by Curran, Tim
Alive.
By God, they were all still alive.
Mitch was looking out over the wreckage of the city which was so utterly complete that it left him breathless. Houses were gone, entire blocks were gone, but through it all, they had survived. It was enough to make you believe in a higher power. And if Chrissy had been there with him, he just might have.
When the rumbling started and that wave came rolling through the valley picking up speed and force, devouring Slayhoke and Fort Providence as appetizers and heading for the main course with slavering jaws, it was Tommy and Harry who had gotten everyone organized. They had no idea what was happening. With that rising noise and the ground trembling, maybe there was an earthquake or somebody had finally detonated a nuke out at the Army base like many had prophesied for so many years now. Maybe that was what was happening and that deadly shock wave was heading right at them.
There was no earthly way to know.
But they gathered up the Zirblanski twins and Deke Eriksen, Mitch and Wanda and Chuck Bittner. Got them together as the volume was turned up and the house shook. They didn’t know what was coming but they knew it was going to be bad beyond belief. They had organized things, but it had been Wanda who told them what was coming.
“Dam went,” she said, almost calmly. “Tidal wave coming.”
They had about ten minutes to take action. Tommy got Rita and Rhonda, Chuck and Deke up onto the roof using a ladder and Harry had carried Wanda up there, even though she said she did not want to go. Mitch came up last. But before he went up, Tommy came down and they grabbed lanterns and flashlights, blankets and bottled water, three five-pound bags of salt and their guns. It wasn’t much, but it was all they had time for.
Sitting up on the peak of Wanda’s roof, there hadn’t been time to do much but hold onto each other and hope for the best. The water hit with devastating force, peeling the siding from the house, taking the rain gutters, and Tommy’s truck as a souvenir. The rumbling and roaring were so loud, you could not have even yelled above it. Trees went down and power lines followed. Mitch watched in absolute horror as the Zirblanski’s house literally crumbled into jackstraw and took the Blake house with it. Arland Mattson’s ranch was engulfed and then Mitch’s red brick two-story simply fell apart. All those houses just sank into the swirling, foaming waters and were seen no more.
But when it finally ended, Wanda Sepperly’s was still standing.
And they were all still alive. Petrified and shocked and overwhelmed, but certainly no worse for the wear.
Other than that, Kneale Street had been pretty much decimated. If he squinted his eyes through the misty drizzle, Mitch could see the shells of a few houses, but they were pretty much gutted. The Chambers’ chimney still stood, but nothing else. The Gendrou’s garage was still there, but the house wasn’t. The Procton house was still standing, though everything around it was missing…garage, trees, everything.
Devastation.
Good God, the devastation.
Mitch just watched that silent yellow river of contaminated water passing by Wanda’s house. It moved with a lazy current now, but still the water was nearly up to the roofline and the stink…of sewage and smoke and rot…was unbelievable. Steam rose from it in twisting plumes, a dense fog blowing over its surface. Logs and broken furniture floated by. Entire sheds and amputated roofs, bobbing cars and trucks, the walls of houses and picnic tables, garbage and scraps and fragments. And bodies. Dozens and dozens of bodies moving past in slow dead man’s rolls. In whole and in part. Many of them inhabited by confused rats and birds.
And the flies.
Christ, he’d never seen so many flies in his life. The air was thick with them. They rose off the bobbing wreckage in black, angry clouds, hundreds and hundreds of them. They got in your hair and crawled over your arms and nipped as flies do before a rain comes. But the rain was already falling. It had much been lighter since the wave hammered through the streets, but nobody wanted to get their hopes up. It had to stop sooner or later. For now it was a chill misting rain and no more and that was livable. But the flies? They never lightened. They were breeding by the millions with all the floating garbage and carrion. It was a feast to them.
Mitch put a cigarette in his mouth and lit it. “Harry,” he said. “Tell me again and don’t leave anything out.”
