The Night Parade (12 page)

“You're sick, David. Your last blood test. You've got it.”

“You're a liar,” David said. “You're just trying to get me to come back. I won't do it.”

“It's not a lie. It's no trick. David, please, think about your daught—”

“Fuck you,” he said, and ended the call.

His hands shook. Sweat rolled down his forehead, though the rest of his body felt strangely cold. Through the center of his body, he felt as though an electrical current pulsed, causing every fiber of his being to vibrate with a surge of power—of anger—that threatened to shatter him into a billion microscopic pieces. He wondered if it was a residual effect of Ellie's touch or if it was generated internally, born of his own anger.

He closed his eyes, leaned against the car, and focused on controlling his respiration. The last thing he needed was for Ellie to see him upset. Things were already bad enough without that.

In his hand, the phone rang again.

He powered it off without a second thought.

F
or better or worse, he opted to drive to the nearest city identified as a black
X
on the newspaper's map. It was a town in Kentucky called Goodwin, and he liked the sound of it. Even when he turned the map on its side, making all the
X
's look disconcertingly like little black crosses, he clung to the plan and didn't veer off in another direction.

While he smoked, he pulled up directions to Goodwin on his phone. He was fearful it might ring again in his hand—fearful he might actually answer it and scream at the person on the other end of the line right in front of his daughter—but the phone did not ring. He kept it on long enough to scribble the directions down on a slip of paper he found in the glove compartment, then shut it back off. He lit a fresh cigarette with a match and, for the first time since he was a little boy watching his mother smoke in the car, marveled at how there used to be cigarette lighters built into the dashboards of American automobiles.

As they drove, the horizon soured to the color of a bruise. The sun sizzled out like a dying fire. Ellie scrolled through the radio stations, hoping to find a broadcast that played music, but the reception was poor and there was nothing but static across the dial. Even the radio evangelists had disappeared. To keep her happy, he stopped at a gas station and bought a few used CDs from a bin, things he would never listen to in his real life—Roxette, Cyndi Lauper, Bananarama. They were only a dollar apiece. Ellie played them but remained unemotional. Detached. It concerned him.

That evening, they ate the remainder of the burgers from earlier, now cold, tasteless, the patties beginning to stiffen. Ellie kept the shoe box of bird eggs tucked between them on the console. As he drove, David kept glancing at her profile, desperate to decode her emotions. He didn't like how silent she was being, didn't like the distant look in her eyes. He knew it would only get worse tonight, when they arrived in Goodwin. He would have to put on a good face. He would have to somehow make it all palatable, them staying overnight in what promised to be a deserted ghost town.

But that proved more difficult than he had thought.

As he had assumed, based on the
X
that covered the town on the map, Goodwin had been evacuated. He was prepared for the empty streets, the darkened buildings, the ghostly nothingness left behind. What he wasn't prepared for was what greeted them a good five miles prior to reaching the town. Signs had been staked along the shoulder and the median, the handwriting done in harsh lettering with thick markers of varying colors, some signs so large they looked like billboards, others so small they were barely noticeable among the clutter. Snippets of phrases stood out as they drove by:
THIS IS A DEAD TOWN; THE
L
ORD GIVETH, THE
L
ORD TAKETH; POPULATION ZERO
; S
ODOM
& G
OMORRAH
. One sign in particular caught David's attention, perhaps because it was decorated much like a poster for a high school pep rally, adorned with glitter and letters cut from brightly colored construction paper. It read:

As they drew closer to the town line, David saw small crosses erected in the grass on either side of the road, eerily similar to ones he sometimes noticed along the highway memorializing victims of automobile accidents. There were too many crosses here to count, blank white structures perhaps two feet in height, each one identical to the next. That was what he found most troubling—the sameness of all those crosses—for it spoke of some morbid unity that had taken place here, a ceremonial mourning of the collective dead.

“I don't like those things,” Ellie said, gazing out at the crosses as they drove by.

“They're just crosses.”

“Did all those people die here?”

