Mr. 8

by David J. Thirteen

  There were never beggars in Market Square. Where did they all go when they weren’t at the shelters? What dark corners of the small town did they disappear into it? Then he remembered the bridge and Ray—Patient Zero.

  He picked up his tray and went over to sit with the card players.

  “Don’t mind him.” Red Cap gestured to the proud man sitting off by himself. He was at the very end of his table with his arms folded. He faced the Christmas tree, as if he were waiting for it put on a show.

  “He doesn’t think he belongs here.” He laughed again. Despite it being deep in tone, there was something tittering about it, as though it were more of a nervous tic than a product of mirth.

  “Poor guy,” the small man sitting next to Denton said. His jacket’s hood threw a shadow across his face. Only the rough dark stubble on his chin could be seen clearly. “His house burnt down. Got here too late for a bed. Bet he’s wondering where he’ll go tonight.”

  Next to Red Cap, a gaunt man with a shock of blond hair and two missing front teeth said, “It won’t be with us. He’ll be too grand for that,”

  His attention drifted over to Denton. He stuck a bone white finger in his face and asked, “Who hit you? Was it Cal?” Through the missing teeth, the “ess” sound lisped: wash it Cal?

  Denton stroked his chin and let his hand linger there. “No. Who’s Cal?” he asked, without much interest.

  “He’s a fucking mad dog!”

  The blond man began to rise out of his seat. The strain in his facial muscles gave him a patina of impotent rage. Red Cap put his hand on the man’s arm and patted it in an effort to calm him down. “Dutch got into a fight with him last month.”

  “He attacked me!”

  “We know. We know,” he said soothingly, as Dutch sat back down. Changing the subject, he turned to Denton, “Tough luck not getting a bed. You got a plan for tonight, after they kick us out?”

  Where would he go? Not home. He couldn’t sleep in his car. Not in this weather. What options did he have? He might just have to bite the bullet and go to the police. Even if they didn’t believe him about the virus, he had to look at the big picture. They might botch the whole thing by not quarantining him, but at least his statement would be on record. As the number of insane increased, the CDC would eventually figure it out. Bexhill might end up crippled by the disease, but so long as Linda was safe, what else mattered? He just needed to sound the alarm in hope that they would stop it here and keep it from spreading.

  “I’m going to the police station.”

  “Oh, that old scam. It’s not as easy as it used to be. Good luck to you.”

  It seemed that seeking shelter at the stationhouse wasn’t unheard of, even though that wasn’t what Denton had in mind. He decided not to explain and began to eat his soup instead. It barely had any taste and was badly in need of salt, but its warmth comforted him. His ragged nerves began to calm down and he could feel the tension easing in the back of his neck.

  “Are you going to eat that?” The man next to him pointed at the bread.

  There was no way he was going to be able to chew the hard lump of stale bread with his jaw still tender. “No. Take it if you want.”

  “Thank you kindly.” The bread vanished in seconds, disappearing into the mouth hidden by the hood.

  When only a thin residue that the spoon was unable to capture remained in the bowl, Denton decided he couldn’t put off asking them any longer.

  “Did any of you know Alfred Reynolds?” He stared into blank faces. “Some people called him Ray. In the summer, he stayed under the train bridge by the water treatment plant.”

  Red Cap shook his head. The other two looked down at the table. The man sitting behind Denton started coughing uncontrollably. It was a hacking cough that sounded as if it were trying to scrap something horrible off of the surface of his lungs.

  Denton shrank away. The soup threatened to come back up at the thought of the sickness spewing from the filthy old man.

  How foolish I am, Denton thought. What could he give me that would be worse that what I already have. If these people knew what infected me, they would run in panic from this place.

  The coughs slowed to a sputter. When they finally stopped, a soft voice spoke, “I know Ray.”

  Denton turned around. The man was watching him. His eyes seemed unfocused, and his skin had a loose rubbery look to it, which made his face seem more expressive than it really was.

  “You did?”

  The man nodded. “I’ve been under the bridge with him a few times.”

  “When was the last time you saw Ray?”

  The man was quiet. His fingers traced out the topography of his whiskers, as though trying to read his memory through braille.

  “The fall, sometime. The apples were out. I wouldn’t have gone there except I was coming home from spending the day in the orchards, and it was getting late and cold. There was a fire under the bridge.”

  “You wouldn’t have gone? Why not?” There was a clue here, he could feel it. Fate had led him to the shelter and this man. Ray told him something—something that would make everything clear.

  “Ray doesn’t get along with anyone. He’s a strange bird. Never likes people coming around. Gets steaming mad, if you get too close to him. But I thought I could just stop by to warm myself.”

  Denton could picture the scene. This old vagrant stumbling along the tracks with apple juice stuck to his chin, a clear September night overhead, and a wind that cut through his clothes. A small fire created a glow under the bridge, like a flickering flame in a lantern.

  “Did you talk to him? What did he say?”

  “Like I said, Ray was a strange one. He was acting really odd that night. He was raving, saying he had figured out the truth. Kept asking if I wanted to know it.”

