Double Cross [2] (28 page)

I
DON’T KNOW HOW
I get through the day. Otto’s out there, in terrible trouble. Every few hours I call HQ for updates. They never have anything, just vague hopes that the next lead will pan out, and then the next.

I’m starting to get that they’re fishing. By the end of the day they’ve interrogated, revised, and released fifty people. Result: fifty people are walking around Midcity remembering their day wrong. And I think about Packard: tired, weary, doing his best to get Otto back. I think about what he said about the bracelet, and I want to ask him about it. I want to see him; the sense of unfinished business between us is overwhelming. Like a madwoman, I clean my apartment top to bottom, as if outward physical order will calm the chaos in my heart.

Just before I lock myself to the bed frame for the night, I remember the druggie-fencer-burglars, and I put my stun gun under my pillow, just in case the cops haven’t made their arrests. I toss the key across the room.

Exhausted as I am, sleep won’t come, so I pull out my mystery book. As I read, I begin to focus too much on possible telltale sensations in my head. This, at least, is one advantage to being handcuffed to the bed: I can’t go to the computer and read about my symptoms and freak myself out even more. Plus, it’s been months since I visited the vein star forums; I have no doubt somebody has
posted scary new information. I remind myself I wasn’t feeling any head weirdness when I was in that tense situation at Covian’s, and that sort of stress would bring on a vein star episode if anything would. This self-talk must work, because I drift off.

The crash startles me awake so violently that I shoot up in the bed, wrenching my arm. Was that from inside my apartment? I’m afraid to move. It’s 2:10 in the morning. Another nearby crash jolts me into action—clumsily I grab my phone and dial Shelby. More cracks—like the cracking of wood. Somebody’s smashing through my front door.

Shelby answers and I frantically tell her somebody’s trying to get in, and I’m trapped on my bed, and why the hell didn’t I call 9-1-1?

“We are calling 9-1-1 and coming there.” A click. More crashes. I hold the phone tight, wishing she was still on the other end.

Another crash, and another. I grab my stun gun. Then a different kind of crash and a bang. The front door, hitting the wall. They’re in. I sit in full alert, eyes wide.

Sounds in the living room. Heavy, plodding footsteps—more than one set. I’m so exposed, so vulnerable! Quietly as I can, I yank at my cuffed hand, like magically I’ll get free. Then I maneuver around, trying to swing over to hide under the bed. Impossible.

In my state of hyperawareness, I can remotely track every movement and action of the intruders through sounds. Clinks of metal is them going through my keys and change dish by the door. Lower-pitched clinking; they’re in my junk drawer.

I consider hiding under the covers—surely they’re just looking for things to steal and fence, and then they’ll leave. And if they’re so out of it, like the reports said, maybe they won’t think twice about a lump in the bed. But I don’t want to be unable to see them!

Plodding footsteps around the living room floor. Another set down the hall to the bathroom. The creak of the medicine cabinet. The sound of a glass bottle, shattering in the sink. My perfume. Chains clacking on glass. They’re pawing around in my jewelry and hair stuff on the ledge by the sink.

More crashing and smashing. My heart slams in my chest. They’re nearing.

Brain flash. I grab handfuls of laundry from my floor beside my bed and pile it up with some pillows next to me, then I yank my crocheted blanket out from under the comforter. You can see through it. I curl into a ball in the corner near my headboard next to the pillows and throw it over myself, praying I blend in with the laundry.
Please be really drugged up! Please!

I sit really still, peering through the gaps in the blanket. Soon a light form plods in—a woman with blonde braids and a shapeless white gown. She bumps into my dresser, then, with mechanical movements, starts to shuffle through my jewelry and trinkets.
Take what you want
, I think.
Take it and go.

A man lumbers in and joins her at my dresser. He’s wearing a loose printed top and matching printed pants. Two more women crowd in after him. One of them pulls scarves out of my basket.

