Dark Advent

by Brian Hodge

  * *

  Diane strutted down the fourth floor hallway as if she had every right to be there. The place reminded her of a college dormitory more than a hotel now. Pass by this room you hear drunken laughter, pass by this one you hear passion, by this one you hear two acoustic guitars. Nobody paid her much attention, but she was ready to spring the knife just in case.

  She’d left Travis staked out like a desert captive on an anthill, squirming and twisting to no avail. To keep him quiet while she was gone, she stuffed a hand towel into his mouth and sealed it over with masking tape. Until then, though, he must’ve set a new world’s record for creative use of the word bitch.

  She stopped before Erika’s room, holding the all-doors passkey that she’d compelled Travis to hand over. She lingered a moment to make sure the hallway was clear, then she was inside the darkened room in the wink of an eye. The smell hit her first, that nursing-home smell of a warehoused human being. Diane fumbled alongside the doorjamb to find the light switch.

  And bit her lip. “Oh Erika,” she whispered.

  The figure on the bed was in much the same position as she’d left Travis, except her wrists were raw with abrasions from the rope, and she was clothed. She looked deathly pale, and as she rolled her head to face the light, her eyes looked like two dark tunnels to nowhere.

  Diane switched on the room light. “It’s me, Erika. It’s Diane.”

  “Huh?” Her voice was sluggish, pouring like syrup, and that tiny line creased between her eyes. Recognition and confusion.

  Diane sat on the bed beside her, slashed the ropes and tossed them beneath the bed. Erika lay blinking her eyes, and Diane hugged her, crooning into her ear.

  “You sore? Yeah, I bet you are.” Tied to a bed for over a week, damn right she’d be stiff and sore. Diane rubbed her hands over Erika’s sides, legs, arms. When she hit the inner part of her right elbow, Erika hissed with pain and whimpered.

  Beneath the sleeve, Diane found a huge mottled bruise, speckled with injection sites. Goddamn them.

  “Can you hear me, hon? Can you follow what I’m saying?”

  A weak nod. Erika’s tongue flicked out over her chapped lips. Her eyes roved, focused. “Good to…see you.”

  “Gonna get you out of here. Take you home.” Diane took a deep breath. Good intentions and all, but the girl was so out of it. While there was a struggle going on behind those eyes, they were still glassy enough to have come from a taxidermist. “Can you walk? Think you can walk for me?”

  All she got was a grunt.

  Diane wrapped her arms around Erika to tug her from the bed, and Erika slid off like a sack of grain, heavy and loose. She got her feet beneath her and tottered, a spindly-legged colt learning to walk. Diane supported her with both arms, walked her around the room.

  “Gonna get you back home, back where you belong,” she whispered into her ear. “Back where we love you. Get you cleaned up. Get you all gorgeous again for when Jason comes back.”

  “Jason…?” she moaned.

  Diane prattled on, soothing her as if talking to a child, as Erika’s legs grew steadier. “That’s my girl,” she said. “You’re doing great. I’ve seen drunks who couldn’t do half as well.”

  Erika was mumbling, and most of it Diane couldn’t make out, but there’d be time for that later. She took Erika’s limp, oily hair and pulled it back from her face, over her ears, tucked the length down inside the back of her shirt. She pulled from the bottom of her purse a shoulder-length red wig and plunked it onto Erika’s head. Auburn curls spilled across the girl’s forehead. Diane was betting that most everyone around was oblivious to her presence here, but minimizing the risk of someone recognizing her couldn’t hurt.

  She peeked out the doorway, and except for a woman with a wine bottle banging on a door halfway down the hall, it was clear.

  Erika leaned heavily on her, head nestled in the crook of Diane’s neck as the mop of red hair spilled over her cheek. Diane held her tightly all the way down to Travis’s room, where she pulled the knife again before entering.

  No need. He was still as helpless as when she’d left, just as alone, and every bit as furious. She’d never seen such enraged eyes. Muffled snarls came from behind the masking tape and towel, and she thought she could still make out the word bitch.

