Okay, I’ve written enough-way, way too much, probably. But think all of this over, would you? Put those good inventive brains of yours to work, because THIS IS REALLY BUGGIN” ME! Talking to Herb is no good; he calls it displaced grief. I thought about talking to J. Marinville from across the street-he seems both kind and perceptive-but I don’t know him well enough. So it has to be you. You see that, don’t you?
Love you, J-girl. Miss you. And sometimes, especially lately, I wish that we were young again, with all the dirty cards life can deal you still buried well down in the deck. Remember how it was in college, when we thought we’d live forever and only our stupid periods ever caught us by surprise?
I’ve got to stop or I’ll be crying again.
XXX (and tons more),
Chapter Five
Standing bare-chested at the bathroom mirror that afternoon before the world dropped into hell like a bucket on a broken string, Collie Entragian had made three large resolutions. The first was to quit going around unshaven on weekdays. The second was to quit drinking, at least until he got his life back on an even keel-he was doing far too much boozing, enough to make him uneasy, and it had to stop. The third was to stop procrastinating about looking for a job. There were three good security firms in the Columbus area, people he knew worked for two of them, and it was time to get cracking. He hadn’t died, after all; it was time to quit yowling and get on with his life.
Now, as the Hobart house burned like merry hell down the street and the two bizarre vans approached, all he cared about was holding on to that life. Mostly it was the black vehicle creeping along behind the pink one that galvanized him, that engaged every instinct to immediately relocate, possibly to Outer Mongolia. He didn’t catch more than a rain-blurred glimpse of the figures in the black van’s turret, but the van itself was enough. It looked like a hearse in a science-fiction movie, he thought.
“Inside!” he heard himself screaming-some part of him apparently still wanted to be in charge. “Everybody inside now!”
At that point he lost track of the people clustered around the late postman and his keening, shrieking wife-Mrs Geller, Susi, Susi’s friend, the Josephsons, Mrs Reed. Marinville, the writer, was a little closer, but Collie lost track of him, too. His focus shrank to the ones in front of Old Doc’s bungalow: Peter Jackson, the Sodersons, the store-clerk, the longhair from the Ryder truck, and Old Doc himself, who had retired from veterinary practice the year before with absolutely no clue that something like this was waiting for him.
“Go!” Collie screamed into Gary’s wet, gaping, half-drunk face. In that moment he wanted to kill the man, just haul off and kill him, set him on fire or something. “Go in the fucking HOUSE!” Behind him he could hear Marinville screaming the same thing, although it was presumably the Carvers” house he had in mind.
“What-” Marielle began, stepping to her husband’s side, then she looked past Gary and her eyes widened. Her splay-fingered hands rose to the sides of her face, her mouth dropped open and for one mad moment Collie expected her to drop to her knees and start singing “Mammy” like Al Jolson. She screamed instead. And as if that had been all their attackers had been waiting for, the gunfire began-harsh, compact explosions that no one could have mistaken for thunder.
The hippie guy grabbed Peter Jackson by Peter’s right wrist and tried to haul him away from his dead wife. Peter didn’t want to let go of her. He was still howling, and seemed completely unaware of what was happening around him. There was a KA-POW, as deafening as dynamite, followed by the sound of shattering glass. A KA-BAM, even louder, followed by a shriek of either fear or pain. Collie’s dough was on fear… this time, at least. A third report, and Billingsley’s ceramic German Shepherd disappeared from the forelegs up. Old Doc’s inner front door stood open behind a screen with a scrolly, ornamental B in the middle of it. That dark rectangular hole-an opening which might lead to a cave of safety-looked a thousand miles away.
Collie ran for Peter first, with no thought of bravery so much as crossing his mind; it was just where he went first. Another deafening report, and he was tightening his back and buttocks against a potentially lethal hit even while his mind was informing him that one, at least, was thunder. The next one wasn’t. It was another whiplash KA-POW, and he felt something slap a groove in the air past his right ear.
First time shot at, he thought. Nine years as a cop before they stuck it to me and broke it off-four beat, four plainclothes, one IA-and never shot at until now.
Another report. One of Billingsley’s living-room windows blew in, billowing the white curtains like ghost-arms. Guns going off behind him like artillery now, just bam-bam-bam-bam, and he felt another hot load go hustling by, this one to the left of his head, and a black hole appeared in the siding below the broken window. To Collie the hole looked like a big startled eye. The next one hummed by his hip. He couldn’t believe he wasn’t dead, just couldn’t believe it. He could smell burning cedar shingles and had time to think about October afternoons spent in the backyard with his dad, burning leaves in smouldery aromatic piles.
He had been running for hours, he felt like a goddam ceramic duck in a goddam shooting gallery, and he hadn’t even reached Peter Jackson yet, what the fuck was going on here?
It’s been five seconds since the shooting started, the colder side of his mind informed him. Maybe only three.
The hippie guy was still yanking Peter’s wrist, and now the girl, Cynthia, muckled on above the hippie guy’s grip. But Peter was actively resisting them, Collie saw. Peter wanted to stay with his wife, who had chosen a divinely bad time to arrive back home.
Still picking up speed (and he could boogie pretty good when he really wanted to), Collie bent and hooked a hand under the kneeling man’s left armpit on the way by. Just call me the mail train, he thought. Peter thrashed backward, trying to stop the three of them from pulling him away from his wife. Collie’s hand began to slip. Oh fuck, he thought. Fuck us all. Sideways.
There was another shriek from behind him, at the Carvers”. In the corner of his eye he saw the pink van, now past them and speeding up, accelerating down the hill toward Hyacinth Street.
“Mary!” Peter screamed. “She’s hurt!”
“I got her, Pete, don’t worry, I got her!” Old Doc screamed cheerfully, and although he had no one-was, in fact, running past Mary’s sprawled body without so much as a glance down at it-Peter nodded, looking relieved. It was the tone, Collie thought. That crazily cheerful tone of voice.
The hippie guy was actually helping now instead of just trying to. He had Peter by the belt, for one thing, and that was working better. “Help out, fella,” the hippie guy told Peter. “Just a little.”
Peter ignored him. He stared at Collie with huge, glazed eyes. “He’s getting her, right? Old Doc. He’s helping her.”
“That’s right!” Collie shouted. He tried for Doc’s tone of good cheer-a kind of sprinting bedside manner-and heard only terror. The pink van was gone but the black one was still there, rolling slowly, almost stopped. There were figures-too bright, almost fluorescent-in the turret. “Billingsley-”
Marielle Soderson bashed past him on the left, almost knocking Collie flat in her sprint toward Old Doc’s front door. Gary blew by on the right, hitting the store-girl with his shoulder and knocking her to one knee. She cried out in pain, mouth pulling down in a bow-shape as something-probably her ankle-twisted. Gary did not so much as spare her a glance; his eyes were on the prize. The girl was up again in a flash. The pain-grimace was still on her face but she was holding gamely to Peter’s arm, still trying to help out. Collie was gaining an appreciation for her, schizo tu-tone hair or not.
Onward sprinted the Sodersons. It had taken them a moment or two to get the general idea, but it had certainly clicked for them now, Collie saw.
There was another report. The longhair shouted in surprise and pain, grabbing at his right leg. Collie saw blood, amazingly bright in the gray gloom of the storm, seeping through his fingers. The girl was staring at him, her mouth open, her eyes wide.
“I’m okay,” the hippie said, regaining his balance. “It’s just a graze. Go on, go on!”
Peter was finally finding his feet, both literally and metaphorically. “What in the fuck… is going on?” he asked Collie. He sounded drugged.