The speculative short fi.., p.1
The Speculative Short Fiction of P. E. Cunningham, page 1
The Speculative Short Fiction of P. E. Cunningham
Contents:
Car 17
Monkey See...
Satisfaction Guaranteed
Snake in the Glass
If You Can't Stand the Heat...
A Little Magic
Pteros 1 - Healer
Pteros 2 - To Slay the Dragon
Pteros 3 - The Timeseer
Pteros 4 - Purpose
Mother's Demon Helper
The Son of Walks Through Fire
Compiled February 2025
************************************************************
CAR 17
P. E. Cunningham
Published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 2007
Like Lawrence Connolly and the narrator of “Stars Seen Through Stone,” P. E. Cunningham lives in Pennsylvania—specifically, in the heart of Dutch Country. She notes that her town now has its very own Wal-Mart store, complete with a buggy parking area so the Amish can shop there. Perhaps it was thoughts of modern modes of transportation that inspired this tale, which mixes old-fashioned sentiments with high speed dangers to make for a mighty good read.
***
Officer Will Jamison had been gone for a week before I dropped by Simpson’s Garage. I hadn’t thought anything of it at the time, but when Joel’s girl Brandi mentioned what was going on, it jolted me out of my own grief and got me moving. Half the town had turned out for Officer Will’s funeral, but the most deserving mourner hadn’t been there, and nothing short of God’s will would have kept her away. She must have been hurting awful bad, more than anyone knew.
Some things you just can’t let lie. Not with a life at stake.
I ambled in like an old-timer, after a glance out back. Haberville Borough had a contract with Simpson’s Garage. His crew patched up the cop cars that got banged up or shot at or threw a rod or whatnot. The fixed-up ones sat in a line by the fence, all shined up and ready to rock. It wasn’t until you got out back that you spotted the rest: the burned-out, beat-up junkers, up on blocks or on flat tires, some with hoods and doors torn off, some crumpled up like Kleenex, tossed out like a fridge on a trash heap. Car 17 wasn’t out there yet. I took that as a good sign.
Joel was bent over a bench in the center bay, tinkering with a car. A pickup sat with its hood up, like it fell asleep with its mouth open. Joel used to pal around with my older brother in high school, that’s how I knew him. He took the mechanic job when he and Brandi started getting serious. I mean marriage-serious. He needed this job, and I didn’t want him losing it over some dumbass kid with a weirdass theory. But I owed it to Officer Will.
“Hey, Joel,” I said, and waved.
He flicked a glance my way. “Oh, hey, Chuck. What brings you by?”
“Heard you’re having trouble with Officer Will’s old car.”
“Yeah. It ain’t run at all since the shooting. I thought maybe a bullet hit the gas line or nicked something, but I can’t find anything.”
“Y’mind if I have a look at her?”
He squinted over the car at me. “Since when are you a mechanic?”
“I know some stuff about cars,” I lied. “Thought maybe I could help out.”
“You know you ain’t supposed to be here, right? You could get us both in trouble.”
“C’mon. We all liked Officer Will. I’d hate to see his car get junked. Just let me see her. Somebody comes in, I’ll scram. You can say you never saw me. For Officer Will, man.”
Joel chewed on his lip. I think my mentioning Officer Will got to him. He and Car 17 were the closest thing we’d ever had to a legend.
“Yeah, okay,” he said finally. “Guess it couldn’t hurt to have a fresh eye look at it.” He pointed the car at me. “But anyone shows up, you’re gone. Got it?”
I promised to stay invisible. Joel took me outside and led me around the corner.
They’d towed 17 to the garage after the shooting, and worked on her for hours at a stretch. But days of mechanicking turned up zilch. Then there were other vehicles with stalled engines and blown gaskets and burnt wires, real fixable stuff, and 17 was taking up a bay. So they rolled her out back and left her sit. Not on the junk heap yet, but right on the edge.
“Y’need anything?” Joel asked, skeptical-like.
“Just some tools. I may have to get under her.”
Joel shrugged and trudged back inside. Meanwhile I just stood there and eyed Will’s car. She was a Chevy Impala, like most of the cruisers they had back then. Today Haberville uses Ford Crown Vics, but back then it was Chevy all the way. I popped the hood and poked around so I’d look like I was doing something useful.
Couple minutes later Joel returned, toting a creeper and toolbox. “I never saw anything wrong in there,” he said. “How about you?”
I can change my own oil and that’s about it. “I don’t think it’s in here,” I said. “I have an idea, though, but I’ll have to root around a little. It could take some time.”
“It’s gonna take until five, ‘cause that’s when I leave,” he informed me. “When I leave, you leave. No argument.”
Two, three hours. Maybe enough. “Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Yeah.” Joel pursed his lips at the cruiser. “Be nice if you could do something. I always liked this car. It always ran real sweet.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“Yeah? Where were you, front seat or back?” He laughed and punched my arm, like he did when I was twelve, but nowhere near rough enough to hurt. “I’ll come get you when I’m ready. Try not to break anything.”
