Black Wings Of Cthulhu: Volume Two Part 10

Bloom JOHN LANGAN.

John Langan is the author of a short story collection, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (Prime Books, 2008), and a novel, House of Windows (Night Shade Books, 2009). His stories have appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction as well as in anthologies including The Living Dead (Night Shade Books, 2009) and Poe (Solaris, 2009). He lives in upstate New York with his wife, son, dog, and a trio of cats, and whatever's scratching at the walls.

"IS THAT-DO YOU SEE-"

Already, Rick was braking, reaching for the hazards. Connie turned from the pa.s.senger-side window at whose streaky surface she had spent the last half-hour staring. Eyes on something ahead, her husband was easing the steering wheel left, toward the meridian. Following the line of his gaze, she saw, next to the guardrail about ten yards in front of them, a smallish red and white container. "What?" she said. "The cooler?"

"It's not a cooler," Rick said, bringing the Forrester to a stop. His voice was still sharp with the edge of their argument.

"What do you-" She understood before she could complete her question. "Jesus-is that a-"

"A cooler," Rick said, "albeit of a different sort."

The car was in neutral, the parking brake on, Rick's door open in the time it took her to arrive at her next sentence. "What's it doing here?"

"I have no idea," he said, and stepped out of the car. She leaned forward, watching him trot to the red and white plastic box with the red cross on it. It resembled nothing so much as the undersized cooler in which she and her roommates had stored their wine coolers during undergrad: the same peaked top that would slide back when you pressed the b.u.t.tons on either side of it. Rick circled around it once clockwise, once counterclockwise, and squatted on his haunches beside it. He was wearing denim shorts and the faded green Mickey Mouse T-shirt that he refused to allow Connie to claim for the rag drawer, even though it had been washed so many times it was practically translucent. (It was the outfit he chose whenever they went to visit his father.) He appeared to be reading something on the lid. He stood, turning his head to squint up and down this stretch of the Thruway, empty in both directions. He blew out his breath and ran his hand through his hair-the way he did when he was pretending to debate a question he'd already decided-then bent, put his hands on the cooler, and picked it up. Apparently, it was lighter than he'd antic.i.p.ated, because it practically leapt into the air. Almost race-walking, he carried the container towards the car.

Connie half expected him to hand it to her. Instead, he continued past her to the trunk. She tilted the rearview mirror to see him balancing the cooler against his hip and unlocking the trunk. When he thunked the lid down, his hands were empty.

The answer was so obvious she didn't want to ask the question; nonetheless, once Rick was back behind the wheel, drawing his seatbelt across, she said, "What exactly are you doing?"

Without looking at her, he said, "We can't just leave it there."

"If the cell phone were charged, we could call 911."

"Connie-"

"I'm just saying. You wanted to know why that kind of stuff was so important, well, here you are."

"You-" He glanced over his shoulder to make sure the highway was clear. As he accelerated onto it, he said, "You know what? You're right. If I'd charged the cell phone last night like you asked me to, we could dial 911 and have a state trooper take this off our hands. That's absolutely true. Since the phone is dead, however, we need another plan. We're about forty, forty-five minutes from the house. I say we get home as quickly as we can and start calling around the local hospitals. Maybe this is for someone in one of them. In any event, I'm sure they'll know who to call to find out where this is supposed to go."

"Do they even do transplants in Wiltwyck?"

"I don't know. Maybe. I think Penrose might."

"We could stop at the next state trooper barracks."

"The nearest one is our exit, up 209. We're as quick going to the house."

"You're sure there's something in there?"

"I didn't look, but when I lifted it, I heard ice moving inside."

"It didn't look that heavy."

"It wasn't. But I don't know how much a heart, or a kidney, would weigh. Not too much, I think."

"I don't know, I just-" She glanced over her shoulder. "I mean, Jesus, how does something like that wind up in the middle of the Thruway? How does that happen?"

Rick shrugged. "They don't always hire the most professional guys to transport these things. Maybe someone's tail flap was down, or they swerved to avoid a deer in the road and the cooler went tumbling out."

"Surely not."

"Well, if you knew the answer to the question-"

For a second, their argument threatened to tighten its coils around them again. Connie said, "What about the lid? I thought you were reading something on it."

"There's a sticker on top that looks as if it had some kind of information, but the writing's all blurred. Must have been that storm a little while ago."

"So it's been sitting here at least that long."

