Empire Of Salt (10 page)

Another blast hammered the night.

Patrick examined his useless legs. He suddenly wished that he'd never started drinking. He gazed towards the open door, silently slipped the pacifier into his mouth and began to suck on it.

Natasha sprinted out the door even before she knew what was going on. It never occurred to her to be afraid until she heard the fourth shot, which made her jump and scream. She found she'd grabbed Derrick, who was also holding her. They separated, briefly embarrassed.

"I think it came from over there," Jose shouted, pointing down the street.

The air had cooled somewhat, a relief from the staggering heat of the day. A million stars lit a cloudless sky, reminding Natasha that she wasn't in Philadelphia anymore. Only a few of the streetlights still worked, casting intermittent halos of sickly yellow light.

A dark figure rushed across the street two blocks down.

"There!" Derrick pointed.

"Did you see who it was?" Carrie asked.

Gertie shook her head. "Can't be Abel. That was too small."

Derrick turned to Natasha. "Maybe it was Obediah?"

"Could be, but why would he run?" Gertie shouted back towards the restaurant. "Maude, you make sure you call Will and tell him we have shots fired."

Shots fired.
Natasha had never heard those words said outside of television.

Suddenly another figure, this one much larger, ran into the middle of the street, raised a shotgun, and fired in the direction the other person had gone.

"Abel, is that you?" Gertie called.

"Ms. Gertrude." Abel's voice was an octave higher than it usually was from the excitement and exertion. "I saw one of them things. I think it got my boy."

"Things? We have things?" Frank asked.

"Just leave it be, Abel Beachy. You're going to kill someone with that shotgun." Gertie shouted.

Even from two blocks away, Natasha could see the whites of the man's teeth as he grinned and said: "That's the point, is it not?" He patted the gun, then took off.

"What the hell?" Andy came out and peered down the street. "What's all the shooting?"

"Abel had one of them things in his sights." Gertie glanced at Natasha and Derrick.

"He did?" Andy's eyes widened and he took a step back. Then he turned and ran, staggering a little as he went, back towards his house.

"What do you mean by things?" Natasha asked, remembering the
thing
she saw running between trailers earlier in the day.

"
Bad
things," Frank replied, then giggled.

Gertie stared at him for a moment, then shook her head in disgust. "Go back inside and keep these kids' father company. He can't even walk and we surely don't need him outside with Abel Beachy acting like it's an invasion of the Body Snatchers. We don't need no -" She glanced quickly at Natasha and Derrick "- new comer getting lost or hurt in these houses."

Natasha smiled grimly, but beneath it she knew what Gertie meant to say was that they didn't need
no drunk
. As if to prove it, Gertie patted Natasha on the shoulder and told her everything was going to be okay. Then Gertie ordered her and Derrick to come with her and split the others who'd come outside to watch into three parties of three. Before they separated, Maude brought out flashlights for each group.

Soon Natasha and Derrick were following Gertie, who strode into the darkness like a gunslinger. Her fearlessness was what kept the kids going, because as soon as they left the neon-lit front of the restaurant, all the bogeymen of their nightmares began to play across the possibilities of who they might meet, and what the
thing
was that had gotten the Beachy kid.

Natasha wanted to press the issue. What were the things everyone was talking about? But she didn't want to do it in the dark.

They entered a burned out hulk of a trailer through the space where the sliding glass door used to be. Most of the furniture had burned to unrecognizable black shapes. A single blue marble stood stark against the soot-stained floor.

"Jessica Sullivan used to live here," Gertie said. "She collected those tiny stuffed animals. This must have been one of their eyes."

"What happened to her?" Derrick asked.

"Her son packed her up and sent her to an old fogies' home."

"But he left her stuffed animals." Natasha pointed to where the blue eye rested.

"Didn't matter to him. He just wanted her out of his hair." Gertie picked it up and put it in her pocket.

"So what happened to the trailer?"

"Vandals burned it like they burned most of the others."

The three of them moved from one trailer to the other. Occasionally they'd come to one that was occupied. Sometimes Gertie would peer in the window, and sometimes she'd knock and have a few soft words with the occupants, but they never went inside.

Down the street they saw the Romanian's trailer. As they drew near, Gertie held up her hand for them to stop. Holding the light as steady as she could, she continued towards the fence. Even from where Natasha stood, she could see a body lying atop the sea of beer cans. She ignored Gertie's command to wait and followed, Derrick pressing right against her, his hands on her back as they edged closer to the body.

She heard a droning sound, something like a remote control airplane.

"What is that noise?" Derrick asked. Gertie walked to the fence and shone the light on the body. It was the Romanian for sure. His pants had fallen down revealing white buttocks the color of dead fish bellies, as if he'd passed out in mid-moon. The sound was coming from him, not an airplane - snoring.

"Kristov's passed out." Gertie scoffed. "Lot of good those will do him," she said, pointing at the beer cans. She leaned over the fence and shouted, "Can't hear them if you're passed out!" He never stirred.

They were on their seventh or eighth house when they heard a rustling behind one of the trailers, followed by a groan. A figure separated from the shadows and lurched in their direction.

Gertie brought her bat around as she shone her light into the shadows.

"There you are." Auntie Lin stepped into the beam of the trembling flashlight. "What got into you, going out when there's a madman with a gun blasting at everything that moves?"

"That madman is Abel Beachy," Gertie said.