“Thanks.” I waited till he went back in the garage, then climbed onto the creeper and rolled myself underneath. I left the hood up and the toolbox open and took a spanner with me. All camouflage. I wasn’t planning on doing any real work. I just didn’t want anybody to see me. It might get a bit tough to explain.
Today Haberville’s pretty built up—we got expensive housing developments and our own Target and everything—but way back when, we were still right on the edge of rural. We had a feed store in town, and an old played-out quarry out on Wanner Road where we weren’t supposed to hang out but everybody did. We weren’t big enough to rate two cops in a patrol car, but then, crime in Haberville was mostly of the speeders and Saturday-night drunks variety. Maybe a knife fight now and then, to liven things up a bit.
Will Jamison grew up on my block. By the time I was eleven, when it all happened, he was already a cop. He’d come home to Sunday dinner with his ma every weekend he wasn’t on duty, then take a stroll around the neighborhood, riding us kids for stupid stuff like, “Your shoe’s untied, that’s a misdemeanor” and we’d jeer back with, “Hey, where’s your gun?” (which he never wore on visits home) and we’d all laugh and he’d tell us stories about what cops did and that. Those were good times.
Will had a funny streak too. I mean ha-ha funny, not weird funny. But you had to wonder sometimes. A lot of the stories he told us were just plain piles of BS. Like that yarn he spun about how he got Car 17. According to him, cop cars didn’t come off the lot; they ran wild, in herds, and you had to rope and ride your own and break it like a bronc. Like the Texas Rangers, he told the littler, gullible kids. You and your horse are buddies and ride the range together, looking for outlaws. We use cars now, not horses, but it’s the same thing.
But that wasn’t all, he went on. You want a car that won’t break down or quit on you in the middle of a high-speed chase, or when the lead starts flying. You want a car you can trust your life to. So I put a spell on mine, he said. He related how after he brought 17 in off the range, he soaped her up and hosed her down in an empty parking lot under a full October moon, to wash all the bad stuff out of her, then rubbed on two coats of wax, to seal the good stuff in. Then he put his hands on the borough seal they’d put on her driver’s side door, and spoke the magic words of the police department: to protect and to serve.
And that was that, he wrapped it up. She was mine after that. Why, if we didn’t lock her in the garage, she’d follow me around like a puppy and wag her trunk like a tail.
Even the littler kids weren’t dumb enough to swallow that. “Yeah, that’s a ripe one,” my brother used to say while holding his nose. We all held our noses for that story. But that was the one that stuck with me the hardest, not so much then, but later on. It sure helped explain a lot of things.
***
Officer Will never had a serious girl that we knew of, but he loved cars from the time he could push Hot Wheels across the kitchen floor. Car 17 was his baby. He treated her like a princess, kept the oil changed and the engine tuned and slipped her special at the pump when the cops were supposed to use regular. “He’d take it to bed with him if it’d fit,” his mother used to complain. But he’d been that way with the beat-up Ford he’d rescued and rebuilt back when he was a kid. It’s how he was with cars.
And the car paid him back. We started hearing stories around—not Officer’s Will’s tall tales, but stuff from other people, some of ‘em cops. The kind that make you shake your head and go nah or yeah, now pull the other one. Like the high-speeder Officer Will got on the interstate. The guy ran a stop sign, and when the cops tried to pull him over he took off. Got up on the highway and ran it all the way up to one hundred and fifty, with Officer Will right on his tail. “I didn’t know our c
Then there was that other story, the one people wondered and whispered about. The one neither one of us could shrug off because the both of us seen it. Officer Will wouldn’t tell that one. I think it scared him a little. I know it scared the crap out of me. But love and duty are kinda scary, when you stop to think about it.
***
It started with a hit and run on Falmouth Street, out at the edge of town. Some drunk wobbling along the berm near Mosley’s Bar got himself mowed down. At least, the cops reported, that’s what the tire tracks said, ‘cause nobody witnessed anything. A couple of guys in the bar thought maybe they remembered hearing a car engine around the time the guy got hit, but that was all. No squeal of brakes, no thump. The cops found flecks of green paint on the guy, and put out a call to local garages to let ‘em know if somebody brought in a dented green car, but nothing came of it.
Then some kids out partying in Sell’s Park said some nutcase came after ‘em and tried to run ‘em down. One kid got clipped and had some bad bruises, but otherwise he was okay. A cop, not Officer Will, passed by right then, and the other car took off. The kids said the car might’ve been green, but it’s tough to tell when it’s going on midnight and you’ve been knocking back beers for the last couple hours. Somebody remembered a big dent in the passenger-side door, but nobody saw the driver clear. It was like the car didn’t have a driver.
This prompted recollections of Officer Will’s best ghost stories, about rogue cars that prowled the streets hunting pedestrians. These were cars that had been in hit-and-runs and caught a taste for blood. They’d slip out of their owners’ driveways at night and go roaming around for victims. Or the wild cars, the would-be cop cars that never got caught, that would creep into town and attack people, like man-eating tigers. To stop them, you had to cut their gas lines, then stuff the tank with sugar so the evil wouldn’t come back. The little kids passed these stories around like baseball cards, but I was going on twelve by then and didn’t buy it no more. Not all that much, anyway.
