Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede, Bradley Denton [libby ebook reader .txt] 📗

the ones by the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Full Tilt Boogie. Mother could get righteously angry with the best of them, but even she had a hard time holding a grudge against the dead.

Still, things always get worse before they get better. The year of Mother’s thirtieth birthday was a signal for all of the evil on the planet to squirm out into the light. 1971 began with the conviction of Charles Manson and three members of his “family” for the slaughter of seven people. The murders were two years in the past, but it was only with the trial that the sickening details were revealed. Then, as if that weren’t horror enough, a court-martial told the world that Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr., was guilty of the murder of twenty-two South Vietnamese civilians. Our allies.

One night soon after the conclusion of the trial, flipping from one radio station to another, I chanced upon a country music station playing a song that praised Calley as a hero. I was confused by this and asked Mother to clarify the situation for me. She refused. If she had her way, she said, I wouldn’t hear anything about what was going on out in the world in the first place.

Laos was invaded by South Vietnamese and U.S. forces in February, and thousands were killed. Jim Morrison died of a “heart attack” in France on July 3. North Vietnam was bombed in December.

And, paradoxically, while the world was filled with pain, there were triumphs. Apollo 14 and Apollo 15 went to the moon in January and July, and I felt pride so massive I thought my chest would explode. Space had tried to stop us, but we had come back. We had conquered another planet.

I was eleven years old.

There would be two more lunar landings in 1972, but then we would abandon our new planet, won at such high cost, without so much as a good-bye.

The Vietnam war and the Apollo program had more in common than was clear at the time.

By the end of the year, Mother had begun to talk openly of her beliefs concerning the ancient Atlanteans, their ships of light, the Cosmic Battle, and the malevolent ones. I laughed and told her that she was dreaming.

I thought that I knew better than she did, that my A in science meant that I knew far more of what the Universe was about than she with her fantasies ever could.

Obviously, I knew less than nothing.

That, at least, hasn’t changed. Everything else has.

Miraculously, Peggy Sue started when the Bald Avenger attacked at the roadside park, and we escaped. I would like to think that I would have gone back to help Gretchen, but I didn’t have to face that decision. As I was slowing down to consider it, the Ford crew cab that the Bald Avenger had been driving barreled past. Its interior light was on, and I saw Gretchen at the wheel. I followed.

Now that Peggy Sue, Gretchen, and I had survived and would continue to survive for a while (the Jaguar’s rear tires had been shot flat, so the Avenger couldn’t come after us), I began to wonder how my neighbors’ Doberman had happened to show up in the middle of Oklahoma. Ringo’s size and his galvanized chain collar had identified him beyond any doubt.

He had appeared some four hundred miles from where I had last seen him.

As I rode, I listened to the ragged noise emanating from Peggy Sue’s semi-amputated left tail pipe. Ringo had bitten through it, and I still had the threaded tooth he had lost doing so. I had seen his eyes, and they had burned with blue sparks.

The conclusion I came to was weird enough that Mother would have been proud of me: Ringo was a doggy robot, or a canine android, or something like that. Therefore, he had stamina beyond that of mortal Dobermans and could follow me indefinitely. Unless the Bald Avenger had killed or deactivated him, I would be seeing the beast again.

That made me unhappy. Ringo scared the piss out of me.

As did the Bald Avenger. I hoped that they had managed to waste each other, because I figured that was the only way I’d have a shot at making it to Lubbock unscathed. So far, the regular cops hadn’t been a big problem, so as long as I could get the Avenger and the Doberman pinscher cyborg off my tail—

I would still be in trouble. Ringo belonged to Cathy and Jeremy What’s-Their-Name, which had to mean that they were something weird too. (The astute reader will recognize that I should have figured all this out two days earlier when Ringo bit through hot metal. I plead extenuating circumstances. Buddy Holly had just come back from the grave and had read my name on TV. I was preoccupied.) I was being pursued by things beyond human ken. I began to wonder whether Mother might have been on to something all along.

Such were my thoughts when Gretchen’s truck pulled onto the shoulder. I stopped alongside, and she rolled down the window.

“Goddamn cheap-ass ratmeat,” she said.

I flipped up my faceplate. “What’d I do now?”

“This junk Ford is out of gas. I abandoned my backpack to get to it—my backpack, with my weights and tape player and everything—and now it’s stranded me in Oklahoma at two-thirty in the morning with a dorkus on a motorcycle.”

I patted the portion of Peggy Sue’s seat that extended behind me. “Room for a passenger,” I said.

Gretchen’s face contorted. “I’m wearing warm-ups over a tank top and shorts. I’d freeze.”

I shrugged and revved the Ariel’s engine. It didn’t sound good, which diminished the effect I’d been hoping for. “Up to you,” I said, “but I’m going on to Lubbock.” I put the bike into gear.

Gretchen poked a shotgun barrel out of the window. “You take off without me, and I’ll shoot ‘Peggy Sue’ right in the motor,” she said.

I stopped. “How’d you know her name?”

