Frankenstorm: Category 8 (2 page)

The door was opened by a man who filled the doorway. He was tall, broad, black as midnight, with a head as smooth as an egg, and he wore a black sweatshirt, dark pants, and sunglasses. He was so unexpected that, for a moment, Andy wondered if they’d come to the wrong house.

The pounding beat of hip-hop music became louder when the door opened and, combined with the noise of the storm behind him, was a distraction for Andy.

“Uh, I need to see Jodi,” he said.

“Jodi who?”

“Jodi Rodriguez. My ex-wife.”

His eyes were invisible behind the dark glasses. “Jodi ain’t here.”

“Is my son, Donny, here?”

“No, Donny ain’t here.”

“Where are they?” Ram said.

The man did not move his head, just kept staring straight ahead, but Andy knew he was looking at Ram. “You got a warrant?”

Ram laughed. “I’m not here to search anything. We’d like to see the home owner, please.”

“How you know I’m not the home owner?”

Ram smiled pleasantly. “You gonna make trouble? I’m not here for trouble. The man wants to see his son, that’s all. What’s the problem?”

He stared at Ram for a moment from behind those opaque lenses, then said, “Hang on a sec.”

He started to close the door, but Ram reached out and stopped it, saying, “Hey, there’s a storm going on out here. Mind if we wait inside?”

The man’s mouth tightened for a moment and he seemed about to shove the door closed, anyway. He thought better of it and pulled it open to let them in.

The strong smell of marijuana filled Andy’s nostrils and he immediately thought of Donny. Anger rose up in his gullet like bad seafood, but he held it down.

An entryway to the left opened onto a sunken living room where several people, black and white, were sitting around listening to music and talking. There were two black men and one black woman, and a white couple. Every head in the room turned to Andy, then shifted to Ram just behind him. They stiffened and the two black men stood up abruptly. Andy recognized none of them—they weren’t part of Jodi’s old crowd.

“Don’t worry,” Ram said, smiling, “I’m not here to bust anybody. That’s not what this is. Andy, here, is an old friend of mine and I’m just helping him out, that’s all. Nobody panic. I don’t want any trouble.”

The two men remained standing for a moment, watching Ram. One was small, skinny, boyish, and wore a fedora pulled low in front. He said something to the other one, who sat down, then came across the room to Ram. Up close, he was obviously older than he’d first appeared, probably in his late thirties, with a rugged face and a thin scar across his throat. He was quite short, not much over five feet. “What can we do for you, officer?” he said in a low, raspy voice.

“This is my friend Andy Rodriguez,” Ram said. “His ex-wife and son live here. He needs to see the boy as soon as possible.”

“Yeah, well, they around here someplace.” The little guy didn’t hold still. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, bobbed his head, fidgeted with his hands. He turned to the big guy who had answered the door and said, “Get ’em down here. I think they upstairs.” To Ram, he said, “I’m Anton. We just visiting from Sacramento. Vic’s a business associate of mine. We came for the tornado.”

Still smiling, Ram said, “You mean the hurricane?”

“Yeah, yeah, hurricane, that’s it. We never been in no hurricane before, figured that’d be some real sick shit, y’know?”

Ram looked around the room. “Well, with all these windows unprotected, you’re going to have the hurricane right in here with you before it’s over.” His smile never faltered.

“Ain’t comin’ till tomorrow.”

Ram shook his head. “Now they’re saying it’s coming tonight.” He looked at the windows again. “And I wouldn’t want to be in here when it hits.”

The little guy looked nervously at the windows, then turned to the others. “You hear that? The tornado’s comin’ tonight.”

“Hurricane,” one of the women said.

“What the fuck ever. Where’s Vic?”

A moment later, a tall white man with shaggy dark hair that fell to his shoulders and a neatly trimmed beard and mustache walked into the room. In the cream-colored kaftan he wore, he looked a bit like Jesus Christ. He looked at Ram nervously and said, “Is there a problem?”

Ram’s smile became a grin. “Vic! You look real good. A lot better than the last time I saw you. Remember that?”

Vic frowned suspiciously. “I don’t think so.”

“Yeah, I arrested you on a DUI, remember? Well . . . maybe not. You were pretty drunk, and it was a while ago. Anyway, my friend Andy here needs to see Donny.”

Vic turned to Andy and said, “Who’re you?”

“I’m Donny’s father. Jodi’s ex-husband.”

Vic’s eyebrows rose. “Oh, yeah, yeah.” He turned to Ram again. “You’re not here to bust us, or anything?”

“No, just helping Andy out. Can he see Donny?”

Vic continued to stare at Ram. He obviously didn’t believe him and was wary.

