told herself, because she hadn’t gotten it right.
She should have been counting more, should have slowed it down, made it last.
Only she hadn’t.
The fear wrapped itself more tightly around her heart and squeezed.
The tears flowed freely now, and she brushed at her cheek with her other gloved hand, and left a streak there. She stared down at the dirt on her glove and wondered vaguely how it had gotten there. They had been clean when she put them on.
To one, to five, to fifteen.
One, five, fifteen.
She listened to the house, and heard nothing. Didn’t hear the sound of the furnace, didn’t hear the grandfather clock in the front hall, and wondered why. The clock must have run down, and she wondered when she had wound it last. Hadn’t it been yesterday? No. Friday. No...before that. But when she didn’t remember.
Five, six...seven, eight, open the gate.
She told herself she would get through the door now. She had things to do. She had to get outside and get to—
Get to where? She frowned, wondering if she’d been heading to the store or someplace else. Maybe a job interview? Yes, that was it. After she’d been fired, she’d pored through the classified section of the newspaper for jobs that interested her. A number of positions called for workers who stayed at home, which appealed to her. So she had called for an appointment, and she was headed for it.
Only...she frowned...only that appointment had been yesterday.
Or the day before.
She had blown it again.
One, five, fifteen.
She must have stopped the sequence somewhere, some place, and she’d royally screwed up again.
She hadn’t been counting last week when she’d been singing along with the old Bee Gees song on the car radio, and she hadn’t seen the van in front of her stop abruptly and so she had thumped into the back-end of it. Her car had been more damaged than the other driver’s, and she’d had to have it towed away, and she wasn’t sure how she would get it back, because the bill was so huge, and she was running out of money. Farron tried to help her with money from time to time, until she got on her feet and got another job. But she hadn’t gotten another job. She wouldn’t be getting another job if she couldn’t get out the door.
Three, four, five.
One, two, three, four...thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.
She was so tired. So weary of the repetition. Over and over those numbers floated in her head, drifted through every waking thought. She was so tired of them. She should try them in foreign languages, she thought with a sudden giggle.
Unos, dos...cinco.
It wasn’t the same.
...three, four, five....
She yawned. She could lay down on the couch, and take a nap for a while, and then when she woke up, she would be rested, and she would get up and wash the dishes and she would go out the door.
For whatever reason she had to go out the door.
But first she had to count. And she had to get it right. Because if she didn’t...she shuddered, thinking what might happen.
One. One, two, three....
She didn’t count in her sleep. At least she didn’t think she did. Usually she woke, and for the first few minutes of her day, didn’t think about counting.
Maybe that was a mistake.
It had been morning, after all, when Farron told her he was leaving her. She had cried and screamed at him, and then fallen into a silence and simply stared at him. Why, she wanted to say, why? But every time she opened her mouth, all she could do was cry.
She had counted much too late then. She had counted to one, to five, to fifteen as he picked up the suitcase he had packed before she woke, had counted as he went down the stairs and she trailed after him, had counted as he walked out the door and she had stared out the front window as he got into the car and drove away, counted as the only man she’d ever loved left her.
Counted.
Too late.
She hadn’t gotten it right.
Her father was right; she was such a screw-up.
The fear was in her veins, in her lungs, in her tissue; it permeated every bit of her body.
She wept then, loudly, forlornly, and she wanted it all undone. She wanted it to be all right again, although she never knew it would be.
Suddenly she felt a warmth in her groin, and then down her leg, and she looked down and saw the piss running there, making the pool at her feet even larger, and she recognized the foulness she’d been vaguely aware of, and realized then that she hadn’t been there for a few minutes, she hadn’t been there at the door even for hours.
She had been there all day.
Maybe all night. Maybe longer.
One, two.
Three, four, shut the door.
But how could you shut the door, if you couldn’t even open it?
Seven, eight....
How long before you begin to decay? she wondered vaguely, and knew now why there were so many flies.
Nine, ten, do it again.
She would get it right. It was just a matter of time.
BRUJA
Chato Del-Klinne looked around at the airport terminal as he stepped out of the jetway. Not precisely Kansas, he could hear Sunny say teasingly as if she stood next to him, and he would have smiled, except he didn’t feel like it; he felt...uneasy.
Not precisely Kansas, no.
Southern Texas along the Mexican border, to be more precise. He’d been asleep on the plane, thinking he was heading back to Las Vegas when the captain announced that because of the vigorous storm system to the west, he had been ordered to change his route and land at Dry Plains International instead of Dallas/Ft. Worth.
“Vigorous.” Chato shook his head. He just loved these euphemistic terms. Vigorous...meaning the entire western sky was painted a sickly yellow green, twenty twisters had been spotted between Dallas/Fort Worth and Amarillo, and if everyone was lucky, the tornados wouldn’t remove the top six inches of soil throughout the state of Texas, not to mention every single trailer park in the Lone Star State.
And so here he was. The airport was bigger than he’d expected. It was, after all, an international airport, but mostly he had discovered with great irony that in the southwest that term meant flights scheduled to and from Mexico. Period.
International.
Yeah,
