Chapter 10

 

The door to the second floor stood half-open, held by the world’s most morbid doorstop: a dead kid staring from a twisted set of wire-rim glasses.

"Dylan," Steve said, feeling numb. "His name was Dylan." Nice kid…deferential, always inviting Steve over for a party, Steve hardly ever accepting, except that one time, around Halloween, and even then, Steve had left early, following the Elvira chick upstairs and—

"Come on, Steve," Cat said. "We can’t help him."

They hurried down the stairs but jerked to another stop halfway down the final flight.

At the base of the stairwell, Steve saw long, pale legs, an arm, and the top of a head, the long, dark hair of which spread away like spike-lines from the head of an anxious cartoon character. Not that this girl felt any anxiety now. Her glazed eyes did not blink.

Another, smaller girl hunched over the dead girl, obscuring most of her torso. She turned and snarled at Steve and Cat like a dog defending a bone, and Steve saw the blood on her face and hands. Red to the elbows, she held something ropey and glistening…

Oh God, Steve thought, she's eating her.

Grinning, she tugged a coil to her mouth and took a big, snapping bite. Her teeth severed the bluish intestine and dark sludge ran from both ends. She lapped at it like a kid drinking from a garden hose. Bad smells filled the stairwell.

That’s shit, Steve thought, feeling oddly detached. She's sucking shit out of that thing. From beside him came a gagging sound, and in a distant way, he understood that Cat was puking. His own gorge rose. What he saw and smelled, what he heard, the awful smacking, growling sound the girl-thing made as she chewed guts and slurped shit, it all came together, hard and heavy as a sledgehammer, and plowed him in the gut.

He puked.

"Here she comes," Cat said.

The girl snarled, a bright green bubble ballooning from one nostril, and rushed up the stairs.

"Wait," Steve said and stuck out his palm like a traffic cop. He wasn’t finished puking. The girl coming at him like this, when he needed to spit and wipe his mouth and maybe puke some more, pissed him off. It was stupid, sure, but it did; it pissed him off so much that as he shifted into a batter’s stance and aimed at the snot bubble, he thought, What a bitch!

The charging girl reached out, and Steve scored a homerun. The bat took her not in the snot bubble but the side of the head. Something cracked loudly, and impact jolted through the bat into Steve’s arms. He felt her head give, and then she toppled, head over ass, and lay motionless at the base of the stairs.

They jumped over her and went out the door into the night, Steve hoping to God he hadn’t killed her.

"Come on," Cat said and drew him into the shadows behind the apartment dumpster. They crouched, catching their breath, and talked in whispers about what they should do now that they had escaped the fire. Steve suggested they head out of town, but Cat thought it unwise, knowing so little about the situation. Overhead, flames guttered out of upper story windows, and dark smoke billowed into the night sky. Down in town, a loud explosion boomed. As the sound of it died away, laughter fluttered across the parking lot.

From all directions came the sounds of chaos: screaming, laughter, gun shots, alarms, car horns.

"Let’s go to my place," Cat said.

Steve asked where she lived, and Cat pointed toward the West End. "Shartle Street."

Above them came the sound of shattering glass. Something big plummeted off a balcony, hit the parking lot with a resounding clang, and bounced over a row of cars, spraying foam and winking in the lamplight.

A beer keg. Some asshole had thrown a full beer keg off a balcony.

"Come on," Cat said. "We can’t sit here, waiting. What if that cop, the one shooting everybody, strolls by?"

"Cut across town now, all this crazy shit going on?" He let out his breath, running a hand through his hair.

"We don’t have to go through town," Cat said, "Not through the center. We’ll cut across campus and come in from the back."

That still meant cutting across town. Steve cast a glance in the opposite direction, off into the shadowy streets beyond the dumpster. "That’s the way to go."

"Look, Steve, do what you want. I’m going home. Those backstreets, they have all the same risks: crazy people, cars, shit, what if dogs are crazy, too? Did you think about that? But out there, we’ve got no place to go. At least this way, we go to my place, we have a roof over our heads and doors that lock and food and running water and a toilet, you know? Shit, I’m going. You coming?"

Steve felt an impulse to just peel the fuck out of there. To hell with her A+ ass and the way her body felt so tight and warm under his hands and how cool she was and how she had guts…

Aw, hell.

"Hold on," he said. "I’m coming."

They cut through the darker side of the lot. Cat kept slipping ahead of him, and he kept sprinting back out in front of her. Maybe it was macho bullshit, but he liked this girl, and if some nut jumped out, Steve wanted first swing.

