2000-11-06 at 21:22:40

Well, here's another small offering, but this one is slightly different. This is a short story in 2 parts. I have the first one here. This is the gristle of the story, so to speak, and the second as yet unwritten half is the explanation. Now, I want some feedback as to whether or not to post or write the second half... if you really want to know such unimportant details as what's in the hollow cornerstone and why the narrator speaks in plural... Oh, go read it. Then write me and tell me what you want. I'll take the best two out of the first three letters as my response. I'm serious, people. Write or I sic the ghost after you.

Here it is, anyway.

The Passenger

A Short Story In Two Parts

by The Vault

He was bent over the counter putting the decimal and the last two zeros on the check when the smiling salesman said, “I almost don’t want to sell you this car.”

When he looked up, the smiling salesman wasn’t smiling.

“What do you mean by that?” Walter Macaw replied, nonplussed by the frankness of the other man’s gaze.

“You remember the accident about a year back. With your frat brothers.”

“Frank and Marty?” Walter flushed, a pinkening of the hairline at his temples, and felt his confidence flow back. “Yeah, I remember them.” The pricks, his mind appended.

“This is that car.”

“You’re shitting me,” Walt replied, and glanced over his shoulder onto the lot. There it sat - that cherry red 1964 Mustang convertible with the white leather seats. It was beautiful and it always had been, even that day he’d first seen it on the back “scrap” lot with nearly all its windows broken out and the deep indention in the passenger side front door.

But it had been restored, every single bit repaired, replaced, or cleaned - and it was going to be his. Accident or no accident.

“Yeah, that’s the one.” His smile wasn’t coming back, and hadn’t left a forwarding address. “I don’t understand why the police didn’t hold on to it… but two months after the parents of that girl came around and sold it to me for parts. Asked me to scrap it. I don’t know why I never got around to it.”

“It was just an accident. Nothing big. And it still runs like a dream, doesn’t it,” Walt demanded, pen point still poised.

“Just like a dream,” the other man assured, and shook his head as if to clear it. “I still don’t know why you want it, though.”

“Dad took the Jag away.” You noisy son of a bitch. “I need a machine for the summer, and I want something that folds down for the sun. Now am I buying this car or not?”

“Yeah, sure!” protested the other man in alarm. “The customer always knows best.”

“Damn straight.” With a flourish, he signed off on the check - a whole week’s allowance -- and handed it over the counter. The salesman passed him the keys.

“Pleasure doin’ business with you!” he called as Walt slammed the show room door behind him, but still couldn’t shake the feeling of unease. There had been that blood stain on the leather of the back seat - he thought he had gotten most if not all of it out - and the tiny piece of scalp he’d found in the door latch of the driver’s side back door, with two sad strands of long sandy brown hair still attached to it. Everyone had heard the whispered rumors. But the two dead frat brats had belonged to the two richest families in this tiny town and the whispers had been just that - whispers.

Yeah, he’d prettied it up and replaced the crumpled door - and it ran like a dream, after a bad accident and a year left sitting undriven in the elements. The rumors had always said that maybe it wasn’t just an accident after all.

But at that moment the bell to the front door rang, breaking into his musings, and the salesman had a fresh sparkling smile ready for the next likely customer.

**********

Fuck yeah, he thought, cruising away at an obscene 60 miles an hour on the little dirt road that lead back to the frat house. And I had almost forgotten those bastards. Nice car. The chick wasn’t that bad either. Everyone had always said that if someone could get her to spread, they could turn Ms. Ice-Bitch into a tart.

He propped his elbow on the driver’s side door, the tough canvas sunroof folded down and the wind whistling past. What a story. I had to dodge their sobbing relatives to get my damn CDs out of their rooms.

“...you...”

Walt plunged a thick pinkie - the right one, with his class ring on it - into his ear and swiveled it at high speed, to clear the canal. Some of their girl cousins weren’t sobbing all that hard, though. Those little shits - if you can’t keep it in your pants, at least keep it in the family. And God help you if you chase a chick after Frank or Marty had them. If you could get them to put out in under six months, you were gifted.

He sighed and goosed the gas. Fuck the Jag, this thing is sweet! The girls’ll love it.

The wind breathed again.

