Dark Advent (16 page)

And Erika froze, suddenly defused. She wobbled a couple of jerky sideways steps into her yard and collapsed onto her backside. Watching as the men and their glorified dead-cart rolled away, out of sight.

* *

The next week passed with both terrifying speed and agonizing slowness. Erika watched lots of TV, not caring what was on, and when all the stations signed off for the day, she played movies on the VCR. She gorged when she wasn’t hungry; starved even when she was. She spent one stretch of thirty-six hours doing little more than sleeping. And when at last she awoke and knew that she wouldn’t be sleeping again anytime soon, she finally thought she was emerging from her heart’s coma.

Erika looked at herself in the full-length mirror in her bedroom. The sight alone was enough to make her want to cry, but she wouldn’t allow it. It was the tenth day for those clothes, even her panties. And she’d thought her hair looked bad in the hospital.

“Hi gorgeous,” she said to that horrendous reflection staring back. “No more flaking out, okay? No matter what.”

Then she took the longest shower of her life. She cried during most of it, but for the first time she felt they were healing tears, a runoff of all the poisons that had pooled within her. She was getting cleaned up again, inside as well as out.

A big salad for dinner. Then some serious thinking. At the kitchen table, she scribbled random thoughts on a notepad.

Shortages, she wondered. Undoubtedly. Food. Gasoline. Clothing? She had enough to last a while. But, she then realized, if a lot of people had died, the demand for everything would be dropping.

What about electricity? The power was still on, but not like before. Sometimes it dimmed, browned out, flickered, and once it was gone it might never come back on. At least that was something she had no control over. Stockpiling batteries could do only so much good.
Cross that bridge when we come to it.

Noise…the neighborhood had been abnormally still the past days. So when there came the sound of breaking glass, then braying laughter and the squealing of tires, she heard them as plainly as if they’d come from the next room. Erika dropped her pencil and walked into the living room to peer out the window at the street outside.

A car sat across the street and down a house, a car that didn’t belong: old, grimy, rust-eaten. Its driver was repeatedly slamming the transmission from forward to reverse, back and forth, in little screeching bursts. Three other guys were attacking the house, firing bricks through the windows. The Wilders’ house. Their son Chad had been Cal’s age. The two of them had hung around together some, gone to concerts as they’d gotten older.

Erika pressed her fingertips against the window as she watched the three boys disappear into the house. Moments later they dragged a screaming Chad back out with them. When he struggled, they beat him for it.

I
should do something, I should, but there’s four of them and one of me and I
don’t
want to die.

Who were they, anyhow? Enemies from school? Chad had been an extremely smart kid, maybe just the slightest bit effeminate. Seemed as if guys like that attracted enemies for all the wrong reasons.

Erika pounded a clenched fist against her thigh as they took a long stretch of rope and bound Chad’s ankles and arms. They pulled him screaming and twisting across his lawn, off the curb and into the street…and then tied the other end to their back bumper. Laughing, they all jumped into the car, the engine revving.

They’re gonna DRAG HIM? Why doesn’t somebody DO something?

Erika watched as curtains fluttered in another house across the street. Somebody else who couldn’t get involved. She remembered the ultimate urban horror story, the murder of a young woman in New York City, right around the time Erika must’ve been conceived in her parents’ bed. Thirty-eight witnesses, no heroes. Twenty-three years later, and it didn’t appear that people had changed a bit.

But she could do them one better. It wasn’t much, but she could at least call the police. The man who answered sounded exhausted.

“They’re killing my neighbor,” Erika blurted into the phone. “They beat him and now they’re gonna drag him behind a car!”

“Where do you live?” How could he sound so calm, so…so bored?

Erika gave him the address.

“I’ll try to get somebody over there as soon as I can.”

That was it? “No, you don’t understand, this is happening
now.
”

A low, weary groan. “No, I don’t think
you
understand. There aren’t a lot of us left these days, and those of us still around are spread pretty damn thin.” He coughed. “We’ll do what we can.”

The line clicked dead in her ear and she was again alone.

What do you do when even the law breaks down into fragments? Take it into your own hands? And with what? Frank Jennings had never even owned a BB gun.

Erika wandered back to the window, walking with that thick, slow-motion gait so common in bad dreams. It was rapidly spreading from her legs to her trunk to her arms…all over her. The overwhelming sensation of complete helplessness.

“Oh please, please,
stop
it,” she whispered at the window. Her fingers gripped the sill tighter, tighter, until her knuckles felt as if they would burst through the skin. Her teeth were clenched, and tears trickled down her cheeks.

