Feral (28 page)

Charity understood with a touch of anger that Toni was avoiding her.
 
She asked too many tough questions, and he didn't want to answer any more of them tonight.
 
She was glad he was away from her now though; she needed a few minutes alone.

She watched them all for a few minutes, made her way slowly from the crowd, toward the exit.
 
Remembering what Toni had said, about how she couldn't take her torch outside, she wondered what would happen if she tried.
 
She didn't know, so she didn't chance it.

She pushed the butt of her torch into the dirt and stalked to the exit.
 
All around the playground, as always, was darkness, unbroken nothing.
 
Through the arched doorway she saw trees.

She stepped outside and the rest of the night appeared around her.
 
Behind her, faintly now, she heard the noise of music and laughter, but it was like white noise from another world.
 
When she turned, the playground appeared deserted.
 
No one had followed her out.
 
Quickly she stepped behind the big sign,
Feral Park
, glanced around feeling horribly vulnerable, and pulled the cell phone from her pocket.
 
It was raining, so she hunched over it to keep it dry.

“Please work please work please work,” she murmured, and when she turned it on the
no service
message was not there.
 
She hunted down her father's preset, found it, and pushed
send
.

It rang.

“Yes.” A sibilant hiss of triumph.

After the third ring, a recorded message played;
I'm sorry, but the party you are trying to contact is outside the service area
.
 
Please try again later or leave a voice message after the beep
.

The phone beeped in her ear.

Reluctantly, and with a small voice, she spoke.
 
“Dad.”

Lightning flashed above, and a second later its booming thunder shook the ground.

“Dad, are you there?”

S
hannon heard that first great shock of thunder, not distant like the ones earlier, but directly overhead.
 
The storm had officially begun and Shannon was glad they were under cover, even if it was with this strange, wild man.

They were somewhere under Riverside's industrial park, in the heart of an old network of tunnels and culverts.
 
The man, Dave, had explained on their trip through the pipe how it was used to help control flooding before the corporation of engineers built the dam up-river.

“It was before my time, but from what I understand it didn't work very well anyway.
 
They built it to take excess flow and rout it underground to the other end of this little peninsula.”

They were inside a raised concrete recess just off the main waterway, probably meant for a long-out-of-use maintenance crew.
 
There had been no floods since the dam went up in the 1940s.
 
What little water did make it into the tunnels was never more than a few inches.
 
It ran swiftly to the river at the old tunnel's termination a few hundred feet farther down.

Dave had a fire burning inside a circle of large stones.
 
Not for heat—it was only a little cooler down there than it was above—but for light.
 
Sitting alongside the wall just out of spark range was a stack of scavenged wood, a supply of cardboard, and plenty of old newspaper.

A few feet from the fire, a thick padding of filthy old blankets covered the concrete.
 
A small table stood in the center of the blankets.
 
On the table were an extinguished oil lamp and a small pile of magazines and paperbacks.
 
There was a Playboy, which Dave had valiantly attempted to cover when he noticed it.
 
What little of his face showed under the weeks-old dirt and bristly beard flamed in embarrassment.
 
A Soldier of Fortune, an Outdoor Life, and a few tattered paperback novels.
 
The novels displayed a surprising diversity: Plato's
Republic
, Charles Grant's
Symphony
, and a generic romance, a crotch ripper, her father had called them, with Fabio on the cover.

I don't know what's more surprising
, Shannon thought,
his selection, or that he can read at all
!
 
She felt brief shame for the unkind thought, but couldn't help feeling it just the same.
 
Dave
was
a man, but he was just as feral as the kids in the park.
 
She had sensed that, even while reaching out to him in the dumpster, had felt the wild animal heat in his touch.
 
He had scared her, though she tried not to let it show.

Was he dangerous?
 
Crazy?

She didn't know, and that was all the more reason to be on guard.

But she had felt that he could help them, a touch of that old sixth sense, maybe.
 
She didn't know that either, but he did seem to know about the kids.

Dangerous or not, she decided, he was safer than being out in the dark, with
Him
searching for them.
 
He had almost got them again, luck and timing saving them, but it probably wouldn't next time.
 
Dave may be able to help them find Charity, or at least find out what happened to her, but he couldn't help with the Bogey Man.
 
She didn't think anybody could.

There was a long silence after Dave's brief history lesson on Riverside's underground.
 
She and Gordon—who had remained utterly silent through the whole thing—watched each other nervously over the table.
 
They sat in old chairs: she in an old kitchen chair with green plastic upholstery that had been the height of fashion in the sixties, Gordon on a splintery bar stool.

Dave sat alone by the fire, legs crossed, hands clasped in his lap, head down and staring into the jumping flames.
 
After his story, he had gone eerily silent, withdrawn.

Shannon kicked Gordon lightly under the table.

C'mon, say something
.
 
I can't do this by myself
.

Gordon jumped, startled.
 
He turned to Dave, frowned, and after a few moments, spoke.

“This place isn't so bad, you know.” He grimaced when Shannon kicked him again.
 
He gave her a desperate look, shrugged his shoulders.

Dave turned and regarded him with weary eyes.
 
