by Max Wilde
They stopped behind a stone wall, a threadbare creeper clinging to it like a skein of arteries. The institution was hidden from view. Alfonso set the brake on the wheelchair and delved for a pack of cigarettes in the pocket of his white uniform, his huge frame shielding Junior’s face from the sun as he fired up and took a long drag, exhaling, releasing little grunts of satisfaction.
Junior scoped as much of the landscape as he could: a high chain-link fence and the hard shine of car windshields at the very extreme of his peripheral vision. The parking lot, with the road beyond. The road to freedom.
The orderly consulted a massive timepiece sunk into the fat of his wrist—a dazzle of fake diamonds surrounding a face the color of pond scum.
“She’d better not be standing Alfonso up. No, no. Uh, uh.”
The big man took a step away from the chair to peer around the wall and the sun lazered Junior’s eyes again, causing a fresh fall of tears.
Alfonso squinted down through the smoke. “Damn, son, you’re cryin’. That won’t do. No way. Not on Alfonso’s watch.”
He clamped the cigarette between his teeth and stepped in close, wielding a handkerchief the size of a table cloth, his paunch like an airbag against Junior. As the orderly dabbed at his face, Junior saw the Taser, its Smurf-blue handle sticking free of the holster that hung from Alfonso’s utility belt, and knew that this was it. The moment.
The strap that held the Taser in the holster had worked free of its Velcro patch, so it required no strength or dexterity, all Junior had to do was snake an arm forward and free the device, point it up at the orderly’s sweating neck and press the trigger.
A dart-like electrode, tethered to the Taser by a spiral of conductive wire, took Alfonso beneath his jawbone and he chicken danced for a second, then collapsed in on himself, ending up lying on his back on the pathway, the heels of his Nike’s drumming against the paving.
Junior allowed the scalpel to slide from his sleeve into his waiting fingers and fell upon the orderly, drawing the blade across the man’s throat. Skin and flesh parted and blood pumped out in geysers that diminished as Alfonso’s heart stuttered and stopped.
Junior felt for a pulse in the man’s neck. Nothing.
Panting, hands slick with blood, he dragged himself off the body and back onto his chair, hearing the staccato tap of heels as the Latina nurse appeared around the wall.
She stared down at the orderly and gasped, her hand flying to her glossed lips as she knelt down.
“Alfonso? Alfonso!”
Her head was level with Junior’s hand and it was all too easy to edge forward and place the bloody blade against her throat, letting the tip dent her skin.
“Take one of the cable ties from his belt,” Junior said in a whisper.
“Please,” she said. “Don’t hurt me.”
He pressed a little harder with the blade and a red droplet broke her skin. “Do as I say.”
She freed one of the plastic-strap handcuffs and Junior extended his left arm. “Tie us together,” he said.
She stared at him, mute. He jabbed her again and a bead of blood ran down her neck and dropped onto the white collar of her uniform.
“Do it,” he said.
She put her left arm against his and battled to lasso the cable tie around both their wrists. He could smell fear beneath her sweet perfume.
Junior, still holding the scalpel, fed the cable tie through the eye of the ratchet and dipped forward, gripping the tie with his teeth and pulled it tight with a little zipping sound, feeling it bite into his flesh, hearing the nurse whimper.
“Do you have a car?” he asked, laying the blade against her throat again. He jabbed her when she hesitated. “Don’t lie to me.”
“Yes, I have a car.”
“You’re going to wheel me to it and drive me away from here, do you understand?”
“Yes,” she said, Junior’s arm manipulated like a marionette as she clutched the handles of the chair and started wheeling it toward the car park where windshields dangled starbursts of light from the thirsty cottonwoods.
30
When the man in the suit produced the wood saw from beneath the desk, Gene knew they were in the deepest kind of trouble.
The man, staring out the window at a distant range of purple mountains, bent the blade like a bow and when he released the metal it quivered and sang out a high, plaintive note, before he stilled it with a fingertip and lay the saw on the desktop beside the sidearms taken from Gene and Drum on their arrival.
