It's Alive! (7 page)

Frank stepped into the corridor and almost tripped over two orderlies who were mopping the floor. He grimaced in disgust, imagining what they were mopping up. He strode briskly past the receptionist and out the front door, which one of Perkins’s men opened for him.

His Corfams clopped on the concrete entranceway, echoing against the building. He stopped and listened—he didn’t know for what. Police cars were parked all around, the dark forms of their drivers inside. They paid him little notice; evidently Perkins had got word outside that he should be permitted to leave Community Hospital. It was quiet out here. Slowly he scanned the thick hedges that ringed the hospital. He shook his head and continued to his car, still where he’d left it, directly in front of the hospital entrance. Police cars were parked behind it. On his windshield, glistening with dew, was a parking ticket. He snatched it and ripped it up, scattering the pieces into the street.

He slid into the driver’s seat and put the key into the ignition. Then he sat still, turning his head to look into the backseat. He stared at the emptiness. Then he sighed, started the motor, and drove away.

A block down the street he passed another row of thick hedges. A segment of the hedge moved. The movement followed the path of his car for a few feet, then stopped.

Frank drove nervously, stopping abruptly for red lights, bucking forward when they changed. He spun the radio dial back and forth, and finally got a news broadcast:

“. . . Police still offer no explanation for the mysterious five deaths that occurred last night at Community Hospital in Westwood. Informed sources at the hospital allege that the deaths followed the birth, only moments before, of an infant in a mutated form. KBOP has acquired exclusive information naming Mr. and Mrs. Frank Davis, of Westwood, as the parents of the infant in question. The whereabouts of the newborn child are not known—”

Frank viciously switched off the radio and slammed his fist into the dashboard. “They named us! The bastards named us! Don’t they have any PR guy at that stinking hospital?”

He pulled into his driveway, his lights picking up a glint off the backyard swimming pool. Though dawn streaked the sky at the horizon, it was still quite dark. He got out of the car and stood, slowly letting his eyes fall around the lawn, the bushes, the perimeter of the house. There was no sound save that which his hard-soled shoes made on the macadam and, as he approached the house, on the manicured grass.

Climbing the four steps to his front door, he slid the key into the lock, turned it, and shoved the door open. Then he turned and looked back again at the lawn and the shrubbery. He left the front door ajar as he switched on the foyer light, two living-room lamps, and the overhead fluorescents in the kitchen. Then he went back and shut the front door, flipped the knob of the double-lock closed, and connected the security chain.

Frank had never been in this house, at dawn, alone.

He stood for a few moments in the silence of the well-lit downstairs. Then he walked stiffly into the kitchen, feeling his muscles ache with exhaustion, and pulled open the refrigerator door. Plenty of milk (you could always tell when Chris wasn’t home), cold cuts, salad greens, cheeses, various leftovers. Nothing appealed. He pulled open the freezer door of the side-by-side. Piles of meat—steak, chops, roasts, hamburger. He was too tired to wait while a frozen hunk of meat cooked. He closed the door.

He wasn’t really that hungry.

He crossed the living room to the den, to the bar, and poured himself two fingers of Chivas. He wasn’t really thirsty, he never drank much, but he needed to relax, and sleep. He took off his shoes. Taking a sip, he leaned on the bar. Ice. Could never take it straight. He traipsed to the kitchen, grabbed some cubes from the freezer, and headed back for the den, glancing up the stairs as he passed.

When he reached the den, he halted. Slowly and quietly he put his drink down. He looked back at the stairwell. Nonsense. He padded across the living room and looked up the stairs. Foolishness. Still . . .

He went quietly up.

Upstairs he switched on the hall light. Doors to all four bedrooms were closed, as usual. Habits. Shut the doors when you leave. You too, Chris. He opened the door to Chris’s bedroom and flipped up the light switch. Just as Chris had left it—bed not made. Ordinarily there was a rule. Not last night.

He went into his bedroom and turned on the light. Of course, their bed was not made either. Lenore’s dresser drawers were still open. Imagine. She’d be appalled.

The guest room was spotless, tidy, sterile, as always. Necessary, in his business. Never could tell when you had to entertain a client. Couldn’t tell an overnighting client to wait in the hall while you fixed up his bed. No client had ever slept in his house. But you never could tell. Never have anything messy, in your office or your home, that a client might see. “Good PR men,” Buck had once said to him, “wear clean underwear.”

The nursery room. He turned the knob, pushed the door open, and reached around, before entering, to feel for the light switch.

A yowl. Something leaped from the darkness. Frank swung his arm in front of his face and stumbled backward into the hall.

The cat landed at the top of the stairs, arched its back, then sat down and licked itself.

“Biscuit! Damm it. Whew! Been locked in there all night?” He went over and picked up the Siamese, rubbing its belly, then put the cat down and went back to the nursery and turned on the light.

Everything just as they had left it, the toys Lenore had been playing with still in the middle of the floor. He knelt to pick them up, and put them neatly back in their place in the corner. The white crib with its gay quilt stood like a forlorn shrine.

