The Bleeding Season (13 page)

Startled, I took a step back but kept the beam trained on him.  The light reflected off his eyes, causing them to glow, two red orbs cutting the night.  The standoff continued until finally, after a few contemplative sniffs, the rat turned, waddled to the end of the plank, and dropped down into darkness.

The acids in my stomach churned and I belched, tasted beer.  Despite the chill in the air perspiration had beaded along my forehead, and my mind began to clear a bit.
What the fuck am I doing?
  I looked back over my shoulder.  The fog was so thick the dealership across the street was completely concealed by it, though the rooftop lights were just barely visible above the haze.

Something moved behind me.

I spun back around toward the factory, the flashlight in one hand, my nightstick in the other, both leveled in front of me and sweeping across the doorway in unison.  Just beyond the rotted plank, partially shrouded in darkness, stood the woman.

Our eyes met and I offered a subtle nod.

She took a few steps deeper into the building then looked back at me.

I felt myself moving forward, swinging a leg over the plank and climbing through the doorway as if I no longer had complete control over myself.  The flashlight flickered and extinguished.  The darkness mixed with a soft cool breeze, the fear welling up in me in a single frantic rush as I shook the flashlight.  The beam returned, casting a pool of light ahead of me, but by the time my eyes had adjusted I realized the woman was gone.

I stepped over a small pile of rubble and garbage and did my best to ignore the array of gut-wrenching smells.  I swept the light about, searching for her, but found only a graffiti-covered wall and floors thick with debris.  Scratching and then a scurrying sound I recognized as more rats momentarily distracted me, so I swung the light around.

Down a long and narrow hallway to my right, I saw a glint of light but no sign of the woman.

I carefully crossed the room, following the light at the end of the hallway.  It led to another room, smaller and in even worse shape.  I stopped in what was left of the doorway and saw a single candle burning on the floor, garbage strewn from one corner of the room to the next.  The horrible stench of human waste filled the stale air.

The flashlight shook in my hand.  I shut it off, returned it to my belt and gripped my nightstick with both hands.  As I moved into the room, the flickering candlelight lapped the walls, casting shadows like thrashing demons.  The woman was kneeling on the floor in the center of the room, holding something and rocking slowly.  A dirty syringe, a spent book of matches and a blackened spoon lay scattered nearby.  My eyes shifted; she was holding a boy in her arms—the same little boy who had hidden behind her leg at Rick’s apartment building—but now the boy was lifeless.  Cradled, arms and legs dangling, his head lolled to the side, rested in the crook of the woman’s elbow, mouth open, small, swollen tongue protruding, eyes wide but seeing nothing—long dead.

Sinking deeper into madness, I shortened the distance between us.  The woman’s head turned to reveal a face tormented and dirty, eyes bloodshot and terrified, cheeks hollow, dark skin pockmarked.

She glared at me like I was to blame, slowly rocked her dead son in sickly thin, needle-ravaged arms, and whimpered softly.

“You here about the plumbing?”

“No, ma’am,” I answered.

She looked away, eyes gliding to the far wall as if she’d seen something else, something more.  Lips moving silently, she continued to rock the boy in her arms.

My eyes darted about the room, following the edges of light provided by the candle to the far wall, where painted in either red paint or blood were odd symbols that looked almost like hieroglyphics, hastily smeared about.  What was once the door to the room had been suspended between two small stacks of chipped cinderblocks, forming what appeared to be a makeshift altar of some kind.  Something lay beneath it in a heap on the floor, dark and unmoving, but I couldn’t make out what it was.

The woman moved, diverting my attention back to her.  She laid the boy on the filthy floor gently and with great care then began to pull at the belt holding her robe closed.  Bony fingers worked furiously until the belt was undone or torn loose, and the robe had fallen open.  She slid one hand beneath the boy’s head, pulled it closer and leaned over him.  A single small and emaciated brown breast fell free, the nipple elongated and raw.

She held the boy close, guided her nipple to his lips and pumped the loose skin along her breast, lips again moving rapidly but silently.

“Lady,” I managed, “Christ—lady, let me—let me get you and the boy out of here.”

She looked up at me.  “You here about the plumbing?”

“No, I’m not here about the goddamn plumbing!”

