Live Girls (39 page)

“Give me ... a
kisssss
."

Then she touched his face with a sticky hand...

Casey gasped when the door burst open and Shideh rushed inside in a flurry of black garments and flowing white hair. Casey was curled up in the corner holding the cushion around her protectively, her limbs quaking, her teeth clenched, exhaling in puffs through her mouth. Shideh towered over her.

“What are you doing in here?” she snapped.

“N-n-nothing."

“What was that sound?"

Had there been a sound? Casey had heard two loud cracks earlier but had thought, rather distantly, that they were the sounds of her skull breaking open because of the intolerable pounding within it.

“I d-d-don't know,” Casey stammered.

Shideh bent down and pulled away the cushion, taking Casey's arm. Shideh lifted her to her feet.

“You're going to feed now,” she said.

"No!"
Casey began kicking and hitting until she broke away from Shideh's grasp.

Shideh tossed the cushion aside and crouched beside Casey, who was huddled, once again, in the corner.

“You will feed now,” she whispered, “or I'll throw you down there.” She pointed to the trapdoor. “With
them
."

Davey made a deep-throated gasping sound as he threw himself backward, jerking his head away from the woman-creature's hand. He smacked his head against the wall and grunted at the sudden, sharp pain. In his effort to get away from her, his right hand had lowered and his left raised protectively before his face.

She froze, her arm still outstretched, staring at Davey's left hand. She leaned a bit closer, and as Davey turned his face to her, putting light on her again, he saw that her blue eyes had lost their cold, hungry look. They were soft, shimmering, almost as if they were filling with tears. She gently touched her fingertips to the side of his numbed, gray hand.

“You're like us,” she whispered wetly. Her head tilted to the left, and if he ignored the rest of her disfigured face, Davey could see the sympathy in her eyes. “You believed the lie, too."

Davey pulled his hand away from hers and lifted the gun again, aiming it at her head as he inched along the wall toward the doorway. Dirt and pebbles and bits of rubble crunched beneath his feet.

The creature by the window through which Davey had entered was still slapping its wing to the floor, but more slowly now.

The thing that had dropped from the pipe was scuttling over the floor, retching.

The woman-creature watched Davey as he neared the doorway and she chuckled; it was a chuckle without humor and without malice.

“Welcome to hell,” she said.

The others moved forward.

They bled out of the darkness toward him, some of them waddling on stumps, others slithering over the floor like great fat worms, and still others walked upright, cradling their deformities in their arms or dragging them heavily.

Davey turned away from them and made a move for the door but hit his foot on something heavy and soft. He looked down.

The face of a young girl peered up at him; it was attached to a squat three-foot-long body covered with matted brown fur and trailing a tapering pink tail. The girl's nostrils were flaring; she was sniffing his leg.

Davey almost dropped the penlight from his teeth; he stumbled into the doorway and looked once more over his shoulder.

They were still shuffling toward him.

Davey darted quickly through the doorway and scanned the room with the light beam.

Just inside and to the left was a steep, wooden, ladder-like staircase that led to the ceiling. It was directly beneath a trapdoor that was scarred with deep slashes like those Anya had left on Davey's windowpane.

There were some boxes and crates stacked against the far wall and eyes blinked between them, rheumy, lost-looking eyes. Things moved, shifted.

Cobwebs dangled from the pipes overhead.

Something moved above them. It cooed like a happy toddler, then laughed like a drunk.

In the corner to Davey's right was the oil tank. It was fat and rusted and stood on four short metal legs against the wall like some resting, bloated, metal beast. At the top were two gauges that sparked in the light like watchful eyes. Behind the gauges was the opening, flat and round and closed. Davey went toward it.

He put the gun in his pocket and reached for the top of the opening. It was too high; he couldn't reach it. He spun around, taking the light from his mouth and holding it before him, and eyed the crates against the opposite wall.

Something heavy slithered behind them.

Davey took a few tentative steps toward the crates. Through a space between two of them, he saw a face layered with shiny scales. He put the light in his mouth again and reached for his gun as the face slid toward him.

Its eyes blinked with vague curiosity. It didn't seem to want to hurt him.

You're like us
.

Davey unwrapped his sweaty fingers from the handle of the gun in his pocket and cautiously reached for one of the boxes.

It might not like having its shelter disturbed,
he thought, and the voice that murmured the warning in his mind was the voice of the same little boy who had sat in the hard rickety pew every week to listen to all those hellfire-and-damnation sermons. For an instant, that little boy was back as if he'd never been gone.
It might not just blink and stare, it might come shooting out of that narrow space with its teeth snapping, reaching just about the right height to bury those teeth between my legs and never let go
...

He grabbed a corner of one of the wooden boxes and pulled, expecting to be too weak from fear to be able to do more than drag it across the floor. But he lifted it easily...

...
stronger than you ever thought possible
...

...and pulled it away from the others.

Something long and covered with glistening open sores slid along the wall and disappeared behind another crate.

