Decimate, p.36
Decimate, page 36
Then the front of Big Timber Brewpub is gone.
The noise reaches Dean a split second later. Rattles his bones, tickles his balls.
The front window, the front door, and a chunk of the building’s second-floor offices have been replaced by a giant, yawning mouth fringed with split timbers and shattered glass. Office supplies swirl out of the second-floor hole. Debbie’s desk, which he knows was pushed against the rear wall of her office, has been blown out the back of the building, it looks like. Dean’s never witnessed a force this powerful. And he’s never even heard of one that can make that kind of blast without smoke or flame. This was a pure wave of pressure that tore through the building back to front like an invisible meteor, leaving a hollowed-out interior that’s now lined with dangling, sparking wires and filled with whirling dust. He’s tempted to think it’s sawdust swirling through the air, but it’s not, he realizes. It’s the red dust of demolished brick. If the blast went clear out the back, the staircases inside have been torn to bits. And that means those three idiots on the roof have no chance of escape.
“I’ll do it,” Poe finally says.
“Do what?” Claire asks.
“Climb it!”
Poe races toward the base of the bell tower. Tries the door. Of course it doesn’t open. Every constant door on a memory deck accesses the vault, and the key is high over their heads. But it’s insane what Poe’s proposing. The bell tower looks like it shouldn’t even be able to stand. What will happen if they add Poe’s weight to it?
Then she remembers Poe doesn’t have any weight. Not now. Not here. No heart, no lungs, no blood, and no veins.
“I’ll go with you,” she says.
“Bullshit, you will. If we can kill Vernon on a memory deck, you could fall and break your neck. You’ve both still got bodies, remember? Me, I’m just some kind of Ghostbusters shit.”
And just like that, her brother starts climbing the side of the tower. Suddenly she sees that all the twists and turns and crazy jagged edges are to their advantage. There’d be no climbing if it was a normal, mostly vertical shape. But in this condition, it’s got the lines of a coastal tree gnarled by a lifetime of ocean winds.
Poe crawls over the side of the branching section that juts out over the street, manages to get to all fours on the section’s upward spine, and starts crawling forward.
“Oof,” he says. “Thought I’d be fine if I looked down, but note to file—a fear of heights will follow you into the afterlife.”
“Less talking, more focusing!” Claire cries out.
Poe falls silent and climbs.
The gaping hole in the second floor is widening. Shredded boards tear free in big clean sections with splintered ends. They float out from the front of the building, then tumble to the street as if they’re being released by giant invisible hands. They make loud sawdust-spewing cracks as they land. Then there’s another huge boom that threatens to empty Dean’s bladder.
Using a weapon Dean is sure will change the face of the entire world, Vernon repeats what he did to the first floor to the second. And then the real hell breaks loose. The back part of the roof starts to cave in first; then the roof starts collapsing toward the front of the building’s shell. The square top Flip was crouched behind earlier starts to go. Suddenly all three men are tumbling through the air like rag dolls swept from a high shelf.
They freeze ten feet from the ground.
Behind them, the facade of the building starts to fall. None of them turn to look because they can’t. The only parts of their bodies under their control, it seems, are their faces, rictuses of terror and astonishment, wildly distorted by the blue glow coming from the Land Cruiser. Whatever weapon Vernon just used is not only levitating them but holding them prisoner. In midair.
Slowly, they begin descending. But at just the moment Dean thinks their feet might touch the ground, they stop short of the rubble, Flip Morrison and Buddy Packer flanking the guy Dean doesn’t recognize. Then suddenly Flip and Buddy turn, start floating toward the smoke and wreckage. Three different fires have ignited inside the building where the pub was servicing a full house a little over an hour before.
He’s going to burn them, Dean thinks. Vernon’s going to burn those sons of bitches.
Dean raises his gun, not sure what he’ll do with it.
A mercy killing, maybe. Will that get him killed too?
