The Death of Wendell Mackey (11 page)

“You okay man?” Andy asked. His face was difficult to read. Possibly it was concern, or just Andy toying with him, mocking him. Even if Wendell had the gun available, Andy looked like no stranger to quick, aggressive movements. His nose had a pronounced lump at its center, where the bridge turned direction and moved up into his forehead, and his ears were cauliflowered and swollen. He was all simian shoulders and arms, with those cold dark eyes set back in his skull.

“What do you mean?” Wendell stepped back.

“Because you got a little…” Andy brought his finger to his nostril as he watched Wendell.

Wendell felt the blood drip onto his upper lip. He wiped at his nose with his hand, saw the streak of red, and grabbed for a brown towel hanging over the oven door.

“You look sick, man,” said Andy.

“Allergies. Dry skin.”

“And the flu, right?”

“Yeah, that too.”

“You need more than just food.”

“I’m fine. Really.”

“Okay then.” Andy shrugged. ”Well, who do you think they were?” he asked again, but with the look of someone who already knew. “I’ll tell you what I think. They’re federal agents. But not like you’d think, not normal FBI, though that would be bad enough. It’s some sort of secret agency, black box kinda stuff, guys who just bleed back into the background once they’re done with…whatever it is they’re doing.”

If the institution was close, close enough to have its men downstairs, Wendell thought, then the apartment was more a holding cell than a refuge, with no place for escape. But if they were from the institution, then why were they waiting? Clearly they could have determined which one was his mother’s apartment in no time. Yet no one had approached. Which brought him back to Andy, his concrete block of a head nodding almost giddily as he spoke, a man either blowing smoke, or so taken with his own conspiracies that he was seeing things that weren’t there.

“Did they come into the building?” Wendell asked. “I mean, do they think they know who did it?”

“Nah. They’re not too bright. Probably going after some drug dealer or something. They didn’t even want to listen to me. They don’t want to hear the truth, about the shape shifters and the—”

“What?” Wendell dropped the brown towel onto the table.

“The shape shifters, the reptilians, and all the—”

“The
what?
”

“The
reptilians
, man. The shape shifters. They’re called the Babylonian Brotherhood, and they’re the ones who run it all.”

“This is a joke.”

“Sounds crazy, I know. But I’ve got some YouTube stuff you should see. That’ll turn you around. Turned me around.” And with all the seriousness of a physician describing the cancer ravaging his patient’s bowels, Andy added, “They look human, sound human. It’s just that they aren’t. Either it’s cloned human skin over their lizard skin—that’s one theory—or they can mask their true selves with their superior technology. That’s what I think they do. But I hear that you can spot them with certain kinds of mirrors, like silver-backed mirrors. That’s why there aren’t any silver-backed mirrors hanging in the White House.”

Andy continued speaking, and Wendell dropped his eyes to his hands. He raised his fingers up, careful not to draw too much attention to them, and he saw fingers more desiccated than the day before, each sucked down more to the bone, like dried tree roots. They still moved and flexed, even felt strong, but he no longer recognized them as his own. And beneath the skin…

“It’s all a sham,” Andy said, “all fakery. But below the surface, that’s where the truth is. And underneath, they’re monsters.”

The cut on his foot had revealed abnormal flesh.

No, this guy’s a lunatic,
Wendell told himself.

Then again, underneath your skin…now that’s something begging for an explanation.

“You don’t look right, man. What’s your story?”

Wendell dropped his hands again. “Me? No story.”

“But you’re new here. That old lady who used to be here—”

“Dead. My mother. I’m just here, collecting belongings, stuff like that.”

“From where?” Andy narrowed his eyes. If his eyes had shrunk any further, compressed between Andy’s thick eyelids, they would have disappeared.

“Where?”
He knows
, Wendell thought.
It’s all just a game to him
.

Andy smiled, then chuckled. “I’m just messing with you, man. Seriously, you look like a straight shooter. Just busting your balls. You and me, we’re alike. So we gotta stick together here, behind enemy lines. These government types are just one of the problems for guys like us. All around us we got these impure folk, these mud people, multiplying like fleas. Like we need anything else to worry about. No wonder this place is a sewer. But not us, not you and me. So no worries, man. I’m just messing with you.” He continued to laugh, rapping his knuckles onto the table.

Wendell smiled.

“And I was just messing with you last night too,” Andy added. “Sorry about that whole thing.”

The room cooled. Wendell got hot.

“What did you say?”

“You know,” Andy said, “last night. I figured you just weren’t a guy to take a joke. Not with how you reacted.”

“So you, you’re…”

“Yeah, that was me.”

“You’re Drake.”

“It’s my last name. But my mama called me Andy. So you know how it is, sometimes I get a coupla drinks in me, a nice girl on my arm,” and he grunted as he pumped his fist back and forth quickly, indicating what had transpired with the woman last night, “and I get lost in the moment. ‘Lost in the moment,’ isn’t that what they say?”

“That was you.” Wendell’s hands felt heavy. Whatever stirred in him last night began to stir again.

Drake sensed it. His face changed, hardened. “You got a problem with a little joke?”

“That was…”

“Now, you’re not gonna go and do anything rash.” It wasn’t a question. “Things happen.”

As in things happen to people like me
, Wendell thought,
people who question him. Threaten him. Bad things
. Still, he felt hotter, and that presence in him, that new self, began to wake.

“You told me you knew who I was,” Wendell said.

“What?”

“Last night. You said ‘I know who you are.’”

