by David Wong
. . . and I knew it was a scam, a lawyer trick, but I kept picturing Coach Wilson turning his back, again and again and I figured, hey, screw them. The prosecutor, this bearded Jewish tough guy, didn’t want to push the charges. He said it was a five- on- one fight and shit happens, didn’t want to see me disappear into the jaws of the juvie justice system. The school backed off on the expulsion under threat of lawsuit and, bada- boom, I wind up spending my final year at Pine View.”
A speck of crystal landed on the windshield. A lone snowflake. Another landed a few inches away.
“So,” I said, “four months later Billy is adjusting to life without eyes, saying good-bye to sports and driving and independence and knowing what his food looks like before he eats it and never knowing if a fly has landed in his soup. He takes all of his pain pills at once. Demerol, I think. They find him dead the next day.”
Silence. Desperate to hear her say something, anything, I asked, “So how much of that story did you already know?”
“Most of it. There was a weird rumor that went around that you had snuck into his room and poisoned him or something stupid like that, with rat poison or something, which was stupid because the police would have noticed that.”
“Right, right.”
I started that rumor, by the way.
“You must have felt horrible when you found out. About Billy, I mean. That’d be awful.”
“Yeah.”
Nope.
What followed was the longest and most tense conversation pause of my life, like being stuck on a Ferris wheel with somebody you just puked on. Exactly like that, by the way. The truth was, I didn’t feel sorry for Billy. He teased a dog and got his fingers bitten off. Fuck him. Fuck everybody. And fuck you, Amy, for somehow getting me to tell you this. Sure, yeah, I felt bad about it, Your Honor. And that day years ago when I heard about the kids shooting up the school in Colorado I shook my head and said it was a tragedy, an awful tragedy, but inside I was thinking the look on the jocks’ faces when they saw the guns must have been fucking priceless. So, yeah, as far as you know, I felt just as bad about Billy as a good person would. And I’ll never, ever tell you otherwise. Never.
She said, “Still, who knows what he would have done to somebody else if you hadn’t—”
“I don’t feel bad about it, Amy. I lied about that part. When I heard, I felt nothing at all. I thought I would, I didn’t. The guilt just wasn’t there because I’m not that type of person. And that’s what I’ve been saying, that’s why you’re in danger here. I don’t think those things, those bits of walking nothing can use you, but I think they’d know me as one of their own. So keep the gun on me. And keep your finger along the side of the trigger and be ready to squeeze it as hard and as fast as you can.”
Silence again. Did I say that last silence was the longest and most awkward of my life? The record didn’t stand for long.
I would give everything I own to somehow take this conversation back.
I said, “We have no idea what they were doing to you, Amy, when those things took you all of those times. But they’re not going to do it again. This being scared bullshit, it’s exhausting for me. And you know, I reach a point where I say, you can kill me or tear off my arms or soak me in gasoline and set me on fire, but you won’t keep me like this, imprisoned by fear. Now, after everything I’ve seen, I’m not really scared of monsters and demons and whatever they are. I’m only scared of one thing and that’s the fear. Living with that fear, with intimidation. A boot on my neck. I won’t live like that. I won’t. I wouldn’t then and I won’t now.”
After a long time she said, “What do we do?”
“We sit here. Just keep the gun on me, okay? We’ll sit here and wait for the sun. Then I’ll talk to John. John will know what to do.”
I can’t believe you just said that.
CHAPTER 14
John Investigates
4:20 A.M.
John had decided to go to the Drain Rooter job site early to get a look around on his own. So while Amy and I sat camped out in my Bronco at the unborn doughnut shop, John was rolling his Caddie up the snowy road past Amy’s house. He didn’t get far, of course, arriving at a bundle of vehicles trying to unstick a jackknifed Drain Rooter semi tractor trailer.
