Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place
Page 28
researchers. Bobby referred to instructions in Lee Chen's code book and
entered the restricted files through a complicated series of maneuvers
that circumvented SSA security.
He was unhappy about breaking the law, but it was the way of high-tech
life that you never got the maximum benefit your data-gathering system
if you played strictly by the rules. Computers were instruments of
freedom, and government were to one degree or another instruments of
repression; two and could not always exist in harmony.
He obtained the six numbers and addresses for the Frank Pollards living
in California.
"Now what?" Frank wondered.
"Now," Bobby said, "I'll use these numbers and addresses to cross
reference with the California Department of Motor Vehicles, all of the
armed forces, state police, major city police, other government agencies
to get descriptions of these Frank Pollards. As we learn their height,
weight, hair color of their eyes, race... we'll gradually eliminate
them one by one. Better yet, if one of them is you, and if you've
served in the military or been arrested for a crime, we might even be
able to turn up a picture of you in one of those and confirm your
identity with a photo match." StarTING AT the desk, cadicorner from
each other, Julie and Hal removed the rubber bands from more than half
of the packets of cash. They sorted through the hundred-dollar bills,
trying to determine if some of them had consecutive serial numbers that
might indicate they were stolen from a bank, savings and loan, or other
institution.
Suddenly Hal looked up and said,
"Why do those flowerlike sounds and drafts precede Frank when he
teleports himself?"
"Who knows?" Julie said. "Maybe it's displaced air following him down
some tunnel in another dimension, from the place he left to the place
he's going."
"I was just thinking.... If this Mr. Blue is real, and if he's
searching for Frank, and if Frank heard those flutes and felt those
gusts in that alleyway... then Mr. Blue is also able to teleport."
"Yeah. So?"
"So Frank's not unique. Whatever he is, there's another one like him.
Maybe even more than one."
"Here's something else to think about," Julie said. "If Mr. Blue can
teleport himself, and if he finds out where Frank is, we won't be able
to defend a hiding place from him. He'll be able to pop up among us.
And what if he arrived with a submachine gun, spraying bullets as he
materialized?" After a moment of silence, Hal said, "You know,
gardening has always seemed like a pleasant profession. You need a
lawnmower, a weed whacker, a few simple tools. There's not much
overhead, and you hardly ever get shot at."
BOBBY FOLLOWED Frank into the office, where Julie and Hal were examining
the money. Putting a sheet of paper on the desk, he said,
"Move over, Sherlock Holmes. The world now has a greater detective."
Julie angled the page so she and Hal could read it together. It was a
laser-printed copy of the information that Frank had filed with the
California Department of Motor Vehicles when he had last applied for an
extension of his driver's license.
"The physical statistics match," she said.
"Is your first name really Francis and your middle name Ezekiel?"
Frank nodded.
"I didn't remember until I saw it. But it is me, all right. Ezekiel."
Tapping the printout, she said,
"This address in El Encanto Heights-does it ring a bell?"
"No. I can't even tell you where El Encanto is."
"It's adjacent to Santa Barbara," Julie said.
"So Bobby tells me. But I don't remember being their Except..."
"What?" Frank went to the window and looked out toward the distant sea,
above which the sky was now entirely blue. A few early gulls swooped in
arcs so huge and smoothly that their exuberance was thrilling to watch.
Clearly, Frank was neither thrilled by the birds nor charmed by the
view.
Finally, still facing the window, he said, "I don't recall being in El
Encanto Heights... except that every time I hear the name, my stomach
sort of sinks, you know, like I'm on a roller coaster that's just taken
a plunge. And when I try to think about El Encanto, strain to remember
it, my heart pounds, and my mouth goes dry, and it's a little harder to
get my breath So I think I must be repressing any memories I have of the
place, maybe because something happened to me there, some thing bad...
something I'm too scared to remember."
Bobby said, "His driver's license expired seven years ago and according
to the DMV's records, he never tried to renew it. In fact, sometime
this year he'd have been weeded out even from their dead files, so we
were lucky to find this before they expunged it." He laid two more
printouts on the desk.
"Move over, Holmes and Sam Spade."
"What're these?"
"Arrest reports. Frank was stopped for a traffic violation once in San
Francisco a little more than six years ago. The second time was on
Highway 101, north of Ventura, five years ago. He didn't have a valid
driver's license either time and, because of his odd behavior, he was
taken into custody." The photographs that were a part of both arrest
reports showed a slightly younger, even pudgier man who was without a
doubt their current client.
