The Collection

There was no traffic, or very little. They traveled east, in the opposite direction of most of the commuters, and the city gradually faded into suburbs, the suburbs into open land. After an hour or so, Brian grew brave enough to talk, and several times he made an effort to communicate with the man and ask where they were going, why this was happen­ing, but the man either did not answer or answered in gib­berish, obscene non sequiturs.

Another hour passed.

And another.

They were traveling through high desert now, flatland with scrub brush, and Brian looked at the clock on the dash­board. Ordinarily, he would be taking his break at this time, meeting Joe and David for coffee in the break room. He thought of them now. Neither, he knew, would really miss him. They would file into the break room as they always did, get their coffee from the machine, sit down at the same table at which they always sat, and when they saw that he wasn't there, they'd shrug and begin their usual conversation.

Now that he thought about it, no one at the company would miss him. Not really. They'd be temporarily inconve­nienced by his absence, would curse him for not being there to perform his regular duties, but they would not miss him.

They would not care enough to call and see if he was all right.

That's what really worried him. The fact that no one would even know he'd been abducted. Someone from per­sonnel might call his apartment-the machinery of bureaucracy would be  automatically  set in motion  and  a perfunctory effort would be made to determine why he was not at work-but there would be no reason to assume that anything bad had happened to him. No one would suspect foul play. And he was not close enough to any of his coworkers that one of them would make a legitimate effort to find out what had happened to him. He would just disappear and be forgotten. He glanced over at the man in the passenger seat. The man grinned, grabbed his crotch. 'Here's your lunch. I call it Ralph.'

Shapes sprang up from the desert. Signs. And beyond the signs, buildings. A billboard advertised 'McDonald's, two miles ahead, State Street exit.' Another, with the name of a hotel on it, showed a picture of a well-endowed woman in a bikini lounging by a pool.

A green sign announced that they were entering Hayes, population 15,000, elevation 3,000.

Brian looked over at his passenger. A growling whirr spiraled upward from the depths of the man's stomach, and he pointed toward the tall, familiar sign of a fast food restaurant just off the highway. 'Eat,' he said.

Brian pulled off the highway and drove into the narrow parking lot of the hamburger stand. He started to park in one of the marked spaces, but the man shook his head violently, and Brian pulled up to the microphoned menu in the drive-thru. 'What are we getting?' he asked.

The man did not answer.

A voice of scratchy static sounded from the speaker. 'May I take your order?'

Brian cleared his throat. 'A double cheeseburger, large fries, an apple turnover, and an extra-large Coke.'

He looked over at the man in the passenger seat, quizzi­cally, but the man said nothing.

'That'll be four-fifteen at the window.'

Brian pulled forward, stopping when his window was even with that of the restaurant's.

'Four-' the teenage clerk started to say.

'Gonads!' the man yelled. 'Gonads large and small!' He reached over Brian and grabbed the sack of food from the shelf. Before the clerk could respond, the man had dropped to the floor and pushed down the gas pedal with his free hand. The car lurched forward, Brian trying desperately to steer as they sped out of the parking lot and into the street.

The man sat up, dumping the contents of the bag in Brian's lap. The car slowed down, and there was a squeal of brakes as the pickup truck behind them tried to avoid a col­lision.

'Asshole!' the pickup driver yelled as he pulled past them. He stuck out his middle finger.

The man grabbed a handful of french fries from Brian's lap. 'Drive,' he said.

'Look-' Brian began.

'Drive.'

They pulled back onto the highway. A half hour later they caught up with the pickup. Brian probably would not have noticed and would have passed the vehicle without incident, but, without warning, the man in the passenger seat rolled down his window, grabbed the half-empty cup of Coke from Brian's hand, and threw it out­side. His aim was perfect. The cup sailed across the lane, through the open window of the pickup truck, and hit the driver square in the face. The man screamed in pain and sur­prise, swerving out of control. The pickup sped off the shoulder and down an embankment, colliding with a small paloverde tree.

'Asshole,' the passenger said. He chuckled, his laugh high and feminine. Brian looked over at the man. Despite his throwing capa­bilities, the passenger was grossly overweight and in terrible physical condition, no match for Brian. He turned his atten­tion back to the road. They would have to stop for gas soon-at the next town, if they weren't pulled over first- and he knew that he would be able to escape at that time. He would be able to either run away or kick the shit out of the obese bastard.

But though he wanted desperately to kick the crap out of the crazy fucker, he wasn't sure he really wanted to escape. Not yet, anyway. He didn't seem to be in any physical dan­ger, and if he were to be perfectly honest with himself, he was almost, kind of, sort of having fun. In some perverse, al­most voyeuristic way, he was enjoying this, and he knew that if he allowed the situation to remain as is, he would not have to go back to work until they were caught-and he wouldn't even be penalized, he could blame it all on his ab­duction.

But that was insane. He wasn't thinking right. He'd been brainwashed or something, riding with the man. Like Patty Hearst.

After only a few hours?

'Holy shit,' the man said. He laughed to himself in that high-pitched voice. 'Holy shit.'

Brian ignored him.

The man withdrew from his pants pocket a small, lumpy, strangely irregular brown rock. 'I bought it from a man in Seattle. It's the petrified feces of Christ. Holy shit.' He gig­gled. 'They found it in Lebanon.'

Brian ignored him, concentrating on the road. On second thought, he wasn't having fun. This was too damn loony to be fun.

But the man was finally talking to him, speaking in co­herent sentences.

'We need gas,' the man said. 'Let's stop at the next town.'

Brian did not escape at the gas station, though he had ample opportunity. He could have leaped out of the car and run. He could have said something to the station attendant. He could have gone to the bathroom and not come back.

But he stayed in the car, paid for the gas with his credit card.

They took off.

For the next hour or so, both of them were silent, al­though Brian did a lot of thinking, trying to guess what was going to happen to him, trying to project a future end to this situation. Every so often, he would glance over at his pas­senger. He noticed that, out here, on the highway, the man did not seem so strange. Here, with the window open, he did not even smell as bad. What had seemed so bizarre, so frightening, in the parking lot of the bank, in the business-suit world of the city, seemed only slightly odd out here on the highway. They drove past burly bikers, disheveled pickup drivers, Hawaiian-shirted tourists, and Brian realized that here there was no standard garb, no norm by which de­viation could be measured. Manners and mores did not apply. There were only the rules of the road, broad guide­lines covering driving etiquette.

Inside the sealed worlds of individual cars, it was any­thing goes.

Brian did not feel comfortable with the man. Not yet. But he was getting used to him, and it was probably only a mat­ter of -time before he came to accept him. That was truly terrifying.

Brian squinted his eyes. Ahead of them, on the side of the road, was a stalled car, a Mercedes with its hood up. Stand­ing next to the vehicle, partially leaning against the trunk, was an attractive young lady, obviously a professional woman, a career woman, with short blond hair and a blue jacket/skirt ensemble that spoke of business. 'Pull over,' the man said. Brian slowed, stopping next to the Mercedes. 'That's okay,' the woman began. 'A friend of mine has already gone to find a phone to call Triple A-'

'Get in the car!' The man's voice was no longer high and feminine but low and rough, filled with authority