The man was as anonymous as this tract house built in one of the new suburbs that spilled out of the city into the desert. He was in his early fifties. Not dressed well or badly. Needed a haircut. If not for the faint trace of a foreign accent—Eastern European? Russian?—that blunted his vowels, there would be nothing remarkable about him.
He turned to Gene and Drum, who were seated side by side before the desk. “One of the men you killed was the son of my cousin. And because of the manner of his death, there are certain expectations. Do you understand?”
Gene understood well enough to stay silent but Drum lifted a huge paw and said, “Now just one goddam minute, friend. We didn’t kill nobody and we came here with a business proposition.”
The man ignored Drum, holding out the saw to one of his soldiers who wasn’t much smaller than the sheriff, a tattooed power lifter with a shaven head and a goatee.
“Do the cowboy first.”
The skinhead took the saw and moved into position behind Drum. Two other men, squat and dark, sandwiched the giant. The remaining two soldiers, lanky rednecks, stood over Gene.
Drum tried to stand, an act rendered comical when the two brown men (all sinew and compact power) pressed him down into his seat, and he only managed to lift the legs of the chair free of the floor for a moment before the skinhead buried a fist in the giant’s midriff and the chair clattered to the wood, Drum’s breath leaving him in a mighty gust.
The sheriff sagged forward and the muscle man swiped Drum’s Stetson from his head, letting it settle bowl up on the floor as if awaiting contributions from an audience.
The bald man laid the saw against the base of Drum’s skull, cocked his elbow, and began to hack away, the teeth of the blade stirring up a confetti of flesh, blood welling from the sheriff’s neck and a high wail escaping his throat.
Once more Drum tried to gain his feet, knocking the saw aside. And again the dark men dragged him down like a rogue hot air balloon. The skinhead stepped back and swung a boot in a roundhouse kick that connected with the giant’s chin and left him slack-jawed and dazed.
“I want him conscious,” the man in the suit said, stopping the powerlifter in mid-pirouette as he wound up for another kick.
The two men guarding Gene shifted a little to improve their view as the big man applied the blade once again to Drum’s flesh.
One of the men held an Uzi. He’d been their guide, meeting them at the bar in the city and driving with them in the Town Car, a Mercedes SUV on their tail. He had something of the look of an actor who’d appeared in DVDs Skye had brought home from Blockbuster before it expired with most of the town. Gene, glancing back at the man as they drove—the blond guy gazing out the window at the sunstruck city, ignoring all of Drum’s attempts at conversation—had failed to recall the name of the actor.
It came to him now, as he stared into the snout of a chatter gun: Owen Wilson. Then he wasn’t seeing the weapon any longer, he saw Timmy and Skye on the sofa giggling at dumb comedies that he’d failed to find funny. And he saw Skye lifting Timmy from the sidewalk that morning, staring at Gene with eyes filled with something he could not name, and before Gene thought long enough to stop himself he sprang from his chair and hit the man with the chatter gun, knocking the barrel upward, the gunman stitching a useless line of bullets up the wall and into the ceiling.
Gene ripped the weapon from Owen Wilson’s hands and fired a short burst into him at point-blank range, a gout of blond hair, brain m
atter and bone flung to the far wall where it splattered a Russell print of a cattle drive. The wind of a round passed Gene’s face and he spun and shot the other man in the chest.
The two brown men, weapons holstered to allow them to wrestle Drum, were easy targets and Gene emptied the Uzi into them. The skinhead swung the saw at Drum who felled him with a single blow to the sternum that stopped his heart.
The man behind the desk had hold of Drum’s weapon and shot him in the shoulder. Drum, all sweat and blood and piss-stained suit pants, grabbed the desk and tipped it, pinning the man against the wall. Gene’s Glock slid down the desk top and bumped to the floor.
Drum lifted the Glock and leveled it at the pinned man, who said nothing. Drum killed him with two shots to the head.
Silence and the stink of propellant.
Drum sank to his knees, blood leaking from the wound in his neck and the gunshot in his shoulder.
Gene dropped the spent Uzi and dipped a hand into the Siamese-twin heap that was what remained of the dark men, emerging with a .44. He held the weapon on Drum and cocked it.
