by John Inman
Moving as silently as they could, they reached the end of the alley. The air was colder than Ned had ever known it to be in San Diego. And the night was darker. From where they stood, he couldn’t see the glow of fires burning downtown. And without it, the darkness here wasn’t really darkness at all but a solid black bubble that loomed over them, blinding them to everything that lay ahead or behind or above. Ned waved his hand in front of his face and saw nothing. If Joe hadn’t been standing next to him, holding on to his sleeve, Ned would have felt adrift in a sea of ink, alone and lost and drowning.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he muttered. “I’m glad you’re with me.”
“Me too,” Joe said. “Come on.” With a little prodding, he coaxed Ned out of the alley and onto the sidewalk that led past the deli.
On this stretch of boulevard, the night was silent, but Ned knew they were anything but safe. That brick hadn’t chucked itself through the deli window. There was somebody out here. Probably a lot of somebodies. Hiding. Lurking. Plotting. And Ned seriously doubted any of them had civic improvement on their minds.
Joe stopped abruptly and sucked in a breath. “Oh, no!”
“What?” Ned hissed, alarmed.
“I forgot the flashlight. I left it back at the deli.” Joe chewed on his lip and then shrugged. “Well, we can’t do anything about it now. Stay close to the buildings!”
Trying to move silently, Ned didn’t answer, but he edged closer to Joe and took a fistful of his coattail to assure they wouldn’t become separated. Joe still had hold of him too, but Ned wasn’t taking any chances. He didn’t release his grip on Joe’s jacket for a second.
Up ahead, they heard the crash of glass. Another plate glass window had been shattered. It sounded like it too was coming from the deli. Muted curses followed the shattering glass along the darkened street. The crackle of countless footsteps scraped through shards of windowpanes. Hushed voices rose up, then just as quickly fell away. Ned knew that, even if he couldn’t see them, the looters were climbing through the deli window, moving in to see what they could plunder, who they could harm. He and the others had gotten out in the nick of time.
“Mr. Wong was right, Joe. He won’t have a business when he comes back.”
“No,” Joe whispered sadly. “He won’t. Quickly now. There’s nothing we can do. Let’s get across the street.”
It was almost impossible navigating through the Stygian darkness. Good thing they knew the area so well, or they wouldn’t have been able to move at all. It didn’t matter so much, now, that they had lost the flashlight. Using it would have been like luring moths to a flame, snagging the attention of every bad guy in a three-block radius.
There were no cars moving on the street, and now Ned understood why. All four lanes of the boulevard were effectively blocked, littered with refuse. Overturned trash cans. Mailboxes torn from the curbs. Uprooted bushes. Even bicycles and stuff pulled from looted parked cars had been flung everywhere. Ned tripped over something soft and bulky in the darkness, and it was only because Joe had hold of him that he kept his feet. It took him a few seconds to realize that the soft thing he had tripped over was a body. A human body. It was imminently still, that body. Imminently… dead.
“There are c-corpses out here,” Ned stammered. “These people must be killing each other.”
Joe didn’t sound like he much cared. “All the more reason for us to get off the street.” With another tug, he dragged Ned through the obstacle course of discarded junk and pulled him into the park on the other side of the street.
Here in the open, farther from the buildings, they were once again in a position to see the light in the sky where the fires downtown left a glow on the horizon. It didn’t light the ground around them, but it was sufficient to set their course. They could at least see in which direction they needed to go.
They ducked under a stand of trees where the air was colder and the darkness inkier. By the smell of the trees and his own familiarity with the area, Ned knew they were pines. They took a moment to catch their breath and gaze back to where Mr. Wong’s shop would be. They couldn’t see it, but thanks to the glow of the distant inferno, they could see the outline of the twelve-story building that towered above the deli.
