Nightwalk 2 Page 10

  “Again,” I grunted.

  We both redoubled our efforts, and this time I heard something slide on the carpet as the door opened another six inches. I started to push again when a horrible realization hit me.

  If I could hear something as soft as an object sliding on the carpet, then that meant…

  I wheeled, drew my gun, and fired into the darkness behind us.

  The Coonan thundered in the confined storeroom. Fire blasted from the barrel, and each flash gave me a strobe light view of the Rex’s ghastly jaws opening as they reached toward us.

  I screamed and lurched backward against the door, still firing, as Darla shrieked beside me and somehow pushed even harder. Then several things happened at once.

  The monster howled and jerked its head backward, while something crashed on the other side of the door and it lurched open another five or six or inches.

  Darla slithered through in an instant, with me right behind her.

  Once through, I spun and slammed the door closed again. As I did, my hip bumped against something wooden that must have been holding it closed. It felt like a wall cabinet and I didn’t waste a second in trying to yank the thing against the door again. I didn’t make much progress since it was heavy and I could only pull with my gun-free hand.

  I had no idea where Darla had gone, having lost her in the darkness. But then she settled the question for me herself.

  “Look out!” I heard her yell from somewhere in the darkness to my right. “Behind you!”

  Shit! Seriously?

  Once again I whirled and brought the Coonan up to fire. As I did, somebody flicked a lighter on and I found myself staring down the gun barrel of someone else.

  We had found more survivors.

  More desperate refugees holed up against a storm they couldn’t understand.

  Now me and one of their number had pistols pointed at each other’s heads.

  Chapter Five: Walking With Ghosts

  It was a scene right out of an action movie.

  A standoff between two desperate men who had never met, pointing pistols in each other’s faces.

  I used to hate those scenes. Mainly because they were amazingly stupid and nearly ruined the movies for me. It always seemed to me the situation would most realistically be resolved by the character who didn’t say anything, but merely pulled the trigger first. It was the logical solution to the dilemma. But those scenes are written with high drama in mind, not logic.

  The reality wasn’t high drama.

  The reality was terror.

  The reality was two men in a dark room, staring down gun barrels by the paltry illumination of a cigarette lighter.

  The other man looked young, somewhere in his twenties. He stood a very slender six feet tall. He had long, blonde hair in cornrow braids, a stringy goatee, a lip stud, and a small hoop through one eyebrow. His black t-shirt said something about Odin, but I was a little too busy to read it.

  He stared wide-eyed down the barrel of my .357 as I gazed into the black tunnel of his revolver. Somewhere in the back of my mind a voice screamed for me to pull the trigger, just like I had mocked those characters in action movies for not doing. Another part of me wondered if he had a voice in his head yelling the same thing. Either way, that lighter would get too hot for whoever held it pretty fast, and if somebody didn’t die before then, the shooting would most assuredly start as soon as the light failed.

  I needed to do something fast.

  “Hey, pal,” my voice barely made it above a whisper, “let’s not do this. I’m your neighbor, not an enemy.”

  That didn’t end up going over as well as I hoped.

  “Oh yeah? Well we’ve had ‘neighbors’ shoot at us tonight,” he spat. “We’ve already lost two people to ‘neighbors’ and we were just walking by their house.”

  Oh freaking great.

  There were pockets of frightened and armed people probably scattered all over Coventry Woods. Many had gone straight into “hole up and survive” mode and probably considered anybody out and about on foot to be potential looters. I knew this first hand because two years ago I had nearly been shot by a man guarding his family in a stranded SUV. These people must have run into somebody with an itchier trigger finger.

  “I believe you,” I replied. “I encountered something like that earlier myself. There aren’t just monsters out there. There are some damn crazy people with guns. How about you and I not be those people. How about we show a little trust.”

  “Okay then, give me your gun.”

  Dammit! I couldn’t do that. Maybe if it were the first night and I was willing to hole up and take a risk on the good will of my fellow man, but not tonight. I had a mission, and I couldn’t risk it by putting myself at the mercy of this man.

  “How about we just slowly holster our guns together. You won’t have to worry about me very long. I intend to move on soon.”

  “Mister, I don’t know you, and I really ain’t in the mood for taking chances.”

  “That makes two of us, but I ain’t asking for your gun.”

  “You’re the one who busted in waving a gun around in the first place.”

  “Because I had a friggin’ T-rex on my ass!”

  “Okay, fair enough. But it ain’t in here. When you’re ready to leave I’ll give you your gun back.”

  Was this guy for real?

  “I…can’t…do…that.”

  “Then it looks like we’ve got a problem.”

  The voice in the back of my head now yelled louder for me to go ahead and pull the trigger before he did. That lighter had to be getting hot. Time was about up. I didn’t want to shoot this man, but my choices narrowed by the second.

  Fortunately, the voice of reason finally decided to speak up.

  “Justin,” a woman’s voice came from the darkness behind him, “he’s obviously not like those other people. Let’s do it his way.”

  “Mickey,” he replied in a warning tone, “we don’t know him.”

  “I know. But like he said, they were chased in here. I think he’s okay.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.” Her voice now contained an audible hint of exasperation. “He’s in the same situation we are, and we don’t have anything he would want anyway. Now do it his way.”

