Joel watched to see if he could pick up on any reaction from Herbert, anything from calling him "bro", but there was none. His face remained a mask of utter concentration, his eyes locked on laptop screen, where Lucinda was sucking some guy off, bringing her head back so that her lips just touched the head of his cock then slamming her head forward and burying the cock to the roots in her throat. Herbert grinned, eyes wide. He swallowed with effort, like a front row guests at a live cooking show. "Sheez. And you have how many girls?"
"Steady? I don't know. Eight or ten, I guess. They change out. Some girl leaves, another one joins up. It's just the way things work."
The camera panned up, and Joel shuddered. The "star", a fit guy only a few years out of college, was wearing the same mask Mr. P. had been wearing when everything went haywire.
"You pay these people?"
"Not the guys. They line up."
"I’ll bet," Herbert said, staring. "What do you pay the girls?"
"Depends. Lucinda there, she gets top dollar. Look at that ass. When Playboy came through doing the Girls of the Big Ten spread, they included her. So that upped her rate to a grand. Besides, as you can see, she can really act." He laughed a little. It was a risk, but he knew to make it out of this alive, he needed to start taking some risks.
Much to his relief, Herbert laughed, too. "Actress of the year." He was nodding faster. He looked at Joel, then back at the screen. "You ever act in these?"
"Me? No. I'm just a businessman."
"Small pee-pee, huh?" Herbert said, then broke into grating laughter.
Jesus, he sounds like a buzzard. But Joel kept his smile. "Let’s give those girls a call. They trust me. I’ll tell them that I can take them to safety." He talked quickly, the plan unfolding in his mind. "We could pick them up, take them someplace. This is the chemistry building, right? There has to be some ether here somewhere. That would make things a lot easier."
Herbert shook his head. "Right now, I want to upload some film onto your site."
Joel held his smile but felt it wobble. Upload some footage? What was this crazy bastard planning? Patch footage of murder and mayhem into the site? Joel winced, picturing his subscribers. They’d log in, expecting perfect college pussy, but end up with some guy doing the crow-on-roadkill to some other guy’s guts.
"I don't know," Joel said. "Like I said, I'm not really into the tech part. I just get the girls, pay them..."
"And cash the checks, right?"
Joel laughed. He couldn't read Herbert, though. Was he really laughing?
Herbert said, "Let's just say it’s really important to me."
"Geez, Herbert. I don't know. I mean, I'm really not up on—"
"Really important. Like if you weren't able to make it happen, I'd kill you."
Joel just looked at him. Saw he meant it. Swallowed. "I’ll see what I can do."
"That a boy, Joel. I do wish I had set up the camera earlier and caught that asshole trying to rappel out of the library. That would have been some fun watching that one, huh?" Then, holding his fingers over the keys like a pianist preparing to play, he said, "Now walk me through this."
Ten minutes later, Herbert ran a firewire between the laptop and a digital camcorder he had apparently packed for the occasion. On Herbert’s insistence, Joel had replaced all clips and the standard live feed with the line out of his camcorder.
"Say hi to everyone out there in TV land, Joel," Herbert said, aiming the camera.
"Hi," Joel said, and found he couldn't smile.
"Aw, c'mon, you old sour puss. You can do better than that." Herbert grinned extra wide and slapped the pocket that held his squirt gun full of acid.
Just thinking about it made Joel's foot and leg hurt worse. He smiled.
"That's it, buddy! That’s the spirit!"
Joel looked at the camera, looked away, looked back. He felt his smile fading and forced it to return.
To his relief, Herbert lowered the camera to check the laptop. "Nice work," Herbert said. "We are up and running. Real time, baby." Then he slid the laptop into a backpack, closed the zipper to the firewire, slung the pack onto his shoulders, and tucked the camera into the pocket of his puffy jacket. "Now we’re mobile," he said.
Chapter 26
"Stay here," Charles told Dianne, who was crying again and rocking back and forth, holding her arm. An irrational anger rose in him where pity should have dwelled. He tried not to show it. "Keep trying 911. I need to check on Mary, and I’ll get you some pain killers, okay?"
She nodded, not really looking at him, and he left her.
