Crash

A dusty road is unforgiving. It steals your comfort, the heat beating down from above, a relentless sunshine that scorches all sense of time and reason, reducing the mind to one solitary thought. Thirst. To quench thirst, to stop being thirsty, to drown oneself rather than feel this unbearable dehydration ever again. Inside of his host, he could feel the rubbery texture of his suffering body, the freckles now darkened to black blotches on the surface of his host's skin.

"You are one heck of a mess," Clara said, taking her eyes off the road to glance back at him over her shoulder. "It's been a real quiet stretch of road along here, I don't know where we're going to find you a proper house to live in." She fanned herself with the map, the gentle breeze it provided a teasing comfort. "I sure could use a tall glass of lemonade right now. That's the only thing that beats this kind of heat. That tart sweetness, it lingers on the tongue, gets all that saliva jumping. That's why it quenches your thirst, see. It's a whole chemical process, one that works better than water."

He groaned and closed his eyes, his head heavy on the old pillow. "Water. It would do me good."

"Never mind water, you need a whole new hotel complete with swimming pool and basement bar." She shook her head, her hands tight on the steering wheel. "You look like you've been dragged through hellfire. Maybe a good dose of the holy water would cure you of what ails you." She bit her bottom lip, her fingers tapping along the rim of the steering wheel in haphazard, jazz jittering. "I know what it is you need me to do, but you should have gone and told me back in Foss, where there was plenty of human sacks that you could fill. I had that mayor all lined up, but oh no, he wasn't good enough for the likes of you. You're real stupid, you know that? That was a winning ticket of flesh you threw away."

He kept his eyes closed, the heaviness in his head a swirling mass of black motor oil that refused to metabolize. There was comfort in the numbness it provided, but there was also the danger of his host collapsing, the skin rendering and leaving him free to seep out of the large wounds to lay in a jellied, immovable mess on the floor of the Chevrolet. He ran his hand over his dry mouth, flakes of skin peeling off onto his palm. "I need water."

"What we need is a good party." Clara tapped her fingers along the steering wheel, the rhythm now steady, formulaic. "My feet have been itching for a fox-trot since Kansas. This little dust bowl has to have something. It's been slim pickings the further west we go, and I'm starting to wonder if the whole of California's going to be nothing but some big, depressing shoreline instead of the blast of life I know it has to be." She grinned, red lips peeled back over her even, large ivory teeth. "But that's just me being pessimistic. Really, how crazy is that? Hollywood not being a place built on a girl's dreams, did you ever…?"

His groaning annoyed her and she let out an impatient sigh. "The point is, we can't go moaning over what we don't know. You should have let me kill that mayor and you should have got yourself a brand new leather sack, a real tailored fit. But oh no, Mr. I'm Taking The High Road — you had to go and demand we hit the road before the Sherriff hunted us down. What Sherriff? If you meant Borden, we were way out of his jurisdiction and out of his concern. We could have slaughtered the whole town in front of him and without him able to cross the state line he couldn't do a thing to stop us."

"Stop you, you mean," he corrected her. "I have no interest in killing off a whole town."

She shrugged, the issue unimportant. "You wouldn't be able to do that any easier than he could have." She turned her head to face him, her arm reaching down to shove his shoulder. "You've been sleeping like the dead lately. There's something real wrong with you. I don't get it, that body should have lasted you longer."

"It didn't."

"I get that, you lunkhead, but I can't figure as to why. The last one did you good for well over a week, and that one had plenty of wear and tear before you got to it, believe me." She glanced back at the road, her hand carelessly steering, the wheels of the Chevrolet kicking up thick clouds of dust that partially obscured their view. "It's that damned motor oil, that's what it is. You're soaked in it. Light a match and your flame would never go out."

He opened his eyes at this. He lifted his head painfully up from the mouldy pillow, a palm under his chin holding it up. "You wouldn't."

She narrowed her black rimmed eyes at him, her arm draped over the back of her driver's seat as she leaned over, making sure he heard her. "Like a hurricane lamp. That's what you'd be. And I'd dance naked around your corpse and carve x's and o's into ashes when the flames were done with you."

"You're an evil creature."

"You don't know what evil means."

"I'm getting a good education."

"Lunkhead. I'm no different than anyone else. There's no hellfire waiting for me."

"I don't know what hellfire is."

She threw her head back and let out a loud laugh. "It's the big bang, all over again!"

Bright lights. Sun glinting off steel.

Arms.

A face.

A mouth… No, two mouths. Opened wide. Terror.

That's exactly how it happened.

