The lobby had been ransacked.
All that racket from the night before, the banging and crashing, well here was its source. Plaster was gouged right down to the lathes, holes punched in the walls, doors torn off hinges. Everything was broken and shattered. And for about six or seven feet up the stairs, the railing balusters had been smashed like somebody had taken an axe after them. A goddamn big axe.
“What happened here?” Janie dearly wanted to know.
But I had no idea. Something had come into the building last night, that same thing that had been howling, and it went on a real bender down here. But what that might be I could not even guess.
“Look,” Carl said.
The front door was missing. Texas Slim found it outside, cast into the street. Its surface was cut with triple ruts like it had been worked with a scythe. A sturdy, century-old hardwood door…it must have taken something damn nasty with big claws to do work like that.
“Fucking monster,” Carl said.
“Guess I’d be inclined to agree with you,” Texas Slim said, though it was obvious he didn’t care for the idea.
We stood around in silence and I knew I had to get them going, get them doing something constructive before the significance of this made them want to hide under the beds. And I was just about to do that when somebody walked up.
“About time you people got up.”
Gremlin was standing there.
His olive drab fatigue coat was dusty, a ribbon of cobwebs hanging from one sleeve, but other than that he looked no worse for wear…that is, if you discounted his bruised face, split lip, and blackened eye.
Nobody said a word for a moment.
I went over to him. “Where the hell have you been?”
Gremlin offered me a grin that was downright creepy. “That’s some nice welcome,” he said. “I was hiding out. Some kind of thing down here last night. I hid out in an old coal bin in the basement.”
For some crazy reason, I just did not believe him. His eyes were glazed, shell-shocked almost. And that grin…it was dopey and strange, seemed to be saying, I know something you don’t, oh yes.
“We figured you were dead,” Carl said. “Too bad.”
I said, “Did you see what did this?”
“No, I heard it, but I wasn’t getting close enough for a look. Fucking thing was sniffing around…I think it was looking for me.”
Janie, who was usually the most sympathetic person in the world, did not say a word.
I was getting a bad feeling, but I couldn’t be sure what it meant.
If the others had misgivings about Gremlin’s story, they tried to hide it, but not Texas Slim.
He stood there looking at the destruction, the. 50 cal. Eagle in his hand. I was watching him. Watching him real close because I knew two things about Texas: he was fucking weird and he had a very good head on his shoulders. So I watched him run it all through his brain, see what he came up with. Texas stood there, holding his gun and wrinkling his brow as he did when he was vexed. Then slowly, he turned his gaze on Gremlin. Kept it there.
It was a hard stare and Gremlin quickly started to squirm.
“What the hell is it?” he demanded. “Fuck are you looking at me like that?”
Texas Slim shrugged. “Just wondering certain diverse things, I suppose.”
“Yeah…like what?”
“Like how it was you were down here last night and you didn’t see what did this. Strikes me as funny, that’s all.”
Gremlin looked to me for support and got nothing but a cool blank stare. “I heard it, same as you did. But I hid out. You think I was going to come out and face that fucking thing with the way it was howling and tearing this place apart?”
“You were armed, weren’t you? You had a three-fifty-seven. Why didn’t you try and pop our visitor?”
I stood there, waiting, as did the others.
Texas Slim was interrogating the guy, but someone had to. Something just didn’t wash about Gremlin’s story and it didn’t wash so much that it just plain stank rotten.
“What is this? What are you insinuating?”
“Yeah,” Carl finally put in. “Fuck are you insinuating, asshole?”
But Texas, being Texas, just shrugged and smiled thinly, let it all go. He’d made his point and he knew it. He’d cast doubt on Gremlin and a doubt that was tangible enough so that even thick heads like Carl picked up on it.
After all that, I got them organized, got everyone loaded up with their duffels and sacks and on the road. There was only so much daylight and I didn’t want to waste a second of it.
14
By late afternoon the next day, we still had no wheels.
We wandered for hours, searched as far west as the Tri-City Plaza on 5^th, but the Geiger started beeping because we were getting too close to Chicago. So we cut back to Midtown, then down as far as Glen Park, searching Gleason Park and the University lots and still came up with nothing. Then back downtown to Union Station to check parking garages. Just about everything had been stripped of tires or was smashed-up or had a dead battery. It seemed pretty hopeless.
We were marooned in Gary.
Trapped in that cemetery.
We had to get out. That was the bottom line. The background radiation was a little high, not too bad, but we were practically on Chicago’s doorstep and if a good gust came blowing east from the Windy City we would be in trouble.
As we walked, I thought about all the things I missed. Fresh food, TV, and motorcycles came to mind right away. There were bikes around, but most of them were either wrecked or in pretty bad shape. All the dealerships had been looted after society and law and order had collapsed. People being people had helped themselves to all those little extras they’d never been able to afford. It was tough finding good vehicles, too. Most cars and trucks were either smashed up out on the roads, abandoned and rusting, or had been stripped of useable parts. You’d see a lot of that. Really nice pick-ups, SUVs, sports cars sitting around on flat tires with shattered windshields, engines stripped or destroyed. Oh, there were plenty of drivable rides out there, but the people who had them also had guns. Lot of times you’d just find cars with skeletons in them.
Nobody was in a real good mood. We were tense, expectant, waiting for something truly horrible and truly dangerous to come around every corner. Because it was there. We all felt that. It was watching us, waiting for us, we just didn’t know what form it would take. And after those sounds we’d heard last night, we expected only the worse.
But that was night.
This was day: a misty, damp sort of day that carried an unpleasant chill to it. I didn’t like us being this vulnerable. In a vehicle we had the luxury of protection, of shooting and driving off…but not on foot. Any pack of crazies could chase us, corner us, and we only had so much ammo.
As we walked down yet another street, scoping out the rusted hulks of vehicles, the rubble and refuse, the bones heaped in the gutters, I was thinking about Gremlin.
Gremlin in general annoyed me in ways I could not exactly put a finger on…but after that weird howling last night, he had popped back up this morning and something had been very off about him. I was not sure what. There was something there and my gut-sense told me it was trouble, but of what variety I could not imagine. The howling. Gremlin coming back. That fucked-up, creepy grin on his face. Maybe I was just tired and wigged, but I was also certain I was not wrong in my assessment of him.