Suddenly the one with braids walks toward me. I curl my fingers around my stun gun, think about lunging, until I realize she’s going for my bedside table, inches away from my head. I fight to stay still even though my every instinct screams to scramble away.
Thieves are just like bees
, I tell myself.
Leave them alone and they’ll leave you alone.

She pushes my book and my glass of water right off the side. Crash. Up close she looks like she’s about forty, and she breathes loudly through her open mouth. She examines my locket necklace, tosses it aside, pulls open
my vibrator drawer and rummages through, movements more zombie than druggie. And that steady, rhythmic breathing, almost like she’s sleeping.

Sleeping.

A haze of terror spreads over me. Sleeping.
No!
There’s no way Ez could’ve linked to anybody else—nobody on the planet can penetrate the force field Otto sealed her in—not without a descrambler.

Unless it’s somebody else turning them into sleepwalkers. With a sick feeling I revisit Simon’s theory about the boyfriend, Stuart Dailey, being the culprit all along.

She shuts the drawer. The man comes nearer, as if to help her search my bedside area. The printed outfit is Spider-Man pajamas. I focus on Spidey’s black, webbed face, willing them not to see me.

As if she hears my thoughts, the woman with braids turns her head, looks at me with dull eyes. She rests a hand on my arm, squeezes, and moans. All of them turn to me.

Fuck!

She tugs at my blanket; I clutch it to myself with my free right hand, which also has the stun gun.

“Help!” I yell. “Help!”

The man starts pulling the blanket away from my feet and I kick him; they seem intent on getting the blanket off me. Morbidly I wonder if they see it as a kind of food wrapper, like foil around a burrito. The woman with braids pulls harder on the blanket, so I just let go of it and zap her with my stun gun. She collapses on me and I shove her off onto the floor by the side of my bed while kicking Spidey, who is making headway with my feet. He seems impervious to pain. One of the other women crawls over the far side of the bed, and suddenly my stun gun hand is caught in the blanket. I kick and squirm like crazy. Spidey presses all his weight onto my feet and the
woman peels up my T-shirt and lunges, face-first, at my bare belly. I scream as I feel her warm tongue on my belly, and then the searing pain of teeth breaking my skin.

Suddenly the room is lit up red. Sirens. The three sleepwalkers jerk to attention—including the woman who bit me. Blood drools down her chin. As if on command, they head back toward my living room.

I gape in disbelief at my stomach; blood oozes from a spot just to the left of my belly button. I want to stick my finger in it and see how deep it is, but I’m afraid to. I roll my T-shirt so it doesn’t get into the wound, and I just watch the blood, feeling sick, pulling mindlessly on my handcuffed hand.

They’re coming back. I pull the blanket over me but they rush right by, carrying equipment—sledgehammer, blowtorch, welding mask. They’re going for the window. Spidey smashes the pane, and the three of them lumber out to the fire escape.

Rustling next to me—the woman with braids is waking up! She rises and heads toward the fire escape.

Sounds in the living room.

“Hurry up—in here!” I scream. “Hurry!” What’s taking them so long?

She’s nearly out the window as my room fills with blinding light. Flashlight beams.

“Police! Stop!” A cop darts after her and hauls her back inside.

Somebody flicks on the bedroom light.

I point. “Three more are getting away!”

A pair of cops goes out the broken window.

“Are you hurt?” A woman officer comes to my side. It’s obvious I am; the front of my belly is bloody. She looks at it with concern.

“She bit me,” I say in a strangely calm tone.

“EMTs will be here any moment.”

I feel nauseated.

She asks me if I have a key to the handcuffs, and I point out to the corner where it is. “Please,” I say.

She retrieves it as other cops march the woman with the braids out. The woman still looks asleep. What does it take to wake these people?

A different officer, this one wearing latex gloves, presses gauze to my wound. “Ambulance on the way,” he says.

