The car she’s driving is a small black import, tinted windows, fancy rims on the tires. Knowing Val she probably stole it from the school parking lot just to look cool. Before she can spot me, I slip into the phone booth. The phone is one of those heavy, metal boxes, screwed to the metal part of the booth. I grab it on both sides and yank on it once, twice, until it pulls free.
The cops are still milling about, the light bars atop their cars flashing, the firemen putting their tools back, eager to get to the station so they can beat each other on Halo 16 or something. It’s now or never. If I don’t cause a ruckus, they’ll be gone before I know it.
I hoist the heavy phone unit onto my shoulder and walk unseen until I’m in front of the check cashing place. There’s a sign over the door: Premises Monitored 24/7. I hope so. I really, really do. I raise the phone high, then launch it through the plate glass window in the front.
It’s loud but not loud enough. But that’s not the diversion I was looking for anyway. It comes in a split second: an alarm that has me running for the nearest column. And now the cops and even the firefighters come sprinting from their cars and trucks, passing the column where I cling and flooding into the store.
Once they’re all inside, guns drawn, backs to me, I run to the nearest cop car. It’s still idling, door wide open, lights flashing—and it’s mine. All mine.
I get behind the wheel, strap myself in, and slam it into drive. It bucks like a wild bronco, leaps forward, and nearly pins Dad against the smoldering pickup truck as he continues sifting through the ashes, trying to identify a body that never was.
The Sentinel senses trouble, but he’s still in the station wagon, eager to retain his anonymity.
I pull up more gracefully, until my open window faces Dad.
He turns, perturbed until he sees me. Really sees me.
“Maddy?” he gushes.
“Get in,” I shout. “In the back, and don’t ask questions.”
He gets in and doesn’t ask a single question.
“Buckle up,” I say, and the minute he does, I drive right past the Sentinel still struggling to get out of Dad’s station wagon with his surgical mask half on, half off, his liver lips frozen in a silent scream.
Inside her little car, Val obviously hears me before she sees me and speeds up as I slam over the curb and into the street.
But her little import is slow, and my cop car is big and bad and fast. God knows how many horses are stampeding under this shimmery black hood. I nail her car sideways, smashing her right taillight, spinning her around so that she’s facing the parking lot.
Her expression is both shocked and evil, and that’s before she sees it’s me behind the wheel. When she does, she morphs to downright apocalyptic: yellow eyes burning, gray teeth gritting, mouth cursing.
Her slurs drown in our dueling revving.
She guns it. Smoke spews from the friction of one of her tires on the dented undercarriage.
“Maddy,” Dad scolds.
But I ignore him, bearing down on Val’s little stolen car as it flees into the night.
27
Cabana Charly’s and the Eternal Tan
My teeth grind as I stay on Val’s tail no problem, turn after turn, her one working brake light winking with each clamp on the brakes as she tries desperately and fails to shake me.
A few turns into the chase, Dad says calmly, “Lights.”
The flicker of a smile crosses my face. Of course the first thing he says—the first real thing—is a reminder.
Still, I ignore him (uh, a little busy at the moment) until he says it again: “Lights.”
“Dad, what?”
I check him in the rearview, and he’s actually grinning. “I don’t know who you’re chasing or what they did to you or what you intend on doing to them, but if you don’t want the rest of Barracuda Bay’s finest to spot you in a stolen police car, you need to turn off your lights.”
I snort. “Good thinking.”
Have you ever tried finding the button to turn off the police lights while speeding down an empty street in the middle of the night at 80 miles per hour, trying to keep up with an angry, panicked Zerker who wants nothing more than to trick you into driving straight into a light pole? Then you know it’s not so easy.
I finally find the switch a few minutes later, just as Val’s turning toward the wrong side of town and down an old, dusty road I’ve never been on before. And I know, somehow I know, where she’s going to take me: someplace big, someplace deserted, someplace private. Someplace befitting a violent, possibly re-deadly, showdown where the cops and certainly the Sentinels won’t know to follow.
