"Chill. I don’t even touch the stuff, normally. But look: I’m beat to shit, and I’m hurting, and I think we’re in a world of trouble here. I say we smoke just a bit of this. If we don’t do something, we’re going to die."
She shook her head. "Fuck that. No coke. You start snorting that shit, the next thing you know, you’re stripping in a converted house half a mile off the turnpike, giving five-dollar handjobs."
"And Lord knows I don’t want to be giving five-dollar handjobs," Steve said. This got a grin out of her. "I’m not trying to push the shit on you, Cat. I just…I’m fucked up. My gut’s killing me, truly, and I’m tired as shit. I feel like curling up in the tub and going to sleep."
"Not an option."
"No."
"What’s it like?"
Steve shrugged. "Heaven and hell, I’m told. That’s if you actually do lines, which I have no intention of doing." He pulled out his weed and packed a light bowl. Then he sprinkled a pinch of coke over the green. "I did this once, years ago. I’m out on this balcony, this guy Derrin, he’s kind of a shady asshole, a friend of a friend, and it’s me and him and one of his buddies. We’re out there on that balcony and Darrin pulls out this joint, and we start passing it back and forth. I catch it a few times around, then we’re standing there, bullshitting, and I start feeling a little weird, you know? Like I was lifting up? You know how when you drink a pot of coffee you feel sharpened up and kind of light?"
"And like taking a piss?"
"That’s it. Only I didn’t have to take a piss. I just had to move. I asked this guy what the fuck kind of weed that was. He and his buddy, they start laughing, all apologetic. ‘Oh shit,’ he says, ‘we threw a little coke in the blunt.’ Twenty minutes later, I’m all alone out on Laymon Lane, doing sprints. Back and forth, back and forth."
Cat laughed. "But you didn’t run back in there demanding the rest of the bag?"
"Nope."
"Didn’t score a bag the next day?"
"Nope. It scared me. You smoke weed day in and day out, year after year, you end up a little burned out, you maybe get bronchitis easier, and you’re left with the motivation of a drunken sloth. So be it. But coke is different. It’s too good, too intense. I knew if I started doing lines, I’d end up dead or in prison, neither one of which is my style."
Cat nodded. "Light up, then." She laid a hand on his shoulder. "But do me a favor and don’t smoke enough to go around the bend, Steve. All right? I can’t be alone now."
"Got it," he said, and sparked the bowl.
Chapter 33
Herbert sat on the bench and concentrated on reloading his Glock. This was pain beyond anything he had ever imagined. The scissor wound sent waves of pain through his chest and gut, making it hard to breathe. The leg was even worse. It felt like lava, pooled and spreading, was burning away the meat of his thigh. He whimpered without meaning to, and tears ran unbidden from eyes he could barely open. None of this by choice.
Herbert growled, drew smoky phlegm coppery with blood, and spat on the sidewalk next to where the black guy lay dying.
With trembling hands, Herbert released the magazine from his Glock. The empty clip clattered on the sidewalk. He didn’t bother to pick it up. Instead, he pulled a fresh mag from his belt, slapped it home, and worked the slide, chambering a round. "I ought to blow your fucking brains out," he said to the man on the ground.
The man groaned and opened an eye. The other was swollen shut. Blood bubbled from one nostril, and his mouth leaked dark blood. More blood drained from holes in his gut. Higher up, a wound foamed pink froth. That was the killer, Herbert knew. A lung shot. The guy gasped, shuddered, gurgled. His hands clenched, unclenched, clenched.
Around the corner, Joel was screaming Herbert’s name. Herbert turned his head in that direction, blinked, and turned back to the man who’d almost killed him.
"I gotta hand it to you, old buddy," Herbert said. "You were…almost…the man." Something like a laugh sputtered from between his gritted teeth. "Oh, you did fuck up my leg. You really did."
He glanced down.
Acid had burned a mouth in Herbert’s thigh. His pants had melted there, and he’d have to take care of that, once he had the time, have to work with tweezers and scissors and maybe pins to extract everything that wasn’t his leg from the ruined flesh that formed the lips of the new mouth. The rest of it gaped, red and oozing and oh-so-fucking-painful.
