The Complete Flashback Saga

Chapter 5

“Jesus H. Christ,” Roy Bonner muttered.

The dinosaur dipped its head and began feeding.

“Jesus, gods ...!” Roy turned away from the window and his giant belt buckle brushed against Savanna’s hip.

There had been a time, not so long ago, when she would have turned away also, shuddering with revulsion. But not now, and perhaps not ever again. The scene outside sickened her, but it was hardly shocking when compared to the memory of her husband being eaten alive in front of her. Twice, now. Once in the real world, once in her vision.

Vision? No, she corrected, dream. It hadn't been a vision.

The room was silent.

Those remaining watched as the giant tyrannosaur devoured its prey. They watched with an involuntary reverence, like primitives awed by some terrible wilder-god. On some level, even the dullest of them knew why. The animal being eaten was a surrogate for those inside: a sacrifice.

And then the rex paused and its jaws became still. It stood poised, frozen. Roger, Savanna, and the clerk inched closer to the glass, watching. The beast had c****d its head, as if listening to opossums rustling in the grass. It sniffed at the air gingerly, its great head poking left to right, right to left, like a bird.

“Oh s**t,” the cashier said ominously. “It can smell us.”

“No,” replied Roger. “It heard something.”

Savanna took his left hand in her own and pointed. “My God, Roger ... there's somebody coming.”

VIII | OmarEVEN BEFORE THE SNOW-speckled cones of light appeared from the direction of the off-ramp, the tyrannosaurus rex had sensed something approaching. Swiftly it snatched up its cold, meager prize and moved to conceal itself in the distant trees, covering the snow-blown length of the parking lot in just a few sinewy strides.

Then its dark eyes floated in the white-spotted blackness above those trees, out there beyond the lights of the gas station, and the beast was all but invisible as the Washington state patrol car swung into the lot.

The cruiser moved slowly at first, creeping past the pump island, crossing the lot as if in slow-motion, and then its red and blue lights began flashing, and it swept up to within a dozen yards of the overturned 4x4 and stopped.

“Jesus, we got to warn him ...” Roger pushed against the door.

“No!”

The authoritative decree had issued out of the biker’s camp. Roger turned around to find one of them pointing a pistol at him. Savanna gasped. Nobody moved.

“Back away from the door,” the biker ordered, his eyes glaring from his tanned face like a rabid animal's.

Roger stared at the man, uncomprehending.

“Goddamn it—do it!” the biker shouted. It was the voice of a wild-man; saw-edged and uncontained, incapable of bluffing. Raw.

“Easy, Omar ...” urged one of the gunman's peers.

“Roger, honey,” Savanna stammered helplessly. “Please God do what he says.”

So much for her new convictions. Dinosaurs were one thing. A crazy, drunken man with a gun was something else entirely.

The cashier nudged her husband's shoulder with considerable force, and Roger moved away from the door very, very slowly.

The gunman's eyes shifted to the clerk. “Move, Buckwheat.” Then to Savanna: “Move.”

Cautiously, Savanna and the clerk inched toward Roger.

The man named Omar applauded. “Good Buckwheat!”

“That's enough, man!” the clerk barked explosively, and moved toward him with clenched fists.

Omar exploded, too. He surged forward like a leather-clad tidal wave and struck the clerk across the jaw with the pistol grip. When the clerk rebounded he had a gun barrel hovering in his face.

Omar stepped away from him slowly, smiling like a lunatic.

“You 're a spunky buckaroo, my friend,” he said. “Hell, I think

I might even spare your sorry black ass. But we've got a credibility problem here ...”

His dark eyes fell upon the Bonners, and he zeroed in on Roy. “Hi, Tex.”

Roy Bonner glared at him, his face flushed in anger, and stepped away from his wife. He had that good-old-boy ‘I’m going to roll up my sleeves and kick your ass’ look burning in his eyes

Omar raised an eyebrow. “You people don't seem to take me very seriously,” he said. “But that's all right. I didn't really expect you to ... until I killed somebody.”

He trained the pistol on Roy Bonner's head, and his mad eyes flashed to the man's belt-buckle, on to his wedding-ring, and then up to his face.

“Take Roy here, fer instance,” he continued, saying Roy in his best John Wayne. “Now this tub of s**t I simply do not like.”

“Go to hell, you—”

“Roy, Roy, Roy ...” Omar droned, shaking his head, and glanced sidelong at Clara. “Kiss your hubby on the cheek, fat-body. He's going on a round-up.”

Clara froze, petrified.

“Suit yourself.”

Omar fired. Pop! And stringy sections of Roy Bonner's brains were ejaculated onto the walls like spaghetti.

Clara screamed as his body crumpled to the floor. Her little black shoes clacked over the tiles as she rushed to his corpse. They tapped twenty times, or maybe a hundred. They tapped out the ghost number of years lost.

The stealer of those years was white-faced and dazed. He did not hear the ghost number in her wails and the tapping of her shoes. He saw only his victim's brains on the wall, and had to struggle a moment to remember how they'd gotten there.

There is a checkpoint at the border of every man's soul, where the road which winds into the country of madness begins. At Omar's checkpoint there was no guard on duty, and he often wondered where the man had gone—or if indeed he had ever been there at all.

