In the Deadlands Read online

  The bus was slow moving and slower witted. In fact, it was that very slowness which so angered the automobiles. Had the big yellow beast displayed just one bit of rapid flashing anger, its tormentors might have held back.

  But it didn’t. Unsure of itself, it kept edging backwards, away from the splashing Camaro—back, back, backwards, one uneasy step at a time, until the sudden blaring cry of the Firebird startled it forward with a frightened lurch.

  The Camaro sidestepped the heavy wheels easily, but there was a quick scraping-metal sound, a high-pitched HHAAAGKKK of first blood being drawn. When the Camaro leapt away, there was a fresh scratch along its flank.

  The rest of the pack was frozen for a moment, as if in drawing its breath. They waited for the Camaro’s reaction, for the bus’s reaction. Horrified by what it had done, even if only inadvertently, the bus fretted uneasily back, away from the Camaro. The Camaro roared in triumph and circled again for another advance upon its prey. It was in the center of the ring now and enjoying the admiration and support of its fellows. The cars growled and whinnied, honked and hooted; they urged the scrape-fendered champion on to greater and more inspiring deeds. The Camaro circled proudly, displaying its wound like a badge of honor. There was a fresh scratch on the bus’s flank too, and the scent of machine blood wafted over the pack like a sigh.

  Buoyed up by its first encounter, the Camaro turned again toward its prey, but the Impala, hungry and impatient, also moved out of the pack. It was a heavy and powerful car, and it rumbled a deep, throaty challenge. It rolled menacingly forward.

  The bus took a step back, but it couldn’t escape. It was hemmed in by the vicious flashing teeth of the other cars. It found itself being snapped at and unable to back up any more. Worriedly, it fretted from side to side.

  The Impala advanced. Encouraged by the excited beeps and honks of the others, it closed in, sighing through aching teeth. The Camaro made as if to move forward and join the Impala, but a low growl from the bigger car warned it off. The bus is mine! The Camaro scooted back, complaining loudly.

  The bus was watching the Impala now. It was a dangerous adversary. It was not playing the feinting game of the Camaro. The bus rumbled warningly, but to the Impala it was only further challenge.

  Then the bus gave a lurch forward, as if to scare off the other. It wouldn’t scare. The Impala rolled smoothly forward, stalking, stalking, until it was almost nose to nose with the ponderous other. Its four bright eyes held only the promise of glittering death.

  Startled, the bus took a step back, and in so doing, crunched into the snuffling Firebird; the car had been lurking behind it—it howled, more from shock than hurt. But it was a signal. The pack edged in, each car moving just a little bit forward. The Camaro was in the forefront.

  The bus lifted one great wheel in warning, but the pack ignored it. The Camaro, overcome with its own daring, dashed in to chivvy the bus’s throat—and found itself pinned beneath the wheel. It uttered a gashing, crashing, agonized scream—a howl of shock, rage, anger, frustration and despair, all in one. It was suddenly cut short.

  As one, the cars gave a cry. The roar of their engines rose. Black smoke belched from their exhausts. An acrid and pungent odor filled the air: the smell of death, realized and impending.

  The autos moved. Unmindful of the danger to themselves, for they were no longer acting as individuals, the cars rolled in. With a sharp rasping snarl, the Cougar leapt at the back of the bus. Its claws scrabbled for purchase. Farther along the great beast’s flank, a blue Corvette had sunk deep fangs into the bus’s side. Metal ripped and shrieked. The smell of gasoline and oil and diesel fuel swung heavy in the air.

  The Corvette had torn a rent in the bus’s side. It lapped at the flowing ichor and buried its fangs again. The bus grunted in finally realized pain and swung halfway around to strike at the sportster, flinging it away and onto the sidewalk, a flimsy pile of metal and fiberglass. Its proud angles and wings were torn and crumpled, and it lay there gasping and sputtering.

  But if it was out of the battle, it had still inflicted heavy damage on the bus, and others moved in to widen that gaping wound. Already a Barracuda was slashing into the torn metal-flesh, its sharp teeth rending and tearing.

  The bus howled at it, howled at the Cougar that was clawing at its back. It shook and heaved and issued a deep, agonized cry. But the Cougar had a firm grip and wouldn’t be moved, and the Barracuda kept lunging in again and again.

  Frenzied, the bus threw itself fiercely back, then forward. Its great tail lashed from side to side, smashing windows and crumpling fenders. The cars swarmed forward at it, around it, biting at its wheels and its unprotected flanks.

  The bus rose up in agony, shaking and screaming. The Cougar slipped off its back and crashed down onto the Firebird that had been doing something to the rear of the bus. The Barracuda was flung away too. Heavily, the bus struck out at its tormentors, but it was outnumbered hopelessly. Already the Cougar was scrabbling onto its back, widening the fissure of torn metal, ripping open the flesh, scooping in with its claws. The bus’s black blood ran down its sides and into the streets.

  The Cadillac moved in then. Barking and protesting, the smaller cars were edged out of their way. It shouldered roughly through and began to rip great chunks of rubber off the bus’s tires. It ignored the bus’s shrieks as it stuffed bleeding gobbets into its maw.

