She blinked at him then nodded.
"Good. Take off your belt," he said.
Wincing, she complied. She really was badly hurt and would need medical attention as soon as possible. Something told him, however, that the ambulances were going to be a little busy tonight. He thought of the morphine sitting in the refrigerator then dismissed the thought immediately. The supply was dwindling, and this event, whatever it was, was sure to make supplies shorter. Dianne could suffer now and laugh later. Mary would have her peace.
Dianne handed him her belt, which he looped over Burt’s head like a leash.
"You’re not going to drag him?" Dianne said.
"No, but if he comes full to again, this will help us to control him without having to hurt him so much. Can you lift him?"
Dianne opened her mouth, said nothing, and shook her head.
"That’s okay," Charles said. Internally, he berated himself. Lift him? She’s suffered multiple breaks, and she’s going to lift him? Think, man, think.
He couldn’t lift Burt by himself, not with his back. He could try to drag him under the shoulders, but again, his back…
And then he remembered it, sitting in the back room, folded up like a serving table, the wheelchair Mary had used on her chemo trips, after she’d grown too weak to walk. What a grueling marathon those sessions had been. Poor Mary.
Charles went inside. He wanted to snap on the TV or radio or check the web, but there was no time, not now. Instead, he went straight to the back room, where his wife lay in the shadows. She stirred, moaning. No matter how many times he heard that sound, it always managed to terrify and depress him. The sound of it was so deep and hollow, like winter wind moaning in a cold, dry cistern. It was only momentary, though, and she drifted off again. Even here, even now, with all that was happening outside, Charles said a little prayer of thanks, as he always did when he knew his wife had reached a fork in the road of probabilities and managed to move quietly down the more peaceful of the pair. He pulled the wheelchair out of the room, carried it back outside, and unfolded it into serviceable shape.
Burt was still out. Dianne hovered, examining his face with shaking hands. She rolled him onto his back and removed the sock from his mouth. Charles told her to replace it. She ignored him. Outside, the neighborhood shouter was looping back in this direction, and down in town, the sirens were louder.
A car roared up the street, tires screeching as it turned onto Maryland Boulevard, and shot away doing what sounded like twice the posted speed limit. I hope he hits the shouter, Charles thought, and pulled Burt into the chair.
It was hard work. Burt wasn’t a large man, but neither was Charles.
"Oh my lord," Dianne said, getting a clear view of her husband.
Charles grunted, pulling Burt further into the chair. Something in his back twanged like a breaking string, and a little line of fire leapt up, raced across his ass, and burned down the back of his left leg. Welcome back, sciatica.
Once Burt was loaded, things got easier, and in minutes, they had him in the laundry room of Charles’s house. Dianne was crying and thanking Charles.
"Stop," Charles said, taking her face in his hands again. "I need you to stop right now. Mary is right in there, and she’s gotten awfully bad these last weeks, and we’re not going to disturb her." He realized he was squeezing Dianne’s face a little hard. He let up the pressure. "Understand?"
She nodded, looking like a frightened kid. Charles needed her to come around as much as possible, as quickly as possible, needed her to regain control.
"We have to hurry," Charles said. "If Burt wakes up before we get him tied, we’re in a lot of trouble. Now, go to the front door, make sure it’s locked, and draw the shades. I left a light on in the foyer. Turn that off, too, please. Got it?"
Again, she nodded. Then she set off.
In her absence, Charles turned to Burt. The nose was flattened, and one cheekbone looked badly hurt, too, but these were minor in comparison to the generalized trauma evident in the skull. The right side of Burt’s forehead seemed further forward than the left, and slightly higher. Still, the guy was alive…and getting livelier.
Rope…where did he have rope? It was in the garage, which meant he’d have to go outside again, out in the yard, out with the shouters. No thanks. For starters, he would use cords from appliances. He drew the toaster to the center of the counter. Mary had loved the granite; it broke his heart that she’d enjoyed it for less than a year prior to the bad news. He pulled a large knife from the butcher block.
