Repairman Jack [07]-Gateways (44 page)

“They’ve got Anya.”

“The sons of bitches,” Dad said, straightening and reaching for the phone. “I’m calling the cops.”

Jack grabbed his arm. “Hold on a sec. I want to see this again—on the TV.”

“Fine. And while you’re setting that up, I’ll be calling—”

“Just wait, okay? Just let me see it again before we get officialdom involved.”

Dad reluctantly agreed, grumbling about wasting time as Jack wired the camera to the audio-visual inputs on the backside of the TV.

“This happened at least twelve hours ago, Dad. Maybe more. Another ten minutes isn’t going to matter.”

He finished plugging in the wires, then reran the movie. The TV screen offered over one hundred times the viewing area of the camera’s LCD. It offered sound as well. The movie began with the rattle of the lawn-ornament cans and Oyv’s barking, but that broke off with a high-pitched squeal just as the last of the clan reached the front of the house. A couple of minutes later the things streaked away. Jack was ready with his finger on the PAUSE button.

“Got ’em!” he said. He leaned closer to the screen. “But what the hell are they?”

The camera’s image intensification coupled with the speed of the things left little more than amorphous, blurry streaks on the screen, but there was enough resolution to reveal five shapes instead of three in the first batch. He’d missed the other two because they were farther from the camera and hadn’t caught as much light. He could see that the three in front had slightly curved bodies that reflected light like a shell might; their wings were fuzzy blurs.

“Y’ask me,” Carl said. “They look like flyin’ lobsters.”

Not a bad characterization, Jack thought. But lobsters didn’t fly, so what on earth were these?

Jack felt his neck muscles tighten. On earth…

Nothing on earth can harm you here.

But what if those flying lobsters weren’t from anywhere on earth? What if they were somehow from the Otherness? Semelee had gone down into that sinkhole. Maybe she’d found something down there that she could control like she did the creatures in the Glades.

Jack pulled the rolled-up paper towel out of his jeans pocket and unwrapped the little crystal shard.

“What have you got there?” Dad said.

“Not sure.” He handed it to him on the towel. “Careful. It’s sharp. Ever seen anything like it?”

“I did,” Carl said. “Saw one just like it stickin’ outta the tore-up wood on Miss Mundy’s door. I just figgered it was glass.”

Dad was holding it up, rotating it back and forth in the light. “You know, it almost looks like some weird sort of fang.”

Carl laughed. “Glass teeth! That’s funny!”

Dad lifted the beer bottle he’d been sipping at during the endless weather reports and scratched the fang’s point along the glass. It gave out a faint, high-pitched squeak as it scored the surface.

Dad frowned. “Not glass. Much harder. The only thing I know that can scratch glass like that is a diamond.”

“If it is a tooth,” Jack said, “that means that Anya was attacked by things with diamond teeth.”

They all sat silent for a moment, then Jack restarted the movie. They watched more of the things fly out, then the clan crowd into the house. When they emerged this time he kept freezing the frames but got no better view of what they were carrying than before. What else could it be but Anya?

But alive or dead?

As the movie ended again, Dad slapped his thighs. “That does it. Time to call 9-1-1.”

“Don’t bother, Dad.”

“Why on earth not?”

Jack pulled the Glock from the SOB holster and checked the magazine: full.

“Because I’m going after her and I don’t want them getting in the way.”

3

Tom could only stare at his son. He’d sensed that the Jack who had gone into Anya’s ruined house was a different Jack from the one who’d come out. But now he’d changed further. His mild brown eyes had turned to stone; he seemed remote, as if he’d left the room without moving his body.

“After her? Are you crazy? We trumped a couple of them once because it was a controlled situation and we had surprise on our side. But all that’s changed now. You can’t expect to stroll in there alone and—”

“Won’t be alone,” Carl said. “I’ll come along.”

Tom noticed Jack’s cold eyes warm briefly at this simple man’s unadorned courage. And in that moment he wished Jack were looking at him like that.

“Not necessary, Carl,” Jack said.

“’Tis. She’s a good lady. Lotsa people look at me funny, some don’t even want me around. But she always smiled at me and when it was hot she gave me lemonade and cookies and stuff like that. My own mother never treated me that good. And besides, the clan ain’t got no right to do that to her. Semelee’s gone crazy. Ever since she come up outta those lights she’s been different. Scary. Who knows what she’s got in mind for Miss Mundy. We gotta get her back.”

“But that’s what we have police for!” Tom cried.

He’d resisted the urge to chime in and say he’d go along too. Anya was a friend, a good one, and his blood curdled at the thought of her in the hands of a bunch of swampland inbreds. But it was just because he cared about her that he had to stop this craziness. Jack’s gung-ho plan might wind up putting Anya in greater danger. Might even get her killed.

“And in case you two would-be vigilantes haven’t noticed,” he added, “there’s a Category-Three hurricane blowing out there.”

“Exactly why we’ve got to take care of this,” Jack said. “Who’re you going to call? The Novaton police? Their whole department, along with every other cop south of Miami, is going to be tied up with the hurricane emergency. They’ll be busy with evacuation, shelters, looting prevention. You know the drill. A missing-person problem will be put on a back burner till the storm’s passed. Hell, we don’t even have proof she was taken.”

“But the movie—”

“—will be great in court. But do you think it will get a bunch of cops running around in boats out in the Everglades looking for a particular hummock in the middle of a hurricane?”

Tom had to admit he doubted it—but only to himself. Under no circumstances did he want Jack going out there—not even with Carl, who Tom couldn’t see as much help.

“Carl,” Jack said, pointing to the screwdriver protruding from his sleeve. “Do me a favor and use that to take the medicine cabinet out of the wall in the bathroom.”

