Will didn’t know how to solve the problem of illegals coming into this country. It wasn’t right to break the law and take jobs from Americans who could use the work at a decent wage. And it made him sick that some of the big companies were taking advantage by paying illegals little to nothing with no benefits and sometimes in dangerous conditions. It wasn’t like they could form a union or complain to OSHA. He’d read about a meat packing plant in Midwest that got busted for having a huge workforce of undocumented people, including a large group of children. When he thought about it, he wondered what he would do if he lived in a place with no work and no future. (Well, if he lived in one he couldn’t leave anyway.) He’d do what half the population of backwoods Kentucky had been doing for generations: pick up stakes and move to where the work was. Problem with the illegals was that when they picked up stakes, they moved over an imaginary line that striped their humanity, like walking over a bad spell.
Will leaned into a bend and upshifted on the way out. The Indian got the idea and put on a little extra. The leaves blurred to sheets of wavering green in his peripheral vision. Will thought about the stories Daddy used to tell about the coal wars back in the early part of the Twentieth Century. The miners went on strike to protest bad pay, perilous conditions, and the dept-vortex known as the company store. The companies brought in Italian immigrants to die for next to nothing down in the black holes punched in the mountainside. And when they petered out or went on strike themselves, the companies brought in trainloads of blacks. Those poor sons of bitches got caught between the company and the miners. Will gunned it down a straight stretch, the engine roaring off the trees and rock outcrops. He wondered how many bleached ribcages still fingered the sky back in these woods.
By the time he pulled up next to Tommy Ward’s patrol car in the parking lot out back of the Wal-Mart, Will’s mind had cleaned itself out. He was here to work. Maybe he could make sure the bust went down smooth. Tommy’s boys sometimes liked to play it a little rougher than they needed to. Tommy hopped (as well as his gut would allow) out of the car and gave Will a warm handshake. Rough calluses pushed into Will’s hand. (Tommy’s hobby was splitting wood. He had a pile out back of his house near as tall as the roof line. Reminded him of his hero—Ronald Regan.)
“Constable! Damn happy you could come up and join our little swarree.”
“Tommy,” Will said. “Wouldn’t miss it. When we set to go?”
“Ha! All fired up and ready to pop?”
Will squinted up at the sun. “Yeah, I suppose I must be.” Tommy Ward was practically shucking and jiving on the pavement he was so juiced up. This was as big a deal as he’d seen in years. Finally something to give the job some edge. He’d have stories to tell for years after this one. “Super 8’s just up the street a bit, right? They all still there?”
“Kent pulled in last night with a final load of them—well, final ‘cause we’re going to make it final. Our man on the stakeout counted another half dozen or so. I got Steve MacMillan watching ‘em.”
Will nodded. Steve was a good guy, a little older and cool; reminded Will of Stu Redman from The Stand. He’d taken the deputy job because the pension was good and he had three young children. Most of Tommy’s boys were little more than grown-up high school bullies who’d gotten tired of mailbox baseball and cow tipping. If things got stupid, Will could look to Steve for help. “How many in total?”
“We put it at between fifteen and twenty.”
“Jesus, in one room? How long they been there?”
Tommy turned toward the motel as if he could survey through its walls. “Few days at least cept’ for that last bunch.”
Will put his hands on his hips and looked at his boots. “How many armed?”
“Oh, you getting uncomfortable Constable?”
“C’mon, Tommy.”
“Just ribbing you, just ribbing you.” He put on a lisp, “You’re always so sensitive… Anyways, way I figure it, just our coyote’ll have a gun. They don’t like the cargo to be carrying.”
“Right.”
“You can bet a few of them’ve got knives or razors hid on them somewhere, though, so watch your ass all the same.”
Will had a thought. “Tommy? You or any of your guys speak Spanish?”
“Nope, but I brought my universal translator.” Tommy patted his holster. “Don’t worry about it, Constable. Them beaners’ll get a look at the heat and our badges and hit the floor like sacks a’ shit.”
