Lost Cargo (28 page)

They looked at each other.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Ready,” she said, gripping the Nikon.

“That camera’s broken, you know.”

“I know, but the reporter wants it.”

Which was the absolute last thing Travis was worried about. They got out of the car. The dankness of the concrete walls and the floor got under his skin and drove his uneasiness to the boiling point.

He turned toward Lexie, about to say something, when the water stain at the top of the pillar caught his attention. The sullen stain around the metal hardware dripped down the side until it faded away to a thin trace. Something about the stain mesmerized him. He moved closer to it. To his surprise, the metal hardware wasn’t hardware at all, only more stain, a mottled gray-black substance that must have spread from a nearby air-conditioning vent. The discolorations had looked like metal struts from a distance, and nuts and bolts, even rust. Fooled him. The light was too low to really make it out, but one small spot near the top almost resembled an eye in the concrete. He stopped to stare at it, unable to believe what he was seeing. No, not almost, it did resemble an eye, as though some sick prankster had painted it there. An eyelid half-closed over an eyeball.

The eye moved.

“Lexie,” he called in a flat voice. “Get in the car.”

She froze. “I can’t. You have the keys.”

“Get back behind the cars.”

“Why?” she said uncertainly.

“Because it’s the pillar.”

When the eye rolled again in its concrete socket, a single thought ran through his mind. He should have known. The alien had outmatched them in a murderous game of wits. Worst of all, they were out of the car, cut off from each other. The eye stared at him. Then the loathsome pillar shifted and twisted away from the ceiling. Rounded shoulders appeared, turned, and swung out. The slablike indentations down the side weren’t indentations at all, but heavy folded wings that reached to the grimy floor. The alien spread her wings across the floor and thundered toward Lexie.

Lexie scrambled behind a car, clutching the camera.

The alien hopped toward Lexie and landed on a car, dwarfing it. Her claws raked across the metal and cracked the windshield. Shattered glass sprayed across the ground. With a reedy shriek the creature stretched out her fantastic neck.

“Lexie, get down,” Travis screamed.

Lexie moved the other way.

“Get down, Lexie!”

The alien flew toward him and struck him so savagely he almost blacked out. Bright sparks of light shot across his eyes. He rolled under the bumper of a Saab, his face scraping the concrete, ribs cracking, camera bag and lenses smashed against a tire. Sharp pain tore through his chest. “Lexie,” he screamed, but he couldn’t see her, only a forest of metal undercarriages and black tires.

“I’m trapped,” she screamed back.

“I’m going to tell you to do something, and when I say it, you do it.”

He took one of the lenses out of the camera bag. The alien was a predator, and he was going to take a chance that she would go after anything that moved. As the alien landed on the hood above him, he threw the lens as hard as he could over the rail behind him. Pain ripped through his ribs. The lens landed with a metallic
thock
on a small black car one level below, bounced, hit a pillar, and rattled to the far end of the corridor.

The alien shrieked and flew over the rail.

“Run, go, go, go, now!” he called.

Lexie rolled out from under the car, wild-eyed, and stumbled toward the elevator, leaving a trail of blood, and he crawled after her, standing up, grabbing his ribs. Almost there, almost there. They made it, and she slammed her hand against the button, and the elevator ground to life far off in the building.

The creature shrieked below them.

Travis punched the elevator button again. “Come on, come on,” he said, clenching his fists.

The elevator creaked down the floors.

“Damn it, come on,” he swore.

The tiny bell pinged. The doors opened to an elevator full of marble and mirrors. They rushed inside, exposed in a three-sided box, while the creature’s howls tore through the garage like a maelstrom. Travis pounded the Close Doors button. The ghoulish thing was at the rail, squeezing over it, wings beating, claws extended, mouth wide open. She rushed at them. Travis shoved Lexie behind him.
Close, damn it, close
. In the huge mirrors the monster seemed to be coming at them from all sides.

The doors shut. When Lexie pressed the button for the ninth floor, he didn’t stop her. The lobby was too close. They could never get off there. He held her in silence while the elevator rose, his heart hammering.

