“You okay, Mr Marinville?”
“Yeah.” He tried to say more, but what came out instead of words was a hitching half-sob. He wiped snot off his nose with the back of his hand and then tried to smile. “Cynthia, isn’t it?”
“Cynthia, yep.”
“And I’m Johnny. Just Johnny.”
“Kay.” She was looking down at the entwined bodies. Audrey’s head was thrown back, her eyes closed, her face as still and serene as a deathniask. And the boy still looked like an infant in his fragile nakedness. One that had died in childbirth.
“Look at them,” Cynthia said softly. “His arms around her neck like that. He must have loved her such a lot.”
“He killed her,” Johnny said flatly.
“That can’t be!”
He sympathized with the shock on her face, but it didn’t change what he knew. “It is, though. He called Cammie in on her.”
“Called her in? What do you mean, called her in?”
He nodded as if she had offered agreement. “He did it the same way COs in the bush used to call in artillery fire on enemy Villes in Vietnam. He called her in on both of them, in fact. I heard him do it.” He tapped his temple.
“You’re saying Seth told Cammie to kill them?”
He nodded.
“The other one, maybe. You might have heard him… it-”
Johnny shook his head. “Nope. It was Seth, not Tak. I recognized his voice.” He paused, looking down at the dead child, then looked back up at Cynthia. “Even in my head, he was a mouth-breather.”
The houses had returned to what they really were, Steve saw, but that didn’t mean they had returned to normal. They had clearly taken one hell of a pasting. The Hobart place was no longer burning, there was that much; the downpour had tamped the fire to a kind of sullen fume, like a volcano after the main eruption. The old veterinarian’s bungalow was more fully involved, with flames leaping from the windows and black, charry patches spreading along the eaves and bubbling the paint. Between them, the house of Peter and Mary Jackson was a tumbled, shot-up ruin.
There were two fire engines on the street and more coming. Already hoses lay tangled on the lawns over there, looking like fat beige pythons. There were police cars, too. Three were parked in front of Entragian’s place, where the newsboy’s body (and that of Hannibal, couldn’t forget him) lay under plastic which was now puddled with water from the downpour. The cruisers” red lights swung and flashed. Two more cruisers were parked at the top of the street, blocking the Bear Street end off entirely.
That won’t do any good if they come back, Steve thought. If the regulators come back, boys, they’ll blow your little roadblock right over the nearest ice cap.
Except they wouldn’t be back. That was what the sunlight meant, what the retreating thunder meant. It had all really happened-Steve only had to look at the burning houses and those that were all shot up to know that-but it had happened in some weird fistula of time that these cops would never know about, or want to know about. He looked down at his watch and wasn’t surprised to see it was running again. 5:18, it said, and he guessed that was as close to the real time as his Timex was ever going to get.
He looked back down the street at the cops. Some of them had their guns out; some did not. Not one of them looked clear on how he or she was supposed to be behaving. Steve could understand that. They were looking at a shooting gallery, after all, and probably no one on the surrounding blocks had even heard any shots. Thunder, maybe, but shotguns that sounded like mortar shells? Nope.
They saw him on the lawn, and one of them beckoned. At the same time, two others were gesturing for him to go back into the Wyler house. They looked like a pretty mindfucked posse, all in all, and Steve didn’t blame them. Something had gone on here, they could see that, but what?
You’ll be a while figuring it out, Steve thought, but you’ll get something you can live with in the end. You guys always do. Whether it’s a crashed flying saucer in Rosewell, New Mexico, an empty ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, or a suburban Ohio street turned into a fire-corridor, you always come up with something. You guys’re never going to catch anyone, I’d bet my far-from-considerable life savings on that, and you won’t believe a single goddam word any of us say (in fact, the less we say the easier it’ll probably be for us), but in the end you’ll find something that will allow you to re-holster your guns… and to sleep at night. And you know what I say to that?
that’s what!
One of the cops was now pointing a bullhorn at him. Steve wasn’t crazy about that, but better a bullhorn than a gun, he supposed.
“ARE YOU A HOSTAGE?” Mr Bullhorn boomed. “ARE YOU A HOSTAGE-TAKER?”
Steve grinned, cupped his hands around his mouth and called back, “I’m a Libra! Friendly with strangers, loves good conversation!”
A pause. Mr Bullhorn conferred with several of his mates. There was a good deal of head-shaking, then he turned back to Steve and raised the bullhorn again. “WE DIDN’T GET THAT, WILL YOU REPEAT?”
Steve didn’t. He’d spent most of his life in show-business-well, sort of-and he knew how easy it was to run a joke into the ground. More cops were arriving; whole convoys of black-and-whites with strobing red light-bars. More fire engines. Two ambulances. What looked like an armoured assault vehicle. The cops were only letting the fire trucks through, at least for the time being, although thanks to the rain, neither blaze looked like much shakes to Steve.
Across from where he stood, Dave Reed and Susi Geller came out of the Carver house, arms around each other. They stepped carefully over the dead girl on the stoop and walked down to the sidewalk. Behind them came Brad and Belinda Josephson, shepherding the Carver children and shielding them from the sight of their father, still lying in his driveway and still as dead as ever. Behind them came Tom Billingsley. He had what looked like a linen tablecloth in his gnarled hands. This he shook out over the dead girl’s corpse, taking no notice of the man down the block who was trying to hail him with the bullhorn.
Where’s my mom?” Dave called to Steve. His eyes looked simultaneously wild and exhausted. “Have you seen my mom?”
And Steve Ames, whose life’s motto had been
hadn’t the slightest idea of what to say.
Johnny got into the living room, walking on tiptoe and stepping over as much of the mess Cammie had left as he could. Once past that obstacle, he started for the door with more speed and confidence. He had brought his tears under control, at least for the time being, and he supposed that was good. He didn’t know why, but he supposed it was. He looked at the clock standing on the mantel. It said 5:21, and that felt about right.
Cynthia caught his arm. He turned to her, feeling a bit impatient. Through the picture window he could see the other Poplar Street survivors clustering in the middle of the street. So far they were ignoring the hails from the cops, who didn’t seem to know if they should come up or hold their positions, and Johnny wanted to join his neighbors before they made up their minds one way or the other.
“Is it gone?” she asked. “Tak-that red thing-whatever it was-is it gone?”
He looked back into the kitchen. It hurt him almost physically to do this, but he managed. There was plenty of red in there-the walls were painted with it, the ceiling too, for that matter-but no sign of the glowing, embery thing that had tried to find a safe harbor for itself in Cammie Reed’s head after its primary host had been killed.
“Did it die when she did?” The girl was looking at him with pleading eyes. “Say it did, okay? Make me feel good and say it did.”