The Axman Cometh by John Farris

those eyes with the end of an ax handle and goes out the door as the woman in the carpenter's overalls calls to Dab in the back room.
    "I hope you're not going to tell me I got to wait another day for my greenhouse sashes, Dabney Hill!';
    "They came in this mornin ', Myrna. Drive your pathetic old truck 'round to the back and I'll load ' em for you right this minute."
    "How's the world treating you, Shannon?" She's a feisty little woman with a bad overbite, which causes her to spray her s's around like Daffy Duck.
    "Fine, Mrs. Rockett . That Army man who was just in here, he's from Rhode Island." Shannon always got A's in geography. There is a magic in names and places for her, that prompted her to name the late family hound "Borneo" when she was seven. Some day , renowned as an artist, she will travel to all those places in the National Geographic that have caught her fancy.
    "Will wonders never cease?" Mrs. Rockett hands Shannon her truck keys. " Darlin ', would you mind so awfully doing me the favor? It's double-parked directly out front. I just got to get off my dogs a minute, they're killing me."
    "No, problem, Mrs. Rockett ."
    As she reaches the sidewalk Shannon catches sight of Autry Smith driving by in his station wagon. Now he's wearing sunglasses but he's taken his hat off. In spite of his haircut, he's a very good-looking mam. He honks and she waves, thinking wistfully that she wouldn't mind so much being an army wife if you got to do all that traveling. Ankara, Turkey. Wasn't there an article on Turkey in the Geographic a few months ago, the splendors of Constantinople? Last night she read about Lapland. With faraway lands spinning through her mind she gets into Mrs. Rockett's truck and puts the key into the ignition. But the truck won't start, it just grinds sluggishly underfoot. Exasperated, Shannon sits back and looks around the familiar street near downtown Emerson, Kansas, and wonders if her time will ever come.
    "What's the matter? Can't you get it started? Look, I'm in a hurry, it's an emergency!"
    (Eighth Avenue and 33rd Street, New York City. The cold rain is coming down in monsoon quantities now and the battered old cab has stalled in the intersection after the driver was forced to brake for some fool peddling through the rain on his bicycle. The driver wears a white turban that is none too clean, like cast-off bandages, and English is not his native tongue. He shrugs and waves his hands. " Eempossible !" he says, of the junkpile he has been issued to drive.)
    "We can't just sit here," Donald Carnes says anxiously, seeing only a smear of lights through the windows, which are thickly awash in the downpour. "Somebody's going to hit us. You ought to get out and push us over to the curb."
    " Eempossible !" the driver says, with a cutthroat's glare at the back seat, and Don is thankful for the thickness of the lucite partition, filled with holes like Swiss cheese but more neatly arranged, that separates them. He's not sure where they are, being unable to read a street sign. A bus looms, stops a hair's breadth from the side of the cab where he is sitting, and Don quickly slides to the other side of the bumpy seat, painfully engaging a spring half-sprouted from the stuffing like some evil growing thing. Horns. It's much too warm in the cab, at least the heater has been working, overcompensating for other deficiencies all the way down from Columbus and 79th where, fifteen minutes ago, he counted himseif lucky finding an empty. The heat, coming after five Papa dobles and what he now ascribes to the effects of some sort of drug maliciously slipped into one of the drinks, perhaps by the scary Hemingway impersonator in Cabrera's bar, has him nauseated. Anxiety hasn't done him any good, either. He had not looked forward to a particularly peaceful evening, trying to sort out with Shannon at least a few of the difficulties that had aborted their wedding plans five months ago (her difficulties, not his), but now he seems