Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [121]
By the time we were onto Route 81 my head was hurting badly, and I was gripping the steering wheel to prevent my hands from shaking. There was nothing to do except watch the road, and no conversation to drown out the one I was already having with myself.
“What is it between you and Maxen?” Nearly said quietly then, breaking the silence. I didn’t answer. “I mean, I get the sense this guy hates you real bad.”
“It’s nothing,” I said, lighting a cigarette. Vinaldi should really have been driving. It took me three attempts to get it alight.
“The fuck,” Nearly said calmly. Her tone very clearly said that she’d been building up to this and was unlikely to stop for animals or small children. “What you mean is it’s none of my business.”
“Yes,” I said tightly. “That’s exactly what I mean.”
“Well it is so my business!” she shouted, suddenly furious in that force-of-nature way women have. “I’ve got a right to know. Psycho lunatics come slamming into my life, take me beyond the Twilight Zone and completely ruin my shoes, and you say it’s none of my business?”
“No one has any right to know anything about my life which I don’t want them to,” I said, forcing the words out slowly and clearly.
“Not even someone who likes you?” she said, her voice different.
“Especially not them.”
“They helped you, didn’t they?” Vinaldi asked suddenly, out of the darkness in the back.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you do. The kids. They helped you find the ship.”
“What kids?” Nearly asked.
“You didn’t see them, I guess, because you weren’t there the last time. Maybe just because you don’t know about them, or maybe because old Jack and I have got a fair dose of The Gap inside us as well. I think it’d be fair to say that, don’t you, Jack?”
“Just shut up, Johnny.”
Nearly: “What kids?”
“When that little girl—Suej, or whatever—went down, I saw something.” Despite myself, I found I. was listening to Vinaldi. I’d thought that last vision had been mine alone, a product of misery and fear. “There was a whole bunch of children standing round her, Gap children—except they didn’t look right. They show you where the ship was, Jack?”
I didn’t answer, and Vinaldi took that as a yes.
“You know what they were, don’t you Jack? You know why they looked so weird? Didn’t you see the scars on them? On their necks?”
“Johnny, please don’t tell this.” My whole body was shaking now, the headlights on the highway in front of me a Jackson Pollock of red and white blurs against black.
“I’m going to tell it, Jack, and you know why? Because you’re full of shit. You go round the whole time with a chip on your shoulder about how badly you’ve fucked up. You think everything’s tainted, that somehow you did something which has spoiled the whole world. You spend your whole time saying to yourself ‘Well, I’ve fucked up this life so I’m just going to sit here and wait for the next one.’ Well you didn’t This whole mess is because of Arlond Maxen, and it’s not your fault the guy hates you. He hates you because of something you did which was not a fucked-up thing to do, and that’s why all those spares died, and why Mal died, and why you’re probably going to die too.”
“What?” Nearly shouted, and then said it again more quietly. “What? Johnny, what are you talking about?”
I knew there was nothing I could do to stop him, so I just kept the car on the road and tried not to listen as Vinaldi told her.
It happened two months before the war in The Gap was abandoned. Mal and I were part of a unit which was very deep in-country. North and South don’t mean a whole lot in there, but if most people were in the South,