He didn’t have to wait long.

The guy stepped out from behind an SUV. He was skinny, lost in a baggy brown t-shirt that read I might be fat, but you’re ugly…and I can diet. His big, shit-eating grin oozed green.

Steve didn’t slow. Pushing the bat out horizontally, he ran straight at the guy, giving the bat a little shove at the last moment so that it nailed the guy in the neck and sent him off his feet. That was great, but then Steve’s foot caught the tumbling lunatic. For a brief, wild moment, Steve thought he was going to eat pavement, but he caught himself on the hood of a car and got turned around in time to see the crazy coming onto all fours.

As the guy labored to his feet, Cat drove a kick into his balls. The force of the blow lifted him a little, and he staggered backward a step, but the pain didn’t seem to bother him. He grinned, stepping toward her, and Steve brought his bat around hard. Maybe too hard. On impact with the skull, the bat made a loud crack-pop sound, and the guy dropped, just dropped, like the bat had knocked all the bones straight out of him. Or the life, Steve thought. Shit.

He stood and stared at the guy sprawled facedown at his feet, and tried to know how to feel about it all. Just a moment ago, this guy would’ve liked nothing more than to eat Steve and Cat alive, but still…was he dead? Steve jammed there, not really thinking, just staring, still feeling the jolt of impact where it had leapt out of the bat and run up his arms, like electricity.

"Steve!" Cat yelled. She’d already started away.

Steve started running again.

They passed a pair of crazies fucking missionary style in the grass. The guy was thrusting away and screaming for all he was worth. Steve glanced their way and understood the screaming at once; the girl had her thumbs buried in the guy’s eyes. The ruined orbs drained from their sockets, but he kept pumping away, and so did she. Then he pried one of her hands free, shoved it into his mouth and bit down hard.

Steve and Cat kept moving.

A little further along, Steve asked Cat to slow it down. "If these assholes keep coming at us, I want to have the wind to fight."

They slowed to a jog and stuck to the dark alley. Steve had been meaning to quit smoking for years but had never quite gotten around to it, and now his lungs burned so bad he almost smiled when the fat girl charged out of the darkness, howling and spluttering and flailing her arms.

"Wait," Steve said. "Let her come at us."

Cat stopped, and Steve fought to catch his breath, thinking just how crazy this was, standing here and waiting for one of these freaks like they were waiting for the 3:30 bus. The fat girl didn’t look dangerous. She looked soft and clumsy. Stupid. Funny.

She hurried toward them, a big, crazy smile on her face. "Pleeee-hoo!" she shouted.

Steve held the bat out like a spear, figuring he’d let her knock the wind out of herself, watch her drop, maybe kick her a couple of times, and be on his way; but then, just as she reached him, however, she ducked low and drove hard into his legs like a football player making a tackle. Steve staggered and almost fell, the girl hugging his legs. He reached for her head, but it whipped back, the green-stained mouth wide open.

"No!"

The girl’s head snapped forward. He twisted, and she sunk her teeth into his upper thigh. White-hot pain exploded as she bit down. Steve yelped and tried to struggle free, but the girl moved fast, jumping up and sinking her teeth into the meat of his left forearm.

"Fucker!" Steve yelled and hammered the pommel of the bat down one-handed, nailing the top of her head, once-twice-three times, until she popped free and fell back on her ass, laughing and spitting out green slime and red blood…his red blood. He slammed his knee into her face and sent her sprawling, and then Cat was over her, stomping. Steve joined in. A minute later, the girl lay still on the patchy asphalt of the back alley.

"I jabbed her when she tackled you," Cat said, displaying the bloody knife. "She didn’t even feel it."

"I feel this," Steve said, gripping his forearm.

Cat knelt, tore a strip of fabric from the fallen girl’s skirt, and wrapped it around Steve’s injury. "I was afraid she was going to bite your dick off."

"You were afraid? I was terrified," Steve said.

"We get to my place, I’ve got plans for that thing," Cat said, and she started once more into a light jog.

Steve followed, the pot easing his nerves but taking his head to bad places. Shadows loomed. Noises—and there were plenty, in all directions—echoed and resonated. And his mind, picturing the green shit leaking from the crazies’ mouths, took him back to Banjo.

The summer of Steve’s fifteenth year, he had moved his stuff into the basement and declared it his new bedroom. It was sweet. He could sneak out at night without getting caught, and as long as he slipped back in before his mom woke, it was cool. His mom would come home for lunch and find him down there, middle of a beautiful summer day, playing video games. That never failed to piss her off.