But instead of floating the two men into the flames, Vernon pitches them forward. In terrible tandem, they each pick up a broken plank from the rubble. When Vernon turns them to face front again, both men are blubbering, staring down at the arms they can’t control.
The third man is still frozen in place, back to his buddies, like someone trapped inside a plaster cast. His friends close in—float in—on either side of him and raise their arms. The man starts to scream, but it’s choked off by the first swinging, punishing blow of Buddy Packer’s arm. Then Flip starts wailing on the guy too, and the blood flies.
“Shit!” Poe screams, and Claire hears his voice has changed.
Crawling up the final slope of the twisted bell tower, to where the cupola rises like a finger that’s bent back from the rest of a pointing hand, her brother is ten years old again. The Poe of that night, the Poe of the pulse. Gore-Tex jacket and tousled hair.
“What happened?”
“I can’t control it. I got scared.”
She’s trying to think of some advice to shout up at him so he can change back to his adult form when she realizes it hasn’t slowed him down any. The intricate gathering of bird gargoyles waiting for him a few yards away might be easier to navigate for someone small.
“Just go with it!”
“Gee, thanks, sis!”
“You volunteered for this, remember?”
“Because I don’t have a body, remember?”
There’s no forgetting it. As before, she’s changed in tandem with him. Looks down to see the bright red jacket she wore that night, mud-splotched hiking boots that seem comically small to her adult eye.
Poe’s reached his destination, and she sees she was right. He’s small enough to sit on the edge of the cupola and hold the ledge above his head with one arm. “How many?”
“All of them!”
“There’s, like, sixteen, Bear!”
“Try for as many as you can.”
Poe reaches up. He’s standing now in a crouch, feet on the edge. One hand gripping the ledge overhead as his other arm reaches into the nest of carved birds that are almost the size of his ten-year-old body. He’s gripping one of its eyes, twisting the stone. It comes free.
“Got one!” he cries. Then he goes for another, and she feels something she hasn’t since they first crossed into this hellscape.
Relief.
Dean fires.
He watched for as long as he could, and then he fired: one, two, three shots in quick and frightened succession. He’s lost track of time, but it feels like a whole minute has gone by since the first man crashed to the rubble, beaten to a pulp, and then, sputtering with sobs, Flip was forced to make his first skull-crushing swing at Buddy Packer.
He’s shot both men. They hang lifelessly in the air. No longer alive to receive commands from whatever the fuck Vernon Starnes has in that Land Cruiser.
Mercy killing, Dean thinks.
Then the Land Cruiser starts to turn in his direction.
Dean runs, surging with confidence that Vernon didn’t spot him in time. But when the Land Cruiser roars around the corner, headlights falling on him, he realizes he was wrong. Then he’s slammed face-first to the pavement by a force he’s got no words for, and suddenly he’s being dragged backward.
At first, Claire’s not sure what her brother’s doing. She saw him put the stones he was able to pull free in the pocket of his jacket; then he climbed down from the edge of the cupola and onto the back of the twisted bell tower’s almost horizontal spine.
“What are you doing?” Claire cries out.
They’re still the children of the pulse, but he’s tucked the stones inside the pocket of an article of clothing that could vanish in an instant. Will it take the stones with it if it does?
“Speeding things up!” he answers. He tosses the wadded-up jacket down to her. She has to run to catch it, but she does. Then she’s unraveling it, feeling the hard lumps inside the pocket, shaking the stones loose into her child-size hand. She drops the jacket, cradling the stones in her hand, races toward the glass storefronts. Grateful to be this short again because it reduces her chance of being seen through the glass.
Dean’s floating now, floating like the men he just killed.
Feeling what they felt.
A sense of being encased in ice while your body fights to break free. It’s like every inch of muscle, every organ inside him, is reacting to a violation it’s never felt before, and he worries that this alone might tear him apart before Vernon’s mad weapon can do him in.
“Vernon!” he shouts, and he hates the groveling sound of his voice.
