“Okay,” Kerri grunted. “Let’s go.”
“Don’t let him fall,” Heather pleaded.
Kerri locked her arms and clenched her jaw. Javier’s weight nearly pulled her down into the pit with him, but she managed to hold on until he’d reached the top. He clambered out of the hole and collapsed next to them, breathing hard. While he examined his cuts, the girls untied the rope and got dressed again. Kerri noticed that even under duress, Javier copped a glance at both her and Heather in the nude.
“Thanks,” Javier said when he’d recovered.
“How bad is it?” Heather asked, brushing tiny pieces of glass from his hair.
“Nothing too deep. Just scratches mostly. Could have been a lot worse.”
“Let’s see to Brett,” Kerri said.
They hurried out into the hallway and knelt next to their friend. Brett was conscious, but obviously in pain and going into shock. His teeth chattered uncontrollably, and his face was pale. Despite this, he smiled when he saw them.
“You look like shit,” Brett told Javier.
“So do you. I hope you got the number of the truck that hit you.”
Kerri heard the tension in Javier’s voice, even though he tried to joke with Brett. His eyes were focused at the three bloody stumps on Brett’s hand.
Brett nodded toward the mutant’s corpse. “See for yourself. Kerri fucked it up good.”
Javier stood and stared at the dead thing. He prodded it with his toe.
“Heather, get a picture of this. My cell is down there in the pit.”
Without a word, Heather touched a button on her phone and aimed the screen toward the dwarf. Kerri held Brett’s good hand and watched. Up close and illuminated, the thing looked worse than it had in the darkness. The skin was pasty and pale, blotched with red areas that appeared to be advanced patches of eczema. The remaining eye was not merely large, it was malformed, with an oblong, hazel iris and uneven pupil. In the stark light, the whites of its eye appeared slightly yellowed. The nose on the woman was wide and flat, the skin on each side pulled back to accommodate a wide slash of a mouth and the thick teeth inside. The jaw was broad and angular. Kerri understood now how it had chewed through Brett’s finger bones so easily. Kerri’s attack had ruined any possible symmetry in the thing’s face, but staring at it now, she was sure that no part of it had ever truly been balanced. The thin hair running along the dead woman’s scalp sporadically painted the jaw line. It was hard to judge how old the mutant might have been.
Then Kerri noticed something else. Earlier, when she’d been attacked in the dark, she’d bitten down on what could have only been her attacker’s tongue. The tongue of the woman on the floor was uninjured, and while the hand that had clutched Kerri’s hand was equipped with long, talon-like fingernails, the corpse’s nails were blunt and cracked.
Javier shook his head. “Midgets. Giants. What’s next?”
“Let’s not stick around to find out,” Kerri said. “This isn’t the one that attacked me earlier. That makes at least five of them, counting the two we’ve killed, and the two Brett saw earlier.”
“Brett,” Javier whispered, “can you walk?”
Licking his lips, he nodded.
“Where’s your cell phone?” Kerri asked him.
“I put it in my pocket,” Brett explained. “I didn’t want the battery to get low. We might need it later.”
“So you sat here in the dark?”
“Y-yeah.”
“You dork.” She patted his hand.
“We can’t go back the way we came,” Javier said, his Spanish accent growing more noticeable for a moment. “And we can’t go forward any farther, unless we want to swim in broken glass.”
“And all the other doors and windows are bricked up,” Heather said. “So how do we get out of this shithole?”
Kerri cringed. Heather’s voice was shrill and stressed.
Brett moaned again. “Seriously. I need bandages, or a real tourniquet.”
“I’m going to need your belt, anyway,” Javier told him.
“What? Why?” Kerri frowned.
“Because I lost my knife, and I need a weapon, and you’re in no shape to fight if we get attacked again.”
Brett chuckled and winced. “Yeah, well, I think I need it more than you right now, dude.”
“You can use my club,” Kerri said.
Javier smiled. “No, you’re keeping that. By the looks of this thing, you’re pretty good with it.”
Heather sighed impatiently. “Well, if the doors and windows are all blocked, why don’t we try hammering our way out? I’ve still got my brick.”
Brett answered before anyone else could. “There’s no way we’re getting past that barricade. Not without a sledgehammer or something.”
Javier looked down at his hands for a moment and then back at each of his friends. “So we find a different way out of here. And I know how.”
“What do you have in mind?” Kerri’s voice was low and soft, but every word was clipped. She’d noticed that Brett’s breathing was growing erratic.
Javier looked up at the trapdoor in the ceiling. “We have one doorway that isn’t blocked.”
Heather shook her head. “No fucking way.”
“How are we going to get Brett up there?” Kerri asked. “Look at his hand. He can’t go crawling around on it.”
“He has to. Either that, or we hide him here and go for help.”
“I’ll go along,” Brett whispered. “I can do it.”
“We follow it to wherever it lets out,” Javier said. “Then we look for this basement that Brett told us about. It’s the only choice we have left. Either we find a way out, or we find something to help us get past the barricades.”
“Maybe if we all tried to move them together?” Kerri suggested.
“No,” Javier’s voice was low and firm. “I tried moving the barrier, too. I think something is locking it in place.”
Coughing, Brett sat up and started taking off his bloody T-shirt. “Somebody want to help me here?”
“What are you doing?” Kerri tried forcing him to sit back against the wall.
“I need to use my shirt as a tourniquet. Javier needs my belt.”
