“You gonna shoot or what, Kyle?” asked Ray in a dead voice.
Kyle waved the gun under his nose a bit, chuckling. The bag slipped half off, revealing black metal.
“Not a drinker? On the wagon, Ray?”
My hand slipped down to my gun, and Kyle caught it.
“Hold it right there, Paula,” he said, darting a glance my way. “I’ll shoot you both before you’ve got it out.”
I froze, but tensed to go for the gun if he shot Ray.
“You two were going to leave me, you were gonna step out. No need to deny it. You were going to leave me here, alone. ” he hissed the words between clenched teeth.
He pulled out his pliers then and reached up to grab Ray’s cheek with them. “Well, I’ve got just the thing to keep you around.” The tattoos on his arms did a snake dance as his muscles tremored with tension.
Sweat popped out on my skin and I could see sweat on his face and arms too, glistening oily beads that reflected the shimmering colors of the fields. I heard Beth coming up from the store, her sandals slapping on asphalt and crackling in the dead ivy that had once grown on the cement islands in the parking lot.
“Don’t kill each other,” she said, her voice sounding desperate. Her fear for our safety had finally overwhelmed her fear of the confrontation. “I know what’s wrong with you Kyle. You’re afraid we’ll all leave you here.”
Kyle laughed, his eyes snapping over to Beth, then back to Ray, who flinched at the touch of the bloody pliers.
“He’s nuts Beth,” I said quietly. “Over the edge.”
“I think he never wanted to see anyone leave,” Beth continued. “Perhaps each time he saw our fiery rip eat another one, a strip of his sanity came loose and burned with them. We’re all incredibly lonely. We all grew up in towns, where people and cars filled the air with noise and smells. How long had it been since you saw a movie Kyle, or caught a whiff of diesel fumes?”
“Fuck off,” growled Kyle, his lips lifting away from his teeth in a snarl.
“You don’t want to kill us, Kyle,” Beth said gently. Her face came into the light now, dusty tear-streaks and all. “We’re the only friends you have left now.”
This last struck home and Kyle looked at her, his mouth gaping like a fish, his eyes wide and lit with insanity. It was all the chance that Ray had, and he took it. He knocked the gun aside and it went flying away, firing inside the brown paper sack. The blast blew out the back of the bag and the sack gave birth to the black pistol in midair, like an alien bird. Before the gun clattered onto the dusty asphalt, Ray pulled out his shotgun. He struck Kyle just below the ear and he went down.
We stood there for a moment, guns out, panting and sweating. A breeze came up and glued grit to our moist skins. Blood trickled down Ray’s cheek and ran into his mouth, staining his teeth red. It looked like a terrier had taken a bite out of his face. Staring down at Kyle’s motionless form, all of us felt a new freedom. With this feeling came decision. Moving quickly, hardly speaking, we gathered together the camping gear from the BMW and what other belongings we wanted. Like parents on Christmas night, we shuffled past Kyle with muffled steps, hoping he would not wake up until we were gone. It would be harder to leave with his crazy eyes boring into our backs.
Standing at the brink of the rip with our backpacks full, we took a last glance at old Earth. Just over the horizon the moon hung high, looking white and clean over the dirty world. The parking lot was barren and empty, the rusting hulks of cars everywhere like a slaughtered herd of metal beasts.
Kyle slept peacefully on the asphalt, unconscious and undreaming. A clear spot in the dust had appeared before his blowing nostrils. Ray’s cheek had stopped bleeding, and he had his shotgun in his hands. Beth had a struggling cat tucked under each arm. We were ready.
“Let’s make sure that wherever we end up, we’re together,” I said, and put my hand on each of their arms. Together, we took a step forward. Swirling liquid color closed over us, and we left old Earth behind.
Although as years passed and Beth, Ray and I lost track of one another under the yellow sun of the new world, none of us ever forgot the man who had tried to hold us back. In the frontier boomtowns that dotted the wild landscape of Tau Ceti, I often wondered what had become of Kyle. Had he gone completely mad? Had he eventually stepped out? Or was he still back on old Earth, possibly the last man there, a beetle rattling about inside the ribs of an ancient behemoth that had long since died and rotted away?
I tended to think the latter.
Rusted Metal
Tom Riley, the brewery’s night watchman, was just arriving at work. There was a touch of corn snow in patches on the ground and Tom’s boots crunched as he headed down the backstairs to the employee’s entrance. It was Wednesday night and it was a cold one. The wind blew hard and had an icy edge to it that stabbed deep into your lungs. It was normal weather for mid-January-but not for the end of October.
Tom paused before the employee’s entrance to listen to the wind whipping the trees like an enraged master. The trees creaked and groaned under the assault, lashing and scratching at the brewery’s gray cinder block walls with leafless branches. He worked to force his key into the frozen lock with numb hands. Finally he succeeded and the door opened, immediately the comparative heat of the brewery’s interior washed over him like hot breath.
He stepped inside, stamping his feet and blowing on his hands. It was 11:30 pm precisely when he clocked in, and John Shepler, the night foreman, was waiting for him.
“Barely made it tonight, Riley,” Shepler remarked while knocking a cigarette out of his pack with an experienced flick of the wrist. Shepler was a thin-armed man in his late thirties who smoked and sweated constantly. He wasn’t supposed to leave until Tom was on duty and he always resented every extra minute that he was forced to wait. He leaned back against the bulletin board next to the time clock and lit up.
“But I made it, didn’t I?” Tom replied with a winning grin. Shepler didn’t smile back, so Tom added: “Sorry, it comes hard to get out of bed for the dead shift when you pass up fifty.” Shepler wasn’t supposed to smoke inside, but Riley was willing to let it go if it got the bastard out of the plant quicker.
Shepler still wasn’t smiling. He crossed his skinny arms and puffed on his menthol cigarette. He gazed at Tom with dull, piggy eyes. Tom wondered whether the foreman was only an obnoxious prick at the end of his shift, or if he was like this all evening long.
There was silence between them while Tom took his cap and gun belt out of his locker. He snapped his big, four-battery flashlight into place and checked the revolver. The pistol was supposed to be just for show, but Tom always kept a stash of spare cartridges in his breast pocket. When he was dressed he swung the locker shut. The unoiled hinges screamed in the silence of the closed brewery.
Shepler still hadn’t said anything. He drew deeply on his cigarette and gave a brief, rumbling cough. Tom hoped he would just put on his coat and go. Technically, the foreman outranked him, but now that he was pushing sixty Tom was past the days of licking boots. Especially for piss-ants like Shepler.
“There’s been a break-in downstairs. We think some kids did it.”
“Where?” Tom’s tone became serious. This sort of thing was his department. Inwardly he smiled, this explained why Shepler hadn’t left for home the moment Tom had arrived. Shepler shrugged a hunched pair of bony shoulders and took another puff before answering. Tom cinched up his gun belt impatiently and with a little more purpose than usual.
“They came in through a window-way in the back. I guess they busted up some cartons, took some stuff.” He took a faded bandana out of his back pocket and mopped the sweat from his brow. The brewery was always warm because of all the boilers and refrigeration units, but no one sweated as much as Shepler.
“Did you call the cops?”
“Nope, didn’t seem worth it. They didn’t get anything of value anyway. Just a pile of crap back there, everything from adding machines to antique bottle-cap presses. Hell, that stuff has been gathering dust back there for forty years or so.”
Tom nodded and rubbed his lower lip against his teeth. The stuff was probably valueless, except possibly as scrap. He recalled too, that Shepler had had a few run-ins with the law in his time and was never one to be too fond of alerting the police. He reflected silently that it was just as well, at least this way word of it would probably never
