Echoes of Darkness (13 page)

She rose and fell on him, around him, crushing him deeper into herself with every thrust, so hard it bordered on pain. Ben just tried to ride it out, to last long enough and not get hurt. Though she had started with kisses, all softness was gone from her. Her face was twisted into a rictus of lust that was almost savage, and Ben realized he was not making love with a partner: he was being used to service her immediate need. Though that realization hurt a little, there was still a small part of him that thought
I have to write this down and send it in to Forum!

He climaxed. There was nothing he could do to stop it, not thinking of baseball, going to his happy place, nothing. It didn’t slow her down in the least—he wasn’t sure she even noticed. She pounded on him with increasing ferocity, her internal friction keeping him erect and functioning. He felt teeth nipping and biting at his shoulders and throat. The combination of sharp little pains and her own frantic pleasure drove him over the edge again: his first ever double orgasm. She stiffened, hands gripping the edges of the gurney to provide leverage, bearing down with more than just her weight as she ground herself onto him, harder and harder until he felt a final crushing squeeze deep within her, her release so strong it hurt—hurt a
lot
. The battering he’d just taken coupled with his twenty-four-hour workday, and as he screamed at this sudden and unexpected pain, darkness closed over him.

He blacked out.

He awoke to a tickling near his groin, soft lips working their way down his hip. Eyes closed, he moaned softly in anticipation. The kissing lips became softly nipping teeth as they worked their way down to his thigh . . . then an explosion of pain as she bit into his leg.

His eyes popped open and he stared down to find the girl gazing up at him, her teeth buried in his thigh to the gums. His scream, for he
was
screaming, increased in volume as she jerked her head upward, savagely twisting a huge chunk out of his leg. He rolled off the gurney, on the far side from where she was standing, the hole in his flesh spraying blood across the floor.

“Jesus
Christ
!”

She shoved the gurney, sending it flying aside. Ben scrambled away as she stumbled forward, bent over to grope for him clumsily as she chewed, then swallowed.

“What the hell are you doing!”

“Waaaaarrrmmmm . . .” she replied.

She batted his ankle in an attempt to grab. Ben scooted backward, his naked butt sliding easily over the blood-slick floor. His feet were still tethered by his pushed-down pants, and somewhere he heard a banging noise. The girl staggered forward, eyes glassy, chin and chest covered with the blood from his leg like a child’s bib gone horribly wrong.

He struggled to his feet, yanking up his pants despite the pain, slamming through the doors into the autopsy theater.

He stumbled around the autopsy table, tripping over something on the floor. He caught the table edge and looked down.

Dr. Jonah, lying chest down but face up, his head twisted a hundred and eighty degrees, one eye missing, bite marks covering his face. Ben screamed as he heard the theater doors open, knowing it was the girl, but he couldn’t take his eyes from Dr. Jonah.

Then the pathologist sat up. Ben saw the girl coming and backed away, then watched her trip over Dr. Jonah, both of them going down in a heap. Ben lurched back out into the morgue and caught the doors as they closed, toeing down the hinged stoppers usually used to prop the portal open. It wouldn’t work if they thought to
pull
, but . . .

Through the narrow inset window, he saw the blood-stained girl approach the doors, staring out as Jonah shuffled over, head on backwards. The doors strained against the stoppers’ little rubber feet.

This can’t be happening,
he thought.
Jonah’s dead, he
has
to be, and that girl
 . . .
 ohmigod, that’s
Rebecca
,
isn’t it? But
 . . .
 that means . . .

His gorge rose as he recalled what had happened on that gurney, but he was distracted from those thoughts by the banging. The pounding. He followed the sound to the wall of cooler drawers. There were thirty small steel doors set into the wall, and fully twenty-five of them were moving. Jouncing. The steel handles shimmied, reflecting the lights.

More than two dozen . . . 
things
were trying to get out.

Ben screamed.

