The Light at the End (36 page)

At 5:15, it began to pour. For days, it had been threatening, climbing in humidity, trickling occasionally, carefully building up pressure. Now it let loose in a torrential flow, shattering the still-dark sky with thunder and buzz-saw bolts of lightning.

Danny Young could barely make out the shape of the phone booth through the driving rain. He ran toward it, bowleggedly hopping over the pools and streams that constantly formed in the street. In the fifteen seconds it took for him to step inside the booth and shut the door behind him, he was thoroughly soaked.

“Son of a bitch,” he mumbled absently, hugging himself. He dug into his breast pocket, pulled out three soggy packs of matches and his joint case, its metal and stone exterior dripping. “Damn it!” he yelled, flipping the case open. There was only one joint left. He noted with relief that it was only slightly damp.

Danny had been wandering the streets for just over four hours, shuffling and smoking and mumbling to himself, Sleep had been out of the question. Going home had been out of the question. All he could do was think about Claire, play it over and over in his head, until the stretch of hours and the dope-smoke haze combined to make the memory fade into something like a dream.

Now, with the rain pounding all four glass walls of his coffinlike enclosure, he found himself staring at the telephone. His own mind seemed suddenly clearer; much clearer, in fact, than it had felt since… since…

Since she died
, he thought, and then all the other thoughts came piling back with renewed clarity, and then his eyes were staring deeply into the narrow darkness of the coin slot while questions began forming in the bright space behind his eyes.

What went down after I split?
he wondered.
Did they get him? Are they still after him?

Are any of them still alive?

The coin slot of the pay phone stared back at him like a single winking eye. There were, he knew, plenty of dimes left in his pocket. All he needed was one. One phone call. And then he’d know.

“I’m afraid,” he whispered out loud. He laughed. “No
shit
, I’m afraid!” he chided himself. But his fingers were digging into his right pants pocket.

When the phone rang, Josalyn expected it to be Joseph or Doug. She’d been beeping their pants off for the last three minutes, punching their numbers in over and over with steadily increasing desperation, her gaze flipping back and forth between the door and the switchboard. “Come on, Goddamn it,” had hissed through her teeth so many times that it had almost become a mantra. So when the phone rang, she let out a nervous, triumphant whoop and snatched up the receiver like a starving woman at an open buffet.

“Joseph? Doug?” she shouted.

“Danny,” said the thin voice from the other end. “Is this Josalyn? I… I’m sorry, but…”

“Danny?” Josalyn actually had to stop for a second, remember who Danny
was
. Then it came back, and she practically gibbered into the phone, “Danny, where are you? Can you get in here right away?
Please
.”

“What?” Danny’s voice was a tinny squeak. “What’s going on?”

Josalyn bit down on her lower lip to keep it from trembling while she pulled herself together. “Rudy’s coming,” she said finally. “He’s on his way here. I don’t know how he found us, but he did, and he’s coming, and we need everybody out here
now
. Can you get here? Can you do it?”

A moment of silence, from the other end.

“Can you do it?” she repeated, forcing calm, keeping her voice level with the last remaining threads of her composure. If Danny didn’t answer, she was going to scream.

But it wasn’t necessary. Danny’s voice squeezed through the tiny speaker, sounding suddenly clearer, stronger. “I’m on my way,” he said. “Don’t worry. I’ll kill that bastard myself, if I have to.”

“Thank you,” she breathed. All the teeth in the world couldn’t stop her lips from trembling now. “Hurry. Please.”

“You got it,” Danny said, and hung up.

Josalyn just sat there, mutely, clutching the receiver. Which was a good thing, as Joseph called only a moment later, briefly complaining that every phone he hit for the last five minutes was out of order.

“Joseph and Stephen are on their way,” she informed Jerome a minute later. “Tommy’s gone. Something happened… I guess we’ll find out later.” She lit a cigarette with trembling fingers. “And Danny’s coming, too. I don’t know what his story is, either.”

“And Rudy’s coming.” Jerome’s dark eyes were moist and frightened. They could have been her own;
would
have been, if the responsibility hadn’t been thrust upon her now.