They had no more lifted their eyes to stare at the roofline far above their heads than a small flame surged to life near the summit of the building. A scream pierced the night as the flame quickly grew. Inside the blossoming ball of fire on one of the building’s uppermost balconies, they saw the outline of a person, upright and writhing. Be it man or woman, they couldn’t tell. But circling the burning man or woman was a handful of spectators. The spectators were laughing. One held a red gas can, another a torch. The twisted human outline inside the ball of fire screamed again. This scream was quickly stifled, as if by the inhalation of flames crisping the victim’s lungs. The body, wreathed in fire and still writhing in agony, flung itself forward, trying to outrun its own agony. Teetering for a moment at the edge of the balcony, it slowly, oh so slowly, went silent and tilted out into the night. In a mute pinwheel of fire and light and thrashing limbs, the body somersaulted through the air for what seemed countless minutes before it struck the street with a bone-crushing thud directly in front of the deli. Still shrouded in flames, there at last the victim lay still, its torment over.
Far above, Ned heard cruel laughter. In the weakening illumination from the flames devouring the burning body lying sprawled against the curb, he could see the gaping black hole where the deli’s window had once been. A sea of faces peered through the frame of shattered glass. They were staring at the dying ball of fire still sputtering on the street with the broken and twisted stick figure of a person, blessedly dead, inside. Some of the faces were smiling. Some of the faces were laughing. They looked inhuman there in the orange light of the feeble flames. Like demons or something. And for all Ned knew, maybe they were.
Suddenly overcome by the horror of what he had seen, Ned spun away and pressed his face into Joe’s chest. He bit back bile, his mind racing with either fury or terror, or both. “They did that on purpose, Joe. Did you see? They set that person on fire—and laughed.”
Joe turned away too, using his body to further block Ned’s view of what had happened, of those pitiful remnants of flame still flickering on the sidewalk, of the ugly leering faces in the window. In a voice weak with emotion, he pleaded, “Don’t think about it. Let’s keep going. Please. Our only ally now is the darkness. We’ll hide ourselves inside it while we take the trail through the park. Hopefully, we’ll be alone there. No one will see us. We have to get to the zoo, Ned. We’ll be safe there. I know we will.”
Ned had to force himself to leave Joe’s arms. Using his knuckles to wipe the tears from his face, he said calmly, stubbornly. “You lead. I’ll be right behind you.”
“Brave man,” Joe said. “Let’s go.”
Once again, Ned clung to the tail of Joe’s jacket as they slipped away into the night. Moving as quickly as he could to keep up with Joe, Ned desperately closed his ears to the sound of cruel laughter still ringing out from the building behind them. He ached to gaze back one last time at what lay crumpled on the street—the burning pile of refuse that was once a human being. But he didn’t. He knew that one more glance would change nothing. The memory of that tumbling figure, wreathed in flames and falling through the air, would never leave. There could be no unseeing what he had just witnessed. No matter what he did, there could be no disremembering.
“Hurry,” he pleaded to Joe’s back, aching to get as far away as he could from the site of such horror. “Please hurry.”
Obeying, Joe reached behind him and clutched Ned’s hand, pulling him quickly into the forest and onto the familiar path that threaded a trail down through the trees.
Up ahead, for the first time in hours, they heard the yelp and cry of dogs. And farther away, the whooping bleat of a howler monkey, its razor-thin wail slicing through the night like a serrated knife.
> Ned almost smiled. In spite of the dogs, the raucous cry of that monkey was like a flashback to happier times. Back when the most troublesome thing Ned had to worry about was how desperate he was to tell Joe he loved him. The good old days indeed.
The zoo, he thought, focusing his attention on the trail ahead and the feel of Joe’s coattail clamped in his fist. We have to get to the zoo. The words kept repeating themselves inside his head like a mantra. Over and over again.
Joe whispered from the shadows. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep us safe.”
Ned’s heart gave a quiet thump inside his chest. “I’m not worried, Joe. I’m not.”
Staying close, staying vigilant, they burrowed deeper and deeper through the tunnel of darkness beneath the trees. The shadows were deep and unrelenting, the air so cold it gnawed at Ned’s cheeks and brittled his ears.
Despite his brave words to Joe, Ned was terrified. He could barely remember the crystal clearness of light and the sensation of sunlight on his skin. The only warmth he felt at all was his love for Joe. That fire was alive and hot inside him.
