Dark Advent (23 page)

“You be careful,” was all he could think to say.

“You bet your wrinkled ass.” Diane stepped forward and slowly drew her arms around his shoulders. They squeezed each other tightly while an October wind swirled through. It should’ve been bearing with it leaves, he idly thought. They broke, still clasping arms.

“Don’t take this wrong, but…” She rolled her eyes, cocking her head to one side. “But I
do
love you, you know.”

He grinned, feeling the flush creeping into his cheeks and the tips of his ears. “I know how you mean it. And the same goes from me to you.” He squeezed her forearms. “And when you find your little girl, tell her I love her too. I seen enough pictures and heard enough stories.”

“I reckon so.” Diane didn’t do a half-bad imitation of him.

Caleb walked her to the driver’s door, shutting it after her. The day wasn’t so bright that she needed sunglasses, but she put them on anyway. He saw why a moment later, as a tear trickled out from behind one lens. The car roared to life, doubly loud under the low concrete ceiling. Then she was on her way.

He stood still for a while, listening to the squeal of her tires as she descended the circular exit ramp. It diminished until it faded altogether, until she was undeniably, irrevocably gone.

At last he stooped to gather up his gear. Alone.

4

“You know,” Erika said, her voice neutral but leaning toward friendly, “somehow I get the idea that sticking us together like this was a little more than coincidence.”

Jason gave her his best mock-innocence look, guaranteed to disarm any living, breathing woman at twenty paces. “Hey. I’m just as much a victim of circumstance as you are.”

She scowled and made as if to punch his shoulder. “Keep it up…and you won’t just
sound
like you’re being tortured.”

They were out walking the sidewalks with notebooks and pens, making a systematic circuit of the streets surrounding Brannigan’s. Any shop, restaurant, or other business that looked as though it might yield some benefit to their community, be it food or supplies, they made a note of. Rich Patton’s idea. Jason also wondered about the pairing. Maybe Rich was easing back from his initial hands-off warning regarding Erika, no doubt in part owing to Jason’s cleaning up and no longer looking like a heroin addict.

But even if Rich had had a change of heart, Jason didn’t think he’d be turning cartwheels of joy anytime soon. At first he’d been drawn to Erika the way any normal hetero male would feel about a nice-looking woman with smarts, bursts of humor, and whose company just made the day better. But now, while he still liked her, he didn’t know if it could go beyond friendship. She seemed a hard one to reach. He was having trouble finding the proper word to describe her.
Standoffish
wasn’t quite right.
Aloof
came closer.
Guarded
had potential. He’d keep trying.

Under the open sky, it was turning into a lovely fall. The days were crisp and bright, and the trees within the downtown region had become vivid splashes of color against the stark background of the buildings.

Erika slowly viewed their surroundings as they walked. “I still find this a very humbling experience.”

“What?” Jason said. “The city, you mean?”

“Yeah. It’s like a dead body. But one that hasn’t decayed yet.”

“Interesting comparison.”

“My mom used to tell me I had the soul of a poet.”

He grinned. “I can see that.”

Erika frowned. The worry line appeared, clouding every other feature of her face. “She didn’t mean it as a compliment. You never think of the typical poet as accomplishing much in life. Except maybe dying a penniless alcoholic.”

Not much I can say to that.
He was glad that they then came upon an ice cream and sandwich shop, and he had cause to break the mood and scribble into the notebook. Then they moved on. Get her thinking about something else, he decided.

“What do you miss?” he asked. “I mean, besides everyone you loved and cared about.”

“Hmmm. Let me think.” She craned her neck toward the sky, placed her hands on the small of her back. “I miss the way you could always find something to do around here, something to take your mind off whatever was bothering you. The little escapes. I miss movies. And the theater, too…the Fox, the Muni Opera, the symphony. Just the stability of it all. How about you?”

He rubbed the side of his neck. “Newspaper comics. Especially
Doonesbury.
That’s rough. And I hate the idea of never again hearing a new Van Halen album. I miss hearing the radio in the morning. Fresh donuts.” He saw her laugh and shake her head. “I’m happy with life’s little pleasures.”

“I think you’ve adapted well enough.”

They wandered gradually west, making note of another couple dozen places, passing a movie theater where the latest James Bond film was the featured attraction for all time to come. Jason checked his watch: not even one in the afternoon yet.

