Most men can't make it through even five words of what I'm about to tell you (20 page)

ribs. Still, his T-shirt and front pocket of his pants was stained dark with blood.

Not only was the shadow man nowhere to be found, but there were no workers present, either too early or else they had

cal ed it because of rain. Trucks full of debris were parked everywhere, the building itself down to a wood and metal

skeleton. Boards and bricks and roofing material and broken glass littered the site and it struck me that the deconstruction

project was a sort of slow-motion explosion.

We weren't too far from the spot Falconer and I had stood, I saw the row of blue Port-A-Potty's standing behind us.

I felt a hand on my upper arm, gripping it. Amy. I heard her suck in a breath and when I looked at her, she said, "Look.

David... look."

I saw the shadow man, in the distance.

Then I saw another one. And another.

They grew out of the shadows, three and four at a time. Each time my eyes focused on one spot, walking shadows would

appear where I wasn't watching. It was like trying to count snowflakes after they landed.

There was an army of them. Too many to count. The landscape was entirely black in places, patchy, like an oil slick.

But Amy wasn't looking at them. She was looking up, her eyes bouncing up and down as if taking in the length of

something. I followed her gaze and saw nothing at all, nothing but gray sky and the hazy wash of the rain. But there was

something there, something invisible to me. I blinked, as if trying to adjust to the light in a dark room.

When I finally saw it, I almost lost my feet. My knees buckled and I suddenly couldn't catch my breath.

A tower. Wide as the mal at its base, stretching impossibly high. I couldn't see the top, it pierced the clouds. It was a dirty white color, a texture like rough stone. There were no windows, no design, no color scheme, not one second's

consideration of the human eye and sensibility.

"It's skulls," said John. "Look, man. It's made of skulls!" I couldn't verify that, not in the rain. He may have just seen that on an album cover somewhere.

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The size of the thing leveled me, crushed me, suffocated me under the weight of my own insignificance. I've been to the

city, I've seen skyscrapers, I've been up in the World Trade Center. But this thing, out here in the middle of flat land that

was barely interrupted by gentle rol ing hills and patches of woods, it was an obscenity.

The crowd of shadows spilled out from the base. I tried to unsee the tower, to see the broken mall again. I could almost do

it, could almost see the mounds of dirt and trucks and dumpsters with the construction company logo on the side. But it

was like talking to a naked man and trying not to see his penis.

I looked in every direction and found the shadows had surrounded us.

I said, "John, your phone..."

"It's gone, back in the street somewhere."

I felt Amy push her body against me. Huddling together, a primal reaction.

John said, "The furgun, Dave."

"Not against these guys, John. This is... a whole other level."

"No. No. You can control that thing, I know you can. You shot out a buffalo at Buffalo Burger. That came from your head,

Dave. You just got to focus, that's al ."

The shadow people moved in. So, so slowly. A dark tide creeping in on an island of mud maybe twenty feet in every

direction and shrinking. Beyond it, were the shadows. Glowing eyes, little pinpricks of light appeared on dark, featureless

faces.

"Focus? On
what?
"

"I don't know, I don't know. The most powerful thing you can imagine."

John bumped into me, from the other side. Packed together, looking like a bundle of three humans held together with

straps. The shadow people were right there, and I mean right there next to us on every side.

Amy shrieked, screaming, "NO! NO! NOOO!" in short, barking bursts, the single word over and over again. A shadow man

was approaching her, a few feet away now.

She had her hand out, holding her little gold cross necklace like a talisman.

I pul ed her back, wild with terror, but there was no place left to go. John was yel ing, saying, "FUCK! David! Fuck! FUCK!"

Amy held out the cross and the shadow man walked right into it, right into her hand. My stomach turned as I watched her

hand dissolve and vanish completely, the necklace falling free and landing silently in the mud. She pulled back a stump,

her left hand gone forever. But, no, that must have been the confusion of the moment because of course her left hand had

always been gone, the accident and al that.

I raised the furgun. My mind was blank.

I reached out and grabbed Amy's other hand and squeezed. I closed my eyes.

In that one second before I squeezed the trigger, a face came to mind. The face was the same one that would have come

to probably 75% of Americans, if put in the same situation. A bearded face that was purely from the imagination of some

long-lost Italian painter, a face that looked nothing like a middle-eastern Jew. I suddenly remembered two dozen horrible

kids shows my adopted parents made me watch on VHS, where in the final scene the main character always turned

toward the camera and basically said, "I know how we'll solve this problem! With
Christianity.
"

Well, their programming worked. When terror drove everything out of my mind, I fell back on the iconic face and al I could

picture in my head was that painting, that shitty velvet Elvisey Jesus that hung on my wall. I think now that with Amy's

hand clasped in mine it created some kind of chain reaction, because I'm pretty sure that both of us were picturing the

same face.

I opened my eyes.

I squeezed the trigger.

A flash of white light poured forth from the device in my hand.

The whiteness condensed down to a shape. Small.

Square.

