Dark Advent (28 page)

Eternity.

Finally they came back, Jason facedown and horizontal in the midst of them. One on each leg, one at each shoulder, and someone supporting his middle. Clothing trailed toward the floor in strips.

Sam’s face was ashen. “Look at his back,” he was saying. “Look at his
back.
”

Erika rose from the couch, wanting to move closer but dreading every step of the way. Julie still clinging to her like a koala to a tree, she stepped as close as she dared.
Let him be all right, please.

Tears sprang out like a dam had burst. His back looked like a raw side of beef.

“What happened to him?”
she choked out, following as they moved ahead toward Jason’s room. By now the remaining people on the floor had clustered about as if drawn by a magnet.

“I heard a truck coming,” Sam said. “And I went to the other end of the bridge, ’cause I thought it was gonna be Jason and Billy finally coming back. But it was some black truck. Two guys in the bed threw him out and just kept on going.”

“Black truck,” Caleb said from the background. “We know who
that
was.”

“What about Billy?” Pam Patton asked. “Where’s he?”

“Don’t know,” Sam said. “Don’t know, I just don’t know.”

“Maybe they got him too,” said Jack.

Maybe it’s wrong,
Erika thought,
but that doesn’t bother me half as much as Jason.
She rubbed Julie’s bony little back.
Please, just let him make it through this. Is that too much to ask for?

They carried him into his room and laid him face-down atop his unmade bed. He wasn’t totally unconscious, as she’d thought earlier. He mumbled and grunted and balled the quilt in white-knuckled fists as if holding on to something for dear life. She saw with a renewed horror that his left cheek and eye were badly bruised and swollen. Rich grimaced and gently worked him out of the shredded shirt and jacket, tossing them into a corner.

She couldn’t look at him anymore. Not like
that.

“We got no doctors here,” Jack said, sitting by Jason on the bed and moving his hair so it wouldn’t touch the bloody welts up near his shoulders. “Would you look at this? It looks like they whipped him with something.” His finger followed a few stripes that coursed out from the main mass, then he looked up at a few of those who’d managed to squeeze into the little room. “What can we do for him?”

Cleaning and disinfecting was the general consensus. Juanita Morris went after cotton and hydrogen peroxide.

“How could he survive something like that?” Jack said. “Do you have any idea how many times he must’ve been hit? And how hard?”

No one spoke. They could only stare.

Juanita returned with the peroxide, cotton, and gauze. Jack took them from her and paused a moment.

“He may not know what’s going on,” Jack said softly. “We’d better be ready to hold him down.”

After a moment four reluctant volunteers moved around the bed to restrain him. And Erika left the doorway. She set Julie down and scooted her off to play out on the main floor, then sagged against a wall in the hallway leading that direction. Her shoulders gave an involuntary shudder at Jason’s first cry.

“He’ll be okay, I betcha.” It was Caleb behind her.

“You don’t know that,” she whispered, not bothering to turn. “Like Jack said, no doctors. We don’t know how that might’ve broken him up inside. The only thing we know is how to make it look better.”

“But he’s got a fire in him, Erika. It ain’t always real apparent, but it runs pretty deep in him. Sometimes that makes all the difference in the world.” He rested a hand on her shoulder from behind. “I don’t want you thinking I’m cutting out, but I need to leave for a spell. I can’t say how long. Maybe it’ll help him, maybe it won’t. But I gotta try, that much I owe him.”

She turned to face him, not caring that her face was blotchy, that her eyes were bloodshot and red-rimmed and her nose was runny. “I don’t understand.”

He touched a fingertip to her lips. “No time. Maybe later.”

She watched him leave, jingling a pair of car keys he’d filched off someone.

Erika returned to the main floor and curled onto a love seat in a tight, compact ball. Feeling cold, so very cold. She pressed her palms to her ears. No use…she could still hear Jason yelling. And what was worse, feel him.

* *

Early evening. Things had quieted down. Best of all, so had Jason. Erika sat upright on the covers of her bed, and her room was nearly filled to capacity, though it took few people to accomplish that task. Pam Patton had brought a chair and sat beside the bed, as had Juanita. On the floor, Colleen sat with her back against the wall, and beside her was Farrah, the twelve-year-old.

