The Damned (27 page)

“Tell me who did it.”

“That girl? Who knows? She was a walking billboard that said
Love me!
or
Fuck me!
or
Kill me!
depending on who looked at it.”

Malvo lets his mind rest on this. Sighs like his memories of my sister were nothing but sweetness and sunshine. Acting again. It holds at bay the aggression that's seizing him. But not for long.

“Can I tell you something, Danny?” he says, a white line of spit ringing his lips. “I thought I wouldn't mind a little company over here. Someone who knew me back in the good old days. But you're kind of a
drag
, to be honest.
Who killed my sister? Tell me! Please!
Puts me in mind of a note from one of my directors. ‘When you don't know what to do, do
something
.' ”

He brings his hands even with his shoulders. At the same time, I back up, thinking I've left at least a foot between myself and the wall. But I'm already there.

“So what do you say?” Bob Malvo says as he locks his fingers around my throat. “How about we
do
something?”

Willa!

A thought-message that goes nowhere.

Eddie!

It's the boy's name that has me trying to punch Malvo's hands away. It doesn't work. Not even close.

But it reminds me that I still hold the rock. The one I'd grabbed when I was kicked awake. A stone the size and weight of a large marble, nothing more. Enough to give my fist ballast. Pushes the knuckles out, jagged and hard.

All I can hear is the sucking away of sound that precedes blackout, the floating orbs of light.

My fist swings up and I watch it as if from a distance. An event outside my control.

It finds the underside of Malvo's chin. I know the sound's back on when I hear the crack of teeth. His. Spat out against my face. One
chip finding the corner of my eye so that I push blindly against him after his grip loosens on my throat.

Within seconds, we both discover that driving the other against the wall is a better tactic than a fistfight. For a time, there are only the bass notes of bodies meeting stone.

In one back-and-forth I give Malvo more room than I mean to. It allows him the space to drive at me, elbows up like the horns of a bull. I manage to jump aside before contact. His momentum, the missed hit, my own hands on his belt—all work together to see his head meet the granite behind me.

It barely slows him down. His frame straightening as he emits a hiss through his now missing front teeth.

All of which takes a little time. Time I use to knock the wooden door down and run over it into the gray light. Up the slope where I'm able to make a guess as to where Woodward might be and start toward it, arms pumping.

Malvo close behind. The hissing now a throaty gargle, as if he's preparing to sing.

Through the trees, one of the lanes widens where the administrative building sits, graffiti-tagged and roofless. Just beyond, the avenue's concrete river.

A dash toward it I'm not alone in making.

Other footfalls joining Malvo's now. All of them wordless. The whole earth trembling with the weight of their lengthening strides.

The idea that I'm not going to make it helps. Spurred on by hopelessness.

I jump off the curb. On my first step down, the toes of my left foot catch on a piece of upturned road and send me rolling to the median. As I go I catch sight of the crowd stopping at the edge of the cemetery's property line.

Malvo there before anyone. Hands reaching for me but legs planted to the ground.

From out of nowhere, my father's voice.

There's a border in the middle. An invisible line.

It's the same for the rest of them. Malvo, the two men and woman
who ran me down, along with half a dozen others who watch me get to my feet and limp on. Across the way, at the edge of the Fairgrounds, the same hand-holding couple have come to see what the commotion's all about.

That's forever, Tiger.

For a moment, the two sides of the dead face each other across the divide. Curious only in the way of those spotted while speeding along the highway, those glimpsed pulling the mail from the box or hanging laundry on the line. Existences like your own on the face of it but different in ways you can't even guess at, and when they're gone, they're gone.

T
houghts are hard to hold on to in the After.

Basic facts of who I am as difficult to recall as the names of primary school teachers or second cousins or, in my case, the once memorized roster of the 1984 Detroit Tigers.

Lance . . . Parrish? He was the catcher. Chet Lemon, center field. Kirk Gibson. Or Kurt? Either way, born in Pontiac, Michigan.

I remember the team finished first that year with a .642 winning percentage, but not my mother's first name.

This must be the struggle of Alzheimer's, of old age, of time itself. The horror of feeling the details escape your grasp replaced by the greater horror that eventually you won't even miss them.

None of it as bad as forgetting the ones you love.

I keep Willa and Eddie with me as I make my way down Woodward toward the black towers. But even this comes with a cost. The more I think of them, the more difficulty I have remembering what I've come here to do. There isn't room for both.

One foot on the far side of the river and the other on your throat.

This comes back to me, though I can't remember from where.

You can't push her back. She can only be pulled.

P
AST THE FEATURELESS GOLF COURSE
in Palmer Park, a few players scattered over the fairways, looking for lost balls in the quack grass around a drained pond. Then over McNichols Road, where Woodward loses its median and the north-south lanes join, the road wider but in even worse condition, some of the concrete slabs pointed straight up like an ancient wall. On either side of the avenue, dollar store after fast-food island after parking lot. The latter with more cars in them now, a littering of American product both recent and historical, so that an Escalade sits next to a Packard, an F-150 next to a Studebaker. All wrecks.

For a few blocks, in North End, things briefly improve. The Cathedral of the Most Blessed Sacrament still mostly intact, an anchor for the massive homes along Boston and Chicago boulevards. It takes a longer look to reveal the differences. A poplar tree growing up through a hole in a roof. A man in a tux and woman in a maid's uniform, dry-humping on a side yard tennis court.

Then it gets bad again.

Not just the damages to the landscape, the cinder-block bars and Check 'n Gos, but a chill in the air that has grown more solid over the past few blocks. The distance between where I started and where I am now has brought on a change of seasons, from dreary fall to dreary winter. With every mile I get closer to downtown the temperature drops another ten degrees. The fog hardening.