The elevator doors on the far end of the corridor slid back. Hurried footsteps moved across the garage floor.

Ravenous, the Elemental drew in its wings and formed indentations that rippled across its front and mimicked the seams in the concrete wall. It had grown so tall that it had to bend its neck across the low ceiling to camouflage itself against the long concrete and metal beams. The surface of its skin grew discolored, imitating rust and nails and small irregular shadows, pits, and stains.

The creature draped itself across the corridor.
Memories, flesh, flesh, flesh
.

Its own memories of hunting in the rivers on its native planet came back, mixed with memories from the stew of creatures it had killed in this strange world: mice and bats and birds and warm things that burrowed in dark holes and tunnels and hid in damp corners, and more memories of stones and walls and bridges it had spread itself against and climbed and copied. It hungered for the pop of juicy muscle and brains and the crack of bones in its maw.

An intense man with dark eyebrows clipped across the floor to a
BMW
. He placed a package of papers on the back seat, looked around, and locked the car. The man tried the door handle as if he wasn’t sure he’d locked it, left, and then returned with a scowl to peer through a side window.

He seemed satisfied this time and headed back to the elevator.

When he reached the middle of the corridor, he wiped his palms on his pants and scurried back to the car. He pulled the door handle and seemed relieved. He had just turned to the elevator again when something crunched under his shoe. A chunk of glass. The man stared at the glass sprayed across the parking spaces and seemed to see the damaged cars for the first time.

“Punks,” he said. “Bunch of Halloween punks.” He stared one more time at the smashed windshields and took quick steps toward the elevator.

The Elemental peeled itself away from the ceiling, began to reform as an eight foot bird, and made a low, guttural cry.

The man opened and closed his mouth like a fish gasping for air. His hand flew to his face. Then he ran, still gasping, looking over his shoulder.

The Elemental began to stride toward him. It gave another guttural cry. The man bumped his hip into a car, lost his balance, and sprawled across the concrete. His keys and papers and a flash drive scattered in all directions.

“No, my files,” he cried, got to his knees, stuffed papers down his shirt, found his feet, and ran.

The car alarm screamed. Lights flashed.
Whoop, whoop, whoop, errr, errr, errr, whoop, whoop
. The man rolled his eyes in terror and stumbled on. The Elemental was closing in on him. It knew what it was going to do. Peck the flesh off his legs. Peck his organs into bloody pink shreds. Peck his eyes into gaping holes. Peck his brains out. Gorge itself and suck the bones dry.

The man screamed when it caught him by the elevator.

M
onroe packed the last of his books into a cardboard box. The basement apartment’s dank walls and narrow grated windows had gotten under his skin. He ought to be home with Annie, holding her in his arms, instead of rattling around this empty place. He shouldn’t have blown up like that. Most women wanted children and she wasn’t asking him to give up law school. She had a dream of her own to open a restaurant. There had to be a compromise if they could just find it.

Blue light streamed before him. “No,” he said violently, rubbing his fists against his eyes. To his relief the apparition disappeared.

He started to phone Annie and changed his mind. Roses. Get her some roses. He called a cab and wondered if it would ever get there. When it finally pulled up, he ran into gusts of sleet that howled across the street and tried to figure out where to buy roses in the middle of the night. He headed downtown to a grand old hotel with glowing windows and frozen flags, paid the cab to wait, stamped the ice off his shoes, and hurried past the pompous doorman into a lobby with gold brocade chairs and dazzling chandeliers. The place looked like the Titanic.

But the gift shop windows were dark. Disappointed, he stared at the shadowy souvenirs and imported chocolates. No roses. Maybe a twenty-four hour grocery store would have them. He was about to turn away when he saw a pink lottery report taped to the window.

He pressed his hand against the glass. Six numbers, and five matched. He’d won some money. It had to be a mistake.

His pulse pounded as he traced the numbers. His birthday, the month and the day. Annie’s birthday, the month and the day. The month and the day they met each other.

Five numbers out of the same six numbers he played every week.

