Misery

falling to either side of him and into his lap, his face plowed into bloody senselessness by the mower’s blade. Saw him crawling out of the barn and down the driveway to the bulkhead, the torn streamers of his uniform swinging and fluttering. Saw him melting magically through the bulkhead and reintegrating his corpse’s body down here. Saw him crawling across the packed dirt floor, and the little noises Paul heard weren’t rats but the sounds of his approach, and there was but a single thought in the cooling clay of the trooper’s dead brain: You killed me. You opened your mouth and killed me. You threw an ashtray and killed me. You cockadoodie son of a bitch, you murdered my life.
Once Paul felt the trooper’s dead fingers slip, tickling, down his cheek, and he screamed loudly, jerking his legs and making them bellow. He brushed frantically at his face and knocked away not fingers but a large spider.
The movement ended the uneasy truce with the pain in his legs and the drug-need in his nerves, but it also diffused his terror a little. His night vision was coming on strong now, he could see better, and that was a help. Not that there was much to look at — the furnace, the remains of a coal-pile, a table with a bunch of shadowy cans and implements lying on it and to his right, up a way from where be was propped… what was that shape? The one next to the shelves? He knew that shape. Something about it that made it a bad shape. It stood on three legs. Its top was rounded. It looked like one of Wells’s death-machines in The War Of the Worlds, only in miniature. Paul puzzled over this, dozed a little, woke, looked again, and thought: Of course, I should have known from the first. It is a death-machine. And if anyone on Earth’s a Martian, it’s Annie-fuckin-Wilkes. It’s her barbecue pot. It’s the crematorium where she made me burn Fast Cars.
He shifted a little because his ass was going to sleep, and moaned. Pain in his legs — particularly in the bunched remains of his left knee — and pain in his pelvis as well. That! probably meant he was in for a really bad night, because his” pelvis had gotten pretty quiet over the last two months.
He felt for the hypo, picked it up, then put it back. A very light dose, she had said. Best to save it for later, then. He heard a light shuffle-scuffle and looked quickly in the corner, expecting to see the trooper crawling toward him, one brown eye peering from the hash of his face. If not for you I could be home watching TV now with my hand on my wife’s leg.
No cop. A dim shape which was maybe just imagination but was more likely a rat. Paul willed himself to relax.
Oh what a long night this was going to be.

He dozed a little and woke up slumped far over to the left with his head hung down like a drunk in an alley. He straightened up and his legs cursed him roundly. He used the bedpan and it hurt to piss and he realized with some dismay that a urinary infection was probably setting in. He was so vulnerable now. So fucking vulnerable to everything. He put the urinal aside and picked up the hypo again.
A light dose of scopolamine, she said — well, maybe so. Or maybe she loaded it with a hot shot of something. The sort of stuff she used on folks like Ernie Gonyar and “Queenie” Beaulifant.
Then he smiled a little. Would that really be so bad? The answer was a resounding HELL, NO! It would be good. The pilings would disappear forever. No more low tide. Forever.
With that thought in mind he found the pulse in his left thigh, and though he had never injected himself in his life, he did it efficiently now, even eagerly.

He did not die and he did not sleep. The pain went away and he drifted, feeling almost untethered from his body, a balloon of thought drifting at the end of a long string.
You were also Scheherazade to yourself, he thought, and looked at the barbecue pot. He thought of Martian deathrays, burning London in fire.
He thought suddenly of a song, a disco tune, something by a group called the Trammps: Burn, baby, burn, burn the mother down…