Savanna reached over and switched off the ignition, then got out of the truck and jogged to catch up with him. A convoy of motorcycles roared past dangerously close, hurling sludgy water at them like flying shrapnel. The blast of its passage furled their clothes and jostled their hair.

  Roger leaned forward with his hands on his knees and scanned the tall grass. The wind blew all around him and the plains responded. A million tall blades of grass did The Wave.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Honey ...” Savanna’s whispering voice was but a pale sound beside him. “Look ...”

  He looked up to find her staring off into the distance, and matched her gaze.

  “Holy Jesus,” he murmured, and stood straight to join her.

  Ahead of them, the horizon had gone to a sooty black in what must have been mere seconds. Storm clouds were rolling in like before—but faster—and Roger found himself laughing more than a little nervously.

  “This isn’t very damn funny anymore, is it?” he said.

  Savanna gazed forward as if in a dream. As far as she was concerned, it never really had been all that damn funny. Roger had a frightening way of laughing off the ominous. The more he smiled and laughed his nervous little laugh, the more Savanna had always suspected real trouble.

  Neither of them spoke as they watched the massive anvil clouds roll forward, boiling and tumbling as if captured in a loop of time-lapse film. Roger’s blood ran cold at sight of lights amidst the soup; not lightning kind of lights, but airplane kind of lights. And then he recalled joking about the H-bomb going off, and suddenly felt as though a battalion of tarantulas were crawling up his spine in single file. He put his arm around Savanna.

  “I think it’s time to go,” he said, and she nodded absently, as though in deep thought. Her eyes were riveted to the odd lights.

  They walked back to the truck. Roger walked around to the front and checked the bumper. The chrome was mildly scratched, and bent inward a little at the center. But the bend may have been there before, he couldn’t be certain. At any rate, there were no traces of blood.

  They got in. Roger started the engine and let it run, making sure it hadn’t been damaged. After a moment, Savanna said:

  “It had arms.”

  The motor idled. Roger stared at her. Then he pulled away from the shoulder to rejoin the wagon train east.

  After several miles the freeway began to slope upward, and Roger pointed his finger southeast. “There,” he said. “Saved by the big ‘O.’”

  She looked out her window and saw the glowing sign of an Ozark Gas-n-Go, turning slowly round against the rapidly darkening sky. Fossil-fuel Freddy winked at them thriftily from his home in the first oversized ‘O,’ making the okay sign with a scaly thumb and forefinger. Freddy was the saurian equivalent of Goofy; nobody really knew exactly what the hell breed he was.

  “We can sit it out there, I guess,” Roger said. “Whatever it is.”

  Savanna nodded, saying nothing, and turned her ghostly-eyed glare back to the boiling sky.

  “Roger, look how fast it’s moving.”

  He leaned forward and peered up, and found that the tremor in her voice had been well-justified.

  It was almost upon them. The storm was thundering across the sky like a giant man o’ war: a harbinger of chaos trailing tendrils of rain—and now lightning—from beneath its dark umbrella. Its black shadow fell rumbling over the truck and Roger stepped on the gas.

  An instant later the churning tempest seemed to roll right over the top of them, and the rain hit the windshield with such sudden fury that Roger was reminded of his trips through the auto-wash as a kid. He was reminded of that spinning, hissing, roaring tumbler that twirled wildly over the hood of his dad’s Buick and rumbled up the windshield in a red and black blur—like some great, shaggy caterpillar. Then the cold water slanted in through his window and began to patter wildly against the dash.

  “Jesus Christ!”

  He switched on the wipers and set them to their maximum speed, then groped along the wet dash for the vice grips. His hair was already dripping in his face and his clothes were nearly soaked. The blades only whipped back and forth impotently against the glass. If they made any difference at all, he was hard-pressed to tell. “Honey ...”

  She reached over and grasped the wheel. He clamped the vice grips down on the rusty sprocket beside him and cranked the window up.

  “Maybe we should pull over,” she said. “Wait it out here.”

