The Bad Place Part 36

He remembered how neighbors and other people had talked about his sisters-and also about him when, as a boy, he had been kept out of school because of his problems. Violet an Verbina looked and acted mentally deficient, and they probably did not care if people called them r.e.t.a.r.ds. Ignorant people labeled him r.e.t.a.r.ded, too, because they thought he was excused from school for being as learning disabled and strange as his sisters. (Only Frank attended cla.s.ses like a normal child.) The light began to coalesce into a ball. As more power poured out of his hands and into the ball, it acquired a deeper shade of blue and seemed to take on substance, as if it were a solid object floating in the air.

Candy had been bright, with no learning disabilities at all. His mother taught him to read, write, and do math; so he got angry when he overheard people say he was a deadhead. He had been excused from school for other reasons, of course, mainly because of the s.e.x thing. When he got older and bigger, n.o.body called him r.e.t.a.r.ded or made jokes about him, at least not within his hearing.

The sapphire-blue sphere looked almost as solid as a genuine sapphire, but as big as a basketball. It was nearly ready.

Having been unjustly tagged with the r.e.t.a.r.ded label, Candy had not grown up with sympathy for the genuinely disabled, but with an intense loathing for them that he hoped would make it clear to even ignorant people that he definitely was not-and never had been-one of them. To think such a thing of him-or of his sisters, for that matter-was an insult to his sainted mother, who was incapable of bringing a moron into the world.

He cut off the flow of power and took his hands away from the sphere.

For a moment he stared at it, smiling, thinking about what it would do to this offensive place.

Through the missing window and the partially shattered walls, the wail of the sirens became deafening, then suddenly subsided from a high-pitched shriek to a low growl that spiraled toward silence.

"Help's here, Thomas," he said, and laughed.

He put one hand against the sap hire sphere and gave it a shove. It shot across the room as if it were a ballistic missile fired from its silo. It smashed through the wall behind Derek's bed, leaving a ragged hole as big as anything a cannonball could have made, through the wall beyond that, and through every additional wall that stood before it, spewing flames as it went, setting fire to everything along its path.

Candy heard people screaming and a hard explosion, as he did a fadeout on his way to the house in Placentia.

BOBBY STOOD at the side of the freeway, holding on to the open car door, gasping for breath. He had been sure he was going to throw up, but the urge had pa.s.sed.

"Are you all right?" Julie asked anxiously.

"I... think so. Traffic shot past. Each vehicle was trailed by a wake of wind and a roar that gave Bobby the peculiar feeling that he a Julie and the Toyota were still moving, doing eighty-five with him holding on to the open door and her with a hand on his shoulder, magically keeping their balance and avoiding road burn as they dragged their feet along the pavement, with body driving.

The dream had seriously unsettled and disoriented him.

"Not a dream, really," he told her. He continued to keep his head down, peering at loose gravel on the shoulder of the highway, half expecting a return of the cramping nausea.

"Not like the dream I had before, about us a the jukebox and the ocean of acid."

"But about 'the bad thing' again."

"Yeah. You couldn't call it a dream, though, because it just this.. - this burst of words, inside my head."

"From where?"

"I don't know." He dared to lift his head, and though a whirl of dizziness swept through him, the nausea did not return.

He said, "'Bad thing... look out... there's a light that loves You. - -." I can't remember it all. It was so strong, so hard like somebody shouting at me through a bullhorn that pressed against my ear. Except that's not right, either, because I didn't really hear the words, they were just there, in my head But they felt loud, if that makes any sense. And there were images, like in a dream. Instead there were these feelings, as strong as they were confused. Fear and joy, anger and forgiveness...

and right at the end of it, this strange sense of peace that I... can't describe." A Peterbilt thundered toward them, towing the biggest trailer the law allowed. Sweeping out of the night behind its blazing headlights, it looked like a leviathan swimming up from a deep marine trench, all raw power and cold rage, with a hunger that could never be satisfied. For some reason, as it boomed past them, Bobby thought of the man he had seen on the beach at Punaluu, and he shuddered.

Julie said, "Are you okay?"

"Yeah."

"Are you sure?" He nodded.

"A little dizzy. That's all."

"What now?" He looked at her.

"What else? We go on to Santa Barbara.

El Encanto Heights, bring this thing to an end... somehow." CANDY ARRIVED in the archway between a living room and dining room. No one was in either place.

He heard a buzzing sound farther back in the house, and after a moment he identified it was an electric razor. It stopped. Then he heard water running in a sink, and the drone of a bath room exhaust fan.