Suddenly, hovering there before us, was that stupid-ass painting.

The painting swiveled, faced the dark hordes. The eyes on the face burned with white fire. The mouth opened, and let

loose an inhuman roar.

Painting Jesus faced the shadow man that had taken Amy's hand. White laser beams fired from his eyes.

The shadow man exploded.

The eyes lit up again, fired. Another shadow man left the world.

The painting turned in mid-air, sped back toward us. We hit the dirt. The painting buzzed overhead, and John said, "THE

SHITTERS! GO TO THE SHITTERS!"

He was right. The painting was leading us toward the Port-A-Potty's.

Beams of white fired left, then right, clearing swaths through the shadows, piercing the darkness.

We headed toward the third shitter,
the
shitter, the one we knew could work as a door.

There was a single shadow man standing in the way, blocking the door as if determined to let no one pass.

Painting Jesus flew toward the shadow man, then circled behind him. Painting Jesus screeched like an animal and the

mouth on the painting opened wide. The painting launched itself at the shadow man, and then Painting Jesus bit his head

off.

The shadow man's body evaporated like a cloud of car exhaust. I walked through the spot, grabbed the metal handle of

the shitter.

I squeezed my eyes shut, concentrated again. I knew this was necessary somehow, that I had to think of where I wanted

it to take us.

I opened my eyes, ripped open the door, and plunged myself through it.

Bright sunlight. No rain. I found myself standing on pavement. I squinted around and was relieved to find we had arrived

back at the school. I saw John's Caddie in front of me, still parked in the visitor spot.

I had emerged from the rear door of the Book Mobile truck, the one we had parked behind. Through the open door I could

see shelves of children's books with cartoonish covers. Then John and Amy popped out of thin air and almost made me

shit my pants.

As John climbed out of the truck, he pointed behind him and said, "When they write the new Bible, that is
definitely
gonna be in there."

I said, "Hey, at least it stopped raining."

John looked up at the clearing sky, confused. He glanced at his watch, then sprinted back toward the Caddie. He leaned

inside the car, looked at the dashboard and swore to himself.

He ran back and said, "It's almost ten!"

"
What?
"

"We lost time! Going through the door! You must have fucked it up somehow."

I turned toward the school. A building ful of children. I let out a breath.

"Okay, let's go."

I aimed the furgun at the sky and jogged toward the front door. I pulled it open and felt a jolt of relief when I saw just the

main hal way of the school, decorated with kiddie Halloween characters.

John said, "Ahead, to the left. There's a door that's always locked that goes downstairs. I'll have to pick it."

Behind us, a woman screamed.

We all wheeled around to see an enormously fat, blond lady standing in the open doorway to a classroom. I couldn't figure

out what she was screaming at, then I looked down to see my pants were caked with mud, and that John had a shirt

wrapped around his blood-soaked abdomen, and that we al had soaking wet hair matted down around eyes blown wide

with terror, and that I appeared to be holding a metallic porcupine by the tail.

The woman was screaming a man's name, presumably the security guard that other lady had mentioned before she tried

to kill us.

We didn't wait for the guy to show up. John pul ed out his knife and went to work on the door, sliding the blade around the

jamb in a way that I was pretty sure would open no door in the world.

The security guard jogged into view, a man somehow even fatter than the teacher who had alerted him.

"Hey! What are you doing there? Sir!"

The guard waddled our way, keys on his belt jingling with every step like a tambourine.

Amy said, "Wait! Wait!" but the man would not be deterred. He swung a meaty arm around John and threw him away from

the basement door. John and the guard tangled, the guy getting John in an awkward headlock and shouting commands at

him. John got a hand around the man's belt and I heard a
klink
as the ring of keys hit the floor.

John pulled out of the headlock, his hair a swirling mess. He took off running down the hall, looking back over his shoulder

and screaming, "I'M SHOOTIN' THE SCHOOL! HERE I GO!"

The guard wasn't sure it was safe to leave me and Amy, but didn't want to let John go. He took a step after John, then

looked back and glanced down at the furgun. I tried to look innocent. Amy said, "We were trying to stop him!"

I lifted up the furgun and started combing my hair with it.

The guard turned took off after John, rounding a corner and disappearing from sight.

I snatched the keys off the floor and on the fourth try, found one that fit in the lock.

I pushed in the door, hearing a sound like running water splashing around in a sink.

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The sound turned out to be fifty thousand insect legs clicking up a set of stairs. The baby mouth bugs, each small enough

to sit in palm of your hand, covered the floor and moved with sickening speed. Amy screamed.

I let out a disgusted squeal, tried to pul the door shut. The little monsters spilled over my shoes and fanned out into the

hall behind me. I couldn't get the door to close all the way, the act of closing it had mashed up several hundred bugs in

the half-inch of space between door and floor.

"DAVE! What the hell?"

John was sprinting down the hall, having done a U-Turn at some point.

"We're too late!" I screamed, shaking bugs off my shoes and pants. I felt pinching little bites around my ankles. "He's hatched! Shit!"