It was the flame that kept him going.
THE FERAL dogs kept barking in the distance, but none of them approached. Joe and Ned were moving more slowly now, planting their feet carefully, the darkness so deep it was like walking through soup. Ned had taken Joe’s hand a while back, and Joe couldn’t begin to express to himself how much comfort that gave him.
The trail was leading downhill now. Joe knew where they were by the tilt of the land and the feel of the colder air in the more shadowy places. The clean scent of pine lay heavy around them, the familiarity of it comforting. Especially after the stench of smoke and burning flesh back on the street.
“Joe?” Ned ventured beside him, his voice hushed. He was clearly trying to be quiet.
“Hmm?”
“Those people back there,” Ned whispered. “Why were they acting like that? Why were they hurting each other?”
Joe had been wondering about that too. He had come to a few conclusions while he and Ned worked their way down the infernal trail. “I think it’s only the ones who were evil to begin with. It’s almost as if the darkness makes them brave enough to let themselves go, be who they really are.”
“You mean cowards and bullies,” Ned said.
“Yes. Cowards and bullies. Like you see on the internet. They figure they can’t be seen, they can’t be identified, so they act out their most vicious fantasies. Hurting people. Trying to prove to themselves they are really brave, when in reality they’re just the opposite.”
A gentle silence settled around them, and in the midst of it, the bleating cry of the howler monkey sounded off in the distance once again.
“I wonder who it was,” Ned asked, his words almost sleepy, as if he wasn’t really asking but just pondering aloud. Or maybe he was just worn out by the horror of it all.
“You wonder who who was?” Joe asked, edging closer to Ned to wrap an arm around his waist while they plodded down the trail, walking more carefully now because there were roots in the path to trip over, loose stones to twist an ankle on.
“The person they burned,” Ned said, his voice fragile. Joe felt him shudder as if the memories he dredged up were frightening him all over again. “The person they… murdered.”
“Probably even they didn’t know. Maybe it was random. Senseless. Maybe they just killed for the sake of killing. I don’t understand it either, Ned. Maybe no normal person could ever understand it.”
Joe stopped and turned to face Ned. He pulled him into his arms and coaxed Ned’s head down onto his chest. He spoke softly in Ned’s ear even while listening for anything approaching from either direction on the trail. This was no time to let their guard down.
“Try not to dwell on it,” he whispered, his lips brushing Ned’s flaxen hair, the beautiful color of it lost in the darkness but yet alive in Joe’s memory. “The person is no longer suffering. That’s enough for us to know.”
Ned’s lips rustled on the front of Joe’s jacket when Ned answered. “Do you think they’ll ever be punished for what they did?”
Joe sighed. He had been thinking about that too. “Yes. I think they’ll be punished. Either in this life or the next, they’ll pay dearly for what they did.”
“That’s what I think too,” Ned said. “Evil like that can’t go unpunished. Not if there’s still good in the world.”
Joe smiled at that, at the simple innocence in Ned’s response. “There will always be good in the world, Ned. Hell, as long as you’re in it, how could there not be?”
“You’re making fun of me.”
Joe’s smile broadened. “No, actually, I’m not. I mean every word I say.”
He gently pushed Ned to arm’s length as if to study his face, but it was pointless. It was so dark he couldn’t see anything, least of all Ned. “It’s time to keep moving,” he said, picturing the white puffs of their breaths mingling on the frigid air, though the sight itself was swallowed in the enveloping darkness. “Besides, I’m freezing. We need to get inside.”
“Yes, please,” Ned said amid a shiver signaled by the clatter of teeth.
Joe laid a hand across Ned’s icy cheek as if to say, “Good, then, we understand each other,” and a moment later they were once again headed down the trail. A shimmer of light appeared somewhere up ahead. Joe squeezed Ned’s hand, and by some sort of sensory uplink, he was sure Ned had seen it too.
More quietly now, they moved farther along the trail. They walked carefully because the path was steep here. And that steepness was like a guidepost to Joe. He knew exactly where they were.
