Time for a little disinformation, I thought, turned the handle, and swung the door open so I was looking through the screen.
“Hi, John,” I said in a purposefully weak voice.
“You haven’t been answering your phone, and my wife’s in a tizzy about what we’re supposed to be bringing for Easter dinner,” Sampson said, studying me through the screen. “Don’t you listen to your messages?”
“Not when I’ve got four people puking their insides out,” I said. “Damon brought some nasty stomach bug home from school. Norovirus or something. It’s killing Bree with the cracked ribs and all.”
Sampson took a step back with a foul look on his face. “You got it?”
“Not yet,” I replied. “But I’ve been up all night with everyone else.”
Sampson took another step back, and I took that as a cue to open the screen door and step out onto the porch, saying, “Easter dinner’s touch and go for the time being, John. Could be one of those eighteen-hour viruses, though.”
“Hate those things,” my partner said. “Had one in Cancún last year that laid me flat, and I’m not up to repeating that scene anytime soon.”
“Don’t blame you,” I said loudly, and took several steps toward him, offering my hand so he could see the Ziploc bag and the phone inside. He glanced at it, showed no reaction, just reached for my hand.
Stepping in to throw my arm around him in a guy’s hug, I whispered, “Thierry Mulch, the guy who sent me the bizarre letter about the massage parlor killings, has taken my family hostage. Look at the picture on the phone. They’re all like that. My house is bugged. Not certain about my cell. Mulch says he’ll kill them if I contact police or the FBI. Hang back for now. And pray.”
“For sure, Alex,” Sampson said in a normal voice, stepping back nice and relaxed, as if he heard that sort of dire message every day. “I know Billie still wants to make the green beans and bacon dish you all like.”
“Bacon might be tough on their stomachs,” I said, turning to go back inside. “I’ll let you know.”
“All right,” Sampson said. “Have a good evening.”
“Long as I’m not moving buckets around I’ll be fine,” I said, and shut the door. Pausing there, I listened to Sampson’s footsteps fade away and started toward the stairs and the bedroom.
But then my phone vibrated. A text from Bree: You were told not to contact police. You were told the penalty.
I immediately texted back, He’s my partner, Mulch. He came asking about Easter dinner. I did not call him. Repeat: I did not call him.
For several agonizing minutes I got no reply, then my phone buzzed with a second text from Bree: Suffer the consequences, Cross.
Before I could do a thing, my phone buzzed again — a picture with a time stamp, taken just moments before.
Nana Mama lay sprawled on her side on a cement floor. There was a pool of blood beneath her slack, spattered face, and a gaping wound on the left side of her head, just above the ear.
CHAPTER 105
It was like someone had struck me in the stomach with an axe blade.
Doubled over, I whimpered in a child’s voice, “No. Please, dear God, no.”
I staggered forward, trying to sit on the stairs, but the disbelief and grief were overwhelming, and I lurched into the banister. Falling to the hallway floor, feeling gutted, I sobbed my heart out.
For more than three decades, Nana Mama had been my rock, my anchor, more so than any of my wives or significant others. She’d rescued me from the orphanage. She’d pushed and cajoled me through school, and had seen me receive my PhD in psychology.
My grandmother was right there when I wed my first wife, Maria, and rocked Damon and Jannie for hours when they were babies. She held my hand at Maria’s funeral, and helped me through the tough times after Ali’s mother left me. She had been overjoyed the day I married Bree. Throughout Nana Mama’s entire life, she’d been open and kind and tough to everyone, family and friends, and especially to me.
I’d always thought of her as immortal somehow.
And now, Regina Cross Hope was gone in a pool of blood, lying on some cold cement floor in God only knew what basement or empty building, a bullet through her head courtesy of a psychopath named Mulch whom I knew next to nothing about.
But I instantly hated Mulch. I had never really hated any of the bloodthirsty lunatics I’d faced in the past, preferring to look at them as disturbed creatures I was charged with capturing. But Mulch felt beyond Gary Soneji. He felt beyond Michael “The Butcher” Sullivan, too.
