So much for Roger being up-to-date on out-of-date pop culture.
“Stay still so I can cut you,” he growled.
Oh, sure. No problem—not.
I grabbed a jar off one of the shelves. I think it might have been peanuts or something. I’m not sure. I wound up and threw it as hard as I could toward the back of the store, hoping whatever noise it made would lure Roger away. I wanted him confused and as far from Dorcas as possible.
What had I been thinking letting her come with me? Just because she was a tough nut didn’t mean she could make it through something like this. The guilt started bubbling up inside, threatening to consume me. Instead, I mentally shoved it back down and channeled some one-hundred-percent, undiluted, Trina anger.
“Grow up, you big baby,” I screamed out in the darkness as I crept from aisle to aisle. “Oh, boo-hoo for you. So your wife died. She was going to die, anyway, Roger.”
“You shut up,” he hollered. I could hear the anguish in his voice.
Wherever he was, he was uncomfortably close. I grabbed something else off a shelf—I think it was some sort of electric thing like a cheap clock radio—and I chucked it as hard as I could, as far away from me as possible.
“I’m going to filet you, kid,” he bellowed as I watched the beam of light play off the ceiling, heading toward where whatever I threw landed. “I’m going to make it hurt, too.”
“Oh, that’s good,” I screamed back at him. “Make me hurt as much as you do. Way to go, big man.”
I saw the beam of light shift again and head back in my direction. When he seemed only one aisle over from me, I took another electronic thingy and threw it over his head so it hopefully landed a couple aisles on the other side of him.
“You talk too much,” he shouted in the darkness. I could tell he was still an aisle away, but I wasn’t sure what to do next. The last thing I wanted was to run smack dab into him. If I did that, I think I’d be running straight into his knife. Not a good thing. Not a good thing at all.
I stood still, my hands out like I was mentally prepared to grab onto something. What to do, what to do, what to do?
“I’ve been fumbling around this place for a week,” he ranted. “You know that? It’s been a good goddamned week, and I’ve learned every square inch of this place—just like you know every square inch of that teenage, white-boy, privileged, skinny little body of yours.”
Hey, I worked out a little. That was a low blow.
“What are you, from Littleham or Meadowfield or something? One of those uppity towns where you don’t know nothing about the real world?” Now, that was an even lower blow. Meadowfield was our rival town. The kids there all came in one generic variety—the kind who thought their tatti didn’t stink. “Yeah, I bet that’s it,” he continued. By now, Roger was shouting and that wasn’t a good thing. For the first time, I heard the poxers in the basement stir. “But if you’re not going to come to me, then we’ll just have to do this the hard way,” he seethed. “In the dark.”
Roger’s flashlight abruptly went off and I was totally blind.
22
I PULLED THINGS off of the shelves—big things, little things, things that felt like soup cans—and I tossed them as hard as I could to the four corners of Jolly’s Pharmacy. Yeah, you try and find me, old man. I’m everywhere.
The truth was, I was scared to death.
I heard him make his way down the aisle next to me toward the back of the store. That was good. While he was slithering that way, I felt my way around the bottom shelf and found it filled with stuffed animals. I wish the shelf was packed with bricks instead, but beggars can’t be choosers. I sunk my hands into the plush toys, pulled back double fistfuls, and flung them in a wide arch. At one point, I heard Roger swear. He was close to the end of his aisle and I guess I had beaned him with a bunny or something.
I was ready to slide myself into the space I made on the shelf when I heard him say, “You think stuffed toys are going to bring me down? Let me see, that makes you in aisle . . . six.”
So much for hiding among the teddy bears.
I took off toward the front of the store, staying low, because all I could imagine was Roger seeing my silhouette through whatever light filtered in from the front windows. In the darkness, I saw the outline of the rubber ball display where I left Dorcas, and headed that way. When I got there, Dorcas was gone.
Oh, no—she was on the move, too.
If Roger ran into her before he ran into me, she was a goner for sure. Well, I suppose we were both goners in the end. This wasn’t a video game. If he stuck one of us with that jackknife of his, no little message was going to pop up saying, ‘Game Over. Do you want to play again?’
I stood there, my fingers clutching the large metal basket filled with rubber balls, my breath ragged and shallow, when I got an idea. The balls—I could use them. I pushed over the metal display, purposefully making sure it made a huge crash.
“Up here, stupid,” I screamed, then wound up my lucky soccer foot and started kicking the balls around the store. I could hear the twangy, rubber sound they made as they connected with my sneaker and sailed into the air.
“Damn you,” he bellowed. He wasn’t close but he wasn’t far either. Before he had a chance to hoof it up to me, I took a gamble and ran all the way over to the left-hand side of the pharmacy and crouched down low next to a newspaper rack. It probably had papers on it from Springfield and Worcester, and maybe even a local rag like the Guilford Gazette. The headlines would have been from last Friday night. Maybe they would be talking about the Emmys because, you know, it was Emmy season. Or maybe they would be talking about how bad this year’s apple crop was turning out. I didn’t care about headlines. All I could think about was how much paper there was and how useful it could be for frying poxers. A little could go a long way with even the most ignorant, backwater, misspelled bit of news.
