Hundreds, she said.
Hundreds of folks just went away.
Did you have the Rapture and forget to invite me?
I pray that’s true because that means you took her,
You took my Keisha.
And if it’s true and she’s up in your kingdom,
Then praise you, Lord, thank you, Lord.
Take her and leave me behind,
An old man like me has seen too much anyway.
I wouldn’t make much of an angel.
Think my wings might be dirty brown,
Not white like they ought to be.
But, Lord, if you would take any pity on me at all,
Just bless me with the truth,
Bless me with—
The engine stutters, then stutters again. Ron curses under his breath, knowing what’s coming. This is really a stroke of crap luck. He leans forward and taps the fuel gauge. It says half-empty. If he were an optimist, it might say half-full. But Ron Bent isn’t much of an optimist. He flicks the clear plastic of the fuel gauge and the needle falls down to empty. Damned, blessed, stinkin’, car. He knew he should have had that gauge fixed. The car is shimmying now, shivering like a dog shaking off water. All Ron can do is ease it over to the side of the road and sit there, head pressed back against the headrest, eyes closed in frustration. It’s gonna be a long walk to get a gas can.
He gets out of the car, wanders into the empty road.
For a minute, he’s so pissed off he thinks of walking away from the car, just leaving it here—even though this hunk of crap is just about the only thing he has left—and pushing forth on foot. Maybe that’s how it should be. He can spend the rest of his years wandering the earth, like Christ, a pauper and a pilgrim. Except he’d get pretty damned wet in those Florida rainstorms. Christ didn’t live in a semitropical climate.
He looks up the road; as far as he can see, nothing but yellow lines and pavement and pine trees in sand. He sighs, looks down at his feet. Time to start walking.
Suddenly a sound: the snap of a twig. He turns his head and squints (his old eyes don’t work like they did—seen too much, they have). Someone is there, in the woods, moving between trees. Ron watches. He sees a pink shirt, blue jeans. Whoever it is doesn’t seem to see him. Ron stands still and watches the figure move in slow, limping steps, parallel to the roadway at first, then toward it, and finally breaking into the clear perhaps forty yards up ahead. Several times, Ron almost calls a greeting to the stranger, but something strangles his voice in his throat. Finally he speaks.
“Hey.”
The figure, a young man, looks back at him, or maybe past him, then continues up the road in the opposite direction, unfazed. Ron almost turns and walks away, but he doesn’t.
“Hey,” he calls again, and when the teenager seems to pick up his limping pace, Ron jogs after him. Even with the pain in his knees sparking red like firecrackers at every step, he catches up to the kid in no time. When he does, he draws up short.
The kid’s jeans are dripping wet and smeared with mud. His shirt, which had appeared a pinkish red from a distance, now appears to be a white T-shirt, soaking wet and stained with blood or something like it. He grips a flashlight in each hand so tight that his arms are shaking with tension.
“Hey,” Ron says, touching the kid on the shoulder.
The boy, probably no older than eighteen, wheels around, raising both flashlight-wielding fists defensively.
“Who are you?” the kid says, his voice a rasping whisper.
“Name’s Ron. Ron Bent,” he says, trying to smile. “You okay? What are those flashlights for?”
Ron sees now that the kid is shaking. His face is covered with grime, except for two paths trailing down from his eyes, where tears must have washed it away. Four bloody scratch marks streak one cheek. Must have been a fight, and someone clawed his face. As Ron studies him, the kid’s eyes begin welling up again, though he tries his best to sniff it away.
“My friend lost his light,” he says, looking hard at one of the flashlights in his hand.
The kid tries to pull away, and Ron detains him as gently as possible. “Wait a minute, wait,” he says. “You don’t look so good. What happened to your arm?”
The kid looks at his arm, uncomprehendingly.
His left wrist has swollen to almost the size of his fist, and it’s blotched and streaked an angry, bruised shade of purple.
“Oh shit,” the kid says.
“Maybe we should get you to a doctor.”
