Resurrection House (21 page)

A shape moved near the tube, too far off to be identified, but this time Charlie had no doubt that the shift in blackness was real. For several seconds it was as though an area the size of a compact car had brightened and blinked like a gargantuan eye. On the intercom Cranston’s chattering turned to peals of high-pitched laughter. The tick-tack of typing ceased. His hysterics continued for several seconds and then silenced.

“Kau-ahu,” whispered Nance.

Tamora and Pinto echoed him.

“Something’s out there,” Charlie said.

“The anomaly,” said Fordren, pressing his face against the glass wall.

“No,” Brenner said. “They’re tricking us, getting inside our heads. There’s nothing out there but fish and sand. All we have here are three lousy, fucking soldiers who’ve lost their minds. And you’re buying their crap.”

“Use your head, Tommy-boy,” Charlie said. “Think! It’s like standing on the beach, watching their fins cut the waves. They’ll never know you’re there unless you splash in beside them. Electromagnetic fields aren’t neatly defined like lines in the sand. They interfere with each other.”

“Oh, God,” said Fordren. “You’re saying the anomaly wasn’t aware of us before now. Until we plugged the men into the EM field, it had no idea we even existed.”

“A hunter can’t track what it can’t scent,” said Charlie. “It knew of the sharks but had no interest in them.”

Outside the tube the swarming sharks crisscrossed one another’s paths, rising then diving, circling, darting in and out of sight, and then in a moment they were gone, scattered in many directions into the undersea gloom, all but the six in the pen. A ripple passed through the murk before an invisible current gripped the tube and shook it. Metal and glass groaned with the strain. Again the surrounding blackness moved, seemed to swirl, and then twisted like a whale rolling onto its belly.

“Kau-ahu hungers!” Nance screamed.

The soldier jolted forward, his bloodied hands clutching air. His mouth gaped in a feral snarl, and Charlie saw lines of blood tracing his gums, tiny flecks of flesh caught between his teeth. He shuddered. Nance was no longer a man. He’d become an embodiment of the craving for nourishment, survival, death. Kill the other. Take its life before it takes yours. Nance, along with Tamora and Pinto, could see the life force of men. Through them, so could Kau-ahu, and with the soldier’s minds filtering their perception, the vast thing understood what the sharks’ primal brains had concealed.

Charlie’s fear erupted and surged with every shift of shadows he spied in the waters, every abyssal eddy that suggested the incomprehensible scope of the thing approaching them. His mind churned to give it shape but failed. Whatever was out there was a thing beyond the natural world, a monster, a legend come to life. His mind felt on the verge of crumbling, and he thought of Cranston; but then Nance’s threat snapped him back into the moment.

The soldier grabbed for him, and Charlie fired, putting a round through Nance’s forehead at point blank range. The gunshot resounded like cannon fire in the enclosed space. Nance jerked back beneath a spray of gore, and the bullet traveled on, pinging against the upper surface of the tube, cracking it. Beside him Fordren and Brenner yelled, warning him not to break the glass, their words clashing into gibberish.

Brenner seized Charlie’s wrist. “No,” he said. “We need them alive.”

“Don’t you see what they’ve brought here?”

“Get your head together, Agent Barrow, and hold your fire. That’s an order!”

Charlie whirled, breaking Brenner’s grip and bringing his weapon around. The general responded too late, halting his gun hand as he faced the neat hole in the barrel of Charlie’s Glock. All at once the power of the gun flooded back to Charlie, sending a cool wave through him. The spreading tendrils of his fear curled back on themselves.

“You’re the one who needs to get his head straight, Tommy-boy,” Charlie said. “Whatever guilt and baggage you’ve got wrapped up here, this is not about you. Don’t you see what you’re risking? That thing out there—can’t you feel the energy pouring out of it? The hunger? The savagery? It’s real. If you want to save lives, you need to do everything you can to stop it from going any further than this beach.”

“You’ve lost your mind,” Brenner said. “Doctor Fordren, in case you were wondering, now would be a very good goddamn time to use the gun I gave you.”

Fordren flinched and regarded the forgotten gun in his hand.

“Stay out of this, Fordren,” said Charlie.

“Don’t listen to him,” Brenner said. “Shoot him.”