I must live through this, Walt thought suddenly. His bullet head with his close-cropped, to-the-moment-fad cut turned to the left and to the right. But he could see nothing but forest. No happy little college couple with a radio too loud picnicking in the woods, no car zooming to pass him with speakers blazing. He checked the back seat in the mirror - nothing but the sleek white leather and white floorboard carpet. He was alone. It had been nothing.

And he’d never admit to feeling relief when the white columns of Kappa Nu Beta came into view.

**********

Perhaps we should explain. Let’s tell you the story of a girl. This was a very pretty girl, but she was very shy, too. She liked books, and puzzles, and watching movies, and music. She liked to be alone, and she stumbled through this world, eyes downcast, slipping through the crowds, going to classes or meetings and doing what was required and then, with grateful relief, going back to her room.

But she wasn’t entirely alone.

No, sometimes her roommate came home. Her roommate stumbled through this world too, but usually in hangover, drunkenness, or both at once. Her roommate did not like music. Her roommate did not like books. Her roommate liked parties and boys (lots of boys!) and loud screeching noise and nail polish and tight shirts. And that was okay, for the very quiet girl could have the room all to herself and pay only the occasional fee of making sure that when her roommate finally came in passed out, she was in a position not to drown herself in her own vomit at night.

Such different souls. Perhaps our quiet girl should have taken that into account when she was invited by her roommate to a party over at Kappa Nu Beta, and promised much fun.

Her roommate seemed to have fun; a plastic cup filled with something smelly in one hand, her stockings half off, her other hand writhing in the crotch of some boy she probably hadn’t met before tonight. Our quiet girl realized very quickly that this was not much fun. So she tried to find her way back out to her car. She ran the gauntlet of drunken frat boys with their drunken sorority girls. She was pinched and pushed and prodded and teased. Fingers ran up her skirt and down her chest, but she made it out. She emerged into the cool night air, trailing a wake of cigarette smoke and beer fumes. She found her car. She unlocked the door. And then she made the mistake of needing something in the back seat and opening the back door to get it, instead of just driving on, driving away and escaping.

A sharp hard push, the slam of the door behind her, the raucous laughter as two strangers joined her in her cherry red Mustang convertible - no matter what’s in the back seat you never ever need it that much.

For her, the night’s fun had just begun.

**********

Oh, let’s get to the exciting bit. No one wants to hear about how many times during the summer Walt thought he heard or saw strange things while driving the car, whether or not they were real or just his imagination. You our reader already know something’s up. You need to get to the meat of the story as much as we need to tell it.

It was a night, an autumn night a great deal like that fun evening over a year ago. This wouldn’t be anything as chintzy as “the anniversary of the tragic accident”, written of course in a bold italic font: the anniversary of the tragic accident! No, just a night. The moon wasn’t even full. Sometimes it’s the event and not the night that the shadows remember. And how could they have forgotten?

He’d bought the beer that night, for him and his roommate. He’d gotten his groceries (microwave dinners and more beer). He’d put them in the back seat.

Don’t smirk, reader. This is the scary bit.

So he opened the door and bent in. Can you see him now - starter jacket and all, rounded ass poking up into the air as he roots for his drinks? Keep an eye on that ass because we’re going to show you what no one else saw, not even him.

Walt pulled the six-packs out of the floorboards onto the backseat and just before he would have straightened up a deep impression appeared for half a second in his sheer tear-away exercise pants; an impression in the shape of a man’s right shoe, with no foot there to make it. The force of the blow knocked him across the back seat. A beer smell wafted in as the six-packs were yanked from his hands and thrown into the front seat, landing hard like a set of cans but sounding soft, like a light purse. His legs were folded in and the door slammed shut so close behind him that the handle ripped the skin of his left knee open.

“Hey!” he screamed, in a voice that boded ill for whoever had thought this would be a nice prank to play. Running footsteps. The door in front of him opened by itself, the driver’s side door opened and slammed shut again. The backseat passenger door shut. An unseen presence drew him up by his hair and applied a hand to his face, hard. “Cunt,” the voice said casually from nowhere, puffing beer-breath in his face. The nowhere voice laughed and the wheels of the car churned the gravel of the makeshift parking lot, speeding Walt off into the night, alone with the emptiness of the car.

“What the hell is going on here!” he roared, and got another pop for his pains, this time so hard that his vision blurred. Something creaked inside his nose and blossomed in a knot of heat. He decided to shut up - how could you stop a punch you can’t even see?

