Bad Glass Part 25

"Is that lightning?" Taylor asked.

"I don't know."

She grabbed my hand and started pulling me down the street, west, toward the center of town. It seemed like her anger was gone. For the moment at least, it had been preempted.

People were emerging from the buildings up and down the street. Dirty, ragged refugees, some rubbing their eyes as if just awakened from a solid sleep. They were all staring up at the sky. Mute. In shock. If they weren't in shock, I thought, if they were capable of reacting in an appropriate, rational way, there'd be screaming and panic. Chaos and prayers and violence. The sky was bleeding, after all. Up above our heads, the sky had fallen. And this ...

This was its b.l.o.o.d.y corpse.

"Dean!" Taylor called into my ear, startling my eyes back down to the street. She was pulling at my arm violently. I'd stopped without realizing it. "We've got to find out what happened. We've got to find somebody who knows!" I got my legs moving once again, and we continued west. Toward the courthouse, I realized, toward Danny and the military.

We found Mama Ca.s.s at Post Street. She was sitting in a lawn chair in the middle of the road, directly in front of her restaurant. Her customers stayed back on the sidewalk, but her old Jewish cook-Hershel, I thought, remembering his name-stood at her side, his hands tucked beneath a tomato-stained ap.r.o.n. She had a bottle of beer dangling from one hand as she stared up at the sky. There was a bemused look on her face.

Taylor was going to run straight past, but Mama Ca.s.s stopped us. "Where do you think you're going?" she asked in an amused voice. "Running to the military, maybe?" Taylor pulled to a stop and turned back toward Mama Ca.s.s, pure hatred burning in her eyes. Mama Ca.s.s was watching us with a sly grin. "That won't get you very far, darling." She sounded drunk. Or high. Or out of her f.u.c.king mind.

Taylor dropped my hand and looked down the length of the street, in the direction of the courthouse. For a moment, I thought she was going to sprint off without me.

"Your friends in the military have been driving, pell-mell, up and down the street." She pointed along the cross street, first toward the hospital, then toward the courthouse. "Their f.u.c.king Hummers-they almost ran me over. They don't know what's going on. They have no f.u.c.king clue. They think we're under attack. They think that that-" She waited for a handful of heartbeats until a fresh crack rang out in the sky. "-is artillery fire. They think somebody's lobbing sh.e.l.ls at us."

"It's got to be atmospheric," Hershel said. For someone so old, his voice was surprisingly strong. "Vapor in the air. Colliding fronts. The red-it's got to be refracted light bouncing off of something in the atmosphere."

"Red sky at night," Mama Ca.s.s recited, nodding, but the smile on her lips suggested that she thought Hershel's explanation was complete bulls.h.i.t. "Sailor's delight." She raised her beer bottle to the sky, toasting the chaos, and took a long swallow.

Taylor looked back down the street.

"They're not going to help you," Mama Ca.s.s said, not even looking in Taylor's direction. "They don't know what's going on. They don't have any f.u.c.king idea. You might as well just sit back and enjoy the fireworks."

She gestured toward my backpack. "And you ... you might want to take some pictures," she said. "I'm sure your Internet fans would love to see what's going on."

I spent a moment staring up at the bloodred sky, that violent, roiling sea above our heads. Then I shrugged off my backpack and followed her suggestion.

A piece of paper torn from a lined notebook. Undated. Hand-printed words:

(The piece of paper has been crumpled repeatedly. The left-hand side is a ragged tear, torn from a notebook binding. Large, shaky words cover the top part of the page-smeared pencil, inscribed by a palsied hand.

The paper is aged and well handled. It is no longer crisp; instead, it has been transformed into a fragile cloth, by folding and refolding, by damp and greasy fingertips.

Dingy and gray; smeared graphite. Sprinkled, dipped in water, then dried once again.

The words are barely legible. But they are legible.)

-there's nothing left in me, Taylor. Not anymore.

I'm sorry.

I failed you. I couldn't stop failing you.

The sky stayed red for about twenty minutes.