“Yeah.” Drake’s eyes widened, as if stung by a realization, an epiphany. “Yeah, that’s right. I think it’s getting clear.” He stepped towards Wendell. “You and me won’t have any trouble, because—”

“Because why?”

“Because suppose someone told someone else about a certain quiet tenant up here, knows something about that guy who got himself gutted. Suppose even—”

“You better leave.”

“That a threat? How about this: You don’t know who I am, and you don’t want to. So you better learn to sleep with your eyes open.” And in one fluid move Drake’s hand came up and he stepped into Wendell—

It took no thought. Wendell’s left hand was up and squeezing a ball of flesh on Drake’s chest.

What am I doing…

“—the
hell
man—”

Squeezing and pulling, knowing that it could all just rip right out. Wanting it to.

Drake tried to pull away, chopping at Wendell’s arm with his own. He stepped back and now it was Wendell’s turn to step towards him.

“Look, man, you better—”

“Leave,” said Wendell, an octave lower.

Tunnel vision, with Drake lit up in the center. Wendell became very aware of Drake’s movements—now hesitant and flat—and he watched the muscles contract and quiver in the massive man’s neck and shoulders. Wendell pushed Drake into the front door, and Drake fumbled for the knob.

“Trouble’s got a way of finding us, don’t it?” Drake said, trying to reassert his own strength. The door opened.

Wendell still had his hand twisted into Drake’s chest.

“Just go away.” Wendell pushed, almost effortlessly, and Drake tripped into the hallway.

“Whether you want it or not,” Drake said, “it finds you.”

“Just go.”

“It finds you. And they’ll find you.” Andy put his hand to his chest and winced. “And now that I know that you’re—”

The door slammed shut. And for a moment, peace.

Then: “But you’re not just like them, are you?” Drake said through the door. “You’re something else. Something worse. So, we’ll be seeing each other again, Mr. Wendell. Don’t you worry.” Wendell heard him turn and walk away, his chuckle rolling into a laugh, and then growing edges and turning to a sharp cackle.

Wendell’s hands shook, and he felt his heartbeat hammering away on both sides of his neck. The tunnel vision left, and Wendell walked into the bathroom to vomit up his egg rolls.

He must have fallen asleep. Or blacked out again. His head was resting against the porcelain bowl of the toilet. His head throbbed, and he still tasted the acid in his mouth.

Gun. Get the gun.

Wendell stood up. If it was still in the apartment, it had to be in his mother’s room. He left the bathroom, still a bit wobbly, and hurried through her bedroom door, surveying the room.

“Gotta be in here.”

He flung open the dresser drawers. Nothing but mouse droppings. Then he turned to the foot locker at the end of the bed. It moaned open and burped a cloud of dust, which settled back down onto the knit blankets within. At the top of the pile of blankets was a pair of wool gloves. He looked down at his hands. The veins drew maps over leathery skin. He placed the gloves on the floor next to the locker. Under the blankets were scarves and shirts—some his father’s and some his mother’s—and a tan trench coat, which he pulled out and dropped onto the gloves. They would come in handy when he ventured out. He reached down beneath the piles of blankets and clothes to the bottom.

Bingo. He felt something hard.

“Feels small,” he said. But everything was bigger when he was a boy. The gun was wrapped in cloth but Wendell could still feel its shape. He pulled it out of the locker, unwrapped and inspected it. There was a little rust on the barrel, but overall it was none the worse for wear.

“Bullets.”

He reached back to the bottom of the locker. Nothing there. Absently, he flicked open the cylinder and saw six chambers filled with rounds. She had kept it loaded, all of those years.

“My birthday,” Wendell whispered, sitting down on the floor.

It wasn’t the birthday when his father died, but years later, when Wendell was out of the house. He had come back to the apartment for his birthday, an event which amounted to a box of macaroni and cheese, no cake, and a few hours watching
The Lawrence Welk Show
reruns and an assortment of infomercials on television. His mother had kept insisting that it was too cold in the apartment, rubbing her shoulders.

“So she went to the locker for a blanket for me,” Wendell said. Now he wondered if she was looking for a blanket, or something else, as he looked down at the gun in his hand.

She was bad
, he thought,
but was she really that bad?

“Yes, she was.”

He closed the cylinder and dropped the pistol into his pants pocket. Then he grabbed the trench coat and put it on, and reached for the gloves and slipped them on.

On a hot day, gloves and a trench coat would draw stares.
But this city is full of freaks
, he reasoned, and he would just be one among many, probably assumed by most to be homeless—which wasn’t untrue—or a bit off his rocker, which, all things considered, could have been possible. But he would join the mélange outside, and mix as inconspicuously as possible into it. He would disappear into the concrete, between the cars and trucks, and look for it.
It
.

Food. The hunger was still there.

It wouldn’t leave him until something stayed permanently in his stomach. Without food, he wouldn’t last long. He had to risk it and go out. The apartment was his fortress, imperfect and penetrable though it was, but salvation would turn to starvation. He walked out of the bedroom and grabbed the apartment key on the top of the refrigerator, then headed for the door. He opened it and stepped out into the mercifully cooler, fresher air.

He heard Sister Agatha behind her door, rustling about, clinking plates together like she was clearing the table, or setting it. And humming, something soft and peaceful, a song that Wendell thought he should know but couldn’t remember. He cleared his throat and the humming and movement behind her door stopped.

Soft footsteps. She must have approached her door, he thought, and was now looking at him through her peep hole.

Wendell dropped his head, slammed his door shut and headed for the stairs.