Black Friday (6 page)

The van had veered off the road, rolled across a sidewalk, and crashed into the side of an industrial electrical supply shop.

Judy scanned the lobby, looking for doors that might lead to stairs. She wanted to be lower, to bury herself in the building and get farther away from the sky. Everyone seemed to disappear up into the sky, so she wanted to be underground with the weight of the entire church overhead.

Judy pushed through the heavy swinging doors into the nave. A bowl of holy water stood in the center of the entry. Judy moved around it and started between the rows of pews. The ceiling drew her eyes upward to the heights of the arches. At the far side of the room, on the right side of the transept, Judy saw an exit sign and headed for it.
 

She didn’t make it.
 

As she jogged up the center aisle, movement above drew her gaze and she saw them. The shadows were roaming. Judy stopped, thinking that perhaps she was somehow casting a shadow up there. A shadow jumped—it moved from a nook between two arches and slid down the arch into a deep corner. Judy fell to her knees and waited for it to swoop down and take her. She knew it must have been one of these shadows that took the nun and her neighbors from the street.

Judy prayed.

As a teen, Judy had rejected her mother’s religion, but it came back to her in less than a second. She prayed first for protection—some prayer her mom had recited—but those lines seemed to merely beseech God for strength and wisdom in the face of adversity. Judy wanted more than that. She wanted God to reach out and protect her with his power.

A noise, like whistling wind, echoed through the arches above her and Judy crouched lower, touching her interlaced fingers to her knees and forehead.

A prayer by St. Augustine popped into her head.

“Watch, O Lord, with those who wake, or watch, or weep tonight, and give Your Angels and Saints charge over those who sleep.”

She shook her head, but kept whispering the lines to herself. It was wrong—the prayer was meant to protect those who were sleeping or weak—but it was the closest she could come up with. A cold wind brushed the back of Judy’s neck and she imagined the black shadows swooping down to carry her off like the others.

Judy finished the prayer, “Shield Your joyous ones. And all for Your love’s sake. Amen.”

Another brush of wind was accompanied by that whistling sound. Judy stifled a scream and made her body into a tiny crouching ball on the cold floor of the church.

This time, Judy prayed with her own words—“I know I haven’t always been a good person, but please don’t let them take me away like the others. I promise I will be better. I promise my devotion to you and to…”

Judy gasped as something plucked at the back of her jacket.

“Please, just tell me what you want. I don’t know what you want,” Judy said. Her voice cracked as she sobbed into her hands.
 

Something grabbed the back of her jacket, and Judy felt herself sliding forward. She screamed when she opened her eyes and saw the tiles flying by under her knees.
 

Her body slid across the cold floor as her thoughts slipped backwards, into the past.

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Judy fought to stay in the present, but her mind wouldn’t obey. She dropped into a memory from the month before. In it, Judy was sitting on her couch, her legs starting to sweat under a thick quilt, watching the muted newscast on TV. She had her phone pressed up against her ear a little too tight. Her ear ached from the pressure.

Judy threw off the quilt, crossed the room, slid open the window near her kitchen table and stepped through to the small porch there. It was just big enough to stand on—just a way to get to the ladder which satisfied the fire code. Judy kept an ashtray out on the railing.

“I got a note from Crusty. He said he already knows which one we’ll pick,” Maureen said over the phone.
 

Judy lit her lighter behind her back and then brought it up to the cigarette clamped between her lips. She took a very slow drag as she lit it and then exhaled through the corner of her mouth.

“Are you
smoking
?” Maureen asked.

“No, Mom,” Judy said. “Of course not.”
 

She held the cigarette down at her waist, as if her mom would see it over the phone.

“How many people are coming this weekend?” Judy asked. She was trying to move the conversation away from the Christmas tree. Each year since Judy’s sophomore year in high school, they’d cut down their own Christmas tree from Eastman’s Evergreen Meadows—a lot about twenty minutes west of their Connecticut home. Hugh Eastman ran the lot, but Judy’s family called him Crusty because they’d called his father Crusty before he died. Everyone claimed ignorance as to the origin of the name Crusty, but Judy knew. Her older brothers Jon and Wes, the twins, had invented the name. They invented all the nicknames in the family, regardless of anyone else’s opinion. Because of Jon and Wes, Judy had an Uncle Scribble and a Grandma Wooly.

Before Judy’s sophomore year, when they’d switched to a cut-your-own lot, the family used to spend hours and hours shopping for a Christmas tree. They’d open with the same question at each lot—“Do you have any binary trees?” Nobody ever had any idea what they meant by a
binary
tree. You’d think that over the years the people who ran the lots would eventually clue into the request, but they never did. Perhaps they had too much turnover to offer perennial continuity on such questions.

What Judy’s family sought was a tree with two tops. Judy wondered how they ever succeeded in finding one, but they did every year. One would think that the Christmas tree growers wouldn’t bother to cut and ship a binary tree, but somewhere, usually in the back of the twentieth place they visited, Jon or Wes would shout, “Got it!” They’d strap the freakish tree, regardless of how sparse or misshapen, to the roof of the wagon and head home with their binary tree.
 

“I haven’t heard from that many people. No more than twenty or thirty,” Maureen said. Judy’s mom always threw a Thanksgiving party two weekends before the big day to leave the holiday just for family. “I wish you could come.”

“I just can’t get away with work and all,” Judy said. “And I don’t know if my car could make it.”

“I wish you’d just get rid of that thing,” Maureen said.

Judy rolled her eyes and took a long drag. Where did her mom think the money would come from? She’d spent everything on the first and last month, and security deposit. Leaving Shane had sapped her savings, but it had been totally worth every penny.
 

