Then she stopped.
Bill wasn’t there. Something had taken his place.
Bill was dead.
Tears welled up suddenly.
Bill was dead.
She clenched her teeth to keep from screaming.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. She wasn’t some tragic soap-opera heroine. She was an ordinary suburban kid, about to start her junior year of high school. She was supposed to be worried about sex and clothes and whether her friends were on drugs, not about monsters eating her boyfriend, or Elias taking his father’s gun and going off to shoot people.
Bill was dead. That thing had eaten him.
And she had talked to it, touched it, tried to kiss it, for God’s sake!
She didn’t want to be with Elias, with that gun, or with Mr. Smith, who seemed a little bit crazy – he might be a nice enough guy ordinarily, but he was strung pretty tight just now, what with having gone four nights without sleeping while he worried about those creatures. She didn’t really know him, anyway, and until he calmed down she didn’t want to know him.
She didn’t want to be in that little Chevy, driving over to Bill’s apartment.
And she didn’t want to try and act normal right now, either. She didn’t want to talk to Emmy Ryerson about trying to sneak into the Ringo Starr concert at the Merriweather Post Pavilion, or to her mother about buying her school clothes for the fall, or to anybody about anything normal, because she knew that in the back of her head she’d keep remembering that Bill had been killed and eaten, and she’d want to scream.
She could just lock herself in her room and try to forget all about it, and she even took a step toward the stairs before she realized that wasn’t going to work.
You don’t forget something like that so easily.
She had to do something.
She looked at the kitchen phone.
Bill was dead, and so were all his neighbors, except for Mr. Smith. And his family – Harry and Sid and Jessie. They were dead, too.
Oh, God, even little Sid!
She had to talk to someone about it. Elias and Mr. Smith were too busy trying to do something about it; she just needed to talk, to try and understand it. She wasn’t ready to do anything yet.
She knew some of Bill’s neighbors. She’d babysat for some of them. She’d talked to them.
She knew some of their friends and relatives, too.
She reached for the phone and dialed.
Chapter Five:
Later Saturday
1.
“So what do we do, do we just walk in and shoot somebody?” Elias asked.
Smith shook his head. “Give me the gun,” he said, holding out a hand.
Elias hesitated, still holding the automatic. “Wait a minute,” he said. “First tell me what you’re going to do. This is my dad’s gun, after all.”
Smith sighed. “I’m going to go into the building, and go up to my apartment, and then I’m going to call up the Goodwins on the phone and ask if someone can come up and help me move stuff, and when someone comes I’m going to shoot him, and if anyone finds out and asks what happened I’ll claim that I mistook him for a burglar.”
Elias considered this, and couldn’t see anything really wrong with it, in theory.
One detail still bothered him, though. “It’s my dad’s gun,” he pointed out. “If the police get it they’ll trace it. How’re you going to explain that?”
Smith shrugged. “I don’t know yet. Maybe I stole it. I don’t think I’ll have to explain it. You think these things are going to call the police?”
“But what about the neighbors…” Elias began, and then stopped. He had forgotten.
There were no neighbors. Just the creatures that he privately thought of as proto-vampires.
“So what do I do?” he asked.
“You wait here,” Smith told him. “And if anything goes wrong, you get out of here, and you and Maggie can try your luck.”
That sounded for all the world like a speech from a bad movie, Smith realized, the sort the hero gives before he plunges into some ridiculously dangerous situation, and as soon as Smith had finished saying it he wished he hadn’t.
For one thing, it brought home all too vividly the possibility that he might be about to get himself killed, just like the heroic leader in all too many old war and adventure movies.
And horror movies, of course.
He knew if he stayed and talked any longer he would lose his nerve. “Give me the gun,” he said.
Elias handed him the gun, butt first.
Smith took it awkwardly; it was heavier than he had expected.
Elias saw Smith’s uncertainty. “You know how to shoot, don’t you?” he asked, worried.
“No,” Smith admitted. “I know you point and pull the trigger.” He lifted the gun.
“It’s loaded, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Here,” Elias said, holding out his hand. “Give it back.”
Smith handed it back.
Elias expertly released the clip, checked it, slid it back in place, then worked the slide to chamber a round.
He handed it back to Smith with the safety off, ready to fire.
“Be careful with it,” he said. “It goes off pretty easy. Just squeeze the trigger gently.”
Smith nodded. He started to stick the gun in his pocket, then looked at the tension on Elias’s face and stopped.
“I can’t walk in there with a gun in my hand,” he said.
“Yeah, but you don’t want to stick it in your pocket, either – the trigger could snag on your belt or something.” Elias groped around behind the driver’s seat for a moment, then came up with an oily rag. “Cover it with this,” he suggested.
Smith draped the rag across the gun and his hand. “That looks stupid,” he said, studying the result.
“Hold it with your other hand, like a bandage,” Elias suggested.
Smith looked at him suspiciously. “This is the rag I use when I check the oil. It’s filthy. It doesn’t look anything like a bandage.”
“You got a better idea?”
Smith shrugged and tried it, holding the rag around his right wrist with his left hand as if staunching a bad cut.
“All right,” he admitted, “It’s better than nothing.” He opened the car door.
“Watch where you point it,” Elias called, as Smith climbed out.
2.
Nobody had paid any attention to him as he had made his way from the car to his apartment; in fact, he had seen no sign of life anywhere in the complex. No children played in the grassy area between the two sections of parking lot; no housewives were sunning themselves on the balconies.
He had to put the pistol down on the floor to unlock the apartment door. As the door swung inward, the thought suddenly struck him that his own particular monster might be lurking inside, ready to pounce, and he quickly knelt and grabbed the gun.
The air conditioning was still out, and hot air poured out over him as he stood up.
Remembering at the last moment what Elias had said, he stopped his finger from touching the trigger.
Nothing jumped out at him.
Gun in hand, no longer concealed, he stepped into his own living room, ignoring the heat.
“Anyone home?” he called.
A car horn suddenly sounded from outside, an almost nasal beep, repeated four times in quick succession.
Startled, he spun to face the windows, and then, realizing where he was, he spun again, looking first back out into the stairwell, and then down the little hallway to the bedroom.
Nothing.
He swung the door closed, and listened carefully to be sure it latched. Then he marched across the room and peeped out through the drapes, the gun held up, pointing at the ceiling, the way the actors always held their guns on all those cop shows on TV.
Elias was looking up at him through his car’s sloping windshield; the boy waved.
Smith waved back.
That had almost certainly been his own car’s horn he’d heard; Elias had beeped at him about something. The wave had been calm, though, not a signal that something was wrong.
Well, he’d figure it out later.
He crossed to the kitchen, put the gun down on the counter, and picked up the phone. The Goodwins’ number was written in felt tip on the edge of the memo pad he kept there; he read it over, then dialed.