The Night Parade (26 page)

T
he police car did not follow them; instead, it continued straight on I-70 as David negotiated the Olds off the exit ramp and onto a narrow band of blacktop.

He looked at Ellie in the passenger seat. “Are you okay?”

She nodded.

“Scared?”

“Sometimes,” she said.

“Now?”

“I gotta pee too bad to be scared right now,” she said.

He smiled then laughed. She smiled, too. It did his heart some good. “Yeah,” he said. “I gotta pee, too. We'll stop somewhere.”

But there was no place to stop for several miles. They drove, flanked on one side by acres of cornfields while tracts of dusty flat land greeted them on the other side. For a time, the only sign of civilization were the telephone poles every quarter mile.

“Scarecrow,” Ellie said, pointing out the window. “See it?”

“Look at that.”

The thing was close to the shoulder of the road and looming several feet above the tall green stalks of corn. It was nothing more than a sackcloth head tied to a cross from which a pair of weather-faded overalls hung like the sail of a tiny ship.

“It's silly now,” Ellie said. “There aren't any birds for him to scare away.”

“So much for job security,” David said.

Yet as they drew closer, David realized there was something too . . . authentic . . . about the slouching human form strung up to the post in that field—the weighty slump of the head, the articulated fingers protruding from the sleeves, the bulk and musculature of the thighs in its sun-faded overalls. Beyond the scarecrow, David glimpsed several more out in the field. These others had the same distressing qualities as the first, and there were the coppery stains of blood on the clothes of a few of them. He wondered if he was seeing things accurately.

“Those scarecrows look all right to you?” he asked Ellie.

She pressed her nose against the glass of the passenger window, her breath fogging it up. “They look creepy,” was all she said after a moment.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

He decided not to push the issue.

Ten minutes later, they drove past a succession of small farmhouses. The lawns were all overgrown and there appeared to be no livestock in any of the pens. There were vehicles in some of the driveways or parked along patches of grass behind the houses, yet David got the distinct impression that these houses were empty. This thought was only confirmed when he noted the red
X
's painted over each front door.

The road emptied them out in the center of a small two-street town. Clapboard buildings ran the length of both streets, squalid mom-and-pop storefronts that appeared neglected and forgotten despite the
OPEN
signs in some of the windows. The most inviting appeared to be a small sandwich shop, so David parked the car.

“Put your hat back on,” he said. “And this time, use the right bathroom.” He winked at her. Then he slid the Glock out from beneath his seat and wedged it down into his pants against the small of his back.

Ellie grabbed the shoe box and opened her door.

“Wait,” he said. “Leave that here.”

“I won't.”

“It'll look too weird, you hauling around a shoe box like that. We don't want to do anything that might cause someone to remember us later.”

“I won't leave them behind again.” Her tone was firm, her eyes heavy on him. He knew better than to argue with her when she had her mind set. Her mother had been the same way.

“Okay,” he relented.

They entered the sandwich shop, which was no bigger than the claustrophobic little office David had shared with the other instructors in his department back at the college, and went straight to the rear. There were no tables, just a wall-length counter where two burly men sat eating sandwiches and drinking coffee. Keno played on a TV screen behind the counter. The air smelled of grease.

“Restrooms?” David asked the man in the white apron behind the counter.

“You sick?” asked the man. He was scrutinizing David's face.

“No.”

“Your kid?”

“He's clean.”

The man pointed to a shabby rectangular cutout in the drywall that couldn't precisely be called a doorway. “End of the hall,” he said. “You want some menus?”

Because the tone of the man's voice suggested the bathrooms were for paying customers only, David said, “Sure.”

The man placed two menus on the counter in front of two vacant stools while David led Ellie through the cutout in the wall and down a narrow, unlit corridor. There was a single door at the end of the hall with the word
RESTROOM
written on it in black marker.

Ellie went first, then waited out in the hall while he used the toilet. The bathroom itself was no bigger than a shower stall, the toilet—and a good section of the wall behind it—caked in black grime. There was a single window here that looked out upon the row of shops and the road they had taken coming into town. Massive black flies, each one the size of a small grape, thumped senselessly against the windowpane.

