ocalypse (Book 10): Drawl (Duncan's Story) (10 page)

As the shrubs towering before her began to blur at the
edges, she heard a familiar voice bark: “Remember the ROEs. Center mass is no
longer effective.”

She detected faint scuffing sounds from somewhere behind
her.
Someone crossing the street?
Boots on pavement?

Then she heard the soft tink-tink of metal hitting on metal.
Keys perhaps?

Finally, on the edge of her fading vision she saw one of the
black cylinders sweeping her way. She saw a black nylon strap of some kind
swinging in unison with the black boots clomping her way.

“Headshots only,” was the last thing Mary Palazzo heard
before the darkness took her. The pair of muffled reports reached her ears
after she was already gone. The spent brass skittering down the street was
reflected in her staring dead eyes, but seen only by the man who, acting on the
assumption the bloodied woman was turned and escaping zone Lima Hotel Sierra,
had cut her life short a day before her thirtieth birthday.

After pausing at the top of Tilly’s stairs to listen for
sounds coming from within, Duncan hauled open the flimsy wooden screen door,
its rusty spring announcing his presence. Holding the door open with his left
shoulder, without hesitation, he rapped three times on the center of the sturdy
oak door. He waited a few seconds and, when there was no reply verbally, nor the
usual sound of his adopted aunt’s sensible shoes clicking across the wood
floors, he knocked again.

Nobody answered after his second volley and best he could
tell, nothing was stirring inside.

“Take a peek,” Charlie said.

There were a trio of small square windows above Duncan’s
line of sight. Framing the door on two sides were two more windows, narrow and
rectangular and hung with floral print curtains. Not wanting to ask Charlie for
a leg up so he could see through the smaller windows up top, instead, Duncan
craned sideways and peered into the darkened home through a sliver-thin parting
of the curtains near the right side door jamb.

“What do you see?”

“Shadows.”

Hand in a fist and poised to deliver a final knock, Duncan glanced
at the side window again and caught a reflection of Charlie at his back. The
man was shifting his weight from foot-to-foot and nervously eyeing the street
the way they’d come in.

“Something’s eating at you.”

Stepping forward and craning his head near Duncan’s
shoulder, Charlie said, “Damn straight it is. Helluva wreck with what had to be
a
fatality
and I still haven’t heard a siren closing in.”

Knowing the response time this close to downtown shouldn’t
have exceeded the three or four minutes that had elapsed since they passed by
the scene, and, calculating the odds in his head which were skewed wildly in
his favor, Duncan extended his hand. In it was the wad of money won playing
Keno earlier at the bar. “Hundred bucks says the hills will be alive with the
sounds of sirens by the time we finish inside … or three minutes, whichever
comes first.”

“Police, Fire … EMTs?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Duncan said, nudging a rolled-up Oregonian
newspaper with his toe.

Without hesitating, and by no means practicing what he liked
to preach, Charlie said, “I’ll take that action.”

The men shook hands. Then, with the mayhem down the street
out of sight and now apparently out of mind due to the wager, Charlie’s face
sprouted a wide grin. Probably the first since returning from the bar earlier.

“Even though I’m enabling you, those Andrew Jackson’s are all
mine, Old Man.”

Knees popping loudly, Duncan crouched down. “How do you
figure? The clock’s been ticking for five … maybe seven minutes already. You,
my friend, are giving back some of that rent money.”

It’s all yours anyway, Mr. Winters
, thought Charlie.
Win,
win.
He wagged his head subtly and said, “No. There will be no first
responders on this one. Because they’ve
all
got their hands full with
the hooligans and injured cops downtown.”

Duncan said nothing. The key was where it was supposed to
be: underneath a clay planter, home to a cluster of tiny cacti. His knees
groaned in protest when he stood. He opened the door with the key and cracked
it a hands-width.

“Hellooo. Aunt Matilda? It’s me, Duncan.” Save for an incessant
low-timbre buzzing coming from the back of the shotgun-style layout, there was
utter silence. “Anyone home?” He looked around the entry. It was home to a
rolling grocery cart, old newspapers stacked in a pile and, at eye-level to the
left—hooks filled with different styles of coats necessary to combat Portland’s
weather, which was ever-changing from the end of September through July 4th.

Duncan sensed Charlie crowding him in the foyer and then felt
a tapping on his shoulder.

