Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel (42 page)

“What the hell is that?” gasped Callie.

Paul stared at Charlotte in wonderment. He’d never seen her outside of his residence before. He forgot to swing the handset, and it clattered to the carpet at the end of the cord.

“That’s my cat,” he said.

In the electric silence Charlotte relaxed her spine and curled slowly around herself, trotting towards the other end of the desk. She hissed at Paul as she passed, though not as murderously, more in the spirit of “What are you looking at?” Then, as the freezing cold prickled the skin of everyone in the room, she leapt at the window overlooking the courtyard.

The window disintegrated—the whole window, all at once—and an infinity of tiny, blunt fragments like windshield glass sagged away from the frame and cascaded in a glissando
through the branches of the tree to the courtyard deck below. Charlotte leaped straight through the glittering waterfall of glass and landed lightly on a large limb of the tree just below the window. The humid air of a warm Texas evening flooded through the wide gap, and Charlotte glanced back at Paul and gave him a curt little
mrow
like a command, then started down the limb towards the trunk.

Paul dropped the phone and lunged over the desk for Callie. He grabbed her by the wrist and practically flung her out the open window. She shrieked, but the limb caught her in the midriff and she clutched it with both arms. Paul followed an instant later, knocking himself nearly breathless, and the two of them swung for a moment by their fingers and then dropped the three or four feet to the deck, prancing on tiptoe among the atomized glass.

The three pale men who had cornered Preston backed slowly away, their goggling gazes fixed on the cat in the tree. Charlotte hissed again, and the pale man descending the tree scrambled back up towards the roof. Over his shoulder Preston said, “Get behind me.” Paul and Callie trod carefully through the glass; Paul felt the stinging little pellets embedding themselves in his soles. He glanced up through the tree and saw Colonel and Olivia and the mob of pale men crowding to the edge of the open window; above them he saw Boy G peering out of the ceiling, warily watching Charlotte.

Then the cat, out of boredom or mischievousness, vanished, and the pale man in the tree started to descend again. Others leaped out of the office into the upper branches. Pale faces appeared over the edge of the courtyard roof again, and the three men around Preston started forward.

“Head for the stairway!” barked Preston, and he shot one of the pale men through the throat; the man fell gagging to the deck as the crack of the pistol reverberated round the courtyard. But the others kept coming, and several more dropped from the branches, plopping softly against the deck. As Preston slowly backpedaled behind them, Paul and Callie inched towards the stairs where the courtyard emptied into the parking lot, but
more pale guys were crowding into the gap. Paul stopped and threw his arm across Callie, putting her between him and Preston. She glanced round at the pale men bobbing along the roof-line and hanging from the tree and crowding closer along the deck, and she pressed Paul’s back with the tips of her fingers.

“Where’d your cat go?” she said.

“What cat?” shouted Preston, as he backed into Callie and Paul.

“Here, kitty kitty kitty,” called Callie, tremulously.

Preston fired another shot and missed, and the bullet whined around the courtyard. Everyone hunched their shoulders—Paul, Callie, Preston, the pale men all around—but as the ricochet died away more pale men jumped from the roof to the courtyard deck or dropped from the tree, chanting
“Are we not men?”
louder and louder. Paul glanced at the exit to the parking lot, but more pale men were swinging down from the pedestrian bridge and crowding the gap. Two of them were already grappling Preston for his gun. Paul reached back for Callie, and she wrapped her arms around him from behind, pressing her head against his shoulder. In the distance he heard the rising grumble of an engine, some late-night cowboy peeling rubber, no doubt, and as pale hands reached from the tree and pawed softly at his scalp and arms and shoulders, Paul thought, I wish I was that guy.

But the engine came closer, and through the gap Paul heard the piercing screech of tires, then a door opening, then the
ping ping ping
of a little warning alarm. “Your key is in the ignition,” said a pleasant little recording. Paul heard the glide and thump of a sliding door, and he looked through the gap into the parking lot, over the heads of the pale men, and saw Nolene marching towards him, looking righteously pissed off. One of the pale men heard her coming, too, and turned towards her. Without ceremony she lifted her left hand and spritzed him point blank with a little canister of pepper spray, and he squealed and threw himself to the pavement. She was swinging something from her right hand—Paul saw it rise and fall over the heads of the pale men—and suddenly the knot of men in the gap under the pedestrian
bridge tumbled out of the way like bowling pins. Nolene marched into the courtyard under the bridge, liberally pumping pepper spray in all directions, and, with her other hand, swinging a bulky child safety seat in a wide figure eight. The seat swung free at the end of its seatbelt straps, which Nolene had wound round tightly round her wrist, and she worked her massive arm up and down and over and under, clobbering screeching pale men right and left.

