"I'm pretty sure it was her," Hailey whispered, pointing in the direction of the kitchen, from which came the sounds of sizzling meat and Sheila's rather impressive singing. She must have wanted to become a vocalist but let the wrong guy lead her down the wrong path. Barry had seen it before. A singer is told she should be a model. A model is told she should pose nude, that it will help her career. Next up is stripping. Then this, if you're lucky enough to land an escort gig in lieu of standing on a corner.
A pity for Sheila in particular, as she had real, raw talent. Barry had planned to kill both these girls tonight, but he decided he would keep Sheila around for a while.
He looked at Hailey, who was still rambling about Sheila's betrayal, and began to snicker. Hailey didn't know it, but Sheila just saved her life.
"What's so funny?" Hailey asked.
"Nothing," Barry said. The doorbell rang and he stood. "Sorry. I was just remembering something funny that happened yesterday."
"So you weren't listening to me?"
"I was, I promise."
He opened the door. Derek pushed his way in quickly, a disgruntled expression on his face, but stopped when he saw Hailey. He looked at Barry, smiled, and slapped him on the arm. "Didn't know we had company," he said. "Is that steak cooking?"
"T-bones," Hailey said. She stood, wobbling, and came up to Derek to introduce herself.
Barry left them and went to the kitchen. Now he definitely wasn't going to kill them. Sheila had set the table and was preparing a full dinner. Salad, asparagus, twice-baked potatoes with bacon and sour cream, stuffed Portobello mushrooms, and a cheese cake.
"How the hell did you manage all this so quickly?"
"I went to culinary school for a year and a half," she said. "I dropped out when my mom died."
"Sullivan?"
"Yep."
"You have an amazing voice," he said. "You could have had a career in music."
Sheila smiled, but she had sadness in her eyes. "Thank you."
"Why didn't you pursue it?"
She shrugged and returned to cooking. Barry refilled his glass with bourbon and made a drink for Derek. Then he called him out to the balcony so they could speak in private.
"Where's Whitney?" Derek asked when he stepped out into the cool evening air.
"She went to her sister's," Barry said.
They sat in the patio chairs.
"Probably a good thing. You hear what's been happening today?"
"Aside from that?" Barry said, pointing up at the object.
"The shootings," Derek said. "Bunch of west end gangs are crawling through the city like cockroaches killing every cop they can find. Now they're hitting fire departments, too."
"Oh yeah?"
"Engines 16, 17, and 18 so far."
Barry was surprised. It's not often you get more than you pay for. "Who's behind it?"
"Hell if I know," Derek said. "We sent out a 10-19 to all units, brought them in, gave out every unmarked we have available. But we've still got dozens of cruisers on patrol, and the state boys think they can handle themselves. They're all sitting ducks."
"Maybe you should go on vacation."
"Wish I could. That's how I came to find out about Hayden. Went to the hospital to see a couple of our boys and saw Louis beat all to hell. He was mad, too." Derek began to laugh. "Hayden must have jarred his brain loose 'cause he was talking about this girl who came in earlier. Teenage girl, real cute he said. Claims she was floating in midair." Now he was laughing to the point of hysterics. "So serious, too. I mean, Louis is a prankster from way back, but I swear he actually believed what he was saying."
Barry sat forward. "He said a girl was floating? In the hospital?"
"In the ER waiting room. You should see his face, Barry. Looks like a damn eggplant! He probably has a skull fracture, loopy bastard. Thinks the girl has an alien inside her."
"Who was this girl? What was her name?"
"I don't know."
"Was she admitted?"
"Don't know that either. Why don't you ask Hayden? Louis said they left together. Maybe she's his girlfriend. He's got a girlfriend, don't he?"
"I don't keep up with my son's love life."
"I thought Whitney told me he did. Or maybe that was Johnny's kid." Derek sighed. "Johnny's dead, by the way. Him and half my other guys. This thing's big enough to call in the national guard, but you can't get in touch with anybody right now. Federal government's shutting us down, Barry, sealing us off. Doesn't look good."
