Authors: Jay Bonansinga
Twisted (25 page)
Then came the ultimate windsâthe inner wallâand everything slashed sideways as though the earth had just turned on its axis.
Debris whipped past Grove with the speed of major league fastballs. Any one of these projectiles could have instantly killed him. It was a miracle he wasn't brained by a flying hubcap or impaled on a hurling fence picket. Something drove him onward, onward toward the safety of Doerr's bungalow, onward toward that infernal fire hydrant at the corner of Calhoun and St. Charles.
The next leg of the journey passed in that maddening dreamtime for Grove.
Trudging through a horizontal wall of rain, lurching from handhold to handhold, he somehow managed to cross at least eight blocks amidst the worst winds in recorded history, and it only took himâaccording to the clock, at leastâsomething like twenty minutes. His saving grace was the streetcar, which had blown over onto its side in the second surge. Grove was able to use the knotted power lines along its mangled roof as handholds.
By the time he reached the fire hydrant at Calhoun, the little rusted plug was underwater. He had to dive down to its base in the pitch-dark, fighting frenzied currents, in order to feel for the rope.
Sadly, the rope was not there anymore. All Grove could feel was the scabrous surface of the iron hydrant. Then, all at once, the frayed end of the rope brushed his hand, and he grasped it. He had some difficulty untying it, but finally managed to loosen it.
He burst to the surface sucking air, the mountaineering rope firmly clenched in his hand.
The rain slashed his face, nearly drowning him, and he gasped for air. It was dark as pitch now, the moon gone, his goggles gone, his long coat torn and flagging in ragged strips. The wind was a constant deadly foe now. Like a billion fire hoses strafing the street from the south, driving the floodwater into the heart of the city.
Grove only had moments to get inside. The next wave could easily do him in. He couldn't feel his right arm. His lungs burned, and he couldn't hear a thing, but he began blindly tugging himself north along the channel where Calhoun used to be, using only the rope for purchase.
The bungalow was now only about six or seven hundred feet awayâa couple hundred yards at the most. Grove starting pulling himself through the black void, the rapids curling around his waist. It was not unlike pulling himself upstream, waist-deep and hurting in the world's fastest-moving river. The rope was taut one moment, then slack the next, then taut as it caught up on wreckage, then slack again as it slipped free.
The only thing that kept Grove going was the fact that Kaminsky was attached to the other end, safely ensconced inside the bungalow on Freret Street, three short blocks away. At this very moment, in fact, the Russian was most likely wedging himself against a stationary object inside the house like a doorjamb or a wall strut as the rope's tension waxed and waned. Grove could just see the big man hunkering in that dark bungalow, grumbling obscenities at the violent give and take on his fat belly, as Grove reeled himself in.
Not much farther now. Maybe a hundred yards. Not much more than the length of a single football field. But it might as well have been a million miles because the storm had risen to the level of an unadulterated blackout.
Grove dipped down until he was practically underwater as he pulled himself across the flooded lawn of an adjacent row house. His ears filled with white noise as he closed in on the bungalow, the rain whipping the side of his face. His buttons had torn off, and now his coat flapped furiously behind him. He could barely see his hand in front of his faceâthe only illumination coming from a flickering gas lamp on the corner still feebly sending a nimbus of dirty light across the block.
So close now. So close. He was going to make it! Goddamnit, he was going to make it!
He pulled on the rope as hard as he could, when all of a sudden, without warning, the rope gaveâand the sudden slack sent him careening backward.
He splashed into the rapids, nearly dropping the rope. He flailed for a moment, then got back on his feet and got a hold of the rope, which was now a limp noodle in his hands.
He started frantically reeling in the loose rope, his heart racing, his mind swimming with panic. He reeled and reeled, as the winds spun around him like a great jet engine revving out of control, churning gravel and shards across his face. It felt like barbed wire scourging his flesh.
Blinking away the pain and disorientation, and the moisture stinging his eyes, he reached the end of the rope, pulled it out of the water, and looked down at it. In the flickering light, he gaped at the frayed end. His heart rose into his throat. His testicles shrank up into his body.
The end of the rope was soaked in blood.
21
Grove made it to the front porch just as an ancient oak was rent apart behind him, just off the southeast corner of the house, the cracking noise penetrating his deafened ears.
