Nightwalk 2 Read online

  I’ll give her credit, she jumped up without argument. But she still stood by the thing and I knew that wouldn’t be good enough. Not even close. As I reached to grab her arm I could already see small tracks of blood start to run from the cut forming on her neck.

  “Hey!” she protested as I jerked her away from the seat and toward the flare.

  “GO!” I yelled as I snatched up Tommy’s duffle bag and the shotgun she had leaned against the bench. “Grab the light and run for the front of the cemetery! Now, or you’re going to DIE!”

  “But…” She stooped to pick up the flare, yet still hesitated in obvious confusion.

  “NOW, DAMMIT! RUN! I’ll BE RIGHT BEHIND YOU!”

  This time she did as instructed. It dismayed me to see the blood seeping into her collar as she turned and bolted up the path. I guess she didn’t feel it due to being jerked around, and the sweat that covered us both.

  I drew my pistol and charged after her. As I did I could only pray we had acted in time. But that assumed we could actually take any actions capable of mattering in the first place. If I was right, she now ran from a predator who ultimately won all its races. Her only hope lay in the possibility these were special circumstances and this time it wouldn’t pursue her far.

  I saw her look back once, but when she saw I followed close behind she continued the race toward the front. I couldn’t really blame her. If I were her I wouldn’t want to be running around alone tonight either. At least her legs seemed to be functioning fine.

  I took heart in the fact her head didn’t fall mostly off by the time we approached the front entrance. Well, that and the fact my much older legs didn’t fall off either. Since she still lived at this point, the cut must have gotten no worse once we started running and we were probably out of the danger zone.

  “Hold it!” I wheezed. “That’s good enough!”

  She stopped beneath the wrought iron arch of the front gate, and I admit to being gratified to see her toss the flare to the ground so she could hold her knees while she bent over and tried to catch her breath, too. If somebody at least ten years my junior was also winded, I couldn’t be too far out of shape. Right?

  The fact she appeared as winded as me made me feel a tad more kindly toward her. After all, at least some of our problems with each other could be due to her having the worst night of her life, too. Maybe a little more effort on my part might improve matters.

  At least a token gesture.

  Besides, a little chivalry never killed anybody.

  “Here, take this.” I staggered to a slow walk and pulled a strip of cloth from Casey’s rag bag as I approached. “Your neck is bleeding.”

  In hindsight, I probably should have given her one of the red strips.

  Darla looked confused as she took the white strip I offered and pressed it up against her neck. She held it there for a few seconds before pulling it away to look at the results.

  While she had lost nowhere near a dangerous amount of blood, she had bled profusely for a brief period. And that blood had mixed with the layer of sweat covering her skin, both thinning it and increasing its apparent volume.

  “Uh, Darla,” I began as she stared open-mouthed at the gore-soaked rag, “it’s not as bad…”

  She looked up from the rag to me, and back at the rag again. Then her eyes rolled back in her head and she collapsed in a boneless heap.

  “…as it looks.” I finished in lame resignation.

  Well, shit.

  Apparently in my hands a little chivalry can be a weapon of mass destruction.

  I gazed at the fainted woman before me, glanced down at my watch, then groaned in disbelief. This just kept getting worse by the minute.

  Over half an hour had passed in my mission to save the world from a screaming death, and so far I had managed to screw up history, go the wrong way, get myself injured, and gallantly terrorize a woman into unconsciousness. The Three Stooges couldn’t have done it better.

  And the clock was still ticking.

  Chapter Four: Blazing Trails

  Funny thing about the past….an awful lot of people live in it.

  Some probably do it because in their case it might have honestly been a better place. Others may dwell there due to some deep-seated regret that won’t let them go.

  But I think for the most part people do it because it’s safe.

  If only they knew then what they know now. If they were only the person then they are now, think how much better they could have handled things. The past did its worst and they survived, so imagine how large and in charge the new wiser, more experienced version of them would have been. They’ve got the inside info on what was what back then. They’ve got it covered.

  Trust me, it’s all a crock of shit.

  They might be a different person, or they might not. If they are, they will still only be a bit player in a world that’s a whole lot bigger than they are. Their being different only means it will react to them differently. And whatever inside info they think they have isn’t going to last them very long, especially since every time they use it the world changes into something they remember less and less.

  In almost no time at all they’ll find themselves winging it in a whole new present, just like they had been doing all their lives.

  Only this time they’d be kicking themselves twice as hard for the screw-ups.

  Kind of like I was doing at the moment

  Except I didn’t have the luxury of time for self-recriminations.

  As I stood under the wrought-iron entrance to the Woodlawn Gardens Cemetery, looking down at Darla’s unconscious form, I understood I had some decisions to make. Some very important ones. I would need to make them quickly, and then commit to them.

  So that’s what I did.

  I thought harder than I ever had in my life. I thought about the stakes, I thought about the things I had been told and the things I knew, I thought about the things I stood for, and the things I was willing to do. And I did all this thinking within a couple of minutes.

