Quicksilver(21)

If the events of the day had been profoundly disturbing, they had also inspired in me a pleasing sense of adventure, a tentative longing for a life flavored with more excitement than that enjoyed by a magazine writer who’d spent most of his years in an orphanage. Suddenly, excitement struck me as being the pursuit of fools, and adventure seemed to have become a synonym for suicide.

Darlene arrived with our plates balanced on her left arm, from hand to shoulder. With her right hand, she dealt the three orders of pork sliders onto the table, spilling not one drop of sauce or a single French fry. “Enjoy yourselves, children. I’ll be right back to refill your drinks.”

I thought the repellent pair of masqueraders must have killed my appetite. But even condemned men on death row eat a hearty dinner before the lethal injection, in denial of their mortality. It is human nature to know we die and still to disbelieve it; otherwise, we might not carry on. When the aroma rising from the sliders made my mouth water, I picked up the first of the two small sandwiches and finished it by the time Darlene returned with a Pyrex coffeepot in one hand and a fresh cherry Coke in the other. I ordered a second plate of sliders, and so did my companions.

Darlene beamed at us. “I like folks who know what eatin’ is all about. Some come in here, they don’t want dressin’ on their salad, don’t want butter on their baked potato. They want a plantburger. They should just save themselves some money, go on out in a field, and graze.”

“We haven’t eaten here in a while,” Bridget said. “Is José still the head chef? I think it was José or Juan or maybe just Joe.”

“There was a José back when. He was good. But now it’s one of us—Paloma—and she’s even better than he was. Don’t you think?”

“A woman cooking at a truck stop!” Bridget clapped her hands with delight.

Darlene said, “There was a time I never thought I’d see it, what with the good-old-boy management you get in this business.”

I couldn’t understand why Bridget cared a whit who the chef was when there were monsters in the room.

When Darlene left us to our meal, I said, “Screamers, huh?”

“It isn’t just the open maw,” Bridget said. “First time I saw one, I thought of that painting, The Scream. These creatures terrify me, but I also think there’s something despairing about them. If a scream ever came out of one, it would be a howl of hatred but also of blackest insanity, like an entire asylum full of mad voices all shrieking at once.”

In the spirit of a man slated for execution immediately after dessert, I found myself licking the sauce off my fingers, craving every iota of pleasure available to me, assuming that pleasure can be measured in iotas. “What do they want? What’re they doing?”

“We don’t know,” Sparky said. “Maybe we’d rather not know, but we think it’s inevitable that we’ll find out. Unless one of them realizes Bridget and you can see the truth of them.”

I stopped licking my fingers. “Is that possible?”

“Why couldn’t it be?”

“And then?”

“Nothing good. Which is why we have to play ignorant.”

I thought about that. I didn’t like thinking about it. I almost lost my appetite, after all.

“By the way,” I said, “you two were great with all that wedding reception patter. I wish I could be that smooth. I’m sorry I said ‘knocked out’ three times. Once would have been better.”

Bridget said, “You did fine, Quinn. But just never again call me ‘sweetums.’”

“I couldn’t believe I heard myself say it.” We ate in silence for a minute or two, and then I remembered. “You said there was an incident with one of them. What incident?”

Bridget put down what remained of her second slider and wiped her fingers on her napkin, like an adult. Evidently, she’d seen enough Screamers that the sight of two more didn’t reduce her to the morbid conviction that she’d soon be torn apart and swallowed by a large walking worm with wicked hands. I expected her to reveal the details of the aforementioned incident. Instead, the napkin fell out of her hands, and she went as still as if she’d been flash frozen, and her gaze fixed on something as distant as a moon of Saturn.

Although Sparky didn’t put down his slider, he lowered it from his mouth without taking another bite. He said, “Uh-oh.”

I didn’t ask, Uh-oh what? My brain had already downloaded too many weird and scary events for one day. Yeah, I had more storage capacity, but I wasn’t going to solicit additional freaky data.

After maybe twenty seconds, Bridget unfroze. Her expression remained grim, but her stare shifted several million miles to her grandfather. “They’re going to kill a lot of people.”

I didn’t ask, but Sparky seemed to think I had, so he said, “She means the Screamers.”

“They’re heavily armed,” she said. “They’re waiting. As the dinner hour peaks and the restaurant gets full, they’re going to open fire. It’ll be a massacre.”

We lived in a strange, dark time. Massacres were growing more common, and not all of them involved guns. Sometimes the weapon of choice was a bomb, sometimes Molotov cocktails thrown into a crowded church or synagogue. Now and then an airplane was flown into a building or a train of tanker cars was intentionally derailed and several square blocks of a town were set afire by the spilled petroleum. More often than not the perpetrators claimed a just and noble cause. Throughout history, whole societies that seemed stable have imploded when self-righteous narcissists, enflamed by insane ideologies, so threatened the larger population of the sane that soon everyone feared to stand against the violence, whereupon madness accelerated. No one seemed to remember the lessons of history—or cared to learn them. Perhaps we would persevere through this current darkness. But the very fact of it argued for a second order of pulled-pork sliders—which Darlene now brought to table—and, if time permitted, the richest dessert on the menu, just in case it would be our last.