“Keep her quiet,” replied a new voice from the empty front seat as headlights from an approaching vehicle painted the underside of the canvas roof a brilliant white. As the cars passed each other, the air in front of the rear view mirror rippled. A wave exchanged. We’re all brothers here. Nothing unusual.

“Oh yeah,” the back seat voice murmured in anticipation. Rough hands manipulated Walt around the seat as if he weighed nothing, as if his struggles made no difference, pushing him down on the upholstery, bringing up his legs. There was the sound of nylon ripping. The car turned on to the main road.

“Hold your damn horses, Frank, we’re in the middle of town.” The front seat voice gave a drunken giggle, and the Mustang swerved before settling on the yellow line.

“What’s going on?” Walt repeated in a quieter, less macho voice. Over it he heard the tones of lighter harmonics - a girl’s steady but frightened query.

“Don’t worry, babe, we’re just going to show you a good time.” A glint in the darkness, lit by a passing street lamp: the shine of phantom teeth in a dead boy’s mouth.

“Please, just let me go,” Walt felt his lips move, heard the higher voice say. “Take the car, take my purse - just let me go.”

“We aren’t interested in the car.” The front seat (Marty, his mind named it) chuckled. “We aren’t even interested in the purse.” The voice carried a lewd note at the end.

A zipper came down in the darkness... silken suggestion of flesh-on-flesh friction. “Just say when, Marty. I’m ready any time,” the voice beside him panted.

Another turn, and a new barely-paved back road. “We’re good now. Do it.”

Invisible hands pawed at his crotch. Walt felt a pair of underwear slide down, even though his pants were still intact, not a snap unfastened. He slapped at the hands and gave a full-throated scream, hearing what should have been his own voice slide preternaturally high in the scales.

“Shut up!” the back seat voice answered, following the command with another bruising blow. The world spun away as Walt swooned.

He woke again to the piercing pain.

**********

“I must get out of this.”

He barely breathed it, hardly thought he said it aloud. His huge athletic body looked ridiculous bunched up in the floorboard, but he wouldn’t have cared had he known. It wasn’t as if he could do anything about it either. Ladies and gents, Walt was no longer the driver.

No, Walt was deep inside himself by now, doing hysterical little laps around the track of consciousness with his other unknown guest. They were covered in blood, their pants drenched, their fingers caked with drying, sticky fluid. The thought of any sort of fluid made them both want to vomit, but right now the best thing would be to act like part of the scenery.

Marty was with him in the back seat now, still invisible. They had stopped in a lonely dead end and changed places, by the sound of it Frank keeping watch on Walt while Marty took a piss and worked himself into a boner. Then it had started again. Sometime along the way the fight went out of Walt. It did no good to struggle and only made it hurt worse. The phantoms now each enjoyed a phantom beer and talked quietly, satisfied as it were, and Walt had no mind to wonder at how they had raped him in a spot that didn’t exist on a man.

He was filled with ache…the bruises and welts rising on his face, torn and lacerated muscle injuries he’d done himself by struggling, the impossible wound between his legs that wasn’t really there at all. He shivered, but silently, and hot tears slipped out with no sobs attached to them.

A speck of his mind clawed its way up to the light long enough to remark “She was a virgin,” before being pulled back under the maelstrom of missing sanity.

“I must survive. I must get out of this.” He glimpsed faded tintype memories of a mother and a father, both loving, of a room at home filled with familiar and beloved things, and -- most strangely of all -- of a cornerstone with a removable edge, hollow inside.

Lights around the car roused the two-in-one out of their fugue. The ghosts were driving onto the Strip, the long road in the middle of town that was home to most of the shops and fast food stores. Curiosity almost made Walt sit up in the floorboard but a warning grunt from Marty and the sound of what sounded suspiciously like a folding knife unfolding kept him huddled down where he couldn’t be seen.

The Mustang turned twice, then slowed to a stop. “Billy Burger, can I getcha order please?” bellowed a scratchy metallic voice into the cool night. Walt restrained himself from screaming…the suicide gleam from a nonexistent knife blade and an invisible gaze kept his vocal cords frozen. He lay there unmoving as Frank the Ghost placed an order for four hamburgers with everything, two large fries, and two sodas. They pulled up to the window. The halogen glare burned down into Walt’s eyes... he dared not cover his face.

