Skeletons (22 page)

Now they're gone.

Joe, who's shuffled over to the pool and is staring stupidly into it, ignores my question, preferring to scrape a stick at a powdery covering floating on the water's surface near one end.

"Where are the Vomits?" I repeat, a little hysterically. He continues to stare at the powdery scum. Horrible thought number two comes my way. I point to the floating powder.

"That's not . . ."

He grins at me. "No, man. Not them. But somebody else. Didn't like the news, I imagine. Party ending and all. Think her name was Cheryl . . ."

My secretary! Yak!

This is the end. I stalk across the lawn, looking up to locate the window outside Bobbie
Zick's
office. Got it. Nothing so convenient as a ladder nearby, but there's a drainpipe that could stand climbing. A couple of false starts and I find I'm not good at climbing drainpipes. But at that moment I see the porker, Noreen, leave the house, moving toward Bobbie's Mercedes with a stack of cartons in her hands.

Quickly I'm inside. Keg is passed out next to his magazine, but there's still one line of coke on it. I
snorkle
it up, barely stopping. I toss the magazine aside and stride up the stairs.

The door to Bobbie's office is closed, but I don't even knock, letting the coke help my foot kick it in for me.

"Hello, Roger."

Bobbie is sitting at his desk, calm as ever, feet up, chair tilted back. One hand is behind his head, the other cradles a telephone lazily to one ear.

"What the fu—" I begin to shout.

"One moment, old boy," Bobbie says to me. He shifts his attention to talk to someone who has entered the room behind me.

"It's all right, Noreen," he says. "He can stay. Just finish loading those papers, will you?"

Noreen angrily slams the door on the way out.

Bobbie points at a chair. I'm sputtering, but I sit down as Bobbie continues his phone conversation.

"No," he says, "nothing to worry about. Just that dividend I told you about. Yes, of course I'll hold on to it, but at this point I don't think we'll need it. Yes, of course, you can never tell."

He listens to some words on the other end, then says, "All right, yes, of course."

He hangs up.

"Now, Roger, old boy," he says, leaning forward and folding his hands. "What can I do for you?"

"Do!" I shout. I know I really shouldn't yell, my radar's at full shriek, but the coke and the fact that my office, career, and secretary are dead has pushed me past the limit. Bobbie, however, seems to take this in stride.

"There's been a slight shift in plans." He smiles calmly.

"Do you mind—"

"Of course I don't mind telling you, old boy. In fact, I rather hope where we're going there'll be more
Stoli
to drink. You see, if we stay here, we'll all be dust or in jail by tonight."

Now he has my interest.

"It's at the point where you can hear gunfire in the valley," he says, "and that makes me very uncomfortable. We've done just about all we can do from here, so we're moving north."

"North?"

"Suffice it to say that I've had a lot on my mind besides music for the last few weeks, Roger. The world has become a very complicated place. And new . . . opportunities arose. A few like-minded men got together and thought we had a good plan for running the new world. More economics than anything. A kind of . . . super-consumerism." The phone rings. He laughs, ignoring it. "All right, let's call it what it was. A structured monopoly. We'd control all sources of distribution, and more importantly, we'd control all sources of productivity. You saw it on a small scale with the music business. After all, that's where I started out. If we controlled all the artists, then no one could go anywhere else for music, correct? Well, it only made sense to expand this idea to other areas such as food production, water distribution, electronics, media, including publishing and television and radio, transportation . . . well, you get the idea. Somebody has to run things, and since nobody seemed to be running anything, we made our play. Unfortunately, Abraham Lincoln came along. That bastard is a genius, I have to give him that. I never thought he'd be able to tie the United States back together, but it looks like he may be doing it."

He looks off to the empty wall of his office where the stereo-video equipment had been stacked.

"Anyway, our little scheme just won't work, not in this country now, anyway. We're going to try to consolidate up north." He smiles. "You realize I'm telling you all this because you're still with me, don't you?"

"Uh, right," I say.

"Good. I hope you understand. Our original pact still stands. You're still VP in charge of music, though I don't know how much of it we'll be able to produce on the run. Until this war thing ends, I don't think people will be buying many records. A shame, I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for this business."

"The Vomits?" I ask.

He waves his bony hand. "Turned loose, like the rest." He stands up. “The party's over, Roger. When the dust settles, we'll see."

Surprisingly, he rises and comes around the desk, making me stand, and puts his arm around my shoulder. He draws me to the window. Together we look out on the grounds, the tennis courts, the parking lot, the recording studio. I try not to look at the pool with its scummy surface.

'The game's not ended yet, Roger. There's a world to be made out there, of wealth, and power, anything you want if you're on the winning side."

"Right, Bobbie."

I feel his hand move up to my neck and tighten, just a little too much. I turn my head and look into his skull—and at this range, with his human face just a misty vapor surrounding that white bone, it never fails to put a chill up the old back. Two eye sockets that lead into . . . nada. I get the uncomfortable feeling I always get with these boners—that they'd much rather kill than talk to you.

His hand tightens just a little more on my neck and then he lets me go.

"Can I ask you something, Bobbie?" I say.

"Anything, old boy."

I look at him and smile, concentrating on the ghostly image of his face and not the skull. "Why me?"

He throws back his head and I think he's going to laugh, but instead he just looks at the ceiling. "Why you?"

Noreen appears in the doorway, scowling, telling Bobbie it's time to go.

"We'll be right down," Bobbie says. Noreen retreats, a final pile of boxes in her huge bony hands.

