Luca"s leg throbbed. "What am I supposed to do now?" He looked at the husky. "No way I"m driving."
"I don"t like driving without the controller. Or Daddy. It"s pretty sort of scary. Especially because I can"t look around me like I can when we"re going somewhere as a family. But we can"t go anywhere as a family now because I don"t know where anyone is and the phones don"t want the numbers to work."
The husky trotted to the edge of the clearing and stuck his nose at something Luca couldn"t see. Luca slowly followed. In 10 steps the dirt ended in concrete. On the other side of the yellow paint sat a rundown shack that looked like it sold milkshakes. And they were probably great milkshakes, because a lot of bikes were in the bike rack.
Luca looked both ways and crossed the street. He felt a bristle on the other side. He turned back and looked toward the trees, but saw none of the eyes he felt peering from behind them.
They"re there. But I don"t know how many because the math is hard when it gets to a lot.
Luca looked another moment, then turned and headed for the employee entrance of the ice cream shack. It was locked but the window wasn"t. Inside, he looked for the white plastic box with the big red cross, like the one in Mrs. Engler"s office.
He found it in a cabinet a lot like Mrs. Engler"s, the first place he tried. It looked mostly the same, though it didn"t have the peeling Transformers sticker that Johnny Bryson put on the back when Mrs. Engler wasn"t looking.
Luca split the square into a rectangle, then made a pile of the stuff people used when ambulance men were saving people in the movies. He finished cleaning his wounds and suddenly felt hungry. A little at first but then the hungry grew really, really big. It grew into the kind of hungry his dad called "alligator hungry."
He made a bowl of ice cream and a big sandwich. He didn"t eat enough ice cream to get sick later, like he had at Billy"s birthday when he ate so many scoops he threw up in the pool. He ate just enough to know his mom would be happy if she was sitting right beside him. After all, maybe she was.
Maybe everyone else is here and I"m the one who"s not?
He removed the one bike without a lock, the red one with a white stripe, then swung on the seat and looked into the sky. Sure enough, the rainbow was back. Luca started to pedal, leaving the eyes behind him.
Luca stayed on the bike, but the next several hours were mean.
His leg looked like it had a layer of Rice Krispies coated in blood. His head felt like when he hung upside down on the monkey bars and fell, and his tummy was like the time Greg Moore punched him in the stomach because he had accidentally dropped and cracked his Super Soaker. Except worse.
He stopped four times, seven counting the places that were locked. The entire time he still hadn"t seen a single person. Probably about 500 cars, though that stuff was hard to count. All the empty made it easy to feel the something following behind him. A lot more animals were here than at the ice cream shack, maybe times two. But Luca didn"t mind. They felt like less alone. And besides, they probably knew a lot of stuff he didn"t. Like where his mom and dad might be. If the rainbow knew, maybe they did too.
It was only after his fifth stop when Luca finally realized he had a hard time seeing the rainbow when he was thirsty. The rainbow had started to flicker alongside a roll in his belly when he saw another one of the shacks that looked busy like it was open but was empty like it was closed.
A few yards from the front of the shack, Luca"s bike hit a sharp rock jutting from the dirt. The bike"s front tire came to a dead stop while the rear wheel lifted from the back. Luca"s short stint as Superman lasted only a second.
He hurt. A lot. A million galaxies worse than when Greg Moore had punched him. He wanted to close his eyes but couldn"t. The big rainbow was back, leapfrogging over the little one.
I"m supposed to go. I"m supposed to go now.
Luca stood. But only for a moment. His knees wobbled, then quit. His cheek met the thin side of a rock on its way to the dirt and a little river of blood ran toward the highway.
Luca woke in another small clearing. He felt different. Looked different, too. His mottled arms had returned to their normal olive color and his legs were free of their b.l.o.o.d.y Rice Krispie layer. His face, which he remembered falling on, didn"t hurt either.
The Husky was there, looking at Luca with large, sad eyes that looked even larger and sadder beneath the bright light of the full moon. In front of Luca sat a small pile of broken twigs and brittle leaves, gathered like the mini-mountains Dad made for the family campfires, just smaller.
And water was there. A lot of it. All the bottles were warm, but at least 20 were sitting in a big pile of plastic just a few feet away.
Luca looked at the sky. The rainbow was gone.
"It"s coming back," the dog said, though its mouth didn"t move.
Luca shivered. That was un-possible. Dogs didn"t think loud enough to hear.
"Sometimes we do."
This doesn"t feel like my pretending reading mind imagination. This is different. Like someone scratched me on my thoughts.