  He tossed the vice grips back onto the dash and took back the wheel, peering into the maelstrom between swipes. There was no longer a road. He was driving blindly at fifty miles per hour into what had become, in just seconds, a seamless gray void. Glancing southeast, he saw that the Ozark sign had completely vanished in the downpour. So had the taillights of the motorcycles somewhere ahead of them. “Yeah,” he mumbled at last. “I think you’re right ...”

  He hit his blinker and craned his neck around to check behind them. Someone might as well have pulled a shade down over the rear window—there was virtually nothing there. No freeway, no headlights, no anything except the roaring, tumbling, monster-caterpillar of the auto-wash. He cursed beneath his breath and steered for the shoulder anyway. A moment later they rolled to a stop at the side of the road.

  “This is too weird,” he mumbled gravely. And then he laughed a little nervously.

  Savanna cranked on the heater. “It’s getting cold.”

  Roger looked outside. “Where the hell is everybody? We should be able to see something. High beams or fog-lights—something.”

  There was nothing. Only the rain. Rain which came down from the blackness in endless sheets, wave after wave, pounding the hood, the windshield, the roof. The 4x4 had become an enormous steel drum.

  Savanna switched on the radio again.

  “Honey,” Roger began, “there’s no way—”

  But there was something. It was just a flash, a brief blat! of sound, a voice. And then only static. They looked at each other in the dark of the truck.

  “Try the vice grips ...” Savanna said.

  He had already reached for them. He maneuvered them around the tuner’s stub and began twisting it left and right hurriedly. Savanna watched his face as he worked and felt her blood run cold. Her easy-going husband was her barometer for measuring the tenor of any potentially dangerous situation. When the little needle surpassed even the nervous laughter and entered that red zone in which dark lines began to parch his face—she always knew they’d taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque.

  “Go slow, sweetie.” She put her hand on his soggy shoulder. “You’re going to miss something.”

  “There’s nothing here,” he said, looking as though he were twisting the vice grips just to be doing something. The corner of his mouth had started twitching nervously.

  She rubbed his neck. “Honey—”

  Again the snatch of sound came and went. He’d passed it by. Ever so briefly, it had sounded like the droning tone of the Emergency Broadcast System. He immediately began circling back, but the vice grips shifted in his jittering grasp and clattered to the floor. He swiped at air as the rusted tongs tumbled through the hole and rattled wetly below.

  “Shit ...” He reached for them and saw their steely handles skew sideways in the run-off. They skidded along the water to vanish from view.

  “Oh, that’s just splendid!” he spat venomously.

  He released his seat belt.

  “Want me to feel around for them?” Savanna asked. “My arm’s skinnier.”

  He leaned toward the hole and stuck his arm through. “It’s okay ...”

  He touched the cold asphalt and water sluiced between his fingers.

  “Go slow,” Savanna said. “If they’re there you don’t want to nudge them any further.”

  His fingertips traced along the crocodile skin of the highway, questing, searching—

  And then there was pain. And flowing warmth. And he couldn’t pull his arm back out of the hole.

  “Ohmygod!”

  “What is it?!” Savanna screamed.

  He began jerking his shoulder savagely. His eyes were wide and wet, literally gleaming with something, everything: anger, pain—unbelievable, vein-bloating, hair-whitening pain! Gleaming tears welled up in their corners to roll down his cheeks like shooting stars.

  “Jesus!” The tiny metal drum was not enough to contain his cry.

  There was something pulling at his hand. It had hooked him, penetrated his wrist, broken through to the other side of the flesh. And now it was yanking and thrashing savagely.

  Savanna screamed helplessly, grabbing his upper arm and pulling with him. She heard what sounded like wet cloth ripping. And suddenly he was free, he was pushing back against his chair again. And all was warm and sticky as she licked at her lips and tasted salt there, and realized his blood was jetting from the stump of his wrist to draw stringy graffiti on her face and across the windshield and into his lap which had gone dark with urine.

  She shrunk against the door shrieking, her long-fingered hands shaking and contorting and opening and closing madly in front of her. They danced as though possessed of the Spirit, responding to inaudible Tongues—like writhing bodies fallen to rapture in the isles of some backwater church. Still screaming, she shirked her T-shirt up and over her head. Holding the edge of the cloth between her teeth, she groped for Roger with both arms.

