The Dark Knight (Apocalypse Weird 2) (12 page)

Cory pressed his hands to his ears.  The loud explosions of
the gunshots drove him to his knees.  He closed his eyes, reeling with each
blast.

Within a minute, the shooting had stopped and the street was
quiet until the boys started laughing.  The one wielding the heavy baseball bat
was breathing heavily, coughing.

“Heather MacLean,” said a tall boy who’d jumped from the
driver’s seat.  He was holding a snub-nosed revolver.

Heather stared at the boy.  Lane Hardy.  The leader of the
loadies from High School.  A year ahead of her.  They’d never known each other,
really.  Back in elementary school they might have played kickball together
back when they were all playing kickball that year.  When kickball was life. 
But she didn’t think he actually knew her.  Knew her name other than to call it
out if she did something stupid in the quad.

But he looked older.  He had a goatee.  His face was drawn
and tight.  There were crow’s feet around his eyes.  He walked forward,
crossing the lawn toward her.  Cory was still squeezing his eyes shut and on
his knees.  Hands over his ears.  Lane Hardy pushed him over as he walked by. 
Cory tumbled onto the grass.  Then opened his eyes and looked around.

“Batman, huh?” said Lane, standing over Cory.

Cory just looked up at the strange man with a gun like
Daddy’s.  Guns were a “no no”.

“How’d you...” began Heather.

“We wuz just out cruising the old town,” said another boy. 
Randy Flagg.  She’d known him too.  He and Lane were friends.  People said
Randy Flagg was strange.  “Heard someone screaming and thought we’d come see
what was what.”

“Good thing we did, huh guys?”  Everyone agreed with Lane. 
They all seemed older to Heather than they should have.  Like they’d been
living hard for longer than just the few days since she’d last seen them in
school.  Taller.  Leaner.  More muscular.  Some of them even had cruddy new
tattoos.  She couldn’t remember them having tattoos the last time she’d seen
them somewhere on campus.

Lane Hardy came close to her and offered his hand.  She
could see a crude tattoo of a simple Black Hand between the thumb and index
finger.  He stuck the shiny gun in his waistband.  She took his hand and stood
up.

“You look real great, babycakes!”

She involuntarily smiled, feeling herself blush.  Then she
saw her Dad face down in the street.  He’d been flung into a mailbox.  She
couldn’t see his face.  Just his pants and shirt and loafers.  That was him. 
His style.  Community College Professor of English lit.

Not anymore, she thought.

“You alright?” asked Lane Hardy as she stared for a moment
longer at the dead corpse that used to be “Daddy”.  “Look like you seen a
ghost.”

She turned and shook her head.  Shaking away everything that
once was.  Everything she thought life should be.  Yeah, he was right, she
thought about her Dad.  “Death is just nothing.”

“We’re going to the mall, Heather,” said Lane.  “Wanna
come?  It’s pretty cool.  We can do... well, hell, we can do whatever we want
now.”

She looked up at him.  He was missing a tooth.  Crow’s
feet.  Definitely crow’s feet.

“You wanna gun?  We got lotsa guns.  Booze too.”

Someone whooped at the mention of booze.  The big chunk of
male testosterone carrying the aluminum baseball bat.  The whooper.  He had a
round, potato-shaped head. 

“Yeah,” said Lane.  “Gasher loves him some booze.”

“I don’t know,” mumbled Heather as her ears began to buzz. 
“I just don’t know anymore.”

“Well, gotta decide right now, chick.  ‘Cause them things
are thick as flies a couple of streets over and no doubt they’re headed this
way after all our target practice.”

Cory was sitting on the grass cross-legged.  Cory as
Batman.  Rocking back and forth.

“Okay,” she whispered and looked at the body of her Dad one
last time.

Lane snapped his fingers and tapped the open palm of one
hand against the closed fist of the other.  “Alrighty-then!  Let us make
haste.”  He walked toward the Charger and Randy Flagg cried, “Mount up!” as he
finished spray painting something in the middle of the street.  Numbly, Heather
followed Lane to the car.  She looked back at Cory, only once.  He was staring
off at something.  But she couldn’t tell what.

“Don’t even think about it,” said Lane, holding the door
open for her to climb into the back seat.  “He’s a liability.  And there’s no
room for liabilities in this future.”

Okay, she thought she’d said out loud, but didn’t.  She
climbed into the car, distantly feeling Lane pat her on the butt as her head
began to feel dull, that distant
buzz
rising between her ears not
unpleasantly.  She slithered in between two other boys, men really, in the
backseat.  She didn’t feel threatened.  She didn’t feel safe.  She didn’t feel
anything.