“Shoes,” Charlie whispered.

Sure enough, suggesting Tilly was somewhere in the seven-hundred-square-foot
house, on the tile floor beside the stacked newspapers were the woman’s colorful
New Balance sneakers.

Duncan nodded and stepped under the arch dividing the foyer
from the rest of the living space. In the front room were a pair of chairs and
a small sofa. All three pieces were in floral prints nearly matching the
drapes. Unlike the stereotypical widowed elderly woman, Tilly was not a cat lady.
Hence the furniture was not clad in see-through vinyl and the area rugs and
runners covering the wood floor were immaculate—free of fur and not a stray
thread showing.

No sirens
, thought Charlie, already counting his
winnings, which were going to go in the envelope anyway.

Duncan took another couple of steps inside and looked
around. Nothing seemed amiss. However, the dozen or so plants in the self-proclaimed—and
proud of it—greenthumb’s care that were scattered throughout the front living
room and small eating nook seemed to be thirsty and forlorn, their leaves
drooping over side tables and windowsills.

Not good
, thought Duncan, feeling a tiny flutter in
his gut, as if leathery bat wings were brushing his insides.

Pushing the notion that something wasn’t right from the
forefront of his mind, he pushed deeper into the house where the air was still
and warm. He paused by a small table awash in light spilling in from the south-facing
windows. On the table was a pile of unopened junk mail and beside the assorted
envelopes was a shallow plastic box the size of a sheet of printer paper. Above
a hinge on the see-through pink box the days of the week ran left to right, Sunday
through Monday, spelled out with raised letters.

The kitchen was next and as soon as Duncan crossed the
threshold he caught a whiff of something sickly sweet he at first attributed to
spoiled food his aunt, the consummate recycler, had no doubt forgotten to
transfer outside to the wheeled composter.

“Tilly?” he called.

Nothing
.

The low-muted humming they had detected when they entered
the bungalow was now more of a raucous buzzing noise that, best-case-scenario
sounded kind of like a box fan in dire need of a shot of WD-40, or worst case
scenario, a trip to the curb on trash day. Either one, Duncan figured he’d be
taking care of before the day was done.

Cocking his head toward the noise, Charlie whispered, “I
don’t like this one bit.”

“I don’t either.” Duncan looked at his watch. “Because I’m
ninety seconds away from losing a hundred bucks.”

Charlie’s knowing grin was lost on Duncan as he pressed on
through the kitchen and stopped before Tilly’s bedroom on the right. The door was
closed and the noise was coming from within. And hanging in the air of the tiny
hall that fed to a bathroom on the left and was capped by a door leading outside
to the backyard was the same spoiled meat pong Duncan had detected in the
kitchen.

Feeling the chill in his stomach migrating up his spine, and
starting to fear the worst, he verbalized his wishful thoughts. “It’s gotta be something
deep in Tilly’s trash or some meat lodged in the sink trap.” He looked at
Charlie for a second opinion and got only a blank stare.

The current running up Duncan’s back sprouted tendrils that
worked their way around his ribcage. With gooseflesh now breaking out all over
his body, he reached for the smooth brass knob on Tilly’s bedroom door. After
taking a deep breath and tightening his grip, he turned the knob slowly
clockwise and pushed. The door swung inward unimpeded. However, instantly
Duncan was hit in the face and upper body by a black form escaping the room. He
stood his ground as the reptile part of his brain analyzed the threat and in a
fraction of a second dismissed it for what it was: hundreds, if not thousands
of flies startled and sent fleeing in unison for the light-filled doorway.
Duncan raised his hands to his face and exhaled the breath he’d been holding
since entering the rear of the house. His first action parted the shiny black
cloud, the second sparing him from inhaling a mouthful of the winged pests.

While the black mass was fleeing the room, the bedroom door
continued its slow swing and the near pitch-black interior was slowly revealed
in little snippets. First the armoire against the left wall was awash in light.
Then Duncan noticed the bright inch-high sliver of light coming in under the
thick blackout curtain over the room’s only window, which happened to be open a
fraction of an inch at the bottom. Finally, barely visible in the gloom and
turning smartly back and forth atop a pole with a wide base for stability he
spotted a large diameter fan droning on at the foot of Tilly’s bed. The bed pushed
against the right wall was a double-sized item covered with floral print sheets
and wrapped by a duvet cover that brushed the floor. On the bed was a body-sized
lump hidden under a cheery yellow sheet.