  He was thrashing about in his seat as if it were electrified, the breath hammering in and out of his mouth, a mad kind of survival-light burning in his eyes. He seemed to be attempting some desperate kind of breathing method. She fell across the shifter trying to get a hold of his arm and its rubber crown jabbed at her ribs viciously. She suddenly caught his flailing wrist in a lucky snatch, but his flesh was covered in blood and her thin fingers slid helplessly away to grope at dead air. She tried again. The swinging, crimson-gouting stump only danced away each time, winking at her whitely with its flashing stub of bone. At last she caught it again and began squeezing to choke the blood flow.

  And something nipped her in the stomach. She reared back and looked down.

  Cold yellow eyes were staring up at her through the hole in the floor.

  She screamed still louder and shrunk against her door yet again, dropping the T-shirt. Her hand raked along the dash, twisted into a long-nailed crook by her panic. Roger began to hyperventilate violently. Something poked its head up through the hole and looked to her briefly. It had scales. It looked like a big monitor lizard, colored beige with black stripes.

  But its movements were twitchy and fast, exactly like a bird’s.

  She blinked—and it had turned on Roger. She watched in fathomless horror as it sought out his spurting wrist and began to nibble and tear at the mutilated gristle. Her husband shrilled, throwing his head back violently against the backrest. His body had begun to spasm, bucking and quaking and lolling. His legs pumped wildly, kicking at the floor, the steering column, through the wheel to the dash, again and again and again. His red sneakers smashed out the clear plastic over the speedometer.

  Savanna opened the glove-compartment and plowed through its jumbled contents. She came up with Roger’s .38 and pointed its muzzle at the back of the thing’s head.

  “Leave him alone you scaly bastard!” Her tear-strung face was a twisted white mask.

  The gun wavered in her grasp as she sought an opening in the mish-mash of flesh. Roger’s dark blood (it’s type-O, she thought insanely, yes type O-negative rare so rare he’ll bleed to death and no one can help not me not me) was blotting the windshield like lumps of maroon paint.

  “Leave him alone!” she bawled. “Leave him alone leave him alone leave him alone!” There was an opening and she fired.

  The pistol bucked and the thing’s head blew apart. Chunks of meat and pieces of bone exploded like shrapnel against the windshield. The smooth, bloody glass cracked into a thousand spidery rings. Savanna began to hack violently in the smoke. Her ears rang as if every radio and TV speaker in the world were shrieking with the searing tone of the Emergency Broadcast System cranked to full volume. The thing’s head collapsed steaming into her lap.

  She stared down at it breathlessly, the smoking revolver slipping from her fingers to tumble against the carpet. The thing’s reptilian head twitched in her lap and she saw a tiny convulsion ripple down its neck.

  “Honey, oh god ...” Roger mumbled.

  She looked up to find his face had gone completely blue. His eyes were glassy and still. That fiery survival-light had flickered and dimmed to a weary acceptance of death. The shock was clearly taking its toll. Something exploded inside of her and she shoved the dead animal off her. She half-heartedly tried to shove it down through the opening, but it was wedged in there tight and wouldn’t even budge—so she simply left it there.

  She snatched up his wrist in her right hand, thinking, Concentrate, dammit, concentrate! Remember that first-aid course—then pressed her thumb into the outer flesh of his arm and the flats of her fingers against the inside. She did the same thing with her left hand—midway along his upper-arm, pinching closed the brachial artery against the arm bone.

  Straining to keep his arm elevated, she dipped her head to the blood-splattered floor hump and snatched up the T-shirt with her teeth. She swung it around his wrist with a jerk of her chin, and managed to pin the twisted cloth where it crisscrossed itself beneath her bloody fingers. Glancing down she spotted the blue cap of a ballpoint pen, poking sideways out of the jumble of junk between the beverage holders. She drew the pen free with her teeth and clenched it there, then released his biceps and tied the shirt’s ends in a half-knot. He started hemorrhaging instantly, the blood leaping for the ceiling as if pumped from a squirt gun. She held the Bick to the half-knot and knotted the cloth twice more. Then she twisted the pen, praying it would not break—once, twice, a thousand times.