Through the windshield, she could see her Dad’s legs and the
rest of his body behind a hedge that bordered the lawn of the 1974 house.

Death is nothing, she told herself again.

Right?

Cory stood up.

Time to go home now.  Getting dark.  Daddy will be home
soon.

The roar of the Dodge Charger faded into the distant end of
the day.  Cory could hear tires squeal as it made some sharp turn and then the
engine wound up as the mean boy named Lane Hardy mashed the accelerator and
sped away from the dead-filled neighborhood and the aftermath of a slaughter in
progress.  A slaughter that might never find its end.

“Errrr...” sung Cory softly, mimicking the fading tire
squeal. 

All around, he could hear them even though they were
unseen.  The strangers.  Their distant moans.  Banging into fences in unseen
backyards.  Stumbling through houses and shattered sliding glass doors to come
out.  To come out and get him.  Drawn to the gunfire that still seemed to echo
off the walls of the white and beige stucco houses and even Cory’s ears.

Cory went back inside the house he and the girl had waited
in all afternoon.  He closed the front door behind him and made his way to the
back of the house.  He opened the sliding glass door and smelled the lawn and
early evening rising.  The grass felt wet and heavy and fresh in his nostrils. 
There was water on the concrete.

Cory looked at the refrigerator, walked to it and devoured a
handful of the lunchmeat.  He drank some water from the sink faucet because he
was thirsty, wiping his mouth with his sleeve when he was finished.  In the
backyard, he climbed the fence after making the “Bhuwuuush!” sound before he did,
and then let himself down into the silent wooded area beyond the housing
tract.  He knew the pharmacy was just down the hill through the woods. 

He tried to be quiet. 

He knew somehow strangers were attracted to noise.  He knew
being quiet was important from now on.  But Cory was large and not the most
agile of persons.  He finally crashed through the dry, brown, summer’s end
foliage and down onto the silent parking lot behind the pharmacy.  The bright
white sodium lights hummed to life, casting hot cones of light in the early
twilight.  Above him, the sky was a pale blue.  An early night blue.

Silence.

Cory walked around the outside of the store and didn’t see
any of the strangers there.  He took the parking ramp up to the main road and
walked back uphill toward the entrance to his neighborhood, sweating underneath
his mask.  He was still clutching the bag of medicine for Mrs. Sheinman.  He
was very tired.  He hoped there would be pancakes when he got home.  When Daddy
came home after patrol.

He really hoped there would be pancakes.

He made it back into the neighborhood hearing nothing but a
deep, intense quiet that had settled over everything in the last twenty-four
hours.  Gone were the sounds of the distant freeway, humming and droning,
always running day and night.  Gone were the sudden emphatic explosions of kids
playing late into the dark on still, hot summer nights.  Gone were radios in
garages as cars were being worked on.  Gone were TVs behind windows casting
blue light late into the night.  All these things were missing and gone.  Even
the dogs that once barked at Cory as he passed their gates and fences had
disappeared.

Cory saw a cat he didn’t know.  He tried to pet it, but it
hissed and ran off into a dark house.  Cory continued on, almost home. 
Sometimes he would see shapes behind the shattered windows of the houses along
the street.  But he was quiet and walked slowly and none of the strangers came
out after him.

When Cory made it to Mrs. Sheinman’s house, he found the
porch light on, but it seemed small and even wan as though it were being
besieged by the night.  For a long moment Cory stood in front of the house.  He
knew he did not want to go inside.

But he had to.  Mrs. Sheinman needed her bag of medicine.

Maybe Daddy is home now, he thought.

Cory opened the gate, listening to it whine on a rusty
sing-song note.  He imitated it as he always did.  But this time his voice was
little more than a whisper or even a dry croak.  Then he closed the gate which
was what he was supposed to do and walked up to the front door of the house. 
He entered and listened.  The house was dark, save for a lone light in the
living room by the TV.  Cory went and placed the bag of medicine on the table.

“Tired,” he mumbled to himself. 

He walked toward the guest room that Mrs. Sheinman had set
aside for him on nights when Cory’s Dad wouldn’t be home until late.  At the
far end of the hall, he saw the door to Mrs. Sheinman’s bedroom was closed.

He approached the door.

“Ummm...” He started to say something about the bag of
medicine.  Instead he said, “Home now,” flatly and walked quickly back down the
hall.  Halfway along its length, he heard a flat
thump
from behind the
door to Mrs. Scheinman’s bedroom.

Cory stopped.  Listening.

Another
thump
.

Raspy breathing.

Like the strangers when they had come too close to him.