Luca didn"t like his thoughts being scratched. At least not without being asked first. Mom and dad wouldn"t like it. So he refused out-loud dialogue with the dog, but was willing to follow the husky as it trotted back toward the highway. He grabbed two bottles of water and opened one. Warm, but refreshing.
Luca followed, hearing the rustling of more padded feet slapping the dirt behind him.
He walked for hours, feeling stronger the entire time. He was still warm, warmer than he should be, but a whole lot cooler than he"d been a few hours before. Before he fell down, before he woke to a dog that could talk to his thoughts. Before he woke to a ready-to-go campfire.
Luca didn"t get thirsty again. Every time he felt his mouth start to dry, the husky would appear with another bottle of water.
"I think I"m going to have to name you," Luca finally said, drinking water and rubbing the husky on the snout. "How do you like the name, Dog Vader?"
The dog whimpered. "It"s good for now."
Luca stroked the Husky"s fur.
He"d been walking for hours and though he wasn"t really tired; it was probably past middlenight or even next day. So Luca stopped, lay his head on a smooth rock and closed his eyes. It was only a moment before he was in the twitchy part of dreams, where his body moves a little but his brain moves a lot.
He opened his eyes and saw an Indian. The kind like in the movies. The kind you"re supposed to call Native Americans. The Indian was sitting on a stump looking at Luca right where Dog Vader had been just a moment before. The man smiled.
Luca sat up. "Am I dreaming?" he asked.
"What do you think?" the Indian spoke, his mouth not moving either. His voice didn"t sound like the deep-voiced Indians from the movies though. It sounded like his own voice, a bit, just like the dog"s had.
"Yes," Luca nodded. His floppy hair bounced up and down. "And no."
"You are correct," the Indian smiled.
"Are you Dog Vadar?"
"I am your friend, yes, but I never agreed to that name."
"Can I call you Dog Vadar?"
"No." The man smiled. "But you may call me something else. What would you like to call me?"
"Kick."
"Kick?"
"Yes, like sidekick. Like Robin. From Batman and Robin."
"Okay. But what makes you think that I"m the sidekick?" The Indian continued to smile.
"Because you"re the one following me."
"Then Kick it is," he said with a laugh.
"Where are we going?" Luca asked.
"There," Kick pointed toward the far side of the coastline.
"Are we almost there?"
"Almost."
Luca believed him. He closed his eyes again and didn"t open them until the bright light and white spots came back and told him to. Of course the rainbow agreed. Kick, if Luca wasn"t crazy, was sitting beside him, awake, snout pointed at the rainbow. Luca got up and followed. So did the countless animals behind him.
Luca looked both ways, crossed the street, then ambled over a thin row of rocks separating the road from the sand. He looked at the coastline, then gasped and fell to his knees.
Cats, dogs, birds, and plenty of other animals that weren"t fancy enough for the zoo were there. They were everywhere. Maybe 1,000, though Luca was sorta bad at counting when the counting stuff was spread all over the place.
Luca turned back toward the highway and followed the rainbow. An army of beasts followed.
BORICIO WOLFE.
Streetlights had flickered the entire way from his apartment to Her Majesty"s, but unlike his apartment and the rest of c.r.a.p Alley, currents were crackling at the Circle K. Neon bathed the lot in a cheap glow, which looked especially bright against the backdrop of black.
Boricio laughed out loud at the unlocked cop car and held his grin while looking at the shotgun sitting upright in the back seat. s.h.i.t sure is easy at the end of the world! He opened the trunk of the cruiser and headed inside the Circle K for a bit of light early-morning shopping.
Beer, chips, protein bars, Excedrin, p.o.r.n, everything Hostess makes, a few Cup-A-Soups, and some other sundries made it into the surprisingly large trunk. Boricio slammed the trunk shut, then went back in the store to empty the cash register, just in case. He took the snub-nosed revolver from under the counter and tucked it into his waistband next to his .45, also just in case. After a swift kick to a safe that wouldn"t open and a like it f.u.c.king matters, Boricio was sitting in the front of a police cruiser for the first time in his life.
View"s much better from here.
The few miles to the Mississippi were graveyard quiet, with less than nothing on the radio and the same empty hanging in the air outside. Though Boricio wasn"t sure what he expected to see when he hit the river, it wasn"t anything close to what he actually saw. He figured there"d either be no one or everyone, but a fat river void of boats - save for what looked like three ships sitting out as far as his eyes would go - wasn"t on his radar at all.
If it had been bobbing in the middle of the Mississippi by last sundown, it was gone now.