Then the green car ran down an old lady in the street, right in the middle of the afternoon, and it stopped being funny real quick.
This was right by the grocerette, so there were plenty of witnesses. By all accounts, the car had been parked at the curb with nobody near it, and didn’t make a move until the old lady started crossing the street. People said it was the squeal of the tires that turned their heads around. That green car peeled away from the curb and went at her at top speed, they said. No swerves, no brakes. Hit her head on, ran over her and lit out. No accident. Just pure and simple murder.
Of course people looked for a license number. We’ve all been trained by TV cop shows. According to the witnesses, the car had no plates. Nobody could even remember if it was a two-door or a four-door. Nobody got a look at the driver, either. In fact, nobody could remember seeing a driver. Not even hands on the wheel.
Speculation flew all over town like crows at a dump heap. Some crazy kid. Some psycho guy. Some twisto who’d seen too many movies. Some high school science geek who’d rigged a car so he could steer it by remote control and now was out for revenge. That didn’t explain the victims, ‘cause there wasn’t any connection, but the cops still took it all down.
The little kids, of course, decided it had to be one of Officer Will’s wild cars that’d gone bad and was out killing people, and they begged Officer Will to hunt it down and catch it.
“We’re all on the case,” he reassured us, and he wasn’t kidding around. Haberville had about nine-ten cops back then, and every one of them came by to check out the scene of the crime. This wasn’t some drunk or druggie weaving his car around the roads anymore. This was deliberate murder. You don’t commit murder in Haberville, not with our cops on the job.
Officer Will got to the grocerette within an hour of the first report. He parked 17 across the street from where the green car had been sitting and checked in with the ranking officer. The duty cops still milled around and warned people to go on home, folks, show’s over. The old lady had already been carted off in an ambulance. That didn’t stop people like me and the other kids from hanging around to see what was up. Not that much was left, just a few oil stains on the tar by the curb, and some other stains, that weren’t oil, in the middle of the street.
The duty cops questioned witnesses and jotted down notes, while the others, like Officer Will, listened in but didn’t interfere. They were done quick, and after one last shoo-off to the lookie-loos they went back to their cruisers.
“Hey,” one of the duty officers called to Officer Will. “Get your car off the crime scene.”
“What are you talking about?” Will said. “She’s clear. I put her right over—”
He pointed to the empty curb. Empty because 17 wasn’t there anymore. While the cops were grilling people she’d slipped out of park and rolled across the street. I don’t remember seeing her move; I’d been watching the cops work, like everybody else. But there she was, with her back end sticking out in the street. Her front end sat right over the oil stains left by the green car. Like she was trying to pick up the scent.
Officer Will got in and moved her, and the cops scraped up samples and did what they could, but without a better description than “green car” or a license plate number, what they could do didn’t amount to much. The old lady’s family put up a reward of $1,000 for anybody who could tell them who owned the green car. Officer Will asked us kids to keep our eyes open and come straight to the cops if we saw anything. And no more playing in the street.
A couple of us did prowl around town, giving the squint to any car that had even a speck of green on it. Part of it was to help out Officer Will, but—yeah, I admit it—a lot of it was the reward. A thousand bucks is like all the money in the world when you’re ten or eleven. And it was summer, and we were out of school. What else was there to do?
So we rode our bikes for hours on end, and went places we probably shouldn’t’ve, and bugged the bejesus out of the grownups and phoned in all sorts of tips. Like Danny Feinberg, who turned in his brother’s girlfriend’s cousin ‘cause the guy had a green VW. A Beetle, yet. Truth is, we weren’t even sure what kind of car we were looking for; just that it was green and maybe had a dent in the door.
But nobody turned up squat. None of the tips panned out, and nobody got the reward. I heard through my brother, who heard through Joel, that the cops were working with the DMV and checking up on anybody who owned a green car of any year, make or model. The auto body places swore up and down they hadn’t worked on any green cars, or repainted any to some other color.
Some sicko from out of town was Dad’s opinion. Some asshole passing through. Probably in Nevada by now, running down people on the Vegas strip, or headed for southern California to join the rest of the crazies.
Funny about the driver. Nobody remembered seeing anyone behind the wheel. I guess when a car’s bearing down on you all you can see is the grill. The driver kinda gets crowded out of your memory. Or maybe the car had tinted glass or something, like a Mafia car or a spy car. That started a whole other line of rumors, like the mob was trying to move into Haberville and these were all hits. What a drunk and some high school kids and an old lady buying bananas had to do with the mob, nobody had a real answer for.
So we went on looking for a dented green car. You figure if you find the car, the driver will have to turn up.
Things stayed quiet for almost two weeks. The big rush of leads petered out, and people stopped jumping every time some jerk revved his engine. We figured maybe Dad’d been right; it was just an asshole passing through. Then the car attacked again, and this time it went for a kid.