“No, listen,” the kid says, “he’s lost down there. They took him away. There was nothing but blood in the water, then I found the flashlight. I looked and looked and he was gone. We have to go back. We have to find him.”
“Wait,” Ron says, “somebody kidnapped your friend?”
The kid nods, his eyes wild and haunted. He looks back over his shoulder.
“The door is back there. We have to go find him.”
“Wait, slow down now. Who was it? Who kidnapped your friend?”
The kid is staring at the yellow line of the road, curving away at his feet. He has dark circles under his eyes. Ron wonders how long he’s been wandering around like this.
“It was them,” says the kid, as still as stone now. “It was the sleepwalkers.”
Wasn’t as far of a walk to the gas station as Ron had thought, praise God. He left the kid in the car, walked maybe half a mile down the road, and returned with two gas cans. One he emptied into the tank, the other he put in the trunk for the next time the fuel gauge crapped out on him.
The kid was pretty wet and pretty dirty, so Ron had pulled an old towel out of the trunk and covered the car seat. Now they’re rolling. The kid sits on the towel, still gripping his flashlights, not moving. Ron glances over, hoping the kid won’t notice the scrutiny. No worries there. The beleaguered youth leans back against the headrest, staring up at the treetops as they pass, his eyes looking glassy. Something about that kid’s eyes . . .
Wide boy’s eyes, narrowed to slits.
Ron hasn’t seen eyes like that in a long time. Not since—
June, 1969. Huge drops of rain fall from the thick, green canopy above, tapping on his helmet, slipping down his face and away. Nobody’s talking in the jungle today. There’s nothing to say. They’ve been marching for a lot of days now. Everyone else keeps track of days, dates, holidays, birthdays, but not Private First Class Ron Bent. He’d rather not, thanks very much. He measures time in incidents. Today is three days since Pvt. James McPhereson, a handsome, quiet, probably secretly gay kid, was walking point and tripped a booby trap, lost his legs, and took six hours to bleed to death waiting for a lift that never came. Three weeks since they left Lai Khe for Dodge City. Maybe four days since their squad of fifteen guys broke off from the rest of the company. Two days since they encountered heavy resistance trying to rejoin the platoon and realized they’d been cut off, with the goddamn radio crackling and hissing, some kind of malfunction, and no way to call a taxi for a ride out. One day since they ran out of food.
Now, there’s just the dripping of rain, the sloshing of mud—the mud isn’t just at their feet, it’s everywhere, under his fingernails, in his hair, caked in the moving parts of his M16, in his mouth, gritty and nauseating, even between the cheeks of his ass, God knows how. In the distance: the rumble of a mortar going off and the dry snap of gunfire.
Somebody stepped in shit. Maybe the rest of their long-lost platoon.
The man on point (it’s hard to tell from the back, but he thinks it’s Dirty) raises a fist and the men all stop, crouch, and listen, scanning the foliage around them for any sign of Charlie—as if that’ll do any good; there could be a whole regiment of North Vietnamese regulars on the other side of the next leaf, and the only way to know would be to smell ’em, since they’re so goddamn supernaturally quiet and vision is so limited.
“Charlie’s so quiet,” for some reason, makes him think of playing hide-and-seek as a kid. He would cov
er his eyes and Paul would hide and Ronnie Bent would count his little ass to one hundred as fast as his lips could move, and then he’d look around for his big brother, only Paul was gone. Impossibly, completely gone—not under the dining room table, not in the pantry—so impossibly gone that little Ronnie would look for him for hours and start to think maybe goblins snatched him away. (Paul would really make use of his vanishing abilities ten years later, when the draft came around. Then he vanished so completely that even his loving family never heard from him again.) Little Ronnie finally surmised that his brother probably snuck up the stairs, out his bedroom window onto the roof of the porch, climbed down the sycamore tree, and walked to the drug store for a soda. Or a root beer float. Probably laughing his smug ass off the whole way.
Private First Class Ronald Bent was still thinking about root beer floats when the first tracer round whistled past, maybe two inches in front of his face. He felt it more than anything, a puff of wind on his cheek. Then the guns were rattling off rounds, littering all that mud with piles of spent brass as the leaves around them danced a strange, flicking, bullet-induced jig.
