Then his stomach dropped. He"d forgotten to move his car. A day"s pay just vanished to a parking ticket, a.s.suming it hadn"t been towed.
The crowd pa.s.sed and revealed a woman in a wheelchair. She looked up at him and her face shifted. As George stepped back on the path he moved to the left and gave her a quick nod. He wanted to be sure she knew he saw her and wasn"t going to collide.
She tugged on the wheels of her chair, rolling it back into his way. He caught himself before banging his shins on the wide wheel. His legs jammed up for a second and he came to a stop.
The young woman had large eyes and dark hair that pa.s.sed her shoulders. Her skin was the pale hue of someone who never got outside. A look of relief broke across her face as she stared at him. "Oh, thank G.o.d," she said. "It"s you."
George smiled. The price of wearing a uniform and an ID badge was everyone a.s.sumed you were there to help, but it didn"t really bother him. "What can I do for you?"
"I wasn"t a hundred percent sure you"d be here," she said. "I thought I remembered you saying once that you worked here before, so I figured it"d be the best place to start looking. Mom and Dad weren"t happy with me switching schools at the last minute. I"ve been looking for you ever since we got here."
He blinked. "Sorry," he said. "Do we know each other?"
"George," the young woman said, "it"s me. Madelyn."
He blinked and looked at her. There weren"t many students he was on a first-name basis with, and he didn"t remember any in a wheelchair. Then he had the awful thought that maybe the young woman hadn"t been in a wheelchair the last time he saw her. He studied her face and tried to guess her height if she was standing.
She stared back at him and then her face fell. "d.a.m.n it," she said. "You don"t remember anything, do you?"
FOUR.
"YEAH, I"M SORRY," said George. "I think you might have me confused with someone else."
Madelyn shook her head. "Nope."
He tried to look apologetic. "I don"t know you."
"I"m Madelyn Sorensen," she said. "The Corpse Girl."
"The what?"
"And you"re George Bailey," she continued. "St. George? Formerly the Mighty Dragon?" She said the last two names-or maybe they were t.i.tles-in a hopeful way.
The use of his full name shook him until he realized that someone with good eyesight could read his name off his badge. And if she"d been in the wheelchair for a while, she was probably used to reading things from a distance. He glanced down at the gloves hanging off his belt, his name written on each one in big letters.
Madelyn watched his face. "Nothing?" she asked. "You don"t remember me?"
He shook his head.
"You have to remember," she said. "What about Barry?"
"Who?"
"Stealth? You have to remember Stealth."
"Is that a person?"
She smacked the arm of her wheelchair. "What about dreams? Are you having dreams?"
George paused. He remembered waking up in the middle of the night, still exhausted in the morning. "What do you mean?"
"They probably seem more like nightmares if you don"t remember anything," she said. "Are they-"
"Maddy," called a voice. "Everything okay, hon?"
She glanced back over her shoulder. "Yeah, Dad," she answered. "Just getting directions to the dining commons."
A man with a silvery-gray beard nodded to her and waved at George. George waved back automatically. The man looked like faculty. If not here, then somewhere.
Madelyn turned back to him. "Okay, listen," she said, "this is important."
George looked at her.
"This is all wrong," said Madelyn. "The world isn"t supposed to be like this. None of these people should be here."
He looked at the crowds. "They won"t be," he said. "It"s just like this while everyone"s moving in. In a day or two-"
"No," Madelyn said. "They shouldn"t be here in the bigger sense."
"How so?"
"There was a plague," she said. "It broke out in the spring of 2009 and wiped out most of the world-"
"Spring of 2009?" interrupted George. "Four years ago?"
"Yes."
"Is this a game?" he asked her. "One of those LARP-things?"
"No." She shook her head.
"Is it the a.s.sa.s.sin one, where you"re supposed to tag another student, because the university has some pretty solid rules about-"
"This is real," she said. "It happened. Everyone died. Even me."
"You"re dead?"
"Yeah. For about four years now."
He looked at himself. "Am I supposed to be dead, too?"
She scowled. "Don"t be stupid. If you were dead, how could I be talking to you?"
He smiled and tried to make it look sincere. "Right, of course."
"You have to believe me," she said. "Billions of people died. You gathered all the survivors into a film studio here in Los Angeles-"
"I did?"
"Yes."
"Me, personally?"
"Yeah. Well, I mean, I don"t know how much you did by yourself, but you did a lot of it. Everyone trusted you to keep them safe."
George wondered if the young woman was a student. Maybe she was just a visiting relative, here to see her brother or sister or cousin off to school before going back to ... therapy? Heavy medications? "Okay," he said. "And everybody trusted me because ...?"
"Because you"re a superhero," she said.
"I"m sorry?"
"You"re the superhero. The Mighty Dragon. I had a poster of you in my bedroom before everything fell apart."
Any student mentioning their bedroom set off warning bells in George"s state-employed mind. He looked past her and tried to catch the eye of the bearded man. There was a quick contact and her father understood something was wrong.
Madelyn watched him for some kind of reaction. "None of this means anything to you?"
"Probably not the meaning you"re hoping for."
"Everything okay here?" asked the bearded man, setting his hands on the wheelchair"s handles. "It"s taking a while just to get directions." He was a little older than George had first thought, and up close it was clear the beard needed a trim.