Now, I wasn’t there, so this story is hearsay. If you know John, you’ll take the details for what they’re worth. Please also remember that, where John claims to have “gotten up at three thirty” to perform this investigation, it was far more likely he was still up and somewhat drunk from the night before.
John says he pulled up to the scene, which was roped off with yellow- and-black tape that announced it as a Hazardous Material Area. Several guys in yellow jumpsuits were milling around and cleaning the scene with some urgency, so of course he immediately decided to cross the DO NOT CROSS tape. Two steps in, John found himself standing on a faded pink stain on the snow, as wide as a car. He deduced that this was blood, though the truck driver’s body was gone. He stood over this large bloodstain and said, out loud and in the presence of several bystanders, “This is blood! David must have been here.”
At this point two elderly security guards in parkas, the guys who normally work the front desk at the plant, asked John to step behind the tape. John claims that here he told the guards that he could not speak English and when this failed to persuade them, he faked a violent seizure. I am unclear as to the purpose of this part of his plan. John flung himself down and began rolling around in the snow, thrashing his limbs about and screaming, “EL SEIZURE!!! NO ES BUENO!!!” in a Mexican accent. Half a dozen pairs of boots came mushing through the snow toward him.
From the ground, John saw something that stopped him cold. The semi trailer was, according to him, “bleeding from the ass.” John saw gallons of a red liquid running freely from the rear cargo doors of the truck, pooling on the road below, the stuff almost black in the moonlight. Several gloved hands seized him and dragged him through the snow, men in jumpsuits and protective masks. John squinted through the bustling team of men around the truck and saw several guys haul out a couple of blue plastic barrels, stained on the sides with the red substance that now seemed a little more like transmission fluid than blood. Dark and thick and oily.
Right behind them, several casket- shaped boxes were hauled out, the men carrying them like pallbearers. John stressed that these containers were not caskets but were merely casket- shaped, coated with several stickers that seemed to indicate some kind of biohazard. Not the sort of thing you would use to ship bottles of a household chemical to the local True Value.
Here’s where things get hazy. John claims that the men hauling him away from the scene were escorted by other men carrying submachine guns, though when pressed, he admitted that they may have been flashlights. Either way, John says the men threw him down and intended to execute him, at which point he kicked one of the men in the face and backflipped to his feet. He then wrestled away the man’s gun and “dick- whipped” him with it. I am unclear as to whether or not this means he struck the man in the groin or merely slapped him in the same manner in which he would slap a person with his dick. I never ask John to clarify such things. Anyway, he said he swung again and slammed another man’s skull with the gun, so hard it “made the batteries fly out.”
Next—according to John, of course—in one continuous motion, he “triple-kicked” a third man in the face, while shooting a fourth “right in his damned cock.” John, of course, knew that he couldn’t leave that man just lying there, screaming in pain. So he grasped him by the sides of his face and mercifully snapped his neck with a sharp twisting motion of his bare hands. At this point John says the rest of the hazard workers noticed what was going on and a chase ensued; he escaped by stealing a nearby horse. This is the first inconsistency in John’s account, because when the story picks up he is calmly driving his Caddie back down the road, past Amy’s house and away from the Rooter plant. I suspect that, in reality, either the men at the cleanup sit
e didn’t see John at all or they merely gave him a dirty look until he turned around and drove away. Again, I wasn’t there and I do not wish to cast an unfavorable light on John’s personal credibility.
Undaunted, John turned off on a country road not far from the house. He wasn’t the first to have this idea tonight, he figured, because there were tire tracks in the snow leading up, and John figured the last person who came this way was doing what he was doing: getting around the accident.
A few minutes in he became sure he was right because the road seemed to circle back around to the rear of the old industrial park, which contained the Rooter plant along with an abandoned beans- and- wienies cannery, a Best Buy distribution center and a closed Hanes jockstrap jockstrappery. Just across the highway from that was the abandoned Undisclosed Shopping Centre with its rows of decaying stores where the only inventory was mildew, bats and squirrel families building nests out of used rubbers.
