Splintered

by Jamie Schultz

  “What indeed?” he asked.

  Chapter 12

  The beginning of a regular job was as comfortable as sliding into your own bed after a month in cheap motels, Anna thought. No kidnapping or any of the other shit Sobell had had them working—just a new place, like a present waiting to be unwrapped. This she understood, and she was good at it. She wished Karyn were with her, ready to drop a warning about any bad shit about to go down. It felt weird to do this without her, like it was her bed but somebody’d turned the mattress while she was gone, and it was ever so slightly unfamiliar.

  It had taken less than three hours to get the basic 411 on Mona Gorow, and another thirty minutes to drive to the woman’s street in Beverly Hills. Nail drove slowly down the street as Anna watched the neighborhood. It was, well, Beverly Hills. Nice lawns, carefully cultivated palm trees, old houses.

  “They’re gonna arrest us just for driving around here,” Anna said, only sort of joking.

  Nail nodded. “Yep. Be lucky if I don’t get life.”

  “They’ll fucking deport me.”

  Nail chuckled, but Anna couldn’t even laugh at her own joke. When did I get so anxious? she wondered.

  There wasn’t much going on out here this afternoon. That seemed like a good thing at first, until the lack of other traffic made her feel conspicuous. She looked around, counting. She could see eleven houses from here, before the street curved and dipped down a little hill ahead. This wasn’t like the Mendelsohn job, where he’d lived out in the middle of nowhere and all they’d had to do was show up. These houses were in the lower-rent section of the Hills, where the houses were huge but basically jammed together on lots barely bigger than the buildings. Mona Gorow had neighbors. Lots of them. This didn’t look like the friendliest neighborhood right now, but nobody was home, so who knew? Maybe they all barbecued together on weekends. Maybe some hedge fund motherfucker who worked from home was looking out the window at them right now, taking down the license plate number.

  Except . . . now that she noticed, there were a lot of For Sale signs up. Century 21 had claimed the yard just ahead and to her right, Re/Max the one next door and the one directly across the street. Of the eleven houses Anna could see, six of them were for sale. That was weird.

  They crossed Ash Lane, took a rather sharp turn, and it was as though a switch had been thrown. Same neighborhood, just a different block, but it might as well have been on Mars for all the resemblance it bore to the last block.

  “What the hell . . . ?” Nail asked.

  Anna just nodded. It was cold here, for starters, easily ten degrees cooler than it had been just across the street, but that was the least noticeable difference. “Street sweepers didn’t come,” she said.

  “Huh? Oh. Yeah. That, too.”

  “That, too?” The ground was covered with the bodies of dead locusts, piled over the sidewalks, strewn over the streets, filling the yards. Maybe it was just that the street sweepers hadn’t got here yet—it was only the next day—but that seemed unlikely here, of all places. Moreover, there were no traces on the even carpet of locusts in the street. No cars had been through here since yesterday’s locust Armageddon. Not a single one, it looked like.

  “I mean . . . it feels nasty,” Nail said.

  She turned to look at him. The backs of his arms had bunched up in stripes of gooseflesh, and he was slowly shaking his head no.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Think I might be sick.” He swallowed a couple of times and frowned.

  “Sure you don’t want me to drive?”

  He stopped the car. A trickle of sweat wended its way down behind his ear, down into the collar of his shirt. His throat convulsed again, another thick swallow.

  Anna looked around. Nothing jumped out as the source of Nail’s anxiety, but she kind of got what he was feeling—a kind of metaphysical shove, a sense that she needed to be somewhere else. It was uncomfortable in the way that walking in on something very personal was, an internal sense that she had intruded rather than a sense of some external opprobrium.

  I never feel like this, she realized. How many places had she broken into? How many bedrooms and bathrooms and private areas, without once feeling that she was invading somewhere she didn’t belong?

  “I’m good,” Nail said. “I’m good.”

  “Drive.”

