by S. D. Perry
Amanda’s features contorted, and then she was sobbing, leaning into John again. “I never wanted this to happen,” she wailed.
“Of course you didn’t,” John said. “No one thinks that.”
“It’s my fault; if I hadn’t been with him in the first place, this never would have happened.”
“Don’t think like that,” Sarah said, automatically. She’d told herself the same thing a thousand times after Jack had left. “You couldn’t have known how it was going to turn out.”
Amanda blinked at her, her cheeks streaked with tears, a runner of snot falling over her lip. “Maybe I could have. Maybe I just didn’t want to.”
Sarah didn’t have a response for that.
“It’s only some things,” Amanda said, looking at John, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. “What I’m seeing. Some of it is fated, inevitable, and some is still, like, variable. Open for discussion. It’s not one or the other, like everyone thinks. We have to find him, the tourist, the summer man; we have to tell him. Or maybe he already knows…I have to meet him. I’m going to meet him.”
Sarah didn’t know what the girl was talking about. She didn’t seem too clear herself.
“We should go inside,” John said. “I’d like to see Bob, talk to the doctor. And you should be sitting down. Have you been treated by anyone?”
Officer Miller cleared his throat. “She came out here to smoke AMA. Doc said shock, maybe. I would have kept an eye on her, anyway.”
“Thanks, Dad,” Amanda snapped. She glared at him a beat but couldn’t seem to sustain her attitude; she mostly looked young and extremely tired. “Whatever. Hey, what’s a ten-fifty-five?”
Miller frowned. “Where’d you hear that?”
“Never mind, I’ll look it up,” she said.
He kept frowning, but he sounded slightly less hostile. “It’s code for coroner’s case.”
Amanda nodded as though that was what she’d expected. They went inside, Sarah trailing behind John and the teenage girl, feeling possessive and guarded and irritable, telling herself that was a silly, immature reaction to the situation, telling herself that she needed to grow up or go home, already aware that she wouldn’t leave him, not tonight, not as long as she could be with him.
Bob felt bad that the kid was dead, he really did, although he couldn’t deny that his initial reaction had been a sense of relief—he’d still been struggling to sit up when Eric and Amanda went upstairs, presumably to her bedroom. He’d start to get up and then the pain would take him down, every nerve and muscle in his left arm spasming, and he’d curse himself to cowboy up and take the pain, but he kept almost passing out, he couldn’t seem to get up no matter what, and he kept thinking of what Eric was doing to her and feeling minutes slip past and feeling useless. When the cops had come—that prick Leary, unfortunately, but he had a gun and Amanda was in danger, no matter what she believed—Bob had filled them in quick. Teenage boy with a gun and a hostage, very fucking dangerous.
He’d heard the gunshots a moment later, and Amanda’s scream, her loud, living scream. Bob had been unable to help a burning, self-righteous satisfaction along with that initial relief, the feeling one has when vengeance has been fulfilled or justice served, depending on one’s point of view. Amanda was alive, Eric—who’d shot him, the little bastard—probably wasn’t. He was in too much goddamn pain to think about much of anything else as the Keystone paramedics went to work. Everything after that was a blur of pain and movement.
“…think he’s sleeping. We should come back tomorrow.”
“Not sleeping,” Bob said, opening his eyes. Amanda was next to his right side, John at the foot of the bed. Bob tried to push himself up a bit and felt a burning slice of hell shimmer through his left shoulder and along his side. That woke him up.
“Somebody prop me up a little more, would you?”
John found the controller, and the hospital mattress slowly tilted him forward. When he finally faced them, he felt something in his chest loosen.
“You’re OK?” he asked Amanda.
She nodded. “Yeah. You?”
Bob smiled. His lips felt rubbery. “Hospital meds,” he said. “I’m pretty close to useless, actually. But I’ll be up and around by tomorrow, I guess.”
Amanda nodded. “We’ll need you,” she said. “I think we’re close to the end. The things I’ve been seeing, they’re here, now, I’m pretty sure.”
