Page 52 of The Bad Weather Friend

After a day in which he’d felt for the most part powerless, a mere pawn on the chessboard of life, Benny took real pleasure in the task of efficiently fueling the Explorer. It wasn’t pleasure equal to an orgasm or eating filet mignon, but it was real. He slid his credit card in the scanner slot and took the pump-hose nozzle out of the nozzle boot and flipped open the little door on the Explorer’s fuel-tank access and took off the cap. He inserted the spout of the automatic nozzle in the tank-filler neck and squeezed the trigger and breathed deeply of the gasoline fumes and took pride in his competence. Admittedly, the task was small and millions of people accomplished it every day, but the successful completion of this mundane chore had the surprising effect of liftinghis spirits and increasing his confidence. Despite how he had been brought down by recent events, he didn’t have to be forever a pawn on the chessboard of life. He could be a bishop or a knight, certainly not a queen or a castle, but maybe eventually even a king if only he stayed smart and made the right moves.

As he capped the fuel tank and shut the little access door and returned to the pump and seated the nozzle in the nozzle boot and got his receipt, his mood continued to improve, his self-assurance to swell. Then he dropped his credit card. As he stooped to retrieve it and stood and put it in his wallet, a car came off the street too fast and braked with a shriek of tires. Three thugs erupted from the no-doubt-stolen sedan, all in their late teens or early twenties, admirably diverse as to race but not as to gender and probably not as to religion, none of them presenting the appearance of a person who went to a church or synagogue or mosque. One was armed with a pistol, another held a machete, and the third gripped a tire iron.

In the harsh light that flooded down on the pump island, the guy with the gun was as pale as a corpse and gray around the eyes, but he compensated for this colorless condition with green lipstick and bright-orange hair waxed into a fright wig that made Benny’s thatch look like the five-hundred-dollar coiffure of aGQmodel.

“I want your car, asshole.”

Although Benny’s high spirits were plummeting, he was still buoyant enough to think it would be amusing if he replied,My car doesn’t have an asshole, but fortunately he said, “Okay, sure, I understand, no sweat.”

The driver’s door opened. Like a Norse god being born out of rock, Spike emerged from the Explorer.

Harper opened the back door, and Spike told Benny to get in with her, and the guy with the gun said to Benny, “Hey, hey, hey, give me the key.”

“He doesn’t have the key,” Spike said. “I’ve got the key. If you want this vehicle, you have to ask me nice for it.”

“I’ll stand with you,” Benny assured Spike.

“Please don’t,” the giant said. “Get in with Harper. This won’t take long.”

“You some mush-brain dimwit?” the guy with the machete asked Spike.

“Why?” Spike asked. “Are you starting a club?”

Benny decided to get in the back seat with Harper.

AS BENNY GETS IN THE BACK SEAT WITH HARPER, HE REMEMBERS HIDING IN THE MOUNTAIN PIERIS

Two of the three surviving men loaded the pieces of their slaughtered compatriot into a body bag that they had brought for the purpose of transporting the corpse of Bugboy. As that grim task was undertaken, Mrs. Baneberry-Smith and a man whom she called Kimball, seeking privacy for a conversation, had come downhill from the gore-splashed area where the confrontation recently occurred. They stood beside the mounded mass of mountain pieris in which Benny, Jurgen, and Mengistu had taken refuge.

Their Tac Lights revealed their approximate location, but the density of foliage prevented Benny from seeing anything of them.

Kimball said, “After we haul Hawthorne’s body out of here, we’ll come back at first light to collect what’s left of the freak.”

“Leave it,” said the headmaster’s wife. Her voice was not soft, as previously it had been, but possessed the lacerating effect of her whip. “And don’t call it a freak. It was a masterwork of cross-species engineering, one of the many wonders of Regulus technology.”

“But if anyone finds that thing—”

“No one will. Carrion eaters will be at it, and what they don’t consume will rot away quickly. I don’t want anyone seeing ISA agents on or near the campus in daylight.”

“No one will know we’re ISA. We’ll dress as hikers, hunters, whatever.”

“If you cock-ups dressed as fairy princesses, everyone would still know exactly what you are. Having you here at night is risky enough. If you hadn’t screwed up and lost control of my beautifulolla podrida, you would have him in your truck now, alive, and be halfway to Area Fifty-One. This shit, your stupidity and ineptitude, has set my work back six months or even longer.”

This black-clad whip-carrying obscenity-spouting woman was dramatically different from—and much more exciting than—the Catherine Baneberry-Smith who, in a flower-print dress, had served cookies and tea in her drawing room. She almost seemed to be a different person, perhaps a wicked twin.

Benny understood now why Galsbury wanted to work in her lab. She was hot in one sense and cool in another. However, it was important to remember that something happened to Galsbury in her company that drove him to eat ants until his lunulae turned blue—which was the least of it.

Agent Kimball endured her tongue-lashing, perhaps because she was hot and he was one of those men for whom being whipped was a source of pleasure. Or maybe because she was so important to the dark operations of the Internal Security Agency that he dared not anger her.

After she finished excoriating him, they stood in silence for half a minute or so. Then Kimball repressed whatever anger he might have felt and spoke to her in a voice suggesting concern or even compassion. “In that jungle, twelve years ago, it wasn’t just some spider that bit you. What was the thing really like and how were you ... attacked? What did you endure that day, Cathy?”

Following a hesitation, during which it seemed Mrs. Baneberry-Smith might regret the sharpness of the rebuke she had directed at Kimball, she proved instead to have no remorse. “What happened to me would have left an absurd specimen like you squirming on the ground, shitting your pants and vomiting up your entrails. None of you ISA types has the intellectualcapacity to endure what I endured. The physical pain you might have survived, but the mental torment and emotional anguish would have destroyed you.”

Deep in the mountain pieris, Benny had more sympathy for Mrs. Baneberry-Smith than he might have expected. There were her faults and her insane experiments that had to be considered, but she also made tasty cookies, even if they smelled strange, and she served good tea with honey to sweeten it, and she welcomed him to Briarbush with what seemed to be genuine warmth. He assured himself that her lovely foxglove-purple eyes and the way she perfectly filled out her skintight black clothes had nothing to do with the tenderness that her words evoked in him. She had not always been a foulmouthed mad scientist. Once she’d been an innocent girl and then an adventurous young entomologist, and it was forthatCatherine, the Cathy before the mysterious event in an Asian jungle, that Benny felt compassion, even pity.

“Imagine, if you can,” Mrs. Baneberry-Smith continued, “what it would be like to be bitten and injected not with mere venom—if only it had been venom—but with a fluid that’s a data-storage medium so vastly superior to silicon-based memory that a few milliliters can contain the entire history and all the knowledge of an alien race whose civilization is thousands of years more advanced than ours. Stretch your pathetic little mind to consider being plunged into a sea of bizarre revelations, strange science, freaking weird alien perspectives and customs, so that you think you’re going mad, your entire concept of reality turned inside out and upside down. You feel as though your true self is being subsumed into some hideous hive mind, as if you’re drowning not physically but intellectually.”

By this point, Jurgen Speer had clutched Benny’s right arm to express fear and amazement at the woman’s revelations, and Mengistu Gidada had clutched Benny’s face with the same intention before finding his companion’s left arm and seizing that. They trembled with dread that wasn’t entirely unappealing and inhaled wonder with every breath. They virtually crackled with a kind of excitement that adults had long forgotten if they had ever felt it.

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