  There had been no vehicular traffic through the area, and the For Sale signs were up in force, but the area wasn’t quite abandoned, Anna noticed. Somebody’s porch light was on, and she saw a blond kid peek out through a big picture window before his mother pulled him away and yanked the curtain shut.

  “Who would stay here?” she asked.

  Nail didn’t answer.

  “There’s the place,” Nail said, pointing to a sprawling house ahead on the right.

  “Keep rolling.”

  “I don’t even know how we’re gonna do basic recon on this,” Anna said.

  “Wanna try the old California Gas and Electric, or should I go with Time Warner Cable?” Nail asked. “Pretty sure Tony’s still got the van.”

  “Here? That’ll stick out worse than if we camp on the lawn.”

  “Got any other ideas?”

  Anna didn’t answer. She was focused on trying to watch the house as they went by without looking like she was watching the house. She didn’t see much. There was a blue-and-white sign, little more than a blur in her peripheral vision, that was almost certainly an ADT sign. No surprise there. Two-story house, oversize for the lot, maybe five thousand square feet. Every window curtained, every curtain closed. The neighboring houses crowded close, with too damn many windows on the adjacent sides. From here, the only promising thing was the cedar fence around the backyard. If it was fully enclosed, that would provide at least some protection from prying eyes once they got in.

  What prying eyes? You’re thinking about this wrong.

  “Go around the block,” Anna said. “I want to get a look at the alley.”

  Nail turned right four houses down from the Gorow place and rolled slowly down the side street. The alley behind the row of houses was a nearly straight shot, affording a clear view of the backs of the houses. Anna managed a little smile when she saw that the board fence continued around back.

  “Let me out,” she said.

  “It’s the middle of the day in the Land of a Million White People. You really want to go sneaking around back there?”

  “Yeah. Park at the end of the block, and I’ll meet you in five.”

  “Your call,” he said.

  She got out of the car, and Nail pulled away.

  Several of the houses in this row had similar board fences, but most had fences built of metal bars. Like cemeteries, Anna thought. Inconvenient for her because anybody could see right through them. Presumably that was part of the point.

  Given how dead the neighborhood was at this time of day, it seemed low-risk to take a quick walk through the alley. She put on a ball cap but otherwise walked with her head up as if she belonged there. If anybody saw her, hopefully they wouldn’t think much of it.

  She hadn’t got fifteen feet into the alley when she started to get a real good idea of why the people who lived on this street were clearing out. There was something badly wrong here. No single thing was that bad, but lots of small details were just . . . off. At the first house she passed, the lawn sprinklers were running, and never mind that city ordinance forbade it at this hour, or that the grass in the entire backyard was a sun-bleached brown. Somewhere a bird sang two alternating notes, over and over again. It had decided on the two most dissonant notes Anna could imagine, notes that not only didn’t belong together in any normal birdsong, but sounded out of tune and wavery besides, almost like a theremin or one of those weird singing saws. The second yard was fenced in, so Anna saw nothing of note there, but she froze, poised to run when she looked into the third and saw a body floating facedown in the swimming pool.

  She kept herself from bolting just lon
g enough for her brain to decipher what she was seeing. It wasn’t a body at all, just a puffy jacket, arms stretched out to the side. Shouldn’t that have sunk by now? Maybe it had air trapped under it. Or something.

  The moment of panic passed, but her heart didn’t slow as she walked by the fourth house and approached the open gate. The concrete of the alley was stained here in a series of staggered, elongated ovals. It took no imagination whatsoever to believe they were a set of bloody footprints. Going to the Gorow house.

  Why am I not carrying? Anna wondered suddenly. The answer was obvious—the same reason she usually didn’t carry a gun. Get pulled over and searched, and having a gun on you will make your day go from bad to worse in just as long as it takes the cop to yell for his partner and cuff you. Now she wondered if she should have made an exception this time.

  She approached the gate, half convinced she needed to turn around and hoof it back to her ride already, right now, before something happened. The bright daylight now seemed like it was on her side rather than a liability, yet it was a poor sort of defense. Now maybe somebody could be a witness to her upcoming homicide. Not much consolation there, and it didn’t ease her nerves any.

