Sebastian Nemo knew the crowd started to gather outside the restaurant by four o’clock. It wasn’t like people camped out on the sidewalk or anything, but after the Daily Meal listed the Desert Dolphin seafood restaurant as one of the ten best restaurants in America, it was suddenly easier to get tickets to the Masters than to get a table in the quaint little restaurant—the key word being little. And a table with a majestic view of the Superstition Mountains east of Mesa and saguaro cacti marching across the sand—well, you better show up by four or you didn’t have a chance.
Sebastian had taken up his spot outside the door in the shade on the east side of the building at three—the hottest part of the day, a sweltering ninety-one degrees. But it would begin to cool off now and it wouldn’t be too long before he could luxuriate—for half an hour at least—in the air-conditioned interior of the restaurant that would be front-page news in every newspaper in America tomorrow morning.
As expected, the place would be jammed, with a huge waiting list standing outside.
What was it Casey Stengel said once—“Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.” Sebastian chuckled.
He hoped he’d be able to enjoy his meal before he had to depart. He was hungry and the menu sounded scrumptious. Duck and pork rillettes, terrines, sausages and pickles all made in-house. A raw bar—which he’d have to forgo because the chair couldn’t conveniently access it. He’d measured all the passageways, knew exactly where he could “drive” and where he couldn’t. It wouldn’t do to get hung up in there.
The doors opened promptly at six. The management didn’t want the crowd to have to wait outside in the desert heat a second longer than necessary. Sebastian rolled along behind the maître d’. The building was shaped like a wagon wheel, with the kitchen and bathrooms in the center and aisles fanning out from it to ever-widening table groupings. The choice spots, obviously, were on the outside of the ring that on two sides offered a view of the mountains and desert.
The subdued clack and clatter of silverware on china and the gentle rumbling of conversations all around him covered the whirring sound of the mechanism when Sebastian switched it on. He punched the timer on his watch as he summoned the waiter to order dessert—which he would not, unfortunately, get to sample.
When there were exactly seven minutes left on the timer, he made his way to the men’s room in the center of the wheel hub of the restaurant. It had doors opening from two different sides of the building. That was why Sebastian had selected it. He motored into the handicapped stall and waited until the room emptied. Then he rose from the chair and turned his suit jacket inside out, changing the dark blue blazer into a pale yellow one. He put on sunglasses and affixed a reasonably natural-looking toupee to his bald scalp. Stepping out of the stall, he pulled a wire instrument from his pocket and inserted it between the door and the jamb of the stall, using it to hook the door catch and slide it into place. Now, the door was locked from the inside. He pocketed the wire and strode purposefully out the door on the opposite side of the bathroom from the one where he had entered.
This part was where it got a little dicey. Sebastian had to find the right—why, there she was, seated on the aisle two tables from the door! He approached the older woman, who was wearing too much makeup and a dress suited for someone twenty years younger and thirty pounds lighter. She was seated with an older couple engaged in an animated conversation. Perfect!
As he passed her chair, he dropped to one knee and picked up the napkin he had palmed.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Did you drop this?”
She looked around, spotted her own napkin in her lap and replied, “No. Mine’s right here, thanks.”
He smiled his widest, most winning smile and then shoved a hypodermic needle he’d carried in his suit pocket into her ample belly—below the level of the tablecloth so it was unseen. She only looked startled and had no time even to speak before the spasms struck her. She went totally rigid, then flopped out of the chair onto the floor in what appeared to be a grand mal seizure. He stepped back into the crowd that quickly gathered around her, moved nonchalantly to join a group of patrons who were leaving, seeming to be one of them as they walked past the distracted hostess and out the door.
Sebastian moved purposefully, not rushing, to his blue van and got inside. He drove slowly down the street to the end of the block, watching the digital readout count down to zero.
Then the world rumbled as if a volcano had erupted nearby. The Desert Dolphin Restaurant belched a fireball into the sky and the concussive force of the explosion rocked cars in the parking lot. Sebastian lifted the cell phone from his pocket, flipped the top, punched “call” on the number he’d already dialed and spoke to the silence that answered the phone.
“Done.” He hung up and drove away while debris was still falling out of the sky. When he turned onto the expressway, he tossed the phone out the window.
