Mike constructed a sheepish smile. “Oh, I fell off my bike.”
“Ooo, looks painful.”
“It’s not that bad,” he said, his tone light, and in truth the bruises hardly hurt at all.
“Well, just be careful.”
“Thanks.” Chewing the soft, spicy muffin, he pedaled off into the darkness. Be careful, he thought. Now that’s a joke. How can you be careful when you live with a monster?
He headed south, away from the lights and activity of town, and as he approached the turn onto Route A-32 he slowed, looking out at the long black ribbon of asphalt as it rose up and down the hills and snaked around out of sight. This used to be part of his regular paper route, but since the near-miss with that wrecker the other night he hadn’t been out there. Then he remembered that he had planned to approach Officer Oswald about it and had been so caught up in Crow’s attempts to make him the next Karate Kid that it had somehow totally slipped his mind.
The chrysalis has only a few defense mechanisms, but it tries. It tries.
Now that memory clicked back into place and he slowed to a stop, debating. He could turn around now and find Oswald…or he could finally own up to the realization that the whole tow-truck thing was not what he thought it was. It was a near miss with some drunk asshole who thought it would be fun to play chicken with a kid on a bike. That was all. Anything else, he told himself, was ridiculous. Besides, he had no witnesses, no proof.
He looked down the road. “Crow wouldn’t chicken out,” he said aloud. “He’s not afraid of anything.”
With those words in the front of his brain, Mike set his jaw, kicked down hard on the pedal, and shot the War Machine forward onto the black road.
(3)
The late afternoon gloom churned around Mark as he bulled his way through it. The shadows thrown by the big oaks and the tall barn resisted him, jostling his shoulders as he hunched forward into the stiff wind, stalking purposefully toward the empty nowhere of the farm road that led away from the house and eventually into the fields. His legs pumped like a fortissimo metronome, marking the rhythm of his furious pace. He paused once to angrily light a cigarette, sucking in fiercely enough to ignite a third of the Camel and fairly spitting the blue smoke into the night air; then he snapped his lighter shut with the metallic aggression of lopping shears and shoved it in his pocket as he resumed his march toward the end of his own anger.
The actual physical destination turned out to be the barn, not by any choice but merely because it loomed up in front of him and he stopped, startled, and looked up at it as if he’d never seen it before. His surprise betrayed the intense confusion in his mind: he hadn’t realized he’d walked this far from the house or even in that particular direction. He stood in the road, smoking the cigarette in harsh puffs, whipping the butt out of his mouth between each puff and blowing the smoke out in a thin, forced stream as he regarded the barn. It was the same barn he’d always seen, the barn that had been there when he had been born, the same barn he’d helped his father paint red when he was ten and repaint twice since then. It was the same barn in which he’d smoked his very first cigarette; the same barn in which he and Val had spent many a covert hour leaping from the loft into the massive hay mounds that covered most of the floor. It was the same barn where he and Connie had first kissed almost thirteen years ago, and where he had first made love to her, nestled there in the soft fragrant straw of the highest loft, the two of them losing their virginity together in a few moments of sweet, clumsy fumbling that possessed far more passion than skill. It was the same barn where he had had his last conversation with his father prior to that terrible night. Mark had come home for lunch and had spent twenty minutes talking to Dad about Terry Wolfe’s offer to lease a parcel of their land to build a Christmas Town attraction. Dad had said he’d think about it, and Mark had driven back to his office at the college. The next time he would see his dad would be while they were all hostages to Karl Ruger, and from that moment on everything had gone to shit.
Mark walked slowly up to the tall red sidewall of the barn. He reached out to touch it, drawn for some reason to the wooden planks, needing to feel the slightly pebbled surface of the thick layers of red paint. The paint felt cold, but it felt real, and it was an old and familiar texture. Mark leaned his forehead against the wood, closing his eyes and then screwing them up into tight pits of gristle as a wave of unbearably intense emotion crashed down on the shores of his soul. His lips writhed, trying to speak, trying to articulate what he needed to say. His chest ached with the burning need to scream.
In the end, all he could say was one word. “Connie!”
It came out as a whisper of mingled desperation, self-loathing, and fear that he had lost her forever. He stared inward across the vast empty landscape that stretched between his wife and his own impotent, damaged soul and wondered how he could ever make such an impossible journey back to her. With each beat of his breaking heart he pounded on the side of the barn with a balled fist. Inside the barn the echoes sounded like the amplified beating of a giant’s pulse.
