by Ray Garton
Jordan spoke quickly and concisely, telling Coogan to get ready to hide the car when they arrived, then hung up and looked into the backseat, keeping an eye on the rear window for signs of pursuit.
Mark stirred as he lay across the seat with his head in Lauren’s lap. He was bleeding from a deep, swollen gash high on his forehead and Lauren held a handkerchief over the wound. She looked at Jordan with a pinched face, fighting tears.
“Is he bad?” she asked. “I mean, is he gonna be all right, do you think?”
“Yeah, he’ll be all right,” Jordan said, thinking, But will we?
When they pulled into the narrow alley behind the store, Coogan and Lizzie were waiting for them beside a dirty white garbage bin that had been pulled away from the wall. Marvin stopped the car, waited for Jordan and Lauren to get Mark out of the backseat, then drove into the manzanita that grew liberally behind the building. That afternoon, he and Jordan had gone into the manzanita with an axe and a saw and had cleared out a space just big enough for the car; Marvin drove into it, killed the engine, sidled his way out of the tight space and helped Coogan and Lizzie roll the garbage bin in front of the car.
In daylight it hadn’t worked at all, but the darkness of night added the finishing touch; the car was invisible without a search.
Marvin straightened his glasses and smoothed out his sport coat, then followed the others inside.
“Where were you going, Mark?”
Mark was lying on the sofa with an ice bag on his head. He did not reply.
Lizzie was standing in the kitchen doorway, leaning on the doorjamb. Coogan sat on his ratty love seat with Joan, who had come by late that afternoon after work. Paula was all over the room, fidgeting, pacing, toying aimlessly with knick-knacks.
“Couldn’t you at least give him a few minutes to get his bearings?” Lauren asked impatiently.
“No. Mark, where were you going?”
He opened his eyes, licked his lips and muttered something unintelligible, then rolled his eyes to Lauren. They were watery and unfocused, but they stayed on her without wavering.
A whirlpool of emotions sucked at her insides as she looked at him. She felt the same compassion for him that she would feel for anyone who had been hurt, but when she looked at him, she saw Nathan and a part of her wanted to start hitting and clawing him until he told her where Nathan was and how she could get to him. But when she looked at him, she also saw their years together and all they’d been through, the times he’d given her support, the times she’d given it to him, and a part of her wanted to embrace him, kiss him and cry. She wanted to give in to neither emotion, so she pulled herself away from Mark’s pleading, confused stare, stood and crossed the room to the fireplace, where she stood with her back to him.
“Okay, Mark,” Jordan said, “you’re gonna have to start talking. You don’t have any choice. You’re not going anywhere until you start answering some questions.”
“Ignore him!” Paula snapped. “Don’t say anything.”
Mark shifted his position on the sofa and groaned quietly.
Joan spoke up: “I really don’t think this is a good idea, Jordan. I’ve told you how these people work. You should’ve gotten him and just left town. This is not a good idea.”
Jordan faced her. “You think it’s a good idea to let him go trigger a meltdown? Huh?”
“How did you know?” Mark croaked.
Joan sighed, frustrated and afraid. Coogan patted her hand and whispered in her ear, “If it’ll make you feel any better, I’ll go into the store and check the front windows, make sure nobody’s prowlin’ around. Hell, I’ll check all the windows.” He got up and went to the front of the house and through the curtains that led into the store.
Mark propped himself up on his elbows and the ice bag flopped to the floor. “You couldn’t know about that,” he said to Jordan. “How could you know?”
“God told us,” Jordan said. He pointed to Lizzie. “See that woman over there? She channels god. He’s been telling us all kinds of nasty things about you people in the Alliance.”
Paula cracked her knuckles loudly as she glared at Jordan.
Mark’s eyes widened and he sat up straighter. “Is … is that true?” He looked at Lizzie. “Is it? True?”
Lauren and Lizzie began to speak at the same time, their voices blending together into gibberish.
Lauren rushed to the sofa as if she were about to start beating Mark, as she’d imagined herself doing earlier, and said in a low, trembling voice, “Mark, for god’s sake, will you wake up and let go of this shit, these lies, will you just wake up and tell us what we need to know so we can get Nathan and I can get the hell out of here!” as Lizzie barked, “No, Mark, that’s not true, Jordan is just being a smart-aleck and I don’t appreciate it!”
“Will you people stop!” Joan shouted.
The room fell silent and everyone turned to see her standing before the love seat, her fists clenched at her sides. Joan’s lips squirmed as she spoke, as if resisting the urge to pull back and bare her teeth. “What the hell is wrong with you people? I thought you wanted to do something about this, to try and stop what’s happening here in Grover. If I’d thought you were going to be like this, like a bunch of screaming children, I wouldn’t have gotten near you.”
Lizzie walked slowly to Joan’s side. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, it’s not just you,” Joan replied, looking at the others. “You all seem to bring out the immaturity in one another.”
Paula giggled maliciously, enjoying their conflict.