If I ever reach Alfred Street the ground will be frozen. So will I.

I'm crossing Grand Boulevard when I hear the roars again.

Hide.

Eddie's voice. Breaking through from wherever he is. Which means he's closer to this side than he should be.

Something's coming.

“No! Eddie? Go back!”

The sound of my voice echoed by an Amtrak overpass. The dead
seeking warmth under cardboard blankets raise their heads to see me shamble past.

Hide!

There's a car lot on the left. Jimmy Dale's Pre-Owned. Random stock here and there, along with piles of scrap metal. A chain-link fence, still upright, stands between the lot and the street. A vine of some sort has snaked through its honeycomb of holes, acting as additional cover. It'll have to do.

The problem is the fence. Climb over? Look for a gate? No time for either.

I'm about to run on when I spot a tear along one of the posts. Wide enough for a man to squeeze through if he doesn't mind getting grated by cut metal.

Another round of roars.

Now.

When I make it through to the other side, my chest, stomach, and legs crosshatched with cuts, I look for cover. If the beasts are as close as they sound, the sales building is too far away. There is only a sculpture of steel rods and fenders and car body parts, thirty feet to the right and against the fence.

I'm falling to my knees and scrambling around behind the pyramid of scrap when Red Eyes roars beneath the railway overpass. Its voice louder and deeper than the other two, thrumming and hypnotic.

There is no way to confirm whether it has seen me or not. Not without moving. And moving means it will hear.

Even thinking is a risk. Because if I can feel its thoughts, it must be reaching out for mine. And I
can
feel its mind. Subtle as radio signals picked up by the fillings in your teeth.

Quiet.

This is new, too. The whole of Detroit suspended in the airless silence of a vacuum.

How much time passes before I decide to crawl over and take a look out at the street? Enough for my hands and feet to go numb.

I wriggle through the dirt, staying low. Nothing there.

Maybe it thinks I've gone farther along than I have. Or it knows
I'm watching and will do some hiding of its own. It doesn't matter. I have to start walking again or freeze.

I come out from behind the piled metal. Start toward the gap in the fence. Feel something watching me.

My feet stop but my head turns.

Wolves.

Guard dogs of no discernible breed to begin with, but now, on this side, enlarged and mutated. Wolves combined with the grotesque creations of dollar store Halloween masks. Eyes sunk back in their skulls. One brown, one spotted like a cow, one black. Stepping out from what was once Jimmy Dale's office.

Even as I start to think of what I might do next, they spread apart. A widening semicircle that cuts me off from where I'd been hiding. A couple seconds later, one of them stands between me and the hole in the fence.

There is no going ahead. There is only what's behind me.

I swing around and run for whatever's there.

A Crown Vic sedan. Long and wide as a tugboat. Judging from the faded blue stripes along the sides, a decommissioned Detroit Police cruiser.

It's all simple now. I make it there, the door opens, the windows are still intact, I get in, and all of it holds. Or the wolves rip the feet off my legs.

The passenger side door is closer, but it's closed—possibly jammed, possibly locked—and I can see that the driver side door is ajar. I figure the odds of a sure thing are better than an unsure thing, even if I have to get to the other side.

The wolf-things close in behind me. Teeth chattering with excitement. The promise of meat.

I hit the front of the car instead of shearing around it, a painful meeting of fender and thigh. It doesn't stop me, though. My hip slides over the end of the hood and I find my feet again on the far side.

One of the creatures, the brown one, jumps onto the hood. Its teeth would be on my arm if its nails didn't slip on the smooth surface, a scratching dance that makes it snarl with fury.

I'm rounding the partly opened door when the black wolf comes out from behind the car. Behind me, the brown makes it off the hood. Lands on the spotted cow, who shrieks with surprise.

There's a fraction of time when all three see how easy it will be to take me down. Time enough to also see there will be a race between them as to who gets me first.

It's why, when they come at me, they jump earlier than they likely otherwise would.

I fall sideways into the driver seat. Grab the handle as I go. Most of me inside when I slam the door closed, but not all. Not the foot of my already injured leg. The foot the door closes on.

The brown is on it instantly. The teeth tearing neatly through the sides of my shoes. Sinking into skin. Pulling me out.

I'm another tug or two from being on the ground when the other two wolves fall upon the first.

It lets me pull my leg back in though it costs me a scream. Which returns the creatures' attention to how I might be removed from the car.

With a yank, the door clicks shut at the same time the monsters throw themselves against it. And again. Their heads used as battering rams against steel.

I try to move the foot that the brown chewed on. It throbs like a swarm of hornets are attacking it, but doesn't seem broken anywhere. If the pain can be tolerated, I can likely still put some weight on it.

So it can carry me where?

I'm not leaving this car with those leaping, howling things out there. And their seeing me here every time they jump up for a look only doubles their frenzy. Makes them run their heads against the door again.

After a while, it knocks some sense into them.

The spotted wolf jumps onto the trunk. The black onto the front hood. The brown takes running leaps at the rear passenger window on my side, which is open a few inches and already webbed with cracks. Pounding, scratching. The three of them in a race to find the way in.

I try to think of my family, the ones left behind. Summon a face or
spoken word in their voices. But I can't remember their names. There is nothing but the wolves. Wailing with an almost pitiable need.

At the same time as the brown knocks a mug-sized chunk out of the rear window, the black smashes its snout through the front windshield. The teeth snapping two feet from my face even as the shards slice its jaws.

I don't want to think of her. But she comes anyway. Her name. The exhilaration she felt when she saw something was going to die.

“Ash?”

Curious.

She'd be interested to see which wolf finds my throat first. And while I called out for her, even as I reached out for her, she would feel nothing for me. Only disappointment if her pick didn't win.