Frank backed out of the room, and quietly closed the door, as if not to wake the baby.

He went back downstairs and drained his drink. Pulling off his tie, he slumped into his soft leather den chair. The phone rang. He reached over and picked up the bar extension.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Franklin Davis?”

“Who’s calling?”

“This is the Los Angeles Times. This Mr. Davis? We’d like to ask you a few—”

“Davis don’t live here anymore. This is the cops.”

“Please don’t pull that on us, Mr. Davis. We’re a responsible newspaper. There is no way of avoiding this. It’s an important story, no getting away from it. And we’d like to give you the opportunity to—”

Frank slammed down the receiver, breathing heavily. Then he took the receiver off the hook and laid it on the bar.

“No more calls from those cranks!”

Then he unlocked the antique desk and pulled open the top drawer; he took out a .38 revolver, checked to see that it was unloaded, then aimed it at the wall.

“Any of those nosy newsmen come around here, I’ll scare the pants off ’em.”

He put the gun back. No I won’t, he thought. Think if it hit the papers that a gun-crazed father threatened members of the press. Think of Clayton Associates.

He sat down and stared at the wall.

In moments he felt himself dozing. He shook his head, pulled himself painfully erect, and dragged through the living room. Checking the locks on the front door, he headed for the stairs. Then he stopped, turned, and went back through the kitchen.

The hook was in place over the cellar door.

He started again for the stairs when Biscuit brushed past him languorously. Getting no attention, the cat shrugged its shoulders and continued through the kitchen to the back door. It looked back once to see if there was any final chance for petting, and, discerning none, nosed through the two-way flap at the bottom of the door and disappeared into the night.

The back door was bolted. Frank watched the flap drop shut behind the cat, covering—he blackly enjoyed taunting himself—a hole something of the size of that he had seen at the hospital, in the skylight.

He chuckled at his own morbidity, and went to bed.

The light of dawn spread dark shadows from buildings along the street. A bus stopped at an intersection lined with factories which, while silent now, would hum with activity in a couple of hours. A man in a cheap tuxedo with rhinestone-studded lapels got off the bus, carrying a trombone case in one arm and a morning paper in the other.

The bus pulled away and the man put down the case and took the newspaper from under his arm, unfolding it for the front page, when he heard a faint whimpering.

He looked up. The whimpering came again.

He knitted his brows and turned his head slowly, listening. The sound came again, low, plaintive.

A baby’s cry.

“What the . . . ?”

He picked up the case and began walking slowly past the darkened factory. The cry was a bit louder. The hiccuping cry of a tiny infant. He stopped at the head of a narrow alley between buildings. The cry was coming from deep in the alley.

“Who in hell would leave . . . ?”

He searched the shadows with his eyes for signs of somebody—surely somebody was in there with the baby. He could see nothing.

Putting down his case and paper, he walked tentatively into the alley, feeling his way along the building.

“Hey, baby, easy now, it’s okay. Somebody leave you here in the dark all by yourself? It’s okay. No wonder you’re upset. We’re going to take you to a nice, warm police station. Where the hell are you?”

The cry became a wail, then a shriek.

“Hey!”

The shriek was joined by his scream. He could not see what quickly clawed the life from him.

Across a nearby back lot, a house window went up. A woman’s voice. “Who’s out there?”

She could hear nothing more, not even the sound of something slithering or crawling away.

The window closed.

Police Sergeant Whipple thumbed through the pile of the night’s arrest records and reports. Then he pushed them aside and picked up the morning
Times.
His eye fell immediately to the headline halfway down the front page:

FIVE DIE IN HOSPITAL;
BIG INFANT SOUGHT

WESTWOOD, October 10—Police today would not, or could not, reveal any clues in the mysterious deaths last night of three doctors and two nurses at Community Hospital.

The five had reportedly been involved in the delivery, moments before, of a baby to Mrs. Franklin Davis of Westwood. The baby is listed as missing.

The five victims (names listed below) apparently died from throat wounds similar to what might be inflicted by, as one source put it, “one of those little hand rakes you use in flower boxes.”

Police spokesman Det. Lt. Pinkins said that rumors that the attacks were carried out by a mutant infant were “premature.”

He said that the police were not ruling out possible murder-kidnapping, or even the explosion of some warfare anti-personnel device that could have killed the adults and propelled the infant out through the skylight, leaving a small hole (see pictures, page 5).

A confidential hospital source, however, insists that the Davis infant, as yet unnamed by the parents, was in fact a huge mutant, and that it is currently the primary suspect in the attacks.

Attempts to reach Mr. Davis, a public-relations executive with Clayton Associates in Beverly Hills, have been unavailing.

Police, already under fire recently for lackluster performance, have shrouded their investigation in secrecy, except to say that a “special unit” has been formed to work on the case and to search for the missing infant.

As often pointed out by this newspaper, such “special units” in the past have had no success at all in apprehending . . .