“No, General, I can’t,” Fordren said. “I feel it, too. That thing out there isn’t even from our world. Maybe the more we tried to track and measure it, the more we’ve drawn it out from wherever it belongs. We’ve nurtured it. We’re nothing but feeder fish. All of us. And we need to cut the line. I’m sorry.”

Fordren exhaled and pointed his gun at Brenner. “Agent Barrow, you do what you have to.”

“That’s my job,” Charlie said, swinging his weapon around toward the soldiers.

Tamora and Pinto growled; the deep, gurgling noise rose from their throats, shifting up and down in pitch. They shook and lurched forward. Another powerful current rocked the tube, shaking the men. A pale shape slid toward them, a gnarled extension like rubberized bone reaching out of the blackness and testing the glass with massive cilia. The water shifted, moving clouds of sand, and Charlie saw the dusky spot of the eye once more, a parabola the size of a house, a bottomless well to draw them all down and drown them. The bony feeler lashed back and then whipped down, hard, cracking the glass. A hairline split ran from the point of impact to the weakened area where Charlie’s bullet had ricocheted. The appendage coiled for another blow.

“You see
that
, don’t you?” Charlie said to Brenner. “It’s no trick.”

Tremors from another riptide current jarred Charlie and spoiled Fordren’s aim. Brenner swore, but the obscenity faltered in the report of his gun as he drew and fired. The shot passed an inch to Charlie’s left, clanking off the metal frame of the airlock chamber. Another gunshot followed. Brenner’s chest spouted a brief stream of blood, and then the general toppled and slid along the curved wall of the tube.

“Oh, shit, I actually hit him,” said Fordren.

“Nice shot,” Charlie said.

Driven by the sight and smell of blood, Tamora and Pinto rushed toward Brenner. Darkness swirled overhead like a congealing oil slick. Charlie backed away toward the airlock door, lifted one foot over the rim.

“Where are you going?” Fordren demanded.

“Charlie, help,” Brenner called as the soldiers grabbed him and dragged him deeper into the tube. “We can still get out of here. Take the men with us. Destroy the implants.”

“It’ll follow us,” Charlie said. “It’ll come after us. It’ll come after everyone. No one will be safe. What if it finds its way out of the sea? What then?”

Fordren moved to the airlock, then skidded to a stop as Charlie waved the Glock in his face.

“Agent Barrow?” said Fordren.

“You still have those drugs, Doctor?”

“Yes.”

“Then you won’t have to suffer if you don’t want to,” Charlie said.

“But you promised to get me out alive, scout’s honor.”

“I was never in the scouts.” Charlie braced himself in the airlock opening, and then, using his foot, shoved Fordren back into the tube. “The thing is we’re the ones who are cornered, aren’t we? That thing’s got our scent now, and it wants to make us its prey. But we’re predators and I warned you about predators when they’re closed in. Forgive me, but whatever your research discovered should be forgotten now.”

The tube shook again as the anomaly battered it. Charlie raised his arm and emptied the rest of his clip into the ceiling. Glass chipped and sprayed down in a dusty, glittering cloud. Cracks appeared along both sides of the tube, spreading fast, joining those that had appeared under Kau-ahu’s blows, and as the first jet of water spurted in, Charlie withdrew, slammed the airlock door shut, and locked it. He emerged from the other side, locked that door, too, and walked to the lab.

Cranston watched him with eyes wiped blank by fear.

“Wouldn’t we all like to take the easy way out?” he said, knowing Cranston probably didn’t hear him. Then Charlie shot him in the chest. The technician’s body hopped with the impact and tumbled from his chair.

Through the steel of the airlock, Charlie heard the faint, indistinct ruckus of the tube caving in, of water rushing to fill an abhorred void, and though he listened for a long time, he heard no screams, no cries, no voices of any kind, before there was unbroken quiet. Afterward he moved through the lab, gathering notebooks and computer disks, and smashing anything else that looked important, kicking open computers, and yanking out hard drives. He worked for three hours, scouring the complex to collect or destroy anything he thought might make it possible for someone to recreate Doctor Fordren’s work. How long humanity had shared space with that thing in the sea, he couldn’t guess, but until now, neither had ever known of the other’s existence. Without the EM-eyes, perhaps things would go back to the way they had been. If not, Charlie could only guess what would come of two top-tier predators facing off for survival. If Kau-ahu came onto the land, humanity would have nowhere to run.

