by Joe McKinney
“You miserable bastard,” he said to the picture of his father that suddenly appeared in his mind. “My inheritance—you want me to do to the world what you did to me. It’s a lie, all of it, and I won’t do it. Do you hear me? I won’t.”
He banged his fists down on the steering wheel.
“Do you hear me? I won’t do it!”
Chapter 21
She’d called Paul half a dozen times at least during the day. At first she was angry. Rachel told herself that when he finally answered his damn phone she was going to lay into him and say all the things she didn’t get to say when she threw him out the first time. But as the day wore on, and he still hadn’t answered his cell phone, she started to fray at the edges.
The air conditioner was blowing, but not doing much of anything to cool down the apartment. She sat in a kitchen chair with a box fan blowing over her and tried calling him again.
She got his voicemail.
“Paul,” she said, “I’m sorry. Please call me back. Just talk to me. I was scared earlier. God, I was so scared. So much has happened in the last few days and I don’t know what to do about it. But I know I love you. Please believe me on that. I don’t want you to leave. I want you to come home. Please, if you can get off work tonight, come home. I don’t care if we have to stay up all night, just come home. We can talk through this.” She swallowed the lump in her throat and sniffled. “That’s all I wanted to say, Paul. Just know that. I want you home with me.”
Then she hung up.
She thought of calling him right back, leaving another message to tell him that she believed him now. After seeing his mother—God, after touching the breaker switches covered with human skin—she believed him. But she didn’t call back. Calling him too many times before he was ready to talk might only serve to drive him away, and she couldn’t afford that.
When he finally decided to call her, she would tell him she believed it all now. She would talk to him, and she would keep the whiney little girl buried deep down inside her. Paul didn’t need to deal with that. He needed someone who would stand by him, and that was going to be her.
Their love was worth it.
***
And she was still telling herself that at 11:45 that night, though her brave face was starting to crumble. She was in bed, reading a book upon which she couldn’t concentrate. The pages just looked like a blur. She folded the book down across her stomach and looked around the apartment.
Something was wrong, and it took her a long moment of staring out across the apartment to figure it out.
It was so quiet.
She listened to the silence and thought how strange that was. No matter what time of day, there was always traffic going by on the street below. Three o’clock in the morning on a Tuesday and you could still count on a car or two every couple of minutes. And that dog next door— about the only time of day that thing was quiet was in the heat of the afternoon when it was too hot to do anything but lay in the shade and pant.
She waited and listened and the silence stretched out interminably.
Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore.
She went to the patio door and opened it and walked out onto the covered patio. The night was still, but not in a peaceful way. A faint breeze brushed against the Italian junipers that flanked the yard. Her bare legs were damp with sweat but she felt no chill from the breeze. If anything it was more stifling out here than it was inside. It was almost like a giant black blanket had been draped over the world. She could feel its smothering presence.
She was about to walk back inside when a car passed on the street below. Rachel watched it glide by, but didn’t notice until it was out of sight that it made no sound.
“What in the...?”
There was a moment of self-doubt in the car’s wake. She wasn’t sure what she had just experienced. Maybe she just hadn’t been paying attention.
She waited for another car to go by. One followed seconds later, and that one too passed in complete silence. No throaty exhaust notes. No tires slapping on concrete. No incoherent echo of a stereo played too loudly. The stifling night air suddenly felt dangerous. That was the first thought that came to her mind and it refused to leave. Something about all this was dangerous. She was in danger.
Rachel hurried back inside, closing the door behind her with a palpable sense of relief.
But the relief didn’t last.
She thought of seeing Paul’s mother and reaching into the pantry for the breaker switch and touching human skin instead. She asked herself why in the hell she was still here.
“Okay, right. Time to leave,” she said. “Time to get in the truck and get the hell away from here.”
She slid into a pair of jeans and put some clothes and her toothbrush into an overnight bag and headed for the backdoor.
Rachel got out onto the landing at the top of the wooden stairs that led down to the backyard and stopped.
Something was wrong.
She scanned the yard. On the other side of the carport was the familiar shed and concrete slab where the neighbors kept that miserable dog of theirs. It was standing up now on that concrete slab, facing her, its chain trailing out behind it and disappearing into the darkness on the other side of the shed. The dog was barking furiously, but there was no sound. And the yard was filled with shadows. More than the various objects along the fence line could account for. They looked intensely black against the green of the lawn.
Something was definitely wrong.
Rachel felt afraid. She had a sense that something was coming, the way one can smell the air and know a storm is on the way, and it paralyzed her. She tried to move her feet and just couldn’t.
Then the dog was gone. She was watching it when it was sucked up into the darkness behind the shed. She blinked at the empty spot on the concrete slab. One moment the dog had been there, the next it wasn’t. It was if some giant thing had grabbed the other end of the chain and yanked it back into the darkness with an almost cartoonlike suddenness.
“Oh my God.”
She dropped the overnight bag next to her foot and clamped a hand over her mouth. There were naked men coming out of the shadows, moving like flowing water around the shed and across the lawn and over the fence into her yard.