"A word to the wise," Herbert said. "Never carry a loaded squirt gun in your pocket." He leaned to one side and puked. Even as he retched, the laughter started, and while he hung his head, spitting, he told the dying man, "Pain did that. Not disgust, buddy. So don’t go thinking I’m a pussy or something."
The man hitched another gasping breath.
"You know," Herbert said, drawing his own breath through flared nostrils, "you don’t look so good." He laughed. It hurt. He let his head roll back, eyes closed.
Joel’s shouts had turned to screaming. Maybe he had company. Or maybe it was just sinking in, what was going to happen to him.
The black guy opened one eye and looked at Herbert.
"You’re one fucked pooch," Herbert told him. "Tell me something: are you the guy I shot off the library wall?"
The black guy coughed. Dark blood splashed on his chest. He lifted his head a little. The open eye burned.
"Ooh, you hate me, don’t you? I can respect that. Mano a mano, right?" Herbert paused, staring hard at the hating, dying man, as if there might be some secret there. "So, I shoot you off the wall, you land in the tree, right? Then you manage to get out of the tree and do all this?" Here, he motioned over one shoulder, pointing at the smoking building with his pistol. "And after that, you almost do me with a pair of scissors? Nice work."
The guy’s arm stretched out slowly, its hand locked in a claw, reaching for Herbert’s leg.
Herbert shimmied down the bench out of reach. He laughed. "You know what was best of all, buddy? I mean, you know what really took the fucking cake? The NMR. Fuck! That was awesome! BOOM! That NMR came through the roof like a fucking rocket. I shit you not. Blasted right through and zoomed up into the sky. Fucking awesome. Think about the force. It blew up from the third floor, through the fourth, and through the fucking roof." He shook his head, grinning. "I gotta hand it to you, my man. That was some nice fucking work. You’re no meathead. Not even an asshole. Though you did try to kill me." Herbert laughed again, but pain cut him short. "Fuck, my leg hurts."
The guy who’d almost killed him reached back over his head with his arm. The hand squeezed shut on one of the bench legs, and, to Herbert’s amazement, the guy actually pulled himself along the ground, toward Herbert.
"See?" Herbert said, pointing at the guy’s hand with his pistol. "That’s what I’m talking about. You’ve got big balls, hombre. Die with your boots on, right? You know, back around the corner, when I was taking care of that asshole, Joel, I was thinking of taking you home and lowering you into a vat of acid, an inch at a time, just to show you how my leg felt, but I’ve decided against it. I respect you too much."
The guy let go of bench and raised his middle finger.
Herbert squealed with laughter. Fuck the pain. This was hilarious. This guy was the man…or the vice-man, anyway. "You’re too much, partner. Too much." Then, waving the pistol in a circle overhead, he said. "These other assholes, they come here, they think they’re so fucking great, but they’re nothing. Teachers hand them grades, parents hand them money. These kids are assholes, all of them, partying like this is four more years of high school. Well, they didn’t count on tonight. And they sure as hell didn’t count on Herbert Weston." He scratched the side of his head with the muzzle of the Glock. "But I have to admit, I didn’t count on you. No sir-ree. I certainly did not count on you."
The guy was fading. His arm fell slowly to the ground, and the glaring eye lazed. His wounds oozed and foamed, and the interval between his harsh gasps was lengthening.
Around the corner, Joel’
s shrieks quickened, sharpening. That would draw crazies. That meant it was time to go, time to get back to his list. Herbert screamed as he struggled to his feet. Once he’d steadied himself and controlled his breathing, he said, "Well, old buddy, I hate to leave you like this since you are, without a doubt, the most interesting person I’ve ever met in this shit-bird town, but like the guy in that old poem says, I’ve got promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep."
And turning, he hobbled off toward his car.