He took off his mask and cape in the spare room.  Then he
went to a small bathroom and brushed his teeth with the toothbrush Daddy had
always made sure Cory had when he stayed the night.  He heard another
thump
.

He did not want to hear anymore thumps.  He did not like the
thumps.  Strangers made thumps.

With the toothbrush still in his mouth, he opened the door
to the spare room and looked down the dark hallway that led to Mrs. Sheinman’s
room.  The door was still closed.

Again he heard another
thump
. 

He closed the door.

He stepped back from it.

He pushed a small desk in front of it and stood back.

He rinsed out his mouth and got into the tiny single bed. 

“Ummm... God Jesus please keep Daddy safe.”  Which is what
Cory prayed every night.  The same prayer.  He meant it every time.  Then he
added, “Um... me too, God Jesus.”  Which was something he’d never prayed
before.

He lay in the dark for a long time listening, trying to be
very quiet.

He was afraid.

He got up quietly, retrieved the mask and cape and put them
back on.  Then he got back into bed.

“I’m Batman,” he whispered.

Then he slept.

There were no more bumps in the night.

Cory left the house in the morning.

The day was already hot and thick and there were smells in
the air that were not pleasant to him. 

He’d left because he knew Mrs. Sheinman was a stranger now.
When he awoke in the morning and dressed, taking off his Batman cape and mask,
putting them into his backpack, he’d heard the bumps and the groaning whispers
coming from behind her door.

“Ummmm...” he tried through the bedroom door, but couldn’t
think of what exactly to say.  Instead, she’d only growled at him and banged
into the flimsy door as a reply.

Cory left the house, closing the gate behind him as he went,
as he always did.  At his own home, a few doors down, he found it as he’d left
it.  There was no sign of Daddy.  A dirty policeman’s uniform wasn’t by the
laundry machines.  Daddy wasn’t in his bed, sleeping.  Cory had a snack bar and
a glass of milk, only spilling a little bit when he poured it, which was good. 
Then he sat down in front of the dark TV.

If I just wait here, he reasoned, then Daddy will come home
and turn on Batman.  Cory hummed the theme to the show as he waited.

“Na-na na naaa NuH...”

Soon he began to rock back and forth because he was very
worried and he didn’t understand any of this.  He did not like these
strangers.  These bumps.  None of it.

Things were not as they should be, which is very hard for
someone who uses patterns and routines to cope with life.  Things were messy,
and even scary.

“Na-na na naaa NuH...”

Batman would know what to do.  The real Batman.  If the
Joker, or Plant Lady, or Crocodile Man, or Scarecrow had captured Daddy....

“Na-na na naaa NuH...”

...Real Batman would know what to do.  How to... help Daddy.

Then another thought occurred to Cory.  Maybe a criminal has
Daddy in a secret hideout.

He thought of all the criminals.  Thought of which one it
could be.  He watched the dark screen of the silent TV and tried to see and
remember all the shows all at once.  He saw every episode.  And the more he
thought of each criminal, and Daddy, and what all the strangers and the smoke
and fire and Mrs. Sheinman could mean, he was even more afraid.

“Na-na na naaa NuH...”

Then...

“Scarecrow,” Cory whispered to the silent, stuffy room.  “He
would make it all Halloween.”

Which in Cory world was the worst day of the year. 

The day when things are not what they seem.  Not what they
should be.  What Cory is used to, and needs.  Of all the villains on the 1990’s
cartoon version of Batman, there was no villain scarier to Cory than the
Scarecrow.  Those episodes were always the most frightening and Cory didn’t
really like them very much.  But he watched them because he knew if he waited
long enough, Batman would win because Batman was brave.  When Batman stopped
the Scarecrow, Cory felt like he’d been brave too.  All through the Scarecrow
episodes, when he’d wanted to not watch and he’d continued to even so, that, to
Cory, was being brave.  Cory was often afraid and he wished he was like Batman
all the times he was afraid, even though sometimes, Batman was afraid too.

Cory reached into his backpack and took out the mask and
cape.  He held them and wondered if he could be brave enough to find the
Scarecrow and rescue Daddy.  Cory wished at the moment that he was brave enough
to do the thing that needed to be done, even though he was afraid.

Just like we all do sometimes.

He clasped the cape around his neck.

He drew the mask over his head, adjusting it with one of his
large sweating hands until it didn’t pinch his nose and make his breathing
stuffy.

He would go find Daddy.  Even if the Scarecrow was in his
way, even if all the Batman villains were against him, he would be brave and he
would find Daddy and they would come home and... well, there would be pancakes.

Which meant so much more than just pancakes as ordinary
things often do sometimes.

“I am the night...” spoke Cory in the silence of the empty
family room.