The Night Parade (6 page)

E
llie was awake when he returned to the motel. She was propped up against the headboard, her long hair in uncombed tangles. She was watching a cartoon on the TV. She had the shoe box in her lap, the lid open, and was gently running a finger along the bird eggs inside. There were three of them, small, speckled things that looked impossibly delicate to David, like porcelain. They were fitted snugly in a nest of twig-bits and leaves. Ellie swung her legs off the side of the bed and, setting the shoe box aside, studied the shopping bag he hauled into the room and set down on the table.

“Did you find my note?”

“Yes,” she said.

“I got some stuff for us. Some food, but some clothes, too. And toothbrushes.” He offered her a conciliatory smile.

“I want to call Mom.”

“It's still early.”

“She wakes up early.”

“There are some things we need to do first,” he said. From the shopping bag he withdrew a T-shirt with silk-screened trucks on it, the nondescript baseball hat, some other items. “Also, we need to talk, Little Spoon.”

“Is it about Mom?”

It was, but he didn't need to go there just yet. He still needed some time to figure out how he was going to explain what had happened to Kathy, and now certainly wasn't the time. Right now, they needed to get back on the road and keep moving. Which meant, for the time being, he would lie to her. It was a lie he had begun last night when they traded the Bronco for the Olds, and he'd had several hours to build upon that story in his head so that it sounded plausible.

David pulled a chair out from the table and sat opposite her. “I want to explain to you a little bit about what's going on back home. Do you know what a quarantine is?”

“It's when they keep you in one place and they don't let you leave. Like jail.”

“Yes, that's right. I'm surprised you knew that.”

“They've been talking about it on the news for a long time. Some towns are being quarantined if too many people have the disease.”

“That's right,” he said. “Well, that's what's going on at home right now. Our neighborhood has been quarantined.”

“That means we shouldn't have left,” she said.

“But then we wouldn't be able to see Mom.”

Her eyes narrowed the slightest bit, and David could read her thoughts:
We aren't able to see Mom now, so what's the difference?

“It's like you said,” he went on. “It's like being in jail. But I didn't want that for us. So I took you away before they locked everybody down.”

Ellie said nothing.

“Because of that,” he said, “there's a good chance people will start looking for us, Ellie. These are people who think they're doing the right thing and will want to make us go back.”

“Back home?”

“Yes. But you don't want to be locked in your house without being able to leave, do you?”

“And we wouldn't be able to see Mom?”

“No,” he said. “We wouldn't.”

“Okay.”

“It's important we don't let these people find us,” he said.

“What will they do if they find us?”

He chewed at his lower lip. When he spoke, his voice sounded paper-thin and intangible to his own ears. “We don't need to worry about that, sweetheart, because they won't find us.”

“But what about Mom?”

“Mom is safe. You know that.”

“Do you promise?”

He felt something toward the back of his throat click. “Yes,” he said, the word tasting funny. Poisonous. “Yes, hon. She's safe. You know she is.”

“Okay.”

“Because I want us to be as safe as possible, too, there are a few things we need to do today before we get back on the road.”

For the first time, he saw Ellie's gaze shift to just over his shoulder, to the items he had placed on the table behind him. The T-shirt, the baseball hat. The scissors, comb, hair dye . . .

“They'll be looking for a father and daughter,” he said, his voice level, unemotional. When he realized that his hands were fidgeting between his knees, he forced them apart. “We need to change that.”

Ellie had always been a perceptive child. Even as a toddler—heck, as an
infant—
it seemed her demeanor reflected the emotions of her parents. On more than one occasion, Kathy had commented that Ellie was special, and not just in the way all parents thought their children were special. Kathy was convinced that sometimes their baby daughter was able to
know
things. Emotions. Feelings. David had always presumed this was a trait all young children shared—that they were mirrors of their parents' emotions and fundamentally more perceptive than their adult counterparts—but now, looking at his daughter and seeing the wheels working behind her eyes, he wondered if Kathy might not have been on to something.

The corners of Ellie's mouth turned downward. Her chin wrinkled.

“Hey. It'll be okay,” he promised her.

“I don't understand. If we can't go back home, where will we live?”

“It's just temporary,” he said. “Things will work themselves out soon enough. This isn't permanent.”

She had grabbed a lock of her auburn hair and tugged it down over her shoulder. She wound a finger in it now, as if feeling it for the last time. She was perceptive, all right.

“Things are going to be okay,” he said again.

But her expression told him that she knew he was lying.

D
avid cut off Ellie's auburn locks in the motel bathroom. They went through it together, without ceremony, the whole thing as somber as an execution. Ellie sat there with a look of horror on her face the entire time, but never once did she complain or cry or put up a fuss. He could be grateful for that, at least.

