"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!"
"And we have your statement, ma'am," the policeman said in a tired voice without turning around. He rolled his eyes at his companion.
No one came forward. The crowd began to thin. Ba hesitated, unsure of what to do. Two rotted corpses… at least he was now sure that the Doctor had not been in one of those body bags. He should leave and continue the search, he knew, but something held him here.
That old woman on the stoop. He wanted to speak to her.
Alan walked up a ramp toward a highway. Cars rushed by him; the sheetlike cascades of dirty water from their tires added to the downpour, leaving not a dry spot on his body. He barely noticed. He did not know the name of the highway but sensed that it traveled in the right direction.
He reached the main span of the road and continued walking. Lightning blanched the dark sky and thunder drowned out the rumble of the cars and trucks speeding by. Wind lashed the rain into his eyes. He walked on, faster now, a sense of urgency lighting inside him. He was late, behind schedule. If he didn't hurry, he'd arrive too late for Jeffy.
Without thinking, he turned and began walking backwards. Of its own accord, almost as if by reflex, his arm thrust out toward the traffic, his thumb pointing toward his destination.
It was at a point in the road where the water was particularly deep and the cars had to slow to a crawl to pass through, that a car pulled to a stop beside him and the passenger door flew open.
"Boy, do you look like you could use a lift!" said a voice from within.
Alan got into the car and pulled the door closed after him.
"Where y' going?" said the plump man in the driver's seat. Alan said, "Jeffy."
Finally, the crowd, the ambulance, and the police cars were all gone. Only Ba and the old woman on the stoop remained, he in the rainy darkness, she in the pool of light under the overhang on her front stoop.
Ba walked over and stood at the bottom of the steps.
"What did you see?"
She gasped as she looked down at him. "Who the hell are you?"
"Someone who has seen strange things in his lifetime. What did you see?"
"I told the police."
"Tell me."
She sighed, looked over to the opening of the alley beside the building, and began to speak.
"I was watching the storm. Sitting at my window, watching the storm. I always sit at my window, rain or shine. Not much going on outside most of the time, but it's sure a helluva lot more than's going on inside. So I was sitting there, watching the lightning, when I seen this guy come walking down the alley, walking kind of funny, like he'd hurt his leg or something. And he's walking in the rain like he don't know it's raining. I figure he's on drugs, which means he's right at home around here."
"Excuse me," Ba said, his interest aroused now. "But what did this man look like?"
"Maybe forty. Brown hair, blue pants, and a light blue shirt. Why? You know him?"
Ba nodded. That described the Doctor perfectly. "I'm looking for him."
"Well, you better hope you don't find him! You should have seen what happened to those two bums, God rest their souls"—she crossed herself—"when they tried to rob him! He grabbed them and they went into fits and died and rotted, all in a few minutes! You've never seen anything like ft! And neither have I until today!"