They Kill, page 9
She pushed Joey off of her. Then she helped him to stand and pulled up his pants.
“Run,” she said. The word came out in a gasp as she struggled to get her breath back. She tried again, and this time her voice sounded more normal. “Run!”
For a moment she thought he would do it, and as he ran, she’d do whatever she could to slow down the smiley-face man, to keep his attention on her long enough for her little boy to reach the end of the alley and make it to the sidewalk on the other side, where hopefully someone would see him and help him.
But Joey didn’t run. Instead, he plopped down on his butt, looked at the smiley-face man, and cried. Tears streamed down his cheeks and his chest hitched with sobs. Olivia reached out and gathered Joey to her once again. At least she could hold him while whatever was going to happen to them happened. She didn’t want to look at the man – at the thing – that was coming for them, but she did anyway. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe she felt a need to be brave for her son one last time. Or maybe she did so out of some innate perversity of the human psyche, a need to stare death – especially one’s own death – in the face as it came for you.
The smiley-face man stopped when he reached them. He gazed down at them with his frozen too-wide smile and his empty black eyes.
“Why are you doing this?” Olivia said. She didn’t expect a reply, but she got one anyway.
“I want to make the world a better place,” the smiley-face man said. “And it will be much better without you two in it.”
He raised his copper knife high, and he brought it down, swift and strong. Then he did it again. Again. Again. Again….
* * *
A little while later, Randall gazed upon his handiwork. The girl and her son were hardly recognizable as things that had once been human. They’d become a single collection of ragged, torn meat and bone, slathered in blood. Blood splattered the alley walls, pooled on the ground around the remains, stippled his face and hands, soaked his shirt and pants.
He felt better than he had in years. In fact, he felt fan-fucking-tastic! It was so rewarding to know you were doing good work and making an important contribution to your community.
He considered gathering the Chucks he’d thrown to stop the woman from fleeing, but they were all messy now. Then again, he wasn’t exactly Norman Neat right now, was he? He spent several minutes collecting his Chucks, careful to avoid cutting his fingers on their sharp edges, and returning them to his pocket. When he finished, he stood and pondered what to do next. What he’d like to do was go to ArtWorks and give Sierra an attitude adjustment. But she’d told him that she taught at the college at noon, and she wouldn’t be back at ArtWorks until later, for her afternoon class there. He wasn’t sure what time it was, but he figured that if Sierra hadn’t left for the college yet, she’d do so soon. He decided there was no hurry. Sierra would return to ArtWorks eventually, and in the meantime, there was plenty of work for him to do around here.
He held his knife with the handle pointed upward and looked at the smiley face on the end.
“What do you think, Chuck? Ready to greet some more of Bishop Hill’s less-than-upstanding citizens?”
The smiley face winked at him in approval.
Smiling – but then, Randall no longer could do anything but smile – he flipped his knife into a regular grip, turned and walked away from the savaged bodies of Olivia and Joey, and set off to find more people to introduce his friend Chuck to.
* * *
Sierra was finishing cleaning up after her second class of the day when she heard her phone buzzing in her Egyptian hieroglyphics bag. She always left the bag on the windowsill near where she taught, so she’d have easy access to whatever materials she’d brought for the day. She walked over to the windowsill and removed her phone from the bag. This time she checked the display to see if it was Stuart calling, but it wasn’t, which was a relief. She’d had more than enough of him for one day. He’d left a voicemail message earlier that she’d immediately deleted without listening to, and recently, he’d left another, which she’d also deleted. She didn’t recognize the number, and she almost didn’t answer, figuring it was most likely a sales call. She decided to take the call, though. After the morning she’d had, she’d enjoy telling a salesperson to go to hell.
“Hello?”
At first whoever it wasn’t didn’t speak. Sierra was about to end the call when a male voice said her name.
“Yes?”
“This is Marc. Marc Naranjo.”
Sierra was so surprised that Marc had called her that at first she didn’t know what to say. Then she got angry. How dare he call her today of all days? She was about to tell him off – despite the fact that she knew he had to be hurting too – but then he said, “This is going to sound extremely fucked up, but by any chance did you see Jeffrey today?”
Sierra’s anger drained out of her in a rush and was replaced by a cold, sick feeling in her gut.
Hang up now, she told herself. Before this gets any weirder. But she didn’t hang up. Instead, she found herself answering calmly. “As a matter of fact, I did.”
* * *
Sierra sat at a table near the entrance to Temptations Café. She wanted to be close to the door in case her meeting with Marc took a turn for the worse and she needed to make a quick getaway.
Temptations wasn’t far from Riverbank Community College, which worked well for her since she had to teach at noon and didn’t have a lot of time for lunch. Even so, she’d been reluctant to come here. Jeffrey and she had eaten here often, so much so that she’d come to think of it as their place. She didn’t like the thought of Marc intruding on her memories of Jeffrey. But Marc had suggested meeting at Temptations, and she wondered if it was because he knew what the place meant to her. Maybe.
