by Ronald Malfi
The only peculiar thing he saw—or imagined he saw—was the wooden Jesus from the Powell house, now liberated from His cross, standing in a narrow alleyway between two buildings, staring at David with those mad eyes . . .
* * *
He was still speeding fifteen minutes later when a police car turned on its rack lights behind him.
Shit.
He looked over at Ellie, who sat ramrod-straight in the passenger seat. The expression on her face—or lack thereof, for she looked to him like a zombie freshly dragged from the grave—terrified him.
He glanced up at the rearview mirror.
Maybe it’ll pass us.
But they were the only two cars on this desolate stretch of highway.
Shit. Shit.
The cruiser sped up until it was right on his bumper. David considered his options, which were practically nil, before clicking the directional and pulling over onto the shoulder.
Ellie turned around in her seat and stared through the rear windshield as the car came to a stop. “What are you doing?” There was panic in her voice.
“We have to stop,” he said.
“No!”
“It’s okay. Relax.”
Cooper’s gun lay on the console between their seats.
This is it, he thought. It’s showtime. What am I made of?
He picked up the gun. It was still warm. The interior of the car reeked of gunpowder. Or maybe that was just in his head. Either way, the gun felt like it was forged from iron; it was impossible to hold it steady. At the last second, he shoved it under his seat.
The officer approached the vehicle and made a roll-your-window-down gesture when he came up to the door.
“Daddy,” Ellie said.
“Shhh,” he told her. “It’ll be okay.”
He rolled down the window.
“License and registration,” the officer said automatically.
David leaned over onto one buttock and reached for his back pocket, only to find nothing there. He felt like he’d been kicked in the chest. But then he remembered his wallet was in his bag, which was piled up in the backseat. He said as much to the officer, who responded by taking several steps back from the window.
“Sir,” the officer said.
David looked at him. “What?”
“Sir. Sir.” It seemed all the officer was able to say.
“My wallet is in the back, in my bag,” David repeated. “If you want, I can get out and you can—”
“Are you sick, sir?”
He thought he’d misheard him. “What’s that?”
“Are you . . . are you sick?” The cop’s voice cracked. He took another step back from David’s window, his shiny black boots stomping over a tangle of kudzu. He had a pale, drawn face, with a fair complexion and eyelids rimmed with red.
David said, “Sick? What do you mean?”
The cop pointed at him. “You’re bleeding,” he said, then clapped a hand over his own mouth.
“I’m . . . ?” David glanced at his reflection in the rearview mirror. Indeed, his nose was still gushing blood. He probably broke it when he slammed into Cooper back at the house. Blood trickled down over his lips and had spilled onto his shirt—Turk’s shirt—too.
“Stay in the car.” The officer held up a hand like a crossing guard.
“I’m not—”
“Please,” said the cop. He peered in at Ellie, then took another step back. “Go. Just go.”
The cop returned to his car, got in, and pulled back onto the road. The rack lights went dead as the cruiser sped by, leaving a cloud of exhaust in its wake. The cop didn’t even glance at them as he drove away.
David stared at his bloodied reflection again, his heart thundering in his chest.
“Here,” Ellie said. She had dug a Kleenex out of the glove compartment and handed it to him.
He cleaned up as best he could, which wasn’t very good at all. When he pressed a finger to the tip of his nose, pain blossomed behind both his eyes, though he didn’t think it was broken.
Yet for some reason he couldn’t help but laugh.
28
They slept in the car that night, parked behind a row of Dumpsters in the parking lot of an abandoned bowling alley in southeastern Missouri. Ellie had already been asleep for some time when David parked the car. He was ravenous but he looked like shit and didn’t want to risk stopping anywhere. He reclined his seat and rolled down the window, letting in the cool autumn air. Crickets chorused in a nearby field and a cloud of gnats orbited the single lamppost at the far end of the parking lot. There would be no birds on the prowl tonight. Once again, David wondered if this was how the world ended—in disease among a plague of insects. It wasn’t just that the birds had disappeared; it was that the insects had begun to take over. Wasn’t there something in the Bible about that?
Before closing his eyes, he powered up his phone and checked his e-mail. He knew it was wishful thinking, hoping that Tim had gotten back to him so quickly. And he was right—there was no message from Tim.
What if he’s gone dark? Completely off the grid? It was only a matter of time before Tim vanished completely.
Tim had never trusted the government, the police, the politicians, the bureaucrats. He’d stopped carrying around a cell phone because he didn’t want NSA listening in on his calls. He didn’t own a TV. The last bit of correspondence David had received from Tim had been in the form of an e-mail, so that kept some hope alive that he was still connected to the World Wide Web . . . but even that knowledge was not very reassuring.
What will we do if I don’t hear back from him? Where will we go? We can’t run forever.
David turned his phone off and shut his eyes. He slept for a while, surprised at the ease with which he came upon it, only to awaken sometime later by the harsh, mechanized sound of a helicopter flying close to the ground. He opened his eyes, hearing nothing but the steady chuh-chuh-chuh sound of its rotors.