“You leave him alone, Roger,” I heard Dorcas scream from somewhere on the other side of the store. She sounded like she was near the back.
“No, you leave her alone,” I yelled out into the blackness. I could picture Roger in my mind, whipping his head from left to right, not knowing which way to go first. Hopefully we were addling his already addled brain, because this dude was seriously whacked and we needed all the leverage we could get.
I heard movement down the aisle I was in. I figured Roger was on the move again and a lot less blind then we were in this maze. Then I heard the clank and scratch of his blade along the metal shelving. Now that was definitely goosebump-worthy.
“I’m coming to get you, kid,” he whispered in a low, raspy snarl. His psycho voice sent shivers down my spine.
Blind with fear, I forced myself to get back up and run across the front of the store. Was this how my life was really going to end—scared to death by the living instead of the dead?
Somewhere around the middle of the store, I got turned around and ran head-on into a display of Halloween masks. They glowed in the dark, just a little. As I hit the ground hard, horrible faces of clowns and skeletons rained down around me. Their stupid, hollowed out eye-sockets and evil grins fueled my fear like gas on an open flame.
The next thing I knew I was crawling on all fours down one of the aisles. I could still hear the scratch of Roger’s blade somewhere in the store. Maybe he even laughed a little in that demonic way that meant he had completely gone nuts. I desperately felt in front of me, my palms and knees aching as I scrambled as quickly and quietly as I could.
Finally, one of my hands landed on something soft and squishy. I almost yelped, but I shoved whatever noise that threatened to come out of my mouth, down into the pit of my stomach. I wasn’t going to give in to this—no way. No freaking way.
It was a stuffed animal. Another one was next to it, and then a third. I was back in aisle six where I had
cleared a space for me to hide. I reached out blindly, groping in the darkness until I found the empty cubby I had excavated for myself. With a deep breath, I folded myself into it with both my hands holding on to the metal edge of the shelf just in case I had to leap out in a hurry.
“Roger’s coming,” I heard him twitter in a maniacal sing-song voice. Okay, I’d pick the covered bridge and the poxers in the ambulance over this any day.
My heart was beating a mile a minute and my throat went dry. Huddled on that bottom shelf, I could actually feel the blood racing through my veins, and it occurred to me that this whole situation was absolutely crazy. A week ago, about the only thing that made blood race through my veins were the online videos that I wasn’t supposed to watch but did anyway.
Now I was hiding in the dark, in a place called Jolly’s Pharmacy, in the butthole of Massachusetts, being chased by a homicidal senior citizen bent on slicing me up and feeding me raw to his dead wife.
Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up.
Squeezed in among the stuffed animals, I couldn’t help but think about everyone we left behind. What was happening there? Were they dead or dying? Did they . . . I couldn’t even think it . . . mutate into poxers? What if they had? If I died at the hands of Roger Ludlow, Trina would just have to pick up the pieces and take out Mom and the rest without me. How would she ever be able to live with herself? How would Dad ever be able to look at her again?
What a mess. What a nightmare.
I heard a noise in the back of the store. I’m not sure, but it sounded like the door. Did Dorcas make it out? What about me? Was she going to leave me here at the mercy of Roger and his sharp little toy?
I wanted to scream ‘Hey, I’m the immune one. Don’t leave me here with Roger the Ripper’, but I could barely breathe. Dorcas wouldn’t really leave me, would she? Could she? I shriveled into myself, dark thoughts taking over and making me realize that there was no one I could trust—absolutely no one. If eighty-two-year-old Dorcas Duke was determined to ring every last second of smoke-filled life out of her sorry existence, was she going to do so at my expense?
I was her sacrifice—a kid with total immunity, a kid who had his whole life ahead of him, a kid who never even got past first base with Prianka Patel.
What a bitch. Not Prianka—Dorcas.
The darkness was shattered by a piercing howl. “AAAARRRRGHHHHH,” Roger screamed in utter futility. “I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you. You did this to yourselves. You came in. No one asked you to come in but you came in just the same.”
He was at the top of aisle six.
“I was fine. I was just fine,” Roger bellowed. “Me and my Millie, we were fine.” If he was so fine, then why did he answer the S.O.S.? Oh yeah, his Millie was getting hungry and we were meat on the hoof.
I heard his slow and steady footsteps coming down the aisle. The sharpened blade of the knife scratched against the metal shelving like fingernails on a chalkboard. It was like the sound of death.
He was ten steps away.
He was five steps away.
When he was right in front of me he stopped. I don’t know what made him do it. I don’t know if I stank of fear, or my heartbeat sounded like a timpani, or what. I stopped breathing as he stood there. I could imagine the sweat dripping through his fingers as he held on to that little blade, its metal edge waiting to cut deep into my throat.
All of a sudden, his old-man hands shot out and dug deep into my scalp, and it was my turn to scream. Roger dragged me out of my hidey-hole, laughing like a banshee the whole time.
That’s when Dorcas shot him.
She used the handgun I left in the ambulance. Somehow she managed to get herself out the back door and into the ambulance to find what I had stupidly left behind. Still, she came back for me.