“Hey, Vic,” Anton said. “He says the tornado’s comin’ tonight, man, you gotta do somethin’ about these fuckin’ windows.”

“What are
you
doing here?” Jodi said as she entered the room.

Andy was startled by how thin and pale she was as she hurried to his side looking at once surprised and angry. Her blond hair had been cut short and was flat and lifeless, and the sparkle was gone from her squinty eyes.

She said, “You’re not scheduled for a visit today You’re not supposed to
be
here!”

“I came to see Donny.”

“Well, you
can’t
see Donny because it’s not your day to—”

“
Dad!”
Donny said from the entryway.

Andy turned and smiled at his son. The boy was wearing a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans. Andy knew they wouldn’t have a chance to get his coat because he was just going to get Donny and leave without pausing for anything, but once he got in the car, he’d be fine. He hurried to his son with arms spread and said, “Hey, kiddo, how’s it going?”

They hugged and Donny said, “How come you’re here tonight?”

“Because I needed to see you.”

Ram was suddenly beside him. “Take him and get out to the car,” he whispered to Andy. “Now.”

“Come on, big guy,” Andy said, turning Donny toward the front door.

“Hey, wait, what do you think you’re doing?” Jodi said. “Where are you going? It’s not your scheduled time!”

Ram intercepted her, still smiling as he said, “He just needs a minute with the boy, that’s all.”

“But he can’t
do
that!”

Ram nodded. “Yes, he can. The boy’s in danger. You got drugs here. I can smell the weed, and your windows aren’t boarded up, which means when that hurricane hits soon, you’re gonna have a mess here. You’ve put your son in danger.”

“But-but-but—”

“It’s gonna be just fine, don’t you worry. While he talks to your boy, I want to have a word with you.” Ram went over to the front door to see Andy out. He whispered, “I’ll be out in a minute, just sit in the car and wait.”

“Where we going, Dad?” Donny asked as they went out the door.

Andy said, “We’re going to sit in a police car for a minute, Donny, how about that?”

He glanced back just in time to see Ram closing the door with one hand and reaching under his raincoat to draw his gun with the other. Putting his arm around Donny, he said, “Okay, let’s run to the car!”

They ran down the steps and into the wind, down the front walk, feet splashing in puddles, to the cruiser parked at the curb. Andy opened the car’s rear door and let Donny dive in, then followed him and pulled it closed.

“What’s happening, Dad? Why are you with a policeman?”

“He’s here to help me get you home.”

“Home? You mean your place?”

“Yeah. How would you like that? Would you like living with me full time?”

“Really?”

“Sure. I’ll fix up the spare bedroom for you. We can get a basketball hoop for the backyard.”

“And it’ll be quiet, too, won’t it?”

Andy put his arms around the boy and held him close, chuckling. “Yes, it’ll be quiet. Is it noisy like this most of the time here?”

“Yeah. Mom’s friends like music. A lot. But they don’t like cops.” He looked out the window at the house. “I bet they’re not very happy right now.”

Andy followed Donny’s gaze and looked through the window at the house. Water cascaded down the glass and made the house look like it was melting. He wondered what was going on in there. Ram had refused to tell him how he planned to convince Jodi to transfer custody, and Andy had been worried about that ever since. After seeing the people in the house, it seemed even less likely that Ram would be able to convince Jodi of anything. In her current mood, Andy doubted he’d be able to talk to her at all. The longer Ram stayed in there, the more worried Andy became.

Up the street, Andy saw a clump of shrubbery rolling and bouncing over the pavement, driven by the wind like a tumbleweed through a ghost town.

“How long is he gonna be in there?” Donny asked.

“I don’t know. I’m not sure what he’s—”

Andy’s body jolted when he heard the first gunshot from inside the house, and again when the second fired. Then a woman screamed. Andy’s insides turned to ice.

He turned to Donny to reassure him, but the boy looked unfazed. He did not seem at all surprised by the gunshots. He casually said, “They prob’ly shot him. They’ve all got guns.”

Three more shots, almost overlapping each other. Another scream. As the wind blew harder, the windows of the house, along with the entire neighborhood, went dark.

Ollie was running up the stairs when the lights went out and plunged the stairwell into blackness. It startled him and his toe hit the top of the next stair and he went down, cracking his forearms against the edge of a step, then slid most of the way back down the stairs. He cursed as he reached up and turned on his headlamp, then got to his feet. His breathing was loud in the stairwell, and his heartbeat was loud in his ears.

He pulled the door open and stepped into the second floor corridor. He looked to the right, the left, stood there and listened a moment. It was drafty, and he could hear the storm outside, but he neither saw nor heard anything in the corridor. He knew that didn’t mean much.