He intended to head straight for the hall and the bath, take the man by surprise. But he heard a rustle of paper from the opposite direction.

He crossed the dining room and stepped into the kitchen doorway. It was smaller than the kitchen in his mother's house, but it was as spotlessly clean and orderly as his mother's kitchen had not been since her death.

A woman in a blue dress was sitting at the table, her back to him. She was leaning over a magazine, turning the pages one after the other, as if looking for something of interest to read.

Candy possessed a far greater control of his telekinetic talents than Frank enjoyed, and in particular could teleport more efficiently and swiftly than Frank, creating less air displacement and less noise from molecular resistance. Nevertheless he was surprised that she had not gotten up to investigate, the sounds he had made during arrival had been only one room away from her and, surely, odd enough to p.r.i.c.k her!"

curiosity.

She turned a few more pages, then leaned forward to where He could not see much of her from behind. Her hair thick, l.u.s.trous, and so black it seemed to have been spun from the same loom as the night. Her shoulders and back were muscular. Her legs, which were both to one side of the chair crossed at the ankles, were shapely. If he had been a man with any interest in s.e.x, he Supposed he would have been excited by the curve of her calves.

Wondering what she looked like-and suddenly overwhelmed by a need to know how her blood would taste stepped out of the open doorway and took three steps to her. He made no effort to be silent, but she did not look up.

The first she became aware of him was when he seized a handful of her hair and dragged her, kicking and flailing, out of the chair.

He turned her around and was instantly excited by her.

He was indifferent to her shapely legs, the flare of her hips, trimness of her waist, the fullness of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Though beautiful, it was not even her face that electrified him. Something else. A quality in her gray eyes. Call it vitality. She was more alive than most people, vibrant.

She did not scream but let out a low grunt of fear or an then struck him furiously with both fists. She pounded his chest, battered his face.

Vitality! Yes, this one was full of life, bursting with life, her vitality thrilled him far more than any bounty of s.e.xual charms.

He could still hear the distant splash of water, the rattle-h of the bathroom exhaust fan, and he was confident that he could take her without drawing the attention of the man long as he could prevent her from screaming. He struck her on the side of the head with his fist, hammered her before she could scream. She slumped against him, not unconscious dazed.

Shaking with the antic.i.p.ation of pleasure, Candy placed her on her back, on the table, with her legs trailing over the edge He spread her legs and leaned between them, but not to commit rape, nothing as disgusting as that. As he lowered his face toward hers, she first blinked at him in confusion, still rattlebrained from the blows she had taken. Then her eyes began to clear. He saw horrified comprehension return to her, and he went quickly for her throat, bit deep, and found the blood, which was clean and sweet, intoxicating.

She thrashed beneath him.

She was so alive. So wonderfully alive. For a while.

WHEN THE deliveryman brought the pizza, Lee Chen took it into Bobby and Julie's office and offered some to Hal.

Putting his book aside but not taking his stockinged feet off the coffee table, Hal said, "You know what that stuff does to your arteries?" :'Why's everyone so concerned about my arteries today?"

'You're such a nice young man. We'd hate to see you dead before you're thirty. Besides, we'd always wonder what clothes you might've worn next, if you'd lived."

"Not anything like what you're wearing, I a.s.sure you." Hal leaned over and looked in the box that Lee held down to him.

"Looks pretty good. Rule of thumb-any pizza they'll bring to you, they're selling service instead of good food. But this doesn't look bad at all, you can actually tell where the pizza ends and the cardboard begins." Lee tore the lid off the box, put it on the coffee table, and put two slices of pizza on that makeshift plate.

"There."

"You're not going to give me half',."

"What about the cholesterol?"

"h.e.l.l, cholesterol's just a little animal fat, it isn't a.r.s.enic." WHEN THE woman's strong heart stopped beating, Candy pulled back from her.

Though blood still seeped from her ravaged throat, he did not touch another drop of it. The thought of drinking from a corpse sickened him.

He remembered his sisters' cats, eating their own each time one of the pack died, and he grimaced.

Even as he raised his wet lips from her throat, he heard the door open farther back in the house. Footsteps approached. Candy quickly circled the table, putting it and the woman between himself and the doorway to the dining room From the vision induced by the dummy's sc.r.a.pbook of pictures, Candy knew that Clint would not be as easy to kill as most people were. He preferred to put a little distance between them, give himself time to size up his opponent rather than take the guy by surprise.