  That last came out as a bit of an order and I suspected “Mickey” acted as the true leader of this group.

  “Okay, then,” he glowered at me. “So be it.”

  The pair of us slowly lowered our pistols. We watched each other with suspicious care as we put away our weapons… mine in my holster, and his in the front of his pants.

  Only then did the dumpy kid with the lighter sigh and let the flame go out. I didn’t have time to make out if it was a boy or a girl. Fortunately, by then my eyes had adjusted enough to see a little by the light of the glow stick at my belt.

  Still, if introductions were in order then I would like to see better.

  “Do you guys have any light?”

  “No,” Mickey answered. “Just David’s lighter. Marshall had a lantern, but we lost him and it on Burroughs Drive.”

  Her voice added a layer of bitterness to its already hard tone, and I understood “Marshall” had been more a loss to her than the others.”

  “Well, I can at least help with that.”

  I slipped off my backpack and fished down into the bottom for a couple of seconds before pulling out a six-inch cookie tin. It had originally held imported cookies for Stella, but I had put it to my own use once she had finished them off. I pulled the lid off to reveal it now contained wax up to within a half inch of the top, and five wicks spaced in a cross pattern.

  Yeah, I know, I know… flares, glow sticks, flashlights, and now a big homemade multi-candle. I even had a six pack of small tea candles. Let’s just say that over the past two years I had developed some serious issues with the dark.

  It actually surprised me how well I had handled it tonight.

  “Here.
” I handed it to the kid. Since he had the lighter, I could only assume this was David. He looked to be a slightly overweight fifth or sixth grader, with medium length hair, tortoise shell glasses, and wearing pajamas featuring a superhero I didn’t recognize. “Set it next to something once you light it. Then prop the lid up behind it and it will reflect more light into the room.”

  He did as instructed and I got my first good look at this band of refugees, and the harbor they had washed up in.

  Despite the fact I drove past this strip mall every time I entered or exited Coventry Woods, I had no idea what it contained other than Madre Mona’s and a daycare/preschool. And I only remembered the preschool because Stella told me Casey had gone there when she was small. Regardless, it appeared I would be getting acquainted with the place tonight.

  And for starters, it appeared we had broken into a fabric shop.

  Bolts of cloth filled the shelves along both walls, and two free-standing racks held rolls of fabric in the forward center of the store. A third lay capsized where we had pushed it over when Darla and I forced our way in. Two other rotating displays held buttons and the like. A short counter near the rear held a cash register and faced a cutting table across the room.

  As I noted all this, I saw Viking Boy stare in dismay over to where Darla glowered back at him from beside the table.

  “Aw shit,” he groaned. “She had a gun, too.”

  “Yeah, and she didn’t use it. Like I said, we didn’t come here to cause trouble.”

  In truth, I don’t know if he ever had anything to fear from Darla’s quarter. When the candle was first lit I noticed she had the shotgun pointed at the floor.

  I considered being irritated with her again but remembered she had been the one to warn me of the threat from the other man. If it hadn’t been for her, I would have had his gun barrel pointed at the back of my head and would have been forced to disarm without choice. So she had watched my back, which meant I had no room to complain.

  At the same time I couldn’t help but notice she had done the exact minimum our bargain had called for. It had been enough, but it behooved me to remember that in a lot of ways I was still on my own.

  “So you’re telling me we really have a Tyrannosaurus Rex at our back door.” Mickey’s voice brought me back to the situation in front of me.

  Mickey turned out to be a smallish woman in her forties, with short black hair, Asian features, but an accent that guaranteed she was Houstonian born and bred. She wore a black, sleeveless t-shirt and long, red-striped pajama pants. Despite her stature, it only took one look to affirm my earlier impression of where the true leadership of this group resided.

  She stood beside the front fabric roll display with folded arms, a stony face, and a bearing that couldn’t have said “Don’t fuck with me” any plainer than if it had been embroidered across her shirt.

  “Yep,” I walked past Justin to approach her. “He’s the real deal, and the bastard looks almost exactly the way they picture him. I’m afraid the back alley is now closed to traffic. By the way, I’m Mark Garrett.”

  “Mickey Hayes,” she replied, then let her shoulders slump with a sigh. “That’s just great. Oh well, I guess as long as it stays back there it can have the place. It’s not like we’re going anywhere anyway.”

  She gestured at the rest of her group on the floor behind her, and I saw what she meant.

  This group had taken casualties.

  The first ones I noticed were the three lying on the floor. One figure wrapped in cloth had obviously already died, while two others clung to life nearby. Both were young women.

  The first, a raven-haired youngster, had been covered up to her collarbone in a makeshift blanket made from a bolt of cloth. Her bare shoulders showed somebody had removed her shirt, and the blood soaking through the fabric indicated it had probably been for an attempt at first aid. I wasn’t sure if she was truly conscious or not. She stirred feebly and muttered something to a young man in rough work clothes who knelt beside her, but it sounded Spanish so I didn’t understand a word

  The other was ghastly beyond words.

