The Damned (28 page)

And then, all at once, I'm not alone.

S
omeone sits in the passenger seat next to me who wasn't there a second ago. Not Ash. There isn't her smell, for one thing. And there isn't the swallowing sadness that comes before the confirmation that it's her.

A man. A uniformed cop with a moustache that suits his wide face. He's not oblivious to how bad this is—he sees the wolves-that-aren't-wolves as well as how they now see him, his eyes darting between their three positions. Yet his features remain open, the professional skill of communicating calm to others who need it.

Greg.

His name comes to me even if it doesn't return his wife's—my wife's—with it. Her first husband who took a bullet to the throat in his own home.
A good man,
she'd called him. A soul sent to a better place than this, but here all the same. Come here for me.

Things, feelings, people. Souls. Maybe they can go back and forth more than we think.

“I know who you are,” I say.

He nods. A kindly, distinctly masculine gesture. A signal of peace between those who might otherwise have conflicting interests.

“I'd say we ought to get a drink somewhere,” he says. “But I'm pretty sure this is a dry county. And you don't have the time.”

The black wrenches its head out of the hole in the windshield and drives it back through. The whole snout in the car now, almost the ears, too. Once it gets past those it will come in to the shoulders. More than far enough for its teeth to find me.

“Here,” Greg says. “You need this more than I do.”

He reaches inside his Marcellus Police windbreaker and pulls out a gun. Not his service revolver, but a small Browning semiautomatic. He flips it over in his hand, smiles at the return of a memory.

Greg hands the gun over to me. The surprisingly heavy metal of a proper weapon, the density of purpose in the palm of my hand.

“We called it the Just In Case,” he says.

I nearly thank him but he gives his head a slight shake to indicate it's not necessary. And then it's his turn to almost say something to me.

I know you loved them, too.

He opens the passenger side door and steps out of the car. The wolves pause to watch him walk away just as I do. A cop's untroubled saunter around the side of the sales building and he's gone.

Once he's out of view, the monsters start fighting to get in again.

Two of them do.

The brown through the rear passenger window, tumbling onto the bench seat. The black through the front.

The glass falls away from around the black's body at the same time I raise the Browning. It bites the hand that holds the gun. Its teeth cutting through skin as my finger squeezes off the shot.

The bullet explodes through its back. The creature releases its hold, looks at me like this was only a game and it can't believe I took it as far as I have. An expression it holds as its head collapses onto my lap.

I spin around and fire into the back of the car without looking.

The first shot misses the brown, but startles it. Gives me the chance to align my aim and put the next bullet into its skull.

Which leaves Spot.

Until a moment ago, it was banging away at the rear window. Now nowhere to be seen.

I open the driver side door and let it swing out a few inches. I've got the gun aimed at the gap but no teeth come snapping into it. Did the missed shot find it? It's possible that it lies on the ground at the end of the car but I don't think so. It was smarter than the other two. Using new tactics after it saw what the gun did to its brothers.

Kick the door open wide. Step out with the gun at arm's length, scanning the lot. When my left foot finds the ground it sends an initial note of pain straight up to the back of my head so intense it brings me close to passing out. Then, just as quickly, it recedes. Finds a throbbing rhythm I can just about manage.

I leave the Crown Vic behind, start backing up toward the fence where I found a way in. My eyes traveling around the edges of everything, looking for a shape to emerge from its hiding place. It's why, when the spotted wolf comes at me from behind and off to the side, I don't see it until it's too late. Running silently from the same pile of scrap I used for cover from the tigers. Plowing into me.

But it doesn't take me down.

My legs hold me against the impact and still do even as it clamps its incisors through my pant leg and pulls back. It wants to topple me over. Instead, I shoot it in the hip.

It lets go. I start backing away again, thinking I've got some time, but then it's charging at me. Its lame rear leg bouncing around like a hammer tied to a wire.

I shoot it in the chest.

It puts in another two strides before it falls.

The lot is quiet again except for the Browning, clicking and clicking as I keep pulling the trigger before dropping it next to Spot. Then I pass through the fence and start south without looking back.

I
'm expecting the gunshots and howls to have brought more people out along Woodward to see me. Instead, the blocks that follow are oddly emptied of movement. Perhaps the Detroit of the afterlife is like the living Detroit in this respect: when you hear trouble, you don't call 911 or come out to see what's going on, you mind your own goddamned business.

It's only after I've crossed the I-94 that I see people once again. Most of them standing at corners in Pistons and Lions wear, waiting for something that will never come to take them home. Others look like tourists. Out-of-towners in brightly colored golf shirts or floral skirts. One wears a money belt around his waist, another squints at a map she's holding upside down.

They're here because this section of midtown once attracted them here. A stretch of Woodward Avenue that has the Detroit Public Library on the one side and the Institute of Arts on the other. The white stone of both structures riddled with handprints and smears, loops and commas—not a word, not a name, not a picture—all of
the same dark brown color. Graffitists who have used human feces for paint.

“That's all the high culture this town has left,” I remember my father saying as we drove between the two buildings on the day he took me to his office. “Blink and you'll miss it.”

It was a remark I didn't really understand at the time, but now see was directed not at the institutions themselves but the very character of the city. How little the place he'd poured his working life into had to show after the decades of prosperity and seemingly unstoppable growth, all of it so swiftly peeled away. The way Detroit would always be the Motor City even after the motors stopped being made.

The tourists stop to study me the same as the others do. I can feel their interest turning to something else, something I notice for the first time emits its own vaguely sulfurous odor. As before, I keep my eyes down. Don't look at them in the hope they'll let me pass.

