“What was that?” the kid says as I throw on the brakes. He started zipping up his oversuit and got two zippers jammed. It was the first time I’d seen him get excited and I had to laugh. He thought we were having a wreck. I had my oversuit zipped up and my mask on—it protects your face and eardrums—before he looked in the rear-view mirror and saw what we had hit.
“You don’t want to be getting out,” I said. I sprayed my throat with C-Level and stuffed the can in my pocket.
“Hand me that Boy Scout hatchet from under the seat,” I said.
He was watching it in the mirror, gray-white, the color of gravestones, and at least thirteen feet across the claws. I doubted he’d seen one before, alive. Not many people have. “You going to kill it?” he asked. “It’s still flopping.”
Once you crack the shell, they’re dead from decompression, but dying can take all day. I hadn’t gone looking for it, but since it came to me—I flipped down my mask and climbed across the kid, since the airlock is on his side. I crossed under the truck and approached it carefully. It was still venting steam out of the cracks in the shell where my truck had passed over it. I had missed all but one claw. There’s about sixty pounds of meat under the back but High Top Meat won’t buy lob out of the shell. With the hatchet, jumping in, I cut off the one big and four smaller claws I hadn’t marked, tossing them under the truck. Since the lobster was dragging itself away from me, toward the shoulder, I turned my back on it. After all that activity, I needed another shot of C-Level, which means lifting your mask for a second. I gathered up the claws and I was about to strap them onto the spare tire rack with a bungee cord when, next thing I knew, the thing had pulled my leg out from under me and was dragging me toward the side of the road.
It was the tire-marked claw. I should have cut it off and tossed it away. I shouldn’t ever have turned my back on it. It had me by the boot and was starting that slow sideways cut even while it pulled, and I knew I was in trouble. He still had six legs, each as big as a fencepost, and he was taking me home with him.
I reached for but missed the tire rack. I reached for but missed the hatchet. I reached for the big, soft rear trailer tire, even though there’s no place to grab it—then I saw two shots crack the lobster’s shell. You don’t hear shots in a near vacuum. I looked back and saw the kid ducking under the truck from the other side, shooting. Even with the big gloves on he hit it twice more, but you can shoot those things all day long. They’re like snapping turtles. I pointed at the Boy Scout hatchet, waving my arms, but the kid was falling. I hadn’t left any breath spray for him. He was sealed in his suit and turning blue. But just as he fell he pushed the hatchet close enough for me to reach it.
Thank God for the Boy Scouts. I chopped my foot free, and wearing the claw like a clamp on my leg, dragged the kid under the truck, up the ladder and into the cab. Even inside in the air, he could barely breathe. The fall had knocked his mask loose, and his tongue and throat had swelled up from decompression. Luckily they make a spray for that, too, and I had some in my first-aid kit under the seat. I’ve had it used on me and it’s bad. It puckers you up like eating a green persimmon but it works. It’s called GAZP.
I pried the claw off my boot and stuck it up under the seat. When I was sure the kid was breathing, I went back out and got the 9 mm where he had dropped it. The lobster was gone and the claws I had cut off were gone, too, so the whole thing was a waste. I wasn’t surprised. They say he eats them.
“Well, kid,” I said when we were in gear again. “You saved old CD’s butt back there.”
“Weren’t nothing. You get the claws?”
“Just the one he had me with. It’s under the seat. That’s that smell.” Landlobsters smell like piss on coals until they’re decompressed, and then it’s gone.
The claw wasn’t worth anything because it was tire-marked, but I didn’t mention that.
All that talking wore me out, and the kid too, I guess. I looked over and saw he was asleep. I was in high third.
On either side of the highway, nothing but miles and miles of stone. It’s amazing to me that so many people could live for so long in those little mountains and leave so little sign. Twenty miles further and the road got steeper, going down. I had to gear down to low fifth. I popped in Hank Senior and the kid whimpered a little from a dream. At that minute I might have been driving past his great-grandaddy’s grave. I could tell from the way he talked it was up here somewhere—somewhere between eastern Kentucky and western North Carolina, northern Virginia, and east Alabama. Somewhere in those endless wrinkled little hills that got unwrinkled and raised up, and rolled their children out into the world, rubbing their eyes and wondering when they get to go home.
Maybe someday. I read in Popular Science that Flat Mountain is sinking again, at about a foot and a half a year.
At that rate it’ll only be one hundred thousand years.
From the edge of the western slope you see a snow-white roof of clouds, but from the eastern slope you see what looks like the edge of a giant blue-green ball. You first see it just as the switchbacks start, at about ninety thousand, when there is just enough air to leave a little vapor trail back over the road. Far ahead the sky is not black anymore but dark blue. Then you see it’s really the sea. And not just a few miles of it: you are looking halfway to Bermuda from eighteen miles high. From here you can see that the water and the air are two versions of the same stuff.
The roads down the eastern slope are better, probably because the highways were newer, mostly four lanes. The switchbacks are long—forty, fifty miles a swoop. Morgantown, Hendersonville, Bat Cave, just names given to turns anymore, since the towns are long since gone. At Bat Cave (no bats, no cave) the kid woke up, and this time he didn’t try not to look impressed. We were far enough east and far enough down Flat Mountain to see the Atlantic Coast all the way from Morehead City to Savannah. The Carolina Desert is the color of October woods, red and orange and yellow and brown. It’s a fast trip down, with no cogway needed. Here on the eastern slope, the yoyos are muscle trucks, and the robot train roundabout is set in a cold, dry cloudless perch called Shelby, which looks down fifty miles onto Charlotte. There’s a good diner there but I just rolled on past and hit the hard switchbacks below 21,500 with my KJ barking like a hundred-dollar hound.
It gets dark early in Charlotte, but it felt good to be down in the air. I unsealed the locks and let the dry night wind run through the cab. There used to be magnolia trees in Charlotte but that was before the Uplift. Now they were just street names, like the towns on Flat Mountain. We found Magnolia on my map, but first I took the kid and bought him supper.
The reason I bought his supper was, I kept remembering the Mexican who bought my meals all the way across Missouri and Oklahoma when I was just a kid. He said he used to hitch, and he even tried to give me a five when he dropped me off, but I shook my head and wouldn’t take it. The thing is, when he looked under his car seat later on, his pearl-handled revolver was gone. I sold it in Fort Worth for twenty dollars. I have always felt ashamed of that ever since.
The kid had two black eyes from the decompression but his throat was better, good enough for him to eat. He didn’t complain when I paid for his supper. Then I stopped at High Top Meat. I told the kid to wait in the truck. The night broker shook his head when I unwrapped the claw and he saw the tire marks. “Too bad, CD,” he said. “I can’t buy road kill unless it don’t look like road kill.”
“How about for dog food?” I said, and he gave me a five.
The kid looked nervous and asked how I’d done, and I lied. “Good,” I said. I gave him a twenty and told him it was half the money. He folded it and put it in his watch pocket with the ten.
Magnolia was one of those dirt streets with no sidewalks and little modular houses, all alike. Any one of them could have been his grandma’s house, or any one not. “Don’t turn in, I’ll get out here,” he said at the end of the street, gathering up his stuff in a hurry.
“Vaya con Dios,” I said.
“What’s that mean?”
“Means good luck finding your pa.” I never did find mine.
I slept eleven hours while my rig was serviced and loaded.
I was halfway up Flat Mountain the next day before it occurred to me to look in the glove compartment for my 9mm. Of course it was gone. I popped in Crystal Gayle and had to laugh.