Chapter 34
In the moments preceding his death, Demetrius returned with detached lucidity to his childhood. As a boy, he lived in a small house beside a wide creek with high banks in the fold between two steep, forested hillsides. In springtime, leafless black trees dripped cold rain, and outcroppings of mottled stone emerged from fading caps of ice, and the snow that had blanketed the forest floor for months shrunk away to reveal pressed black leaf litter and the yawning rib cages and stitched, yellow skulls of winter-killed deer. Sometimes, when, boots heavy with mud, Demetrius wandered these thawing spaces or lingered over bones imagining their stories and thinking about life and death, the words of his father, who had burned to death in the factory when Demetrius was too young to cross the creek alone, would return to him. It was as if he could feel his father’s big, calloused hand once more, as the dead man warned him of springtime melt-water flash floods. They came all at once, with little warning, his father told him. There would be only a distant booming; then a wall of water would rage past, there and gone, taking things—and sometimes people—with it.
One spring midnight, Demetrius awoke to one of these floods passing in the darkness outside, thundering and roaring like the end of the world. The following morning, he stood at the edge of the creek and stared at the changes wrought by the passing waters. Streamside trees were snapped to stumps beneath palpable vacancies where once had towered oaks and sycamores of great size and incalculable age. Below these, further change in the creek itself, where disgorged stones, massive and monolithic, canted at strange angles like pagan gods of tribes long vanished, pediment now only to muddy banks laid raw, where pendulous roots hung half-revealed, like the emboweled secrets of the world.
Chapter 35
When Herbert limped back to his car, he found a girl stretched out on the back seat. "Well, well, well," he said. "The Lord helps those who help themselves."
He rapped on the glass with his pistol.
The girl opened her eyes.
Herbert waggled his fingers.
She blinked.
He saw no green around her mouth. He saw no weapons. He saw neither fear nor rage. What he did see was abandonment. This one looked like she’d clocked out and left the office, and somehow she’d ended up crawling into his back seat.
It was too perfect.
Herbert slid into the driver’s seat, growling with the pain as his burned leg bent, and hit the auto-lock, sealing all four doors. He looked into the rear view. Behind the screen separating the back seat from the front, the girl sat up and stared blankly ahead.
"Just out for a stroll, darling?" Herbert asked.
"Fuck," the girl said. It was flat, uninflected.
"I like the way you think," Herbert said. He turned the key, and the Crown Vic roared.
Chapter 36
Joel regained consciousness only to wish he hadn’t.
First came pain.
Then terror.
He remembered everything: the explosion, his desperate flight, crawling broken around the building. He remembered everything fading, the world going black around him. Then, nothing.
Now he was draped over something, bent at the waist. His eyes focused.
Slats.
Bench slats.
To which his wrists were cuffed.
While unconscious, he’d been bent over a bench and cuffed in place. Needless to say, he felt compromised, especially when a passing breeze made him realize another detail, which chilled him…both literally and figuratively.
He wasn’t wearing any pants. Someone had pulled them to his ankles.
He tried to stand but couldn’t. It wasn’t just his injuries. Someone—no prizes for guessing who—had tied his waist to the top of the bench.
He lifted his head, looked around wildly, and saw no one. No Herbert, no crazies. At least, not yet.
But he did see something, and once he saw it clearly, he knew it had been placed there for him to see. It was a note. Scrawled in blue Sharpie ink on crumpled paper spotted with blood and smudged with soot, it read:
Dear Joel,
I thought you were my fucking friend, but you turned out to be just another asshole. Welcome to The List, sans question mark.
Toodles,
THE MAN
P.S. Smile! You’re on Candid Camera!
Candid Camera?
Joel lifted his head again, looked right, looked left…and saw it, standing on a tripod, back by the bushes. The camera. Behind it, cables disappeared into the shadowy hedges. Joel didn’t need to see what was back there. He knew.
A laptop.
And he was pretty sure what that laptop was doing, where it was beaming the image of his bare ass.
He moaned. This time it wasn’t just the pain.
It wasn’t fair. He had done nothing to deserve this. Nothing.
He struggled against his restraints, but it was no good. He was trapped. It was no fair, and he was trapped, and—
"Wooooo!" came a voice from behind him.
Joel’s bladder let go.