Dianne, returning to the kitchen and seeing the knife, shrieked, "What are you doing?"
Turning toward her, Charles hissed, "Shut up. I told you." Realizing that he was holding the knife toward her, he dropped its point. He also lowered his voice. "You can’t do that, no matter what happens. I told you."
In the brief pause, no sound came from Mary’s room. Again, he uttered a silent prayer of thanks.
"What are you doing with that knife?" Dianne asked.
In response, Charles went to the counter and cut the toaster’s plug. Leaving the knife on the counter, he crossed the linoleum and used the cord to tie one of Burt’s legs to the chair. Burt coughed. Then he gurgled.
"What’s wrong with him?" Dianne said, moving forward.
I think he fell, Charles thought, and again, laughter roared up inside him. This time, however, he contained it easily. The thought of Mary next door sobered him.
On a nearby side street, a chorus of insane shouting moved through the night.
"Try the phone," Charles said, nodding toward the counter. He doubted that she’d have any success, but he wanted to contact the police and paramedics, and beyond that, he knew she needed something to do. Without something to do, Dianne was a liability. "Try 911. It’ll be busy. Hang up, hit redial. Keep trying, and you’ll get through."
She went to work. So did he. He snipped the plugs from his coffee grinder and knife sharpener, and, after some hesitation, the coffee maker itself. It had taken Mary so long to find the thing. With these cords, he did a better job of tying Burt’s legs and wrists to the chair.
It wasn’t enough.
Charles stood, hands on hips, looking down at his half-bound captive and cursed himself for being so stupid. Why had he cut the cords? Why had he ever believed they’d be long enough to do the job? He had to think, had to keep everything straight and see everything for what it was. He had to secure Burt’s waist, chest, and neck, and he couldn’t get it done with appliance cords.
He had to go out to the garage.
Burt groaned.
Dianne froze, staring at her husband.
"Keep calling," Charles said. Then he went to the garage.
Outside, he could hear sirens in the distance. Nearer, though the shouting had stopped, the night simmered with malice. He could feel it, throbbing off the trees, the houses, the hedges. Lord, don’t let the hide-a-behinds get me.
The hide-a-behinds. How long had it been since he’d thought of them? Twenty years? Thirty? The memory of them should have made him laugh, should have at least brought a smile to his face, but here, tonight, it just shivered through him like a cold breeze.
Long ago, when Charles was a child in upstate Pennsylvania, his father had warned him to get home before dark or he’d be out with the hide-a-behinds. The hide-a-behinds, his father had explained, came out at twilight and retreated at dawn. Charles always imagined them standing stock still, eyes open and unblinking, in horrible, cobwebby, lightless caves pocking the wooded hillside behind his house. His father said they spent their nights waiting for tardy children to come within reach. In Charles’s mind, hide-a-behinds were hulking, bipedal moles, taller than men and lumpy, with short but strong arms drawn up close to their bodies, arms they’d use to snatch at passing children, should any unlucky boy come too near the tree behind which they hid. Every night that he left late the home of a neighborhood friend, Charles watched the trees and walls and hedges, waiting for the hide-
a-behinds, knowing, because his father had told him, that if he did ever see one, it would be too late for escape. He would be dragged back to that cobwebby hole in the hillside and never heard from again.
The really scary thing about the hide-a-behinds was that they could hide anywhere. Take the tallest, fattest one, and he could easily hide behind a skinny sapling. It was their particular brand of dark magic, and it had such a powerful affect on Charles that he thought of them even during high school, walking girls through parks and quiet neighborhoods. Of course he knew by then that it was all one of his father’s jokes, a ploy to get him home on time, but still his eyes scanned the landscape, and some small part of him remained alert. More than alert…afraid.
Tonight, on his short walk to the garage, he thought he could feel the hide-a-behinds peering at him from behind every tree on the yard.