Her eyes rolled back in her head as if she’d lost all control of them, and her body bucked, throttled by phantom hands.

I stood frozen as a small appendage emerged directly from the cracked skin along her nipple.  At first I thought it was a long hair.

But then it moved.

Another matching thing broke through the skin, moved in time with the other along the boy’s lips, as if searching for purchase.  The woman’s hand tightened around her breast, and as her nipple burst the shelled back of what appeared to be some sort of beetle or cockroach squirmed free, followed by another and another.  As they bled from her onto the boy’s mouth, forcing their way between his lips and disappearing between them, I realized the hair-like substance had been an antenna.  The insects continued to gush from her in impossible numbers, overflowing in the boy’s mouth like renegade parts of a single clicking, pulsating mass.

I reached blindly for the wall behind me, doubled over and somehow managed to choke back the vomit gurgling at the base of my throat.  I staggered back, steadied myself against the wall, and looked at her.

She was still kneeling next to the boy, but no longer holding him.

The insects were gone.  Her eyes, now unnaturally wide, began to bleed.

“What…what’s happening to me?” I asked.

She lunged for me with inhuman speed and clamped her hands onto my forearm.  Her grip was painful and possessed greater strength than she appeared to have, and the moment her flesh made contact with mine, I felt a surge of energy explode through me like an electrical shock.  My body jerked to rigid attention, and as my head fell back I heard the sound of my nightstick bouncing along the concrete floor.

Horrible flashes of unspeakable carnage flickered through my mind like an old 16mm film.  Faces, such hideous, boil-covered, bloody grinning faces; growls and guttural laughter; fire; the screams of nameless beings engulfed in plumes of brilliant orange flame and blood.  Teeth—fangs—ripping at slabs of human meat, what had once been people hanging upside down and gutted like cattle.  Depravity—depravity like I had never seen—and all of it gushing through me in a single violent stream, disintegrating into a shimmer and a wisp of fog, trailing away from my vision like a spiral of cigarette smoke snaking toward a ceiling.  

But there was no ceiling, only dark sky and thick fog.

I was outside again, standing in the middle of the street between the factory and the car dealership.  My nightstick was on the ground at my feet, but the flashlight was on and clutched firmly in my left hand.  Heart racing, I crouched down, retrieved my baton and bolted for the dealership.

Consumed by the fog, I struggled to maintain my bearings, running as hard and as fast as I could despite the burning in my lungs and the ache in my legs.  And although I could not see it, I knew the evil was still there, still with me.  There, in the fog, chasing, circling me, calling to me in low, tortured growls.

CHAPTER 8

Three days.  Three days of confusion and disbelief, of vague memory and flashes of terror.  Three days of lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, wondering if it was night or day beyond shades pulled shut, of drug-induced sleep, of groggy submission even when I was somewhere near consciousness.  Three days of trying to convince myself I had not gone utterly insane.

The owner of the dealership had gone to work that morning to find me gone without explanation, the door unlocked and the desk where I’d been stationed littered with a pile of spent beer bottles.  Nino had tried several times to contact me via the two-way but I hadn’t responded.  I’d left the dealership and driven back to Potter’s Cove, parked out in front of Rick’s apartment building and waited for him to come home from the club.

At about four o’clock he pulled in and I met him on the street.  Concerned, he invited me in but I declined, and asked him instead about the young black woman and her son who lived in the first-floor apartment when you first walked in.

That apartment was empty, Rick told me.  Had been for months since the last tenant, a single middle-aged man had moved out.  Then she was a squatter and had broken in and was staying there without anyone’s knowledge, I’d insisted, because I’d seen her the other day.  She’d spoken to me the other day.  Her
son
 had spoken to me the other day.

Near total emotional collapse, I explained what had happened, and it was then that Rick insisted I let him drive me home.  I agreed, but only after he promised he’d find out what was going on in that apartment.

I vaguely remember Toni thanking Rick before putting me to bed, then laying there, exhausted and spent, straining to hear their voices in the kitchen until I’d drifted off into something similar to sleep.  At some later point she appeared with a prescription from her boss, pills that would relax me and help me sleep, she promised.  Trust her, she’d said, and I did.

