False Memory

Two angry Orcs and one Hobbit locked in a car. What are the chances that all three get out alive? Poor.

Either the Hobbit wins and moves on to the next level of play, or the game ends.

To peer into the front seat, she’d have to turn her head away from Zachary, leaving him visible only in her peripheral vision. “One sound of movement, one glimpse out of the corner of my eye, and you’re dead.”

“If you were me, I’d already be dead,” Zachary noted.

“Yeah, well, I’m not you, shithead. If you’re smart, you’ll sit tight and thank God you have a chance of coming out alive.”

Heart beating so hard it felt like it was tearing loose. That was okay. More blood to the brain. Clearer thinking.

She turned her head and leaned to look into the front seat.

As she expected, Kevin’s machine pistol was on the passenger’s seat, within his easy reach. Big magazine. Thirty rounds.

“Okay, Kevin, carefully use your right hand to pop the lock release, with the emphasis on carefully, and then put it back on the headrest.”

“Don’t get nervous and waste me for nothing.”

“I’m not nervous,” she said, and the steadiness of her voice astonished her, because she was shaking inside if not out, shaking like a field mouse in the shadow of an owl’s wings.

“Gonna just do what you say.” Kevin slowly lowered his right hand from behind his head.

Martie glanced quickly at Zachary, who was keeping his hands high, beside his face, in order not to alarm her, even though she hadn’t told him to do that — and she should have told him — and then she looked into the front seat once more.

As Kevin’s hand seemed to float down toward the lock release, he said, “I like to play Carmageddon. You know that game?”

“I’d figure you for Kingpin,” she said.

“Hey, that’s some cool action, too.”

“Easy now.”

He pressed the rocker switch.

What happened next seemed to have been planned between the two men telepathically.

The locks released with an audible sound.

Instantly, Zachary threw open the back door and rolled out, and from the corner of Martie’s eye, she saw him reaching down to scoop the machine pistol off the floor as he went.

Even as Martie squeezed off two shots at the departing redhead and sensed that at least one might have hit its mark, Kevin dropped sideways onto the front seat and grabbed his weapon.

Her second round still booming like cannon fire in the confines of the car, Martie went to the floor, out of Kevin’s line of sight, pointed the Colt at the back of the front seat, and rapid-fired a horizontal spread of one-two- three-four rounds into the upholstery, not sure if the slugs would punch through all that padding and support structure.

Vulnerable from the front and above. Nothing preventing Kevin from returning fire through the seat, and him with thirty rounds to find her. If unhit, he might rise up, shoot down on her. Vulnerable, too, from the open door, from Zachary outside with the second machine pistol. Couldn’t stay. Move, move. Even as she fired the fourth round into the seat, she scrambled for safety.

She dared not waste time backing up to open the door behind her, so she went out of the door that Zachary had opened, maybe straight into a hard barrage, with only one round remaining in her seven-round magazine.

No barrage. Zachary—for me, the emphasis is on hump — wasn’t waiting for her. He was hit, down, though not dead. With at least one and possibly two bullets in his broad back, the rugged beast was struggling onto his hands and knees.

Martie spotted what he was crawling toward. His pistol. When he’d gone down, the piece had tumbled out of his hand. It lay about ten feet in front of him on the snow-dusted ground.

All survival mechanism now, Sunday school and civilization no match for the savage in her heart, she kicked him in the ribs, and he grunted in pain, tried to grab her, but then he fell forward onto his face.

Heart knocking, knocking so hard that her vision pulsed, dimming at the edges with each beat. Throat crimped tight with fear. Breath falling like chunks of ice into her lungs, then rattling noisily out of her. She skated past Zachary to the machine pistol. Snatched it off the ground, expecting to be lifted and pitched by the powerful impact of multiple rounds in the back.

Dusty locked in the trunk of the BMW. Desperately shouting her name. Pounding on the inside of the lid.

Amazed to be alive, she dropped the Colt. Spun with the new weapon in both hands, squinting into snowy murk, searching for a target, but Kevin hadn’t been behind her. The driver’s door was closed. She couldn’t see him in the car.

Maybe he was dead on the front seat.

Maybe he wasn’t.

Hardly any glow remained in the winter sky. Not the color of gypsum anymore. Ashes now, and pure soot in the east. The falling snow was much brighter than the fading realm above, as if these were flakes of light, the last bits of day shaken loose and cast out by an impatient night.

Pearlescent in the car’s headlights, the snow — curtains behind curtains behind more curtains of snow — played tricks on the eye, and shadowy shapes seemed to steal through it where, in fact, no shadows moved at all.

In a genuflection to God-given instinct, Martie dropped onto one knee, making a smaller target of herself, surveying the gloom and the bright wedges thrown by the headlights, searching for any movement other than the relentless and utterly vertical descent of snow, snow, snow.

Zachary lay facedown, unmoving. Dead? Unconscious? Faking? Better keep one eye on him.

In the trunk of the car, Dusty was still calling her name, and now he was desperately trying to kick his way through into the backseat.

“Quiet!” she shouted. “I’m all right. Quiet. One down, maybe two. Quiet, so I can hear.”

Dusty fell silent at once, but now in spite of the hoof-beat thunder of Martie’s own galloping heart, she realized the car was idling. Clockwork engine. Heavy, damping muffler: just a soft, low whump- whump-whump.

Nevertheless, there was enough noise to mask any sounds Kevin might make if he was lying, wounded, in the car.

Wiping laces of snow off her eyelashes, she rose slightly from her crouch, squinting, and saw that the front door on the passenger’s side of the BMW was open. She hadn’t noticed it before. Whether wounded or not, Kevin was out of the car and on the move.

* * *

Arriving at Green Acres well ahead of the unsuspecting Jennifer and the two idiot nephews of Miss Jane Marple, Dr. Ahriman went into the restaurant to select a takeout snack to curb his appetite until dinner, which he would most likely have to postpone until late this evening, depending on events.

The corn-pone decor stunned his sensibilities, and he felt as though someone had rapped a shiny steel reflex hammer lightly against the exposed surface of the frontal lobe of his cerebrum. Oak-plank flooring. Country-plaid fabrics. Striped gingham curtains. Horrid stained-glass depictions of wheat sheaves, ears of corn, green beans, carrots, broccoli, and other examples of Mother Nature’s vast bounty separated one booth from another. When he saw the waitresses wearing blue-denim, bib-style culottes and red-and-white-checkered shirts, with small straw hats barely larger than skullcaps, he nearly fled.

He stood by the cashier’s station, reading the menu, which he found more gruesome than any set of autopsy photographs he had ever perused. He would have thought that a restaurant offering such grim fare must go bankrupt in a month, but even at this early hour, the place had business. Diners were stuffing their flushed faces with enormous green salads glistening with yogurt dressing, steaming bowls of meatless soup, egg-white omelets with stacks of dry cracked-wheat toast, veggie burgers as appetizing as peat moss, and gloppy masses of tofu- potato casserole.

Appalled, he wanted to ask the hostess why the restaurant didn’t carry this insane theme one step further, to