Ladies' Night (19 page)

She toppled over beside him and for a moment they were face to face and he stared into her red-rimmed eyes. And she opened her mouth wide and
roared
at him.

It was not his mother.

He stood and backed away, watching her agonized attempts to remove the blade, watched the hands go to the dripping handle and then fly away as the slightest touch drew her through infinite waves of pain, the face seeming to turn in upon itself, suddenly old, ancient, the mouth open sucking air and whimpering.

Not his mother
.

A gruesome evil heap on the floor.

She was nothing.

He stooped and reached for the cast iron pan.

You've got no choice
, he thought. The thing will get up again. In the movies they always do.

And you can't run away, you sure can't go outside.

He had no choice.

But suddenly he was sobbing like a baby.

He raised the pan high over his head and brought it down with all his strength.

And she was silent.

He ran to his bedroom and closed and locked the door and lay down carefully on his bed because his ribs throbbed terribly now. It didn't help that he couldn't seem to quit crying.

It was only a few moments later that he heard sounds from the kitchen.

The clatter of metal on the floor and a cry of pain.

The cleaver
, he thought.

He heard a scraping sound, something moving through the hall. His ribs felt so bad he could hardly move.

And it wasn't over.

Mary didn't like it anymore.

The man on the hood of the prowl car.

The gleaming red face which dripped through the hole in the windshield onto the floor mat. The arm that waved whenever she made a turn. He bothered her.

She stopped two blocks east of Grand Central Station, got out and walked to the front of the car and looked down at the second man, the one wedged between the grille and bumper. His head was gone. She had no idea when he'd lost it. The ragged flesh of his neck had turned black.

She grabbed him by the belt and tugged.

She got his legs down so that he was kneeling on the street, his arms and chest still stuck in there. His chest was soft when she reached in under him. She tossed the rest of him down and wiped her dripping hands on the pants cuff of the man on the hood of her car. Then she grabbed his feet and pulled.

He immediately slid free. Almost free. Pieces of him still clung to the windshield. She pulled him across the hood. His head thumped down on the bumper. She threw him across the body of the first man and stood there breathing heavily for a moment, then walked over and sat inside the squad car.

She was feeling that tingling again.

She reached down and put her hand down there, and she was wet again too. She started the car and raced the motor.

She let the car idle a minute and threw it into DRIVE. The left side of the car rose slightly in front and then in back as it rolled over the pair of bodies. She cruised along slowly.

She kept one hand down inside her and the other on the wheel. Waves of pleasure rolled over her. She heard the siren wail behind her and pressed her foot down on the gas pedal and the car burst forward.

"You look like something out of
Playboy
," she said.

She drove one-handed through the dark sea of bodies that populated her memories.

The thing at Elizabeth's feet lay motionless, its head covered with potting soil. She sat on the bed and stared at it a long time. It looked ridiculous, really.

She stood and walked carefully around it and into the bathroom. She peeled off the nightgown and, for the third time in just a few minutes, began to bathe her wounds.

She was almost out of
Bacitracin
.

She remembered that her mother had favored Mercurochrome.

She found an old, half-empty bottle in the medicine cabinet. The orange lines on her cheeks made her look like an Indian in war paint. There were teeth marks and scratches on her thighs, legs, breasts, and stomach. She dabbed them with Mercurochrome.

There were stripes all over her now.

She walked back into the living room. The body had not moved. Of course it hadn't. There were sounds coming from the
Brauns
' apartment next door but she barely registered them. She turned on the television. There was nothing but a lot of static. She turned it off again.

A dullness, a lethargy had settled in. As a dancer it was strange for her not to feel in touch with her body. But there was little sensation except for the throbbing of her wounds. Her arms felt weightless, the soles of her feet, numb. She realized she was naked.

Where had she left it? The nightgown?

She walked to the bathroom again and there it was on the floor. It was streaked with dry blood.

It wasn't what she wanted.

She'd get dressed instead.

She went to the closet and picked out a blue silk blouse and loose-fitting white linen pants. Soft against the wounds.

She put them on and thought,
what next?

Everything tumbled in a gentle confusion.

She couldn't just sit there with that thing on the floor.

Her eyes kept returning to the window. Her thoughts seemed bound up in that cobalt sky. Dawn was arriving soon and the window beckoned.

The woman had come through the window.

She opened it an inch. She felt a cool breeze on her bare hands, felt it billow the blue silk blouse.
Sensation
. She opened it further, closed her eyes and let the breeze wash over her, felt it brush the skin of her throat and rustle her hair.

She heard screams from the street and simultaneously, laughter from the hallway. She slammed the window shut.

The woman had come through the window
.

But if the woman had come in that way, couldn't she go
out
that way?

Sure she could. She could wait till dawn, look for a policeman or a man —
any
man — to walk by, then call out to him below through the window and climb out onto the tree and escape. She only had to wait.

She sat down on the bed, willing the sky to brighten.
Soon
, she thought. She glanced at the thing on the floor in the ruins of her room and thought how it had not moved and now neither would she. She smiled.

We're two of a kind
, she thought.

