Bestiary (66 page)
Authors: Robert Masello
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers
The footsteps had stopped, and Sadowski wondered what Tate was thinking. Was he wondering why Sadowski hadn’t outfitted him with an asbestos sheath, too? Had he been burned—badly—by the fire? Was he going to be really hard to look at?
And what should he, Sadowski, do? Should he play dead? Or should he say something, or stir inside the bag, to show that he was still alive in there? His fingers instinctively reached for the gun that he now regretted having left in the car.
The footsteps came closer, but they sounded heavy and hard. Maybe Tate was on his last legs. That wouldn’t actually be so bad; if he died, Sadowski could take his wallet and ID off of him, and his body would probably never be identified; there’d be a lot of unidentified remains by tomorrow, Sadowski figured.
Either way, Sadowski hoped he had a full canteen on him; his throat was parched and he’d left his own water supply in the Explorer.
Sadowski didn’t hear anything more, but he sensed someone very close by, and even through the small aperture he could smell something now—but it wasn’t like human sweat or flesh, even of the slightly cooked kind. He knew those smells pretty damn well, from the white phosphorus attacks they’d laid down on the insurgents in Iraq. No, this was a different smell, but it, too, took him back to the desert . . . to the day that Captain Greer had talked them all into that little extracurricular mission outside Mosul. It was the smell he’d encountered in that empty zoo in al-Kalli’s palace . . . where the bars of the cages were bent like they’d been hit with battering rams . . . and Lopez, the poor dead son of a bitch, had helped to press on the wings of that iron peacock . . . to reveal the box that Greer claimed he had never opened.
He decided not to call out. Or move. Or give any sign of life at all.
But the footsteps came closer anyway. And something was strange about that, too. It didn’t sound like two footsteps at a time . . . but four.
Sadowski tried to pull the zipper closed again, but it was stuck firmly in place.
And the smell—of scorched fur and rugged hide—got much stronger.
Sadowski froze, not so much as breathing anymore.
But something was breathing—and it was directly above him now. As he peered through the hole in the bag, he saw a green eye, as big as a baseball, looking back down at him. He felt a trickle of urine stream down his leg.
The creature snorted—its breath was as fetid as a garbage dump—and Sadowski felt a broad paw grazing the top of the bag . . . looking for a way in.
Jesus, Mary, Mother of God, God Almighty
. . . Sadowski couldn’t think the words fast enough. And he couldn’t think of anything else he could do; he could barely move his arms and legs anyway.
. . . Sadowski couldn’t think the words fast enough. And he couldn’t think of anything else he could do; he could barely move his arms and legs anyway.
The gentle pawing became more firm, and Sadowski could swear that he heard the click of the creature’s claws suddenly extending; one of them, an evil, crooked talon, hooked itself inside the tiny opening at the top of the bag and drew the zipper down as smoothly as a tailor. Sadowski lay there like a sardine in an opened can, while above him he saw what looked like a giant hyena, a mottled beast with hanging fangs and a thick matting of black fur all across its shoulders and neck.
Sadowski wanted to jump up and run, but his feet were still tangled in the bottom of the sheath, and when he tried to kick them free, the creature reared up on its hind legs, the black fur flying out like a cape, like the wings you’d see on a vampire bat. And then—just as Sadowski had mustered enough spit to scream—the beast threw back its head and let out a howl of its own, more bone-chilling than anything Sadowski had ever heard, and loud enough to drown out his own cry altogether.
Then it fell forward—jaws open and claws out—its black fur wrapping itself like a reeking veil around his thrashing head.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
SUNSET BOULEVARD WAS predictably snarled, the traffic inching along as policemen, stationed at the major intersections, tried to redirect the cars and keep the lanes moving at all. Carter ached to hit the klaxon again, and then use the limo like a snowplow, just shoving everything ahead of him out of the way; he had no doubt that this car could do it. Everytime he stopped dead, he studied the screens and dials on the dashboard, and eventually he found the phone connection.
“Number, please,” an automated female voice said.
Carter, relieved, recited his home phone number.
But instead of connecting him, the voice said, “Unrecognized caller. Please say your name.”
What would it recognize? Al-Kalli? Or, more likely, Jakob? And did he need Jakob’s last name?—because he had no idea what that was.
Carter tried “Jakob.”
The automated voice did not respond.
He tried “Mohammed al-Kalli.”
But again, there was no reply.
“Please say your name,” the voice finally repeated.
And this time, in total frustration, Carter simply said his own.
“Unrecognized caller. Please say your name.”
Carter gave up. Maybe they had some code name; maybe it could actually recognize Jakob’s voice itself. The blue light, next to the siren, was still silently flashing. What the hell was that, anyway—LoJack?
“Good-bye,” the automated voice chirped.
“Yeah, right,” Carter replied, “have a nice day.”
A cop waved him through a blocked intersection—he managed to go about three car lengths—before he had to stop again entirely. He lowered his head to peer up through the tinted windshield at the sky; the wispy cirrus clouds that he had seen earlier were eclipsed now by plumes of smoke, rising like funnels from every direction. It reminded him of the pictures he’d seen from Kuwait, when the fleeing Iraqis had set the oil wells on fire.