Now, three blurred days later, I found myself parked across the street from Battalia Security’s home office, a small storefront space on Acushnet Avenue, one of the main drags in New Bedford.  I sat in the car and watched the place until I felt ready to wade into what I knew would be an unpleasant situation at best.

A pair of tiny bells over the door signaled my entrance.  I moved to the front desk where Marge, the receptionist, secretary and occasional dispatcher sat, headset in place, long acrylic fingernails tapping a keyboard.  She saw me and offered a tentative smile.  “Hey, Al.”

“Hey.”

“How you doin’, hon?” she asked quietly.  “You OK?”

I nodded.  “Nino in?”

She cocked her head toward his office at the end of a small hallway behind her, the door closed.  “He’s waiting for you, go ahead in.”

*   *   *

Nino, stressed out of his mind as usual, glanced up from an enormous pile of paperwork as I entered his office.  He tendered a gas-lock smile and motioned to a chair in front of his desk.  “Have a seat.”

I closed the door behind me, stepped over to his desk but stayed on my feet.  “Nino, listen, I’m sorry about all this, I—”

Nino held his hands up, tossed a pen onto his desk and sat back in his leather swivel a bit.  “I know you are, Al, I know you are.”  Again, he motioned to the chair.  “Sit.”

I moved to the chair and lowered myself into it, feeling like a child summoned to the principal’s office.  “Nino, there’s no excuse for what happened, and I’m sorry, sincerely I am.  I give you my word nothing like that will ever happen again.  Ever.”

His eyes darted about, looking anywhere but directly at me.  He leaned back further in his chair and nervously stroked his mustache with stubby fingers.  “You been with us a long time,” he finally said.  “You’re the best employee we got.  The best we ever had.”

“I got fifteen years in here, Nino,” I reminded him.

“I know you do.  You’re senior guy by like ten years, for Christ’s sake.”  He again smiled briefly through obvious discomfort.  “And besides all that, you—well, shit, you become a friend, you know what I’m saying?”

“I just—I’m having some problems at the moment, but—”

“Yeah, I hear ya.”  He straightened the chair, pushed away from the desk and stood up.  A squat and bulbous man with a penchant for flashy jewelry, ill-fitting slacks and imitation silk shirts, on this day he had worn a sweat suit and tennis shoes, signaling he didn’t plan to stay at the office long once our meeting was concluded.  “Here’s the thing, though.  I talked to Petey last night, and I did what I could, but my brother’s the boss, Al, you know how it is.  I got say, but he’s got final say.”

“Look—”

“He thinks the world of you too, man, you know that.”  Nino waddled over to a water cooler in the corner, found the cup dispenser empty and grabbed a nearby coffee mug instead.  “But shit, Al, you walked on a job.”

“I know.  I fucked up bad.”

Nino sniffed the coffee-stained mug, then slid it under the nozzle and filled it with water.  Watching the bubbles rise in the plastic bottle, he said, “Thing is, we lost the account.”

“Christ, Nino, I’m sorry.”

“I did everything I could.”  The mug now full, Nino returned to his desk and plopped into his swivel.  From his middle desk drawer he pulled a package of two Alka-Seltzer tablets, tore them open and dropped them into the mug.  “I’m sorry, we gotta let you go.”

“Come on, Nino,” I said, standing again.  “I fucked up, but I got years in here.”

“You walked on a job!  You fucking walked away in the middle of the night and left the place unlocked!”  He grabbed the mug and killed the contents in one frantic gulp.  “Then, if that ain’t bad enough, the guy finds beers all over the place!”  He slammed the mug on the desk and it split from the force into two even halves.  He glanced down, realized he was only holding a handle, and fired it at the wall.  “Drinking on the fucking job happens now and then, you don’t think I know that?  But you clean the shit up, for Christ’s sake!  What kinda fucking moron leaves them lying around?  What are you, freakin’
stunadz
?  Petey had to get involved personally; you see what I’m saying?  Petey don’t like to have to get involved personally.  He had to talk to the guy and calm his ass down.  Shit, Al, he mighta sued us.  He still might.”

“If you can just give me a week or two,” I said.  “Just a week or two to get my shit together.  A leave—give me a leave.  No pay, just some time off so I can straighten things out.”