Coda

by Keith Knapp

  “What happened?” a shaking Sophia asked.

  Mike opened his mouth, then closed it. Jillian did the same. They were shaking, too. They both had a story to tell but were either too afraid or too confused (probably both) to tell it.

  “We heard a shot,” said Rachel. “Did you get one?”

  “Sort of,” said Jillian once she found her ability to speak again. She went on to explain what “sort of” meant. Many points of the story the others didn’t believe; Mike confirmed those aspects for Jillian.

  “Those things aren’t normal,” said Sophia.

  “No shit,” Mike said.

  “So what you’re saying,” said Rachel, “is that we’re stuck here and right now the safest place is in this room.”

  “Yeah,” said Mike. “I think we’re stuck here.”

  “But for how long?” asked Sophia. “If those things are just gonna shrug off bullets, then-”

  “It was down for a couple of minutes,” said Jillian. “We do Mike’s plan. Get ‘em all in here, take ‘em out, then run like there’s no tomorrow before they come back from the dead.”

  31.

  The Volvo careened into the Honda. Muscular framework combined with decades of fine Swedish craftsmanship made little of the Honda hatchback.

  Mike heard glass break in both cars while his eyes lifted to the stoplight. As he had thought, the Honda had had the right of way. He realized that didn’t matter anymore as he fixed his gaze back on the accident, currently in progress. The Volvo crushed the hatchback into another car that Mike couldn’t make out the model of. Could’ve been a Nissan.

  More glass shattered as the hatchback crumpled like a paper cup. The car now resembled something more out of a cartoon rather than real life, like Wile E. Coyote had set up an ACME trap that could flatten cars like pancakes; a sure invention to kill the Road Runner. But Mike’s attention wasn’t on the awesomeness of the accident anymore. It was on the driver of the Honda.

  Scrambling, turning the wheel, Alison Randal screamed. The steering wheel folded, smashing her arms, and her scream ended. Then Mike couldn’t see her anymore as the three cars (the third was definitely a Nissan, he recognized the logo) turned counter-clockwise together toward the corner, where the Volvo took the job of knocking down the stoplight, forcing pedestrians to scatter into the street, arms flailing, mouths blaring.

  Traffic at the intersection came to a stop with screeching tires and the unmistakable smell of burnt rubber. An old woman on the other side of the street held her hands to her mouth in surprise not at the wreck but at the stoplight which now lay dead in the middle of the crosswalk, which was apparently a more interesting spectacle to her. This was all shown to Mike in vivid panoramic Technicolor detail, every frame of the accident coming to life before him as if he’d been there.

  Which he hadn’t.

  He was at the halfway point of the crosswalk, running but not running, breathing but not breathing, moving at a snail’s pace. It was like trying to run through water. He had to get there soon. Alison was dying.

  The three cars had separated during their spin and he had easy access to the driver’s door of the Honda. Thank God for small favors. His hand reached out for the handle. Mike prayed to God the door still worked

  don’t let Your divine intervention be that You just made it so I could get to the door, let me be able to open it, too

  and that he’d be able to get Alison out. He yanked the door open, and while the handle didn’t work anymore, that ended up not mattering. The door broke off from the car and fell to the ground. Mike fell with it, catching Alison’s bloody

  she’s fucking soaked in it

  body before she had a chance to hit the pavement. Her head smacked into his chest, staining his shirt with blood. He held her up, her body half in/half out of the car. She was trying to pull herself free but her legs were jammed in there pretty good.

  “Sheriff’s office. Top right drawer,” she said, a tooth falling out of her mouth. Mike

  * * *

  pushed himself up on his elbows and was staring at a buff woman in a flannel. The buff woman stared back at him. “Bad dream?”

  Mike was having trouble getting his bearings. He was both in the hotel room and back in the intersection of Sepulveda and Victory at the same time. He had never been there, never saw the accident, but had envisioned it countless times in his nightmares. Oh, yes. There were nightmares in Mike Randal’s head, alright.

