Nightwalk 2 Read online

  “You wanna try that again?” I snapped in a forced whisper as I rejoined her. “I don’t think the creatures on the other side of the neighborhood quite heard you.”

  “I didn’t know you were there, dammit.”

  “Really? Who did you think it was?”

  “I don’t know. Some horrible type of monster, maybe?”

  “The type that says ‘Darla, please don’t scream’?”

  “Oh God, just shut up!”

  Well, since we hadn’t already been horribly devoured by a certain apex-predator, I could only assume it couldn’t force itself any farther into the building. But it was still down there. I couldn’t see it, and I damn sure wasn’t going to make a light in order to do so, but I knew it waited down there. It could smell us. It could probably hear us, too. Now it would probably do like most predators and lurk outside our hidey-hole to see if we would pop our heads out again.

  Feeling around in the dark, I discovered we crouched at the end of the hallway. I found doors to both sides and behind us. Darla probably already knew they were there by now, but had showed the good sense not to go barreling into a dark room alone.

  After all, that’s what she had me for.

  But first things first.

  I knelt in the darkness and removed my backpack. Then, going completely by feel, I opened one of the boxes of shells and reloaded all four magazines of the Coonan. Nothing like being armed to get one’s nerves back in order.

  I even briefly considered going back down the hallway and opening up on the T-rex. With its front end pushed so tightly into the building, I could probably fill its head full of holes. I’m sure the monster had a thick skull, but I had a gun up to the task. It would just be a matter of finding his little brain.

  But that reeked of hunting for trouble, and I had my hands more than full with the trouble hunting me. Besides, if the T-rex was jammed in the front of the building…

  I turned my attention to the door across from us, the one that would open into a room at the rear of the building, and gently put my ear against it. Nothing. No sounds of occupation on the other side. Still not wanting to take chances, I grasped the doorknob and began turning it as silently as possible. It opened with the faintest click.

  Up till now all of this had been done in total blackness, but I didn’t dare enter an un-scouted room blind. The Rex wasn’t the only ghastly killer in these parts. So I twisted my glowstick tube partway open, while at the same time positioning my body to shield the dim light from the view of anything down the hallway.

  Then I carefully pushed the door open, letting Mr. Glowstick and Mr. Coonan lead the way.

  After spending the last few minutes in total darkness, my eyes had adapted to the point I could see fairly well over a short distance, even by the light of the only partially revealed glowstick. What I saw didn’t inspire confidence.

  This had been a classroom. Or at least the attempt at controlled chaos that passed as a classroom for three-year-olds. Two long, low tables with tiny chairs ran along each side of the room, with a desk at the middle of the far end. Judging by the floor near my feet, it had been carpeted with a colored pattern designed to hide the occasional stain or spill. But that was only the floor near my feet.

  The rest of the room lay under a foot-high layer of thick fernlike organisms. I say fernlike because the leaves did look very much like those on a fern, but these things also had a slender stalk rising about two feet from the center and ending in a glowing bulb. Only they weren’t bulbs.

  As I stared into the room, all the bulbs swiveled in unison and stared back.

  Strange triangular pupils expanded in neon green irises as they locked on to me. Their collective scrutiny was unnerving in the dim silence. The fact they almost carpeted the entire floor gave the room an alien, swamp-like atmosphere.

  I had no idea what threat this manifestation presented, and no desire to find out. I’m sure it could have killed us somehow. After all, that seemed to be the running theme tonight. The important thing was I had seen what I needed to see.

  I closed my glowstick tube, then pulled the door shut with infinite care. I didn’t breathe until I heard the sound of a click.

  On to Option B.

  Behind us, lumber shifted and a massive snort issued from the darkness down the hall. I suppose Mr. Rex just wanted us to know he was still there. I could only hope it didn’t herald an attempt to push himself farther into the building. I didn’t see how he could do it, but never underestimate nine tons of carnivore with ambition. I needed to get on with this.