Clara meanwhile was trying to stuff her husband's brains back into his head. Sobbing, Savanna moved to draw her away but was drawn away herself by Roger and the clerk.

Omar swallowed once, blinked, and then turned to them.

His eyes were drunken and glassy as he warned: “Anymore bullshit, from any of you, and you 're going to be picking little pieces of his fat-body widow here out of my s**t, too ... dig?”

Everyone dug.

Then the crazed biker waved the gun at his fellows. “Anybody not with me?!”

An old hippie with a straggly gray beard emerged from the fold. “We're with you, Omar. We 're your friends, aren't we?” He turned to the other bikers. “We're all Omar's friends, aren't we?”

The bikers murmured agreement.

The old sage took a cautious step forward. “This about that problem in Seattle, Omar?”

The gunman's face contorted and flushed. “I just wanted a piece of ass, man. She killed herself, dig?” He moved the gun to point directly at the man's skull. “Look, are you with me or not because if you're not, then you're with these sorry bastards over here ...” The gun swung back to Roger and the others.

“We're with you,” the old hippie repeated.

“Yeah?” Omar said, and gestured with the pistol recklessly. “Then go kill the lights, you moron!”

The Old Hippie motioned to another biker, and that biker jogged into the back room and disappeared. They all waited fidgeting as he sought out the panel, and after a moment Omar called: “We're all waiting, s**t for Brains!”

Then the room fell to a tentative blackness, and while everyone's eyes were adjusting to the dim glow of the lights outside—which crept in through the windows like dull, orange moonlight—the man came scrambling back out again,

The Old Hippie turned to Omar in the semidarkness. “See, Omar? We 're a team.” But his head was trying to slither up his ass as he added, “Do you have a plan, Omar?”

Omar the Great and Terrible smiled, revealing black and yellow teeth which were spaced along his gums like decaying guard-towers. “Yeah, old man ... I got a plan.” His dark eyes flashed toward the window.

A moment or two later, a sole sheriff's deputy got out of the cruiser and began advancing toward the 4x4 with his gun drawn. Several-dozen yards away the shadowy tyrannosaur waited, poised among the trees like some great, reptilian jungle cat. It was merely a silhouette, visible only to the initiated.

“You see,” Omar muttered ominously. “We’re all just gonna wait right here ... and let nature take its course.”

IX | TannerHE NOTICED THE OVERTURNED pickup right after flicking on his high-beams, and a hundred different scenarios raced through his head as he swung into the parking lot and eased the cruiser 's big hood slowly around the pump island.

But when the row of homegrown choppers appeared in the snowy wash of his headlights, the young patrolman's little mystery seemed ready to solve itself. His friends the Dusty Moths were here; well, well ... imagine that. And it appeared highly probable that that borderline psycho Omar Mason had used the state of emergency to do something really stupid. He hit his lights and pulled up closer to the hulk.

He snatched up the radio instinctively, but was greeted only by empty static. Since the outset of the weather disturbances he’d become wholly conditioned to its droning nothingness, and had reached for it on several occasions even though he could hear for himself that its airwaves were blank.

If it had been working properly, patrolman Orley Tanner would have long-since received word of Omar's little Murder-One problem. Cursing, he slammed it back onto its hook and killed the volume.

His fingers drummed on the wheel.

The interior of the Ozark station was completely dark. But hadn't it been lit when he'd first pulled in? He couldn't quite remember. In any case, it was dark now. Yet the exterior lights—such as the rotating sign he’d just passed beneath, and the neon runners which wrapped around the island-canopies—were all burning bright.

He looked to the overturned import not far from his cruiser, and his eyes dropped to the ground. There was a pool of fresh oil there with lines of blue neon shimmering on its surface.

Motor Oil's Motor Oil, he thought insanely.

But something made him peer closer, and he noticed its color was not in fact black but a deep, dark red. Maybe it was just the dim, orangish haze of the storm-shrouded arc-lights, playing havoc with his color perception. He switched on the spotlight and trained it on the puddle.

And then Tanner realized it wasn't oil at all ... it was transmission-fluid. No, it wasn't that, either. It was—

His right hand dropped to his revolver and he swallowed hard. It looked like a pool of blood.

The cruiser's big engine ticked as it cooled. Slowly, he slid the revolver free of its holster. Grabbing his Mag-light in his free hand, he threw open his door and climbed out into the cold.

His spit-polished shoes crunched in the snow as he walked the short distance to the puddle. Reaching it, he thumbed on the Mag-light and cast its beam onto the pool's red surface.

It was blood, all right. But where was the victim?

He jogged the flashlight and discovered a winding trail of tiny blotches which led off toward the highway. And there was something else, too. Some kind of impressions in the snow—about three feet each—their precise shape obscured by the wind. There were three or four of them. They were spaced roughly fifteen feet apart and ran along both sides of the blood trail. He followed them with the flashlight's beam until they vanished from view into a stand of decorative trees. Squinting in the dark, he could make out nothing save swirling snow and the dim outline of a huge pile of dirt behind the trees. It looked as though there was a mother lode of a boulder up there. But there was something else, wasn't there? A dark glint of some kind ...

Tanner took a step forward and the snow groaned beneath him. He probed the dark shape with the Mag-light. It was hard to tell anything through the shadow-play of the branches ...