Darkman (32 page)

He massaged his stump, which dead-ended at the knee, thinking for the billionth time of the accident that had cost him his leg. Too simple, it had been; too avoidable. Skip had grown up on a farm in Indiana. His dad, a crusty old buzzard, made Skip work in the fields, drive farm machinery too big for him, slaved him from dawn till dusk during summer vacation while the other boys did fun stuff. On a Wednesday the thresher he was driving caught on a thick chunk of old wood, halting the blades. Skip, ten years old, had gotten down and kicked out the soggy piece of wood. Instantly the thresher worked fine again, dragging Skip’s foot in, amputating it, dragging his shin in, amputating it, dragging his knee in, amputating it. It was a process that Skip had found revolting but not yet painful. The thresher’s big blades were sparkling red and wet under the afternoon sun, twirling merrily. Skip tore free and hobbled home, got yelled at by his father for being such a stupe, and then was driven to the doctor with a plastic trash bag tied to his stump to catch the blood. His dad was already fuming and roaring about how much this disaster would cost him in doctor bills.

Skip tore his mind away from the subject, trying unsuccessfully to get interested in the program on TV. He looked around for the remote control, couldn’t find it, didn’t feel like getting up from the couch, so he slumped sideways instead and drifted off to sleep . . . and woke up two hours later when his television exploded. He jerked upright, frowning. The TV was a smoking shell with a pink wooden leg sticking out of its shattered face. He wondered instantly if he had done this in his sleep, heaved his shoddy prothesis into the TV from the sheer hatred he felt toward it and the misery it caused his stump.

The television burped and rattled. Lazy flames waltzed in its bowels, sending black tatters of smoke to the ceiling. Skip looked around, dazed. Except for the TV, nothing else was amiss.

But the front door was standing fully open.

Skip stood up and hopped to it, beginning to cough on the smoke. As far as nightmares went, this one was a dandy, if it was indeed a nightmare. He shrugged to himself and swung the door shut.

Darkman was waiting behind it, a dark hulk in a cheap suit. Skip emitted a squawk and fell backward as the door thumped shut.

Darkman stood over him, a living skull capped with a bit of scrufly hair in spots, blackened bone and burned flesh, the hint of decay wafting off him. He bent down and stuck a finger bone against Skip’s forehead. Skip tried to wriggle away, eyes stupidly crossed as he took in the sight of the Darkman’s rotting hand.

“Where did you take her?” he said in a grating, tortured way, as if his lungs were dying inside him while Skip watched.

“Tuh-tuh-tuh-take who?” Skip said, gurgling.

Darkman hoisted him off the floor by the front of his shirt. “Julie Hastings, you bastard. You stuck her in your trunk. She’s not in there now, and I ought to tell you your old Javelin will never be the same.
Where is she?”

Skip squinched his eyes shut, not able to look at this monstrosity anymore, not able to stand the smell of putrefaction that was carried on the outrush of its hot breath. “I took her to Strack’s house!” he shouted. Fingers bone clamped onto his throat and shook him.

“What is a Strack?”
the monster barked in that queer, strangled voice.
“Who in the fuck is this Strack?”

“Just a guy.” Skip whimpered, almost slipping into the comfortable, dreamy world of shock. He was slapped across the face, making his eyes pop open. “Rich guy,” he said. “Big in real estate. Louis Strack.”

“What does this Strack have to do with the Bellasarious memo?”

Skip almost wet his pants, for this answer would not satisfy the creature that was about to kill him. “I don’t know about any memo.”

“Liar! You were there when Durant took it out of my pocket. How does Durant tie in with Strack?”

“The big boss,” Skip answered immediately, not wishing to die a hero’s death. “Strack runs the crime in this city, uses Durant as a front man. Strack stays clean as a whistle while Durant and the rest of us get dirty. Okay?”

Darkman deliberated. Was it okay? Did it make sense? What value did Julie hold for Strack? Enough to kidnap her, obviously.

“What about your old buddy Rick? Why didn’t he tell me this?”

Skip shrugged as he tried to get up. “Rick was a loser, man. Durant wouldn’t trust him to keep his mouth shut even if it was Superglued.”