It passed directly overhead, a great black hornet against a smoky black sky. It had a single searchlight combing the ground below. For a moment, the light passed right across the hood of the car. David sat there holding his breath, watching as the helicopter continued on into the night, the massive propeller eating up the darkness.
They’re looking for a black Ford Bronco, he reminded himself.
Once the helicopter was gone and the world settled, it was as if it never existed.
29
Six months earlier
In the weeks before his classes were discontinued, David would arrive at his classroom to find that a great number of his students had taken to wearing cheap plastic Halloween masks. The trend had begun months earlier, after fears that the virus might possibly be airborne and that any precautions that might keep exposure to germs at a minimum—to include the use of face masks—were recommended. When the sale of face masks could no longer keep up with the demand, people began rioting in the streets. It was then that the CDC revealed that the masks held little to no benefit. Nonetheless, people—mostly teenagers and young adults—who couldn’t get ahold of the N95s and similar masks took to wearing plastic dime-store masks. After a time, wearing the masks became less about protecting yourself against the disease and more about the solidarity of the healthy. To wear a mask meant you were still “clean.” In a way, it even became some sort of morbidly bizarre fashion statement. It wouldn’t be unusual to see packs of teenagers roving through the streets in the early evenings, their faces adorned with the countenances of Wolverine, Spider-Man, Minnie Mouse, or Smurfette. At first, the college had tried to ban the wearing of masks in the classrooms, but they ultimately conceded that point when students, citing public health fears, threatened to withdraw from their classes altogether. And so it became typical for David to arrive at class and look out upon a sea of plastic cartoon faces.
Creepier than the cartoonish masks were the paper plates with eyeholes cut out that some people tied around their faces. The more imaginative individual
s drew faces or designs on their plates, sometimes beautifully and skillfully rendered, though more often than not just downright eerie. The more practical individuals kept their plates untarnished, walking around with blank white ovals strapped to their faces like expressionless mutes in a hospital psych ward. In David’s estimation, these were the creepiest.
It was one of these blank white plate-wearers who happened to remain standing near the back of the classroom when David entered. Most everyone else had dropped into their seats right away when he entered, with the exception of a few stragglers who felt entitled to finish their conversations first. David always gave them about a minute. He removed a stack of texts from his briefcase and waited for the murmurs to die down before looking up and out over the columns of masked faces.
The student in the plain white plate-mask was the only one who had not taken a seat. He wasn’t even facing forward, but gazing across the classroom at the wall of windows that looked out onto the quad two stories below. In general, David had always been pretty good at learning his students’ names, but since they’d started wearing masks, it seemed a futile and unreasonable task, so he had given up on it. It provided for anonymity when grading their papers, which alleviated implications that a low grade on an essay was because he disliked a particular student (though a slim few still attempted this, albeit unsuccessfully), yet the trade-off was that the masks made for rather antiseptic and emotionless discussions during class. In any case, because of the masks, David did not know the name of the student who stood at the back of the classroom.
“Take your seats, please,” he said, flipping to one of the bookmarked pages in the Bible-size Norton Anthology. He briefly scanned the highlighted text before glancing back up at his students.
The student in the plain white mask remained standing at the back of the classroom. The student was male and dark-skinned—that much David could determine—with hair buzzed nearly to the scalp. He wore a flimsy nylon jacket over a checkered flannel shirt. His motorcycle boots were covered in grime.
There was a roster somewhere in David’s briefcase. He kept it handy whenever he felt the need to address a certain student by their name (as opposed to the corresponding character depicted on their mask), and he produced it now, scrutinized it. The empty seat belonged to Sandy Udell.
“Mr. Udell,” David said, straightening his posture behind the desk. “Is there a problem?”
Udell ignored him; he just kept gazing out the window. David looked out into the quad to see what might be attracting the guy’s attention, but save for a stamped concrete walkway papered in dead leaves and an overcast sky, there was nothing.
“Hey, Sandy,” another guy in the class said to him. “Drop your ass, yo.”
This comment elicited a few chuckles from the peanut gallery.
David came around his desk and stood at the front of the class. “Mr. Udell,” he said, more sternly now. “Sandy. Hello, hello.” He snapped his fingers.
The white mask gradually turned until the jagged eyeholes faced David. The plate was not a perfect circle, pulled in at the sides by the bit of elastic that held it to Udell’s face, giving it a warped, oblong look. David was suddenly struck by the impression that, behind that mask, Sandy Udell’s face was actually squished out of proportion, too. He imagined a narrow fishface with eyes bulging on either side of a narrow, bladed head, and lips so distorted that they couldn’t close all the way.
Udell pointed toward the wall of windows. “You see that?” he said, his voice muffled behind the mask.
Again, David looked out the windows. The other students did, too.
“I don’t see anything,” David said.
“Storm’s coming,” said one girl.
“Please sit down,” David said to Udell.
“We a party to it,” Udell said. Those blank eyeholes gazed at David. “All of us.”
David said, “What?”
