Children of the Island

by Wright, T. M.

  Snipe looked where Carlos had nodded. He saw nothing out of the ordinary—a bare space in the dingy, cream-colored wall between the two corridors, where a fire extinguisher had once been installed; a closed door halfway down the wall on the left, and on the right what looked, in the dim light, like several very large cockroaches moving slowly up the leading edge of the wall. He said angrily, "You just seen a couple roaches, asshole!" and nodded at the edge of the wall.

  But he realized in the next moment that what he and Carlos had seen weren't roaches at all; they were fingers—someone's small dark fingers probing the edge of the wall. "Carlos," he whispered, "get that son of a bitch!"

  Carlos grinned. "Sure, Snipe!" He moved very quickly. By the time he'd reached the edge of the wall, he'd pulled his knife out and his grin had become a loud, ecstatic, raucous laugh. Three in one day, it said, "Shit, damn!"

  Snipe listened to the laughter. He couldn't see much because Carlos had turned the corner. But his laughter rang through the building, and it made Snipe feel very good; it even made his throat feel a little better: the phrase, Laughter is the best medicine, sprang into his mind, and he wondered briefly where he'd heard it. He turned to the little group, who were all looking in awe toward the spot where Carlos had disappeared. "Laughter is the best medicine," he told them, and then he laughed at himself, but it caused a very sharp pain in his throat, so he forced himself into silence.

  It was then that Carlos' laughter began to sound noticeably shrill, almost, Snipe thought—and discarded the idea immediately—as if Carlos were weeping and laughing at the same time. "Carlos?" he called.

  And the laughter ended.

  The silence that followed was short-lived and tense. It ended when these words, in Snipe's voice, vaulted down the corridor: "You seen a couple roaches, asshole!"

  Snipe's reaction was immediate and violent. He reached for Carter Barefoot, grabbed the scruff of his collar, and slammed a fist hard into the bridge of the man's nose. "Son of a bitch!" he shouted at him, spittle flying everywhere, "Son of a bitch! What are you doing to me, what are you doing to me?!" and he slugged him again, in the same place, and felt the cartilage fold up beneath his knuckles.

  He let go. Carter Barefoot crumbled to the floor.

  And then these words, also in Snipe's voice, came down the corridor. "Son of a bitch! What are you doing to me?! What are you doing to me?!" And Snipe looked up at Mars-Bar, standing only a few feet away. "Mars-Bar?" he asked, because the look on his face was a look of deep confusion and awe, as if he were watching the sun rise in the west or the Atlantic Ocean turn itself inside out. "Chrissake, Mars-Bar . . ." Snipe said.

  And he saw Mars-Bar back away from him, his eyes wide, his lower lip trembling, his fists clenched hard at his side. He saw Mars-Bar cross himself quickly, desperately. He turned to look at what Mars-Bar was looking at.

  The child was standing, motionless, naked, and blank-faced, well into the light, several feet away. Her mouth, her hands, and her arms were coated with Carlos' blood.

  She opened her mouth. She said, "Son of a bitch! Son of a bitch! What are you doing to me?! What are you doing to me?!"

  And Aunt Sandy, just to the right of the child, put her hand hard to her stomach.

  Bill Meese broke into an awkward run down the corridor, where Carlos had disappeared, stopped, turned, and ran the other way, past the child, past Snipe, past Mars-Bar. He was screaming all the while.

  Aunt Sandy vomited.

  Wanamaker passed out, falling in a heap over Carter Barefoot.

  "This is a private place, you know," the child said, in a voice that Snipe did not recognize.

  And then Mars-Bar was gone, after crossing himself again several times and murmuring incantations to his mother. Snipe listened to his panic-stricken curses echo hollowly in the building, and, finally, fade away altogether.

  That is when he realized that except for the inert bodies of Wanamaker and Carter Barefoot, he and the child were alone in the corridor. That all the other old people, along with Mars-Bar, had run.

  It had been barely twenty seconds since the child had appeared. And a little more than a minute and a half since Carlos announced that he'd seen something down the corridor, that maybe he should check it out.

