Apocalypticon (26 page)

“Right?” Patrick asked. “In the cellar?”

“We don’t have a cellar,” Mary said quickly. “Now, if you’re going to stay, you might as well be useful. You can bring in some firewood from the pile out back. Follow me.” She led them down the hall and around a corner, past a door secured with a padlock. Cold air drafted from beneath as they walked past. Patrick turned to Ben and mouthed,
Cellar?
Ben nodded.

What the hell was going on here?

They brought a few loads of firewood into the house (after cautiously inspecting the grounds for runners), then politely requested to retire to the guest room to put their things in order. Mary consented, suspiciously, and they hustled back to the room and closed the door.

Ben set right to work stuffing his blanket into his knapsack, but Patrick stood thoughtfully by the door, tapping his cheek and staring blankly into space. “What do you think he’s doing down there?” he asked.

“If Hollywood has taught me anything, it’s that Warren is creating an army of self-sustaining, man-eating vampire/plant hybrids in that basement. We should get the hell out.”

“Maybe he’s conducting experiments on sedated politicians,” Patrick mused. “Or working on some sort of organic madman antidote, with beakers full of bubbling green potions.” He inhaled sharply. “Ooo! Maybe he has a Tesla coil down there!” he said excitedly.

“I don’t care if he has a petting zoo down there. I’d rather take my chances with the runners.” Ben zipped up his knapsack and slipped the wrench and the knife into his pockets. “Get your stuff together. Let’s go.” But Patrick barely heard him. He was getting that warm, tingling feeling that he always got when he was about to make an exciting decision.

“Let’s go see what’s in that basement,” he said.

Ben threw his knapsack on the ground. “You know what I hate about you the most?”

“My naturally trim physique?”

“The fact that you’re so predictably maddening.”

“So you
do
want to go see what’s in the cellar?”

“No, I want to leave. I want to go back into the woods because I think we’re safer with the freaking zombies than we are with these whackos. They give me the fucking creeps. I just want to go to Disney World and get done with this stupid trip and not end up being cut into pieces by Ward Cleaver.”

Patrick pressed a hand to his chest. “You think this trip is stupid?”

“Well. No. It’s actually been pretty exciting,” Ben admitted. “And I like the fact that I’m not the one with a hole in his hand. So it could be worse. But I really want to get the hell out of Stepford.”

“We will, Benny Boy, we will” Pat promised, chuffing him on the chin. “Just as soon as I find out what’s in that basement.”

•

The plan was simple; Ben would distract Mary while Patrick slipped out and tried the storm doors. If Ben was good for anything, it was a distraction, “But no fire this time,” Patrick warned.

Mary and the children were in the living room down the hall. They could hear the little girl babbling happily as the boy struggled with his numbers. “As long as they stay in the room, we’re fine,” Patrick said. “But if they come out, you go into action.”

“What sort of action?”

“Distraction action!”

“What should I do?”

“Be a master of disaster!”

“What kind of disaster?”

“The kind that stops wops!”

“They’re not Italian.”

“I know, but I had a good rhyme scheme going.”

“It was racially insensitive.”

“We live in an insensitive world,” Patrick said sadly. “Do whatever you need to do, just keep her in the house and not looking for me in it.” He strapped on the machete and gave Ben a little salute. “I go to discover the truth.”

“You go to discover your arm severed from your shoulder. If you’re not back in ten minutes, I swear to God, I’m leaving without you.”

“Better make it twenty. If there’s some sick science experiment happening down there, I’m liable to get engrossed in it.”

“You’re likely to become part of it.”

Patrick thrust a finger into the air. “Then I go for science!”

•

Ben winced as Patrick closed the front door. He was sure Mary heard the click. But the lessons continued in the room down the hall, and after counting to ten, he let himself breathe again. He looked around to make sure no one was looking, then he slipped into Warren’s study. Why he thought there might be anyone around to catch him, or why anyone might care, he couldn’t say. He just felt jittery. The Tinder family was batty, even the kids. He could’ve sworn that he’d woken up in the middle of the night to find the girl staring at them from the doorway. It had freaked him right the hell out. When he rubbed his eyes and looked again, she was gone, and it could’ve been a dream, but still. These people weren’t right.

He opened the liquor cabinet and perused the bottles. Warren might be batshit, but he had good taste in booze. He pulled out a bottle of Grey Goose and a bottle of Kahlua and set them on the bar. He poked around the lower shelves and was delighted to find a container of Coffeemate. He set to work mixing himself a White Russian. It wasn’t quite the same without ice (
Definitely not a White Siberian
, he cracked to himself), but, lordy, did it do the trick. He was generous with the alcohol, sure, but the real high was in the familiar comfort of the creamy drink.

