Nightwalk 2 Page 25

  Since that meant the two of them were alone out there somewhere, I shared the sentiment.

  As we rushed to disentangle me from the creature, it started to become obvious what a sorry state I was in. My shirt now hung in tatters. Blood-soaked tatters. Charred, blood-soaked tatters. And the sleeve of my shirt had been half torn off from where the monster bit me. I didn’t even want to think about what I looked like under the mess.

  Between the two of us, we finally extracted me from the dead obscenity’s grip, with the baby howling in the background the whole time. As cruel as it sounds, we both ignored it. There was simply nothing we could do for the kid right then. He would have to wait until we rejoined the others.

  But when I finally stepped free of the monster’s corpse, things went downhill fast. As I started forward to retrieve the flare burning nearby, my legs wobbled and I went straight to my knees. The adrenaline had started wearing off. And as it did, all the damage I had done to myself over the past few hours landed on me like a mountain.

  Lupe barked something in Spanish and motioned for me to wait as he went and retrieved the flare instead. I had no choice but to comply. Hell, it took everything I had to keep from collapsing further. I simply hurt that bad.

  The other man returned with the flare, and after a few seconds of study he put it in my left hand. I started to object to having to carry it with my injured arm, but then realized what he was up to. Coming around to my other side, he bent and pulled my uninjured arm over his shoulder, then helped me back to my feet.

  His strength surprised me, despite him being a little smaller than me. And it mortified me to realize how badly I needed his support.

  “Gracias, Lupe,” I thanked him, slightly abashed, but now focusing on trying to support as much of my own weight as possible.

  “De nada.”

  The grim tone he used when accepting my thanks caught me off guard. I thought for a second I had somehow angered him. But when I looked over and saw the bleakness in his eyes, I had one of my rare moments of insight and actually understood.

  There is no joy in being thanked for saving somebody when you couldn’t save the person who meant the world.

  He pointed us north, and I followed his lead without saying anything else.

  We hobbled onward— two different men in two very different worlds of suffering— but the orphaned baby’s cries emanating from my backpack spoke for us all.

  ###

  A long sixty seconds later, I discovered where Darla and David had holed up.

  A car slowly materialized out of the blackness ahead. It sat dead in the road, and I could make out Darla’s tense face behind the windshield illuminated by her glowstick.

  Of course! I remembered Cassie saying she and her husband had abandoned their vehicle up the road. Apparently when Lupe had spotted the car he saw the opportunity to stash the other two in there and hurry back to help me.

  Darla opened the door and came out just as we hobbled up.

  “Did you get them all?” she asked, staring fretfully into the darkness behind us.

  “Yeah,” I gasped, slapping my hands down on the hood of the car to brace myself as Lupe released me. “Problem solved. Now I need you to come over here and get my ammo out so I can reload. While I do that, you pull the kid out of my backpack and see what you can do for him. We have nineteen minutes, which means you guys need to get into that pipe within the next five, so let’s move.”

  She started to look cross at being given orders, but then grimaced and hustled around behind me. I fished out the empty magazines I had stuffed in my pants pocket, while she got the ammo. Spreading them out on the hood of the car, I took the bullets from Darla and started a fast load of the first magazine while she untied my backpack flap. I wanted to do this fast, smooth, and by the numbers…

  …which naturally meant it wouldn’t exactly go that way.

  “Oh my god!” Darla gasped behind me.

  “What?” I paused in alarm.

  Then the smell hit me.

  And it was vile.

  “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me!” I practically howled at the heavens, then fought to refocus on loading bullets. “Tell me the kid was wearing a diaper.”

  “I wish!”

  “Seriously?!”

  “They must have had to change him sometime earlier,” she gagged. “Augh! He’s been sick. There’s like a gallon of diarrhea in here! He’s twisted half out of his sheet too, and it’s all over everything.”

  Of course it was.

  And between the sweat, the bug guts, and now this, I stood awash in a stench that would set off fire alarms.

  Mark Garrett… savior of worlds, but don’t stand downwind.

  “Just do what you can with the kid,” I groaned. “We’ve gotta move.”

  Darla plucked the baby out of my pack and carried him like a radioactive ingot around to the side of the hood. Then, while I finished loading, she used every rag in Casey’s rag bag to give the distressed child a hurried wipe-down.

  “From here on out, you stay bare-bottomed,” she growled at the baby as she worked. “Hell, it’s hot anyway.”

  Meanwhile, I finished pushing shells into the final magazine and suppressed a sigh of relief as I secured it to my belt. Despite having Lupe standing nearby with the shotgun, I had been anxious about not having my primary weapon. In this place, it felt uncomfortably like being naked. But being fully armed again helped immeasurably.

  The uncomfortable truth is that man’s rise from the prehistoric darkness came as much from his weapons as his tools. We used the stone hatchet to build the shelter, yet it was the arrows and spears which kept the tiger at bay. Without them, we are fearfully vulnerable creatures. But over the eons we had built ourselves a world that gave most of us the luxury of forgetting our vulnerability… which was fine, as long as that world’s rules were in play.

