The two men fell as one against the kitchen door. Jim scarcely felt Brad’s weight atop him, or the pressure that weight put on the knife that pierced him. He did not hear Kim Bailey run screaming to the front door or the heavy booted footsteps only seconds afterward. All he was aware of was the bearded cheek touching his face, and the hand on his chest, a hand whose fingers twitched lightly, like thin branches in a gentle breeze. He held the hand in his own until the movement finally ceased, then closed his eyes, feeling tired, cold, happy to rest, eager to be warm again.
CHAPTER 30
Mike Gifford, Bob Rankin, and Chief Kaylor sat together in the Merridale police station drinking coffee and waiting for dawn. The other men, called from their beds, had returned to them. Gifford shook his head. “Hate to be the real estate agent that’s got to sell that house.” Kaylor chuckled grimly. Bob Rankin forced a weak smile.
“Goddamn slaughterhouse, that’s for sure,” agreed Kaylor. “You believe what that trooper said though? About hang fire?” Gifford’s young face was lined with doubt.
“From what the girl said happened, I don’t know what else it could’ve been,” Kaylor answered. “The gun behind the refrigerator supports it.”
Gifford took another sip from his Penn State mug. “Never heard of that. Oh, I mean I’ve heard of it, but just never heard of it actually happening before.”
“I saw it once,” said Rankin quietly. “At the academy. We were slow-firing .38’s on the range, and the guy on the line next to me—his gun didn’t fire. So right away he starts to open the chamber and a sergeant yells at him, ‘Put that gun up!’ loud as he can. The kid does, and bam. The bullet the firing pin had struck six, seven seconds earlier finally goes off. ‘That’s called hang fire, asshole,’ the sergeant says, ‘and it happens one time in ten thousand, but that time it could’ve blown your fucking foot off.’ Well, it made an impression on me. I’ve had a lot of misfires over the years, but I just hold that bitch out and count to fifteen, just like that sergeant said.”
“Sure as shit what Meyers should’ve done,” Gifford said, then paused. “On second thought, maybe not. He got what he deserved. Couldn’t believe his face. Like a fucking maniac. How’d you like to have that where you cook your dinner? And down in the cellar? Thornton and that Grimes woman? Jesus, he was a psycho all right. Thank God he didn’t get the chance to do anything to the girl. In a way it’s kind of lucky that Callendar got in.”
“I should’ve seen him,” Rankin said. “He shouldn’t have gotten past me.”
“No,” Kaylor agreed, peering at Rankin over the edge of his cup. “He shouldn’t have.”
“What the hell, it worked out.” Gifford smiled. “The girl’s safe, and it looks like Callendar’ll pull through. And Meyers is dead. That alone has got to cheer you up some.”
Kaylor stood quickly. “Get this shit cleaned up. And get your feet off the desk. If anyone wants me, I’ll be at home.”
“Holy shit, Bob,” Gifford said when Kaylor had gone. “What’s with him?”
“I don’t think he liked what you said. About Meyers.”
“Well, Jesus H. Christ, I’m sorry, but anybody who did what that son of a bitch did doesn’t deserve to live.”
“Maybe not. But you don’t want to get callous about it. Or worse, happy about it.”
“I was only joking.”
Rankin moved to the window. “Some joke, Frank,” he said, staring at the blueness starting to fade at the approach of dawn. “Just look at it. It’s all really some joke.”
Ash Wednesday
Fred Hibbs awoke just before dawn, and he didn’t know why.
He knew it was early from his watch, not from any brightening of sky through a window, for his cell had no window. He usually slept soundly until 7:00, when the bells would ring twenty minutes before breakfast, and he would rise, scratching and moaning, eventually splash some water in his face, use the toilet, throw on his drab gray clothes, and wait for them to unlock his cell, so he could march down to the mess hall for breakfast.
He lay there in the darkness wondering what they’d have today. Eggs, he hoped. Not that the eggs were all that great—they were those powdered things, and they used too much water to cook them. But along with the eggs they always had bacon, thick, greasy slices of it that crisped and hardened at the edges, so juicy it was more like ham. Fred thought maybe they got a good price on the stuff from a local farmer.
