Night Sky

by Suzanne Brockmann

  As it was, she’d looked at my pink V-neck tee, skinny jeans, and pink sneakers and said, “Ooh, you look nice. Where are you heading?”

  “Cooking class.” I couldn’t help myself, mostly because I was still smarting from seeing my reflection in the bathroom mirror. Yeah, I looked nice, but next to Dana, I was going to look like a “nice” twelve-year-old boy in a pink shirt and sneakers.

  But Mom looked so sad at my caustic comment that I quickly relented. It wasn’t her fault that I didn’t have boobs. My father—he of whom we never speak—had to have been responsible for my height and coloring, so he was probably responsible for my less-than-generous physique as well.

  “I’m walking over to meet Calvin,” I told her. It was not quite a lie. I just left out the part where I was walking over to his car rather than his house.

  Now, as I sat in his car, I realized I’d been in such a rush to escape that I’d forgotten to “forget” my cell phone at home.

  “Dammit,” I said as Calvin pulled onto the highway, heading for Harrisburg. I held up my phone. “I’m gonna shut it off. If she calls you, don’t answer.”

  “Yeah,” Cal said, “’cause I always answer, because I love the time I spend chatting with your mom.”

  I laughed, but then weirdly found myself defending her. “I think she seriously lost it after the accident. I mean, she was always overprotective, but…” I sighed.

  “But you weren’t even hurt.”

  I looked at Calvin, who as a child had survived his own near-death experience and ended up with a crappy heart and legs that didn’t work. I didn’t know what happened—what buttons my accident pushed—but when my mother came to the hospital, she acted like it was the freaking end of the world. I don’t think it helped that the ER doctors kept rechecking me. They couldn’t believe that I’d walked away from the totaled car without a scratch, while my now-former best friend Nicole was in the ICU, barely alive.

  “My mother’s crazy,” I told Calvin as I tried not to think about that night more than six months ago in Connecticut, when Nicole had lost control of her car. We’d slammed into the median and started to roll…

  I exhaled hard, pushing those images away, unwilling to relive it, unable to talk about it, even with Cal. It was over. I was alive and Nicole was too—although her parents had shipped her off to a special school in Switzerland.

  Special school. Right.

  “Well,” Calvin said, bringing me back to the here and now, “I guess moms worry no matter what. Mine sure does.” He looked at me. “Did you bring the photos Dana wanted?”

  “Yeah,” I said, pulling the printed snapshots out of my purse. Most of them were blurry, because Edmund was always in motion, always laughing at something. The two best included the just-out-of-the-pool shot that Detective Hughes had shown me, as well as a five-by-seven posed portrait of the Rodriguez family that Sasha had given me at Christmas.

  Looking at the photos of Sasha made my throat tighten up. I missed her, and I wanted her back.

  “So?” asked Cal. “Projectile vomiting or Tourette’s?”

  I considered the question, placing the photos carefully back in my bag. “Is the blind date someone I’d like to see again?”

  Calvin took the same exit we’d taken to get to the Sav’A’Buck. “Absolutely. He’s smart, funny, and super sexy. Basically, he’s got all of my irresistible charm and more.”

  “Then Tourette’s. Because dropping the f-bomb requires less cleanup than puking does.”

  “Good call,” Calvin said, nodding. “I’m with you.”

  We passed the Sav’A’Buck on the right. Its neon sign was unlit in the daylight, and the place looked dingier than ever. I thought about the lady who had jokered in the store, and chill bumps popped up on my arms and legs. She’d willingly taken a drug made, at least in part, from the blood of girls like Sasha and Lacey.

  And me.

  The road we were on led directly into downtown Harrisburg. As we drove, the shops and homes became even more dilapidated and filthy. I stared at a brick building covered from sidewalk to roof with multicolored graffiti. Like the artwork in the old cineplex, it was pretty—but the mountains of trash piled up in what had once been a parking lot were not. The roof of another building had caved in, and its windows were boarded up. The next didn’t even have boards in place—just a jagged rim of broken glass around gaping holes where the windows had once been.

