Creepers (34 page)

Larabee called one of his men to escort Louise and Lisa out. Corelli promised he'd see her later. After they'd gone, Frank turned his attention once more to Larabee. "You have any special procedures for bites from these things?"

"New York Mercy Hospital is handling that."

Of course, Corelli thought. But he said, "A friend of mine's back in the tunnel, and he's been hurt. Send in some men and see to it he gets to Mercy right away."

"Yessir." The lieutenant snapped to, responding instantly to the sound of authority in another's voice.

Fifteen minutes and four cigarettes later, Corelli watched as Larabee's two men returned from the tunnel--alone. "Where the hell is Willie Hoyte?" he demanded, jumping to his feet.

"We don't know, sir. We followed the tunnel all the way back to the burned-out station. Your friend was gone." The young Guardsman looked distinctly bored.

Corelli wanted to complain, but what could he say? "Thanks, anyway," he finally dismissed the two men. Where the hell was Willie? Shit, he never should have left him alone in such a poor condition. If any of the creepers had come back, with Willie being so weak...

After deciding that Willie's fate was out of his hands, Corelli left the subway station to find Louise. At least she was okay. And Lisa. Maybe now they could begin to forget all the terror and horror, all the tears and death. Maybe now they could begin a real life of their own. The thought gladdened Corelli momentarily. Then, again, he thought of Willie. In his gut Frank knew he'd never hear from the leader of Dogs of Hell again; and he knew he'd never have a minute's peace because of it.

It was a no-win situation. It wasn't fair that his new happiness should be overshadowed by Willie's loss. But where, Corelli wondered as he walked into Lisa's hospital room an hour later to find Louise waiting for him, where is it written that life is fair? He took Louise in his arms and held her like he used to hold Jean. A new life was about to start for them, and right now that was all that mattered.

Chapter 16

Ringo and Marcie LaMarr sauntered down Forty-second Street like a king and queen. Ringo had staked out his territory on the strip years before; he was one of the regulars who'd found a home in the honky-tonk world of Times Square. The forty-year-old Ringo might have held a regular job, had a real home and a loving family, but he'd decided there was a better way to live. He collected illegal welfare payments, lived out of an SRO--single-room occupancy--hotel on the Upper West Side, and had already helped Marcie get three abortions. She was his woman, and a family might be nice, but hell, that would put her out of commission for too long. Not many Johns wanted to fuck a pregnant whore.

The Times Square area was a midtown jungle. The dregs of New York drifted into its ever-changing tidal pools on waves of anger, greed, despair, and violence that everywhere else were only undercurrents. Here, along the gaudy, low-life Forty-second Street strip, sex, drugs, and chemical escape were a floodtide that grew after midnight into a raging torrent. While other parts of the city slept, exhausted from a day's frantic pace, Times Square writhed in the ecstasy of a self-induced nirvana.

Ringo loved the strip. He loved to saunter with his woman up and down, back and forth, nodding and saying hello, occasionally making a sale of badly cut coke or oregano "marijuana" to the yokels who drifted onto the strip from the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Being recognized on the strip as someone made Ringo feel like a man, for he knew that anywhere else in New York's career-oriented society he'd be considered no better than any of the stray dogs that are so problematic.

Marcie was just along for the ride. If she weren't with Ringo, she'd be with someone else. She needed men almost as much as she needed smack to veil her eyes to the strip's sordid reality. If her father hadn't raped her when she was only twelve, then run off leaving her mother with four other kids, life might have turned out differently. But he had done those things, and in her own way, Marcie drifted from man to man looking for the security her father had taken with him. As for the tricking, well, Ringo needed money; he was just down on his luck for the moment. He'd pull his shit together one of these days. In the meantime, the world was full of Johns willing to pay for Marcie to be nice to them--for ten or fifteen minutes. Besides that, Ringo was her husband, and if he wanted her to fuck for money, she'd do it.