The universe rolled over three times before it finally settled in for its nap. Destruction lay in pieces of mangled steel all around them, heavy bales of smoke issuing forth from both mangled motor cars. She was already on her feet, staggering towards the other automobile, a farmer's truck to be precise. There was a deep gash on the back of her leg that bled out in a thin stream into the belly of her heel. The inside of the farmer's truck was engulfed in flames. Hellfire, he thought. It was burning the last remnants of the poor farmer's jaw to cinders. A gold tooth sizzled and popped as it melted.

She wiped at her chin with the back of her hand, drawing away blood from a tiny cut. The farmer remained in the driver's seat, his mouth in a silent, charred scream as the flames licked over his body with hungry fury. She turned back to where he was waiting at the side of the road, the Chevrolet crumpled into pieces beside and in front of him. She placed her hands on her hips, surveying the scene.

"Well, that beats all."

He glanced up at her from the side of the road where he was sitting, her body strangely unaffected by the horrible scene. "You have hardly a scratch on you."

"I do," she said, and pointed at the tiny cut on her chin.

He gestured to the ragged chunk of flesh that was all that was left of his right arm. "Of course. How unobservant of me. You missed that gash on your leg."

"This is all your fault." She checked her heel and tutted over the injury. With great effort, she helped him to standing, an action that caused a considerable amount of discomfort, especially when he nearly slipped out of the torn apart limb. "All I really wanted was a party, and you had to go and tempt fate."

"How so?"

"You can't talk of the devil without him coming around." She snatched her purse up from where it had fallen near the rolling steering wheel, now beheaded from its usual spot at the motor car's dashboard. She rummaged inside of it, pulling out her cigarette tin and a match. Her hands were rock steady as she lit herself some smouldering comfort. "We'll have to walk for a while. It's getting to be dusk, and we have to find some place to hole up until morning. You're not leaking too much, not now anyway. We'll tie that up and pretend you're just another soldier home with a war wound."

She shook out a handkerchief from her handbag and dabbed at the ragged stump of his arm before tying it on tightly. "If it's an old war wound, it shouldn't be bleeding," he reminded her.

Her concern was minimal. "We'll be walking in the dark soon, no one will notice. Damn, but it's a hot night, a girl could use a cold drink, a tall lemonade, or even a special iced tea, the kind without a lick of iced tea in it. Don't be looking so glum, we have to get away from this scene, there's no need for having coppers around over a silly little car wreck." She marched ahead of him, heedless of his injury and discomfort. She stomped her foot, furious at his lethargy. "Come on, we have to get away from here, quick and quicker!"

He limped towards her as fast as he could, the sloshing of himself inside his sorely injured host putting him off balance. "I don't know why you are berating me, I wasn't the one who crashed the stupid motor car. And just how are we going to get to California now? I have a real fear my legs will fall off well before then, probably somewhere along Texola."

"Shamrock," she reminded him. "That's where the Reynold's Hotel is. You're going to make it there, because I want to be there. The manager owes me a favour and he's going to deliver." She stopped short, waiting for him and his dragging feet to catch up. "Oh come on, I've seen corpses move faster than you!"

She paused, her head cocked to one side. A puzzled expression overtook her otherwise stone cold face, her sharp features softening as they recognized the tune dancing along the sparks that still lit the air around them. "That there's a party," she whispered to herself, her dark eyes lit up with inward glee. She ran back to him and grabbed his one good arm and dragged him forward. "You hear that? It's singing. There's a party going on all right, and we're inviting ourselves!"

"I can't go in there like this."

"Don't be stupid. You came home from the war with a few things lost, is all."

She pulled him onto a wooded path, the darkness sliding over them in an opaque thickness that was not unlike his favourite drink. She pulled him onward, heedless of the way the twigs and debris of the path dug into his exposed areas of flesh, cutting lines of seeping black. "Langley played this on his trumpet. Oh, does that ever take me back! Listen, you can hear Langley's heart breaking in those higher notes, a fool and his heart, both exploded. He's really good, whoever is on that stage. Listen to the way that horn weeps and wails!"

It was true. He paused to rest against the thick trunk of an old oak, its branches teeming above him in black fingers, ready to clutch at him and pluck what limbs he had left apart. Langley's trumpet, or rather the ghost of it, echoed across the forest floor, a creeping sadness that sank everything it touched into a moonlit blue hue. "I've missed that sound," he admitted, surprised at himself. "It's the only thing of this world I can say I truly understand."