Dean’s hopes of being brave in a moment like this are dashed. In the end, he realizes, fear does the talking for you. The greatest indignity of all, he thinks.
“It was wrong what was done to you, Vernon. You’re right to be angry. You’ve got every right, Vernon.”
He can see the kid’s face behind the windshield. It’s not easy with the reflection thrown off by the blue light. Vernon’s eyes look dead, the whites of them the same color as the light.
Dean’s floating closer to the nose of the Land Cruiser, like he’s being studied. Inspected.
“I told him not to,” Dean chokes out. “I told your uncle not to bury your mother. I told him to wait until you were out to give her a proper funeral.”
There’s silence, and then a familiar voice says, “But you’re the reason I was there.”
The windows are rolled down, so it’s easy to hear him, and Dean wonders if Vernon rolled the windows down just so he could hear the screams of his dying attackers. And what can Dean say to this accusation?
“You’re the reason I couldn’t stop him,” Vernon says.
“No, Vernon. Please—”
“You’re a bad man too, Sheriff Jorgensen.”
“Vernon, I did what I had to do. That’s all. We only held you—”
“He took my mother away when I was in there. Because of you, Sheriff Jorgensen. He took my mother away, and I couldn’t do—”
Dean crashes to the pavement so hard, pain thunders up both sides of his body. He realizes it’s firing out of his knees, which he landed on. He crumples, the wind knocked out of him. But when he jerks from the terrible pain, he’s got control of his limbs again. And suddenly it seems like a good thing, a very good thing, that Vernon Starnes stopped talking midsentence.
Head spinning, Dean rises to his feet. The Land Cruiser’s horn is blaring. He stumbles sideways out of the headlights until he can get a good look through the driver’s side window and sees Vernon slumped over the steering wheel, the horn screaming from the pressure of his chest.
Vernon Starnes, for all intents and purposes, has been knocked out cold.
Dean runs.
32
After his mother set off for work each morning, the grassy backyard at Uncle Johnny’s house became Vernon’s universe, and that was how his mother wanted it. She’d given him plenty of toys to play with outside because Uncle Johnny didn’t want him in the house when his mother wasn’t around.
“You go off into your own little world when you’re with your army guys, sweet pea. And that’s exactly where I want you to be when you’re home with Uncle Johnny, OK? Just go outside and be in your own little world.” Technically they were called “action figures,” but he called them army guys because the army was apparently something important, and he knew this because Uncle Johnny told him the army was something he could never join because he was too stupid. Vernon knew that boys who were only four years old probably couldn’t join the army anyway, but he also knew Uncle Johnny thought he could never be in it. Not ever. Not even when he was grown.
The ant pile, the grassy shade offered by the evergreen that sprouted from the alley behind his house, and the enormous sidewall of the pool nearby—these were the landmarks of his own city, a place where no one stared or asked questions he couldn’t answer. A place for his army guys to roam. In his head, he called it Vernonville, and when he told his mother this, she laughed and held him close and kissed his forehead and called him “clever.”
The morning of the bad game, he said goodbye to his mother just inside the front door, which was how she wanted it because she was afraid if they said goodbye out on the porch, he would try to follow her all the way to historic downtown Leadville, which was really just a few blocks away but sounded like a magical place. She gave him a big hug and kiss, then called out to Johnny to tell him she was leaving. But as usual, he didn’t say anything back. Then Vernon was alone, and he was nervous suddenly because he couldn’t remember where he’d put his army men after he got done playing with them last time.
He looked on the back porch, on the window ledge near the porch swing where he thought he put them last. But they were gone. He searched the grass, even getting down on his belly and moving his eyes level with the dirt to see if any of them were lying flat and hard to see otherwise. Then he saw where they were, and his heart skipped a beat.
They were in a bad place. They were where he wasn’t supposed to ever go. The rim of the swimming pool, way up high. His mother had made him promise he wouldn’t go anywhere near the pool when he was alone. She would give him swim lessons when they had the time, but right now, he could only get in it with her.