They’d all eaten but Erika, and so Pam had brought in a University of Missouri mug full of instant soup, insisting she sip at it. Chicken. It was about all she felt she could handle.

“Did you ever wish you’d done something, only it was too late to go back and do it?” Erika asked. The question was open, anybody’s forum.

“We’ve all got our regrets.” Pam stroked Erika’s leg, stretched across the bed. “Roads we never took.”

Erika wrapped her hands around the steaming mug, then pressed it to her cheek. Warm. “I feel like I’ve been kind of a bitch to him. No, that’s not right. I haven’t even paid that much attention to him. He likes me, I guess. And I’ve held back so much.”

“This isn’t the time for that, that’s certain,” Juanita said.

Erika nodded. “I know, I know. But I just couldn’t do any better. I’ve been so…so…”

“Scared?” Pam said.

“Yeah.” She sipped at her soup. “I don’t remember ever feeling that any guy really liked me for
me,
not when we’d get to know each other. It was like, whoever he was, he was only sticking around because of…
” And how do I put this? “…
because of what I’d do for him. And even that got old after a while, every time. I just didn’t want to go through that again. Jason, he seemed sincere enough, but it’s like I didn’t want to take the risk. Like I’d rather keep a couple little dreams alive instead of seeing them go sour. And now, if he dies…” She drew her knees up under her chin, hugged her legs, hid her face. After a few moments she looked up again. “You know, a couple times I wished he’d just grab me, and save me the trouble of worrying about it. All the modern woman stuff aside, that’s what I think I wanted.”

“A modern woman could’ve done it the other way around,” Colleen said. Then she ran a hand through her hair and tilted her head over to Farrah. “You shouldn’t be hearing this, kiddo.”

“I know about boys,” she said, very gravely. Farrah folded her hands together in her lap. “Not everything, but some of it. And sometimes I get scared I might never make it to find out the rest.” She clutched at Colleen’s arm. “Don’t make me leave. Please?”

Colleen looped an arm around her, pulled her closer, smoothed her hair.

Pam tilted her chair back on its rear legs, stared at the ceiling a moment. “There’s a saying I heard once, and I really like it. Sometimes I drag it out when Rich balks at some decision I think he’d be better off going ahead with. I tell him, ‘On the plains of hesitation lie the bleached bones of millions who said
tomorrow.
’”

Colleen scooted her feet close to the kerosene heater standing in the middle of the floor and wiggled her toes. “Go for it, Erika. What’s the worst that can happen? If…
when
…he gets better, and his back can hold out, get with him and let him know you’re someone who was worth that wait.”

Erika smiled with warmth and relief she only half felt, at best. But half was half, and a few minutes ago it would’ve been a complete lie. Half-truths she could live with, among friends.

But that first step’s always the toughest,
she thought, contemplating some unknown future day when she could follow Colleen’s advice.

Another few minutes had passed when there came a tapping at the door. Jack Mitchell poked his head in. “Caleb’s back. Says he’s got something for Jason.” He cleared his throat and opened the door wide enough to step in. “Jason came around a little earlier, before Carl and Liz got back from the pharmacy with the Percodans. He’s out like a light now. But first he told me something about what happened. You won’t like it.
I
sure didn’t expect it. But it seems Billy’s switched sides. He set Jason up, led him right to them.”

Silence, long and loud. And then:

“I could just castrate that little shit.” It was Juanita. And nobody offered any better ideas.

I
can’t blame myself for this,
Erika thought on the way to Jason’s room. She scarcely felt the floor beneath her feet, hardly felt herself moving. How many times had she snubbed Billy? Lots. It had gone on even longer than she’d kept Jason at arm’s length. But that was different: the attraction to Billy simply hadn’t existed at all.
It’s not my fault. Why couldn’t he just be friends?

The crowd in and outside Jason’s room had thinned to fewer than a dozen. A Coleman lantern hung from a rope and hook in the ceiling, throwing a dim, yellowish-white light over the room. Jason was still stretched out facedown, though since the afternoon someone had removed his pants and replaced them with a pair of sweats he liked to wear. He seemed at peace.

Caleb had taken over, sitting on the edge of the bed with a blue Tupperware bowl in his lap. He scooped up a handful of its contents, little more than green pulp.

“Caleb? What the hell?” Jack planted his fists on his hips.