One scene came back to him, his mom standing on the steps, saying, "Come upstairs and join the world", trying to play it off like a joke when it really meant, Get your ass up here. I want to yell at you.

He had finished the level and gone up.

She was opening a can of soup. She put it down hard on the counter then eyed him as she worked the opener. "I saw Jerry Timmerman down the block, mowing yards," she told him. "He's probably been up all day, probably on his third yard. You know what that means? He's probably made thirty bucks...and all that time, what have you been doing? Sleeping and playing those stupid games."

And Steve, who didn’t give a shit—he’d made seventy bucks the night before, selling weed in the park—said, "Jerry’s so stupid he actually buys into that crack of dawn bullshit. He's out there sweating his ass off when anybody with half a brain would know enough to stay in the basement and chill out. He's too stupid to go to college, no matter how much he saves, so what he's doing, we call it On the Job Training."

That got the never-ending fight going again. During those days, it didn’t take much. All of their interactions were lightly scabbed; the slightest brush from either of them set it bleeding and smarting again.

Looking back, he felt stupid. He shouldn’t have tipped his hand like that. All it did was fuel the fighting, and all wrapped up in the center of his attack on Jerry, of course, was an implied attack on his mom, who had always worked her ass off for low wages. So he felt a little bad, too. All that stuff he'd thought about Jimmy was true enough—the kid was stupid—but he shouldn't have jabbed his mom.

Still, he reminded himself now, it was easy enough, reliving incidents in isolation, to feel like a grade-A asshole, but it was important to remember that this all happened in some pretty heavy context. This all happened in a house infected with chronic bitterness, where his mom, who hated the life she’d made for herself, nevertheless crammed her silver-lined, Horatio Alger bullshit down Steve’s throat day in and day out. And that, the other side of the coin, still hung in the sky of his memory like a bad moon. He could never package his childhood memories all neatly and sweetly. For Steve, childhood memories were often murky and seldom carried any sort of didactic message. They delivered no earth-shattering revelations, few nuggets of wisdom. In them, situations, actions, and relationships all seemed to blend right and wrong. These memories paired stubborn pride and regret in equal portions, and never reconfigured into a connect-the-dots ascension of morality.

Mostly.

There was one memory, however, that haunted Steve, and it was all regret, all self-loathing. It was the memory of Banjo. For as long as he’d lived, he’d never told a single soul.

This all happened the summer he first moved into the basement. One day late in the summer, his mother came home, called him out of the basement, and got on his ass about some antifreeze pooled in the driveway. Okay, he'd said, okay…and he’d blown her off. She'd gone back to work, and he'd gone back to his games, and later on, much later on, when he was coming home from Dom’s house, he'd seen the dog. Dead.

It was the neighbors' dog, Banjo, this Welsh Corgi dog that looked like a burrito on stumpy little legs. Banjo had lived right next door, with Walt and Louise. Walt and Louise loved that dog.

Once, when Steve was younger, he'd been forced to go around and fundraise, selling peanuts or candy or popcorn or something. He’d gone door-to-door, giving his pitch, and ended up on Walt and Louise’s doorstep. They didn't have any kids. But they had Banjo. He was yellow. They had this framed picture on the wall, with a little light and everything. This was a full-size portrait, framed and matted and everything, and that light made it all formal, even somber, like a shrine, like Banjo was dead already. He wasn't, though. He was down by their ankles, all mellow and wagging his tail while they said no thanks.

It’s weird, how little we know about our neighbors. He’d lived right next door to those two all those years, and what did he know about them? That she had weird hair, and he liked to drink and fish; that they both had some kind of speech impediment or something; and of course, that they had a stubby dog named Banjo that was actually kind of cool; he never barked at you or anything, even if you were coming home late, four o'clock in the morning, the night before you were going to catch a load of shit from your mom about some pebble-brained asshole mowing yards down the block. But that was it, that was all he knew about them. Most of all, he knew they loved that dog.

And then, suddenly, it was dead. Dead at the bottom of Steve’s driveway. Dead because Steve hadn’t bothered to do what his mom had told him to do earlier that same day…clean up the antifreeze. Steve’s guts turned to water. Then they froze. Thawed. Froze again. Thawed. He walked down the drive and stood over the dog. Banjo was dead, all right. He was stiff. His eyes were open but dull and glazed. Steve’s guts froze again. Banjo had been sick there, and the stuff that had come out of his stomach was foamy and bright green.

