Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [153]
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Mort, you didn’t see it,” and he’d never heard her scared before, wasn’t sure if he’d ever heard anyone that scared. “You didn’t see that fucking thing!” and it hit them again, Mort’s side this time, and he was thrown, smacked his jaw on the nub end of the bat. Steel ping and pop, and the wall of the van bowed inward. Mort tasted blood, bitten tongue or broken tooth, and he wrestled the bat from Theo’s hands.
“Lock the doors behind me and don’t move,” and of course she said no, no and fuck you; Mort opened his door, slid out and almost lost his balance on the loose gravel under his boots, almost fell. He brought the bat around, everything he had going into the swing, but there was nothing there. Nothing at all, but the dark and the scraggly bushes and the side of the van gouged in like they’d been sideswiped by a bus.
“Come on,” he said, spitting out blood and library whispering like maybe he was afraid someone would hear, unable to look away from the dent, paint and rust scraped away to the raw metal underneath. “We’re gonna get Dar, and then we’re gonna get the hell out of here.”
“I’m right behind you,” Theo replied, shaken, but almost sounding like herself again, and together they crossed the yard to Spyder’s house.
4.
Another bus station, this bus station again, and Walter sat by himself in the Burger King kiosk, sipping a large Pepsi that had been watery and flat and warm for thirty minutes, but he couldn’t afford another, watching the clock. Waiting for his boarding call and the bus that would carry him north, nowhere in particular, but as far away from Birmingham and Spyder as the hundred and fifty bills in his wallet, everything he had left, would carry him. Crazy, coming back here to begin with, he thought again , like anyone was gonna listen, like Spyder was gonna talk, but at least it was something. All he could do, and he’d done it, and whatever else, he wouldn’t have to feel like a goddamn coward.
He fumbled with the safety cap on the bottle of pink hearts, half empty already, spilled four of the pills out into his palm. He swallowed two, washed them down with another sip of the Pepsi, and put the other two back for later. All that later left ahead of him, all that sleep left to stave off as long as possible. Slipped the bottle back into his jacket pocket, and that’s when he saw the spider, hairy brown spider big as a silver dollar, crawling towards him across the garish wallpaper. Just a fucking house spider, but he felt his stomach roll, grabbed his backpack and slid out of the booth, trying not to draw attention on his way as he walked quickly past all those faces to the restroom, to cold porcelain, cold water. Privacy if he was lucky, and he was, no one else at the row of sinks, at the urinal, no shoes or pushed-down, rumpled pants legs showing from under the stalls. Walter splashed his face and the nausea began to recede, turning him loose, so he wouldn’t have to dry-heave again, nothing in him to puke up but the pills and Pepsi. He pulled a paper towel from the dispenser and rubbed it across his face, rough brown and the animal smell of his dirty wet hair, wet-paper smell. Looked up at the face in the mirror, hardly a face he even recognized anymore. He was starting to look sick, like he had cancer, or AIDS, maybe, like he’d been sick for a long, long time.
Walter turned off the tap, and behind him, the wiry, coarse rasp of hairs like porcupine quills drawn slow across clean white tile, labored breath, and it was there in the mirror, squatted between him and the door. Between him and escape, and he made himself look, made himself fucking stare, and one of its fang-lipped mouths moved, said his name, “Walter,” like something