Resurrection (29 page)

The rain had turned into a deluge again and Reed could barely hear himself think. He’d left the bus some thirty minutes before. It should have been a pretty easy trek, but somehow he’d gotten turned around. He didn’t know Bethany very well. But the bus had broken through the barrier at Coogan Avenue and sped down a hill, around a corner, then into the water.

But if that was the case…where was that damn hill and where was Coogan Avenue?

Reed paused, the water sloshing around him, a lake clogged with dead leaves and trash and bobbing debris. The rain poured down and visibility was shit. It was like being lost in some alien world. It was hard to get your bearings when you could only see ten or twenty feet in any direction.

You got turned around, you idiot. That’s what happened. It’s this damn rain. You made for that corner the bus took and instead of going up Coogan Avenue, you turned into a side street.

Which meant, of course, that instead of getting out of Bethany, he was deeper into it now. Not good, not good at all.

Swearing under his breath, realizing he had just made an even bigger mess of things and doubtful that he would even be able to find the bus now until the rain let up, Reed moved through the foul water towards the buildings lining the street. He pushed a floating tree branch out of his way and watched an overturned rowboat float by like a dead alligator gone belly up.

But the rain was pouring down with such ferocity, he could not even see those buildings, let alone find them. So he stopped and felt the panic rising up inside him like lava working its way up the cone of a volcano. Nothing but rain and gray mist and rising water and…
dammit, this was a real lovely fix, now wasn’t it?

Just Reed alone, a bad case of the heebie-jeebies blooming in his guts. He turned this way, then that, the rain forcing him to cover his head with his soaking jacket. Lot of good that did to keep him dry. He felt something bump against his leg and he uttered a dry little scream.

Oh, for chrissake, you got to get it togther here.

He stopped, breathing hard, his heart pounding away. Just breathe in and breathe out. Calm down. Easier said than done, though. Being out unprotected in the streets like this was like being lost in a wind tunnel full of blowing water and spray. Even though everything was wide open in every direction, he felt claustrophobic like he had woken in a box.

Okay now, follow your instincts. That’s the way.

He started towards where he thought the buildings were and something else bumped his leg and this time he just swore angrily. Then he moved off again and tripped on something, went face-first right into the water, fighting his way up, brushing wet leaves from his face. And then he went down again like a foot had been stuck out in his path. He came up yet again, wiping water from his eyes, trying to blink them clean. He bumped into something else, but this thing was adrift.

He shoved against it with one hand and felt his fingers contact something cold and fleshy.

Right in front of him were
bodies.

Yes, three bodies face down doing the dead man’s float…except now that he had bumped into them, they were circling like sharks until they collided into one another again.

Reed made himself look.

A teenage boy and an elderly man and a young woman with a braided dark ponytail that had washed around her neck like a rope. Her blouse, which barely covered her in the first place, was drawn up around her shoulders. Her flesh was impossibly white and smooth like molded plastic. She was thin and Reed could plainly see the ribbing of her spine. There was a tattoo of a rising, ornamental sun at the small of her back.

Floaters.

Jesus, just like over in River Town.

Reed felt more than a little sickened now. He splashed away from the bodies, telling himself that they were dead and completely harmless. Christ, if he’d bumped into a sack of potatoes he wouldn’t be freaking out like this. And, ultimately, a sack of potatoes was no more dangerous than a few floating cadavers. Yes, it all made perfect sense. It was very logical…but why wouldn’t his brain accept it? Why was it thinking things he could not even bear to acknowledge?

Where were those buildings?

He splashed forward a bit and suddenly went ramrod straight, sensing movement. He just stopped dead, his muscles bunching and his senses tripping over one another trying give him some kind of input. He spun around in a circle, but there was nothing there. But the idea that there
might
have been sent him into spasms of uncontrollable shivering.

“Is someone there?” he called out. “Anyone?”

His voice sounded weak and was quickly overcome by the lashing rain. Out of the corner of his eyes, he kept catching glints of movement, figures or forms that melted into the grayness of the storm whenever he looked. It was his imagination. It had to be his goddamned imagination because what he had seen had not looked solid like flesh and blood, but something flapping and membranous like a sheet.

Terror raced through him and this time he could not get a handle on it.

He raced off, stumbling through the water and it was deep and thick. Like trying to run in a dream, like he was dragging cinderblocks behind him. He saw leaves and refuse, then those bodies again.

Except the girl was not among them.

She just floated off, you goddamn moron,
a voice in his head said like it was extremely pissed-off.
Don’t you be thinking anything else. She…just…drifted…away.

Reed tried to keep it together.

He was out there probably in the middle of the street turning circles. Enough already. Balling his hands into fists, he strode purposely forward and within a minute, he spotted the buildings. That wasn’t so damn hard, now was it?

The buildings were all two and three story affairs made of the same soiled brick. The upper floors were apartments, he guessed, and below, street level, dentist’s offices and pharmacies and curio shops. All of them dark and empty, pooling with shadow. Through the plate glass windows, he could see boxes and things bobbing. So much for inventory. Above, all those tall rectangular windows were simply wet and gray, beaded with raindrops.

The thing to do, Reed decided, was to duck into one of the storefronts for a bit, see if the rain subsided, then he’d just have to back-track the best he could.

It was a plan and it made sense.

He started towards the front of a silk-screening shop and above he heard a creaking sound cut through the rain. He looked up. One of the windows on the second floor was open.

