Malus Domestica (33 page)

“Oh, that’s horrible,” said Owen. “I would’ve lost my mind.”

“I had to go get my wife to pull it off. We tried to suffocate it with nail polish, we tried heating it up, we tried alcohol. No fun. You ever held a lighter to your dong?”

Owen laughed like a kookaburra.

Conversation slipped into silence again. The two men walked for what felt like a half an hour, forging through tall wheatgrass and the occasional clump of blackberry brambles. This time of year there weren’t any berries, and what there was, had rotted into pulpy purple tumors that oozed at the slightest brush.

Mike glanced at his partner as they walked. Officer Owen Patrick Euchiss was a scarecrow with an angular Van Gogh face. The black police uniform looked like a Halloween costume on him. They called him Opie after the sheriff’s son on
The Andy Griffith Show
because of his first two initials, which he signed on all of his traffic citations. It looks classier, he’d said one day. Like one of those ‘fancy-pants authors’.

His constant sly grin reminded Mike of kids he’d gone to school with, the little white-trash hobgoblins that would snort chalk dust on a dare and brag about tying bottle-rockets to cats’ tails. Middle-age had refined him a little, but the Scut Farkus was still visible under Opie’s mask of dignified wrinkles. Rumor around the station was that Owen had never passed the Georgia civil service test, but had gotten the job through nepotism. Apparently someone was good friends with the chief, and a late-night phone call was all it took to make Chief Lowry look the other way.

And somehow, in the end, DePalatis had gotten stuck with Opie.

It never paid to be the nice guy, did it?

“Ferris wheel,” said Owen, snapping Mike out of his reverie. He straightened, peering into the trees.

The track they were walking down began to widen, grass giving way to gravel, and skeletal machines materialized through the pine boughs. They emerged into a huge clearing that was once a parking lot, and on the other side of that was an arcade lined with tumbledown amusement park rides, the frames and tracks choked with foliage.

Had to admit, the place had a sort of post-apocalyptic
Logan’s Run
grandeur about it. A carnival lost in time.

Not any better than the pet cemetery.

The two policemen walked aimlessly down the central avenue, heels crunching in the flaky gravel, their eyes searching the remnants of Wonderland. “What are we supposed to be looking for?” asked Owen. “Demon clowns? ‘Uh heh heh! We all float down here, Georgie!’”

“You heard the same thing I heard.”

“‘Something shady’.”

“Ayup.” Mike made a face. “That’s really not a very funny joke, by the way.”

Owen grinned.

They came to a split, facing a concession stand. Owen took out his heavy skullcracker flashlight and broke off to the left, heading toward a funhouse. “I’ll check over here.”

Mike went right. A purple-and-gray Gravitron bulged from the woodline like an ancient UFO. Across the way from that was a tall umbrella-framed ride, chains dangling from the ends of each spoke like fishing poles.

He contemplated this towering contraption and decided it had been a swing for kids, but without the seats it could have been a centrifuge where you hung slabs of beef from the chains and spun the cow blood out of them. Or maybe it was some kind of giant flogging-machine that just turned and turned and whipped and whipped.

When the rides had been damaged enough and lost so much of what identified them, they became alien and ominous.

Deeper into the park, Mike found a gypsy village of third-wheel mobile homes, giant holes punched in their roofs by the elements. Bushes cloaked their flanks and bristled from inside.

Something whiny bit him on the face and he slapped a mosquito. Blood on his fingers. He wiped it on his uniform pants.

After wandering in and out of the nine caravans of the carnie village, Mike decided that none of them were in good enough shape to sustain life. Every one of them was beat to hell and falling apart, scrap metal and flat tires. He headed back into the main arcade.

At this point he had developed an idea of what Wonderland looked like from above: an elongated I like a cartoon dog-bone, with a Y on each end, the arcade forming the long straight part down the middle.

Mike stood at the west end of the dog-bone, staring at the concession stand, and took his hat off to scratch his head.

He took the left-hand path, walking toward the funhouse. Behind the concession stand to his right was a series of roach-coaches: food trucks with busted, cloudy windows, wreathed in tall grass. After the funhouse he found a Tilt-a-Whirl, an honest-to-God Tilt-a-Whirl. Bushes and a tree thrust up through the ride, dislodging plates of textured metal and upending the seashell-shaped cars.

