Brood

by Chase Novak

  He resists the temptation to look at the wound on his hand—it will only make everything worse. It’s taking him longer than usual to get on his feet. One foot is planted, but his weight is primarily on his knee. Okay, on three. One—

  That’s as far as he gets. The wild boys and girls of the park come swarming from every direction. They plow into him as if he were a tackling dummy and it’s the night before the big game. He ends up on his stomach, his face pressed into the pebbles. The little white stones jam into his nose, enter his mouth, press into the lids of his tightly shut eyes. He is helpless.

  He hears the boy on the swing yelling at the others, telling them to cut it out, slow down. “We’s okay, we’s okay,” he shouts. “No more! Take it easy.”

  But it doesn’t feel as if any of the others are in a state of mind conducive to taking it easy.

  What follows is an evisceration beyond anything anyone ever imagined, a vicious, savage devouring of his flesh and his bones, and the extinction of his life. Perhaps the horror of it can be inferred by two and only two moments at the end of John’s life. The first is the moment of hope he experienced as the brood piled on him, the hope that there was something playful in their intent. Their heads, their knees, their bony chests, all knocking into him—monkey pile on Johnny!

  The second moment is later, maybe three minutes into the attack, after they have rolled him onto his back or perhaps after he managed to roll onto his back himself. By then he is almost completely overwhelmed by the physical pain that is being inflicted on him—the tearing of his flesh, the twisting of his limbs. In an instinctive move to defend himself, he takes a wild swing at the blur of bodies, a real roundhouse, delivered, he thinks, with enough force to dislodge and perhaps knock unconscious at least two or three of them. But nothing happens. He doesn’t feel the impact of his fist against…anything. No one says ow; no one reels back. The punch has not been thrown. But why not? And then he sees why not…the arm he thought was going to deliver the blow is not attached to him. It has been yanked clear out, and now one of those fiends who lives inside the darkness has it in his dirty little hands and he raises it above his head to show it to the others.

  Rodolfo has given up on trying to get them to stop attacking the officers. He stands to one side with Polly, noting which ones are most out of control, which ones are going at it because they are being led by the hungriest and angriest of the crew, and which ones are simply watching. It’s information he needs to determine whose blood gets drawn and sold and whose behavior is so extreme that their blood would simply be too dangerous on the open market.

  Chapter 12

  CENTRAL PARK CLOSED

  Aftermath of Wild-Dog Attack of Two Police Officers

  Don’t know where to begin. The kids disappeared. Still can’t get a straight story about where they went, or why. They came back with another kid who claims to be the goddamn mayor’s son! And I almost drank. (Well, technically, I did drink. I bought the bottle of vitamin V, opened it, and a little of it touched my lips. But my lips did not blister, I did not go on a bender, and the vodka was drained—by an actual drain!)

  All right. I’ll start again. The kids disappeared. Oh! Hearing that horrible little song in the therapist’s office that tells you the outer door has opened and then going out to see that empty waiting room and looking all over town for them—needle, haystack, etc.—and not having (and still not having) any idea where they went, or what drove them, not knowing if they were taken or if they were running after something or maybe just running away from me…Oh my God, the things I do not know. I am a fountain of no information.

  I was unable to find them. They came back on their own with little Dylan Morris, if that’s his name, in tow. Dylan has to be the most disquieting child I have ever met. He looks at you, not to know you and not to communicate with you, but simply to see what you are going to do. Are you going to try to touch him? Are you going to move left or right; do you have food or something else he might want; do you intend to do him harm? It’s like walking on a path in the woods and accidentally coming upon an animal and both of you are completely surprised. But Dylan’s strangeness is more than a creepy lack of human affect—if he’s a runaway, I can understand why he might be hard to reach. Who knows what he’s been through, what he’s running away from, and what he’s had to do to stay alive? The thing about him is—Jesus, I don’t even want to write this down. It will be like proof that I’ve started to go mad…and if I do go mad, those kids will really and truly disappear into the grinding machinery of the child-care system that processes kids like sausage meat. But here it is anyhow: Dylan’s hands glow in the dark.

