Mysterium

No answer. But Dex could see the beam of Howard’s flashlight poking around—a little too vigorously, Dex thought. He took a step inside. “Howard?”

Nothing.

“Howard, it’s cold out here! Bag your loot and let’s get going, all right?”

He felt something touch his leg. Overcome by a sudden sense of unreality, Dex looked down. Here was Howard: crouched behind the cash counter with sweat beading on his pale forehead. Howard had grabbed Dex’s ankle and was waving some panicked, indecipherable signal.

Dex guessed this ought to be frightening, but for a long moment it was only confusing. He said out loud, “What the hell?”

And the flashlight beam continued to probe the darkness—but not Howard’s flashlight.

Another presence loomed in this dark arcade of shelves and desks, suddenly visible as Dex’s eyesight adjusted to the dark. He turned to face the rear door just as the beam of light pi

He heard Howard shouting something: it might have been Don’t shoot! or God damn! And he felt his left arm twitch in a useless, distant fashion, and the wet warmth of blood.

And then footsteps.

And then a sudden, second light—the brightest yet.

Clifford decided to ride home by way of Powell Road, which crossed Beacon north and uphill from the business district.

It was a short ride down the park path and out the gate onto Powell. Home from the park was a gravity-assist all the way. The bicycle bearings shrilled into the dark and Clifford felt the wind on his face like a barrage of needles. The big houses near the park blurred past on each side of him, fading behind him like an elegant dream.

He leaned on the hand brakes at the corner of Beacon and came to a stop beside a tall privet hedge.

Curiosity and prudence had begun a pitched battle in the pit of Clifford’s stomach. Curiosity had the advantage. He peered around the hedge, downhill toward the shops south of Oak.

There was not much to see from this distance; only a distant light, a headlight, which winked out when he looked at it: another patrol car.

Would it be dangerous to try to get closer? Well, obviously it would. No doubt about that. He had seen the bodies on that wooden cart outside City Hall last June, and the memory put a jog into his heartbeat. People had been killed for what he was doing right now.

But it was night and he was agile and he could always hide or run… and anyway, it wasn’t him they were after.

He wheeled down Beacon almost all the way to Oak, keeping close to the trees and hedges of these big lawns, most of which had grown high and weedy over the summer.

At Oak, Clifford pulled up next to a dark automobile parked at the curb and noticed with a sudden shock of fear that it was a military patrol car and that he had come abreast of it with the idiotic boldness of a four-year-old. He dropped his bike and was about to run for the cover of a leafless willow tree when he saw the car was unoccupied; both soldiers must have crossed Oak and gone down Beacon, where he could dimly see a motion, a commando-style jog from storefront to storefront, and the dance of several flashlight beams.

He had come too far and was too exposed. He lay in the grass considering his options. He didn’t think he was in danger, at least not yet. He was fascinated, almost hypnotized, by his proximity to something potentially important, something somber and hidden.

Then Clifford heard a bang like a firecracker and saw a simultaneous flash of light. Someone had fired a gun, he thought, and the implication of that simple event seemed to wake him from a daze. The soldiers were shooting at someone—the soldiers were quite possibly killing someone.

And maybe it should have scared him… but mostly it made him angry.

He thought again of the dead bodies outside City Hall. That had angered him, too, though it had been too awful to absorb all at once; the anger was subtle, it lingered, it had no outlet. This was more immediate, and Clifford’s anger focused to a fine point. The soldiers had no business here, no business telling people what to do and certainly no business shooting them.

He wanted to do something about it, take some retaliation, and he looked around helplessly—and saw the patrol car parked a few feet away.

The canvas roof was closed against the weather but the door might not be locked. Clifford crossed the sidewalk and grasped the unfamiliar handle. It opened easily. He leaned inside, distantly amazed at his own audacity. The interior of the car smelled of worn leather and cigarette smoke. The air was stale and still warm. He leaned across the bench seat wondering what sabotage he might be able to perform. His eyes fixed on the knobbed lever projecting from the floor. A gear shift, he guessed. He remembered his mother explaining the gears on her Honda. Experimentally, Clifford grasped the handle and twisted it. Left and down. Left and down.

He didn’t know what kind of gear mechanism this automobile might have; there was no reason to expect it to work like the cars he was accustomed to. But it did possess a neutral gear and Clifford knew at once when he found it. The car inched forward, its tires crackling on the cold street.

He sat up in alarm. The patrol car was rolling at an angle across Beacon, which was useless; it would only fetch up undamaged in the drainage ditch. He needed to get out… but first he twisted the oddly shaped steering wheel until the car was pointed more or less directly down the slope of Beacon, a steep enough incline to get some real momentum going.

Which happened more quickly than he expected. Clifford scrambled back across the bench to the open door and found the pavement scrolling past at a surprising speed. He closed his eyes and jumped, an awkward leap; he hit the sidewalk with feet, hips, shoulders. He tore his shirt and scraped his palms bloody. He would have to explain this to his mother, come the morning. If he ever reached home.

He hurried back to the shadow of the tree to watch the empty car, which had already rolled a considerable distance. Its motion was stately at first, then alarming. Its speed increased until it seemed to Clifford as if the car had been launched from some enormous slingshot. It rattled over every bump in the road, took small but perilous leaps; now, well across Oak and down the empty avenue of Beacon, it tilted perilously on two wheels and then righted itself. The slope of the street declined past Oak but the runaway car seemed to take no notice.

He tried to figure out where it would impact. The hardware store, he thought, or, no, it was veering right; the barber shop, the bookstore—the gas station.

Clifford gasped and held his breath.

He felt a sudden awe at the enormity of the events he had triggered. He understood that there was going to be more damage than he’d imagined—damage on a huge scale, damage that made his knees weak with anticipation.

He couldn’t guess at the speed of the patrol car as it left the road, but he thought it might be going faster than any car had ever gone on Beacon Street. The tires came up over the lip of the curb and the whole car seemed to levitate above the air-and-water dispenser at the Gulf station. It rotated as it moved, the back end rising as the nose dipped, and when Clifford realized it was going to collide with the self-serve gas pumps he instinctively covered his ears.

A grinding crash echoed up the empty road. Clifford watched through eyes squeezed nearly shut. He saw the patrol car sheer off a pump unit before it came to a full stop. There was a last rattle, a fading hiss, then silence, and Clifford dared to take a breath.