He tossed it down, the whole glassful, and mixed up a second. Then he stashed the bottles back in the bar and closed it up. He wandered around the study, drink in hand, examining the carvings on the shelves. Why on Earth someone would collect so many sad-looking Indians for a personal collection was beyond him. It was like the Trail of Tears ended in Colonel Mustard’s library.

He inspected the books lining the walls, looking for some concrete evidence of mental instability, something like
American Psycho
, or
Mein Kampf
, or anything by the Marquis de Sade. He was surprised to find a host of classics, peppered with a little science fiction and a smattering of humorous essay collections, mostly from Sedaris and Burroughs.
The real sick shit must be in the basement
, he decided. Warren probably kept
The Necronomicon
down there, or the “Blood Qur’an,” or maybe both. Patrick was probably being literally eaten alive by books written in blood.

Speaking of Patrick, where the hell was he? Ben didn’t have a watch, so the twenty-minute deadline was pretty meaningless, but it had to be getting close by now. He knelt down and pressed his ear to the floor, but he couldn’t hear a single sound coming from the basement. That could be good or bad. He took another sip of his drink. As much as he wanted to get the hell out of Dodge, and as much as he would love to just grab his bag and run, he wasn’t about to leave Patrick behind.
And Pat knows that, dammit
. So the twenty-minute deadline was even less than meaningless.

He decided to calm his mind by doing a lap of the house. He needed to check in on the classroom anyway. He and his drink meandered out into the hall. He turned the corner and froze dead in his tracks. Mary stood just outside of the living room, her back to him. The kids were scurrying around the corner toward the kitchen. Snack time? Lunchtime?

Dammit
.

He was frozen with indecision. Should he back away and slip upstairs into the guest room and hope she would just not think to bother them? Or should he take the initiative and create a diversion right now? If he did the latter, what would he say or do? His brain wasn’t working properly. It couldn’t tell him to move forward or backward, so he just stood in place. For a moment he thought maybe Mary would follow the kids and make the decision for him, but, instead, she turned around and caught him standing in awkward mid-crouch, breakfast alcohol in hand.

She gave a little gasp of surprise, then her face quickly fell to annoyance. “Do you need something?” she asked icily.

Make a diversion. Make a diversion
, he thought.

He held up the White Russian. “I found this in the kids’ bedroom.”

•

Patrick crept along the front of the house, instinctively ducking as he moved past the windows, which was stupid, because they were all boarded up from the inside. He slid around the corner and approached the storm doors. He carefully reached down and pulled at one of the handles. The door raised freely an inch or two; it wasn’t locked from the inside. He set the door back down noiselessly and looked around. He was alone: no kids, no angry wife, no flesh-eating politicians. He blew in his hands to warm them. The air was cold, colder than usual, and he needed to be warm and springy in case evasive bodily maneuvering became necessary. The fingers on his right hand still felt numb, and the whole injury put him at a serious defensive disadvantage. He hopped from one foot to the other and shook out his arms. Somewhere in the back of his mind, a voice that sounded suspiciously like his late wife’s whispered something about going back inside the house and forgetting about the cellar. But that voice had a way of steering him away from the more exciting things in life, so  instead of heeding it, he gripped the metal handle and pulled open the door. It was dark as night in the stairwell. Patrick squatted and peered down into the cellar gloom. Dim candlelight flickered around the walls. He stepped down onto the stairs and pulled the storm door closed behind him. 

He sat on the third step for almost two whole minutes, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. When they did, he could see that the stairs led to a shallow hallway, which opened up into the main basement room. The walls were heavy stones held together by cement that was beginning to flake away, but the structure seemed sturdy on the whole. The candles were hidden from view, tucked back behind either side of the entry tunnel, but their glow flickered across the hard earthen floor. Patrick could hear Warren humming from somewhere in the darkness. He eased his way down the stairs and crept slowly along the tunnel.

He stopped at the mouth and held his breath, listening. Warren’s humming seemed to be coming from somewhere behind him, on the other side of the concrete. He crossed the tunnel and ducked around the opposite wall. He could just barely see the outline of the staircase ascending to the padlocked door in the hallway above. Why bother locking that door when the storm doors were completely unguarded? The obvious answer sent a chill through Patrick. Tinder wasn’t trying to keep people in the house out of the basement; he was trying to keep something in the basement out of the house.

