American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,94

off. Streamers of red come bursting out of the top of the man’s skull like fireworks, and he topples back.

“Fucking Christ!” screams Mona. She rushes to him, but she can see he’s already far beyond help. His body is totally limp, the asphalt already covered in a spreading sea of blood.

Mona stops and stares, wondering what to do now. She has never shot someone before now, and though she has seen people die it was never in such a horrific manner.

But the man’s body is not completely still. His ruptured head is twitching from side to side. And somehow Mona does not think his neck is jerking it back and forth: instead, she thinks the source of the motion is coming from inside his skull, as if something within is beating against its walls.

There is a squelching sound, and she thinks she can see something sprouting from the gaping wound at the top of his head, tiny gossamer tendrils wriggling out as if trying to taste the air, and as the thing struggles the flow of blood triples…

“What the fuck,” says Mona softly.

Then with a tiny, reedy cry, the wriggling stops, and the little tendrils appear to foam up (exactly like baking soda and vinegar) and dissolve. The dead man lies still in the middle of the road, gun still in his hand. Mona stares at him, not sure what to do.

There is a flash of lightning from out over the town, the bolt rushing down to strike to ground, and a clap of thunder. Mona turns to look. The cloud lightning above the mesa is roiling as always, but that strike was much closer, and unlike the normal lightning it produced a thunderclap…

She does not need to think about it more. She dashes around to the driver’s side of the Charger, jumps in, and peels out.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

When Mona comes rushing into the office at the Ponderosa Acres, Parson looks up from his desk—his expression stuck between amusement and irritation, as always—and asks, “I take it your visit was a success?”

Mona wonders what to say. Something shudders and curls in her stomach. She runs to his trash can, grabs it, and vomits into it prolifically.

Parson looks on, mildly perplexed. “Or perhaps not?” he asks.

“Things got fucked,” gasps Mona.

“They got what?”

“Fucked,” she says again, angry. “Things went fucking nuts on the way back here!”

“In a matter that concerns the key?”

“No, it does not concern the key. I don’t think. Hell, I don’t know.”

“Then you have it?”

She glares at him, streams of spittle still hanging from her lips. She wipes them off with a forearm, rummages around in her backpack, and takes out her glove with the key wrapped inside. She looks at it, then up at Parson. So far, he’s given her very little reason to trust him.

He seems to sense this. “I am not going to do anything with this key,” he says.

“That’s not really a comfort, Mr. Parson.”

“I will not even take it from you. This key is more for you than for me, Miss Bright. I only wish to see it, and verify what it is.”

She throws it to him, and he does not react at all, as if he’s never caught anything before in his life: the glove bounces off his shoulder and lands on his desk. He looks at it, confused.

“There’s your fucking key,” she says.

He opens up the glove, looks within, and smiles. “Good. Very good.”

“No. No good at all,” says Mona.

“Why not?”

“Some crazy fuck attacked me on the road,” she says. “And I shot him. Well… I actually shot him a couple of times. But then he took out his own gun and, and…” She mimes holding a gun to her chin and pulling the trigger, and makes a childish pkchoom noise. “Blew his own fucking brains out, right then and there, like it was nothing.”

“This man… shot himself?”

“Yes!” says Mona. “Are you not fucking hearing me?”

“But why did he attack you?”

“I don’t know! He just did! He was, like… lying in wait for me. He’d set up some tire spikes, I’m almost sure of it, and I blew a tire and had to change it and that’s when he came at me.”

“He… came at you?”

“He tried to grab me.” She pauses. “Well. He actually did grab me. And when he did, I saw…”

Parson is sitting forward. He asks, “You saw something?”

“I saw underneath the town. There’s something there, something broken and laid out all over and under this valley. And it saw me,