“Crushed geranium leaves. Lousy time of year for comfrey.” He winked at Diane, then gently spread the first handful near Jason’s left shoulder. “Good for healing cuts and real bad scrapes and such.”

Jason twitched under his touch at first, then fell still. His hand tightened on the quilt beneath him, then relaxed. He groaned softly.

“Caleb, that’s ludicrous. You don’t—” Jack stepped forward with all the indecisive fluster of a man who feels he should take charge but knows he’s missed out on something vital.

“Trust him on this,” said Diane. She quickly gripped Jack by the wrist, looking sideways at him and giving no quarter. “He found you clean water, didn’t he? Just trust him.”

And so they all did.

9

The parking garage stood ten levels high, including the roof. Starting out on four, the bridge level, following the rectangular path all the way up and back down again a few times made a decent jogging path. Boring? Sure. Monotonous? Even on a good day. But it was the safest place around.

Slowly but steadily, Jason was getting his strength back. The ribs still ached if he breathed too deeply, and flexibility wasn’t yet what it used to be, but he was patient.

Time to heal offered time to plan, to daydream and let the darker side of his imagination run wild.
What’s the worst I could do to them? Set them on fire, one limb at a time? Make them play Russian roulette with one empty chamber? Sit each one naked on a bucket holding a starving rat?

Nothing sounded bad enough.

He was on his last trip down, catching slightly different vantages of the same buildings on each circuit around. He could hear only his breath and the echoing slap of his shoes. When he hit the ramp leading from five down to four, he slowed to a walk.

Lost as he was in the vengeful world that had been festering inside for two weeks and a day, he didn’t notice Erika sitting cross-legged on the trunk of his car until he was nearly there. She wore a floppy knit hat and a ski jacket. She raised a mittened hand to wave.

“Looking good as new,” she said. “I’d sing the theme from
Rocky
but the sound might reopen a wound or two.”

“Sweet pain.” Jason dropped into a boxer’s crouch and flicked a couple of jabs. Dumb. He wasn’t ready to move like that, and his back let him know it.

“Maybe if I had my flute. I used to play, did you know that?”

He shook his head, a plume of breath steaming before his face.

“I bet I knew every flute part the Moody Blues and Jethro Tull ever recorded.” Erika hopped off the Mustang and walked the last few steps between them. She brushed her hand on his left cheek. The swelling had gone and the bruises were down to a pale shadow. “You scared me to death, you know that?”

“This year I’ve made a habit of getting the shit kicked out of me every couple of months.”
And what’s
with
you today, anyway? Not that I object.
“It was just time again.”

She frowned, then drew a shaky breath and looked up into his face. Her eyes were wide…and scared? “Can I hug you?”

It caught him by surprise, and he regretted the blank look he gave her. Then, “Just don’t squeeze too hard.”

Her arms wrapped around his middle, lightly, tenderly, and she rested her head against his chest. It was a welcome pressure, one he hadn’t felt in a long time. Beneath the hat, her hair smelled of shampoo.

“Can I tell you something?” she asked.

“Only if you promise to quit asking permission for everything.”

She laughed, nodded against him. “Promise.” She drew away to face him again, her cheeks flushed. “I’ve been looking for the right moment to talk. It never seemed right when you were laid up in bed, and you’ve been on your feet a week now, and…I don’t know, when I saw you leave to go jogging, it felt like the right time.”

Jason stepped over to lean against his car, patted the trunk lid beside him. She followed.

“I think I know how you feel about me, or at least used to. I don’t guess it’s been any big secret you tried to keep. And I guess with things being the way they are, it’s stupid for two people to have to play all the silly pursuit-and-retreat games we used to have time for. Am I making sense?”

“So far, so good.”

Erika pressed her hands to her head. “It must be coming out better than it sounds in here. Anyway. What I want you to know is that I was attracted to you too. Not at first, but before too long I was. Your first impression, I didn’t know what to make of you.”

He had to agree, remembering braking the Mustang beside her and stepping out, all body odor and ultimatums.

“But,” she continued, “I was scared of going with my feelings. I was afraid the past would repeat itself. I’ve been through some times and done some things I’m not very happy about, and I can’t think of anyone who’s ever truly cared about who I really am. After enough of that, after enough misunderstanding, you just get burned out on it all.”