Will ran it through is mind. He’d taken a couple of semesters of Spanish in school but that was a thousand years ago. He couldn’t do much more than kick down the door and shout, “Please! Where is the bathroom?”
The car radio squawked. “Sheriff? This is MacMillan, over?”
Tommy reached in and pulled out the hand mic. “Go, Steve-oh.”
“Two-bears get here yet?”
Tommy handed the mike to Will. “Right here, Mac.” He handed it back.
“Can you all come on over to my position? There’s something going down in that room. Over?”
Will was already trotting around to the patrol car’s passenger side by the time Tommy Ward said, “We’re on our way, Steve.”
* * *
The three of them squeezed into the cab of Steve MacMillan’s big pick-up truck. A pair of binoculars floated on the dashboard amid a tide of food wrappers. A couple of day’s growth of stubble darkened Steve’s cheeks and it smelled just a fart shy of an animal den. Steve pointed to the room on the far end of the motel and whispered as if they could hear him from this distance. “Those curtains been closed most of the time I been out here, but about five minutes ago I seen ‘em kind of smash up against the glass like someone pushed into them.”
“Well, shit,” Tommy said, “there’s got to be at least a baker’s dozen of them in there. Somebody probably just tripped over somebody.”
“Yessir, but then I seen one of the illegals at the window. He was trying like lord a’mighty to get out, but someone pulled him back. It happened real fast, but I saw it.”
“Tom we need to go,” Will said.
Tommy Ward didn’t even try to conceal the excitement in his voice as he grabbed the hand mic off the radio and squawked it. “Gentlemen, this is your Sheriff. We are go in one. Come back, please.”
A chorus of scratchy voices squawked back, “Ready, over.”
Steve MacMillain started up the truck. Will reached down and fingered the snap off the hold-down on his holster. Tommy Ward let out his breath and thumbed the mic, “This is Sheriff Ward. Three…two…one…Go!”
When it was all over, Will wouldn’t remember the truck jouncing over the curb or Tommy Ward almost flattening him as they all piled out. He wouldn’t recall the purple eye makeup on the woman behind the front desk or the look of satisfaction on the face of the chambermaid, nor that her feet were bare. There would be no memory of the other cops pounding in a second after them, the rasping of their breath or the tromp of their boots. Somehow Will ended up on point and was the first at the motel room door. His memories started with his foot against the door. Everything leading up to then was flash-fried by what he saw afterward.
At first he thought they were all sleeping. Then the blood on the wall, a cheery splash of crimson that couldn’t be more than a few minutes old, registered in his peripheral. So did the smell: the loosened bowels of fourteen men. Men, that was funny. Half of these bodies had housed teenage boys. Will walked into the room, stepping over the outstretched hand of a dead man. Will’s eyes moved up that arm, over the blue denim work shirt, rolled up at the elbow, past the shoulder to the neck. Did some woman press her lips to that spot his final night with her? Did some child wrap her arms around the strong column of her father’s neck as he carried her to their front door? Will’s eyes traveled further, pulled toward the man’s own. They were whited over, seeing nothing. Maybe seeing everything. His jaw was clenched shut.
Someone called his name from the door. Will put up a hand to silence
them and realized it was full of gun. He holstered Smaug and stepped over another man, another, another. He found the coyote, Howard Kent, with his lower half shoved under the bed. Had he been trying to back into this hiding place? He clutched a nine-millimeter semi-automatic in his left hand. Will leaned down. Someone used his name again. This time he ignored them. Will sniffed the gun barrel. It hadn’t been fired. He glanced up. Kent’s white eyes painted him with nothing.
Will stood up. White eyes like a handful of ivory chips tossed over the ground. Twenty-eight blank television sets that had played some secret, terrible show. Now they played milky reflections of one man standing in the middle of the room while six others crowded the door. Will stepped over more limbs and torsos and made his way to the blood spatter on the wall. From what he could tell everyone was intact, so where did this come from? He could smell the copper in the air as he drew near and almost tripped over his answer. A huge man, all work-carved muscle, sprawled on the floor. Will grimaced. This one had swallowed his own hand up to mid-forearm, dislocating his own jaw and tearing the skin at the corners of his mouth. His throat had burst and the artery sprayed the wall.