Davey backed his way to the tank, carrying the crate. He put it down, put a foot on it, testing it, then stepped up on the crate, reaching for the lid of the tank opening. Wrapping his fingers around it, he pushed and twisted until it opened upward on a hinge with a metallic screech. Reaching his right hand across his stomach to his left coat pocket, Davey pulled out the two Drano-filled Ping-Pong balls. Supporting himself against the side of the tank with his left arm, Davey held the two balls over the opening...

They might explode immediately,
he thought,
they might not explode at all
.

...and dropped them in.

The ground fell away beneath him.

Benedek was beginning to swear under his breath. He looked at his watch every thirty seconds or so.

It was 9:24, three minutes short of Davey's time limit. Benedek kneaded the seat cushion beneath him with the fingers of one hand while pressing the fingers of the other hand into the pit of his stomach where a familiar feeling was beginning to knot, the feeling that something was going very wrong.

“Excuse me,” Benedek said to the driver. “Do you have the time?"

“I thought
you
had it,” she mumbled, looking at her watch. “Either that or a real fascinating wrist. Um, it's about nine-thirty by my watch."

“Jesus,” Benedek breathed, scooting across the seat. “Look, you just stay here, okay? I'm gonna go get my friend. Don't go anywhere, and there's another twenty for you."

“Hey, I'm in no hurry,” she said with a wave of her hand.

Benedek slammed the door of the cab. Maybe the driver's watch was fast, maybe Benedek's was slow, but it didn't matter, enough time had passed for Davey to get into trouble, so Benedek broke into a jog, stumbling to a halt beneath the red-lettered sign.

Taking a deep breath, Benedek pushed through the black curtain and stepped inside Live Girls for the first time.

And the last...

“Please, please let me go,” Casey pleaded, “just let me go, I, I need some air, th-that's all.” Her whole body burned to the tips of her fingers and toes.

“It's not
air
you...” Shideh stopped, cocked her head. “Someone's here,” she whispered. “When I come back, either you feed or you go down there."

Shideh stood and spun around and the black gown whispered as she hurried out of the room.

Davey fell away from the tank and into a heap among the broken wooden slats that had collapsed beneath him. The penlight dropped from his mouth and rolled away, its beam wobbling over the floor. He pulled his feet away from the broken crate and crawled on his hands and knees toward the light; it was snatched away by a gray, half-fingered hand.

Davey snapped his hand back.

The scaly creature between the boxes held the penlight up to its face, examining it with curious eyes. It worked its mouth with effort, and said in a sharp but quiet whisper, “My son used to have one of these.” It slowly lifted its head to Davey. “May I keep it?” The eyes blinked as it waited for a reply.

Without looking away from the creature, Davey got to his feet and backed away.
Holy Jesus, its
son!

The penlight shone upward on the creature's face, casting shadows over parts of its flat, scaled features.

With a slack jaw, Davey nodded.

“Thank you,” the creature rasped. Like a turtle pulling into its shell, it slowly retreated to its hiding place.

The room darkened as the penlight was withdrawn, but Davey could still make out his surroundings; his eyes had adjusted to the lack of light.

He turned to the steep, rickety stairs and saw that the others were coming into the room, dragging themselves through the doorway.

Somehow, they no longer seemed as threatening as before, just lost, confused. Davey resisted the urge to pull out his gun, but he kept his distance and moved very slowly toward the stairs, one long step at a time, until his foot bumped something.

There was a woman lying near the foot of the stairs; blood streaked her white hair and was splashed on the remains of her torn blue nightgown and her face.

Davey could not look at her face.

He knew it was Jackie.

Davey looked back at the creatures as he stepped over the body and put his foot on the bottom step, then the next one, never taking his eyes from the shifting audience behind him, until he could lift his right hand and push up on the trapdoor.

It would not open.

He pushed again, harder.

It remained firm.

“God ...
dammit,
” he muttered as he felt along the edges of the door, looking for some way,
any
way, to open it. He found nothing.

Something moved quickly over the floor below and Davey turned.

They were all standing aside to let something through, something that was slapping the cement floor and wheezing harshly. It was the legless creature Davey had shot earlier, pulling itself along rapidly, its head swollen and cracked, but in one piece now with worms wriggling in its hair. Heading straight for the staircase, it looked up at Davey and gurgled, “You hurt my
head!
"

Davey began to beat on the trapdoor with his fist, just as the creature reached the bottom step.

Beyond the curtain, Benedek was struck with the smell.

Like crawling inside a week-old used rubber,
he thought.

He took a few steps into the dark, holding a hand out before him, feeling for a wall.

A door creaked open to his right.

He heard someone moving about and turned toward the sound.

Bars. A cage.

A glimpse of white hair.

Relief swept through Benedek and he wanted to scream her name.

“Jackie?” he croaked uncertainly.

He saw the white hair again,
distinctly
.

“Jackie! Oh, Christ, Jackie, honey.” He pressed close to the bars, wrapping his hands around them. “Are you all right?"

Something moved toward him.

“Jackie?"