Ladies' Night (15 page)

That made Mary cackle.

She kept on driving.

"I want to see all you guys back in here Friday night," said Phil. "You hear me? Drinks are on the house."

Fourteen men would be a lot of drinks but Tom had a bad feeling that not all of them would be taking him up on that.

The eight-inch stainless steel carving knife felt oddly insubstantial in his hands.

He tucked it into his belt.

"We ready?"

Nobody's ready
, thought Tom.
We're going anyway
.

Phil set one of the fire extinguishers behind him on the bar. He took the hammer out of his belt where he'd put it next to the knife and went to work with the claw on the crossbeams over the door.

They could hear them massing out there —
how many?
— moving off the windows to the door, attracted to the sound of breaking wood, concentrating on that now. Pounding, scratching.

He pulled off the last of the beams and used the hammer to loosen the pins on the hinges. Tom went to the locks, setting his extinguisher off to one side behind him.

The door would fall inward. They couldn't help that but they could see to it that it fell as straight and clean as possible into the room.

They had cleared a twelve-foot area in front of the door, pushed back the juke and the barstools, so that now all that remained there were the two big steaming pots which had just come out of the kitchen. The pots were filled with open bottles stuffed with gauze and rags. The men stood around them armed with knives and cleavers and broken table legs, whatever they could find, each of them carrying a dishrag against the heat from the bottles, and lighters or matches.

The younger man, Neil, stood directly in front of the door a few feet back with the third extinguisher ready. Bailey stood right behind him.

It felt like nobody was breathing.

Phil nodded.

He pulled the bottom pin on the hinges while Tom threw the slip bolt and then the top pin as Tom threw the second lock and the door fell forward just inches from where Neil stood rigid as a stone with the extinguisher. Phil was already standing over the first of two women who had pitched through the doorway. The big man's hammer had come down hard across her head. At the same time Neil stepped forward over the fallen door, Bailey right behind him. He heard the sudden rush of air from Neil's extinguisher clearing the women off the stairwell followed by the sound of breaking glass as Bailey pitched the first bottle into the shadowy forms out on the sidewalk. By then Tom was already bent over the second woman, the heavy blade falling like a hatchet on her neck. Blood spurted across his thighs.

He stood up as Neil pressed forward, a cloud of white powder spreading out ahead of him. The women in the stairwell fell away, tumbling over one another. More bottles exploded. Then Phil was beside him with his own extinguisher and Tom was moving too, hauling the third up off the floor and pointing it, pulling the pin and pressing down the handle, and they were up the stairs in an instant, Bailey and the others right behind, moving up to the sidewalk and the street.

My god! There were
dozens
of them!

They had broken the streetlight and in the grey semi-darkness they swarmed around the tight wedge the three of them made and Tom knew the extinguishers wouldn't hold them long. Most of the men were outside, bottles popping on the sidewalk like firecrackers. He saw ghostly blue-yellow flames crawl the curbside, saw one woman fall screaming, her light summer dress on fire, saw a hydrant glowing and flickering in front of him as though coated with St. Elmo's fire.

A fat dark girl in jeans and sweatshirt was moving toward him with what looked like a torn-up parking meter raised over her head and he sprayed her but it did no good, she just squinted and kept on coming. He turned the tank in his hands and pushed it into her face, saw the nose and mouth seem to burst and the girl fall away. He turned and two more were coming at him. He sprayed them with the powder and they screamed and ran, hands clawing at their eyes.

Men were breaking for the street, trying to find paths through the crowd of women as they stepped away to avoid the flickering flames. Bailey was almost free, nearly to the edge of a shifting knot of women. Tom saw the table leg in his hands rise and fall twice and thought,
run, yes you've got the chance now
but Bailey didn't run. He turned and launched himself at them from behind, working his way back to Tom, busting heads.
You're crazy
, he thought.

He tried to keep moving steadily forward and out in Bailey's direction. Phil and Neil were both to the right of him and he knew there were other men who were still trapped behind him. Phil's tank was suddenly empty. He saw him swing it like a sledgehammer into the body of a teenage girl, cracking her ribs so that she coughed up blood as she fell.

An old woman was running toward him with a raised pewter candlestick in her hand. He pointed the spray into her open mouth and eyes.

Behind her a man lurched through the crowd, the blade of a knife protruding from his chest from behind the shoulder, his black t-shirt glistening, then disappearing into the flailing hands and bodies of four young women. He saw another man take a blow across the genitals from a cop's nightstick. A third man stabbed in the cheek.

Beside him Neil screamed. Tom whirled.

The woman held a claw hammer just like Phil's and Neil was on his knees. There was blood and two deep gouges the claw had made across his cheek and forehead. A second woman reached into his hair and pulled back his head. She was trying to scalp him.

With a paring knife
.

He let loose a jet of powder but it was too little too late and the hammer came whipping at Neil sidearm. It fell across his throat and Tom heard it smash his larynx.

His extinguisher sputtered empty.

He went after her anyway, pulling the knife out of his belt and stepping across a line of blue fire on the sidewalk. He slashed at her and she ran, pushing two more women away from her on either side, opening a space in the crowd as she did — so that now Bailey was standing right there in front of him just a few feet away. There was only one woman left between them and Tom rammed his empty tank into the back of her head.

He tapped Phil on the shoulder.

They slashed their way to the street.