“Got an idea,” he said. “I know it’s a fair walk from here, but why don’t we see what Union Station is like now?”

“I bet we’d have the whole place to ourselves!” she said, growing truly animated for the first time since they’d been out. “We could go nuts in there.” Erika beamed at him. “Union Station. That’s another thing I really miss.”

They continued west after cutting south to Market Street. Union Station had been one of the shining jewels in the crown of the rebounding downtown St. Louis. A long-unused train station from days gone by, it had decayed into ruin and done nothing but cost the city money and image points. But they’d breathed new life into it, and into the building’s shell had brought together the happy coexistence of the Omni International Hotel and one of the more unique shopping malls around. It had opened just over two years ago. The Omni had quickly become
the
place to stay in St. Louis, with rates to prove it, and the mall had done monster business since Day One.

Be interesting to see the place empty again.

“How do you like Caleb?” she asked out of the blue.

“Fine, I guess. It’s just been over a week, though, and he keeps pretty much to himself, so I don’t really know him.” Was there anyone who could say they’d gotten to know the old man, besides Erika?
“
You
seem to get along with him all right.”

“We’ve got a lot in common.”

“Seriously? He’s gotta be…what? Three times as old as you?”

Erika gave him a sober look. “We’ve each been misfits, in our way. He understands that side of me better than anyone I ever met.”

“How were you a misfit? You seem normal enough to me.”

She shook her head. “Not now. Okay? Maybe someday I can explain it, but don’t ask me to now.”

Woman of mystery,
he thought.
Or maybe she just gets weirder the longer you know her.

Market Street took them farther west, past the Federal Building, City Hall, Kiel Auditorium. And long before they were in sight of any part of Union Station other than its granite clock tower, they heard voices…faint, many voices blurring into one great murmur. They looked at each other and quickened their pace, and soon saw, blocks ahead, an actual crowd of people. There must have numbered at least two hundred. Jason hadn’t seen this many living beings in the same place in months.

They drew nearer and found everyone’s attention focused on a small cluster of men north across Market Street at Aloe Plaza. Behind them stretched the long rectangle of Milles Fountain. At one time water had sprayed from statues of cavorting nymphs and cherubs. Once clean and pure, the water had since gone green with stagnation.

Jason and Erika melded with the back rim of the crowd. Everyone was listening to one of the guys near the fountain talk. After a moment, he realized that the scenario had the feel of political rallies he’d seen on the Quad at college. But as he listened to the man’s message, it became frightfully clear that democracy played no part in it.

“Oh my god,” Erika whispered beside him.

“What is it?” he said, getting no answer. Her eyes were glued to the speaker.

“Somebody once told me that we’ve been shit on all our lives, all of us,” the man said. He was of average height but thickly muscular, and had two of the fiercest eyes Jason had ever seen. “Well, now we’ve got a chance to change all that. And I’m taking it. My men and I…
we’re
taking it.”

“Who gave you that right, huh?” someone in the crowd asked.

The man sought the anonymous person out with those angry eyes, found him, and his mouth curled downward in a contemptuous sneer. “What part of
take
didn’t you understand? Nobody
gives
anything anymore, asshole. It’s
take
now
.
Somebody’s gotta start calling the shots so it doesn’t end up back like it used to be.” He tilted his head back for a moment, the heavy muscles of his throat bulging like thick cables. “So now you’re either with us, and I promise you you’ll be taken care of as long as you work. Or you’re against us. There’s no middle ground. Not here. Not now. Not anymore.”

Jason found himself queasily mesmerized. Not that he agreed with this man or his sentiments or his entire ruthless attitude. Clearly the man was a flaming asshole, and a dangerous flaming asshole at that. But he was undeniably captivating in his own scary way. You looked at him too long and you got the feeling that if you didn’t go along with him, he’d break you in half just to show you the error of your ways.

Jason felt Erika tugging at his arm. “You know who that is, don’t you?” she said. “Don’t you?”

“Should I?”

She was frantic, and her fingers dug into his arm. “He’s the guy that killed his neighbors back in the summer,” she whispered fiercely. “He burned them alive in their house.” Her fingernails were becoming painful. “You heard about it, didn’t you? You
had
to.”

“I heard.” Jason stared ahead, and at last Erika released his arm. So
this
was Travis Lane, the latest statistic from the national nightmare quota. The name was more familiar than the face, though now it came back to him that he’d seen it a few times on the news. The crime itself he’d found morbidly fascinating. What went on in a man’s head that could lead him to roast five neighbors with no remorse? What was there…or what was missing? “Who are those others with him?”