“I don't think so,” he said. It was a lie; he felt the wrongness of it on his tongue. “I think they put them here before they evacuated.”

“Crosses mean someone's dead,” Ellie said flatly.

David said nothing.

“Where did the rest of the people go?” she asked.

“Someplace else.”

“Why are we here?”

“Because no one else is.”

“So people left this place because of the disease,” Ellie said. It wasn't a question.

“According to the newspaper, yeah,” David said.

“That means the disease was worse here than in other places.”

David nodded. The white crosses blurred together as he drove.

“What if it's still here?” she said.

“What's that?”

“The disease,” she said. “The Folly. What if it's still around, hanging in the air or something?”

“I'm not sure it works that way.”

“But it might.”

He glanced at her. “You're immune, Ellie. You're safe.”

“But what about you?”

He smiled wanly at her. “I'll be fine, too,” he told her. Thinking,
That son of a bitch Kapoor won't get inside my head with his lies and his tricks.

They drove beneath an overpass. American flags hung from the ramparts, and there were stuffed animals tied to the chain-link fencing. A plastic doll's head dangled from a length of rope like some primitive trap. In startling white letters, someone had spray-painted across the roadway a single, blinding word:

“What's that word mean?” Ellie asked.

“I don't know,” he said, though he recalled a history lesson from his school days about a group of settlers who mysteriously vanished from Roanoke Island in the sixteenth century, leaving no trace behind, save for the word
croatoan
carved in the trunk of a tree. He thought it best not to mention this to his daughter.

“I don't like this place,” she said. She had gathered her shoe box into her lap again and was now running her fingers along the three eggs inside the nest. “It's scary.”

“It's just a town,” he assured her, wondering just how confident his voice sounded. “It's roads and buildings and cars. There's nothing here to be afraid of.”

“There's nothing,” she said, and David couldn't be sure if she was repeating part of what he said or if she was making some observation of her own. Perhaps trying to convince herself. “It's not just a town,” she added. David did not ask her to elaborate.

Just before the city line, they were greeted by a road sign welcoming them to Goodwin, Kentucky. It was incongruous, though, since it was posted on what remained of a chain-link fence outfitted in concertina wire. Several sections of the fence had been knocked down, including the part that should have run across the roadway. The place had been quarantined at some point, too. David drove through, feeling his skin prickle. There were more white crosses here, and someone had painted a crude biohazard symbol on a tree trunk in neon orange.

“Daddy!” Ellie shrieked and David slammed on the brakes.

There was a figure slumped over in the middle of the road, perhaps ten yards ahead of them. In the garish light of the car's headlamps, David could make out the awkward angle of the person's head, the stiff, unnatural way the figure was sitting upright in the middle of the road. A leg was bent at an aggressive angle off to one side, the foot seemingly absent and leaving behind the abrupt bone-white stump of an ankle.

But—

“Another one,” Ellie said, pointing toward the shoulder of the road. This figure was standing, arms strangely akimbo, its body propped against the guardrail and leaning at an impossible angle. Its head was missing.

David felt a prickling sensation course down his chest and melt like steam off his body.

“It's okay,” he said, touching Ellie's knee. “They aren't real.”

She leaned forward, staring out the windshield.

David flicked on the high beams and said, “See? They're dummies. Mannequins.”

“Oh,” she said, still tense. David thought he could feel her heartbeat vibrating through the Oldsmobile's chassis. “Why?”

“I don't know.”

“To scare us?”

“I don't think so.”

“Like scarecrows,” she said anyway. “But for people.”

“No, hon. I don't think so.” He pointed farther ahead, to a row of shops that flanked the main road. Several shop windows were broken, and there were items strewn about the sidewalk and street—clothing, furniture, household appliances, a shopping cart tipped on its side. A third mannequin leaned halfway out of a storefront's busted plate-glass window. The stores here had been ransacked.

