1.

 

1975

Shard Hardtack turned the ignition key and brought the V8 to life just as the magic mushrooms took hold of his mind. The engine rumbled with suppressed aggression. Like Shard, it was eager to run, eager for revenge. Two tons of American steel and one hundred seventy pounds of human flesh vibrated in unison, man and machine indifferent to the danger ahead. Doom was all but certain. So, too, was success.

He stretched back into the seat and glanced at his watch. The green glowing hands indicated it was one minute past three in the morning. Thirty minutes ago, in anticipation of the night's work, he'd ingested a large cap and stem of psilocybe cubensis and the fungus was doing its thing in his blood.

Scanning the horizon with his one eye, he took in shades of black where the ground became mountains and the mountains became sky, where glowed ten million grains of celestial sand and a scythe blade for a moon. Flickers of vivid colors that did not exist danced at his periphery. No other light lived on this section of the desolate desert road. No motorists. No illumination from the dashboard. 

Shard slipped into neutral, secured the parking brake and opened the door, then stepped out for a final inspection of the Plymouth Fury. It sat in its quivering idle, speaking to Shard in their private language. The paint job was black on black and absent all brightwork and chrome. The one nod to vanity was the Latin words, under the driver's side window painted in sterling gray, ‘Ferox Ferro.’ Aside from this small christening the only decorations of the machine were scars. 

The vehicle was covered in dirt and blood; the big hood dappled with human-sized dents. Three of the four headlights were smashed out. The fourth was unlit. A many-tendrilled crack laced across the windshield like lightning trapped in glass. 

 He was not bothered by the cold desert wind that gusted around him. The mushrooms warmed Shard's belly. Like the car, Shard was clad in black on black: black denim trousers, a black canvas mechanic's jacket and a black cotton thermal t-shirt. Shard circled the machine, recalling how each dent and gouge was made, relishing in the memory of the violence. The passenger-side door was peppered with bullet holes, as was the rear panel. Machete marks marred the roof. The back window also cracked, hit by a shotgun blast courtesy of a man who had used his last breath trying to destroy Shard and the Ferox Ferro. 

He rounded the tail of the car where the bumper clung in a crumpled line under the massive trunk like a drunken smile; strolled the length of the driver's side, where more bullet holes punctuated the panel and he returned to the nose of the metal beast, admiring his latest modification.    

Using up the last of his favors with a machinist friend in Fresno, Shard had made an addition. A cow catcher. The Plymouth's wide front end drooped under the weight of the steel contraption that Shard had welded to the bumper. He had found the thing detached from its original host, a Ford F250. The metal grate was made of angled black bars and came to a point in the center like an arrowhead and gave the Fury the appearance of a demonic train engine sent from the last station out of hell.

Shard lay his hands on the expansive hood, feeling the vibrations and heat of the V8, letting the motion course up his limbs and through him straight to his heart, mainlining the energy. Everything was in order. 

He returned to the driver’s seat. The car accepted him like an old lover, familiar and exciting at the same time. Shard relaxed, shut his eye, absorbing the feeling of the car. Soaking in the sound of the engine, he gripped the leatherbound steering wheel. Lungs took in the scent of gasoline and hot metal.

Recalling the words of the last man he had killed, he considered their veracity. In life, this man had called himself the Warlock and had been part of a vicious gang of motorcycle toughs. But the Warlock had not been very tough in the end. Before killing this man, Shard had extracted information. The biker seemed sincere as he was bargaining for his life and Shard took the man as genuine. He had a good sense of such things, especially while in an altered state, which he always was while working at vengeance. 

Shard had promised him his life in exchange for the right answers. Warlock had supplied the answers. And Shard had killed him, relishing in the shock and confusion of the man's expression as the deed was done. Shard felt no guilt or compunction about his lying. It was the Warlock and his gang who had taught Shard about duplicity five years ago. So his own deception elicited no emotion other than rage, briefly respited by the Warlock's screams.

The truck is coming north from Mexicali by the 86. Arriving at the Salton Sea at dawn. 

The Warlock swore this to Shard. The vehicle in question, a Chevy delivery van was supposedly painted as an ice cream truck. Inside were going to be two men, Lou Nova and Sprog. Hidden in the cargo hold were bricks of heroin. The drugs were incidental. Shard had no interest in them. He was no cop. Indeed, he had little use or respect for the so-called authorities. At best, they were a nuisance. At worst, they represented a concerted impediment to his work. 