Something rustled in the corner.
Will’s left hand flew up in a stop, stay back flat for the other cops. His right filled with dragon. He stepped over the giant toward the sound, over by the window. There was someone behind the window curtain. He thumbed back the hammer with glacial speed and held his breath. There were fourteen dead men in this room. Whatever hadn’t died was behind this curtain. Four other hammers cocked behind him and a shotgun racked a shell. Oh, shit. Those idiots might shoot him, but he was already reaching out for the edge of the curtain. Will yanked it back and his breath caught.
A Latino boy, maybe a year or two older than Childe Howard, hugged his knees on the floor. He rocked a little back and forth, his eyes boring holes through the fabric of this universe and seeing…something else. A rosary was intertwined in his little fingers. He had dirt under his nails. For a moment, Will thought he had some kind of weird punk thing going on with his hair—the roots were dyed platinum blonde. But then he got it and a little involuntary “Oh,” escaped him. The kid’s hair was in the process of turning ghost white. Will made Smaug safe and called over his shoulder. “It’s a kid.” He crouched down. “Hey, amigo.” The boy stared into and past Will Two-Bears McFarlan and rocked, rocked, rocked. “Que pasa? Que pasa?”
Will almost thought better of it, then reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. The boy was freezing with shock, all his blood pulled to his core. The boy’s eyes stayed away, but his lips parted and breath shaped a word. Will leaned in to hear it. “What’d you say, pardner? Que?”
“Avispa.”
* * *
The sun had slipped below the shoulder of the mountain by the time Will was able to slip away home. He hated riding after dark. The critters came out and the Indian’s headlight wasn’t worth much. He’d already scared a small heard of deer back up the side of a draw as he rumbled around a corner. Orange eyes in the half-light, frozen on him and then scattered apart like sparks from a campfire. You’d think the damn things would know enough to run from a sound like a motorcycle, but they had gotten used to people. He supposed it was kind of pretty when he thought about it, but he was feeling a little too scoured to do pretty just then.
There had been fifteen of them in all, including the kid he found. That one breathy word was all they got out of him. He’d fallen into some kind of catatonic stupor by the time the ambulance got there. Tommy Ward had called in the Staties after all. He wasn’t about to screw around with protocol with a body count to consider. It took an hour for them to get there: two suits and two uniforms, all with crew cuts. Tommy and the suits went off to one side to talk—rather the suits took Tommy around the corner and reamed him a new one. He came back hat in hands, twisting the rim and red as a July strawberry. The suits did some poking around and picture taking and when the county M.E. arrived they did some ordering. Will and the rest of Tommy’s goon squad spent the afternoon stacking corpses. It took two van trips and one in Steve MacMillain’s pick-up to finish the job. All those white eyes.
The other men were baffled by what they’d seen. Was it some kind of contagion? Poison the M.E. had guessed, gas pocket of some kind maybe. He’d know more after the autopsies. But he wanted Tommy and his men including Will to keep an eye on themselves and call in they started feeling “symptomy”. Will rounded a corner and spooked a crow out of the road. What the hell kind of a symptom was reaching into your throat so far you blow out your main pipe? And how exactly would he call that in? He fogged up his face plate with hot giggles.
Will flipped the shield up and fresh air whooshed in, cooling his head and pulling tears from him eyes. He’d kept his mouth shut when the Staties took his statement; told them just what he’d seen in that room and not what he thought had caused it. Was the Pompiliad as close as Roanneville? No, he didn’t get that feeling, didn’t get the sense that it had been in the room, not directly. He didn’t know how he knew this. It didn’t feel like when the spider filled his head with images, visions of the Wasp’s progress across the plains toward Chicago. But Will did have a taste for the thing now, and its impression had been in that room, its influence. It wasn’t here but it was preparing the way.