“It’s right there, if you all want to see it,” Udell went on. He still had his arm up, his finger pointing out the windows. “Just have to open your eyes.”
“What is it?” David said.
“An angel,” said Udell. He turned back to face out the windows. “Angel coming down from heaven, right through them black clouds. Has a key in one hand, big chain in the other.”
The students closest to Udell scooted their desks away from him, the sound of the chair legs squealing across the floor like trumpet bleats. A girl in a plastic Barbie mask got up and, clutching her books to her chest, moved quickly to the opposite side of the room. Others started to get up from their desks, too.
“Everybody just stay calm,” David told them.
“He’s sick,” someone said.
“It’s the key to the abyss,” Udell said, his voice rising as if to compete with the din of his classmates. “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock!”
“Holy shit,” someone groaned.
The students began their evacuation, filing quickly out the door at the back of the classroom and into the hallway. A girl fell over a desk and someone else stepped right on top of her to get out the door. The girl cried out, then managed to hoist herself to her feet and flood out into the hallway with the others.
“Look at it,” Udell said. He walked slowly toward the wall of windows. On the horizon, dark storm clouds crept closer and closer to the campus. But what was Sandy Udell seeing? When he reached the windows, Udell placed both palms flat against the glass.
Someone called David’s name. He turned and saw Burt Langstrom standing in the doorway behind him, his face pale and stricken. Burt looked over at Udell, who appeared to be mumbling a prayer.
And then Udell screamed.
It was the bloodcurdling scream of someone in physical pain. Udell’s hands balled into fists. He began pounding them against the glass.
“What do you want from me?” Udell shouted. “Tell me! Tell me!”
“Come on,” Burt said, snatching ahold of David’s arm and yanking him toward the door.
But David’s feet felt glued to the floor. He couldn’t pull his eyes from Udell, his pounding fists against the windowpanes like the thrum of a heartbeat.
“There is a monster coming out of the sky!” Udell screamed. Then he slammed his face against the glass. Again. Again.
David jerked his arm free of Burt’s grasp and rushed over to the boy. He grabbed Udell around the waist and yanked him back, but the kid was too big and too determined. David slipped a hand around to the front of Udell’s head and tried to prevent any subsequent blows to the glass, which had already begun to fracture, but the kid threw an elbow into David’s ribs, knocking the wind from him. David buckled and dropped to the floor.
Someone out in the hallway screamed. Burt rushed over to David, scooped him up under both armpits, and dragged him toward the door. The heels of David’s shoes left black streaks on the linoleum.
Udell rammed his head against the window a final time, shattering the glass. Jagged spears of glass rained down on the wall-mounted heater and the floor in a dazzling, reflective array. David gasped and managed to grab some air. Before Burt could drag him out into the hallway, he climbed to his feet and once again shrugged Burt off of him.
He shouted Udell’s name, but it was too late: The kid had managed to hop up onto the heater, and without hesitation, leapt through the ragged hole in the window.
A wave of shrieks rose up from out in the hall. David was crying out, too, although he wouldn’t realize this until later, as he sat speaking with police and contemplated why his throat was so hoarse.
David turned and shoved through the crowd of students that had gathered in the hallway just outside the classroom. Burt followed him down the stairwell and out into the courtyard, where a sizeable crowd had already gathered. Shock registered on every face. Someone kept muttering, over and over again, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God . . .”
It was only a two-story drop, but Sandy Udell had swan-dived onto the stamped concrete walkway. His paper mask had c
ome off in the fall, revealing a lacerated and glistening pulp that looked more like raw hamburger meat than someone’s face. The impact with the pavement had flattened one side of Udell’s skull while the glass from the window had sliced the kid’s nylon jacket to ribbons.
When Udell gasped, David did, too. The kid’s shoulder, which bulged from his torn jacket at an impossible angle, readjusted itself. One of Udell’s arms grated along the concrete, scraping over bits of gravel and javelins of glass. He brought his hand up and out and past his head, his fingers groping for purchase on the pavement. Udell was trying to drag himself along the ground.
Jesus Christ, no, David thought.
He knelt beside the boy and said, “You’re going to be okay. Just lie there and don’t move. Lie there and don’t move.”
There was a sound like air escaping a vent. Udell’s body seemed to deflate. His arm stopped moving; his fingers stopped groping. David heard the gurgle of blood at the back of the kid’s throat as he died.
30
They were back on the road the following morning by the time Ellie woke up. She yawned, stretched, gazed momentarily out the passenger window at the autumn trees shuttling by, then looked at him.
“Was it a bad dream?” she said.
He didn’t need her to elaborate. What happened back in Goodwin felt like a nightmare to him, too. He shook his head. Said, “I wish it was. Are you okay?”
“I guess so.”
He stared at her for several heartbeats before turning back to the road.
“What?” she said.
“What you did to him,” he said. “That guy Cooper. With the gun.” He wanted to ask a million questions but he couldn’t formulate a single one.
“It just happened,” she said.
“Was it like when you were angry and you shocked me?” he asked.