And then she shows up. Young, thanks to plenty of makeup and subdued lighting. Bouncy, thanks to plenty of tissue. Dressed in a cheerleader’s outfit. Steve is whacked out of his head and just a little confused. So he locks up his best girl together-both of them-and he does what any man would do. He goes to work and figures he’ll worry about the whole thing later, because it’s a little much to expect that something as simple as a man can handle all this stuff at once. After all, a man can’t work and think at the same time. But maybe he’ll have some free time on the weekend or something, between ball games and pay-per-view bikini contests. Get down to brass tacks then.
In the meantime, he’ll just let his little problem keep.
Both of her.
Together in not-so-cold storage.
Men. They were like little robots. Wind ’em up and watch ’em go. Want to figure them out? Open them up and look at the gears. Metal and wire. The schematic hadn’t changed in several thousand years.
But April Destino was another story entirely. Amy realized that. April had some part in this, too. She had set Doug Douglas in motion. She had left the cheerleading outfit. And while Amy recognized that her own anger had brought her here, she also knew that her anger had been stoked by April Destino. Her strings had been pulled by an expert, and now she was walking in April Destino’s shoes. Quite literally.
Amy returned to the corner. The room seemed very small. It didn’t seem like Steve Austin’s room at all. April’s books were here, and April was here. Nothing seemed as amusing as it had just a minute or two before. Amy stared at her feet, resisting the fear that churned in her belly.
She stared at April’s corpse.
She saw what April had become.
“You brought me here,” Amy said. “You made me come.”
Silence. Blue lips pursed as if to speak, but now Amy’s hard eyes discerned the dark slivers of thread on those lips. The pursed expression was a result of an undertaker’s shaking hand, a needle worked too fast through flesh that had always been much too pliant. A task performed too quickly, as if fearful that something dangerous might spill from those cold lips.
“Why did you do it, April?”
The question was simple. Amy waited for an answer, but none came.
No words would spill from April Destino’s lips ever again.
The fluorescent light refused to whisper. The stitched silence was as impenetrable as a locked room.
8:28 A.M.
In the dream Shutterbug is standing before the big drive-in screen during the world premiere of his first movie. Rows of cars stretch into the darkness, each car wedged in tight like a bullet in a full clip, each windshield dappled with a summer’s worth of dead bugs that won’t wash away until fall brings the first heavy rain. And all those eyes behind all those windshields watch Shutterbug. All those eyes see his face through mosaics of dead bugs.
His cricket eyes are as black and round as camera lenses. His yellow-jacket grin is lined with teeth like razors. Cracked antennae warp his perceptions, but that is a natural state of affairs. He is a Shutterbug and he is smiling, and all eyes are trained on him.
It’s wonderful, all that attention.
Until Shutterbug realizes that he is naked.
He’s embarrassed, of course, but not too embarrassed because he can see that the people in the can are naked, too. And April Destino is naked, lying on a pool table parked between a Nova and a Barracuda. She’s naked, smiling a lazy spiked-punch smile and her teeth are little white squares that couldn’t hurt anyone, and Bat and Todd and Derwin and Griz are standing there, dirty jeans swimming around their ankles, and they are smiling but their smiles aren’t at all lazy, and Shutterbug hears April’s tinny moans spilling from the corroded speaker that hangs from one of the corner pockets.
And Shutterbug knows what’s happening up on the screen because he can hear what’s spilling from the speaker. But now it seems that everyone is watching him instead of the movie, staring at his cricket eyes and yellow-jacket teeth and cracked Shutterbug antennae.
Let them watch, he thinks. They’re only ghosts. Their bodies are skinned with shadow, each one as light as the breeze that rides the night air. Shutterbug doesn’t fear them. He sees gravel through the waxed bodies of muscle cars, hot oil settling in black engines. He sees vodka bottles and six-packs of beer hidden in locked trunks, along with guys who snuck in for nothing and who won’t get out for any price.
If he really looks hard, he can see through that Chevy van in the first row. He sees two teenagers locked in a passionate embrace, sees through their skin, their jaws. If he really looks hard, he can see their tongues dancing behind the dead butterfly on the windshield.
They are only ghosts. Shadows. They can’t do anything to him.
And then the first one laughs.
It’s April, sitting up on the pool table, pointing at him, awful laughter rippling over her little white teeth, over lips stained with spiked cherry punch, the sound amplified through two hundred iron speakers.
And then it’s more horrible than Shutterbug imagined because he was so sure that the things in the cars couldn’t harm him. But each chuckle is like a little knife. He can’t stand up to it and neither can his film.
The film breaks, and Shutterbug is bathed in white light. Car horns bleat. Rows of headlights switch on as one, and Shutterbug has to close his eyes and he can see red veins and his eyelids are nothing but dark filters throbbing with blood because the light is so bright.
Just for an instant he can see himself through their eyes. He’s so very black against the very white screen, and his face isn’t insectile at all. It is a face just like Derwin MacAskill’s.
Everyone can see it.
His father yells, “Marvis! Cover yourself!”
But he can’t do that. The light is too bright, so bright that he begins to see through his eyelids. Everything is red and spider-webbed with tiny veins. He sees round bugging eyes in caverns of bone. Ghosts wearing transparent grins, the rows of teeth behind each set of lips sharp and twisted and wolfish.
And April Destino wears the worst grin of all, though her teeth are little and white and square, and Shutterbug recognizes in an instant that she has been hungry for a very long time. April points at him, and he sees the blood racing through her veins, he sees her heart pounding and knows it is a muscle and it is very, very strong stronger than he ever imagined.
April says. You missed the best shot, Shutterbug. But that’s okay. I’m still waiting for you, and this time…I’m ready!
Bright light burned a flat line across Shutterbug’s face. The sound of his own gasp filled the room, and, hiding behind it, he imagined that he heard the dull echo of April’s damning words.
He opened his eyes, squinting at the shaft of morning sunlight that knifed through a crack between the bedroom drapes. His head ached intensely. It didn’t seem possible that sharp rocks had been shoved into his skull in place of his eyes, but that was the way he felt.
He made the mistake of rubbing his eyelids and the pain intensified.
Amazing. An amazing colossal hangover. This was all he needed on top of last night. His feet hit the floor-a dull, rubbery sound-and he realized for the first time that he had slept in his shoes and clothes. He had dreamt that he stood naked before his high school class while he’d really been sleeping fully dressed. There was a healthy measure of irony in there somewhere, but Shutterbug wasn’t quite up to finding it.
He made it to the window and fiddled with the drapes, eliminating the nasty slice of light that had tormented him. The last threads of the dream unraveled, and he began to forget about it. He let himself do that; he didn’t want to spend another second in the company of the laughing ghosts.