Outside, somewhere distant, someone screamed. What was going on? They needed information. First, though, he’d check on his wife.
Mary’s breathing was slow, the body at low tide. He sat on the couch, his back to stacked Hospice supplies, his knees pressed up against Mary’s bed. It struck him then, as it did every time he sat with her, how much he loved his wife and how much he missed the silly, simple times they'd spent so leisurely, so freely, day after day, down through the years prior to her illness, neither of them expecting it would all end like this. How many nights had they doled away on this very couch? Thousands, surely. In happier times, they’d had a routine: dinner on the couch, small talk, and Jeopardy…then Mary would stretch out, resting her head in his lap while he read or watched television. Hours evaporated. Most nights, he'd end up rubbing her head, massaging the scalp and running his hands through her silky hair; then she'd ask him to pinch her hair, and he'd bunch it up in squeeze a little, and finally, after finger-combing and squeezing her hair for twenty minutes or so he'd show her the hair all wrapped around his fingers, all the loose stuff that had come out. Too much, she'd say, and he'd wad it up like a little bird's nest and toss it onto the coffee table before them, and that would be the end of the night’s head rub.
Sitting there in the gloom, he laid a hand on her thin shoulder. His wonderful wife, his best pal, his girl, the woman with whom he'd planned and lived his life, was never going to get better. Soon, she would…
He wasn’t ready. He couldn’t bear it, couldn’t take it, but the world didn’t care: it was going to happen anyway. He would sit with his wife as she lost her final battle, and he thought, perhaps, he might go insane and knew with absolute certainty that he’d never, ever feel happiness again. But it would be his duty not to cry, not to show how he felt in front of Mary. She had always had dignity, and she would want him to hold it together. He would. By God, he would.
Mostly she slept now. Sometimes comfortably. Sometimes not comfortably at all.
Over the week since she had stopped talking, Mary would open her eyes and look at him. Her eyes were lost to the morphine, and it pained him to see her struggling, trying to bring them into focus. Her mouth would open, moan wordlessly, and one eye would roll, independent of the other. They were still her eyes, it was still Mary, only she couldn’t keep them still, couldn’t focus on him, couldn’t speak. It wasn’t like anything. It just was. And it was worse than he had ever imagined anything could be.
During these episodes, Charles always told her it was okay, that he loved her; she didn't need to struggle; everything was okay, and she should take it easy. But he wondered if he was doing her a disservice, wondered if maybe she really, really wanted to talk to tell him something, to tell him she loved him, or to tell him that it would be all right, to take it easy, or maybe even to ask him to rub her hair like old times. Naturally, though, he went to soothing her and telling her it would be okay, and after a short while—shorter all the time—she would calm down, and he would keep cooing to her, and she'd fall back into the morphine.
"Charles?" It was Dianne, calling softly from the kitchen.
"Just a minute," he said. He realized he'd been crying. How about that? He hadn't even known it. One thing was for sure: he didn't want Dianne to see him crying. No. This was private, a moment shared with Mary and no one else.
"Someone's here," Dianne’s voice said.
&nbs
p; And then he heard it, the voice outside, and leaning to the right, he saw the shape on the doorstep outside. He rose from the couch, breathing through an open mouth.
Someone knocked.
Charles stiffened.
The knock sounded again, quietly, the knocker either scared or polite. Or stealthy, Charles thought. What would he do if it was someone like Burt came through the door?
He would fight. If necessary, he would kill. He would protect Mary.
He crossed the room, reaching the door just as the knocker knocked again, this time a little more loudly. Charles glanced at the kitchen. Dianne stood, staring at the door, clutching the knife in her good hand.
Charles leaned into the peep hole. There, in walleye vision, was Hank Billups, his neighbor from down the block. Hank was a big man, almost comically so, with a big head and big hands, and both he and his wife, Susan, were given to a Southwestern style of attire, Hank wearing Navajo patterns and pointy-toed cowboy boots, Susan wearing a lot of turquoise. They were friendly, but Mary never liked to visit because the deer heads hanging in Hank’s living room gave her the creeps. Now, standing on the porch, Hank called, "Chuck?"