What the hell was going on? Was the whole city of Los Angeles going up in flames? He was reminded of the guys in army fatigues—Sadowski and his pals—who had shown up at the bestiary, and of something their leader had said: “Oh, I’ve got a plan,” or something like that, and then he’d glanced at his watch, as if making sure he was still on schedule. It seemed both impossible and incomprehensible—why would anyone do it?—but Carter had to wonder if what he was seeing was more than random wildfires, started by careless picnickers or kids with fireworks. Was it some insane and orchestrated plan?
He crawled forward, another thirty or forty feet, just as a helicopter swooped overhead; more images of Middle Eastern warfare teemed in his head. And his fear for the safety of Beth and Joey suddenly grew, exponentially. Were they home? Were they waiting there for him? Or had they fled to safety somewhere else?
A fire truck, sirens blaring, maneuvered itself across the intersection, right in front of Carter, and then, with a police escort clearing the way in front of it, started driving along the shoulder toward Sepulveda. The right side of the fire truck was riding up on the sidewalks and curbs, but Carter saw his chance and he took it; he gunned the Mercedes and caught the fire truck’s wake, following along close behind. A firefighter, manning the ladder at the rear, waved him off, shouting, but Carter couldn’t make out what he was saying—though he could certainly guess the gist of it—and he didn’t care, anyway. He was determined to get to Summit View, and this was the only way to do it. Several times cops, too, hollered at him through bullhorns, and once, Carter got so pissed off he purposely hit the klaxon again, a blast louder and more powerful than anything you’d hear from even a sixteen-wheeler. He also noticed that one of the LED screens read INTERCOM ENGAGED. He touched the screen and then said, “Testing.”
His voice boomed out over the jammed traffic lanes.
Oh man. What did this car not do?
“Official business,” he said. “Please clear the way.”
That must have given the cops a surprise, he thought—and at the next corner, they slowed down and fell back to attend to an accident. Carter didn’t doubt that they’d made note of his license plate, though, and that al-Kalli—if he’d lived—would have been hearing from them soon.
Al-Kalli. When Carter thought about what he’d seen not an hour ago—the man’s head rolling, and still sentient, if Carter’s guess was correct, across the dirt floor of the bestiary—he couldn’t believe it; it was as if Carter’s own mind could not process the information, could not accept everything that had happened, and everything he had witnessed, that day.
And though it wasn’t late even now, dusk had come early—the sun was shrouded behind an increasingly dense pall of smoke and cinders. Passengers sitting in the stalled cars that Carter passed looked stunned, terrified. Some had abandoned their cars altogether, and were running down the center lanes, carrying dogs in their arms, or car seats with squalling babies still in them. In the brown grass along one side of the road, he saw several people kneeling around a Hispanic man with a Bible who was leading them, heads down, in prayer; black ash swirled around their heads. Terrible shades, he couldn’t help but think, of 9/11.
He fumbled at the levers of the wheel until he found the windshield wipers and fluid; as the blades went back and forth, the window at first got sootier and more smeared, but then, with another jet of fluid, it began to clear.
The radio—he finally thought of trying the radio, but when he found it, and got it on, it was tuned to some Middle Eastern music station. Although he needed to keep both hands on the wheel, every chance he got he reached over and played with the controls until he found a news station. But even then the reception was terrible, and staticky. “Fires . . . Temescal Canyon ablaze, fanned by Santa Ana winds . . .” There was another burst of static, and then a fire official’s voice saying, “Please stay in your homes unless and until an evacuation order is given.” Carter continued to listen as the announcer read off an endless list of freeways that were impassable, roads that were closed, neighborhoods that were endangered. But nothing, thank God, was said about Summit View—at least so far.
The fire engine had turned off in another direction several blocks before, and Carter now was simply barreling along the shoulder, often with one or two tires off the macadam, and eliciting blasting horns and angry shouts and bullhorned police warnings. Over the car’s loudspeaker, he occasionally repeated his claim of official business, and once—at a particularly tricky juncture—announced that he was the mayor; the powerful black limousine with the fortunately tinted windows made a convincing case.
But when he got to Sepulveda and approached the entrance to Summit View, he found the long driveway blocked by a couple of fire trucks and several police cars. A stream of cars, some of them hastily loaded with stuff, was coming down off the hill and being shepherded toward the Valley. He had to stop short, and a young cop wearing a white paper face mask banged on his closed window with the butt of a flashlight. Carter rolled it down.
“You can’t go up there,” the cop barked, the mask billowing out, “we’re evacuating.”
“I have to,” Carter said, “I live there! My family’s up there!”
“Not anymore they’re not. Everybody’s coming down.” He waved to the left. “Now move it.”
He walked away, but instead of turning in to the file of cars slowly moving toward the Valley, Carter moved forward. The cop saw it and, pulling down the face mask, hollered, “What did I just tell you?”
Carter rolled the window up. The cop was running after him, and in his rearview mirror Carter could see that he was actually unsnapping his holster. Carter was fairly confident that this was a bulletproof car, but that still didn’t mean he wanted to test it.
“Stop!” the cop shouted, and two or three other policemen, dead ahead, got out of their cars to see what was happening. They had parked bumper to bumper, to blockade the right lanes of the drive. Carter would have to go around them. He steered the limousine over the curb, up onto the lawn, and then through the towering palm trees that lined both sides of the drive.
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