  Ray was under the bridge in the heat of the infection, eights spray painted all around him, frantic and anxious from the building violence in his brain. He had changed. No longer driving others away, he was welcoming and offered to share the fire and the truth. Wasn’t that what Denton wanted, the truth?

  “Did he tell you what this truth was?” Denton inched forward on his seat and leaned in closer to the man.

  “No sir. I didn’t want to know anything from him. I just wanted to sit by the fire. The whole time he keeps tapping his forehead and chattering away about it. Says he can see straight into people and make them better, strange nonsense like that.”

  Despite being disappointed that the truth hadn’t been asked for and hadn’t been told, Denton still felt a chill from the story. It’s was like a horror movie: this poor old soul sitting in the madman’s lair under the bridge, completely unaware of the danger he was in and terrors that lurked there.

  “Then what?”

  “I get up to go. And he tells me, he’s leaving soon, but if I change my mind and want to learn the truth to go and see him.”

  “Where?”

  “He said I could find him on Mt. Nazareth.”

  “Mt. Nazareth,” Denton blurted out. He could feel the blood drain from his face. “Why would he go there?”

  “Hell if I know. To go live with the devils, I figure. He’d fit right in.”

  “The Devil! The Devil!” Dutch screeched, standing up in horror, like Satan had just walked through the door.

  The silver haired man with the cross stomped across the room with his finger pressed against his lips. But instead of shushing him, he yelled, “Shut your trap. Remember where you are, man.”

  Red Cap grabbed Dutch by the shoulder and pressed him back down into the chair. “The Devil can’t come in here. He can’t enter a church. It’s holy ground.”

  Dutch trembled, but he seemed to get enough control of himself to keep quiet.

  Denton switched seats and moved across from the coughing man, so he could speak more quietly
.

  “What do you mean devils?” he asked in a whisper.

  “You know, the ones in the hills near here.”

  Denton sat back bewildered. How sane was this man?

  “Old stories. Demons in the woods. Devils in the trees.” The hooded man crossed himself after speaking.

  Red Cap made as if to spit—a gesture to ward off evil. Dutch had his head buried in his arms and appeared to take no notice.

  “Up on Mt. Nazareth?” Denton asked. The universe seemed to be colluding against him. Why there? Why did this lead back there?

  The man with the hood nodded.

  Denton turned back around and said, “And there were eights—or circles—painted everywhere, right? Under the bridge, I mean.”

  “Not that time,” the coughing man said.

  “What do mean? Did he paint eights there before?” Was this coot mixing things up?

  “No, it was later. On one of the first really bad nights, when the ground was too cold to sleep on.”

  The first frost had been around the second weekend in November. He must have meant then or soon after. Of course. That was more fitting with the timeline. People only started showing signs of the infection around then.

  Then why was Ray acting so strange months earlier?

  “There was no room at Fillan’s, so I was looking for a place, and I saw the fire down by the river. I was frozen to the bone. So I headed down, with a bottle I’d gotten earlier that day. Thought I’d trade a few drinks to sleep by the fire.”

  “But you said Ray didn’t like people.”

  “Figured he’d cleared out long before. It wouldn’t be the first time someone took over his camp after he left. I never would have gone, if I knew what was waiting down there.”

  “What was there? What happened?”

  “All I could see was the fire, at first, under the bridge. It’d been built up big. An old pallet and some branches were burning and the flames went past my chin. I got scared then. Figured it must be some kids having a party. I didn’t want to run into no teenagers. Not all by myself. But no one was around. Or at least so I thought. Then I see him. There’s this man just sitting there staring at the wall, like one of them Buddhist monks, with his legs all twisted up under him.”

  “Ray?”

  “It wasn’t Ray.”

  “He’d changed,” Denton prompted.

  The old man cleared his throat with a loud harrumph and continued, “I say hi and tell him I’ve got some liquor. But he doesn’t say anything. I get worried that something was wrong with him, so I goes right in front and face him, and that’s when he gets mad. Says I’m disturbing the energy or something. And I see he’s mapped out all the circles of Hell around him. It stuns me, that. While I’m looking at these two great big red circles, he springs up like a weasel and grabs me and hits me with a stone.” He pointed to a thin pink scab on his forehead. “I’m on the ground, and he gets on top of me, and gets his hands around my neck, and I’m sure I’m a goner. I lash out and hit him with my bottle. It breaks against his head, and he falls back, and I’m certain I killed the bastard. But he jumps right back up. That’s when I ran. I ran as fast as I could.”

  “And did Ray chase you?”

  “I tell you it weren’t Ray. That thing under the bridge was a monster. Thank God I got away.”

  “So, he didn’t chase you?”

  “Don’t know. Never looked back. But I got lucky. It’s funny: I was afraid of finding teenagers that night, but they’re the ones that saved me. When I got to the road, they picked me up in their car.”

  “What car?”

  “One of them vans, like folks drive their kids to school in. It was blue, or maybe black. They took me to the hospital.”

  “And did you tell them about Ray?”

  “No, cause it weren’t Ray.” Irritation grated in his voice. “I told them all about that devil under the bridge, though. And all about the circles he’d drawn.” He paused and his eyes narrowed with suspicion. “You know, it’s strange: they were real curious about it and seemed to know all about them drawings already. Just like you.”