There wasn’t a lot to see, not at this distance, not at this angle. Only a rotting car, blatting and careening its way up and down the street, back and forth, back and forth, with a taut line stretched from the bumper to some bundle being hauled roughly over the pavement. At first, the bundle waved frantic arms, and made screeching sounds, and then it seemed to lose heart, and the arms didn’t seem quite so frantic anymore, and finally they seemed almost lethargic.

“You
evil
shits,” she said.

And so she waited, and waited, as those interminable screeching sounds mingled with those of the engine and the tires, waited, hating herself more with every passing moment, waited, until at last the guys in the car tired of the game. The car slowed in front of Chad’s house, stopped. Someone hopped from the car with a knife, slashed the rope, bounded back into the car. And they were gone. She was out the door in a second.

Erika ran out to the street, knelt over Chad. Tried not to gag when she got a close look at what the pavement had done to him. Chad Wilder, her brother’s friend. They’d seen Ozzy Osbourne on tour recently, happy as little head-banging clams. Could they have ever guessed what was waiting for them just around the corner?

Erika touched one raw cheek, and his eyes wearily sought hers, like the eyes of a mortally wounded dog seeking its master’s one final time. Full of love, and lost hope, and need. Especially need. Their gazes locked for a long, lingering moment.

And then Chad’s eyes closed again, for the last time.

Peace.

Erika cried for him then. Yes, better to cry. She wouldn’t cry for herself, only for others now. As long as she could cry for others, she’d be okay.

Because that’s what would keep her human.

4

Always darkest before the dawn. That’s what Travis had always heard.

Now it looked like he and the others stuck in the slammer would starve like caged rats. You couldn’t get much darker than that.

They’d been locked up together for a solid month, he and Diamond and the giant who only wanted to be called Pit Bull. Miles hadn’t even lasted a week. They’d carried him out one afternoon, wracked with chills and barely conscious. Good riddance.

Travis kept his eyes and ears open after that, and got to watch the place slowly fall apart. The guards were staying on duty longer, as if fewer of them were given longer shifts. Fewer prisoners were coming in, and the more recent arrivals were often carried out on stretchers a few days after arrival, like Miles.

Shortly after his grand jury hearing, Travis’s lawyer quit showing up, as did Diamond’s. What the story was in Pit Bull’s case, he couldn’t say. It felt as if the outside world had forgotten them. As the bionic plague took hold, St. Louisans probably spared more caring thoughts for the animals at the city zoo than for jailbirds like Travis.

But the outside world had enough problems without adding killers, thugs, and other renegades to the list. In the United States, varying degrees of martial law had been imposed, then had broken down as casualties soared. In most large cities across the globe, charlatans and quack doctors bilked small fortunes from a desperate populace, hawking miracle cures and preventatives and anti-pestilence pills as plague mania ran rampant. But monetary fortunes were useless. In one day, the Dow Jones Index dropped more than 40%. The suicide rate was six times the national average by the next morning. In rural areas, entire towns were sometimes razed by fires set by terrified people in hopes of eradicating local epidemics. The World Health Organization declared a state of global emergency. Faced with steadily eroding staffs, power plants had to shut down generator after generator. Unable to stay suppressed any longer, the story broke in headlines the size of which were usually reserved for the ends of wars and the deaths of presidents.

Meanwhile, on the inside, Travis sat on his ass and waited. And watched. And finally threw a tantrum when, following a week of haphazardly scheduled meals, lunch was cut out entirely.

“I want my fucking lunch!” Travis bellowed at one of the guards passing through the corridor. “Where’s our fucking lunches?” Others along the corridor, the few who were left, clamored assent. Travis gripped the cell door with both hands and gave it a furious rattle.

The cop whirled and drew his nightstick and slammed it an inch from Travis’s fist. The impact rang as loud as a gong.

Pit Bull was up and across the cell in a second. His bulk plowed into the door beside Travis, shuddering the bars, and he clawed through the bars at the cop. Travis almost grinned as he heard Pit Bull growling deep in his throat. The resident giant was wrapped around his little finger.

The cop backed up against the door of the empty cell across the corridor. “You’re still getting two squares a day, assholes, so consider yourselves lucky.” He turned his back on them, clutching the nightstick, and went on his way. For a moment he looked ready to cry.

That look hadn’t been wasted on Travis. Travis had seen the cop numerous times during his month-plus stay, and it looked as though the man had aged ten years in the last week.

The scuttlebutt going around was that everyone on the outside was getting sick. Bad sick, the kind of sick you don’t get up from. Travis hadn’t paid much attention at first—simple minds always seemed to conjure up wild conspiracies—but now the truth was getting too blatant to dismiss. And at night he’d lie awake waiting for the first onset of symptoms, whatever they might be, as if listening for the ticking of a time bomb.

