“What’s with the dolls?” Stern asked.
Sam grimaced as if ashes were on his tongue. “My mother. My late mother. She left me all this.”
Stern’s eyes glinted off the silent audience staring out like children’s corpses, like contemptuously amused ghosts. “She must have been bent.”
Sam barked a laugh; and in the heavy, airless room it reverberated off the walls and furniture. “Don’t get me started.”
Stern grinned at him, a horrible, exhilarating grin wider than any human mouth should have been, teeth curved and razored like a shark’s.
“You got anything around here to eat?” he said.
“Jeez, what I’d give for some WD-40,” Colleen said, and Cal had to agree. The front wheel on the shopping cart was wailing like the unquiet dead.
They had turned onto Tenth now, only five more blocks to Roosevelt Emergency. He had expected the wide avenue to be packed, but they’d seen few people, mostly wary souls who walked fast and gave them a wide berth, plus a scattering of grim men guarding shops and restaurants with handguns and rifles.
The front wheels of the cart hit a hole, and Tina gave a small moan.
“It’s okay, baby,” Cal said, not slowing. He reached down and stroked her shoulder. She seemed barely aware of him. In the moonlight, her face had a blue sheen. She was breathing in ragged gasps, struggling for each breath. Cal gripped the bar of the cart tighter and increased his speed as much as he could. The pavement in the street would have been smoother but there wasn’t room to get the cart between the stilled cars.
Colleen kept pace alongside, her long, easy strides matching his, the big wrench held loosely, an extension of her arm. He saw she was watching him. “What?”
“Nothing,” she said. “You’re just not what I’m used to.” And what might that be? Trouble with my love life, she had said outside the Stark building, and she’d been in no hurry to get home since she’d descended on that punk with her handy cudgel.
“So what’s with you and elevators?” he asked, trying to make it sound light, to speak of anything other than the breathless dread he felt, to cover the heartrending rasps from the huddled figure in the cart, mindful of the street, the air, the night.
“Dad was a grease monkey in the military; guess it got into my blood.” She scanned the shadows ahead. “Heart got him when I was fifteen. Ma and I didn’t exactly see eye to eye, so I packed up my tools soon as I could, hopped a bus east.”
“And never looked back,” Cal added. He was working hard to avoid the ruts in the pavement, but the front wheels twisted with almost willful contrariness. He kept up the pace, urgent, headlong, his legs aching from the forced quick-march. He found he was holding the metal bar with a white-knuckle tension that sent pain shooting up both forearms. He loosened his grip, just a little, and the discomfort eased.
“Well, you study history,” Colleen’s voice mingled with the night breeze, “you might just have to learn something from it.” Her face clouded. Then she said, “So what’s your story? Where’re your folks?”
For a moment, Cal considered evading, painting some Brady Bunch scenario to be spared the recital of the gory details. Then he nodded toward Tina. “Dad ran off when she was born. And when she was four, Mom. . got killed.”
He braced for the pitying gasp, the familiar questions. But all she said was, “How old were you?”
“Eighteen. But I wasn’t gonna let anybody split us up. I got myself declared her guardian, had everyone swear I was responsible.”
Colleen’s eyes slid over again to appraise him. “They were right.”
No, they weren’t. I became a fucking lawyer and left her till all hours with nannies and au pairs and all sorts of faux parents who weren’t-
Colleen shot up a warning hand. He stopped short, brought the cart to silence. She was peering into the darkness ahead, listening keenly. Now Cal heard it, too, a shuffling of many feet, a scurrying. And something more, murmuring voices that sounded predatory, expectant.
Cal pressed down on the bar, lifting the squeaking front wheel off the asphalt, keeping it mute. He crab-walked the cart behind an overflowing dumpster, out of sight. Mercifully, Tina was quiet, eyes shut. He and Colleen crouched down.
Small, huddled figures appeared in the intersection, moving quickly along Sixty-second, speaking in soft, eager tones, whispering and chuckling like naughty children.
Children? Their silhouetted heads seemed abnormally large, their arms too long. Their clothes flapped loosely, bunched and oversize, and they moved with a strange, lithe step. Cal caught the glint of what looked like a rifle barrel, held straight up, in their midst. Then they were gone.
Cautiously, Colleen emerged, stepped to the cross street to make sure. A moment later she waved Cal forward. He eased the cart out, drew up by her. Her eyes mirrored his own thoughts, betraying incredulity and-something he hadn’t seen before in her-fear.
Cal tried to reassure himself they were just people, fleetingly glimpsed, misperceived. But something deep in his gut belied that. His sense of events stirring, of the world altering, grew stronger, more insistent. This darkness, this silence, wasn’t just some outage, some one-shot event, to be righted tomorrow.
This was tomorrow.
Colleen was still peering down Sixty-second, wary and uncertain. “Come on,” Cal said. With an effort she tore her attention away, and they continued down Tenth.
Cal tried to lose himself in forward motion, enveloped in the terrible rhythm of his sister’s tortured breath. But the image of those huddled dark shapes, moving so swiftly, so purposefully, would not be banished. In his mind, it became all of a piece somehow: the malformed, twisted ones speeding on their errand; the dream of darkness, of blood and the sword, the multitudes crying for him to act; the homeless madman warning of the catastrophe to come, which did come; Stern, muted and deflated, crumpled on his office floor, so like Tina in that fevered flatness, now that he thought of it.
And that punk in the T-shirt, reaching for the gun.
Unreality seized him. It was as if the dream had not ended, merely transformed, and he was snared in it, changing.
Tina moaned again, snapping him back to the moment. He murmured reassurance, then glanced at Colleen, prowling silent alongside, certain again in action.
“Colleen,” Cal began, still on the move. “Yeah?”
“When you hit that guy holding the gun on me… did you see anything?”
“Red.”
“No, I mean,” he searched for words. “I thought I saw. . something.”
“Like what?”
“Like-” he hesitated and noticed that Colleen had stopped in her tracks, was staring ahead in astonishment.
He followed her gaze and saw them, in the hundreds, men and women all jostling, pressing forward, struggling to get into the great, dark building as desperately outnumbered figures in lab coats, scrubs and a scattering of security uniforms strove to keep them back.
They had reached the hospital.
A steak a day, cooked rare, Mother had demanded for both of them. Blood to feed the blood.
But what do you do when the electricity cuts out and six months’ worth of prime cut is turning to a soggy mess in the freezer? You let it go, that’s what you do, and you attend to your guest. My guest. When had he ever used that phrase, when had he had call to? Never.
Sam bustled back into the dining room, hefting the platter with its great hunk of meat. Stern sat at the table, immense and dark and incongruous before the lace tablecloth, the linen napkins, the silver.