Nightwalk 2 Page 11

  She pursed her lips in concentration as she folded the cloth in half and cut a hole in the middle of the fold.

  “I suppose that will work,” she conceded with a shrug. She obviously didn’t feel enthusiasm for the idea but apparently had nothing better to offer. Then she looked up from her work and fixed me with a challenging look. “So what about them?”

  “Huh?”

  “Those guys,” she nodded toward the group up front. “You’re the one calling all the shots, so are you planning on bringing them along or leaving them here?”

  It was a fair question, albeit one I wasn’t entirely comfortable with.

  “I’m not supposed to change the past.”

  “So that’s a ‘no’ then? And you’re making your decision with the full realization that if you leave them, and what you told me is true… then they are going to die.”

  “They died two years ago, Darla.”

  I almost wished I hadn’t said that—mainly because it also applied to her—but it was true. Yet to my surprise she didn’t flinch or react in some other negative way I would have expected.

  “So be it,” she shrugged. “Then you better get to chopping on your hole.”

  Wow, that was easy.

  Of course now with her being so agreeable about it, I started having second thoughts.

  “On the other hand,” I hedged, “It’s not like I know for sure what happened to these people. I mean, it’s not like I have any inside information they were here when the bomb fell.”

  That amounted to flat out rationalizing on my part, and I knew Darla could see straight through it. It didn’t take a genius to see this group had injured to care for and had found what they considered a safe spot to hide in until this whole thing sorted itself out. Left to their own devices, they would be going nowhere.

  “True,” she replied with a surprisingly bitter smirk. “Not to mention, nothing says history or dumb luck won’t see to it they die anyway on the way out of here. And at least with them along your odds of making it go up. Besides, if the ‘sands of time’ thing works the way this man in white of yours seem to imply, then some of their deaths may be set anyway. That means they are going to die no matter what you do. And whether they die here or somewhere else isn’t going to matter after the bomb falls. You’ll have to decide for yourself what the risks are if some of them make it.”

  As always, her logic was both ruthless and faultless, yet at the same time I had the strangest feeling I had just been put to a test… and failed.

  “I suppose you’re right,” I admitted, “but how would I explain the situation to them? It sounds insane.”

  “Oh, I can take care of it. I’ve already got a story that hits all the right points and will make sense to them. But you have to make a decision first.”

  “Really?” Now I truly was surprised. “Thanks, Darla.”

  That only earned me a dark look.

  “Let’s just say as soon as I saw these people I had a feeling we might need it. But this is your call.”

  Her sardonic tone didn’t jibe with somebody who I had just thanked, and I started to get the definite feeling there was another issue involved here, but I had no clue what it could be.

  “Aren’t you the one who preaches safety in numbers?” I probed.

  “Yeah, but I’m not the one making the decisions on who or what’s worth a risk to the future. This is your mission and your call.”

  Dammit. Apparently she didn’t intend to help me out with this any more than what she just offered. I would have preferred a little more input on where she stood, and her current attitude puzzled me. I’m not sure why she chose to accept me as sole decider on this matter. Normally she had strong opinions about what course to take and lobbied hard for certain decisions to be made.

  But she had chosen to handle it this way, and now I had my own decision to make.

  The fact I had been warned to be wary of “leaving footprints,” gave me a case of indigestion. I might not be able to change some of their fates, but would changing the ones I could make things better or worse? I had already experienced firsthand how a seemingly innocuous rescue put other people in danger. Did I dare mess up time more than I already had? Without knowing the possible consequences, I had no way to tell.

  On the other hand, I could damn sure use another armed person to help carry the load. Justin (or Viking-boy, as I liked to think of him) wasn’t ideal, but he would be a damn sight more useful than Darla. I had a feeling Mickey would be a good person to have watching my back, too. Furthermore, some monsters might hesitate to attack a larger group, and if they did my odds of being the one attacked would be diminished.

  And as cold and ruthless as it sounded, that became the deciding factor.

  Footprints or no; none of it would mean a damn thing if I didn’t survive to stop Hallett from escaping.

  “Oh well,” I exhaled, “the more the merrier. I’ll go look into breaching the wall while you try and convince everybody I’m not crazy.”

  She stared at me without expression for a good five or ten seconds before answering.

  “Yeah, that’s what I figured.”

  I suppose it wasn’t an unexpected decision, but the dead way she said it seemed off. I really thought she would be more pleased than this.

  Instead of commenting further, she pulled the gray cloth over her head. It fell down her front and back to make a poncho, which she cinched at the waist with a black strip of cloth. The effect was startlingly colorless on her. Honestly, I didn’t know why she bothered since it was hotter than hell, with crushing humidity, and she hardly struck me as the body-shy type.

  But I had better things to do than sit around trying to figure out Darla, so I headed over to the north wall where I spotted a gap between two sets of long shelves. The space looked about two feet wide, which suited my purpose.

  I pulled out the marine survival knife and tapped the wall with its butt. The hollow sound told me I called this one right. I had struck drywall.

  Without further ado I slammed the blade into the wall with all my strength.

  “Hey!” Justin exclaimed, “What are you doing?!”