Looks like it"s time to get the f.u.c.k out of Dodge.
A minute later Boricio was back behind the wheel, with the siren at full bray and the cruiser"s odometer kissing red, headed back into the business district. To see so many buildings, a city that was always busy like this, dead, was a mind f.u.c.k like no other.
After a few miles of nothing, Boricio found himself playing "I Spy" with his sanity. The empty outside was bad enough, but the s.h.i.t he couldn"t put his finger on was a chronic case of Crabs worse. People were missing, but now it seemed like s.h.i.t was missing, too. And he didn"t know what. He could feel things gone, but couldn"t put his finger on what they were. Like memories he couldn"t withdraw from his bank.
He knew billboards were missing, but wasn"t sure which. Seemed like all the chain s.h.i.t was still there, though. Boricio flew by a billboard for Applebee"s advertising their new Stacked, Stuffed, and Topped "Entrees You Deserve!"
That right there"s a swinging sack of c.r.a.p, especially in New f.u.c.king Orleans. Not like the slop makes you sick, but it"s always cold, c.r.a.ppy, or served by some curly c.u.n.t hair pimply faced f.u.c.k who spends 40 minutes giving you the WhatThef.u.c.k? eye. Plus, the p.u.s.s.y up in there is always too old or too young. Never just right. If the world is dead, at least it took Applebee"s with it.
Boricio whistled as he flew by the missing church that everyone knew wasn"t really a church. That one he knew was missing. The big billboard was still there, but other than that, it was just a big empty nothing sitting on the side of the street.
Well, how about that!! Crazy, f.u.c.king s.h.i.t.
Boricio kept fiddling with the radio. Nothing. h.e.l.l, he"d settle for Top 40 right about now, but the nothing on the radio and the nothing on the scanner matched the nothing in the air and all the nothing he"d been driving by.
He was about to drive back home; he"d thought of a few people"s places he"d like to break into if they weren"t there. Some people that had some good s.h.i.t that could keep him high for months. But then, in the middle of the street was a pickup. Unlike the countless other vehicles he"d pa.s.sed, this one had a pa.s.senger standing next to it. The guy was waving for help.
Yee. f.u.c.king. Haw.
Boricio slowed to a stop and gave the siren a celebratory blare as he pulled beside the stranded motorist. The pickup was less than a year old and the dude with the fresh haircut standing next to it was wearing clothes that still held their store-bought creases.
What kind of a.s.shole puts on new clothes to meet the seven f.u.c.king hors.e.m.e.n?
Boricio lowered the window, then leaned his head out and smiled. "Morning, Sir. Need any help?"
The motorist nodded. "Thanks officer, you"re the first car I"ve seen pa.s.s in the last two hours. Any idea what"s happening?"
"Haven"t a clue," Boricio stepped from the cruiser, closed the door behind him, and leaned against the black and white. "Been responding to calls all morning. Didn"t even have time to get my uniform on proper." Boricio gestured at his dirty jeans and the faded indigo polo with a tear on the collar. "Where you from?"
"Gretna, but there"s no one there now. Whole city seems to have disappeared. Same here, I see?"
"Bout half the town"s gone missing," Boricio chewed on the lie, "They sent the rest of us south on reconnaissance. I"m sure happy to have found you. I was about to turn around."
"Any idea what"s going on?"
"Nothing for sure, though we got a call from the feds around 4:00 a.m. saying there was some strange happenings started last night over in Nevada. Nothing certain, but you can imagine how the rumors are flying." Boricio had to swallow his grin, looking at the idiot with the brand new clothes wrestling the idea he"d put there.
"You think it"s some kinda ... alien thing?"
"Probably. Seems like Hollywood"s been predicting somethin" like this forever." Boricio ran his hands through his thick hair then looked up and down both sides of the street. n.o.body else in sight.
Time to figure out if this f.u.c.k knows anything worth knowing.
"I need to check in with dispatch. Anything you can think of for me to tell them?"
"Not much to say. I woke up this morning and everyone was gone. Thought my girlfriend was p.i.s.sed since we had a big blowup last night. Same brand that happens every 28 days or so and she"s never left before, but I"ve never slept on the couch either, so I didn"t think anything of it at first. But then the air got so heavy, know what I mean?"
"No, not sure. We didn"t have anything like that up north, just a bunch of people running and screaming in the streets. What sorta feeling you mean?"
"Well, it was like..." the motorist swallowed hard, "Don"t think I"m crazy or nothing, but it was like the air weighed more, or maybe less, I"m not sure, but it was different. And I could feel it so I knew something was wrong."
"What"d you do?"