  Okay. I’ve been sitting here staring at the last sentence I wrote. What if I really am losing my mind?

  Yes, maybe I am. And here’s further proof. I have let Adam and Alice convince me to let Dylan stay here. Just for the night, they say. I have never seen them so adamant, so fierce and unyielding, and in all honesty, I gave in out of fear—the last thing I could tolerate at this point is their disappearing again. As I saw it, my job, my mission was pretty straightforward: Keep them in the house at all costs. Keep them safe. And sometimes you get the job done by easing up on the rules. What would I rather do, defend the principle that whatever Mama says goes—or Aunt Cynthia, or whoever the hell I am to them—or defend their lives?

  We were at the dining room table. I sat there and watched them shoveling in food. What a relief! Despite a day straight from the pits of hell, seeing them eat made me happy. (They haven’t gained an ounce on my watch!) When Dylan reached for something—he has the manners of a ferret—and the light from the chandelier touched his grabby little hands, his skin glowed fresh strawberry red. I know I already said this but I am saying it again. I’ve got a kid asleep upstairs who glows in the dark. And what made it even crazier is that when I gave Alice a look, she just cocked her head, like she was trying to figure out what I was looking at her for, and the same thing went for Adam. Either they didn’t see it, or they didn’t care, or it was all some terrible trick of my mind. Anyhow, the deal we finally made was this: Dylan can stay the night, and in the morning we figure out what to do with him. I’ll shake him loose from his nutty story about being the mayor’s son and find out where he actually lives and that will be that.

  And this house. This house is full of rats. How many? A thousand? Try getting an exterminator in this town! It’s like getting an appointment with a neurologist—“We’re booking into September, miss.” I need someone here yesterday! Anyhow, I finally found one who at least was willing to blow some blue sky up my ass and tell me he’d be out here in the next day or two…

  As for Alice and Adam: They have got to tell me why they disappeared like that. Maybe they don’t even understand that when you are a part of a family, that is simply not the way you behave. Maybe they don’t understand how I worry about them, what it puts me through. Maybe they don’t even understand that they have value, and the idea that something might happen to them simply does not frighten them, or even register. I have to keep reminding myself that these two beautiful children have been living in the worst kind of poverty—emotional poverty. When have they ever felt secure in the love of a mother (or a father or, really, any adult)? And that is why I call you dear, Dear Diary, because I can say to you what I trust no one else to hear, and that is this: I adore those children and I believe—with all my soul—that the love I feel for them is stronger than any medicine, any fucked-up drugs their silly, desperate parents took, and strong—

  She hears a sound and lifts the pen from the page, turns toward it, waits. The house is silent—or as silent as a house can be in New York. Thunder rattles around the dark sagging sky. She goes to the window, looks out. It is nearly midnight and it is beginning to rain—perhaps some relief from the heat is on the way. Though it is a weeknight, and late, there is more traffic than you would see in a dozen Saturday nights anywhere else. Cabs, limos, minivans in from Long Island, Jeeps in from Jersey, Teslas
in from who knows where…A slow, gauzy ripple of lightning. On the sidewalk, pedestrians stroll, oblivious to the rain. Some even welcome it—spreading their arms, opening their mouths to drink it in. She scans the street for any sign of that creep. She doesn’t see him, but there is scant comfort in that. He could be anywhere. He could be in a coffee shop a block away. He could be standing so close to the house she cannot see him. He could be in the house at this very moment…

  Too much is happening; too much is going wrong. She can feel the pressure of events surging within her, ready to burst through the ultimately fragile seawall that is her self-confidence. That was her self-confidence.

  Cynthia opens her computer and goes to her search engine and types in Mayor Morris missing son, just to make absolutely certain that this Dylan character the kids have brought home is completely full of shit. The query elicits more than a million responses and she clicks open the fourth—someone once told her the ones on top paid the search engine to put them there. It is a New York Times story, with a banner headline: MAYOR’S SON VANISHES. A subhead says: “Dylan Morris Missing Three Days, Police and Mayor’s Office Finally Releasing Information.”