As soon as the water subsided, or as much as it was going to, Tommy had Harry tell him about what happened at the University. It hadn’t been a pretty picture. Jacky Kripp was some kind of animal. Harry said when they picked Chrissy and Lisa up, he hadn’t been sure that was what Jacky was up to. That at the University, before Giggles the Clown showed, he had put a stop to what Jacky had in mind. Jacky and he were about to go to it hot and heavy when the zombies stopped by for a snack. Mitch wanted to believe Harry. Something inside told him that he could believe Harry. But there was still that protective, parental doubt worming at him.
For what if Harry was lying? What if he and Jacky had actually raped them or something even worse? For after all, they were both bad boys. Sure, Harry Teal seemed okay…but was he?
You have to believe him, Mitch, that indefatigable voice of reason told him. You don’t have a choice. If he had done something other than what he was saying, then why bring it up at all? Why even mention Chrissy?
That was true. That was very true and it made perfect sense, but fatherly paranoia was fatherly paranoia. The idea of someone violating or hurting Chrissy was enough to make Mitch boil inside. But he had to keep it in context. Harry had protected the girls. That’s what he claimed and either he was a very good liarbeing a professional criminal, he probably wasor he was telling the truth. When Mitch first heard him out, he’d looked over at Wanda when he was done and Wanda had simply nodded her head. Wanda believed him. Tommy seemed to. And Mitch himself? Yeah, deep down, he believed Harry. Because maybe Harry was a lot of things, but he didn’t see the man as some kind of sexual predator.
“That’s about all there is to tell,” Harry finished.
“And that’s what that sick squeeze of shit said?” Tommy prompted him. “That you couldn’t find him because he was going where the bad boys and bad girls go? The ones no one wants?”
Mitch was filled with venom, helpless, utterly helpless. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Tommy considered it yet again, only this time he seemed to be onto something. “Think about it, Mitch. Where do boys and girls that no one wants go? What kind of place to they put them in?”
And Mitch got it. Yes, yes of course. “The orphanage.”
21
The rumbling had stopped.
Whatever had hit the city, whether it was a bomb or an earthquake, it had settled down now. Chrissy had hoped that whatever it was would shake the building down around her, but it hadn’t happened. The buildingor whatever it washad indeed shook and reeled, but it had not fallen.
So much for that.
There were nineteen people in the pit with Chrissy.
That was easy enough to ascertain. The clown had brought them all here, but he hadn’t bothered taking any of their personals from them. So while they didn’t have any flashlights, they did have disposable lighters and matches. It wasn’t a pit really, it was a cellar. But in Chrissy’s mind, it was a pit, all right. Dark and dusty and cobwebbed. There were nineteen people in there. Men and women, no children, thank God. But of the nineteen only two others seemed capable of doing more than going mad. Quite a few were in shock, others just simply insane, talking to people who weren’t there, sobbing and whispering. The others were mostly silent. Beaten and injured.
There were only the two that Chrissy could count on: Albert Accaro, an unmarried auto mechanic; and Alona Seelig, who was apparently some kind of biker chick with a bad attitude.
These were the three.
Of the others, only Ed Watts, had bothered speaking to them or answering direct questions. He was in his right mind for the most part, but he was no help in any
thing. “I don’t know what you people are planning, but you’d better be careful. That clown is right outside the door and I’m not going to allow you to make things worse for the rest of us.”
To which Alona promptly said, “Shut the fuck up, Ed.”
Yes, the clown was outside the door. That scathed wooden door with no handle on the inside. There was no doubt of that. They could hear him out there from time to time, singing or humming and there was no mistaking the odor that came off of himlike a bin filled with bad meat, maybe flavored with hospital waste and coffin mold for spice. Yes, he was out there and from time to time he pressed up against the door, drawing his nails…or claws…over the outside panel, making people wince and whimper. Sometimes he’d call individuals by name, tell them how he would eat them, or simply spill all the dirty details of their private lives. Things that monster could not possibly know, but seemed to know just fine.
Right then he was singing, “Rain, rain, go away! Come again another day! Little Grimshanks wants to playyyyy!”
His voice was like forks and knives scraping over concrete and like that, it went right up your spine. Grimshanks the Clown was about as terrible of a thing as Chrissy could imagine. He was a zombie like the others, but yet, he wasn’t exactly like the others. They were evil, too, but he was just a little higher on the insanity scale. He terrified everyone…except maybe Alona. Alona kept mouthing off to him and the funny things was, although he roared and made the door shake in its frame, he did not come after her.