The gravel road and fresh tire tracks that John followed took him through a narrow strip of woods alongside the Rooter property. It was while passing through the leafy darkened canopy that he saw a flickering of lights off to his left, flashing between the tree trunks.
He slowed and stopped, seeing bouncing white beams that had to be men with flashlights, maybe a half dozen or so.
Shots rang out.
The lights vanished and John sat there for a few minutes before he picked them up again, farther down in the trees. He pulled forward a little down the road, peering into the woods, saw the flashlight beams stop and then blink out one by one. Whatever the men were looking for, be it a raccoon to boil or one of the guys’ contact lenses, they had apparently found it. He peered into the trees looking for more activity, decided that the group could have been mere redneck poachers or fraternity scavenger hunters, and stepped on the gas. The big Caddie crested a hill and when John saw what was below, he slammed on the brakes. A truck was down there, a heavy truck that looked military but didn’t have a military paint job. Flat black from head to toe. This was apparently the source of the tire tracks he had been following.
A group of men carrying what had to be rifles stood around the vehicle, and John immediately reached out and punched the switch to kill his headlights. Then it occurred to him that the lights suddenly going off might have been more noticeable. So he punched them back on, thought he saw two of the men turn toward him, and then quickly turned the lights back off again. Now he felt the strobing of his headlights was almost impossible not to notice; in fact, all of the men seemed to be looking up the hill at him. The group might have either pursued him or raised their rifles to perforate his windshield had a gorilla riding a giant crab not leapt out of the woods and eaten two of them.
You heard me.
John said the thing was as tall as the truck and walked on six legs that looked horned and armored like something seen at a seafood buffet. But there was a part that had the feel of a mammal, too, fur and arms. Please remember that from John’s distance the beast would have been the size of a dime, so I won’t criticize his crab- riding monkey description even though we all know it’s retarded.
The thing crawled away—sideways—with the legs of one man still kicking from its mandibles. Cracks of rifle shots rang out and little flares of muzzle flash lit up the snow at the foot of the hill. The men raced into the woods. John waited, then threw the Caddie into reverse and backed far enough down the other side of the hill as to be out of view of the army truck, though he claims that from that vantage point he could still see the truck, so that’s probably physically impossible.
Shots rang out from the woods. An animal screech rang out from the woods. Shots rang out from the woods again. More howls and then more shots, dozens, rattling over each other. Full auto fire. Screams.
There was silence for a moment and then John says he saw a single figure sprint out of the woods and head to the truck. The man jumped into the back, pulled out two small cases the size of lunch boxes and ran into the woods again. After a moment, more shots hammered the night air. The bestial screams again. More shots. More screams. More shots. There was a low, animal moan from the woods. The gunfire fell silent. John threw the Caddie in gear and was prepared to drive past the truck before the men returned, but he was too late because here was the lone man, running back. He was carrying the small cases, which seemed lighter now. He ducked into the truck again, emerged with two new cases, and returned to the woods. Gunshots resumed, followed by the screams of the monkey- crab.
This went on for about half an hour and then finally the noises stopped. Four men wandered out of the woods and mounted up in the truck. The truck pulled away. John followed. He passed a turn that led back to the Drain Rooter plant, probably to the employee lot, but saw that it was sealed off with a chain- link gate. If this had been an action movie, John thought, he would have rammed through it. Unlike a movie prop car, however, John was depending on the Cadillac to get him to work the next morning, and a punctured radiator would cost a week’s pay.
But more importantly, the truck he was following didn’t turn off at the gated road and he was now very eager to see where it went. John hung far back, content to follow the trail of the tire tracks. They kept going through the main access road for the industrial park and across the two- lane highway that intersected the road. The truck had continued onto the white canvas that was the parking lot of the dead Undisclosed Mall. It had circled around to the back of the eastern wing, one fork in the mall’s U-shaped floor plan.