  I focused on the task at hand and listened to hear how Darla intended to explain all this. She didn’t disappoint.

  “Like he said,” Darla answered him, “we were just passing through. Now we’re moving on. You might ought to consider joining us.”

  “Joining you?” Mickey interjected. “We can’t join you. We’ve got injured. And you don’t know what could be waiting on the other side of the wall anyway! We’ve got enough problems without him letting something in here!”

  “You’ve got more problems than you know,” Darla fired back. “I think you noticed we already knew about the cops on the other side of the overpass.”

  “I wondered about that. How?”

  “When Mark and I were on Chambers Circle we came across the body of a cop. We couldn’t get too close because something was chewing on him. But oddly enough, we could hear his radio still worked.”

  I kept my ears tuned to the conversation behind me as I cut on the drywall, not wanting to miss any of this. I had to give it to Darla, she could lie with the best of them.

  “Apparently we’re close to the edge of this thing. I think it’s somewhere around the railroad tracks. But we heard the cops talking about setting up firing lines at every exit out of here, and they were ordered to shoot to kill before anybody got close.”

  “Damn,” the man identified as Dr. Hall spoke up. “It sounds like a quarantine. If that’s the case we’re better off staying right here. They’ll send in military units to secure the area and then medical teams to start processing people. We should sit tight and let the professionals handle this."

  “Oh they intend to handle it, alright,” Darla spat out. “But not the way you’re hoping. This is an invasion, not a plague, and they told the cops on the radio to hold the line. They said the airstrikes would commence at five-thirty.”

 
“Airstrikes?!” at least three of them blurted out.

  “You heard me. They don’t intend on rescuing anybody.”

  “That’s crazy!”

  “Oh yeah? Look around you! There’s some weird shit going on here. There’s no ‘procedure” on how to handle something like this. So guess what? Somebody in Washington has decided to just make it go away. Simple as that.”

  “Bullshit,” Justin objected, obviously shaken. “We’re Americans. They wouldn’t bomb their own citizens.”

  “Oh, wouldn’t they?” Darla spun on him. With her new gray getup, and her face smudged from previous misadventures, she looked like a mad peasant woman in the candlelight. “There’s a freaking T-rex stomping around behind our building and things we can’t even name crawling all over the place out there. You think they’re going to risk letting this spread?! For God’s sake, there’s a city around us! They have to stop this here and fast! That’s their primary objective. We’re nothing but collateral damage in their books.”

  By this point even I was enthralled, and it took an effort of will to maintain enough attention on my work to keep going while following the scene behind me. I wondered if she had taken acting lessons. After all, she had been a bikini model for the local radio station and those kinds of gigs were often where aspiring actresses started. Whatever the case, she now put those skills to use.

  “The point is,” She held up one finger, lowered her voice, and I saw two people actually lean in to follow her next words. “Coventry Woods is screwed. And whoever is still in Coventry Woods by five-thirty is screwed right along with it.”

  “But you just said there’s no way out,” the boy named David said in a hushed tone. “You said the police will shoot us if they see us. Just like they already shot the girl over there.”

  “No, honey,” she turned a look of compassion on the youngster that almost caused my jaw to hit the floor. This was a hell of a performance. “I said they had been ordered to cut off all the exits, but that don’t mean they know where all the exits are. Mark thought of a different way to get out of here. And it will work.”

  Several pairs of eyes moved to settle on me and I forced myself to keep my concentration on the wall. I had now located the two studs, and had just about removed a stretch of drywall spanning the space between them and stretching from the floor to a height of about five feet. It was about time to turn my attention to the drywall on the other store’s side.

  “And what way is that?” Mickey pressed.

  “We’re going to go under the cops, and come out behind them where they aren’t looking.”

  “Oh yeah? How?”

  Darla now gave the other woman a conspiratorial grin, which came as another surprise since Casey had assured me Darla was the type who instinctually disliked other women.

  “You remember a couple of years ago when that Heyward kid in the Cypress Knoll subdivision crawled down in the storm drain and got washed away in that big rain? Remember where he came out?”

  I hadn’t heard about this, but Mickey must have lived here a while because she snapped to the reference immediately.

  “The flood pond!”

  “Exactly,” Darla affirmed. “The cops can’t see it from where they are, and the pipe will take us under the railroad tracks and to the Cypress Knoll subdivision on the other side. We just stay down there till the bombs stop falling, then crawl out and haul ass for the interstate or wherever else we want to go. By then the streets will be full of people in their pajamas due to all the racket and nobody will notice us.”

  Mickey considered this for a thoughtful second before responding.

  “That could work,” she murmured in dawning realization. “It would be both an escape tunnel and a bomb shelter. It could actually work.”

  “All you’ve got to do is make it to the pipe.” Darla assured her, “and that’s where we’re heading. You in?”

  ###

  “Okay,’ I said to Viking Boy, “here’s how we’re going to do this…”

  Dammit! His name was Justin. My brain could get hung up on the stupidest things sometimes.