I had a hard time taking pictures of that sky. Without anything in the foreground, it looked like nothing but a red, fluid pattern, an abstract collage of crimson and pink and electric blood. Finally, I went wide-angle and focused on the eastern skyline, down the length of the street. It was a view of the city from the floor of a concrete valley, with the walls on either side reaching up (and bending out) before opening onto the wide red sky. I set the camera to burst mode and shot five frames a second until I caught a couple of frames with the lightning-or the artillery fire or whatever it was-above the left-hand line of buildings.

After I captured that shot, I sat down on the asphalt and pretended to stare up at the sky, taking my place alongside Taylor, Mama Ca.s.s, and Hershel. But really, I had the camera down in my lap, angled up at Mama Ca.s.s as she watched the heavens. There was a childlike wonder spread across her face, and I tried to capture that expression, that joyful, rapturous euphoria, with the bright sky shining behind her. I was shooting blind, though, so I couldn't be sure if the autofocus was locked on her or on the buildings in the background. I didn't bother to check on the LCD screen, and after a minute, I just shut down the camera and tucked it back into my backpack.

The street was still eerily quiet. I knew that there were people on the sidewalk behind us-I'd seen them as Taylor and I had approached-but they didn't make a single sound.

I reached out and took Taylor's hand, gently, trying not to startle her. She looked down from the sky, first glancing at our joined hands and then looking up at my face. She was perplexed and overwhelmed; I could see that in her glazed eyes. I gave her a rea.s.suring smile, and she turned back toward the heavens.

She didn't drop my hand, at least. For that I was grateful.

The sky turned back to gray. The change from red to gray was slower than the change from gray to red. There was no earth-rending roar, no quick unnatural movement up in the atmosphere. The red just darkened gradually, and a new cloud front blew in from up north. It took a couple of minutes for the last of the red to disappear. Then it was just your typical overcast early-winter sky.

The reaction to this event, this return to normality, was surprisingly subdued. Mama Ca.s.s stood up and stretched lazily. She handed her empty beer bottle to Hershel, then folded up the lawn chair and tucked it under her arm. Back on the sidewalk, people looked down from the sky. They exchanged muted words and then walked away. I even saw one man yawn as if just getting up from a midafternoon nap.

It was over. Life-this parody of life here inside the city-could resume.

"Come back to the restaurant with me," Mama Ca.s.s said, using her free hand to gesture toward the open storefront. She was smiling, relaxed. "I'm thinking you two can help me out with something. A delivery."

"What?" Taylor asked. She sounded genuinely offended. How could Mama Ca.s.s confuse their relationship so thoroughly? Why would she for one second think that Taylor would do anything to help her out?

"Don't play it that way, girl," Mama Ca.s.s said. "We're in this together, right?" She smiled. It was a staged, artificial smile, and it put the lie to her words. "Besides," she continued, "if it bugs you so much, you can think of it as giving Terry a hand."

"Terry?"

"Yeah ... Terry. Your mentor. I'm running some errands for him. I'm doing him a favor." She spit out this last word-favor-giving it barbs. Suddenly, her drugged euphoria was gone, and she was wielding nothing but venom. "I'm acting like an adult here, Taylor, and if you can't do the same, if you can't ditch that holier-than-thou bulls.h.i.t, maybe you should just keep on running. Maybe you should get out of the way and leave the adult interactions to people who aren't complete f.u.c.king p.u.s.s.ies."

Taylor's eyes widened with surprise, and her mouth fell open in a wordless gape. She didn't have a reply.

After a moment of silence, Mama Ca.s.s turned back toward me and smiled, once again picking up that relaxed, mellow att.i.tude. "C'mon, Dean," she said. "I'll show you what I was thinking." Then she headed toward her restaurant.

It was as if the red sky hadn't even happened.

There was laughter in Mama Ca.s.s's dining room. People had drifted back to their tables; they'd picked up their abandoned forks and resumed their interrupted meals. The laughter, the mindless chatter-it made me think that perhaps they'd picked up the same conversations, too. Hershel went on ahead, disappearing into the kitchen, while Mama Ca.s.s paused at a couple of tables to chat with her customers. Taylor and I stayed a couple of paces back. Taylor was stewing. Her arms were crossed, and her head was turned, refusing to even look in Mama Ca.s.s's direction.