By the time the door finally came to rest against the wall
to Duncan’s right, he was at the side of the bed and fully convinced the stench
now permeating every room in the bungalow was coming from a corpse festering under
the sheet an arm’s reach away.

Swallowing hard and holding his nose, he turned and brushed
past Charlie—whose jaw was just dropping after coming to the same startling
conclusion as Duncan had.

Batting loitering flies from his path, Duncan stalked through
the house. The screen door screeched as he stiff-armed it open and expelled that
initial carrion-scented breath from his lungs. With tracers and stars popping
in front of his vision, he hinged over and planted both palms on his knees.

He was drawing in a second glorious lungful of fresh air
when again the screen door screeched and banged and Charlie was there on the
small porch matching him in posture, also gasping for fresh air.

Outside the little bungalow in Ladd’s Edition the hills were
not
alive with the sounds of sirens as Duncan had suggested. Instead,
Charlie’s dry heaves were accompanied by muted screams coming from the
direction of Hawthorne three blocks away.

Ignoring the wager as well as the shrill animalistic warble
that could have come out of either a man or woman, Charlie wiped a strand of
spittle from his mouth then said, “How long do you think Tilly has been dead?”

Duncan went to one knee and plucked the rolled-up newspaper
off the threshold where, presumably, the delivery person had left it. He
removed the rubber band and unfurled it. Holding it two-handed and squinting at
the fine print on one corner, he replied, “This is the Saturday paper. Morning
edition. What day is today … anyway?”

“Saturday,” said Charlie, slowly. “All day long.”

“Then Matilda has been dead since yesterday morning at the
latest.”

“And you know this
how
?”

The screaming rose in volume. There was not just one voice
now but a chorus of pain-filled wails, and like a sonic wall it seemed to be
moving closer.

Brows coming together in the middle, Duncan cast a troubled
gaze down the narrow street. “I got a look at her pill box when we were inside.
Yesterday’s A.M. slot was empty. I’d be willing to bet the farm that the
newspaper atop the stack inside the foyer is the Friday edition and Tilly’s
already made mincemeat of every crossword puzzle in the thing.”

“I want none of that action,” Charlie said. “So you’re
saying Tilly missed taking her pills last night.”

Duncan nodded. “The rest of the compartments for the month are
still full.”

“So what do we do?”

Duncan plucked his phone from a pocket. “This your first dead
body?”

Charlie shrugged.

After tapping out the police non-emergency number from
memory, Duncan hitched his shirt over his nose and went back into the house. He
made his way to the bedroom where he tugged on the sheet, exposing Tilly’s
upturned face. Her features were frozen in a knowing look, eyes closed and lips
curled up at the corners, as if she had been privy to some insider info before
leaving the earth. Maybe her light at the end of the tunnel had been something
other than the train Duncan was expecting the day he drew his final gulp.
Whatever the reason, Tilly’s final affect was a far cry from the death masks
worn by the young soldiers—living and dead—that he had plucked out of rice
paddies, from within crowded jungle LZs or off of remote mountain firebases all
muddy and bristling with splintered trees and crushed vegetation.

With the phone still pressed to his ear and going unanswered
at police dispatch, Duncan tugged at the other end of the sheet, exposing
Tilly’s stockinged feet and bare legs up to her knees. She had gone to bed
wearing khaki walking shorts. Shifting the phone to his off-hand, he pressed
down on the mattress where it met her legs and saw angry purple bruising
running along the undersides of her calves. Though all of his knowledge of
postmortem bruising had been gleaned from Matlock and an occasional episode of
C.S.I. name-that-town, it was enough to confirm that she’d been dead for some
time. There was no reason for him to guess how long. That would have to be
determined by the real pathologist—not the armchair, TV-schooled variety.

After what could have been twenty rings or fifty—he hadn’t
been paying close attention—he ended the call, thumbed in 9-1-1 and hit Talk.

This time he counted the number of warbling trills assaulting
his ear as he walked back out to the porch. Nine rings total until the
connection was made. Then he listened to a recording telling him all about “high
call volumes” and urging him to “hang on the line” before offering assurances that
a “dispatcher would be with him as soon as possible.” Lastly, causing a grim smile
to crease his face, the same voice urged him to think through the nature of his
call and, barring a truly life-threatening situation, hang up and call
police
non-emergency
.

