The Damned (7 page)

“Look. Teddy. I need you with me. ‘Cause if you aren’t with me…” It was a threat, a thinly-veiled ultimatum that hung in the air a moment before Teddy answered it: “
With
you? Dude, I always have been, haven’t I?”

“True enough, bro. True enough.” Dub took another drink of beer, the bottle half empty now as he sat it on the table. “Just leave it to me. I’ve got it all worked out. You and me giving the orders, Bert and Ernie and the boys carrying them out. We’ll be the leaders. They’ll be the generals leading our troops into battle, keeping the Q’s in line—the ones who don’t join us, that is. I imagine most will when they see how we treat the ones who don’t.”

Teddy hit the joint a couple of times, dropped the spent roach to floor and ground it against the tile. “Dude, you got any word on the scouts?”

“Nothing.”

“They should’ve been back by now.”

“If they’re coming back. Who knows, maybe they decided to keep going, get the hell out and see what’s at the end of the line. What do you think?”

Teddy shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe we should send somebody after them.”

“I’ll think about it,” Dub said. “In the meantime, we’ve gotta see the old man tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“Yep. That business I was talking about? Carlicci wants another load of girls. We’ll run some up there and check him out, stock up on some of that killer flake of his.”

“Where does he get all that shit?”

“You kiddin’? Probably has a team of chemists grinding it out in his basement or something.”

“Chained to the
wall
in his basement.”

Chuckling, Dub said, “No doubt.” He finished off his beer and set the empty bottle on the table. “You can bet your ass
that
old man’s playing all the angles—
all
the angles.”

“Probably sittin’ up there in that fortress of his trying to figure a way for
him
to come out on top. Maybe we should think about a long term plan to short circuit
his
plans.”

Dub shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe we should. Let’s snort a couple more lines and talk about it. Then we’ll round up Bert and Ernie and the boys, go check out the inventory.”

Karen Turner could pinpoint the day her life started its slow spiral toward the drain: that morning four years ago when two vials of morphine from a locked medicine cabinet on the eighth floor of Hope Memorial found their way into her pocket—two drawn out but only one given to Mrs. Chambers. She selected her two units, pocketed one and doctored the chart, leaving poor old Mrs. C fending off her pain with a woefully inadequate supply of medication. It was easy, really. So easy that the next morning she did it again, and later that day with another patient. On and on she went, until a once in a lifetime event had become a daily occurrence, a shameful routine of lies and deceits that started with her miserable ritual of crawling hung-over from bed, into the bathroom for a cold shower and a couple of diet pills to get that motor turning. Then it was out the door and off to the hospital—not to comfort and nurture those hapless souls unlucky enough to have been placed in her care, but to raid from the pharmaceutical cookie jar as much Schedule-Two narcotics as she could lay her hands on. Squirreling away her illicit bounty until she could go running home to David, the love of her life, the hot guitarist on his way to a life of fame and fortune and rock ‘n roll riches. A predestined life, if you asked him. Not that anybody had to—he was perfectly willing to tell anyone who’d listen. Whip out that guitar and run those slim fingers of his up and down the fretboard and, well, it was easy enough to believe. Karen sure believed in him. She was certain he would make it, and that he would take her with him, even if he’d never actually said he would.

When she hit the skids, when she could no longer cope with or hide her surreptitious activities, the job and the drugs gone, rock ‘n roll Davey out the door and on his way to the next pretty young fool, Karen found herself residing in the gutter, scratching and clawing her way through state-sponsored rehab centers, hating every minute of it as the days turned to weeks and the weeks to months, in and out and back on the streets, until one day she found that she had actually reclaimed a piece of her life, a small measure of the dignity she had left behind so many years ago. From a Registered Nurse to a flop-house-floozy in and out of rehab, to a barely recovered addict unable to get a job anywhere within the medical community who, somehow, during all her trials and tribulations, had managed to hang onto her nurse’s license, Karen finally found herself working as a lowly dental assistant, far away from the state of the art critical care facility she had once taken for granted—a starting point, a humbling experience to look back upon as she slowly edged her way up the ladder and back into the fold.

