Most men can't make it through even five words of what I'm about to tell you (15 page)

Falconer rewound and played it again, on a slower speed. The image was grainy but you could see pretty clearly an

object zip by, about five feet off the ground. Dark hair, a face. Franky Burgess' severed head.

Illustration b
y Nedroid

My mouth went dry. He rewound, played it again. The head floating past.

Sweat droplets prickled along my neck.

"Nobody's tossing that head, detective. The fucking head is flying on its own."

Falconer glanced at me. "I can think of at least two things wrong with that theory."

I didn't respond. My heart was pounding. The realization of what I had done didn't start with my brain, it started in my gut

and grew out from there.

No way. No way. Oh, shit, shit, shit...

Memory flashed in my mind. Leaning over the sink, washing my face...

Falconer was talking, I couldn't hear what he said. I got up from the table and went to the door.

He wheeled on me, said, "What the fuck are you doin'?"

"You have to get me home, detective. Now. Right now."

"Why?"

...splashing the water on my face and looking up, in time to see something moving in the mirror, back in the bedroom...

I pul ed on the door. Locked. I pounded it with my fist.

"Wong! What the hel ?"

"It's at my house, Falconer! It's at my fucking house!"

* * * * *

car. I dialed my home number from the passenger seat in Falconer's Porsche, dialed and let it ring and ring and ring and

ring and ring, muttering, "Come on, come on, come on..."

No answer.

It couldn't have taken four minutes, but it was the longest ride of my life.

We made it to my house. I opened the passenger door of the Porsche before it had stopped, jumped out, fell to my knees

in the damp leaves, scrambled to my feet and charged toward the front door. I dropped my keys twice trying to get it open,

hands shaking.

I flung open the door and screamed for Amy. No answer. I ran across the living room and into the bedroom.

Empty bed.

Empty bathroom.

I ran back through the living room, passed Falconer, who stood with his automatic in both hands, sweeping the room with

it.

I ran into the second bedroom, saw bits of wood on the floor and saw the closet door was closed, saw a hole in the door,

ragged edges torn inward, like someone had thrown a bowling ball through it.

"AAAAMMMYYYY!!!!"

I yanked open the door and saw the inside was splashed with blood.

This is one of those feelings that everyone has felt but that we don't have a word for. It's the numb, weightless sensation

you feel at the moment you realize all the remaining years of your life have just changed for the worst.

It's seeing the girl walk crying out the door and knowing it's the last time, it's waking up in a hospital bed and realizing you can't feel your legs, it's getting a phone call at five in the morning from the cops telling you your friend has died in a car

wreck.

Amy must have felt that a few years ago, when she woke up from surgery on her mangled hand only to realize that, while

she was under, they decided to amputate instead.

That feeling, whatever they cal it, hit me when I opened the closet in my bedroom, the closet I knew Amy was in, and saw

the blood dripping down the inside of the door. Thick drops of red clinging to splinters around a ragged hole in the wood.

That feeling, like fal ing, the way it must feel driving a car off a bridge. Nothing between you and the dark below you, a

darkness that turns out to be the black line drawn down the center of a life. Every event thereafter is defined according to

on which side of the line it occurred, doomed to always be saying things like,
"Now that was about two years after Amy

died..."
and feeling the same hot sting behind the eyes every motherfucking time.

When I looked down, nothing registered with me but meat and blood. And fur.

Molly lay dead, her throat torn out, the blood soaking into the carpet on the floor of the closet.

Amy was next to her, upright against the wall. Those green eyes, open, unblinking. There were smears of blood on her

cheek.

I stared into those open eyes for an eternity of seconds. Suddenly, the irises flicked up to meet mine. I heard a

mechanical
click
.

I jumped back, saw she was aiming John's crossbow at me, realized she had squeezed the trigger. If there had been an

arrow in it, it would now be protruding from my chest.

"AMY!"

She flung aside the crossbow and jumped up and threw her arms around me and made panicked noises. She was

yammering and pointing at something across the room.

"It's okay, it's okay, it's okay... Shhhhhhh..."

I twisted away enough to see Falconer looking down at the floor, at Franky Burgess's severed head. The feathers of a

short arrow jutted from its open mouth. Falconer nudged the head with his foot and it rol ed over. A metal razor arrowhead

protruded two inches out of the base of its skul .

"It killed Molly! David! It killed Molly! I woke up in bed and I could feel breathing, breath against my face and I thought it was you and I opened my eyes and there was this
thing
hovering there and I kicked it and I ran out and I was screaming

for you and I couldn't find you and I grabbed that thing and got in the closet and dragged Molly in there and was yelling for

you and..."

Falconer looked over the busted closet door with his "are you shitting me" expression. His face was going to freeze like that. He touched the jagged hole in the middle of the door, the thing looking like it had been hit by a civil war cannon.