Then it struck him that there was something special about today, and he immediately wondered if there would be any improvement in the mess hall cuisine as a result. But when he remembered he sighed. It was Ash Wednesday, that was all. Back in Merridale he probably wouldn’t even have realized it. But here, with all the PR’s and dagos, it was impossible to ignore. All they were talking about in the rec hall the day before was which priest would show up to put the ashes on the foreheads. Father Bill from St. Peter’s was the favorite at 5-2.
Fred smiled. If he’d known what prison in Lansford had been like, he’d have beaten up Eddie Karl a long time ago. Those prison movies were just bullshit. Oh, sure, maybe if you were a good-looking nineteen-year-old you were in for some trouble, but Fred had made buddies, stayed out of the mean guys’ way, and got along with the guards, who were really pretty nice if you didn’t hassle them. The bed was soft enough, the food was edible and plentiful, and there were magazines to look at, TV to watch from 7:00 to lights out.
And best of all, thought Fred Hibbs, there were no ghosts. On the tail of that thought he rolled over, deciding to go back to sleep.
But at that moment, a light began to reach through the thin membrane of his eyelids, making him wonder, Guard? Guard with a flashlight? Why?
He opened his eyes and saw the shape taking form in the opposite corner of his cell, directly under the water pipe that cut through each cubicle in the cellblock. It grew slowly into existence, a foot from the floor, a steadily gleaming wraith hanging naked from an unseen rope, shedding a pale light over the staring Fred Hibbs.
The light was blue.
Fred screamed, but the vision remained, its eyes opened wide, as in watching. Fred screamed again, and again, and again.
And soon, all the others were screaming as well.
It spread over the world like ink on tissue, slowly, inexorably, from the center outward until no whiteness remains. Its focal point was Merridale, and it began at dawn. Lansford was the first city of any size that it reached, Gettysburg the first site of utter horror. Few tourists were up at that hour, so the battlefield roads were nearly empty. But the early risers — truck drivers, people on their way to six A.M. shifts, anyone awake and about at the time who used the smooth two-lanes that passed the Wheatfield, Devil’s Den, the site of Pickett’s Charge — all were plunged into a scene worthy of the imagination of a Dante, a de Sade, a Hitler. Thousands of men stood, fell, lay dead in time, as the ball had struck them, as the shell had burst, as the bayonet tore away their lives. They littered the roadways, still warring to occupy the same space in the crisp March air, but warring without motion. Cars and trucks bounced off roads into low ditches and against stone walls. There were new deaths from injuries and heart attacks. When the rest of the town woke and realized, there were several suicides. By the time the first ambulances went out for the injured, the Wheatfield was an unbroken plain of blue.
TWA Flight 405 was the first plane to experience contact with the phenomenon. In the corridor a charred and dismembered corpse seemed to swoop down its length, its left arm and what remained of its right thrown up in the air as if in surprise. Half the head was missing, and a witness recalled later that it looked like a lump of grayish ice cream from which a serving had been scooped.
A man in first class turned away from his window as the ruined body of an old woman shot past, only to catch a glimpse in the seat beside him of a young child whose head was nearly severed from his lacerated body.
A college student went into hysterics as the crushed upper torso of a young woman str
eamed through his seat back, then rushed through his own body.
In the cockpit, the pilot saw a coalescence of body scraps whirl by as if in the teeth of a storm.
From the time Flight 405 reached the accident site to the moment it left was less than two seconds.
The wire services had the story by the time the phenomenon reached New York City, so there were those who were at least partially prepared, although most New Yorkers awoke completely innocent of the knowledge that the nightmare had come from the two-storied buildings of Merridale to breach their steel and concrete towers. There was panic. There were deaths that led to greater panic. Morning rush hour subway tunnels exploded with screams, crosstown busses turned into cages of frightened children. Taxis, cars all stopped as people ran futilely, quickly discovering that there was nowhere left to hide in this ultimate gridlock.