"What do you think they're planning?"
Derek stood and approached the rail. He craned his neck upward and studied the object. "To be honest, I think they're scared shitless. I think they're scrambling to figure out a way to communicate with that thing, and if it doesn't happen in the next day or two, they're going to launch a nuke at us."
"Bullshit," Barry said, standing. "That won't happen. They've seen enough movies to know that thing's technology has to be light years ahead of ours--or else it wouldn't be here. They detonate a nuke, we'll all be fried and that thing will still be sitting there."
"They're gonna do it, Barry. Mark my word."
"Not in this day and age."
"Day and age? What the hell are you talking about, man? It's a new day, a new age. We're not dealing with domestic terrorists here. Have you even put any thought into what that thing is?"
Sheila appeared at the door and said, "Dinner's ready."
"Okay, babe," Barry said. He stepped up next to Derek and Derek looked at him.
"Well? Have you?"
"It's a spaceship," Barry said. "So what? It's not the freakin' Death Star. If it was here to blow shit up, it wouldn't have picked Louisville. It would have picked New York or LA or Tokyo. And there'd be more of them. Unless it has a one-punch super-weapon that'll blow up the entire planet, in which case there's nowhere to go, so why plan for it? Why not live today like you're going to see tomorrow? Whatever that thing is, it's given us the opportunity of a lifetime. We can rob this city until it's naked wearing a whiskey barrel. No one's here to stop us, and no one's here to see it go down. Open your eyes, Derek."
"My eyes are open," Derek said, "and you know what I see? ICBMs. They've already got them pointed at us. Right now there's some young military tech. kid sitting in a little room waiting for the go code. And that little shit's eager to push the button. It's the American way, Barry. You don't understand something so you drop a bomb on it. Lady Liberty's got crosshairs in her eyeballs and today she's looking at us. You bet your ass. We need to get out of this city pronto."
Barry laughed deliberately, though in truth he believed Derek might be right. The sky could light up at any moment and reduce him to vapor. But if he could get his hands on whatever was attached to that man's head he saw today, the military blockades wouldn't be able to hold him. That man had flung cars around like Hot Wheels, and from the looks of him he was half dead.
But Barry was strong, in mind and in body. If he had that kind of power, maybe he could leap from Main Street to Evansville in a single leap. Maybe he could stop a nuke in midair and send it straight to D.C.
He just had to find the guy and figure out a way to kill him.
Or he could find the girl.
Derek had gone silent. Still staring up at the object.
It was everything Barry could do not to push him over the balcony right now. Derek always had been a scared, paranoid freak. In college he'd spent most of his time developing conspiracy theories and losing girlfriends because he couldn't shut up about the ruling class and their plots of mass genocide.
When they were kids, Barry used to sneak over to the high school gym and shut himself in one of the unused lockers in the girls' locker room. Not only did he get to see all the girls naked, but he also learned all kinds of scandalous information from their gossiping. One girl, Lindsey Strange, was cheating on her boyfriend with her math teacher, Mr. Parker. She read a note he'd written her to all the other girls, and when they all left
the locker room for gym class, he stole the note and used it to blackmail Mr. Parker repeatedly. He got a new bike out of the deal, then money. Next he approached Lindsey and made her strip naked in front of him. He made her get a really short haircut, which earned her so much ridicule at school that she quit the cheerleading team. Mr. Parker found another job and moved away, and Barry spent two years wearing Lindsey down to the point that she fell in love with him. She sat with him on the school bus. She started coming to his house under the pretense of tutoring him in advanced mathematics. She went from being his own personal slave to being his girlfriend.
