Brood (16 page)

Adam is silent for a moment. From the back of the apartment comes the bright silver burble of Polly's laughter. “I'm starting to smell,” Adam says, his voice little more than a whisper.

“Maybe you're eating too much,” Alice offers.

“I get so hungry.”

“You can eat, just don't keep it.”

Adam makes a face, shakes his head. “We better call Mom,” he says.

“Mom's dead.”

“You know who I mean. Cynthia.”

“She's our aunt. Not our mother.”

“We better call her. It's not even fair.”

“So call her.”

He pulls his phone from his pocket. It's almost out of power.

“What should I tell her?” he asks.

“I don't know. Say we're okay.” She thinks for a moment. “Yeah. And tell her not to call the cops or anything. Just say we're fine.”

“I think she's nice,” Adam says.

“I do, too. But…”

“But what? Nice is nice.”

“But she doesn't understand us,” Alice says.

“What if she does?”

“She doesn't.”

Their attentions are suddenly seized by a high-pitched, unstable noise. It sounds like a kitten in a tin garbage can mixed with the electronic bleat of an alarm clock. They turn toward the sound's source—it is coming from the long hallway.

“Gort!” a girl's voice calls. “Get back here!”

A moment later, a little pink face peeks around the wall at the end of the hallway. It's a child's face, a baby's. Yet it is airborne. Is someone carrying the child?

The twins hear a fluttering sound, as if a deck of cards were being shuffled. The infant's eyes are wide and full of bright green cunning. The baby turns toward Alice and Adam, and its mouth turns up in a delighted smile. The baby's tongue extends. Its eyes become brighter, more alive, yet at the same time less human somehow, less feeling.

With the suddenness of movement of a hummingbird, the child zooms toward the twins. They see now it is a boy, naked; his little penis is squat and flaccid, like the tied-off end of a party balloon. His belly is round and strangely textured, like the rind of a cantaloupe. His little fingers wave yearningly while the pale gray wings that spring from his shoulder blades beat furiously in the air as he hovers before them. The wings themselves look moist, larval. He takes another long look at Alice and Adam, who cower, terrified, before him. But he seems to mean them no harm. He hears his mother's voice calling again and he turns and darts quickly back to her.

“We have to go home,” Adam says, his voice trembling.

Alice shakes her head. “We are home,” she says.

T
he Watertight Plumbing truck pulls into the loading dock on the north end of the vast, seemingly abandoned warehouse in Queens. A late-summer moon, dark orange, pocked and pitted like a rotted pumpkin, floats in the mottled sky, bright enough to draw the eye but not shedding any light whatsoever. It is never quiet in the city, even here in a so-called outer borough. There is always the noise of trains and trucks, the throb of music. The streets are never empty; there is always someone coming, someone turning a corner, walking a dog, jogging, looking for a parking space. In the constant back-and-forth, the unceasing activity, it is easy to go unnoticed. No one asks,
What is that building behind the high-voltage fencing?
No one wonders,
Why would a plumbing truck be pulling into a loading dock when it is almost midnight?
But the people running the project at this Borman and Davis lab have (successfully, so far) banked on the notion that the more witnesses there are to something out of the ordinary—an injured cat, a mugging—the less likely it is that any one of them will do something about it. If you feel you are the only person seeing something odd, dangerous, or illegal, you are likely to intervene, or at least report what you've witnessed. In a crowded situation, however, you have an out. You can assume (assumption being the sum of hope plus apathy) that someone else will take care of it, or that it has already been dealt with and so for you to register a complaint or call out a warning or enter into the fray in any other way not only is unnecessary but might actually muddy the waters and cause more trouble.

And so tonight, as on many other nights, Dennis Keswick drives his truck up to the locked gate of this mysterious building and rolls the window down so the CCC can see who it is. The smocks and suits have refused to issue him a proper ID card, prepared as they are to completely deny any and all knowledge of Dennis should something go wrong. He has stopped agonizing about this insult, this continuous underestimation of his worth, and now he waits nonchalantly while whoever is working security tonight presses the button that allows the gates to swing open so he can proceed with his human cargo. The gates are a little out of line; the metal scrapes along the cement as they open wide enough for Dennis to roll through. He is in what he calls major-production mode. He has taken Rogers at his word and stepped up his program of tracking, capturing, and tranquilizing the wild children. Normally, he would bring them in one at a time. On rare occasions, he has snagged two.