  But tonight they weren’t, and I needed to get a move on if I wanted to keep that safer world a reality.

  “Done,” I announced, and tried not to totter as I straightened up. “You ready?”

  “Ready,” she snapped as she pulled the baby up to her. Then she turned her head and cooed sweetly in its ear, “And just so you know, sugar… if you ever do to Aunty Darla what you did to him, Aunty Darla will feed you to wolves.”

  Apparently maternal instinct didn’t number among her defining characteristics. Go figure.

  “Then let’s get a move on. Where’s David?”

  “Backseat.” She nodded at the car, “I think the kid is as messed up as you are. Maybe worse.”

  Yeah, I suspected the same thing. He had hit that rock wall hard. While I was a lot more bloody and torn, my damage was all visible. Other than his face and shoulder, I feared his went deep.

  Which gave us all the more reason to keep moving. I dragged myself around to the backseat door and pulled it open.

  “David?” I stuck my head in the car and squinted at the boy.

  No answer.

  “David? Are you okay?”

  Still no answer, and for an awful second I realized I might be talking to a sitting corpse.

  But then he slowly raised his head and looked at me. One eye was now swollen completely shut, and the other looked distant and vague. A thin trail of blood ran like a tear track from his closed eye, and his entire face was smeared with drying blood from the cheekbones down. He didn’t answer, but at least he still lived and reacted to my presence.

  “David,” I continued. “It’s time to get you to safety. I know you are hurting, but I need you to walk. I promise it will only be for a little bit longer. Can you do that for me?”

  He blinked slowly and continued to stare at me without speaking.

  Crap.

  Whatever this was, it started to look a lot worse than shock. And if he couldn’t walk, the only one left who could carry him would be Lupe.

  I had recovered enough to walk unassisted, but not a lot more than that. I now ran on nothing but fumes and the promis
e this would all be over within the next twenty minutes.

  “David?” I asked with waning hope. “You there?”

  Thankfully, some meaning must have sunk through, for the boy blinked again and then gave me a slow nod. And although he moved like an automaton, he finally started moving; I stepped back and watched with concern as he slowly clambered out of the car. Then he shambled along beside me as we joined the others at the car trunk.

  I wasn’t complaining. At this point we were just trying to get there, one small victory at a time.

  But even then, fate couldn’t help but try to daunt us one last time.

  A mutter of thunder accompanied a flash of cloud lightning. One of those brief double flashes. It wasn’t much, but it gave us the barest glimpse of the being whose crushing presence we had been feeling in the sky. The one we were on the very edge of walking under again.

  It’s hard to capture what I saw in words. I honestly don’t think our language is equipped to convey some aspects of the gigantic entity that floated, slowly rotating, over the area.

  In shape, it was vaguely like a vast, uprooted tree. An enormous disk of squirming, mist-shrouded “roots” formed a base stretching hundreds of yards across. And toward the center of that disk, those roots joined and flowed upward to form a titanic, ghastly trunk. The trunk’s surface stayed in constant motion, while also featuring building-sized orifices that opened and closed like obscene mouths randomly placed around its girth. At its top the trunk split into a number of huge, bare limbs that diverged almost horizontally for a distance before curving upward and stretching into the clouds above.

  The whole thing seemed to breathe and change and be alive in ways I don’t know how to convey.

  There was so much more to it than that, but words simply fail me. The description of the behemoth fails without experiencing the incredible presence of the thing.

  Even the brief glimpse of it made my head hurt because I suspected it stretched off in directions my senses weren’t equipped to perceive. Not and stay sane. Colossal as it was, it merely represented part of a much greater whole… the barest fingertip of some unimaginable entity that had inserted a piece of itself into our world for purposes of its own.

  And I had formed a strong suspicion of what those purposes were.

  We needed to move.

  “No way,” Darla moaned as if reading my thoughts, “Forget it. I’m not going under there. I’ll just wait here for the bomb.”

  I understood her attempt to balk. Under other circumstances I would have probably felt the same way.

  “Easy, Darla,” I gently admonished. “I doubt it’s any more aware of your existence than you would be of a random ant in an anthill.”

  “Oh, that’s comforting.”

  “In this case, yes it is. We’re just going to be quiet little ants and walk through the giants shadow on the sidewalk. It will only be for three or four minutes, and then you will be in the pipe. Okay?”

  She took a deep breath, and I could see her try to gather her will.

  “You think we’ll make it?”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “I’m pretty sure we will. As a matter of fact, that thing is doing us a favor without even realizing it. None of the monsters roaming around tonight are going to want to stay under it either, so we’ll have a clear shot.”

  “Right,” she nodded, and squared her jaw. “Clear shot.”

  “Clear shot,” I affirmed.

  I caught Lupe’s attention and pointed first at my eye and then the boy. He nodded his understanding. He would keep an eye on David and I would fend for myself.

  “Okay then, this is it,” I announced and turned toward the north. “We should get there in a few minutes. Darla you walk up front beside me, and Lupe will follow up with the kid.”

  She looked like she intended to object again so I held up my hand and continued…

  “There are some things I need to explain to you before we get there. Important things you’re going to need to know when you climb out the other end of that pipe. And I’m too damned sore to be trying to talk over my shoulder to you.”