  About ten feet back from the gate, she stopped. There was no denying now that the red marks on the pavement were bloody footprints. Dried blood, but heavier here and now accompanied by little round dried spatters. She couldn’t help it—she thought of Tommy, of trying to hold his guts in while he hyperventilated, and it was easy to picture some poor bastard, hand in his jacket, the blood flow getting worse as he tore the wound open with every step and got too weak to keep pressure on the wound.

  She shook her head. Where had that come from?

  The footprints went inside, but Anna wasn’t about to follow them. She hung back, inspecting the gate. Its top hinge had torn loose from the cedar post. The screws still hung loosely from a couple of the holes in the hinge. There was something unsettling about a door hanging in that way. It spoke of destruction and neglect, like a house with a smashed window nobody had bothered to board up.

  There were marks in the gate, she realized. On the inside-facing surface. A series of them, seven or eight sets of four parallel scratches. Deep scratches, with splinters jutting from their sides. The wood in the scratches was still a lighter color than the rest, so they hadn’t been there long enough for the sun to age them. Dark spots, undoubtedly more bloodstains, flecked the wood in some spots, stained it heavily in others.

  They weren’t from a dog. Too high, the individual marks in each set too far apart. It was impossible not to imagine a person clawing at the door in some frenzied desperation, fingers bleeding, a little at first, spots and specks, and then more and more as the pads tore away. In Anna’s mind’s eye, she saw yellow-white bone protruding from the ends of a crazed man’s fingers, and he still kept clawing, mad to get away from—from what?

  She didn’t want to be here, not this close, not until they’d watched the place a little while. She traced her steps back out of the alley. It was all she could do not to run.

  Chapter 13

  Sheila followed the gray thing through the night, down badly lit back streets and through sullen, stinking alleys, and the Chosen followed her. Sheila went first, nearest the thing. The others kept a healthy distance, fifteen feet back or so. The gray thing barely tolerated her, and it seemed to get agitated when too many of the others got close. They remained fascinated with the thing, but Sheila had ordered them back.

  A single car turned onto the desolate side street down which they walked, yellow streetlights tracing its contours. Sheila ducked into a doorway. Behind her, the Chosen made themselves small in the mouth of an alley. Weak hiding places, and even the need to hide disgusted Sheila, filled her with the urge to tear flesh—but she felt it necessary. Sheila had been worried at first about the gray thing provoking some kind of response, like somebody calling the cops on them (to report what, exactly? she wondered), but it hadn’t happened yet. It seemed people had an aversion to the gray thing. Drivers hit the gas, punks hanging out on stoops went inside, and the occasional person walking the street crossed to the other side and turned at the next opportunity. Did they remember it? Did they even see it at all?

  The hiding wasn’t for the gray thing’s benefit—it was pure paranoia, a burgeoning fear even stronger than her rage and her hunger. The gray thing didn’t seem to care who observed it, but Sheila didn’t have that luxury. Every corner was a hiding place for enemies of the Chosen, every window a vantage point from which those enemies could gaze down upon them, every building a shelter in which they could lurk and wait for the opportunity to attack.

  It was funny. When Van Horn had been in charge, Sheila didn’t worry about this stuff. That had been the old man’s job. She’d been vaguely aware that they had enemies, and there had been a couple of fights, even, but she hadn’t wanted to focus on that. Van Horn’s problem.

  Then Van Horn had been taken, and the problem had fallen to her. Denial vanished as an option. She didn’t care about the other Chosen, as such, but she recognized the safety in numbers, and it was clear they were being hunted.

  Another reason to find Van Horn.

  The car slowed as it approached the group and then, like all the others, abruptly sped off. The gray thing slid to the end of the block, then into the intersection. Jaywalking, Sheila thought, and a bubble of laughter escaped her. She walked faster, not wanting to let the thing get too far ahead.