Bobby pushed aside some of the money and sat on the edge of her desk.
"He escaped from jail both times, so they're looking for him even after
all these years, though probably not too hard, since he wasn't arrested
for a major crime."
Frank said, "I draw a blank on that too."
"Neither report indicates how he escaped," Bobby said,
"but I suspect he didn't saw his way through the bars or dig a tunnel or
whittle a gun out of a bar of soap or use any of the long accepted,
traditional methods of jailbreak. Oh, no, not our Frank."
"He teleported," Hal guessed.
"Vanished when no one was looking."
"I'd bet on it," Bobby agreed.
"And after that he began to carry false ID good enough to satisfy any
cop who pulled him over." Looking at the papers before her, Julie said,
"Well, Frank, at least we know this is your real name, and we've nailed
down a real address for you up there in Santa Barbara County, not just
another motel room."
"We're beginning to make headway" Bobby said,
"Move over, Holmes, Spade, and Miss Marple." Unable to embrace their
optimism, Frank returned to the chair in which he'd been sitting
earlier.
"Headway. But not enough. And not fast enough." He leaned forward
with his arms on his thighs, hands clasped between his spread knees, and
stared morosely at the floor.
"Something unpleasant just occurred to me. What if I'm not only making
mistakes with my clothes when I reconstitute myself'.? What if I've
already begun to make mistakes with my own biology too? Nothing major.
Nothing visible. Hundreds or thousands of tiny mistakes on a cellular
level. That would explain why I feel so lousy, so tired an
d sore. And
if my brain tissue isn't coming back together right... that would
explain why I'm confused, fuzzy-headed, unable to read or do math."
Julie looked at Hal, at Bobby, and knew that both men wanted to allay
Frank's fear but were unable to do so because the scenario that he had
outlined was not only possible but likely.
Frank said, "The brass buckle looked perfectly normal until Bobby
touched it... then it turned to dust."
ALL NIGHT long, when sleep made Thomas's head empty, ugly dreams filled
it up. Dreams of eating small little things. Dreams of drinking blood.
Dreams of being the Bad Thing.
He finished sleeping all of a sudden, sitting up in bed, trying to
scream but unable to find any sounds in himself. For a while he sat
there, shaking, being afraid, breathing so hard that his chest ached.
The sun was back, and the night was gone away, and that made him feel
better. Getting out of bed, he stepped into slippers. His pajamas were
cold with sweat. He shivered.
He pulled on a robe. He went to the window, looked out and liking the
blue sky very much. Leftover rain made the grey lawn look soggy, the
sidewalks darker than usual, and the dirt in the flowerbeds almost
black, and in the puddles you could see the blue sky again like a face
in a mirror. He liked all that, too, because the whole world looked
clean and new all the rain had emptied out of the sky.
He wondered if the Bad Thing was still far away, or close but he didn't
reach out to it. Because last night it tried to hurt him. Because it
was so strong he almost couldn't get away from it. And because even
when he did get away, it tried to follow him. He'd felt it hanging on,
coming back across the night with him, and he'd shaken it off real quick
like, but maybe next time he wouldn't be so lucky, and maybe it would
come all the way right into his room with him, not just its mind but the
Bad Thing itself. He didn't understand how that could happen, somehow
he knew it might. And if the Bad Thing came to his Home, being awake
would be like being asleep with a nightmare filling up your head.
Terrible things would happen, and there would be no hope.
Turning away from the window, starting toward the closed door to the
bathroom, Thomas glanced at Derek's bed and saw Derek dead. He was on
his back. His face was bashed, bruised, swollen. His eyes were open
big, you could see them shine in the light from the window and the low
light from the lamp beside the bed. His mouth was open, too, like he
was shouting, but all the sound was out of him like air out of a popped
balloon, and he would not have any more sound in him ever again, you
could tell. Blood was let out of him, too, lots of it, and a pair of
scissors were stuck in his belly, deep in, with not much more than the
handles showing, the same scissors Thomas used to clip pictures from
magazines for his poems.
He felt a big twist of pain in his heart, like maybe somebody was
sticking scissors in him too. But it wasn't hurt-pain so much as what
he called "feel-pain," because it was losing Derek that he was feeling,
not real hurt. It was as bad as real hurt, though, because Derek was
his friend, he liked Derek. He was scared, too, because he somehow knew
the Bad thing had let the life out of Derek, the Bad Thing was here at
The Home. Then he realized this could happen just the way things
sometimes happened in TV stories, with the cops coming and believing
that Thomas killed Derek, blaming Thomas, and everyone hating Thomas for
what he'd done, but he hadn't done it, and all the while the Bad Thing
was still loose to do more killing, maybe even doing to Julie what it'd
done to Derek.