Ringo nodded to three fat cops lolling around near a porno bookstore. They didn't acknowledge him, but they knew who he was. Everyone on the strip knew Ringo LaMarr. The cops were out-of-place here--this was the people's land, not the cops'. They stayed because sometimes there was trouble and they had to break it up. Ringo knew that if it'd been up to the cops, they'd just as soon everyone on the strip killed one another. And for that he hated all cops.

"Where we goin'?" Marcie asked in her petulantly sweet voice.

"Meeting Bubba in fifteen minutes," Ringo said after checking out his stolen four-hundred-dollar chronograph watch. "He's to be at the Greek place on Eighth Avenue. We get something to eat and score some grass."

"You gonna work me tonight?" Sometimes Ringo wanted to be alone and he sent her out on the stroll. They kept a shabby room in a nearby hotel for that purpose.

"Not tonight, baby. I think we gonna party tonight."

"What's up, sugar?" Marcie asked, squeezing his arm.

"Jes' feel likes partying, that's all," he responded as they reached the corner of Seventh Avenue. Ringo noticed immediately that something was up. He knew the strip as well as he knew the track marks on his left arm. There were too many cops here tonight "'Scuse me, sir," Ringo said politely to a policeman standing at the entrance to the subway. "Is there some trouble hereabouts?"

The cop looked Ringo up and down all at once, immediately taking in the purple suit, black shirt with white tie, cherry-colored platform shoes, and oversized white felt fedora. A smile flickered, then died on his lips as he beheld Marcie. She made this dude look like he'd just stepped out of the exclusive Paul Stuart men's clothing store. "The TA's doing some work down in the subway. It'll be closed until six this morning."

"That so?" Ringo didn't believe it for a second, but he was shrewd enough to see the cop did. "Well, good luck, sir." He pulled Marcie back toward Eighth Avenue, where they were to meet Bubba Leroy in ten minutes.

"I never heard of the subway being closed before," Marcie whined.

"That's 'cause it ain't never been closed before. Mark my words, sugar, something big's up tonight."

"What you mean?"

Ringo shrugged. "It's a feelin' I gets in my bones. There's gonna be trouble on the strip tonight, real big trouble."

Marcie shivered. She didn't like violence the way Ringo did, although she'd been known to beat the shit out of an unruly John on occasion. "Maybe we should get outta here, honey. You wanna party, let's do it uptown."

Ringo roared with laughter. "You shittin' me, babe? And miss all the fun? No way. Now, come on, I got some wheelin' and dealin' to do."

As Ringo pulled her back down the street, Marcie looked over her shoulder at the subway entrance, where policemen were gathering like vultures over a fresh corpse. Ringo was happy, but Marcie was just plain scared.

Dolchik walked out of the TA office into the long, wide corridor that linked the entrances to the subway with the token booth and turnstiles. His footsteps echoed down the hallway, ricocheted off the walls, then sailed back to him. Never had he seen the subway so empty. New York City never slept, and at any hour of the day or night there was always someone waiting for a train. Always. But not this morning.

The idea of an empty subway system was a fanciful thought that often lulled him to sleep. Now that the dream was a stark reality, Dolchik drew no comfort from it. The subway was empty because of a nightmare, and in the few hours left before dawn, he prayed the nightmare didn't worsen. He ducked under a turnstile and surveyed the empty station. Tomorrow it would again be full of running people, always running, oblivious of tonight, acting as if nothing had ever happened down here.

"Captain? Captain!" a distant voice called out to him.

Dolchik relinquished his daydreaming as one of his creeper team frantically signaled him from the doorway of the TA office. "We've got trouble, Captain. They want you on the walkie-talkie."

A minute later Dolchik hustled into the office, his face red from exertion and his eyes wide with expectation. He grabbed the proffered microphone and pushed the button. "Dolchik here. What is it?"

"It's Larabee, Captain. We seem to be running into a timing snag."

"What the fuck are you talking about, Lieutenant?" Dolchik held his breath. This operation was a first--hopefully a last; there were so many things that could go wrong.