  “…you and I are going to kick that side of the wall together. I think there’s a shelf up against the wall, so we need to put some real oomph into it. Kick high, and it should turn the shelf over while knocking out the piece of drywall I’ve precut on that side. Then I go through to see what we’ve got over there.”

  “You sure you don’t want me in there with you?”

  “I would love to have you in there with me, but you’ve only got three bullets in your thirty-eight. We have to do our planning with that in mind. Which in this case means your best place is right here. If something gets by me you can make them all count while it tries to squeeze through this hole.”

  “Pretty smart,” he nodded, then gave me a half grin. “But if you ask me, you still got more balls than brains.”

  “Or I’m a complete nut case. Never forget that option.”

  “I suppose that’s possible, too,” he replied with an agreeable shrug.

  I’ve gotta confess, I had started to like Justin. For a guy who’d shoved his gun in my face about ten minutes ago, he wasn’t half bad… or maybe Stella and Casey were right, and I desperately needed to get out and make friends.

  At least this guy was willing to do his part and seemed reasonably solid. I wouldn’t stack him up against the likes of Tommy, but on the other hand I didn’t need to worry about Justin suddenly wanting to wear my skin as a skirt either. That’s gotta count for something.

  “If he goes in there alone, it’s more than possible.”

  The pair of us looked back to see Mickey walking up with a prybar in her hand.

  “Look, mister,” she stated. “I think you’re right about where Justin should stay with his gun, but that don’t mean you should go anywhere without backup. You should either let your girlfriend with the shotgun or me go in there behind you.”

  I glanced across the dimly lit room at Darla, who sent me back a look saying, “No way in hell.” Not exactly an earthshaking surprise.

  “Well, it’s probably gonna be too tight of quarters over there for a shotgun so I guess you just volunteered.”

  Mickey nodded then got behind me, prybar at the ready.

  “Okay, David,” I said to the kid, “go ahead and light the torch and bring it over here so you can hand it to me as I go through the hole.”

  The boy did as instructed.

  “Everybody ready?” I asked.

  “One more thing,” Justin broke in. “Why not loan Mickey your machete? It’s lighter and would probably work better for her than the prybar.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. Mickey had a certain ‘hard’ look that made me suspect she could swing the prybar just fine, but the machete actually did make a lot more sense. I pulled the weapon from its sheath and handed it over.

  She took it without comment and hefted it to get the feel of the thing.

  “Damn, Mick,” Justin laughed. “Now you look totally Viet Cong.”

  Yikes!

  “And you look like Cindy Brady trying to rob a bank,” she fired back in an offhand manner, while giving a slow practice swing with the blade.

  A quick glance back and forth between them revealed neither to be upset by the exchange, so I got the definite impression these two had known each other long before tonight.

  But this wasn’t the time or place to get to know them better, and I could only try to take comfort in Justin’s seeming willingness to let Mickey risk herself as my backup. He obviously cared enough to see she had a better weapon, but hadn’t objected in the least to her offering to accompany me on this. Hopefully I could take that as a sign of his confidence in her.

  I guess I was about to find out.

  “Okay then,” I took a ready stance, “let’s do this. One… two… THREE!”

  Justin and I stepped forward and kicked in unison, our feet striking the wall almost perfectly side by side about four feet off the ground. The pr
ecut rectangle I had made in the far wall snapped loose immediately and we felt the second impact of striking heavy furniture beyond.

  Unfortunately, whatever was on the other side didn’t tip over. It must have leaned away from the wall for a second, but then fell back and slammed into place. Since the drywall had fallen away I could now tell we dealt with a metal object. And considering it was painted white, I figured we were dealing with another shelf or cabinet.

  We had already made a bunch of racket, so Justin and I shared a look then took the simple course of kicking it again.

  This time it went over, leaving a rectangle of blackness.

  We spent a couple of seconds with our breaths held and our pistols trained on the hole. After all, anything in there certainly knew where to come looking for us by now.

  Nothing. Just blackness and silence.

  Okay, then.

  Since nothing seemed interested in flying out of the darkness to kill me, it now fell to me to get in there and find out if it waited within. I tried to remember exactly what aspect of my career as an author qualified me for this type of thing. Nothing really came to mind. I would just have to leave that up to the seemingly infallible judgement of the man in white.

  It sure would help if I trusted him more.

  I slipped through the hole as fast and silently as I could. The Coonan led the way while I grabbed the torch as I went by. I looked left, right, and up as I went through, trusting nothing. Then I cautiously straightened, to give myself a view over the shelves.

  We were in a party supply store.

  Empty foil balloons dotted the walls, reflecting yellow gleams in my torchlight. They celebrated birthdays, graduations, anniversaries, and weddings. Festive streamers looped along where the walls met the ceiling, and brightly colored signs gave rates for entertainers, catering, and inflatable attractions for the kids.

  The shelves were stocked with paper plates, table covers, and party favors of all kinds. Considering the number of families and kids in the area, I’m sure the place did a tidy little business on birthday parties alone.

  But there would be no more parties in Coventry Woods.

  The sight of the decorative gaiety, and the thought of all the occasions it would never again celebrate, caused a brief wave of depression to sweep through me.