After a couple of minutes, Mama Ca.s.s waved us toward the back of the dining room. She escorted us through the kitchen and into her office.

"How's the hand?" she asked. She leaned back against the edge of her desk and gestured for me to raise my palm up into the air. I showed it to her, and she nodded. "It's healing up all right? It isn't hurting?"

"It's getting better," I said, "but it still hurts a bit." This wasn't exactly true. In fact, it didn't hurt at all, but I was running low on Vicodin. Mama Ca.s.s nodded her head in understanding.

Taylor shot me a perplexed look. I hadn't told her about my hand or Mama Ca.s.s's help, so this was all news to her. I caught her eye, and after a second, her confusion turned to anger. I couldn't help feeling a bit guilty. Like I was conspiring with an enemy, like I was sneaking around behind her back and plotting against her.

"What do you want us to deliver?" Taylor asked brusquely, turning away from me.

"A package. Something Terry wanted me to find."

"What is it?" Taylor asked again, crossing her arms.

"I'm not going to tell you that," Mama Ca.s.s said. "It's Terry's business, not yours." She turned toward me. "Can I trust you, Dean?" she asked. "Can I trust you to be careful and discreet? Can I trust you to keep this out of her hands?"

I nodded, then glanced at Taylor. Her arms were still crossed, and she was staring angrily at the wall. "It's for Terry," I explained, trying to win her over. She just shrugged.

Perhaps Taylor would have preferred that I just let it go right there. But I was curious. I wanted to know what Mama Ca.s.s and Terry were working on, and I was pretty sure that that was what Taylor wanted, too. Despite her feelings for this mercenary businesswoman, despite her obvious loathing.

Mama Ca.s.s circled to the far side of her desk and bent low over its open drawers. There was the sound of rummaging-the crinkle of paper and change, the rattle of loose items-and when she came back up, she had a brown-wrapped parcel in her hand. It was a book; I recognized that as soon as she handed it over. A hardback book. I could feel the solid edges beneath the layer of butcher paper, the sheaf of recessed leaves.

"Be careful with it," she said. "It wasn't easy to find. My contacts had to scour all of Seattle."

I tucked the book into my backpack, and we turned to leave. Taylor stepped out of the room ahead of me.

"Dean!" Mama Ca.s.s hissed as soon as Taylor disappeared through the door. She rounded her desk and, with a huge dose of melodrama, slipped a pill bottle into my hand. I glanced at the label: Vicodin. "For the pain," she said with an ingratiating wink. The wink made me feel dirty, slimy. I slipped the bottle into my pocket and quickly followed Taylor out into the restaurant.

"I hate her," Taylor said as soon as we were alone out on the street. "I really f.u.c.king hate her. She's a game player. It gets her off. My father worked with people like that at the university. They're the ones who got all of the promotions, on the backs of their lies and their power plays."

She got quiet right then, and I knew that she was thinking about her father, remembering what had pa.s.sed between them, what she thought she'd done. Her voice, raised in anger, as he fell through the floor. His rolling eyes and searching hands. And then her mother, doting on that floor-bound body, her hidden heart filled with blame, or love, or both, or neither.

We walked a block in silence. When we reached Monroe Street and turned to head up north, Taylor pulled to a stop. I turned to face her and found her forehead wrinkled in confusion.

"What's wrong with you, Dean?" she asked.

I shook my head, not understanding the question.

"Why are you trying so hard? With me? What attracts you?"

I stared at her for a moment, still perplexed. "You do, Taylor. You attract me."

She looked at me skeptically. "No, Dean, that's not it. That's not good enough. Not anymore." A bitter, contemptuous smile surfaced on her lips. "There's something wrong with you, Dean, something genuinely wrong. I'm sure of it now. You're not quite right in the head. You're not quite ... sane. Not if you want to be with me." With this, she turned and resumed walking.

I let her get ahead of me. Then I dug out my new bottle of Vicodin and bolted down a couple of pills.

There was no one guarding the Homestead's entrance. No Mickey with a baseball bat. No figure hiding in the shadows. Taylor was confused.

"They should be here. They were here yesterday." There was a note of panic rising in her voice.

