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As the last blue sky shrank northward, thunderheads towered as if they wereviolently froeyet crawled the planet

I walked south, into the wind, retracingthat other street drains lacked the lightning bolt--until I arrived at the mouth of a wide alleyway sis and warehouses In sohborhood, workers labored, deliveries were being made and shipments loaded But here, in spite of wind-stirred power-company lines that softly whistled overhead, there lay a stillnesscity

As I entered the alley, the sun abruptly subed in clouds, and the bleak, black shadows of utility poles melted into the potholed pave docks,roll-ups, and latticed s of many small panes so filthy that they were all but opaque

Past thenarrower than the others, with a h to admit trucks of any size The ere as blinded with dust as all the others, but lights inside lent the glass a silvery sheen

Beyond doubt, the cowboy trucker was nearby The ihter and more colorful and so fearso his threat, I wished fervently that I had bought a Kevlar jockstrap

At theWhen I heard nothing, I drew the pistol from my waistband I tried the lever handle, and the unlocked door opened a crack E silence, I eased inside and closed the door quietly behind htened by overhead banks of fluorescent tubes Only the middle of the three bays contained a vehicle, a white Ford van, one of those sh this one had no coo eo area contained nothing, though perhaps soon it would ied, and terrified childrenFor the sake of silence, I left the vehicle open

In the back wall of the garage, opposite the roll-ups, two doors flanked a freight elevator There is a classic short story in which a man must open one of two doors, aware that a beautiful lady waits behind one and a hungry tiger behind the other, but he doesn’t knohich door is which Given ht The freight route didn’t appeal, either

Co stairs They were concrete with glued-on rubber treads for safety, which also served to mute my footsteps I eased the door shut behindwhen I heard two male voices above me in the stairwell The words bounced between the brick wall on lossy-yellow fiberboard on my left, and were distorted so that I couldn’t be certain that either speaker was the cowboy trucker

With the pistol, I could intimidate them But if my quarry was not one of the two, I would have no way of knohether or not Iinnocent e--and found it changed Instead of overhead fluorescents, three single-bulb laht shone just bright enough for one and that bare concrete replaced the than any of that was the red-and-black ProStar+ with sparkly silver striping and its long black trailer, which stood in the center bay where the white van had been only seconds earlier In this enclosed space, the eighteen-wheeler looked even bigger than it had appeared to be on the open road, and although an inani consciousness and intention, cannot be n as the Death Star hich Darth Vader atomized entire planets

Ten

THE PROSTAR+ STOOD IN THE TRANSFORMED GARAGE as though it had eaten the Ford van I wondered if I should reconsider my disdain for possessed-vehicle

After a life of supernatural engage ihteen-wheeler to the side farther fro there until I could get a glih the driver’sand the windshield, of who followed me out of the stairwell If one of theet the drop on him If that proved to be impossible--if, say, he appeared with the flamethrower that he intended to use on the children--I could retreat through the outer door by which I’d entered the building and hide elsewhere along the alley, at a position from which I could monitor events

No one ca They seemed to be nearby, yet their voices were veiled The words were distorted beyond understanding, as when the cowboy and the man with the battered-boxer face--sery conversation in the basement machine room at the truck stop

This time, they did not appear even in phantom form I had only their voices, by which I could not precisely place them And then they fell silent

I was concerned that they had become aware of me, as I had been aware of them in the machine room Perhaps our circumstances had been reversed and I was semitransparent to them while they were invisible to me

The next twenty or thirty seconds were as sharp as saw teeth, working on ular chill of one of these h the space that I occupied

Instead, I heard an engine turn over, not that of the ProStar+, but that of a h it was h some barrier just as the voices had been filtered I could only assume that it was the white Ford van, which had beco and low ru perplexed me for a moment But then I realized that this was the distorted sound of a big seg on its tracks