Charles wiped once more at his eyes, took a deep breath, and opened the door. Hank smiled with apparent relief and looked side to side. "You and Mary all right?"
"Pretty much," Charles said, and with painful awkwardness explained that there had been "trouble" with Burt and Dianne next door and that everything was under control now. With Dianne standing somewhere close behind him, he decided to leave out Burt’s ill-fated swan dive from the window and the interesting yet uncomfortable fact that Burt was currently tied and taped in a chair in the laundry room. Instead of venturing into all that, Charles asked Hank if he knew anything about what was happening, but all Hank knew was what he’d seen and heard here in the neighborhood and what he heard on the scanner, which sounded pretty bad. He didn’t have time to get into it. He, Susan, and some of the other neighbors were getting together and heading out of town until all this blew over. A line of vehicles idled at the curb. "Scanner says it’s local. You guys want to come along?"
"Thanks," Charles said. "I can’t, though. Mary isn’t well enough to travel, I’m afraid. She’s…not doing well."
Hank nodded slowly and said, "Hold on, Chuck. I’ll be right back." He went down to the lead vehicle, which Charles recognized as Billups’ Suburban, and after a brief conversation, came back up the steps. "Sit tight," Hank said. "We’re coming in."
"Huh? I can’t go, really. Thanks, but…"
"Understood, Chuck." Hank laid a big hand on his Charles’s shoulder. "Susan and I are coming over, if you’ll have us. We’ll stick it out. What kind of neighbor would leave you and Mary alone at a time like this?"
Along an adjacent street, someone screamed.
"I…well, you don’t have…" Charles said. He was at a loss. He barely knew these people, had always avoided real contact with them. Now he felt ashamed, thinking of how he and Mary had joked about their hick neighbors, and thinking of the countless number of times Mary and he had done their best to avoid prolonged conversations, hoping the Billupses wouldn’t ask them over, thinking of the half dozen invitations they’d declined. Standing here, now, his natural instinct was to decline Hank’s offer again, to tell Hank not to worry, he’d be all right, but Charles wasn’t sure, if this thing was as big as Hank made it sound, that he would be all right. And Hank had guns, knew guns, had used them to shoot and kill big animals. Man-sized animals.
Hank ended the awkward moment. "Don’t say anything else, Chuck. We’re coming in. You just try and stop us. Give me a minute, and I’ll let the rest of the caravan know."
The rest of the caravan. How did Hank maintain good humor in the face of this…this incredible sacrifice? Charles watched him go, watched his broad back disappear into the gloom and onto the darkened porch across the street, where he could see the red ember of someone’s cigarette.
Dianne asked what was going on. Charles told her, embarrassed at the lump in his throat.
"Thank God," Dianne said. "What did Hank think about Burt?"
"We didn’t get into it," Charles said.
There was a pause. Then Dianne asked if Charles had found the pain killers. "My arm really hurts," she said.
He apologized but no, he hadn’t found them yet.
Dianne didn’t reply. She turned and went back into the kitchen.
A minute later, Hank was back, a big gun slung over one shoulder, a large backpack slung over the other.
Charles said, "I don’t know how to thank you, Hank."
"Hell, Chuck, don’t worry about it. Have us for dinner some time. I’m sure you’d do the same for me if the tables were turned."
Charles smiled and nodded but wasn’t so sure. Would he have done the same? He truly did not know. He’d never been much of hero, never been the come-to-the-rescue sort. Even tonight, when he had helped Dianne outside, he’d tumbled into it. It hadn’t been a conscious decision. He hadn’t had a caravan awaiting him, for crying out loud…
Hank clapped him on the back. "Susan’ll be right over."
Charles thanked him again, feeling numb and humbled.
"Hell, don’t mention it."
Charles tensed, seeing the shadowy forms approaching.
Hank chuckled, no meanness in it. "No worries. That’s just the neighbors."
Neighbors? Charles thought. What neighbors?
"Hey, Charles," someone said.
"Evening," a woman’s voice said.
Charles counted seven, eight, ten of them. He recognized Tim and Andrea Fleming and their two teenage sons. The boys, both hockey players, Charles remembered, carried their sticks now. Tim had a ball bat. The streetlight winked off a foot of flashing steel in Andrea’s hand.