“That’ll be nine dollars and forty-six cents.” Walt listened, fully coherent for the first time in his horror. Did the window attendant not see - or see the ghosts? Couldn’t he tell that there was something wrong?

Clinking of change, crinkle of dollar bills. The light flickered as the waiter stowed the money away in the drawer. “Nice car, man,” he remarked over background noises as he finished bagging the meal.

“Yeah, it’s pretty sweet.”

“Whatcha doin’ tonight?” He handed over the paper bag. Walt saw a pale wrist with brown hairs, nothing more. The attendant was alive. Was he blind? The leather of the backseat was soaked in blood, and he had tried to scratch up the invisible faces and necks of both boys, when all else had failed.

“Crusin’ for ass.”

The young man laughed. “For real, man. Have a good evening.”

“You too.” Frank sniggered as they pulled out of the drive, back onto the darkened roads. He tossed Marty’s share back to him, and Marty folded away his knife. Walt couldn’t help himself - he watched, noting detachedly the indentations invisible fingers made in the hamburger bun. The specter seemed to catch him staring.

“Want some?” he said, extending the burger till it waggled right under Walt’s nose. “No?” Walt attempted to fight back a bout of sickness. It came out as a rather acidic burp. Marty snatched back his morsel and bit into it savagely.

I’ve got to get out of this, he/she thought solemnly as they stared up into the vacancy currently clutching half a hamburger, dropping shreds of lettuce and sesame seeds onto the upholstery. Walt thought of the attendant, not seeing them there, not seeing the blood and the ripped clothing, and rage began boiling within. I’ll get out of this, one way or another. I’ll make them pay.

**********

Walt was a good boy now. Walt had never been a better boy in his life, because now he knew what breathing - what living was worth. The ghosts drove around in circles, turning, turning, flash of street lamp or gloom of forgotten trails. Seemed like everything was winding down to a close. Walt was afraid. Dead girls tell no tales, after all. They were looking for some place to dump his body.

The spirit currently sharing double-occupancy was fully a creature of the moment, still hurting, still angry, still in the process of rape and death. Walt tried to separate and rise above, bludgeoning his mind for any detail of the accident it could recall.

They had found the car in the cul-de-sac at the end of Carter Street. Walt shivered; it was a more lonely and pitted old road than the one to the frat house. There had been a dead dog at the beginning of the skid marks that lead to the telephone pole.

Good. More, he begged, trying to ignore the quiet snuffling from his new roommate.

The boys had been thrown free, through the windows. It had been bad. Closed casket funerals for both. The pricks, his mind appended - with a new and holy fervor.

The girl (his mind stalled on the name, and she was in no condition to make introductions) had been tossed up and out, through the canvas roof. She’d hit a tree trunk…a pine… taken it right to the abdomen.

She had died on the scene of massive internal bleeding.

Walt began to sob, quietly but earnestly. He was going to die. It was all going to end for real. No take-backs, no gotchas, no mulligans, no loopholes and no way out. He was going to die. It was all that mattered now.

The Mustang made a left turn, and suddenly there were no more streetlights. Walt didn’t have to read a sign to know. This was the end of the road.

The boys were quiet now, pensive. The feel in the air was the kind of letdown you get after a good party. You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here. Time to clean up and close up.

How long was this road? How soon would it end? Walt was measuring his life in miles, not minutes.

Then he felt himself move and froze in horror but it made no difference. She was slowly but steadily inching their body up into a sitting position. She had finally realized that unless she fled, they would kill her.

No! he screamed inside himself, terrified. No! Stay! You idiot! They’ll wreck in just a minute! They’ll die! If we’re down in the floorboard I can hold on! I won’t get thrown out - I’ll survive it! But she persisted, doggedly rotating their torso a fraction at a time, ever watchful for signs that they noticed her furtive movement.

In a moment she had done it. Suddenly Walt could see out the window; the monochromatic world, washed out and faded by the headlights of the car, swallowed again by darkness as they whipped past. Trees, field, old barbed wire fence, pairs of glowing eyes from small forest things. The car hit the bumps and potholes at unsafe velocity, bouncing Walt around in the floor and still the specters didn’t notice. She put his left hand on the window frame, his right on the door handle, began pulling ever so slightly.