Biscuit was spoiled. Must be Miss Minnie and Mr. Gerald had give that dog whatever he wanted ’cause when Theresa didn’t, the poor thing took on like he was dyin’.
If Becca hadn’t complained about it, Theresa might have let it go. But when Becca said she had little red bites all over her legs, Theresa knew it was long past time to admit that she did, too. Biscuit had fleas. So Theresa took him to the dog groomer in town and left him for the day—got him washed in that special soap, all fluffed up and smellin’ good.
She spent that whole day cleaning the house, vacuuming and emptying the bag outside like the instructions Becca found on the Internet said you was supposed to do when you got fleas in the house. She’d put bay leaves against the baseboards, too, and water in flat pans beside where Biscuit snoozed on the floor in her bedroom and in Becca’s so’s any stragglers would jump in and drown. It was a lot of work, but the only really hard part was convincing Biscuit he had to sleep in the garage that night. She didn’t pick Biscuit up at the groomer’s until late afternoon and he wasn’t a bit thrilled to be left in the garage when she got home.
“I’m gone take me one of them pills tonight,” Theresa told Becca right after they’d got the supper dishes cleared away. “I’m so ’xausted I can’t think and I need me one good night’s sleep. I’m going to bed early, might not even wait ’til it’s good dark outside.”
“You go to bed and I’ll snuggle up in my girl cave with a mindless novel.” Almost completely soundproof—Becca said it was “silent as King Tut’s Tomb”—the basement apartment where she was staying had been Bishop’s favorite place to read, too.
Theresa set out dishes of food and water for the forlorn mutt in the garage before she went upstairs to get ready for bed. He’d been acting queer for the past couple of days, come to think of it, sniffin’ around and whinin’, and wouldn’t let Theresa out of his sight. But soon’s he’d figured out she was gone make him sleep on that quilt she’d spread out on the concrete garage floor, he started to take on somethin’ fierce—whinin’ and barkin’, runnin’ around in circles and growling.
Theresa didn’t know what to make of it. But she’d puzzle it out tomorrow after a good night’s sleep. She put on her comfortable white cotton nightgown she’d once told Bishop had been designed by Omar the Tent-maker, locked the door and dropped the key in among her undies, stirring them around so’s she’d have to be full awake to find it.
The setting sun was painting darkening shadows on the yard outside her window when she sat down on the side of the bed with the tiny white pill in her dark palm. It was so little she put it in her mouth and swallowed, didn’t even need water to wash it down. Then she stretched out between the sheets, knowing it wouldn’t take the pill more than a couple of minutes to whisk her away into tender darkness.
So she let her mind go, let herself think about Isaac. She savored the memories of her boy, kept each one in a frame by itself in a special room in her heart. But she didn’t go in that room often. Couldn’t. Bein’ in there with the presence of him all around—it hurt so bad she could feel her whole being split open like a watermelon with the crack running ahead of the knife and everything inside pink and bare and fragile. His face bloomed in her mind; she smiled and began to nod off, expectin’ that when she opened her eyes, the sun’d be shining on a new day. It wasn’t.
She come awake—didn’t know what roused her—and was instantly aware of the stink. Not as thick and nauseating as it often was, the smell was still unmistakable—a horrible olfactory stew of rotting flesh, excrement and filth. And the sound of screaming and wailing. She looked at the clock on the bedside table, where the red letters said it wasn’t even eight o’clock.
The streetlight on the corner shone through the white sheer curtains, so the room wasn’t completely dark. She could see them, little eyes that almost glowed, staring at her from the foot of the bed. Frustration welled up in her chest. She’d took a pill! She wasn’t s’posed to be having nightmares, smelling that stink and seeing monsters! Would she never get another good night’s sleep?
There was movement on the floor, scurrying like, and she watched one small dark shape, then another and another clamber with ease up the wooden frame of the footboard. The shapes sat motionless then; all she could see was them shiny bright eyes.
She shuddered at the sight even though she understood that what she was seeing wasn’t really there, that it was only a dream. She believed that right up until the dream bit her.
When razor-edged teeth sank deep into the side of her foot, the pain shocked her alert. It was real.
Rats.
Then they swarmed up off the floor onto the bed and were all over her and she began to scream.