He waited. And waited. And finally concluded that he and Pit Bull and Diamond had been spared. With all three of them emerging healthy and whole, they were playing havoc with the law of averages, but maybe fortune was smiling for a change.

The relief was short-lived as he suddenly contemplated which would be worse: to die of the illness, or live through it only to starve and dehydrate when no one was left to bring them the basics.

When they went a day without food and had been reduced to cupping water from the toilet, Travis was sure the end was close. No more thoughts of running to Mexico, no more blaming Sheila for ending up here…

He just burned within to make somebody, anybody, pay.

“Gotta be some way to get a guard in here,” Travis said one night while he and his cellmates sat around doing nothing more than gauging the diminishing light at the window. “Get him in here and bait him so he gets close enough to grab.”

“Nobody’s here but us,” Pit Bull said. “They forgot us.”

Besides the three of them in the same cell, there were another five on down the corridor. Sometimes they called out to each other, but had lately run out of much to say.

Diamond, stretched out on his bunk, looked over at Travis and hitched his thumb up at Pit Bull. “Why don’t we get the Jolly Green Giant here to bust down the wall?”

Nobody laughed. Trying it was too much of a temptation. And the impossibility of succeeding was too frustrating.

* *

Sometime after dawn the next morning.

The day was still in its infancy. No one in the cellblock was up and around yet…as if there were anything to be up and around for. But Travis was awake, feeling dull cramps of pain along his sides from lying too long, scratching his week-plus growth of beard, and fingering the tender scars from last month’s police dog attack.

Then the place came alive with noise.

Seemingly unaided, the locks on the cells started popping open. It took a moment to fathom that one; they were opened electronically. Which meant that some savior was nearby.

On a top bunk, Pit Bull was awake immediately, jolting upright and nearly bashing his head into the ceiling.

Travis stepped over to the door, slid it back on its rollers, felt enormous satisfaction in driving it fully open and slamming it to the end of its run. The clash of steel and concrete rang out into the corridor.

“I think we’ve just been paroled,” he said back to the others.

As Pit Bull and Diamond fumbled with their shoes, Travis stepped into the corridor. He looked at the heavy steel door separating them from the rest of the station, then turned around to gaze down the corridor. The row of fluorescent bulbs still burned in the ceiling.

Freedom—what was the catch? You didn’t get something for nothing, not in this world.

As Pit Bull and Diamond joined him, and the others down the corridor emerged with trepidation, the heavy steel door opened. Come out, come out, wherever you are.

It was one of the boys in blue. Haggard, eyes haunted, sweat and oil glistening on his face. His hand rested on the butt of the gun at his hip. Forty, maybe. Graying hair starting to fall out.

“God help me for this,” he said quietly, “but you’re free to go.” His soft voice seemed unnaturally loud amid the cold steel.

And no one moved.

The cop shook his head. “I can’t let you men die in here. No matter what you did, this isn’t Nazi Germany. You still got a right to a little dignity. But I can’t take care of you anymore. This place…it’s over for me. For all of us. The ship has sunk.”

By now the five from down the cellblock had crowded in behind Diamond and Pit Bull. Travis glanced back, trying to put faces with voices and then deciding there’d be time for that later.

“What day is it?” he asked the cop.

“Friday. August seventh.”

“What’s it like on the outside?”

“It’s a whole new world.”

Travis didn’t know what that meant, but he liked the sound of it.
Whole new world.
Maybe a better world now. Someplace better suited to a man unafraid to get dirty and sweaty, who wanted to live by his muscles and his wits.

“The keys to your gun cases,” Travis said. “I want them. And directions on how to get there.”

The cop chuckled nervously, crazily, shook his head. “Aw no. No no no. I can’t do that, can’t go that far.”

Travis eased a half-step forward, slowly curving his mouth into a sharklike smile, his eyes narrowing. “Or maybe you’d rather have me tell my friend here to tear off your head and piss in the hole.”

Pit Bull crossed his arms, and muscles rippled along his chest and shoulders like waves on a still pond.

The cop’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. “I’ve got the gun,” he said, and drew it nervously. He left a sweaty smear on the leather.

“So you do.” Travis grinned even wider. “But that still doesn’t make you even. Anybody wanna take bets?”

Diamond took a step forward, smiled good-naturedly. “Me? I’d take the bet.”

“Kill him anyway,” came a whisper from behind.

Mexican standoff.

