Ladies' Night (16 page)

Lydia crouched in the treetop. The girl was sleeping and her back was naked. The sight of her nudity pleased Lydia the way the sight of her own body never had. She knew what she wished to do.

She was patient. She waited for the wind to rise or the sounds of the city to mask the sound the screen would make when she slid it open and climbed inside.

Gunfire sputtered a few blocks over. A siren whined. It was enough. Her hands went to the window and lifted it an inch. She pushed the sliding screen together and lifted it away. It made only a slight metallic rustling sound when she dropped it into the hedges below. Her fingers gripped the windowpane.

She stepped inside.

~ * ~

His mother lay across his body, her fingers like cold bands of steel over his wrists
.

His mother's breath was his breath.

Her tongue was in his mouth.

It dripped poison into his mouth and Andy tossed his head against the pillow, dislodging her but the face would not go away, it followed him, its mouth open. He tried to free his hands but he couldn't. She tightened her grip and he felt like his wrists would snap. He struggled, felt silky
breastflesh
pressed soft against him beneath the sheer parted nightgown, her hips grinding.

It was not his mother. His mother was gone.

She was there instead.

He wanted to cry.

But there was anger there too because of what
she
had done to his mother and he tried to free one leg from under her, move it out from under and get some leverage.
Get her off
.

He couldn't.

She had him.

Her mouth sought him. He tossed his head and screamed.

"
Get off me! Get off!
"

Her breath was foul. He thought he was going to vomit. In a panic he lurched side to side trying to shake her, to buck and kick and fight her — and this squall-burst of movement on the bed jarred her away for just an instant, only an inch or two but enough for him to bring up his knee under and into her,
into her there
.

She howled and let go of one of his arms and slapped him hard.
Twice, three times, four
, but that was okay because that meant his own arm was free too now and he balled up a fist and hit her in the face with everything he had.

She screeched like a cat and sat away from him and brought her hands to her face, releasing him, and he saw he'd made her nose bleed, she was wiping it and looking at the blood unbelievingly with wide strange eyes and he sat up and pounded at the face with both his hands as hard as he could — and somehow he was strong enough or crazy enough because she fell off him to one side. In a split second he was off the bed and scrambling for the open door.

He took one long running step and then another. He felt a hand clamp over his ankle and tripped and hit the floor head first, the right side of his face smacking against the floorboards, the air whooshing out of him. Everything went yellow and black. When he could see again she had the ankle in that impossibly strong grip of hers and she was dragging him like a sack into the living room.

He saw her glaring face and knew — knew better than he'd ever known anything in his life — that she was going to kill him.

His mother. This person who had been his mother was going to kill him
.

The thought was so enormous it stunned him.

She was going to hurt him so had that he wouldn't be there anymore. He would be . . . nothing at all
.

And then he was crying, pleading, he didn't know what he was saying except that he was trying to get her not to kill him, to let him be. He was calling her
mommy
mommy
mommy
whining like a puking little kid, eyes streaming tears, nose dripping, but he was so scared he didn't care, he couldn't care.

And she looked at him. Just looked.

Like he was so much garbage bagged and ready.

Like he was
already
nothing.

And maybe he was
.

Daddy
, he thought.
Daddy please
.

At first they thought the voices and the now-familiar sounds of breakage came from the florist's shop half a block away. But no. Someone was inside one of the darkened shops just across the street — the Korean vegetable market, the beauty shop, the TV repair, the meat market, maybe even the Food Emporium, though the lights were on in there and they could see no one. They listened trying to pinpoint the sounds, but there was a good breeze blowing again and you couldn't be sure.

They were almost at the corner. Anxiety tightened in his chest. They were really only yards away from Andy and Susan now. He could not help thinking — almost
knowing
— that the boy was still alive. What was left of his faith he put there — that somehow he'd avoided her. That he was waiting.

What about Elizabeth?
he thought.

He felt a pang of regret. He had desired Elizabeth, yes, but he'd also honestly liked her. For a moment he wondered if they'd ever have gotten together — and if they had, if it would have worked. He guessed they'd never know.

~ * ~

On the south side of 68th Street, in front of a bank, a woman stepped out of the shadows.

She stood staring at them, her face a pale blank mask, her red cotton dress billowing in the breeze. She began to whimper. Her face began crumble with what seemed like relief.

And then she started to run, arms held wide to them imploringly.

It shocked him. She was crying, tears bright on her cheeks.
She's okay!
he thought.
How can that be? How can she not he one of them?

He suddenly remembered the little girl lying beneath the Picasso print in the lighting shop. It hadn't really registered before — there were so many dead, so many bodies — but she hadn't looked changed. She'd looked murdered. Period.

It threw all his thinking into question. He'd been ready to kill Susan and Elizabeth too if he had to. But maybe some of them were still okay. Maybe Susan was okay. He pictured them hiding together, Susan and Andy, huddled safely in the darkness of their bedroom.

He glanced at Phil and the other man.
They see it too
, he thought.
Amazing
.

The woman was halfway across the street. She was sobbing loudly.

The man in the white shirt reached out to her. "It's okay, lady," he whispered. "Quiet down now. You got to be quiet."

