NOS4A2(149)

“He hasn’t been hurt,” she said.

“Victoria,” Tabitha Hutter said. “When did you—”

“Hang on!” Lou cried. “Vic, dude. You can’t do this alone. You can’t cross this bridge alone.”

Vic readied herself, as if she were aiming a rifle on a distant target, and said, as calmly and clearly as she could manage, “Listen to me, Lou. I have to make one stop, and then I’m going to see a man who can get some ANFO for me. With the right ANFO, I can blow Manx’s world right off the map.”

“What info?” Tabitha Hutter said. “Victoria, Lou is right. You can’t deal with this on your own. Come in. Come in and talk to us. What man are you going to see? What is this information you need?”

Lou’s voice was slow and ragged with emotion. “Get out of there, Vic. We can horseshit around some other time. They’re coming for you. Get out of there and go do what you have to do.”

“Mr. Carmody?” Tabitha said. There was a sudden note of tension underlying her voice. “Mr. Carmody?”

“I’m gone, Lou. I love you.”

“Back atcha,” he said. He sounded choked with emotion, barely hanging on.

She set the phone gently in its cradle.

She thought he understood what she was telling him. He had said, We can horseshit around some other time, a sentence that almost made sense in context. Almost but not quite. There was a second meaning there, but no one besides Vic would have been able to detect it. Horseshit: a principal component of ANFO, the substance her father had been using to blow up shelf rock for decades.

She limped on her bad left leg to the sink and ran some cool water, splashed it onto her face and hands. Blood and grime circled the drain in pretty pink swirls. Vic had bits of Gasmask Man all over her, drops of liquefied Bing dripping down her shirt, splattered up her arms, probably in her hair. In the distance she heard the wail of a police siren. The thought crossed her mind that she should’ve had a shower before calling Lou. Or searched the house for a gun. She probably needed a gun more than she needed a shampoo.

She pushed open the screen door and went carefully down the back steps, keeping the weight off her left knee. She would have to keep it extended while she rode. She had a bad moment, wondering how she would shift gears with the left foot—then remembered it was a British bike. Right. The gearshift was on the right side of the bike, a configuration that hadn’t been legal in the United States since before she was born.

Vic walked up the hill, face turned to the sun. She closed her eyes, to concentrate her senses on the good warmth against her skin. The sound of the siren grew louder and louder behind her, the Doppler effect causing the shriek to rise and fall, swell and collapse. Tabitha Hutter would lop off heads when she found out they had approached the house with their sirens blaring, giving Vic plenty of advance notice they were coming.

At the top of the hill, as she lurched into the parking lot of the New American Faith Tabernacle, she looked back and saw a police car swerving onto Bloch Lane, sliding to a stop in front of Bing’s house. The cop didn’t even swing into the driveway, just slewed to a halt with the car at an angle, blocking half the road. The cop behind the wheel flung himself out so quickly his head bumped the doorframe and his hat was knocked into the road. He was so young. Vic couldn’t imagine dating him, let alone being arrested by him.

She continued on and in three more steps could no longer see the house below. She had a moment to wonder what she would do if her bike wasn’t there, if some kids had discovered it with the keys in the ignition and taken it for a ride. But the Triumph was right where she had left it, tilted over on its rusted kickstand.

It wasn’t easy to stand it up. Vic made a small sobbing sound of pain, pushing with her left leg to straighten it.

She turned the key over, flipped the switch to RUN, and stomped on the gas.

The bike had been rained on and sat out all night, and it would’ve been no surprise to her if it didn’t want to start, but the Triumph boomed right away, seemed almost impatient to go.

“I’m glad one of us is ready,” she said.

She turned it in a circle and rolled it out of the shadows. She took it around the ruin of the church, and as she glided along, it began to rain. Water fell glittering and brilliant from the sunlit sky, raindrops as cold as October. It felt good on her skin, in her dry, bloody, dirty hair.

“Rain, rain,” she said softly. “Come again and wash this mess away.”

The Triumph and the woman upon it inscribed a great hoop around the charred sticks that had once been a house of worship.

When she had returned to the place where she started, the bridge was there, set back in the woods, just as it had been the day before. Only it had turned itself around, so as she drove onto it, she entered from what she thought of as the eastern side. There was green spray paint on the wall to her left.

HERE it said.

She rolled onto the old rotten boards. Planks rattled beneath her tires. As the sound of the engine faded in the distance, a crow landed at the entrance to the bridge and stared into its dark mouth.

When the bridge disappeared two minutes later, it went all at once, popped out of existence like a balloon pricked by a pin. It even banged like a balloon and emitted a clear, shimmering shockwave that hit the crow like a speeding car, blew off half its feathers, and threw it twenty feet. It was dead by the time it hit the ground—just another piece of roadkill.