It was all culminating to Barry's ultimate plan, losing his virginity to her, but Derek ruined everything. He'd always suspected something was wrong with Barry's and Lindsey's relationship. The first of his conspiracy theories, as it were. Sure enough, one day when Derek stayed home sick from school he went snooping in Barry's room and found the note. Then he slowly began to piece everything together. He found out where Mr. Parker had moved to and called him. Mr. Parker explained everything, and then Derek ratted Barry out to their parents, Lindsey's parents, and the school principal. Barry was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for thirty days and when he returned Lindsey was gone, having been yanked out of school by her parents and sent to an all-girls catholic school for her junior and senior year.
Barry had hated his brother ever since, and on top of aspiring to one day kill him, he'd also set the goal to sleep with every one of Derek's girlfriends and as of now had an eighty percent success rate, including Derek's wife.
"Let's eat," Barry said, turning toward the balcony door.
Derek didn't respond. He was still staring at the object.
Barry snapped his fingers. "Hey, Dr. Strangelove, we eating or what?"
"Yeah," Derek said, distantly. "Whatever you say, boss."
~ ~ ~ ~
Roger spotted Sprinkles coming out from under a bush and as the cat scampered up 15th Street, he was left with two choices: stay and help the woman cop whose partner lay on the ground bleeding profusely and screaming, or slip away unnoticed and chase after Sprinkles.
Neither option sounded appealing. If he ran away, he would carry more guilt than he thought he could live with. If he stayed, he might never see the cat again.
It's just a stupid cat, his ex-wife would say right now. Nina hated cats. She hated all animals. That was her term of endearment for Roger on his worse days--the days of fighting, late nights, her discovery of drug paraphernalia above the bathroom medicine cabinet, the time he brought home a girl from a bar when Nina was supposed to be pulling a double at the hospital, the day he punched his supervisor at the warehouse and got fired. You're an animal, Roger! You behave like an animal!
He didn't argue. She was right. That's why he didn't fight her when she hired that big bald-headed attorney and took everything except the '93 Taurus that hadn't been driven in two years. He could have had his half, or more, after discovering she'd been sleeping with the guy throughout the divorce proceedings, but he blamed himself for that. It was over. There was nothing he could do.
Kind of like this situation. Sprinkles was already out of sight and he didn't see which way he went. He only had one option left: save the lady cop.
The gang members stood like a firing squad in the street from one curb to the other, unloading clip after clip into the squad car, shooting wildly. They looked like they had plenty of experience holding their guns in cool and intimidating ways but little experience actually target shooting.
Behind the car, the lady cop crouched next to the back wheel, covering her head and crying out, "Please! Pleeease!"
The other officer, a young light-skinned black man with corn-rolled hair, lay flat on his back, his chest spurting blood. His right hand reached upward and swatted repeatedly, as though a fly were pestering him.
Roger surveyed the scene, the houses and buildings in the area. The squad car sat diagonally in the intersection of 15th and Hale Avenue. Roger was hiding behind the house at the corner, on the right side of Hale, facing 15th. Far down the street behind him, the old man stood out in his yard, probably smoking another cigarette, watching the events unfold. The gang members stood on 15th Street up ahead and to the left. On the other side of the street where they stood were two houses not ten feet apart. That was the spot. That's where he needed to be. He had a plan.
In order to get there unnoticed, he ran across Hale Avenue, jumped the short, rusty cyclone fence, crossed the back yard of the house opposite the ones where he was headed, between which ten men with guns continued to pierce the squad car with .9mm rounds, and came around the side, staying low, until he reached the front.
He peeked around the corner. Luckily no one had spotted him. He was very close to the men now and realized some of them were just boys, the youngest of them not even in high school yet. Most of them held their guns sideways with one hand. Several stabbed their guns at the air as they fired. Terrible shooting. At least Roger had one advantage.
Now came the scary part. He had to get across the street, and short of circumventing a block's worth of houses and running the risk of them deciding to advance on the car, his only choice was to stay low and cross the street directly behind them. This was nothing like the shooter games he spent so much time playing. The gunfire was deafening, the clank of bullets on metal so impactful the fear of being shot consumed him. If just one of those boys so much as detected movement in his periphery . . . game over.