Oh, God, no…please no…don’t let this be happening. No. I didn’t do anything to deserve this, God, please…
He heard slapping feet, coming fast.
NO!
Lie still. Just lie still. Don’t move. They’ll just run by. Lie still.
But he couldn’t lie still. He couldn’t stop crying, couldn’t stop shaking.
And once they started in on him, he couldn’t stop screaming.
Chapter 37
Herbert drove slowly, loving the mayhem that unfolded before him. Strolling through the initial chaos had kicked ass, and sniping from the rooftop had literally been a dream come true, but this…this was glorious. The town was deeply, irrevocably fucked, and knowing it was he who’d caused it all, well that made Herbert feel like he had an NMR in his pants.
"Is this the bee’s knees or what?" he asked the girl.
"Fuck."
"You got that right. Fuck, indeed. Look," he pointed across the street to where a corpse was wedged like a dead antelope in the notch of a tree. "Looks like the work of the ol’ College Heights Cougar, huh?" Then he launched into his trademark laughter. "And up here. Check out crazy legs."
Just ahead, a girl hopped along the sidewalk. Below the left knee, her leg twisted and flopped like that of a broken puppet, several inches of bone jutting forth from the flesh.
Herbert slowed the car, bent low for a better look at the girl, and stopped. He rolled down his window far enough to call to her, "Hey."
She stared in terror but didn’t run. How could she?
"You hurt?" he called.
The girl nodded, bawling, and hopped toward him. "I’m not supposed to be here," she said. "Will you take me home?"
"I’m afraid you’re out of luck, sister," Herbert said. "My fuck doll’s got the back seat, and my pipe bombs are riding shotgun."
The girl reached the car and stood now with her fingers wrapped over his window. She tilted her head, looking troubled, then started sobbing again. "I want to go home."
"If I were you," Herbert said, "I’d sue those legs for lack of support!" He brayed out laughter.
The girl only cried harder.
"Hey, easy there, crazy legs. Easy. I’m just fucking with you, that’s all. Lean in here."
She was shaking her head, sobbing.
"I’ll tell you a secret," he said.
She didn’t seem to hear him.
"Come on now," Herbert said, keeping his voice soft. "Just
lean in here, and I’ll tell you a little secret, and then we’ll see, maybe I’ll take you home." He snapped his fingers. "You know what? Fuck it. I will." He slapped the dash. "I’ll take your broke ass home."
Her breath hitched. She looked at him.
"All you gotta do is lean close and hear my secret, and then it’s home you go."
She leaned a little closer.
"Come on, sugar tits, you can get closer than that. What do think I am, crazy?" More laughter.
She leaned away.
"Fuck it, then," Herbert said. "If you’re too fucking good to hear my secret, you can hop all the way home. Suit your goddamn self."
"Wait!" the girl said, suddenly frantic. "Wait. I’ll listen." And she leaned close. "What’s your secret?"
Herbert smiled and said, "You want to know my secret?"
The girl nodded. Snot glistened beneath her nostrils. She wasn’t much to look at, Herbert thought. Hardly worth his time, even for this. "I want to know the secret."
"The secret is," Herbert said, raising the pistol, "I am fucking this dog."
Seeing the pistol, the girl shut her eyes and shook her head, sobbing harder. She didn’t pull away or drop to the ground or beg, just cried and shook her head and kept her eyes closed. He pulled the trigger, her head jerked, and Herbert had just enough time to see the small hole open at bridge of the nose before she collapsed. The red mist dissipated. The girl had dropped out of view, close to the car, but he could see her brains spread as loose and lumpy as dog puke across the pavement. Ears ringing, Herbert drove on.
"Fuck," the girl in the back seat said.
"That about sums it up," Herbert said, and that set him off laughing again. This was a grand time. In fact, of all the grand times he’d had, this was the grandest, the ultimate grand time of all grand times, the king, the sultan of grand. This fucking ruled, and he was fucking this dog. No two ways about it. His lifelong love, chemistry, was the science of change, and he was its greatest practitioner. Herbert Weston was large and in charge, and he was changing things forever.
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