Part of him - a more adult part - insisted that was dumb, that half a loaf was better than none, that most of the reporters in the world would kill to get just a slice from this loaf, whatever it turned out to be.
But John Leandro was a man younger than his twenty-four years. When David Bright, believed he had seen a generous helping of twerp in Leandro, he hadn't been wrong. There were reasons, of course, but the reasons didn't change the fact. He felt like a rookie who gets a fat pitch during his first at-bat in the majors and hits an opposite-field triple. Not bad ... but in his heart a voice cries out: Hey, God, if you was gonna give me a fat one, why didn't You let me get it all?
Haven Village was less than a mile away. He could walk it in fifteen minutes ... but then he would never get out of the poison belt before the air in the flat-pack ran out, and he knew it.
If only I'd rented two of these goddam things.
Even if you'd thought of it, you didn't have cash enough to pay the frigging security deposit on two. The question is, Johnny, do you want to die for your scoop or not?
He didn't. If his picture was going to be on the cover of Newsweek, he didn't want there to be a black border around it.
He began to trudge back toward the Troy town line. He got five dozen steps before realizing he could hear engines - a lot of them, very faint.
Something going on over on the other side of town.
Might as well be something happening on the dark side of the moon. Forget it.
With another uneasy glance at the woods, he started walking again. Got another dozen steps and realized he could hear another sound: a low, approaching hum from behind him.
He turned. His jaw dropped. In Haven, most of July had been Municipal Gadget Month. As the 'becoming' progressed, most Havenites had lost interest in such things ... but the gadgets were still there, strange white elephants such as the ones Gardener had seen in Bobbi's shed. Many had been pressed into service as border guards. Hazel McCready sat in her town-hall office before a bank of earphones, monitoring each briefly in turn. She was furious at being left behind to do this duty while the future of everything hung in the balance out at Bobbi's farm. But now ... someone had entered town after all.
Glad of the diversion, Hazel moved to take care of the intruder.
7
It was the Coke machine which had been in front of Cooder's market. Leandro stood frozen with amazement, watching it approach: a jolly red-and-white rectangle six and a half feet high and four wide. It was slicing rapidly through the air toward him, its bottom about eighteen inches over the road.
I've fallen into an ad, Leandro thought. Some kind of weird ad. In a second or two the door of that thing will open and 0. J. Simpson is going to come flying out.
It was a funny idea. Leandro started to laugh. Even as he was laughing, it occurred to him that here was the picture ... oh God, here was the picture, here was a Coca-Cola vending machine floating up a rural stretch of two-lane blacktop!
He grabbed for the Nikon. The Coke machine, humming to itself, banked around Leandro's stalled car and came on. It looked like a madman's hallucination, but the front of the machine proclaimed that, however much one might want to believe the contrary, this was THE REAL THING.
Still giggling, Leandro realized it wasn't stopping - it was, in fact, speeding up. And what was a soda machine, really? A refrigerator with ads on it. And refrigerators were heavy. The Coke machine, a red-and-white guided missile, slid through the air at Leandro. The wind made a tiny hollow hooting noise in the coin return.
Leandro forgot the picture. He leapt to the left. The Coke machine struck his right shin and broke it. For a moment his leg was nothing but a bolt of pure white pain. He screamed into the gold cup as he landed on his stomach at the side of the road, tearing his shirt open. The Nikon flew to the end of its strap and hit the gravelly soft shoulder with a crunch.
Oh you son of a bitch that camera cost four hundred dollars!