His mobile phone, lying on the floor by the gurney, began to chirp. He scrabbled for it; flipped it open.

“Hello?”

“Ben! Ben, my boy, where are you?”

It was Maxwell.

“Uh . . . still at the hospital, why?”

“I finally got in touch with Bill Harrison. Look, that stuff he sent me, it wasn’t for use! It was something he . . . uh . . .
acquired
from some witch doctor there. Bill saw some remarkable things and sent me that sample for testing in a modern lab—but I don’t have time to go into that right now! I understand that girl we dosed with the stuff didn’t make it?”

Emphasis on the
we
. Ben glanced at the face staring at him from the autopsy suite.

“Yeah, she’s dead.” His gorge rose again.

“Look, Ben, we have to do something. I’m driving; almost there. Meet me in the morgue in five minutes, got it? No excuses!”

“I’m way ahead of you, Doctor. I’ll be waiting.”

He closed the phone before Maxwell could reply. He looked down at his leg, still bleeding freely, and wiped a hand across his forehead. He was sweating profusely, the fever already upon him. His leg felt strange; a numbness that did not deaden the pain radiated outward from the bite. His mind was foggy. He wondered how long he had, but decided it didn’t matter.

He shuffled along, yanking open doors and pulling out drawers. Dr. Maxwell’s patients rose up around him. As they tore into him he just hoped he’d have time to rise again before Maxwell arrived.

He did so want to greet the good doctor.

PHOTO FINISH

“Excuse me,” said Billy.

The counterman looked up from the cardboard carton he was rummaging through, flipping a stringy gray ponytail behind his shoulder. The man was tall and wide, and with the long hair he reminded Billy of Mr. Martin, the custodian at his school. Billy discovered as he stepped up to the counter that unlike Mr. Martin, however, this man was emitting some serious body odor.

“Yeah?”

“Hi. I was wondering what you could tell me about this camera. It
is
a camera, right?”

The stinky guy just stared at the thing Billy had placed on the counter for a moment, like he didn’t recognize it either.

“Where’d you find that?”

“Uh . . . back there,” Billy said, pointing vaguely into the hodgepodge depths of the pawnshop. “It was on a shelf in the back, right next to that.”

He indicated his best friend, Frank, who displayed a blue bag, the word
Polaroid
emblazoned on the side. Frank must have seen and correctly interpreted the pit stains on the man’s t-shirt, and was wisely standing back from the counter, where the air was relatively fresh.

Stinky the counterman looked from the thing the boys had found, to the bag and back, then leaned toward Billy and took up the gadget. The words, “Yeah, kid, it’s a camera,” rode into the room on breath that stank of old cigarettes, coffee, and a complete lack of oral hygiene. Billy slid back a step, standing closer to Frank and concentrating on not wrinkling his nose or gagging.

Stinky twisted the Polaroid to see it from different angles.

“It’s a camera,” he repeated. “An old Polaroid One-Step Express. I forgot this was even back there. Man,” he added in a whisper, “it’s been a while . . .”

Frank’s feet shuffled impatiently for a few seconds, then he said, “What’s that slot in the front for?”

Stinky’s head snapped up, eyes wide, as if he’d forgotten they were there.

“This?” He touched the slot beneath the lens. “This is where the pictures come out. Look here, kid.”

His fingers, strangely dexterous for a man so large, popped open the base of the camera, just below the slot.

“Your film cartridge goes in here.”

He snapped the compartment shut, then held the camera up, peering through the viewfinder.

“You take your picture—click—and the actual picture comes out of that slot. The thing develops itself once it’s exposed to air or something, and wham! A minute later, you got your picture.”

He placed the camera back on the counter. “So, you want it?”

“It comes with the case, right?” Billy said.

Stinky nodded.

“It’s marked ten dollars. That gets me everything?”

Another nod, and Billy found himself nodding along.

“I think it sounds like fun. I guess I’ll—wait a minute! How old is this thing? Can I even get film for it?”