Exasperated from hitting nothing but dead ends, Duncan
snapped the phone shut and motioned for Charlie to follow him back into the
house. And as they hauled open the screen door, releasing another flight of
trapped flies, the screams from the direction of Hawthorne were back and seemed
to be growing nearer.

***

A handful of minutes after reentering Tilly’s house they
emerged for the final time, Charlie in the lead and laboring with his end of
dead weight. They carried her body over the threshold and set it gently on the
porch. It was wrapped in the yellow sheet and, for good measure, a thick mothball-scented
comforter they had found in a bedroom closet. Thankfully the harsh chemical
smell leeching off the fabric somewhat countered the sour stench of soft farts
and burps randomly escaping her dead body.

But the double layer of treated fabric did nothing to deter the
voracious insects that had followed them through the door. Flies dove and landed
and skittered into the folds, no doubt searching for somewhere to lay their
larvae.

Thank God she wasn’t a biggie
, thought Charlie as he
picked up his end again. “Me first down the stairs?”

Duncan showed him his open palm. “Give me a sec,” he said
and flipped open the phone and hit redial. Heard nothing this time. No
recording prompting him to second-guess the kind of help he needed. No push a
certain digit to connect here kind of choices were offered. There was only a
soft hiss, like he imagined outer space might sound like. He tried his brother
in Utah again. Same story—lights out and nobody’s home.

“Nothing?” asked Charlie.

Duncan closed the phone slowly. Spun it on his palm,
thinking.

“Not even a ring tone this time.” He leveled a concerned
gaze at Charlie.

“None of that all circuits are busy crap?”

“Dead air.” Duncan grabbed his end of the comforter. “We
can’t leave her here. With my back and knees … you better go first.”

And Charlie did go first. Backwards down the stairs and in
charge of the end with Tilly’s head, which he didn’t want to drag along the
cement stairs all the way to the sidewalk. So he concentrated fully on keeping
his fingers locked with the fabric, and his upper body ramrod-straight.

And the attention he was giving the task at hand was why he
didn’t see the narrow bike tire crossing behind him as he negotiated that final
step down to the sidewalk.

Also deep in concentration, Duncan had been trusting Charlie
to steer as he watched his own foot placement on the stairs.

There was no forewarning from the dazed cyclist pushing her
bike in front of her. So the chain reaction caused by Charlie’s tripping over
the bike wheel was instantaneous and painful for all parties involved.

Like a string of dominoes, starting with Charlie pitching
over backward and losing his purchase on the comforter, they all spilled into a
heap.

Tilly’s head did meet cement with an unfamiliar, awful
crack.

Still gripping onto the seat and apparently in some kind of
a trance or shock, the slender female folded over sideways and became pinned
underneath the bike and all of Charlie and Tilly’s added weight.

Midway down the run of stairs, Duncan looked up just in time
to see the bike’s front wheel fold over like a taco under Charlie’s backside.
Simultaneously he was tugged in the direction his friend was now falling. A
half-beat later Newton’s law was in full swing. Things seemed to slow and he was
in gravity’s firm grasp, past the point of no return, the fabric torn out of
his hands. On the way to a Pete Rose landing atop his favorite aunt’s corpse,
he saw Charlie’s mouth form a surprised O and the soles of his boots go
vertical to the sidewalk. Shifting his gaze right, he noticed the
twenty-something being slapped to the grass parking strip by the back-half of her
bike. And strangely, unlike Charlie, her face remained slack. There was no
sudden
oh shit
spark in her eyes. No autonomous gasp of surprise. Her
lips were pursed into a thin white line and stayed that way even as she was
landing flat on her backside.

Still processing what this all meant, Duncan came to rest
lengthwise on Tilly’s corpse. Equal and opposite reaction being what it was,
his hundred and ninety pounds sent the remaining gasses rushing from her
abdomen and, sheet and comforter no kind of baffle, straight into his face.

