He pulled her tight against him, kissed the top of her head. “You’re not crazy, girl. This town is crazy, but not you.”
After a time she quieted down and he was afraid for her.
Afraid because she was a tough, ballsy woman who didn’t take shit from anyone or anything and now she was weak and beaten, whimpering like a little girl.
This is what scared him.
She was always a rock and now she was wearing down, flaking away before him.
“Sam and all this… I can’t think straight. I don’t know.”
“Sshh. It’s gonna be okay. I’ll get you outta here.”
Then they both heard something coming up the sidewalk.
At first it was muffled and indistinct, but then it became obvious: the slapping of bare feet. Many of them.
Ben and Nancy hugged one another, drawing strength.
The parade of bare feet came and went, their owners making a series of wet, almost reptilian hissings as they passed. Ben had this almost suicidal, crazy urge to peer over the hedges and see what manner of people made such sounds.
But he didn’t.
He just held Nancy and was held, waiting.
Ten minutes later, they were still clutching one another. Waiting for what came next and not having to wait long. It came from across the street, from a bank of dark homes. Ben could feel his breath catch in his throat and hold there. It was merely a sound, but it conjured an almost physical horror in him.
I can’t take anymore of this, oh God in Heaven, I can’t.
Across the street, he could hear a shrill, eerie giggling.
The giggling of a little girl, demented and loathsome.
10
“All I want to do is live,” Lisa Tabano told the bald, mustached man who carried her into the church. “I don’t even want to know about this… I just want to live.”
Johnny Davis nodded in the darkness. “Seems a simple enough thing, doesn’t it?”
“I used to think so,” she said, her voice weary.
“I’ll try to get you out, but I can’t promise anything.”
“Thank you. Then we can get the police, the army, I don’t know. The authorities. Someone in charge. Maybe… maybe my mom and dad… maybe they’re alive somewhere.”
“Maybe they got out,” Johnny said.
She ignored that. “We’ll get out, get the cops, whatever. Let them sort it out.”
Johnny laughed low in his throat. “Oh, you are naïve, aren’t you? You don’t get it, do you? You don’t even know what this is all about.”
Lisa looked at him. “Do you?”
All that got was laughter.
She saw him shaking his head, massaging his jaw (something he seemed to do whenever confronted by something he didn’t like). “No point in getting into any of this,” he said. They were just inside the main door of the church where Johnny had taken her after finding her on the steps out front. He opened it a crack, peered out. “If you want to get out, we might as well start on that.”
“I was kind of thinking that maybe you were coming with me,” Lisa said. “Or am I mistaken on this?”
“Sadly mistaken, dear.” He pulled a pack of RedMan chewing tobacco from inside his survival vest and stuffed his cheek. “I’m staying right here.”
“For godsake, why?”
“You wouldn’t understand. It would take just too long to explain it and we don’t have the time.”
An enigma?
Oh yes, and then some.
Here was a guy who obviously was some sort of survivalist—dressed out in fatigues and survival vest, armed to the teeth. A guy who had positioned himself in the church belfry and, thankfully, picked off those psychos who were about to make hamburger out of her. Hard as a concrete piling, he was built thick and heavy and was definitely no stranger to the business of killing. Not some weekend warrior here. No gun freak wannabe who dreamed of action and jerked off over back issues of Soldier of Fortune, but would piss his pants at the first taste of the real thing.
No, Johnny Davis was the genuine article.
But there was an undercurrent to him Lisa just couldn’t put a finger on, some secret agenda. A mystery.
But right now, despite everything that had thus far happened, neither Johnny Davis or any of the rest of it was a priority for her. She was beginning to feel nauseous and sweaty like maybe she had a good flu bug going.
But it had nothing to do with that.
“We should leave before things get… worse,” he said.
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
He sighed, shook his head. “Goddamn women and their bladders.”
She ignored him and he led her through the church to the rectory in the back. He motioned towards the bathroom and left her alone. She closed the door and clicked on the light. She set her guitar case and purse down. When she was sure he was out of earshot, she relieved herself (though that wasn’t the real reason for this visit).
When she was finished, she splashed some water in her face and looked at herself in the mirror. Good God. She was wasted, drawn, her dark eyes and hair standing out in marked contrast to the pale, sweaty skin of her face. Twenty-three years old and already she had discolored rings under her eyes, worry lines at the corners of her lips. Like Keith Richard’s junkie sister.
God, she felt horrible.
She opened her purse, took out a baggie of brown powder. She didn’t have a spoon, so she scooped up a tad and shoved into her nose, sniffing it up. She repeated this and sat down on the toilet, shivering, her eyes watering, her guts flipping and flopping.
When’s the last time you ate? she asked herself. The last time you actually put some food in your body?
But she couldn’t remember.
A day? Two? Three?
Got so after awhile all you needed was the junk, you didn’t need anything else.
She was pencil-thin, nearly emaciated, sporting a classic hard-living rock and roll look: haggard, gaunt, a big head of hair and a skeleton for a body. All those years as a teenager she’d gone on one crazy, punishing diet after another trying her damnedest to look like her heroes—Johnny Thunders, Joe Perry, Nikki Sixx—and now, at last, a rock star in her own right with a hit album, she’d discovered their secret: heroin. You didn’t need diets or fasting or any of that nonsense, all you needed was H. Food of the gods, yes oh yes oh yes.
Already she could feel it canceling out the bad stuff.
Her personal cloud found her, wrapped her up tight. She’d peak in fifteen minutes or so, but the climb was oh-so delicious. Nose full of junk, she could laugh at the psychos outside.
Euphoric and revitalized, born again, she gathered up her stuff and left the bathroom, had a foolish urge to skip and whistle.
This was more like it.
She had nearly six grams left. Plenty to last.
God, if mom and dad are dead, if—
Don’t think about it. That’s for later,she told herself, when you’re safe.
“Took you fucking long enough, rock star,” Johnny said when she returned.
It was dark and Lisa was glad for it. She didn’t want her savior, Johnny Davis Rambo, seeing the change coming over her. She had a pretty good vibe on the guy now and it told her he was not stupid, that he’d been around.
“You gonna lug that guitar case with?”
She looked at him like he was mad. “Of course. It’s very rare, man, worth a bundle. It’s everything to me.”