One of the men in the front of the advancing crowd crossed into a yellow circle of lamplight and the sight of him took Rachel’s breath away. He was a bent, gray-colored, skeletal thing. The face was grotesque and strangely protruded because of the way the body was bent forward. The skin seemed ill-fitting over the skull, almost like it had started to sag off the cheek bones. The eyes were vacant. The mouth seemed drawn-in, puckered like an old apple. But the most horrible thing about the man was his staggeringly advanced state of emaciation. His knees and elbows and knuckles seemed engorged. His thighs looked sickly. His biceps were so thin she could have probably encircled them by putting her thumb and forefinger together. His stomach had a sunken-in shape that made her wince.
She was thinking heroin addict until she saw the black Y-shaped stitching on his chest. It was only then that she thought of death.
She screamed.
There were more of them now.
Her eyes darted back and forth across the yard in blind panic. They were staggering across the yard in fits and jerks. They seemed so slow, and yet the distance between them and the house narrowed every second.
One of them hit the wall below her. She looked down at him, and he turned a dead face up at her.
“No,” she said, barely able to make a sound for the painful beating of her heart. “No, you stay away!”
But the dead thing never hesitated. It slapped its hands against the wall and started to scale upwards, climbing with an insect-like motion that brought a fresh wave of screaming to Rachel’s lips.
She ran inside and locked the door and scanned the room for something she could slide against the door to bar it. She saw the couch and got behind it and shoved it all the way across the floor
to the door. It hit with a thud that was answered by a pounding from outside. She screamed, then screamed again as a hand punched through the top of the door and pushed it inwards. A man’s gray, sunken face appeared in the hole, followed by his bare arms and shoulders.
She staggered backwards into the coffee table.
There was a crash to her left. Another one of those things was punching its way through the wall. Actually tearing its way through the Goddamned wall. Behind her, there were more of them breaking through the glass patio doors.
“No,” she whimpered. “Stay away! Oh Jesus please, stay away!”
She was cut off, and they were getting closer. She tried to scream but couldn’t. All she could make herself do was stumble backwards towards the bathroom and beg them not to come any closer.
She tripped over one of her boxes of books and when she looked up one of the dead things was almost on her.
She scrambled to her feet and picked up the box and threw it at the thing with everything she had. It hit the dead man in the shoulder and the box exploded open, spilling paperbacks everywhere, but the dead man didn’t even flinch from it.
“No,” she said. “Come on. No.”
Her back hit the bathroom wall and her hand dropped to her side and the doorknob.
Right away she thought, Get inside. Now!
She slipped inside the bathroom, and right as she was about to slam the door saw Paul’s Barber fifty cent piece and the cordless phone on the bedside table. She grabbed them both and closed and locked the door.
Rachel squeezed Paul’s coin in her left hand and used the thumb of her right hand to punch in 911. She focused on the coin as the phone rang.
Please, Paul, help me. Oh Jesus, Paul. Please.
There was a crash on the other side of the door that made Rachel scream. The coin went flying out of her hand.
A woman’s calm, almost bored voice came on the line. “9-1-1, do you need police, fire or EMS?”
Rachel screamed out something unintelligible about dead men tearing down the walls.
The dispatcher broke in and said, “Ma’am, I can’t understand you. Ma’am, please. Ma’am, you need to—”
The bathroom door exploded open, and a moment later there were dead hands all over her.
Chapter 22
Paul was so exhausted when he arrived at the Eastside Substation that he didn’t even notice Mike coming in right behind him from his jog.
Mike called out to him.
Paul stopped, turned around.
Mike looked Paul up and down and said, “Dude, what the hell happened to you? You sleep in that uniform?”
“Huh?”
Paul looked at himself. Only then did he realize he was still wearing his uniform pants and the black t-shirt with the worn-in sweat stain from where his body armor had been the night before. He was covered in dust and he smelled like rotted wood.
“What happened?” Mike asked. “Rachel kick you out?”
Paul didn’t answer.
Mike laughed. “Holy shit. She did. She kicked you out.”
“I don’t want to talk about it, Mike.”
“Man, you don’t have to. One look at you and anybody could see it. It’s written all over your face. Either she kicked your ass out, or you’ve been drinking for the last twelve hours.”
“Mike, please...”
Mike threw up his hands. “Hey, it’s cool, dude. You know what I always say—you’re not a real policeman until you’re on your third marriage.”
Paul turned away, but Mike stopped him.
“Hey, Paul, come on. Wait. I’m just kidding.” He said, “Look, you need to get changed out in a hurry. If Garwin sees you walking around in only part of the uniform like that, he’ll write you up so fast you won’t know if you’re coming or going. And he won’t care what kind of deal you got going at home. He isn’t much on discipline, but the uniform is one of his pet peeves.”
Paul just nodded and headed for the locker room. Mike followed him. He was still breathing hard from his run.
He said, “You’ve got an extra uniform, right?”
“Yeah,” Paul answered. “All except the t-shirt. I guess I can just wear this one again.”
“Like hell. Dude, you are not riding in the same car with me in that thing. You smell like goat piss. I got an extra you can borrow. I’m about as wide as you are tall, so it should fit you. What are you, a two XL?”