Darkman pulled Skip upright. Skip wavered on the edge of collapse, standing on one leg and clutching Darkman’s lapels for balance, his head rolling on his shoulders like a drunk. “Got a phone in this dive?” Darkman snarled.

Skip lifted one weak hand. “Over there.”

Darkman shoved him toward it. Skip fell, moaning, onto his remaining knee. Darkman kicked him in the ass. “Call Strack. Find out what he’s done with Julie. Mention my name and I tear your throat out. Understand?”

Skip nodded as he crawled to the phone on the wall in a corner of the living room. He clawed his way up the wall, eventually finding the phone, and punched the buttons. Darkman waited, growing angry at this small-town punk who walked on a machine gun and did everything he was told, even if it was murder. The scrawny bastard had no right to live.

“Sure,” Skip was saying into the phone, trying to keep his voice level. “The new building going up at the waterfront? No, no, not that. She hurt my bum leg so bad today, I’d like to be there when you shove her off.”

“Tell him to wait,” Darkman snapped, his heart speeding up. “Tell him it will take an hour or more to get there.”

Skip put a hand over the receiver. “It’s only a twenty-minute drive!”

“Then make something up!”

Skip went back to the phone. Sweat was running down his temples and his hands were shaking. “Um, my stump’s been bleeding a little. Not real serious, but it hurts. I’ll patch it up and come over in, say, an hour?”

Relief transformed his face. “Thank you, Mr. Strack. Thank you very much.”

He hung up. “You’ve got your hour,” he said wearily, wiping a hand across his wet forehead. “Riverfront construction, over where the docks used to be. There’s a high rise going up, twenty-two stories done already. Just steel, though. Think you can find it?”

“Don’t worry.”

“Well, then,” Skip said, swelling up a bit, “get out and leave me alone. In an hour Strack’s gonna kill that bitch. You wanted a ringside seat, you’ve got one. So go the fuck away. And send me a check for the TV you busted.”

For Darkman that gnawing hint of anger at this kid roared alive, a beast waiting to be let out, demanding it. Just to look at this young man’s defiant face was enough to set the red rivers in motion, the anger, the hate, the raw lust to kill, three rivers fusing into one and blotting out reason. The little piece of Peyton that had survived through all these ordeals begged him, screamed at him, to control it, control that anger and that hate.

No more, Darkman thought savagely, and jumped at Skip. Skip’s eyes only had time to open wide in fear and surprise before Darkman was on him, pulling hair out by the handful, ripping skin into bleeding shreds, gouging his eyes out, grunting with animal satisfaction as Skip screeched in agony and tumbled to the floor. Darkman stepped back, his heart racing, his breath pumping up and down and scorching his wounded throat.

Skip was a skinny man made of mangled clothes and bloodied skin, writhing on the floor, clawing at the bleeding holes that had been his eyes. Darkman’s blood lust grew as the smell of blood drifted up to his gaping nostrils.

He jumped to the television and snatched the burning leg out, madly out of control, seeing only hate and death in a world gone insane, himself gone insane. He jiggled the leg and a handgrip flipped out, complete with trigger. He aimed the absurd contraption at Skip’s head and jerked the trigger back.

Skip screamed for the last time as the rapid-fire bullets sizzled through his skull.

The gun ran out of bullets. Darkman howled with rage and smashed it through a window. He squatted, got hold of the couch Skip had been dozing on so peacefully, and flipped it over. He stumbled into the kitchen, no longer himself, no longer anyone in particular. He yanked drawers out and hurled them away. A flying fork pinged off the counter and ticked against his forehead, where rage was a monster as big as the universe. He found the fork and stabbed it through the refrigerator door a dozen times, bending it, breaking it, panting and shrieking in this orgy of destruction.

He was about to snatch the clock off the wall and toss it through a window when it struck him that time was passing—yes, time was passing—and he had much to do before meeting the estimable Mr. Strack. The rage was dwindling, leaving him sick and shaken, confused, almost spent. He staggered out of the kitchen and saw anew what he had done.