David was no barber, but he did the best he could, and in the end his daughter wore the approximation of a young boy's modest if clumsy haircut. When he finished, he came up behind her and they both looked at the mirror together to examine his work. Tears threatened to spill down her face, but she still did not make a sound. She no longer looked like his daughter. David kissed the side of her face. Her skin felt hot against his lips.

“Put on the T-shirt and hat I bought,” he told her as he cleaned up the curls of auburn hair from the bathroom floor. He was careful to get every strand, every scrap, which he tucked away inside the plastic shopping bag. He'd take the hair with them and dump the bag somewhere along the way.

“Boy clothes,” she intoned, leaving the bathroom.

“You're a boy now,” he called after her.

Once he was done cleaning up the hair, he trimmed some of his own, then opened up the box of hair dye. His was a natural tawny brown, the sorrel hue of a deer's hide. The hair dye would turn him Superman black. He hoped it would be enough to suitably alter his appearance. He wondered,
Should I dye my eyebrows, too?
Best to do the hair first and see how things looked.

Ellie appeared in the bathroom doorway as he was midway through the coloring process, his dripping head hanging over the bathroom sink, muddy tracks of dye sliding down his forehead.

“Are we in trouble?” she asked him. She had obliged, and was wearing the T-shirt with the trucks on it, the blue baseball cap. She looked alien to him. Some stranger's little boy.

“No,” he said.

“Are
you
?” she said.

He looked at her sideways. “I said no, didn't I?”

Ellie shrugged. “What's my boy name?”

“Huh?”

“If I'm a boy now, you can't call me Ellie. Or Eleanor.”

“I'll just call you Little Spoon.” He grinned at her while he combed the dye through his damp hair.

“I don't like that,” she said. “Not anymore.”

“I've called you that since you were a little kid.”

“Not anymore.” She looked at the bag of hair clippings that sat on the sink counter. “I don't like it anymore.”

“Since when?”

She rolled her slight shoulders. The T-shirt was a tad too big. “For a while now, I guess.”

“How come?”

“I just don't. Stop calling me that. I'm not a baby anymore.”

He straightened up, wiping the inky droplets off his forehead with a hand towel. He'd have to take the towel with them, too. No evidence left behind. “Okay. Okay. I won't call you that anymore. Sorry.”

“Where are we going when we leave here?”

“To get something to eat. Aren't you hungry?”

“I mean, we can't just keep staying in hotels. Where are we going to go if we can't go home?”

“I'll figure that out after we eat. I'm starving. Aren't you starving?” He was desperate to change the subject.

“Are you telling me the truth?” she asked him. “About why we can't go home, I mean.”

The question jarred him. And it wasn't just the question itself, but the confident and suspicious tone Ellie used when asking it. As if she knew the truth and was testing his honesty. It caused him to pause before answering, and she seemed to pick up on that, too.

“Of course,” he said.

“And about Mom, too?”

“Yes,” he said.

Her gaze hung on him.

She's special,
Kathy's ghost-voice spoke up in his head then.
A special child.

“I'll only be a few more minutes,” he said, and eased the bathroom door closed with his toe.

 

I
t was one of the rare evenings he stayed late at the university grading papers. Walking across the quad, the night was a cold, wet soup. Late-winter snow swirled around the lampposts, weightless as dandelion fluff, and never touched the ground. He took the footpath to the parking lot, slowing in his progress when he noticed something small and dark flapping about on the path. He came within two feet of it and saw that it was a small brown bird. It was still alive, its twig-like feet scrambling for purchase on the stamped concrete. As David watched, one of its wings flared open and fluttered maniacally to no avail.

David crouched down and watched the bird die. It took less than a minute. By the time he stood, a chevron of geese was honking across the sky just above the treetops. He thought it odd that they were there in February. Didn't geese fly south in the winter?

He coughed into a fist as he continued along the footpath toward the parking lot. There were still a number of cars in the lot, even at this hour. His Bronco was parked at the far end of the lot, since he'd misplaced his faculty pass earlier that month and didn't want to risk being towed by parking in any of the faculty spots without it. The tow-truck drivers fished the campus parking lots day and night and were ruthless.

He was halfway across the lot to his car when something exploded off to his left. It was very close, the sound of its detonation causing him to drop his briefcase. He looked around but could not see what might have caused it. The lampposts were spaced too far apart, and it was too dark to make out any real—

He caught movement out of the corner of his eye, a large object bulleting down from the sky at such an alarming speed, David drew his arms up to cover his head despite the fact that the object was crashing down several yards away. It struck the hood of a Volkswagen with a sickening solidity, rolled up over the windshield, then toppled to the asphalt. It took David only a second to realize what it was, but by that point, more and more had begun to rain from the sky, a mortar attack. Only instead of bombs, they were geese.

