Carrion Comfort (56 page)

What next? Worst-case scenario: the man with the lizard eyes was one of
them
, one of Saul’s mind-monsters, and his intentions toward Natalie were not friendly. The stakeout in the restaurant was a backup for whatever move this guy made. Probably more in the lobby. If they left and Gentry followed, he would be immediately visible. He had to precede them to follow them— but which way?

Gentry paid his bill and returned for his topcoat just as Natalie and the man rose from their seats. She looked straight at Gentry from twenty feet away, but there was no recognition in her eyes; there was
nothing
there. Gentry moved quickly through the lobby and paused by the front door to make a show of tugging on his coat.

The man led Natalie to the elevator, pausing to make an obscene gesture at another man seated on a worn couch. Gentry took a chance. Natalie was in Room 312. Gentry had asked for Room 310. The hotel had only three floors of guest rooms. If the man with the dead eyes was taking her anywhere but her room, Gentry would lose them.

He crossed quickly to the stairway, took the stairs two and three at a time, stood panting for ten seconds on the top landing, and opened the door in time to see the man follow Natalie into 312. He stood there for almost a minute, waiting to see if any of the others from the lobby were following. When no one appeared he moved lightly down the hall to pause with three fingers touching the door to Natalie’s room. He found the grip of the Ruger and then decided against it. If this man was like Saul’s Oberst, he could make Gentry use the revolver on himself. If he wasn’t like the Oberst, Gentry did not think he would need the weapon.

Jesus, thought Gentry, what if I break in and this is some good friend of Natalie’s who she’s inviting up? He remembered the expression on her face and silently slid the passkey into the lock.

Gentry went in fast, filling the short interior hallway, seeing the man seated, turning, opening his mouth to speak. Gentry took half a second to notice Natalie’s semi-nakedness and the terror visible on her face and then he swung his arm up and then down, bringing his fist down on the top of the man’s head as if he was driving a huge nail with the base of his hand. The man had been rising; now he went deep into the sagging cushion, bounced twice, and sprawled unconscious across the left arm of the chair.

Gentry made sure the man was out of action and then he turned to Natalie. Her blouse was unbuttoned, bra undone, but she made no move to cover herself. Her entire body began shaking as if she were in the beginning of a seizure. Gentry pulled off his coat and draped it around her just as she collapsed forward into his arms, her head snapping from side to side in silent negation. When she tried to speak, her teeth were chattering so hard that Gentry could hardly understand her. “Oh . . . R-Rob . . . hub . . . hub . . . he tried t . . . to . . . I . . . c-c-couldn’t d-d-do any—y-thing.”

Gentry held her, supported her, and stroked her hair. He was wondering feverishly what the next move should be.

“Oh, G-g-god, I’m . . . g-going . . . to . . . b-be sick.” Natalie rushed into the bathroom.

Gentry could hear retching sounds from behind the closed door as he bent over the unconscious man, lowered him to the floor, frisked him quickly and efficiently, and lifted his billfold. Anthony Harod, Beverly Hills. Mr. Harod had about thirty credit cards, a Playboy Key Card, a card identifying him as a member in good standing of the Writers Guild of America, and other plastic and paper tying him to Hollywood. There was a key to a Chestnut Hills Hotel in his jacket pocket. Harod was beginning to stir very slightly when Natalie came out of the bathroom, her clothing set right, her face still damp from washing. Anthony Harod moaned and rolled over on his side.

“God
damn
you,” Natalie said with feeling and unleashed a kick at the fallen man’s groin. She was wearing solid, low-heel loafers and the energy behind the kick would have served well in a forty-yard field goal attempt. She aimed for Harod’s testicles, but Harod was rolling over and the blow took him just inside the hip, flipping him over twice and bringing his head hard up against the wooden leg of the bed.

“Easy, easy,” said Gentry and knelt to check the man’s pulse and breathing. Anthony Harod of Beverly Hills, California, was still alive, but was quite unconscious. Gentry moved to the door. The room had no bolt and chain; the other lock was on. He came back and put his arm around Natalie.

“Rob,” she gasped, “he was
in
my m-m-mind. He m-made me do things, made me say things . . .”