  Soon he felt himself return to the reality (for what that was worth) of the hotel room. The nightmare didn’t fade, it stayed with him, but at least now he could tell that’s all it had been: a nightmare.

  Moonlight bathed the little room in a silver-yellow glow. Brett snoozed against a wall, Rachel next to him, her arm around his shoulders. Sophia had gotten the dusty bed. From his position on the floor, all Mike could see of the woman was her left hand dangling over the mattress. It twitched. She was dreaming.

  Weariness had overcome the group as the night wore on. None of them felt tired but they were all beyond exhausted. There was nowhere for them to go—the hounds outside were making sure of that. After the two dog-things had returned for their little sneak attack, they’d once again taken positions in the middle of the road. Waiting. Just waiting. The fat one had still been in the window, but was alive and apparently well.

  Top drawer on the right.

  Alison’s words echoed in his brain. That hadn’t been part of the dream before. Didn’t even make any sense. That was some new craziness for him. He got to his feet, dusted his hands off on the butt of his jumpsuit.

  “Bad dream?” Jillian asked again.

  Spinning around, Mike saw Jillian sitting Indian-style underneath one of the windows. He had completely forgotten she was there. The woman sat motionless, inspecting him. Roscoe lay at her feet, his chin on one of her knees. There wasn’t enough room on the bed for both Sophia and the dog, so the pooch had decided to hang out with Jillian while she took watch.

  “Uh, yeah,” Mike whispered. “I suppose.”

  Peering out the window, Mike saw the two hounds down there still sitting on their hind quarters, waiting. Yep, that was their plan, alright. To wait it out.

  “Wanna talk about it?” Jillian asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “I just don’t, okay? Get some rest. I’ll take watch. I’m awake now.”

  Mike turned away from her. Even though he was sitting he was still tall enough to be able to see outside. But he wasn’t looking out the window. He hung his head down, his sneakers his prime source of entertainment for the moment. He played with one of the laces absentmindedly, like a grade-schooler with a nervous tick.

  Jillian patted Roscoe on the head. His ears flopped down to his jaw and he let out a restful sigh announcing to the world that he would be asleep in about ten seconds.

  With that sigh, Jillian closed her own eyes and found herself

  * * *

  looking into a coffin. She wasn’t tall enough to see inside of it, but she knew her mother was in there. The open-casket funeral had attracted a whopping seven family members. Her grandparents were there of course, burying their only child. Two sets of great uncles and aunts, doing what they could to console Jillian and her father. While there was no question that everyone in the room needed a good dose of reassurance that everything would be all right and that the pain would pass in time (time, that great healer of all wounds), it was Jillian and Richard Hadley that understandably took it the hardest.

  Diane Hadley had been ill for years, since before Jillian started remembering things. Her father had explained to her that mom was very, very sick with a disease that she could never quite grasp the name of (by the time Jillian was fifteen she could at least pronounce it: Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis), and that they had to hope and pray that God would fix her one day. But God was busy, it seemed, and Diane seemed to lose weight before their very eyes. The cough, that wretched cough of hers, got worse
every month. Some days she’d wake up as if there was nothing wrong with her, life was her very best friend and it would never leave her, but those days were few and far between. On most mornings she’d wake up (but usually never make it out of bed) looking like she’d spent the night knocking on death’s door. Death finally answered on September 9th, 1978.

  On September 10th, Jillian pushed herself up on her tip-toes to get a glimpse of her mother in the coffin. Stretching her legs, she could see her mother’s nose and that was it. It was pink and orange and she couldn’t figure out why it looked so strange. On the drive home her father had explained that when people die, other people would sometimes put make-up on them so that they’d look good for God.

  Trying to lift herself higher, Jillian pulled on her father’s hand. With a somber grin he knelt down, picked her up off the ground, and propped her on a knee.