Charlie stepped outside onto the beach just before dawn. The pen was gone, the sharks with it. Charlie walked a little way down shore. His body shook as it relaxed and his adrenaline faded. He sat on a rock for awhile, caught his breath, and considered what to have for breakfast. There was a little diner he liked in nearby Knicksport. Good coffee and hot food sounded just about right. His world had just been twisted inside out at the roots. Better to fill his belly before letting his mind really grapple with it. His stomach was growling, and he found he had one hell of an appetite.

"From every corner, as you glance about you in these dark streets, some figure crawls half-awakened, as if the judgment hour were near at hand, and every obscure grave were giving up its dead."

--Charles Dickens,
American Notes

A police cruiser rounded off Park onto Mulberry Street and skidded to a halt. Officer Cameron Broome cut the siren. Painted red and white by the cruiser’s flashing lights, an ugly crowd huddled beneath Mission Bar’s tattered awning. They looked like a single organism clothed in a patchwork of faded T-shirts, frayed denim, leather jackets, and silver piercings. Cam felt their collective, predatory gaze as he emerged from the cruiser. He loosened two buttons of his uniform raincoat for easier access to the automatic snugged in his holster and tried to ignore the snare drum rattle of the downpour slamming the cruiser’s roof. His life had changed since he transferred to the city: Two years on the job upstate, and he’d never drawn his gun; here he considered it on almost every call. He snapped his collar against the grabbing wind, tilted his hat low on his forehead, and stepped forward like an intruder. His partner Bennie Hidalgo emerged from the passenger side door and met him at the curb.

“Fuck, man. About time you got here.”

A thin, papery-skinned man stepped out of the crowd, his arms wrapped across his chest to keep warm and mask his trembling.

“You the owner?” said Hidalgo.

“No, man. I ain’t the owner. The owner ain’t here. I’m the bartender. I’m Dubby.”

He rubbed his nose with two fingers, sniffled, kneaded his eyes then ran a hand through short-cropped hair bleached orange-blonde, and began the routine again, wired hot on something.

“So, where did it happen, Dubby?”

“Inside. Men’s room. Come on.”

Dubby turned, kicked the door open, and went in.

Hidalgo waited while Cam radioed their position to the dispatcher and requested confirmation that an ambulance and detectives were on their way. The two cops were responding to a homicide call that both suspected would turn out to be an overdose. Mission Bar had a reputation as a gathering place for cokeheads, junkies, and tweakers, a place where people minded their own business and anyone with cash didn’t have to worry about scoring.

The crowd lingered around Cam, drenched and dripping, oblivious to the water running down their faces, most of them probably stoned or high. They were Asian, Black, Caucasian, faces like you’d see on any crowded street in the city, except their glassy stares reduced them all to the same wet core of anonymous need; they were lost souls whose only purpose was to feed their hunger. Once that was all you were, Cam wondered, what difference there was between you and anyone else in the world.

He gazed up the block towards the intersection with Canal Street, where cars rolled past restaurant and storefront lights that glowed like liquid stars. Down here, though, the thick shadows of the darkened buildings and storm-emptied streets seemed as black and cold as an empty heart underwater. This was Chinatown, part of old New York, and its neighborhoods had history. Hundreds of years of stories of the people who had lived and died here, of the masses of immigrants who had packed squalid tenements on their way to better lives, of those who had made the neighborhoods their own and those who had taken to their streets and dark alleys. It reminded Cam of the small towns he’d patrolled upstate, but constricted, yearning upward like vines in search of new purchase, person upon person upon person with little more than an arm’s length of privacy between one window and the next. The raw humanity of it amazed and repulsed him.

Hidalgo shifted into the entrance to get clear of the rain and held the door open. Most of the crowd had already drifted back inside.

Dispatch confirmed backup was on its way. Cam clipped his radio back on his belt. He glanced up at the remnant of a sheet metal sign over the door, the bar’s faded name barely visible on it, and then followed Hidalgo inside.