  “Fine,” she sighed.

  “Then let’s move out.”

  ###

  I spent my last few minutes in the company of my fellow man that night lecturing, hurting, and trying not to walk like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

  Just to compound the misery, we had only shambled fifty feet down the fog-carpeted road when we reentered the great entity’s shadow.

  Once again, the entire weight of prehistory fell upon our shoulders. The type of prehistory best left forgotten. The surrounding darkness came alive… became hungry, and feral. It thickened around us, seeming to crowd in and diminish our circle of light under the strength of its malice.

  Going back under this thing by our own volition strained every fiber of our resolve. Beside me, Darla hunched her shoulders against the almost conscious malevolence now imbuing the night

  “I know,” I assured her, “but ignore it. Focus on what I’m telling you instead, because it’s a lot more important. Starting with this…”

  I pulled the flashlight from my belt and handed it to her.

  She took it, turned it over, clicked it, then gave me a dour look.

  “Thanks. A dead flashlight. How sweet.”

  “Just listen,” I sighed. “When you get in the pipe be sure and click that thing on and off every so often. I would say there’s about an even chance it will start working once you hit the edge of this thing.”

  “You think?”

  “Yeah. When I showed up this time, it was well after the two distortion events when all the other electronics stopped working. So I thought mine might still work. But they didn’t, which tells me it’s an ongoing effect instead. Something about this mess interferes with electrical stuff.”

  “Okay,” she now looked at the flashlight with new interest. “What else?”

  “I guess you might as well have this as well,” I unclipped the stun gun from my belt and handed it over.

  She looked at the weapon in surprise and then back up at me.

  “You think I’ll need it?”

  “You never know. When you come out the other end, you’re going to be walking into a real mess. While the Cypress Knoll subdivision wasn’t ground zero, it still took a good bit of the blast. I saw some early footage of flattened and burning houses taken before the army moved in and shut down all non-official communication.”

  “Damn,” she whispered.

  I could see her starting to consider implications and decided to save her the time. It was imperative she understood that this was still a long way from over for her.

  “Exactly. They will arrive and take over operations from the local authorities about ten o’clock. You need to be out of there by then.”

  “What do you mean? Why? How?”

  “Just head for the interstate. Move as fast as you can. There will be a Fire Station on your way there, so I recommend leaving David there. Tell them you found him wandering around, that he obviously hit his head and he’s having hallucinations. Then get out of there and move on.”

  “Why?!”

  “Darla, now we’re getting to the really critical part. The government is going to pass this whole event off as a terrorist attack. They are going to say Al Qaeda set off the bomb, and pretend none of the things you saw tonight happened.”

  “You’re shitting me!”

  “No, I’m not. And the thing you need to understand is they will ruthlessly eliminate any threat to that narrative. If you don’t believe me, just wait a week and see what happens to a kid named Paul Maris. He escaped from Coventry Woods with pictures, and went to the newspapers. He ended up in a federal penitentiary. And you might say he’s a lucky one. I know for a fact that a couple of other people in a position to know something about this event had tragic accidents over the next couple of weeks. So I think leaving David with the Fire Department and moving on is a much safer solution than having multiple people fr
om Coventry Woods in one place.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “The important thing is, keep your head down. Don’t be a threat. Personally, I pretended I had been out of town when this happened. It worked, but I’m sure there are other alternatives.”

  “Right,” she whispered. “Shit!”

  “Believe me, I know how you feel. I hate laying all this on you, but we’re almost out of time and you need to know this stuff.”

  She didn’t answer, but merely nodded.

  “Even when you get out of here, this ain’t over.” I continued. “And I want you to know now, the worst part of all is going to be knowing what happened, yet keeping your mouth shut while listening to them lie. You’re going to be picturing the people you lost, the home you lost, the life you lost, the living hell you and they went through, and all while some guy from Homeland Security will be on TV saying it was over in an instant for most people and praising the government’s response in helping the rest. I wish I could tell you how to deal with it, but all I can say is remember the kid in the penitentiary. This is a case where the truth will not set you free.”

  I could see her pale as she absorbed this. It had begun to sink in just how far down the rabbit hole she was.

  “Why would they do that?”

  “I don’t know,” I lied. “It doesn’t matter. The important thing is knowing they are going to do it.”

  In truth, over the years I had come up with a partial theory about the government’s behavior afterward. But to tell it to her would entail explaining who Roger Chandra was, which would dramatically increase the chances of getting her killed.

  After thinking it over for a few months, I had realized that if Chandra had smuggled his device from his lab in south Houston, to his house in north Houston, then it must be something he could fit in a car, or a van. And since he had set it off at his house, it also meant the machine didn’t require an industrial power supply.

  And that was truly frightening.

  Chandra’s dimensional elevator was a far scarier device to fall in the wrong hands than a nuke. It was portable, and it could tear up reality in an area covering miles. And that’s assuming the next builder didn’t scale it up to do more damage. What could a really big one, covertly built in a warehouse and attached straight to the power grid do?