Steve didn't know what to do. He stood there, staring at the dog, thinking about how much trouble he'd be in and how sad it was about the dog, and how upset the neighbors were going to be. It didn't matter that he didn't know them or that they were kind of weird or anything. He felt horrible. They loved this dead dog more than Steve loved—well, more than he’d ever loved anything, he guessed—and because of him, it was dead.

It was one more fuck-up in a long tradition of fuck-ups, and far from the last. It would be nice to say that it taught him his lesson, and in retrospect, it had. Steve had never again left anti-freeze sit on the driveway. But in reality, he continued fucking up all through high school, shit, right up to the present moment. Totaling cars, getting picked up on pot charges, underage drinking, then there was the whole thing with the Molotov cocktails he'd been throwing under the bridge, down by the railroad tracks and the river. It was safe and all, nothing to burn, but then one night, he came home, and his mom flipped. She was starting to cry, but mainly she was pissed off, frustrated, whatever, and she was saying, "Why do you smell like gasoline? Why does my son come home at three in the morning, smelling like gasoline?" Bad night.

But the king of all bad nights was the night of the Banjo thing.

Standing over the dog, he filled with dread. There was no bringing Banjo back, no matter what. He looked across the yard. Walt and Louise’s house sat small and green and plain, the house of a childless couple who’s favorite thing in the world was…No. He’d shut off that line. He felt bad, but feeling bad wouldn’t bring the dog back to life. Nothing would. So what good would it be, Steve going to the gallows? He had to cover this up, had to get Banjo out of sight before anybody came home.

Luckily, his mother was still at work, and Tim was down the block, playing with all his sport-o buddies. Steve bent down, reached for the dog, and pulled away. He didn’t want to touch it. But he had to hurry. He went to the garage, got a shovel and the big piece of burlap they used for trapping and dragging leaves in the fall, went back out, and levered the stiff dog onto the cloth. He kept pushing with the shovel—Banjo really was stiff, no flop in him, and it was hard to get him over—until the dog lay at the center of the sheeting, which Steve folded in half and draped overtop the corpse. Then, bunching the loose end in one hand, he dragged the dog away from the driveway as he’d dragged so many piles of leaves, across the yard, through the high, brushy grass at the back of the lot, and spilled the load over the embankment into the creek. It wasn’t a big creek, but it did have water in it then, thank goodness, because late in the summer, it usually ran dry, and he used the water to help him move Banjo downstream another couple hundred yards, where he hid dog, burlap, and shovel within a jam of debris that had gathered beneath the exposed roots of an old creek-side sycamore during the previous spring melt.

Hurrying home, he hosed down the driveway and then, hating the drag mark he’d left across the back yard, he mowed the grass. The grass was high and damp, and when he’d finished, emerald liquid drooled from beneath the mower deck, and he’d been staring at this, thinking of the foam he’d rinsed from the drive, when Walt had pulled in next door, given his standard sleepwalker’s wave, and disappeared into the little green house.

Steve hurried inside, and that night, his mother had taken his brother and him out for ice cream, she’d been so pleased that he not only cleaned up the antifreeze but also rinsed the drive and mowed the lawn. Steve, mowing without being asked? Her son was growing up.

They never found the dog. Steve snuck out again that night, but instead of hanging around the park, dealing weed and trying to get with girls, he’d run a solo mission. Flashlight? Check. Shovel? Check. Dead dog? Check. He’d floated Banjo further downstream, creeped as hell, truth be told, half afraid the dead dog was going to drown him in the dark pool beneath the sycamore roots, and buried it in the field behind the abandoned paper mill. For a long time, posters of Banjo hung all over town, and every time Steve saw them, he remembered the dog, the foam, his guts freezing and thawing, freezing and thawing, but they’d never caught him, never even suspected him. Still, he’d carried the remorse all this time, would always carry it, and every now and then, something—a jug of antifreeze, a corgi shitting in some yard as Steve passed, a foamy pistachio pudding at a family reunion—would bring Banjo back to him, dead and stiff and staring, and Steve would feel like shit all over again.

And now, staring at the green shit foaming from the kid’s mouth, Steve shuddered, thinking, Is Banjo behind all this? Are all these people dying because I didn’t clean up the antifreeze?

"Steve?" It was Cat, calling him back to reality. She’d stopped in front of him, and he almost slammed into her. He’d smoked too much weed. He’d taken too many hits, too deep, too long, and now, with his life on the line, his brain was taking him on a little stroll down memory lane. Chill. Get your shit together, Steve.

Cat pointed. "Look."

"What?" he said. And a wild, irrational fear leapt up in him: Banjo was going to come hitching out of the shadows…

"Over there, on the ground," she said. "Is that a moped?"