Garden of Evil (30 page)

In a way, he almost hoped that he had, because that would mean that there
was
a way.

‘Oh my
God
!' said Summer. ‘How can they
run
so fast? Nobody can run that fast!'

‘These jokers can,' Ricky told her. ‘Good thing they weren't around when we were holding the LA Olympics.'

‘You think that's funny?' said Jim.

‘Not at all. It scares the living crap out me, if you must know.'

Jim turned into Franklin Avenue without braking, and the Mercury spun through three hundred and sixty degrees, with Summer screaming all the way around. Even Ricky said, ‘Jesus, man! You're going to kill us before they do!'

But Jim gunned the engine again and headed east, underneath the freeway. The only other vehicles on the road were a few abandoned cars with their doors left hanging open. All kinds of debris was scattered across the road, some of it groceries, some of it luggage and baby buggies, some of it bits of people. Jim made a point of not looking at it too closely, and steering around it whenever he could. He ran over one end of a woman's severed leg, and, grotesquely, it kicked up into the air, like a cancan dancer's.

They turned at last into Briarcliff Road, roaring up its steep, tight curve, and sliding to a halt in the parking space in front of Briar Cliff Apartments.

Jim said, ‘
Out
! And inside! They'll be here any minute!'

They ran up the two flights of steps to Jim's apartment. As they reached the front door, Jim looked back down from the landing and saw the first of the white-robed figures running up the slope toward them.

Most of them were young black-bearded men, but there were wild-haired women and children, too. Their shrouds and robes were even filthier than they had been when they had first appeared – smudged with smoke and spattered with fresh blood, as well as the centuries-old blood and fluids with which they had been stained when they were first interred.

They were still completely silent, and they were still blurred and out of focus, so that their eyes looked like shadowy hollows. Santana had described them exactly: they were the ‘dead-alive'.

‘Inside! Quick! They're here!' Jim shouted. He pushed Summer into the hallway in front of him and then slammed the door behind him, locking it and bolting it and sliding on the safety chain.

‘Think that's going to keep them out?' asked Ricky.

‘I don't know. Let's hope so.' Jim looked around and saw the heavy little oak bureau at the end of the hallway, which he used for storing receipts and screwdrivers and dead batteries and out-of-date credit cards and string. ‘Here, give me a hand.'

Together, grunting, they pushed the bureau until it was up against the front door. DaJon Johnson came out of the living room and said, ‘Wha's goin' down, man? That cholo just told me those scary dead dudes are right outside.'

‘They are, yes,' said Jim, and as if to prove that he wasn't scaremongering, there was a deafening crash against the outside of the door, and then another, and then they heard fists beating against the kitchen windows.

Jim went through to the kitchen. The landing outside the windows was crowded with white-robed figures, and they were pummeling at the glass in a frenzy. Their mouths were stretched wide open, as if they were howling, but they made no sound. The left-hand window cracked, and then smashed, and then the right-hand window splintered.

DaJon Johnson and Ricky followed Jim into the kitchen. Joe Chang and Al Alvarez and Kyle Baxter joined them from the living room. Jim looked around and saw the girls all clustered together, and his father standing in the far corner, looking helpless.

‘They're getting in!' said Al Alvarez. ‘They're trying to pull out the whole goddamned window!' Six or seven white-robed arms came waving in through the left-hand window, like octopus tentacles. Almost all of their hands were sliced and cut by the broken shards of glass that remained in the frame, and blood sprayed all over the yellow-tiled window sill, but that didn't deter them. They seized the frame and started to wrench it violently outward.

Jim dragged the cutlery drawer out from under the worktop and crashed it down on to the kitchen table. He took out his ten-inch carving knife and said to Ricky and his students, ‘Here! Grab what you like!'

They all picked up knives, except for Rudy Cascarelli, who chose Jim's double-pronged carving fork, and Kyle Baxter, who went for his Chinese cleaver. Jim went up to the sink, leaned over it, and started stabbing at the hands that were gripping the window frame. DaJon Johnson had picked up two knives, one in each hand, and he attacked the white-robed figures as if he were berserk, chopping furiously and relentlessly into fingers and knuckles and forearms and elbows.