“What a shame,” he told the wilderness.

A wooden shed with two doors stood behind the Tilt-a-Whirl, quite obviously an improvised latrine. He wondered if Porta-Potties had even been invented in 1987. He opened a door and found it full of hickory bush, leafy switches bursting up out of the shit-hole.

“Hey Owen!” Mike shouted into the trees. “Where’d you go?”

A behemoth of a generator trailer lurked in the tall grass, an olive-gray box the size of a minivan with cables snaking out of it every which way. Here, the treeline marked the end of Wonderland. A chain-link fence tried to separate fun from forest, but sagged over, trampled by some long-gone woodland animal.

Mike went around the generator to the woodline and looked both ways. Tucked behind the back wall of the Tilt-a-Whirl, a pair of gray-green military Quonset huts nestled against the trees. One of them opened at the end in a door with no window in it, secured with a padlock.

N
O
A
DMITTANCE
—E
MPLOYEES
O
NLY
!

“The hell?” He lifted the padlock. It was a new Schlage, no more than a couple of years old.

The door itself wasn’t quite up to snuff. As Mike tried the doorknob, the entire wall flexed subtly with the muffled creak of leather. Old plywood? He pressed his palms against the door and pushed. The striker plate crackled and the wall bowed inward several inches.

“Geronimo,” he grunted, and stomp-kicked the door. The entire wall shook and dirt fell out of the hut’s roof.

Another kick set the door crooked in the frame. The third kick ripped the striker out and the whole door twisted to the inside, the hinge breaking loose. Inside was pure jet-black car-full-of-assholes darkness. Mike took out his flashlight and turned it on, holding it by his temple.

Dust made soup of the air. He stepped into the hut.

A workbench stood against the wall to his right, and a dozen buckets and empty milk jugs were piled in the corner, all of them stained pink. Wooden signs and pictures were stacked against the walls:

V
ISIT
H
OOT
’
S
F
UNHOUSE
!

A
RE
Y
OU
T
OO
C
OOL
F
OR
S
CHOOL
? D
RINK
F
IREWATER
S
ARSAPARILLA
!

G
ET
L
OST
IN
O
UR
H
ALL
OF
M
IRRORS
!

Three hooks jutted up from the bare cement floor in the middle of the room. Chains were attached to them, and the chains led up to three pulleys, which angled them down to hooks on the back wall.

Old blood stained the floor around the hooks.

“Ah, no,” said Mike, drawing his pistol.

On the other side of the workbench was a door. He gave the stains a wide berth, sidling along the wall.

The door was already cracked open. Flashlight in one hand and pistol in the other, he crossed his wrists Hollywood-style and pushed the door open with his toe. Behind the door, the polished black body of a Monte Carlo reflected his Maglite beam.

POW!
A Taser cartridge exploded in the eerie stillness. A bolt of lightning hit Mike in the ass and he barked like a seal, his knees buckling.

Staccato electricity pulsed down the Taser’s flimsy wires,
tak-tak-tak-tak,
racing down the backs of his thighs. Streaks of prickling pain shot up his spine. He hit the floor bleating in a weird tremolo. His hands balled into fists and his toes scrunched inside his shoes.

The pistol fired into the wall between his jitterbugging feet, blinding him with a white flashbulb.

He couldn’t open his hands. He couldn’t point the Glock. All he could do was lie there and vibrate. “You
had
to come in here, didn’t you?” asked the silhouette in the doorway, tossing the Taser aside and plucking the pistol out of Mike’s hands.

Chains rattled through a pulley and coiled around his ankles. Someone hauled him up by the feet and suspended him above the floor. One of those white five-gallon buckets slid into view underneath his forehead, knocking his useless arms out of the way, and then his hands were jerked up behind his back and he was locked up in his own cuffs, dangling like Houdini about to be lowered into a glass booth full of water.

“This is what I should have done to that faggot, instead of lettin him hang around,” said a man’s voice, reminiscent of Opie but growlier, deeper, more articulate.

Mike’s heart lunged at the
snick
of a blade being flicked out of a box-cutter.