That was interesting.
Other than that door which was like a portal into an ogre’s kitchen, there was only one possible way out. Up near the ceiling there was a boarded over window. They had no idea where they were or what was outside, but they intended to find out. The window was about two feet wide and just over a foot tall. Chrissy figured she could wiggle through there and most of the others, too. It would be a tight squeeze for Alona, but she’d make it. That lady was nothing if not tenacious. She hated that goddamn clown maybe worse than the others and she wanted to piss it off, do anything to give it trouble. And escaping would surely piss Grimshanks off.
“These boards are old,” Albert said, examining them by matchlight. “They’d be pretty easy to bust off, but it would make noise. Last thing we want here is to make too much noise.”
Alona checked ‘em out on tippy-toe. “We’ll have to force ‘em real slow, maybe muffle ‘em with clothes or something.”
She was wearing a hooded sweatshirt. She stripped it off in the darkness and handed it to Albert. He pressed it up against the boards and tucked it in tight. All he had to use for leverage was a long quarter-inch piece of pipe he’d pried from the wall. It was rusty, but firm. It would work if he could just wedge it behind that lower board. Using the blade of his jackknife, he began to loosen that board, working very patiently and carefully. Each time he pulled it out, light spilled in.
“I know what you people are up to,” Ed Watts said.
“Glad to hear it, Ed,” Alona said. “Now be a good boy and fuck off.”
“You’re endangering all of us.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, we’re already endangered, you idiot.”
“I’m just saying, is all.”
Alona glared at him in the darkness. “Listen to me, Ed, and listen to me very carefully. What we’re doing is for everyone. If you cause any trouble or slink over to the door to tell Pervo the Clown what we’re doing, I will tear your balls off with my bare hands. And then I’ll make you eat them. Are we on the same fucking page here, Ed?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Glad to hear it.”
Chrissy just stood there speechlessly. Alona was really something. Though she wasn’t much over five-feet tall, she had a ten-foot attitude.
Albert kept prying the board. It groaned once and then he stopped, waited for Grimshanks to say something or come slithering under the door, but he didn’t. Wiping sweat from his face, Albert went back at it. He was making progress, but it was slow.
Then outside the door, there was a scratching. “Hey, hey, Chrissy-poo! Chrissy Barron! I know you can hear me, you little twat! I just wanted you to know that I’m thinking about you! Did you tell your friends how you like to touch yourself? How you like to squeeze your tits and slide your fingers in your hot little la-la! Did you tell them that? I bet you didn’t! Deke likes it when you give him handjobs! No oral yet, but you’re thinking about it, aren’t you?”
Chrissy stepped farther into the room with Alona at her side. Maybe it was time to test the waters. What he was saying was private and that made it all that much more creepy to hear. But she was beyond Grimshanks’ little games by that point. Sure, he was evil and wicked and demented, but he was one-dimensional. He liked to get a rise out of you. Liked to piss you off and scare you. He seemed to feed off the negative emotions he created. When you let him get to you, he got louder; when you ignored him, he seemed to shrink away.
Chrissy thought maybe it was time to get him louder, that might cover the sound of what Albert was doing.
“Chrissy, I want you to give me a handjob! Oh, pretty, pretty please, you hot little cunt! And when I come, oh hee hee, I’ll make you suck me off! I’ll shoot my wormy jizz right down your fucking throat! Isn’t that a lark? Isn’t that a funny? Isn’t that a silly game for us to play?”
“Just leave me alone!” Chrissy shouted at the door.
Grimshanks cackled. “But I won’t! I won’t! I won’t won’t won’t! And you can’t make me! I’ll get you, Chrissy-pissy, fingers in her pie, teased the boys and made them cry! I’ll get you! I’ll have you! I’ll fuck you so hard you’ll bleed, you little snatch! Grimshanks will shove his rotten prick in you and hump you, hump you, hump you! Just like Deke wants to! Hump! Hump! Hump! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! And when I’m done, I’ll shoot my happy stuff in you and you’ll get pregnant! You’ll have my baby! I’ll plant my seeds in your hotbox! I’ll sink my eggs into your sweet soil like a wasp injecting its eggs into a spider! Oh, and when my baby is born, it’ll eat you from the inside out! Ha ha ha! Ho ho ho! Little Chrissy, gimme a blow!”