He hurried along, wincing at the crunching sound his feet made on the graveled driveway, and entered the garage. Over the years, it had accumulated more and more junk, until, much to Mary’s chagrin, it had grown so packed that they’d surrendered to the clutter and started parking the car outside on the gravel. Insanity. Charles felt a pang of guilt. Why hadn’t he seen to his responsibilities while his wife had been well enough to have enjoyed them? No. He’d ignored the garage, pleading too much work and too little time, ignored Mary and her requests, and the junk had spread like a goddamned tumor…
Get a grip, he told himself, realizing he was teetering on the edge of the same pit that had eaten Dianne’s rational mind fifteen minutes earlier. And that was something: he needed to finish up here and get back inside, make sure Dianne and Burt were still under control. Rope, then. He clicked on his flashlight and maneuvered across the clutter, half expecting a dozen hide-a-behinds to pop up, gleeful in their patient surprise, to the equally cluttered workbench where he found too little rope but also a wonderful treasure: duct tape. One dwindling roll and another full one.
He gathered rope and tape, and, starting for the door, saw the hammer hanging from the pegboard. Better grab that, too.
He reentered the house as Dianne hung up the phone. "It’s no good," she said.
"Keep trying."
He ran the tape around Burt and chair, first making a seat belt, then a chest strap. As things turned out, there was no easy way to fasten his neck or head, so Charles just ran some extra tape over Burt’s shoulders, arms, and legs.
He was weighing the use of rope, thinking it wise to keep the rope handy in case of another break in, when the phone rang. He and Dianne jumped. Even though he’d turned the ringer low months ago, the sound of it was impossibly loud in the heavy silence of this curious moment.
Dianne stared. It rang again. Charles took it from her. "Hello?"’
It was Sandy, his oldest daughter. She was sorry she hadn’t called when she said she would, but she had forgotten little Jimmy’s pee wee football game and then a few of the couples in the development had just gotten together, a spur of the moment thing—this she said as Charles stared at green slime drooling down Burt’s chin—and couldn’t quite get to it, but how was Mom?
Thankfully, he’d had this conversation so many times before that he was able to fly on autopilot. Oh, Mom was okay. Not good, really.
Sandy informed him that she was still planning to come out the next weekend, would that be okay?
During a brief pause, he studied the bulge of Burt’s forehead. It was growing. "Okay, Sweetie," he said. "That would be nice. Look, I hate to cut you off, but I’m in the middle of something, okay? Nothing, really, but I can’t talk now. How about I call you early in the week?"
They said their goodbyes. It was, all at the same time, surreal and sad and funny. He wanted to end the call as quickly as possible and yet wanted nothing more than to talk to Sandy. He had, in fact been waiting all day for her call, growing a little concerned as afternoon gave way to evening and the phone still had not rung, hating himself for fretting like an old woman and wondering how much of his urge to call her had to do with fears for her safety and how much had to do with his own, selfish loneliness. Time moved so slowly in the house. Now he was filled with a strange mix of emotions. He felt loss, guilt, and, surprisingly, a little thrill at having fooled her.
A car raced by out front. It roused Burt, who muttered more gibberish before nodding back into unconsciousness.
Charles handed the phone back to Dianne. "In a minute, we’ll start calling again," he said. Then, taking off his other sock, he said, "Tell me what happened tonight. How did it start?"
Chapter 21
Bang!
Demetrius winced.
Gunfire. A bullet whined off the wall ten feet above him. Brick puffed red where it had hit.
The sniper!
He risked a quick glance at the ground, where someone stood, looking up. Even without a psychotic welcome wagon, it was still too far to drop, a good thirty or forty feet.
Bang!
The bullet struck high again. Was the guy actually trying to hit him? Or was he firing at someone else, someone up in the window? A brief nightmare image presented itself to him: a pair of crazies gnawing through the hose like oversized mice.
Don’t panic, he reminded himself.
He looked up. From this angle, the window was a sliver of darkness, an oily, indefinite anchor for his lifeline, the pale fire hose.
Below him, the watcher started shouting. Come and get it, he thought. Shit.
Bang!
Another bullet cracked off the masonry overhead, and a grit of powdered brick showered down. Whether he was shooting at Demetrius or crazies in the window, this guy was a horrible shot.