  But Snipe hadn't run.

  Snipe couldn't run.

  Snipe was riddled with fear, and by the deep certainty that he was experiencing his last few moments of life.

  And so, despite his view of himself, he said to the child, he pleaded with her, "I don't want to die." And as he said it, he told himself that what he was really telling her was that he didn't want to die the way Carlos obviously had.

  She said to him in his voice, "I don't want to die," and he heard, though she didn't say it, one other word, "either," tacked on to the end of the sentence.

  "I don't want to hurt you," he whimpered.

  She repeated it.

  "So I'll go . . . I'll go . . . I'll go . . ." But he got stuck on the phrase, and could not complete his sentence. The child had vanished.

  Crying with fear, Snipe ran back to his makeshift office, where he locked the door, bolted it, then ran to the windows and bolted them.

  From the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle:

  THEY'RE ARMING THEMSELVES IN MANHATTAN

  In the wake of recent numerous unexplained and brutal murders in Manhattan, the Manhattan Islanders appear to be ready to fight back. According to Deputy Police Commissioner, James Hefter, gun sales have skyrocketed an incredible 1000% over the same period one year ago, and request for permits have quadrupled.

  "I must emphasize that, above all, caution be exercised," says Deputy Commissioner Hefter. "I understand the need of the average citizen to protect himself, but he should be assured that these killings are not beyond the capabilities of the New York City Police Department to deal with. We are, as a matter of fact, looking into numerous leads at this very moment, and though I cannot promise that a break in the case will emerge today, or even tomorrow, I can assure all of you that these killings are not, as some have claimed, the work of madmen. To the contrary, they display a pattern and a predictability that madmen are not capable of."

  The killings began a little over one week ago, when two young women on their way home from work . . .

  Chapter 60

  October 5th: Evening

  The two cops cruising 12th Street near Third Avenue were discussing a TV show that last aired many years ago but was still being shown as reruns. The show was called "Barney Miller," and the cops loved it. One of them, a tall, well-muscled guy in his late twenties, identified very strongly with Wojohowicz, the Polish cop on the show; and his partner, for reasons of intellectual vanity, identified with Dietrich, the curly-headed, wise-cracking character who always seemed to have quick answers to obscure questions. The partners liked the show so much, they adopted the characters' names as nicknames.

  "It's fucking timeless, you know what I mean," "Dietrich" said.

  And the one who identified with Wojohowicz agreed. "Timeless is the word. The little things might change—but not the real nitty-gritty of everyday police work. "Wojo" was the rookie, barely a year out of the Police Academy, and still aching with enthusiasm, while his partner, the one who thought of himself as Dietrich, had been with the force nearly a decade. Although Dietrich's enthusiasm had waned long ago, he got a kick out of Wojo.

  "The streets are very quiet tonight," Wojo said, his tone heavily portentous.

  Dietrich forced back a smile: "Yeah," he whispered, "the streets are very quiet."

  "It's those murders, I'm sure of it. They keep people at home."

  "And that's really the best place for them," Dietrich observed.

  "I suppose," said Wojo, obviously unconvinced. "It's just kind of . . . sad."

  "Sad?"

  "Uh-huh. A city like this . . . I mean a great city, a truly great city like this, and no one is out enjoying it."

  "It's bad for business."

  "Very bad
for business." Wojo paused, then looked back toward a narrow alley they'd just passed. "I saw something."

  Dietrich brought the car to an abrupt halt. "Where?"

  He inclined his head to the rear, unbuckled his gun. "That alley."

  "You want to check it out?"

  "Yeah." He pushed his door open, vaulted from the car, and took up a position with his back to the closed and locked grating of a store front. He had his gun drawn; his arm was bent, the gun's barrel pointing upward.

  Dietrich watched, half-amused. This wasn't the first time that his partner's enthusiasm had bubbled over. He got reluctantly out of the car, and moved quickly over to where Wojo was standing. "What'd you see?" he whispered.

  "Movement," Wojo answered.

  "Movement? What kind of movement?"