John waited what he thought was a sufficient amount of time for the men in the truck to dismount and go wherever they were going, then cautiously drove around the building so he could see the truck parked near the ramp and boarded-up entrance of what would have been a department store had the mall ever bothered to open. John staked out the spot, saw nothing. He finally grew impatient and, being totally unarmed and without a flashlight or any kind of survival instincts, tromped over to a doorless doorway and walked in like he owned the place.
The cavernous space was as cold as a meat locker. Some moonlight spilled in from a framed hole in the roof, the skylight that had the glass shattered out of it last year. Snow had sifted down through the hole, leaving a coating at the center of the floor like spilled flour. Right across the edge of it were footprints. Five or six leading to an elongated skid that John assumed was created by a guy slipping in the snow and falling on his ass. John didn’t make the same mistake, circling around the dusting of snow and following the direction of the tracks. They led to a metal MAINTENANCE door and John paused to wonder if maintenance on this place was the easiest job in the world or the hardest. He found the door locked and claims he picked it. I’ve never known John to know how to pick a lock but I don’t claim to know all of his secrets. Maybe the guys just left it unlocked.
Anyway, John says he picked it and inside found a small, dirty, windowless room that seemed to be home to a lot of spiderwebs and dark scurrying shapes, but no exits. He flicked on his lighter and confirmed it. No doors, no hatches, no tunnels. Just like Amy’s bathroom, the trail led there and stopped. John turned to leave, and out of the corner of his eye he saw a doorway. He felt like an idiot because, how do you miss it, right in the middle of the wall like that? Tall, arched at the top, ornate. Totally out of place in a room like this. Then he turned to face it and saw that it was only a blank wall again.
He turned to the side, once more saw a blurry glimpse of the big door out of the corner of his eye. There, but not there, like an optical illusion. John went over to the wall and pawed around on the surface by the warm glow of the butane flame, looking for a lever or a seam or hidden hinges or something. After several minutes, he found it only to be a solid wall. He glanced at his watch—
5:06 A.M.
—and realized he had to be at the job site in less than half an hour. He left, guessing—rightly—that he would be back.
5:18 A.M.
I alternately turned the Bronco’s engine on and off so we could run the
heater without poisoning ourselves with carbon monoxide, as I heard could happen if a parked car was left on too long. Especially this one, which smelled like rotten eggs from time to time anyway. I had always credited it to some sort of emissions problem, and I was sure it would remain even if I gave the truck a thorough cleaning, though I had never fully investigated that scenario.
Amy’s hair smelled like strawberries. She was leaning on me, her feet on the armrest of her door, the gun pointed somewhere in the direction of the glove compartment. There was a coating of white on all of the glass now, as if a sheet had been thrown over the Bronco. For the second time that night I had the very odd, weightless feeling that we were the last two people on Earth.
I said, “Can I ask you something?”
“Nope.”
“Why were you in Pine View? There’s barely anything wrong with you. And I have a right to know, you know, as a taxpayer.”
“The car accident. I missed school for a few months, had all kinds of problems when I came back. They had me on antidepressants and everything else. Well-butrin. I bit a teacher and wound up with the crazy kids.”
“You bit a teacher?”
She sighed and said, “Okay. One day me and Mom and Dad were driving, going shopping for school clothes. I was fourteen, about to start high school. I fell asleep in the backseat and woke up and felt like somebody was shaking me. Then I was upside down, my cheek pressed to pavement. Glass everywhere, blood every where. Dad had been thrown from the car, he died right there, two feet in front of me. His face was just—it was like a rubber mask. Just, nothing there. Mom was laying there, legs pinned under the hood, screaming. I was mostly okay but my back was twisted around and my legs were numb, my hand was caught under a door and I just laid there and told Mom to calm down, that help would be here soon. We laid there forever. And I could hear cars passing. I could hear them and it’s like, ‘why don’t they stop?’ Somebody, you’d think . . .”