Quicksilver(22)

Bridget picked up her second slider, which she had left half-finished, and she polished it off.

I said, “What—you had a vision?”

“I don’t have visions. It was a presentiment. A feeling, an impression. But pretty specific.” She pushed the empty plate aside and slid one of the fresh orders in front of herself. “We’ve got time to enjoy these, but we’ll have to split before we can tackle the banana cream pie.”

As Sparky tucked into his food again, I said, “But.”

“Yes, dear?” Bridget said.

“But shouldn’t we call the police?”

“That won’t do any good,” she said. “They’ll think it’s a crank call. And the minute they show up, the Screamers will open fire.”

“Then shouldn’t we warn these people?”

Sparky said, “Same situation, son. We’d only be precipitating the massacre. The moment we shout a warning, the Screamers will start blasting away.”

“But.”

“What is it, dear?” Bridget asked, though her mouth was full.

“We can’t just walk out and let people die.”

“Of course we can’t,” said Sparky.

“Then what are we going to do?” I asked.

“Kill the Screamers,” Bridget said.

“They can be killed?”

“Of course they can,” she said. “We’ve done it before.”

“The incident,” I surmised.

“There you go,” Sparky said.





|?10?|

There is a famous story of demons being cast out of men and into a herd of swine that thereupon ran into the sea and drowned. Bridget, Sparky, and I had neither the power nor the pigs, nor a nearby sea, that would allow us to deal in that fashion with the demons that came to dine in the truck stop. Envisioning the combat to come, I foresaw myself bullet-riddled, slipping across a floor littered with a variety of fried foods, taking a pratfall into several spilled orders of banana cream pie.

I do not find any death to be a laughing matter. However, I expect that in the aftermath of my own demise, I’ll probably find the circumstances of my murder—I am convinced it will be a grisly homicide—to one degree or another absurd and probably amusing. After all, the human pageant is both tragic and comic. Those who are unable to perceive the humor of it also do not grasp the true horror of it; therefore, they fail to understand life or where it’s taking them. Maybe that’s a blessing, but I don’t think so. They say that ignorance is bliss. I think ignorance is the mother of extreme behavior, ensuring either a colorless and tedious life or one of passionate commitment to foolishness of one kind or another.

So each of us ate two more small pulled-pork sliders, wishing they were larger. With two mass-murdering Screamers waiting for the restaurant to get busy enough to provide a large number of victims, we ate in silence. We didn’t have time to finish our dinner and discuss the state of modern interpretive dance, or whatever we might have discussed in less fraught circumstances.

Bridget wiped her hands on her napkin, neatly folded it, put it beside her plate, and said, “Logically, we’d leave the restaurant by heading away from the kitchen. When we start toward the back, those two wormheads might be suspicious.”

“Then you do think they know some like us can see them?”

“Maybe,” Sparky said. “But if so, it seems like they aren’t able to detect who those seers are.”

“However,” Bridget said, “they’re highly suspicious by nature. Look at one of them with revulsion, and you’re liable to trigger a violent reaction quicker than if you started to sing the national anthem at a college faculty luncheon. So we have to put on a little performance. You know what I have in mind, Grandpa?”

“Paloma,” Sparky said.

“Since we won’t be stopping at the cashier, leave plenty of money for the full check plus tip. We don’t want to stiff Darlene. We’re already going to screw up her evening.”

“What performance?” I asked. “What am I supposed to do?”

“You just trail close behind us,” Sparky said, as he counted bills out of his wallet. “And don’t say anything, especially not ‘sweetums.’”

“We’ll wait till a hostess escorts customers to a table toward the back. Get ready to move quickly, so the timing will work,” Bridget said.

Bridget and Sparky seemed eerily calm, while I was hoping to get out of this with clean shorts. “The place is filling up. There aren’t many empty tables left.”

Picking up her large purse and zippering it open, Bridget said, “We’ve still got a little time.”

“You’re sure?”

“If I wasn’t sure, I’d be shrieking like a little girl and running for the exit.”

I warned her: “I’m maybe a minute from doing that.”

A minute passed, and I didn’t make a spectacle of myself.

When a hostess appeared, moving among the tables in the center of the room rather than along the booths, trailed by a young couple, Bridget slung the straps of her purse over her right shoulder and moved to the edge of the banquette. “Wait . . . wait . . . now.”

She slid out of the booth. Sparky followed her, and I followed him. I told myself that if I wasn’t eaten by coyotes while lying in a bassinet, I was meant to survive for a purpose more important than having a meal of pulled-pork sliders in an Arizona truck stop before being shot down by wormheads.