The tree crashed down on the lawn with an immense, booming splash, carving a boulder-sized divot out of the back of Kaminsky's Jeep.
Grove didn't even hesitate. He lurched through the bungalow's gaping entranceway where the screen door hung off its hinges by a thread, banging in the wind. The inside of the flooded living room was dark and painted with darker stains, the wind swirling through it like an insult. Grove stood there for a frenzied instant fighting the dizziness and panic, gazing hotly around the empty room.
Many things registered simultaneously in Grove's sputtering consciousness.
One:
The dark stains were blood, and they were profuse and hectic. Some of them were smudges, most likely indicating a struggle, others were spray patterns indicating open arteries. It looked like a war had taken place in there, and it looked as though it had taken place recently.
The dark stains were blood, and they were profuse and hectic. Some of them were smudges, most likely indicating a struggle, others were spray patterns indicating open arteries. It looked like a war had taken place in there, and it looked as though it had taken place recently.
Two
: Despite the constant, excruciating noise of the storm, and the mad winds blowing rain into the bungalow, the place felt empty, or at least lifeless, which made Grove's gut pinch with monkey-brain panic. It felt like a trap. He reached into his torn coat and removed his .357â
: Despite the constant, excruciating noise of the storm, and the mad winds blowing rain into the bungalow, the place felt empty, or at least lifeless, which made Grove's gut pinch with monkey-brain panic. It felt like a trap. He reached into his torn coat and removed his .357â
âbecause he was also registering at that point a
third
realization: The dark lump lying in the corner near the overturned couch, just under the florette of plasma decorating the wall, was Ivan Kaminsky.
third
realization: The dark lump lying in the corner near the overturned couch, just under the florette of plasma decorating the wall, was Ivan Kaminsky.
Grove assumed the tripod stanceâmore out of instinct now than anything elseâand began sidestepping across the sodden living room, his Tracker raised and ready to talk, his jerky, paramilitary movements kicking up six-inch bursts of water that instantly diffused in the unstable air. He reached the body and, keeping the gun raised, allowed himself a single moment to look down at the remains.
He saw that the Russian had sustained major injuries to the trunk and upper body. His throat was gashed so deeply a white knuckle of trachea was visible. A wide dark pool of sticky, drying blood spread beneath his skull. Kaminsky's eyes were still open, a frozen stare.
Grove knelt and blinked. Emotion tried to push through the back of his heart, but he stuffed it back down, swallowed it like a stony pit in his throat. His eyes watered with anguish. He wiped his face with the back of his arm. His gun still gripped in both hands, he glanced away and saw something else across the room that caught his attention for just a moment.
Above the archway into the kitchen, a jagged, charred hole, fringed in pockmarks, marred the wainscotting. It looked fresh, and just about the size of a twelve-gauge wad cutter at close range. Grove looked back at Kaminsky. “You tried, Old Hoss... .” Grove's broken, crestfallen utterance was drowned by the atmospheric din. “I'll get him. I promise you, Kay.”
Right then, almost on cue, punctuated by a surge of wind that sounded like the sky shearing apart, Grove thought of Maura, and a fresh jolt of adrenaline streamed through his limbs, driving him back to his feet. He spun and aimed the Tracker at the shadow-draped far corner. Had something moved? His eyes were playing tricks again.
He started sidestepping his way into the kitchen, which was now littered with pots and pans and overturned chairs and Rorschach patterns of spilled cereals. More signs of struggle. No sign of Maura, though, no sign of a second body anywhere, thank God, thank God. Grove whirled back toward the archway when a small black lump flew across the room at him.
The sap tagged him square on the forehead right above the bridge of his nose.
The impact was so well placed and well timed, it knocked Grove backward with the force of a battering ram, sending off skyrockets in his eyes. He staggered against the wall, managing to stay on his feet for several seconds, completely dumbstruck. The pistol slipped from his grip and clattered to the floor. And for one sick instant Grove thought the storm had kicked something off a shelf at him.
Then the blackjack arced out at him again for one last finishing blow.
This time the heft struck him right on the pivot point of his jaw. Firecrackers popped behind his eyes, and the lights flickered off, and he folded to the floor with a gentle sag. He landed on his back.
It was as though a shade were drawing over him as he struggled to move. The last thing he saw was the thing that was once Michael Doerr, outlined in lightning, stepping into view, soaked and breathing hard and holding a homemade sap filled with steel slugs.
