Sally placed her right hand on the floor and shifted her weight onto it, easing her body up from the seat in preparation for moving completely to the floor. The sound the seat made was not loud, not by any stretch of the imagination. Nor was it sinister. It was little more than a small creak, a squeak, perhaps, a breath of material and spring, hinge and wood, moving in its time-honored fashion from the pulled-down position into the folded-back position. But it was tantamount to a fanfare of trumpets or a seismic shifting of the San Andreas plates. And the slurring started up again, this time with seeming determination, and Sally heard it shift from the carpeted central aisle onto the wooden flooring – that meant that whoever it was had moved into one of the rows. She contemplated dropping to the floor but that would mean the seat would make an even louder noise. She could lift her head but that would only serve in delaying the inevitable. Wherever the person was that was looking for her, he or she or it was not about to abandon the hunt if Sally wasn't in one particular row. They'd simply try another row. And Sally thought that "they" was pretty much the case. She was sure there were two, maybe three of them. Hell, maybe there were four of them.
Once she had made the decision, all the anxiety evaporated.
In one perfectly fluid motion, Sally jumped from the double seat, hoisted her pumps from the floor and stood up to her full height.
The old woman edging her way along two or three rows in front of Sally seemed almost as surprised as Sally herself, but appeared also to recognize Sally, tilting her head to one side and then, pulling off her gloves very slowly, holding her arms out in front of her as though to embrace Sally like a long lost friend or distant relative come to visit. The woman was wearing dark glasses, just like the people in the hotel corridor – and just like, Sally now saw, the old man walking up the main aisle and the neatly suited gentleman threading his way between the seats of the right hand side block.
Up in front of her, the old woman was holding onto a seat-back as she hoisted a leg and prepared to clamber over – an action that would then leave a further two similar seats to be hurdled. In the dim light given out by the myriad tiny bulbs in the theater's ceiling, Sally watched in a kind of rapt fascination as the wood beneath the woman's fingers seemed to flake and then collapse to the floor in a shower of slivers and shavings.
The man in the aisle removed his gloves and slid them into the pockets of his white coveralls. Maybe he was a doctor… or an ice cream seller? Whatever, Sally didn't think he now operated under any "good humor" or Hippocratic oath. Holding his arms straight out in front of him, he lumbered up the aisle slowly but with a grim determination. And the same could be said of the man in the suit, now nearing the end of his row, thereby leaving him with just the center aisle to cross and two rows to move up: he would reach Sally first, she reckoned, unless the old woman got the hang of straddling seats.
She glanced back and saw the woman fall over backwards, just toppling over like a tall statue placed on an uneven surface, her legs going up into the air, dress flying up in a flurry, pants and hose showing, one shoe falling off, and the woman's head hitting another seat-back with a blow that Sally thought would have felled most linebackers, never mind a little old woman who looked like the real life counterpart of the granny figure who used to look out for Tweety Pie and take a broom to Sylvester the cat in the old cartoon shows.
We have to get out, mommy, someone said in the back of Sally Davis's head. She nodded. But which way was going to be best? That was the jackpot question.
Suit Man had reached the aisle. He had removed his gloves – no surprise there – and was reaching out ahead of him as he emerged from between the seats and headed diagonally for Sally's row-end. He would reach it seconds before the old man who might be a doctor.
Sally heard a clatter from her left and she spun around just in time to see a young woman with a milky-pale complexion wrong-foot herself on soda cups and popcorn cartons and keel over like a tree being felled just a few feet away from her in the row in front. The girl hit her head on one of the chair backs in front of her – a hard hit, Sally thought, and one which brought with it a dull and sickening thud – as she went down, her right hand straining upwards from where she now lay on the floor, groping towards Sally.
Now the doctor had reached the end of Sally's row and Suit Man was hot on his heels, the two of them shambling along like store window dummies, walking as though they had never done it before and were not altogether impressed.
Over towards the screen, the old woman seemed to be stuck astride a seat back, her dress hoisted clear up to a pair of voluminous pants and exposing wattled, flabby-skinned legs the color of alabaster. She was adjusting her sunglasses–
Why's she wearing sunglasses, mommy?
–with hands that appeared totally new to the task they had undertaken.
Without even thinking about what she was about to do, Sally slipped her feet into her pumps and stepped first onto the seat next to her. Then she pulled her dress up, the material bunched in her right hand and the left held out beside her as a balancing stick, and she stepped up onto the seat back in front of her. Then, realizing that momentum was the only thing that was going to work here (and even that was a tall order), she started forward towards the screen, stepping from row to row by chair back to chair back, suddenly aware from her eye corner that two more "people" had entered the theater by the door at the right of the screen.
There was no noise from the old woman, the pasty-faced girl, the doctor or Suit Man, and Sally determined not to look back to see what they had made of her escape. What were the people aiming to do to her? Whatever had happened to them, she thought, why had it not happened to her?