  She locked the door behind them. “Miss me?” she asked cheerfully.

  Erika, wig askew by now, stared at Travis. She cocked her head as if struggling to comprehend the sight. And then she began to quiver with weak sputters of laughter.

  Diane moved to the far wall and opened the window. The moonlight showed her the lawn area, gloomy and overgrown, with the bulky silhouettes of trees. Toward the right, another wing of the Omni stretched away from this one. Utility buildings sat far ahead across the garden, but directly below, the lawn doglegged out of this little boxed-in area.

  “We’re going on a little trip now,” she told Travis, scooting beside him on the bed. “And you’re going with us. As an insurance policy.”

  Travis glared at her, his breath whooshing in and out of his nose.

  “I’m gonna untie you from the bed, and then tie the scarves together. Legs first, then hands. Don’t do anything stupid. You’re the one with all the muscles, but I’m the one with the knife. Who knows, you might get away with it. But screw up just once”—she traced the point lightly down the inside of his thigh—“and you’ll find out how sharp this thing really is.” She sliced effortlessly through the sheet to prove her point.

  Travis’s breath rushed out in a huff. But he’d calmed over.

  Diane kept the knife snuggled into his groin as she undid the scarves, moving slowly and leaving nothing to chance. Silk shackles for his ankles, then hands behind his back.

  “Erika, can you make it out the window on your own?”

  Her head bobbed in a sort-of nod, the wig still cockeyed. Diane sighed and plucked it from her head and pitched it into a corner before leading her to the window, helping her keep balanced until dropping from the sill. Erika oofed loudly when she hit the ground and rolled, and it was none too graceful, but she looked okay.

  “You next,” she told Travis, and he scowled horribly. “Yes, naked.”

  A fierce rumble welled up in his throat as he rose from the bed and shuffled across the room to the window. Diane promised herself that after this was all over, she was going to have to go off somewhere and treat herself to the biggest, longest laugh she’d had in maybe forever. Travis sat on the windowsill, and she helped him pull his legs up and spin around until they dangled down the outside wall. Understandably, his landing was even clumsier than Erika’s.

  Diane glanced about the room. Better make it look as natural as she could. She pitched Travis’s pile of clothes into the closet, then turned off the ceiling light. Then she was out the window.

  They moved across the weed-choked lawn, Diane walking, Erika weaving, and Travis bunny-hopping with his privates flopping. They followed the dogleg out, then skirted the edge of the beer garden. Diane led them along a sidewalk, then a service drive that emptied onto Twentieth Street. She turned right, north, and led them up Twentieth until they, in less than a block, were behind a bar and restaurant facing Market Street. And in the parking lot sat Caleb and the truck he’d taken, waiting patiently in the cab with his rifle aimed leisurely out the window.

  “I don’t believe it,” he said when they drew nearer. “I’ll be damned if you didn’t pull this off.”

  He slid out of the truck and the first thing he did was throw his arms around Erika in a fierce hug. She did her best to return it, and Diane saw tears leaking down Erika’s moonlit face. Her breath was coming easier now, her insides loosening from the knot they’d been in for the past three hours.

  “He rides in back,” Caleb said, hitching a thumb at Travis and studying him as if looking at a bug. Travis was still growling deep
in his throat, and she couldn’t begin to imagine the bottled-up obscenities that would come pouring out whenever they removed his gag.

  Caleb helped Erika into the cab, and she was muttering about how she had to pee, and how they’d come in and untie her three times a day so she could use the bathroom and how tough it was to pee in front of strangers, and she seemed not to notice when Caleb ducked back out of the cab and hugged Diane.

  “Damned if you didn’t pull this off,” he repeated. “If you ever did anything to make me any prouder of you than I am right now, I don’t think my heart could stand it.”

  Diane grinned from ear to ear, and leaned her head against his shoulder. With the pressure off, the giggles were starting to take over again.

  “I am woman, hear me roar,” she said.

  5

  It was Saturday, and Jason was up before the sun and even beat the roosters. It had become his normal routine.