It had not been open before.

Tilting his head back, he called out: “Hey! Is someone up there?”

There was nothing but the sound of the rain, a few lonesome breaths of wind creating a spray that he had to blink from his eyes. He was certain that window had not been open before and the idea of that filled him with a brief rush of terror. His heart fluttered like a trapped moth, then settled down.

Don’t you dare start that shit again.

He stood in the flooded streets, water falling all around him. It had not gotten deeper since he had left the bus, but it sure as hell had not retreated any, either. As he waited and he did not really know for what, a dead cat floated by followed by an empty coffee can. A few sticks. And more leaves, of course. The water itself was
dark and oily looking.
God only knew what was in it.

Reed kept thinking of Lucy Costigan, the soccer coach. Her of the hard, sleek body and bouncing ponytail. If she hadn’t decided to stay in Park Falls with her fucking sister none of this would be happening. And, man, wasn’t it amazing that in the middle of this mess he was still thinking with his dick? Because he was and he knew it. If Lucy was there she’d be wet and cold, her nipples hard against her shirt like thimbles and Reed would put his hands on them and—

He let out a cry as something wet slapped into the back of his neck.

He almost went under again, whirling about crazily and that’s when he saw what it was. Sure, it was floating there in the rain-speckled water: a doll. A little ragdoll with a stitched mouth and shoebutton eyes. As he watched, it slipped beneath the surface and sank.

Reed knew it didn’t jump on him of its own accord.

He looked up and there was a woman standing before that opened window on the second floor. She was terribly pale and she wore no shirt. He could clearly see the naval of her flat belly and her round breasts quite clearly. She smiled and waved. Her mouth was moving and she was saying something, but he couldn’t hear what it was.

It was then that it struck him with a dreamy sort of realization that the woman in the window was Lucy Costigan. Well, it couldn’t be because Lucy was in Park Falls and that woman up there looked to be a brunette. But the resemblance was uncanny. Same big dark eyes and high cheekbones, long neck, and even the breasts…just as he’d imagined them.

She was trapped up there.

Sure, that was it. She needed someone to rescue her and when they did she would be impossibly grateful and…

And Reed, not paying one lick of attention to his instincts and that high alarmed voice in his head, strolled right up to the door of a curio shop called Leslie’s Notions. The door was open and he waded right in there, bumping past floating boxes and plastic bags. It was shadowy in there and the fear he had felt before had not entirely abandoned him. Some childlike sense of horror told him that any moment something huge and shaggy and oyster-eyed would rise from the standing water and sink its teeth into him.

But as quickly as that image had inserted itself, it fled.

Because Reed felt an exhilaration now, one born from a childhood spent reading fairy tales and heroic fantasy. There was a damsel in distress and he would now rescue her. It was the thing to do. It seemed right and more so, it simply felt right.

At the rear of the store, a door stood open and Reed found stairs there. He began to climb them. About half way up, he stopped again, just wondering frantically what he thought he was doing here. This was insane…yet, so necessary. He could not have stopped himself even if he had wanted to. His heart was telling him to rescue Lucy Costigan even if it was really not Lucy Costigan.

So up he went, glad to be out of the water now.

The steps creaked and his entire body was so waterlogged it felt clumsy and heavy. There was a bad stink up here, one that he associated with shit and raw sewage, but also crawling things, profuse and many-legged.

But that didn’t stop him.

He found a corridor and a waiting room. The door was closed, but he could see wet footprints leading up to it and then he knew it had been these same footprints that he had followed out of the water and up to this door.

The smell was worse up here, just flyblown and rancid, a poisoned smell of corpses afloat in stagnant ponds. And this made Reed again ask himself what in the fuck he thought he was doing.

But then he heard the approach of squishing feet.

“Lucy?” he said. “Is that you, Lucy?”

“Yes,” a voice said and he thought for one moment that it sounded like wind blown through a reedy pipe, hollow and haunted.

The door opened and Lucy was standing there.

Reed went to her as she came to him, melted into his arms and it was then he saw that braided dark ponytail plastered to one bony shoulder with wetness and knew it was the floating dead woman. But he didn’t honestly care. He held onto her and she was cold as the guts of a dead fish and only marginally less slimy.

“Down below, down below,” she said in that voice of windy churchyards. “Down in the dark spaces, that’s where I’ll take you.”

Reed kissed her lips and they were frigid and waxy. Her bland white face was perforated with tiny holes as if something had been tunneling into her. Her flesh was not only cold, but gelid and wormy. As she pulled him closer against her, one of her breasts mashed flat and then popped like bubble in a spew of black fluid.

But by then, Reed did not care.

He let his Lucy take him to the window and then out of it, falling together into the surging dead sea of Bethany. He might have screamed once as they splashed down, his lungs quickly filling with rainwater. But that was it. Looping him in those boneless arms, she dove beneath the streets of Bethany, pulling Reed through those nighted tunnels and into the forever darkness of the rushing, cloistered underworld below where there was only silt and black water and decomposition.

All in all, Reed’s death was almost peaceful.

8

It was coming.

Night was coming.

Like some dead clock chiming just over the gray, fuming horizon, echoing with the sound of midnight down mahogany corridors, night was surely coming. And it was coming with menace and murk and malevolence, and what could you really do but fold up like a flower engulfed by night-frost or lay still like a corpse tucked away in a moonlight latticed box and just hope it would pass you by without stopping or lingering and reaching out for you?