  The left side of her head and neck, along with her left arm, had swollen to grotesque proportions. The features on that side of her face had been stretched into a distorted mess. Her arm was little more than a grossly inflated tube with a small hand at the end almost as an afterthought. Although they hadn’t removed any of this girl’s clothes, they had still covered her with a cloth as well. Judging by the shape under the fabric, her side and leg were obscenely swollen, too. I could tell she still lived by the bubbly sound of each breath she struggled to take.

  The rest of the group were not in as dire condition as these two, but they had definitely suffered as well.

  A woman in a blue bathrobe sat against a shelf nearby, holding a quietly fussing baby. I took solace in the child’s distress because that meant it had been awake when Chandra’s machine had engaged, and subsequently reduced all the sleepers in Coventry Woods to brain-dead husks. The woman seemed to barely notice it, instead staring into nothing with a look of numb shock.

  Her behavior puzzled me, but then I saw the item on her arm. It was a toddler wrist leash, the type many women use to keep a young child tethered to them when they went on walks or to the mall. But the coiling line of this one hung broken only a foot or so from her wrist.

  Aw no.

  She had had two children, and tonight that leash hadn’t kept her other child close enough.

  Mickey saw me staring and said her name was Kayla Stewart, and she taught third grade at the nearby elementary school. She didn’t mention what happened to the child on the leash. I was just as glad she didn’t.

  The last man still “standing” actually knelt near the Hispanic couple and appeared to be taking the girl’s pulse. A whip-thin individual with a glorious full head of collar length white hair and goatee, this guy still almost reeked of the word “doctor.” For a second, the sight of him slightly elevated my mood. But then I remembered I had places to go and things to do, and the time to do them was vanishing with fearsome rapidity.

  “So what’s their stories,” I gestured at the two prone young women. I figured I might as well get all the info I could while I planned my next step.

  “That’s Lisa Taylor,” Mickey murmured softly, indicating the girl with the grotesque swellings. “We had something pop out of a manhole on Deer Ridge and Monroe. It looked like a bunch of tentacles without suckers, or maybe eyeless snakes. It ended up getting Calvin Brower and Kayla’s two-year-old girl. Lisa grabbed the girl and tried to hold on, but one of the things turned out to have a mouth which it opened and spit some kind of stuff all down one side of her. She screamed at the time that it burned, and those swellings started showing up about half an hour later.”

  The girl’s story came as a graphic reminder of how we hadn’t been the only group sneaking through the dark corridors of Coventry Woods. There were probably others still out there.

  “And she’s Lucy Baca,” Mickey indicated the other stricken young lady. “We encountered her and her “friend” at the entrance to Woodlawn Gardens. She had been shot, but could still walk with assistance back then. She said she was from the Emerald Court subdivisions to the south. She told us there were cops lined up on the other end of the overpass, and they were shooting anybody who came near. That’s when we changed course and came here.”

  So, this had been the group who had gone through the graveyard ahead of us. Or at least one of them.

  I shot a glance back at Darla, and she met my eyes as she pulled a bolt of cloth from a nearby shelf. She didn’t even bother to look surprised to hear my story about the cops and overpass had been true, so I guess she had bought in.

  “All we know about the guy with her is his name Lupe,” Mickey continued, now giving me a sharp look. I think she caught the shared glance between me and Darla. “He doesn’t speak English, so I’m guessing he’s from Mexico.”

  “Do any of you guys speak Spa
nish?”

  “Nope, not really. You? Lucy was translating when needed, but she faded fast. Dr, Hall says he’s pretty sure she’s bleeding internally, and he ain’t optimistic.”

  “Damn, I’m sorry to hear…”

  “Mark, honey,” Darla called from behind me. “May I have a word with you?”

  Mark, honey? Seriously? Up till that moment, I wasn’t even sure she knew my name.

  “Coming,” I replied, then turned back to address Mickey while pretending not to notice her openly suspicious scrutiny. “It seems I have been summoned.”

  Now what the hell was going on?

  ###

  I moved back to the gloomier rear of the store where Darla now unrolled part of a bolt of gray muslin on the cutting table. I wondered what she could be up to. Nothing about her struck me as a seamstress.

  “Yes, dear?” I inquired, trying hard to keep all traces of sarcasm out of my voice for the benefit of anybody listening in.

  She waited until I reached her before answering.

  “Have you figured out what to do next?” She spoke in a low but urgent tone as she cut about eight feet of cloth from the bolt. “Time hasn’t stopped, you know.”

  I should have known. Despite her stated preference of safety in numbers, Darla had shown little curiosity about our current companions. Still, she had a point. Fortunately I had formulated a plan while getting a feel for the group we had had been thrown in with.

  “Yeah. We need to go north, but we can’t go out back anymore, and we can’t go out front. So we we’re going to go through instead.”

  “Through?”

  “That’s right. Some of these walls between the stores in this strip mall will be firewalls, but most will just be drywall and studs. I can hack through one of those pretty fast.”

  “And the firewalls?”

  “The fronts of the stores are all glass. When we encounter a firewall, I’ll shoot out a glass panel, step outside, and then shoot out a panel on the other side of the firewall. If it’s clear, I’ll cover you as you get to the next store.”