“Okay, look,” Jordan said. “Some of us are running on very little sleep and we’re all on edge. Let’s try to keep that in mind and not let it get the best of us.” He turned to Mark again. “Yes, we know you were on your way to Diego to do whatever it is you have to do to trigger a meltdown, and we know you’re doing it for Hester Thorne. That covers what you’re doing and for whom, so … why are you doing it? Just to make Orrin’s prediction come true?”
“Prediction? What prediction?”
“You don’t know?”
Mark shook his head stiffly. “I’m doing it to usher in the New Age, to pave the way for Orrin’s coming on this plane.”
“You don’t have to tell him that!” Paula shouted. “None of them understand! They’re ignorant! They despise the truth and enjoy their blindness!”
Jordan ignored her. “She said nothing about the warning Orrin gave to the press about this? She didn’t tell you that she’d already predicted it?”
Mark frowned. “No. But she wouldn’t lie to me. Hester can’t lie.”
Lauren muttered some profanity under her breath.
“So,” Jordan said, “you didn’t know that she’d predicted the death of Reverend Barry Hallway and a former member of the Alliance was piloting the reverend’s plane when it went down?”
“No, that can’t be,” he groaned. “That can’t be.”
“Don’t listen to them,” Paula went on, “don’t listen to a thing they tell you.”
Lizzie stepped over to the sofa, got down on one knee and asked Mark, “Do you get enough to eat there?”
He said nothing.
“Are you required to take frequent enemas?”
He glanced at her then. “Just to … clean out the impurities of a lifetime of ignorance.”
“Do you get enough sleep?”
“Plenty of sleep. I sleep eight hours a day.”
“In increments of two hours, correct?”
He turned his body away from her on the sofa.
“Mark, do you realize what’s been done to you? You have been underfed, probably overworked, deprived of sleep, probably required to spend a good part of the day chanting. Your system has been broken down, you have been broken down so you could be built up again … into the person Hester
Thorne wants you to be.”
“That’s a lie,” he muttered.
“Yes!” Paula shouted. “A lie! They’re all lies! They’re liars, all of them, and they’re jealous of you because you have the truth and they want to turn you away from it!”
Jordan turned to her and was about to tell her to shut up when there was a loud crash from the store, accompanied by an explosion of broken glass. Jordan looked around the room quickly, said, “Where’s Coog—” but cut himself off when the lights went out and the cozy living room was replaced with darkness. “Marvin.”
“Right here.”
“You gotta light?”
Marvin took out the small black flashlight he kept in the pocket of his sport coat and turned it on. Its narrow beam cut sharply through the darkness and cast a soft glow on their faces; they were frightened faces, every one of them.
Jordan hunkered down, reached under the sofa where he’d slid Mark’s gun when he came in—it made Joan and Lizzie uncomfortable—and said quietly, “You got yours, Marvin?”
“In my hand.”
“Anybody else in here have a light?”
Joan got a butane lighter from her purse, went to the fireplace, and lit two fat candles on the mantel. They sent out a fine golden mist that cast long shadows on the wall.
“Everybody stay in here,” Jordan said. “If you need anything, holler. C’mon,” he whispered to Marvin. They started toward the curtained doorway at the end of the hall as Paula said smugly, “They’ve probably come to get us.” Jordan called, “Coogan?”
There was a faint response, an unpleasant harrumph sound.
Jordan remembered the first time he met Coogan and how, under stress, the old man had clutched his chest and heaved for breath as if he’d been running. He might have had a heart attack, fallen and, say, slammed a shelf into the fuse box. Maybe …
“Coogan, you all right?” Jordan asked as he pushed the curtain aside and stepped into the store. There was an unpleasant smell clinging to the darkness, the smell of severe body odor and long-spoiled meat. They winced at one another as Marvin’s light passed over rows of candy and packaged nuts, cookies and crackers, condiments and loaves of bread, until—
—the beam came to rest on a large potato-chip display that had been knocked over and had slammed into the beer cooler’s sliding glass door. From beneath the fallen display case, a beefy arm in a torn plaid sleeve stuck up between two of the shelves.
“Damn,” Jordan breathed as he and Marvin rushed down the aisle and lifted the display case back into position. Coogan lay on his side, his face bloodied. “What happened, Coogan? Coogan?”
The old man’s eyes opened halfway and he made a thick sound in his throat. Jordan knelt beside him, helped him into a sitting position, then asked the question again.
“Dun … damned …” Coogan paused to reach up slowly and touch a sore spot beneath his wreath of hair. He said something else, but all they could make out was “ster.”
“Coogan, what—”
There was a sound in the store, a crunching footstep. Marvin spun around and swept the flashlight beam through the store, holding it on the glass door in front. The top half cast a glaring reflection of the flashlight’s beam, but below the flat strip of metal that stretched across the door’s middle, there was no reflection at all.
Then, three things happened simultaneously.
Marvin said, “Jordan, I think there’s something really wr—”
Coogan muttered, “Damned ugly monster.”
And something rose up from behind the row of merchandise beside Marvin. Something big.