Stinky kept nodding. “Pretty sure you can.”

Frank fished in the camera bag and pulled out a pair of small rectangular boxes. “Hey, what about this? This says ‘instant film.’ Is this what you’re looking for?”

“Cool!” Billy turned back to Stinky. “That’s included, right? You said the bag was included.”

Stinky shrugged. “Sure. That kind of film goes bad after a while, though. Check the box for an expiration date.”

Frank looked. “August 2005.”

Billy deflated. “So, it won’t work?”

“It might,” said Stinky. “But probably not. You can always get more film, though, right? So, you want it?”

The bell over the pawnshop door rang as Billy carried his new purchase out to the street.

A half hour later, Frank followed Billy out of the pharmacy and toward their bicycles.

“Dude, I can’t believe that pawnshop guy ripped you off like that!”

Billy shrugged. “Maybe he didn’t know.”

“Oh, he knew. I
know
he knew! You heard what the lady at the photo counter said. Polaroid stopped making that film
years
ago. The new company that started making this stuff charges
twenty dollars
a pack!”

Billy would have been more angry himself, but the way Frank was carrying on kept making him smile. He unzipped the bag on his shoulder and took out the camera, unfolding it and popping the film door open as Stinky had shown them.

“What’re you doing?” said Frank.

“I’m gonna try it,” said Billy, sliding one of the boxes of expired film from a pouch on the side of the bag. “The lady in there said the film might work if it was properly maintained and refrigerated.”

“
Might
.” Frank shook his head. “It
might
work.
If
it was properly maintained and refrigerated. We found it on a shelf at the back of a pawnshop. You really think Captain Body Odor maintained it at all? He can’t even use deodorant.”

Billy held the camera under one arm and shook out the film cartridge, tossing the empty box to Frank. He slid the cartridge into the slot and closed the film door with a
snick
. He almost dropped the camera when, with a grinding little whir, a black sheet extruded from the picture slot.

“See? It’s all black—overexposed, right?” said Frank, pointing an accusing finger at the camera. “I told you it was too old!”

Billy pulled the black sheet loose, flipping it over to inspect both sides.

“I didn’t take a picture. I think this is the top of the pack, like the camera loaded it in and opened it up. I think it’s working.”

“The
camera’s
working,” Frank pointed out. “The film might still be crap.”

He sounded like he hoped it
was
crap. Maybe he was enjoying being on a tear about it. Billy flipped the camera around, peering through the viewfinder.

“Say cheese!”

Frank, unsmiling, flipped up his middle finger.

“Perfect!” Billy said.

The shutter clicked, and with another whir a square gray blur within a white frame came rolling out of the slot.

“You see that?” Frank pointed again. “Blank. You got ripped off. I knew it!”

“Just wait,” said Billy. “The guy at the pawnshop said you have to wait a minute for it to develop, remember?”

So they waited, staring at the gray square . . . and slowly, an image of Frank came into view: deadpan expression, upraised finger in the foreground.

“Cool!” Billy said.

“It’s all brown,” Frank replied. He was right. Everything was tinted brown or tan, but it was clearly a photo of Frank giving Billy the finger. It looked antique, like something in a museum, though it was less than two minutes old.

“I like it,” Billy said. “It looks kind of cool, and this pack of film works. That means I paid Stinky ten dollars for a working camera and at least twenty dollars worth of film.”

He leaned forward, waggling his head and filling his voice with exaggerated cockiness. “So . . . 
who
got ripped off?”

Frank nodded, smiling about the camera for the first time since they’d seen it.

“Okay, fine. It
does
look sort of cool, and you didn’t get ripped off. So.” The smile widened into a grin. “Can I try it?”

The ride home took more than an hour as they stopped along the way and took photos of each other. They were at the playground on the edge of their neighborhood, waiting for a picture to develop, when Frank asked, “Who’s that?”

