The Donors (14 page)

 

 

 

 

 

Jason heard Nathan much more clearly, but the anxiety it produced just made it harder for him to relax. The call room ceiling shimmered for a moment and the light seemed to fade, but Nathan's scared voice made him anxious and the lights came back up as if they were on a dimmer switch. Jason took a deep breath and tried to picture the cave as he remembered it from so long ago. He closed his eyes again and tried to imagine the hot wet feel that his memory told him to expect.

“I'm coming, buddy,” he mumbled and gave a long exhale. The room around him started to feel warm and heavy and the picture in his mind of the cave solidified. A small, little-boy voice from deep in his mind called out to him.

Don't go. The creatures are there and they are waiting for you.

Jason ignored his child voice and the picture in his mind became clearer. He pushed the childhood terror away like kicking off a blanket. He felt a cool, sweaty film form on his naked body and opened his eyes.

The low ceiling of the cave seemed much closer than he remembered and he reminded himself that he was a lot bigger than the last time he had been here. He sat up in the dirt and looked around.

The cave stretched out in both directions and disappeared into the dark. Scattered about on the dirt floor he saw several puddles formed by dark purple liquid which dripped in little streams from the walls. It looked a lot like old blood and seemed to ooze from the cave itself. Nathan failed to appear in either direction and he stood up, his head only inches from the irregular ceiling. Then he headed off slowly to the right, picking his way around the blood puddles. He listened intently for the grunting sound of the creatures from his childhood nightmares.

“Nathan,” he whispered softly. “Where are you, buddy?”

I'm hiding. I'm in a littler cave hiding from the Lizard Men. Please come find me, Jason. I'm scared and I don't want them to smell me.

Jason picked up his pace. As he moved the passage seemed to narrow and after a slight bend he saw it rose up to a ledge about fifty yards ahead. Jason almost missed the small low hole to his right, but saw it at the last moment. He crouched down and peered into the darkness. In the inky blackness he could see nothing and the thought of belly crawling into the little hole terrified him. He stuck his head in, down on all fours, and called softly into the dark.

“Are you in there, buddy?”

“Jason,” Nathan's scared but excited voice whispered back. “It's me. I'm in here.”

The fear disappeared, replaced by an overwhelming need to get to the boy—to hug him and make sure he was alright. Jason was relieved to find he was just small enough to stay up on all fours, keeping his belly out of the moist dirt. A short distance inside the hole it took a slight bend and just past the turn he saw him. Nathan sat back against the wall with his knees pulled up to his chest and rocked slowly back and forth.

“Jason!” he called out, a little louder than Jason would have liked. He moved toward his buddy and awkwardly wrapped one arm around him. He supported himself with some difficulty with the other, his shoulder jammed against the wall. Nathan wrapped both skinny arms around his neck and Jason noticed without surprise that the bandage was missing from his hand, though he still held it up, the fingers curled in a ball.

“I gotcha, son,” he said and felt tears from the boy's cheeks on his shoulder. “Are you okay?”

Nathan pulled back and wiped the tears from his face. He looked embarrassed that he was crying. “I think so,” he said in a trembling voice. “Steve is dead. They tore him apart and ate up his guts. It was so gross.” Nathan's voice cracked a little and Jason wanted desperately to take him away. “Jenny is there, too.”

The words felt like a knife through Jason's heart.

“Jenny? Is she okay?” he asked.

“I think so,” Nathan said and looked down at his knees. “The Lizard Men didn't want to mess with her, I think. They just ate up Steve and then disappeared.”

“Can you show me?” Jason asked, his hand now on Nathan's cheek.

Nathan looked at him and hesitated, then seemed to summon his courage. He nodded silently and pointed back out of the narrow hole. “It's back that way.”

The two of them crawled back into the larger passageway of the cave. Jason stood up. His back ached, but Nathan took his hand and pulled him up along the rise toward the ledge. He moved quickly, like he moved around in his own house, and Jason felt a tightness in his throat that the little boy had been here enough to be so familiar. As they approached the ledge, Nathan slowed and dropped onto his hands and knees. Together they crawled the last few yards.

