Serpents Rising (15 page)

But I looked. And instantly felt the bile burning upwards into my throat. I fought the urge to vomit. I looked up at the ceiling and forced myself to take deep breaths, first one, then another. I looked back down at what had been, just a few hours before, a kid named Owen. A boy in his teens, trying to be tough, to stand up to a stranger — and for a friend.

I felt the horror taking over inside me — crushing, hysterical horror — and I knew I was losing control, that I was panicking, even as I told myself
not
to panic, to stay calm, to think, to reason. Not to scream, which was the thing I most wanted to do.

I had to keep breathing. More deep breaths.

I wasn't sure how long I stood there, not moving but for the heaving of my chest. Maybe a minute, maybe two. Finally I looked again at the horror on the floor. It was hard to know where exactly the blood had come from, what parts of him had been stabbed or slashed. Maybe the throat. But lower too — the chest and maybe the stomach.

Owen's unseeing eyes seemed to be fixed on the blood, as they had probably been, watching as the life flowed out of him onto a barren warehouse floor.

I looked slowly at the closed door to the other room. I was shaking, shaking violently, and I couldn't stop. I had to open that door and look in the other room. And I knew that if the killer or killers were in there, opening that door would be the last thing I ever did. Or I could find myself looking at more death — at Owen's girlfriend Jen. Or Zoe. Or both of them.

Yet even as those thoughts overwhelmed me, there was a part of me — of my mind — that seemed to be coming back. I was at least able to think, consider what I had to do. It was that part of my mind that told me not to touch anything.

I raised an elbow and pushed on the door. It slowly drifted open.

The room was empty. No, that was wrong. There were no people, alive or dead, in the room. But it wasn't empty. I'd remembered the first time Cobb and I had been in the place, how Zoe had tried to make the most impossible of spaces into something at least a little orderly.

This room was not orderly now; it was a shambles. Broken pieces of dishes and glass, a mattress that had been cut or torn into small bits of fabric and smashed coils scattered around the floor, a dresser with its drawers strewn around the room, clothing ripped into pieces … that was the room now.

But I didn't see bodies or even blood and for several seconds tried to make sense of what I
was
seeing. None of it felt real.

Cobb. I had to get to Cobb, let him deal with this. He was the detective. He could try to find meaning in all of this — understand it.

I had to get out of the building. I took two steps backward and turned. I went by Owen's body without looking at him again. I stopped at the door, hesitating, wondering if there was something I should do before I left. I couldn't think of anything. Without touching the handle, I gently closed the door, pathetically, like I was trying not to waken someone who was sleeping.

I shook my head and began to walk, forcing myself not to run. And then I heard it.

A sound. I wasn't sure what. Muffled … a hiccup or sob … something … from over there. To my right. I walked as quietly as I could to where I thought I'd heard the sound. It seemed to have come from the place next door.

The killer or killers? No, whoever had destroyed Owen wouldn't be hiding from a lone, unarmed man. I was counting on that. If I was wrong …

When Cobb and I had come here the first time we hadn't looked in there. There'd been no signs of anyone having been there. Ever. Or at least since this incarnation of the building had come into existence.

Yet I was sure that a sound, almost surely a human sound, had come from behind the door that was hanging from a couple of hinges. I pried it far enough open to allow me to look inside. Still nothing. And no recurrence of the noise, whatever it had been.

I manoeuvred my way inside. It was dark but the darkness wasn't total. I could see well enough to allow me to survey the room. Nothing to indicate it was, or had been inhabited by anything more than whatever crawled the ceilings, walls, and floors of an all but abandoned warehouse.

I turned to go … and heard the sound again, not more than a few steps from where I was standing. It seemed to be coming from the vicinity of where I guessed the kitchen sink would have been located if the building had been completed. Just a space and some pipes were there. And below that several large pieces of cardboard leaning against the wall. No, not against the wall. They were leaning against some framing jutting out from the wall, meaning that there was a space behind the cardboard and below the space for the sink.