“Cabana Charly’s,” Dad croaks from the back, holding on to his seat belt for dear life. As we take another turn on two wheels, his face goes from hospital sheet white to zombie white.
“Dad, seriously, what? I’m trying to concentrate here.”
His voice is eternally patient. “Whoever it is, probably going to the old Cabana Charly’s factory. It’s the only thing this far out in the boonies.”
“The sunscreen place?” I say, killing my headlights to further confuse Val. I stay locked in on her winking taillight as a building looms in the moonlit distance.
“Yeah, it went out of business a few years ago, but I still have to come out here every few months or so when a homeless person reports a dead body. Usually another homeless person’s.”
Sunscreen factory. Giant parking lot. Abandoned. Lots of space to kick my teeth in and torture my dad while she’s at it. Why wouldn’t Val like it?
It’s downright Zerker-frickin’-rific!
I slam the brakes, and Val flies ahead through the rusty, open gate of Cabana Charly’s. Once I can no longer see her taillights, I creep the car forward into the high brush of the lot just outside the gate. We’re like a tractor moving through cornstalks, the weeds are so high. A few feet in, I can’t see anything behind me. It’s like the car has been buried by dandelions and saw grass.
I slip out of the car, open the back door for Dad, and hand him the keys. “Get lost,” I tell him, only half-jokingly.
Before I can say, “No, really, I’m serious, head for the hills,” he pulls me in for a gigantic bear hug. With all that’s happening, I let him, sinking desperately into his fatherly smell of Old Spice cologne and the hand sanitizer he buys by the gallon for his desk in the coroner’s office.
“I miss you, Maddy. Promise me that no matter what happens this time, we’ll be together.”
“I can’t do that, Dad,” I groan, shoving him away. “As much as I want to be with you, this isn’t the kind of life you want.”
“It’s my life, and I want to be around to watch you grow up.”
“This is it,” I bark, reminding him. “I won’t grow up.”
He smiles placidly, too old and wise to get sucked into my eternally teenage drama. “Then I want to be around to watch you get older. Don’t play semantics with me, young woman. You know what I mean.”
Ugh. I look over my shoulder, imagining what Val has in store for me when I finally catch up with her.
“Will you leave if I promise?”
He nods. “I will pretend to leave if you promise, but I have no intention of running away from my daughter’s fight.”
Ugh, this guy. “Okay, all right, Dad, but stay here, okay?”
He nods, leaning against the car.
“No, really. Stay here. Don’t fake stay here like in some cheesy movie where you come running in at the last minute to save the day. Really stay here.”
He nods, but I can’t stick around to find out if he’s shining me on or not.
After all, I have a Zerker to kill.
At the last minute, just to be sure, I open the back door fast and shove him inside even faster.
He rocks the car and howls to be let out, but I feel better now.
Win or lose, live or die, at least Dad will be safe, locked in the back of a police cruiser, buried in weeds higher than the top of most
school buses. He might die from starvation when nobody finds him, but better that than be gnawed on by some Zerker witch.
And hopefully, when all is said and done, I’ll be able to run or walk or even limp out of Cabana Charly’s and come find him, let him out. Even if it’s the last thing I ever do.
28
Bad to the Bone
The gate’s open and Val’s car is still running in front of a giant warehouse door. It’s cracked open, and a sliver of light pours through. They still pay the power bills after being out of business a few years? Then I hear the long, slow whine of a generator running at Mach 10 somewhere out back. It sounds like every generator on our street when the power’s out after a hurricane, a sound I know well.
I crouch on the other side of the door and slip the electric pen from my fanny pack to hide it. If I know Val, she’ll have company and she’ll frisk me—or worse. I think of hiding it in my shoe, but it might snap in half if I kick her or something, and then where would I be?
