7 Sykos

by Marsheila Rockwell

  After setting the grill to warm for the eggs and hash browns, and starting some coffee brewing, Light began ferrying rashers of bacon to and from the microwave. The juggling act of preparing large quantities of foods with three different cooking times and two different methods reminded Light a little of the adrenaline rush he got from being the first on scene to help a victim he knew was not going to make it, and he found himself smiling and humming “Vegetables” by The Beach Boys.

  When everything was done, he dished the food up on plates and brought them out to the breakfast nook. He put out a squirt bottle of ketchup, salt, pepper, cream, and sugar on each of the two tables. Then he got silverware and napkins out, and set them around the tables in the order one of his strict stepmothers had virtually engraved in his skin with her belt.

  “The knife protects the spoon from the fork,” he murmured, no longer humming, or smiling.

  Finally, he poured seven cups of coffee, set them on saucers, and placed them above the plates of food just so, then went to go get the others.

  There was some grumbling and cursing at first; the sun wasn’t even above the horizon yet, though the outside temperature was already climbing. But it hadn’t taken much convincing to get the rest of them to come to the breakfast nook once they smelled the tantalizing aromas drifting from the lobby. And if those smells came with an undertone of decomp, no one was rude enough to point it out.

  The Sykos set to and devoured their meal in record time. Even so, Light—­who was sitting with Fallon and Pybus at the “big kids’ table”—­finished first. He watched the others eat for a few moments, then his eyes wandered around the room, coming to rest on the wall of windows. He looked down on the leftover ketchup on his plate and an idea struck him. As the others finished up, he took the squirt bottle, walked over to the window, and began writing.

  The others had been talking quietly among themselves as they ate, sharing idle chitchat, but they fell silent as Light worked. When one bottle of ketchup ran out, Pybus stood and brought him another, then another. And then Light was finished and he stepped back to reveal his handiwork.

  .EREH ERA SOKYS

  “It’s not blood, but you can’t tell that from a distance.”

  “What is that, Russian?” Sansome asked.

  Lilith let out a piercing laugh. Light couldn’t blame her, but he held his amusement closer to his chest, allowing himself a sly smile.

  “Seriously?” she said. “You can’t read that?”

  “If it was in English, I—­”

  “It is English.”

  “See?” Antonetti said. “I said he was a Dumbo!”

  Fallon slammed a butter knife down on the tabletop, hard. “That’s enough! God, you ­people are all children. Worse than! None of you are exactly rocket scientists, and let’s not even start on your moral and ethical standards.”

  “I was just having some fun,” Antonetti said, pouting.

  “I didn’t think it was so fun,” Sansome countered.

  “We’re all in this together,” Fallon said. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all get along?”

  Light was about to reply when Warga’s voice came from the lobby. “That might be nice, but this ain’t.”

  Light and the others looked out to see a group of Infecteds coming out from behind the hotel. They were going room to room, checking the hotel for squatters who’d moved in since the last round of “Where’s Waldo’s Brain?” Their usual animalistic grunts and growls were quiet, and almost sounded like the murmur of conversation from here.

  “They’re going to be between us and the truck soon,” Warga said.

  “Should we try for it?” Antonetti asked.

  “We’ll never make it,” Fallon replied.

  “Then what?” Light asked.

  “What about over there?” Lilith asked, gesturing across the street to the south. They all looked. She was pointing at a castle, guarded by a pirate ship and a lance-­toting dragon. “It’s so cool; I dreamt about it all night.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Golfland,” Light said, just as Fallon said, “Sunsplash.”

  Fallon laughed. “In the dark, I guess didn’t realize where we were,” she continued with a small smile. “It’s a water park with a miniature golf course and games and food inside. Mark and I came here before I had Jason.”

  “You actually went somewhere and had fun?” Light asked, surprised.

  Fallon’s smile disappeared.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “While you’re strollin’ down Memory Lane, Doc, the Infecteds are strollin’ closer and closer to us.”