A space large enough for …

I pushed the cardboard aside in one motion and found myself looking at two people crouched down. My mind had been working overtime since I'd found Owen, and now it strangely remembered the scene in the movie
A Christmas Carol
where the Ghost of Christmas Present pulls aside his robe and shows Scrooge the two poor and starving orphans.

There
were
two people in the space and they did look like the two people in the movie. But they weren't orphans, at least not
child
orphans. I reached out my hand. Zoe was the first to take it and allow me to pull her out of the space. Then I helped Jen out of there and to her feet as well.

There was blood over the front of the hoodie she was wearing and some on her hands as well.

“Are you hurt?” I kept my voice to barely more than a whisper.

She shook her head and I guessed she had gone to Owen in some kind of effort to help him. It was obvious that it had been Jen who had been doing the sobbing. And now as she realized that she wasn't in immediate danger, the sobs became louder. I put my arm around her shoulder and she leaned against me, shaking.

“Come on,” I said. “We need to get out of here.”

I steered Jen toward the stairs with Zoe making sure she was right beside me. None of us spoke and Jen seemed to be regaining control. The sobs became intermittent.

We reached the bottom of the stairs and stopped. I raised my finger to my lips.

“Let me make sure we're okay before we go out there.”

I poked my head out the door and peered around before stepping completely outside. I couldn't see anything or anyone that raised alarm bells and the only sounds were from distant machinery performing some kind of industrial tasks.

I stepped back inside. “Okay, my car is across the street. It looks clear out there so let's go there together, get in, and get the hell out of here.”

“But what about…?” Zoe's eyes flicked upwards in the direction of her rooms.

“We'll deal with that once we know we're safe and away from here.”

She nodded and Jen grabbed my arm. She was still shaking. I wanted to say something reassuring but couldn't imagine what might be appropriate in the face of what they had seen in the minutes just passed.

“Let's go,” I said and led them out into the daylight.

We hurried to the Accord. Zoe and Jen scrambled into the back seat as I threw myself behind the steering wheel and we roared off. I spent most of the first few blocks looking in the rearview mirror and taking several turns and even a couple of U-turns to thwart any potential tails. But after ten minutes or so, I slowed it down and looked for some place to stop and regroup.

I chose the parking lot of a Starbucks on 11th Avenue, just out of the downtown area. I turned to look at Jen, who had her head tilted back on the seat, then at Zoe, who was watching me.

“Okay, I need you to tell me what happened. Cobb will want details, but give me the condensed version.”

Zoe nodded, spoke slowly. “Well, I went off to talk to the people I'm going to stay with. Owen and Jen headed for the restaurant to have that breakfast and we were going to meet on the way back here. But in the middle of breakfast, Owen remembered that he'd left his ID at my place. He got so worked up about it, Jen told him to run back and get it and come back to the restaurant.”

She took a deep breath and looked at Jen, who was crying again, this time silently and with her hand over her face. “When he didn't come back she waited and met me and we went back together. They were going to help me pack up my stuff and be ready for when you got there to pick me up. But when we … went into … my …” she faltered. “You saw … what we saw.”

“Did you see anyone else?

She shook her head. “We freaked. Jen tried to lift Owen but then we heard someone coming so we hid. We thought it might be whoever had … but it was you.”

I nodded and took a twenty out of my wallet. “Okay, go get us three coffees. The biggest they've got.”

For some reason I figured coffee was the thing that would most help Jen right at that moment.

“I have to call Cobb and see how he wants us to handle this.”

Zoe nodded, looked at Jen, then hurried into the Starbucks.

I pulled my coat off, reached back, and wrapped it around Jen, who was still shaking. I cranked up the heat in the Accord, pulled out my phone, and called Cobb, hoping like hell he was out of his meeting at the school. He answered on the second ring.

I only got as far as telling him Owen was dead and the girls were with me. He interrupted me. “Where are you?”

When I told him, he barked, “Don't move. Don't talk to anybody. I'll be there in twenty minutes.”