Bang!
High again. This time, though, something gave. The hose hitched a little, sagging.
And then Demetrius knew.
This guy wasn’t a horrible shot. He was the same guy who’d had been dropping crazies at a hundred and fifty meters. He wasn’t firing at Demetrius or crazies in the window. He was shooting the hose, blasting it to pieces so that …
Bang!
The hose lurched. In slow motion, it stretched and stretched, tearing from the bullet holes the sniper had put through it.
There was only one thing to do. Demetrius crouched against the wall in a deep squat, then pushed out as hard as he could, releasing the rope…
Chapter 22
"Up here," Cat said. Pointing with the knife, she indicated a block of row old homes, big places with wide porches. Most were dark. Two blocks further on, it was almost exclusively residents, the end of the world.
Whirring up the sidewalk, nearing Cat’s house, he realized: Gable Arms had burned tonight. He was homeless.
Screw it. He’d been meaning to leave for months.
Crossing the street, he asked, "Which one’s yours?"
"714. Right there."
714 was dark.
Steve cut the engine as they pulled into the driveway, and they puttered to a stop between the houses, where Steve depressed the clutch and made a little K-turn, parking it so that its nose pointed toward the street. Any surprises inside, he wanted to be ready to ride. Hi-ho-Silver.
"Come on," Cat said, taking Steve by the hand. She led him around the back. Somewhere, a few houses distant, he heard shouting. A few blocks distant, he heard a shot. Fainter, yet persistent as ever, the noises of downtown carried on.
Here, though, all was quiet.
There was a little yard in the back. A hose snaked through the tall grass to an aqua-blue kiddy pool. A beer bottle lay at the pool’s center.
Cat unlocked the back door, and the door groaned open. She tugged him inside and told him to lock the door. He did, but felt a vague wave of unease. What if the lights popped on, and a whole roomful of people poked out from behind counters and doors and furniture? Surprise! No thanks. He shook that image straight out of his head but not until he’d seen the surprise party in a little more detail: the green smiles, the pointy hats, the ruined sheet cake smeared across the table, its red icin
g way too much like blood, and of course the streamers, intestines strewn all over the cupboards and along the ceiling and the backs of chairs…
Fuck that, Steve thought, hurrying after Cat, moving into a small living room dominated by a big couch. Cat called into the dark recesses of the house. "Hello?"
Nothing.
She crawled onto the couch and drew the curtain behind it slightly to one side, peering out into the side yard. Over her shoulder, Steve saw nothing. Good. At least things were calm here.
Steve placed a hand on her side, letting his fingers slide just under the hem of her shirt. Her skin was warm and smooth. With the tip of his middle finger, he could feel the point of her hipbone. He moved his hand up and over, smoothing his palm over the flat of her stomach. She felt good. Tight. Warm. Pressing lightly, he made wide circles on her stomach until the tip of his index finger brushed the swell of her breast. "So what do we do?"
"If you think you’re getting laid now, you’d better …."
He leaned enough to kiss the top of her ear. Her eyes fluttered, and her lips parted. Then she turned, grinning, and said, "Not yet, Slick."
"But I don’t want to die a virgin."
"Very funny. Let me grab a couple of things and leave a note, and we’ll get out of here."
"You think leaving a note’s such a good idea? I mean, I hate to say it, but what if your roommates are, you know…what if they’ve gone nuts? What if they come home, see it, and come after us?"
"I don’t think these crazies are big on reading. They’re a little more Bohemian."
"Yeah, cup of coffee and a side of human flesh."
"Eww," she said and punched him playfully.
He pulled her into a hug and was surprised to find her trembling. He held her close, saying nothing, not trying any funny stuff this time, just giving her a little comfort. They held the embrace, Steve loving the feel and the smell of this small, tough, beautiful girl in his arms, the house dark and quiet around them, until Cat’s cell phone vibrated, scaring the shit out of them. They popped apart, and Steve almost knocked a lamp to the floor.
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