So far, so good.
He would’ve liked every light in the place to be burning, but at least it was warm. He hadn’t realized how cold he’d been until the warmth touched his hands, his face.
God, he was numb.
A corridor wound off to his left, very dim, and that was the way he needed to go. He started off, the shadows alive with secret threat.
The police offices were all lit up.
But empty.
There was a bullpen securing a few desks and filing cabinets, stiff plastic chairs for visitors, safety posters on the wall, wanted bulletins tacked to a corkboard. All illuminated by buzzing fluorescent lights overhead.
Lou entered carefully, moved into the bullpen, holding the swinging gate so it wouldn’t make any noise.
And his heart fell.
It looked like a tornado had howled through the place.
The floor was heaped with papers and folders as if someone had cleared the desktops with a broom. Computers were smashed under desks, keyboards jammed into their screens. Drawers were empty, their contents strewn about. Wastepaper cans kicked aside, a coffee maker and its attendant pot smashed in the corner. A letter opener was imbedded nearly two inches into the wall.
Yeah, the crazies had been here, too.
They’d made a thorough job of it by the looks of things. Probably the worse thing was the smell—like old piss. As if the crazies, monsters—whatever in fuck’s name they were—had urinated all over everything to mark their territory.
Lou went to the first phone he found, picked it up.
Dead.
Even the cops didn’t have working phones. There was a radio, but the microphone was missing, wires ripped out of the back.
Don’t you see? a voice said to him. Don’t you see what’s going on here? You’re completely cut off from the real world. It’s what they want. You’re normal and they can’t have that. This is a mousetrap, and you’re the mouse, my friend. No way out. The storm took care of the phones, they did the rest. And moment by moment, the noose is tightening.
Lou slumped against a desk, a crude mockery of a smile etched into his face like somebody had slashed it there with a knife. Okay. All right. Yes, indeedy. This is what it was like to go insane, eh? Worse than he thought. Maybe it would be easier if he just surrendered.
No.
He plugged a cigarette into his mouth, lit it, drew hard off it. The nicotine woke up his brain, parted the mists of bullshit. Like a worn-out TV set that needed to be slapped on the side, it started working again. The picture rolled a bit at first, sure, but it was receiving and processing again.
There was a door off the bullpen, another entrance leading into darkness.
He chose the door, a restroom.
He walked right in there, gun raised. He was feeling like Dirty Harry or the guy in High Plains Drifter, a man with a gun and a past and a serious need to kill some people… or, in Lou’s case, things that looked like people but were people like a rubber glove is a human hand.
Typical bathroom. A few urinals with rust stains against one wall, sinks against the other. Above them a mirror. It was spattered with water stains, flaking in the corners. But none of that caught Lou’s attention. He only saw what was scrawled across it:
GOD HELP US ALL
By this time, it took quite a bit to unnerve him. Two days ago, had he walked into an empty, vandalized police station and saw something like this he would’ve pissed in his shoes. Now, as ominous and menacing as it indeed was, he only studied the message, wondering vaguely what that crusty, dark stuff was.
Blood?
Lipstick?
He turned away, his brain still asking the same shopworn question: What exactly happened here?
He paused before the sink, dragging slowly off his cigarette. A long gray ash dropped away. He let the butt fall with it into the basin. Setting his gun aside, he turned on the faucet. That still worked. His cigarette butt sizzled out, ashes sucked down the drain. He splashed water on his face, wetted his lips. Oh Lord, it felt so good, so—
Jesus H. Christ, you fucking idiot!
He pulled away like it was acid… or he’d been splashing water from a urinal in his face. Only this was much worse. The water. Something happened here. Something had gotten these people and had gotten them bad. Too fast, he figured to be strictly from body contact, had to be airborne, maybe, or in the water. His imagination shifted into high gear. He could almost feel whatever it was coming through his pores, oozing into him like cold syrup, settling into his cells.
Fuck it.
He went to the sink and started gulping water.
Yeah, better. Goddamn right it was better! Ha, ha!
And then he happened to look in the mirror, saw the blunt tips of black shiny shoes under one of the stall doors. He was not alone.
He reached for the gun.
12
Ben and Nancy Eklind were on the move again.
“We’re going to walk right out of this town,” he told his wife. “No stops, no bullshit, no nothing. No stolen cars. We walk out, get our asses somewhere safe.”
It was a plan.
Ben decided then and there, after they were a safe distance away from the hanged boy and the child laughing in darkness, that they weren’t going to bother with anymore of the houses, lit up or not. All of them were potential traps. Better on the streets where you could run, maneuver.
They simply had to get out.
That was all that mattered; leave this clusterfuck to the authorities. But to get out they had to purge their minds of all the horror, wipe the blackboards clean, so to speak, so they could concentrate.
As they approached Chestnut, he pulled Nancy behind a tree.
“Are you okay?” he said.
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m just fine, Ben. What could possibly be wrong?”
Good. Sarcasm. Meant she was indeed okay or as okay as she was going to get this night. They crossed Chestnut at a jog, holding hands. They saw no one or nothing and that was perfectly fine. Soon enough the houses ran out and then there were warehouses, a few decrepit factories behind locked fences, a public works garage, a junkyard, and beyond, more dark buildings and a train yard.
“We make that train yard,” Ben said, “and we’re free.”
Nancy had nothing to say to that. She simply nodded.
Ben studied the streets.
God, so many shadows, so many traps waiting to be sprung.
He remembered reading To Kill a Mockingbird in high school. There was a line in it about nothing being as dangerous as a deserted, waiting street. It had stuck in his mind all these years, buried with the attendant trash of daily living, only to emerge now. As if maybe it had been waiting for this, waiting to be applied to this spook show.
Hand in hand, they started walking faster, practically jogging.
He could feel the night air on his exposed hands and face like the breath of something long dead.
Not far now: the weedy fields of the train yards were just ahead. He studied them in the deadly moonlight. A gravel road wound along the edge of Cut River. Beyond it were the silent hulks of the trains themselves, huge and segmented worms clinging to the rails, waiting to be woken.
He could feel Nancy’s hand gripping his own tighter and tighter, feel the breath aching in his lungs. Yes, this was it. So simple and easy, of course, he hadn’t thought of it until survival instinct had pointed the way: the fields, the woods, you dumb shit, make for the open spaces.