We stepped into the sketchy business center, and she c.o.c.ked her head, listening for sounds of life inside the building. I could hear wind rattling paper out on the street, but the building itself was still and silent. After a moment, Taylor barreled forward, making her way down the dim bottom-floor corridor-past the insurance office, the office supply place, the acupuncture clinic-then up the stairs to the second floor. I followed, not wanting to fall behind.

Up on the second floor, Taylor pushed aside the plywood window cover and crawled out onto the plank bridge on the other side. I was about to follow when movement down the length of the corridor caught my eye. A door near the front of the building stood wide open. It was about twenty feet away, and in the gloom I couldn't see what the room was. Broom closet, bathroom, storage? Its purpose was lost in murky black.

But there was movement there, inside the dark. A churning motion on the floor that set my skin to crawl. Black ma.s.ses in the dark gray. And it was silent, whatever it was. Absolutely silent.

The plywood cover swung back and forth from Taylor's pa.s.sage, and I reached out to hold it steady, still watching the threshold down the length of the corridor. As I watched, part of the black shadow broke away, flowing smoothly out into the corridor. It was a large black spider, moving on multijointed legs. It was as big as a small dog, much bigger than the spiders that had swarmed through the crack in the wall back at the abandoned apartment building. How long ago was that? I wondered, not quite sure. A week ago? Is that right?

The room behind the spider continued to crawl with dark motion. It could have been just my eyes and my overactive imagination populating that darkness, but I thought I could see that s.p.a.ce full of spiders. Moving, swarming, crawling over one another in waves of liquid motion.

My back shivered in an involuntary spasm, and the spider started to crawl my way. Before it got more than a couple of feet, I slammed the window cover aside and frantically crawled out onto the thin bridge that linked this building to the next. If I waited, if I stood there for one second longer, I was afraid I'd find myself hypnotized by the spider's smooth, almost mechanical motions-standing there frozen as it drew near, as wave after wave of its brothers and sisters broke away from the darkness, surging out into the corridor to engulf me, to swallow me whole. And the touch of those bristled legs, caressing-light, tremulous touches, gaining muscle and strength-quickly paralyzing me inside a dense spiderweb mesh.

And maybe the touch of a finger in there, too, hidden. And lips and tongue.

As I crossed the bridge, I didn't even think about the distance to the ground or the way the wood wobbled and bounced beneath my feet. I just kept going, not pausing until I jumped down into the hallway on the other side.

There were no spiders here in the back rooms of Terry's ballet studio. At least none that I could see. Just Taylor, moving quickly ahead.

I caught up with her at the end of the hallway. She didn't notice my rattled state. She was too busy looking for Terry.

She called out his name as she stepped onto the wide studio floor, but there was no one there. Terry's ratty sofa stood vacant near the window, surrounded by a scattered corona of books. She crossed the hardwood floor and circled the sofa-once, and then again-as if it were all a matter of angle, as if she'd be able to find Terry if she could just look at it from the right direction.

I paused in the center of the room and peered into every corner, checking for shadows, checking for spiders. But there were none. No shadows, no spiders.

"He's gone," Taylor said, her voice trembling. "I was here yesterday, and now he's gone. They're all gone."

"We just got here, Taylor," I said. "He could be anywhere. I'm sure he's fine." But really, with the spiders, I knew I was lying. I had no idea what had happened here, no idea what had happened to Terry, but I didn't think we'd find him again. Not really. The spiders were an omen, a harbinger of loss.

"Let's go," I said. "Let's keep looking."

Taylor nodded and hurried on ahead, retracing the path we'd taken through the building on our previous visit. I kept my eyes on the shadows as we climbed the stairs and crossed to the second bridge. The shadows in the staircase were deep, but they were motionless.

The third building was as quiet as the first and second. Taylor stopped to listen at each new hallway, but there was never even a whisper of sound. I waited as she c.o.c.ked her head and slowly craned her neck, angling her ears for any hint of humanity in the air, any quarreling voices or laughter, or the tinned sound of a distant boom box. I wanted to keep moving. In those brief intervals of silence, I could feel waves of spiders cresting against the closed doors around us, on all sides, penning us in. But there were only empty rooms. Empty rooms and silence.