  Rising early gave him a chance to get out and exercise his wounded leg with no one watching, and, as a bonus, the sunrises were rarely disappointing. He was feeling stronger day by day, the aches in his leg and shoulder a little less deep with each dawn. His arm was free of the sling now. He still limped, and suspected he would for a while yet, and still used the cane, but its days were numbered.

  Jason slipped on a pair of gym shorts and a new shirt whose back touted New Zealand’s South Pacific Classic. These surfing shirts had been all the rage a couple years ago, then faded away, but apparently Heywood had been slow in keeping up with fashion. He laced on track shoes and eased out of Molly’s house as she puffed in her sleep down the hall.

  The morning air was clean and clear and not quite cool enough to call crisp, but it was close enough. There was no finer medicine. The first rays of the sun peeked over the eastern horizon, over Lake Whitney, and he aimed for it as if heading for a beacon.

  His walk took him along a narrow street lined with simple, tasteful houses, none too small and none too large. Guardian trees ranked the sidewalk, towered over lawns, birds stirring in their leaves and branches.

  Jason stopped, leaning on the cane, staring at a house to his left. He wasn’t sure who lived there, but that didn’t matter. It could’ve been anybody, and that was the point. Somebody resided behind those darkened windows and made it a home. Finally, here was a place where there was none of the menace that had come to be synonymous with blank, dead windows, like blind eyes looking in on a hollow soul.

  There was safety here, far from St. Louis.

  Jason continued his unhurried gait east, wondering when the day would come when he could resume running again. A great place to run, this town.

  Soon he had company. Jason was aware only of a ghost’s movement between two of the houses at his left, a whisper of paws. A second later, T Rex came bounding out alongside him, bushy tail wagging and his tongue lolling from his mouth. T Rex, who’d kept a bedside vigil with Tomahawk before he’d regained consciousness at Molly’s. As the great German Shepherd sniffed and nuzzled Jason’s cane hand, he was awfully glad the dog knew and liked him. You might never recover from being on the wrong end of those teeth and claws.

  “How you doing, boy?” Jason scratched the dog’s head, scrubbed the bristly fur at his shoulders. “I guess we can all feel safe with you guys on patrol.”

  T Rex butted his head against Jason’s leg, then maneuvered the back of his neck under Jason’s hand. Over the past few days, he’d enjoyed watching as Gil and the others from Fort Hood put the dogs through their training maneuvers, keeping them in top form. Interesting stuff, good for a diversion—they’d run T Rex and the rest through various search games, and pursue-and-subdue exercises, and of course the attack training, where the dog got to chew on a guy’s arm while he wore what looked like a giant oven mitt. Nobody had to worry any more about Middle Eastern fanatics attacking embassies or smuggling guns and explosives past airport security or landing on American soil…those days were over. But the dogs didn’t know. They had their routines, and Jason supposed there was a certain element of security in keeping them primed.

  As he continued east, T Rex trotted amiably beside him under a pre-dawn blue-gray sky. At last the sidewalk ended and they moved across a short expanse of ground to the lake’s edge. A wet chill kissed his ankles as he kicked up dew. They sat at the same picnic table where, earlier in the week, Tomahawk had volunteered for the trip to St. Louis.

  He watched the sun creep over the far edge of the lake, casting a long shaft of fire across the flat surface. The water was a black mirror changing to silver. He wondered what this sunrise looked like in St. Louis.

  “Gonna eat breakfast at Gil’s today,” Jason told the dog. T Rex regarded him in that way dogs seemed to comprehend every word while refusing to condescend with a reply. “I think he said something about pancakes. If you’re lucky, I’ll sneak a couple out for you.”

  He scratched T Rex’s head and the dog wagged his tail and they watched the sunrise together, as it broke over the lake and threw their shadows back at the town.

  And if he’d known it was going to be the last one he would enjoy here, he might have tried to make it linger just that much longer.