“It’s all right,” said Gentry. “We’re going to get out of here right now.” He gathered up her extra shoes, snapped her suitcase shut, helped her into her coat, and threw her camera bag over his own shoulder. “There’s a fire escape going down to that alley. Do you think you can get down there with me all right?”

“Yes, but why do we have to . . .”

“We’ll talk when we’re out of here. My car’s just down the block. Come on.”

It was dark out. The fire escape was sagging and slippery and Gentry expected half the hotel staff to come rushing out when he dropped the screeching, rusted ladder the last eight feet. No one appeared at the back-door.

He helped Natalie down the last few rungs and they moved quickly down the dark alley. Gentry smelled snow and rotting garbage. They emerged on Germantown Avenue, went west thirty yards, and came around the corner ten yards from Gentry’s Pinto. No one was in sight; no one emerged from the dark storefronts or distant hotel as Gentry turned on the ignition, shifted gear, and swung onto Chelten Avenue.

“Where are we going?” asked Natalie. “I don’t know. We’ll just get the hell out of this place and talk it over.”

“All right.”

Gentry turned east onto Germantown Avenue and had to slow for a trolley going the same direction. “Hell,” he said.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing. I just left my suitcase in a room at your hotel.”

“Anything important in it?”

Gentry thought of the changes in shirt and slacks and chuckled. “Nope. And I’m sore’s hell not going back.”

“Rob, what’s going
on
?”

Gentry shook his head. “I thought maybe you could tell me.”

Natalie shivered. “I never felt . . . felt anything like that before. I couldn’t do anything. It was like my body wasn’t my own anymore.”

“So we know they’re real,” said Gentry.

Natalie laughed a little too loudly. “Rob, the old lady . . . Melanie Fuller . . . she’s
here.
Somewhere in Germantown. Marvin and the others have seen her. And she killed two more of the gang members last night. I was with . . .”

“Wait a minute,” said Gentry, passing the trolley and a city bus marked SEPTA. The brick street lay straight and empty ahead. “Who’s Marvin?”

“Marvin’s the leader of the Soul Brickyard Gang,” said Natalie. “He . . .”

Something hit the Pinto hard from behind. Natalie bounced forward, using her hands to keep from hitting her head against the windshield. Gentry cursed and swiveled to look behind him. The huge grill of the city bus filled the Pinto’s rear window as it accelerated to hit them again. “Hang on!” shouted Gentry and floored the accelerator. The bus came on fast, tapping the Pinto’s rear end again before the little car began moving ahead.

Gentry got the Pinto up to fifty-five, shaking and bouncing over the irregular brick surface and the ruts of trolley tracks. Even through the closed windows he could hear the roar of the bus’s diesel as the huge vehicle accelerated through half a dozen gears to catch up. “Oh, damn,” said Gentry. A block ahead, a semi trailer was backing into a loading space, temporarily obstructing the avenue. Gentry considered going up onto the sidewalk on the right, saw an old man rummaging through a trash container, and took a hard left into a narrow street, the rear end of the Pinto bouncing off the curb in a controlled slide. From the sound of it, Gentry guessed that the rear bumper had been torn loose during the first collision and was dragging behind them. Roughhouses flashed by on either side. Junkers, new model cars, and wheel-less derelicts lined the right curb.

“It’s still coming!” cried Natalie.

Gentry checked the rearview mirror in time to see the huge bus take the turn by bouncing up onto the sidewalk, taking out two no-parking signs and a mailbox, then accelerating down the hill after them in a cloud of diesel fumes. Gentry saw the small dent in the wide front bumper from the first tap. “I really don’t believe this,” said Gentry.

The street came to a T-intersection at the bottom of the hill, a snowy railroad embankment ahead of them, vacant lots and ware houses to the east and west. Gentry took a hard left, heard the rear bumper tear loose, listened to the little four-cylinder engine revving its heart out. “Can they catch us?” breathed Natalie as the bus crashed around the corner behind them and roared partway up the embankment before bounding back onto the pavement. Gentry caught a glimpse of a driver in khaki, straight-arming the large steering wheel, dark figures lurching in the aisle behind him.

“It can’t catch us unless we do something stupid,” said Gentry. The narrow street cut sharply to the right in front of an abandoned factory, ran fifty yards downhill between empty tenements and brick-strewn lots, and dead-ended at the railway embankment. There had been no dead-end sign.