The hurt, the fear for himself, the fear for Julie-all of it was too
much. Thomas gripped the footboard of his own bed and closed his eyes
and tried to get air into himself. It wouldn't come. His chest was
tight. Then the air came in, and so did an ugly-nasty smell, which in a
while he realized was the stink of Derek's blood, so he gagged and
almost puked.
He knew he had to Get Control of Himself. The aides didn't like it when
you Lost Control of Yourself, so they Gave You Something For Your Own
Good. He'd never Lost Control before and didn't want to lose it now.
He tried not to smell the blood. Took long deep breaths. Made himself
open his eyes to look at the dead body. He figured looking at it the
second time wouldn't be as bad as the first. He knew it was going to be
there this time, so it wouldn't be such a big surprise.
The surprise was-the body was gone.
Thomas closed his eyes, put one hand to his face, looked again between
spread fingers. The body still wasn't there.
He started shaking because what he thought, first, was that this was
like some other TV stories he'd seen where nasty-dead bodies were
walking around like live bodies, rotting and getting wormy, with bones
showing in places, killing people for no reason and even sometimes
eating them. He wasn't much for one of those stories. He sure didn't
want to be in one. He was so scared he almost sent to Bobby-Dead
people, look out, look out, dead people hungry and mean and walking
around-but stopped himself when he saw there wasn't blood on Derek's
blankets and sheets. The bed wasn't rumpled, their. Neatly made. No
walking dead person was quick enough to get out of bed, change sheets
and blankets, make everything right just in the few little seconds while
Thomas's eyes were closed. Then he heard the shower pouring down on the
floor of the stall in the bathroom, and he heard Derek singing the way
he always did when he washed himself. For just a moment, in his head,
Thomas had a picture of a dead person taking a shower, trying to be
neat, but rotten chunks were falling off with the dirt, showing more
bones, clogging the drain. Then he realized Derek was never really
dead, Thomas hadn't really seen a body on the bed. What he'd seen was
something he'd learned from TV stories-he'd seen a vision. A Psychic
vision. He was a sidekick.
Derek hadn't been killed. What Thomas saw, just for a moment, was Derek
being dead tomorrow or some other day a tomorrow. It might be something
that would happen no matter what Thomas did to stop it, or it might be
something would happen only if he let it happen, but at least it was
something that already happened.
He let go of the footboard and went to his worktable.
His legs were shaky. He was glad to sit down. He opened the drawer of
the cabinet that stood beside the table. He saw scissors in there,
where they should be, with his colored pen and pens and paper clips and
Scotch tape and stapler-an half-eaten Hershey's bar in an open wrapper,
which shouldn't be in there because it would Draw Bugs. He took the
candy out of the drawer and stuffed it in a pocket of his robe,
reminding himself to put it in the refrigerator later.
For a while he stared at the scissors, listened to Derek in the shower,
and thought how the scissors were jammed in Derek's belly, letting all
Place. Finally he touched the black plastic handles. They felt all
right, so he touched the metal blades, but that was bad, real bad, as if
leftover lightning from a storm was in the blades and jumped into him
when he touched them. Sizzling, crackling white light flashed through
him. He snatched his hand back. His fingers tingled. He closed the
drawer and hurried back to bed and sat there with the covers pulled
around his shoulders the way TV Indians wrapped themselves in blankets
when they sat at TV campfires.
The shower stopped. So did the singing. After a while Derek came out
of the bathroom, followed by a cloud of damp, soapy smelling air. He
was dressed for the day. His wet hair was combed back from his
forehead.
He was not a rotting dead person. He was all alive, every part of him,
at least every part you could see, and no bones poked out anywhere.
"Good morning," Derek said, the words slurred and muffled by his crooked
mouth and too-big tongue. He smiled.
"Good morning."
"You sleep good?"
"Yeah," Thomas said.
"Breakfast soon."
"Yeah."
"Maybe sticky buns."
"Maybe." "I like sticky buns."
"Derek?" 'Huh?"
"If I ever tell you.
Derek waited, smiling.
Thomas thought out what he wanted to say, then continued: