The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (34 page)

“On the beach,” she said, “earlier, I never finished what I was saying to you.”

He mumbled what could have been, “Doesn’t matter,” his words already half a snore.

She swallowed a mouthful of Baileys. It had been a week since she had not been drunk. Each day’s biggest challenge lay in consuming enough alcohol to maintain the pleasant version of the state, without tipping over into anger and self-pity. She said, “This one day, my convoy was caught in an ambush. Textbook example of how to spring one. There were eight of us, traveling west to one of the bases, there. I was third in line. The country was flat, which somehow registered in how big the sky felt. We stuck to the middle of the road, which ran through neighborhoods of squat, sand-colored houses, past palm trees and these big bushes whose name I couldn’t remember. The ground was dry; the rigs pulled up rooster-tails of dust as they went. There wasn’t any speed limit—well, none that we kept to. In front of some of the houses, groups of men in white robes and red headscarves watched us pass. A few of them threw rocks; although it was more the kids, teenagers and younger, who did that. They had a pretty good aim, too. I’d adjusted to the crack of a rock striking the windshield, the bang when it struck the door. We hadn’t been driving that long when the guys ahead of me slowed, fast. Over the radio, I heard Grant, in the lead truck, say, ‘—in front of me,’ and then the IED detonated.

“I saw the explosion, the jet of smoke; I heard the boom, like one of those big fireworks they set off towards the end of Fourth of July displays, the kind of sound you feel deep in your chest. It blew out Grant’s windows, shredded his tires, tore the shit out of his engine. Probably concussed Grant, too; although, the insurgents shot him, so who knows? Everything came to a halt. I knew we’d been hit, and when the shooting started, I knew it wasn’t over. After the bomb, the gun sounded almost tiny, like strings of firecrackers. I wasn’t sure, but I thought we were being targeted from the windows of a couple of houses on either side of the street. Crossfire, right? Most of the fire concentrated on the first truck, but I heard McVey, who was in the second truck, screaming that his windshield was full of holes, and he was pretty sure they’d hit his engine, too, because it was dead.

“Everyone was on the radio at the same time. Shea, the head driver, who was fifth in line, kept trying to raise Grant. ‘Grant,’ he said, ‘move ahead.’ Finally, McVey told him Grant was dead, and things weren’t looking too good for him, either. ‘All right,’ Shea said, ‘you’re going to have to pull around him.’ ‘No can do,’ McVey said, his rig was not moving. Shea couldn’t—this was the guy who’d come off as such a badass the first time I met him. Now that the shit was burying the fan, he couldn’t process what was happening. He must’ve told McVey to drive around Grant half a dozen times. McVey said he would love to, but his truck wouldn’t move.

“The whole time, the insurgents kept firing, pop pop pop. A bullet punched through the top of my windshield. My AK was on the passenger’s seat; I was waiting for Shea to tell us we were going to have to leave our trucks and take the fight to our attackers. At the very least, I was expecting him to direct us to rescue McVey. Because it would have to be us. Someone had radioed the Army for assistance—it must have been Shea—and the woman on the other end told him to wait for an answer that still hadn’t come. My heart had shrunk somewhere deep down in my gut. The base of my throat hurt. I was wearing the flak jacket and helmet the company had issued us, but I didn’t rate its chances of stopping a bullet from an AK too high. Any minute, I expected the insurgents to leave their windows, or start targeting the rest of us. But all they did was empty magazine after magazine into Grant and McVey’s rigs. McVey had gone from demanding help to repeating this kind of prayer, ‘Jesus, Jesus Christ, oh Jesus, save me, Jesus Christ.’ There was room to the right of his truck, maybe enough for me to squeeze through. I thought I might be able to roll up beside him, use my truck as a shield to let him escape from his and climb in beside me. I could picture myself doing this, but I couldn’t do anything to make it happen. My left hand was on the wheel, my right was on the gearshift; my left foot had the clutch pressed in, my right was over the gas—and I sat where I was. Shea was speaking to me, had caught up with the situation and was saying I had to pull around McVey and lead the group out of there. I didn’t.”

