Breakers (12 page)

"I'll tell you what's going on here." Craig's voice echoed through the vaults, the fine glass of the chandelier. "You hired us on to watch the place, then used us to deliver coke."

Murckle laughed. "That's anything new to you two?"

Craig muscled his pistol into Murckle's face. "How about a new hole through the back of your head?"

"No, I don't think so. My stylist is out of town."

"I only want to hear two more things out of you: where's your money, and where's your stuff."

Murckle laughed again and rolled his eyes. "If I had money, you think I would hire you three?"

Hu watched, stony as the cliffs below, while Craig leveled the pistol at his face. "Give it up or he gives up the ghost."

"Go ahead. Would you be kind enough to shoot him in the chest instead? I always thought I'd have him stuffed."

Raymond started down the steps. "Craig—"

Craig clicked back the hammer. "Give it up, you inscrutable fuck."

Hu flinched, lips pulled back in a silent snarl. "There is a safe beneath the third stone of the path in the back yard."

"You son of a bitch," Murckle said through a disbelieving grin.

Bill drifted the barrel of gun to point at the ceiling. "What's the combo?"

"36-24-36," Hu said.

"I'm taking anything they steal out of your pay," Murckle said.

Craig swiveled the gun to Murckle's face, his triceps swelling like an incoming wave. "You think you can take and take and take and the money will keep you safe. You know what the best part of this is? Everyone's too busy dying to give a fuck."

Murckle's jowls sagged like a shirt in need of a wash. The crash of the gun pounded from the high, bare walls. Murckle's head snapped back, exit-blood fanning the white carpet, a limp stream gushing from the hole in front. His legs folded beneath him with a wet pop. Raymond tried to step backwards, caught his heels on the stairs, and thumped to his ass. Hu shuddered away, blinking and licking his lips. On the floor, Murckle's left hand wiggled like a shoelace being drawn across a carpet.

Hu let out a long, shaky breath. Craig turned and shot him three times in the chest.

Bill threw up his hands. "Craig!"

"What? He was Murckle's right hand here. Guilt by association."

Bill shook his head at the floor and put away his gun. "What if he was lying about the safe combo?"

"Oh. Shit." Craig wiped his nose, jerked his chin at the piles of paintings and TVs and laptops. "Well, we'll still have all that."

Bill considered the paintings. "Least it's abstract. They won't even notice the blood."

The step creaked under Raymond's descent. Craig's shiny scalp swiveled. "Where you going?"

"Home." Raymond's chest felt filled with motes of painless light. "To my wife."

Craig shook his head. "See, the problem is I can't let you do that."

"It's all right." Raymond took another step. Craig raised his pistol.

"What the hell you doing?" Bill said. "You think he was in on it, too? He's the one who tipped me off."

"I know he's fine on that. I also know he witnessed us kill three men tonight."

Raymond gave his head a tight shake. "I'm not judging."

"That's comforting, but you know who will? The
judge
you're put in front of."

Bill lifted his hands to his waist, palms down. "Craig."

Craig's eyes flickered and his jaw hardened. "I'm keeping us safe, Bill. It's all right."

"You shoot that boy, I will leave you. This is no joke."

Craig's mouth drooped open, slow as a sunset. "You kidding me?"

"I just explicitly said it wasn't a joke. Do you ever listen to me?"

His jawbone bulged the thick skin beneath his ear. "You're willing to put us at risk over this guy?"

"Murckle could have landed me in jail," Raymond said. "He almost got us killed tonight. You think I care if he's dead?"

Bill smiled with half his mouth. "I wouldn't say there's any 'if' about it."

Craig craned back his neck, teeth bared, and stuffed his gun in the back of his pants. He closed on Raymond. His stubble looked like it could scour pans. "Your word. Give it to me."

"It's yours."

"Come on, kid, convince me. Tell me you won't tell a soul. Not your wife. Not Jesus Himself if he took you out for a beer at Dodger Stadium."

Raymond raised his right hand. "No one."

Craig drew back, giving Bill a look. "This lands us in jail, I'm finding me a nice Aryan boy."

"Thanks," Raymond blurted. He stepped over Hu's silent body, smelling copper and feces. "I'm going home. Good luck."