“Now, like—” John gestured, a helpless, hands-to-the-ceiling, “now? Tonight?”
She nodded, looked to John, back to him. “It might already be too late to do anything. Or maybe…what I’m feeling is like everything’s going to stop suddenly. I don’t know; everything seemed so clear when I was at John’s, I had this really clear understanding for a minute…but I can’t get it back.”
Bob made a sincere effort to concentrate. Something she said, it was important.
When I was at John’s.
Bob closed his eyes, the better to think. Another conversation surfaced, from John’s kitchen.
Why do you think you’re picking it up now?
Maybe he’s getting stronger…or maybe he’s closer.
“Do you know everyone on your street?” Bob asked, looking at John. “Who lives next door to you?”
John shook his head. “I don’t know. A man, ah…Mallon, name’s Mallon. I ran into him the day that…that Mr. Calvin died. Why?”
“Because being at your house is different,” Amanda said. She looked at Bob. “The way I’ve been feeling, since I’ve been there. You think…”
“Mallon,” Bob said, and felt a great rush of certainty, so strong and right that the drug haze seemed to burn away. “Mallon. That was Typhoid Mary’s last name. I ran across it a couple of times recently, when I was looking at articles about contagion. It’s him; it’s got to be him.”
“Not so fast,” John said, but he also looked fully connected, hearing what Bob was saying. “Next door? You think he’s been next door to me, all this time?”
Amanda’s eyes were wide. “What do we do?”
“We go talk to him, I guess,” Bob said. “If you met him, you think you could tell if he’s the one?”
“Yeah, I think so,” she said. “I’m already pretty sure, though.”
“How?” John asked. “Why?”
“I don’t know how to explain it…”
“Try.”
Amanda shook her head. “Everything is changing, everything is in motion, moving, ah…like, pivotal moments are occurring, maybe that’s what I’m seeing, maybe I’m seeing choices being made…I feel like…I feel like the movie’s almost over. I thought maybe that meant I was going to die, but Eric died, not me…”
She trailed off, her chin trembling. “I don’t know what I mean.”
“It can’t hurt to go talk to the man,” Bob said, looking at John. “We’re not accusing him of anything, just stopping by to chat.”
John finally nodded. “OK, but not tonight.” He glanced toward the hall and looked at his watch, back at Bob. “You’re in no shape, old man.”
Bob wasn’t about to argue. His sudden excitement appeared to have exhausted him; he was back to struggling to stay awake.
We’ll want to get the gun first, too. Still tucked in John’s back office. “Tomorrow, as soon as they let me go. I want to be there.”
Amanda and John both agreed, and John put his arm around Amanda, and Bob said he was sorry, and Amanda said that she was sorry, and then he blinked once, twice, and they were gone, and then he slept.
Three separate times on the way home Jeff had just lain down, picked a clear spot on the side of the road and sat and then toppled over, and three times, Tommy had urged him back to his feet, sure that it was past midnight by now and his mother had called the cops when Jeff’s mother had called her to see if they were at Big Blue. Jeff had wet his pants a little the last time he’d lain down, and Tommy had kicked him in the shin, really hard, desperate to be home and safe.
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Jeff’s, he told himself. If God was merciful, Jeff’s mom wouldn’t be home yet and they could go inside and hide in Jeff’s room and this monstrous night would be over. No one would ever know that they’d been drunk or at the carnival by themselves or that they’d seen a bunch of men beat another man to death. Tommy knew he was still fucked-up, but he also knew what he’d seen and heard. The guy who’d whacked off to little boys, who’d followed them through the woods and chased him through the dark, he was history.
The closer they got to Jeff’s, the more Jeff seemed to recognize where they were and where they were going, and he stopped trying to lie down. There was no car in the drive. Jeff led them around to the back door. Tommy tried to straighten up, thinking that if he had to pretend to be OK they were fucked, he couldn’t remember ever being so tired, and there was puke on his shirt and dirt on his knees. They stepped inside and looked around—and Jeff laughed.
“It’s ten o’clock,” he said, pointing at digital green readout on the microwave. “She won’t be home for like two hours.”