  Her mother’s eyes were closed. Heavy eyeliner was caked onto her lashes. Her forehead, usually crinkled with lines of pain and distress, was as smooth as the oak desk in her mother’s writing room—mom had fancied herself a novelist but could never get one finished. Her long brunette hair flowed over her shoulders, not a lock out of place. She was skinny beyond belief, but it was the first time Jillian had seen her at peace.

  “Mommy,” was all that came out of Jillian’s mouth before she started crying.

  * * *

  The trucker stirred in her sleep. She lay flat on the ground across from Brett and Rachel. Brett let out a little snore, a cough, then was quiet again. Jillian pulled one of her arms out from underneath her (she was sleeping on her arms, her stomach facing the floor, and Mike wondered if she always slept like that) and wiped at something on her cheek. She uttered a word, a sound—Mike couldn’t tell what—then her arm went back underneath her stomach, which convinced him that this was her natural sleeping position of choice.

  That damn Honda hatchback rolled to the forefront of his mind again. Alison struggling to get out alive. So vivid, so real. He could still feel the asphalt on his ass.

  Another snore wedged itself in Brett’s throat, cleared, then he went back to sleep with a labored breath. Rachel was curled next to him, her arms no longer around his shoulders, her face contorted into a look of despair.

  Sophia’s mouth formed an upside down “U,” her eyebrows a mean-looking “M.” Whatever was going on in her never-never-land was not going to let her have a peaceful night’s rest.

  They were all having a bad night, and that somehow comforted Mike. At least he wasn’t alone.

  That’s when the hounds outside decided to stop waiting.

  * * *

  Now she was seventeen going on forty.

  Her mother’s headstone stood in the grass, the name and date of death staring at her, reminding Jillian that yes, death eventually comes by to claim everyone. But she already knew that. She’d known that for years.

  The stone had become weathered and beaten over time (time was doing more damage here than healing), and the “e” in “Diane” was all but gone. Jillian brushed two fingers against the stone where the “e” should’ve been. The indention of the letter could still be felt.

  Next to Diane Hadley’s grave was another one belonging to Richard Hadley. The man had died a year to the day after his wife of a heart attack. Jillian knew what had really happened; he had died of a broken heart.

  She had watched her father slowly waste away. He’d lost seventy pounds by the time he passed and spent most of the time locked in the bedroom. Time hadn’t healed that wound, either. In fact, the more she thought about it, Father Time seemed more apt to ruin things than to make them better. Life wasn’t like a wine that got better with age, it just got worse and worse until one day the cork went back into the bottle and the party was over.

  Her own heart had been broken, too. Shit, it still was. Some days she cursed her youth knowing that there were years ahead of her. But she had to go on. The slashes on her wrist from the razor in the bathroom did nothing to dull the pain of two missing parents. The gun she hid in the nightstand at her Uncle’s house (where she had the misfortune of living since her father had died) reminded her that there was always a way out, but she never took it. As damaged as she was, Jillian knew her parents wouldn’t want that.

  “Get up!”

  “WAKE THE HELL

  * * *

  UP!!!”

  The first rays of dawn attacked Jillian’s eyes, forcing them closed again. Above her was Mike, and boy was he shaking her violently. She tried to talk, to tell him that she was awake and to please stop it, but all that came out was a wobbly garble. She reached up and shoved his hands away.

  Grabbing her under the arms, Mike yanked her to her feet. Jillian’s head swam with wooziness as she looked around to see Roscoe darting back and forth, tail down, teeth exposed. Rachel and Sophia stood on either side of the door, primed to dart out at any second.

  But hadn’t she just been in the graveyard, visiting her folks? Wasn’t she-

  -no, she was forty-seven, not seventeen. A truck driver, not a high school student.

  “What the hell is-”

  Mike cut her off. “Those things must’ve gotten bored. I think they’re on their way up.” He held up the revolver in front of her face. Showtime.

  “Whoa, just slow down there a sec, cowboy,” mumbled Jillian. She massaged her temples, adjusting to being awake and upright. “They got in?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Mike spat out as he rolled the gun in his hand.