At first there was nothing to it. The elevator doors slid open and the men moved swiftly down the corridor. The first thing they saw was the body of a woman with her neck broken lying on the floor. Then they saw the others. There were maybe twelve of them who had begun to drift back to their individual apartments and who were scattered throughout the hallway and now were turning slowly and deliberately like hunters scenting new game.

Phil started firing and the first to fall was old Mrs. Strawn because she was closest and held an ice pick, the explosion in the middle of her blue housecoat shaking some of the curlers out of her hair as she dropped. The next was a young girl Tom didn't know, wearing pajamas, shot twice in the ribs.

By that time the others realized they had a problem here and started moving faster.

Dan stepped out three or four paces to the right of Phil and began working with the bat, cutting a path to Tom's door. Phil fired twice and a little naked girl went down beside him and a middle-aged woman fell to her knees clutching at her neck. Phil began reloading.

Tom stood ready with a knife in each hand but there wasn't any need. The bat was keeping them at bay. He watched three of them flee around the corner and recognized Mrs. Strawn's older sister — a carbon copy right down to the curlers except that the housecoat she wore was pink, not blue — waving a curling iron at him as she stumbled out of sight. A woman he knew to be a stewardess was backing away from Dan, who missed her once and then connected with her knee. When she fell to the carpeting he was on her with the bat like the bat was an axe and the woman was a log that needed splitting.

There were only two of them in sight by then and Phil had the gun reloaded. One was moving sadly, stupidly down the hall past Tom's door to the right where the hall dead-ended in front of the apartment next to Elizabeth's. Nowhere to go but straight to hell and that was where Phil put her. The other was just a teenager hissing and clawing at them with her back to the wall opposite. Phil walked in close and shot her execution-style in the forehead and she slid down the wall, her head bubbling a froth of blood.

They went to the door.

Phil reloaded the two empty chambers while Tom used his keys. The keys felt slimy in his sweaty fingers. The top lock was giving him trouble until he realized he was throwing it in the wrong direction,
Jesus, it wasn't locked!
it was only the bottom lock that'd been thrown. He slipped it out and fumbled through his keychain for the other one.

And that was when Mrs. Strawn's older sister stabbed him with her sister's ice pick.

She came out of nowhere, moving faster than any old lady had a right to move and for a moment they'd let their guard down, Tom working with the keys, Phil reloading, Dan concentrating on Tom and the door that was going to open momentarily — and the ice pick went into him at the collarbone near his shoulder and came out fast and down again into his neck and suddenly there was blood everywhere.

He felt no pain, just shock and fear that he was not going to make it, that he would never know what all the killing had been worth and what had happened to Andy. Andy, who had flogged him through a night of terror. The ice pick slipped into him a third time — into his chest — as Phil fired directly into her face scattering blood and brains across the hall.

No
, he thought.
It was not going to go down that way
. He pulled the ice pick out of him and dropped it to the floor and stumbled to his knees.

He heard the echo of the pistol and then nothing, a vast empty silence. He struggled against a descending flood of color.

"Help me up."

He stared into Phil's eyes, read pity there. Real sadness. He focused on the eyes.

"Get me up."

They lifted him to his feet.

"Now. Give me the gun."

He saw them look at one another and knew what they were thinking. That it was crazy to give him the gun. He was probably a dead man already. But it was his son in there and his wife and it was his battle. He thought that as long as he could stand they couldn't refuse him. And he was standing.

"Please," he said.

He needed to dismiss the pain, the sense of something slowly trickling away. He put his back to the wall and held out his hand. He felt them hesitate. Then heard Phil sigh.

The .22 didn't weigh much. He had that to be thankful for anyway. He found the key on his chain and handed it to Dan, heard it in the lock.

The door swung open.

He moved inside ahead of them, the floor of his apartment bucking and rolling beneath his blood-soaked shoes.

He willed away the mist.

Andy crouched behind his bed.

The forty-pound fiberglass bow was strung and a soft leather quiver of target arrows hung over his shoulder. He fixed an arrow to the bowstring.

Now
, he thought.
Come on
.

There was an awful pain in his ribs but he didn't think pain had messed up his judgment, he thought he'd got it right. As soon as he heard her moving in the kitchen, he'd ducked out into the hallway and turned on the light. Then he'd turned off
his
light and left the bedroom door wide open. That way he'd see her framed in the door so he could make his shot but she couldn't see him — she wouldn't know where he was in there.

He'd seen it in the movies.

He knew he'd hurt her bad — that was what the rasping dragging sounds were about and why it was taking her so long and he just wished she'd hurry up before this trembling got to him. His ears were keyed to the sounds as though they were a part of him. She was only a few feet from the door when they stopped again.

Come on
.

Suddenly he heard gunfire — a series of short rapid popping sounds and god! they startled him. He was so much into to these other sounds
she
was making. He threw himself back against the wall and lost his grip on the bow and the arrow slid off the bowstring. He heard its wooden shaft and metal tip clatter to the floor. To be without the arrow even for a moment terrified him.

He groped beneath the bed. But it was dark, he couldn't see, his whole plan was backfiring on him now and he couldn't find it! It had rolled somewhere.