  Wojo glanced quizzically at him as if to say the question had been impossibly stupid. "Suspicious movement, of course."

  "Oh." Dietrich nodded toward the alley, about twenty feet away. "You think we need backup?"

  "Naw," Wojo answered, and began inching toward the alley. Dietrich followed.

  They stopped several feet away from the alley. Wojo yelled, with great authority, "This is the police; whoever is in the alley, show yourself at once."

  Silence.

  Wojo repeated, "This is the police; whoever is in the alley, show yourself at once."

  They heard the unmistakable and chilling sound of a shotgun being cocked.

  Dietrich pulled out his gun. "Stay put!" he ordered his partner. "Stay right the fuck where you are!" And he crossed in front of him so the toe of his shoe was beyond the edge of the wall and into the alley. He said crisply, "You got ten seconds from right now to drop that weapon and come out of there! You got eight seconds. You got six seconds." They heard the shotgun clatter to the pavement.

  "Okay," said a man's voice, "okay. How was I to know—he appeared, hands behind his head, at the front of the alley. He was a tall blond man, and he looked very scared—"you were cops. How was I to know?"

  Dietrich threw him against the far wall, "Spread your feet!" he ordered; the man did it. Dietrich frisked him; there was a small caliber handgun in the man's pants' pocket and a long-bladed knife in a holster tied to his leg. Dietrich sniffed at the barrel of the gun; apparently it hadn't been fired recently; then he cuffed the man, and started leading him back to the car. Wojo fell in behind, the shotgun in hand.

  "You're a goddamned one-man army," Dietrich said to his prisoner.

  "Yeah?" the man said, "Well I got a permit for the .22, I got a permit."

  "And the shotgun? Do you have a permit for that?"

  "I don't need a permit for it."

  "Sure you do."

  "Since when?"

  "Since about forty years ago. What's the matter, you don't read the papers?"

  They got to the car; Dietrich opened the door and pushed him in. He leaned over. "What were you doing in that alley?" he asked.

  "Protecting myself," the man answered. "And my family. I got a right to do that."

  Dietrich sighed. "Yeah," he said, "sure you do." And he closed the door.

  Wojo was disappointed. He said to Dietrich, on the way to the precinct with their prisoner, "Whats'a matter—you think I woulda gotten myself blown away, or something?"

  Dietrich shook his head. "No. I'm sorry. It was a touchy situation; I thought I should handle it."

  From the back seat they heard, "So what's gonna happen to me?—I'm going to get thrown in jail, or what?"

  Dietrich answered, "Just for the night. You'll get an appearance ticket in the morning. The judge will probably ask for bail."

  "Jees," the man said, "I can't afford that."

  "Then he'll probably waive it," Dietrich said, then to Wojo: "You've never come up against a shotgun before, have you?"

  "No," Wojo answered, "but neither had you, your first time." He was noticeably glum.

  Dietrich thought a moment. "You're right," he said.

  "I'm sorry . . ."

  "Hey you guys," the man in the back seat said; and there was a note of urgency in his voice. "Hey you guys," he repeated, "there's some—"

  "What's the problem?" Wojo broke in; he glanced back, through the metal screen that separated the front and rear compartments. "You know, you're damned lucky you didn't get yourself blown away, my partner here—"

  "But there's someone—" The man's voice had grown shrill and incredulous. "There's someone . . ."

  "Someone what?—for Christ's sake," Wojo said, as if growing very impatient. He retrieved a flashlight from the glove compartment, shone it through the screen; the light fell on the man's face; "My God!" Wojo breathed. "My God!" because the man's face was a mass of blood.

  Dietrich said, "What's the problem?"

  And that is when the man in the back seat screamed. And Dietrich, reacting in a very human way to something so loud, so harsh, and so sudden, craned his head around, felt adrenaline coarse through him, and with the kind of strength he would not normally have been able to summon, hit the brake pedal all at the same time.

  It was an unfortunate reaction.