“They might be back,” Nathan said without looking back, more to himself than to Jason. “I didn't smell the fart smell, though.”

That brought a flood of old memories and then a fresh one—the horrible smell in the alley when the creatures had disappeared. Everything clicked back into place.

The poop smell when they come and go? Remember? Remember smelling it when they took your mom?

Jason pushed the thought as far away as he could. Nathan arrived at the ledge, his head low, and peered down. Jason slid in beside him.

“She's gone,” Nathan whispered.

Jason looked down into the cavern. The horrible sight of Steve's dead and mutilated body didn't bother him much—he had seen lots of horrible shit in the ER. What choked him up was the realization that Nathan had watched it happen. Then Jason saw another body slumped over in the corner of the room, a black puddle of old blood like a halo around the head.

“Who's that?” Jason asked with some fear. He felt like he should know.

“Don't know,” Nathan answered. Jason realized the five-year-old's voice sounded steadier than his own. “He came yesterday.”

Yesterday.

Jason suddenly knew exactly who the body in the corner belonged to, but he needed to be sure. He also wanted to see where Jenny had been and make sure that he didn't see any blood or other evidence that she had been hurt, at least physically. He could see an area of disturbed dirt.

“Is that where Jenny was?” he asked and pointed.

“Yeah,” Nathan whispered.

Jason thought a moment. He sure as hell didn't want to be down there when the creatures came back, but he couldn't leave without being sure about the cop and Jenny. He would slip down real quick, check it out, and come right back.

“Stay here,” he whispered to Nathan, “I'll be right back.”

“No.” Nathan's voice trembled and Jason felt his tiny hand on his arm. “Don't leave me. I want to go with you.” The voice was full of tears. Jason suspected that Nathan hovered near his breaking point.

Jason stood, but stayed hunched over and squeezed Nathan's hand in his.

“Stay right with me and hold my hand,” he said, as if they were going to cross a street to get ice cream.

Together they descended the steep path into the larger cave. Nathan's hand tightened in his as they approached Steve's corpse and Jason held his arm back behind him, to put himself between Nathan and the body.

“Don't look, buddy,” he said paternally as he turned to see how Nathan was doing. Nathan shrugged. His eyes looked old.

“Already seen it,” he said simply.

Steve's body looked like the scene of a botched, amateur autopsy. The belly had been torn apart more than cut, and now lay gaping open and eerily empty. He wondered how the body looked back home on the other side. For a moment that thought, which came to him so naturally, confused him—then he remembered what it meant. Jason didn't really understand the difference or the connection between the cave and the world they had come from, but he knew that all of them, including what remained of Steve, somehow existed in both places. He felt a tug on his hand that brought him back and looked down. Nathan looked back at him anxiously.

“We should hurry in case the Lizard Men come back,” he said.

Jason tried to flash a reassuring smile, but felt a little more like he made the face of an infant with gas. They left Steve's body behind and headed toward the slumped body that lay face first in a pool of its own black blood and gray matter. The back of the police officer's head was nearly gone and Jason knew that if he rolled him over (which he had no friggin' intention of doing) there would be another hole where the right eye should have been. He looked fatter all bent over and naked, but he had never thought of Maloney as trim and fit. Jason looked at his ‘friend,' who he'd sometimes kidded about eating donuts, and swallowed hard.

“Come on,” he whispered to Nathan, who pulled back at his arm and stood on tippy-toes, trying to keep his feet out of the puddle of brains and blood. “Show me where Jenny was.”

Nathan took the lead and pulled Jason behind him. He walked a yard or two to the left of Maloney's corpse, then stopped and pointed down into the dirt without saying a word. Jason looked at the small area of disturbed wet ground. His imagination helped him create an outline of where Jenny had lay and thrashed about, but really it just looked like an oblong depression. There was a small area of wetter looking dirt, and Jason wondered if it was where her sweat had pooled or if his girlfriend had pissed herself. He felt tears trickle down his cheeks as he imagined her there, naked and scared, writhing in confusion. What did she see in her head? Was it her trips here that she saw as nightmares? Jason closed his eyes. Nathan squeezed his hand tighter.