Then everything went black and silent.
Â
He saw a wall of gauzy white, and felt himself being lifted, lifted, lifted up into the air, and he blinked and gasped for breath, his first breaths, and he felt the cold hands of the tabibu midwife hoisting him high above the swaddling bed, high enough to see the landscape around the village. The ramshackle huts and shacks were barely visible in the dust storm. In the distance beyond the village, the mompambo plains boiled with sand clouds.
He cried out, a primal squeal of shock and terror at the harsh, unwelcoming world into which he had emerged, and he felt the pinch of the
tabibu
fingers on his tiny rump, and he squalled and squalled, but he could not stop gazing out into the distant barrens with his infant eyes.
tabibu
fingers on his tiny rump, and he squalled and squalled, but he could not stop gazing out into the distant barrens with his infant eyes.
A great pale whirlwind had appeared out there. It rose off the undulating sands, swirling and twisting toward the village, gobbling every baobab tree and scrub brush in its path, and sending shards of timber and weed up into the air like a brown fountain. This was Vida's dust devil, now glimpsed by her newborn baby, coming faster and faster, like a monster, coming straight for the infant son, who stared, transfixed by the twister, as it began to transform, like an impossible moving sand sculpture, melting and reforming, metamorphosing, elongating into a dark, hard, shiny object roaring around the outskirts of the little village.
Somehow, even in this elemental, nearly embryonic state, the babyâthat is, Groveârecognized this object as being the true object behind the ghostly dust devil: a
truck
. A very menacing black pickup truck kicking up a swirling cloud of dust. The truck had a painter's ladder hanging off one side of its whiskey-pocked quarter panel, and big broken searchlights like bugging eyeballs on its roof. The truck slammed to a stop in front of the midwife's hut, raising a thunderhead, and a tall, light-skinned black man emerged from the cab.
truck
. A very menacing black pickup truck kicking up a swirling cloud of dust. The truck had a painter's ladder hanging off one side of its whiskey-pocked quarter panel, and big broken searchlights like bugging eyeballs on its roof. The truck slammed to a stop in front of the midwife's hut, raising a thunderhead, and a tall, light-skinned black man emerged from the cab.
Danger radiated off this man in the faded jeans, sweaty, sleeveless T-shirt, and rippling muscles, as he ambled up the path toward the midwife's door. The wind swirled around him like ghostly accompaniment. The dust clouds seemed to follow him like a pack of hounds. He approached the door through which the midwife had already carried Vida and the newborn Ulysses, and he kicked it in with a pointed cowboy boot.
Squeeeeeeeak! Bam!
The door jerked open on rusty hinges, then slammed back shut. The man was enraged, his white-hot anger seeming to spur the dust storm behind him and above him, which was now swirling around the hut. It moaned and whined as the man screamed at Vida in Swahili,
“Ngozi ya mnyama mtoto mchanga!”
(“You hide my own baby from me!”) And again, the man thrust a boot against the battered screen door.
“Ngozi ya mnyama mtoto mchanga!”
(“You hide my own baby from me!”) And again, the man thrust a boot against the battered screen door.
Squeeeeeeeak! Bam!
The storm rose in answer to the jerking door, and the man screamed and threatened and menaced, and Vida screamed and sobbed, and the baby shrieked, and the wind wailed, and this was the true storm into which Grove was bornâa terrible, chaotic home punctuated now by that slamming door.
Squeeeeeeeak! Bam!
Squeeeeeeeak! Bam!
Squeeeeeeeak! Bam!
Squeeeeeeeak! Bam!
Squeeeeeeeak! Bam!
Squeeeeeeeak! Bam!
Â
Â
W wwwooosh! Thump!
Coming awake in stages, groggy and confused and hurt, Grove felt the rain on his face, his arms tied and raised over his head. For an unknown amount of time he had been wavering in and out of consciousness, incorporating the strange, watery wooshing-thumping noise from the darkness around him into his fever dreamâor vision, or primal memory, or whatever it wasâof his volatile biological father kicking in that door.
W wwwwoooooooosh! Thump!