Behind them were the Livingstons, Joe and Carol—or was it Karen?—and one of their mothers, who must live with them, Charles figured, having seen her out weeding the garden and sitting in a lawn chair on overcast days.
Then Hank was introducing him to someone he’d never met. "Chuck, this is Gary. He and his wife and little girl just moved in down the block, into Phyllis’s old house."
"Hi," Gary said. He was a young, strong-looking guy, maybe thirty, with dark hair and a build like a running back. He carried some kind of gun and wore a tool belt on which a hammer hung like a low slung Colt.
Hank clapped Gary on the back, adding, "Gary sent his wife and girl along with the caravan but said he’d stick around with us."
"Thanks," Charles said, stunned. What unbelievable neighbors.
Susan Billups was next. She carried a short black gun, a shotgun, Charles thought, that looked like something a cop would carry. It was short, with a pistol grip and shells in a webbed girdle around the stock. She also carried something like a walkie-talkie. She hugged Charles.
"We’re real sorry to hear about Mary, Chuck, real sorry. We would’ve been by had we known."
Charles thanked her for coming, and she told him not to worry about it and went into the house. Charles tensed instinctively but relaxed when Susan let the screen door close softly behind her. Turning, she motioned him over. "Where would you like me to set up this scanner? It makes a bit of noise, even turned low. I don’t want to disturb Mary, if we can avoid it, poor thing. She back there?"
Charles could barely keep up. Back there. She meant the back room. He nodded.
"Well, we’ll plug this squawk box in over here in the kitchen, then, and turn it low, try not to disturb her, okay?"
"Yes," Charles said, and thanked her again, still numb. He listened as she suggested her husband and Gary go next door, lock things up, and kill the lights. Then he followed her inside.
Susan went before him into the kitchen. "Oh, Dianne," she said, going to where Dianne lay on the floor beside Burt, holding her arm and crying.
She wheeled him in here, Charles thought, narrowing his eyes. Was some of the tape loose? Was Dianne out of her mind? Had she loosened some o
f the tape?
Susan leaned her shotgun on the refrigerator and handed the scanner to Charles. "Plug that in, hon." Then she bent over Dianne and started talking to her softly. It seemed to work. She examined Dianne’s injuries and stole glances at Burt, who looked worse than ever. His head ticked back and forth like the hand of a broken clock.
Charles plugged in the scanner. It blared to life.
Susan said, "Volume’s on the bottom right," without turning or breaking stride.
Charles thumbed the dial and listened to a stream of police and paramedic chatter. This situation was as big and as bad as he had feared. Somehow, utter chaos had erupted downtown—only ten blocks away…
Chapter 27
Liz stared, no longer afraid. She’d clicked off, her animal midbrain seizing control as her heart rate exceeded 175 beats a minute. Oddly enough, this limbic coup d’état actually paralleled a similar transformation in the crazies around her. Neither she nor they noted the irony.
Staring with something like fascination, she watched the boy at the front of the restaurant perforate his own thigh with a badly bent fork. Up yanked the arm, then thwap…he buried it in the thick meat of his blood-smeared thigh, and a tremor shuddered through him. "Ooop!" He stiffened. Then he worked the fork back and forth, yanked it free, lifted it over head, and jammed it once more into his thigh. "Ooop!"
Yank, plunge, shudder. "Ooop!"
She could have watched forever. But her feet were carrying her again, just as they’d carried her from the Lion’s Den, where she had lain for a time she could not conceptualize and where everyone was dead now; and soon, her feet had carried her so that the crazy with the fork was no longer in front of her eyes. Without looking both ways—either way, actually—she stumbled across College Boulevard, tripped but did not fall when one of her feet caught on someone lying in her path, wove around one car, and crawled over the hood of another. Crossing the hood, she passed through a hissing fountain of steam jetting from the front of the car, and she remembered hazily a time when she was a little girl and the family station wagon had blown its…radiator? Remembered the side of the road and how the wagon would shiver every time a big truck passed, and remembered her father yelling as steam hissed from the propped hood, her father cursing, using the f-word…
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