  The door across the hall would open into a room facing the front of the store, which did me no good, so now I turned my attention to the door at the end of the hallway. If I didn’t find what I searched for in here, we were in real trouble.

  Once again I carefully turned the knob and eased the door open.

  This time I discovered a much larger room that ran from the front of the building to the back. It must have served as an indoor playground and lunch room. Small plastic slides, a small plastic fort, stackable plastic boxes, assorted plastic cubes and tubes to be crawled through, and all on a bright checkerboard of interlocking rubber mat pieces. I’m surprised the walls weren’t padded. It was a large, hyper-safe fun zone for a generation who would never know the joy of scooping the cat turds out of the dirt-filled tractor tire that passed for my childhood sandbox.

  A small kitchen area occupied the rear third of the room, with low tables perfectly suited for toddler statures.

  From what I could see, we had this room to ourselves. At least from what I could see. Unfortunately, there were a hundred nooks and hiding places where something smaller and deadly could lie in wait. The other problem was the line of free-standing room dividers running along near the back of the room. If this room had the door into the back alley, I would have to go down there and find out for myself.

  I took a couple of cautious steps into the room and tugged on Darla’s arm to follow. She didn’t waste any time in closing the door behind us. Then the pair of us threaded our way through the playland obstacle course until reaching the divider in back.

  Nothing leapt out and ate us on the way.

  Now for the moment of truth.

  I peeked around the divider, fearing the worst. Then I breathed a sigh of relief to discover nothing behind it but a few stacks of folding chairs leaning against the wall and a rear door.

  If the door hadn’t been there, then it would have had to been on the Rex’s end of the building. And that would have been disastrous.

  But Fortune appeared to be in a good mood, and continued to smile.

  “Oh good,” I observed aloud as I examined the door’s knob. “It has a button and doesn’t take a key on this side. We are free to leave the building.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact it is,” I retorted.

  “Yeah, hooray for us,” Darla growled. “Back into the great black yonder. And thanks to you and your little Wild Bill Hickok show, we’re on our own again.”

  Ouch.

  I bit off the next retort due to a manly effort of restraint… and the recollection that the last two times I had argued with Darla — two years ago — she had diced me like a tomato. Not to mention, her complaint might have had a little merit. I suppose from a certain point of view the whole jelly-blimp genocide and T-rex/preschool mating could be seen as things getting a tad out of hand.

  Better to be the bigger man and focus on the possible.

  “It’s gonna be okay,” I tried to reassure her. “They’re only two or three stores back. We’ll rejoin them in just a minute.”

  “Oh yeah? How?”

  “Simple. I’ll just step out there, go back down the alley, and start knocking on doors. The T-rex is out front now, remember?”

  I could tell from her glare she didn’t like it, even though she knew I was right. I also supposed I couldn’t really blame her. We had just escaped from a primeval horrorshow that might have bee
n a teensy bit my fault, and now as soon as we reached a safe room I planned to jump right back out there again and start banging on doors.

  “But I’ll tell you what,” I offered as consolation, “we’ve pretty much established this room is clear. You’ll be okay in here. You wait right inside the door where it’s safe, and I’ll go check on the others. Then I’ll knock when I get back. Deal?”

  “What?! Hell no! I’m sticking right behind you!”

  “Huh?” I practically gaped at her. That sounded like a Casey answer, not a Darla Dower answer. And now she had done it twice! What was going on here? Her saying that made as much sense as a meow coming from a wildebeest. I knew Chandra’s machine had twisted things up, but this beggared belief.

  “You heard me. I’m staying right where I can see you.”

  That’s when I finally got it.

  I had been misreading her. This wasn’t Darla being plucky or pushing herself to be braver than ever before. This was Darla being the same old Darla, but with a new wrinkle.

  “You aren’t backing me up,” I realized aloud. “That’s not what you’re doing at all! You’re just trying to make sure I don’t ditch you.”

  She didn’t answer, but she didn’t have to. The defiant glare on her face said it all.