Temptations was a small, simple place without much in the way of décor or ambience. Just old tables and chairs, tacky curtains on the windows. But the food was good – soup and salads, mostly – and they had a selection of pastries and pies that were made on the premises and which were absolutely delicious. The desserts were the café’s main attraction, and Sierra would never understand why they bothered serving anything else. She went ahead and ordered a Caesar salad and iced tea. The food arrived, but once it was in front of her, she found she wasn’t hungry. She picked at it until Marc arrived.
She hadn’t seen him for almost a year, but when he entered the café, she nearly didn’t recognize him. He was thinner now, and he’d shaved his head. He’d grown a mustache and goatee, and since he was ten years older than Jeffrey, his black beard was streaked with white. He wore a gray suit with a white shirt and purple tie. He would’ve looked good, but he had a distressed air about him. His tie was crooked and the knot loose, his face was pale, and he moved with fidgety agitation. If they hadn’t come here to talk about seeing her dead brother, she might’ve thought he was nervous about seeing her, and maybe that was part of what bothered him, but if so, it was only a small part. He gave her a shaky smile when he saw her, then joined her at the table. He didn’t greet her – didn’t say hello, offer to shake hands, ask how she was doing these days. He merely looked at her until a server came to their table, a young woman Sierra figured was probably a college student. A lot of Riverbank students worked at businesses near campus. Marc ordered a cup of coffee, but no food. When the server left, he nodded toward Sierra’s salad.
“I’m glad you went ahead and ordered,” he said. “I have absolutely no appetite myself.”
“I don’t have much of one either.”
It felt so strange to be sitting here with the man she blamed, at least in part, for her brother’s accident. But then again, she also blamed herself, so they had that in common. They belonged to an exclusive club: People Who’d Driven Jeffrey Sowell to His Death. All they needed was for Courtney Marsh to be here, and the roll call would be complete.
They didn’t speak again until the server brought Marc’s coffee. He added a ton of sugar to it then added so much cream the contents overflowed onto the saucer. He lifted the cup with shaky hands, spilling a bit more onto the table, but he managed to bring the coffee to his mouth without dumping the whole thing onto his lap. He drank half in several large gulps, then set the cup back down. His hands trembled slightly less now.
“Thank you for coming here,” he said. “I was sure when I called you’d think I’d lost my mind.”
“The jury’s still out on that,” Sierra said with a nervous smile. “For both of us.”
“Before we go any further, I just want to say I know this day is hard for you. It’s difficult for me, too. Jeffrey and I had our last dinner here, the night he died. I suppose that’s why I wanted to meet you here. Sort of a way to honor his memory. I know I’m not exactly your favorite person in the world, so I appreciate you putting your feelings about me aside so we can talk.”
Sierra hadn’t put her negative feelings toward Marc that far to the side, but she saw no reason to tell him this. They weren’t here to repair their relationship – not that they’d ever really had one. They were here to talk about the impossible. Neither of them had gone into any detail about their sightings of Jeffrey on the phone, and now that they were face to face, she had no idea how to get started.
“You want to go first?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I’m still trying to process what I saw. It was a lot to take in.”
There was a quaver in his voice as he spoke, and Sierra wasn’t sure she wanted to hear his story. But that’s why they’d come here, to share their stories, so she told hers. She left nothing out, not even the message Jeffrey had somehow carved into brick simply by touching it. Marc kept his gaze fixed on her the entire time she spoke. So intense was his focus that he didn’t seem to breathe as he listened. When she was finished, she thought he might challenge the part about HI SIS, or least express some skepticism. But he didn’t. Not only did he seem to accept that part of her story readily enough, but he nodded, as if it made perfect sense to him.
She’d also told him of the dream she’d had last night, the one in which the strange man in the black suit had returned Jeffrey to life.
“Do you have any idea who the man in your dream was?” Marc asked.
She shook her head.
“I figured he was just part of the dream, a character my subconscious invented, kind of like a reverse undertaker who brings people back instead of burying them. I didn’t think he was real, but now….”
“Since Jeffrey did return from the dead, like in your dream, do you think this man in the black suit might be real too?”
“I don’t know. Maybe?”
Marc downed the rest of his coffee. He started to talk, but then the server came by to refill his cup. He didn’t bother doctoring it this time, and he launched into his own tale.
If she’d thought her story was crazy, Marc’s was absolutely insane. She would’ve discounted it entirely if it hadn’t been for the detail about Jeffrey’s touch being the thing that caused the tree to become sick and which killed that poor woman and her dog. As difficult as it was to believe that her brother had somehow returned from death, she couldn’t imagine him hurting anyone, let alone killing them. But who could say what a person became after they died? Yesterday, she would’ve dismissed such a thought as ludicrous. Today, not so much.
“So what do we do next?” Marc asked when his story was done. “Hire an exorcist?”
“So there’s a we now?”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to presume. It just came out that way.”