"Seems likely. Maybe that was what happened-maybe the truck skidded and that caused the cooler to come loose."

"Wouldn't you stop and go back for something like that? Someone's life could be on the line."

"Could be the driver never noticed, was too busy trying to keep himself from crashing into the guardrail."

The scenario sounded plausible enough-a.s.suming, that is, you accepted Rick's a.s.sertion about underqualified drivers employed to convey freshly harvested organs from donor to recipient. Which was, now that Connie thought about it, sufficiently venal and depressing likely to be the truth. "What if it's supposed to be heading north, to Albany?"

"There's probably still enough time, even if whoever it is has to drive back the way we came."

"Maybe they could fly it wherever it needs to go. Doesn't Penrose do that?"

"I think so."

Already, she was buying into Rick's plan. Would it make that much difference to call the hospitals from their house instead of the police station? Equipped with a fully charged cell phone, they could have been rushing whatever was packed in the cooler's ice to the surgical team who at this moment must be in the midst of preparations to receive it. Connie could picture herself and Rick striding into the Emergency Room at Wiltwyck, the cooler under Rick's arm, a green-garbed surgeon waiting with gloves outstretched. With the cell inert, though, home might be their next best option. Based on her experiences with them at an embarra.s.sing number of stops for speeding, the Wiltwyck troopers would require more time than whoever was waiting for this cooler's contents could spare for her and Rick to make clear to them the gravity of the situation.

That's not true, she thought. You know that isn't true. You're just p.i.s.sed because that guy wouldn't agree to plead down to ten miles an hour over the speed limit. She was justifying Rick's plan, shoring up his ambition to be part of the story-an important part, the random, pa.s.sing stranger who turns out to be crucial to yanking someone at death's very doorway back from that black rectangle. Because... because it was exciting to feel yourself caught up in a narrative like this, one that offered you the opportunity to be part of something bigger than yourself.

Rick had the speedometer to the other side of eighty-five. Connie reached her left hand across and squeezed his leg, lightly. He did not remove his hands from the wheel.

FOUR HOURS LATER, THEY WERE STARING AT THE cooler sitting on the kitchen table. Its surface was pebbled plastic; Connie wondered if that contributed in any way to keeping its contents chilled. The red cross stenciled on its lid was faded, a shade lighter than the bottom half of the cooler, and beginning to flake off. The symbol didn't look like your typical red cross. This design was narrow at the join, the sides of each arm curving outwards on their way to its end-the four of which were rounded, like the edges of a quartet of axes. Connie had seen this style of cross, or one close to it, before: Alexa, the first girl with whom she'd shared an apartment, and who had been more Catholic than the Pope, had counted a cross in this style among her religious jewelry. A Maltese cross? Cross of Malta? Something like that, although Connie remembered her old roommate's cross ornamented with additional designs-little pictures, she thought; of what, she couldn't recall. To be honest, this version of the cross seemed less a religious icon and more the image of something else-an abstract flower, perhaps, or an elaborate keyhole. For a moment, the four red lines opening out resembled nothing so much as the pupil of some oversized, alien eye, but that was ridiculous.

What it meant that the cooler resting on the blond wood of their kitchen table bore this emblem, she could not say. Did the Red Cross have subdivisions, local branches, and might this be one of their symbols? She'd never heard of such a thing, but she was a manager at Target; this was hardly her area of expertise.

Rick said, "Maybe it's a Mob thing."

"What?" Connie looked across the table at him, slouched back in his chair, arms folded over his chest.

"I said, Maybe it's a Mob thing."

"What do you mean?"

He straightened. "Maybe it's part of someone who, you know, messed with the Mob. Or someone they had a contract on."

"Like what-a finger?"

"Finger, hand-proof that the job was done."

"Seriously?"

He shrugged. "It's a possibility."

"I don't know."

"You don't know what?"

"I don't know-I mean, the Mob? Transporting-what? Severed body parts in medical coolers? Wasn't that a movie?"

"Was it?"

"Yes-we saw it together. It was on TNT or TBS or something. Joe Pesci was in it. Remember: he's a hit man and he's got these heads in a duffel bag-"

"Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag."

"That's it!"

"So there was a movie. What does that prove?"

"It's just-"

"Or maybe it's some kind of black market thing, a kidney for sale to the highest bidder, no questions asked."

"Isn't that an urban legend?"