  “I could take a turn,” Rain said, approaching from behind.

  Sheila jerked her head around. “What?”

  “Your fingers,” Rain said. She pointed at Sheila’s left hand, where three fingers were gone, one for each time she’d called the gray thing. The stumps sang a constant refrain of pain. It had become an exciting sort of background noise. “There’s only so many of them. I could call the . . .” She tipped her head toward the gray thing. “That. Next time.”

  Sheila cast a sharp look at Rain, looking for signs of treachery, but Rain’s face was guileless as ever. “It’s mine,” Sheila said.

  “Okay.”

  Kind of silly for her to assert ownership over the thing, but that was how she felt. Sometimes she even thought of the thing as a dog, because that was its function in some sense. It snuffled around until it picked up the trail, and it brought her a little closer to her quarry each time. Other times, she thought of it as a sort of giant slug, because it looked like one.

  “I would have named it, once,” Sheila said.

  “Like ‘Fido’?”

  “No. Its species. If you discover it, you get to name it.”

  “Does it even have a species?”

  “I don’t know. I’d sort of like to find out.” Rain was looking at her as if she’d gone right off the deep end, but instead of feeling angry, as she did so often these days, she smiled. “I used to be an entomologist. Professor, actually.” That part of her, though muted, still found the gray thing endlessly fascinating. Not long ago, she would have liked nothing better than to study it, watch it eat, sleep, and reproduce, and eventually dissect it. Another part of her found it utterly repulsive. Not because it was like a slug—she quite liked slugs and was fond of pulmonates in general—but because it wasn’t, exactly. It was nearly featureless, with no eyestalks, no eyes, and no mantle. Moreover, its slime trail stank of rot, and ragged white chunks hung suspended in it, looking like nothing so much as bleached, waterlogged hunks of flesh.

  And there was the fact that it quite clearly understood human speech. It followed commands, and despite its having no features, Sheila got the very clear impression it followed them because it wanted to, not because it had to. That was mildly upsetting, when she thought about it. What if it changed its mind?

  All things considered, she would just as soon have left it alone to sleep and feed in whatever unthinkable place it called home, but each night the trail went cold. They’d go as far as they could, then fan out, looking for more clues, and find nothin
g. Then she’d call it back.

  “I used to have a garden,” Rain said. “I probably liked slugs a lot less than you did.”

  “Do. We’re not dead.”

  “My dad used to kill slugs. Leave beer out for them. They’d find it and drown.”

  “He’d have a harder time with this one.”

  “You think we’ll find him? Van Horn, I mean.”

  Sheila fought down a flash of annoyance. “I wouldn’t be doing this otherwise. You might have noticed, it takes a hell of a toll.” It did, didn’t it? It must. She looked at the stumps of her fingers again. The blood was exciting, even dried, but she thought she should be more concerned about the gross violation of her person.

  “I can wrap those, if we can find some gauze. Or even clean rags.”

  “What?”

  “Your injuries. I can wrap them. I used to be a nurse.”

  “I thought you used to be a gardener.”

  “I used to have a garden. I used to be a nurse. Among other things.”

  That was what you did, didn’t you? Wrap wounds? Cover them? Intellectually, Sheila understood that, but emotionally, it was . . . uninteresting.

  “They’ll get infected if we don’t do something about it,” Rain said.

  Sheila shrugged. “If it makes you feel better.”

  Rain pulled a mostly clean T-shirt from her bag and began tearing it into strips.

  “Give me your hand,” Rain said.

  The gray thing turned, slithering down a trash-strewn alley, and Sheila followed it in. “Not now,” she said to Rain.

  “This will just take a minute. We’ll catch up.”

  It was more out of some misplaced sense that she should bandage the wounds than any desire to do so that Sheila stopped.

  “Quickly,” she said. She put out her left hand. Only the index finger and thumb remained, and the stumps of the other fingers were an angry red. Rain stared at them, swallowed, and bit her lower lip. Sheila heard her stomach rumble.