  Warga was right.

  “I say we make a break for it,” Light said.

  Fallon looked unsure for a moment. “Why not just head the other way? They’re coming from the east—­we go west. And north.”

  “I don’t think that’s going to work, Dr. O’Meara.”

  While the others had gathered in the lobby, Pybus had stayed behind, finishing his meal in a slow, stately manner rather than slurping it up hungrily as the rest of them had. He was standing now, pointing out the windows Light had defaced. Peering through the big, backward red letters, Light could just make out a second crowd of Infecteds across Country Club Drive. Coming this way and not using the crosswalk.

  “West is no longer an option, Doctor,” Pybus said. “Or north.”

  Fallon looked resigned, then nodded.

  “Golfland it is, then. There’s fencing all around it, thick wrought iron with pointed tips in some places. I don’t think they know how to climb, but that’s just a guess.”

  “They’re still behind the truck, but not for much longer,” Warga said. “If we’re gonna go, we need to go now.”

  “Count of three?” Fallon asked.

  “Fuck that shit,” Light said as he pushed the lobby doors open and started running quietly across the parking lot. The others followed suit, Pybus and Sansome bringing up the rear.

  They made it to the pirate ship without being seen, though the western group of Infecteds had now crossed the street, and the eastern group was swarming around the UPS truck.

  Light started to run for the fence line, but Fallon stopped him.

  “Wait until the two groups meet up. There’ll be some confusion then, and they’ll be less likely to notice us.”

  “And that much closer if they do.”

  “You want to vote on it?”

  Light surveyed the others quickly. Sansome had moved protectively toward Fallon when she asked the question, and Pybus was staring him down. They’d vote with her. Warga would probably vote with him, and Antonetti, but Lilith was a wild card. Even if she agreed with him, she was just as likely to vote with Fallon as she was with Light, for the sheer pleasure of spiting him. If the Greek Goddess of Discord had a human avatar, it would be Lily June Ogden.

  “Not this time,” he said.

  Fallon nodded, and they waited until the two groups came together and started to merge.

  “Now!”

  They ran for it and reached the gate . . . only to find it chained shut. Lilith scrambled over while Fallon turned to Sansome.

  “You need to get it open, Joe, and fast.”

  Sansome moved forward without replying, grabbing the gate’s frame with one hand and the fence post it was chained to with the other. With a mighty heave that popped out the veins in his neck and created an instant sheen of sweat on his broad forehead, he pulled the gate away from the post, straining the chain so much the links started to deform.

  “Go . . . now!” he said through clenched teeth, and the others needed no further encouragement. Antonetti went first, then Fallon, then Light. Pybus got stuck partway through, and it took the three of them to yank him inside, popping a link on the chain as they did. The additional stress had forced the gate open a litt
le wider, so Sansome was just able to squeeze through.

  Fallon told the others to scatter, but she stayed by Sansome.

  “Get it closed again,” she said to him. “Quickly!”

  She said something else, but Light was already heading into the course’s interior and didn’t hear what it was. He watched from a distance as Sansome bent the gate back into some semblance of its former shape, then turned and ran with Fallon just as the first Infecteds started streaming into the parking lot.

  Against all odds, they’d made it in without being seen. Light hoped that was a harbinger of things to come.

  Somehow, he doubted it.

  CHAPTER 33

  22 hours

  The Sunsplash side of the park smelled like a cocktail of chlorine and mildew, with a urine chaser. It looked like it had been vacated in a hurry. Water still ran on some of the rides Fallon could see, and no one had bothered to clean up the messes that must have been made on its last day in operation. Fallon remembered it as being clean and bright, and guessed that it took a lot of regular maintenance to keep it looking fresh when it was open, what with children peeing where they shouldn’t, dropping ice cream, and spilling soda, combined with the natural effects of water that didn’t always stay where it was put.

