Strange Highways

cane with one palsied hand, before either Joey or Celeste could even cry out to her.
     It was late October of 1975, and the Vietnam War had ended back in April, but Joey felt as if he were in one of those Asian battle zones that had filled the television news when he was growing up. The sudden, senseless death might have shocked him into immobility and fatal indecision - except that he was actually a forty-year-old man in a twenty-year-old body, and those additional twenty years of experience had been gained during a time when sudden, senseless violence had grown commonplace. As a product of the latter decades of the millennium, he could cope reasonably well in the midst of gunfire and random slaughter.
     The living room was filled with light, making easy targets of him and Celeste, so he rolled onto his side and fired the 20-gauge Remington at a brass floor lamp with a fringed shade. The roar of the shotgun in that confined space was deafening, but he pumped a fresh shell into the breech and fired at one of the end-table lamps flanking the sofa, then pumped it again and took out the lamp on the other end table.
     Understanding Joey's intent, Celeste fired one round into the television screen, silencing the sitcom. The burnt-powder stench of gunfire was immediately overlaid with the hot, astringent odor of ruined electronics.
     "Stay low, under the windows," Joey instructed. In the ear-stunning aftermath of the shotgun fire, he sounded as though he were speaking through a woolen winter scarf, but even though his voice was muffled, he could hear the tremor of fear in it. He was a child of the premillennium follies, steeled to the savagery of his fellow human beings, but he nevertheless felt as though he might wet his pants. "Follow the walls to a doorway, any doorway, just get out of the room."
     Crawling frantically along the floor in the darkness, dragging the shotgun by its strap, Joey wondered what role he was supposed to serve in his brother's nightmare tableau. If Celeste's parents returned to town and stepped into P.J.'s gun sights, locals would provide all twelve bodies needed for the creation of his demented bit of theater. But he must have a use in mind for Joey too. After all, he had raced to catch up with the Mustang on the county route, swung onto Coal Valley Road, and paused tauntingly, daring Joey to follow. Although he perpetrated atrocities that any normal person would call acts of madness, P.J. didn't otherwise behave irrationally. Even within his homicidal fantasies, he operated with an appreciation for structure and purpose, however grotesque they might be.
     In the Bimmers' kitchen, the light in the oven clock cast a soft green glow that barely illuminated the room - but even that was bright enough to make most of the details visible and to keep Joey close to the floor.
     Two windows. One over the sink. The other beside the breakfast table. Both had side-panel curtains and, better yet, vinyl roll-up blinds that were drawn halfway down.
     Cautiously rising to his feet at the side of the breakfast table, with his back pressed to the wall, he reached out and pulled that blind all the way over the glass.
     Breathing hard, both from exertion and fear, he was bizarrely convinced that P.J. had circled the house and was now directly behind him, outside, with only the wall between them. In spite of the wind and rain, maybe P.J. could track him by his loud breathing and would shoot him through the wall to which his back was pressed. The moment passed, and the shot in the spine didn't come, and his terror abated somewhat.
     Although he would have preferred that Celeste remain on the floor, below any possible line of fire, she risked a bullet in the arm by drawing the blind at the sink window.
     "You okay?" he asked, when they eased back to the floor and met again in the center of the kitchen, staying on their knees in spite of having secured the two windows.
     "They're all dead, aren't they?" she whispered bleakly.
     "Yeah."
     "All three."
     "Yeah."
     "No chance
     "No. Dead."
     "I've known them all my life."
     "I'm sorry."
     "Beth used to baby-sit me when I was little."
     The eerie green glow from the oven clock made the Bimmer kitchen shimmer as though it were underwater or had passed through a veil into an unnatural realm outside the flow of