Nightwalk 2 Read online

  My hearing must have started to return because I realized I could hear the monster’s “chirrs”, and they were now weak and fading. Fresh hope spurred me to struggle even harder than before. I got my forearm up under its “head” and started to push in an effort to peel the damn thing off of me. The next time I slammed the knife home I left it buried in the beast. Then I pulled hard on it, cutting it open all the way down its side.

  That was the final killing blow.

  The monster’s side opened up and a large quantity of warm bug guts poured out over us both. It felt like being smothered in a vile gravy of chopped organs.

  I retched and struggled in the dead thing’s grasp. The tendrils didn’t want to let go, causing me to slowly tear myself free like a Velcro strap on a shoe. That quickly turned into an exercise in self-inflicted pain. The corpse’s legs were stiff, and extracting myself from those took effort as well.

  Yet finally I pulled myself free.

  I lay gasping in the cramped front seat of the cruiser, almost too exhausted and sore to take comfort in my survival. How hurt was I? I knew I had to have sustained more damage. I knew the lion’s share of the goop I lay in belonged to the predator, but I also suspected there were going to be plenty of red streaks in the pale sludge.

  Unfortunately, the light from the outside flare was too dim inside the car to tell much. If anything, due to my still eye-dazzled condition, the light in the car seemed to be getting dimmer. No… waitaminute… it WAS getting dimmer.

  The square of flare light on the ceiling moved and elongated. Something, or someone, had picked up the flare and now moved away with it!

  What the hell?

  With a barely suppressed groan I struggled to sit up. My hand slipped and I fell back once, but then I succeeded on my second try.

  As I suspected, somebody was making off with my light.

  “David?” I croaked, “What are you doing?”

  The kid yelped and whirled, wide-eyed, and almost dropped the flare in the process. From the look on his face, one would think he saw a ghost. Which now that I considered it, might be exactly what he thought. From the outside, all they saw was the huge bug crawl into the car after me, a few gunshots, then nothing.

  “I…I…your girlfriend told me to!”

  “Huh?”

  “Y-your girlfriend. She said you were dead and we needed the light. So she sent me to go get it.”

  Oh.

  Of course.

  A glance back at the entrance to the alleyway revealed Darla to be holding the baby in one arm and the shotgun in the other. She now stared in our direction with a tense, but otherwise unreadable expression.

  You’re the mystery writer, Casey’s voice spoke in my head, and you don’t recognize a… what do they call it… femme fatale when you see one?

  Right. Point taken.

  Darla was a human being, scared, and had actually tried to help a couple of times, but she was still Darla. This really shouldn’t have been a surprise. In truth, it surprised me how disappointed I found myself being in her.

  “Just a second, David,” I sighed. “I’ll go back with you.”

  I reached down beside me and fished the three shotgun shells out of the goop on the front seat. No point in leaving what I had nearly been killed over. Then I pulled my hat from the floorboard where it lay on top of the creature and squashed it down on top of my head. I won’t even bother trying to describe what that felt like.

  Then I scootched over, opened the driver’s side door, and creaked to my feet.

  The boy watched with an expression akin to awe as I hobbled over to join him. He cast several surreptitious glances up at me as I limped along with him back to the others.

  I guess from his point of view I had just slugged it out with a monster and won. He probably didn’t understand how I would have far rather avoided that whole thing, and had only been caught in it due to my enormously stupid move of reaching in through the window in the first place. The whole fight had been avoidable. Regardless, the kid probably hadn’t seen much in the way of victories tonight… only people dying.

  So now he looked at me like I was some kind of badass, when dumbass was a lot closer to the truth.

  I guess it didn’t matter. History would probably try to snuff him out the first chance it got. And if it didn’t, he was welcome to walk away from this with whatever lessons suited him. That’s the way things usually seemed to work out anyway.

  And speaking of lessons learned…

  “Seriously, Darla?” I shook my head in disbelief as we rejoined them. “You sent the kid to go sneak up where the monster might be and get the light?”

  “We needed a light! You have them all!” she replied with a defensive glare. “Besides, he volunteered!”

  “He’s what?! Twelve?!”

  “I’ll be thirteen in three months,” David offered.

  “See?!” Darla pointed his direction, “Practically a teenager!”

  I stared at her in dismay.

  “You are unbelievable,” I said in wonder.

  Casey truly had nailed it.

  Darla might not be a psychopath, or murderer, or even a “whore”, but I finally appreciated right then how she was an animal ruthlessly committed to her own survival. All other considerations were secondary. And just like the femme fatales in noir movies… it wasn’t personal. She lived in a world where she did what she had to do. She didn’t see herself as making choices, but in having her hand forced by circumstances at every turn.

  She hadn’t meant to get me clobbered by Tommy, or Ethan murdered back at the cell tower. But she had still let it happen. She could have yelled to warn me of Tommy’s approach, but in her mind that option didn’t exist. And she wouldn’t have intended to get David hurt if something happened to him on this latest move either. As a matter of fact, I’m sure she silently prayed for his safety with every step he took… but she had sent him all the same. She thought I had died, and Lupe didn’t speak English, so it was next man up and that “man” was David.