  The rest of the cars had fallen onto the bus already. Its heaving attempts were no longer strong enough to shake them off, and they were ripping and tearing hungrily at its flesh, always trying to reach its throat. They fought with frenzied lust.

  The Cadillac was eating everything it could. Gobbets of bus-flesh dripped out of its lips. It masticated in rapid jerking motion. It stuffed and gobbled—pieces of the other cars as well as hunks of the bus, the fender of the Impala, too, crumbling bits of the pavement. The bus was almost ignored as the Cadillac grabbed at everything that came near it. Its hunger was manic and insane.

  The mighty leviathan was making one last effort to escape. In a heroic effort, it rose to its feet, unmindful of the cars hanging from it, the great holes in its sides, and the bleeding entrails that hung out of its wounds—at which the cars still snapped and bit.

  It was a doomed effort. The bus was little more than a shell now—still reacting, still feeling, but its vitals were being torn out even as it moved. The Mustang hanging sharply at its throat like a terrier had struck home, and transmission fluid was leaking all over the street. The bus sank back down onto its knees, almost a kneeling, supplicating posture.

  The death blow was not long in coming. It came not as a single thundering end, but as a series of vicious bites, as a continual rending and tearing, as a slow, agonized ripping away of the vital organs, as the painful, aching process of the feeding of the pack. The bus shuddered once and was still.

  The cars plunged inward hungrily, climbing and clambering over each other in mad intensity. They leapt onto the back of the bus, or into its gory sides. They thrust their muzzles deep into it, swallowing without chewing. Their ravenous hunger overcame them and they fought amongst themselves, clawing and scratching.

  The body of the bus was invisible now, blanketed by the flashing bodies of its attackers. The only piece of yellow skin visible was the small tender scrap that a young Volkswagen was contentedly chewing.

  The noise was horrendous: scraping and scrabblings, clawing, shrieking—the continuing sounds of gobbling hunger being sated. The stench was awful. Reeking fumes swept up the streets, outward in all directions.

  The black blood ran thick on the pavement. The cries of challenge and triumph had long since faded into the slobbering sounds of choking motors, eating, gnawing, snarling, tearing at the bus’s frame. They steamed and stank.

  They still swarmed over the giant corpse, but with lessening intensity. Their initial frenzy had been fed, and now they were feeding their stomachs as well. The Firebird was repaying the insult of its crumpled grill. It belched an
d farted happily, joyously.

  The cars made quiet gobbling sounds of satisfaction. The bus was being quickly reduced to its bones—and even those were being eagerly torn away. The Volkswagen crept out of its alley again to lap at the bloody streets.

  The big Cadillac growled sluggishly and parked itself against a wall. Even its hunger had been sated. It belched its gluttony into the air.

  And then they heard it.

  The sound. The deep, rumbling, far off sound.

  And the scent, far off but still distinct—the scent of diesel.

  A surge of sudden fear caught them. Their eyes were white with the realization. As the rumbling sound grew louder, the cars looked at one another and knew the afternoon was over.

  The trucks were coming.

  AFTERWORD:

  I think you have to live in Los Angeles to get it.

  An Infinity of Loving

  This is the other “terrible” story.

  There was a reckless editor who had somehow managed to sell several dozen anthologies to various publishers. To fill them, he seemed to be buying every story that crossed his desk whether it was worth reading or not. A lot of writers sold a lot of their trunk stories in a very short time.

  And that pretty much killed the anthology market for a while.

  He wasn’t a bad man, I’m sure he thought he was contributing to writers and to science fiction, but I don’t think he understood the consequences of flooding the newsstands and bookstores with mediocrity.

  At the beginning, he kept nagging me for stories.

  I sent him two. I didn’t think they were very good, so I hadn’t sent them out anywhere. I expected (even hoped) that he would reject them. Then I would have a good reason for not sending him anything else.

  He bought both the stories.

  That was why I didn’t send him any more.

  Ironically, a year or so after it was published, some would-be plagiarist typed it up and submitted it to Galaxy Science Fiction magazine. It was rejected. And rightfully so.

  Once she surprised him in the shower by climbing in with him.

  Once he surprised her with a spray can of shaving lather and they made love, laughing in the foam.

  Once they sat and looked at each other across the dinner table and forgot to eat.

  Once she leaned over to him and kissed him gently on the eyelids.

  Once they went swimming at three in the morning without bathing suits, and after they had dried each other off, they fell asleep in each other’s arms.

  Or, to put it another way, they were in love. Young and in love.

  And in that, they were lucky, for consider the odds against it:

  Consider, for instance, how slim the chances were that (a) this particular boy should meet (b) this particular girl in (c) this particular place and at (d) this particular time; and most important of all, (e) that each should be in a receptive state of mind, allowing them to respond favorably to each other.

  Consider the alternate possibilities:

  Suppose he had stopped at the post office first; he would have arrived at the Laundromat ten minutes after she had already left. Or suppose he had remembered for once to bring change, or that the change machine was not out of order; he would have had no reason to speak to her.