Kerri slipped her hands under her shirt, and unhooked her bra. Then she slipped it out of her sleeve.
“Try this. It should do the job a little better.”
Brett grinned. “Impressive.”
“Yeah. Tyler used to …”
She trailed off, unable to complete the sentence. Kerri was surprised. With everything that had happened, she’d forgotten about Tyler while they were trapped in this hallway. She guessed that she’d pretty much gone insane after Tyler died—freaking out and everything. But here in the corridor, she’d pushed past all that. She’d killed the mutant, made a tourniquet and a rope, rescued Javier, and then made another tourniquet with her bra like she was MacGyver with breasts. Now her take-charge attitude evaporated as it all came rushing back to her.
“That’s perfect.” Javier took the bra from her and knelt next to Brett. His hands moved quickly and deftly, wrapping the still warm undergarment around Brett’s wrist and pulling it tight. A moment later he pulled the belt away and examined Brett’s fingers.
“Heather, can you light his hand?”
Heather shined the screen over Brett’s hand, and they all leaned closer. His remaining fingers were swelling. Kerri winced as she looked at the damage. She didn’t know how Javier could study the wounds with such clinical detachment.
“Good,” Javier said. “The blood flow has stopped. Cutting off the circulation was a quick fix, but if we don’t get you to a doctor soon, you’ll have bigger worries than a few fingers. You need blood in your hand or you’ll wind up losing it. So it’s good that the flow has ceased.”
Brett cleared his throat and moved his hand out of the light. “So, let’s get going. Fuck this sitting around shit.”
His tone was lighthearted, but Kerri could hear the fear in his voice. She knew how he felt. Brett had always been one to make jokes or talk tough when he was nervous or insecure or scared. This time was no exception, but he couldn’t mask the terror. It was there in his voice, no matter how hard he tried to hide it.
It mirrored her own.
TEN
“Still no po-po,” Leo sighed. “This shit is fucked up.”
Their other friends had wandered off down the street, bored with waiting around and looking for some other form of entertainment. He, Markus, Jamal, Chris, and Dookie were still standing on the corner, watching the house at the end of the block. The derelict building seemed to loom larger as the night grew darker. Mr. Watkins stayed outside with them as well, not saying much. Just listening. Privately, Leo wondered if Mr. Watkins suspected they were going to fuck with the white kids’ car and was hanging around to make sure they didn’t.
“Yo,” Chris said. “Y’all remember when them NSB boys were outrunning the cops, and they holed up inside the Mütter Museum and took hostages and shit?”
The others nodded.
“Yeah,” Leo replied. “So what?”
“I watched that shit on television. This shorty I knew from back in the day was banging a dude from NSB’s crew.”
“Only shorty you know,” Markus teased, “is the one that gave you the drips.”
“Shut the fuck up.” Chris frowned. “Anyway, there were cops all deep around that museum, in like, five minutes and shit. Now why do they show up for that, but not for this?”
“Because,” Leo told him, “there ain’t no tourists flocking to see our neighborhood like they do for the Mütter Museum.”
The boys chuckled. Leo glanced at Mr. Watkins. The older man’s eyes seemed to sparkle, and there was a slight grin on his face.
“Mr. Watkins,” Leo said, “you know you don’t have to hang out here with us, right? I mean, if you gotta go to work tomorrow, then you probably want to go to bed. It doesn’t look like the police are gonna show, anyway.”
Shrugging, Perry took a drag off his cigarette and exhaled smoke into the night air. “That’s okay. Lawanda don’t like me smoking in the house, so you boys are doing me a favor. The longer you hang out, the more nicotine I get in my system.” He lowered his voice and leaned forward conspiratorially. “And believe me, living with her, I need all the nicotine I can get.”
Their chuckles turned to laughter, and Perry’s grin transformed into a broad, beaming smile.
“And I’ll tell you boys why the police haven’t shown up yet.” He sat down on the top step of his porch. Leo and the others took seats around him or leaned against the railing. Leo thought that Mr. Watkins seemed surprised—and maybe a little pleased—by their undivided attention.
“Now, it’s true,” he continued, “that the cops are slow to respond down here. Sometimes it takes hours. About ten years ago, I saw a young man get gunned down right over there.” He pointed. “Took the police three hours to respond, while he lay there and bled to death. It ain’t no thing for them to be late. Most nights, it pisses me off, but sometimes I can’t really say that I blame them. With the economy the way it is, they’re even worse about showing up. Ain’t just the big corporations going broke. It’s the governments, too. All levels. Municipal, city, state—even the Feds. It doesn’t matter who’s in charge. Hell, California almost filed for bankruptcy last year. California—an entire goddamned state!”
“What’s that got to do with us?” Jamal asked.
Perry took another drag off his cigarette. “I’ll tell you what it’s got to do with you. People ain’t got no money, so they don’t pay their taxes or other bills. Then the city goes broke. Starts looking for ways to cope with the budget crisis. Ways to save money. First they go after all the programs they don’t think are necessary—the programs that a lot of folks down here count on to survive. But then they’re still coming up short of cash at the end of the month, so they start laying people off. Parking meter attendants, garbage men, maintenance workers—and cops. Always the cops. In the end, the city ends up with fewer cops, but just as much crime. Hell, more crime even. The worse the economy gets, the higher crime rises. But now there aren’t as many cops to deal with it, and the ones who are left—they’ve got priorities. And our neighborhood ain’t very high on that list.”