“It's okay,” he said.
 
“I know it's a shit hole.”
 
Then he paused awkwardly and added, “But you can't beat the rent.”

This surprised a laugh out of Gordon.

Shannon tried to hide her own surprised smile behind a cupped hand.
 
She was happy to see that despite everything, neither of them had lost their sense of humor.

Maybe this guy is okay after all
, she thought, and barely a second later he rose suddenly, his beard bristling and eyes narrowed.
 
He
 
lunged toward them, a knife in his hand.
 
Shannon couldn't remember him having it a few seconds before.
 
There were plenty of places to hide it on his person, but he had pulled it so damn quickly!

Gordon jumped up as Dave rushed him.
 
The old stool fell over behind him with a crack of wood on stone.
 
Before he could run, Dave dove down, and Shannon lost sight of him behind the table.
 
She heard the knife's rusty blade enter flesh, a wet ripping sound, but Gordon did not cry out.
 
He only stared in wide-eyed surprise as Dave rose again, slowly, eyeing the small body wiggling and squealing on the end of the blade.

Dave ignored them, took his seat close to the fire again and busied himself skinning and cleaning his kill.

A rat, a goddamn big one.

Warily, Gordon righted the stool and sat again.
 
He did not attempt conversation with the wild man, and Shannon did not prompt him.
 
She studied the walls, a gritty crumbling gray covered with moss and fungus.
 
She studied the pattern of the ancient blanket that covered the floor; they read the covers of Dave's magazines and paperbacks, but didn't dare touch them.
 
When morbid curiosity at last drew their eyes back to Dave, the worst was over.
 
The rodent was skinned and gutted, stuck on the end of the blade like a rabbit on a spit and turning slowly over the flames.
 
Already the meat was turning a toasty brown.
 
Shannon's stomach growled, and she turned away.

Above them thunder continued its heavy beat, somewhere down the far end of the tunnel Shannon thought she saw the brief flashes of lightning.
 
It might have been her imagination, the illumination was too faint to be certain, but she didn't think so.

Dave ate his meal in silence, never once offering to share.
 
Then he belched and tossed the remains of his dinner into the fire.
 
He sheathed the knife under his heavy shirt and turned to them, a sated look on his face.

“Why were you running from the cops?”

Shannon and Gordon looked at each other for a moment, then at Dave sitting on the floor before them, as attentive as a child waiting for a bedtime story.

They told him everything.

He's probably crazy enough to believe it too, Shannon thought.

G
ordon felt lost in the uncomfortable silence that followed the story.
 
Shannon left after finishing the story, picking a corner of the alcove farthest from Dave and curling up in a parody of sleep on the filthy blankets.
 
Though she seemed at rest, Gordon knew she wasn't. Her breathing was ragged, and he caught her sneaking glances at him and Dave every few minutes.

He knew it had taken all her bravery to reach out to Dave outside, to comfort him while he cowered in the dumpster like an animal.
 
Now, even as Dave regained his composure—the comfort of safe and familiar surroundings, Gordon guessed—Shannon lost hers.

That thing with the rat had not helped.

Dave sat where he had before at the edge of the shrinking fire, shaking his head.
 
It was an unconscious gesture of disbelief.
 
With each turn of his head small clumps of dirt and god-knew-what-else fell from his tangled explosion of hair.

“Far-fetched,” he said, then scratched the chin beneath his matted beard.

At that moment he looked like a mad genius, Einstein's evil twin.
 
He shook his head again, dislodging more debris from his hair, and seemed to fall into deep thought.
 
Perhaps trying to nail down an inconsistency in their story, to explain it to himself.
 
Or maybe he was studying the dirt under his fingernails; it was impossible to be sure.
 
Maybe Gordon was giving him too much credit, but he thought he saw the ghost of a man Dave might have been once, a thoughtful, intelligent, social man.
 
Maybe an important man.

Gordon sat at the edge of his stool, ready to move quickly if Dave's sudden moment of sanity dissolved and the knife came out again.
 
The grubby man was watching him.

“Sounds far-fetched,” Dave repeated.

“Which part?”

“All of it,” he said, then looked away again.
 
“I know about the kids in the park.
 
I‘ve seen your girl, but I don't know about any
Bogey Man
.”

“It's true,” Shannon said from behind her mask of sleep, making them both jump a little.

Dave looked at her, eyes narrowed slightly.
 
“I want to believe you,” he said.
 
“I want to trust you, but it's hard.”
 
He smiled suddenly, craftily.
 
Gordon didn't like the look of it.

“If he's so hot to kill the two of you, why doesn't he?
 
Where is he now?”

“He's close,” Gordon said.
 
He could feel him in the dark around their pitiful oasis of light, waiting.
 
Lightning flashed outside, lighting the far end of the tunnel briefly.
 
Gordon thought he saw a shadow in the brief flash, but chalked it up to imagination.
 
A second later thunder boomed.
 
He could hear the rain outside too; it was coming down heavily now.
 
Soon the main tunnel just a step down from their little concrete island would become a shallow river, flowing toward its confluence with the Snake River.
 
“The light keeps him away, but he's close.”