Ron’s gun was jammed. He tried to clear the round out of the chamber, but it was the mud, the goddamned drying, cracking mud that wound its way into everything and strangled his M16. He crouched lower. It was raining bullets now.
He heard “Corpsman up!” behind him, to the right, and there was Pvt. Jack Spagnoli, facedown in the mud.
Ashes to ashes, mud to mud.
Jack was funny and mad about cards. Texas hold’em and blackjack.
Red Jack was his game now, as blood from the gaping exit wound wicked into his fatigues, dark as Rorschach ink.
Jack was dead.
Ronnie pulled the M16 out of the already-stiffening hand that would never hold an ace again and turned it on the enemy. Spitting lead. Somebody was hit off to the left and was moaning. Somebody else kept telling the wounded guy to shut up. Finally, Ron saw Dirty (Dan Dawson, Dirty Danny) up ahead, frantically waving the men on.
They hightailed it out, those of them who could, through the slashing leaves of the jungle. They all knew they were running blind, but they followed Dan all the same, because to sit still when badly outnumbered meant death, just as running might mean death—you could run into a booby trap or a machine gun nest or worse. As fast as they ran, the machine gun fire still didn’t abate; tracers kept whizzing past on either side, heavy pops of hand grenades burst not too far behind. Several times, he heard cries of pain behind him, or cursing, but he didn’t look back. He had become like a jungle cat now. It was a primal thing: death was behind him and death was the enemy. He ran until his breath was a loud wheeze and his heart filled his head with throbbing, always staying a few steps behind Dan, Dirty Dan, who wound up to be from a town right near Ron’s, a football rival, in fact.
When, at last, the rattle of gunfire had fallen off and the only sound was the slap and swish of leaves, Dan slowed and finally stopped, his hands on his knees. He looked at Ron and past him, then stood up straight.
It was then that Ron noticed it. Dan’s eyes had changed. They were drawn into a tight squint, implacable as burnished steel. Nobody in northern Ohio had eyes like that, Ron thought, and Dan’s hadn’t been like that either—not before the war, not before today. Now they had changed—and it was frightening.
Ron followed Dan’s gaze back over his shoulder, and he saw what Dan was looking at: nothing.
There was nobody behind them. None of their comrades had made it. There was only the rain.
All this flashes before Ron in an instant. The memory fills him up to the point of spilling over. He glances at the boy in the seat next to him, wanting to share the memory with him, wanting him to know that he isn’t alone, that the feelings consuming him right now aren’t insurmountable. They can be conquered. Ron wants to say a thousand things, but as so often happens, the words just won’t come. Finally, he says:
“I lost my daughter. She was kidnapped too. I’ll help you however I can, I promise.”
The kid doesn’t answer him.
Ron turns on the radio, an oldies station, and sighs.
In the sick-clean smell of Hudsonville’s only doctor’s office, Caleb sits staring at a children’s toy. It has a flat board as a base and stiff metal wires protruding upward from it, four or five of them, each painted a different color. The wires twist and loop around each other like roller-coaster tracks. On them are brightly painted beads. There are yellow beads on the blue wire, blue beads on the green wire, red beads on the blue wire, purple beads on the orange wire . . . Caleb remembers these things from his childhood. They were always touted as a “game” or a “toy.” And with the festive, eye-catching colors and the complex shapes, it looked pretty exciting; until you started playing with it and realized all you could do is push the beads to one side and back, and back again, and back again. It wasn’t a game. It wasn’t fun. It was something else. A distraction. It makes Caleb so angry he could smash it into the bland-papered wall of the waiting room, watch the beads explode and scatter . . .
And he wonders how many other things in his life have been nothing but distractions. Maybe everything.
“Caleb,” a heavyset nurse in a white smock says.
Caleb rises, glancing at the old fella sitting next to him (Ron? Was that his name?)
The guy nods back. “I’ll wait for you,” he says.
“That’s okay,” Caleb says. “Thanks for the ride.”