  She just wanted to get out of this alive, but because of who she was her approach to the problem had a bad tendency to come with collateral damage. And it always would. A cornered femme fatale is a notoriously dangerous creature to be around, and she had been cornered all night.

  I had temporarily neutralized that after convincing Darla I intended to get her to safety. Even though she didn’t completely trust me, I had made her feel secure enough to leave matters in my hands. She had even stepped up and helped when I wanted the people in the fabric store to go with us… hell, she even did it when my decision to do so had confirmed in her eyes how I found their lives worth trying to save when I hadn’t hers. Being safe gave her room to bend a little. But once I “died” she had reverted straight to form.

  It would have been enraging if it weren’t so maddeningly sad.

  And the bitterly hilarious part of the whole deal was that my grasping this didn’t change a goddamned thing. Next to preventing the world from dying, somehow my overarching goal had become to get her out of here. Sometimes even I don’t understand the way my mind works.

  Yet be that as it may…

  “David,” I growled at the kid while glaring at my “partner” for the evening, “this is Darla. Darla is bigger than you. Darla has a shotgun. Darla is allegedly a grownup!”

  “Hey!” she objected.

  “So the next time something like this happens,” I continued while ignoring her, “you tell Aunt Darla to go prance her happy ass out there and get the road flare herself. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir,” the kid murmured.

  “Oh, thanks a lot,” Darla snapped. “Undermine me with the kid.”

  This time I openly gaped at her.

  “That’s what you took away from this?” I asked in astonishment. “You are an absolute phenomenon!”

  I would have truly loved to flesh things out and explain my outrage further, but I reminded myself I hadn’t been sent back in time to yell at Darl
a Dower.

  I still had a mission to finish. In addition to which, Darla didn’t pose the only problem in this makeshift little group.

  Her sending David meant another situation had now reached the point of demanding my attention as well. And I looked even less forward to approaching that situation than I did to handling matters with Princess Difficulty. I could see no easy way to deal with this one.

  But I needed to deal with it. And it needed to be dealt with right now, before we went any farther and it got somebody killed.

  I held up a hand to forestall whatever comeback she was forming and turned to face the last standing member of our little group.

  “Lupe,” I sighed. “We need to talk.”

  ###

  “No hable Ingles.”

  Yeah, pretty much what I had been expecting.

  Lupe had been hanging back since Darla and I joined him and the others in the alley. And he had been so quiet it was easy to forget he followed back there. He probably preferred it that way. But this time I couldn’t let him do that.

  “Poquito Ingles?” I inquired in a mildly disbelieving tone.

  Look, when you’re raised in South Texas, you pick up a few words here and there. Since Lupe had followed Darla and me instead of Mickey and Justin without any prompting, I suspected the reverse held true in his case.

  He didn’t reply, merely watching me with a wary expression.

  That provided all the answer I really needed. Now for the hard part. I gathered my will and got right to it.

  “Lupe?” I asked gently, gesturing at the burden he carried. “Let me see Lucy, please?”

  He held her protectively and said nothing. Not exactly the agreement I had been hoping for, but I decided it didn’t count as a no. I guess if he decked me I could always take it as a suggestion to rethink my criteria for what I considered permission.

  I stepped up and carefully lifted a fold of cloth obscuring the girl’s face.

  She was so very beautiful.

  Smooth, delicate features, with long lashes and sable hair. Her profile was a pale study in youthful perfection. I could see the character in her face… feminine, expressive and proud. It was easy to understand why any young man would fall in love with her, and I could see why a certain young man would hold on to her for all he was worth. That’s why I truly dreaded what I needed to do next.

  I touched her cooling cheek, then moved two fingers to the side of her neck under her jaw. I took a long time, longer than necessary, but I just wanted to give things every chance I could to work out another way. But it didn’t. In the end, I guess the result didn’t surprise me.

  She was simply too small to have lost so much blood.

  Somebody had put a high-powered rifle round through this petite young woman, and it had done its job all too well. Even though I knew the shooter had done it to save six million lives, the end result of the act still took my breath away. This shouldn’t have happened. None of this should have happened. But it did, and it had left a young man holding the corpse of the future he dreamed of.

  Now I had to find a way to convince him to let it go.

  If I survived this it would be all I could do not to beg the man in white to send me farther back in time, just so I could kick the living shit out of Roger Chandra. But no, instead of that pleasant fantasy, I got this…”

  “Lupe,” I sighed and put a hand on his shoulder. “She’s gone.”

  No answer, just another hard stare. I seemed to be getting a lot of those tonight. He probably already knew it, but knowing and accepting are two different things.

  “You did your best,” I continued in the best consoling voice I had, “but it’s over. There’s nothing you can do for her now. You need to put her down.”

  “No comprende.”

  Shit.

  Maybe he understood me, or maybe he didn’t. Even if he did, I felt like a louse for trying to do this to him. He hadn’t had time to accept it. He hadn’t even had time to start mourning yet.

  But I needed him. I needed real backup. I was hurt and wearing down by the minute. And since I didn’t anticipate things getting any better, I needed another grown adult who wasn’t Darla and preferably had their hands free.