Now look at me
, she thought, as she rifled through some picked-over garments at the old abandoned fashion boutique a couple of blocks from the warehouse in which she’d been crashing, a worn and frazzled knapsack half full of peaches and Spam, Hostess Twinkies and bottled water by her side, the spiked bat she’d found back at that gruesome site leaning against the glass-enclosed counter behind her, empty of the watches, jewelry and toiletries it had once contained.

Karen fluffed out the garment she had pulled from a disarrayed pile on one of the display shelves, a sleeveless tan top she probably would never actually have bought if she’d had a reasonable amount of stock to choose from. But it was clean, and it wasn’t white like most of the tops that lay in the snarled and tangled mess. She sat it atop the pile and pulled the black halter she had worn for the last couple of weeks over her shoulders. It was dirty, soiled with smoke and ash, and she smelled her body odor when the garment brushed across her face. It was a sad and disheartening situation: no food, no clean clothes, nowhere to bathe, unseen dangers at every nook and cranny, nowhere to turn to avoid them, except to hide out quiet as a church mouse, hoping above all hope that no one noticed her. And, of course, eventually someone
would
notice her—it was inevitable. Karen sighed and dropped the garment to the floor, staring down at her bare breasts a moment before snatching up the new top, shrugging herself into it and brushing her shoulder-length tresses away from her neck. Her eyes were brown, her hair the color of chestnuts. She had lost a considerable amount of weight these last seven weeks, but somehow had managed to halt the slide into emaciation, with her cans of food and snacks, the bottled water and the occasional bottle of wine she’d managed to pilfer along the way.

Into the top now, she smoothed her hands down it, across her breasts. Then she stuffed a couple of blouses into her knapsack and wandered further into the store, to where another jumbled pile of pants of various colors and sizes lay in the middle of the floor. Karen sifted through them until she found a pair of jeans that might fit her. But she couldn’t put them on—she couldn’t bring herself to stand naked in the middle of that store, not even for a second, not even if she did have a top on. So she stuffed the jeans into her sack and slung the knapsack over her shoulder. She was about to turn and leave when she noticed a door slightly ajar at the rear of the store. Karen knew she was going in there. Even if she’d wanted to leave, she couldn’t have—and she did want to leave; common sense told her to get the heck out of there, to hurry back to the warehouse before something happened, before somebody grabbed her and
her
bones ended up back at the grisly place she’d found those discarded bats. But she couldn’t leave; the packrat in her wouldn’t allow it, not without rifling through the unseen treasures waiting beyond that door.

Across the room she went, through a high-arcing archway sectioning off the store into two large rooms, past empty clothes racks silently guarded by mannequins in various stages of dress, some limbless, some not, others ankle-deep in the assortment of garments lying strewn about the place. A hazy, grey light filtered through the storefront window as she paused before the partially open door that drew her forward. The door groaned when she pushed it, and the hazy grey light followed her through the doorway. She knew something was wrong when she stepped into the room, knew it for sure when she looked up at the wraith-like figure hanging like a bizarre Halloween decoration from a thick length of orange extension cord wrapped around a pipe running down the middle of the ceiling. The dried-out husk of a woman, her arms spread out and dangling beneath a threadbare black shawl, more resembled a gigantic moth, or a withered and decaying bat than a human being.

She wanted to leave, to run screaming from the place, but she didn’t. She stood there, spellbound, staring up at this poor unfortunate woman, wondering what she had seen, what manner of atrocity had driven her to such extreme measures. A ladder lay beneath her—Karen wondered if she had kicked it over on purpose, a last-second act born of desperation to keep from changing her mind as the cord tightened and her throat constricted. Or was the ladder going over simply an accidental by-product of her legs whipping back and forth, caused by the suicide itself?

