Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede - Bradley Denton (best thriller books to read TXT) 📗

for more than a year. And then, soon after Christmas, we learned that Uncle Mike was being drafted. By the time Mother could arrange for time off work to visit him in Des Moines, he had already been shipped to boot camp.

But on June 8, I knew neither that Mother saw the tornado as an omen nor that her brother was destined to be sent to Vietnam. All I knew was that on that day, I had been saved by the power of prayer.

So you pray your prayers to God, and I’ll pray my prayers to mine. May the best chorus win.

The cop car from El Dorado stayed on my tail for so many miles that I almost stopped to give myself up. Raising a finger to Authority is all well and good, but you can’t hold it up there forever.

But Peggy Sue slowly began to gain a little ground, and then a little more. Finally, when it had been several curves and hills since I’d last seen the red and blue lights in the mirrors, I pulled off onto a dirt sidetrack and scooted Peggy Sue under a railroad trestle, where I turned off her lights and waited.

I waited a long time, but the cop car never came past me, although a few other cars did. As I had hoped, the El Dorado Authorities must have stopped soon after the bike and I left their official jurisdiction. I turned on Peggy Sue’s lights and pulled back onto the paved road. I knew that we still weren’t safe, though, because the El Dorado boys had probably alerted the Authorities of whatever jurisdiction we did happen to be in.

Less than two miles later, I passed a black Jaguar that was parked on the shoulder of the road with its lights off. I recognized it as one of the cars that had passed while I’d been hiding under the trestle. Probably just a couple of rich kids making out, I told myself.

The car’s headlights came on, flashing from the Ariel’s mirrors into my eyes, and began following us. I cranked Peggy Sue up to eighty and held her there, but the Jaguar kept pace, staying within a half mile. Almost a hour later, after our road had bypassed Winfield and Arkansas City and had taken us into Oklahoma, the headlights were still shining in the mirrors.

I’d had enough of them. Peggy Sue and I took a sharp left onto a strip of blacktop with a sign that said TO KAW RESERVOIR. A forest crowded both sides of the road, and the Ariel’s headlight beam threw crooked shadows among the trees.

The road curved back and forth as the leafless forest became thicker, and I had to reduce our speed to keep us from jumping off the blacktop and ramming a tree trunk. During a rare stretch of straight road, I glanced at a mirror and saw the Jaguar’s headlights emerging around the previous curve.

The road was angling down toward the reservoir. I sped up a little despite the danger, hoping to put at least two curves between us and the Jaguar, but the headlights never dropped back quite far enough for me to pull over and hide in the trees.

The forest ended abruptly, and the road was swallowed by a wide, sloping apron of asphalt. As Peggy Sue and I passed through on open gate onto the apron, the bike’s headlight beam wavered among the aluminum masts of sailboats docked at a marina. The sky was still covered with a thick shell of clouds, so neither moonlight nor starshine broke through to gleam on the water. The lake was an unbroken sheet of black stretching toward the horizon.

I turned the Ariel around and accelerated back onto the road. Then I braked hard, kicking down the stand at the same time, and dismounted, running back to the open metal-bar gate. I pulled the gate across the road and jumped back onto Peggy Sue just as the Jaguar came around the last curve. Its headlights almost blinded me, and I had to guess whether the Ariel and I had enough room to shoot past without running off the road.

The bike’s left mirror scraped against the driver’s side window, and then we were past and running hard. I heard the Jaguar’s tires squeal, but I didn’t look back to see whether it had hit the gate. Either way, the driver would have to get out and open the gate so that he could drive onto the apron; the road was too narrow for the Jaguar to turn around.

I remembered where most of the curves were, so the bike and I were able to go faster than we had coming down to the lake. When we had almost reached the main road, with no sign of the Jaguar behind us, I stopped, killed the Ariel’s lights, and rolled her into a clump of trees and dead brush on the inside of a tight left-hand curve.

The Jaguar came by about thirty seconds later. Its tires shrieked on the curve and its lights shone into the trees across the road from us, and then it was past. A moment later I heard it burn out onto the main road and roar an angry twelve-cylinder roar—heading south, I thought. The driver was pushing it hard.

We waited until I couldn’t hear the Jaguar anymore, and then we waited a few minutes longer. The sound didn’t return.

I whooped and slapped Peggy Sue on the tank, then pushed her out of the trees and remounted. If I could continue to be devious for a few more days, we might make it to Lubbock after all, especially since I was starting to get used to riding in the cold.

We went out to the main road again and headed south, but I started looking for more obscure side roads so that we could start zigzagging. I didn’t want to risk running into the Jaguar again.

