“We’ll be careful. We’re driving straight through. I wouldn’t pick anybody up. I’ve got a family to watch out for.”
“That’s right. You’ve got a family to watch out for.” With a final nod, the attendant turned and strolled back toward the station office. Relieved, Frank turned to reenter the motor home.
What the dickens was wrong with him? He’d been watching too much TV, especially the kind of gruesome R-rated horror videos his son and friends were beginning to favor. The station’s isolation, the soiled handkerchief, the emblem of the deer on the hat, with the four dismembered legs, all had other, more plausible explanations than the one that had made evil connections between them in his thoughts. Been out in the sun too long, he told himself. Alicia and the kids were right, after all. What they needed were not stimulating encounters but air-conditioning, neon, television, and prepared food.
So what about the bones?
Yeah, what about them? What did he know about bones? They could have come from anything. Or they might have been plastic fakes planted there as a gag. That would fit the attendant’s sense of humor. Buy some from a medical supply house and bury them near the enclosure to scare prying kids like Steven. Furthermore, if anything illegal was somehow involved, that didn’t mean the old man had a part in it. It made no sense. Anyone wanting to dispose of a body and who’d take the time to dismember the bones wouldn’t bury the incriminating results only a few inches deep.
As he reached the entrance to the motor home, he spared a last look for the subject of his musings—and paused. There was something moving at the back of the old man’s pants, up near the beltline. He squinted. The bright sunlight made it difficult to concentrate. A tuft of black attached to a wire or stick protruded from a corner of the coveralls. Funny he hadn’t noticed it before, but he’d been looking the old man in the eyes, not staring at his backside. Despite the fact it was still blazing hot outside, a chill ran through him.
The twitching black tuft looked just like the tip of a tail.
You have been out in the sun too long, he admonished himself.
Alicia greeted him as he slid back into the driver’s seat. “Everything all right, dear? You were out there a long time.”
“Fine,” he muttered as he fumbled with the ignition key. “Everything’s fine.”
The engine grumbled. Come on, dammit, he thought tensely. Catch, you steel bastard! Don’t you die on me here.
With the third wrench on the key the big engine came to life. Frank let it idle for a minute, then put it in drive. The motor home exited smoothly from the station. As soon as they were clear, he leaned slightly forward so he could see the whole image presented by the rearview mirror on Alicia’s side. Nothing stirred behind them. The station and its attendant trailer home appeared as still and lifeless as they had when he’d first pulled in.
He turned onto the on ramp, flooring the accelerator. The motor home picked up speed like a runaway juggernaut, roaring onto the deserted sanctuary of the slow lane.
Alicia didn’t speak until her husband set the cruise control. “Frank, you look like you’ve seen a ghost. Is something wrong?”
“No, nothing’s wrong. Everything’s fine.”
“You’re lying. I can always tell when you’re lying.”
He clung to the wheel, didn’t look around at her. “Tell you later. It’s no big deal, okay? We’re on our way again and everything’s fine. Just don’t press me about it right now.”
Maybe she saw the tension in his face. Certainly she heard it in his voice. “All right. You’ll tell me about it when you’re ready.”
“Right.”
He ought to have been able to relax then but could not. The landscape was beginning to bother him as much as his memories. For one thing it seemed darker than it should have been outside. There wasn’t a cloud in sight and the external thermometer hadn’t fallen a degree, but suddenly it didn’t look as bright as it had before they’d pulled into the strange little gas station. The interstate was unchanged, but the desert didn’t seem right anymore.
The plants, the sandy shoulder pushing up against the pavement, even the mountains no longer looked the same. Steep slopes had acquired a rusty red hue instead of the familiar beige and brown. Several plants hovered over the barbed-wire fence that isolated the interstate from the surrounding terrain. Branches reached for the concrete. At sixty it was impossible to say for certain, but a few appeared to be dripping dark liquid. Probably creosote, Frank told himself. Creosote bushes were supposed to be common in this part of the world. But should a bush drip creosote?
The ocotillos looked shriveled and drawn, like anorexic octopuses. Then there were the Joshua trees, not as common here as elsewhere in the desert, with their contorted limbs that resembled broken arms. That was to be expected. All Joshua trees looked like that.
But they shouldn’t have had faces with wide, imploring eyes and mouths frozen in midscream.