  She actually believed I would do it. She actually believed I might cut and run on her.

  I stared in dismay at her as that thought took hold. And the more I thought about it, the madder I got. Seriously? I had done nothing but right by her, and this was the thanks I received? This was simply incomprehensible! And I had had enough!

  “Dammit, Darla! What the hell is your problem with me?”

  “My problem?” She snapped back. “My problem is I don’t trust you. That’s my problem.”

  “Why?” I spread my hands in exasperation. “Why on earth not? Here I am, literally changing history by helping you get out of this alive, and you still don’t trust me? My god, I saved your life!”

  “By mistake!”

  “Yeah,” I conceded, “but a mistake I was willing to live with. Hell, more than that, it was a mistake I’m trying to see stays permanent. What difference does it make now?”

  She looked at me like I had grown horns for a second, then shook her head with a bitter laugh.

  “You just don’t get it,” she snarled. “You’re standing there fitting yourself for a halo, when the truth is you ain’t all that different from Tommy.”

  “What?! How the hell do you figure that?! You really are crazy. You have to be the most ungrateful wretch I have ever met!”

  “Oh, I’m crazy, am I? You mind if I ask you a question?”

  “Sure. Whatever floats your boat.”

  “Okay. You said this godlike ‘man in white’ put you on the cell tower, and you appeared right after that girl, Ashlyn, died. Right?”

  “Yeah,” I frowned at the odd direction this conversation had taken. “So what?”

  “Ever wondered why right then? Why would this ‘all knowing’ guy put you on the tower at that exact moment?”

  “I don’t know,” I shrugged helplessly. “Maybe he’s random in some ways? Believe me, he’s not human and I’m not sure it’s possible to guess at what his motives are.”

  “Oh, I don’t think it’s so terribly hard. I think you just have a talent for avoiding the answers you don’t want to see. Even when they are staring you right in the face.”

  I started to get an ugly sinking feeling I stood on unsure ground, although I couldn’t figure out why.

  “Okay, you’ve lost me, Darla. What in the hell are you talking about?”

  “We’re getting to that. As a matter of fact, we’re now at the million-dollar question. You ready?”

  “Sure,” I sighed. “Lay it on me.”

  “Here’s what I want to know,” she said through clenched teeth, “and you answer me honestly. What if he had put you in five minutes earlier?”

  “Huh?” I now squinted at her in confusion.

  “What if he had put you in five minutes earlier?” Her voice now dropped to a deadly monotone. “What if you had appeared up there, armed as you are, and looked down to see Ashlyn climbing up the tower?”

  “Okay, what’s the point?” I replied with wary discomfort. Ashlyn’s death was a subject I had struggled mightily with over the past two years. Of all the faces that looked at me from the darkness in my nightmares, hers haunted me the most.

  “She’s climbing toward her death,” Darla bored in. “That monster is waiting for her, and you know it’s there. The ‘old you’ froze up on her, and now she is trying to finish the job herself. She’s only seconds away from climbing within its reach, and it’s about to grab her and start whipping her to shreds. And you know all that. Now you look me in the eye, and you tell me what you would have done.”

  “Darla,” I found myself breathing heavily. I did not like this. “I-I was told to avoid changing the past. I was supposed to avoid changing anything.”

  “I didn’t ask what you were told,” she stepped up and locked eyes with me, “and I didn’t ask what you were supposed to do. I asked what you would do. Now, answer… the… question.”

  I knew what I was supposed to say. I knew what I wanted to say. But I also knew Darla would see it for the lie it was.

  “I… don’t know.”

  “Oh yeah?” she smirked, but with a strange look of despair in her eyes. “I think your ‘man in white’ knew. And I think you know, too. So, answer the question!”

  “Okay, fine! I would have probably screwed up and saved her! Is that what you want to hear? What the hell does this have to do with anything?!”

  “Yeah,” she muttered, and nodded to herself. “Yeah, I figured as much.”

