Petrified (32 page)

‘One of the flying things took Tory and then the other one came down and smashed Jay to bits.'

‘OK, OK, take it easy,' Kenny told her. He looked around, and then he said, ‘Seems like they've gone now, anyhow.'

He used one of the bent uprights to help himself stand up. Now he could see what was left of Jay, glistening in the street light. He clamped his hand over his mouth and retched.

‘Jesus,' he said, with his eyes watering, and he crossed himself. ‘You weren't fucking joking, were you?'

‘We need to call somebody,' said Pat, her voice quaking. ‘We need to call nine-one-one.'

Kenny looked up. ‘What were those things? Like, what the fuck were they?'

‘I don't know. Just call nine-one-one.'

Kenny took his cellphone out of his coat pocket. He punched out 911, but he had lifted his phone only halfway up to his ear when there was a shuddering bang on the metal roof, right above his head. This was followed by a furious flurry of scratching. He looked up and saw eight curved claws hooked around the edge of the guttering.

‘
Pat
,' he said, and pointed upward. ‘
It's landed on the roof
.'

There was a rattling noise, and some more scratching, and then another harsh screech. A creature's head appeared, upside down, staring at him with yellowish-green eyes. Kenny took one step backward, and then another. The creature didn't move, but continued to stare at him. It was hideous, this thing, whatever it was, but it was expressionless, and it was impossible to tell what it might be thinking. Maybe it wanted to smash him to bits, too. Or maybe it was just curious.

He slowly raised his cellphone to his ear. A voice was repeating, ‘Nine-one-one. What is your emergency, please?'

Kenny had never felt so frightened in his life. ‘We're at the Palumbo Playground. We've been attacked by these things.'

‘What things, sir?'

‘These flying things, like demons.'

‘Excuse me, sir. Did you say “demons”?'

‘They've taken one of us. Tory. And they've killed another one, Jay.'

‘When you say “demons”, sir, are you talking about a gang called The Demons?'

The creature blinked at him, its eyelids closing upward, like a frog's, and he saw a gray forked tongue flicker out of its beak.

‘No, I mean real demons! They have horns and tails and they can fly, and they killed my best friend Jay and took a girl called Tory. For Christ's sake, you have to send somebody before they kill us, too!'

‘A patrol car is already on the way, sir. Just try to stay calm.'

‘How can I stay calm when there's one of them sitting on the roof and it's staring at me like it wants to bite my fucking head off?'

‘Please, sir, stay calm. You don't have to use that kind of language.'

‘My best friend has been smashed to pieces! What other kind of language do you suggest I use? Fucking Arabic?'

‘Sir—'

Before the emergency operator could say any more, however, the creature came scuttling into the playhouse in a sudden rush, dragging its wings in behind it. It came across the ceiling, upside down, and gripped Kenny by the neck with its claws. Kenny tried to cry out, but the creature's claws were so sharp that they pierced his carotid artery and penetrated his windpipe with a hiss of air. He dropped his cellphone and desperately seized the creature's forearm, trying to pull its claws out, but the creature was far too strong for him, and he was already spurting bright red blood out of his neck and all down his coat.

Pat whimpered, climbed on to her feet, and started to climb awkwardly over the handrail. She managed to swing both legs over and drop down on to the rubbery play surface. Then, still whimpering, she ran toward the yellow gate that led out into the main playground area. She was so terrified that she found it difficult to make her legs move one in front of the other, and to keep her balance. She almost felt like falling to her knees and letting the creatures catch up with her.

She was two-thirds of the way toward the gate when she heard screeching, directly above her. She didn't look up. She didn't dare, she just kept stumbling on, past two other playhouses and a swing set.

She heard another screech, and the
flap-flap-flapping
of wings. Oh God, she thought, it's going to get me. It's going to fly down and smash me into bits, the same as it did to Jay. But still she kept on running, and still she didn't look up. Maybe she was going to die but she didn't want to see her own death coming.