Roger rose from his crouched position, readied his gun, and stepped out into the open.
Cockroaches
Danny crouched by the wall on the Exit 125 overpass of I-65, just south of Gene Snyder Freeway. In the orange sunlight, he smoked a cigarette and watched the object, a thing so large and heavy that if it were to fall it might open a fissure in the ground deep enough to vomit up lava.
From here the view was breathtaking. Danny was far enough away as to not be directly under the thing and could see its upper hemisphere. The ring encircling the object was completely detached and turning slowly, like the hour hand of a clock, casting so dark a shadow diagonally along the middle of the object that it gave the illusion of a deep, metallic cavern where flying creatures beyond fathom slept hanging from the walls. As a backdrop to the view, a canopy of deep red and purple clouds streaked across the horizon.
Danny only noticed the ring's movement because he'd been sitting here so long. Getting to this overpass unseen had proved quite a task, hiking up Exit 125's long ramp the least of his journey, and for an hour he lay on his back in the gravelly emergency lane, smoking and decided how best to proceed.
But the time for rest was over. As soon as he finished his last cigarette, he was going to break through the barricade and get the hell away from that thing in the sky before some hatch opened up at the bottom and shot down a laser to vaporize the city. Danny at the right distance to hear the faraway screams and know, for a moment, what colossal agony raced towards him.
A quarter mile to the south, soldiers stood guard in a line that stretched from emergency lane to emergency lane across the interstate, all of them posted behind a thick run of tangled razor wire. Parked at random behind the men were two tanks, one for northbound, one for southbound, and enough military jeeps, hummers, and trucks to host a parade.
Danny peaked up over the concrete wall, scanned the row of soldiers, and dropped. He guessed thirty and maybe twenty more mingling in the back.
A few more, for certain, in the tanks.
He was ready. He rose slowly, snuck his rifle onto the ledge. Through the scope he studied the soldiers' faces. Despite their stiff, unflinching posture, the men were talking to each other. Some of them were laughing.
Kill a few to rile them up. Kill a few more and force them to use heavy artillery. Run back to the Exit 10 overpass. Climb the embankment. Get into the woods. Any soldiers posted there would have headed down to the interstate to see the action. Slip right past.
Danny pulled the trigger a
nd a soldier's face exploded.
He watched the body drop, relished the stunned expressions on his comrades' faces.
Then he was being shot at, first by M-16 rifle fire, then by M-60s, what sounded like dozens of them. He could feel the bullets eating away at the other side of the wall as the machine guns ate up bandoliers.
He began to laugh. It had only taken one shot. Behind the thunder of gunfire, he could hear the whine of the tank's cannon turning.
~ ~ ~ ~
Roger sprinted across the street, figuring with the noise no one would hear him, and his chances of being seen increased the longer he stayed out in the open. When he dove around the corner of the house, he was sure the gunfire would turn on him.
But it didn't.
He scrambled to his feet and crab-walked to the corner, where he peeked out at the firing squad. Several of them had stopped shooting, but the youngest of them still grinned and fired away, as if today were Christmas and they'd just turned on the most anticipated video game of the year.
Roger knew the feeling, but this was nothing like a first-person shooter. No surround sound system in the world could duplicate the real sound of gunshots, the thud of them, the terror that sound evoked right out of the air.
He took aim on the kid farthest from him and fired. Blood burst from the kid's neck and he collapsed into the kid next to him, who had stopped shooting moments before.
Roger shot that one in the head and he fell on top the other.
He took out two more before the rest noticed and started looking his way. He darted down the side of the house and around back.
The kids were shooting at the house now. Roger peeked around the back corner, up the alley between the two houses. He could see two of the remaining five kids from here, and their attention was focused on the corner he'd just fled.
He jumped across the opening and ran around the left side of the adjacent house, up to the corner. He had a good angle on them here. He could see their backs.
The Object: Book One (Object Series) Page 13