“No,
please!”
he managed to grunt.

“You live, you learn, I guess.” The man cut a deep fish-gill V in Mike’s neck, two quick slashes from his collarbone to his chin.

The pain came a full second later, a searing cattle-brand pincering his throat. Both his carotid and his jugular squirted up his cheeks and over his eyes, beading in his hair. He gurgled, sputtered, trying to ask ‘Why?’ and ‘Why me?’ and ‘What did I do?’ and shout ‘Please don’t leave!’ and ‘Help me!,’
but there was nobody in the garage to hear him.

The door slammed shut, leaving Mike in musty darkness.

Blood dribbled steadily into the bucket as he slowly regained control of his body.

Being upside-down invested what blood he had left in his brain, giving him a clarity he wouldn’t have been able to achieve standing up. He tried to twist his tingling arms around, but the cuffs were so tight his hands were falling asleep. Or maybe it was from the blood loss? He wasn’t sure anymore.

A sit-up was out of the question, at least from this angle. Mike flexed his abs, but only got high enough for the blood to run into his ears before the front plate in his Second Chance vest made it impossible to bend any further.

He relaxed, setting himself to swinging. “Gob-dab,” he said, blowing blood from his lips. Some of it pattered on the floor.

I guess this is the end of the line, then.

A strange sort of samurai tranquility came over him as Mike hung there, listening to the drum solo of his life ebbing away. Tap-tap-thump-tap. There was no denying it. This was it, and to his surprise some part of his psyche relaxed, serenity unfolding inside him like a paper flower.

Nasty way to go, but shit, it was a great ride, wasn’t it? He thought about his wife; thought about his dog; thought about his car. This became a taking of stock. He had accomplished quite a lot in his life, he decided. Not everybody had their own house, not everybody found their soulmate. He was comfortable. He had nine hundred and sixty-two TV channels and a Keurig. His dad was proud of him, as far as he could tell.

God, how morose!

After what felt like an eternity he tried to tell himself a joke, but he couldn’t quite grasp any good ones. Any other time he would have had a great joke ready to go, a real bawdy knee-slapper, but none came to him just then.

As he began to slide into death, Mike DePalatis opened his heavy eyes.

In the corner of the Quonset hut, a figure stooped under the curve of the roof, as if it had slipped in under the wall. The woman gleamed as if she were made of light
(photons,
he thought, a random interjection of 5
^th
grade Science class,
she’s made of photons),
and even though she didn’t seem to be wearing any clothes, a reassuring vibe told him it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore, least of all modesty.

Gliding into the room, she came to his side and leaned over, her hands on her knees, regarding his upside-down face as one does a puppy in a pen.

I’m so sorry this happened to you,
she said but didn’t say.

Up close, he was surprised to see that she was Asian, with fine features and smiling, merry eyes.
Me too.
The room spun. Mike licked his dry lips.
This sucks.

You already know there’s not enough time to save you,
the woman said but didn’t say.
But rest knowing that there is a plan in place.

That’s good.
He allowed himself to smile.

She reminded him of the Blue Fairy, graceful but melancholy, welling with a spectral blue light.
Hey, am I a real boy now?
he thought hopefully.

The woman chuckled, her laughter the tinkle of a wind chime. She straightened and stepped away, fading until the only evidence of her presence was like the faint warmth of heat left in stones, after the sun has gone behind a cloud.

A dark stillness overtook the room as Mike relaxed, sighing deep in his throat.

18

L
EON
HAD
RENTED
A
couple of movies from the Redbox—the new
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,
some Alex Cross movie with Tyler Perry, and whatever the latest Nicolas Cage flick was. Except for Wayne, they all sat in the living room eating pizza and watching the movies, Katie lying on the floor drawing her pictures.

The sun settled on the purple-gold horizon, fleeing from a speckle of stars, and the summer’s last serenade of frogs and crickets trilled in the trees.

The kids had gone home to get permission from their parents to spend the evening at 1168. Katie’s grandmother had been more than happy to have the night off, and started filling a hot bath before Amanda even left. Pete’s mother and Amanda’s dad, on the other hand, came over to get the lay of the land.