A car alarm went off. Windshields imploded. Most of the geese were killed upon impact, but a few of them survived, albeit mortally wounded, and their shrill cries were more like the agonizing shrieks of a child than any bird he'd ever heard. Some of them screamed just a few feet from him, their massive, twisted wings sliding cruelly along the pavement.

The whole thing lasted thirty seconds, maybe less. When it was over, the parking lot was a minefield of dead fowl, the occasional spastic jerk of a massive black wing, the incessant trilling of a chorus of car alarms.

David gathered up his briefcase and ran for the Bronco, thankful that he'd misplaced the parking pass, which had left his own vehicle, parked so far away, unscathed.

He felt the urge to call someone on the drive home, but who would that be? The police? The fire department? The goddamn ASPCA?

It was generally a thirty-minute commute home, but an accident on the beltway had knotted up traffic near Baltimore, and David found himself staring at a wall of taillights for over an hour. Rain began to fall. To make matters worse, someone thumped against his rear bumper, and David had to get out and examine the damage. There was only a faint white scuff on the Bronco's rear bumper, but it was enough to cause him greater unease. He couldn't stop hearing the shriek of those birds, the terrible sounds they made as they smashed through windshields and caved in the hoods and roofs of those cars.

By the time he turned onto Columbus Court, it was just after ten o'clock. He was starving—the last thing he'd eaten was an apple with peanut butter around noon—and his mood hadn't changed much since getting his bumper nudged on the beltway. When he heard his cell phone chime, he groaned and fumbled it out of his jacket pocket. It was a text from Kathy, asking where he was. When he glanced back up, the pale shape of a man, illuminated by the Bronco's headlights, filled his windshield.

David simultaneously jerked the wheel and jumped on the brake. Had he been driving a less weighty vehicle, the thing would have fishtailed or simply plowed into the man. But the Bronco was a sturdy ride, and it shuddered to a stop in the middle of the street.

“Holy shit.” The words wheezed out of him in sour notes, as if he were a punctured accordion. He spun around in his seat, craning his neck to glimpse the pale figure through the side window. David didn't think he'd struck the man—he was still standing, after all—but he couldn't be positive. The damn fool had appeared out of nowhere.

David climbed out of the Bronco, his sweat-dampened shirt growing chill in the cold night. He hustled around to the rear of the Bronco and saw the man still standing there, now tinted red in the glow of the Bronco's taillights.

It was Deke Carmody, clad in nothing but a pair of threadbare boxer shorts. Deke's ample gut spilled over the boxers' waistband, a runway of black hair rising from his navel and fanning out across his heavy, sagging breasts. His feet were bare, and as David stared at him, Deke took a shuffling step toward him through a puddle of black water.

“Deke, what the hell are you
doing
out here?”

“That you, David?”

“Look at you.” David approached him, touched the man on one shoulder. Deke's flesh was cold, wet, and knobby with goose bumps. The feel of it made David recoil, and he was quick to withdraw his hand. “What's going on here, Deke?”

Deke blinked at him, as if to clear his vision. There was muddled confusion in his eyes. David wondered if Deke was in shock from having nearly been run over.

“Hey, David.” Deke broke into a wide smile. The sight of it chilled David further. “How you been?”

“Deke, man, why are you standing out here in the middle of the night in your underwear?”

Deke glanced down. His bare feet shuffled around in the puddle. His toes were practically blue. When he looked up and met David's eyes again, there was still no clarity there.

“Come on,” David said, grasping Deke high on one forearm; it seemed his fingers sank too easily into the pliable flesh. “First thing, let's get you inside.”

“Oh,” Deke said. “Okay, David.”

David led Deke up the walk of the man's house. When he reached out and grasped the doorknob, he found the knob wouldn't turn.

“Christ. Door's locked, Deke. You locked yourself out. In your undies, no less.”

“Side door's unlocked, I think,” Deke said.

“Let's go see,” David said. Still clutching Deke's forearm, he went around the side of the house and found the side door was, in fact, unlocked. And not just unlocked—
open.
David glanced at Deke again, hoping to ascertain some semblance of normalcy behind the man's eerie, vacuous stare. But Deke Carmody's eyes were like two dead headlamps. It was like some vital fuse had burned out inside of him.

“Go on,” David said, urging him toward the doorway. “Get in.”

Deke shuffled inside and David followed. The lights were off, and David felt along one wall for the switch. When he found it, he flipped it on, and the single bulb over the kitchen sink winked on. Deke quit shuffling and stared up at the naked bulb as if in awe.

Unmarried and without children, Deke Carmody lived alone. The house was the domicile of a lifelong bachelor, complete with dirty dishes stacked in the sink and the smell of burnt coffee in the air. But as David looked around, he saw that things had been changed, and in a way that set him on alert. David's first thought was that Deke's house had been burglarized . . . but on closer inspection, he realized that no burglar would bother doing the things to Deke's house that David was observing. Kitchen chairs, for instance, hadn't simply been knocked to the floor; instead, they were stacked on the kitchen table. The sight of them was jarring. When he turned around, he saw that all the cupboard doors stood open. Boxes of cereal and canned goods had been arranged in careful pyramids on the countertops. David couldn't help himself—he thought of poltergeists and exorcisms.