  Chapter 32

  The Spreading Evil

  THE ROOF GROANED UNDER THE WEIGHT of the snow and the windows rattled, gently waking Denton from a coma-like sleep.

  From the moment consciousness found him, pain and nausea flooded his body. There didn’t seem to be a muscle, joint, or bone that didn’t feel old and battered. His head was full of broken glass, and a railway spike dug into his left temple.

  Ever since getting home from the hospital, his sleeps had been long and dark, and his body had rebelled at the thought of getting up.

  He turned over to his other side hoping the new position would ease some of the discomfort and perhaps he would slip back into the black pool of dreams. As horrific as they had been, at least they were free from the pain.

  His hand slid over to Linda’s side of the bed searching for her warm body. All he encountered was cool, smooth sheets.

  His face pressed into the pillow. The case had a starchy, stale smell, as though it had been cleaned long ago. The pattern was pink roses on white. The rest of the room was lost in gray murk.

  This wasn’t his bed.

  He wasn’t in his house.

  All traces of drowsiness rushed away and a jarring reality started to form around him.

  He groped at the night table in search of his glasses, hoping habit may have left them there for him. His hand brushed against something and it fell with a carpet muffled thud. The sound was too heavy and solid to be the glasses; he leaned his body over to lengthen his reach. The thin metal of one of the arms found its way to his fingers, and he pulled them onto his face in one fluid, well-practiced motion.

  The neat guestroom came into focus. On the table next to the bed was a small lamp made out of milk glass and a matching vase with fake pink roses. A doily drooped off the edge threatening to slip off. The only thing preventing it from falling was a glass with less than an ounce of water in it.

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Denton grabbed it and greedily sucked down the last drops. The faint moisture seemed to only highlight the dryness in his throat. He need more.

  There was a bathroom just down the hall, two doors down, and another one by the stairs. The whole layout of the house started coming back to him, replacing the last vestige of the strange dreams that plagued his sleep.

  He sat up and put his feet on the floor. One foot felt the soft rug, a hard corner dug into the sole of the other. He reached down and picked up the book he had knocked over. The black and red cover brought it all back to him: the whole night—the whole miserable night—everything from the moment Radnor grabbed his wrist, to the strange encounter at the shelter, and how he ended up spending the night in this room.

  They kicked them out of St. Fillan’s at a little after 11:00. The three card players headed off to a spot they knew behind the bakery, where the ovens threw heat out all night long. They asked Denton whether he wanted to join them, but he declined as politely as he could. When he looked around again, the coughing man had disappeared into the night, taking whatever remaining secrets he might have with him.

  The wind blew eddies of snow around the street, miniature tornados of frost marking the desolation of the town. It was only him and the man who had lost his home to fire, still outside the church.

  A horrific scene filled Denton’s mind: this dour man stands in a bedroom of a suburban home pouring gasoline from a red can onto the bodies of his loved ones. They are infected and changed, strange facsimiles of their former selves. He lights a wooden match on the door frame as he walks out and sets the house ablaze.

  Denton shook the image away. There was no point adding any gruesomeness to this man’s tragedy. If there had been anything suspicious about the fire, he’d be in police custody, not out on the st
reet looking for a bed in a storm.

  “Do you need a lift someplace?” Denton asked.

  The man looked at him as though he had just grown horns. His stare bore into Denton’s forehead, as his mouth twisted in puzzlement.

  “No. I’m good,” he said. Then he set off, plowing through the snow drifts that covered the sidewalk.

  Denton should go too. It was time to turn himself in.

  He hunted through his coat pockets for his car keys. The back of his hand came in contact with the sheet of paper. The one he had taken from Kaling’s apartment. The one Kaling had wanted back so badly.

  The temptation to pull it out and examine it then and there was tempered only by the fear that the thick flurries of snow would ruin it.

  It was a list of the infected, but it wasn’t the first of its kind Denton had come across. There was one at the lodge on Mt. Hamon. Those boys had been assembling their own list. Denton had been unable to read the wall of photos and clippings, but it had likely been comprised of the same people.

  A strong urge came over him to drive there and compare the two. He could go up and check it out and then in the morning investigate Mt. Nazareth.

  Except Bill had told him everything had been cleared out of there and was in Evidence. Not to mention, he couldn’t imagine spending the night in that lodge. It was a place he hoped to never see again.

  Denton paused from the work of clearing snow off of the car. All the more reason to go to the police. Perhaps once he gave the list to Bill, they could review the evidence and see how much it matched up with what the boys had gathered.

  That’ll never happen. You’ll end up strapped to a hospital bed faster than you can say: sedation.

  What if one of them had made notes? Perhaps Eddie had written something down. It was a long shot, but maybe something had been left at the Radcliff home. The police must have searched it, but since it wasn’t the scene of any crime, perhaps they weren’t so thorough. Maybe they missed something.

  But what light would their notes shine on this? He had the list already. Wasn’t he just trying to put off the inevitable: the long, tiring interrogation, the trip to the hospital in handcuffs followed by drug filled days on a psych watch?