  Then she turned her attention back to me.

  “You just hold that thought. Remember that answer. Because now I’m going to tell you something,” she whispered in a strained tone. “I’m going to tell you what happened right before you stopped Tommy from killing me.”

  She shuddered and hugged herself, and I knew she must be reliving the event as she talked.

  “That monster whose body you saw, it ambushed us. It caught us completely by surprise. When it leapt out of the trees it was already too close for Tommy to use his bow, and it had that spear… and I thought we were dead.

  But I was wrong. Tommy wiped the floor with it. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. All he had was his knife, but the fight wasn’t even close.”

  Oh, I could believe it. Tommy had been a born killer… a full-blown psychopath who was frighteningly strong and a martial artist as well. I had tangled with him up close and personal two years ago, and it took both Ed shooting him with his gun, and Casey putting an arrow through his knee to weaken him enough for me to have a chance.

  “He just butchered it,” Darla continued. “And when the thing fell, he slammed it back up against the tree and nailed it there with its own spear. Then while it was dying, choking on its own blood, he got face to face with it, looked it in the eyes, and started stabbing it. Again, and again, and again. I think he was whispering to it while he did. And even after the creature died, he wouldn’t quit. He kept slamming his knife into it like he wanted to keep killing it forever.

  I finally yelled at him to stop, that it was dead already. Just to leave it alone and let’s go.

  But he didn’t do that. He turned and looked at me, while he kept twisting the knife in the thing’s corpse, and he said it was a monster… and it would die like a monster. Just like Ashlyn had been a hero, and she had died a hero’s death…

  …and just like I was a whore, and he would give me the death of a whore.

  That’s when I knew I had screwed up. That’s when I threw the torch and ran.”

  Darla now breathed heavily herself, but kept her eyes locked with mine.

  “But it seems I didn’t make it, and apparently, that’s exactly what he did,” she concluded. “Jack the Ripper killed whores, didn’t he?”

&nbs
p; I now stared at her in dismay, while putting this new element into context with my prior experience.

  I had been wrong two years ago. Tommy hadn’t mutilated Darla like that as an announcement to us. He had done it as a pronouncement of judgment on her.

  “Darla,” I cautioned, “he was insane. It doesn’t matter what he…”

  “What?” she interrupted. “What he thought? What his opinion was? Yeah, he was a psycho. But he would have saved that… that… Ashlyn… while I was a whore, who got the death of a whore. And you?”

  “Darla…”

  “You admitted you would have saved her as well. Even if it meant screwing up time, you would have consciously saved her while knowing that! But when you followed me and Tommy from the cell tower to the jogging path, you knew what was coming then, too. You knew what he was going to do to me. I bet you even saw what he left of me with your own eyes!”

  She stopped, swallowed, and continued in a hoarse whisper.

  “And yet you went the other way.”

  Shit.

  I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples while desperately hunting something to say. Part of me insisted it wasn’t as simple as that, but I couldn’t deny a single thing she said.

  “So you’ll have to forgive my cynicism. But from where I’m standing, it looks like you and Tommy were pretty much on the same page. He was just a little more proactive about it.”

  “Darla…” I opened my eyes and tried once more.

  “But hey,” she gave another bitter laugh, “since you screwed up and saved me by accident, you’ve decided to do me a solid and get me out of here. Hell, you’re heading that way anyway, right? So who am I to complain?! Thank you! Thank you ever so much! You’re my fucking hero! Happy now?”

  Right then I could have really used that ability to say the right thing that I have always envied in other people. Honestly, it must be so cool. But I’m me, which meant whatever consolation I had to offer would almost be guaranteed to be stupid and make matters worse, so I elected to go a different route.

  Part of me felt mad at her, because I still thought the accusation was unfair. Yet another stood aghast at how fearfully close her take on things fit what had happened. It suggested an ugly side to my actions that made me uneasy to consider. Even if it were only partly true, it didn’t exactly make for a comfortable thing to face about oneself.