He looked toward his shoes, ground a pebble across the concrete. He reached over his shoulder to tap his back. “And a little thing like this was all it took to change your mind?”

Erika tilted her head up. She had a lovely throat, he noticed. Statues in museums could only wish they had a throat like that.

“When they carried you in two weeks ago, I was sure you were gone. I hated myself for all the time I’d let slip by. I’m just sorry it took something like that to get me out of my shell.” She kicked playfully at his shoe. “So how ’bout it? You, umm, wanna hang out together more?”

He could’ve grabbed her and started dancing, or given a joyous whoop from the edge of the fourth level and listened to it rebound through the city. He could’ve run to the roof and flown down to rejoin her. Instead he put his arm around her shoulder, leaned his head against hers.

“You don’t have to be sorry it took what happened to bring you around,” he said. “You didn’t cause it. You just made it mean something better.”

He’d heard of people glowing, had always thought it was just a figure of speech. Until now. Until this moment.

“I’m not afraid anymore. To let you get to know me,” she said. “You’ve got a kind nature about you. You do.”

He rolled his eyes. “I don’t know. I surprise myself sometimes.”

She took him by the arm. “I know what you did to that guy in the parking lot at the liquor store. Caleb told me. But that’s not you, not the you deep down.”

I
wish I could believe that.
“It isn’t? How can you be so sure? I know I’m not anymore.” Jason jammed his hands into the pockets of the gray thermal sweatshirt he wore, wandered to the retaining wall to gaze over into the street, to the west. Erika followed, hanging back a few steps. “There are people living not too far from here. In Union Station, the Omni. You’ve seen some of them. Some of them we even have names for. Travis Lane. Lucas. I caught a few more, but I don’t think I could put specific faces with them. And you know something? If I had them right here in front of me, I could throw every one of them over the side and watch them splatter.”

He stopped, gauging her face for some reaction and getting none. Was that good or bad?

He looked into the street again and went on. “Before all this started this summer, I never wanted to hurt anybody. I didn’t have any enemies. You could’ve probably even called me a pacifist. Always better to talk things out. But now…” He shook his head. “I never wanted to feel this way about anybody. I never thought I had it in me to hate people this much. But I can’t help it, and it scares me.”

She was beside him again, running a hand up and down his arm, loosening the knots of tension. “All I can go by is what I see. And I see a lot more of the good in you than the other. And as long as I see that, I don’t have a problem with the rest.”

Yeah, but how would you feel if you saw me take a car jack and cave in somebody’s skull?

“We’ve all got our dark corners,” she said. “Give me a little more time, let me figure out how to say it all, and I’ll share some of mine with you.”

They stood still and comfortable and silent for a long moment. Then he turned back to her, her cheeks pink from the cold, her nose cherry from rubbing it with a mitten, knit hat tilted jauntily on her head. A look of expectation in her eyes.

And for a while it didn’t matter that the world had veered irrevocably off-course, that people like Travis Lane could take the reins if they wanted to, that the future itself was up for grabs.

Because there still wasn’t anything quite like a first kiss.

* *

The days of persistence finally paid off, and Jason thought it ironic how the tables had turned. Now
he
was the one disappearing daily, leaving the others to wonder where he’d been going.

The Old Cathedral was the place. Five days of hanging around and fighting boredom, hoping to meet someone whose name he didn’t know, whose home was a mystery, and whom he’d seen only twice.

The first time was when he’d come between Erika and a certain rape and maybe worse.
I
never forget faces,
the short, cocky guy had said.

But perhaps his threat had mellowed. After Jason had kicked Lucas’s nose into a detour to his cheek, the guy had recognized him, and nearly saluted.

I
need help,
Jason had thought a few days ago.
Even though neither one of us knows who the other is, even though our ideals are probably worlds apart, maybe there’s at least a little respect now.
Because they had a common bond, an independence that wouldn’t be compromised. Wasn’t the enemy of your enemy supposed to be your friend?

Jason began looking for him at the Old Cathedral because he knew of no other place to begin, and of course there was no sign of any of them. Maybe their being here that early October day was a fluke, a one-shot. The hours seemed to pass slower every day, and the cold penetrated deeply here in the middle of December. Along the riverfront, the wind blew colder than anywhere else in the city. Here the wind grew teeth of ice.