Grove looked around, swallowing back the panic. He couldn't feel his legs, and for quite a few frantic moments he could not see very well, his skull panging with agony, his throat burning with a cold, dry, narcotic rawness so painful he could hardly swallow. His wounded right arm was as numb and cold as a block of ice. But worse than that, far worse, was the fact that he had begun to understand, little by little, just exactly where he was, and what was happening to him.
W wwwwwwwwwoooooooosshh! Thump!
The strange, gurgling, thumping noise blended with the moaning, echoing storm in the distance, which told Grove that he had been dragged back outdoors, perhaps back into Fiona's eye. Somehow he had the feeling that he had been unconscious only for a few minutesâten, twenty at the most. The rhythmic tugging on his arms, wedged and bound painfully above his head, told him he was lying supine and being dragged along some rough-hewn, bumpy surfaceâan ungroomed path or some sort of trailâhis lower body submerged in water from the waist down.
W wwwwwwwwwooooooooooooossssshhhh!Thump!
What the hell was that noise? What
was
it!
What the hell was that noise? What
was
it!
With great, agonizing effort Grove managed to twist around and crane his neck upward enough to see just exactly what was making that sound. He blinked woozily, trying his best to focus, upside down, through the misty darkness, until he finally saw the strange contraption that was dragging him along, and the dark figure commandeering it.
For a moment, Grove could not make sense of what he was seeing. Granted, he was looking upside down at it, and the sodium pentobarbital was still working on Grove's scrambled brain, but it just looked so comical and surreal: an old, leprous, iron railroad handcar, squeaking along a length of deserted, submerged railroad tracks in the middle of nowhere, with a madman at the controls, dragging Grove like a sack of tin cans.
Michael Doerr, who stood on the leading edge of the handcar, slowly and steadily pumping the massive handlebar up and down, up and down, was evidently unaware that Grove had stirred awake. Perhaps Doerr was too busy muscling the handcar through the brackish waterâhence the whooshing-thumping noisesâsending out a wake in the black floodwater that bubbled and simmered like a kettle on a stove. His face was deeply creased, contorted with fury. In the dim moonlight it resembled a rotting pumpkin. The black divot of a mouth was working busily, softly reciting some archaic litany.
Was Grove still dreaming? The pain throbbing behind the bridge of his nose was real enough, and when he looked back down at his own body, submerged up to his midriff in black ooze, he realized that it wasn't just the cold that was penetrating and seizing up his joints. It was the residual effects of the same sodium pentobarbital that Doerr had most likely administered after knocking Grove cold.
A shiver of panic crawled up Grove's back because he heard those telltale lunatic winds moaning and wailing in the near distance behind himâhe had no concept of directionâand he realized now what Doerr had done:
He had followed the eye
. God only knew why. Or for what psychotic purpose. Or where the hell they were. From the look of the riotous, swaying shadows of thick foliage, they were probably in some remote, forsaken corner of the bayou.
He had followed the eye
. God only knew why. Or for what psychotic purpose. Or where the hell they were. From the look of the riotous, swaying shadows of thick foliage, they were probably in some remote, forsaken corner of the bayou.
That was the direction in which the eye had been moving ... toward the bayous to the west. Or maybe it was toward the lake. Which was it? Goddamnit, Grove could not remember. His mind would not cooperate. It kept sending fiery little sparks of emotion across his synapses, down through his nervous system, jamming his logic center, sabotaging his rational thoughtâa megawatt alternating current of rage and hatred. He needed to destroy this freak Michael Doerr more than anything he had ever needed to do in his life. And maybe, just maybe, if he played dead ...
The handcar squeaked to a halt. They had reached a natural clearing, and now Doerr climbed off the contraption. His chains and weapons, still dangling from the inner loops of his coat, jangled in the unsettled breezes as he moved around the car through the knee-deep mire. Grove shot a quick, furtive glance at the tree line to his left.
They had stopped on the edge of some sort of long-forgotten Cajun cemetery.
In the blustering darkness, just for an instant, Grove saw the aboveground stone crypts, many of them cracked and ruined with age, stretching into the distance in all directions. The walkways, fossilized and embedded in the soggy earth, were all underwater. But the steepled and gabled rooftops of the tombs were visible like rows of wormy gray archipelagos. It was a vast necropolis, deserted by the ages, haunted by overgrown cypress and long, ragged chandeliers of Spanish moss hanging down and swaying in the eye winds with eerie nervousness.
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