  “Lupe…”

  “No comprende,” he said with more force.

  Dammit!

  I started to try again, but this time Darla interrupted.

  “Holy shit,” her voice dripped with sarcasm. “Are you kidding me? How old were you before your mom started letting you play with other kids?”

  Lovely.

  Apparently I needed to deal with the peanut gallery first.

  “That’s not helping, Darla,” I growled as I took her by the arm and led her a little aside. I noticed she had already handed the baby back to David.

  “Helping what?” she fired back. “The man isn’t miserable enough and now you’re trying to piss him off, too?”

  “No, I’m not trying to piss him off. I’m trying to get him to accept reality so he can help us get out of here alive. Because if he doesn’t, the next time I end up fighting some awful monster it’s not going to be him leaping in to back me up… and it damn sure ain’t going to be David. It’s going to be you. Got it?”

  “Oh, I got it,” she whispered in a fierce tone. “I’m just waiting for you to get it.”

  Huh?

  “Okay, Darla. You want to run that by me again. But make it quick, because we don’t have time for this.”

  She gave me a long-suffering look that didn’t do anything to improve my mood.

  “Do the words ‘situational awareness’ mean anything to you?” she sighed.

  “Darla…” I grumbled.

  “Nevermind,” she snapped. “Let me see if I can take care of it, okay? Watching you try to deal with people is like getting a root canal while listening to clown music.”

  Ouch! As if she had a lot of room to talk.

  Okay, maybe she could be good with people on the rare occasions she bothered to try. And maybe I didn’t always do so hot even when I tried, but at least I bothered to try a lot. Which either meant I was a better person or I hopelessly sucked, but I decided that wasn’t important right then.

  “Be my guest,” I shot back. “But we need him to do this.”

  “I ain’t guaranteeing nothing,” she retorted, “but maybe an approach involving a bit more understanding will work. What I need YOU to do is lead us over there to that island, near the rear of the front façade.”

  “Fine. Anything else?”

  “Yeah, try not to jump in and say anything stupid for five minutes.”

  Grrrr…

  The amazing thing is even then I never wavered in my commitment to get her out of there. Nope, not me. I was a bigger man than that. Instead, I simply adjusted my plan to include shoving her head first into that escape pipe, and then planting my foot so hard in her ass it would shoot her to the other subdivision in three seconds flat.

  “Whatever you say,” I shrugged absentmindedly, my mind now lost in the glorious vision of my boot making cataclysmic contact with her butt.

  Oh yeah, I intended to set off seismometers all the way to Tokyo. I had just given myself a whole new reason to live.

  Bur first things first.

  I turned and started back across the street, this time heading between the barricade of cars and the front entrance. The rest of the group left the mouth of the alley and fell in behind me. We weren’t going far, but at least we were on the move, and heading in the right direction.

  I kept a close eye on the glowing branches above, just in case another creature like the last one lurked up there. Now I understood all the brass casings on the ground. That thing had probably once been part of a larger group, and most of the police had probably been blinded in their fight with them. I figured several died, and the rest did a fighting retreat to somewhere else with the bugs in pursuit. I didn’t know what to make of the lack of bodies, although I had no idea how much of a corpse these monsters co
nsumed.

  We reached the island and as the flare illuminated the area I started to get an idea of what Darla might be up to.

  The rear of the façade had a large flowerbed planted behind it. The garden extended from the wall in a large semicircle, with three different colors of flowers planted within. A decorative stone bench sat in the flowers near the front. A short column flanked each side of the bench, and each were topped with statues of young maidens in diaphanous robes bearing pitchers.

  It was just another upscale touch in a neighborhood that took such things for granted.

  Darla motioned for me to stop. Naturally, the boy and Lupe stopped alongside me.

  Giving me a serious look that I took as a suggestion to remain quiet, she turned and walked over to the flower garden. She moved slowly, and surprised me by stepping over the stone border and making her way into the flower bed itself. Once there, she scanned the ground around her. Then, almost as if we weren’t standing in the middle of death-infested nightmare, she started picking flowers.

  She moved with solemn deliberation, as if picking and choosing among the blossoms. I chafed at her to move faster, but kept my peace. I had already taken shot and this was her show.

  After she had picked a handful of flowers, she returned to the bench. Then, with delicate care, Darla started laying the flowers down in some form of arrangement at one end. She never said a word.

  She didn’t have to.

  A glance over at Lupe revealed him to be clutching Lucy tighter than ever, shaking his head in agonized negation. He knew what was coming. He didn’t make a sound, but tears glistened on his cheeks.

  Darla finished her arrangement, but still held one flower as she straightened and turned our way.

  “Lupe, come here… ven aqui,” she said in a gentle yet firm tone.

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t move. He simply shook his head. His face was like stone, but the tears now flowed freely.

  I couldn’t imagine being him right then. The young man had too much pride to cry, yet too much grief to contain. And now it left him voiceless in the presence of a woman trying to make him face the truth.

  “This is no good,” Darla gestured at him and the body in his arms. “This is… no bueno.”