But tonight he's got three. A tall redheaded girl whose hair smells like burning leaves; a lithe Asian kid who had a fat roll of fifties in his jeans (
had
being the operative word, since Dennis relieved him of his financial burden moments after administering the see-ya juice); and, the most obstreperous of the three, a rather massive young man, six three if he's an inch, with a shaved head and a turquoise-and-red tattoo of feathers where his hair ought to have been. The big guy calls himself Salami; Dennis has him in the book as Gabriel Martin; his parents are or were Louise and John Martin. Gabriel has been on his own for six years, since he was eleven. Louise and John are unaccounted for, presumed dead. Most of the parents of the wild children are dead now—heart attacks, strokes, aneurysms, inexplicable accidents; the mammalian, avian, and aquatic essences pumped into them were too much for their human, all too human, physiology to support. A few of them, though it is against animal nature to do so, even managed to commit suicide, evidently preferring death from a high terrace or beneath the steel wheels of the D train to a life under the constant control of their increasingly chaotic impulses and their decidedly outré appetites.

Keswick's haul is safely locked in the back of his van, each individually chained to the walls of the cargo space, not only for Dennis's safety but for their own. Not all of those wild things get along with one another—some, he has been told, have all the capacity for resentment and evil peculiar to humans combined with the mindless aggression of a cornered beast. (Dennis will never forget helping his aunt Joyce in Hillsborough, New Hampshire, get rid of some red squirrels that had invaded her little storybook cottage in the woods. She wanted to dispose of them humanely and insisted on Havahart traps that would lure them in with some irresistible treat such as organic crunchy peanut butter and capture them but leave them unharmed. What she did not know was that every red squirrel considers every other red squirrel its mortal enemy. And so, when the kinder, gentler trap happened to catch two squirrels, only one of them made it through the night. The bulging, burping survivor was found alive the next morning, round and sated, with a glassy look in his pinprick eyes, and the only evidence of what mayhem had transpired while Aunt Joyce slept in her four-poster bed was the tiny, apparently inedible feet of his vanquished cell mate left on the trap's metal floor.)

Now Dennis hears the rattle and clink of chains echoing in the van's metal back chamber. He is certain it is Salami who has regained consciousness. Not a real problem, more of a pain in the butt. Salami is such a large thing, with so much animal energy coursing through him, that one see-ya obviously did not suffice. Oh, well, more where that came from. He opens the glove compartment and takes out a screw-top jar that was formerly home to alcohol-soaked cleaning pads and now holds a baker's dozen of the mini-syringes—they look rather like pushpins—he uses to knock the kids out before donating them to science, ha-ha, wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

He drives slowly toward the loading dock. Earlier that evening, there was a quick, furious summer rain, and pools of rainwater have collected in the many potholes in the facility's old, neglected driveway. The bluish light that escapes from a few of the building's windows is reflected in the puddles, which shimmer and shake with the van's approach and break into bluish splashes when the tires roll through.

He pulls in. He is about to give the horn a little tap but stops himself just in time. He's already been reamed out for that. Come to think of it, maybe he
will
honk the horn. His hand hovers above the steering wheel. No, better not. Why reinforce every negative thought the smocks and their minions have about him? Instead, he flashes the brights on and off a couple of times.

A few moments later, a rectangle of bright light appears as a small side door opens. An elderly worker emerges, dressed in baggy dungarees and a T-shirt, pushing a handcart.
What,
Dennis wonders,
is this ding-dong thinking? Where in the Sam Hill did he get the idea that this is like unloading boxes of envelopes or bags of feed corn?

He powers his window down and speaks to the old guy in an urgent whisper.

“Hey, chief, we need four strong men and a catchpole.” He snaps his fingers, points at the old guy. “Pronto.”

If the man minds Dennis lording it over him, he gives no indication. He simply shrugs, turns around, and heads back into the building. The bright light flares briefly as he opens and closes the door.

“Me's killing on you so hard, shithead,” says Salami. Even through the closed door, his voice is harsh and heavy, with little striations of his boyish soprano still audible, threaded in like tinsel sewn into the fabric of a shirt.

Oh, this is going to be work,
Dennis thinks with a sigh of resignation.

Moments later, four men equal to the task come out.

“Two are snoozing,” Dennis says to the unloaders. “But the big one's awake, and he's upset.”

“Open up,” one of the unloaders says. He has the catchpole, with its heavy leather loop on the end.

“They're secure in there, right?” asks another worker.

“Unless they can break through steel,” Dennis says.

“Well, can they?” asks the nervous one.

Dennis gives his most derisive laugh. “On three, gentlemen,” he says. “One. Two. Three.”

He flings the doors open. And there they are. Today's catch. Two are sleeping. The girl, at first glance, looks dead. Her face is the color of fillet of sole a day or two past its sale date; her eyes are closed; her mouth droops open. She wears a halter top, shorts. Her bare legs are scratched from thorns and stickers, and her bony ankles are scabbed. Next to her is another unconscious wild one, a boy, also in shorts. His legs are long and lean with very dark hair on the shins. He has a pointy face that looks defiant and mischievous, even with his eyes closed and his chin resting on his collarbone.