  You could practically smell the neglect, and truth be told, I was breathing through my mouth because the stink of rotting fish and burning plastic was so strong. The people here were filled with fear and something else. Despair? Whatever it was, it was awful.

  “Dang,” Cal whispered, slowing the car just a bit. “This is downtown?”

  I’d thought I knew what Mom meant when she talked about the Second Great Depression, but the tired seediness of the CoffeeBoy or the Pizza Extravaganza in the less-well-off parts of Coconut Key was nothing compared to this.

  A single hanging stoplight blinked red at a four-way intersection, and Calvin stopped for a moment. We both pressed the lock button on the door to make double sure it was engaged.

  Across the street on the corner, a woman stood hunched over a brimming grocery cart full of garbage. She rearranged plastic bags, dented cans, blankets, and other miscellaneous objects, her face shaded by an oversized shawl. As Calvin and I drove past, the old lady turned to stare at us, revealing a horribly disfigured profile. Half of her chin was just…missing. One eye bulged almost completely out of the socket, while the other was swollen shut. She smiled—at least I think that was a smile.

  I gasped and Calvin pressed the accelerator.

  “Please tell me that’s not the she-thing you saw in Sasha’s room that night,” he said, his tone light even though I knew he was spooked.

  “No, that woman was homeless, but she wasn’t evil,” I replied.

  “You say that like you know her personally,” Cal said.

  I shrugged. “No sewage smell.”

  “Oh, right,” he said. “I almost forgot.”

  We kept going, further into the decaying center of Harrisburg, where more and more people were out on the sidewalks. Some of them pushed grocery carts; others huddled in the shade beneath the tattered awnings of stores, their knees drawn up to their chests. They looked defeated, as if they were already dead. The only other vehicle on the road was a pickup moving slowly in the opposite direction and ringing a bell like an old-time ice cream truck. It had a big, hand-lettered sign on it that read: Human Corpses Only.

  I turned to look out the back as a man flagged down the truck. He gestured back toward a building where two other men emerged, awkwardly carrying something child-sized that was covered with a dirty sheet. The first man sank to his knees on the sidewalk.

  I realized that the hint of cinnamon that I could smell, even though the car windows were tightly closed and the recirculate button was on, was grief.

  This was worse than I could have ever imagined.

  “What are we looking for?” Cal asked. “I’ve forgotten the name.”

  “The Lenox Hotel. There, up on the right.” I pointed at the looming brick building ahead. It was taller than the buildings around it, but no less dilapidated. It had a sign that said THE LENOX in block letters, in a style that reminded me of medieval knights, complete with a stylized lion.

  “I hope for Dana and Milo’s sake this isn’t where they’re staying.” Cal pulled up next to the building.

  I didn’t answer, but I silently agreed. The hotel’s front double doors had cracks in the glass that were covered by peeling duct tape. A faded and grimy black-and-white pinstriped awning hung overhead, part of it torn and hanging down almost all the way to the sidewalk.

  “Should we go inside?” I asked uncertainly.

  Calvin turned on his hazard lights. The only other car parked on
the street was an abandoned two-toned hunk of metal with three of its tires missing. “Should we even get out of the car? The locals don’t look too friendly.”

  An old man lingered below the hotel’s awning, scratching compulsively at his scalp. He looked at Calvin’s car and pointed a gnarled hand at us. Then he yipped like a dog.

  A hand rapped on my window, and Calvin and I both screamed.

  “Hey, Scooter! Open up!”

  Dana stood on the sidewalk—where had she come from?—one hand on her hip. She was wearing the same knee-high boots that she’d had on last night, this time with black jeans and a black tank top. Her super-short hair was slicked back with a thick black headband. Pencil-thin red bra straps peeked out from underneath her shirt.

  Calvin did as he was told. The yipping dog-man began to approach the car, but when Dana turned around and clapped her hands aggressively at him, he scurried away.

  She hopped in the back, and Cal quickly locked the car again.

  “You’re late,” she informed us matter-of-factly.

  I frowned and looked at my watch. It was twelve oh two.