The woman was maybe twenty-three or twenty-four, attractive in a way, very small and slightly on the heavy side. She wrapped her arms around the man and hugged him tight.

"You all right?" he asked.

She nodded, sniffling. The man turned to Phil and smiled. "Unbelievable, huh?"

"We better get going. Can you travel?"

The woman didn't answer. She just hugged the man tighter and Tom could see his face begin to change.

The man put his hands to her shoulders and gently began to push free of her but like the rest of them she was fast. When her head came up from his chest she was snarling like an animal.

She was shorter than he was so she didn't try for the neck — so it was the sound of what she did that was so horrible, not the actual damage, the sound of her teeth clamping down on his collarbone, grinding through shirt and flesh and scraping the bone as the man tried to throw her off, too shocked even to scream at first, gasping. But then she burrowed deeper and he screamed long and loud.

She clung like a leech and by the time they pulled her off him, the women were everywhere all across the street.

They had been playing in the dark.

They came out of the beauty shop and they still had curlers in their hair some of them and one still had a mudpack on her face and a little pink sheet tied around her neck. A shopping cart sailed out of the Food Emporium heaped with steaks and roasts and sausages, a woman running behind it. A black woman with a Sony portable cassette player on her shoulder came running out of the TV shop.

It was the ones from the meat market who were the worst. They carried things that glinted in the streetlight.

Phil had the woman by the hair but she clung to the man's collarbone like a bulldog so he reached into his belt for the knife and shoved it through the soft part of her neck just under the chin. The jaws opened. The woman spun away pumping blood over the sidewalk.

And then he had to turn away and run because they were on them from across the street and Tom saw the man's white shirt go suddenly awash with blood, the point of a long steel sharpener protruding from just beneath his breastbone. She had it in him up to the
handguard
. The woman was big and heavy and she lifted him off the ground with the thrust of it, then dropped him. There were half a dozen of them crowded around him tearing.

They broke for the Dorset. They heard his screams.

At the entrance Tom flung open the nearest door and they raced inside. They turned and both their knives were up and ready when the first of them came hurtling through the door. Tom slashed her from eyebrow to chin and she went down and Phil put his knife into the second one's ribs. Two more came through the door on the far side of the lobby, one of them the big black woman with the cassette player blaring
gangsta
rap. The other was a svelte blonde jogger with a carving knife.

They stepped out to meet them as a third came through the door they'd just abandoned and Tom thanked god that she was just running at him crazy and empty-handed, because all he had to do was turn and hold out the knife and let her flaccid, naked stomach impale itself on the blade. She sank to the floor.

The music got suddenly louder and he felt something crack against the side of his head and a damp coldness as he fell and heard the radio crash down beside him, silent.

The woman whose face he'd cut was holding onto his ankle and hauling herself toward him across the floor, her blood trail glistening on the maroon carpet. The black woman stood over him, giggling. In another world entirely she'd have had a good smile.

He struggled to his knees. His head was filled with lights. He hacked at the woman on his ankle blindly. He blinked and shook his head and when his vision cleared he saw Phil and the jogger circling each other warily with knives drawn.

They can even be careful
, he thought.

The black woman stooped to pick up the radio. The woman at his ankle was dead, her head lying in a widening pool of blood.

He tried to get up but it was impossible, he was too dizzy. He fell to his hands and knees.

He looked at the black woman as she raised the radio over her head. He heard the static crackle.
I'm going to be killed by a fat lady
, he thought. There wasn't a thing he could do about it. The radio was poised above her head and he bowed his own to receive it like a good bull taking his coup de
gr
â
ce
, thinking
I'm sorry Andy but god I tried
and then suddenly he heard a loud
crack
, looked up and saw the woman's head dart off to the right as though jerked by a rope, her feet rising up off the ground, her body falling like a sack of lead.

He stared down at her in amazement. Her head was a shattered mess lolling on her neck. He looked up and his eyes slowly focused on the black man standing next to him.

Dan. His Louisville Slugger on his shoulder like he was waiting for another pitch.

The other pitch was the jogger.

She'd backed Phil up to the door by now and somewhere along the way she'd stabbed him in the shoulder. She saw Dan coming and tried to move away but there was nowhere for her to go. The desk was right behind her — old Willie, the deskman, headless, seeming to reach out for her with both hands.

Dan walked over to her as confidently as you would swat a fly. He swung the bat one-handed at her midsection.

She put her hands out to block the blow and he heard wrists and finger bones shatter. The knife spun away to the carpet.

Dan let the bat drift back behind him slowly, taking his time, placing the shot. The woman tried to raise her broken hands to protect herself. He swung the bat and hit her full in the face. The head whipped back. The face exploded. She sunk to the carpet.

Dan examined the bat.

He flicked two front teeth out of the wood with the tip of his finger. "Damn! It's good to see you, Mr. Braun. You all right?" Dan helped him to his feet.

"I was hoping you were cops," he said.

"You see Susan or Andy tonight?"

"Nope."

"You know Glen Sharkey?"

"Tenth floor? Sure?"

"He's got guns up there," said Phil.

"No shit."

"First Andy," said Tom, "then the guns."

"You sure you don't want to think about that?" Phil said.