So he wasn’t making as good time, and the couldn’t run full-bore.
But then, he wasn’t in a hurry, except for the hell of it. And this was more interesting, more dangerous, and he liked the thrill of that. He started edging closer to the centerline every time he roared up a hill, playing a game of highway roulette in which he was the winner as long as what-ever coming from the other direction had its headlights on.
When that got boring, he turned his own headlights off.
Now he roared past cars and trucks like a dark demon.
Mel laughed every time, thinking how surprised they must be, and how frightened. They’d think,
He supposed he wasn’t afraid of anything, except maybe going back to prison, and he didn’t think they’d send him down on a speeding ticket. Besides, if Kansas was like most states, it was long on roads and short on highway patrolmen…
Roaring downhill was even more fun, because of the way his stomach dropped out. He felt like a kid, yelling “Fuuuuck,” all the way down the other side. What a goddamned roller coaster of a state this was turning out to be.
The rain still looked miles away.
Mel felt as if he could ride all night. Except that his eyes were gritty, the first sign that he’d better start looking for a likely place to spend the night. He wasn’t one to sleep under the stars, not if he could find a ceiling.
Tess directed her sister to stack the rolls of toilet paper underneath the bathroom window on the first floor of Jane Baum’s house. The six rolls, all white, stacked three in a row, two high, gave Tess the little bit of height and leverage she needed to push up the glass with her palms. She stuck her fingers under the bottom edge and laboriously attempted to raise the window. It was stiff in its coats of paint.
“Damn!” she exclaimed, and let her arms slump. Beneath her feet, the toilet paper was getting squashed.
She tried again, and this time she showed her strength from lifting calves and tossing hay. With a crack of paint and a thump of wood on wood, the window slid all the way up.
“Shhh!” Mandy held her fists in front of her face and knocked her knuckles against each other in excitement and agitation. Her ears picked up the sound of a roaring engine on the highway, and she was immediately sure it was the sheriff, coming to arrest her and Tess. She tugged frantically at the calf of her sister’s right leg.
Tess jerked her leg out of Mandy’s grasp and disappeared through the open window.
The crack of the window and the thunder of the approaching motorcycle confused themselves in Jane’s sleeping consciousness, so that when she awoke from dreams full of anxiety — her eyes flying open, the rest of her body frozen — she imagined in a confused, hallucinat-ory kind of way that somebody was both coming to get her and already there in the house.
Jane then did as she had trained herself to do. She had practiced over and over every night, so that her actions would be instinctive.
She turned her face to the pistol on the other pillow and placed her thumb on the trigger.
Her fear — of rape, of torture, of kidnapping, of agony, of death — was a balloon, and she floated horribly in the center of it.
There were thumps and other sounds downstairs, and they joined her in the balloon. There was an engine roaring, and then suddenly it was silent, and a slurring of wheels in her gravel drive, and these sounds joined her in her balloon. When she couldn’t bear it any longer, she popped the balloon by shooting herself in the forehead.
In the driveway, Mel Brown heard the gun go off.
He slung his leg back onto his motorcycle and roared back out onto the highway. So the place had looked empty. So he’d been wrong. So he’d find someplace else. But holy shit. Get the fuck outta here.
Inside the house, in the bathroom, Tess also heard the shot and, being a ranch child, recognized it instantly for what it was, although she wasn’t exactly sure where it had come from. Cussing and sobbing, she clambered over the sink and back out the window, falling onto her head and shoulders on the rolls of toilet paper.
“It’s the sheriff!” Mandy was hysterical. “He’s shooting at us!”
Tess grabbed her little sister by a wrist and pulled her away from the house. They were both crying and stumbling. They ran in the drainage ditch all the way home and flung themselves into the barn.
Mandy ran to lie beside the little blind bull calf. She lay her head on Flopper’s side. When he didn’t respond, she jerked to her feet.
She glared at her sister.
“He’s dead!”
“Shut up!”
Cissy Johnson had awakened, too, although she hadn’t known why.
Something, some noise, had stirred her. And now she sat up in bed, breathing hard, frightened for no good reason she could fathom. If Bob had been home, she’d have sent him out to the barn to check on the girls. But why? The girls were all right, they must be, this was just the result of a bad dream. But she didn’t remember having any such dream.
Cissy got out of bed and ran to the window.
No, it wasn’t a storm, the rain hadn’t come.
A motorcycle!
That’s what she’d heard, that’s what had awakened her!
Quickly, with nervous fingers, Cissy put on a robe and tennis shoes. Darn you, Janie Baum, she thought, your fears are contagious, that’s what they are. The thought popped into her head: If you don’t have fears, they can’t come true.
Cissy raced out to the barn.
KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH
There has long been a substantial crossover between writers of science fiction and writers of crime and suspense fiction, but most of the early names that come readily to mind (Poul Anderson, Anthony Boucher, Fredric Brown, Isaac Asimov) are male, simply because in its earlier years, few women wrote sci-fi. Now, of course, there are many women in that field, and a number of them — Kate Wilhelm, for example — have also contributed to mystery fiction.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch (b. 1960) was born in Oneonta, New York, attended the University of Wisconsin and Clarion Writers Workshop, and now lives in Oregon. A freelance journalist and editor and a radio news director earlier in her career, she edited
While Rusch is better known as a science fiction than a mystery writer, having won the prestigious John W. Campbell Award for new writers in 1991, she has a solid record of achievement in both genres. Among her sci-fi works are Star Trek (in collaboration with her husband) and Star Wars novels. The’ cross-genre
“The Young Shall See Visions and the Old Dream Dreams” first appeared in
