“My daddy,” whispered Jack quietly.
“I know,” Hayes said. “I know.”
“They couldn’t do that to him. They couldn’t. They can’t,” spat the boy. “I went and hid. But then I found them. I found them later. All of them.” He flared up again, his face growing indistinct, his words a stuttered buzz. “My daddy,” he cried out. “They killed my daddy! They killed him! I’ll kill all of you! All of you! For what you did to my daddy, for what you did!”
“I know.”
“I found them. Most of them.”
“Yes.”
“And I got so mad that… that things stopped. And I could hear the blood inside them and all the angry things inside of them and I thought of my daddy and… and…”
Hayes saw the door of the Third Ring. He watched as the men filed out, Naylor, Evie, Eppleton, all of them laughing, and they descended into the trolley station. The boy watched from across the street and then picked up a waste bin from in front of a diner. He waited, steeling himself, and then bolted after them through the darkness to where the trolley was now standing frozen in the tunnels, curiously still like all time was stopped around it since the boy was moving at unimaginable speeds, and then the boy threw the trash can at the door and screamed at the top of his lungs and charged in. Windows cracked and lights erupted in dazzling fireworks as the boy descended on the trolley like a lightning bolt. And inside the people were like statues, eyes wide, waiting to die. Waiting to die, as they should have. All of them.
There was a glitter from something in a woman’s hands. A pair of scissors, clipping yarn. Hayes saw the boy’s gray-white hand reach forward and pick them up and turn to the nearest person and raise the blades up…
Their flesh tore like paper, and gore tumbled from their wounds at slow, syrupy speeds. The tunnel outside floated by, piping and tubing drifting along like logs in a stream. The boy wept as he lashed out at them, tearing at the still figures that slowly fell to the ground once he stabbed them, wafting down like thistle seeds in a summer breeze. It was like a dreamy dance, sinking to the trolley floor with red streams twirling up and away from their necks and backs and chests. Their faces quiet and thoughtful as though they did not yet know they were dead. And then when the scissors broke he stopped and moved to the man at the front, the pilot-man in the uniform with the shiny brass buttons, but he knew not to hurt him because once his daddy had said those men were very good men and would get him home if he was lost, and to just ask them for help.
Which is what the boy did then. Asked him how to get home, and for help. But the man sat still as stone like the other frozen people, and said nothing. And so the boy turned to look at the little trolley behind him and all the colorless people still falling to the ground or slumping over like marionettes with their strings cut, and he dropped the scissor handles and walked out to the dark tunnel and the distant lights beyond.
Hayes shut his eyes. “I know, Jack,” he said. “I know.”
“Kill all of you,” the child gasped. “All of you. Every one. Even the ones who got away, I found them, too. You can’t hide. You can’t.”
Then Hayes looked into the boy’s heart once more and saw how broken he was. How mad, how hungry. He was not a boy anymore but something irreparably damaged, something vicious, like a rabid dog seeking a hand to bite.
There could be no return from this. No way back. Not from this.
Hayes waited until the boy was quiet. Then he swallowed and said, “Why don’t you get into bed?”
“Bed?” said the boy.
“Yes. It’s bedtime.”
“But it’s light out.”
“Aren’t you tired, though?”
“I guess. I guess I am.”
There was a flurry and then the boy was gone. Hayes looked around and saw he was in bed, staring out the window. Hayes walked to him and sat down beside him.
“Jack?” he asked.
“Yes?”
“I want you to close your eyes, Jack.”
“Why?”
Hayes swallowed again and took a breath. “Because you’re going to sleep now.”
“Oh.” The boy looked at him a moment longer, then did as he asked.
“Now I want you to think of something for me, Jack.”
“What?”
“I want you to think of your old home. Your old house. Before this place. With your daddy. Can you do that for me now?”
“Yes.”
“Then do it, please.”
Hayes saw the memory swell up in the boy. Fall leaves tumbling over the porch gate. Neighbors coming over and bringing leftovers on plates. The sound of crickets, lost in the din of the city now, so lost.
“I remember that,” the boy said. “I remember crickets.”
“Do you remember your daddy?”
“I do. Of course I do.”
Hayes picked up a pillow. “I want you to think of him. Think of him very hard. Okay?”
He saw Skiller’s face in the boy’s mind. Smelled his aftershave. The rough feeling of his pants as the boy sat in his lap. His voice in the darkness, low and calm. Reassuring him that everything would be all right.
“Now go to sleep,” Hayes said. “Go to sleep, Jack. Sleep.”
The boy dropped off. Hayes waited until his breathing was steady. Then he clamped the pillow over the child’s face and held it there.
There was no struggle. Perhaps the boy had known what Hayes was going to do and did not mind. Hayes held the pillow there until the breathing stopped and as he did he noticed drops forming on the pillowcase and realized he was crying again. Still he held it. He waited until the mind and the thoughts he sensed wavered and died, like a candle flame burning low. Then they were gone, perhaps to parts unknown or maybe evaporated into nothing like dew in morning light.
He took the pillow away and stared at the little creature in the bed. He sat on the bed opposite it for some time, clutching himself as though he were cold. Then he began rocking back and forth, moaning quietly. He fought the scream rising within him, tried to choke it out, but then he gave up and howled, a strangled cry that did not even sound human to his ears.
When he was done he walked downstairs to the abandoned street and began heading toward the Department. And as afternoon began to advance and he neared the police station something drifted down to him from up above, some thought or worry from someone near, and Hayes stopped where he was and knew that Garvey was dead.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Hayes went to him in the morgue. At first he did not want to look at all. But then he decided he must. Someone has to look, he told himself. Someone has to look, for things like that.
He was not sure which cabinet was his so he began pulling them out at random. Garvey’s was on the far wall. When Hayes found him he looked nothing like how he remembered him. He was just a thing now. An object, cold and pallid. A casualty, perhaps.
Hayes looked at his friend laid out on the slab, his legs and chest and hands dotted with wounds. He felt grief grip his chest and he knew then as he had perhaps known all his life that in this fading world the good were forever fated to die young and die violently. Fated to change the world only in their remembrance left behind in the hearts of those who lived on. In the sinners. In those who unjustly survived the slain.
“It should have been you,” Hayes said.
A young boy in a white coat came walking in. He saw Hayes standing there and said, “Who the hell are you?”
Hayes turned around. The young man saw the gun in Hayes’s hand and paled and drew back.
“Whoa,” he said. “Whoa, hey.”
“Shut up,” said Hayes.
The young man was quiet. Hayes walked past him and up the stairs of the Department, and then outside.
It was growing dark now. An uneasy hush rolled throughout the city. Tattered clouds made bird’s nests around the yellow eye of the moon overhead. A crowd of drunks tottered over the lanes nearby. Hayes thought he heard one of them singing but when he stopped to listen he realized they were not.