But she’d also told him to play with his men while she was gone. He couldn’t do that if they were way up high. Still, the distance between the ground and the swimming pool’s rim seemed like the height of the Empire State Building. It confused him, gave him a little sick feeling in his stomach, to see his army guys up there because he knew who probably put them there, and it didn’t seem right. His mom didn’t do it. Miss Clara, the woman who cleaned for Uncle Johnny every other week, wouldn’t either; she always lined them up neatly on the window ledge next to the porch swing. She was nice to Vernon, sometimes helped him with words he couldn’t understand. So it had to be Uncle Johnny. But why? Was it a game?
He placed his hands on the metal ladder and started to climb.
Something small and hard ricocheted off the side of the pool. A second later Vernon felt a biting pain in his shoulder. A rock, maybe. But it was going so fast there was no way it could have fallen out of the sky. It was thrown, and a grown-up had to have thrown it because that’s how hard it hit him.
But his army guys were more important than stupid rocks.
He started climbing again. The next rock struck him right between the shoulder blades. He wasn’t expecting it, but the pain was much worse than the first. A little jerking cry went up from him. A sound a baby would make, not a big boy like him. And his mother wanted him to try to act like a big boy when he could.
But this time the rock felt hard and round. And that’s how he definitely knew it was Uncle Johnny who had thrown it. Because it wasn’t a rock, it was a marble, and his uncle had a tin of them. Just the week before, he’d made a joke to some of his friends who were over. “I better keep some on hand since my sister’s kid lost all of his the second he was born.” And then his mother had come in from the backyard with an angry look on her face, and everyone had gotten real quiet.
He realized that if this was his uncle’s idea of a game, then it was probably meant to make him more normal. Because that’s what he always yelled at Vernon about—being more normal. Sometimes when his mother wasn’t there, Uncle Johnny pushed him away from things he wasn’t supposed to have, sometimes hard enough for him to hit walls. But that only happened when he took too many of something they needed to share, something they might run out of.
Not his army guys. His army guys belonged to him, so it didn’t make any sense that Uncle Johnny would take these from him. Unless Uncle Johnny finally wanted to play a game with him, and this was it. And so Vernon thought he should play along because he knew it made his mother nervous to leave them alone together, and so, if they could find a game to play, even if it hurt, it might make things easier.
Vernon started climbing again.
Then suddenly it felt like his right eye had caught fire. He couldn’t see out of it. The next thing he knew, he’d fallen to the dirt. A marble had whacked off the side of the pool and hit him in the face.
I don’t like this game, Vernon thought. I don’t like this game at all.
He didn’t get his army men. Instead, he started back toward the house, and he tried to keep his head down as he walked in case Uncle Johnny threw another marble, but he couldn’t resist looking up, and when he did, he saw a shadow move in Johnny’s bedroom window.
Then Johnny left. He wasn’t supposed to. He made promise after promise to Vernon’s mom that he wouldn’t leave Vernon alone, but sometimes he left for an hour or two and came back with funny-smelling breath. Vernon, knowing there was more of something called danger when he was alone, would sit in a small room and rock back and forth, because the movement made the thoughts in his head slow down, until Johnny returned.
He didn’t do that this time. Instead, he went to the closet in the kitchen where Miss Clara kept the things she cleaned the house with. He was remembering her accident from a few weeks before, how she fell and Vernon’s mom had to bring her water and they almost called a doctor. Later, he asked her if she’d had what they called a heart attack, and she said no. Explained to him that she’d made a mistake and that’s why she fell down. She had accidentally poured bleach into a bucket that had something called ammonia in it, and it made something called fumes, and these were bad. She breathed them in through her nose, and they made it so she couldn’t stand up right, and that’s why her mom had to help her. Miss Clara had taken him to the closet, showed him the little mask she started using while she cleaned—Just to be safe, she said—and showed him the bottles and said, “These two. Never mix these two, OK? It can be a very, very bad thing, Vernon.”