  Something fell over downstairs and a bark came from one of the dog-things. Roscoe pricked up his ears and looked at the open doorway, then whimpered. He ran to Sophia, stopped at her feet and looked up at her.

  Lady, we really need to get out of here, his eyes said.

  32.

  Getting into the hotel had not been easy. Try as it might, Diamond Patch simply could not suck in enough breath to make itself thin enough to fit through the window. It was close, though. So close.

  Blackie and Tan Sock knew this, too.

  Blackie trotted behind Diamond Patch and pushed. Diamond Patch let out a gruff—push harder—and wiggled its hind quarters. Blackie backed up to the middle of the road and Tan Sock followed suit. They shared a glance, then together rocketed full-force toward Diamond Patch’s ass.

  With a couple more good pushes like that from Blackie and Tan Sock, Diamond Patch was finally able to slink through the window. After that, it wasn’t much trouble for the other two to jump through. They were thinner.

  Sunlight shot through the broken windows of the lobby. The three hounds—they preferred to be called hounds, not dog-things—moved across the floor in a flanking position, covering the ground between the stairs and the front door with precision. Blackie snarled at the couch. The hound general in charge—Diamond Patch—looked back at its lieutenant and let out a murmur of a gruff. Blackie backed away from the couch and gave a gruff in response.

  With a nod of its massive head, Diamond Patch waved over its major, Tan Sock. Tan Sock tiptoed its way around the coffee table and stopped at its superior’s side. Diamond Patch looked up the stairs, pointing with its snout. Tan Sock followed its eye-line as Blackie stood in formation behind them.

  Secure with its small battalion behind it, Diamond Patch lead the way up the stairs. It didn’t have to guess which way to head in order to find the visitors. They were making noise, calling out and shouting at them to come up and get them. Stupid, idiotic prey. If Diamond Patch had the muscles to smile, it would’ve let loose with a big shit-eating grin.

  * * *

  Opening the cylinder to the gun again, Mike made sure that those three bullets were still there, then rolled the cylinder shut. His eyes focused on the door. The open door. A shitstorm would be coming through soon. He couldn’t see it yet, couldn’t smell it yet, but he knew. Not too much longer now.

  “Alright, eight shots and a broom,” Mike said. “We’re all complete idiots.”

  Roscoe kept guard of Sophia, his
paws touching her shoes, shoulders hunched, teeth showing.

  “We herd them in here, swing out into the hallway, close the door behind us,” Mike said.

  Rachel cocked the revolver, aimed it just over Mike’s shoulder. “Easy-peasy.”

  Brett positioned himself behind Rachel, his eyes half-closed behind trembling fingers, which held his trusty pocket knife.

  Jillian brought up her Colt and cocked it.

  Mike raised his own weapon. Squinted his eyes. Look out, Clint Eastwood.

  A clatter of clawed paws stampeded up the stairs. Within seconds, the dog-things were on the second floor and staring right at them.

  They stopped. Diamond Patch cocked its head.

  All three of the hounds inspected the open doorway with the utmost scrutiny. This wasn’t the way things were supposed to go, and they knew it. They were supposed to have to bash through a locked door and scrape through wood paneling—not simply walk into the room.

  “Come on you ugly pieces of shit,” Mike mumbled. “Let’s get this over with.”

  As if they heard and understood the mechanic, and for all he knew maybe they did, the hounds rocketed forward.

  Mike’s ear howled in pain from the blast of Rachel’s gun. The woman was standing just behind him and to the left, and he could feel the punch of heat on his face as the bullet exited the weapon.

  “Wait!” Mike yelled, even though he knew he was way too late. Plan A had just been ruined, so it was now on to Plan B, whatever that was.

  But at least her gun worked and she’d only made him deaf in the one ear.

  Rachel was a good shot, so any deafness would be worth it. The bullet landed directly in Diamond Patch’s head—the diamond patch was once again no more. The hound moved off to the side, blood smearing the old walls.

  “I’m sorry, I just did it,” Rachel said.