  “Where’s Milo?” Cal asked.

  “We’re gonna pick him up. He had to make a store run.”

  “He left you all by yourself?” Cal asked, astonished, adjusting his rearview mirror so he could see Dana while he drove.

  Dana gave Cal what I’d come to think of as her dead-eye glare. “Don’t you mean, I let him go to the store all by himself? Considering I’m a G-T and he’s not?”

  “Right,” Cal said as he pulled gingerly away from the curb. “Sorry. Where to?”

  “Dead ahead. The SmartMart’s two blocks down.” As Cal drove, Dana settled back in her seat. “I figured we’d start today’s search over where Edmund Rodriguez’s truck was found. And a heads-up, kids, because unlike this good part of town, where we’re going is extremely dangerous.”

  I exchanged a look with Calvin. This was the good part of town.

  “Coupla hard and fast rules to follow,” Dana continued coolly. “Stay within sight of me at all times. And if I tell you to do something, you do it. You don’t ask why; you don’t hesitate. And if you have even the slightest suspicion that a jokering Destiny addict is in the vicinity, you get the hell out of there, double time. Am I clear?”

  I looked at Cal again as we both nodded.

  She laughed. “Although, sometimes there’s no getting out. I once saw the aftermath of a joker who sent out such a blast of power that he turned every car in a two-block radius into shrapnel.” She leaned forward to point out the front. “There.”

  The SmartMart was little more than a crumbled hut, the front windows opaque with overlapping posters. I noticed an ancient sign that read: “We accept food stamps.” Someone had crossed out the words and written “Eat shit and die” over it. Posted next to it was a more current ad for Good Times vodka.

  Milo must’ve still been inside, because although there were plenty of very large, scary-looking people hanging out front, none of them was him.

  Cal pulled over as Dana continued her story about the cars-into-shrapnel thing. “Although truth be told, you can’t outrun that kind of shit. Everyone in the area was turned into hamburger—including the joker.” She laughed as if that was funny. “Joke was on him, huh? But dozens of people were all just completely chewed up. All that blood in the streets…” Now she sighed heavily as she sat forward to look out at the convenience store. “What the hell is taking him so long? Oh, my aching God. Milo seriously had to pick today to be a hero.”

  I had no idea what was so heroic about going to the SmartMart. I did have a suspicion, however, that Dana told that story to try to scare us into leaving. And I could tell from the expression on Calvin’s face that she was at least half succeeding.

  Cal was looking out the windshield at the bikers gathered in front of the SmartMart. I was more worried about the two tattered-looking men who stood across the street, talking to each other as they pointed at our car. Another creepy old woman stood on the corner, rocking back and forth. She held an old rag doll in the crook of her elbow. Each time she moved, the doll’s head lolled limply back and forth.

  “I’ll find him.” Dana sighed again as she reached to open the car door. But then she stopped and narrowed her eyes at the bikers outside the store and warned us, “Lock up behind me and don’t open the doors for anyone. Y’understand?” She got out, then stuck her head back in the car to ask, “Your windows are bulletproof, right?” But she didn’t wait for an answer. She just slammed the door and stomped her way toward the store.

  Calvin clicked the lock a few extra times as we watched her vanish inside.

  And then, it was like they all came out of the woodwork at once.

  As if on cue, the bikers all turned and looked at us, more than one of them eyeing me through the windshield and licking their lips. Gross. One of them seemingly casually flicked open his jacket, and I spotted the glint of something metal in his waistband—a gun to test whether or not Cal’s car had bulletproof glass?

  But the bikers weren’t the only potential threat. Across the street, a guy with a cane and a badly stained trench coat headed toward us. The old woman we had seen earlier with the horrible face approached with her grocery cart. She waved her fingers almost coyly at Calvin. The two old tattered guys started to cross the street as well. Everyone was heading in our direction.

  “Chewy, I got a bad feeling about this.” Calvin gave me his best Han Solo.

  “Just…don’t look at any of them. Heads down, we mind our own business until Dana and Milo are back.” But it seriously was like one of those cheesy zombie movies Cal and I watched on TV. Everyone honed in on our car, all at once.