"Why you, Roger Garbage?" Bobbie asks, continuing our conversation. Again he looks up at the ceiling, then down at me. Once more the chill with the empty eye sockets. "You want the truth?"

"Sure, Bobbie."

He waits a count of five. "Because . . ." He puts his arm around my shoulder again, this time steering me toward the office door and the waiting Lincoln Town Car below. I get the feeling he's looking for just the right words. At the top of the stairs he suddenly stops, and this time he does laugh.

"Because, Roger," he says, "you're one of us."

We stayed in Mr. Cary's bomb shelter for a long time. I lost track of days. Occasionally we heard a skeleton rummaging around in the cellar outside; twice, the door was tried and Mrs. Garr stood with her gun ready, but eventually whoever it was went away. We ate, slept, and waited.

Finally, after a whole day with no sounds from beyond our door, Mrs. Garr told me it was time to go.

Mrs. Garr knelt down to talk to me. 'This is what we're going to do, Claire. We can't stay here forever. My husband works in New York City. There's a chance—" She stopped, closed her eyes. "There's a chance he's all right, and that he got home and is hiding like we
hid
. There's also a chance he's still in New York. I ... I've got to try to find him, Claire. Do you understand? I just have to know. And if he's alive, he can help us. We'll have to find a place to go, to hide."

She began to cry, and held on to me. "I just don't know what to do, Claire! I just . . . don't know what to . . . do!"

I put my hand on her shoulder. She looked at me, and smiled a little, and stopped crying.

"You're a good girl, Claire. You're the best girl in the world."

She picked up the gun, and Mr. Cary's ax, and crossed the room, avoiding the two piles of dust that had been Mr. and Mrs. Cary. She listened at the door. Finally she turned the lock and pulled the door open.

The cellar was empty.

Mrs. Garr took my hand. "Come on, Claire."

We went through the cellar and up the steps slowly. Every two steps we stopped to listen.

There was no sound from upstairs.

We went through the house slowly, looking into every corner of every room. Sunlight was falling through the windows.

The house was empty.

Mrs. Garr tried the phone, put it down.

"It's dead," she said.

Finally Mrs. Garr opened the screen door and stepped out onto the porch.

A beautiful summer sun was setting.

Except for far-off crickets, the world was quiet.

The car was hidden where Mrs. Garr had left it. We uncovered it, got in, and Mrs. Garr backed it out onto the road and stopped it in front of Mr. Cary's house.

We took all of the food we could find in the house, and filled the water jug from the cellar shelter and took that, too. Then we got in the car and Mrs. Garr turned it toward Withers.

Mrs. Garr drove slowly, hunched over the wheel, studying the road in front of us. We passed the empty graveyard on the left, pulled out of the trees into the area behind Withers.

"Oh, Lord," Mrs. Garr said.

Withers was nearly burned to the ground. The top floors were blackened, caved in, the windows empty of glass. It looked like a skeleton of a building.

Mrs. Garr drove on, out toward the parking lot and the front gate.

The gate was still closed. Mrs. Garr slowly passed Mrs. Page's empty black car and stopped. She got out of the car, pulled the massive iron wings of the gate open, and returned.

As we pulled out into the road, piles of dust were visible, in the gutters near the entrance, in the street. We passed two burned cars, a wrecked bus.

The streets were quiet.

The stoplights flashed red and green. Mrs. Garr ignored them. Cautiously, she drove into the town of Cold Spring Harbor. We saw more wrecked cars, up on curbs or abandoned in the middle of the road. Some of the buildings had been burned. Storefront windows were broken. We passed the harbor front; docks had been searched, boats sunk and blackened.

A light pole had been pulled down, blocking our path. Mrs. Garr edged her car around it.

The sky turned to twilight.

Mrs. Garr stopped the car near the end of one street, in front of a delicatessen.

"Come with me," she said, getting out, taking the gun with her.

We entered the store. The door was unlocked, the lights on. A long deli-counter display window was smashed. There was the odor of rancid milk.

Mrs. Garr looked near the doorway, found a hand basket, and gave it to me.

"Fill this with food, Claire. Whatever will last." There was a phone in the back of the store, and Mrs. Garr went to it and picked up the receiver.

"It works!" she said.

I watched her push buttons on the phone as I got whatever food I could find. There were two loaves of bread, just going stale, along with canned food and boxes.

Mrs. Garr stood with the receiver pressed to her ear. "Please, please," she prayed.

Finally she put the receiver back and came back to me.

"Maybe Michael is hiding," she said hopefully.

She took the filled basket from me and we went back to the car.

It was getting darker. Down the street a few lights had gone on. The downed light pole behind us flashed on, sputtered off, flashed on.

We drove away from the delicatessen, toward the edge of town.

Out of my window I heard sounds. Mrs. Garr immediately slowed, stopped the car, and rolled down her window.

Ahead of us were many voices. We heard the bark of a dog.

Mrs. Garr looked at me hopefully.

We got out of the car. Mrs. Garr took my hand, pulled me into the shadows of the buildings. Ahead, the main street ended, opening out onto a little park. I saw the flicker of fire.

We moved closer. A bank stood on the corner, its big pillars hiding us from view. Mrs. Garr pushed me back into the brick, peered around the corner into the park.

She gasped.

I looked around the corner.

There was a large group, all of them skeletons, surrounding a gazebo. A few held torches or flashlights.

A skeletal dog stood patiently next to a skeletal human, wagging its tail.

A skeleton mounted the steps of the gazebo and held up its hands. Faintly, I saw the outline of a man in a brown suit, with white hair.