David lifted his foot up off the brake and rolled down the street, carving a wide arc around the mannequin in the center of the road. As they went by, the headlights washed over its blank, emotionless features, its eyes dulled to tan orbs, the whole of its nose busted off like the nose of the Great Sphinx of Giza. They cruised through an intersection where the traffic lights were dark. Pages of newspaper whipped along the pavement in the breeze. There were no cars in sight, with the exception of a scorched black frame that sat on four rims, door-less and windshield-less against a curb. It looked like some great slaughtered beast that had been picked clean to the bone by vultures.

At the next intersection, someone had propped up a large white sandwich board in the center of the street. It read:

“What's that mean?” Ellie asked.

“It means no cops,” David said. He drove carefully around the sign.

When he spied a surplus shop on one corner, he pulled the Olds around the back and parked in a weedy lot. He shut down the engine and felt the car shudder, as if exhausted, all around him.

“Why did we stop?” Ellie asked.

“We need to rest. Just for a bit.”

“Here?” She looked around the lot and at the scarred brickwork of the surrounding buildings, the sagging black telephone lines, the tumbledown collage of metal trash cans at the far end of the lot, the fizzing sodium street lamp—the only working light source—across the street. It seemed like every shadow moved, shifting almost imperceptibly, drawing the night closer to them.

“We'll try this store, see if the door's unlocked,” he suggested. There was a metal door back here in the brickwork, situated at the top of some makeshift wooden stairs. Someone had spray-painted a Mr. Yuk face on it in neon green, as if the whole place was poison. “We can find some stuff to keep warm and maybe close our eyes for a bit. We can change our clothes, too, and use the bathroom.” He was trying to sound upbeat, but by the look on his daughter's face, he could tell his suggestion had frightened her. He touched her shoulder and said, “Don't be afraid.”

She looked toward the door with Mr. Yuk on it. “I'm not,” she said. “I'm just worried that this isn't a good idea.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Just a feeling.”

“Should we try a different store?”

“It's not the store,” she said, looking past him and out at the dark slip of roadway on the other side of the parking lot. The buildings there looked like the smokestacks of a sunken ocean liner. “It's this whole place. It feels wrong. Like something bad is gonna happen.”

He squeezed her shoulder and said, “It just seems that way because it's empty. We'll be okay. I promise.”

The look she gave him showed how little faith she had in his promises now. It was his own fault. He only hoped he could soon regain her trust.

He reached into the backseat and dragged the duffel bag into his lap. Without further protest, Ellie grabbed the pink suitcase and, tucking her shoe box beneath one arm, opened the passenger door.

The night was cold, and the air reeked of gasoline. David went up the wooden stairs and tried the door with the number seven on it. It was locked, and made of an industrial metal that would prove impossible to kick in.

“We'll try the front,” he said, and they hurried around the side of the lot toward the street. Here, broken bits of glass glittered like jewels in the sidewalk cracks. A cardboard cup hopscotched down the center of the street on the breeze, briefly attracting their attention. At the street corner stood an old-fashioned arc lamppost, a massive spiderweb stretched inside the ninety-degree angle of its arm. Something large struggled in the web, and it wasn't until they drew closer that David saw it was a small mouse. The thing was partially cocooned in webbing, with only its head and tail exposed. Its tail whipped about frantically . . . then went still . . . then whipped about again.

“Jesus,” David said, just as he caught movement along the lamppost directly above the web. A piece of darkness detached itself from the shadows and campaigned down the length of the post. When it reached the web and proceeded across it, moving at a steady clip now, David saw it was the spider itself. . . though this thing was larger than any spider he had ever seen. It was nearly the size of a grown man's hand, its dark body and slender legs gleaming like armor in the moonlight. It advanced toward the struggling mouse, but not before it paused and seemed to scrutinize David and Ellie with inhuman intelligence.

“Come on,” David said, and ushered Ellie around the lamppost.

The door to the surplus shop was situated beneath a semicircular cloth awning. It was locked, too, but the center of it was made of a single pane of smoked glass. A sign on the other side of the glass read
CLOSED
.