Like a brass band falling down a flight of stairs, many distinctly separate and punctuated events seemed to happen all at once. In a flash he saw the dog, a nameless, skinny brown cur of indeterminate ancestry who could by its sacrifice save or kill him. Ghostly hands closed on long brown hair that Walt didn’t have, pulling hard, the rough voice shouting “You bitch!” His hand jerked convulsively at the door handle and it came open, then slammed shut again as a high-pitched canine yelp cut off with an ominous thud. The car lost that peculiar controlled feeling vehicles have when properly in hand, became a loose cannon and an unknown variable. The front-seat ghost fought the wheel, pawing it in a desperate attempt to bring the car out of its sliding spin but it just seemed to gain speed until it all came to a crunching stop, sideways.

Walt, who had been crouching in the floor, heard in those last slivers of second two separate shattering windows and then he was flying. The canvas held for a microsecond, a half-breath, a heartbeat -- and tore. Go limp! he demanded of the body and it did, suddenly at his control again. He was as boneless as a newborn kitten, tumbling, watching the huge dark pine tree approach without emotion. It was meaningless now, and soon it’d be over.

He hit, and fell, a definite anticlimax. New horizons of pain opened for him as he rolled into a fetal position. But the world didn’t go away. He thought he could hear sirens as he raised his face into the glaring light but it was the horn of the car, sounding without end, an easy touchdown length away. “Oh,” he said, his throat raw, and finally could and did surrender to the strange comfort of vomiting. Walt voided his stomach down to the very acid and then passed out, grateful to be safe and alone at last even if he was dead.

**********

The angels were singing. Rather less than an angel himself, he hadn’t expected such a warm reception. The noise gradually became dissonant and blaring, gaining impurity and losing meaning, becoming once more the car horn as he gained consciousness. There’d be no way to tell how long he’d been out, alone and bleeding in the forest with a dead car and two dead boys that were finally, hopefully, dead.

He found he could move, but everything still hurt. Something hard was prodding him in the knee. Instantly on the defensive he struggled to raise himself, his eyes crossing in vertigo, his hand held out before him as a feeble shield from the next onslaught of horrors.

The car horn was swallowed up in instant, absolute silence.

Satisfied that he still lived she stepped back and planted the butt of the scythe into the soil, leaning on it as she watched him wriggle upright. Walt didn’t know if she cared that she was translucent and glowing blue around the edges, but for all he knew she could have been comfortable that way. There she was, unwitting tour-guide, unwilling seatmate, the girl of his nightmares for years to come, he was certain. Her long brown hair stirred in some breeze he could not feel. She looked calm and at peace, if you didn’t count the bloodstained, torn clothing and the evidence of physical abuse. Her left hand cradled the long wicked scythe easily. Her right was clenched around several hanks of hair, attached to which were faces he’d never forget.

Marty and Frank, now mere fractions of their former selves, moaned and wept their confessions eternally in their victim’s grip.

“Frank. Marty,” Walt croaked. “I’ve seen you look better.”

“Help us,” one of them said. It was probably Frank but with the deep flesh lacerations and the missing eyeball it was hard to say for sure. “She tortures us.”

“Buddy,” Walt said. “I’ll hold her purse for her.”

She turned faded lavender eyes on him, poked the heads with the pointy end of the scythe to make them burble and cringe, impotent victims now, then gestured with it for him to ask his questions.

“Why me?” he demanded wearily, a bit of the old asshole reviving. She extended the scythe blade and hooked a memory he didn’t know he had, fishing it up to his higher brain. A cold autumn night, a beer in one hand, a few minutes out on the porch sipping it. Loud music behind, people talking, laughing, but he is out here. It’s all right.

A girl pushes free of the drunken, smoky crowd and rushes past him, long hair like a pennant in the breeze. He watches her without comment. Skirt’s a bit too long for his taste, but nice ass. Oh, it’s the Ice-Bitch.

Frank and Marty come out after. The Walt of the here-and-now tells himself he couldn’t have known the extent of their mischief... couldn’t have guessed how drunk and how truly demented they both were. The Walt of the here-and-now tells himself sadly that the Walt of Last Autumn or even the Walt of This Morning might not have cared. Lots of things have changed since then.

“Where you boys headed?” he calls after them as they stride down the stairs, not running but focused, hurried.