Killing my grandmother, Mulch had gone for the jugular, and I wanted to fight back, throttle him with my bare hands. Knowing he was listening, I almost screamed out how much I loathed him, how much I wanted to kill him, but something deep inside me had me biting my tongue, still hoping that somehow I’d be able to turn the electronic bugs against him.
Nausea welled inside me. Crawling to the downstairs bathroom, I threw up again and again, trying to get rid of something worse than any stomach bug. Gasping, covered in sweat, I sat with my back to the wall by the toilet, wondering if I should just call Sampson where Mulch could hear me and openly declare war on the coward who’d just executed a ninety-one-year-old woman in cold blood.
But for almost an hour, my thoughts and actions would not track. Every time I tried to formulate a plan, my brain peeled off and found that image of Nana Mama dead of a gunshot wound in a garish light. It paralyzed me.
The second photograph came an hour later. This time Bree had taken the bullet, lying on her side like Nana Mama in a pool of her own blood, the gunshot wound visible behind her left ear.
I could not control my agony in any way, shape, or form. It simply devoured me and I began screaming for my dead wife from the depths of my soul.
“Stop it!” I shouted when the initial shock had passed. “Don’t do this, Mulch! No more!”
Trembling from head to toe, fighting off the urge to vomit again, I wiped aside my tears with my sleeve and texted him back on Bree’s phone. Please, Mulch. I’ll do anything you say. Just stop killing them.
Feeling scorched inside, I stared at my phone and then went into the dining room where Mulch could see me. I crossed to the spider plant and looked directly into the camera lens. I cried out to Mulch to spare my children from my grandmother’s fate and my wife’s. I begged him until I was hoarse, and I texted him over and over again: Have mercy on them. Have mercy on my children.
At nine o’clock I got a picture sent from Jannie’s phone. It was my son Damon, executed in the same manner, sprawled on his side in his own blood. My disbelief became a raw, tearing sensation, as if someone were literally skinning me alive and disemboweling me at the same time.
Damon. My firstborn. My son. My—
My mind collapsed inward, forgot time, and I saw Damon as an infant, sleeping in the swing Maria had found in a secondhand store, and me sitting by his side, thinking that I had never seen anything so beautiful. Then there he was as a Little Leaguer, unsure up there on the mound, looking to me in the stands for support. And Damon as I’d last seen him up on the Kraft School campus after winning a basketball game in the final seconds with a perfect three-point jumper.
GONE.
GONE.
The word began ringing in my head, like a huge bell tolling, and with each peal — GONE — I got weaker, and weaker, dissolving, turning primitive, unable and unwilling to move a muscle, knowing that no matter what I did, no matter what I said, Thierry Mulch was bent on killing them all.
I left the dining room and went upstairs. I lay on my bed, looking up at the ceiling, feeling as if someone had been harvesting chunks of my brain, seeing everything in my room as if down a long, dark tunnel that was closing with every minute that passed.
At ten o’clock that Saturday night, the photograph of Jannie came. Same position. Same shot to the head. A girl who hours earlier had been told that her life could be extraordinary, that her talent was almost unlimited, was gone.
GONE.
GONE.
It was my only thought.
GONE.
GONE.
Ali died at one minute before eleven, according to the time stamp. My little boy’s eyes were open and vacant, an expression I’d seen on scores of corpses over the years.
GONE.
My entire family was GONE. For a long time I lay curled up in a fetal position on the bed. Then, around midnight, though I was still unable to think at all, my legs swung off the bed as if of their own accord. I stood up, seeing everything around me as if through a scratched and blurry lens.
There was no conscious thought at that point, but my brain was not dead. Fully infected by the overwhelming virus of loss, my mind turned reptilian, and the reptile commanded me to walk.