In Washington, D.C. Clyde Thornton’s immediate supervisor had just finished his third cup of coffee and a memorial address to be read before Congress, when a naked, old man in chin whiskers whom he had never seen before sat in thin air on the other side of his office. The living man sat frozen for a moment, then muttered, “Oh God … oh my God,” and grabbed for his telephone. Every number he tried was busy.
At a breakfast in the White House Rose Room, the president and ten congressional leaders all rattled their cups or dropped their silverware when faced with the presence of three undressed men in various reclining postures. Only later, after the officials had run out only to be confronted by similar wraiths, were the three identified as Grover Cleveland, Franklin Pierce, and Warren Harding.
Once over their initial shock, the information transmitting facilities of New York and Washington began to move, so that news of the phenomenon’s spread proved speedier than the phenomenon itself, an early warning system of expanding revenants. Though, as in a nuclear attack, there was no way to pull back the array of bombs and the growing stain of fallout, there was at least a herald of things to come. Though the rest of the world would wait with fear, they at least knew that they were waiting. The great majority would not be caught by surprise.
In new, shiny, underground rooms relatively free of the apparitions, It was determined that the phenomenon was spreading at the rate of 1670 kilometers per hour, and showed no signs of stopping or slowing. Calls were made to the Soviet bloc in an effort to prevent any retaliatory strikes against what might be interpreted as a hostile attack. The calls were successfully concluded, thanks in no small part to Soviet officials in Washington who were convinced that the phenomenon resulted from a technology far in advance of any known scientific community, a view which was seconded by their superiors.
Further calls were made to Europe, India, South America, Africa, the Middle East. Explanations were given, preparations were made.
In Merridale, Joan Craven was vacuuming the living room when the news hit the Today show. The Hoover was too loud for her to hear the voices, but she saw the words, “Merridale Disaster Spreading,” in fat, block letters on the screen behind the announcer, a thickset, robust man who looked suddenly pale and sickly. She turned off the cleaner, dashed across the room to the TV, and turned up the volume. After listening for a few seconds, she called to her husband. “Bob? Bob!”
He came running shirtless into the room. “What’s wrong?” he asked startled. “Are you okay?”
She gestured toward the screen. They both watched, listened.
“My God,” Craven finally whispered. “Oh my dear God.”
Joan looked at him. His skin was chalky and he was shaking, but his face was filled with excitement, his eyes with joy. He grasped her shoulders in his big hands. “It’s Ash Wednesday. Today is Ash Wednesday.” Turning back to the screen, he laughed. “I was right. Even though I didn’t believe it myself, I was right. There was a reason. To get them ready. All the rest of them …”
“You were right,” Joan agreed, hugging him.
“We’ll have to pray now. Pray for all of them.” He shook his head. “Imagine what it must be like. In the cities. Other places.” The thought of Auschwitz came to his mind. Hiroshima. Even San Francisco. There would be places on earth, he thought with sadness, that would be unbearable, uninhabitable. But that was the price you paid for realization, for truth.
Craven took his wife’s hands. “God help them,” he prayed. “God help them to bear it. And God help them to see.”
The world saw. It saw far more than it could have wished.
Cuba’s ghosts, bloodied in revolution and war.
Settlers, massacred and scalped; Indians, tortured in revenge.
Fleshy, blue remnants deep in Chilean dungeons.
Sacrifices with rended chests on the altars of Tlaloc.
The scattered dead on America’s highways.
And it was not yet noon.
The nurses and doctors at Lansford General were used to death, so it took them a far shorter time to adjust to what had occurred early that morning than it had the general public. The patients, unfortunately, were not quite as resilient. Cries of “Nurse! Nurse!” had cut through the halls and rooms for hours, while nurses and orderlies and even surgeons scurried down halls and into rooms, moving beds and shoving the curtained barriers framed by metal poles into place to hide as best they could the forms of the dead from the living.