Tommy wanted to cry; that was the best news he’d ever heard. He was so thankful, so grateful to be somewhere, a house, a friend’s house. “I gotta lay down.”
“Yeah,” Jeff said, and Tommy closed the back door, and Jeff led him down the hall to his room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
For Aaron reese, the summer had started off shitty, as usual. He was still two classes short of his diploma, which his mother wouldn’t let up about, even though he was going to fucking summer school. His stepdad said if he couldn’t do better than hanging around with his dumbshit friends at retard school, he better get his GED and get a fucking job. Aaron hated his stepdad, Michael; he was always saying how Aaron was lazy because he was a year-plus behind and that his friends were stupid, and he’d never even met any of Aaron’s friends. Not that Aaron had any, unless he counted Calvin, who was even more of an outcast than Aaron. Calvin was heavy into porno and was superugly. Aaron wasn’t ugly, at least; a little plain but not deformed or anything. He maybe wasn’t as smart as some, but if anybody ever bothered to try to get to know him, if anyone gave him a chance, ever, he figured he’d do OK. He just didn’t talk so great; words got stuck in his head sometimes, and he’d stand there and stare at whoever had spoken to him, and they’d act like he was retarded.
Aaron had spent nineteen years being lonely, feeling frustrated, becoming angry, seeing how poorly he fit into the world. The things that came so easily to other people were a struggle for him, and that wasn’t his fault, it was just the way things were, and that was somehow the worst of all; that made him burn inside.
In late June, he’d lit his first fire, a neighbor’s unlocked garden shed. It had pretty much been a dud in terms of damage, but the smoke, the alarm, the excitement…watching all those people scramble, that had been awesome. He’d gotten away with it, too. Mr. Winters kept a gas can in the shed, and everyone thought it was an accident, brought on by rising temperatures. The incredible ease with which he’d gained such bone-deep satisfaction…a next time was inevitable.
In July, there had been the barn on the empty lot outside town. Aaron didn’t know who owned the land or why they’d allowed their sagging wood barn to slowly decay over the years, although it had become kind of a landmark. The abandoned barn was the first thing you saw as you turned off the highway to come to Port Isley, standing in an overgrown field backed by evergreens, the roof hanging like an old horse’s back, the paint weathered away. There was even a postcard of it in one of the stores downtown. The rush he’d gotten from burning Mr. Winters’s shed had set him daydreaming, imagining places where he could do it again, where no one would catch him…and then he’d just done it, said he was going out to a movie one evening last week and he went to the barn and went inside, parking in a ditch farther along and coming back through the woods so no one would see him or his mother’s car. The place was empty except for a lot of trash and broken shit that had been dumped there over the years, plus about a hundred giant bales of rotting newspaper. It stank. There was rat shit and mold everywhere, although it hadn’t rained in so long, everything was dry. There were a few signs of occasional human habitation—cans and bottles and wrappers, what looked like a girl’s panties crumpled and faded pink beneath his flashlight’s beam, stuffed in a convenience store big cup. There were a lot of birds in the rafters; after he started building his fire against one corner of the dried-out wall, once the smoke started rising, he heard panicked fluttering and cries. Too bad for them if they couldn’t get out. Not everyone was a winner.
He’d stayed until he’d started coughing and then watched from the woods as his small fire grew, as it swept up the walls and the smoke glowed and the firemen came. He’d wanted to stay, very much, but hadn’t wanted to be caught, not after he’d seen what he was capable of doing.
There was no local paper for some reason, but there was a report on TV and there was some footage of the smoking wreckage in the early morning and firemen gathering up their equipment. The lady reporter looked so serious when she said that the beloved landmark would be missed and that arson was suspected. Aaron went to the library the next day and watched it again online. After some hesitation he looked up fire, and by clicking from link to link he found a lot of useful information about accelerants. He’d never had much use for computers past video game/porno capacity, but the ease with which he navigated the sites for articles and videos made him feel smart and capable. He wanted to do something bigger than the barn, something fantastic, and after watching a clip of a kid throwing a propane tank on a fire, he thought he knew just the thing.