Charlie was on his feet first. Though he felt bad about
dropping Tilly, his eyes were on the young woman who was laid out flat on her
back and unmoving. He edged closer, tentative steps that took him around the
top of her head and fan of splayed-out hair. Once on the woman’s left side, he
saw that she was bleeding profusely. The high zip-up collar on her white
cycling jersey was soaked to nearly black, and below her jawline was a golf-ball-sized
divot where flesh had been rent away. Around the wound the dermis was torn and ragged,
the exposed flesh raised and three shades of purple. She had on a pair of those
quick click in and out biking shoes, black skin-hugging biker shorts, but
strangely—no helmet. Her brunette bangs were soaked and plastered to her
forehead, the perspiration still visibly beading on the exposed skin.

“You gonna check her for a pulse?” drawled Duncan. “Or just
stand there leering at her cameltoe?”

Cheeks suddenly blushed and rosy, Charlie looked up, but
said nothing. Jostling for equal billing in his mind was the inexplicably reawakened
biker on Hawthorne, the dead body at his feet, and now, fully overloading his
senses, the young woman who looked to be bleeding out in front of his eyes.

“Want something done right,” muttered Duncan as he stepped
over Tilly, “you gotta do it yerself.” He knelt by the biker’s head and pressed
two fingers against her carotid. “She’s alive. Her pulse is rapid, but a little
weak.” Then, riffing on the old nineteen-seventies television show
Emergency
,
added, “Get me Ringer’s Lactate with D5W stat!”

This only confused Charlie further.

Duncan stood, his knees weak and rubbery. “It’s a bleeder
alright,” he said. “Whoever got their chompers on her didn’t get the main vein.
She’s shocky, but she’ll be fine. Help me lift Tilly.”

Working together, without a word spoken between them, Duncan
and Charlie got Tilly’s corpse into the Dodge’s load bed. Duncan worked the
comforter free and closed the tailgate. As the retention chains rattled and
clanged against the sheet metal he suddenly became aware of how what he and
Charlie were doing must appear to anybody looking on. Nodding at the bicyclist,
he handed the comforter to Charlie.

“Wrap her with it and make sure she’s still breathing.”

Charlie nodded and went about the task.

Duncan turned a three-sixty, taking stock of every visible
window, upstairs and down, on all of the houses running up and down both sides
of the street. Finishing the slow pirouette, he heard the subdued hiss of
radials on concrete and low rumble of a finely-tuned engine.

“She’s OK,” Charlie called. “Shivering … but OK. You should
try to get help on your phone again.”

“No need,” Duncan called back. “Five-Oh approaches.” He
stepped off the curb and stood by the rear wheels of his pick-up, nearly in the
path of the approaching cruiser. It was one of the newer Dodge models painted
white over royal blue and trimmed with gold accents. Low-slung and wide of
fender, it was the pit bull of police cars. And perched on the roof was a minimalist
light bar and a half-dozen sharply angled needle antennas. He waved his arms
and then quickly wished he hadn’t. After all, there was a corpse wrapped in a
sheet in the back of his pick-up. To further complicate explaining that, a
young woman, victim of some kind of attack, was lying beside the old pick-up’s
front left wheel. All total, it didn’t look good for he and Charlie. Probably the
only thing that could make this scenario harder to explain to the officer was
if Duncan had a faux cast on one arm and the pick-up was a blue panel-van with
a loveseat angled out back.
It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets
the hose again.

Better to plead his case to the law now, he thought, than
have to explain how he came into the possession of two dead women, should Biker
Girl succumb to her injuries. And as he ran through his mind exactly what he
was going to say to the officer, the cruiser seemed to speed up. Validating
that first impression, the Charger’s front end rose up and he heard the throaty
whoosh of the engine gulping fresh air to go with the newly injected fuel.

Duncan waved again and inched further out into the
one-and-a-half-lane street. The cruiser was three car lengths away, and if the
officer driving saw him, it wasn’t evident. And even more troubling to him was
now that the car was close enough to make out the finer details, he saw that bloody
handprints, streaked and hard to make out in places, marked up the white
fenders and hood from the grill on back.

Once the speeding patrol car drew even with the pick-up’s rear
bumper, Duncan bellowed for the officer driving to stop and caught a good look
at his face through the open window. The middle-aged cop wore a mask of grim
determination. He wagged his head side-to-side as the car slipped by. And as if
the motto
To Serve and Protect
wasn’t part of the Portland Police Bureau
seal on the door, the uniformed man mouthed, “Sorry,” and then kept right on
rolling—lights off, no siren, and going somewhere with a stealthy purpose.