Red Engine
The semi was positioning itself across the front of the diner, its trailer completely blocking the window’s view of the interstate. The hairs on the back of Grief’s neck rose and without knowing exactly why, he glanced around the diner, taking in almost a dozen other customers, including one family of four.
“Is there a back door to this place?” he asked Sarah and when he didn’t get an answer, he turned just in time to see her drop down behind the counter, limply flopping across the floor tiles. Thuds and clattering sounded all around him as the cook in the kitchen and the customers at their tables dropped like puppets with their strings cut.
A bell tinkled as the front door swung open and the man from the semi stepped in with a double-thump of his big black boots. Then there was only the sound of heavy breathing as Grief and this man, wearing a flannel shirt in the Arizona summer heat, stared at each other.
When he spoke, the movement of the man’s lips was barley visible beneath the tangles of his wild beard. “I smelled you. I smelled you and I remembered you. You crossed me and escaped me long ago but I never forget. And now I’ve found you.” The man gripped his shirt with both hands and tore it open, revealing a mangled mingling of flesh and metal and wire.
Grief rose slowly to his feet as two realizations hit home at the same time. First, the Red Engine, like a few other predators of the Torment Countries, could take human avatars, which meant the creature was much more powerful than he had wanted to believe. Secondly, Spur’s motorcycle wasn’t built to protect its rider but to tag him as a decoy and a sacrifice.
Grief didn’t have time to be flummoxed by either revelation. He turned and leaped over the counter just as the man from the semi bolted forward in a blur. When the man followed suit, leaping behind the counter, Grief leapt back out in front of it, keeping it between them.
The man laughed, rumbling phlegmatic sound, and the smell of cooking meat wafted from his mouth. “You really should let my proxy finish you. The true me is tearing this way and it won’t be long now. You don’t want to die that way. Some of your kind are at this very moment finding that out.”
Grief felt something try to grip his mind but he sloughed it off easily enough. “Look, I’m not the guy you think I am. You have eyes, right? Look at me.” It was silly, trying to reason with a nightmare like this, and Grief wondered if this was what it was like to panic.
The man plucked a gleaming vegetable knife from behind the counter, his runny pink eyes locked on Grief’s. “Roads. Roads turn a land into a nation, a planet into a world. I have ridden camels and horses and cars and turtles and beetles and men and so many others on so many worlds and the roads between worlds.”
He wagged the knife at Grief, his reflection flitting across its blade like a ghost. “Roads carry the men and their dreams just as arteries carry blood and I am the infection chasing you on the arterial tide.”
With savage suddenness, the man dove down and came back up with Sarah gripped by her neck in his left hand. A flick of the knife slit the unconscious woman’s blouse and bra and a rough jerk spilled her heavy breasts, so pale against the tan of her torso. With the flat of his blade, the man traced the contours of her left breast. “I ride the blood straight into the red engine of man. Under here. The most perfect part of you. I sing its praises.”
Grief cocked his head, weighing options, calculating, then bolted for the door. As expected, the man dropped Sarah and leaped over the counter with a joyous snarl. But Grief spun around before reaching the door and tossed a small object, a sliver of glass encased in amber on which an ovoid spiral-like symbol, a word from a language not invented by man, was etched. As he threw the object at the man and himself to the floor, Grief spoke the word aloud.
All of the diner’s windows shattered. Every glass, every light-bulb, every pair of spectacles and even the faces of every watch in the diner shattered. And all of it, every shard, converged on the man from the semi with the force of a hurricane wind. The spray of blood even reached the ceiling.
Grief was appalled to see the man still on his feet, swaying, the shards jutting out from every part him. But then he collapsed with a sickening explosion of crunches. He lay there twitching, still trying to drag himself towards Grief in the slick lubrication of his own blood.
But Grief was already out the door.
He hesitated before the bike and briefly considered ditching it, wondering if it might not be too late, if it had stained him with Spur’s aura so completely that the Red Engine would chase him even without the bike. Either way, it didn’t matter. Spur had betrayed him and that had to be answered. What better way than the lead his enemy to him?