CHAPTER 106
Dropping the phone, I trudged out the front door of my house, left it open to the wind of a coming storm. I walked in a state of total shock through the streets of Washington, alternately catatonic and then overwhelmed by grief, sobbing my heart out. People who passed me on the sidewalks seemed creatures from another lifetime. Their laughter was like some foreign language I’d never understand again.
By two Easter morning the streets were deserted. By three, they were empty and dark, and thunderstorms lashed the city.
I’d been walking like that for hours by then but didn’t feel hungry, or thirsty, or tired in any way. When lightning bolts ripped the sky and thunder clapped right over my head, I barely flinched. Not even the pouring rain could slow me or soothe the agony burning through every inch of my body.
I heard my little boy’s voice telling me that the only way to kill a zombie was to destroy its brain.
Is this what Thierry Mulch wanted?
Mulch had destroyed everything I loved, everything I believed in. He’d left me a dead, soulless man doomed to endless, meaningless movement. I started hoping that he or some anonymous street predator would appear in my path at last and blow my head off with a shotgun, or crush it with an axe.
In search of that kind of predator, I walked into the worst neighborhoods in DC, desperate for an end to my suffering. But street after street was empty. Everyone had gone inside.
Some internal guidance system brought me later to a known crack and meth house about twenty blocks from my home. I walked through the living dead in that place, seeing the open sores on their skin, the sunken eye sockets, and their rotten teeth, envying the way some of them were drifting on their drugs and others were so far gone that reality didn’t register at all.
One filthy woman who looked older than my grandmother but was probably a few years younger than Bree glanced up from her glass pipe when I stopped in front of her. Her nose was gushing. Her lips were split and bleeding.
“Whaddya want?” she demanded.
“I want to die,” I told her.
“Join the club, honey,” she replied, cackled, and went back to smoking her glass pipe.
“I have money,” I said to her and four or five other people who were lying around in their various stupors. “I want to die.”
Pulling a roll of bills out of my pocket, I held it up and asked, “Who’s brave enough to kill the zombie?”
Several people lying on a mattress stirred and came alert. One guy in a ratty T-shirt and grimy hair looked at the money hungrily. “How much?”
“All of it,” I said dully.
I heard a gravelly voice behind me say, “I’ll take that deal.”
Then I heard a faint whistle as something swung violently through the air before cracking against the back of my skull not far from where Carney had hit me. Everything exploded and I fell into the deepest darkness I’ve ever known.
CHAPTER 107
I wanted to stay there in that darkness, surrender to nothingness.
So there was no joy when I came to with a searing pain in my head and realized to my dismay that I was still alive. Lying in the filth in the crack house, suffering the second blow to my head in several days, I felt the room swirl like a ship in a whirlpool as I begged God to end the pain, to take me back down into that blackness that had been such a relief.
Opening my eyes, I had trouble focusing for several long minutes. Everything just kept blipping and slipping by me like one of those filmstrips we used to watch in elementary school. When I finally was able to stop the room from spinning, I thought it was empty except for that woman, who looked a hundred years old. She was passed out a few feet from me, twitching, drooling, but still clutching her pipe and butane lighter.
Reaching around the back of my head, I felt coagulating blood and a nasty knot where I’d been hit. The money was gone. So were my shoes. But my wallet and badge had been placed neatly beside me.
Getting to my hands and knees, I felt woozy, sick, and the room reeled like a kite in a gale. I fell back on my side, fighting off the urge to puke.
“Why do you want to die, Alex?” a voice asked.
I knew that voice, though I couldn’t place it. My head felt ten times its size and pounded when I turned it toward a dark corner of the room, where a gaunt young woman with close-cropped bleached-blond hair, dark makeup, and several nose piercings was looking at me, a lit cigarette dangling from her lips.
For several confused seconds I had no idea who she was. Then she rolled her head at me as she exhaled her drag of smoke, and I knew her.
“Ava?” I grunted.
“Don’t call me that,” she snapped. “I’m Bee now, like the bug.”
“Bee,” I said, hanging my head and closing my eyes.