“Out of my way,” she hollered, “you self-pitying sons of bitches!”

“Go!” shouted Preston, and he took advantage of Nolene’s distraction to pistol-whip one of the men struggling with him; the other let go of Preston’s wrist and ducked away as Preston fired over his head. Callie shoved Paul from behind, and they skipped painfully over the broken glass towards the gap where Nolene swung the child seat to one side to let them pass.

“I ain’t got all night, Preston!” Nolene barked. A pale man leaped from above, and she clocked him under the chin with the car seat, sending him flying backwards against the wall. “I told the sitter I’d be back in an hour.”

“Yes’m,” Preston called out, trotting across the littered deck, firing wildly back into the tree and up at the roofline.

In the parking lot Callie dived through the open sliding door of Nolene’s minivan onto the backseat, but Paul hung back just outside the gap.

“Move your ass, Professor,” barked Nolene, as she backed into the parking lot. “I ain’t doing this for my health.”

She dropped the empty pepper spray canister and marched towards the minivan. But Paul couldn’t tear himself away just yet. Past the stairs and through the branches of the dying oak, where pale guys swung like pale, fat spiders, he saw Colonel in distress in the window. Plans A and B failed, Paul thought, and now they’re moving to Plan C. The pale men were wrapping themselves around Colonel, sliding their hands around his wrists and ankles and over his nose and mouth. His frantic eyes darted everywhere. From above, Boy G swung upside down and caught Colonel under his arms, hauling him into the ceiling.

But Olivia, queen of the underworld, stood nearly unmolested in the window; one of the pale men curled his fingers around her wrist, and she slapped him. As he winced and slunk away, her gaze met Paul’s, and the last he ever saw of Olivia Haddock, just before Preston caught him by the elbow and marched him into the minivan, she was standing, arms akimbo, in her ruined red prom dress, glowering at him through the branches of the tree.

A
FEW DAYS LATER
, on a hot, sunny Texas afternoon, Paul Trilby—failed academic, former employee of the Texas Department of General Services, born-again vegetarian—was ferrying his last few remaining possessions into the hatchback of his battered old Dodge Colt. He had rolled down the windows of the car, and he kept the door of his apartment propped wide as he went back and forth; it wasn’t like he needed to worry about the cat getting out. The parking lot was nearly empty; only a couple of his neighbors were taking their ease along the balcony, slouching over the rail and sucking back on long-necked bottles of beer. Mrs. Prettyman was watching from behind her curtains, he knew, but she had only come out once, her fingers twitching at her throat.

“You’re paid up till the end of the month,” she’d said. She almost sounded sorry to see him go. “I’m afraid the owner don’t allow partial refunds.”

“Tell him to keep it, with my compliments.” Paul stood up
from laying the backseat of his car flat, his t-shirt already soaked through with sweat. “Get him to take you out to dinner.”

As he went back inside, Mrs. Prettyman stepped under the balcony and peered into the dim recesses of his apartment, but she wouldn’t come through the door. She pressed her fingers to her collarbone. “Where should I forward your mail?” she said.

“What mail?” Paul asked from the sink, as he slung his plastic plates into a box.

Finally she went away, and now Paul was almost done. None of the furniture was his, and he had already loaded his dishes and his clothes. He yanked out the sofa bed and began to strip the sheets off the mattress, stuffing them into a pillowcase. He hadn’t slept in the bed since last Friday but had been staying in Preston’s trailer south of the river. Paul, indeed, had not been in his apartment after dark since the week before, and even during the day, as now, he kept a weather eye on the grate in the center of the parking lot.