Clint appeared in the doorway. Except for his outfit slacks, navy-blue blazer, maroon V-neck, white shirt looked the same as the psychic impression he had left on the book. He had pumped a lot of iron in his time. His hair thick, black, and combed straight back from his forehead.

He had a face like carved granite, and a hard look in his eyes Excited by the recent kill, by the taste of blood still in his mouth, Candy watched the man with interest, wondering what would happen next. There were all sorts of ways it could and not one of them would be dull.

Clint did not react as Candy expected. He did not show surprise when he saw the woman sprawled dead upon the table he did not seem horrified, shattered by the loss of her, or raged. Something major changed in his stony face, though below the surface, like tectonic plates shifting under the earth's crust.

Finally he met Candy's gaze, and said, "You." The note of recognition in that single word was unsettling For a moment. Candy could think of no way this man could know him-then he remembered Thomas.

The possibility that Thomas had told this man-and perhaps others-about Candy was most frightening to Candy since his mother's death. His service in G.o.d's army of avengers was a deeply private matter, a secret should not have been spread beyond the Pollard family.

mother had warned him that it was all right to be proud doing G.o.d's work, but that his pride would lead him to a if he boasted of his divine favor to others.

"Satan," she told him, "constantly seeks the names of lieutenants in Garrny-which is what you are-and when he finds them, destroys them with worms that eat them alive from wit worms fat as snakes, and he rains fire on them too. If you can't keep the secret, you'll die and go to h.e.l.l for your big mouth."

"Candy," Clint said.

The use of his name erased whatever doubt remained that the secret had been pa.s.sed outside the family and that Candy was in deep trouble, though he had not broken the code of silence himself.

He imagined that even now Satan, in some dark and steaming place, had tilted his head and said, "Who? Who did you say? What was his name? Candy? Candy who?" As furious as he was frightened, Candy started around the kitchen table, wondering if Clint had learned about him from Thomas. He was determined to break the man, make him talk before killing him.

In a move as unexpected as his rock-calm acceptance of the woman's murder, Clint reached inside his jacket, withdrew a revolver, and fired two shots.

He might have fired more than two, but those were the only ones Candy heard. The first round hit him in the stomach, the second in the chest, pitching him backward. Fortunately he sustained no damage to his head or heart. If his brain tissue had been scrambled, disturbing the mysterious and fragile connection between brain and mind, leaving his mind trapped within his ruined brain before he had a chance to separate the two, he would not have possessed the mental ability to teleport, leaving him vulnerable to a coup de grace. And if his heart had been stopped instantaneously by a well-placed bullet, before he could dematerialize, he would have fallen down dead where he'd stood. Those were the only wounds that might finish him. He was many things, but he was not immortal; so he was grateful to G.o.d for letting him get out of that kitchen and back to his mother's house alive.

THE VENTURA FREEWAY. Julie drove fast, though not as fast as she had earlier. On the tapedeck: Artie Shaw's "Night mare." Bobby brooded, staring through the side window at the nightscape. He could not stop thinking about the blare of words that had seared through him, loud as a bomb blast and bright as a blast-furnace fire. He had come to terms with the dream that had frightened him last week; everyone had bad dreams. Though exceptionally vivid, almost more real than real life, there had been nothing uncanny about it-or so he had convinced himself.

But this was different. He could believe that these urgent, lava-hot words had erupted from some subconscious. A dream, with complex Freudian message couched in elaborate scenes and symbols-yes, that was understandable; after all, the subconscious dealt in euphemisms a metaphors. But this wordburst had been blunt, direct, like telegraph delivered on a wire plugged directly into his cerebral cortex.

When he wasn't brooding, Bobby was fidgeting. Because Thomas. For some reason, the longer he dwelt on the blaze of words the more Thomas slipped into his thoughts. He could see connection between the two, so he tried to put Thomas out of his mind and concentrate on turning up an explanation for thee experience. But Thomas gently, insistently returned, again and again. After a while Bobby got the uneasy feeling there was a link between the wordburst and Thomas, though he had no ghost of an idea what it might be.

Worse, as the miles rolled up on the odometer and they reached the western end of the valley, Bobby began to understand that Thomas was in danger. And because of me and Julie Bobby thought.

Danger from whom, from what?

The biggest danger that Bobby and Julie faced, right now was Candy Pollard. But even that jeopardy lay in the future for Candy didn't know about them yet; he was not aware that they were working on Frank's behalf, and he might never become aware of it, depending on how things went in Santa Barbara and El Encanto Heights. Yes, he had seen Bobby on the beach at Punaluu, with Frank, but he had no way of knowing who Bobby was. Ultimately, even if Candy became aware Dakota & Dakota's a.s.sociation with Frank, there was no way that Thomas could be drawn into the affair; Thomas was other, separate part of their lives. Right?