  The man in the back seat was dead by then; nothing could have been done for him, though, of course, Dietrich could not have known this. Because the patrol car had not been in for service in over a month, when Dietrich slammed the brake pedal, the front brakes locked and the car went into a right hand spin. Dietrich took his foot off the pedal at once—he was an excellent driver—and watched helplessly as the car careened toward the back end of a big U-Haul van illegally parked only yards away.

  He wanted desperately to say "Forgive me!" to his partner—frantically shining the flashlight around the back seat—but had time enough only for the word "Forgive—" And then the car slammed head-on into the back of the U-Haul truck, its speed on impact just a hair above thirty miles an hour. The car jackknifed and broke in two at the middle; a fire broke out in the engine compartment. Incredibly, the gas tank remained intact.

  The cop who identified most with Dietrich died instantly. The other cop made it halfway to Bellevue Emergency. Before dying he whispered these words to the attendants working furiously over him: "The child—" They radioed this information to the investigating officers, who reported back that no child had been found.

  Chapter 61

  At The Stone

  Snipe had always thought that Channel Three News anchorwoman Gwen McDonald was "a fox," and he'd made a point of watching her show when he got the chance just to utter obscene suggestions at her.

  He was watching her now, in his little makeshift apartment (which had once been Lou's apartment). He was not uttering obscene suggestions at her. He was staring vacantly at her, or, more correctly, at the TV screen, which he'd allowed to become a large, bluish blotch in his line of sight. He was listening to her words—"and so, as a result of the greatly increased number of guns on the street, Commissioner Hefter has pledged that police presence will be, as he puts it, 'formidably enhanced,' to protect us, so it would seem, from ourselves"—and he was saying to himself, over and over again, "I'm gonna die in here, I'm gonna fuckin' die in here!"

  He'd locked himself in the apartment two days ago. He was down to three cans of Campbell's Vegetarian Beans, a dry, Kraft Macaroni-and-Cheese Dinner, and half a loaf of Wonder Bread, which was rapidly turning to mold.

  He had stopped being scared. He was merely coasting, letting Fate take him for its grand ride. He found that he was thinking quite a lot about his mother, although he hadn't seen her for almost ten years. He found that he was remembering her voice, which soothed him, and her body, which soothed him too. He found that he was remembering some of his last words to her: "I don't want no one to hurt me, Mama, that's why I do those things!" And he remembered her response, "Yes," in that fine, soothing voice, "I understand that."

  He was having no regrets. He was not capable of it. He was merely coasting. And listening. And waiting.

  Georgie MacPhail was giving very serious consideratio
n, to the possibility of carrying Winifred Haritson out of The Stone and then to a hospital. Bellevue wasn't far away.

  For sure, she weighed no more than ninety pounds, if that much, and though it would be an effort, he could probably do it. He thought that he cared enough for her to do it; he cared enough, in fact, to have asked her what she thought of the idea.

  "Not much, Georgie," she'd answered. "Because you'll have some questions to answer and I don't think you want to answer any questions, do you?"

  He made no response.

  "And besides, Georgie, you probably could carry me that far, you're a strong boy, but I can guarantee you that it wouldn't be a joyride for either of us. I hurt, Georgie. I hurt bad. I hurt so bad I can't move, so if you try to carry me even a couple blocks to the hospital, I'll be screaming and carrying on every step of the way. And that's something I don't want to do, Georgie."

  He stayed quiet.

  "And haven't you heard, Georgie, people are shooting other people left and right out there, so the hospitals are probably all filled up. What would they want with a tired old woman like me? Save the beds for the people who can use 'em, Georgie."

  All of it, Georgie thought, was true enough. But still, he didn't want to see her in pain. He didn't want to see her die here, in this dingy room.

  Chapter 62

  Evening: At Central Park; Near Bethesda Fountain

  Seth could feel her shivering next to him; he could sense the fear in her, and the need; he sensed that she was slipping away from him and he wanted desperately to say to her, Stay with me, Elena. And so he did say it, in his way. And found that she had already slipped far enough that she did not hear him.

  It was cold in Central Park, as cold as it had ever been during that time of the year, and he could feel that the winter would come early, nipping at the heels of autumn.