And then the cop produced a ring of keys from his belt; tossed them to Travis and stammered quick directions to the gun cabinets. He ducked out the door and they heard fading footsteps, and while one of the guys was champing to go after him, Travis and Pit Bull were blocking the way. Mostly Pit Bull.

Travis smiled, held up the key ring, and jingled it. The others watched, almost mesmerized.

“The keys to the kingdom,” he said.

* *

After over a month of little more than your basic blues and grays and endless shades of each, the world seemed to explode with color. How long had it been since they’d even seen the green of grass? And after a month of breathing stale air in the cellblock, tainted with sweat and urine and the stench of despair, even the air of the inner city smelled sweet.

Red, half a block ahead. The brightest red Travis had ever seen. They approached it, a Pontiac Fiero sitting cockeyed to the curb. Half a dozen parking tickets were clamped under one wiper.

Travis lifted the ten-gauge riot gun from the police station and blew out the windshield. Just for fun.

“Damn shame,” Diamond said, watching a few crystalline bits of glass tinkle onto the dashboard. “Nice car.”

“We can get you a fleet of ’em later,” Travis said. “The price is right.”

Diamond chuckled, then inspected his own weapon, a .308 Marlin rifle with scope. He sighted in on a car parked across Twelfth Street and fired off two shots that rolled through the street like thunderclaps. Scratch one fender and one tire.

“Kicks like a mother,” he said, rubbing his shoulder.

They continued north on Twelfth. Pit Bull was with them, as Travis had expected, though he’d declined a gun. Said he’d never fired one before and didn’t want one. Fair enough. Two of the five from down the corridor had tagged along as well. One was a tall, clean-cut young man named Lucas, though from his gravelly, hoarse voice, Travis had pictured a Hell’s Angel type. The other man was a shorter, thickset fellow with bushy red hair and beard. He told them he’d long ago picked up the nickname Hagar, from the cartoon Viking. Both Lucas and Hagar had chosen M16s from the police arsenal. And the shooting lessons had quickly begun.

Travis ripped at a short loaf of French bread he was carrying. Their first priority after setting foot outside of jail was paying a visit to the nearest diner. “Fucking A,” he said past the mouthful of bread. “This whole city is up for grabs.”

They’d seen a fair number of others since they’d been out, both on foot and driving. Certainly nothing like a normal morning in the city a couple months back, but they were by no means alone. The city was still populated, though by substantially fewer people. A heart-stopping surprise at first sight, but it grew on you. It looked as if all order had been thrown out the window. Traffic signs and lights meant zip. It all
had
to be broken down if they could stroll along Twelfth like gunslingers, blasting whatever they chose.

That was another thing. Of the people they saw, nobody else appeared to be armed.

Travis looked around at the buildings, one by one, then the taller ones in the near distance, then the Arch, far ahead on the riverfront. “You know, if a man was smart enough, and had enough backing, he could run
this fucking place now. He’d
own
it.”

“You don’t think anybody’s gonna come in and take over?” It was Hagar, his voice winded. Obviously he was in the worst shape.

“Like who?” Lucas asked.

Hagar shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe the army? Somebody.”

Lucas chuckled low, wet laughter. “Shit. Army probably
did
this.”

“The army gets sick too,” Travis said. “You don’t get it, do you? It’s up for the highest bidder. There’s no law anymore, you saw that earlier this morning. We make our own.”

Travis looked at each of them in turn, Pit Bull to Diamond to Lucas to Hagar. He grinned. “Anybody want to be a fucking emperor?”

They stood still and silent for a moment, a long moment, an easy moment.
We’re in it together now,
Travis thought.
All of us.
Even when, in the distance, there came the shriek of two car horns and a crash, the moment remained pristine.

Until Diamond’s eyes suddenly lifted over Travis’s shoulder, beyond him, across the street on the corner. They widened.

“Ho-lee shit!” he cried, taking off into a run. He carried his rifle at port arms, like a soldier double-timing in a parade. “I’ll be back!” he called from the middle of the street.

“What’s his problem?” Hagar asked.

“Anybody’s guess,” Travis said.

They all watched a few moments longer as Diamond began to butt-stroke the plate glass window from its frame with his rifle. And they started to laugh, because they’d just seen the three-dimensional letters on the outer wall above the window. Diamond ducked into the hole.

Even Pit Bull was laughing, and Travis took the opportunity to sidle up to him. He looked more than a little odd, that bald head and a scruff of new beard, but they were all looking ragged.

“You haven’t had a hell of a lot to say since we been out,” Travis said.

Pit Bull shrugged, looked down at the sidewalk.

Talk about your backward humanity.
“It’s all new to you out here, isn’t it?”