or were they new friends?—to hurl this rock at the next window on the block that belonged to a pawnshop and gun store. But the black men who were surrounding him blocked his way. They were pissed.
One of them had a bleeding cut on the arm.
“What you doing, asshole?”
“Who you think you are, throwing rocks through a window?”
“My name is Thorn,” he said. “I’m new in town.”
His friends told him to say that. Give his name to anyone he met.
“This guy’s crazier than a shithouse rat.”
“Somebody call Burkhart, put the asshole behind bars.”
Someone tore the rock from his hand and hurled it away.
“That was my rock,” Thorn said.
“Yeah, what you going to do about it?”
Thorn was experiencing something new, a form of X-ray vision. He could see through the clothes and the flesh of these men and see their skeletons and their internal organs. He could see hearts and livers and stomachs and intestines and other body parts he couldn’t identify.
It was amazing. Like an excellent dream, a superman skill.
Then somebody put their hands on him and turned him from the mob of angry black men. It was Laurie, the woman with ginger hair. He looked through her clothes, at her skeleton and her organs. Laurie didn’t seem to have a heart. He stared at where her heart should be and there was a black space.
“His name is Thorn,” she announced. “He’s looking to stir up trouble.”
“He got a good start on that,” one of the men said.