Wolf Flow (26 page)

    He tried to pull away from Nelder's grasp, but the old man's hands clung even tighter to his arm.

    "No-you have to leave! Immediately!"

    The anger surged up inside him, and he struck the old man across the face, backhanded. Nelder hung on to him, the bony hands clenching stronger than he could have imagined. His vision reddened, as he felt the blood come weeping from his eyes, a red sweat seeping from the pores of his face. With the anger came his own strength, the muscles swelling under his dampening skin. Another blow sent Nelder's dark glasses flying onto the ground. The lenses crackled as they broke against the rocks.

    He could barely see through the red haze, but it was enough. Nelder had no eyes; where they should have been, nothing but two deep sockets, red darkening to black, going back into his skull. Something wet moved at the base of the two holes, with a gaze that burned into Mike's head, to that same thing at the center of his brain.

    His teeth clamped together as he struggled to peel Nelder's hands from him. Suddenly, the old man's strength ebbed; he seemed to crumple and shrink as Mike gripped the hard knobs of his shoulders.

    Then the old man came apart in his hands.

    Nelder's shirt split, exposing the white, ridged chest. The drum-tight skin tore open, peeling away from the bones and tendons beneath. The ribs cracked, spilling out the lungs and heart, soft trembling masses suspended in yellow sinew.

    Skin hung in tattered strips from Nelder's bowels, the looped intestines dangling lower.

    Mike felt his fingers sink into the thin layers of skin. The weeping flesh fell away from him, the tapered masses of the arm muscles pulling away from the shoulder and elbow joints. The knife edge of Nelder's skull broke through the face, drawing out the taut, striated ribbons around the mouth and eye sockets.

    He let go of the thing, casting it away from him. For a few seconds, it writhed upon the ground, more red segments detaching from the carcass. The legs snapped at the hips and knees, the tattered ankles lengthening from the blood-soaked trousers. Then it lay still, the blind red face pressed into the dust.

    He stood above it, gazing down and drawing one deep breath after another, the anger retreating once more to his spine. With the arm of his shirt, he wiped the blood from his face.

    There was water in the stone basin by the shack's door. He knelt down and splashed it up with his hands, opening his mouth to let the sulfur taste run down his throat. He scooped up more with his cupped palms and drank it, tilting his head back, the sun full in his eyes. Inside him, beneath his heart, the water spread, filtering into his arms and legs, restoring him.

    He went back to Nelder's corpse and regarded it for a moment. Then he reached down and grabbed its wrists, where the bones and tendons lay exposed. The arms stretched as he dragged the corpse over the ground, but they didn't tear loose; the connective tissue tightened, a web across the collarbone and upper ribs.

    Carefully-he didn't want to lose any part of it-he dragged the red, bedraggled thing up into the path through the hills, the way he had come.

    

    

    The dark water was hidden by the layer of charred timbers and other rubble floating on its surface. Mike squatted down by the swimming pool's edge. He reached down and cleared an open space, pushing the debris away from the tiled side.

    He eased Nelder's corpse into the water, the skull with its blind eyesockets going under first, then the torso with its dangling viscera. The limbs, torn and elongated by the rocks of the hills, drifted for a moment, then sank into the blackness and disappeared.

    Mike stood up, watching the rubble cover the water's surface again. A trail of blood led to the edge; that was the only sign of what he'd just done.

    It had made sense; he didn't even have to think about it. He knew it was what the water wanted. The old man had belonged to it for so long-he should return to it.

    He smiled. He was happy… when
it
was happy.

    He looked over his shoulder. At the clinic building. There were more things in there. Promised to him: things to find out, to know. That no one else knew.

    Bending down, he scooped up a handful of the water from the pool's edge and drank it. Then he walked toward the building.

    

    

    In the dark, the soft, torn thing drifted. The water filled its mouth and crept into its lungs. It lost buoyancy, and fell, its arms wavering above its head like strands of seaweed. Its blood mingled with the water, a cloud seeping from around its heart. The eyeless skull turned upward, toward the thin, diminished rays of sunlight that penetrated the surface.

    That was the other world up there, where things-things such as it had been-moved around, their blood neatly bound into themselves.

    This was its world now.

    It drifted, the water caressing its groin and spine. Easeful peace. It drifted, and waited.

    

    

    She was on her hands and knees, scrabbling across the lobby floor. Looking for the stuff that had been thrown across the space, and shoving the vials and orange plastic containers into the suitcase when she found them.

    That was stupid of her-Mike stood with his arms folded across his chest, watching her. She should've just split, if that was what she wanted to do. Now it was too late.

    Lindy suddenly looked up and saw him standing in the doorway. Her mouth fell open, eyes widening with fear.

    He sauntered toward her. "Going somewhere?"

    Still kneeling on the floor, she scooted back away from him.

    Mike bent down and picked something up from the floor, something she'd missed. He raised it up to show her.

    "You know"-the point of the hypodermic glittered in one of the room's shafts of light-"I think you've gotten a little overexcited…"

    Lindy scrambled to her feet. She turned to run away, but he was right on her. He grabbed her by one arm, jerking her around to face him.

    "Mike…" She struggled, trying to pull her wrist out of his grasp. "Don't…"

    He threw her down to the floor. She sprawled there, facedown, while he stepped over to the suitcase. He quickly pawed through it and found what he was looking for. He turned back toward Lindy as he plunged the needle through the seal on one of the glass vials.

    "I think maybe you need a little something to calm you down."

    She cowered away from him as he approached with the hypodermic.

    "Hey…" He smiled as he grabbed her arm and pulled him up toward her. "You can trust me. I'm a doctor."

    He sank the point into the vein at the crook of her elbow.