  She reads quickly. The article says the boy was taken from Gracie Mansion at some point on Sunday night. It explains the mayor’s decision, made with the full cooperation of the police department, to keep the news away from the public so that nothing would interfere with negotiations with Dylan’s kidnappers, though the reporter points out that sources have revealed there has been no ransom asked for Dylan, and apparently no contact whatsoever with anyone who might be responsible for his disappearance.

  She quickly scrolls down and there it is: a picture of Dylan. Though dressed in the blazer, white shirt, and striped tie required by his school, and though his hair is shiny and wellcombed, and his smile is broad and confident, there is no question that this is the boy she found huddled in the cellar.

  A wave of fear breaks within her.

  This cannot be! She cannot harbor this child. His parents are in agony—the city is in agony—wondering what has happened. How could she not have known? She feels insane, completely isolated. This is not her city. She is holding her phone now, uncertain whom to call. The police, 911? Yes, 911. Of course. She dials. An operator answers on the second ring.

  “I have Mayor Morris’s son in my house,” Cynthia says, her voice frantic, though not much louder than a whisper.

  “Where are you, ma’am?” The operator must see that the call is coming from a cell phone with a San Francisco area code.

  Breathlessly, Cynthia gives her address. But then she hears what sounds like an explosion. Paralyzed by the shock of it, she sits at the end of her bed, hunched over the phone.

  “Ma’am?” The voice is courteous but insistent.

  “I heard something,” Cynthia whispers.

  “You say you have Dylan Morris with you, ma’am? Is that right?”

  “Shhh. Someone’s here.”

  “We have a squad car on the way, ma’am. Is the boy unhurt, ma’am? The boy. Is he unhurt?”

  Holding the phone in front of her as if it might protect her, Cynthia inches out of her bedroom and goes to the top of the stairs, looks down at the entrance hall. The front door is wide open. A clap of thunder, a splintering bolt of lightning. The rain is coming down in sheets, and some of it blows across the tiles in the foyer.

  Oh no, she thinks. Please. No more.

  She pushes the door closed. The floor is slick. The walls are spattered with rain. Her beautiful house!

  But her real concern is the children upstairs. She races to the third floor. As she pounds up the steps, she can hear the 911 operator’s voice calling out to her with less and less patience.

  And when she gets to Alice and Adam’s floor, she sees the thing she was most dreading: two empty rooms.

  “They’re gone!” she cries into the phone. “They’re gone, they’re gone, they’re gone.”

  “You need to stay calm, ma’am. We have officers on the way.”

  And indeed, by the time Cynthia makes it down to the ground floor, a police car is pulling up in front of the house, its whirling lights coloring the driving rain.

  Free! Free! Adam, Alice, and Dylan (who is slower than the twins and so rides on Adam’s back) race across rain-swept Central Park. The driving rain releases the deep heat embedded in the ground after all these days of scorching temperatures, and the park is wreathed in mist, an ancient, haunted moor surrounded on every side by steel-and-glass towers.

  They don’t know if they are being followed, but they do know there is no time to waste. They don’t know where they are going, but they do know they must get there as soon as possible.

  They don’t know who—or what—they are, but they know this: They must survive.

  They stop beneath a giant sycamore for a moment to catch their breath.

  “Maybe we should go back,” Adam says, panting, as he puts Dylan down.

  “Back?” Dylan exclaims, as if the idea were not only crazy but dangerous. He opens his mouth to catch a raindrop that has dripped from the leaves.

  “Why should we?” Alice says. “Anyhow, I want to see where those other guys are living. Okay?”

  “She took us, Al,” Adam says. “We’d still be in foster if it wasn’t for her.”

  “Yeah, I know. Bu—”

  “And we wouldn’t even be together,” Adam adds. “And…”

  “And what?” Alice asks.