"Something wrong?" Julie said as she pulled the Toyota to the left, to pa.s.s a big rig hauling Coors.

He could see nothing to be gained by telling her that Thomas might be in danger. She would be upset, worried. And for what? He was just letting his vivid imagination run away with him. Thomas was perfectly safe down there in Cielo Vista.

"Bobby, what's wrong?"

"Nothing."

"Why're you fidgeting?"

"Prostate trouble."

CHANNEL No. 5, a softly glowing lamp, cozy rose-patterned fabrics and wallpaper...

He laughed with relief when he materialized in the bedroom, the bullets left behind in that kitchen in Placentia, over a hundred miles away. His wounds had knitted up as if they had never existed. He had lost perhaps an ounce of blood and a few flecks of tissue, because one of the bullets had pa.s.sed through him and out his back, carrying that material with it before he'd transported himself beyond the revolver's range. Everything else was as it should be, however, and his flesh did not harbor even the memory of pain.

He stood in front of the dresser for half a minute, breathing deeply of the perfume that wafted up from the saturated handkerchief. The scent gave him courage and reminded him of the abiding need to make them pay for his mother's murder, all of them, not just Frank but the whole world, which had conspired against her.

He looked at his face in the mirror. The gray-eyed woman's blood was no longer on his chin and lips; he had left it behind him, as he might leave water behind when teleporting out of a rainstorm. But the taste of it was still in his mouth. And his reflection was without a doubt that of vengeance personified.

Depending on the element of surprise and his ability to target his point of arrival precisely now that he was familiar with the kitchen, he returned to Clint's house. He intended to enter at the dining-room doorway, immediately behind the man, directly opposite the point from which he had dematerialized.

Either the experience of being shot had shaken him more than he realized, or the rage jittering through him had pa.s.sed the critical point at which it interfered with his concentration. Whatever the reason, he did not arrive where he intended, but by the door to the garage, one-quarter instead of halfway around the room from his last position, to the right of Clint and not near enough to rush him and seize the gun before it could be fired.

Except Clint was not present. And the woman's body had been removed from the table. Only the blood remained as proof that she perished there.

Candy could not have been gone more than a minute-time he had spent in his mother's room, plus a couple of seconds in transit each way. He expected to return to find Clint bent over the corpse, either grieving or checking desperately for a pulse. But as soon as he realized Candy was gone, the man must have taken the body in his arms and... And who He must have fled the house, of course, hoping against hope that a faint thread of life remained unbroken in the worn getting her out of the way in case Candy returned.

Cursing softly-then immediately begging his mother's and G.o.d's forgiveness for his foul language-Candy tried the door into the garage.

It was locked. If he had left by that exit, Clint wouldn't have paused to lock up behind himself.

He hurried out of the kitchen, through the dining room,ward the foyer of the living room, to check out the front lawn and the street. But he heard a noise from deeper in the house and halted before he reached the front door. He changed direction, cautiously following the hallway back to the bedroom A light was on in one of those rooms. He eased to the door and risked a glance inside.

Clint had just put the woman on the queen-size bed. Candy watched, the man pulled her skirt down over her legs. He still had the revolver in one hand.

For the Second time in less than an hour, Candy heard faint away sirens swelling in the night. The neighbors probably had heard the gunfire and called the police.

Clint saw him in the doorway but did not bring up the question. He did not say anything, either, and the expression on his stone face remained unchanged. He seemed like a deaf-mute. the strangeness of the man's demeanor made Candy nervous and uncertain.

He thought there was a pretty good chance that Clint had emptied the gun at him in the kitchen, even though he had telaPorted out of there with the impact of the second slug. Most likely, he had fired every round reflexively, his trigger finger ruled by rage or fear or whatever he was feeling. He could not have carried the woman into the bedroom and reloaded the gun, too, in the minute or so that Candy had been gone, which meant Candy might be in no danger if he just walked up to the guy and took the weapon away from him.

But he stayed in the doorway. Either of those two shots could have been dead-center in his heart. The power within him was great, but he could not exercise it quickly enough to vaporize an oncoming bullet.

instead of dealing with Candy in any fashion, the man turned away from him, walked around the foot of the bed to the other side, and stretched out beside the woman.

"What the h.e.l.l?" Candy said aloud.