"It doesn't make it any safer if you know his name. Anyone firing like that with houses all around is still a madman." Auntie Lin grabbed Natasha's and Derrick's arms and pulled them toward the street. "Come on. We're going back to the restaurant. You haven't eaten yet."

"But -" Derrick began.

"Don't 'But' me. I'm sure we'll see what happens before it's all over. Now let's go." She turned to Gertie. "And you should never have brought kids outside when it was so dangerous. What were you thinking?"

Although Natasha allowed herself to be tugged away, she shot a resigned look at Gertie. Gertie receded into the darkness as she went. Part of Natasha was happy to be going back inside. But another part of her, one she really hadn't known existed, suddenly wanted to know the unknowable. She wanted to be a part of the adventure and the events that were transpiring in the darkness, where Abel Beachy ran with a shotgun firing at God knew what.

Strange how a little change of scenery could alter your attitude, she considered.

Gertie silently bid young Natasha goodbye. That one had an inquisitive streak in her that reminded Gertie of herself. Still, in some places knowing too much could hurt you and she was glad that the girl and her brother had been taken under the protective wing of their Auntie Lin.

What the old Chinese woman had said had hurt, but the she was right. What
had
Gertie been thinking? Lazlo's family seemed a nice sort and Gertie was happy that she hadn't told them the totality of what she knew about Bombay Beach. Not that she had any hard evidence or facts, but running the restaurant she'd heard so much that even if a tenth of them were true they cast a deadly shadow across the community... especially the things that came from the water.

Gertie trembled slightly in the darkness. Now alone with the rumors, she could finally see if they were true. If she'd seen what she'd thought she'd seen Abel Beachy chasing, then she had no business continuing. Then again, she wasn't about to be chased out of the darkness like some weak-kneed Catholic. Her father had been a bouncer and her mother had been a truck driver, and she had the best and worst traits of both of them; primarily the same bull-headedness that had caused them to separate and get back together a dozen times. So she continued on. She held her bat in one hand and her flashlight in the other. If she saw anything, she'd use both as weapons.

Her search took her to the sea shore. Seaweed lay lank and rotting on the water's edge. Dead fish, beer cans, red plastic cups and all manner of trash floated in the tide.

Gertie played her light back and forth, acutely aware of the sounds around her.

Fear crept along her spine as she imagined things in the darkness, silent deadly things, watching her as she walked the tide line.

It sounded like a fish surfacing, or something slapping the water with the palm of its hand.

But her light found nothing but dead sea.

She heard someone calling in the distance. Although she couldn't make out the words, she thought it sounded like
Obediah
, which meant they still hadn't found the boy. Gertie heard a great slurping sound and almost jumped out of her skin, even though she recognized it as Sump Pump #2.

She chuckled and pushed her hair back, then stuck the baseball bat under her arm as she rearranged her pony tail. She decided that she'd give it a few more yards, then return to the restaurant. She'd already done more than was necessary, and out here alone, she didn't know what might happen.

The beam of Gertie's flashlight swept past something white and filmy. She stopped and adjusted the light, circling until she saw what looked like the blind, cataracted eye of an immense dead fish.

As she stepped closer flies erupted from the seaweed to buzz madly about the beam of the torch, making it almost impossible to see. She waived a hand to clear away the pests and stepped closer to examine her find. What she saw, however, wasn't the eye of a fish but a human.

She inhaled sharply.

Oh my God, she thought. Was this Obediah? Had the poor boy drowned?

She turned and glanced behind her, wondering if she should call out. She returned her gaze to the head and tried to make out the features, plus see where the rest of the body lay. But everything was too obscured by the seaweed, the trash and the way the light played off the surface of the water.

Then, for a moment, Gertie could have sworn that the eye blinked. Suddenly she wondered if Obediah might still be alive.

The eye blinked again. This time she saw it.

Or was it the waves pushing it open and closed?

She stepped into the surf and was now close enough to see yellow ichors seeping from the thing's neck.

What kind of person has yellow blood?

Then she saw it in all its gory reality. The thing beneath the water couldn't possibly be Obediah. It was too old. It had the face of a middle-aged man. The neck was all but severed from the body. The head hung by only by a few pieces of skin. The spinal cord had been shattered and swayed like a broken rope in the water. The skin was a mottle of greens. The blood wasn't simply yellow but seemed to glow in the water.

This must have been what she'd seen run across the street.

Then it hit her. All the rumors were
true
, even those far-fetched things that Andy had been spouting to the other drunks in the restaurant when he thought she and Maude weren't paying attention. Gertie tried to step back but found she couldn't move her foot. Looking down, she saw why and screamed. A hand had wrapped around her ankle, green and gray tinged skin, yellowing nails that, even as she watched, pierced the flesh of her foot and slid against her ankle bone.

She screamed again before she was jerked off her feet. She landed hard against the sand, the back of her head slamming the ground. Air left her in a
whoosh
. The flashlight and bat went flying.

Another hand gripped her leg. First one tug, then another and another and Gertie was all the way in the water. She felt teeth slide against her skin and screamed hysterically and breathlessly. Teeth bit into her thigh and ripped away a huge chunk of flesh. They tore in again and again, each time ripping and shredding. When it hit her femoral artery, she screamed a final time, then was pulled beneath the tide. The red of her blood mingled with the yellow of the creature, resulting in a wide, orange slick that held together for a moment, before being washed under by the tide.