Karen stepped further into the room, closer to the woman. She looked up through the faint grey light framing the corpse against the deep shadows that seemed to swallow the entirety of what lay behind her. Karen couldn’t see her face, or anything beyond it, and she was glad she couldn’t. For all she knew the room could be
full
of corpses, moldering husks dangling row after row in the dark, waiting for the light to go out so they could drop down and close in on their visitor. She turned and looked back at the door, which had been wide open when she’d entered the room, but now seemed to be slowly swinging shut, surely a trick of the eye. But what if it wasn’t? What if it did shut; shut and locked, and Karen found herself entombed in the dark with the dried out corpse and whatever lay behind it? Whatever it was, withering ghosts or overstocked pieces of clothing, she didn’t want to find out. She hurried across the floor, through the doorway and back to the front counter to pick up the spiked bat and discarded knapsack. Then it was out the door and onto the sidewalk, where she stood for a moment, glancing up and down the street before stepping off the curb and heading into the roadway. She was in the middle of the street when a pack of bikers roared around the corner.

Karen took off running. She wasn’t going to make it; she knew it—she’d seen how fast they were coming before she turned and ran, seen the clouds of dust kicking up behind them. She turned, twirling and flinging her knapsack like an Olympic hammer thrower. There were five of them, and they were right behind her—the first guy ducked and swerved, the one trailing him caught the bag of canned goods square in the face. His head jerked back and his Harley veered to the left, crashing into the biker beside him, laying both machines over and sending them into a sideways tumble, end-over-end while their riders skidded down the roadway, screaming and skidding and rolling and yelling, the bikes following behind them as Karen ran for the sidewalk, barely missed by the fourth biker, who had lurched forward, gunning his engine in an effort to run her down.

Onto the sidewalk and into the first open doorway she ran, flinging the door shut behind her as the lead rider, who had ducked and swerved and braked to a screeching halt, jumped off his Harley and ran hell-bent after her.

“Hey, goddamnit!” he yelled, kicking the door open while the fourth biker scrambled onto the sidewalk and followed him through the doorway.

It was a bodega, a long abandoned corner store, the shelves wiped clean by looters weeks ago when the shit hit the fan and the lightning flashed, and the clouds chased each other across the horizon. Karen didn’t bother hiding—she ran for the back of the store, hoping like hell the rear entrance wasn’t barricaded or locked. She could hear her pursuers yelling their threats, screaming and cursing and stomping across the floor behind her, both men huffing and puffing, snorting like angry bulls as she raced down the aisle, through an open doorway and into a small stockroom, that faint, grey light spilling in through the open back door, the hard-charging bikers gaining ground as she neared the exit. The roar of gunfire sent her into a sprawling face-forward dive as bullets pounded the white-plaster wall and Karen bounced off the rear threshold, still holding the bat, her chest throbbing with pain as she slid forward and rolled into the alley.

Karen stood up to find a motorcycle roaring down the alley toward her. The last remaining biker, who had not followed his partners into the bodega, obviously electing to head her off at the pass, was closing in fast. She’d never make it to the other side—even if she dodged her way past the guy, the others would gun her down before she managed to get very far. She was as good as dead, and everybody knew it—everybody: her, the grinning biker rumbling his way toward her, and the two behemoths charging for the rear exit.

She stepped back against the wall, gripped the bat and waited. She was as good as dead, but she wouldn’t go down without a fight.

The biker screeched to a halt in the middle of the road. “Look out!” he yelled as his partner appeared in the doorway, and Karen pounded two rusty spikes square into his throat, blood seeping and squirting across the hands that shot up, gripping the fat end of the bat as his pistol clattered to the ground and Karen let go, and the biker did a drunken, stiff-legged stagger into the alley, blood covering his hands and forearms, the guy behind him staring wide-eyed at two pointed pieces of metal protruding from the back of his friend’s neck.

The three of them stood their ground: Karen, watching in horror as the biker fell gurgling to his knees, the two bikers seeming to enjoy what they were seeing. Finally, when the wounded man tumbled onto his back, when his eyes closed and his hands let go of the bat, that last remaining biker killed his engine, stepped off his bike, and said, “You’re in some deep shit now, little lady.”