She kicked at the reeking brown creature that had buried fangs in her foot, then thrashed around on the bed in horror, struggling to sit up—to get them off her—swatting at them, knocking them away, shrieking a high, thin wail of pain and horror.
She could feel their tiny clawed feet as they ran up her body, hear their little squeaking sounds. One bit her on the hand as she tried to knock it away, and it held on, dangling there as she slapped at the other rats swarming over the bed.
One was in her face. She could smell the horror stink and feel his whiskers on her cheek before he sank his fangs into the side of her neck. She batted at him with her left hand and with the right that had a rat dangling off it. She felt a stab of agony in her thigh, another on her belly. Wiggling, screaming and sobbing, she shoved at the creatures biting her, fighting to get out of the bed so she could run away.
But she was so tangled up in the sheets that when she swung her legs over the side of the bed to stand, the covers went with them, and instead of standing, she stumbled and crashed to the floor, landing on top of a solid carpet of writhing rodents. She got to her knees, with rats biting her in a dozen places, and crawled toward the door, her hands and knees smashing rats as she went. She was conscious of screams, sounds unlike any she’d ever heard, but was only vaguely aware they were coming from her own throat. She made it to the door, reached up, got hold of the knob and turned it.
Locked.
Becca was in the basement, couldn’t hear her cries.
Biscuit was locked in the garage.
And Theresa was locked in a room with rats eating her alive.
In the laundry room next to the garage door, Becca was down on her knees with a squirt bottle full of bleach, attacking the mildewed floor drain with a vengeance.
Since Bishop’s death, Theresa had let things go. It was obvious in little ways. She might once have been a meticulous housekeeper, but after the loss of the big man who had been her lifelong soulmate, things had started to slide and Theresa either didn’t notice or noticed and didn’t care.
So Becca had quietly stepped in and taken up the slack. Nothing obvious. She’d mop the kitchen floor before Theresa came downstairs in the morning. She’d dust and clean toilets while Theresa was gone to her weekly Bible study. Over time, she’d gotten the place more or less shipshape. Then Theresa’d come home this morning and started cleaning the house like a buzz saw. She said that was what the veterinarian had said she had to do to get rid of the fleas Biscuit had brought in and to keep them from reinfesting the clean and groomed dog.
Becca smiled. Theresa probably wouldn’t admit it if you put a gun to her head, but she had come to care so much for the dog that she’d have done just about anything for it. Biscuit was slowly dragging the old woman out of the fog of her grief with his wagging tail and big brown eyes.
The only room in the house not shiny by suppertime was the laundry room. Biscuit was afraid of the sounds the washer and dryer made and wouldn’t set foot in the room. Since it was likely the only flea-free zone in the house, they hadn’t scrubbed it in their clean-athon that afternoon. But fleas or not, the room needed attention. As soon as Theresa was settled in bed, Becca went after the surfaces with Pine-Sol, then got on her hands and knees and attacked the musty-smelling floor drain with bleach.
Becca had put on a load of laundry, so the clunking washer right beside her head blotted out sound. But when she sat back on her heels to inspect her work, the spin cycle glided to a stop and suddenly Becca could hear the ruckus in the garage. Biscuit was going postal! He was barking furiously, growling and scratching at the door outside the laundry room like he intended to claw his way through it. As Becca got up to check on the dog, she thought she heard a sound from upstairs. But Theresa’d taken a pill, so she had to be sleeping soundly.
Becca opened the door to the garage.
“What’s the mat—?”
Biscuit streaked past her like his tail was on fire and raced toward the stairs. Becca followed. By the time she was halfway across the kitchen, she could hear Theresa’s terrified screams and she began to run, too.
Becca grabbed the key off the hook beside the door. When she turned it in the lock, flung open the bedroom door and switched on the light, what she saw was a horror too awful to countenance. Theresa was lying on her face on the floor beside the dresser and rats were swarming all over her.
Biscuit didn’t hesitate for a second. He tore into the creatures in a murderous fury, his growl the rumble of some monstrous enraged beast. He cut like a scythe through their ranks, flinging them aside right and left, attacking the filthy creatures with a savage violence Becca never would have believed possible from the mutt who’d lived a placid life in the home of two old people before Theresa rescued him out of the rain.