There was no end of targets but he picked the community theater because it was all wood inside, and it would burn well. Also, no one was using it for anything, so far as he knew; he walked past two days in a row and everything was locked and shaded.
He spent endless stuffy hours of remedial geometry survey dreaming of the fire, imagining the thrill of seeing it devour a beloved landmark that wasn’t an empty, stinking barn. He fell asleep thinking of that computer video, how it had taken a full minute at least for the tiny, hand-size propane tank to explode after the guy threw it in the fire. The tank strapped to Michael’s expensive, rarely used barbecue was way bigger; it would blow the burning walls to pieces, spreading the fire everywhere; he could throw it in once the fire got going really good and be all the way back to his car before it exploded.
He parked a block behind the theater on a silent street. It was very late and very dark, the very dead of night, a few minutes before four. He shouldered the backpack of accelerants—stuff he’d found in the garage or in the bathroom, turpentine, motor oil, some kind of degreaser made with alcohol, a bottle of nail polish remover, and most of a bottle of rubbing alcohol—and took the propane tank under his arm. The tank weighed about twenty pounds, and he thought it was mostly full, the little gauge thing said so, anyway, and except for one forced, unpleasant family picnic on the Fourth, Aaron couldn’t remember the last time the barbecue had been used.
He cut through an open backyard and around a fenced one, and then he was at the rear of the theater. There was a narrow back alley and then some hedges, and there were a couple of places where he would be hidden from everybody, where he’d have time to build something substantial. He had the perfect place in mind, too, a wooden door to the theater’s basement. It was down a half dozen steps—cement—but he thought if he could block the drain hole at the bottom of the stairwell, he could build a fire that practically covered the whole door. Plus the stairwell would be ideal for dropping the tank into, once he was sure it was hot enough. If the door hadn’t burned by then, the blast of the tank would blow it open and the fire would be sucked inside. Of course, the explosion might just blow everything out, but the backpack was heavy with cans and bottles; he thought he could make something that would spread.
He’d only brought some newspapers, thinking that he’d find something else he could use; there’d be
en a ton of shit in the barn. He figured at least old bark dust or dried branches from around the theater, but everything was well watered, the hedges trimmed, the wood and dirt moist from an automatic watering system, one that obviously had been at work only recently; some of the low branches on the hedge he pushed past still dripped. Whatever. He was committed; he’d figure something out.
Aaron set the tank at the top of the stairs and lowered himself to the dark bottom, crouching, opening his backpack. By the light of a tiny keychain LED flashlight he slid the newspapers out and started twisting some of them into tight little logs, crumpling other sheets into balls, building a varied pile. After a moment’s consideration, he crammed the storm drain with some of the heavy twists, sticking as many in the metal holes as would fit, and poured a quart of motor oil—10-30, whatever that meant—over them, clogging the drain. He spread his crumpled paper all around the drooping, oil-drenched wicks and stacked more paper on top, then upended the can of turpentine over everything, splashing the door liberally.
He climbed to the top of the stairwell with the backpack and carefully moved the propane tank around the corner, maybe ten feet away. He returned to the stairs and crouched, the sharp tang of the turpentine searing his nose. He struck a wooden match with shaking fingers and threw it at the sodden pile of paper, throwing himself back at the same time.
Nothing. After an eternity of waiting, afraid that he’d stand up and look down and then there’d be a big movie explosion and he’d be thrown twenty feet, outlined in fire, he carefully crept forward and aimed his tiny flashlight down the stairwell. It wasn’t bright enough to show him anything; he couldn’t see the match, and there wasn’t any fire.
He lit a second match, held it until half its length was ablaze, and threw it into the pit, quickly stepping away. Counting, slowly, to ten, and…nothing.
Shitballs. It was just one of those little boxes; there were only a dozen matches left in it. He sat down and spent a moment arranging the matches so that all their heads stuck out one end of the box, the wash of fumes alerting him to the possibility of a fireball. He would throw it and dive, throw it and dive…