But it was Kyle Baxter who inflicted the most spectacular damage. He lifted the Chinese cleaver high up behind his head, paused, and then swung it down so hard that it severed the hand of one of the white-robed figures at the wrist. The hand tumbled into the sink, and even though the white-robed figure didn't scream, he pulled his arm immediately out of the window and disappeared into the crowd, showering their shrouds and their djellabas with blood.

Kyle Baxter swung the cleaver again and again, hacking off at least five more hands and more fingers than Jim could count. Jim wouldn't have guessed that he could be so bloodthirsty, but he kept on cutting, and under his breath he kept repeating a whole thesaurus of killing and mutilation. ‘Massacre! Execution! Cut to pieces! Decimate! Annihilate! Assassinate! Put to the sword!'

After less than ten minutes, without a sound, the white-robed figures suddenly withdrew their arms from the window, and disappeared back along the landing. Jim heard their feet pattering down the steps, and then there was silence.

He looked around the kitchen. The windows were all broken, but the draining board was dripping with blood and the sink was filled with hairy-backed hands, like a nest of dead tarantulas. Maybe the white-robed figures had simply decided that they had had enough, and that they were getting noplace.

‘Think that's it?' asked Ricky. ‘Think they got the message?'

‘I couldn't tell you, Ricky. I thought they might be coming for me, personally, but I may be wrong.'

Summer came into the kitchen but Jim quickly pushed her out again. ‘You don't want to see this, sweetheart.'

Back in the living room, Bethany said, ‘They won't come back, will they, Daddy? Please say they won't come back.'

Jim said, ‘I wish I knew.'

‘What if they're still out there, waiting for us?' said Jesmeka Watson. ‘If they're still out there, how are we going to get back home?'

‘How do we know we even got homes to go back to?' said Al Alvarez. ‘And there's no phones, so there's no way that we can check.'

Jim went out on to the balcony. Although the back yard was thickly screened by trees, he could see that fires were burning from one side of the city to the other. And there was such a silence. No traffic, on the freeways. No sirens. No helicopters. No passenger planes landing and taking off from LAX.

All he could hear was an occasional sarcastic caw, from that pestilential crow.

Bethany came out to join him. ‘What are we going to do, Daddy? Do you think that Mommy's OK?'

Jim put his arm around her shoulders. ‘Where your mom lives – sure, I'm sure she'll be fine.'

‘But what are we going to do?'

‘I don't know, Bethany. I really don't.'

‘We can't stay here for ever, can we? Maybe we should try to get away. These dead people can't be
everywhere
, can they?'

‘I don't know that, either. The Reverend Silence said there were millions of them. He said that God cursed Lilith's children, so that a hundred of them would die every day. If you believe that really happened, that adds up to thirty-six and a half million every thousand years, and how many thousands of years is it since Lilith was thrown out of the Garden of Eden?

‘They could be everywhere,' he told her. ‘Maybe there's no escaping them.'

DaJon Johnson and Rudy Cascarelli came out on to the balcony, too.

‘You want to check this out, Mr Rook.'

‘Oh, yeah? What is it now?'

‘We eyeballed the road outside, to see if those dead-alives had taken a powder.'

‘And?'

‘Come and check it out for yourself.'

Jim followed them through the living room and out to the hallway. They had shifted the bureau to one side so that they could open the front door, although they had kept the door locked and Joe Chang was standing beside it with his arms folded like a nightclub bouncer.

He unlocked it, although he kept the security chain fastened until he had taken a quick look outside. ‘OK, sir. It looks like it's clear.'

Jim stepped out on to the landing. He went to the railing and looked down. Hundreds of white-robed figures were assembled in the road, silent, unmoving, staring back up at him. When he leaned over a little more, he could see that they were crowded on the landing outside Ricky and Nadine's front door, too, and up the steps that led to Summer's apartment.

‘Looks like they're prepared to wait for as long as it takes,' said Rudy Cascarelli. ‘How soon before we run out of food?'

‘Maybe a day,' said Jim. ‘I haven't been to the store for two weeks. Seventeen people can't survive on two Hungry-Man Boneless Chicken Dinners for very long.'

DaJon Johnson said, ‘This is really off the hook, man. Either they goin' to starve us out or else we try to make a break for it and they rip us to bits. I mean, how far do you think we goin' to get?'