  * *

  Pancakes. He had to keep telling himself they were only pancakes. But more than a year had passed since his last stack, hot and golden brown and dripping with butter and syrup. As far as he was concerned, they now qualified for Food Of The Gods status.

  Sorry, T Rex. But it looks like you get left out on this one.

  His breakfast with Gil had been a combination social visit and business meeting. Gil thought they should get better acquainted, as did Jason, and there remained plenty of planning to do to prepare for the group that Tomahawk would be seeing down from St. Louis. Over the past year, settlers had drifted in singly or in pairs or small groups, but never had twenty or more come at once.

  The primary concern was housing. The previous night, Jason had sat down and composed a list of everyone who’d been at Brannigan’s when he’d left in March. He jotted down who he thought might want to live together, be they pairing off as friends or lovers or guardians of children. All subject to change—with more than five months between himself and St. Louis, some things could be different now. But at least it gave Gil a ballpark idea of how many houses would require wiring into the power grid.

  Jason kept staring at the names topping the list: his and Erika’s. A home of our own. It seemed like a childhood game, playing house together. I’ll be the mommy and you be the daddy and we’ll live happily ever after.

  “We’ll wire ’em for you,” Gil said. “Try to have ’em ready when you get here so you got lights, and can run fans to cool ’em out. But fixing ’em up, repairs, whatever…that’s your folks’ responsibility.”

  Jason nodded. “Fine. Just get us started, and we’ll take over from there.”

  He glanced over the tabletop and across the kitchen, just outside the kitchen door. T Rex sat on his haunches on the back porch, still as a statue, fixing him with a mournful stare that seemed to grow sadder with each pancake that went down.

  “For our house, I’m going to find the biggest stereo ever made,” Jason said, averting his eyes from the screen door. “I hope you’re okay with a few earth tremors now and then.”

  Gil arched his bushy eyebrows and scribbled on a paper. “So, next item on the agenda: a noise curfew.” He looked askance and laughed through his nose. “My boys, they sure knew how to raise the roof.”

  Jason watched as ten or fifteen years crept into Gil’s face and eyes, lingered a sad moment, then retreated. Newly silent, Gil dragged the rest of a pancake around his plate to mop up the last puddles of maple.

  Later, Jason would remember hearing a heavy engine cut the morning silence, idling down at the other end of the block, probably near Molly’s house. It didn’t mean much at the time; even though Heywood’s citizens didn’t find
much cause for driving in such a small place, especially this early, it was still a common enough sound.

  What caught his attention was the way Gil was suddenly looking at T Rex, who’d transformed from a sad-eyed kitchen beggar to a picture of alertness, rigid, standing on all fours and staring toward the opposite end of the block. As if something else within the animal had taken over entirely.

  “T Rex,” Gil said flatly, cautiously. The dog glanced at him, then bolted from the back porch, vaulting a railing in the process.

  What the hell?

  Gil rose from the table, quietly, quickly, striding into his living room. Jason heard a sharp metallic click, and his eyes focused on the heavy .45 automatic in Gil’s hand when he returned.

  “What’s going on, Gil?”

  “Maybe nothing. But there’s not much that makes that dog react like that.” His eyes said the rest.

  That was when the gunfire erupted from the other end of the block. An instant later followed the shattering of glass.

  “Shit,” Gil said, moving for the back door. On his hip hung a walkie-talkie that Jason hadn’t seen before. Gil paused, half in and half out the doorway, glancing back. “Stay put,” he said, and was out of sight before the screen door slapped shut.

  Jason pushed himself out of his chair with his cane and made a hobbling run for the living room. Easing over to the western window, he pulled back a curtain to peek down the block, toward Molly’s. The truck parked in front he recognized at once. Because he’d been hauled away from Union Station in the thing, his back bleeding from a thousand places, and thrown from it out into Brannigan’s parking garage. A truck like that cruised your nightmares for a long time.

  A hundred thoughts raced through his mind, from terror to confusion to rage to fearing that he was a jinx whose presence had brought a fresh crop of miseries on the people of Heywood, Texas.