A small aftershock of his rage told him that this was good and real and nothing to trouble himself about. The rest of him informed him that he was a murderer, a monster on the loose, a beast created by the science he used to worship and teach. Careening into walls that dripped with blood and gore, he found the door and shambled out into the night, then threw up on the lawn that Skip had mowed only the day before, and would never mow again.

39

Darkman and Julie and Louis

S
KIP
A
LTWATER MADE
it to the riverfront construction project barely one minute before Louis Strack’s limousine drove down the winding, muddy strip of road that had been mashed into the ground by bulldozers and cranes over the last weeks. Construction was moving at a frantic pace, obviously: The last time Darkman had been here to salvage parts from his old lab (now bulldozed into mud and dust), the huge steel construction had been only two stories tall. Now it was twenty-two, a giant Erector Set reaching to the moon and partially blotting it from Skip’s sight.

The white limousine’s headlights caught Skip in their glare, making him squint. He raised a hand to shield his eyes just as the headlights snapped off. The driver got out stiffly and opened a rear door of the giant cruiser. The fake Skip, watching everything with the sick memory of the real Skip’s barbaric slaughter chasing through his mind, did his best to control the pace of his breathing; Skip’s battered Javelin was parked on the street two blocks away, and it had been a hard run down this weedy slope. But it was nicely dark, the artificial face that had been hurriedly stuck into place had little chance of melting, and the wig that was most suited to match Skip’s motley haircut was pulled tight over his head.

The impostor Skip shuffled forward uneasily, his feet wrapped in the foul-smelling steam that drifted up from the surface of the river. The steam pooled in recesses in the damp ground like a mysterious glowing gas and entwined the trunks of the scrappy trees that poked up here and there, trees doomed to die as they absorbed the poison that once had been river water.

Darkman arranged his face in a way he hoped duplicated the real thing. He had not had much time to study Skip, to learn his quirks and his posture. It seemed that next to Rick, Skip had been a fairly useless prop in the game of crime, his only talent being his magical mystery leg.

Suddenly a woman dived out of the car, nearly falling in the muck. Faint moonlight told its tale: Julie. A man in a dark suit stepped out with more dignity than Julie had, and took her arm. Together they walked toward Darkman while the driver eased himself into the limo and slammed the door. Darkman’s rage rose up in an instant tidal wave, his dead fingers wanting only to rip and tear and kill the man who had created this hell for him, and for Julie.

But he stopped the emotion before it could expand out of control, because it was almost certain that Strack, and maybe even the limo driver, had guns, and the purpose here was not to get himself and Julie killed but to save the one who deserved to live most.

Darkman gimped toward them, wishing to all the patron saints that he had had time to practice Skip’s voice. He was no Rich Little, no impressionist, no one at all. Strack drew close, just a figure in the dark shadows cut by the huge steel beams, but Julie was still Julie, looking terribly frightened, her hands tied behind her back, a red cloth stuck in her mouth.

“Well, Skip,” Strack said casually, “do you want to go topside and help push her off, or stay down here to hear the splat?”

Rage.

Strack continued.

Darkman pointed up.

Rage.

“Right this way, madame.” Strack swept an arm toward the skeleton that someday would be a building. It was surrounded by a moat of cast-off steel beams, silent trucks awaiting morning, huge tools that defied explanation, rods and pipes and barrels that stank of oil. The odor of recent cement work hung in the air, smelling like chalk dust, competing with the oil fumes and the stink of the mud and the river. It was not a pleasant combination.

“Over there,” Strack said, aiming Julie toward what looked like a large steel-and-plywood box. Darkman tripped over something sticking out of the ground and nearly went down.

Rage.

“When you work high steel for a while,” Strack said, “you acquire a certain sense about things. What you just broke your last foot on, Skip, was a piece of re-bar that was most likely tossed down here from high above. When you’re dancing on a beam twenty-two stories high, it’s fun to watch things fall. I’d estimate that piece of re-bar was over ten feet long when it was dropped, and you saw how little of it was still sticking up. Weird stuff, that re-bar. It’s used for reinforcing poured concrete, just an iron bar about an inch in diameter, so weak that a big man might bend it over his knee. But without re-bar there’d be no construction. Know much about construction, Skippy, my boy?”