  “What do they want?” Calvin asked. “I mean, besides to eat our brains.”

  “They don’t want to eat our brains. I’m pretty sure this is just Dana testing us. Me. She’s testing me. So just ignore them. Just don’t look.” But it was hard not to, and even I couldn’t follow my own instructions. I looked up exactly as the old guy in the trench coat flashed us.

  “Oh, my God!” Calvin shouted. “That is wrong. And disgusting! That is wrong and disgusting! Do not make me get out of this car, old man!”

  “Don’t you dare get out of the car,” I told Calvin, squinting through my eyelashes as the old man, coat now closed, took his cane and whacked the driver’s side window. “Dana told us to keep the doors locked.”

  “If this is a test,” Calvin said, “that girl is messed up.”

  We were now completely surrounded. Some of the bikers had started rocking the car, and even I was starting to doubt my theory.

  “Okay, that’s it! Dana and Milo are going to get their butts kicked by these crazies, unless we do something,” Cal announced. He shifted his car into drive and hit his horn repeatedly as he glared at the crowd. “Get the hell out of my way—I will not hesitate to run you down!”

  He inched the car forward, revving the motor, and the crowd parted in front of us. He had a clear shot to pull out into the street and zoom away to safety, and even I was tempted to make a run for it. Instead he turned and drove right up onto the sidewalk, positioning the car directly in front of the SmartMart’s door.

  As we jerked to a stop, that door opened, and I had a front-row seat to Dana’s astonishment. And I knew I was at least partially right. She’d expected us to run away.

  Milo was right behind her, clutching a small plastic bag in one hand. He stuffed it into his inside jacket pocket as he locked eyes with me.

  Neither of them seemed particularly worried about the crowd. In fact, Milo went over to the old man with the cane and whispered something in his ear. The man shrunk back and then sidled away.

  One of the bikers nodded at Dana and she nodded back, and they all vanished too. And just like that, the street in front of the SmartMart went from completely crazy t
o completely deserted.

  Calvin unlocked the car doors to let Milo and Dana in. “What the hell,” he said. “Was Skylar right? What that some kind of test?”

  Dana’s eyes were cool as she looked at me. “Smart girl.”

  “Blood in the streets?” I tried to make my own eyes as chilly. “That was a little over the top.”

  “Just checking to see if you have balls.”

  “For the record,” Calvin said, “we’ve got ’em. And so does Mr. Unfortunate, which, by the way, was something Sky absolutely did not need to see.”

  “Sunshine’s gonna see a lot worse before we’re done here,” Dana countered sharply.

  “So it was a test?” Calvin shot back. “Did you seriously pay that guy to flash—”

  “No,” Dana said. “The bikers were mine. Old Man Dempsey’s just part of the local color. He’s harmless. Mostly.”

  “Mostly,” Calvin repeated as I chimed in with “The bikers were yours!”

  “Yeah, mostly,” Dana said. “Everyone in Harrisburg is dangerous. So yeah, the bikers happened to be friends of mine—this time. Next time? Who knows? Next time—”

  “Did we pass your test?” Calvin asked, his voice heavy with attitude.

  “Part one,” Dana said. “Yeah. But part two is tonight, when you ask yourself, Am I still alive? If the answer is yes, then—”

  “At this moment, you’re arguing about irrelevant issues and wasting valuable time that should be spent trying to find Edmund Rodriguez before the police do. Because you know once they find him, we won’t be able to get close to him, and we’ll be back to square one.” Milo’s voice cut through Dana and Calvin’s bickering. It was the most I’d heard him talk since meeting him last night.

  Dana nodded but didn’t stop glaring at Cal. “You’re absolutely right.”

  Milo tucked his mop of hair behind his ears. He looked different in the daylight…The angles of his jawline were less harsh, and a five-o’clock shadow had begun to darken his chin. I didn’t realize I was staring until he looked at me and smiled. Dimples popped out playfully on either cheek. I looked away fast.