McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [168]
Stunned, the little Indian girl watched the two soldiers marching away from her. They marched into the darkness. Edgar knew the soldiers would keep marching until they fell into a canyon or lake, or until they crossed an old road where a fast-moving logging truck might smash them into small pieces. Edgar knew these two soldiers would never stop. He knew all of these soldiers, all two hundred and fifty-six of them, would never quit, not until they had found whatever it was they were searching for.
Sixty miles away from that little girl, Edgar burned with vision-fever as he saw the world with such terrible clarity. In that filthy Town Pump parking lot, illuminated by cheap neon, his fellow agents kneeled over him, held his arms and legs, and shoved a spoon into his mouth so he wouldn’t swallow his tongue. Edgar pushed and pulled with supernatural strength. Six other men could barely hold him down. Then it was over. Edgar quickly awoke from his seizure, stood on strong legs, rushed to a dispatch radio transmitter, and told his story. On open channels, Edgar told dozens of police officers and FBI agents exactly where to find dead bodies and survivors. And once those doubtful police officers and agents traveled all over Montana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, and across the border into Canada, and found exactly what Edgar had said would be found, he was quickly escorted to a hospital room, where he was first examined and found healthy, and then asked again and again how he had come to know what he knew. He told the truth, and they did not believe him, and he didn’t blame them because he knew that it sounded crazy. He’d interviewed hundreds of people who claimed to see visions of the past and future. He’d made fun of them all, and now he wondered how many of them had been telling the truth. How many of those schizophrenics had really been talking to God? How many of those serial killers had really been possessed by the Devil? How many murdered children had returned to; haunt their surviving parents?
“I don’t know what else to say; it’s the truth,” Edgar said to his fellow agents, who were so sad to see a good man falling apart, and so they left him alone in his hospital room. In the dark, Edgar listened hard for the voices he was sure would soon be speaking to him, and he wondered what those voices would ask him to do and if he would honor their requests. Edgar felt hunted and haunted, and when he closed his eyes, he smelled blood and he didn’t know how much of it would be spilled before all of this was over.
Goodbye to All That
By HARLAN ELLISON
At the end of a grand adventure, the answer to all the
riddles of existence—with fries and a large Coke.
“Like a Prime Number, the Ultimate Punchline stands alone.”
—DANIEL MANUS PINKWATER
He knew he was approaching the Core of Unquenchable Perfec-tion, because the Baskin-Robbins “flavor of the month” was tuna fish–chocolate. If memory served (served, indeed! if only! but, no, it did nothing of the sort . . . it just lay about, eating chocolate truffles, whimpering to be waited on, hand and foot) he was now in Nepal. Or Bhutan. Possibly Tanna Touva.
He had spent the previous night at a less-than-opulent b & b in the tiny, forlorn village of Moth’s Breath—which had turned out to be, in fact, not a hostelry, but the local abbatoir—and he was as yet, even this late in the next day, unable to rid his nostrils of the stultifying memory of formaldehyde. His yak had collapsed on the infinitely upwardly spiraling canyon path leading to the foothills that nuzzled themselves against the flanks of the lower mountains timorously raising their sophomore bulks toward the towering ancient massif of the thousand-peaked Mother of the Earth, Chomolungma, the pillar of the sky upon which rested the mantle of the frozen heavens. Snow lay treacherously thick and deep and placid on that celestial vastness; snow blew in ragged curtains as dense as swag draperies across the summits and chasms and falls and curved scimitar-blade sweeps of icefields; snow held imperial