Marc was obviously scared, and Sierra couldn’t blame him. Assuming what he’d seen had been real – and despite how bizarre his story was, she felt he was telling the truth – he had every right to be afraid. Your love comes back from the grave only to disintegrate a woman and her dog while you watch? That would be enough to fuck anyone up. There was one aspect of his story that bothered her, though, for purely selfish reasons. Jeffrey had smiled and waved to her, but he hadn’t spoken to her, and he’d walked off before she could catch up to him. She understood why Marc had fled rather than allowing Jeffrey to touch him, given what he’d witnessed. She wondered, if she had seen Jeffrey kill with his touch, would she still want him to hug her? It might be worth being turned to a pile of dust if she could feel her brother’s arms around her one more time.
“If Jeffrey is out there somewhere hurting people, then we need to find him and stop him.” More than that, she wanted to talk with him, to try to understand what had happened to him. Maybe if they knew how and why he’d returned, they’d be able to find a way to help him become normal again – or at least prevent him from killing anyone else.
“Stop him?” Marc said. “That sounds awfully…final.”
She hadn’t meant it that way. She’d meant they needed to prevent him from hurting anyone else. But how exactly were they supposed to do that? If Jeffrey had been in his right mind, he’d never have killed the woman and her dog. So if they managed to find him, how could they expect to reason with him? He’d recognized Marc, though. If she and Marc confronted Jeffrey together, maybe their combined presence would be enough to get through whatever madness held him in its grip, and they would be able to convince him to let them help him. But if they couldn’t, if Jeffrey continued to be a threat, would they be forced to find a way to stop him permanently? If that was even possible. How could you kill something that had already returned from the dead once? The unreality of this conversation was starting to get to Sierra. She felt disconnected from her own body, as if she were merely an observer watching their conversation from a distance.
Her hands rested on the table, and Marc surprised her by reaching out and taking them in his.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “You look…well, I’m not sure how you look, but I don’t think it’s good. Do you need to go lie down somewhere?”
She looked down at Marc’s hands. They were larger than hers, the fingers long and delicate-looking. She wondered if he played piano. He had the hands for it.
This conversation was the longest they’d ever spoken to each other, and this was the first time he’d ever touched her. He’d done so out of concern, she knew that, but these were hands that had touched her brother, had pleasured him. Hands that belonged to the man who’d sent her brother out into the storm that had killed him. The anger and resentment that she’d tried to put aside during their talk – dark emotions she’d fed and cultivated for an entire year – came flooding back.
She pulled her hands from under his and placed them in her lap. Marc, seeming to realize he’d crossed a line, withdrew his quickly as well.
“Sorry,” he said.
Sierra ignored his apology. She wanted to stay angry at him, needed to. It helped focus her mind.
“The first thing we need to do is find Jeffrey,” she said.
“How do we do that? Drive around town and hope we spot him disintegrating more pets, maybe a mail carrier or two?”
She recognized his snark as a defense mechanism against the insanity of the situation, but she still didn’t appreciate it.
“Be serious,” she snapped.
Marc glared at her in response, but he nodded, grudgingly, she thought.
“Yes, we could drive around and see if we get lucky,” she said. “We both saw him wandering the street. Maybe he’s still doing that. But I think we’d have better luck if we went to the places he knew best. He came to ArtWorks, and he tapped on the window to get my attention and waved at me. I don’t think he recognized me – not all the way, at least.”
Although it had hurt at the time, now she was grateful Jeffrey hadn’t entered ArtWorks. What if he’d come inside and tried to touch her, to give her his ‘gift’? Worse, what if he’d touched some of the children? She had a mental image of her students falling away to dust, and her stomach threatened to expel what little of her salad she’d managed to get down before Marc arrived.
“But you think he went to ArtWorks because somewhere in his mind he remembered you work there?”
“Yes. And he definitely recognized you.” She couldn’t help feeling a jealous twinge as she said these words. “Maybe his memory is improving as time passes. If so, he might go to his apartment or maybe where he worked. Those are the places we should try first.” She took her phone from her bag to check the time. “My class begins in twenty minutes, but I can cancel it, and we can get started right away.”
She went to her contacts list to find the number for the college’s art department. She’d tell the administrative assistant that she’d come down with something. Hi, Dawn. I’m afraid I have to cancel my twelve o’clock class today. I’ve got a bad case of my brother has returned from the dead and is disintegrating people.
Maybe she’d go with the stomach flu instead.
But before she could call, Marc said, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea. Because of what happened this morning, I’m extremely late to meet with a client. An important one. My boss will hand me my ass if I miss the appointment altogether.”
Sierra stared at him, unable to believe what he’d said. Right now, Jeffrey was out there somewhere, maybe killing more people, and Marc couldn’t go looking for him because of work? Marc went on before Sierra could challenge him.
“Besides, if you’re right and Jeffrey’s memory is returning, wouldn’t he be just as likely to seek you out at the college as anywhere else? He’s already made contact with you once today. Maybe he’ll try again. You are his sister, after all. It might be better if you teach your class. That way, you’ll be on campus if he goes there.”