"I don't want to be hearing your gums flap-flapping right now, not when my toes are tap-tapping." She skipped ahead of him, feet deftly avoiding tangled roots and wayward rocks. "I'm betting that little hellhole is well watered. Full of spirits and darkies, I'd say. That's the way it is down here, down south. People segregate, only to come back together in strange ways. The booze hound sorority."

The further they walked in, the more the area became swampy and murky, the muck giving off a vile stench not unlike the innards of his unfortunate host. "I'm not so certain we should be going here." There was something in Langley's ghost, the lament of the trumpet, that was off its usual rhythm. There was a discord in the notes. A wayward anarchy that hadn't resided there before.

"They would have come running if they heard that crash." She pulled her lipstick out of her handbag, but it was too dark for her to properly apply it. She shoved her tools back into the handbag with a loud curse. "I'd say it's kind of strange, having a party in the middle of the week, in the middle of a swamp, but these southern types do things differently, I guess." She was careful to keep the hem of her stolen dress well out of the muck, her white knees shining like beacons in the forest darkness.

"I don't know why it's so important for you to go to a party. There's no gangsters there. Only lonely farmers and xenophobic locals."

"Goes to show what you know," she said, her hips swinging, her handbag in a pendulum arc behind her as she walked. "I know lots of folks down this way. Where there's a good amount of drink, there's a good amount of music, dancing and all round good fellas. I'm going to nab me one and get him to buy me a drink. Some good old boy who wants to make sure America doesn't die of thirst."

"The road is cut off. There's debris everywhere." He hobbled up close to her, anger welling within him at her blatant disregard for the precarious nature of their situation. "We are going to be hung from the nearest tree all because you heard a familiar song. That man in the truck, he had to have been a local. Smashing into him and leaving like that, without saying anything… These people won't easily forgive this."

"And how would you know that?" she snapped back. "I thought you've never been in the south."

"I haven't. But I met your terrible friend, Robert Coen. He was a Texan, as I recall. He didn't live long, thank goodness, you took care of that, but he was around long enough to get his meaty hand around my throat. He crushed the larynx. He told me, flat out, 'This is what Southern boys do when you piss them off'. I've done my best not to do so again."

She had nothing to say, mesmerized as she was by the horn and its happy lamentation. He followed her with that self same feeling of impending doom, one which would result in a new host and a slew of other wasted human bodies, each with neatly carved x's and o's on their eyes. One open. One closed.

He shifted in his host and caught himself before he slid out of the poorly bandaged arm socket, his essence sloshing back into his host with phlegm solidity. He wouldn't be able to take many more steps, and she was heedless of his injuries and his decrepit state, which was by now rendering him fully helpless. She would gladly watch him wither away, he thought. She would poke his jelly consistency with a stick and move on without another thought about him.

How easy it would be, to remain so cold and unthinking of others. Perhaps the stress of reaching his target would not tug at his soul the way it did on a minute by minute basis, every linear measure of time full to bursting with worry. He could be wrong about California, and this whole journey was a mistake. It was a thought that curled black around his inner heart and guts, squeezing them into painful shapes.

Now, here they were, on her usual mission. Her handbag swung in time to her happy steps, her pearls glinting against the thin streams of moonlight that made it to the forest floor. He held back, not wanting to be too close to her, to show any kind of association. There was a good chance she would find someone in that party not worthy of life, and he was in no mood to watch her work.

Music swelled with life as they made their way closer to the small, ramshackle structure at the end of the overgrown path. He could hear clapping and shouting, a joyful gathering that was in stark contrast to the shadow of poverty that was deeply embedded upon the shack. As they approached, he could discern the shape of a formerly workable life's debris propped up as though still retaining value. A broken wheel from an ancient horse cart lay abandoned on its side. Broken bottles and pieces of worn furniture lay gathered in a pile near the woodshed, an axe buried deep into the side of the shed's wall. These meagre possessions, now discarded, were nothing more than fuel for when lean times came, and from the meagre offerings it was clear that times were barren indeed. He had been in alleys before, in areas ripe with speakeasy basements and coppers on the payroll. But this was a different setting, even if it did possess the same kind of music that had drifted into his parish hideaway in Chicago. Here, the music had a separate meaning, one that was clearly polarized from the big city's decadence and wealth.

He oozed into his host's throat. "I don't think we should go here," he tried to warn her.

They were on the front steps of the shed. She ignored him and tore open the front door. It dangled on one hinge, flapping like a fan in the humid, unforgiving stillness.

The congregation turned as one, fixing their eyes on her.

"The DEVIL," the white-suited man at the pulpit proclaimed, "has MANY GUISES!"