Drum, sweat and blood staining his shirtfront, said, “Kill me and you kill your boy.”
31
Skye lay on Minty’s bed hiding from the world, the curtains drawn against the afternoon glare. She was alone in the apartment, hadn’t seen Minty since the episode in the bathtub that morning and knew she owed the kindhearted woman an explanation. She’d have to lie through her teeth, in other words.
Sleep was impossible—as soon as she closed her eyes she was back across the border, seeing the torn flesh and eviscerated innards that had so aroused The Other but had left Skye feeling polluted, her digestive system straining to process what she’d gorged upon.
What am I?
That question again. As a teenage girl in the ultra-dorky Twilight era, Skye knew she was no vampire. She wished she were—she’d run out into the sunlight and be done with it. If The Other didn’t turn her feet to lead. She was more like a werewolf, she supposed, but even those lupine beasts seemed restrained compared to her, feasting on human flesh only on the full moon, while she’d consumed five men in two days.
Skye imagined having this conversation with Minty: I ate local on Tuesday, then hopped across the fence for something exotic last night. Even Minty, the most permissive of people, would be shocked to the roots of her dyed hair. Or think her a total whack job.
Where did I come from?
Now that was the question.
Skye lifted the rosary from the bed and held it up, letting the crucifix catch the one ray of light that poked through a gap in the drapes, dust motes dancing in it like chorus girls. Twisting the beads she set the silver and wood cross twirling, the crucified figure rendered in exquisite detail.
The movement of the cross was hypnotic and Skye was lulled into a kind of stupor before she stumbled down a rabbit hole in time and was a child again, maybe six years old, walking with her adoptive mother along the sidewalk in the main road (the town thriving, the storefronts aglitter with merchandise) Skye skipping happily ahead, ignorant of the people around her, all her attention on avoiding the cracks in the paving.
A giant of a man in white gumboots and coveralls, carrying an animal carcass from a truck that exhaled dry ice, blocked Skye’s path as he entered the butcher’s. She darted around his legs, not wanting to see the headless animal, its ribs like hard bars against its torn pink flesh.
When she saw the smiling face of a porcelain china doll she calmed herself, pressing her nose up against the window of a store that stocked only old and wonderful things. Hands cupped against the glass, Skye tracked her way along the display, past an ivory elephant, a top hat and a cape, a rouged Spanish dancer, until a face filled her view, a face so anguished that it scared away all memory of the butchered hog.
It was a velvet Jesus, the figure nailed to the cross rendered in lurid colors on cloth black and sleek as the coat of a cat. The agony was depicted with photo-realistic relish: the crown of thorns atop the mid-blond wavy hair, the drops of blood flowing down the forehead, hands, wrists and ankles, the oozing holes in the flesh painful to Skye, the torment in the soft brown eyes that X-rayed her caused an uncomfortable lurch within, threatening to shake loose something old and dark and terrifying.
Skye yelped and leap back, bumping into her mother who caught her in safe hands and steered her away, muttering about Papists and their idolatry. After that day Skye had always contrived to walk on the opposite sidewalk, eyes averted from the store window.
Years later, when she was ten or eleven, Skye found herself back at the window. The black velvet had faded to a dull brown and the painting seemed banal and crude. But the eyes, once they engaged hers, still had the power to crack open a door buried deep within her, and she’d continued to avoid the store until it disappeared one day, the velvet Jesus with it.
Lying on Minty’s bed, the crucifix pendant still gently swaying, Skye knew that the memory wasn’t random, that the Christ face was a link to something that had skittered away into the shadows of her subconscious.
But were these precognitive flashes to be trusted? Or were they no more real or significant than bits of dreams that evaporated like smoke on waking? Evidence, perhaps, of a change in her. A seismic shift. Caused by The Other that was slowly invading her, cell by cell.