  And consider: if she had not had trouble with her car that morning, necessitating a hasty call to the Automobile Club emergency road service, she would have already been finished with most of her chores, including her laundry. Or, if she had not just cashed a check that afternoon she would not have had the change he asked for. Or, if her period had come just a day later, she would not have been in any kind of a mood to respond to him.

  Or consider what factors went into his choice of that particular Laundromat, or her choice of that particular college to attend, or his choice of that particular city to live in. Or consider the factors that allowed them both to be born in circumstances that were neither chronologically nor geographically opposed to their meeting and falling in love.

  Consider, most of all, the mere fact that he should so delight in her and be able to delight her in return—that special sense of attraction that each held for the other and that special sense of sharing that enveloped them both.

  Consider the fact that they fitted. Consider how lucky they were.

  Of course, if it were not these two individuals meeting, then perhaps it would have been some other combination. There might have been some other girl that he could have loved as thoroughly; there might have been some other man that she could have loved so completely—but there wasn’t. There was he and there was she and there was each other.

  An individual is unique, existing only once and never again duplicated—a special flicker of personality that flashes briefly in the long darkness of nonexistence, glowing with its own particular radiance only for a bit before vanishing back into the nothingness. That this individual and that individual should both flicker into existence at just the right time and just the right place—well, that was a source of delight and amazement and continual surprise to both of them.

  That they were young and attractive only enhanced its beauty, but if they had not been so favored, it still would have been beautiful.

  Consider the great variety of possible human couplings that this could have been:

  He old and she young.

  She old and he young.

  He black and she white.

  She black and he white.

  He born a female and she a male.

  Or both born as males.

  Or both as females.

  Or one of them deformed. Or crippled, or retarded.

  Consider the infinite number of combinations. Had it been any of these, it still wouldn’t have lessened the beauty of what they shared. It would have only made it more difficult for others to comprehend.

  But this was the ideal combination—easy to understand—easier still to be envious of.

  He was handsome—a face not chiseled, but sculptured as in fine wood; clear skin; even features; short nose; brown hair with hints of lighter blond; and eyes so deeply blue that they were luminous.

  Yes, he was slightly vain about his features—and his body too, which was adequate though not as immediately striking. He was trim, not skinny but neither well muscled. He was strong and beautiful in his own altogether way.

  He had confidence in himself; he had a voice like soft velvet; and he had a mind that concerned itself with its surroundings. He acted upon life almost as much as it acted upon him.

  That he had been favored by fate was apparent. He had been favored more than anybody had any right to be. He knew it and he was pleased by it; he had become accustomed to things working the way he expected.

  And that was his biggest fault.

  She—ah, yes—she had hair so red it glowed like silk in the sunlight, eyes so green (blue-green really) they flared like jewels, deep and mysterious. Her skin was so wonderfully fair that she wore little or no makeup at all and she seemed to glow from within.

  She was afraid of the world—just a little bit—and its complexity. There were things out there that were hostile; they could hurt her if she were careless, so she admired him because of his self-confidence and his ability to do all those things she couldn’t; her eyes showed it. And because she worshipped him so, she delighted in doing things for him that he couldn’t; things that she could do, things that would let her fill in the gaps and together the two of them could be as one.

  To her, he was almost too good to be true; she watched him shamelessly, undressing and caressing him with her eyes.

  And he, he realized this—and he couldn’t believe it. That any girl/woman could so thoroughly immerse herself in his life was an overpowering joy; it was a confirmation that there was indeed something lovable in him. It was what he needed to be complete.

  She was too good to lose—indeed too good to ever risk hurting. He went out of his way to do little things for her. And those little things made her love him ev
en more.

  One can’t be loved until one is first lovable—and that each loved the other so much made them both more lovable. And that in turn made each more loving.

  So they opened themselves to each other. He opened himself for the first time and so did she; they plunged headlong into sharing and confessed their secret fears, expunged their private hurts and traded their mutual fantasies.

  Because he trusted her so fully, because she trusted him, because of what they shared together, they were creative in their lovemaking—and that very creativeness (which would have shocked them in any other partner) delighted/teased/pleased them to even greater heights. They were curious about each other’s bodies and they satisfied that curiosity; they wanted to delight each other and they did that, too. They moved and touched with a joyous laughing lust.

  And finally, came that moment:

  She whispered, “I feel like I’m on the edge of death....” That ultimate ecstasy, when emotions become too great to be expressed, when words alone can’t control the joy, can’t communicate it—that point even beyond gasps and giggles when only tears can release the overpowering intensity of happiness.

  “I don’t believe it,” she sobbed. “I’m so happy, I’m crying.” She could hardly get the words out.

  He couldn’t answer her because he was crying too. He held her tight and they cried together, and they laughed at the silliness of it all and their tears mingled on each other’s cheeks.

  The next time they cried, it was for a different reason.

  A left front tire had blown out while traveling at seventy miles an hour in the far left lane of the freeway. The car had lurched—swerved, skidded, bumpety-bump-screeched across three lanes, narrowly missing a pickup truck.

  A maniacal cultist and his band of followers massacred seven people in a suburban home.