Escorting this ice cream truck was the man Shard wanted to kill most of all, a man called Jimmy Knuckles, also known as Padre. The Warlock had given this information to Shard moments before Shard dropped him out of the speeding Ferox and then reversed over the man's body. 

Now, days later, Shard was in the high desert of California, fifty-five miles from the Salton Sea, waiting on the 78, a dusty two-lane road, desolate and uninhabited, where it met the 86. 

His prey was coming. He could feel it. Through the open window, he inhaled a deep breath of cold desert air mixed with the intoxicating essence of engine exhaust. Kaleidoscopic vision blossomed behind his closed lid and he saw himself from the outside, sitting in the quivering metal beast. Shard secured the crash harness over his right and left shoulders and clicked the buckle tight over his heart. He rolled up the window, which had somehow survived all the previous battles, noting the shimmering gossamer trails the glass left hanging in the air to his altered perception. The vibration of the engine was pulling Shard into a trance state. He ran his hand across the dashboard and the leather of the seat. Then he jabbed the clutch down with his left foot and tapped the gas with his right. Just a small nudge. The massive engine responded with a throaty growl and settled again into its reassuring, steady murmur. 

There were half a dozen gadgets mounted under the dashboard crackled. two CB radios, a Bearcat III police scanner and a fuzzbuster radar detector, all powered by an auxiliary battery. 

Reaching to the floor of the passenger side, he grabbed his Coleman thermos and unscrewed the top which served as a cup for the potent, double brew coffee made special for him by a friendly waitress in Barstow. He took a sip. 

One of the radios crackled. A voice said, "Don't blow it." 

Shard looked at the radios to confirm that they were all powered down. 

"Not now, Dick," Shard murmured to the disembodied voice.

"Do you even remember her face?" Dick said through the inert radio. 

"You're not helping." 

Dick had a habit of bothering Shard when he was in his zone. He ignored the interruption but couldn't help but think of his wife. 

Grace. 

Did he remember her face? 

He could picture a face but he couldn't be sure if it was his wife. Shard’s life had become a waking dream for years now. His friends, few that he could claim, worried about his mental state. Time and memory were nebulous and he often slipped between what was now and what was then. Not that it bothered him. He knew when to focus, when he had a target, as now. The ancillary streams of memory and experience that floated on his periphery were not a distraction; in fact it served to confirm the most important thing, that he was alive. 

"Don’t bother me," Shard said to the air, putting the thought from his mind. It no longer mattered what Shard's memory could supply. It mattered only that the score was settled, that the karmic balance was satisfied. 

"Whatever you say, captain," Dick replied. 

To exorcize the voice, Shard powered up the CBs. Their tiny red and yellow lights shone with a happy resonance, emitting a warm hum of static. He flipped through the channels catching only the voices of some far-off truckers talking about 'smokies and poontang.' 

Dick was silent.

Removing his balorama sunglasses, Shard rubbed his face. He had lived the last five years limited to a single eye after an incident seven thousand feet above the earth. Lacking depth perception, he now drove by feel. The psilocybin, opening his third eye, evened things out. 

Another check of his watch. 3:15. 

He let himself merge with the moment, feeling everything around him as the mushrooms bloomed to their fullest. Car and driver melded together. He became one with the Ferox: the steering wheel, the tires, the systems and intricately interlaced mechanizations, the sharpened edge of the ground spoiler. Everything. Shard was aware of all. 

From the back seat, among the piles of Jim Thompson pulps and E. M. Corin paperbacks, he grabbed a hard plastic case, set it on the seat beside him and unlatched it. Inside was a bulky headset which Shard situated on his head like a crown. He lowered the hinged apparatus that looked something like binoculars over his face. PVS-5 night-vision goggles. Military grade. A gift from an old friend named Rex Caliber, a man well-connected; still a pilot, still a hero. 

America’s prince. He and Rex hadn't spoken in some time. Rex Caliber, a high profile member of society, might even be president someday. As such he could not be associated with a hard living road warrior on a mission of murder. Shard didn’t hold it against him.  

Shard had once been like him. But the gods had different ideas. He thought of his old friend as he flipped on the power to the device. As the goggles blinked on, Shards' sight was filled with a bright green image of the two-lane road before him.

He saw the slightest flicker of motion in the scope a few miles down the 86 and heading his way. The flicker became a steady pale light and the light became a small glowing circle that bifurcated into a pair of headlamps. Colors seeped around the edges of the electronic display, a nimbus of shifting luminance. 

They may be murderous degenerates, Shard thought, but they sure are punctual.