It was not the car which Tony had already seen. Probably the eyeless cop really had called for reinforcements, or perhaps the arrival of this car was simply a coincidence. It had rolled off the production line, at the latest, in the early seventies, but it wasn’t that which caused Tony to stare at it without trusting his eyes. The car’s lights had been broken long ago and the fluctuating orange light did not come from them. The car was burning. The whole back half of it was conflagrant. Tony looked in horror at the tongues of flame licking the gas tank cover and waited for the explosion at any second. But there was no explosion. The car slowly moved forward, as if nothing was happening (even in spite of the fact that its back wheels had become shapeless charred rims, stinking of burned rubber). Its driver seemed unaffected by the events right behind his back. (This time, as far as Tony could make out through a dirty glass, it was a black man at the wheel, but Logan was not sure that it was the color of his skin from birth.) Even in the front seats the heat should be intolerable; what would happen to an arrested person in the back seat was terrible even to imagine. Tony stood not breathing, trying to resemble a mannequin more than the real mannequins.
The car slowly passed by and moved farther without stopping. But Tony understood that the danger had not passed at all—now the police car would go to the wall and turn back. The light from the flames shone through a glass door onto a dusty poster lying on the floor. Once, probably, the poster had hung on this door or in a store window nearby. Before the shimmering light dimmed again, Logan managed to discern large letters:
STORE CLOSING
EVERYTHING MUST GO!
DISCOUNTS up to 80 %!
Till February, 29th
The last February 29th was more than two years ago. However, Tony would not be surprised to learn that this shop had been closed more than four years earlier. Or eight. Or… This garbage truck alone has probably been standing here for years… If the concept of a year in general makes sense in this place, where it is always midnight.
The approaching light of a fire came again through the muddy glass at the left. The car was returning. Tony grew numb again, staring straight ahead.
Something rustled behind his back. Somewhere at floor level, not too loudly. A rat, Tony told himself. But his imagination drew another picture: the torn off hand, painfully moving its broken fingers, trying to creep towards him… And after all that he had already seen, such a thought no longer seemed delirious.
Logan tried mentally to hurry the burning car, but it, on the contrary, went all the more slowly and finally stopped just opposite the storefront. There was no engine sound, but only the crackle of the flames. And Tony, struck with horror, noticed out of the corner of his eye what he had missed previously looking at the other side of the car: on its blazing back seat someone sat. Someone… or something…, it was only a skeleton charred black… but could a skeleton sit up straight? Would it not fall to pieces? However Tony was afraid to give himself away by moving even his pupils and forced himself not to look in that direction. Though, of course, if the cop could see his pupils, he also should see more appreciable signs distinguishing Tony from a mannequin… beginning with the condition of his clothes… however, if mannequins gather dust in the window of a shop abandoned for years…
“Anything, anything but him noticing me!” Tony mentally begged. In the next moment, however, he thought that his plea was too precipitate.
The car moved again. It slowly went around the garbage truck and disappeared from sight. Still, for some time behind the rusty truck gleams of flame could be seen, but then the street sank again into gloom. Perhaps it was a trap, and the police would still return? Logan waited a few minutes more to be sure. Nothing happened.
“Wheeew,” Tony, at last, dared to relax, feeling, how his whole body ached because of a wooden immovability. And how very cold he was still—however, he shivered not only from coldness. Now he would like to move, talk, even to joke. “Thanks for covering, guys,” he said to the mannequins. “Why,” he wondered, “were they left here after the shop closed and even their clothes had not been taken off? By the way, a good idea!” Women’s and children’s clothes wouldn’t fit him, but there were male mannequins too. At least he could bundle up and replace his trousers… if only the sizes matched… what a pity that mannequins had no shoes…
He resolutely stepped to the nearest male figure, tried to remove its jacket… and understood that it was not a mannequin at all.
Logan’shands were lying on the shoulders of a corpse. The dead face was stiffened in a grimace of last pain; streams of dried up blood stretched downwards from the corners of a wide-open mouth; rolled up eyes blindly stared with two whitish cataracts. “Why doesn’t it fall?” Tony thought perplexedly, jerking his hands back. However, his recent experience reminded him that dead persons can not only stand, but can also drive cars… But intuitively he felt that that this body was really dead. Rigor mortis? The body was rigid indeed, but it would probably fall down even from a little push…
Tony moved his eyes downwards. And saw something gleaming between the legs of trousers which he had been going to put on. This unfortunate person had been impaled on a smooth metal stake. Brown stains—possibly, not only of blood—had befouled the trousers and dried on the bare feet of the corpse. The base of the stake had been thrust into the round support for a clothes rack. And, looking again in horror at the face of the dead man, Logan more guessed than saw the sharp end of the stake resting against the palate in the black hole of a mouth.
Tony rushed from one standing figure to another, already knowing that everywhere he would find the same. A half-dozen corpses were in this store window and no fewer than that were on the other side of the door… Men. Women. Children. Everyone was impaled on a stake which had been carefully adjusted for height and had passed precisely through a throat, instead of emerging somewhere between ribs or from under a collar bone, as quite often happened during such executions. Whoever had done it, the executioners, obviously, had approached their business with great diligence and attention to details.
When did it happen? The shop had been abandoned years ago, but the bodies looked fresh, even rigor mortis had not passed yet… however, how well could Tony know what happened to dead bodies here?
Something rustled again behind him. But this time he stood with his back to the street.
Tony turned back sharply. And saw that one of the black bags—which, it seemed had avoided the wheels of the police car—was bending in half and sitting up in the middle of the street. The rotten ropes tying its legs and torso stretched and snapped; only a disheveled noose remained on its neck. If, of course, that thing inside the bag had a torso, legs, and a neck—but Logan did not doubt it anymore. Then one more bag began to move, and one more…
Everything must go, oh yes.
Tony looked around in panic. He did not know whether they could get out of the bags and whether they had any interest in his person, but the notion of waiting and checking seemed absolutely mad. However, the idea of breaking through them filled Logan with insuperable horror. He wanted to run—but where? The garbage truck and these bags blocked the way back. In the other direction there was a dead end… Unless he headed deeper into a shop, but who knew they wouldn’t follow him there? If only he had some kind of weapon… he has already ascertained that local…inhabitants…can be harmed. The stakes! Could he use one of them as a weapon? They weren’t aspen, but those impaled on them seemed to remain dead. However, those things in the bags had stayed motionless for a long time, too…