He thought about pointing them out, found himself wondering if he was the only one to notice what might not actually be there. All desert plants looked funny. Just because he was seeing their gnarled shapes as ominous didn’t mean someone else would view them in the same way. They might find the distortions amusing, and laugh at his interpretations. So as badly as the sights unnerved him, he kept his observations to himself.
No one passed them from behind and there was no traffic in the oncoming lanes. That was starting to worry him as much as the appearance of some of the vegetation when something rocketed past in the fast lane. The low jet-black sports car must have been traveling well in excess of a hundred miles an hour.
Damn highway patrol’s never around when they should be, he grumbled silently.
The truck convoy that passed a few minutes later was moving at a more sedate velocity. There were three of the big eighteen-wheelers. He tried to see the drivers, but the three cabs were wrapped in smoked glass. All were painted a bright red-orange and were devoid of company logos or identification except for the big crimson H stenciled on each side. Very catchy, Frank mused.
The last truck had vanished over the horizon when he pulled hard on the steering wheel, forgetting that he wasn’t driving a sports car himself. Wendy squealed and was immediately angry at herself for doing so, while Alicia let out a startled gasp. Then the motor home steadied again. Frank clung to the wheel, trying to drive and stare at the rearview mirror at the same time. There was sweat on his forehead.
“Snake.”
Alicia gaped at him. “You almost wrecked us to avoid hitting a snake? I know you love animals, Frank, but...”
“Not a snake. I thought it was at first, but it had legs. Short, stubby legs, and it was about eight feet long.”
“I don’t care how big it was! You”—she hesitated, leaned toward him—“Frank, you’re sweating.”
Reflexively he drew a forearm across his brow, sopping up the moisture. “It had stripes, Alicia. Legs and orange and black stripes. Eight feet long. And it had—a face.”
She stared uncomprehendingly. “A face? Oh. You mean, like a lizard face.”
“Yeah, that was it. A lizard face.”
Except it hadn’t looked anything like a lizard. It had been distorted, the expression a frozen alien grimace, but humanoid. Much too human. As the motor home had roared down on it, the wide mouth had parted in a hiss of fear and loathing. He’d barely avoided it, careening wildly into the fast lane, fighting weight and wheel as he’d brought it back under control.
A crawling abomination, a stripe-slashed monstrosity born of some fevered nightmare, that’s what it had been. Nothing so normal and healthy as a snake. What was happening?
The gas station. That heat-ravaged gas station with its damned attendant. That’s where it had started. Had they taken a wrong turn somehow? Had he driven onto the wrong on ramp, the wrong highway? They’d driven into a part of the desert people didn’t know about. Perhaps a desert that lay just under or parallel to the real Mojave? Or maybe he was going a little crazy from all the driving and the heat. The latter explanation was the more reasonable of the two.
A glance revealed Wendy locked in the blissful catatonia provided by her tape player, Steven absorbed in a comic book. Say nothing to them, don’t involve them. So far the nightmare was still a private one. Alicia had only been brushed by the horror. Leave her out of it, too. The snake that was something less than a reptile and the station attendant who might have been something more than a man had him seriously unsettled.
“I’m going to lie down in back for a few minutes.” Alicia climbed free of her chair. “Just a few minutes so I can rest my eyes. Then I’m taking over. You’ve been driving too long, Frank.”
“Yeah. Yeah, maybe I have.” He nodded his thanks, followed her with his eyes as she moved toward the back of the motor home. “Steven? Hey, come on up and sit with your old man for a few minutes, kiddo.”
Silence, then a resigned sigh as his son reluctantly set the comic aside. “Okay, Dad.” Moments later a rotund little form plopped itself down in the big captain’s chair next to his. Father and son watched the passing scenery quietly for a while.
“Tell me something, kiddo. What do you see out there?”
Steven had to sit up straight in order to be able to see out the window. He gazed for a moment before turning back to his father. “Same old shi—stuff, Dad. Sand and rocks.”
“That’s all? It doesn’t look different to you? I mean, different from when we started out from Barstow.”
“Different?” Steven frowned, wondering as he made a second survey of their surroundings if this was some new kind of game. He pressed his face against the glass. “I dunno. Some of the plants look kind of funny. Weird, like. Isn’t that how desert plants always look?”
Frank stiffened in his seat. So he wasn’t imagining everything. “How do you mean, ‘weird, like’?”
“Sorta twisted.” Suddenly he was on his knees on the seat, his head turning to look back the way they’d come. “Hey, neat!”
“What?”
“There went one that looked just like a little kid!”