The staircase bisected this half of the room. Flanking it on either side were U-shaped series of metal file cabinets. There were enough drawers to hold all the paperwork for an entire law firm, and then some. A tall candle holder stood in the middle of each section, both of them mounted with thick, squat candles that sat at eye level. He tiptoed toward the file drawers directly ahead and inspected the first tower. The labels were meaningless to him;
Case #115AT Abbot – Paulson, Case #1444PO McKenney – Avondale, Case #13BSP Belmont – Luna
. Carefully, quietly, he slid the button on the top drawer and pulled it open. Metal squeaked against metal. He stopped and listened. Warren still hummed, hidden, from the other side of the cellar. Patrick plucked a file from the drawer and opened it near the candle. The top piece of paper contained a poem written in hasty script:

MY BOLOGNA HAS A FIRST NAME, IT’S O-S-C-A-R

MY BOLOGNA HAS A SECOND NAMEM, IT’S M-A-Y-E-R

I LOVE TO EAT IT EVERY DAY

AND IF YOU ASK ME WHY I’LL SAY

‘CAUSE OSCAR MAYER HAS A WAY

WITH B-O-L-O-G-N-A

He turned the page. The second paper in the stack was a piece of withering loose leaf, yellowed at the edges and delicate to the touch. The words on this sheet were written in careful block letters, crisp and precise, placed exactly in the center of the page:

I WAS DRUNK LAST NIGHT, DEAR MOTHER

I WAS DRUNK THE NIGHT BEFORE

BUT IF YOU’LL FORGIVE ME, MOTHER

I’LL NEVER GET DRUNK ANYMORE

“What in the name of Grayskull...?” Patrick mumbled aloud. Then he heard a chair scrape against the dirt floor. He nearly knocked the candle over in surprise. Footsteps echoed toward him. He flipped the folder shut and stuffed it into the drawer, then dove into the corner, where the tunnel wall met the outer wall, and huddled into the darkness. Warren came around the edge of the tunnel carrying a piece of paper and humming his ditty. He strode purposefully to a file cabinet somewhere along the stairwell, popped it open, and thumbed through the contents. He found the folder he was looking for and slipped the paper inside. He slammed the door shut with a quick flick of his wrist and started back toward the other side of the cellar. On his way back, he noticed the open file drawer and cocked his head at it, frowning. The humming stopped. He approached the drawer and inspected it. He looked around the room, but saw nothing in the gloom. Then he shrugged, closed the drawer, and hummed his way back to the chair.

Patrick wiped a line of sweat from his brow. He stood and crept softly to the drawer Warren had just visited. It was labeled
Case #5589DM Abernathy – Pickle
. He pulled it open quietly and picked a random paper from the bunch of folders.

I WANT YOUR DRAMA, THE TOUCH OF YOUR HAND

I WANT YOUR LEATHER STUDDED KISS IN THE SAND

I WANT YOUR LOVE

LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, I WANT YOUR LOVE

He slid the paper back into its place and closed the drawer. Warren said something from the other side of the room, causing Patrick to jump again. “You finish that Drake report yet, Tomlinson? Let me see it.” Then footsteps, the rustling of paper, a long pause, and more paper rustling. “Good start. Don’t forget the bit about waking up being the best part, et cetera. How about you, Davis? How’s that invoice coming along?” More footsteps, more paper rustling. “Hm. Let’s reword this fourth line item. Use ‘diamond’ instead of ‘sparkler.’ ‘Like a diamond in the sky.’ That’s much better, they can’t dispute that charge, no sir. Good work, Davis.” Warren walked back to his desk and squeaked into his chair. 

Patrick made his way slowly back to the tunnel and peeked his head around the wall. What he saw made him gasp, audibly. He clamped his hand over his mouth and spun back behind the tunnel wall. Warren’s chair squeaked once, then was silent. He went back to shuffling his papers.

Patrick peered around the corner again, trying not to lock eyes on the decomposing body sitting at the desk directly to his left. The corpse had been dead for a while and was more skeleton than flesh. Warren sat at his own desk against the far wall, and a third desk was positioned just to Patrick’s right, back in the corner, barely visible by candlelight. It, too, was manned by a rotting corpse. Warren hummed happily, making notes and checking his papers against each other. “Twenty more minutes ‘til lunch, fellas. Let’s try to get this Marcus case knocked off before noon,” he said. The dead men stared hollowly through their empty sockets and did not reply.

Warren was officially insane, but it wasn’t fear that gripped Patrick; it was pity. He watched the scene for another ten minutes. Warren hummed away at his work, stopping only occasionally to check in on his colleagues. When Patrick had seen enough, he crept back out through the storm doors.