“Connie!” he whispered in a voice choked with tears. Slowly, his knees buckled and he sank to the cold ground, huddling against the barn, not cowering away from the cold, but sinking into his own defeat and failure.
He did not see the shadow rising between him and the distant cloud-choked sky. He was so lost in his grief that he never even felt the coldness of it, a frost harsher and deeper than the icy blast of the October wind. He never saw the pale white hand reach out of the shadows, and knew nothing at all about it until it was far too late.
Chapter 26
(1)
The first swarm of roaches swept toward them. Fifty yards away. Forty. The second swarm was still a hundred yards away but it was moving with incredible speed.
“Keep running!” Crow yelled and reached back to grab Newton’s shoulder. With a growl of fury he propelled the reporter forward and then ran a half pace behind him, ready to shove him again if he slowed. “Run!”
They ran toward the rough path Crow had hacked through the vines, but by the time they had taken twenty steps it was clear that the second swarm would cut them off long before they reached it. Crow grabbed Newton’s arm and they both skidded to a halt as around them the whole forest seemed to be rustling with the sound of a million tiny legs. Crow looked back toward the house and the field. There was still that one big patch of sunlight and there was the fact that the wave of roaches had split apart to avoid it.
“God, let me be right about this,” he said and quickly squatted down to make sure his trouser cuffs were tucked tightly inside his boots. “Newt, listen,” he said, rising and talking fast. “No questions, no arguments. Just follow me. Fast!”
With that he spun around and ran full tilt toward the field—straight at the oncoming mass of insects.
Newton goggled at him. “Are you crazy?” he screeched, but Crow was going at a dead run and within seconds had reached the wave of roaches and kept going. From twenty feet away Newton could hear the sound of Crow’s Timber-lines crunching on the shiny backs of the creatures, the carapaces cracking like pistachio shells. Crow ran fast, arms and legs pumping, heading deeper and deeper into the sea of bristling black bugs. Some of them turned to pursue him and collided with the wave of oncoming bugs, causing a rage of overlapping currents that bubbled up off the ground.
“RUN!” he heard Crow yell over his shoulder.
“Oh, Jesus,” Newton said as the leading edge of the swarm flew toward him, “don’t make me do this.” Then he was running, too, and with his first step his sneaker crunched down onto the shiny black shells and he could hear the bugs pop wetly. He ran as fast as he could, and he stared at Crow’s back twenty feet ahead of him. He fixed on that, not daring to look down, knowing without seeing that the roaches were milling in confusion as the leading edge of the wave was fighting to turn and follow while the main mass of them was still in motion forward. Their bodies boiled up around his ankles as he ran and he tried to pick up his knees so that his ankles would be as high off the ground as possible with each step. He was horribly aware of how low his sneaker tops were.
He ran and ran, and within a dozen steps his shoes were smeared with a sticky white-green goo of insect guts and still the roaches swarmed around him in their legions; the hiss of their bodies scraped against one another and the whisper of their legs over the rough ground was dreadful. He ran as the air burned in his lungs and pain blossomed in his chest like fireworks, all the time watching Crow’s back as the man pelted down the path back the way they had come. Crow was running faster, pulling ahead yard by yard.
We’re going to die! He thought as he ran. We’re going to die! It was the only clear thought he could manage.
Roaches leapt at him, clung to his clothes, crawled up his pants legs as he ran, and Newton was uttering a high-pitched continuous cry of total terror. The field was still a hundred yards ahead and now Crow was almost up to the back wall of the house. Newton saw this and a fresh wave of terror struck him as he suddenly remembered that whoever or whatever had locked itself in that house could use their keys to unlock the locks, and then those doors would open. Front door, back-door, cellar door. All of them would open, and what—dear sweet God, what?—would come howling out?
We’re going to die! He thought, but deep down another, far more horrible feeling was growing. It had no words, no specific shape, but Newton was gradually becoming aware of the possibility that there might be things in that house worse than roaches, perhaps worse than death.
“Newt!” Crow’s voice shook him into awareness and he turned away from the house and saw that ahead of him Crow had suddenly stopped running. Newton almost stopped as well, which would have been fatal because the roaches were gaining on him, coming at him from every direction, both swarms now joined into one vast bristling ocean, but Crow had stopped because he had reached the clear patch of sunlight. He whirled around, alternately brushing bugs off of his clothing and waving furiously to Newton. “Come on! Over here! In the light! Run, goddamn it, RUN!”