The house lights were on, and the stark illumination made the bar feel sickly and toxic. The stink of sweat and smoke filled the air. Cigarette stubs cluttered the floor, ashtrays lay overturned, and spilled liquor pooled in depressions in the worn tile. A cracked hypodermic needle protruded from the black vinyl seat cushion of an empty booth. The place seemed desperate to creep back into the shadows. It begged for the rumble of conversation and the plunging backbeat of loud music to hide its ugliness. The jukebox across the room squatted mute in the corner.

“Down there.” Dubby pointed to a rear corridor lit by bare fluorescent lights. A landing doubled back onto a staircase down to the cellar and restrooms. “The chick that found him is sitting in the last booth. Her name’s Maia. Marty was her boyfriend. He disappeared downstairs, so she went looking for him. Stayed down there a long time, but her friends figured they were up to something, you know, private and then…. Well, like, everything just went to shit, but nobody noticed it at first over the music. When the songs switched we heard her screaming, you know, between tracks, and then she runs out of the back, crying and yelling…and her face…was all messed up….”

Three women sat in the back corner booth, one a slender Chinese girl, with her dark hair shaved on the right side of her head, worn long on the other. She wept into her hands. To her left a spike-haired girl who might have been her sister whispered to her in Chinese; sitting to her right, a muscular, Marilyn Monroe blonde in torn black clothes stroked the girl’s back.

Hidalgo surveyed the scattered group of fifteen or so by the bar. “This everyone who was here tonight?”

“On Friday night? You kidding? Must’ve been eighty, a hundred people in here, but they all cleared out when the screaming started,” said Dubby. “These guys are just the civic-minded bunch.”

“I’m touched by their cooperative attitude. Show me where it happened.”

Dubby’s pasty face tightened. “No, man. I already seen it, and no way I’m going down there, again. No fucking way.”

“Bennie, maybe we should interview the girl and wait for backup,” said Cam. But he didn’t know how long backup would take. A fire blazed out of control on Houston Street, Springsteen was playing the Garden, and the heavy rain made for frequent accidents. That and the latest round of budget cuts had the police stretched thin.

“You talk to her,” Hidalgo said. “I’ll look downstairs. It’s not like I’ve never seen a wrecked men’s room before. Besides it’s about time to unload all that coffee I drank tonight.”

Cam read his partner’s body language—chest thrust forward, shoulders squared, his stride hard and fast—and knew better than to argue. He and Hidalgo had been working together six months, long enough for Cam to learn that for Bennie being a cop was as much about doing the job as looking good while doing it.

Cam asked Dubby to watch outside for the ambulance then walked to the back booth. He felt the ragged group lined up at the bar follow him with their eyes, and he didn’t like it.

“How badly is Maia hurt?” Cam said.

The blonde, her cheeks webbed with black mascara, glared up at him. “She needs a fucking ambulance. What the hell is taking so long?”

“Bad storm. It’s a busy night,” said Cam. “They’re on their way. I can help until they get here.”

“Yeah, like cops know anything about helping people.”

Marilyn had more to say; Cam saw it in her wet smirk ready to jeer at his authority, but she only had time to gasp before Maia lashed out and crushed her head against the table. Maia screamed and lunged forward, trying to scramble over the blonde’s limp body, her fingers scrabbling like claws in Cam’s direction. Shoving the blonde down onto the seat, Maia clambered onto the table, but she was moving too fast. She slipped and crashed onto the floor. Cam snapped handcuffs from his belt and rushed toward Maia, but the other Chinese girl thrust herself between them. He checked his urge to shove her aside when he saw Maia responding to her friend’s whispered reassurances. Her heaving chest calmed and she looked around as if she was waking up from a nightmare, giving Cam his first clear glimpse of her face.

A glistening weal stretched from above Maia’s left eyebrow down to her lips and chin. Shining pinheads of blood spotted it. Maia peered around fearfully with her good eye, its mate blistered and broken like a baked cherry tomato shedding its peel. She rocked back and forth and whimpered. A matched pair of bruises had ripened on her upper arms. Handprints. Cam took her by the shoulder as he gently brought his steel cuffs toward her wrists.

He sensed his mistake immediately.

Every muscle in Maia’s body tensed under his touch. She erupted into a fresh whirlwind of growling, violent motion. Her head snapped back against her friend’s nose and sent her skull cracking against the booth’s wooden seat back. A piece of tooth shot from the girl’s lips, and she crumpled into a daze.