"It busted through! David! It just rammed the door with its face, just rammed it and rammed it and I was screaming and

Molly was barking at it. And she had her paws up on the door and it just explodes, just explodes in and bits of wood are

everywhere and Molly starts yelping and this thing is biting her throat, it's thrashing around and blood is everywhere and

she yelps and falls down and I can see this thing through the hole, this face, and I shot it and I couldn't tell if I got it..."

"You got it, Amy." I looked down at the head, eyes open, arrow impaling the bug thing perfectly. "You got it."

She pul ed away, I wouldn't let her. I had fistful s of her shirt in each hand. I decided I would never let go of her again.

She craned her neck to look past me. I watched her eyes grow.

She said, "Are you Vance Falconer?"

Falconer nodded. "I am." He walked over and put a hand on her shoulder. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine, I'm fine." She looked at me. "Where
were
you?"

"He called me because he thought somebody had stolen the head. By the time we figured out it was here we had wasted

a bunch of time. We got here as soon as we could."

I final y let go of her, then brought out my cell phone and punched in John. I got his voicemail, wondered if he had gone to

work. I had to glance at my watch to even figure out what day this was. Thursday morning. I disconnected and tried

again...

"Yeah."

"John?"

"Yeah. What time is it?"

"Hey, Franky's head is here, Amy shot it with a crossbow. It killed Molly. I gotta go. Bye."

I pocketed the phone. Amy was talking to Falconer, telling him how lucky it was that we got there when we did.

Amy asked him, "Did the government send you because of al the weird stuff that's going on? Like with the San Mateo

Strangler? You wound up getting in a fight with that guy on top of a train, right? We saw the movie. I thought George

Clooney did a good job as you."

I said, "So, detective, you look in the mouth of that head down there, what do you see?"

He gave me a hard look, then went and knelt next to the head.

"The tongue has been gnawed off, like I said." He ran a finger along the shaft of the arrow, or bolt, I guess is what they cal them when fired from crossbows. He pulled open the jaw a bit and stuck a finger inside.

"I wouldn't do that-"

"-There's nothing here, Wong. I can see all the way down to the- OW! Shit!"

Falconer drew back his hand. I saw red along one finger.

"What happened?"

"Something got me!"

I went and leaned over the head. Inside, the bug thing, impaled on a freaking arrow, was twitching. Its sharpened

mandibles flexed, as if trying to bite.

"Shit! The thing bit you! It's still alive!"

I heard the door open and slam shut from the living room, heard footsteps pounding across the floor. John appeared at

the door and said, "What did I miss?"

I said, "The thing inside Franky's head bit Falconer just now."

"Let me see it."

John approached Falconer, who told him to back off. John approached anyway, and said, "Oh, shit. David, look at this."

I did, saw a red gash along Falconer's second knuckle...

...and around the wound, a tiny spot of black. Like a single drop of motor oil.

I said, "Okay, we got to wash this, right fuckin' now."

Falconer, sharing none of our sense of urgency, followed us to the bathroom. He stood with the finger under the faucet

while I asked John if we should get some disinfectant on it.

"Dave, I absolutely do not know. What the hell do you disinfect this shit with?"

"What?" asked Falconer. "What's 'this shit?'"

John said, "Soy sauce."

I said, "That's just what we call it. There was a little bit of black stuff around your-"

"-I saw it. What was it?"

"Venom. Or something. These things secrete it I think."

"These things? The invisible things that take over people's heads?"

"Not just them."

"Is it poison?"

"That's not an easy question to answer. John, go in the kitchen, I've got some rubbing alcohol under the sink."

John left the bathroom. Amy asked if we could move the operation to the kitchen, so she could use the bathroom to clean

up. She had gotten Molly's blood on her hand and it was all over her face and hair and shirt.

She was freaking out about that, and the whole thing, a lot less than I would have. But then again, Amy Sullivan had a

pretty horrifying hand dealt to her by life, from the car accident that took her parents and her hand, to the death of her

brother just a few years later. And still she kept getting up in the morning and turning over the next card, day after day,

and usually smiling. That was Amy. A hundred and five pounds, snorted when she laughed, had seen
Moulin Rouge
sixty-

five times and on the inside, she was iron.

We walked out of the bedroom and met John, carrying not a bottle of rubbing alcohol but a picture in a wooden frame. It

was the black velvet painting of Jesus that he had taken from the wall in the other bedroom. The crappy painting was

Amy's lone contribution to the house's decor.

"Here," said John, and began rubbing the painting on Falconer's finger. "It's Jesus."

"Okay, okay," said Falconer, out of patience. "Back off. It's too early in the morning for this. Tell me what that black shit does."

"Let me put it this way," I said. "Before John and me got that stuff inside us, we were perfectly normal people."

Falconer stared hard at me and I realized after a moment he was doing his lie detector thing. Watching my eyes.

Amy emerged, dressed in jeans and a gray button-up shirt she wore a lot. I put an arm around her. John went into the

bathroom and I heard the water start on my tub.

I leaned in. "What are you doin'?"

"I want to dunk that head. I want to drown that bug thing before it bites anybody else."

"How do you know it can't breathe water?"

"We'l find out. If water doesn't work, we'll use fire."