Allan was down for the count. All the energy had drained out of him over the last twenty minutes. He’d been working on his fifth beer when it happened; it lay, half-empty, on the desk beside his folded arms, the head resting upon them. Everything… the beer, the tension, the endlessly stretching hours… had finally worn him down. And he was out: deeply, sonorously
out
.

They’d tried shouting at him, shaking him, sitting him upright. The best they could get was a mumbled
whuzzizis?
a blank ten-second stare from his bloodshot eyes. Then he was gone again.

“What are we going to do?” Jerome was asking. Josalyn shrugged, sighed, wiped sweat from her brow; she glanced over at Allan, back over to the door, and then up at Jerome again. He was dancing lightly from foot to foot. She looked at him quizzically, and he forced a grin, saying, “I have to wee-wee.”

“Well, for Christ’s sakes, do it now!” she yelled, managing a weak smile of her own. “And while you’re at it, fill up one of these empties with water. We can pour it on his head, if we have to.” Gesturing at Allan. “We have to be ready when Rudy gets here.”

We’ve got to be ready
. Jerome nodded, grabbed up an empty, and hopped over to the bathroom. The door closed behind him. Josalyn watched, fighting down the icy chill inside her, clammy fist clenched around the base of the metal cross.
We’ve got to be ready when Rudy comes. We’ve got to hold him until Joseph gets here. If anyone can kill him, Joseph can.

There was no choice in the matter, no question in her mind. Fate, the night, and whatever gods there were had chosen her as living bait for the final confrontation. She had to be ready. No felling to pieces, no running away, no passive acquiescence to the end. She would live, or she would die, but she would do them fighting.

Like Ian
…

She winced, blinking back the image of him that was starting to form in her mind. She looked at Allan… the washed-out features, the dark and puffy eyelids in repose, the slack and gently snoring mouth… and a sudden wave of compassion stole through her. She wished that she could just let him sleep, awaken in the morning to a neat and happy resolution, unblemished by the horror to come. She wished that there were some way to spare him… to spare them
all
… from any further unpleasantness.

She closed her eyes, and Ian was there: his voice, his presence, very much like he was in the dream, long ago, saying
it’s alright, he can’t hurt you, he can’t touch you now
. She moaned, low in her throat, wishing that it were true and not just a dream brought on by the hour and the stress, wishing he were really there beside her…

There was a sound at the door.

Josalyn’s eyes opened. For a moment, she couldn’t see anything through the mist that clouded the glass. Then she spotted the red eyes, peering in through the window. The eyes like beacons.

That summoned her forward.

A tiny voice in the back of her mind screamed,
NO! NO! DON’T LOOK AT HIM, FOR GOD’S SAKE, JOSALYN!
Then the voice cut off, and her body went rigid, and her mind went completely silent of thought.

Come here
. His voice, from the emptiness within,
Come here, bay-bee
. A giggle of glee.
Oh, coochie-coochie-coochie, little baby, come to Daddy
…

She rose.

Nice Poopsie.

A blank thing, sucked of will, Josalyn moved toward the door.

Pretty Poopsie.

The cross slipped, unnoticed, from her hand and clattered to the floor.

Nice…

Her empty hand closed around the doorknob, twisted it. She couldn’t hear the sudden howl of wind and rain, the flush of the toilet behind her.

When he took her in his arms, she couldn’t feel a thing.

Allan awoke in a cold, stinging sweat. His vision was bleary, and his head felt like it was packed full of mud; but an alarm had gone off, somewhere at the core of him, jolting him into sudden, sharp awareness. He stared at his folded arms, the switchboard, the wall. He remembered where he was. “Josalyn?” he muttered thickly…

…and the alarm went off again, strong this time, more shrill and incisive. He knew, before he turned, what he was going to see.

“NO!” he shrieked, riveted to his seat. Rudy grinned back at him, slick as a water rat, and then sank his teeth into Josalyn’s neck.

Something snapped in Allan Vasey’s brain. He jumped up, still shrieking, and broke into something between a stagger and a run. His hip slammed into the edge of the checkout counter as he rounded it. It didn’t faze him. He kept on coming.