She was only ten feet away from the gate when something fell on to the play surface next to her, and bounced. It had a long mane of bloody blonde hair and she realized that it was Tory's head. She stopped, totally shocked, as the head rocked to a rest beside the fence. Then, suddenly, she was struck on the shoulder by something heavy and wet, a severed leg, and then by a deluge of warm blood and slippery human remains.

She looked up. Her face looked as if she were wearing a scarlet mask and her hair was drenched. The creature was slowly wheeling around in the air and gliding off to the west. She could see the street light shining through the thin grayish skin that covered its wings. It let out a screech, and then started to flap away. Pat didn't know it, but it had taken what it had come for, which was Tory's living heart. The rest of Tory, it had simply dropped to the ground, unwanted.

THIRTY-SIX

Tuesday, 3:12 a.m.

S
tephen let Kayley out of the front door of the Utopia Diner, set the alarm, and locked the door behind him.

‘What a great night,' he said, buttoning up his brown tweed overcoat. ‘And did Lenny tell you who was sitting at table twelve? Don Williams from
Playboy
magazine, who writes all of their Best Bar reviews. Not only that, he smiled a lot.
And
he told Lenny that the lobster mash was to die for.'

Kayley stood on tiptoe and gave him a kiss on the cheek. ‘I can't believe it's all working out so well. It's better than we ever dreamed of, isn't it?'

They walked south along Second Street together, arm-in-arm. At this time of the morning, it was almost deserted. This was a part of Old Town Philly that until five years ago had been tatty and neglected. Stephen Mars had been one of the first bar owners and restaurateurs to start bringing it back to life, and now the Utopia Diner was rapidly making its name as one of the city's classiest nightspots, where moneyed thirty-somethings came to eat sophisticated tapas and crab cakes and drink Martinis and admire themselves in its mirrored walls. In the past year, more than fifteen new bars and restaurants had opened up all around them.

Stephen had risked everything he owned. He had mortgaged his house and invested all of his savings, but now his self-belief was beginning to pay dividends.

Kayley said, ‘How about we take a couple of days of down time? We don't have to do anything special. Stay in bed all day and watch TV.'

‘Maybe. I don't know. I have the year-end accounts to go through, and all the new winter menus.'

‘You
never
take any time off. It's bad for you. Look what it did for your marriage.'

‘Yeah, I know. But I'm always worried that if I take any time off, something disastrous is going to happen when I'm not there. Like everybody in the diner is going to go down with E. coli poisoning, or the building's going to burn to the ground.'

‘Stephen, you have the most brilliant staff ever. You have to trust them now and again. Lenny is absolutely the best manager I've ever worked for.'

‘I'll think about it, OK?'

‘I wish you would. You know, we could even have sex.'

‘Sex, huh?' Stephen nodded in exaggerated approval. ‘That would be a novelty.'

Stephen and Kayley hadn't been attracted to each other at first sight. For starters, Stephen had been married to Margie when they met, whom he had dated since high school, and he and Margie had a boy aged seven and a girl aged three. And he was a workaholic. He had joined a realty company in Glenside when he left college, but he had quickly struck out and started his own business selling multimillion-dollar properties in and around Jenkintown.

He was tall, dark and serious, and he always looked as if he had something on his mind. This was because he always did, and it was always business.

Kayley on the other hand was businesslike without being driven. She was small, with a raven-haired bob and a pale, heart-shaped face. She had always wanted to be a dancer but she was much too full-breasted and apart from that she had absolutely no sense of musical timing. Instead, she had found work behind the bars of several downtown hotels, and then at a trendy cocktail bar on Market Street called Lucca's. That was where Stephen had first seen her, and from where he had eventually bribed her away to run his bar at Utopia. To begin with, he had been impressed by her efficiency and her people skills, more than her breasts.

When Utopia had first opened, Stephen and Kayley had worked together from morning till night with hardly a word spoken between them. Then one night last September, they had worked until it was too late for Stephen to go home. He had booked a hotel room at the Sheraton on Society Hill, and when he locked up the diner, he had simply said, ‘Why don't you stay with me tonight?'