Lightheaded, Monroe read them again. He’d won $200,000. His struggles were over. It wasn’t the jackpot, but it was enough. He could quit his job, lay his resignation on the senior partner’s desk, pay off his debts and finish law school, and when he joined a law firm he could buy Annie a brownstone, the one she wanted to convert into a restaurant, the biggest brownstone he could find, with a turret and fireplaces and climbing roses, maybe someplace in the south, maybe Mississippi, and then—

The ticket. The winning ticket was in the jacket. He ran into the lobby. Travis had the jacket. No, Travis left the jacket at somebody’s house, and he was meeting her right now, and they were going to pick up his sister’s insulin.

The ticket was in the outside right-hand pocket. The pocket had a zipper. It had been raining that night, a rotten, bone-chilling rain. Travis wore the jacket and chances were that he put his hand in that pocket. The ticket could have fallen out in the rain. It could be in the street now, a scrap of ruined $200,000 paper. It could be anywhere.

The image of the door spun in front of his eyes.

“No,” he said in desperation. “Get away from me.”

Fiery light streamed from the apparition. Dizzy, Monroe staggered through the lobby to the waiting cab.

Travis threw his shoulder against Lisa and Ian’s door. “The damn thing won’t open,” he said, wincing at the pain in his ribs. “I put the chain on. I can’t believe it.”

Lexie steadied herself against the wall with a bloody hand. “The roof. We can jump down on their balcony and break a window.”

They backtracked to the stairwell, opened the heavy metal door, and listened for the rustle of wings down the chasm of concrete steps. Silence. Then they crept up a short staircase to another heavy door.

He looked at Lexie, wondering what was waiting for them on the other side, and opened the door. Pain rippled through his ribcage.

They’d guessed right and reached the roof. Bitter cold seeped through their clothes as they crunched across the ice. The storm had tapered off and left a world of frosted vent pipes, gleaming steps, and treacherous slopes. Nine floors below, Connecticut Avenue cut across the city. Other than a faraway cab crawling in their direction, there were no signs of life on the deserted street.

“Where’s their balcony?” Lexie whispered.

“In the back. Wait.” He took out the tracker, hoping it would show where the creature was hiding. The metal flowed around his fingers as the image glimmered to life. The formidable woods appeared, and the stones in the gorge, and the creek. The shining diagram moved across the roof to a humanlike symbol with a blue sun in the chest. Then the image changed to a three-dimensional net that slowly spun into a helix.

“What does it mean?” she gasped.

“That she’s behind us,” Travis shouted. They wheeled around to see the huge shape on the corner of the roof, cutting them off from the balcony. The creature lowered her head and gave a guttural shriek. He moved in front of Lexie. They’d made the wrong choice. They should have run to the lobby.

Lexie took a step back. Then her foot shot across the ice. It happened so fast that Travis couldn’t catch her. Her arms flew out, black wool splayed against the icy tiles, her fingers scrabbling for something to hold. She slid several more feet and caught a boot in the gutter. The camera fell, bounced, and shot over the edge of the roof. Seconds later, a
pop
sounded when it struck a window ledge and then a solid crack as it hit the sidewalk.

“Travis,” she screamed.

“Hold on. You stay here with me.” He got down on his knees, but still couldn’t reach her. The pitch of the roof was too steep. If he went any further, he would lose his footing and take her with him over the side.

The creature opened her enormous wings.

Monroe stared out the window. The cab driver was grousing about the weather, but his voice seemed miles away.

The apparition of the door floated behind the man’s head. Monroe had seen it before, years ago, when he was a boy fishing with his grandfather in a rowboat on a cloudy brown lake. It all came back now. The surface of the lake had grown still. The silt settled. Fish and plants and a hat that somebody lost long ago drifted under the water, and the reflection of a black shape with streaming blue light hovered far, far above.

And he remembered the bees. Bees in the warm Mississippi sun, buzzing over the tiny star-shaped flowers on the hedge outside his grandfather’s house. He was five years old, barefoot by the porch, his nose full of the smells of earth and sunlight, watching the bees, when the tiny door appeared like an iridescent soap bubble. Blue light streamed through its frame. Enthralled, he’d tried to close his fingers around it when the light disappeared and a bee floated past his hand into the hedge.