George R.R. Martin by The Armageddon Rag

Author:The Armageddon Rag
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780553901238
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-01-30T06:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

Home, where my thought’s escaping/

Home, where my music’s playing/

Home, where my love lies waiting, silently for me

By the time he left Denver, headed northeast on 1–76, the left side of his face was swollen and aching. If he was lucky his beard would disguise the worst of the discoloration, but the pain would just have to be borne. It wasn’t too hard. His anger helped. He was mad enough so that hurting became just another goad to his rage. His thoughts were fevered; thunderclouds that filled his head with black fantasies and impossible plans.

He crossed the flat emptiness of eastern Colorado scarcely seeing it, conscious only of the miles rolling by, the cold wind outside, the blare of the radio, and of his anger. He drove fast, driven by his rage and feeding it with speed. Daydream became a low-slung bronze bullet in the passing lane, shooting past cars, trucks, wobbling U-Hauls, swerving right only when some slower-moving speeder blocked the left lane. The speedometer crept up: seventy-five, eighty, eighty-five. And Sandy, fuming, pushed her still faster, and thought of Butcher Byrne. He was full of wrath and full of schemes. He would hire lawyers, get Slum free. He would talk Jared into exposing Butcher in the Hog. He would write nasty reviews of Byrne’s books. He would do something, anything, everything. It was an outrage, a crime. Slum might be helpless, but Sandy wasn’t. He would get justice.

The road became a white-line blur; and somehow that fed the fantasies. Behind the wheel of Daydream, he had power. He could taste it, feel it, see visible proof of it all around him as he passed everything in sight. There is something about a fast car that does that. With a steering wheel in his hands and an accelerator under his foot, even the world’s biggest loser becomes briefly competent. In a world that so often frustrated one and left one feeling helpless to change anything, do anything, affect anything, the car was still subject to one’s will. A tank of gas, an open highway, and a box full of tapes was enough to give Sandy an illusion of confidence, to make him feel effective.

But the mood broke up near the Nebraska border, where I-76 fed into I-80. Gas was running low by that point, and the Denver oldies station that Sandy had tuned to had disintegrated into static. The interstate swung around in a long wide curve; Daydream took it at just over eighty, hugging the road. And then Sandy saw the police car up ahead. But it was too late; they’d radared him already, and one of the cops was waving him over.

He screeched to a stop on the shoulder, rolled down his window, and accepted the ticket in a sullen silence. The cop looked a bit concerned as he handed back the license. “You OK, Mister?” he asked. “You don’t look too good.”

Sandy touched the side of his face. It hurt. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Guess I could use an ice-pack, though.

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