“She's okay, I think,” he said—a parent reassuring a scared child. “I think we gotta go, Jason.”

Jason looked at his friend and smiled sadly. He decided that Nathan was the bravest child he had ever heard of.

And if you were that brave, we might not even be here now. If you had stopped them, Mom would still be alive.

Jason pressed the heel of one hand to the bridge of his nose, physically stifling the obnoxious asshole of a voice. Then looked back at the dirt where Jenny had been. What did she have to do with this? The only connection seemed to be that all three of them had been abused as kids (though for Nathan, childhood had ended only days ago) and even that seemed wrong somehow. Why? It was the pictures right? The ones in the apartment? The thought seemed so important that he couldn't put it off, but he couldn't quite put it together either. And where the hell did she go? Why not come here from her own bed in her apartment, where shifting back and forth would be as easy as dreaming? The answers felt really important but eluded him.

“Jason, please.” Nathan's voice tugged at him with the same scared insistence as the grasping hand on his arm. “Please, we gotta go.”

Jason snapped back. “Alright, big guy,” he said. “Let's get the hell out of here.” He led Nathan back up the sloping path to the ledge. As they approached the top, Jason felt a weird push, like a slight pressure change; his heart pounded in his chest. Without looking back, he scrambled the last few yards to the ledge and heaved Nathan roughly over the low rise and both of them collapsed in a painful heap in the dirt. Just as the dust cloud settled around them the horrible smell, like someone pulled a hot bag full of shit over his head, engulfed him and he struggled not to vomit.

“They're coming,” Nathan sounded terrified. He whimpered slightly. Jason put an arm around him and held him against his chest, their faces only a few inches apart.

“Shhh,” he whispered. “It's okay, buddy. I'm here and I won't let anything hurt you.”

 Nathan's blue eyes held his in desperation, full of a need to believe him. Jason watched as the boy shoved a dirty fist into his own mouth and then nodded.

Jason doubted there was a goddamn thing he could do to keep his young friend safe, but he also knew that he would die trying if he had to. He kept his arm around the boy, then slowly lifted his head just enough to see above the ledge and down into the cavern.

The creatures sauntered around Steve's corpse; Jason felt terror grab him by the throat at the sight of them. They looked exactly as he remembered and the memory explosion nearly made him gasp aloud. The cascade of images, of his dad, of the hospital, of his frequent trips here, running and crying as he tried to hide from those creatures, battered him and nearly paralyzed him with fear. He resisted, with great effort, the need to jump up and run crying back down the path behind him, the Lizard Men snapping at his legs.

“Ow,” a voice hissed from beside his head. He realized his grip on Nathan's arm had become ridiculously tight and he relaxed it, looking wide-eyed at the boy beside him. “They can only smell us if we're scaredy cats, I think,” Nathan whispered in his ear. “You gotta not be too scared or they'll find us.”

Jason nodded and risked another peek down below. The creatures stood very still in the middle of the cavern, right beside where Jenny's body had been. He saw that their heads were tilted back, mouths open to show long, yellowish teeth, their snouts up in the air.

They're smelling for you, you big scaredy cat. If they find you you'll look just like Steve. Control yourself or you and your boy will both be in big-shit trouble.

Jason slid his head back down beside Nathan's and closed his eyes. He took several long, deep breaths and felt his pulse slow a little in his temples. After a moment his breathing no longer sounded so ridiculously loud in his head. He opened his eyes and looked to see Nathan staring at him expectantly.

He's waiting for you to take care of him. How funny is that?

“Hold my hand and stay with me,” he said. “We're gonna head back to the little hole and hide there until we can get out of here, okay?”

Nathan nodded. “I think I can hear the voices a little louder. I think we can leave real soon.”

Jason listened for a moment but heard nothing. Then he realized that he lay alone in a quiet call room. There was no way he would hear the OR voices that Nathan heard. He took Nathan's hand and slid almost silently a few yards back down the path, then got up to his feet in a low crouch and started moving faster and faster back toward the dark bunny hole where he had found Nathan. Nothing about the little hole seemed scary, now.