  Mosquitoes were everywhere, and she saw ants swarming something that might have been half of a hot dog. She considered stepping on them for a brief moment before deciding against it.

  They had entered the park near the Buccaneer Bend Activity Pool, according to the signs. Big waterslides sloped from a platform surrounded by fake rocks and into the pool. After crossing a man-­made river, which Fallon had a vague memory of floating down in faux inner tubes, they circled around the end of the activity pool, wanting to get out of sight of the fences.

  As they rounded the end of the waterslide, Lilith let out a whoop. “Look at that waterslide!” she cried. “That looks fuckin’ amazing!”

  Fallon had to agree. On their left, there were actually four separate tunnel slides, two that dropped from seven stories up, one from five stories, and another from four. To the right was another set of slides, with names like the Hurricane, the Tornado, and the Cyclone. She and Mark had gone down a ­couple of them, at her insistence—­he wasn’t a fan of fast-­moving, twisty-­turny rides of any kind, so whenever she wanted to ride on a roller coaster, or rides like the Kamikaze or the Reverse Bungee, she had to manipulate him into joining her. Or shame him. She didn’t mind doing either one, as long as she got what she wanted.

  Some ­people would feel bad about that. Guilty, she thought, unable to suppress a small smile.

  “That blue and yellow one’s pretty intense,” Fallon said. “It’s ‘sick.’ ”

  “I want to slide,” Lilith said. “How often do you get to play in a place like this when you don’t have to pay out the ass for everything?” Lilith spun around to face Fallon. “Can we? Please? Just for a little while?”

  Fallon was torn. It would eat up valuable time, and they were down to almost twenty-­four hours. But if they were trapped in here anyway, until the Infecteds outside moved on, what was the harm? She remembered how hard she had worked to get Mark to agree and how much fun it had been once he had. The day was getting hot, too. And maybe playing together would be a team-­building activity.

  But then she imagined Lilith, and maybe some of the others, whooping and shouting as they careened down the slides. Some of them were seven stories tall, high enough to be seen from outside the park. “We’re trying not to attract attention,” she said.

  The girl gave her an exaggerated frown. “Come on, Fallon,” she said. “It’s not like we aren’t stuck here for a while, anyway.”

  “I get that,” Fallon said. “But when we have a chance to go, we need to be ready to take it. If you’re up on top of some slide—­”

  “—­then I’ll be at the bottom in twenty seconds.”

  “I’m sorry, Lilith,” Fallon said, shaking her head. “When we get the meteor and get back, I’ll see to it that you get a water park trip out of it. But not here, not now.”

  Lilith held her gaze for long moments. Fallon tensed, half expecting the girl to attack. Maybe she was every bit the psychopath her scans suggested because her look was simultaneously glacial and fierce, as if she could tear Fallon apart piece by piece without the slightest hesitation or remorse. Finally, Lilith broke the stare-­down, muttering, “Tight-­assed bitch.”

  Hot fury rushed through Fallon—­she was tempted to grab Lilith and remind the girl who was in charge here—­but she decided a little rebellion from psychopaths was probably to be expected. So far, they’d been surprisingly cooperative. Each for his or her own reason, no doubt; certainly not for the good of the city, or each other.

  But that was okay. She’d expected as much and had deliberately kept the potential rewards vague, in part because she wasn’t sure what she was allowed to promise but also because that way, each of them could imagine the payoff being whatever they wanted most.

  “I’m going to see what the south side of the park looks like,” she said. “Maybe we can get out that way.”

  “What good would that do? We still couldn’t get to the truck,” Antonetti reminded her.

  “We’ll find wheels of some kind,” Fallon countered. “Joe’s been wanting to hotwire something since we got here.” She eyeballed her team—­her Sykos—­all seemingly distracted by their surroundings, at least for the moment. “I’ll be back in a ­couple of minutes, Gino,” she said. “Keep an eye on everybody for me, okay?”