Her throat was dry. She took a generous pull on the bottle. “They had started kidnapping contractors, the insurgents. They were posting videos to YouTube of these guys sitting cross-legged on the floor, their hands tied behind their backs, surrounded by men in black ski masks. All of them denounced the occupation, a few made requests for ransoms. One guy was murdered, there, on camera, his throat slashed and his head cut off while he was dying. Afterwards, the murdering fuck who’d done it held up the poor guy’s head like it was some kind of trophy. There was this expression on the dead man’s face… I don’t know how to describe it. He looked sick, as if he’d been choking on his own death. I want to say that this was what was keeping me from moving. Maybe it was. Shea was telling me to put the truck in gear and step on the gas. McVey was crying, ‘Jesus,’ over and over again. My nostrils were full of the burnt stink of gunpowder. The insurgents’ guns rattled on, blowing out another of McVey’s tires. ‘Move,’ Shea was saying. I couldn’t believe how level his voice was. ‘You have to move.’

“Then I was. I can’t say what happened. One moment, I was paralyzed; the next, I had the truck in first and was spinning the wheel to the right. It was a tight fit between McVey’s truck and a couple of those heavy bushes, but I cleared it. Bullets smacked the passenger door. One punched through and drilled the seat beside me. I didn’t slow beside McVey’s cab. I didn’t look over at it, or at Grant’s rig, still burning. I focused on the road before me, and that allowed me to see the child standing in the middle of it in plenty of time. I couldn’t say if it was a boy or a girl. It was young—six, seven—dressed in rags. Barefoot. I thought about Grant’s sudden stop. There had been reports of insurgents putting children in the way of approaching convoys and, when the trucks slowed, hitting them. I hadn’t believed the stories—hadn’t wanted to—but it appeared that was precisely what had occurred, here.

“Passing Grant’s truck, I steered left, in an effort to avoid the remains of the IED scattered across the road. This set me straight towards the child. I wanted to turn right, but I had to wait for the truck’s back wheels to clear the bomb wreckage, and by the time they did, I was already too close. I pulled the wheel around, anyway, shouting at the kid to get out of the way, but even if it had heard me over the roar of the engine and the popping of the guns, I doubt it understood English. It stood there, its eyes wide, its mouth open, its arms hanging at its sides. I could have stomped the brake and done what I could to miss the child, but I didn’t. It was like, now that I had put myself in motion, I wasn’t about to stop.

“There should have been no way for me to feel the truck striking something that small. Yet I’m positive a slight tremor ran though the steering wheel as I sped past the place where the child was standing. I didn’t check my mirrors for anything lying in the road.

“Later, after we’d pulled into our destination and were sitting around the mess hall, I asked Shea if he’d noticed a child’s body a little way past Grant’s truck. Yeah, he said, he’d seen a body there that must have been a kid’s. Motherfuckers must have stationed it there to stop Grant, then, when they set off the IED, it was killed in the blast. ‘Savages,’ he said. ‘Motherfucking savages.’ I said nothing to contradict his version of events.”

The bottle of Baileys was empty. Marissa turned it in her hands. She thought Delaney was asleep, but she wasn’t certain. She sat where she was, and did not say anything else.

VII

With a shuddering clash, the elevator came to a halt.

“End of the line,” Barry said, and slid back the door.

The child was still in the car, its expression of horror unchanged.

Barry stepped out into darkness. For a moment, Marissa was alone in the car with the child.
Not real
, she thought.
It’s not real. There is nothing standing there.
Then the tunnel at whose end they had arrived filled with pale, flickering light as Barry flipped the switch that turned on the fluorescent lights set in its ceiling. “It’s this way,” he said and, without waiting for her, set off.

Pulse thudding, she fled the elevator, rushing ahead of Barry. She swallowed, said, “You should let me go first.”

He grunted.

To give her hands something to do, she unsnapped the row of buttons fastening her jacket over top of its zipper, pinched the zipper’s tongue, and eased it down far enough at allow her access to her pistol in its shoulder-holster. She considered tugging off her mittens, but decided that the air, while warmer than it was at the surface, was not that warm. Although she could sense the child at her back, she did not turn her heard. Instead, she said, “This Wallace—you guys must have been pretty close.”

“Oh?” Barry said. “What makes you say that?”

The tunnel was surprisingly finished, its floor and rounded walls concrete. The lights buzzed. “Well,” she said, “I mean, here we are, right? I’d have to check the odometer for the exact mileage, but we’ve come pretty far. Not to mention, all the other stuff you’ve been up to. You don’t do that for just anyone.”