It was probably less than that but by the time Cobb got there, Zoe and I had managed to look after a few things. While the girls drank coffee, I had run across the street to a consignment store and bought a couple of changes of clothes and some towels I'd wet down in the store's washroom.

It was contrary to Cobb's instructions but I didn't think he'd object.

Jen was relatively cleaned up, had changed, and was at least somewhat composed when Cobb pulled in behind me. Zoe and I were drinking coffee. Jen hadn't touched hers. Cobb pulled open the passenger door and slid in.

He looked at me, then swung around to look at each of the girls in turn. “Okay, first of all, is everybody okay?”

The girls nodded and I pointed to the pile of bloody clothing on the floor of the back seat. “Jen came in contact with Owen. We got her cleaned up.”

Cobb took some time to think about that, finally nodded. “Okay, I need to hear it again. From the beginning.”

Zoe, as she had the first time, did the talking. Cobb listened until she got to the part where she and Jen were walking back to the warehouse.

“What time was that?”

“I think it was around two-thirty.”

“Where did you two meet?”

“In front of the motorcycle restaurant.”

“Then what?” Cobb said.

“We walked back to my … the place,” Zoe said. “Jen was worried that we'd miss Owen and I told her he'd probably be stoned or sleeping.” She looked hard at Cobb. “Who did that to him?”

“We don't know yet. Okay, you got back to the building, then what?”

“We came in the back way, which is the only way in and out. I guess you know that.”

Cobb nodded.

“Then we went up to our floor —”

Cobb held up his hand. “Let's back up a second. Did you notice any vehicles parked on the street?”

The girls looked at each other and shook their heads in unison.

“I … we were like … talking. I don't know if we were paying that much attention to what was on the street, you know?”

“How about across the street or down the street a ways?”

“Uh-uh,” Zoe said.

“What about people? Anybody walk by?”

“I didn't see anybody.” She looked at Jen, who shook her head again.

“Okay, you went inside. Anything look different? Sounds, smells, anything?”

“I don't think so.”

“Jen?”

“I … I didn't notice anything.”

“Okay, go on.”

“We were talking all the way up the stairs. Everything was all like normal. We got to my place and the door was closed. I pushed it open and Jen called to Owen. We didn't see him at first, but then …” She looked down for a minute then raised her eyes to meet Cobb's. “If those people find Jay before you do —”

“We'll find him,” Cobb said. He turned slightly to face Jen. “You came in contact with Owen. Did you move him?”

“No … well, maybe his arm. I wanted him to get up. I thought …” She broke into sobs again and Zoe pulled her closer and wrapped her arms around Jen's shoulders. I thought she'd done well to be as composed as she was for this long.

Cobb waited, his jaw working up and down.

Jen sniffed and sat up straight, making an obvious effort to regain control. A minute or so and she was ready to continue.

“I think I moved his arm,” she said again.

“Okay, then what?”

“I wanted to hold him, to kiss his face, because by then I knew he was dead, but … I couldn't. I couldn't even —” The sobs came again and Zoe reached for her a second time.

“Jen,” Cobb said, “no one could have done more than you did.”

I looked at Cobb. The look on his face as he leaned forward over the seat, as if to be closer to Jen, was equal parts genuine sadness and tightly controlled anger.

“Did either of you go in the other room? The back room?” I asked.

Cobb looked at me, eyebrows raised.

“That room was trashed,” I said. “Stuff thrown around, everything kind of torn apart.”

Cobb said, “Like the killers had been looking for something.”

“We didn't go back there,” Zoe replied. “I pulled Jen up to her feet and told her we had to get out of there right away in case the killers were still somewhere in the building or maybe coming back.”

“And that's when you heard me coming.”

Zoe nodded. “Which is when we hid in the place next door. When we were in there we could hear someone looking around in my place but we didn't know who it was or even how many people it was. And we were afraid if we tried to run they'd get us and …” She looked at me. “We didn't know it was you. Thank God it was.”