Salami, however, is fully awake, and he sits there glaring at Dennis and the other men. He has given up trying to break his shackles but has not surrendered in any other way. A sound like the grinding of gears emanates from his throat. He is gathering saliva and mucus, and a moment later he spits it out at his captors. The gob flies with the speed and accuracy of a stone launched by a slingshot. Dennis, used to the ways of these revolting creatures, moves quickly out of the path of the missile's trajectory. The Borman and Davis employee with the catchpole, however, is not as fortunate. He was, in all likelihood, Salami's target in the first place. The greenish gob finds its mark on Catchpole's chin, and it hangs there, trembling and semitransparent, like a piece of interstellar goo.

Catchpole may be a little short-tempered for this line of work. Shaking off the spittle, he goes after Salami, not with the catchpole's leather harness but with the pole itself. He brings it down with hard fury on Salami's shaved head, and the boy yelps and cries.

“Take it easy, take it easy,” Dennis murmurs.

But Catchpole is having none of it. Over and over, he slams Salami with the steel pole, until blood oozes out of the boy's skull like juice out of an overripe orange. Salami makes a few futile swipes at Catchpole and, also futilely, tries to protect himself. But he is trapped, defenseless. His eyes go from furious to blank and finally roll slowly up into his head as the once-wild but now-vanquished boy loses consciousness.

Dennis unlocks the three kids, and in short order they are all dragged into receiving. Many times before, Dennis made an effort to follow his bounty in and see where they were brought, how they were processed, what happened next. But each time, he was prohibited from stepping foot in the building, and now he has stopped making any attempts. It's maddening enough to be bossed around by the smocks and the pencil pushers, but to be muscled by these stiffs in security and receiving—that is intolerable.

The metal doors slam. All is silence. Dennis stands there with his van, now empty.

Oh. Not quite.

Three vials of blood have gotten lodged between the corrugated floor and the side of the van. Dennis picks one up and inspects it. He shakes it. Sniffs it. And drops it into his breast pocket. It feels warm against his heart. Curious, his excitement growing, he pockets the other two as well. And then his eyes light up. There is a brown canvas backpack shoved into the corner. He reaches for it and hears the tinkle of countless vials. He's struck it rich!

“Nice place you got here,” the prostitute says looking around Dennis's one-bedroom apartment on the ninth floor of a 1950s apartment house on Ocean Parkway in the middle of Brooklyn. She is a bit heavy but seems not to be self-conscious about it—she wears a short leather skirt and a tight, scoop-neck top. Her voice is derisive; her brightly painted, surgically enhanced lips curl into a sneer. She tosses her head, and her platinum pageboy, sprayed and lacquered into petrification, barely budges. Dennis, who may not be expert in improving his life situation but is more than adept at sensing anything remotely resembling a low opinion of his person, his intellect, or his lifestyle, can see the humid hovel he calls home through the prostitute's eyes. What did the escort service say her name was? Burgundy? Bree? It didn't matter.

And Dennis's name, as far as this woman and the escort service that sent her is concerned, is Carl Ravenswood. He totally loves using that name. His nom de screw. And it's the name on his lease too. The name on his buzzer downstairs. He would like one day to write his old friends and say,
Try living under an assumed name, you'll be surprised how relaxing it is.

He sees his paid guest taking in the fourteen-year-old GE air conditioner, inherited from the previous tenant, who probably got it from the tenant before him; the sofa dragged out of a nearby Covenant House after a kitchen fire; the leaning tower of pizza boxes in the corner, which Dennis has been accumulating over the past three months, because he is playing a game with himself to see how high he can stack them before they collapse and another game to see how long he can stand having them here before he completely loses his mind—she's taking it all in and deciding Dennis is the kind of threadbare customer who has to dig deep in order to pay for his repulsive little nude romps and who will not be able to add a tip to her fee. And here's another thing that Dennis knows, or at least assumes: Bree, or whatever the hell name she is claiming, does not want to be here—none of the so-called girls want to travel to Brooklyn, and the fact that she has been sent means she is a second- or third-tier “provider.”

Yet despite it all, Dennis is excited to have her here.

He reaches into his back pocket and hands her four fifty-dollar bills, fresh from Salami's pocket.

She steps back as if from a hot flame.

“Put it in an envelope and put the envelope over there,” she says.

But he does not want to take instructions from a prostitute. He grabs her wrist and slaps the money into her open hand. She is not about to let it drop to the floor. She turns her back and puts the money into her purse.

“Ever see one of these?” Dennis asks her when she turns around again. He is holding one of the vials that Salami must have dropped.

“What is that? Zoom?” Everything she says sounds pissed off.

“Zoom?” Dennis asks. “Is that what people are calling it?”