He turned right and moved swiftly but quietly down the corridor toward the rear of the building. He knew some of his men were on the second floor and was tempted to shout for them, but after the screams he’d heard on the phone, he decided to exercise caution.

A whispery sound behind him made him spin around. Rapid, rhythmic slapping noises—bare feet running on the tile—grew distant somewhere in the darkness beyond the reach of his headlamp. Someone was running away from him.

Ollie began running after the sounds, his heavy footsteps reverberating in the corridor. He saw nothing ahead. He stopped, listened, heard nothing. Turned around, listened again, then hurried back in the direction he’d originally been going, past the stairwell, farther into the darkness.

He came to another corridor that branched to the right, stopped and listened. Nothing. He took the cell phone from his belt to call one of his team leaders, but his foot struck something solid and heavy and he went down again, cursing. The cell phone slipped from his hand and shattered into a few pieces that skittered over the floor.

“Goddammit to hell,” he muttered as he got up. Then, when he turned to see what had tripped him: “Oh, fuck.”

One of his men, Sean Ferguson, lay sprawled on the floor on his back in a large puddle of blood, his face badly slashed, throat cut. His eyes were wide and his mouth yawned open, as if he had died mid-scream.

Head down, Ollie examined the floor around his feet and saw dark, wet smears and some distinct footprints. Some of the prints were clearly of bare feet. They had come from the direction in which he’d been headed.

“Blood,” he whispered, stepping back. He remembered what Fara McManus had said about what she called the “test subjects.”

Goose bumps rose on his flesh under his clothes and the hair on the back of his neck stiffened. He had no way of knowing whose blood besides Sean’s was all over the floor, so he made sure he avoided it as he moved slowly down the corridor, heading back to the footprints’ point of origin. He made a mental note to remove his boots when he left the building, just to be safe.

The light from his headlamp fell in a pool on the floor and moved along with him, passing over the shattered pieces of his cell phone, smeared with blood. He did not pick them up.

He came to another body, this one a woman in a pale hospital gown lying facedown on the floor. Blood stained the back of her gown and a section of the back of her head was a black, bloody hole. She’d been shot.

Ollie heard a sound up ahead, lifted his head, and saw light glowing through a doorway on the left, sweeping this way and that, and he heard a quiet voice.

“Jesus . . . Christ. Jesus fucking
Christ
.”

He hurried forward, calling, “Who’s there?”

“Ollie? It’s Mack.” His voice was hoarse and tense. He stepped through the doorway and turned toward Ollie, headlamp flashing brightly.

“Don’t move,” Ollie said. “Stay right where you are.”

He went toward him, watching where he stepped. He knew he already had blood on his boots and that he was safe as long as it didn’t get on his skin, but after what McManus had said, he didn’t want to touch any more blood if he could help it. Just being near it made his skin crawl.

“What the hell is going on?” he said.

“Sean and me, we were down the corridor going through all the rooms,” Mack said, “when we heard gunshots and screaming. As we were running down here, the lights went out. We came around the corridor and there were these . . . these . . .
people
. A bunch of ’em. In, like, hospital gowns, or something. They just came out of the dark, a bunch of faces rushing toward us, a bunch of angry, crazy faces, and a couple of ’em had knives and they went for Sean. I mean, they just
jumped
on him like animals, like
savages
, and started stabbing and slashing. I started firing. I got a couple of ’em, killed one, I think, and then they came after me. I panicked, I lost it, and I just ran. Down here, into this room.”

Ollie moved toward the doorway.

“Nothin’ in there but Mikey Holt and Lester Cabot, and they’re both dead. They found the people we were looking for. Shot their way in there”—he turned and gestured toward the doorway through which he’d come—“Blew the fuck outta the door. And they rescued ’em. Just like you said. They found ’em, let ’em out, and then . . . far as I can tell . . . those people killed ’em, killed Mikey and Lester like they hated them, cut ’em all to hell, stabbed ’em. They took Lester’s clothes. Those people, they were like, Jesus, like angry savages, or something.”

“Where the hell did they go?”

“I don’t know. They came outta nowhere, I ran, and then they were gone.”

“You get any blood on you?”

“Blood? I-I don’t know, I—”

“Any of
their
blood, I mean. The people who attacked you.”

“I don’t know.”

“Jesus Christ. Who else is on this floor?”

“It was just me and Sean, Mikey, and Lester.”

Ollie shook his head slowly as he stared at the open doorway. “We’ve gotta find them. We’ve gotta find the people they let out of this room.” He spoke the next sentence in a tight and angry voice. “Before they get out of this building.”