    

    

    He found the spot easily enough. He recognized the outcroppings of rock several yards back from the road.

    Aitch pulled the big Caddy over to the side, the tires crunching over gravel. He left the tape deck and the air-conditioning on as he got out of the car. The late afternoon heat squatted down on him, the highway's vanishing point shimmering beneath a silver mirage.

    Sunglasses dangling in his hand, he looked around the area. Just as bleak as when he'd come out before, with Charlie. This time, he was the only human presence.

    He kicked the dust at the roadside. A set of tire tracks, only partially sifted in, and another, wider set of marks, probably from some kind of truck. Part of the ground was discolored, stiffened into a thin crust. That was Mike's blood, he figured, from when they'd dumped him off.

    That was the only sign left of him. No picked bones inside rags, no pieces of skin dried to leather. Aitch put his sunglasses back on and headed for the car.

    In the cooled space, with the tape's volume turned up, he reached over and opened the glove compartment. The Diamondback lay on its side there, all chambers loaded. Just the sight of it satisfied him, for now.

    He snapped the compartment's lid closed and straightened back up behind the wheel. Dropping the transmission into gear, he pulled back onto the road.

    

    

    A bunch of teenagers hanging around a hamburger stand-the place hadn't switched on its neon yet, though the evening was already swallowing up the last of the daylight. The bluish light from the fluorescents inside spilled through the windows across the kids' faces.

    They all looked over at Aitch as he pulled up and got out of the Caddy. A few of them, with carefully bored expressions, sat on the fenders of their cars and pickup trucks.

    He stopped in front of them. "I'm looking for a young lady," he announced.

    A couple of the teenagers snickered.

    He didn't give a shit. "Drives a red Corvette. Maybe you've seen it around."

    One of the kids, his jaw darkened with a spreading bruise, nodded. "Yeah, we've seen her."

    "Know where she is now?"

    The kid looked sullen and didn't reply.

    He took his wallet from his hip pocket. "It's worth something to me."

    The kid glanced around at his friends, then back to him. "There's an old place. Out that way." He pointed down one of the roads branching off.

    "What kind of place?"

    A shrug. "Just… a big old place. Like it was a hospital or something. It's all boarded up." The kid thought some more. "There's a sign up on top of it."

    Aitch dug out a fiver and handed it to the kid. "There you go." He knew they were all staring at him as he walked back to the car.

    

    

    When he first spotted it, he switched off the Caddy's headlights. The moon had risen high enough to keep the strip of road visible.

    A building with a sign on top of it; cut-out letters, at an angle that he couldn't read them. And dark, just a black shape against the hills.

    The moon glistened off a pond, lying to the side of a lane that turned from the road. A heavy, sour-egg odor hung in the night air. Aitch killed the engine. For a moment longer, he sat with the window rolled down, listening. Then he took the Diamondback out of the glove compartment and slipped it into his jacket pocket.

    

    

    He crouched down by the stone basins. He had stripped to his jeans, his feet bare-it felt better that way. In the thin light that penetrated from the burned walls outside the room's door, his damp skin glowed as though polished with oil. His hair was plastered close to his skull, dark tendrils trailing on his neck.

    Mike lifted his head, the water trickling from the corners of his mouth. He listened, slowly turning his ear toward the faint noise he'd perceived. There was something out there, moving around. Not the animals of the sharp-pointed jaws and red eyes that were always out there, watching and sliding through the stony hills; something else. Or somebody-he could smell the trace of human sweat, different from his or Lindy's. A visitor.

    The thought made him smile. He had a good idea who it was. He'd left his calling card, the mark of what he'd done, as an invitation. There was no way Aitch would be able to resist coming out here.

    
Fine
. He ran his tongue over his lips, tasting the dark water beaded there. He'd been waiting for this.

    

    

    He should've brought a flashlight. Aitch stood just inside the building's front door-he'd found the boards already pried loose-and let his eyes adjust to the dark. The Diamondback's weight filled his hand.

    Streaks of moonlight slanted in through the covered windows. He heard the slow, shallow breathing at the same moment that he saw the figure lying on the floor. Blond hair spilled across a rumpled blanket.

    He knew she was fucked up even before he prodded her with his foot. Lindy moaned, a low sound like a creature dying in the tides of a chemical ocean. The hypodermic lay next to the outflung arm, the same red on its point-it looked black in the room's partial spectrum-as was dotted in the curve of her arm.

    Aitch took the Diamondback out and extended it down toward her forehead. He could already see the results, the blood splattered across the walls the same as Charlie's had been.

    "Mike…" Her lips barely moved as she murmured the name.

    Aitch raised the gun and stepped back from her. There would be plenty of time to take care of her later. Right now, he didn't want that sonuvabitch to be warned that he was here. He gazed around the dark lobby until he spotted the dim light spilling down the stairs from above.

    On the landing halfway up the curving sweep of stairs, he looked out the window at the moon-glazed hills. He drew back, lifting the gun, when he saw something outside, looking back at him. Red eyes, glinting like tiny mirrors-he saw the black, doglike silhouettes moving over the stones and let the muscles of his shoulders and arms ease.

    He reached the head of the stairs and gazed down a corridor of numbered doors. The moonlight spilled through a window at the end of the hallway.

    One of the doors stood open a few inches. Aitch stepped toward it, his back sliding against the wall, the gun raised in expectation.

    The door didn't have a number like the others, but a clouded glass window instead, with a few gold-leaf letters still visible on it. He used his free hand to push the door all the way into the room behind it.

    Some kind of medical office-it looked as if a fight had taken place there. Broken glass glittered on the floor, and an examining table had been knocked over on its side. Aitch stood inside the doorway, looking around the room, the gun's snout following the track of his gaze.