  “You got it,” Antonetti said. He almost sounded proud that she had singled him out. He had been the junior partner, someone to whom the affirmation of others was important. More commonly, psychopaths were narcissists, but as with everything else, one size didn’t fit all.

  She started walking toward the south, trying to find a way through or around the attractions stacked up in that direction. She was barely out of sight when she heard Antonetti’s voice.

  “Dr. O’Meara said not to do that!”

  “She’s not here, is she?”

  “You’re supposed to go down the slides in those tube things,” Pybus said.

  “Fuck that. I like riding bareback!”

  Fallon backtracked until she could see Lilith rapidly ascending the long staircase in undershirt and panties. She caught her instinctive shout before she released it in the girl’s direction, remembering her own injunction to stay quiet and not attract the Infecteds’ attention. “Dammit!” she said, but almost under her breath.

  “Nobody said herding psychos would be a picnic, did they?”

  She turned to find Warga standing just behind her shoulder, arms folded over his chest, watching Lilith with a kind of spaced-­out but beatific grin.

  “No, I pretty much knew it wouldn’t be,” she said.

  He touched his bandaged shoulder. “I can’t really blame her. I was just wishing I could do that . . . slide. Looks like a good time.”

  “I’m not sure it would be safe.” Her tone made it clear that she wasn’t just talking about the ride.

  Watching Lilith climb, Fallon almost forgot, for a moment, why they were here. This was almost like real life, normal life, which had been eradicated so suddenly from the Valley.

  Then again, had she ever known “normal life” at all? Did anybody? Or was everyone’s life just as fucked up as hers, each in its own way?

  “Definitely looks like fun,” Warga said.

  Again, Fallon wasn’t sure if he meant the slide or the half-­dressed, youthful Lilith.

  “Don’t worry, Doc,” he said, as if reading her thoughts. “I won’t hit that. Young meat’s not my style.”

  “ ‘Meat’?”

  “I just call it like I see it.”

  She supposed that was true. If Randy Wayne Warga had thought of his victims as human beings, ra
ther than dehumanizing them in his mind to the point that they were nothing but meat, his for the taking, he wouldn’t have been able to rape and murder the way he did, without apparent remorse.

  She remembered reading through his case files. Even when he had attacked ­people he’d known, which his first few victims were, he had a hard time remembering their names. He could recite details about their bodies and what he’d done to them, but letting them have identities of their own didn’t fit with his particular pathology. He was categorized as an “anger-­excitation rapist,” which meant he got his sexual thrills not from the rape itself, but from the anguish of his victims as he raped and tortured them.

  After his arrest, he had readily confessed to his crimes, seemingly unable to grasp that to other ­people, human beings had value. He’d been subjected to the usual battery of tests, including the controversial Abel Assessment for Sexual Interest, the standard polygraph, and the penile plethysmograph. The latter was a device attached directly to the penis, so levels of arousal at being shown different photographs could be measured. Warga hadn’t responded to the young ones, but when viewing middle-­aged women, he was off the charts.

  Lilith’s voice cut through her thoughts. “Fallon!” the girl cried. Fallon looked up, into the sun. Lilith was at the top of the platform, pointing toward the southwest. “Infected!”

  Fallon couldn’t see anything from where she was. She ran down the path to where she had a view of the Golfland miniature golf course. Sure enough, there was a lone Infected, ambling through the Old West course. She drew her Glock, raised it, steadied her hand.

  But before she fired, she saw another one, coming around the windmill in the park’s northwest corner.

  Then another.

  They had breached the fence, somehow. Or been inside all the time. Either way, they didn’t seem to know where the Sykos were yet. She clambered up the end of a red-­and-­white tube slide, high enough to get a better view looking toward the golf course.

  There were more. A lot more. They were coming toward the park from the buildings across the street, including the hotel. And they were approaching the park from every direction. Many were pressed up against the fence, trying to squeeze through. Some were climbing although they weren’t very good at it. Still others had found the gap in the northwest corner and were squeezing through that.