  Then I made those decisions and got to work.

  Since we had run from the bench almost immediately after I heard the carnage at the playground, I knew Ed and Casey would still be on the early part of that trail heading back through the trees at Stratton Park. I had a little time, but I would have to move fast.

  I whipped out the first aid kit and did a fast bandage job on Darla’s cut. As I suspected it wasn’t deep. We had acted fast enough to keep it from forming into the horrific wound it would have become. Considering it had started to manifest first, I suspected I now knew how Tommy had killed her last time. But this time it amounted to little more than a shallow slice in the skin. In truth, the wound didn’t require this level of attention, and I’m sure Casey would have had something sarcastic to say about the advisability of wrapping somebody’s neck… although her being Casey and this being Darla, she might have also suggested a tourniquet.

  But none of that mattered because the purpose of the bandage wasn’t really for medical utility anyway.

  Then I stubbed out the flare, just on the off chance the other group came up behind us faster than I calculated. Considering it was only half spent I slid the unburnt half into my back pocket. Waste not, want not. Finally, I pulled a capsule of smelling salts from the kit before returning it to my backpack.

  Snapping the little capsule in my fingers, I waved it under Darla’s nose and was gratified to see her respond immediately. The faster we got this show on the road, the better. Now I just needed to push my minimal people skills to their limit and handle this situation without making it worse.

  “Easy,” I admonished in as firm but gentle a way as I could manage when she came fully awake and reached for her throat. “It’s okay. The bleeding is stopped and I’ve bandaged the wound. It’s not deep and it’s not dangerous.”

  Darla eyed me warily as she felt the bandage for herself.

  “What is happening to me?” she whispered, alarm beginning to show on
her face as the memory of what happened returned. “Why was I bleeding? Why didn’t I…”

  “Easy,” I repeated as her voice started to rise. “It’s over. You had a close encounter with something that can’t happen again. Okay? We just got a little too close to the way things originally happened, and… time… tried to correct itself. But now that you’re away from there, the danger is gone.”

  “Away from…” She frowned at me in confusion, then I saw understanding dawn in her eyes. “The bench! Oh my god, was that the bench where…”

  “Yeah,” I interrupted. “And I guess you being in the same place in two different ‘timelines’ made it possible for history to try and superimpose the original outcome over the new one.”

  “Y-you mean I have history trying to kill me, too?! So I really am supposed to be dead.”

  I saw the despair creeping back into eyes and spoke to head it off fast.

  “Had,” I insisted. “But the thing is it had its shot and missed, and we’re not going to give it another one. So that doesn’t matter anymore. Understand? There ain’t any ‘supposed to be’ about it. It worked out one way before, and now things happened a different way. That’s all there is to it. Besides, there’s something more important for you to know.”

  “More important?” she looked up at me in disbelief.

  Now came the crucial part.

  I don’t believe there are a lot of truly useless people in the world. I honestly don’t. Having said this, I have to admit Darla had done a pretty good job so far of persuading me she numbered among them. But in hindsight, up until now she had been fighting us because she had truly believed in taking different courses of action than the ones we had decided upon.

  So maybe if I could get her on the same page as me... well then, that might change things a little.

  Yes, she could be a manipulative, duplicitous, backstabbing narcissist. And yes, I think Casey was dead right about her relationship to men and the world. But even if everything Casey said held true, it couldn’t be the whole story. It just meant those would be the factors I would be working with, and as long as I did so consciously, they could just as well work for me as against.

  I understood she wouldn’t be anything like having Casey, or even Ashlyn, along as backup. But I didn’t expect her to be. I would settle for simply having another set of eyes to watch my back, and another brain helping to figure out my way forward. I just needed to get her wanting to go my way forward.

  At the moment she was terrified, and wrapped tight in her expectations to die any second. But if I understood what Casey had told me correctly, then right now she needed two things to give her a little room to function better.

  A guy she could count on to be between her and the world…

  …and hope.

  It just so happened I could provide a little of both. And to hell with judging her on it for the moment. She was who she was and I would work with that.

  “Yeah,” I said, “Like you said, I came back from somewhere and changed things. I didn’t mean to, but that doesn’t matter. The truth is even if Tommy hadn’t killed you, you would have ended up dying anyway. But guess what? That doesn’t matter anymore either. And do you want to know why? Because what does matter is I still know a couple of things that are going to happen, and I just figured out a way I can change history a little further and get you out of this alive. You interested?”

  ###

  Seven minutes later the pair of us stood at the head of the service alley running between the back of Madre Mona’s Mexican Restaurant and the six-foot cinderblock wall on the north side of the graveyard. What little of it we could make out in the dim light of my glowstick didn’t look promising.

  The alien looking curtains of moss that gently waved as they hung down the sides of the dumpster from under the lid didn’t help matters either. I noticed more of it hanging from the power line running from the meter to a pole next to the graveyard fence.