“What's been going on here, Deke?”

“You know,” Deke muttered, shuffling out of the kitchen and into the living room. He said no more.

David heard noises in the adjoining room. It was the TV, showing the rerun of some eighties sitcom.

“Sit down,” David said, beckoning Deke over to an upholstered armchair.

Deke sat without protest. In fact, he was smiling at David. Practically
beaming.

That smile is worse than the blank look in his eyes,
David thought.
What the hell is wrong with him?

“I'll be right back,” David said, and hurried down the hall. In the bathroom, he found a towel on a hook behind the door. He brought it to Deke, draping it over the big man's broad shoulders.

“Thanks, David.”

“You want to tell me what the heck you were doing out there?”

Deke laughed. It was a nervous, tittering sound that should have come from a smaller person. “Damnedest thing. I guess I was sleepwalking.”

“Sleepwalking.”

“Used to do it a lot when I was a boy,” Deke said. “And again in my early twenties. It's brought on by stress, you know. Doctors told me so.”

Ellie had suffered the occasional bout of somnambulism when she was four or five. It was eerie—David had once caught her ambling past him in the hallway in the middle of the night, which had scared the shit out of him but hadn't woken the girl—but as eerie as it was, it seemed a quirk befitting of a young child. Deke was in his fifties. The thought of him roving around his house—Christ, the goddamn
street—
in his sleep was more than just unnerving.

“Is this a common occurrence?” David asked.

“The sleepwalking?”

“You wander around outside in your underwear regularly, or is this a special occasion?”

“For me?”

“Of course for you. Who else would I be talking about?”

“I don't know.” Deke's eyebrows arched and his mouth curled into what could only be described as a playful frown. “There could be other things here, too.”

David frowned. “What do you mean?” He looked around, noting that the walls were all bare and there were picture frames on the floor. A rug had been rolled up into a tube and set against the jamb of the front door in the foyer. The gauzy curtains hanging over the windows were all tied together in knots.

“What have you been up to in here, Deke?”

“I don't know if it's something new,” Deke said, and it took David a moment or two to realize he was answering David's previous question. “If I've been doing it for a while, I've been asleep and wouldn't know.” And then he laughed—a great bassoon blast that caused David's toes to curl in his shoes.

“Are you on any medication?”

“Cholesterol meds,” Deke said. “Nexium for my 'flux.”

“Anything heavier?”

This time, Deke's scowl was genuine. “I look like a drug addict to you, David?”

“I'm just trying to help. I almost ran you over out there. I can't say I like the idea of you wandering around the neighborhood in a daze every night. And your house . . .”

“What about it?” Deke said, glancing around. If he recognized the unusualness of the place, his face did not register it.

“You got any liquor in the house?”

“You want a drink, buddy?”

“No,” David said. There was a credenza against one wall, a few bottles of vodka and bourbon on it. None were open, and he couldn't see any used glasses. “I mean, have you been drinking?”

Deke waved a hand at him.
Don't be silly,
his expression said. Some of the old Deke was filtering back into his features now. His eyes looked less dead than they had just moments ago.

“Why don't you get to bed and I'll lock up on my way out,” David suggested. For some reason, he was growing increasingly uncomfortable about being in Deke's house. Coupled with that discomfort was the feeling that he was overlooking something very obvious—and very important—and that feeling was setting him on edge.

“Okay, boss. Whatever you say.” Deke got up from the armchair in a huff—it seemed to take great effort—and handed David the towel. His rounded gut glistened with rainwater. “I got some long johns around here someplace,” he said, pausing to peer behind the TV.

“You keep your long johns behind the television?” David said.

Deke stood upright, as if suddenly considering the absurdity of it all. When he turned to look at David, his eyes were unfocused again.

“Maybe I should call for an ambulance,” David suggested.

“Do it and I'll brain you. I'm no invalid.” Deke's voice had gone deadly serious.

“Something's off with you.”

“Who the hell asked you to come in here, anyway?” There was real malice behind Deke's words, enough to make David consider bolting from the house right then and there. It was as if some switch had been flipped, instantly altering Deke's personality.

Drugs,
David thought . . . although he had never known Deke Carmody to abuse narcotics. Alcohol, maybe, but not drugs.
What else could it be?

Deke slammed a palm against the TV and the screen went dead. Then he turned and grinned idiotically at David. The large man opened his mouth, presumably to say something, but nothing came out. Instead, he liberated a fart that sounded like a trumpet blare, sustaining it for a good five seconds.

“Jesus Christ,” David said, too stunned to show emotion.