“You shouldn’t be in a place like this,” Ava said.
I opened my eyes, seeing two of her. “And you should?”
“Got nothing better because I deserve nothing better,” Ava said, spitting out the words. “But you, you got everything, Alex, so pick up your badge and wallet and get out of here before something really bad happens to you.”
When I shook my head it felt like paint cans were swinging from side to side inside my skull. “I’ve got nothing anymore.”
“C’mon,” she said, taking a drag. “You have Bree, Nana Mama, and—”
A rage built in me. “No,” I said. “They’re all dead, Ava.”
She could tell by my tone that it was true. The color drained from her face and she stared at me dully for a long while through the smoke curling in her eyes. Tears began to well and drip down her cheeks. Then she stabbed the butt out angrily and got to her feet as if to go.
“Help me home,” I said.
“I can’t do that. It will be day soon and I have to get safe.”
I blinked, said, “Get me safe first. Please? I think … I know I have a concussion. And I’m bleeding.”
You could tell she was struggling, wanting to leave, wanting—
“Just get me home,” I said. “And I’ll tell you what happened to Bree.”
And then we were two survivors trudging through the predawn streets of Washington. As small as she was, Ava managed to keep me upright as we walked toward my home. The sidewalk seemed like the rolling deck of a ship in hard seas.
But I told Ava everything: how this insane man Mulch had bugged my home, kidnapped every member of my family, and then executed them because John Sampson had come to my door. He’d even sent me pictures on my cell phone. Twice during the telling I broke down so badly I had to hold on to a street sign to keep from collapsing.
The whole time, Ava said nothing, as if this kind of tragedy was to be borne in silence and then never spoken of again. I don’t know how she did it, but she got me to the house. The storms had passed and the first light of dawn was showing in the night sky. The front door was still open. Spring-green oak leaves floated in a puddle in the hallway.
I stood there, gazing stupidly at the leaves floating, until Ava said, “Where do you want me to take you, Alex?”
“Upstairs,” I said.
“You sure you don’t want a doctor?”
“No,” I said as my house began to
move. “I just need to lie down.”
And then, somehow, she’d shut the front door behind us and had gotten me up the staircase and into my bed on my back. The room spun slowly like a carousel.
“Ava?” I asked, trying to focus on her to make the whirling stop for good.
I could see she was annoyed at me.
“Bee?” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Did you kill that girl and burn her body in the factory?”
“What?” she said angrily. “No! Elise, she was my friend.”
“We have evidence at the scene, your ID and that sweater Nana Mama gave you.”
“Someone must have planted it there.”
“We have an eyewitness,” I said. “A homeless man named Everett Prough.”
Ava looked disgusted and furious now. “Of course Everett said I did it. Of course he put my things there and told you that.”
“What? Why?” I asked, confused again.
“That homeless getup is Prough’s disguise, Alex,” she said. “He’s a pimp and an ice dealer, but no one looks at him twice when he’s dressed like a bum. Elise owed him money, but only half as much as I owed him. Prough killed Elise and set her body on fire as a warning to me.”
She began to sob. “I caused it.”
Even with my blurry vision and my bruised brain, I could see that she was telling the truth. I wanted to tell her she hadn’t caused Elise’s death, and to come forward and testify against Prough to avenge her friend. I wanted to tell her that she would be protected and that she wouldn’t have to run anymore.
But was that true? My own family …
I swooned, remembered something about concussions. I wanted to say, “Don’t let me sleep, Bee.” But all I got out was “Don’t let me go …”
The last thing I remember was Ava standing in the doorway staring back at me, hoodie up, chewing her thumbnail and looking like she was getting ready to run.
CHAPTER 108
In the nightmare that followed many hours later, a blurry figure I knew as Mulch raced through the crack house after smashing my head and stealing my money. Like some cartoon character, I took the hit and still was able to get to my feet and chase him outside, except we were no longer in DC but up on that abandoned farm where Carney had taken Cam Nguyen and the babies.
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