I shift on my toes. I feel a pinch at my chest. Bra strap! I work the seam at the underside of my bra until there is a hole just big enough for the pen to slip into. I wriggle it in until it’s comfortable and doesn’t look quite so obvious under my left breast, but without a full-length mirror and a little better lighting, what do I know?
Then I zip the fanny pack and straighten up. I’m going for stealth mode. But when I slink in the door, there she is: all 5’4” of Val standing right there, hands on hips, crooked smile on her face.
“Where you been?” she says knowingly, making me think she has her own satellite overhead or something and has been watching me with infrared vision this entire time. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
“We?” I should have known better than to think—
Whoa! Who the hell are they?
In a storage cage, among old, dusty boxes of sunscreen and pressing against rusty wire mesh, a Sentinel extraction team is grunting. Five Sentinels, highly trained, highly equipped, all in trademark black. Only something’s wrong.
Their eyes are yellow, and not just from the dingy generator lights blinking high overhead. Their skin is less gray, more green, their teeth wet with spittle, their jaws chomping with rage.
“Zerkers?” I spit, walking toward her. “You turned a team of Sentinels into Zerkers?”
So Vera didn’t lie after all. She sent more than one measly team to protect Dad. Unfortunately, Val got to them first.
That.
Wily.
Little.
Bitch!
“Why?” I already know the answer. I just figure, the longer I keep her talking, the less likely she is to release the Zerkers.
Val shrugs. “I just wanted to see what would happen.”
“And?”
“And,” she snaps humorlessly, “you’re looking at it.”
“I’ve never seen a Sentinel turned into a Zerker before,” I say, stepping slightly back. “I didn’t even know it was poss—”
“Quit stalling.” She yawns, running a gloved hand through her spiky hair.
Only, it’s not a full glove. It’s one of those fingerless ones like the BMX dudes wear for whatever reason. She’s wearing red leather pants and a black concert T-shirt for some poser rock band she’s probably never even listened to and a red vest over that, with a choker chain like some textbook wannabe punk-rock chick. Every stupid accessory just makes me want to smash her head in with a vacant building.
But she’s the one with the cageful of Zerkers. All I have is an electric pen pinching the squeeze out of my left nip. So she still sucks.
Her thick black boots give her an inch or two, but I still look down on her as I approach cautiously. I’m watching her. I’m watching the Zerker-Sentinels as they rattle their cage. And I’m watching for any quick exits. It’s not that easy with only two eyeballs.
The warehouse is tall and wide, with lots of black squares where machinery has been moved over the years, revealing the original floor coloring buried below.
Big windows with bars on the other side are broken, letting in moonlight in little slivers or big swaths, depending on the size of the crack. Broken glass litters the warehouse floor. I step on shards, but it’s hard to hear them being crushed the closer I get to the Zerkers in the cage.
“Leave them out of it, Val.” I choke, failing to hide my nervousness. “I’m here. You’re here. Don’t be such a chicken.”
“Me? Chicken?” Her voice is gravelly, her white skin leathery, her deep yellow eyes aflame with hatred. “Hardly.”
“Really?” I snap, because it’s been bottled up so long, it had to come out sometime. “That’s why you hid up in the control booth while Dane and I tried to save Stamp? That’s why you’re standing here now, with a cageful of Zerker Sentinels ready to destroy me? ‘Cause you’re a chicken, that’s why!”
She shoves me. Hard. Like, across-the-room hard. I’ve never been shoved so hard in my life. Not by Dahlia, not by Bones, not by anybody—live or dead—ever. I crash land against the cage, bending it in from the force.
The. Zerkers. Go. Nuts! They try to shove their fat fingers through the openings of the little wire squares. They rattle the cage until I’m sure the hinges will break. And, in fact, a big shard of metal dislodges in the tussle and bounces offs one of my shoes.
It’s just out of reach until I sit up and turn over, my body tight from the fall, even though I can’t feel anything other than maybe a harsher numbness than usual. That, and the certain reality that I am way out of my league. I reach out with one hand, my back to Val, making groaning noises to cover the scrape of metal as the shard leaves the concrete floor.
