A Dirge for the Temporal Read Online Free Page B

now.
      He left the Gasthaus for a ship that might right itself again without him aboard. The lobby was empty as he passed.
      Outside, the afternoon grew a deeper purple, the sun long gone behind a ridge. The stream flowed inevitably. Smoke pumped inevitably. Yet there were no cars except for the wagon he had brought in. There were no people save him. He felt as if he existed in the lull of nightmarish sleep. He foresaw the key turning in the ignition, the engine coming to life, the tires snatching at the asphalt in their haste to obey him. He saw the sign as it would appear in his rearview mirror. Would Verena run after him, pleading about the gears of September?

        September is May and May is September,
        Nor free to forsake, when bound to remember.

      He would laugh as he drove away, he swore. Laugh for the being done to. For the goddamn being done to, Laura. The keys in his fist were like tangible her, biting into his skin, cold, inflexible. He shook from the others the one key that mattered. The noise of the stream lifted as he neared the wagon.
  “Galen!” came the voice of Verena over the rushing water.
      He wasn’t going to look back. He stepped around to the driver’s side of the car, key in front of him like the stolen screwdriver or ice pick in the hand of the prison escapee. As he grasped the handle of the door, he caught sight of something on the stream.
      His eyes locked on the object, instantly recognizing it as a body, a limp, naked human body riding the flow from the direction of the high Alps, now passing under the footbridge, a rag doll at the will of the cur rent. A half second elapsed between its clearing the shadow of the bridge and passing the line of Galen’s vehicle, but it was enough time to reveal the change that visited the body, a shift which shook Galen the witness down to the bone and marrow.
      The body had turned on the current and opened its eyes to mark him.
      No sooner had he beheld this terror than another body passed under the bridge, emerging in a similar surprise of flesh and awakened eyes, rolling against the force of the current, pulling and dragging as if to impede its momentum. In its wake came a third—the other two now having swept out of sight—and behind the third came a fourth. In all Galen counted seven before their abrupt cessation reminded him that he was supposed to be inside his wagon and on his way out of this haunted pass in the foothills of the Alps.
      Slamming the door behind him, he turned the key to the beautiful greeting of a trusty engine waking from a doze. He pulled the shifter into reverse and backed out somewhat slower than he would have liked, in case Verena had decided to come running up behind with her plea. He caught her in his mirror as he shifted again, preparing to speed off in the direction from which he'd come. Out in the street in front of the Gasthaus, she stood akimbo, striking him—rather perversely—as stirringly sexy in the pose. Nonetheless, he put the pedal to the floor and was almost out of there when they appeared in the road in front of him—four, five, six, seven of them, all sexless, of a sickly yellow hue, flesh leeching to their bones.
      He slammed on the brakes—too late as one went flying over the top of the car and another buckled underneath. As the others stared through the windshield at him, mouths stretched in every rictus and scowl, he saw that their expressions were the only thing of life they possessed, making them, as he saw it, fair game. As he yanked it in reverse, howev er, bringing the RPM to critical mass, the creatures divided, rushing by the car, more interested in what was behind it than what was inside.
  Verena ! He let reverse carry the car all the way around, one hundred and eighty degrees, paused only long enough to convince himself that he wasn’t about to invite real-life blood into a hallucinatory reality, then he rode them down like pylons in a road course, too tempting