“Hunting,” one answers over his shoulder.

Walt of Last Autumn burps and wipes his mouth. “Have fun,” he answers sardonically, and chuckles before another sip. He fades into nostalgia once more.

Walt had been the last person between her and the men. The last man who could have stopped them…and didn’t.

“Well, fuck,” he said. “I couldn’t have known how bad they’d be. I couldn’t have known that you weren’t leading them on. And any one of those people at the party are just as guilty as me.”

She shrugged. A bit late now for protests. Besides, her goal had been accomplished. Someone saw. Someone heard. Someone felt.

Now back to business.

“Wait just a damn minute,” Walt protested, feeling a rib twinge warningly as he shifted position. “How come I lived and you died, if we both went through the same... ordeal?”

Her mouth twitched. You had advance warning. You went limp before you struck the tree.

She rattled the heads in stately, half-stoked rage. Besides, I think they had -- they had torn something inside me. I was bleeding really bad. I think... I think I would have died anyway.

“Holy hell.” Part of him was still shell-shocked and only now unthawing. He felt like crying.

Oh, it’s not all that bad. Definitely peaceful. And the perks: well, while revenge is supposed to be a sin...

She poked the blade of the scythe into one torn windpipe and probed about for a minute with a vicious smile on her face, the screams like Wagner to her soul. While agreeing with her totally, Walt nevertheless turned his head and weakly hawked up another mouthful of stomach acid.

Now, onto new business. Three things I ask of you.

She swept him up in her mind. She showed him the inside of the car, pointed here, and here. She took him on a silvery flight down the interstates, to a modest little house in a gentler countryside, made him peek into a window and poke for a moment at a cornerstone.

Tell them this. Show them this. Give them this.

Then he was back in his aching body.

She put the scythe and the severed heads on the hard-packed dirt beside him and sat down to be on his level.

You know, I remember you from classes. You used to be a real asshole.

“Oh, thanks,” he managed, and wiped his bloody nose.

Still, you didn’t deserve this. No one did. I’m sorry.

Her face was still and solemn. He realized that she had been quite beautiful.

“I’m sorry for you. You didn’t deserve this either.”

She shrugged again, a little-girl gesture. Wolves and sheep alike get stormed on in this world. It’s what we do with the rain that counts. You did really well, and you’ll be rewarded.

“It doesn’t matter.”

You’ve already changed. You’re so different from the person you were even this afternoon.

“And all it took was a rape and a near-death experience.”

Don’t beat yourself…you’re fairly bruised already.

She extended a faint hand and wiped the blood from his face.

Most people could have taken an experience like this and either gone mad or convinced themselves it didn’t happen, she said, her mouth never moving, her fingers gentle. You’re doing neither. You’re coping; and some day you’ll be back on your feet again -- just like any other girl. Now get up. You have to go.

She picked up the scythe and pressed his limp hand around it, then laid the murmuring heads in his lap.

These are yours now.

“I don’t want them.”

They don’t want you either, but it’s necessary. Validate my death, and then we can leave all this behind, the both of us.

“Okay,” he sighed. With her silent urging he pulled himself to his feet. The pain was bad but he’d make it. He’d do it somehow.

Don’t worry. I’ll be with you until the end.

With those words, the solemn-faced girl-woman stepped forward and into him again.

“You already were,” Walt said.

Released from the pressure of her silence the car horn started suddenly, blasting into full life as if it had never stopped. He touched the glowing scythe to the hood and the noise petered out with a puzzled “parp?” sound. He opened the door and slid into the driver’s seat, setting the long bladed staff and the heads in the seat beside them.

“Don’t hurt us,” they whispered in chorus.

“Oh shut up, you two, or you’re riding in the trunk.” Walt turned the key and the engine purred into life as if it had just been sitting by the lake for the afternoon. He turned the car onto the road. The front passenger-side wheel rolled funny and the gas gauge stood firmly at empty but somehow he knew the car would go the distance, all the way to that house in the Summerlands.

“Road trip, boys,” Walt said, and turned back onto the lit paths.

**********

He was right. The Mustang went all the way up the interstate without stopping. It rode just like a dream until it rolled to a stop in the driveway and never moved on its own power, ever again.

In a strange way, Walt thought the car seemed particularly relieved. There’s a heaven for everything, including mangy mutts and Mustangs.

**********