“Like this?” said Natalie. “Yeah.” Gentry skidded the Pinto to a stop in the narrow turnaround. Gentry knew that there was no way the Pinto was going to climb thirty feet of junk-strewn hillside. To their left, an empty brick building offered a high gate and twenty feet of chain link fence separating a muddy parking lot from the street. Gentry thought that it was possible that the Pinto could crash through the gate, but he doubted that the lot would be an improvement over their present position. To their right, a row of empty two-story buildings showed boarded-up windows and doors covered with graffiti. A narrow alley ran east from the street.

Behind them, the bus made the right turn and started down the hill. It growled like some gut-shot beast as the driver shifted down two gears.

“Out!” shouted Gentry. He had time to grab Natalie’s suitcase, she took the camera bag. They ran for the alley on their right.

The bus was moving fast when it struck the Pinto a glancing shot on the left rear fender. The smaller vehicle spun completely around, metal flying, rear window popping out, as the bus bounced left, almost tipping over as the right wheels gouged up the embankment, brake lights flashing as it crashed through the chain link fence and came to a stop in the frozen mud of the parking lot. Gears ground and the bus backed over the flattened fence, caught the Pinto squarely in the passenger-side door, and shoved the rental car backward until it caught on the curb not twenty feet from the alley where Gentry and Natalie watched. The Pinto struck a fire hydrant and flipped over with a great tearing of metal. No water came from the fractured hydrant, but the stink of gasoline filled the night air.

“This is a nightmare,” said Natalie.

Gentry realized that he had pulled the Ruger free and was holding it in his right hand. He shook his head and dropped it into the pocket of his topcoat.

The bus shifted gears and pulled into the center of the street, dragging tatters of chrome and engulfing them in diesel fumes. Gentry pulled Natalie a few feet deeper into the four-foot wide alley.

“Who’s doing this?” whispered Natalie. “I don’t know.” For the first time, Gentry believed, in his gut rather than just in his consciousness, that human beings were capable of doing what Saul and Natalie had actually experienced. He remembered reading
The Exorcist
years before and understanding the agnostic priest’s glee at witnessing a power that could only be demonic in nature. The existence of demons suggested, if not proved, the existence of a God the priest had doubted. But what did this incredible series of events prove? Human perversity? The perfection of some parapsychological power that had always been part of being human?

“It’s stopping,” said Natalie. The bus had backed to the embankment and turned left sharply enough to be facing back up the hilly street.

“Perhaps it’s over,” said Gentry. He put his arm around the shivering young woman next to him. “What ever happens, the damn bus can’t get at us here.”

The doors of the bus were on the opposite side of the vehicle, but both of them heard the compressed-air hiss. Gentry could see silhouettes against the pale glow of the interior lights as the passengers moved forward or to the rear. What must they be thinking as they were released after such an insane ride? What was the driver doing now? Gentry could make out only a tall shadow hunched over the wheel. Then he saw the seven passengers moving hesitantly, three around the front of the bus, four around the back. They walked like polio victims with steel braces, like awkwardly handled marionettes. The rest would pause as one shuffled forward, then another. An old man in the lead dropped to all fours and scuttled toward the alley, seeming to sniff the pavement as he came.

“Oh, dear God,” breathed Natalie.

They ran up the narrow alley, jumping over debris, scraping their arms and shoulders against brick. Gentry realized that he was still carrying Natalie’s suitcase in his left hand while he gripped her hand with his right. The end of the alley had rusted wire mesh across it. Behind them, Gentry heard a heavy, animal like panting as someone entered the narrow passage. He let go of Natalie’s hand, used the suitcase and his body as a battering ram, and tore the wire loose.

They emerged on a street that dead-ended to their right, but to their left it ran downhill under a dark railway overpass, and continued north past lighted row houses. Gentry turned left and ran, Natalie passing him before they reached the broken sidewalk. Someone clawed through the wire behind them. Gentry looked over his shoulder and saw a man with white hair and a business suit scramble over tilted slabs of concrete like a frenzied Doberman. Gentry pulled the Ruger out and ran.

There was ice in the darkness under the railroad bridge. Natalie reached it first. Gentry saw her feet fly out from under her and heard her hit hard in the blackness. He had time to slow but still spun and went to one knee.