By 10:00 A.M., when Alice Meadows entered the hospital, the worst of the initial panic was over. US 15 had been heavy with traffic, as people sought to flee, then changed their minds as the radio informed them that there was nowhere to flee to. It had taken her ninety minutes to make what was usually a twenty minute drive. Once in Lansford, the streets were nearly blocked with cars, husbands returning home from work to their families, people trying to reach their friends across town, and everywhere the dogs barked and howled, lending higher, more strident tones to the hundreds of car horns. Finally, Alice had pulled into a small lot a half mile from the hospital and walked the rest of the way.
The hospital seemed far quieter than she had imagined, although the mingled mass of blue, floating corpses that was revealed when the elevator doors opened persuaded her to take the stairs to the fifth floor. Dead from trauma, she thought. Accident, murder. Unnatural death.
The stairway and the fifth floor hall were relatively free of ghosts. When she thought about it, it seemed logical: where do people die in hospitals? In their rooms, or on the operating tables, and even then the heart attack victims, the cancer, patients, the more or less natural deaths would be at home, in their offices, the places they haunted in life; and she marveled once again at the selectivity of whatever was behind all this. You could no longer sweep the bodies away, bury them in trenches, or burn them on piles to hide them from the sight of the living. No. We’re stuck with our dead now.
Jim was smiling when she entered his room. His bed was pushed against the wall in a space that had yesterday held a chair and a small metal dresser. A barrier hid the greater part of the room from her view. She kissed him, then cocked her head toward the curtains. “Bad?”
He nodded. “Not so good to wake up to. There are only three or four, though. This is a newer wing.”
“Ring for the nurse.”
“Not right away. I figured they’d have enough troubles. Besides, I was used to them, being from Merridale.” He smiled. “I just closed my eyes, told myself the boogeymen all over me and in me couldn’t do a blessed thing, and decided to go back to sleep.”
“Did you?”
“I’m not that jaded. Of course not.” They laughed together. Then he sobered and pointed to the TV mounted high on the wall. The picture was on, but the sound was off. “It’s spreading fast, they say. Soon it’ll be everywhere.”
She nodded. “I wonder if that’s good or bad.”
“Bad at first, I guess. The panic, people bashing their cars into telephone poles, maybe killing themselves. But all in all I’m grateful for it. In the long run it could be for the best.”
“How is it today?” she asked, taking
his hand.
He looked down at his sheeted stomach. “Not bad. Hurts, but they keep me doped. Last night the doctor said maybe another week.”
“And then?”
“Then Pittsburgh. If they get all the wrecks off the road by then.”
“They will. We’re a very adaptable race.”
“I hope we’re impressionable too. Are you still leaving today?”
She shook her head. “I’d never get back to New York. The trains, the highways,
the tunnels, it’d be hell. I’ll wait a bit.”
“How long?”
“A few days. A week.” Alice shrugged. “There’ll still be shows, movies. People will still want to laugh, and listen to music. Love songs.”
“Stay in the house …”
“We’ll see.”
“… as long as you like.”
“Thank you.” She nodded acceptance, although she already had her things packed and in the trunk of the car. She would find a motel when she left the hospital, and wait for things to cool down. The house on Sundale Road was no longer hers. The decision to end their relationship had truly been a joint one. He no longer needed what she had given him, and her need for what he had provided was gone as well. The phone call she’d received Monday evening had helped her make her decision.
“I won’t … can’t visit you anymore,” she said.
“I’ll miss you.”
“And I’ll miss you,” she half-lied, “but only for a while.”
“Thank you for what you did.”
Alice kissed him on the lips, wanting to end it, wanting to leave before Beth arrived. She had not told him she was coming. She still cared enough about him to not want to see the expectation in his eyes. “Goodbye.”
When she was at the door he said, “I’ll write,” and she responded, “Me too,” and left knowing that neither of them ever would.
On her way out of the building, she passed Beth, recognizing her from a picture Jim had on the piano. Alice did not introduce herself, but only watched as Beth moved through the lobby with a firm yet graceful stride, eyes set only on the path ahead, the dead past forgotten.
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