He didn't know anymore where he struck or what he hit. He swung almost blindly, trying not to fall amid the sprawl of bodies all around, slashing with the knife and feeling the deadness taking hold of his arm and the sudden shock running through it each time he struck, the warm rain of blood spilling over his hands and wrists and spraying fine mists across his cheeks.

And then suddenly they were free.

A car lay toppled on its side in front of the Savings Bank across the street. They hid behind it panting, trying to catch their breath. A short bearded man in a bloodstained white shirt broke through. They took the risk of being noticed and stood and waved him over. He was carrying a cleaver that had seen some use.

In front of the bar Tom counted four men left out of the original fourteen. He saw them moving in the shadows, heard screams and cries.

One bolted away up Broadway.

That left three.

They'd lost almost half their numbers.

"Dammit," Phil said.

"We can't help them," said Bailey. "They'll get out of this or else they won't. Let's keep moving."

He was holding the table leg away from him at an odd angle. Tom saw why. The wood was dripping with blood, slippery from top to bottom — and he remembered Bailey's mad charge toward him through the crowd.

"You're some piece of work," he said.

Bailey grinned. "I never said I wasn't."

They turned and looked down Broadway.

A lone figure stood under a streetlight about a block away. Otherwise it was clear.

"Let's go," Phil said.

They moved slowly. The picture windows in both the furniture store and the lighting store had been knocked out and there was glass all over the sidewalk out to the street. It was impossible to avoid. It crunched underfoot, disturbingly loud.

They kept to the shadows close to the building.

There was a police car over the curb with a body dangling out the back seat — a black man in handcuffs, some poor bastard who never made it to the station. They found one of the cops a few feet in front of the car with his nightstick gone and his holster empty, a bullet in his brain. They never did find his partner.

Parking meters were broken away. A hydrant was spewing water. The place had the kind of bombed-out look you see after a hurricane without any time for cleanup. Inside the ruined lighting store, the naked body of a little girl who could not have been more than four or five was lying on a chrome and glass table under a Picasso print like some sort of sick evil sacrifice to the modernist age. A man's bloody arm hung out over the window frame. He'd been strangled by a lamp cord.

Across the street there was a light on in the florist's and they heard laughter from inside. Far away they heard glass breaking and police sirens. It was good to know the police were somewhere. Live police. He could have used a little law and order right now.

The entrance to the Burnside, so busy a few hours ago, was silent. He wondered how the
party'd
gone.

He and Bailey peered around the corner.

A doorman was wedged inside the revolving door.

The entrance was brightly lit, open to view from both Broadway and Amsterdam. The florist's shop was right across the street. They were going to be damn visible. They paused in the shadows beside the overgrown jungle of a garden, undecided.

Bailey nodded toward the florist's shop.

"What do you think? You want to wait a while, see if they drift out of there?"

"I don't think so," Tom said.

He looked at Phil and the man with the beard. They nodded. "Okay. Let's go."

Bailey turned. And for just a moment his back was fully to the garden.

She came out of a tree.

They heard it rustle and Bailey whirled but he wasn't as fast as gravity, she was on his back in an instant and the knife went into his neck just under his right ear, pulled swiftly across the right carotid artery and the cartilage of his Adam's apple and the left carotid and out the other side so that what they saw was a thin line of blood moving along behind the knife which began to spurt and then pour out of him in a wide sluice right to left and back again, the woman toppling him to the sidewalk and holding on to him and pulling back so that the wound opened further and washed them all in a great hot spill of gore.

Tom tasted it in his mouth.

Bailey's blood
.

He tasted Bailey's blood as Phil stepped past him and brought down his hammer on the woman's skull so hard he had to pull it free of her. She fell to the side and shook herself like a wet dog. Then lunged at him with the knife.

As though he hadn't hit her at all.

And then it was suddenly as though something
pushed
them. All three of them.

Some inner signal thrumming inside made wholly of violence pouring through them like an ecstatic bile and they went at her all at once, Tom screaming heedless of the women across the street inside the shop and staring at the cords of tension in her neck while he pounded her face with his fist wrapped tight around the handle of the knife its blade pointed up flashing in the moonlight and then kicking her while the man in with the beard chopped two-handed at her back hacking at her vertebrae with the cleaver in one hand and Bailey's table leg in the other. Phil saw her knife clatter to the sidewalk and stepped on the hand that had held the knife and thrust it into Bailey, then ground the hand into the sidewalk and the glass until the fingernails popped while he pounded her head with the hammer.

They looked up from her twisted body, flowing its juices into the littered black gutter.

Had they been attacked then it was possible they would not have had the will or strength to run, that they'd have died like hamstrung cattle pulled down by wolves, without fear or passion, too stupefied to care, more dead than alive.

The street, the sidewalk seemed to drain them like a tap on a dying battery. They stood in the same light they had feared a moment ago and felt nothing.

They looked in each others' faces.

The moment washed through them and was gone.

Goodbye, my friend
, he thought.

I'll get them for you. As many as I can.

And I'll get
her.

For the first time in his life he felt the depth of the cruelty inside him undiluted by guilt or fear or any other emotion and he did not dislike the feeling. He did not know why he should be focused so furiously now on Susan. He did not know why he blamed her. He knew nothing of her yet.

But it was as though she had brought them here. In a way she had. "Come on," he said.