The sink looked about ready to give him tetanus, so he decided to forgo washing his hands. In the streaky mirror over the sink he glimpsed his haunted reflection—sunken eyes, poorly dyed hair, beard stubble shading the lower half of his face. The bridge of his nose was still swollen from when he'd rammed his head into Cooper's chest while trying to wrench the gun from him. But at least it hadn't started bleeding again.

Dead man walking,
said the head-voice. And he wondered just how true that was.

He was just about to leave when he glanced back out the window again. Through the haze of flies, he saw two police cars come rolling up the street. They slowed down as they approached the front of the sandwich shop. One car braked in the middle of the street while the other pulled up alongside the Oldsmobile.

Both cops got out. Their guns weren't drawn but they had their hands to their hips, ready to draw at a moment's notice. The cop who'd parked alongside the Olds—a stocky black guy with a goatee—peered in through the Oldsmobile's windshield. He said something inaudible to his partner. The partner—a young kid in mirrored sunglasses—pointed to the license plate.

David opened the bathroom door. Ellie stood there, gazing up at some foul graffiti someone had scrawled on the wall in black marker. “Get in here,” he said, his voice a tense whisper.

She came in and he closed and locked the door.

“What is it?”

“Cops,” he said.

Through the window, he watched as the officer in the sunglasses said something into the radio he had clipped to his shoulder. Then both of them crossed onto the sidewalk toward the sandwich shop.

“We have to get out of here now,” he said. He flipped the latch on the window, then pried it open. Flies tickled the tops of his hands. “Come here,” he said, grabbing her beneath her armpits. She clutched the shoe box to her chest. “It's a bit of a drop but not too far.”

“I don't think—”

“No time. Go.”

He lifted her out and helped her over the sill. She landed on her feet outside in a cloud of rising dust. Then David scrambled out after her.

There was only one place to go: the alleyway that ran behind the stores. He snatched up Ellie's wrist and dragged her as he ran. The alleyway zagged twice, sharp right turns that, he feared, would empty back out onto the main road and into the path of more police. But he must have gotten turned around, because when they burst out of the alley they were facing a wooded embankment and, beyond, a sea of cornstalks.

“Come on.” He urged her forward.

Halfway across the embankment was a chain-link fence; David slammed into it before he actually saw it. It wasn't too high. He hoisted Ellie over then he scaled it. The chains rattled.

Only when they reached the corn did he risk a look over his shoulder. He could see no one coming after them, but that didn't mean they weren't seconds behind. Just then he heard the sound of a siren.

“Daddy!” Ellie cried.

“It's okay, baby. Come on.”

They ran through the corn.

B
y the time they came through the corn and saw the farmhouse, David was carrying his daughter. There were bits of farming equipment scattered about the lawn here. The house itself looked deserted, and there were even a few boards nailed across some of the windows. A set of rickety wooden stairs led up to a door, the upper half of which was made of glass. A red
X
had been spray-painted from corner to corner.

David carried Ellie up the stairs, then set her down beside him. Without pausing to consider a better option, he elbowed the single-paned window. The glass didn't completely shatter, but he did manage to knock a rectangular section out of the way. He reached inside, fumbled for the lock, praying it was the type of dead bolt that had a knob and wouldn't require a key.

His hand found the dead bolt.

There was no knob.

He took a step back, figuring he could knock the rest of the glass out and climb in through the window and—

Ellie reached out and twisted the doorknob. The door creaked open.

“Stick to me like glue,” he said, slipping inside.

The air was rancid. David wondered how long the place had been unoccupied. Shafts of daylight slid in between the boards fitted over the windows, cutting through the dimness of an outdated kitchen with cornflower wallpaper and a wall clock that had seized up at 2:18. Dust clung to every available surface, making the light bulbs in the chandelier above the kitchen table look like large gray Q-tips. Tiny footprints—rats?—had been stamped into the dust covering the countertops.

“Where are the people who live here?” Ellie whispered against his ribs.

“They're gone.”

“What happened to them?”

“Anything.”

“What?”