The first officer, who now introduces herself as Dana, unlocks me. She wants to know who locked me up and why. She looks skeptical when I insist it was voluntary, to prevent sleepwalking. I give them the story of the attack, leaving out the stuff about Ez and Stuart and us disillusionists. No, I don’t know them. They broke down my door and attacked me. The cops don’t seem overly shocked at the biting. Or are they just trying to keep me calm?

My stomach feels weird and quivery; I can’t stop thinking of the blood I’m losing, and the feel of that woman’s tongue on my skin. And saliva carries pathogens. What diseases has that woman picked up from other victims? What has she transmitted to me?

I pretend to listen to Dana, who’s giving me information on filing domestic abuse charges for some inexplicable reason that I don’t care about. My stomach is bleeding through the gauze, making bright red splotches. Somebody else assures me an ambulance is coming.

More cops arrive, including a pair of detectives. The lead detective, a no-nonsense woman named Sara, has light brown skin and short, salt-and-pepper hair. She wants me to repeat my story and I comply. Even through the haze of my medical trauma, I find myself thinking things like I’m glad I sleep in a T-shirt and sweats, and not something sexy or raggedy. And I have this sudden empathy for people who end up on the TV show
Cops
.

“She bit at you with her teeth?” Detective Sara asks. “You’re sure about that?”

“Pretty hard to mistake,” I say, staring at her tiny little dolphin earrings.

Sara exchanges glances with a pink-faced, sixty-something bald man whom she introduces as her partner, Al. Sara says, “We’d like to keep that detail out of the media for now.”

It takes awhile for this to register. “Oh my God. That’s what happened to my neighbor, isn’t it? Scott Feethum. That’s why he thought they were perverts!”

If Sara and Al are impressed by my deduction, they don’t show it, and they won’t confirm or deny it. They do imply that the blowtorch and sledgehammer are new developments.

“I can’t believe you would make the neighborhood think it’s harmless druggie burglars when people are actually in danger,” I say.

Detective Al asks me again, more sternly this time, to keep the cannibal detail to myself.

I snort, wondering if they’ve made the connection to the cannibal cases three years ago, and how many of them understand that it was a dream invader running this show, or if they all still think it’s Satanists gone wild.

“Any idea where they went off to?” Al asks. When I prove to be no help on that count, he tells me what a bad idea it is to have cuffed myself to the bed. While he recites a list of bad things that could’ve happened—things that even my habitually paranoid mind would’ve never thought of—a pair of EMTs pushes through the small knot of people to look at my stomach. One of them, a blond man my age with tiny glasses, pulls up the gauze and washes the wound with a stinging solution and some sort of wipe while I monitor his face for signs of shock and pity.

“Did it go through?” I finally ask.

“Through?” he asks.

“To my intestines?”

“No, this is pretty superficial,” he says. “And organs like intestines tend to move around, like marbles inside a water balloon.”

“Oh,” I say.

He nods. “If this had been a dog bite, you’d need quite a few more stitches.”

“I need stitches?”

“We’ll let a doctor decide that. You were lucky.” He sticks a butterfly bandage onto my belly, and more gauze on top.

“Because a dog’s mouth is bigger?” I ask. “That’s why it would be worse?”

“And a dog’s teeth are sharper,” he says, “made for ripping and tearing. Human teeth tend to hydroplane.” All this talk is calming me down, even as we move onto the topic of saliva-borne bacteria. He’s not nearly as concerned as I am, though another EMT brings up the remote chance of rabies. I’m just starting to freak out about that when Simon swings in.

“Justine!”

I jump out of bed, which kills my stomach. “Thank God!” I say.

He hugs me, shaggy coat and all. I’m feeling shaky all of a sudden. “She bit my stomach!” I give him the cop version of what happened; he can put together the rest.

“It’s okay,” he says, clutching me to him. “You’re safe.” He wants to see, and I pull the bandage partway off. The EMT informs him that while it’s superficial, they’re recommending transport.

The detectives are back with more questions. Did any of the people look familiar? What did they seem to be after? As I tell them the sleepwalkers were focused on my drawers and dresser a horrible thought occurs to me.