Drop City

screamed with contorted metal. The pickup truck--there was an old man in a feed cap at the wheel, his face fallen away into a deep pit of astonishment and outrage--caught the van just athwart the passenger's side door and then shook itself loose and continued on into a tree, into several trees, and the horse lost all its legs and then found them again, even as Norm's van rebounded from the collision, described a long slow arc and came to rest in the center of the road.
    “Okay,” Norm was saying, “okay, everything's okay,” as if he'd planned it, as if the whole thing were just another stunt he'd orchestrated to enliven the day. He was bleeding from a gash under one eyebrow, a bright reservoir of blood pooling in the orbit of his eye before draining off into his beard. His glasses had been snapped across the spine and the windshield featured a spidery mandala set in the glass like an ornament, and how clever of those German engineers, Marco was thinking, how clever--but shouldn't there be one on his side too?
    Marco was all right, or that was his first impression, anyway. No blood, no broken bones. His right shoulder had a certain rigidity to it where he'd been flung against the dash three times in succession, and the acid seemed to be boiling up in his veins till he could hear the sizzle of it in his ears, but he was all right. All right, and out of the car--kicking open one very reluctant door and setting both his feet on the pavement, which hardly seemed to be moving at all. The horse--Charley Horse--was just standing there, trembling all over as if he'd been hosed down with ice water, Norm was a statue at the wheel of the van, and the old man--and his old wife--were camped out in the woods twenty feet from the road. Everything was still.
    Until the next car--a monster of a thing, a Buick, or maybe it was a Pontiac, staggered in the rear by the weight of the blue-flecked fiberglass runabout it was hauling--came shearing round the curve and Charley Horse bucked twice, put his head down and tried to leap it. Marco heard himself shouting, but he was shouting over the adrenal surge and the successive rippling shore-battering waves of peaking acid, and no other living thing seemed to hear or heed him, least of all the horse. Which immediately laid its thousand pounds of horseflesh across the crumpling hood of the Buick--or no, it was a Pontiac, because there was the chrome _V__ with the stoic chief welded into it--and began a slow futile drumming of its hooves against the fenders on either side. The boat was part of the act now too--it rode up the back of the trailer, then relaxed an instant before gracefully spinning across the road till it came to rest against the bumper of the van.
    Somebody was cursing. The sound of it arose from between the clenched teeth of the crash like an incantation, the same three monosyllables repeated over and over with increasing vehemence till the curses were screams and Marco was moving toward them through a scrim of what was real and what might have been. What did he see? A woman pinned behind the wheel of the Pontiac, her hair in curlers, her face distorted. Charley Horse had managed to tear himself open on the fulcrum of the hood ornament, and he'd collapsed the roof. Marco was fighting the drug, willing his mind to retake control of his body. He ducked away from the horse's hooves, from the horse's hundred buckets of blood and its looping gray intestines, and forced open the back door of the Pontiac. He had the woman--one long shriek of a woman--by the shoulders and dragged her into the backseat as if she were a piece of furniture, and then he had her out of the car and onto the shifting pavement. She wore her mouth like a badge, all that noise and violence, and he stood beside her, an arm round her shoulders, while Charley Horse thrashed himself off the car and slid across the shoulder of the road like a slick black sea lion leaving the shore for good. This time the horse didn't get up again.
    “Marco!” Norm was shouting. “Marco, do something! Shit! What is this, blood?” He was standing in the road now too, and so were the old man and the old lady, squinting into the light as if they'd come in late to a movie and were trying to find their seats. Norm looked strange without his glasses--inhuman, or no: non-human. He'd found a rag in the car--a torn T-shirt that must have belonged to one of the children--and he pressed it to his face to stanch the bleeding. “Fucking