lazy current now, but still the water was nearly up to the roofline and the stink…of sewage and smoke and rot…was unbelievable. Steam rose from it in twisting plumes, a dense fog blowing over its surface. Logs and broken furniture floated by. Entire sheds and amputated roofs, bobbing cars and trucks, the walls of houses and picnic tables, garbage and scraps and fragments. And bodies. Dozens and dozens of bodies moving past in slow dead man’s rolls. In whole and in part. Many of them inhabited by confused rats and birds.
And the flies.
Christ, he’d never seen so many flies in his life. The air was thick with them. They rose off the bobbing wreckage in black, angry clouds, hundreds and hundreds of them. They got in your hair and crawled over your arms and nipped as flies do before a rain comes. But the rain was already falling. It had much been lighter since the wave hammered through the streets, but nobody wanted to get their hopes up. It had to stop sooner or later. For now it was a chill misting rain and no more and that was livable. But the flies? They never lightened. They were breeding by the millions with all the floating garbage and carrion. It was a feast to them.
Mitch put a cigarette in his mouth and lit it. “Harry,” he said. “Tell me again and don’t leave anything out.”
As soon as the water subsided, or as much as it was going to, Tommy had Harry tell him about what happened at the University. It hadn’t been a pretty picture. Jacky Kripp was some kind of animal. Harry said when they picked Chrissy and Lisa up, he hadn’t been sure that was what Jacky was up to. That at the University, before Giggles the Clown showed, he had put a stop to what Jacky had in mind. Jacky and he were about to go to it hot and heavy when the zombies stopped by for a snack. Mitch wanted to believe Harry. Something inside told him that he could believe Harry. But there was still that protective, parental doubt worming at him.
For what if Harry was lying? What if he and Jacky had actually raped them or something even worse? For after all, they were both bad boys. Sure, Harry Teal seemed okay…but was he?
You have to believe him, Mitch, that indefatigable voice of reason told him. You don’t have a choice. If he had done something other than what he was saying, then why bring it up at all? Why even mention Chrissy?
That was true. That was very true and it made perfect sense, but fatherly paranoia was fatherly paranoia. The idea of someone violating or hurting Chrissy was enough to make Mitch boil inside. But he had to keep it in context. Harry had protected the girls. That’s what he claimed and either he was a very good liar?being a professional criminal, he probably was?or he was telling the truth. When Mitch first heard him out, he’d looked over at Wanda when he was done and Wanda had simply nodded her head. Wanda believed him. Tommy seemed to. And Mitch himself? Yeah, deep down, he believed Harry. Because maybe Harry was a lot of things, but he didn’t see the man as some kind of sexual predator.
“That’s about all there is to tell,” Harry finished.
“And that’s what that sick squeeze of shit said?” Tommy prompted him. “That you couldn’t find him because he was going where the bad boys and bad girls go? The ones no one wants?”
Mitch was filled with venom, helpless, utterly helpless. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Tommy considered it yet again, only this time he seemed to be onto something. “Think about it, Mitch. Where do boys and girls that no one wants go? What kind of place to they put them in?”
And Mitch got it. Yes, yes of course. “The orphanage.”
21
The rumbling had stopped.
Whatever had hit the city, whether it was a bomb or an earthquake, it had settled down now. Chrissy had hoped that whatever it was would shake the building down around her, but it hadn’t happened. The building?or whatever it was?had indeed shook and reeled, but it had not fallen.
So much for that.
There were nineteen people in the pit with Chrissy.
That was easy enough to ascertain. The clown had brought them all here, but he hadn’t bothered taking any of their personals from them. So while they didn’t have any flashlights, they did have disposable lighters and matches. It wasn’t a pit really, it was a cellar. But in Chrissy’s mind, it was a pit, all right. Dark and dusty and cobwebbed. There were nineteen people in there. Men and women, no children, thank God. But of the nineteen only two others seemed capable of doing more than going mad. Quite a few were in shock, others just simply insane, talking to people who weren’t there, sobbing and whispering. The others were mostly silent. Beaten and injured.
There were only the two that Chrissy could count on: Albert Accaro, an unmarried auto mechanic; and Alona Seelig, who was apparently some kind of biker chick with a bad attitude.
These were the three.
Of the others, only Ed Watts, had bothered speaking to them or answering direct questions. He was in his right mind for the most part, but he was no help in anything. “I don’t know what you people are planning, but you’d better be careful. That clown is right outside the door and I’m not going to allow you to make things worse for the rest of us.”
To which Alona promptly said, “Shut the fuck up, Ed.”
Yes, the clown was outside the door. That scathed wooden door with no handle on the inside. There was no doubt of that. They could hear him out there from time to time, singing or humming and there was no mistaking the odor that came off of him?like a bin filled with bad meat, maybe flavored with hospital waste and coffin mold for spice. Yes, he was out there and from time to time he pressed up against the door, drawing his nails…or claws… over the outside panel, making people wince and whimper. Sometimes he’d call individuals by name, tell them how he would eat them, or simply spill all the dirty details of their private lives. Things that monster could not possibly know, but seemed to know just fine.
Right then he was singing, “Rain, rain, go away! Come again another day! Little Grimshanks wants to playyyyy!”
His voice was like forks and knives scraping over concrete and like that, it went right up your spine. Grimshanks the Clown was about as terrible of a thing as Chrissy could imagine. He was a zombie like the others, but yet, he wasn’t exactly like the others. They were evil, too, but he was just a little higher on the insanity scale. He terrified everyone…except maybe Alona. Alona kept mouthing off to him and the funny things was, although he roared and made the door shake in its frame, he did not come after her.
That was interesting.
Other than that door which was like a portal into an ogre’s kitchen, there was only one possible way out. Up near the ceiling there was a boarded over window. They had no idea where they were or what was outside, but they intended to find out. The window was about two feet wide and just over a foot tall. Chrissy figured she could wiggle through there and most of the others, too. It would be a tight squeeze for Alona, but she’d make it. That lady was nothing if not tenacious. She hated that goddamn clown maybe worse than the others and she wanted to piss it off, do anything to give it trouble. And escaping would surely piss Grimshanks off.
“These boards are old,” Albert said, examining them by matchlight. “They’d be pretty easy to bust off, but it would make noise. Last thing we want here is to make too much noise.”
Alona checked ‘em out on tippy-toe. “We’ll have to force ‘em real slow, maybe muffle ‘em with clothes or something.”
She was wearing a hooded sweatshirt. She stripped it off in the darkness and handed it to Albert. He pressed it up against the boards and tucked it in tight. All he had to use for leverage was a long quarter-inch piece of pipe he’d pried from the wall. It was rusty, but firm. It would work if he could just wedge it behind that lower board. Using the blade of his jackknife, he began to loosen that board, working very patiently and carefully. Each time he pulled it out, light spilled in.
“I know what you people are up to,” Ed Watts said.
“Glad to hear it, Ed,” Alona said. “Now be a good boy and fuck off.”
“You’re endangering all of us.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, we’re already endangered, you idiot.”
“I’m just saying, is all.”