Chrissy was set to open her mouth and scream at him, but Alona stepped in front of her. “You ain’t got any lead in your pencil, you little faggot! You forget that?” she railed at him. “You’re nothing but a little queer-boy, ain’t nothing but a little queer-boy!”
Something thudded into the door out there and Grimshanks growled low and bestial like a rabid dog. “You shut up, biker cunt! You don’t know anything!”
“But I do! We all do! You told us, you told us all about it!”
“I did? Oh yes, I did, didn’t I? Ha, ha, ha!”
“That’s why we know you’re nothing but a little queer-boy! You like boys and you probably always liked boys! Who did it to you, Grimshanks? Who fucked you the first time? Your daddy? Your mommy? Your uncle, your brother”
“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up, you cunt!” he shrieked out there, scratching at the door like maybe he didn’t have fingernails now, but roofing nails. “You better shut your whoring fucking head up or I’ll come in there! I’ll come in there and get you!”
“Then come and get me!” Alona shouted at him. “You won’t because you’re afraid, you little queer-boy! You’re afraid of women! You’re just a little faggot who got so sick of the pervert he was, that he hanged himself! Just like a little pussy queer-boy!”
Grimshanks was roaring like a beast now, howling and chattering his teeth and pounding the door. Dust fell from the ceiling and plaster fell from the walls. “CUNT! CUNT! CUNT! DIRTY FUCKING BIKER CUNT! I’LL KILL YOU! KILL YOU! KILLLLL YOOOOUUUUU!”
And then there was nothing but silence out there.
Grimshanks was gone.
There was no doubt of that. He was gone and Chrissy could feel his absence. The stink, the invasive malevolence, the stupid childish hatred…gone and gone. Chrissy knew he was no longer out there, same way you knew when a garbage can full of rotting fish had been rem
oved…by the smell. Alona had scared him away or pissed him off so bad he had to leave before he did something he knew he wasn’t supposed to.
But what was it all about?
All Chrissy knew is what the clown bragged about. That there was going to be a party tonight, a festival celebrating the death of Witcham, and that theyall of them in the pitwere going to be used as party favors. No, Grimshanks had not said they would be dismembered and eaten, but then he didn’t have to.
Albert got his pipe behind the lower board and gently eased it away from the window. There was a creak and a groan, but not much else. He pulled it off and handed it to Alona.
“Can you see where we are?” Chrissy asked him.
“No…not really.”
He started in on the other board. It was looser than the first one. He worked it carefully with his strong hands and it started coming away from the window. Except, of course, there was no window there, just an empty frame where one had been kicked out years before.
Though Chrissy and Albert were too preoccupied to pay attention to Ed Watts, Alona had just been waiting for him to try something. And then, as that second board was almost off, he did. He sprang at the door. “Grimshanks! Grimshanks! Grimsh”
But there was a meaty thud as the board in Alona’s hands caught him on top of the head and he hit the ground, out cold.
“That’s one worm down,” she said, looking around. “Any you other shitbags want to step up to bat?”
22
It was a sign of faith.
It was a sign of trust.
That’s what Harry Teal was thinking as he waited on that rooftop with Wanda, the girls, and Chuck Bittner. Tommy and Mitch were gone now and Deke had went with them. They had seen an overturned rowboat float by and Tommy had dove right in after it. Then Mitch went. And finally Deke. They got it righted after some moments and paddled it back to the roof. They were going after Chrissy. They were certain that the clown could have taken her only one place: the Bleeding Heart Catholic Orphanage, which, according to Tommy, was pretty much abandoned and the mother of all spookhouses now. A grim and desolate place atop a hill. Deke went with them. The gentle current was carrying everything downtown, in the general direction of the orphanage.