Carl gave him a strange look—imagine that—then shrugged and nodded and said, “Okay.”

“Medicine cabinet?” Tom said. “What—?”

Jack turned his back and headed for the hall closet.

“Look, Dad,” he said as he knelt by the toolbox and began rummaging through its contents. “I don’t know for sure, but I think that taking Anya has something to do with the lights. But the lights only last a couple of days. By tonight or early tomorrow morning they’ll be gone for another six months.”

“What lights?”

“Oh, yeah. Right. I forgot.” He pulled a socket wrench from the toolbox and headed for the dinette table. “You don’t know about the lights.”

“Care to en
light
en me?” Tom said, following. “And what do you think you’re going to do with that wrench?”

“You’ll see. As for the lights, forget about them for now. Take too long to explain. What matters is that after the lights go out, Semelee and Company will have no more need to hang around their lagoon. Good chance they’ll be gone by sunup tomorrow.”

“And take Anya with them?”

Jack gave him a stony look before he crouched under the table and began loosening the nuts that fastened it to its support pillar.

“I doubt it. She’s the one whose dog chewed a hole in the side of that big mutant gator, remember? I’m worried they’ll feed her to it before they go—if they haven’t already.”

Tom felt his knees go rubbery. “No…they couldn’t.”

“Let’s hope not.”

“Hey!” Carl called from the bathroom. “They’s only one screw holdin’ this cabinet in place and that’s only halfway in.”

“I know,” Jack called back. “Just twist it out.”

One screw? Tom brushed aside questions about his medicine cabinet. The thought of Anya being hurt overshadowed all that.

“Jack, we’ve got to call the police. Or the Coast Guard, or the Park Service.”

Jack stuck his head out from under the table and gave him a you’ve got-to-be-kidding look.

“She’s a friend, Dad. A better friend than you know. And I owe her.”

“For what?”

“For you being alive.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She’s the one who reported your accident to the police twenty minutes before it happened.”

“That’s as crazy as going out in this storm. She told you that?”

“She didn’t. But I’ve no question in my mind that’s what happened. She knows things, Dad. All sorts of things. And now she needs help. When a good friend needs help, you don’t call on somebody else. You go yourself.”

The words struck a chord deep within Tom. Yes, he knew that. He’d been taught that. He’d lived that. But where had Jack come by it?

And yet he couldn’t allow himself to bend here, couldn’t let Jack go out into that storm against twenty men.

“Where’s that written?”

Jack slipped out from under the table and rose to his feet, his face barely a foot away. He tapped a finger on the center of his forehead.

“In here. Right in here.”

Yes…that was where it would be. But not the only place.

He tapped his son’s chest, over the heart. “In there too.”

Jack nodded. “Yeah. There too.”

And as they stood staring at each other, Tom flashed back to Korea. That had been the Marine code: Nobody gets left behind. At least nobody still breathing. Sometimes you had to leave your dead, but you never left your living. If someone was stranded, or hurt and unable to get out on his own, you went in and got him.

And you didn’t call on anyone else because there wasn’t anyone better. You were US Marines, the toughest sons of bitches on earth. It was a matter of pride. If you couldn’t do it, no one could.

Back at Chosin, when Tom took that piece of shrapnel in the gut, he’d radioed in that he’d been hit and couldn’t make it out. He’d expected his buddies to
want
to come and get him, but figured there was no way with all the shit coming down on the Fifth. But damned if three of them hadn’t shown up after dark and carried him out.

“Help me lift off this top,” Jack said.

“What on earth for?”

“Let’s just do it.”

Tom grabbed one side, Jack the other. They lifted it, tilted it, and leaned it against the kitchenette counter. Then Jack reached into the hollow interior of the post and came up with a black plastic bag. Its lumpy contents clunked together as he laid it on the counter.

“What the hell? How’d that get in there?”

“I put it in the other day. Let me tell you, I had one hell of a time maneuvering that tabletop around on my own.”

“But what’ve you got in there?”

Jack reached in and came out with a fist-size lump of metal that he flipped over the counter. Tom caught it, saw what it was—a smooth metal sphere the size of a tennis ball, with a key ring at the top attached to a safety clip—and felt his heart trip over a beat.

“A grenade?”

“M-67s. I had a dozen sent down after seeing that gator.”

“Sent down when? I never saw any—” And then it hit him. “The toys. They were in the toys, right?”

Jack gave him a tight smile. “Right. I also—”

“Hey!” Carl called from the bathroom. “You got a gun in this wall!”

“What?”

A gun? In his wall? Tom started toward the bathroom but Jack got there first. Carl had pulled the medicine cabinet from the wall, exposing the studs and the unfinished backside of the Sheetrock of the opposite wall. The end of an empty metal tube jutted a couple of inches up from the lower end of the space. It had a blued-steel finish and looked like an open plumbing pipe until Tom spotted the bead sight on the end and realized this was the business end of a shotgun barrel.

Jack fished it out and handed it to Carl. Its black polymer stock barely reflected the overhead lights.

“Ever use a shotgun?”

Carl laughed. “You kiddin’? Fed myself mostly by fishin’ and huntin’ before I came to work here. If’n I wasn’t no good, I’da starved.” He took it from Jack and hefted it. “But I ain’t never see one like this before.”

Neither had Tom. He saw a breechlock, a magazine tube, but where was the slide handle?

“It’s a Benelli—an M1 Super 90, to be exact. I think the semi-auto action will work best for you.”

“A semi-auto shotgun?” Tom said. “I didn’t even know they made such a thing.”

“She’s a beauty,” Carl said. “I like the rubber grip. Kinda like a pistol.”

“Very much like a pistol. Will you be able to handle it?”

“Sure. I told you—”