"Where do you think these things come from?"

"I-"

"Look-all I'm saying is, we've exhausted the legitimate avenues, so it makes sense to consider other possibilities."

Connie took a breath. "Granted. But we don't even know what's inside the cooler-if there's anything in it."

"You're the one who said we shouldn't open it."

"I know. It's-if there's something in it, then we need to be careful about not contaminating it."

"Are you listening to yourself? We don't know if there's anything in the cooler, so we shouldn't be too concerned about it, but we shouldn't open it, in case there is something in there. What are we supposed to do?"

Before she could answer, Rick pushed himself up from his chair and stalked to the refrigerator, the bottles in whose door rattled as he yanked it open. Connie bit the remark ready to leap off her tongue. Instead, she stood and leaned over to have another look at the square sticker on the cooler's lid. There were no identifying names on the label, no hospital or transport service logos, no barcode, even, which, in the age of global computer tracking, struck her as stranger than the absence of a corporate ID. There were only four or five lines of smeared black ink, unintelligible except for one word that she and Rick had agreed read "Howard" and another that he guessed was "orchid" but of which Connie could identify no more than the initial "o." Now, as her gaze roamed over the ink blurred into swirls and loops, she had the impression that the words which had been written on this sticker hadn't been English, the letters hadn't been any she would have recognized. Some quality of the patterns into which the writing had been distorted suggested an alphabet utterly unfamiliar, which might smear into a configuration resembling "Howard" or "orchid" by the merest coincidence.

G.o.d, you're worse than Rick. She resumed her seat as he returned from the fridge, an open bottle of Magic Hat in hand. Not that she wanted a drink, exactly, but his failure to ask her if she did sent Connie on her own mission to the fridge. They were out of hard cider, d.a.m.nit. She had intended to stop at Hannaford for a quick shop on the way home, then the cooler had appeared and obscured all other concerns. They were almost out of milk, too, and b.u.t.ter. She selected a Magic Hat for herself and swung the door shut.

Rick had set his beer on the table and was standing with his back to her, bent forward slightly, his arms out, his hands on the cooler.

"Rick?" Connie said. "What are you doing?"

"Is that a trick question?"

"Very funny," she said, crossing the kitchen to him. He was staring at the cooler as if he could will its contents visible. He said, "We have to open it."

"But if there's something inside it-"

"I know, I know. I can't see any other choice. We called Wiltwyck, and they didn't know anything about it. Neither did Penrose or Albany Med or Westchester Med. The transport services they gave us the numbers for weren't missing any shipments-one said they aren't even using coolers like this anymore. The cops were useless. h.e.l.l, that guy at the sheriff's thought it was probably just someone's cooler. Maybe there'll be some kind of information inside that'll tell us where this is supposed to go."

"What if it's a Mob thing?"

"Do you really believe that?"

"No, but I could be wrong, in which case, what would we do?"

"Get rid of it as quickly as possible. Burn it. I don't think there's any way it could be traced to us."

To her surprise, Connie said, "All right. Go ahead."

Rick didn't ask if she were sure. He pressed in the catches on the lid and slid it back. As Connie inclined toward it, he drew the cooler toward them. It sc.r.a.ped against the table; its contents shifted with a sound like gravel rasping. Connie had been antic.i.p.ating a strong odor washing out of the cooler's interior, raw meat full of blood; instead, there was the faintest blue hint of air long-chilled and another, even fainter trace of iodine. Rick's arm was blocking her view; she nudged him. "What is it?"

"I don't know."

"Let me see."

He shifted to the right. The cooler was full of ice, chips of it heaped in shining piles around, around- She registered the color first, the dark purple of a ripe eggplant, shot through with veins of lighter purple-blue, she thought, some shade of blue. It was maybe as wide as a small dinner plate, thicker at the center than at its scalloped circ.u.mference. At five-no, six spots around its margin, the surface puckered, the color around each spot shading into a rich rose. The texture of the thing was striated, almost coa.r.s.e.

"What the f.u.c.k?"

"I know-right?"

"Rick-what is this?"

"A placenta?"

"That is not a placenta."

"Like you've seen one."

"As a matter of fact, I have. There was a show on Lifetime-I can't remember what it was called, but it was about women giving birth, in living color, no detail spared. I saw plenty of placentas, and trust me, that is not a placenta."

"Okay, it's not a placenta. So what is it?"

"I-is it even human?"