The Captive by Robert Stallman Read Free Book Online Page B

moment, that Hegel is a stupid drunk who will simply take years to destroy himself. But it is not that easy, even though , he thought with a wry smile, I am driving his car out of town instead of taking him home. For just an instant he felt guilt, as if  already he had done that act....
    Thunder split the world. Lightning blasted sight to an  incandescent brilliance as the bubble of consciousness  shattered. Everything stopped.
    ***
    Roaring sounds. Hammers beating on stones, dull stones, leaden hammers, roaring waterfalls, screaming winds, screechings, whistlings, sounds battering inside and outside his head. Blood on his face, my face? The smell of old  upholstery, whiskey. What happened? The car. Bill Hegel. He sat up and a roaring filled his ears. Darkness. Was he blind? Too dark for night. Night? And then the roaring filled his mind, part of it, the throbbing inside the skull, the other was, what? train whistle. And then he opened his eyes that had been clenched in pain. Looking into the night he saw trees through a windshield. They began to lighten as a beam like that from a lighthouse swept searching into the trees, picking them out from the darkness to his right. Down the track, the gleaming double rails picking up highlights from the beam of light. The car was sitting on a double track at a crossing. He looked up to see the cross bars hanging dimly above in the night like the crossed bones on a bottle of poison. The sonofabitch has done it to me , he thought. And then he emptied out like a broken bottle, his mind halting before nothingness. Or am I Bill Hegel? The fear turned his stomach inside out. I am Bill Hegel, and the Beast has put me in the car on the tracks to kill me. The light sweeping along the trees to my right, the train coming around a blind curve. Have to get out. The doors smooth along the whole inside surface. Why can't I open them , he thought in panic, hearing the whistle again, rising in pitch, closer. His head still dead with pain. No handles or window rollers. They have been removed. I'm Bill Hegel, and I'm going to die , he thought.
    The train whistle screamed as the flat face of the engine came round the curve, the shrillness of the sound increasing in pitch as the light burst into the car like an explosion and Barry realized the personality switch was part of his guilty dream. He pulled everything in his mind into a small pile that was the wreckage of his consciousness. He turned the inner light of concentration on that pile of debris, releasing the power.
    I shift.
    I swing one arm across the windshield, smashing it to jagged pieces, feeling them cutting through the hair and hide like razors. I sweep again. The train noise rushing at me, and now my spatial sense feels the horror of that  unstoppable traveling mass of iron, coming like a tidal wave, an earthquake. The blinding light washes over me as I push myself into the windshield opening onto the jagged glass that cuts my belly as I wriggle out across it onto the hood. The whistle screams like a knife as the train front swells with speed, a hurtling mass of iron slamming the air ahead of it. I roll, get one foot on a fender to leap away as the engine towers over me, the light disappearing at the last instant, and crashes into the car with deafening, splintering,  destroying sounds. I am hit, torn into, spinning off into the  darkness. I feel my chest and belly laid open, flapping with blood, as I land on a doubled hind leg hard in the cinders and roll down the skidding embankment into the weeds.
    The engine is past, pushing the shattered, tearing  wreckage of the car ahead of it down the track, and the string of lighted windows rushes by, but slowing, the sparks like fiery hair around each wheel. I lie half in the ditch on my back, senses all but gone, sight fading, my spatial sense showing something alive in the darkness near me as the last coach of the train screeches past. The train noise recedes, slowing but still moving away,