"I had a few other questions," said Madelyn with a bitter look at George.
"I hope I answered them," said George.
The bearded man held out his hand. "Emil Sorensen," he said. "It seems you"ve already met my daughter."
"Yeah," he said. "George Bailey." The bearded man"s polite smile trembled and George tapped his ID badge. "Honest."
"And you"re part of the welcome staff?"
"No, sir. Just with the maintenance department. They ask us all to help out where we can on the move-in days."
"Come on," Sorensen said to his daughter. "Your mother wants dinner and she"ll be getting cranky soon if we don"t get some food in her."
George took the moment to give a formal bow of his head to Madelyn and then to Sorensen. The bearded man acknowledged him and George slipped past them to continue down the path. The girl raised her voice to shout, "Wait!" and her father hushed her. George heard them argue for a moment, and then he was far enough away that their voices blended into the background noise of moving day.
He reached the next parking lot, squinted into the afternoon sun, and wished he"d remembered his sungla.s.ses. Or his work cap. The light bounced off a hundred windshields and rear windows. At least there was shade on the far end of the parking lot.
A young woman on the other side of the lot, one of those people who felt the need to raise their voice two or three notches to talk on the phone, chattered on her cell. George could make out half her conversation from fifty feet away. She stumbled off an unseen curb, glanced back, and her laugh echoed between the buildings. She dug in her purse with her free hand, barely looking at the lot.
He hoped no one pulled out, because she"d never see it coming.
A few steps ahead of her, maybe as much as four or five yards, a man shuffled between the parked cars. He wore a suit coat over jeans and a T-shirt, and his hair was a ratty mess. He stumbled in the narrow s.p.a.ce, and his head twisted up to look at the chattering girl. His mouth moved as if he was trying to say something, but George was too far to hear anything. Especially over the young woman.
The woman was still heading more or less in George"s direction. There were a dozen yards between them. No more than ten parking s.p.a.ces. She was two s.p.a.ces from the man, ten feet at the most.
The three of them continued toward each other. George"s pace quickened. He couldn"t put his finger on it, but the situation felt wrong.
The man"s awkward movements weren"t just because of the tight s.p.a.ce between the cars. For a moment, George thought it was the same man he"d seen that morning, the one with the pale skin. But this man was taller, with darker hair and different clothes. He had the same half-drunken gait, though. He lurched toward the chattering woman with a certain focus that made George think of nature doc.u.mentaries.
There were a few feet left between the man and woman. She pulled a set of keys free and gestured with them. A car behind George beeped twice. She looked up and saw George striding toward her.
Then the pale man wrapped his arms around her. He clawed at her chest and grabbed a mouthful of hair as she turned her head. He leaned into her and forced her away from the cars.
The young woman let out a brief shriek, as if she hadn"t decided if the attack upset her or just surprised her. Her phone clattered to the ground. She slapped at the hands, swore, and tried to get a better look at the man. Her expression was a mixture of annoyance and curiosity. The pale man smacked his lips together. It made a wet popping sound with a hard tap beneath it, as if he was snapping his teeth down on her hair.
"Hey," called George. He broke into a run for the last few yards. "Let her go."
The man showed no sign of hearing George or of letting go of the woman. He pawed her some more and bent his head to the soft curve where her neck ran into her shoulder. She smacked him with her purse and her face tightened. The man was a stranger. She was getting attacked in broad daylight. He leaned on her even more, pushing her toward the ground.
George grabbed the pale man by the shoulders. The suit jacket was damp. The man was soft, with no muscle tone at all. George twisted and yanked him off the woman.
It was one of those perfect moments of balance and strength, the ones martial artists train for. The man was thrown through the air and crashed onto the trunk of an old sedan, raising a cloud of dust. George wasn"t sure if it came from the car or the man.
"f.u.c.king creeper," snapped the young woman.
George took a step to place himself between her and the man. "You okay?"
She tugged at her shirt. "Yeah," she said. She took a step, scooped up her phone, and scowled. "You"re paying for this, a.s.shole," she barked at the man, holding up the cracked screen.
The creeper waved his legs until he slid off the car"s trunk. He ended up on his feet more from gravity and inertia than effort. He turned to George and the woman and smacked his lips together again.
The man was more of an oversized teen. His eyes were dusty gray, like old Plexiglas that had been scratched a thousand times. George wondered if he might be an albino, but didn"t think the eyes were right for that, either. One side of the man"s nose was a ragged flap, as if something had gone in his nostril and ripped out the side. His skin wasn"t just pale, it was corpse white.
The creeper took a shaky step forward and his mouth opened and closed. There was something mindless about the movement, like a fish. George heard the man"s teeth clicking against each other, as if they were chattering in the hot sun. It was a familiar sound, but he wasn"t sure from where.
"Do you know karate or something?" asked the woman.
"No," said George. "I was just lucky."
"Well, feel free to kick his a.s.s."
"Maybe you should call the police."
"h.e.l.lo." She glared at him. "He broke my phone."
The pale man"s arms came back up and he took two more steps. "Okay, you need to back off," George told him. "Just stop now before this gets any worse."
The man took another step and seemed to stumble. George reached out to catch him. The man bent down and bit George"s arm.