Praying for Sleep

of track and froze.
    Michael Hrubek began to scream.
    The music stopped, replaced by a mumble of confused voices. The hearse rippled sideways like an airplane in a crosswind.
    Hrubek slammed his torso upward then fell back, again and again, trying to force his way out of the small opening, his massive neck muscles knotting into thick cables, his eyes bulging. He screamed and wept and screamed again. A tiny door in the black partition flew open and two wide eyes stared into the back of the vehicle. Surrendering to the fear Hrubek neither saw the attendant nor heard the man’s hysterical shout, “Stop! Stop the car. Christ, stop !”
    The station wagon careened onto the shoulder amid a staccato clatter of pebbles. A cloud of dust surrounded it, and the two attendants, wearing pastel green jumpsuits, leapt out and ran to the back of the hearse. One tore open the door. A small yellow light above Hrubek’s face popped on, frightening him further and starting another jag of screaming.
    “Shit, he’s not dead,” said the younger of the attendants.
    “ Shit he’s not dead? It’s an escape! Get back.”
    Hrubek screamed again and convulsed forward. His veins rose in deep clusters from his blue skull and neck, and straps of tendon quivered. Flecks of foam and blood filled the corner of his mouth. The belief, and hope, that he was having a stroke occurred simultaneously to each attendant.
    “Settle down, you!” shouted the youthful one.
    “You’re just going to get in more trouble!” his partner said shrilly, and added with no threat or conviction whatsoever, “We’ve caught you now so just settle down. We’re going to take you back.”
    Hrubek let go a huge scream. As if under the power of this sound alone the zipper gave way and metal teeth fired from the crash bag like shotgun pellets. Sobbing and gasping for air Hrubek leapt forward and rolled over the tailgate, crouching on the ground, naked except for his white boxer shorts. He ignored the attendants, who danced away from him, and rested his head against his own distorted reflection in the pitted chrome bumper of the hearse.
    “All right, that’s enough of that!” the younger attendant growled. When Hrubek said nothing but merely rubbed his cheek against the bumper and wept, the attendant lifted an oak branch twice the length of a baseball bat and waved it at him with some menace.
    “No,” the other attendant said to his partner, who nonetheless swung at the massive naked shoulders, as if taking on a fastball. The wood bounced off with hardly a sound and Hrubek seemed not to notice the blow. The attendant refreshed his grip. “Son of a bitch.”
    His partner’s hand snagged the weapon. “No. That’s not our job.”
    Hrubek stood, his chest heaving, and faced the attendants. They stepped back. But the huge man didn’t advance. Exhausted, he studied the two men curiously for a moment and sank once more to the ground then scrabbled away, rolling into the grass by the road, oblivious to the cold autumn dew that lacquered his body. A whimper came from his fleshy throat.
    The attendants eased toward the hearse. Without closing the back door they leapt inside and the wagon shot away, spraying Hrubek with stones and dirt. Numb, he didn’t feel this pummeling and merely lay immobile on his side, gulping down cold air that smelled of dirt and shit and blood and grease. He watched the hearse vanish through a blue cloud of tire smoke, grateful that the men were gone and that they’d taken with them the terrible bag of New Jersey rubber filled with its ghostly occupants.
    After a few minutes the panic became a stinging memory then a dark thought and then was nearly forgotten. Hrubek rose to his full six-foot, four-inch height and stood bald and blue as a Druid. He snatched up a handful of grass and wiped his mouth and chin. He studied the geography around him. The road was in the middle of a deep valley; bony ridges of rock rose up on either side of the wide asphalt. Behind him in the west—where the hearse had come from—the hospital was lost in darkness many miles away. Ahead lay the distant lights of houses.
    Like an animal released from his captors, he circled in an awkward, cautious lope, uncertain of which direction to take.
    Then, like an animal finding a scent, he turned toward the lights in the east and began to run, with an ominous grace and at a great speed.

2
    Above them the sky had gone from resonant gunmetal to black.
    “What’s that?