The banging in the back room rattled the building. Seth imagined the rest of the building coming awake and a slew of noisy neighbors to contend with. A sound ripped through the air that could only be described as Chewbacca getting his leg amputated. Each footstep shook the floor; the china clanged, porcelain cracked, furniture hopped and crashed back to earth with loud thuds as the giant tread heavily from the bedroom toward Seth.
The gun shook in Seth’s hand as he aimed at the running behemoth. He squeezed the trigger, but the safety was on. Seth shut his eyes expecting an impact, only to hear Hesz run past him as he bolted from the apartment. The hallway stairs splintered as Hesz blundered down them. Seth could hear his heart beat in his ears. He was shocked to be alive. It took him a few moments to spot the trail of blood leading from the bedroom and out the front door.
Seth stood, shaking. His first thought was to leave. It occurred to him that hulk could be on the sidewalk waiting to come back. He looked around the small apartment for a place to lay low. A rustling in the bedroom caught his attention. Lelani, he thought. Slowly he walked toward the back, past what looked like a child’s room. A dog lay on the floor, its head at a sick angle. He played with the gun’s latches until he was sure he had released the trigger. The master bedroom was at an angle to the hall, so he couldn’t see inside unless he stepped through it.
“Lelani?”
He poked his head around the corner. The room looked like it had been put through a Cuisinart. A hasty exit was set in the wall where a window used to be. The cop’s wife was helping a dazed Lelani stand. Then she spotted Seth, grabbed her gun off the floor, and aimed at him.
“I’m the good guy,” Seth said, holding his hands up. He forgot he had the pistol.
“Drop it,” the wife said.
“No, really. Your husband’s on the couch.”
“He’s with me,” Lelani said.
The woman kept her gun focused on Seth.
“If you’re her friend, where were you when she was fighting those creeps?”
Lelani looked at Seth. She expected an answer, too. He was afraid. They both knew it and the truth lodged in his throat waiting for a lie to supplant it.
“He covered the front in case there were reinforcements,” Lelani said. She let him off the hook. Seth gazed at the floor, unable to meet her eyes.
They heard crying.
“Bree!” The mother looked about frantic, the gun now abandoned.
The little girl pulled herself out from under the bed, the single-digit generation’s refuge of choice.
“Are the bad men gone?” the girl asked. Mother wrapped daughter in her arms.
“Yes,” she said.
“For now,” Lelani added.
CHAPTER 7
The scene was almost pastoral. A worn-down country road bordered by dirt, weeds, and gravel. Across the street an old wood-slatted New England-style church, steeple halfway to heaven, persevered like a white sentinel over the souls in the adjacent cemetery. Down the road the only gas station in town still washed your windshield and checked your oil. Across from it was the pastel blue-and-pink brick post office. Built in 1977, it was an enduring reminder of an era hell-bent on destroying traditional aesthetics. One lonely traffic light marked the center of town. It rehearsed unceasingly, waiting to reproach the next vehicle. The buildings were far enough apart, and the town high enough in elevation, that Colby could see the pines, birches, and rolling hills and fields of Dutchess County in the distance-a long way from the steel and glass canyons outside his office in New York City.
He watched the sunrise from the diner window as he ground the remainder of his cigarette into the ashtray. It was still long, mostly unused. He lit the damn things out of habit now, not because of the nicotine plea that had become his intimate companion for the past two decades.
He did everything out of habit at this point, like sitting in a country diner to avoid a chill, even though cold did not affect him anymore. Coffee packed no punch, food sat flavorless and undigested in his gut, and every nick and scrape he collected stayed with him unhealed. There was a tourniquet on his pinky where a paper cut had left him a quart low of A positive. His hair and nails continued to grow, but he didn’t dare shave. Back in the city, Colby snorted cocaine for the first time in a decade in an attempt to jump-start his humanity. Nothing affected him.
Clammy described the overall sensation best. Like a humid, sealed attic on a hundred-degree day, except that the staleness was packed under his skin. Nothing moved internally, nothing vented. Gas occasionally emanated from a twist or a bend, the foulest smell imaginable. As the days wore on, the last vestiges of his humanity dwindled like the final swirl of water circling the drain. He looked at the old cemetery, and even the trepidation of realizing he belonged there was as absent as his heart.
Carla sat across from him. She was clearly more traumatized by what had happened to them and subsisted in a perpetual fazed state. Her hair was a mess and the buttons on her blouse misaligned. She had that “freshly fucked” look cosmopolitan women strived to imitate at great expense, except that Carla strove for nothing these days. She had lost her head the night of the attack and insisted they call the police. Colby convinced her otherwise. They would have been quarantined, subjected to study-two walking, talking, seemingly breathing beings without hearts. There was no guarantee the police could even handle Dorn and his crew. And then there was the matter of the million-dollar payoff, which would be jeopardized if they brought in the authorities.
Soon after, Carla had gone catatonic-unable to accept the reality of their plight. She had become incontinent until their bodies purged the last elements in their systems. Colby had dressed and bathed her at first, until he ran out of patience. She hadn’t said a word in days. She followed Colby when he prompted her, like a puppy tracking snacks.
Colby’s “friends” and acquaintances had disassociated themselves from him long ago. There was nothing like a government indictment for extortion to separate the faithful from the frivolous. There was an older sister living in a trailer park in the Carolinas, but they had not spoken in fifteen years, and this was not a situation that would aid any reconciliation. Even with Carla sharing the same nightmare, Colby felt forlorn. Even when he shamelessly fondled Carla in the bath in another vain attempt to reclaim his humanity and maybe help her snap out of her stupor, he was unable to attain an erection. Colby caught his reflection in the glass; his skin had become almost translucent. Purple veins and the bags under his eyes were darker, probably from the congealed blood. He stopped worrying about going to hell. He was already there.
The diner hadn’t been redecorated since a great man sat in the White House; sparkling stars on glittery aqua-blue tabletops banded with corrugated tarnished steel. Holes dotted the hard plastic top where cigarettes lingered-small brown burns like sculpted phlegm. A graveyard of bug husks withered on the window ledge, held together by dust. The checkered linoleum was decades thick with grit and gristle, mopped around nightly in a futile effort to meet the health code. A fat, greasy-haired waitress in her forties who smelled like yesterday and cheap perfume walked up to the table with a pot of steaming coffee.
“Jeez mister, don’t you get any sun down in the city? You look white as a ghost.”
Colby just pointed at his cup. The waitress poured, glanced at Carla who just stared blankly, then shuffled off.
Colby drank the coffee straight. Milk would only cool it. Flavor and texture had become meaningless to him, but heat was a different story. It was his new addiction, the only sensation that registered. As the black liquid flowed down his gullet, he absorbed the energy from each excited molecule. It would be three to four minutes before the fluid in his stomach cooled to room temperature, and at least an hour before it ran through him, coming out coffee, exactly as it went in.