She stood, needing to make some effort to freshen up for her last shift at the diner. It was when Skye sat brushing her hair at Minty’s vanity table, confronted with her double reflection, that it came to her: she saw that face again, that beautiful bearded face, but this time it wasn’t on a half-naked body nailed to a cross, it was the face of a barefoot man in bloody jeans and T-shirt, his hands cuffed behind his back, mesmerizing eyes fixed on the lens of a TV news camera, smiling beatifically into the barrage of flashbulbs as he was pushed into the back of police car and driven away.
32
Even though the nurse drove slowly, easing her little blue bubble car along the rutted gravel road, the dry brown landscape seemed to fly by Junior Cotton, his spatial sense still impaired from years of catatonia and he found himself in the grip of a motion sickness that threatened to have him puking in his lap.
He wiped sweat from his forehead and took a drink from the can of Diet Coke that stood in the drink holder jutting from a dashboard as jazzy as a jukebox. The Coke was warm and tinny, the syrup unpleasantly thick on his tongue, but the gas in the soda made him hiss out a series of burps that eased the queasiness in his gut.
“Where are you taking me?” the woman asked.
“Just drive,” he said.
Driving with no aim other than leaving the institution far behind, the way he had with his parents and then later—glory days—when he and his mother had crisscrossed the country in search of adventure. There had been no plans, no maps, just some invisible GPS guiding them toward the gullible and the weak.
A blur of color caught Junior’s eye and he saw washing strung on a line that sagged beside a rundown house standing in the thin shadow of a windmill.
“Stop,” he said.
The nurse obeyed, pumping the brake with her ridiculous platform shoe, her painted toes peeping out like fries dipped in ketchup. The image filled Junior with a hunger that almost had him slicing at her flesh with the scalpel, right there at the roadside. But he controlled himself and had the woman take her arms behind the driver’s seat, where he bound her wrists with another of Alfonso’s cable ties.
Rooting in the glove box—dipping into a mess of make-up and lipsticks, avoiding a pair of scissors with dayglo pink handles and a brush clogged with hair—he found a wad of used tissues.
“Open wide,” he said, jabbing her with the scalpel when she didn’t obey him immediately.
Her mouth fell open on a picket fence of pointy teeth, and he stuffed the tissues inside. She gagged and sucked air through her nose, a bubble of snot inflating from one nostril when she spluttered and sneezed.
Junior opened the car
door and hauled himself out onto the road. He kicked off his flip-flops, feeling the coarse gravel beneath his soft feet. He looked across at the house and saw nobody. Lowering himself to the ground he leopard crawled over a hard thatch of grass and beneath a barbed wire fence, crossing the open ground that lay between him and the washing line, the stones tearing at the elbows and knees of his jumpsuit.
He tuned out the pain, eyes on the washing that hung limp in the still air, picking out a blue man’s shirt and a pair of khaki work pants that dangled beside a sun-bleached dress and a floral babygro.
Nearly at the wash line, Junior heard the whine of a vehicle and stopped crawling, ignoring a fly that plundered his nostril. An old pick-up truck bounced up to the house and Junior flattened himself to the earth as the vehicle creaked to a halt, the engine idling raggedly.
A door opened on rusted hinges and a man shouted, “May? May!”
When there was no reply boots crunched across gravel and the door of the house flew open, handle smacking a wall. More shouting that went unanswered. The door slammed closed and the boots crossed to the truck, the man cursing as he forced the pick-up into gear and sped out of the yard, throwing up a scrim of dust that settled on Junior and had him blinking and coughing.
When the noise of the truck disappeared, Junior hauled himself to the line and pulled the pants and shirts free of the pegs, unzipping his jumpsuit and wadding the clothes inside. His knees and elbows were bleeding by the time he got back to the nurse’s car.
He freed her hands and she wrenched the tissues from her mouth, coughing and crying.
“What you gonna do with me?”
“Drive,” he said and she got the little car moving, taking them farther down the road into a great sandy emptiness.
They passed a cow, all white bones and dried skin, hanging from a wire fence. A few miles on an old sedan with tailfins lay on its roof on the berm, stripped of its wheels, dark birds scared from its torn interior by the whine of the car. A contrail drew itself across the indigo sky like a line of cocaine, the vapor disintegrating into a furry wisp before Junior caught the distant rumble of jet engines.