“Yeah,” Paul said, then added, “Thanks.”
“Still a man of few words, eh?”
Paul sighed. “It’s been a bad day, Mike. You wouldn’t understand.”
“You’d be surprised,” Mike said. “And we’re gonna be spending the next eight hours together in the car. That’s gonna feel like forever if you’re gonna keep all this shit bottled up. You can talk to me about it. I mean, don’t get the wrong idea or nothing. I ain’t Barbara Walters. Your ass starts crying I’ll throw you out on the pavement. But if you got some troubles, I don’t mind listening.”
Paul nodded.
“Seriously,” Mike said. “No bullshit. I know more about wrecking a marriage than just about any man alive. You can listen to me, do the opposite of whatever advice I give you, and you should be golden.”
That got a chuckle out of Paul.
“There you go,” Mike said. “At least you’re not gonna mope on me all night.” He looked at Paul and said, “You’re not, right?”
“No.”
“Good. Listen, after you get dressed, you should call her. Tell her something nice. I mean, even if she yells at you. Don’t make her beg you to come back. And you don’t have to beg either. Just say something nice and leave it on that. Don’t get into it. If she screams or yells or calls you names or whatever, just say something nice and then get off the phone. She’ll be thinking about what you said all night, and when you come home—” he made a skating motion of one palm gliding over the other “—you’ll be in like Flynn.”
He accented it with a wink.
“I’ll think about it,” Paul said.
***
“44-70.”
Mike was driving. Paul was looking out the window at the ruined shell of an apartment building. Mike waited for Paul to acknowledge the call, but he just went right on staring out the window, oblivious.
Mike keyed up and said, “44-70, go ahead, ma’am.”
“44-70, make 360 Jaffrey. Complainant states she’s pregnant and her husband just hit her in the stomach and threw her down the stairs. Sorry, Mike, I got no cover available. I’ll start the next available your way.”
“10-4, ma’am,” Mike said. “We’re on the way.”
Paul swiveled the laptop around to his side and started to run the history on the address.
“Don’t bother,” Mike said.
“You know the address?”
“Yeah. The guy’s name is Jimmy Schultz. Date of birth is 12-12-86. Last time I ran him he was on probation for methamphetamines. He’s a burglar, too. If we catch up with him, you can pretty much count on him being high. First he’ll run, then he’ll want to fight.”
Paul ran the guy’s name on the MDT and got a felony warrant hit.
“Look at that,” he said to Mike, and swiveled the laptop towards Mike.
They were southbound on Loop 410, the freeway almost empty ahead of them. Mike had gunned the Crown Victoria and now they were doing over ninety miles an hour. As the car rolled up and down over the uneven road, Mike glanced at the screen.
“Blue warrant from the State Parole Board,” Mike said. “Sweet. Looks like Jimmy came up dirty on his last drug test. Man, I’d love to get a hold of him. You’re gonna love this guy. He’s a major sack of shit.”
Paul closed the MDT’s screen and leaned back in his seat, watching the freeway through the windshield.
“You’re getting used to my driving, aren’t you?” Mike said.
“Huh?”
“You don’t look seasick.”
“Yeah,” Paul said, noticing
that for himself now. “How about that?”
***
Paul’s first thought when they entered the apartment was that somebody had been shot at close range with a shotgun. Everything in the room was white. From the carpet to the walls to the ceiling fan to the brand new leather furniture set, all of it was as white as a cloud on a summer day. Except now of course it was spattered all over with Louisiana Hot Sauce.
The smell was horrible. Paul picked up on it before he entered the room. It irritated his nose and his throat and his eyes with the same intensity that he had felt when Rachel tried to make homemade enchiladas and burned the sauce. It was the same peppery burn.
Their complainant was a skinny girl of nineteen with stringy black hair and tattoos down her right her arm and splotchy bruising all over her skin. Paul had come to recognize the look as one of the calling cards of the career junkie. The swell of pregnancy was just starting to show beneath the black tank top she wore.
She told them her boyfriend was high again on meth and that he had flipped out on her when a guy had called the apartment asking for her. He got so mad he took a giant one liter bottle of hot sauce and splashed it everywhere, all over her new furniture.
“All this furniture’s brand new? How much did it cost?” Mike said.
“It cost me eighteen hundred dollars,” she said. “That bastard ruined it. You see that? Look at that. That’s felony criminal mischief right there. You gonna arrest him for that?”
She had her hands on her hips now, her lips pressed together so tightly they seemed to disappear entirely.
“Ma’am,” Mike said, “when you called you said he hit you. You said he threw you down the stairs.”
“Shit, he hits me all the time. You people don’t do nothing about it.”
“Have you ever filed charges on him?”
“No, that’s your job.”
Paul willed himself not to breathe in too deeply. He had become aware of an underlying stink in the place that not even the hot sauce could completely conceal. It was like set-in sweat and grime and rot. Meanwhile Mike was using as much patience as Paul had ever seen him use. He was trying to tell the girl that what she really needed was for EMS to take her to the hospital so that she and her unborn child could get checked out by a doctor.