Give it up. Just go on home.

Jason moved down the steps and back up Memorial toward Olive. A slate sky hung low and heavy overhead, dark clouds skimming past like warships. Could be rain soon. Or snow.

Underneath his parka, his insurance dangled from a shoulder cord. He’d taken his shotgun and, with a hacksaw, removed the butt and half the barrel. Nobody was taking him back to Union Station, never again. Next time he was there it would be by choice. He would come under the cover of darkness, with wrath.

A car was waiting for him a block before his turn. At first he didn’t notice anything off. The sound of an idling car still seemed normal enough, until you actually thought about it.

“You gotta be
the
most patient motherfucker I ever saw.”

Jason looked up from the sidewalk. A Camaro sat at the curb, pointing the wrong way, as if anyone cared about that now. The voice came from whoever was in the passenger seat. Another few steps and the voice belonged to a face…the one he’d been looking for. He couldn’t say he was actually glad to see it, but at least the wait was over. Now, the moment of truth.

“Who you been waiting for all this time?”

Jason stepped up to the Camaro’s door. The passenger looked no
less unsavory than he had in the past, dressed in crusty layers of grubby denim, his hair pushed back behind his ears. His driver was Asian, with a single earring.

“Looking for you.”

“I was wondering. Been seeing you on those steps every day for a week.”

“Give or take,” Jason said.

“Give or take. Yeah. What the fuck’s time mean anymore, huh?” He jerked his thumb toward the back seat. “Hop in.”

And that’s the last anybody sees of me, maybe.

The guy must’ve read Jason’s mind, or his eyes. “If I was still pissed at you, you’d know it. Or maybe you wouldn’t.” From nowhere he pulled a gleaming black revolver, something out of a Clint Eastwood movie. “Boom.” He set it on the dash.

What was it Erika had been saying lately?
On the plains of hesitation…
Something like that. He opened the door, and the guy leaned forward in the front to let him into the back seat. The driver geared the car and squealed a fast U-turn, heading north.

The passenger turned around to prop his arm on the seat back. “a while back I was ready to open you up like a Christmas turkey. But then I saw you do that fucker at the liquor store. Gave him a permanent sinus condition, ha!”

The knots in Jason’s stomach loosened and he leaned back in the seat. The interior of the car was heavy with the oily smell of well-cared-for guns.

“You from the city?” the guy asked.

“I am now,” Jason said, and hit the highlights of his days since the summer. The guy was a good listener, without a single interruption, and when Jason was finished he told his own story. He went into more depth than Jason would’ve dared to anticipate, and he seemed oddly grateful to have someone to tell it to.

His name was Mick, and his was a world Jason had never known . . . of alcoholic parents, of a dad who loved
to hit, of schools where you could get knifed in the crapper. Mick had run with a group of guys who called themselves the Vicelords, but only one other beside himself was left. There’d been others with the same story, though. Bao, behind the wheel, had been an Insane Dragon. Other gang names they tossed around with easy familiarity…the Black Eagles, the Warlords, the Atomic Punks.

If they’d been allies before, now they were family. There was no aggregate name now, just guys and girls banded together to survive. To scrimp and forage and try to keep seeing tomorrow.

“What’s the deal with the Old Cathedral?” Jason asked. “How come you go there?”

“To pray, sometimes.” Mick looked him straight on, and the answer was no joke. “My mom raised me Catholic. I used to get up and pray every day for God to protect me.”

“Lots of us did,” Bao said. “Never know when somebody wanna blast you.”

The way I’ve lived since summer…these guys have lived it all their lives.

Bao kept driving, and before long Jason had no idea where he was. Gone were the towering buildings of downtown, the offices, the stadium, the parking garages. Now there was only brick and broken glass, peeling paint and graffiti. Bao parked along a storefront behind a string of other cars: Caddies, a Trans-Am, others. Time to get out. To meet the rest of the boys in the band.

“You and that old man did all right at the liquor store,” Mick said again. Jason had already told him of what had been done in reprisal. “But you let ’em walk away. That’s where you fucked up.”

He pointed at a curbside row of steel poles—parking meters, long since dismantled. Jason’s eyes followed the line nearer the boarded-over storefront. Couldn’t be…three meters still intact?