Jim was still standing on the landing when Ricky came out. He saw the silent crowd of white-robed figures waiting in the road, and he said, ‘Shit.'

‘What is it, Ricky?'

‘I'm in a fix, Jim. What in the name of God am I going to do now?'

‘W
hat kind of a fix?' Jim asked him. ‘What situation could possibly be worse than this is already?'

‘It's Nadine. She's diabetic. She's starting to go into a coma and she needs her insulin.'

‘Oh, God. Well – there's a couple of cans of Mountain Dew Throwback in the fridge. That should help. It has real sugar in it.'

‘She has to have her insulin, Jim. It's her type of diabetes. She didn't bring any up here with her because she didn't think that we'd be staying for long.'

Jim went back inside. Nadine was lying on his bed, with her eyes half closed, as if she were drowsy. Her cheeks were pale, except for those two lurid spots of rouge, and her forehead was glossy with perspiration. Summer was sitting on the bed next to her, holding her hand.

‘Jim . . .' said Nadine, hoarsely. ‘Sorry to be such a nuisance. All I need is my shot.'

‘Don't you worry, Nadine. We'll sort something out for you. Bethany . . . would you bring me a can of that Mountain Dew Throwback out of the icebox? No, on second thought, Rudy, would you get it for me?' He didn't know if Kyle Baxter and Tommy Makovicka had finished clearing out the sink yet, and dropping the severed hands into the trash.

Ricky said, ‘I got to do something, Jim. If she doesn't get her shot in twenty minutes she's going to go into a coma and then she could die.'

Jim went back through the living room and out on to the balcony, where Hunni Robards and Jesmeka Watson were keeping watch, and smoking at the same time.

Jim said, ‘Any sign of those dead-alives back here?'

Jesmeka Watson shook her head. ‘Not yet, sir, Mr Rook.'

He peered down into the yard, but it was deserted. Between the front of the apartment building and the back stood a ten-foot wooden fence, with a gate in it, but the gate was padlocked and the white-robed figures wouldn't have been able to climb over. He could still see Santana's shovel down there, next to a half-dug gopher hole, which he must have dropped when the Silences came to get him.

He leaned over the balcony even further, and saw that there was a drainpipe which ran down from the guttering around the roof, and down to the ground. It looked as if it were just within reach, and of course it was the same distance away from Ricky and Nadine's balcony on the first floor below them.

‘This is what we do,' he said, beckoning to Ricky. ‘We climb down, we get Nadine's insulin. We climb back up again.'

‘Who do you think I am, man? Cheetah?'

‘It's the only way, Ricky. We can't go out front because they'll rip us to shreds.'

Ricky looked down into the back yard and puffed out his cheeks. ‘Guess you're right. OK, then – let's do it. But I fall and break my fuckin' neck I'm never going to forgive you. And Nadine's shots are in the bathroom cabinet, in case I do.'

Jim went to the very end of the balcony, dragged a chair across to the railing, and climbed up on to it, swaying backward and forward for a few moments like a high-wire walker to balance himself. Then he reached out with his right hand until he managed to get a grip on the drainpipe. He shook it, as much as he could, to feel that it wasn't too loose. Briar Cliff Apartments hadn't been built to a very high standard, and he didn't want the pipe coming away from the wall when they were halfway down it.

‘Right,' he said. ‘Ready or not.'

With that, he swung sideways across the wall and grabbed hold of the drainpipe with his left hand. The drainpipe lurched and his face was showered with dried mortar, and for a split-second he thought that the brackets were going to give way. He hung there for a few moments, not moving, trying to blink the grit out of his eyes and spit it out his mouth, but the drainpipe's fixings stayed firm.

‘OK, Ricky,' he said. ‘I think it's going to hold. I'm going down.'

Jerkily, he slid down the drainpipe, past Summer's balcony and down to Ricky and Nadine's apartment. Even though Ricky and Nadine were on the first floor, there was still at least an eight-foot drop from their balcony railing to the stone-flagged patio below. Jim had to reach out with his left hand and get a grip on the edge of their wall, and then stretch out his left leg until his foot found the top of the railing. If he had fallen backward, he could have broken his spine or cracked his skull.