Billy looked from the developing square in his hand to the picture Frank held: Frank spinning on the little merry-go-round. The old film had turned the bright red disk of the merry-go-round a dark, reddish-brown that reminded Billy of dried blood. Frank was moving too fast for the camera as he went by, a streaky, Frank-shaped blur, trailing color behind it like the tail of a comet. He was leaning out toward the camera, and his face had lost almost all definition, though the twin dark spots of his eyes were still visible, holes in his head bleeding darkness back into the comet’s tail. Beneath those holes was a larger one, dark and wide with white teeth streaking into the blur.

Frank had been laughing on the merry-go-round, but in the distorted photo, it looked like a long, terrible scream made by something no longer human, Frank’s waving arm transformed into a hand thrust forth in supplication. Despite the end-of-summer warmth, it gave Billy a chill.

But Frank wasn’t pointing to the hellish image of himself. His fingernail was tapping a point in the image above and behind him, just beyond the far side of the playground.

There, in the expanse of grass between the street and the woodchip-covered playground proper, small in the distance, was the figure of a man. Distinctly human-shaped but blurred, the figure strode toward them, one arm extended. His clothing was dark, and he either wore a hat or had dark hair worn loose and wild; it was hard to tell with the distance and distortion. His skin had taken on the sepia tone of the background sky, with no visible features to his face, though his posture gave him a sense of urgency.

“Well?”

Billy looked around at the playground and surrounding park and shrugged. He saw no one. Had
seen
no one. They had arrived at the park at dinnertime and had had the place to themselves.

“I dunno,” Billy said. “Maybe he just went by quick and we missed him.”

“Holy crap!”

Billy looked at his friend and saw that while he was examining the photo in Frank’s hand, Frank was pointing at the one Billy held, eyes round. Billy held up the picture and saw it had finished developing. In it, Billy hung upside down from the horizontal ladder, holding on to one of the rungs with crooked knees, arms flapping toward the ground, his t-shirt riding up to expose his belly button. Past upside-down Billy, and his upside-down smile, was the man.

Closer this time, he was about to step onto the woodchips of the playground, just past the spring-mounted Three Little Pigs that the younger kids rode like hobbyhorses. With more clarity than in the previous photo, Billy could make out the man’s long dark overcoat billowing behind him. He was hatless, his medium-length hair unkempt. Billy looked at Frank, who was already staring at him.

“So much for ‘just went by quick,’” Frank said, then looked around the playground again. “I took that picture a couple of minutes after you took this one of me. Dude, I was looking. I didn’t see anyone.”

Billy stared at the pictures again, holding them side by side. There was the man, walking toward them. He was in the background, and with the whole picture being washed out in browns and tans, they had missed him the first time they looked at the shot of Frank. Yet to Billy, the shape also looked strangely familiar.

“Wait a second,” he muttered, thrusting the two photos into Frank’s hands. He sat on the ground, cross-legged, camera bag in his lap, and fished out the other pictures they had taken so far.

The schoolyard behind their school: a slightly blurry Frank riding a wheelie in front of the basketball hoops. Beyond him and to the right, the shadowy striding figure. It was farther away than in the playground photos, in the field next to the school, the distortion reducing it to a silhouette. Before, it had looked like little more than a wonky bit in the old, expired film; now that figure was obvious to Billy’s eye, standing out as a familiar shape.

The picture before that: Billy riding across the basketball court, no hands, standing up on the pedals, arms spread wide like a circus performer. The figure again, farther from the camera, still in the field but off toward the trees on the far side.

Before that: a sepia-toned Billy performed a balancing act on a stack of two-by-fours in front of a house under construction, arms again spread for balance, tongue protruding in concentration. At the far side of the construction site was a low temporary fence intended to keep out pedestrians. Beyond that fence, contrasted by the backdrop of the white house on the far side of the street, was the top half of a figure, tiny, but there if one looked hard enough.