“Anything could have happened.”

Along the opposite wall hung a chalkboard on which someone had kept a running grocery list. Next to the board was a wooden plaque affixed with a series of hooks. Depicted on the plaque was a cartoon pig with its hands—or hooves—on its hips. The caption above its head read
DON'T HOG THE KEYS
! Dangling from one of the hooks was a set of keys.

He snatched them up, saw that one was a car key with the Chevrolet emblem on it.

“You doing okay?” he said, grabbing hold of Ellie's hand. He led her out of the kitchen and down a narrow, gloomy hallway toward the front of the house.

“Y-yes,” she stammered.

The front rooms were empty. Even the furniture had been removed, if there had ever been any furniture to begin with. Flies and gnats and large flying beetles crisscrossed in front of his face. David went to the front windows and saw a bright red Monte Carlo in the driveway. It was then that he considered his options—take the car and get the hell out of there, or hunker down in this abandoned farmhouse until the coast was clear. Both options had their benefits and flaws, their wins and losses. Yet in the end he decided it was easier to find a hiding man than a running man.

Ellie cried out.

“What?”

“There. There.”

It was a dining room with a large oak table at the room's center, set with what looked like good china for several people. But the meal would never come. David counted six bodies of varying sizes hanging from ropes tied to the exposed ceiling rafters. The smallest one looked like that of a child maybe no older than four or five. The air was black with flies, and the smell, which struck David instantaneously, was as thick and meaty as an abattoir's—so much so that both he and Ellie began to gag.

David cradled Ellie's head against his chest. He tried the front doorknob, found this one was locked, then fumbled through the key ring for the house key. He jabbed two different keys into the lock before finding the correct one. It turned, and David shoved open the door and dragged Ellie out onto the porch.

“Let's go, let's go!” he shouted, pulling Ellie toward the car. He unlocked the door, yanked it open, and shoved Ellie inside. He climbed in after her, and in his panic, it took him three or four attempts to jab the key into the ignition. When he finally got it, he had a moment to wonder what he would do if the goddamn car wouldn't start before he cranked it. The engine roared to life.

He reversed down the driveway and hit the road hard enough to rock the car on its shocks. Ellie cried out, “Too fast!”

He slowed down once he was cruising in a straight line toward the highway, the houses with those red
X
's on their doors streaming by in a blur. They drove by the field of scarecrows again, and in David's periphery, they appeared to be shambling down off their posts. David forced himself not to look.

It seemed to take forever to reach the highway. He took the exit, merged with what little traffic there was, and tried to make this shiny red car look less conspicuous by sheer force of will.

They were only on the highway for less than thirty seconds when David heard a distant drumming sound.

“Do you hear that, too?” he asked Ellie.

Ellie was hyperventilating and didn't answer. David glanced at her, gripped her knee. She just stared blankly out the windshield, her chest heaving, her respiration disconcertingly labored.

David looked due north and saw three helicopters descending in the direction of the town he and Ellie had just left. The helicopters passed directly over the highway. David could feel the choppers' rotating blades vibrating through his bones. He kept waiting for them to change course in midair. He kept waiting for them to pursue.

But they didn't.

That man at the milk shake place—
Ninety-nine Cutlass, am I right?
—had seen the Maryland tags, had seen the young “boy” coming out of the women's restroom, and he had called the police. Or maybe he had been a cop himself. A detective like Watermere.

“You're bleeding,” Ellie said. She had gotten herself under control and was staring at him now with concern in her eyes.

He touched his nose but his fingers came away clean. He looked at his face in the rearview mirror.

“No,” Ellie said. “There.”

He glanced down. There was a swath of blood across the front of his shirt and more smeared along his left arm. His palm was sticky with it, and he had gotten some on the steering wheel. He turned his arm over and saw a gash in the flesh just above the left elbow. It must have happened when he elbowed the glass while breaking in to the house.

“I've got towels and shirts and stuff in my bag,” he said.

She just stared at him.

“In the back!” he shouted.

Ellie shook her head.

“What?” he said. “What?”

“You're thinking of the wrong car,” she said.