Miles of back-road zigzagging later, after having passed ghost towns and windowless farmhouses, darkened bait shops and abandoned filling stations, I saw a pair of headlights in the rearview mirrors. They were several miles behind us, but even at that distance they looked familiar.

I twisted Peggy Sue’s throttle, and as we sped faster and faster, the headlights behind us dropped back farther and farther. I relaxed a little and slowed to a safer speed. The occupants of the vehicle behind us didn’t care who we were or what we did. Those headlights didn’t belong to the Jaguar, but to some rural vehicle carrying its occupants home from a late night in town.

A few miles later we reached an intersection with a north—south state highway, and I decided to risk it. The back rounds were rough, and my butt was sore. I knew that Peggy Sue appreciated the smoother pavement, too, because she began running better than she had since leaving home.

That gave me the confidence to pull in at a convenience store/gas station in one of the myriad small towns that dot eastern Oklahoma. Since Peggy Sue was in such a good mood, she would probably start again if I shut her off for a few minutes. I checked my watch as we stopped beside the Regular pump and saw that it was 12:30 A.M. The Ariel had been running for over six hours since leaving the motel in El Dorado. Almost twenty-four hours had passed since Buddy Holly had first appeared on my Sony.

As I filled the tank and tried to get the kinks out of my knees, I realized that while I wasn’t especially cold, I was starving. Not only had it been almost twenty-four hours since Buddy had appeared, but it had also been almost twenty-four hours since I had eaten anything—and that had been a couple of handfuls of microwave popcorn. I needed carbohydrates, and I needed them now. Junk food was the only answer.

I finished refueling Peggy Sue and then went into the shop, removing my gloves but leaving the helmet on, and saw that I was in the right place. Nowhere in the world can you find a wider variety of empty calories than at any American convenience store. While the clerk was busy waiting on a man who was paying for a tankful of unleaded and a pouch of Red Man, I strolled up an aisle and stuffed the pockets of the Moonsuit with as many brightly colored bags and rectangles as they could hold.

By the time the clerk looked up, I had the pockets zipped and four dollar bills in my hand. Casually, as if it had taken me this long to make up my mind, I selected a bag of CornNuts and took it to the register.

“That and gas be it?” the clerk asked. He was nineteen or twenty and bored out of his skull. He wouldn’t have cared if I had shoplifted the icecream freezer and the cash register.

“Yeah, unless you’ve got some contact lens soaking solution,” I said. My eyes were stinging again, although the sharper pain behind my left eye had not come back. Eluding the Jaguar had made me feel good. Even my feet were comfortably warm.

“Sorry,” the kids said as he took my money. “You ought to wear glasses. Less expensive, less trouble.” He tapped his own wire frames.

I grunted, thinking of my black plastic-framed glasses lying entombed in a dresser drawer at home. I had put them away in 1978.

“Twenty-three cents your change,” the kid said, shoving the coins across the counter.

As I looked down at the counter, I saw the stack of Tulsa newspapers beside the register. The one on top had a headline reading SUSPECTED MARXIST AGITATOR TAKES OVER TV AIRWAVES. Below the headline was a reproduction of a photo from the last Cowboy Carl’s employee party. A red circle surrounded my head.

“Want a paper?” the kid asked.

I pocketed the twenty-three cents and looked up. “Nah,” I said, trying to sound indifferent. I was glad I had left my helmet on. Even so, I felt exposed, and I had to stop myself from putting a hand in front of my faceplate. “Nothing but bad news anyway.”

“Got that right,” the kid said, a faint light of interest brightening his eyes. “Say, do you know whether that TV stuff is true? I’m working a double shift, so I ain’t seen any tube since yesterday evening.”

“Me either,” I said, turning to go.

“You come back now,” the kid said, not caring whether I did or not.

As I turned, I found myself faceplate-to-chin with a fierce-eyed young woman with curled, dark blond hair. She was more than three inches taller then me, making her at least six-one. She was wearing worn Reeboks, red nylon warm-up pants, and a blue tank top that left her arms and shoulders bare. Her skin was goose-pimpled, and her muscles and veins stood out in tight cords. She looked as if she could bench press a tractor. She had a backpack slung over one shoulder, and I had the impression that it was filled with cannonballs.

“You,” she said, jabbing me in the chest with a forefinger.

Even through the Moonsuit, the jab left a dune-size spot of pain below my collarbone. Worse than that, though, was the look of contempt on the woman’s face. She knew me. She knew who I was. I was dead.

I tried to run down an aisle, but she sidestepped to block me.

“You own that putrid motorcycle?” she asked. Her voice was a normal woman’s voice except for the edge it had, the edge that said, Answer politely or I’ll break your wrists.

My next thought was that this woman was the driver of the Jaguar that had been following me. I had unwittingly committed some offense against either