“Cut it, Jim,” called Carrie. “That’s really a triple gross-out.”
“It’ll manage it. Come on, Betsy, show ’em what you can do.”
He floored the pedal, the engine roaring. It was the tree on the right of the road that gave way, its dead roots losing the unequal struggle. The dead oak and the rope and the bodies vanished under the bus as it suddenly accelerated, then equally suddenly, jerked to a juddering, protesting halt.
Jim swore and put it back again into neutral, using the vacuum brakes.
“What’s happened?”
“Rope’s caught.”
“Where?”
“Round the axle, I guess, or the brakes. Jammed some place.”
He crawled underneath, finding that his worst fears were confirmed. There was a great knot of cable and splintered bones and tree, all tangled around the front axle on the right side.
“Hopeless,” he said, dusting himself off. “It’s hopeless.”
“We walk?”
He shrugged. “Could be safer, seeing what happened to those hanged people… Means there might be patrols out. It’s not far.”
As he led the way across the steep hills, Jim remembered picnics with Lori and the twins. Hot summers with the plastic foam cooler and Cokes and pieces of chicken breast.
“It’ll soon be dark.”
“Yeah.”
With the sun almost down, it was proving a rough scramble across the steep ravines of the dust-dry scrubland.
Somewhere near the old reservoir they both heard the distant ringing howl of a coyote.
“Must’ve been good times for creatures like that,” said Carrie.
“Crows and coyotes. All the scavengers. Probably the rats and the cockroaches have taken over in the hearts of the big cities.”
“Think we’ll stay up here in the hills, Jim. Though, reckon we’ll manage to reach your house tonight?”
“Could be. But it’s going to be way on past midnight.”
Using narrow paths, half-remembered, Jim Hilton took the woman close by the haunting, haunted shapes of the nine colossal letters that spelled out the name of Hollywood.
They shimmered white in the ghostly moonlight, towering high above them.
“Read someplace that a woman threw herself off the top of one of them,” Carrie said, voice hushed. “Maybe hadn’t made it in silvertown.”
“Tinseltown. That was what they used to call it. Tinseltown.”
TAHOE DRIVE SNAKED UP and around and in and out, overlooking the valley beneath and the distant black block of Los Angeles.
“Time was you’d have seen nothing but lights down there,” said Jim.
Now it was grave silent.
The houses on both sides of the road were totally still.
“That was the Harknetts’ place. Gave great parties. Vodka by the gallon. Friendliest people you ever met. Andy Wells lived there. Had one of the all-time great messy divorces. Talk about the wicked witch of the west. That… hey, it’s been burned down. Shame. Tom and Zena Hedger. College folk. Could never master his barbecue, though. Generally finished up with a call to the fire service.”
“How far to your place?”
“Couple of hundred yards, on the left. Just past that abandoned Subaru.”
On an impulse, Jim drew the Ruger from its holster. The short hairs at the nape of his neck had begun to prickle.
“What you seen?” whispered Carrie, drawing her own six-shot revolver.
“Nothing. Just a feeling, but I learned to trust that when I’ve been backcountry. Up in Montana once, near Swiftcurrent Lake on a late-evening hike. Had the same feeling and when I walked around the next corner there was a sow grizzly with a cub.”
“Hey.”
“Know what steps I took?”
She smiled, teeth white in the gloom. “Yeah. Fucking long ones, Jim.”
They stood still. Something rustled through the dead, cropped grass of his neighbour’s lawn, making him start. There was a glimpse of a sinuous shape sliding toward the side of the plot.
It had been fairly common to see rattlers around Tahoe Drive, and he figured that the absence of humans would have brought more of them down from the barranca at the rear of the street.
Jim found it almost unbearably strange and painful to see his own home under these circumstances. He’d flown out into deep space before, though never for as long as this last mission. But in the past he’d always, always been met back at base by Lori and the girls. Then there’d been the time of debriefing and press conferences.