Bill waved. Craig stared at nothing. Raymond opened the front door. Fog wisped from the ocean, slicking the rails along the porch steps. On the way to his car, Raymond had to fight to keep from running. He drove downhill at a crawl, lights blooming the fog, imagining his brakes would fail at every stop. He parked at the esplanade and took the ramp to the beach where he watched the breakers until his shoulders quit shaking.

"Where have
you
been?" Mia said when he stepped through the door. She grinned from the recliner amidst a room dark besides the pale blue light of the television. "It's past midnight."

"The boss kept me late."

"Hunting the undead? You look like you've seen a ghost."

"No," he said. "But I may have seen a few get made."

She grinned again, mistaking it for a joke. As he stood silent, she covered her elbows with her palms. "What are you talking about?"

"We just needed money so bad."

"What happened?"

He closed his eyes. "I don't want to tell you. But if I don't, that will it easier for me to make the same mistakes again."

He gave her the broad strokes—the inadvertent drug-dealing, their plan to extricate themselves, the chaos in LA and then in the mansion in Palos Verdes. Confessing felt like a breeze through his body, like the events he described had happened to someone else.

After he finished, Mia stared at her hands for several seconds. "But you didn't kill anyone?"

He shook his head hard enough to dislodge a tooth. "No. Of course not. I was just there."

"That's crazy. That's crazy, Raymond."

"Should I have done something to stop them?"

"What could you have done?"

"Gone to the police. Or quit going in to Murckle's before it got that crazy. We could have picked up and driven to Albuquerque. I could have done a million things different."

She sniffled, steepling her fingers over the soft point of her nose. "It's different when you're living it, isn't it? I think it's a lot easier to know what you should have done after it's happened."

"Yeah," he said: but wasn't that just another excuse? He felt better, though, like he always did when he spoke up, when he confronted feelings and doubts; he always felt stronger, capable of grappling any problem; if nothing else, of resolving to do better next time. And Mia, she still loved him. She stared at the TV a minute before unpausing it. A cartoon kid made a fart joke.

She glanced at Raymond. "You know what I read today about how it got its name? The Panhandler?"

"What's that?"

"It nickel-and-dimes you. Drop by drop—your blood, I mean. Once it's weakened you far enough..." She spread her hands in front of her in a gushing motion.

He told her he needed to go to bed, but he thought maybe that was how you lost yourself, too: bit by bit, by nickels and dimes, until one day you look inside and there's nothing left at all. But money, you could always earn more. If you lost what was inside, could you save it back up?

* * *

Like his long night at Murckle's, the end of the world came too fast to know what to do.

The city burned. Raymond and Mia stayed indoors, curtains drawn, and followed the news on their laptops. When that grew exhausting they watched horror movies over the Xbox with the lights turned off and the sound low enough to hear footsteps in the driveway. When they went to bed Raymond placed the revolver in the dresser and locked the bedroom door. Sirens dopplered down the PCH night and day.

Ambulances and cop cars came to their formerly quiet street as well, double parking in front of Cape Cod manors and haciendoid mansions while the paramedics gathered up the bodies and piled them in back.

Raymond's email overflowed with mass-mailed funeral notices, with scared and sentimental goodbyes from friends he hadn't seen since high school, with strange, fevered queries from total strangers. At first he read each one; later, he skimmed; later yet, he deleted them unread. Mia's parents pleaded for them to come back to Washington, but nonessential flights had been grounded to try to limit the spread of the disease. Trying to drive the thousand-plus miles struck Raymond as beyond suicidal.

Anyway, it looked like there might be hope. The power stayed on. The water stayed on. The garbage collectors missed their pickup, which Raymond was glad for; he pulled the empty juice and soda bottles from the recycling and filled them with water and stored them in the basement. He and Mia began rationing food, shifting most of their meat to the freezer and eating crumbled bacon over rice they fried in the bacon grease. On the news, reports of cures shriveled away, replaced by increasingly vague international death counts presented with little commentary and by federal advice to stay indoors, minimize contact with the infected, and to report household deaths immediately.