Will kicked the bike down to second gear and pulled over. He put the kickstand down and pulled off his helmet. He scrambled down the bank and stood at the creek’s edge. The shakes hit him hard, racking up through his ribcage and grabbing his shoulders. Will tried to take in slow, easy breaths, but his throat tightened. He doubled over and retched. It took him down to his knees. For a while he kneeled at creekside, listening to the water sluice away his sick.
Chapter 25
Loraine wanted sex. She’d pushed back from her computer an hour ago with the realization that she could either stay put for another second and lose her mind, or go for a walk and get her shit together. This is what happened to her whenever she worked too long. It wasn’t her fault—sometimes she’d just lose track of how long she’d been crunching away at the keyboard. Childe was such a good boy about feeding himself and taking care of the dog, days could go by before she took a break beyond the odd can of tuna and then collapsing into bed in the wee hours. She could always count on her body to remind her before she fainted away from hunger or sleep deprivation. Now that she was in her mid-forties, she could add sudden attacks of sexual hunger to the selection of body clock alarm sounds.
She’d told the Kiddo she was going for a walk and asked if he’d like her to take the dog. Childe replied from deep within the spine of a Harry Potter novel that Darwin was already outside somewhere. She shrugged and pulled the back door closed. The moratorium on solo missions for the Amazing Ninja Dog had ended without much fanfare. She knew it would. You couldn’t keep a decent mutt away from the emerald halls of the forest and the battalions of squirrels within, nor screenwriters with a bad case of the hottsies. Barring a hot bath with a battery-powered friend, a long walk was always a good choice. That and her dirty secret.
Loraine aimed for the trailhead that emptied out in their backyard and plunged into the cool dark. It was early evening and just chilly enough that she could have brought a jacket, but the air braced her skin and helped clean away some of the cobwebs. She tromped over roots and the odd fern, the house receding over her shoulder and the trail in front of her only half seen.
She hadn’t had sex with anyone since they left Hollywood. That had been Steve Winslow, the effects guy from her last movie. Not a real catch in the looks department, but as long as she was being honest with herself, neither was she so much anymore. (They had giggled the whole time, though, and that was more important in her book. A great bedroom giggler was Loraine.) She had never been a beauty per se, but back in her day she’d been cuter than hell. No one did flirtatious winking better than Loraine Duchamp Howard. And with the right outfit and makeup engineering, she managed to get her fair share of at
tention.
More than anything she got men by making them laugh. Funny women are strange creatures, exotic. It’s the men who are supposed to do all the joking around. Women who could joke with the boys were crass and mannish. (That was her mother talking, of course, but mothers’ voices stay forever, even when we learn to ignore them—like that involuntary reaching for a cigarette twenty years after you’ve quit. You catch yourself doing it, feel a little pain and move on.) She’d caught Childe’s father with her sense of humor. On their first date, Terry Howard had laughed so hard he’d sprayed martini all over his steak.
Steak and a martini: that was pure Terry. He had this old-fashioned advertising man from the sixties thing going, with slicked back hair, sharp suits and a pack-a-day habit. Never mind that he was a studio CPA, forever scurrying around after the director and reminding him how far over budget they were. He always had a martini at five and another at seven and, oh what the hell and why not, another at seven-thirty. Terry had surprised Loraine into marrying him, kind of snuck up on her really. One day they were just dating and screwing and generally having a good time of it. (Lots of bedroom giggling and sneaking off the set for nooners.) The next, there he was on his knee, the sun shining off his laser perfect hair and the rock he was holding out to her. She’d accepted almost out of a sense of novelty.
Childe made the scene nine months after their wedding night on the nose. Terry had wanted to make a Terrance Jr. out of him, but Loraine had vetoed the living hell out of that one. She sat him down with a freshly squeezed martini and read him Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came by Robert Browning and threw in a blowjob for good measure. Now, as she thought back on it a wry smile twisted her lips. Terry had been a decent enough man, but he was such a doofus. He used to squeak with he came. This high-pitched whining noise would issue from his sinus cavity. It reminded her one hell of a lot of the noise Darwin always made when he was in the midst of a decent doggie yawn.