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.I’m doing eighty and that’s already too damn fast for this road.Besides, I feel like I’m driving two cars at once, one of them a sawed-off subcompact and the other a topless muscle-machine that dodges in and out of the tourist traffic like a steeplechaser weaving through a queue of pensioners.It’s deeply confusing and it makes me want to throw up.★★What do you know about—★★ pause ★★—the abductions? ★★★★Women.Young.Blonde.His wife owns a cosmetics company and he looks too young.What conclusion would you draw?★★★★He has a good plastic surgeon.Hang on.★★ The muscle car surges effortlessly around another bus.Meanwhile the SUV has pulled even with me, and the driver is waving his gun at me to pull over.I glance sideways once more and see his eyes.They look dead and worse than dead, like he’s been in the water for a week and nothing’s tried eating him.I recognize that look: they’re using tele-operator-controlled zombies.Shit.My steering wheel is crawling with sparks as the occult countermeasures cut in, deflecting their brain-eating mojo.I tense and hit the brakes, then push the cigarette lighter home in its socket during the second it takes him to match my speed.We come to a halt side by side on the crest of a low hill.The SUV’s door opens and the dead guy with the gun gets out and walks over.I sniff: there’s a nasty fragrant smoke coming out of the lighter socket.He marches stiffly round to my side door, keeping the gun in view.I keep my hands on the steering wheel as he opens the door and gets in.“Who are you?” I ask tensely.“What’s going on?”“You ask too many questions,” says the dead man.His voice slurs drunkenly, as if he’s not used to this larynx, and his breath stinks like rotting meat.“Turn around.Drive back to Anse Marcel.” He points the gun at my stomach.“If you say so.” I slowly move one hand to the gearshift, then turn the car around.The SUV sits abandoned and forlorn behind us as I accelerate away.I drive slowly, trying to drag things out.The stink of decaying meat mingles with a weird aroma of burning herbs.The steering wheel has sprouted a halo of fine blue fire and my skin crawls—I glance sideways but there are no green sparks in his eyes, just the filmed-over lusterless glaze of a day-old corpse.It’s funny how death changes people: I startle when I recognize him.“Drive faster.” The gun pokes me in the ribs.“How long have you had Marc?” I ask.“Shut up.”I need Ramona.The smell of burning herbs is almost overpowering.I reach out to her: ★★Phone me.★★★★What’s the problem? I’m driving as fast as—★★★★Just phone me, damn it! Dial my mobile now!★★ Fifteen or twenty endless seconds pass, then my Treo begins to ring.“I need to answer my phone,” I tell my passenger.“I have to check in regularly.”“Answer it.Say that everything is normal.If you tell them different I’ll shoot you.”I reach out and punch the call-accept button, angling the screen away from him.Then in quick succession I punch the program menu button, and the pretty icon that triggers all the car’s countermeasures simultaneously.I don’t know quite what I was expecting.Explosions of sparks, spinning heads, a startling spewage of ectoplasm? I get none of it.But Marc the doorman, who managed to die of one of the effects of terminal cocaine abuse just before Ramona’s succubus could suck him dry, sighs and slumps like a dropped puppet.Unfortunately he’s not belted in so he falls across my lap, which is deeply inconvenient because we’re doing fifty kilometers an hour and he’s blocking the steering wheel.Life gets very exciting for a few seconds until I bring the car to rest by the roadside, next to a stand of palm trees.I wind down the window and stick my head out, taking in deep gasping breaths of blessedly wormwood- and fetorfree ocean air.The fear is just beginning to register: I did it again, I realize, I nearly got myself killed.Sticking my nose into something that isn’t strictly any of my business.I shove Marc out of my lap, then stop.What am I going to do with him?It is generally not a good idea when visiting foreign countries to be found by the cops keeping company with a corpse and a gun.An autopsy will show he had a cardiac arrest about a day ago, but he’s in my car and that’s the sort of thing that gives them exactly the wrong idea—talk about circumstantial evidence! “Shit,” I mutter, looking around.Ramona’s on her way but she’s driving a two-seater.Double-shit.My eyes fasten on the stand of trees.Hmm [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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