She came back.
She did.
I cried and cried until I thought I would never stop.
23
ROGER WASN’T DEAD. I didn’t know how Dorcas was able to aim so well in the dark, but she shot him in the leg, right in the meaty part of his calf.
“Shut up, you pansy ass,” she spat at him as he blubbered and bled all over the floor of Jolly’s Pharmacy. “Suck it up.”
If I wasn’t crying so hard myself, I might have laughed. Thankfully, Dorcas ignored my tears.
Roger’s knife had flown out of his hand when the bullet hit him, and skittered away like a crab. He fell to the floor, tearing out a clump of my hair as he went. I heard the ripping sound, but I think I was too scared to register the pain, or the sticky wetness that dripped down my forehead.
He couldn’t get up. He sat there bleeding on a pile of stuffed animals and crying for his Millie—always his Millie.
Well poo-poo for you, you homicidal maniac. Millie and her friends were going to have to go hungry—unless, of course, you wanted to offer them your own sorry ass.
What a freak show. What a weird-ass freak show.
Dorcas didn’t say a word as she patiently waited for me to wring out every last tear. I have to admit, that was pretty cool of her.
With Roger’s flashlight, we saw that we were in a little toy section of Jolly’s Pharmacy. This was where all the eighteen-year-old single mothers with tattoos on their arms probably came to buy cheapo toys for their kids. I found a jump rope with daisies decorating the handles. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to bind Roger’s hands together, although I think if he really tried, he probably could have gotten out of the knotted mess I made.
He didn’t struggle. He just wept. When I was reasonably sure his hands were secure, Dorcas and I grabbed him by the jacket collar and I dragged him to the back of the store to the pharmacy. Even in the dark, I knew his ruined leg was probably leaving a streak of blood along the carpet, but I didn’t care. No one was going to send for a professional cleaner. No one was going to look at the floor of Jolly’s Pharmacy ever again.
“This idiot lost us precious time, Tripp,” Dorcas snapped as we deposited him in front of the vitamin display. “We have to find whatever your father needs and get out of here.”
I nodded. It occurred to me that Dorcas actually called me by my real name instead of just ‘kid’. I suppose going through what we just did with Roger had softened her crusty edges a little, but I doubt they would stay soft for long. It wasn’t in her nature to be soft, and right then, I was thankful that she was a tough old lady—like leather tough.
Once we were sure that Roger was about as dangerous as a bowl of pudding, we focused on what we came for. Illuminated by the flickering plastic jack-o-lanterns and our flashlights, I was able to find a cabinet with a lock on it just like my dad described. Luckily, the key was sticking out of the keyhole. All I had to do was turn it to get at all the scary drugs inside.
Dorcas took a ‘Hello Kitty’ girls’ back-pack from a nearby display and stuffed it full of bottles and tubes of medicine, along with anything else she could get her hands on. Meanwhile, I filled a cardboard box with bandages and cotton and more drugs.
Roger Ludlow just sobbed. I didn’t think his tears were because of his leg. He kept calling out in the darkness for his Millie. He wouldn’t shut up, and after a bit we heard banging on a door somewhere in the far back of the pharmacy, near the exit. That was probably where the basement was. At the same time, some of the poxers out front started open-palming the big plate window. I guess it was only a matter of time before either the basement door or the glass was going to give way, and I didn’t want to be there for either.
Before we left, Dorcas bent down in front of Roger. He wouldn’t look her in the eyes. “We’ll take you with us,” she said to him.
“Your nuts,” I told her, but she completely ignored me.
Roger just shook his head—the sign of a man who had completely given up. Roger Ludlow, the homicidal maniac, was no
more. In his place was a wounded old man who was ready to cash in his chips, bite the big one, keel—you catch my drift.
He didn’t have fight in him anymore, misguided or otherwise. Besides, I think he was completely ashamed of his utter insanity. Even thought my head still pounded from where he pulled a handful of hair from my scalp, I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for him. Considering the past week, I’d say anyone was entitled at least one little mental breakdown. It’s just that Roger’s wasn’t little. He dove over the edge without looking back, and now he wanted nothing more than to pay for it and move on.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “You leave me and you leave my Millie. You hear me? You leave us rest in peace.”
Dorcas didn’t ask a second time. Instead, she pulled a bottle of medicine out of her pocket and pressed it into his hand. “Use these,” she said to him. “All of them. It will take away the pain.” Roger pursed his lips together and nodded just once. I knew Dorcas wasn’t talking about bullet wound pain. She was talking about something else—something that could never be fixed.
Then we left him there.
We quietly slipped out the back with our bounty, climbed into the ambulance and locked the doors behind us. Although it was dark out, I could still see that none of the poxers had figured out that we were behind the building. That was good for us but probably bad for Roger.
As we sat there in the dark, Dorcas said, “I just lost a little bit of my humanity.” Her words wafted into the silence that hung between us. She was talking about the bottle of pills. I wondered how strong they were and exactly what might happen if he swallowed all of them.
The Dead (a Lot) Trilogy (Book 1): Wicked Dead Page 10