"It seems it's taking everyone longer to move these things than expected, Captain. If you remember, the idea was to corral them no farther north than Thirty-fourth Street."

"I remember, you shithead," Dolchik screamed, beginning to sense disaster. "So what's the problem?"

"The problem is the other teams pushed these things north, like planned, but we weren't able to give them a backup. When they got to Washington Square, they just kept going on up the Eighth Avenue line, and there was no one to stop them. Same up at Thirty-fourth Street. Captain, the creepers are headed for Forty-second Street all across town."

Dolchik held the phone tightly, listening to Larabee's labored breathing. His computerized mind sifted the information, then reassembled it. It had occurred to him to clear the aboveground areas near the killing ground, but he nixed the idea because he was convinced the Guard could keep the problem belowground. But, goddammit, if the creepers were caught in a squeeze at Times Square, they'd head for the streets, sure as shit. Maybe it wasn't so bad. Maybe.

"Larabee, we've been pretty much in the dark up here. What's the count on these things?"

"Captain, they're like cockroaches in a dirty kitchen on a hot August night. They're coming out of the fucking woodwork."

"Jesus," Dolchik hissed. "You killed any?"

"Hundred, hundred and fifty, maybe. But that don't touch it. They run and leap like frogs with a firecracker up their ass. Hell, if it weren't for the casualties, I'd really laugh."

"How many hurt?"

"One dead, four or five chewed up pretty bad, maybe a dozen or so with superficial wounds."

Dolchik sat down in his chair. Why hadn't he expected to hear it? Why hadn't he thought the creepers would attack to defend themselves? Had he really allowed himself the dream that the Guard would just skip on down into the subway and rout all these things, killing them and neatly disposing of their bodies? Men were being hurt and killed . . . and that was only Larabee's report, from one quadrant of the city; there were three others. Christ!

"Have the casualties been taken to New York Mercy?" Tom Geary would have his hands full.

"Yessir. And one more thing, sir. A guy, a kid, and some dame came walking out of the tunnels bigger than life a while back. He said his name was Corelli and that he wanted to talk to you."

Dolchik actually smiled. So, despite all odds, Frank Corelli was still alive. Well, well. There was no longer any point trying to keep him quiet. From what Larabee had just said, the news would break of its own accord, Corelli or no Corelli. "Where is he now?"

"He's at New York Mercy. The kid with him was pretty badly banged up, near's I could tell. The woman looked in shock."

"Okay, leave it to me. If anything changes, let me know at once." He signed off and sat back. Woman and child. They could only be Louise Hill and . . . Was it possible the child was Lisa Hill? Alive? Jesus, what next? A picture of Times Square swarming with creepers filled his mind, and he went straight for the phone.

The report from the Disease Control Center in Atlanta had come back late yesterday. The blood sample taken from Lester Baker showed a mutated form of rabies capable of reproducing at nearly a thousand times the normal rate. Anyone bitten by a creeper would be dead--or worse, a carrier of the disease--within twenty-four hours if not injected with a megadose of antirabies vaccine.

At least there's a cure, Dolchik thought while he waited to be connected with the mayor's office. "Russ, we've got a shitload of trouble. There's a swarm of those things running wild down in the subway and they've already taken bites outta some of our men. You'd better send some of your gray-flannel boys to New York Mercy to make sure the victims are quarantined . . . and to apprise the doctors of the situation."

There was a long pause, an ominous silence. Then Matthews spoke. His voice was tight with anger. "Dolchik, this is exactly what I didn't want to happen. I wanted to keep this on the q.t."

"In that case, you'd better sit down for this one: there's an army of creepers heading for Times Square."

"Jesus fucking Christ," Matthews exploded. "Can't you stop them?"

"The best I can do is suggest you get as many men in blue up to Forty-second Street and clear the streets within two blocks of any subway entrance. Word is they're coming up the Eighth Avenue line, but chances are they'll fan out onto the Seventh Avenue and Lexington Avenue lines, too."

"The Lexington Avenue station is in Grand Central Station," Matthews whispered in awe.