Riders on the Storm

Chapter 3

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.

“s**t ...” 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.