“No idea,” Erika said.

A rough-looking bunch, whoever they were. A dozen, give or take. Most distinctive was a giant of a man, smoothly bald and wearing a spiked collar. Another squatty fellow looked like a human troll, with a bushy growth of hair and beard. All were armed with rifles, shotguns, whatever—the 9mm automatic in Jason’s waistband began to feel inadequate—all except the bald one. And someone else, he saw a moment later. Another man standing in the background…lean, clean-shaven, with silvery-blond hair. He was surprisingly placid, seemingly out of place with the rest. But then, these days made for strange bedfellows.

“I got something I want you all to see, and remember,” Travis Lane said. “And tell about to people you know weren’t here today. Just so you know we’re not kidding around.” He motioned toward someone to the south, across Market. Jason turned around in time to see a smaller group of six emerge from the front of Union Station.

“Hey.” Jason nudged the guy he was standing beside, a narrow-shouldered geek with a droopy moustache. “How’d everybody end up here? The biggest group I’ve seen since summer has been twenty people.”

“They made us come here.” His eyes jittered with paranoia. “I live in Richmond Heights, and some of them came around yesterday in a truck, found me out in my yard, and they said to be here. Took down my name, address. Description. Look at them. You think I was gonna argue? I didn’t want them coming back mad.”

Jason watched the crowd, people milling nervously about. Heads down, some quietly talking, all seemed content to wait. No one tried to leave, though what would happen if someone did was anyone’s guess.

Tyrants—that’s what these guys were. Born-again tyrants. And everyone else looked beaten and down enough to let them get away with it.

So how far would they take it?
As far as they want.

He reached past his jacket, touched the grip of the pistol. He remembered the hypothetical morality question: What if you had the chance to blow away Hitler before he came to power?

One shot. At this range, he couldn’t miss. One shot, scratch one dangerous flaming asshole from the picture. One shot.

And a second or two later the others would open up right back at him. Erika would die too. And a lot of others. He could step clear of everyone else…but he realized he was no martyr.
I
can’t do it.

The other six coming from Union Station were nearly there.

“I don’t like this,” Erika said quietly. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

Jason nodded. He felt exactly the same.

The six stopped before the fountain, three captors and three captives. The latter three looked considerably worse, dirty, with unkempt hair and scruffy beards. One wore the uniform of a St. Louis policeman; one the white, now filthy, germsuit of an army cleanup unit; the last an ordinary three-piece suit massed with wrinkles. Jason thought he’d seen this last face before, too. Another one from the news; some city politician, the name and office escaped him. All three had their hands bound behind them, and from the way their clothing hung loosely, they looked as though they hadn’t eaten a decent meal in weeks.

Never mind his growing ambivalence to Erika, Jason wanted,
needed
someone to anchor him to the real world. Groping blindly with his hand, he reached out and found hers. She didn’t pull away.

“It was their world before.” Travis Lane pointed an accusing finger at the trio of scarecrows behind him, their faces lined with hunger and fear. “They’ve been found guilty of fucking it up in the first degree. And now it’s
ours.
”

Gunfire ripped the early afternoon air, and in that cruel thunder Jason realized that the world’s de-evolution had finally reached its zenith. Because here they were, in the middle of an American city, watching the slaughter of innocent men, and the killers were the ones in charge.

At the verge of illness, yet unable to tear his eyes away, Jason watched the cop topple backward into the greenish water of the fountain, pushing himself up through the surface three times while shotgun blasts drove him under again and again, until the fourth left him floating. He watched as the politician crawled on shoulders and knees across the plaza, bleeding, until at last he drew up convulsing, smearing pieces of himself across the concrete.

And at last, the gunfire died with them.

“Like I said earlier,” Travis Lane announced, “no middle ground. You’re either with us or against us.”

Silence descended across the crowd, topped off only by an October breeze and broken only by soft, hopeless weeping from here and there. And then movement. There weren’t many, not by comparison to the group as a whole, but more than Jason would have dared predict. They moved forward to…to join forces?

Jason became aware of Erika’s hand still clutched in his, her fingers rigid and trembling and cold.
All I wish right now is that I could hold her and she could hold me and we could make all this go away, go away, go away…