I would guess, if this were the living world, it would be late afternoon now. Here, under the uninterrupted dome of cloud, the sun never shows itself, the shadows not lengthening so much as thickening.

The Ren Cen towers loom larger now, their curved skin visibly pocked where windows have been smashed out. Before them, the older, Art Deco office buildings look porous and brown, as though made of wet sand. In the gathering gloom, the Stars and Stripes hangs from a pole atop the First National, the flag shredded to a limp pom-pom.

I'm close enough to see the baseball stadium, too, set off to the east. The light towers surrounding the outfield wall like sentries.

The view from Alfred Street.

T
HE HOUSE IS STILL HERE
. If anything, it's in better shape than it is on earth.

It doesn't need the steel posts to hold up its walls, and the distinctive turret at the corner of the building has not yet collapsed so that, in the lowering light, a degree of its former grandeur is returned
to it. Because almost every other mansion along the street has been razed, it stands alone for hundreds of feet on every side. The solitude only adds to the suggestion of haughtiness, a refusal to be around others unworthy of its company.

The other difference is that the house has no boards nailed to its doors or windows. What air and light is available passes through its rooms, though from where I stand, where the sidewalk used to be, nothing can be seen inside.

When I leapt from my mother's car on our sixteenth birthday I didn't hesitate as I do now. Back then I had a feeling. An Ash feeling, therefore good as certain.

Now there's nothing.
Less
than nothing. A hollowness inside me I hadn't detected since coming here. Maybe I'm just noticing how I'm becoming like the others, losing myself as I come closer to finding my forever. Which may be here.

I enter the brown light of the house's front hall where the floor is less littered now, only low dunes of dust and tumbling bits of paper on the floor. The silence so dense I try to imagine something in it, the hum of another's blood in their veins, but the quiet only reasserts itself.

“Are you here?”

I sound sixteen again. Or younger still.

When nothing answers, I make my way to the hole in the floor. Somebody has left a wooden ladder where the stairs once went down. So lightless at the bottom I can't see where it touches ground.

I put a foot on the second rung. When it doesn't snap, I get into position and hold on to its sides. It squeaks in complaint but feels sturdy enough. With another couple descending steps I'm swallowed by increments of darkness.

It takes longer than I'd guess to touch bottom. The open rectangle above shrinking to something unreachable, the light at the end of a pier seen from a ship after it pulls away.

The moment I'm standing on the earth floor I only want to start back up. But all at once I'm shaking so hard I don't think my hands could keep their grip on the wood.

Because it's cold down here.

Because I'm terribly afraid.

When my vision adjusts to the dark I blink into the cellar's space and guess where its corners are. Eventually, different shades of black become readable and I start away from the ladder. Hands out in front me.

“I know you're here.”

This isn't true. But it feels like the sort of provocation that might bring her out. A statement of superior knowledge she'll be tempted to challenge.

“I'm not scared of you anymore.”

It triggers a noise. The shuffle of feet over the slats of the floor overhead. Followed by the long scrape of wood on wood.

I turn around in time to see the bottom end of the ladder disappearing up through the cellar opening.

I grab for it, jump, both too late. The ladder clatters to the floor above.

Another shuffle. Someone steps closer to the hole. A lone silhouette leaning over to peer down at me.

A woman.

I was right
, I think.
Those kitten-pretty looks don't age well.

I try another jump. Straight up, my hands stretching to find the edge. And again. A good foot short each time.

“You were always tall,” Lisa Goodale says. “But not
that
tall.”

She waits for me to collect my strength, to stand straight after resting my hands on my knees. At least I guess that's what she's waiting for. I'm wrong.

Another set of steps over the floorboards. Another figure coming to stand next to Lisa.

“Michelle?”

“Hiya, Danny.”

“I thought—I saw you in the school theater.”

“You did. But it turns out the show was
here
the whole time.”

Neither of them make a move. Just look down as if politely waiting for me to ready myself for an already agreed-upon demonstration.

“You never turned around,” I find myself saying. “You didn't call
me on her birthday because you were worried where she might have gone. You knew.”

“It wasn't
all
a lie, Danny,” Michelle says.

“We
did
stop following her,” Lisa says.

“Until we started following her again,” Michelle says.

I look around. The cellar dark in the way of the bottom of the ocean, pressurized and frigid. Even if I could find my way through it there's no way out down here.

New sounds from above shoot my head back up. A third figure joins the other two, shadowing the hole so that their outline is all that can be seen.

“Long time no see, Danny,” Winona says.

“Let me out of here.”

“Why? I thought you wanted to find out about your sister. Well, your wish has come true.”

The three of them inch closer together as if for warmth.

“So tell me,” I say, trying to hold them there with words. “Tell me what happened.”

“We stayed way back. She never looked around, not once,” Michelle says. “And when we got to the corner, we saw her come in here. Waited five, maybe ten minutes, and came in after.”

“Didn't she hear you?”

“We were quiet,” Lisa says. “Quiet as mice.”

“Mice wearing slippers,” Winona says.

“And she was a little distracted,” Michelle adds.

“By what?”

“Trying to stand up straight. Broke her ankle. Her foot swinging around, swollen up the size of a football,” Winona says. “She must have fallen down there, landed where you are now. And she was trying to jump up or find a way out, just like you.”

“Did you help her?”

“I think you know the answer to that one,” Lisa says.

“Why not?”

“Couple reasons,” Michelle says. “The gas, for one. The whole place was doused with it. Kind of hard to get a whole breath in.”

“And the body,” Winona says. “Meg. Lying at Ash's feet. All bashed up. You didn't have to score too high on the SAT to put it together.”