On the Five O'Clock News, Ted Kennedy and Tip O'Neill were extolling the courage and integrity of the late Senator James A. McCready. Sylvia tuned them out.
What am I going to do?
She knew the choice that faced her and she didn't want to choose. According to the chart, it would be high tide off Monroe at 10:43 tonight. If Alan arrived then, she would have to make a decision: a meaningful life for Jeffy against brain damage, maybe even death, for Alan.
She hugged Jeffy against her and rocked back and forth like a child with a teddy bear.
I can't choose!
Maybe she wouldn't have to. Maybe Ba could intercept him and bring him to Charles or someplace where he could rest and become himself again. That would rescue her from the dilemma of either letting him go ahead with what he thought he had to do, or standing in his way and delaying him until the hour of the Dat-tay-vao passed.
And later, after Alan had had days and weeks to rest up, and if he recovered the parts of his mind he had lost over the past few weeks, and knew what he was doing and was fully aware of the risks involved, then maybe she could let him try the Dat-tay-vao on Jeffy.
But what if the Dat-tay-vao was gone by then?
Sylvia squeezed Jeffy tighter.
What do I do?
She looked at the old Regulator school clock on the wall— 5:15. Five and a half hours to go.
Alan realized he was wet. The water poured out of the sky in torrents, soaking through his clothes and running down his arms and legs. His feet squished in his shoes as he walked.
He had been walking as fast as his weak left leg would allow him for a long time. He wasn't sure where he was, but he knew he was closer to Jeffy. He had crossed a bridge over a river and was now walking down a narrow alley between two run-down apartment houses. He came to a spot where an overhang gave shelter from the downpour. He stopped and leaned against the wall for a rest.
Two other men were already there.
"Beat it, asshole," one of them said. Alan strained his vision in the dim light to see the one who had spoken. He saw a filthy man who wore his equally filthy long brown hair tied back in a ponytail, dressed in torn jeans and a T-shirt that might have been yellow once. "This spot's taken."
Alan didn't know why the man was so belligerent, but he took it as good advice. He had to keep on moving. Had to get to Jeffy. Couldn't let a little rain stop him. He started for the end of the alley toward which he had been heading, but tripped and almost fell.
"Hey!" said the other man. He too was wearing dirty jeans, and his greasy, gray sweatshirt cut off at the shoulders exposed crude tattoos over each deltoid. His hair was short and black. "You kicked me!"
In a single motion, he levered himself off the wall and gave Alan a vicious shove. Off balance and stumbling backward, Alan's windmilling arms caught the wall, but his left leg wouldn't hold him. He went down on one knee.
"Bad leg, ay?" Ponytail said with a smile as he stepped forward. Alan felt a stab of pain in his good leg as the man kicked him. He went down on the other knee.
Hurt and afraid now, Alan struggled back to his feet and turned away.
"Hey, gimp! Where y'goin'?" one of them said from behind.
"Jeffy," Alan said. How could they not know that?
"What he say?" said the other voice.
"Dunno. Didn't even sound like English."
"Hey! A foreign dude. Let's check him out!"
A hand clamped on his shoulder and spun him around. "What's the rush, pal?" Ponytail said, grabbing his arms and pinning them to his sides. Sweatshirt came up beside him and rammed his fingers into Alan's left rear pocket.
"Fucker's got a wallet!"
A vaguely female voice shouted from far above. "Hey! What's goin' on down there?"
"Eat me, sweetheart!" Sweatshirt yelled, almost in Alan's ear, as he struggled with the button on Alan's rear pocket.
"Jeffy!" Alan said.
Ponytail stuck his face almost against Alan's. His breath was foul. "I'll Jeffee your head, asshole, if you don't shut up!"
Alan freed his right arm and pushed against him.
"Jeffy!"
And suddenly Ponytail began to gurgle and writhe in his grasp. His eyes rolled upward and a swollen tongue protruded from his mouth.
"What the fuck?" Sweatshirt shouted. "Hey, Sammy! Hey!"
He pulled on the front of Alan's shirt and Alan fended him off, grabbing his wrist with his newly freed left hand.
Sweatshirt began to shudder uncontrollably in Alan's grasp, as if suddenly struck with a malarial chill. His short black hair began to fall out and rain down on Alan's arm.
Alan glanced back at Ponytail, now swaying drunkenly.
Lumps had appeared all over his skin; as Alan watched, they swelled, pointed, and burst, oozing trails of purulent, blood-tinged slime down his quaking body.
Reeling in confusion and shock, Alan tried to loosen his grip but found his fingers locked. Sweatshirt's knees crumbled under him. As Alan watched, the man's stomach began to swell, becoming enormously distended until it ruptured, spewing loops of his intestines out of the cavity to drape over his thighs like strings of boiled sausage.
A woman's voice screamed from high above. Ponytail, now an unrecognizable mass of festering sores, sank to the ground. As the buzz of the gathering flies mixed with the shrill sound of the woman's continued screaming, Alan turned and started walking once more. The images of the scene behind him were already fading into unreality as he picked up the beacon that lay to the northeast.
"Jeffy," he said.
Ba wheeled his Pacer up and down the rain-soaked streets. Chac had told him that the Doctor had headed northeast, and so Ba had driven that way, weaving a path from street to street through the teeming housing projects until he came to the East River. From there he took the Williamsburg Bridge and crossed into Brooklyn. He was unfamiliar with this area of the city. That, coupled with the maniacal fury of the storm and the almost nightlike darkness, slowed his search to a frustrating crawl.
Wherever this was, it was a nasty neighborhood. He did not like to think of the Doctor walking through here alone. Anything could happen to him. The storm, at least, was in his favor. It seemed to be keeping most people indoors.
He turned a corner onto a wider street and saw flashing red lights a few blocks down—two squad cars and an ambulance. Saying a silent prayer to his ancestors that the lights were not flashing for the Doctor, he accelerated toward them.
Ba double-parked and pressed through the buzzing crowd of rain-soaked onlookers to see what had drawn them out into the storm. Over their heads Ba could see a number of attendants in the alley fitting the second of two body bags around the gangrenous and shriveled remains of what had once been a human being. Despite the rain, he caught a whiff of putrescence on a gust of wind from the alley. And even in the red glow of the flashers, Ba detected a grim pallor to the attendants' faces. Both body bags were loaded into the ambulance. The sight of them brought back unwanted memories of the war back home.
"A murder?" Ba said to the man next to him.
He shrugged. "Two rotted bodies. Somebody must have dumped them there." As he glanced up at Ba, his eyes widened. He turned and hurried away.
A man who appeared to be a police detective cupped his hands around his mouth and called to the crowd. The man next to him held an umbrella over the two of them.
"I'll ask you all one last time: Did anyone see what happened here?"
"I told you!" said a wizened old woman from the stoop of the building behind the scene. "I saw the whole thing!"