"I don't think it's going to get better," Mia said softly during the end credits of
A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge
.

"I don't know, I'd say the credits are a big step up from the rest of the movie."

"Not that." She sat in the recliner with her knees to her chest, eyes bright in the TV-washed darkness, staring at the wall as if a cryptic threat were written on the dirty pink paint they'd never gotten around to redoing. "The world."

"Oh. That." He leaned forward, shoulders hunched, room tilting. "Just the world we know, right? Not the Earth itself."

She drummed her bare feet against the floor. "Yep. Still there."

"And so are we."

Mia smiled through the shadows. "Don't say that's all that matters."

"Isn't it?"

"Will life be worth living without ice cream?"

"Who says it's the end of ice cream? We'll still have cows. We'll still have snow." He stood, crossed to his laptop. "Guess we'd better start downloading survival guides before the internet disappears, huh?"

"See if there's anything about how to sew tires into coats."

He smiled. The days passed same and strange; locked in the house, he could almost pretend he was in the midst of a long weekend, happily isolated, with and wanting no one but his wife.

The moment they made plans, that illusion was shattered. They decided they would wait for the Panhandler to die down, only leaving the house to forage when they were down to a few days' food. They'd take the car, grab canned food, water, pasta, rice, and anything else that could be cooked simply over a fire or in boiling water. Longer-term, they'd find out whether any of their neighbors were still alive and in residence. Try to find walkie-talkies, as many batteries as they could carry, establish some sort of neighborhood watch. Keep the radio tuned to emergency channels. Put together a couple survival packs and be ready to move in minutes if things got worse.

The sirens thinned day by day. Within a week, they stopped altogether.

Raymond woke one night to the beeping keen of the smoke detector. He burst from bed and grabbed the revolver; but it was useless against the smoke and fire beyond the door.

10

Walt knifed feet-first into the water. Any icy fist closed over his head. The cold of the water crushed him, clamping his muscles; he plastered his palm across his mouth and nose. He thrashed his feet but couldn't tell which way was up. His head throbbed. His head burst from the water just before his lungs began to sear.

Behind him, the ferry's slow bulk drifted away, engines gurgling and rumbling and burbling. Walt slipped below a wave, gasped, abd kicked out of his shoes. They sank unseen into the sea. Wonderful: shoeless in Manhattan. If he didn't die by drowning, he'd die of gangrenous AIDS-feet.

Paddling, he forced his shallow pants into long, regular breaths. Muscle by muscle, he willed himself to relax. He started kicking for the dark towers of the city.

Shouts carried over the water behind him. A minute later, the searchlight of a small vessel bobbed on the water just past the ferry terminal. Walt laughed bitterly. The docks of Brooklyn looked a zillion miles away. He swung right anyway, angling away from the direct line between the ferry and the boat dispatched to track him down, pacing his kicks. He'd always been a strong swimmer, taking lessons at the country club when he was five, then transitioning to a beach rat a few years later, talking his parents into driving him to the shore every weekend he could. Things changed in his late teens when a mounting dread of the creatures lurking beneath the foamy waves drove him back to their backyard pool. He hadn't been over his head in a lake, river, or ocean since he was 19.

The bay yawned beneath him, a miles-wide mouth of cold black water.

The ferry chortled into the distance. Walt swam on, salt in his mouth, limbs clumsied by the cold. His neck strained from tipping back his chin. His loose shirt billowed in the swells, caressing him like a supple, grasping hand. The scattered lights of Brooklyn waited. How far? A mile? A mile he could walk in 15 minutes. How long would it take him to swim? Half an hour? Was that another way of saying he might have as little as thirty minutes to live? Like a man out of a precognitive sci-fi story, he knew more or less the precise time he would die, but the information was totally useless. He wasn't in position to make the most of his dwindling minutes by hopping on a roller coaster or the classiest hooker in the yellow pages. He would spend his final minutes swimming, skin frozen while his muscles and lungs burned, salt dripping in his eyes, pitched by swells.

Roughly halfway to shore, he was certain he wouldn't make it. His arms felt like overcooked ramen. He couldn't catch his breath. Salt seeped down his nose into his throat, sickening and thirsting.