Josalyn’s back was arched, her head thrown back. Rudy was making a thin sucking sound, her blood jetting into him, fainter than a whisper. Allan’s left hand found a handful of Rudy’s hair and yanked back sharply; his right hand grabbed Josalyn by the shoulder and ripped her away from the vampire’s arms.

“COCKSUCKER!” he screamed, rearing back with his right, still clutching Rudy’s hair with the other. He swung with all his strength, catching Rudy in the jaw. Rudy staggered backwards, looking stunned.

Then he smiled.

“Nice try,” he said, and attacked.

The bathroom door opened just as Allan slammed flat against the countertop, Rudy astride him. Josalyn just stood there like a mannequin, staring dully, as Rudy grabbed Allan by the beard and pulled his head back viciously.

Jerome yelled and rushed forward, grabbing Rudy in a headlock and trying to knock him off the counter. Rudy whipped his head around suddenly, raking his teeth along the soft underside of Jerome’s forearm. A black puckering chasm opened up in the dark flesh, and Jerome wailed like a dying baby.

It may have been the scream, or the fact that Rudy’s attention was distracted. Josalyn had no way of knowing. But she found herself standing there, staring, while Rudy rode Allan like a rodeo star and Jerome collapsed to his knees.

My God
, she mouthed, no wind behind it.
My God, my God
. There was a dull throbbing pain in the side of her neck. Her hand went up to massage it, came away with a thin smear of blood. “Omigod,” she croaked, staggering back a step in horror.

Then her gaze fell upon the cross: on the floor, less than five feet away, where she’d dropped it. It shimmered faintly in the overhead light.

Slowly at first, then madly faster, she moved past the struggling figures and wrapped one fist around the cross. It seemed to pulsate in her hand like a living thing: warm and vibrant and deadly.

And then she was coming up behind Rudy, both hands on the cross, hefting it like a Louisville Slugger. She wanted to call his name, to make him turn, so that he would see her face when the moment came. But she didn’t want to blow her chance; if she did, they were all dead, and she knew it.

Rudy was mechanically pounding Allan’s head against the counter. The dispatcher’s arms flapped limply down either side; his legs were no longer even kicking. It occurred to Josalyn, fleetingly, that it might already be too late to save him. She thought about his twinkling eyes, his constantly burning pipe, his smile. She flashed back over the hours spent at his side, manning the phones, weathering disaster after disaster, sinking deeper and deeper into helplessness and despair and persisting despite it. She saw him in the moment that the call had come in about Armond and T.C.; she saw him comforting Doug, compassion burning in his eyes; she saw him on Bleecker Street, just outside The Other End, tight-faced as he gave his final good-night hug to Ian…

All this, in the second before she swung forward with the cross and struck Rudy squarely at the base of the skull.

The world went white with pain. If a billion gibbering demons were set afire inside his head, their cumulative scream would have been no louder than the one that went off when the cross hit, knocking him forward, not even aware that his hands had slackened and set Allan free, not even aware that he was falling. He did a clumsy flip off the counter, landed on his neck with a sickening crunch that would signify a broken neck in a mortal man. There was no sight. There was no sound. Just a pain so intense as to be an abstraction, something beyond a nervous system’s ability to comprehend… something to stagger the mind of God.

Rudy scuttled backwards across the floor, howling insanely. He didn’t see Josalyn come around the counter, didn’t see the fixed expression of vengeance on her face, didn’t see the incandescent golf swing as the cross came around again, slamming upward into his face, breaking his nose, burning its shape into his flesh, lifting him off the floor and crashing him backwards through the storefront window.

And then he was on the sidewalk, in the rain; and though the pain still screamed through him like smelting iron, he could see Spring Street stretching out in either direction. Mindless, he struggled to his feet. His knees gave, cracked hard against the pavement. He didn’t feel it. Something else had taken over. He got back up and staggered east, his breath rasping like gravel down a chute, his dead heart pounding.

Staggering east, dangerously close to the first rays of dawn that threatened to cut through the dense cloud cover.

It was now 5:30, precisely.

Josalyn was tending to Jerome when the van pulled up, three minutes later. She had soaked a paper towel in holy water and was cleansing the wound, having already mopped up most of the blood. Her hunch had paid off: they were both amazed by how quickly the pain and swelling receded.