  The alley yawned before us like a bleak, overgrown urban tunnel leading straight to the underworld

  “I don’t know what scares me more,” Darla groaned, “the idea of going down there, or the fact I’m following a man who says he was sent from the future to save the world by a pharaoh in a dinner jacket.”

  Lovely.

  When would I learn not to try describing the man in white to people? It was pointless. I couldn’t possibly capture his true effect in words, and his description did make me sound slightly insane.

  At least my decision to try and work with Darla had already borne fruit. She had lived in this area much longer than me, and almost immediately after hearing about my quarry’s escape by crawling through a pipe, she identified his escape route. It was located in a flood pond on the west side of the highway, a couple of hundred yards past the north overpass.

  That meant I now had a clear destination.

  It also meant I still had Darla for backup.

  “C’mon,” I grumbled. “I’ll take care of the fighting, and your job is to make sure nothing sneaks up on me. Just promise me if something leaps out and tries to eat us, you won’t jump and blast me in the ass with that shotgun.”

  “I’ll try and remember that,” she growled.

  I know, I know… I had already cautioned her on it once. But dammit, I had Darla Dower walking behind me with a loaded shotgun. The number of potential scenarios that ended with me featuring a rear end full of buckshot boggled the mind.

  Still, I had made this bed, so…

  “Fair enough. Don’t worry, we’re going to pull this off. The main thing to keep in mind is if we can get there and intercept this guy before he escapes, you can use his route for a getaway.”

  “Right. And you really think this will work?”

  “Yeah. It’s the route he took and it worked. There’s no reason it shouldn’t work for you as well. And since it was a route successfully used the first time, but I intend to make sure the original guy doesn’t use it, history might actually be happier to see somebody else step in his place. So you’ve got that working for you, too.”

  That had been the hope I had offered, and she had found it both reasonable and realistic enough to get her on board. Yet the pipe was a future goal, and right now I needed to get her down this alley.

  “But we’ve got less than two hours and this is the only way.”

  “I know,’ she grumbled, “but it doesn’t mean I have to like it. This is worse than the neighborhood streets.”

  I suppose she had a point. It did look bad. But the only other way would be to go out front of the stores in the open parking lot, which would be suicide. Out there we would be completely exposed to aerial predators. Even as things were, we were going to be a lot more exposed in this alley than I liked. The trees overhanging the fence from the cemetery were spaced uncomfortably far apart.

  To make things worse, circumstances restricted me to using my glowstick for illumination. The flare would light up much of the backside of the building, which would be fully visible to the other group who should be making their way through the cemetery any minute. Not good.

  I had screwed up history enough for one evening.

  So now the time had come to get going, and I would be doing it in the dark.

  I crept into the alley, gun out and senses at full alert. The gloom seemed to close in around me. If anything, the heat and humidity had become even more stifling, and the air reeked of oil and stale Mexican food. I also noticed how the night had settled into a preternatural hush. The only sounds that reached my ears were my own breathing and the soft crunch of my feet on gravel-strewn asphalt.

  The quiet bothered me, but I remembered it being like this last time with Casey and Ed when we entered the graveyard. The more distant gunshots and howls still sounded, yet it seemed like everything closer had gone silent. I wondered if it was a result of the super-predator’s rampage at the playground a few minutes back. I sure hoped so, because I would far rather it be because of some monstrosity’s violent exit of
the area than some other mega-predator’s arrival.

  I could practically feel Darla following behind me. I told her to hang a little farther back, but I doubted she would until I lit a flare.

  We gave the dumpster with its waving moss a wide berth and cautiously ducked under the stuff hanging from the power line. The substance may have been harmless, or maybe not. I had no intention of finding out. Even two years after the event, I still had nightmares about a lady out on a nighttime jog who went to investigate the wrong flowers.

  Then I had to take a deep breath and do a quick and silent dash across a space not covered by one of the trees overhanging the fence. Nothing dropped down on me from the blackness above.

  Once she could see I safely made it, Darla did a fast tiptoe across to join me.

  This gave us another thirty or forty feet of cover. We slunk past the back door to Madre Mona’s while keeping wary eyes on a pile of cardboard boxes stacked next to the exit. We had heard a faint scurry from one of the containers. On any other night I would have written it off as a rat, but this wasn’t any other night. We didn’t turn our attention away from the pile until the darkness swallowed it behind us.

  Then we had to make another quick dash across an uncovered stretch of alleyway.

  By now we both breathed heavily from the sheer tension. We were well into the alley and it offered little room to maneuver, but lots in the way of potential ambush. We stayed low and close to the cinderblock cemetery wall as we snuck farther down the narrow passage.

  It wasn’t until right after we scurried across the next unprotected stretch that Darla spotted the threat.

  “Wait,” she hissed, just as we started forward under the cover of the foliage. “I thought I saw something move behind us.”

  That didn’t sound good. I stopped and let her step around me, then opened the little window on my glow-stick holder to its widest. It still didn’t amount to a great deal of light, but it showed me what I needed to see.

  Pale, frond-like tendrils slowly descended from the blackness in the space we had just crossed.