Fellowship of Fear by Aaron Elkins Page B

angry with himself and the world. He had wanted to go to bed with Mary, all right. Of course he had. Why shouldn’t he? He needed sex like anybody else. He didn’t just need it; he liked it—he liked it a lot. At least he thought he did. It had been so damn long, maybe he was forgetting.
    When he turned off the highway onto the Dump Road, he was deep in his thoughts. He barely noticed the dark young man watching him so intently from the passenger seat of the car slowly going the other way. Probably he wouldn’t have noticed him in any case. His few days of Sicilian driving had inured him to the scrutiny that occupants of passing cars accorded each other. What should have caught his attention, however, was the peculiar fact that anyone at all was emerging from the Dump Road after midnight. The Dump Road—no one seemed to know its real name, but the nickname was apt—was a narrow, back-country route between Sigonella and the Catania highway, used mainly as a route to work by base employees.
    The night was clear, the road deserted and straight. Gideon plunged ahead at Sicilian speed, sunk in gloom. He could have been back at that cocktail party right now, damn it, going through all the delicious rigamarole of the Western pre-mating ritual. Instead, he was zooming down this black, godforsaken road, speeding toward another empty night.
    He really had to have a heart-to-heart talk with himself one of these days. It wasn’t that he was trying to be faithful to Nora. That would be morbid, and she wouldn’t have wanted it anyway. It was just that he needed something— something he couldn’t identify—that he hadn’t found in anyone since Nora.
    There was no shortage of sexy, available women around—that certainly wasn’t the problem—but they wanted either one-night quickies or Meaningful Relationships. For him, the one would have been tawdry, the other …well, he just wasn’t ready. It was funny, really. In his Social Institutions seminar, he separated them neatly into two concepts: the sexual drive was an ancient biological imperative, rooted in the pre-human past, whereas romance was merely a recent artifact, and a dying one at that; a twelfth-century French response to the non-ethics of feudalism. He really believed all that, or thought he did. Yet here he was tied up in knots and going without either sex or romance, horny and love-starved at the same time. Maybe what he needed most—
    He saw the dark shape of the car blocking the middle of the road a split second before its headlights went on, blinding him utterly. His foot clamped to the brake pedal, the wheels locked, and he went slipping and sliding toward the stopped car as if he were on ice. Except for the screeching of the tires, it was strangely like floating in a dream.
    He was, to his dismay, on a low one-lane bridge with no possibility of turning off the roadway. For the second time in a week, he was sure he was about to die, but with teeth clenched and muscles straining, he stepped on the brake and foolishly pulled back on the wheel. And somehow the weaving vehicle stayed on the bridge and slowed enough so that it finally slid into the stopped car at three or four miles an hour. There was a soft clunk, like a beer can crumpling, and then a gentle, tinkling shower of headlight shards to the ground. Then silence and darkness.
    Acting by instinct, Gideon fumbled free from his seat belt, flung open the door, scrambled out, and leaped over the side of the bridge to the gully a few feet below. He landed on his feet somehow, and floundered his way through underbrush and muck, back toward the end of the bridge from which he’d come. Then the flashlights went on and the shouting started, and he ducked back under the bridge and threw himself down into the foul-smelling mud behind a concrete bridge support. He lay on his stomach in the slime, panting and wet. By working his chin a little deeper into it, he was able to look back toward the center of the bridge,