He had never been quite sure why he had asked her, and Kayley had never been quite sure why she had said yes, but she had. They had been lovers ever since.

They had reached the concrete parking structure on Second Street where Stephen always left his Toyota, and they were just about to walk into the low main entrance when they became aware of a howling noise, somewhere in the distance. They both stopped, and looked at each other.

‘What is
that
?' asked Kayley. ‘Is that a train whistle?'

‘I don't think so,' said Stephen, looking around. ‘Where's it coming from? It's more like – I don't know –
singing
.'

But the noise quickly grew louder and louder, and more and more discordant. Soon it sounded like hundreds of mourners at a funeral, all keening at once – a dismal, penetrating, high-pitched chorus that set their teeth on edge and made windows rattle all the way down the street. Dogs began to bark and car alarms were set off, even as far as Lombard Street. The noise became so overwhelming that Stephen and Kayley had to clamp their hands over their ears.

‘
What is it
?' Kayley shouted. But Stephen didn't have time to answer her before she could see for herself what was causing it. In the sky above them, which was already dark, scores of darker shapes appeared, howling as they flew. They were slowly circling over Old City Philly in a swirling black cloud, their wings flapping and their long tails twisting like snakes. They flew in unison, like a flock of migrating birds, dipping and turning as the crosswind caught them.

The stocky black night attendant came out of the parking garage with his baseball cap on backward and stood beside them, staring up at the sky.

‘Now
that's
what I call scarifying,' he shouted, over the howling. ‘What the hell
are
those things? They sure enough ain't bats, and they sure enough ain't birds. No birds that
I
ever saw before, anyhow.'

‘I don't have any idea what they are,' Stephen shouted back at him. ‘They look like some kind of flying reptile to me. I expect they're harmless.'

As soon as he said that, though, they heard a woman screaming, somewhere in the next street. Chillingly, it reminded Stephen of a middle-aged woman he had seen two weeks ago on 52nd Street, whose pelvis had been crushed by a bus. It was the same cry of agony and utter hopelessness. Then they heard more screams, both women and men, from the direction of Market Street, which is where they had just come from. A few seconds later, they heard shots, six or seven of them, and a man shouting.

‘Maybe we'd better get out of here,' Stephen suggested. ‘I don't know what's happening but I don't like the sound of it. Otis? You got my keys?'

‘Sure thing, Mr Mars. Coming right up.'

They heard more screams, and more shouting, and then an ambulance siren whooping, and then another. The flying creatures kept up their keening, which rose and fell as the wind caught it, and made it sound even more unearthly, but now they were
screeching
, too – sharp, harsh, exultant screeches. Stephen grabbed Kayley's arm and said, ‘Come on. Maybe those things aren't so goddamned harmless after all.'

They had just entered the fluorescent-lit interior of the parking structure when they heard a man shouting, ‘
Help me
!
Help me
!' and the sound of running feet.

Stephen said, ‘Stay here, OK?' and stepped back out on to the sidewalk.

He looked northward up Second Street, and saw a young man in a light gray suit running toward him, grimacing with effort, his orange necktie flapping over his shoulder like a flame. He wasn't just running, he was
sprinting
, as fast as he humanly could.

‘
Help
!' he choked. ‘
For God's sake, help me
!'

At first glance, it appeared to Stephen as if the young man was being followed by his own giant shadow, which jerked and jumped as he ran past storefronts and alleys and parked cars and street lights. But then he realized that it wasn't a shadow at all. It was one of the dark creatures that they had seen swarming in the sky. Its wings were flapping steadily and evenly, its wing tips scuffing the road surface with every downbeat. It didn't look as if it was in any kind of hurry, but it was gaining on the young man with every second.

As they came closer, the creature let out a screech, and then a howl that made Stephen feel as if his scalp were shrinking.

The young man turned his head to see how close the creature was. He stumbled and almost fell over, but he managed to keep running. He didn't shout for help any more. Instead he clenched his teeth and lowered his head and ran even faster.