The Zerkers see it, but they either can’t speak or don’t care. They just rattle the cage some more. I turn just in time to see Val advancing on me, boot raised to crush my face. I jab the shard through her knee until the pointy end pops out the underside of her leg.
She howls from shock, not pain, flailing to yank it out.
The Zerkers are howling now too, turned on by the violence, I guess. They’re slamming and banging the cage.
How long can that little cage hold against all that rage?
Val limps away backward, smiling as she reaches into her vest pocket.
I stand at last, my body trembling from the force of her last hit.
She holds a small red box with a long black button in the middle. She points it at the cage.
I flinch, imagining what’s going to happen when the door swings open and those Zerkers fly out—straight at me, no doubt.
But the door doesn’t open. Instead, a light flickers to my right, just behind Val.
She turns to me. “Not there, Maddy. Here!” She waves and walks dramatically toward something out of sight.
I scoot around the cage, around a stack of barrels and old broken slats of wood to find two large tanks standing next to each other. I can’t tell what’s inside because there’s a black sheet covering each one, but they’re glass and boxy. I can see that much. Like maybe elevators or those boxes where the lucky winner steps in and a giant fan starts blowing dollar bills around his head.
Hoses and dials stick out of each one. When I’m standing as close to her as I dare and facing both boxes, she yanks the black sheet off the first one.
Inside is a Sentinel. No, wait. A Zerker Sentinel. I can tell by the way he drools and chomps and his yellow eyes beg for mercy at the same time they long for my brain on a silver platter. Or, hell, a paper plate for that matter.
“Wh-wh-who is he?”
The Zerker pounds against the Plexiglas door of his giant box with huge, gray fists.
“And why should I care?” I add.
“You shouldn’t care about the Zerker in this box.” She caresses the little red clicker in her hand. “But you should care about what happens to him when I … do … this.”
She pushes the black button, and the vague sounds of a vacuum start somewhere in the guts of the big glass box directly in front of me. The Zerke
r hears them, turning around, then back around, losing his black beret in the process and slamming into the Plexiglas door as it rattles and moans. His clumsiness, the human fear sunk deep in his human DNA, makes his plight all the more pathetic. Then the hoses on each side and on top of the box begin quivering, bulging, and hissing as something starts spraying inside the box.
Now I know what the big glass box is. I know exactly what it is. There used to be one in the Barracuda Bay Galleria: a Cabana Charly’s spray tan box. You wore your bikini under your clothes; you paid $10 instead of $30 like they’d charge you for the same thing at the local tanning salon; and if you weren’t shy about middle-aged men ogling you for 15 minutes, you got an automatic spray tan for like two-thirds off the going price. You know, just with a live audience.
Val must have found a few old ones on the warehouse floor and thought it would be funny to spray tan a Zerker. But no, that can’t be all there is to it. Because the Zerker is going, well, berserk.
He claws desperately at the nozzles as something white and bubbly coats him from head to toe. In seconds, maybe less, every item of black Sentinel clothing he owns is covered in greasy foam. It clings to everything: his hair, his eyes, his collar, his pockets, his boots, his fingers.
He snarls and wipes it off, but it only makes it worse. He’s screaming now, then howling, as smoke begins to fill the box. I watch as the Zerker’s clothes melt off, turning a powdery white before falling away. Bright red pustules rush to cover his arms, his neck, his chin, his thighs, his belly.
His white hair burns away to ash, and his skin begins to melt, dripping off his skull. His howls are muzzled now as oozing flesh fills his throat, at least until his lungs burst and leak down his rib cage like giblet gravy. Flesh puddles at his feet, his knotty, skeletal feet. All that’s holding him up now is the box as his skeleton leans against the door, ribs and shoulder blades and finger bones clattering to the floor.
“What was that?” I say, mourning the boy, the human, the Sentinel that Zerker once was.
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