  “Die you bastard and I’ll sleep with every member of the Houston Oilers,” she mumbled as she worked. “Just for spite.”

  Gradually, the bleeding slowed to a trickle ... and stopped. She secured the tourniquet halfway up his forearm with the T-shirt’s crimsoned ends and then threw open her door, pausing to lower the seat before jumping out and slamming the door behind her.

  An instant later she yanked Roger’s door open. Grabbing the frame, she planted both feet against his side and shoved him over the hump and the rubber-crowned gear shift, into the passenger seat. Then she plopped into the driver’s seat, jammed the truck into gear, and they tore away from the shoulder—a scaly tail dragging behind like tin cans rattling behind a honeymoon Cadillac.

  The pickup rocked and Roger stirred, staring at her blankly.

  He coughed and managed weakly, “Try the Bengals. I hear they’re hard up for cooperation.”

  III | Savanna

  The metal-framed signboard read: OUT OF UNLEADED. As the 4x4 careened into the Ozark station’s parking lot, its right quarter-panel smashed the sign aside, whereby it hit the concrete and sent a flurry of hot sparks dashing against the gas pumps.

  Savanna gripped the wheel like a vise and aimed the pickup at the store’s facade—visible once again now that the rain had given way to another burst of hailstones. A station wagon and a Ford truck were sitting out front, as well as a row of motorcycles, so she had to aim for the far side of the parking strip. She jerked the wheel too hard and the little 4x4 spun out of control, hydroplaning wildly across the wet, oily asphalt and smashing into the rear of the Ford. The Toyota’s front bumper crumpled in like an aluminum can and radiator spray geysered out from around the edges of the hood.

  She jammed the shifter into reverse and tried to back away from the jumble of crushed metal. The 4x4’s big tires hissed against the concrete, spinning like turbines, burning through the slick layer of oil and finally their own rubber. It was no good, she realized, the two vehicles were locked together like Siamese twins. She put it into neutral and let off the clutch, and the engine stalled with a pathetic shudder. Throwing open her door, she ran around the 4x4 to the passenger side.

  The hailstones were as big as marbles. They rebounded off her wet head and bare shoulders like white-hot meteors, leaving her pale flesh bruised and throbbing. As she yanked open Roger’s door one of the stones drilled her in the right temple, and by the time the two had begun shambling toward the building’s entrance, her right eye had been blinded by her own blood.

  It was all Roger could do to remain on his feet, desperately clinging to his wife for support. He’d lost a lot of blood. He wanted so badly just to pass out and be free of the pain, but he didn’t want Savanna to have to face whatever was going on alone. He struggled to stay conscious, cradling his severed wrist between his chest and his remaining hand as if he were holding a wounded child.

  The store clerk burst through the double glass doors. He was a thirtysomething black man in white sneakers and a brown attendant’s apron.

  “Christ woman, that was my truck!” His eyes flashed to Roger’s stump, where the knob of bloody-white bone winked beneath the fluorescent lights and seemed to say, “Hi there.”

  He swallowed dryly. “Jesus—what happened?”

  “He did lunch with something scaly,” she grunted. “Come on.”

  He took up Roger’s left arm and together the three entered the building.

  Gasps and shocked profanities accompanied their passage through the room, and a crowd of figures clustered about them like a frenzied Washington press corps.

  “We got it, man. We got it ...” the clerk said.

  They carried him on their shoulders to the little, pristine men’s room, and the clerk held him aloft while Savanna lowered the lid of the toilet. They eased him down onto its smooth, ivory-colored surface. Savanna turned on the water and let it flow between her fingers until it was hot.

  “Got a first-aid kit in the office,” the clerk said, and left the room.

  The toilet was right next to the basin. Savanna drew up Roger’s arm and began running hot water down over the stump. She wasn’t at all sure this was the correct thing to do, cleansing this severe a wound as if it were a skinned knee, but with an animal bite—and with no help on the way—who knew what kind of infection might spring up, or how fast. Especially with a lizard, or an emu, or whatever the hell it had been. Christ. Could there be poison, even?

 

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