“I suppose not,” Barry said, though the tone of his voice was threaded with doubt. “Wally was a friend, of course. We certainly drank enough of one another’s Scotch. There wasn’t a function amongst our set that the two of us didn’t attend, and exchange a few words at. He’d traveled quite a bit, and if we were stuck for conversation, we would compare notes on Finland, or Egypt, or Mongolia. We were forever going to do something together, plan a return trip to one of those countries, take our wives someplace new. We got along all right. I had the sense that, wherever we went, we’d have a fine time, together.”

The tunnel curved to the left. Marissa wondered how far down the pit—or beneath it—their ride had taken them. She did not look behind her.

“I’m sorry,” Barry said. “‘A fine time together:’ sounds like something out of bloody F. Scott Fitzgerald, doesn’t it? Chin chin, old boy, jolly good. Or maybe Wodehouse. The fact is, we weren’t especially close. After he died—disappeared, but who is anyone kidding?—afterwards, I was waiting for one of Wally’s other friends, the fellows I considered his close friends, Skip Arden or Randy Freeman, to step forward, keep up with the police investigation, ensure that everything that could be done was being done to locate whoever was responsible and bring them to account. No one took that step—Skip and Randy seemed to have fallen off the face of the earth—so eventually, I did. I picked up the phone and dialed the police because I could, because it was necessary that someone should do so and I was available. You could call it loyalty, I suppose. It’s difficult to speak about without sounding ridiculous to yourself.”

“It’s okay,” Marissa said, “I understand loyalty.”

In front of her, the tunnel dead-ended in a concrete wall in which a flat, gray metal door was centered. Marissa said, “Through here?”

“I assume so.”

She pulled off her right mitten and reached inside her coat for the pistol. She withdrew it from its holster, and let it hang muzzle-down in her hand as she approached the door.

“What is it?” Barry said.

“Just being cautious.”

A simple doorknob swung the door in. A wave of warm, humid air spilled over her. A rough, unlit corridor stretched maybe fifty feet to a doorway full of soft, yellow light.

“Well?” Barry said.

Before she could answer, the silhouette of an enormous man occulted the doorway. Marissa raised the .38. Mouth dry, she called, “Hello?”

The voice that answered made her want to scream. “Is that Barret Langan?” it called.

“It is,” Barry said. “Is that Tyler Choate?”

“The very same,” the voice said. “And you brought a little friend.”

“Ms. Osterhoudt sees to my well-being,” Barry said. “I’m sure you have employees who do the same for you.”

“Not employees, no,” Tyler Choate said. “I prefer to think of them as associates, fellow-travelers who have not progressed as far along the particular road we walk. Nonetheless, your point is taken. I would consider it a favor, though, if she would lower her pistol. Good manners, you know.”

“Go ahead,” Barry said, “but keep it handy.”

Whatever rock the corridor had been carved from was full of tiny crystals that caught the lights shining at either end of the passageway and glowed like stars. Some peculiarity of the walls’ contours leant the crystals the impression of depth, so that, in walking the passageway, Marissa had the impression of crossing a bridge spanning the stars. The sensation received a boost when she noticed that certain groupings of the lights seemed to align into patterns, constellations; albeit, none of them familiar. She could not hear her boots scraping the floor. She glanced down, and saw a ball of light streak from left to right, apparently far below her.
Shooting star
, she thought, then,
That’s ridiculous
. All the same, the relief that suffused her on reaching the other end of the corridor—from which Tyler Choate had withdrawn—was palpable.

She stepped out onto a white marble floor. Directly in front of her, plush leather seats ringed the base of a sizable marble column. A newspaper lay folded on one of them. A mural whose brightly costumed figures suggested Renaissance Italy decorated the walls before and to either side of her. On her right, a rectangle of black marble, set lengthwise, formed a counter atop which sat a gold pen in a polished wood holder and a small crystal bowl full of candies in gold wrappers. The entire space was suffused with the buttery glow of the sun descending the sky, which appeared to originate from the wall in which the doorway was set. Marissa leaned forward, and saw rows of tall windows bracketing the entrance, each one brimming with daylight. “What the fuck?”
Barry had followed her into the room. “Why,” he said, “this is the Broadsword. What are we doing here?”