She opened the truck door and stepped out. “You talk in your sleep,” she said, climbing onto the bike behind me. She put her left arm around my waist and cradled the shotgun in her right.

“You sure you want to keep that?” I asked. The shotgun was aimed at the back of my knee.

“Positive. Just like I’m positive that I was crazy for deciding to go to Lubbock with you. What do I care if Buddy Holly has risen from the grave? What’s he gonna do for me if he has? Just take me to the nearest town with a phone, yorkface, and I’ll get my friend in Houston to wire money for a bus ticket.”

“What about your lack of spiritual fulfillment?”

“Screw it. I’m alive, and I won’t be if I stick with you. Our association is ended. Let’s go.”

I flipped down my faceplate, and we went. I hadn’t seen any distance-to-next-town signs since leaving the roadside park, but it couldn’t be more than ten miles. Gretchen would survive the ride, and then we would part. It made me a little sad, even though I had a sense that we would each be better off without the other. Gretchen would be warmer, and I wouldn’t have a shotgun threatening to shorten my leg.

I should have remembered: Things get worse before they get better. A mist began to fall, and then, six miles from where the Ford had stopped, Peggy Sue lurched and died. I clutched and let her roll.

“What’s going on?” Gretchen shrieked. “What the bloody damn stupid pissant hell are you doing?”

“I don’t know,” I yelled. We coasted to a stop on the shoulder.

Gretchen dismounted and began stomping back and forth, shouting curses that were unintelligible because she was shivering. This went on for twenty seconds or so, and then she cocked the shotgun and pointed it at Peggy Sue’s fuel tank. “Get off!” she bellowed.

I was rigid. “No.”

She turned away and aimed the gun across the ditch at an empty field. A spike of blue fire roared out, and then another and another. A plastic shell bounced off my helmet. “Goddamn goddamn goddamn goddamn goddamn!” Gretchen cried, cocking and firing, cocking and firing, until the chamber was empty. She threw the gun into the field.

I switched off Peggy Sue’s lights and put down the kickstand. “Feel better?” I asked as I dismounted.

Gretchen punched me in the stomach, but because of the Moonsuit and a layer of cupcakes, it didn’t hurt much. I stood with my hands on my knees, and the mist turned to rain.

Gretchen flipped up my faceplate. Despite the darkness, I could see the water soaking her hair and running down her face. “My parents put you up to this, didn’t they?” she said.

When I was able to stand upright, we started walking. I pushed the bike. Gretchen set a fast pace, and occasionally I ran in an attempt to catch up. Peggy Sue was heavy, though, and before long Gretchen was far enough ahead that I couldn’t see her. When I did spot her again, it was because she was illuminated by the headlights of a vehicle coming from the north.

My first thought was that the Bald Avenger was after us again, but as I looked back I saw that the headlights sat too high to be the Jaguar’s. I stopped walking and straddled the Ariel to pretend that nothing was wrong, hoping that the unknown vehicle would pass by without slowing. I was more afraid of being hauled in than I was of being stranded in the rain.

Gretchen, however, was running down the shoulder toward me, waving her arms.

“Stop it!” I yelled. “We don’t know who that is!”

“I don’t care who it is,” she said.

I grabbed Gretchen’s wrists as she came close, but by then it was too late. A Winnebago slowed to a stop beside us. Lights came on inside, and the door opened.

An elderly couple smiled out. The husband, who was driving, asked, “You folks having trouble?”

“No,” I said, while Gretchen said, “Yes.”

“Need a lift?”

“Please,” Gretchen said, pulling away from me and starting toward the open door.

The wife’s eyes widened. “Dale, the radio, it talked about a motorbike, a blue suit…”

The husband’s face switched to an expression of shocked recognition. He put the Winnebago into gear and hit the gas.

Gretchen ran after it, keeping pace with the open door for fifteen or twenty yards. “I’m not with him!” she cried. “I’ve never seen him before! Wait, goddamn it!”

They didn’t. I got off Peggy Sue and began pushing again. When I reached Gretchen, she said, “I hate you.”

“You can’t,” I told her. “You’re my accomplice.”

I had judged that she was in too much discomfort to hit me this time, and I was right. She began walking beside me and the Ariel, calling us names now and then.

Another vehicle, a flatbed farm truck, came upon us from the same direction several minutes later, and it too slowed and stopped. Gretchen stared at it sullenly.

“What’s up?” the driver asked. His cab light wasn’t on, and I couldn’t see his face. I could, however, see the faces of a teenage boy and girl sitting beside him.

“Just some mechanical difficulty,” I said. “I can handle it, thanks.”

“You sure?” the man asked. “Nearest town’s Pumpkin Center, and there’s nothing there. There’s Lawton, of course, but that’s another twenty miles.”

I considered. Twenty miles might as well have been fifty or a hundred. The Moonsuit was wet and heavy, and my Nikes were drenched.

“Well, I’d hate to leave my bike out here,” I said.

“Got a ramp,” the man said. “Don’t think she’ll fall