The old guy doesn’t respond, and Caleb doesn’t wait for him to. He follows the woman through the door and back down a long narrow hall.
The exam room is like all exam rooms. The nurse takes Caleb’s temperature, takes his blood pressure, and looks at his arm.
She leaves.
He sits, as uncomfortable on that crinkly paper as a fish in the bottom of a boat.
But all doctor’s visits are like that.
He waits for maybe ten minutes, his arm aching like hell, until finally the doctor shows up.
In the sterile light of the exam room the memory of the catacombs, the witch, the sleepwalkers, Bean’s disappearance, all seem like the stuff of B horror films, so unbelievable as to be laughable. Here, there are no shadows, no eerie feelings, not even the ticking of a clock. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t see it coming.
Ron sets down his National Geographic. The “Lost Incan Cities” article was interesting enough, but when he started checking out the naked aborigine chicks, the shame just got to be too much.
Guess I’m a little hard up, he thinks.
Jesus and his Pops ain’t gonna like that one. Course, that’s why he isn’t behind the pulpit anymore, isn’t it? The place for him is out there, wherever “there” is. Not cooped up in some hallowed church but on the streets, on the hallowed highways.
Searching for Keisha, that’s where he belongs. But he’s beginning to think that reunion won’t happen until he reaches the white gates. Even if he can just glimpse her through the bars before he heads down to his place in the spiritual fires, that’d be enough.
But this, today, almost gives him hope. It’s something worth looking into, the fact that this kid’s friend got abducted. And even though the kid is rattled, he was an eyewitness. He thinks he saw the abductor. Together, maybe they could find out what’s going on and who’s behind it all, and put a stop to it.
But all that’s pie in the sky.
If there’s one thing Ron Bent knows, it’s when he’s not wanted. His “no thanks” detector has been fine-tuned through years of rejection, God knows (of course he does—God knows everything). And this kid doesn’t want his help. This kid wants to be left alone. And Ron can take a hint. So he gets up, adjusts his belt, and—
“Sir?”
The lilt of a woman’s voice is coming from behind the counter. Ron steps over and sees the haggard face of a young girl, perhaps twenty-five years old.
“Yes?” says Ron.
“Is that young man your son?”
/> “No,” says Ron.
“Do you know who his parents are? If they’re looking for him, we should let them know.”
“I dunno,” Ron says with a shrug. “I just picked him up on the side of the road and figured he should have that arm looked at.”
The girl nods and makes a note on her clipboard.
“So you don’t have any idea if anyone’s looking for him, who his parents are, anything?”
Ron shrugs. “No.”
She makes another jot.
“And has he been showing any signs of mental instability? Combativeness, depression, anxiety?”
“Well, yeah,” Ron says. “But he said he lost his friend, and I’m pretty sure that arm is busted, so I figure he deserves to be a little cranky.”
The girl nods to herself. “Good,” she says. “Good. And have you noticed any sleep disturbances, nightmares, insomnia?”
Ron looks at her. “In me, or in him?”
“In him,” she says.
“Well I ain’t sleepin’ with him,” says Ron. “What part of ‘picked him up on the side of the road’ don’t you get? If you’re askin’ me, I’d say he doesn’t look like he’s had a good night’s sleep in a while, but what do I know?”
“So you can’t rule out sleep disturbances?” she persists.
“Well, no,” says Ron. He sees her check a box marked ‘yes.’ She nods to herself.
Ron looks at the door. Something about this place is making him uneasy. Claustrophobic. Panic biting at its heels. Boy, just when you think you got something beat. He’s craving a drink too. That thirst is whispering in his ear. He has to get out of here.
“That it?” he asks.
“That’s it, thanks,” the girl says to the clipboard.
Ron heads to the door, grabs the handle, and stops. He walks back to the counter.
“You know what?” he says. “I’m going to leave my cell number with you, just in case he needs it.” he says.
She hands him a scrap of paper. He writes on it, then pushes it back to her.
“You’ll make sure he gets this?” he asks.
The Sleepwalkers Page 12