“Thanksgiving?” her mom asked, after a pause.

“No. I can’t make that either.”

“So you’re just going to sit in your apartment up in Maine, all alone? You’ll be able to come for Christmas though, right?" Maureen asked. It didn’t sound like a plea, or even a request. Somehow it sounded like a complaint or censure.

“Sure, mom,” Judy said.

Whenever someone new came to the house between Thanksgiving and New Years, they wouldn’t even have to ask about the binary tree. Before they could spot the pictures of the twins, dressed in their identical football uniforms—their numbers had been 17a and 17b—or their identical sweaters, Maureen would volunteer information about the tree. “Of course the tree is
not
in reference to the twins,” Maureen would say. “We’ve just always had a tradition of getting a binary tree.”

“He’ll be in town, you know,” Maureen said.

“I’m sorry?” Judy said. She wasn’t being difficult. She’d legitimately lost track of the context of the comment.

“He… will be… in town,” Maureen said. Whenever asked for an explanation of a statement, Judy’s mom would always just repeat herself very slowly.

Judy figured it out the second time—her mom was referring to her ex-boyfriend, Shane. His family lived about a block and a half from Maureen and Owen, Judy’s parents.

“That’s not enticing to me,” Judy said.

“I understand that things didn’t work out this time, honey, but you don’t have to be so hard on him,” Maureen said.

“Thanks, Mom. I appreciate it,” Judy said. “I appreciate you taking
my
side for once,” she didn’t say.

“I’ll let you go then," Maureen said. “You must be busy.”

“Thanks. I’ll talk to you soon,” Judy said.

“Goodbye.”

“Bye.”
 

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She opened her eyes and blinked several times. She was laying on the floor of the church, her face was pressed against the first step of the chancel. At the top of those steps, Judy would find herself in the sanctuary. She used to daydream during services of a desperate man bursting through the doors and running up the aisle chased by the police. He would fly up the stairs and demand immunity from prosecution while pleading his innocence to the congregation.

But this wasn’t the church from Judy’s memory. This was Maine, and Judy had grown up in Connecticut—miles away and a lifetime ago, back before the world had started to fall apart. And the top of these stairs looked like danger, not sanctuary.
 

Just above the altar—from her angle, Judy couldn’t see if it rested on the altar or hovered just above it—a black shape punched a hole in the air.
 

Her breath caught in her throat.

Judy closed her eyes and opened them again, thinking that there was no way the shape would still be there.

It was.

At the other side of the church, the doors banged open and hit the wall. She jerked her head around in time to see them begin to shut again. Judy clenched her teeth and moved her eyes back to the altar. The black shape was gone.

She didn’t hesitate. Judy sprang to her feet and ran for the wall, where a curtain hid the exit door from the congregation. She hit the bar at full speed and then pulled herself through the door. She turned on her heels and pressed the door shut again. It had a narrow rectangular window. Through it, she could see only a fraction of the pews. Judy ducked down so she could see the arching ceiling.
 

Satisfied that no black shapes were following her, she turned and pressed her back to the door. She was in a stairwell. An exit sign pointed down the stairs, but that was out of the question. There were no lights down there. She had no intention of descending into that blackness.

Judy climbed.

At the top of the stairs, she found an access panel for the pipe organ and a door to a storage area. Light filtered into the storage room from louvered vents in the wall. She slipped inside and found an upholstered chair. Dust puffed up from the fabric as she sat down and pulled her legs beneath her. She held perfectly still and stared through the vents. All she could see was part of the ceiling, but she kept her eyes peeled for any movement.
 

She sat there for hours, staring until her eyes burned from the effort.

CHAPTER 7: ROBBY

T
HE
GUN
WAS
POINTED
right at Robby’s face.

Robby’s breathing stopped on its own. His throat tightened and allowed no air to get through. He heard his heartbeat pounding in his ears. His eyes seemed to focus harder and the dim gray-blue world sharpened. Almost painfully sharp, every detail crystallized for Robby. He saw the tremble in Lyle’s outstretched hand. He saw the tears leaking from Lyle’s puffy, swollen eyes, just barely open. He saw a line of snot running down Lyle’s upper lip, and the way Lyle’s wide-open mouth gulped at the air.

Robby opened his right hand and let the can of pepper spray drop to the tile floor. He gripped the handle of the bat, but let the barrel roll in a slow arc towards the floor.

“Good,” Lyle said. “Put the bat down.”

Twenty feet separated Robby from the man.
 

Robby let the bat swing down and back, and then tightened his wrist, bringing the bat back towards Lyle. He twisted his body and flung the bat in a tight helicopter spin at Lyle’s torso. With the bat on its way, Robby turned and hoped. He hoped desperately that the gun felt as uncomfortable in Lyle’s hand as it looked. He hoped that Lyle’s bad stance, blurred vision, and ragged breathing would foul his aim. In fact, he hoped that Lyle’s aim was entirely untrained, that Lyle had picked up the gun somewhere, but never spent the time becoming proficient in its use. Most of all, Robby hoped that Lyle would pull the trigger.

Lyle did squeeze the trigger, reflexively, as he jerked his forearm up to block the spinning bat.

The bullet pulled left, missing Robby by several feet and shattering one of the lower panes of glass.

As the echoing blast of the gun deadened Robby’s ears, he dodged left, aiming his body into a low dive at the glass. He raised his arms, lowered his head, and crashed into to the spiderweb of cracks. Behind him, he heard the bat collide with something—hopefully Lyle’s head—and the gun went off a second time.