  “In foster I was always…” He looks away. Huge billows of mist roll across the Great Lawn, thick as smoke. “I was always sort of scared, is all,” he says in a quiet voice.

  “We’ll go back to the house pretty soon,” Alice says.

  “Mom’s okay, pretty much,” Adam says. “Don’t you think?”

  “Mom?”

  “What are we supposed to call her?”

  “She’s not our real mom,” Alice says.

  “She is now,” Adam says. “And she’s super-nice to us.”

  “Come on, you two,” Dylan says. Great blasts of energy are always coursing through him. He contorts his body to accommodate the constant flow of adrenaline.

  Dylan starts to run, and they follow him. They are running north. Now west. Faster and faster. And faster still.

  Every time they pass beneath the gauzy globe of a streetlamp, Adam sees Dylan’s little grasping fingers flash a deep red. What is he? Adam wonders.

  He exchanges looks with Alice as they bound over a bench. They clear the topmost slat by five feet; the strength in their legs feels limitless. The sky seems to reach down, its gauzy arms lifting them higher and higher.

  What are we? Alice wonders.

  Rodolfo strides purposefully down the long corridor that runs front to back through the apartment on Riverside Drive. What he sees reminds him of an illustration he saw in his last year in school—seventh grade—when they were supposed to be studying the American Civil War but all Rodolfo could do was waggle his pencil and jiggle his legs and pray to God that the top of his head didn’t explode. He remembers precious little of that year, but he does recall the illustration of a tent torn to shreds on one side, a makeshift hospital filled with wounded soldiers, even the most grievously wounded placid and resigned in their cots or on their bedrolls while a stony-faced doctor with a beard like an anvil, assisted by a nurse who was drawn to look like an angel, did what he could to patch them up. Here, in his lair high above the city, nine boys and girls sit on the floor with their backs against the wall extending their bared arms while Boy-Boy goes from one to the other, drawing their blood. He is the syringe master. Not only is he gentle and adept with an intravenous needle, but he is also the one who broke into a nearby Duane Reade and stole several boxes of needles, along with boxes of vacuum tubes. Little Man follows behind him, collecting the tubes, making sure the stoppers are tight, and ferrying them to the kitchen, where he places them in the refrigerator.

  Rodolfo looks on with his arms folded over his chest
, like General Sherman surveying the troops. It’s Bump’s turn now and Rodolfo smiles at Bump’s obvious squeamishness. Bump, who is fierce and fearless, who can outrun any animal in the park and can climb a tree as if it were a porch stoop, is wincing, squinting, and turning his head as far to the left as possible while the needle draws his blood and the tube goes from clear to bright red to something close to black.

  He hears a sound from the front hall, and he turns toward it with the instant, uncluttered concentration of a forest animal that has heard the snapping of a branch.

  It’s little Dylan Morris. Half the cops in the city are looking for Dylan, and he has orders never to come to this apartment. But here he is.

  And he is not alone.

  Behind him is Adam, and behind Adam stands Alice.

  Alice!

  Rodolfo runs to greet her. He runs, in fact, right into her, though it is just a glancing blow. He continues to run—his legs will not stop; they move like engine pistons when the accelerator has been pressed clear to the floor. He slaps at the wall, bounds over the furniture, and, with his eyes wide and his arms raised high, he zooms around and around the apartment in an ecstasy beyond his control. At last, he runs halfway up the living room wall, flips backward, and makes a perfect-ten landing.

  “Me’s know you come,” he says, his chest heaving.

  At five in the morning, Cynthia comes back to the house, released at last from police custody. The police have not shown much interest in the fact that Alice and Adam are somewhere on their own in the vast, perilous city; they are, however, vitally concerned that she saw the mayor’s son, and for the first couple of hours she was in custody, they treated her as a suspect, with pleas for her to help them find Dylan Morris morphing into very pointed questions, which in turn morphed into out-and-out interrogation. She is in the company of Arthur Glassman, whom she called when they finally allowed her to use a phone. They step into the house, slightly hopeful that the twins have returned in her absence.