He slung the pillowcase into the back of the car and went back inside the apartment. He still hadn’t made up his mind whether to take the TV or not. On the one hand, he was tired of cat shows, but on the other hand, if he ended up in the middle of nowhere someplace, Charlotte’s programming might be preferable to whatever he could pull in from some podunk local station. So he tugged the plug out of the wall with the toe of his sneaker, lifted the set in his arms, and carried the TV out to his car. He tread carefully; it was still painful for him to walk, or even to stand for too long. Inside his sneakers, his lacerated feet were taped up in gauze, which he had to change twice a day at least. Preston had doctored him in the narrow living room of his trailer, picking the glass out of Paul’s soles with a pair of tweezers and painting the cuts deep purple with Betadine. Friday night, as they had raced away down empty streets under traffic lights blinking yellow, Preston and Nolene had explained why they couldn’t take Paul and Callie to the emergency room.

“The docs’d take one look at y’all,” Nolene said, watching Paul in the rearview mirror, “and call the po-lice.”

“Why the hell shouldn’t they?” said Paul, still trembling from fear and exhaustion.

“And tell them what, chief?” Preston sagged in the deep passenger seat up front, daubing the sweat off his forehead with a massive red bandanna. He turned and focused his tired eyes over his shoulder at Paul. “Huh?”

“Shouldn’t they know?” said Paul. Callie’s palm lay limp in his, and he squeezed it, glancing at her for moral support. But she was crumpled against the door, taking shallow breaths and gazing at nothing out the window.

“We
know,” said Nolene. “And we know how to take care of ’em.”

“But . . . ,” said Paul.

“ ‘Nuff said, Professor,” said Preston.

In the end Nolene didn’t even take him home but dropped him off a few blocks away from TxDoGS, where Preston had parked his truck in the empty lot of another state building. By now the adrenaline had worn off, and the walk across the pavement to Preston’s pickup had been excruciating. Even so, Paul had shaken off Preston and limped back to the van to crawl back in next to Callie. He kissed her sweaty temple, but she said nothing. She didn’t even look at him.

“Nolene’ll look after her,” said Preston, and Paul let himself be led away again, leaving bloody footprints on the asphalt.

“I told you, didn’t I,” Nolene called after him. “I
told
you not to go in that building after dark.”

Preston took Paul to his small but fastidiously kept trailer in a little park tucked behind a taqueria and a boot repair shop, where he cleaned and dressed Paul’s feet and then gave Paul his own bed while he slept on the sofa. Paul slept all day Saturday and into Sunday, waking up at noon to the smell of slow-roasted meat. He limped out of the cramped bedroom at the end of the trailer, past a row of framed commendations and pictures of Preston and other men in fatigues, and found his host in the kitchenette.

“Sit,” Preston said, hooking Paul under the arm to help him into a chair. “I got you some ’cue.”

But as soon as Paul popped open the large Styrofoam takeout shell and saw the barbecue steaming before him—a limp heap of crumbling brisket and bias-cut slices of hot sausage—he put his hand to his mouth and began to gag.

“Whoa there!” said Preston, whisking it away. “Sorry, bud, I wun’t thinking.” He snapped the shell shut and buried it deep in his little dollhouse fridge, and then—rather expertly, Paul thought, once his stomach settled—steamed some vegetables for Paul, broccoli and peppers and squash. As Paul ate, Preston sat with him and nursed a cup of coffee, shooting concerned glances across the little table.

“Colonel approached
me
once,” Preston said quietly, without any preamble, “back when I first came to TxDoGS.”

Paul said nothing; he kept his eyes on his plate.

“Nearly took him up on it, too.” Preston pushed his coffee cup to one side and rested his forearms on the table. “I was a career marine, a colonel by time I retired. A real one,” he added, his eyes flaring. “I commanded men in battle, Paul, and now, here I was working as a security guard for minimum wage.” Paul met his eyes, and Preston must have seen something in his look because he added, “Let’s just say that from the bottom of a bottle, security guard looked like a step up.” Preston held Paul’s gaze. “But in the end,” he said, “I couldn’t stand that jumped-up little pastry chef. He was plenty pissed when I turned him down, but there wun’t a whole hell of a lot he could do about it.”

Preston explained how he had watched Bob Wier and J.J. fall into Colonel’s orbit. “I didn’t try hard enough to talk ’em out of it,” he said with some regret. “The way I was raised, Paul, I don’t hold with self-pity. You play the cards you’re dealt. Like the man says,” Preston went on, lifting his eyes to the ceiling as he quoted from memory, “ ‘I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted, I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to other people, and I require the same from them.’ ”