Five or six rows along, one of the chair backs was loose.
There was no way Sally would have been able to tell even if all of the lights had been blazing bright. The first intimation was when Sally placed her not inconsiderable weight on the very tip of the bowed wooden back and used it as a springboard to throw her other leg – the left one on this occasion – forward to another row. And so on.
She was mindful of the pasty-faced girl, the doctor, the old woman in the big pants and Suit Man – not to mention the assorted wanderers gathering in the dip immediately in front of the screen – and was busy spreading her concentration between them (and whatever it was that they had in mind for her), the reasons for the gloves and the glasses, the need to stay balanced and place her feet correctly on the seat-backs, and a consideration as to which route seemed most likely to get her out of here. Thus, when the seat clicked once and, with a dull but discernable ping, fired its sheared holding bolt across the dusty floor space beneath the seat, and then yawned backwards until it collided with the upraised seat in the row behind, Sally was pitched unceremoniously forward, landing in a heap around twelve rows from the front.
The pain hit three areas pretty much all at the same time: her face collided with the edge of a seat-back two rows further on, her left breast received a wooden sucker-punch from the chair arm one row behind that one, and her right knee took the full brunt of that chair's back with such force (and noise; Sally didn't expect ever to walk again) that, when she finally hit the popcorn-littered floor in a chaotic bundle of arms and legs and pain and blood, a dim-and-distant part of her was half-prepared to lie still and play dead. But she didn't think she would be able to maintain that level of dummy-playing with any believability – particularly if they were able to feel pulses and watch for signs of breathing.
And the sunglasses, mommy… and the gloves.
Yes, those too.
Shaking her head, Sally got immediately to her feet and took stock of the situation, drinking in the scene around her as fast as she could. The shapes were moving around clumsily and slowly – that was the good news. The bad news was that they seemed to be covering most throughways – the main aisle on the right, the one on the left, several of the individual rows, the wide passageway directly in front of the screen and the two exit doors on either sid
e of it. Aside from the exit doors, which led additionally to restrooms and presumably storage and office facilities, there were only the main double doors Sally had come in by – which meant finding an unoccupied row and heading left to join the aisle leading to it. In turn, that also meant having to deal with whatever was in the foyer.
Why are they walking that way, mommy? one of the voices asked.
Before Sally could formulate an answer, a bitter hardened voice chimed in with a response all of its own. Because they're a bunch of sick puppies, kiddo, it said. They're dead – dead and lost and changed – they aren't pulling off those gloves to shake your hand, and they aren't wearing those glasses to protect against glaucoma.
No, the only sensible way was up. And why not? she thought, glancing up at the ornately patterned ceiling. After all, she had just walked along a ledge eight floors up on the side of a building: no point in stopping now, not when she was on such a roll.
The aisle leading back out to the foyer looked busy now, people starting to thread along the row that she was standing in and the ones on either side of it. When she turned around, she saw they were coming from the other direction.
A strange calm descended on her, and she looked back up the seated area towards the two projection windows. The windows fronted a rectangular outcropping that stood off from the wall. Sally could see a faint green glow on the outside wall facing the left side of the outcropping. There were doors there. She couldn't see them, not exactly (though there were different tones of dark set against the wall) but she just figured a door had to be there. She figured that because if there was no door over there – which, it had to be said, didn't make much sense at all – then her goose was cooked.
Our goose as well, mommy?
"There is a door!" Sally said, defiantly.
As she had opened her mouth, she had tasted liquid, warm and thick liquid. It tasted metallic. She wiped her nose and cried out in pain. It was definitely broken. Plus her knee hurt, both shins were throbbing, and – as she discovered when she bent down to retrieve her lost pump – her left hip would not allow any sudden movements without sending shafts of pain across her midriff and a wave of nausea welling up her throat.
"We have to go back," Sally said.
There was muttering in her head.
Somewhere behind her, a seat twanged and rattled.
Sally dropped the pump onto the floor again, slipped her foot inside and stepped gingerly onto the seat in front of her. Once there, feeling a little unsteady but increasingly aware of the shuffling coming ever closer (she dared not turn around to see what the ones in the row behind her were doing but on one oc casion she thought she felt something brush her back) she stepped up onto the seat back and headed back the way she had come, facing the twin windows of the projection room and moving diagonally now toward the green light on the far wall.
Every step was profound agony but after a few rows she was in the clear from the shufflers. She reached the aisle four rows from the back and, just for a second, she considered jumping down onto the floor. But the pain in her hip said that such a move would undoubtedly be foolhardy–
Foolhardy?
You're a fool, Hardy!
Sniggers
–because she felt that she would then be unable to move at all.