Up ahead, somewhere in the shadows, the tiny footbridge stretched over the freeway. Joe knew they would be safer on the bridge, away from the trees. So he tried to hurry.
Staying as close as possible, Ned matched him step for step. Something was about to happen. Joe could sense it.
More slowly now, leery of the steepness of the trail and wary of those blinking lights he could see up ahead, Joe led Ned carefully down the trail.
NED SAW it first. A caravan of automobiles. Cars, pickup trucks, vans, all packed with people like troop carriers, headlights beaming. They were moving in a convoy along the Cabrillo Freeway, slipping under the little bridge, heading toward downtown. Here and there along the caravan, people waved black banners, as if rallying the world to a cause.
Joe and Ned stood side by side, their noses pressed to the wire mesh encircling the footbridge, watching the lighted caravan pass below. The pickup trucks especially filled Ned with fear. In the truck beds, packed to bristling, stood dozens of men, women, and children, every one of them packing a weapon. Guns, machetes, knives. Ned saw one young man with a fistful of rocks in his hand. Another with an ax over his shoulder. Like a bloodthirsty army, fueled by anger and misplaced patriotism, they screamed obscenities into the night. Like madmen they shook their fists at nothing but the lights of the other vehicles around them. Their insane cries filled the air.
Who were they setting out to fight? Ned wondered. Where was their fury directed? Who, for fuck’s sake, was the enemy here, and who did they think they were protecting? Or were they setting out to protect anyone at all?
“It’s like they’re declaring war,” Joe said, clearly not understanding what was happening either. He edged closer to Ned so he could be heard over the roar of the engines and the screams of mounting fury below.
“Yes,” Ned said. “But who are they declaring war on?” He could hear his own confusion. And he could sense his own fear in the way the goose bumps slithered up and down his arms. He had never seen this much anger, this much crazy, in his life. He was stunned.
“Look at all the guns,” Joe muttered. “It’s like this mob is aiming to take over the streets. As if there isn’t enough looting and killing going on already. And where are the cops? Do you think they know what’s going on?”
“God, I hope so,” Ned breathed. He pictured the throng of looters swarming through
the deli’s front window after smashing it open with rocks. Saw again the body, doused in flames, tumbling through the air, voiceless in its own agony, sailing to its death. He remembered the sound the body made when it hit the street. The whoosh of flames, the crack of bones, the sudden stillness. And he remembered, most of all, how relieved he had been knowing that person’s suffering was over. “There’s enough looting and killing already.”
“More than enough,” Joe said, his trembling hand clutching Ned’s.
The long caravan passing below seemed endless. Stuck in here and there among the cars and trucks, Ned spotted bright yellow school buses. They too were packed with armed civilians. Gun barrels protruded through open windows like thickets of weeds. Faces, both old and young, both eager and murderous, peered out as well. Here too some of them looked little more than kids. And those, Ned thought, were the most frightening faces of all.
Ned’s gaze kept falling on the black banners scattered around. Was that the emblem they had chosen to proclaim who they were? A strip of black fabric, as dark as the air around them? As featureless and empty as the shadows that had fallen over the planet?
“The flags…,” he sputtered. “What do they mean?”
Joe shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. We have to get to the zoo and lay low. If there’s going to be a battle, I don’t want us stuck in the middle of it.”
Ned scanned the sky, seeking the comfort of a single star. A mere glimpse of moon. But there was nothing. The only illumination anywhere came from the train of headlights below. And the sparks of light glinting off thickets of polished gun barrels.
Ned focused his attention back on the caravan passing beneath their feet. “There are so many of them!”
“Too many,” Joe answered. “I have a terrible feeling things just got worse.”
“So do I.” Joe turned to gaze at Ned in the flicker of lights below. His eyes appeared worried as they slipped away from the lights below and once again surveyed the darkness surrounding them. That darkness hadn’t eased up one little bit. And with an army of crazies moving into the city, all the horrible things the world had seen already were now compounded.