The rats swarmed the dog with supernatural strength, biting and clawing, but Biscuit fought them off, his lips curled in a ferocious snarl, vicious fire in his brown eyes. He bit off rats’ heads with one snap, disemboweled them with his sharp canines, ripped and tore at them in a brutal assault, driving them back—away from where Theresa lay facedown on the floor.
Becca could see the legions of small demons that possessed the rats. Grotesque bodies, each uniquely hideous. Some were riding the rats like cowboys in a rodeo, others had become so much a part of the rat that they were hardly distinguishable.
One with a beetle-like shell sat atop a huge rat on Theresa’s back that had its teeth sunk deep into her shoulder. Its limbs—like tentacles, half a dozen of them—were broken on one side as if they’d been injured and flopped uselessly. It was attached to the rat with something that looked like a beak stuck into the creature’s head.
Some were slimy, dripping a yellow or green goo that looked like pus from open sores on their bodies. Everything was out of proportion—heads too large with snouts rather than noses, bloated bodies with leathery skin stretched as tight as the fragile featherless skin on a baby bird’s belly. Their mouths were full of broken, blackened, rotting teeth—or with rows of razor knives shiny with drool. Most had tails that swished restlessly back and forth. All of them bore injuries, missing an eye or an ear, scarred from battles unnumbered down through the centuries.
Their cries and maniacal laughter was a symphony of otherworldly sound that assaulted Becca’s ears. The possessed rats were wired into a frenzy—so crazed they were ripping into each other, locked together in writhing clumps of combat on the floor and the bed. Their movements were too frenetic for them to do great damage to Theresa. In a coordinated assault they could literally have torn her apart, but they were incapable of cooperating in anything, merely racing around and over her, nipping, ripping out small hunks of flesh from a dozen bleeding wounds and crying out in glee.
Then a big rat that had leapt off Theresa’s back to escape Biscuit’s wrath spotted Becca. The demon controlling it cried out and the others turned to look.
“You see us, don’t you? You want some of this?”
The rat launched itself at Becca, leapt an impossible distance, and Becca recalled Jack’s story of the superhuman man in the warehouse, jacked up like a meth-head on his own adrenaline. The rat struck her in the chest, knocked her backward a step and clung to her blouse.
She did not act on conscious thought, didn’t even realize what she was doing until the smell of bleach filled her nostrils. She still had the squirt bottle in her hand and she raised it and fired a spray of liquid into the rat’s face from inches away. It dropped to the floor, blinded and choking, stumbling, whipping its head frantically from side to side and clawing at its snout with its front paws. Becca tore into the ranks of the rats with the bleach, spraying it into their faces. They fell away from her in a wave, blind and reeling.
Squirt! Squirt!
Even with the heightened strength that tapping into the rats’ brains commanded, they were no match for the relentless attack of the savage dog and the burning liquid, and they fled the assault in full retreat—the demons as terrified of Becca’s fury as the rats were of Biscuit’s fangs.
Becca chased them, squirting them and kicking at them as they tried to squeeze behind the huge armoire against the wall that must have covered the hole they had used to get into the house. But there was a logjam. Only one rat at a time could fit in the tight space and the others were a squirming mass, savaged by the acid bleach in their eyes and noses and the chomping bite of Biscuit’s relentless fury.
Becca stomped down into the pack of them jammed together at the armoire, leapt on top of the pile, jumped up and down, hammering them with the heels of her shoes that were slimy with sticky rat blood. Somewhere, Becca had picked up a long, slender vase—on the bedside table?—and was pummeling the rat pack with it. Yelling inarticulate rage as she battered, trampled and poisoned the filthy beasts trying to escape.
The battle could have lasted a few minutes or a few hours. Becca had no idea. She merely found herself beside the armoire, panting, watching the last tail slither back into the crack. Dead and dying rats were everywhere, dozens of them. And the snarling dog with blood and gore on his maw went from one to the next, biting their heads and slinging them out of his mouth one after another to be sure none of them survived.
Becca’s throat was raw—had she been screaming? Her face was wet with tears. She dropped the bleach bottle and the bloody vase and raced to Theresa lying in a puddle of blood where she had fainted.