She pushed the seat down with her foot, balancing on the chair-arm with her good (or better!) foot and leg, and then stepped down onto the seat, her arms held out wide alongside her. Once there, she sat down carefully on the wooden back, the chair threatening to tilt suddenly and Sally throwing her arms up in horror (thereby causing more pain in every area), and then stepped onto the floor of the aisle. Shambling up towards her were around a dozen or maybe fifteen people, all wearing sunglasses and all with their arms stretched out in front of them.
Sally turned and headed for the green light and the doors beneath it.
Each step brought with it an involuntary yelp but she reached the green light in surprisingly fast time. The folks in the aisle had only barely reached where she had been but she didn't waste any time. She pulled on both of the two doors behind the closed curtains but only one – the right one – would open. She stepped through into a long corridor that sloped upwards. This corridor, too, was in darkness, without even the tiny spot bulbs to give at least a little light, and whatever pale illumination was available from behind her was fast disappearing as the door squeaked closed. In that brief glimpse, Sally had seen that the corridor was empty. But there had been a bundle of what appeared to be some kind of material in a heap over on the left. And as the door reached its inevitable conclusion, the bundle had moved.
Sally reached out to the walls on either side of the corridor, sweeping the Hessian covering for a light-switch. It was then that she heard the shuffling from in front of her.
Sally stopped and remained perfectly still with her nose, arms, legs and hip screaming out inside her in absolute agony.
"Hello? Is somebody there?" she whispered.
Nobody answered, but the shuffling continued.
Sally spun around and pushed the doors slightly ajar – the others had reached the end of the aisle and were even now making a drunken left turn to head towards the green light. The green light! That was it. If she could manage to get both doors open then there might be sufficient glow from the green exit sign for Sally to see what she was doing.
She pushed open the door she had used and flipped the retainer bolts from the top and bottom of the secured one: Sally was sure there must be some kind of law against bolting what appeared to be fire doors in a public place, but she didn't think she would ever have an opportunity to complain.
Mommy, one of the voices whispered, somebody wants to–
Sally turned and stepped back just as two bare hands reached for her, reached up to her, from a little old man wearing dark glasses and – Sally saw in the surreal green glow from behind her head – a pair of light colored trousers (stained wet around the crotch area) sitting on top of a pair of symmetrically patterned carpet slippers.
Sally knocked the hands aside and ducked around the old man, who momentarily was now facing the corridor wall. As she shot forward, Sally felt something cold grip the flesh on the lower left side of her back, grip it through her blouse. And just for that split second, Sally knew that it was only her momentum that saved her. If she had been standing still when the hand had grabbed her back then she would have sunk to the floor beneath that strange concordance of darkness and light, heat and cold, pain and pleasure. And even running along the corridor to the end, seeing the faint glimmer of the metal crash bars that she knew would lead to the outside, there was a part of her that almost bemoaned that loss of opportunity – of being able to stop, to finish it all, to face whatever it was – maybe even join Gerry. But all of that was gone when Sally hit the bars and emerged into the early Denver morning, all elements of pain from anywhere in her body were but dim and distant memories. She was braced for more of them, her hands clenched into tiny fists, her muscles charged and waiting to swing, to power, to crash and to maim. But the street was empty and, best of all, over the rooftops eastwards, a lightness was gathering on the horizon.
Sally stopped, took a couple more steps and then slumped onto her knees, oblivious of the concrete hitting cartilage and bone, and then she slid onto her left arm, head held low, and she looked back at the theater's fire exit. Just for the briefest of moments, the gathered people seemed about to step out to follow her but then, then they seemed to waver and pause, their feet hitting the first part of paving slab and stopping. Sally recalled a long ago movie, a foreign film, subtitles, about a group of people in a dinner party who, when they had finished eating, were unable to leave the room even though there was nothing standing in their way.
As one, the figures backed into the theater and two arms – from different people, Sally noted – reached out and pulled the doors closed again.
Sally stretched out where she lay, rested her head on her arm and closed he
r eyes to the muted sunshine.
(32)
It was after seven o'clock when they finally decided it was safe to stop.
Rick waited until he saw a car that he liked the look of and then pulled in.
But, each time, the car had been damaged, running into metal fence posts or outcroppings of rock, and the ignitions had all been left on and the batteries were stone dead. Rick decided they would have to wait until they hit a stop somewhere and, sure enough, one came up.
The place appeared to be called, somewhat unimaginatively, "Diner", and the car was a shiny blue Cadillac Seville, a late '70s model that had clearly been cherished by its owner, he or she having moved on to the same place everyone else had gone.
It was parked up alongside four 18-wheelers, a little foreign job with a stick-shift, and a couple of rust buckets, all sitting outside a coffee house with a curling "Help Wanted" sign taped to the window. Four sets of keys had been on the counter, sitting beside half-eaten plates of food or newspapers open to the sports pages. The process of elimination had identified the ones that belonged to the Seville, a fob which also contained house keys for an unknown home and a bendy Bugs Bunny figurine.
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