Thirty-three
Lazarus thought that maybe he had died and now
inhabited a frightening twilight zone between heaven and hell. He shared
his limbo with King, a brown-skinned doctor with an unpronounceable name,
and a small assortment of aging and unattractive nurses.
The stitches and bruises in his face healed. The
first time he managed a walk to the window, he saw a sign on a lawn along
a blacktop road that read Valley Nursing Facility. And King visited him,
sometimes nightly, terrifying the staff and the other patients down the
hall upon his arrival and forcing him behind the closed door to confess
his crimes in detail, then in more detail still, until, when he was moved
to the motel on the outskirts of Silver Ridge, he was provided a mannequin
and asked to demonstrate how he had held his arm about Ella May’s neck
until she slumped dead in his arms. King continually asked about his
feelings for Evie, and all the fantasies he had ever entertained about
her.
Lazarus was convinced that he’d be dragged into the
hills and shot when either Abe or Krueger got around to it. When Delaney
told him to go home, he backed into a corner and shook his head
vehemently. “Abe’s gonna kill me. He won’t do it quick like. I don’t
wanna be beat up any more.”
“Get the fuck out of here, you stinking animal,”
Delaney guard muttered, “or I’ll hurt you myself.”
Lazarus fled into the hills and roamed the nearby
wilderness for two days, until hunger and thirst drove him home. He
waited until Abe left for work in the morning, locked himself in the
house, and ate everything that was left to eat. The sink filled with
dirty dishes. The toilet had stopped up and overflowed. Without Evie
about to wash clothes, the house had acquired a stale odor of something
that had died and decomposed.
He roamed the house thinking of Evie continually. He
missed her pretty little face and dark eyes. She had escaped him, but had
died regardless, blasted from the top of the hill by the devil himself.
Nothing remained of the old castle but smoldering ash and a black soot
that covered the entire town.
Before Abe came home in the afternoon, he retreated
to the shed and hid. He cleared a spot on the dirt floor and pulled an
old moldy mattress off the wall. He slept for a few hours in the evening,
but lay awake later in the night. A thunderstorm came and went.
He began to imagine sounds in the night. Drippings
of water from the eaves and trees, he told himself. Mice and coons
snooping about. But he thought of Evie’s demons, the little machines that
spat poisoned needles and radiated enough heat to ignite tinder. He
remembered years earlier when Billy had flown remote-controlled airplanes
over the skies of Silver Ridge.
Except that Billy Trevor was dead.
He couldn’t imagine how toy airplanes become living
creatures of metal. Billy Trevor had been like King in that respect.
They were possessed by unearthly spirits.
A ruddy light raced along the outside of the shed.
He saw the stroboscopic flash of the glowing red through slits between the
boards of the walls and caught the smell of burnt metal. He curled up in
a ball of rigid muscle, his heart palpitating in his chest.
His eyes flew open to the darkness. Evie? Could she
still be alive? Did the demons still wander the hills without Billy at
the controls, or was Billy still alive?
He sat up and mulled over possibilities. It seemed
more likely that King’s men had taken too much for granted. If Billy
Trevor was still alive, then so was Evie.
He grinned broadly in the darkness. In cautiously
budding elation, he peered through a knothole. He saw it more clearly
now, headed toward the back lot behind the house.
He fought an urge to follow the machine, remembering
the horrendous pain of the sting he had taken trying to smash Evie’s
visitor with a baseball bat. And the night of the fire in the mill. He
had no wish to risk that degree of agony and terror ever again.
But neither could he just ignore the possibility that
Evie was still alive.
Lazarus scurried from the shed and gave chase. He
climbed the fence in back and saw the crimson light weaving through the
trees at the base of the hill, moving north, away from the barren hill
upon which had stood the Trevor mansion.
The highway was deserted. He went in pursuit of the
fleeing machine in the open. The machine cut through side streets and
then through yards of the residential area near the die-casting plant. He
jogged to keep pace and the healing wounds of his face throbbed gently
with pain.
He stopped along the outside perimeter of the
chain-link fence surrounding several dozen acres of the plant’s property.
He couldn’t stop here. The little machine had somehow gotten inside.
Lazarus pushed his way through the underbrush with
growing determination. He was on to something that King would want to
know about. Maybe he was on to something useful, because King was the
only force in town capable of shielding him from Abe’s wrath.
He found the erosion ditch beneath the fence through
which the machine had gone. He saw, too, that the machine had company.
Two dark figures emerged from the trees and slipped beneath the hole in
the fence as well. As they approached the back of the building, they moved into
the glow of mercury vapor security lights.
Lazarus cringed in the shadows, his teeth grating
together in dread. Rumors of Evie and Billy Trevor’s death had been a bit
premature. They walked hand in hand to the rear of the factory,
surrounded by hordes of Billy’s glowing machines. They picked a lock,
entered through a rear door, and slipped inside the building. Most of the
little machines went inside with them, but a few remained on guard outside.
Lazarus had no choice but to try to get close enough
to eavesdrop. Keeping cover between himself and what remained of the
machines left outside, he reached the side of the building and
slipped closer to the door they had left open.
Lazarus recognized the voices whispering inside the
building, confirming that Billy Trevor and Evie Darker hadn’t been hurt at
all by the explosion on the hill. He could hear the two searching through
the equipment in the shipping department. Evie had always suspected that
Abe’s business had to do with illegal drugs, but she knew nothing of where
they were hidden.
“Here we go,” Billy called out from inside. “The
Styrofoam spacers. Nothing else goes through shipping that could serve
the purpose. And it’s tough stuff, not Styrofoam at all.”
Lazarus squeezed his eyes closed in anguish. An
outsider had uncovered a secret that could destroy them all.
“Cocaine,” Trevor murmured. “Quite a bit of it. But
there’s got to be more to it than just running drugs.”
“But it’s just drugs!” Evie cried. “We can call the
police!”
“It wouldn’t help,” Billy said. “King must but be
running drugs to finance a bigger operation. Drugs alone could hardly
destabilize a society.”
“How could one man threaten the whole world?” Evie
whispered harshly. “Why would he do it?”
“My adversary confuses pathological obsession and
emotional callousness for a virtue we call resolve. He has use for men of
resolve, as many of them as he can gather.”
Evie sounded exasperated. “But why?”
“My adversary, Evie, is a merchant in human souls.
He is a greater evil than you can imagine, more destructive than your
mythological Satan, and vastly more powerful.”
Lazarus heard Evie’s nervous sigh. Lazarus could
sense that she didn’t believe the boy. Billy sounded like he had gone off
the deep end.
“Do you think Lazarus followed us?” she said.
“He’s right outside the door, hanging on our every
word.”
Shock tore through Lazarus like ice jabbed down the
center of his spine. He turned and raced toward the fence, expecting to
be dropped at any moment by a fiery dart stuck in his back. By the time
he had cleared the fence and raced through the darkened residential area,
he realized that it had been a set-up all along. He had been deliberately
lured to the plant by the little machine to eavesdrop on Billy and Evie.
For what reason? To take Billy Trevor’s crazy story
back to King?
“Bet your ass I will,” Lazarus muttered. But he ran
for home through the dark neighborhoods, uncertain of what would be his
best move. If only he could talk to Abe first.
An old saying came to mine. Caught between the devil
and the deep blue sea. It would be safer and a lot less painful, he
suspected, if he could just get himself killed. King and Abe alike
threatened far worse.