Marvin spun to face it, slamming his back into the dairy case and lifting the flashlight to see—
—a chest, an enormous barrel chest, and he lifted the light further until it fell on a hideously deformed face and the odor they’d smelled earlier overwhelmed them in a wave and they raised their guns, but—
—the creature standing before them swept both monstrous arms outward, closing its ham-sized hands around their forearms and effortlessly lifted them over the row of paperbacks, magazines and comic books. The three stubby fingers and fat, knotty thumb dug into their forearms until their hands convulsed and released the guns. Marvin screamed shrilly, Jordan gagged from the awful smell and their minds reeled with the certainty that they were going to die.
Jordan was dropped to the floor, but the creature turned around and tossed Marvin over the row of candy and snacks and against the soda cooler; glass shattered and Marvin dropped to the floor like a swatted fly.
As soon as he was dropped, Jordan began to crawl away from the tree-like legs that towered over him, but the legs turned so that the feet were pointing toward him and the smell worsened, made his eyes water, as the beast bent down, arm outstretched, and hooked a hand under Jordan’s arms, lifting him high in the air.
Jordan felt his chest tighten until he thought his lungs would be crushed beneath his ribs. A sound like a faulty fluorescent light began to drone in his head and he knew that if the sound stopped, his mind would stop with it, just shut down and cease to function, because the face he saw—the same face he’d seen in the cave the night before—could not exist.
Something moved just beyond that face and Jordan directed his eyes toward it, happy to look at something else, anything else, and saw that two other figures had arisen from the dark, two men wearing black shirts and black pants, their faces disguised by the darkness, but he saw them only for a moment because—
—the arm made a sudden thrusting movement and Jordan found himself shooting backward through the air, saw the distance between himself and the creature growing fast, until—
—his back slammed into the wall and he hit the floor like a rock and the darkness began to get darker and darker. …
The living room was thick with anticipatory silence. The women stared at the curtained doorway at the end of the short hall, waiting, dreading what might happen on the other side … except for Paula, who sat comfortably in her chair, certain that someone had come to get her.
Lizzie prayed softly as she watched the doorway; Lauren did the same and was shocked when she realized it; Joan had no doubt that the Alliance had found them and she fought the instinctual urge to rush out of the house and get as far away as possible.
Mark lay on the sofa with the ice bag back on his head, still confused and buzzing from the pills Hester had given him.
The silence went on for an unnervingly long time until the screaming and crashing began.
Joan bolted out of the love seat babbling, “Oh my god oh my god they found us they’re here they’re gonna kill us oh my god Jesus Christ,” and she started across the room for the kitchen and the back door, but Lizzie stepped in front of her and—
—Mark sat up and the ice bag slid from his head again as he swung his legs off the sofa, muttering, “What’s happening here? What’s going on?” as Paula giggled in her chair, and—
—Lizzie put her hands on Joan’s shoulders and held her firmly, saying, “Calm down, honey. Nobody’s going to kill us.” She put her arm around Joan, led her to Lauren’s side and said, “Keep an eye on her, Lauren?”
Lauren was so terrified her entire body was shaking like it hadn’t shaken since she was a little girl. She nodded without conviction and clutched Joan’s arm, closed her eyes and breathed, “Oh, dear god, I’m so scared.”
Lizzie went to the fireplace, bent down and removed the iron fireplace shovel from its stand and handed it to Lauren. “Will this make you feel better?”
She nodded as she snatched the shovel away from Lizzie and held it in a pale fist.
The noise in the store stopped.
Lizzie turned and beckoned Paula. “Come over here,” she whispered.
Paula threw back her head and laughed. “Why? They’re here for me, that’s why they came. Why would I want to—”
The room filled with a rank smell.
Paula screamed as she fell out of the chair and began crawling away from the thing and toward Lizzie.
Joan and Lauren screamed, too, and the shovel Lauren held clanged against the bricks of the hearth when she dropped it.
Mark stood, swayed, and staggered away from the sofa, but without direction, as he babbled, “What’s happening, what’s—where did the—what is it, god, what is it?” He started to fall, but—
—the creature rushed forward and swept him up in one misshapen arm an instant before he hit the floor, then turned toward the doorway where—
—two men dressed entirely in black stepped in from the store and one of them went directly to the creature and took Mark while the other man shouted, “Everyone on the floor! Now!” He spun around and pointed a finger at Paula, saying, “Except you. Get up and come with us.”
Lizzie, Joan and Lauren lay face down on the floor and kept still.
The second man in black went to Joan’s side, got down on one knee, and pulled her head back as far as he could by a handful of hair. “You should know better,” he said quietly, calmly, almost pleasantly. He stood and turned to the creature, waved a hand at Lizzie and said, “Let’s go.”
The creature stomped across the room, leaned forward and struck Lizzie in the head once with what felt like a rock covered with skin, then swept her off the floor. She cried out only once—a sickened and terrified “Oohh!”—and looked up with blurred eyes at the face that hovered over her as the creature held her in its arms the way a groom would hold his bride as they went over the threshold of their honeymoon suite. Oh, god, she thought, what is wrong with him? What is wrong with him?
Then she was carried out of the house, which sounded empty behind her.
SEVEN
INTO THE CENTER OF THE VORTEX