That was all Cam saw before Maia slammed into him.

She beat him, scratched at his hands thrust up to protect his face, snarled and kicked, and howled like a pissed-off cat. She craned her neck and tried to bite him. Cam threw all his weight into a low thrust and wrestled her toward the corner. The hatred burning in her eyes drilled into him, made him feel worthless and hollow. Dread filled him. He felt a strange, stabbing urge to weep for all the lost innocents he had ever met and his powerlessness to save them. He wanted to roll over and surrender. The flood of despair dizzied him, but he resisted and pressed back harder.

One moment Maia was immovable; the next her fury deserted her and she withered. She thrust her face back into her hands and slithered away from Cam until her back hit the wall. Then she began grunting and pushed her fingernails into the skin of her forehead, digging until her knuckles paled and blood oozed between them.

Cam scrambled across the floor, reaching for Maia’s wrists as she began to peel the skin off her face. He grabbed her arms, pinned them back, and locked them in his handcuffs. The metal clasp clicked home. Maia’s uninjured eye rolled back to its white, and her lips quivered. A swollen vein pulsed along her neck. With a low hissing groan, she folded to the floor.

Cam rolled over, panting.

Not a soul among the crowd had stirred; their sallow eyes remained impassive, a silent jury taking his measure. They had been waiting to see who would win. Cam hope their backup would arrive soon.

“What the hell is going on, Cam?” said Hidalgo, emerging from the back corridor.

He reached down and helped his partner up from the floor.

“Fucked if I know,” said Cam. “She must be tanked on something. It was like she had a seizure. She put up one hell of a nasty fight.”

The strangling depression Cam had felt was gone now, but he could tell how shaken he looked from the way Hidalgo stared at him.

When the front door slammed open, Cam realized sirens had been shrilling outside the bar for nearly a minute. Two paramedics rushed in, orange equipment cases clutched in their hands.

“Yo! Back here! Over here,” shouted Hidalgo.

One of the EMTs fell to work on the three girls, checking their pulses and respiration while the other pumped Cam and Hidalgo for information neither could supply. “If you can find out what she’s on,” the medical technician said after Cam described Maia’s behavior, “it could save her life.” He slapped a blood pressure cuff around Maia’s right biceps and wedged the end of his stethoscope beneath it.

Cam eyed the unconscious blonde and the prone Chinese girl, the only friends of Maia’s who might know what she was on. A quick search of the girls’ clothing turned up nothing. To help Maia, he and Hidalgo would have to search the men’s room for a clue to what she had taken.

“It’s very bad in there, Cam,” Hidalgo said, as they descended the stairway.

“This place has been a heroin dive since it opened, Bennie. There’ve been three ODs here since August,” said Cam, surprised at Hidalgo’s fading bravado. “I wasn’t expecting an overflowing toilet.”

The basement steps ended in a cramped hall with three doors, two to restrooms and the third to a small office and storeroom. Grimy electric bulbs burned in tarnished sconces flanking a smashed payphone. The men’s room door hung from its lower hinge, its frame knocked half loose from the wall. The coppery scent of blood tainted the air.

“If you can find any trace in there of what that girl took, you got a career sniffing out drugs with dogs at airports,” Hidalgo said.

“Christ, what happened in here?”

Garish spatters of blood covered everything in the yellow and gray room. The walls of the toilet stall had been pushed over, and the sink was torn from its pipes. A murky red puddle spread around a languid water spout. Shards of the mirror glittered on the wet tile, and a smashed condom dispenser hung from one wall. A confetti of disgorged plastic squares littered the floor below it. Two gaping apertures punctured the cheap sheetrock wall, one smashed inward with a pile of debris scattered before it, the other punctured out into a dark space behind the wall. Marty’s corpse was a visual jumble that defied Cam’s ability to define it until he realized one half was inverted and draped across the shattered urinal, the other tossed sideways in the corner like a pile of wet laundry.

“No way that girl did this, Bennie.”

“No shit. We’re not going to find anything in there,” Hidalgo said from the base of the stairs. “I figure at least three, four guys, maybe a dog or something did it.”