Scream Catcher (18 page)

Lake George Village

Thursday, 7:13 P.M.

Lennox stands naked before the cracked mirror inside the half-bathroom, stares long and hard into his blue-eyed face. He smiles at himself; takes great pleasure in his body. The white-tiled room is lit by an exposed overhead lightbulb. Bathed in the harsh light, he observes not only the face, but every nook and cranny of his muscle-carved torso.

He grips a pair of sharpened sheers in his right hand.

He begins to cut away at the dreadlocks, severing them from their roots just above the scalp. Over the past nineteen months the hair has become so long and thick it falls away from his head not as tiny weightless bundles, but as heavy clumps. The clumps make a kind of thud when they hit the peeling, asbestos floor-covering.

It’s a long tedious process.

But with each clip of the sheers Hector “the Black Dragon” Lennox feels that much lighter, that much more energized.

When the cutting is finished, the beast runs an electric clipper over his scalp. He then takes one last look at himself in the mirror. Raising up his arms, he strikes a double biceps pose. He gawks at mountainous biceps, at tight forearms with veins popping through fat-deprived skin, at deep triceps, at protruding pectorals, at rippling abs.

Not an ounce of extra body fat. Nor a single visible hair.

From this point on, Hector Lennox is dead.

Long live the Black Dragon.

Lightning strikes the village street only yards away from the anonymous basement studio apartment. The thunder is immediate. Not a low rolling rumble that echoes off the rocky cliffsides of Tongue Mountain. More like a series of airbursts from incoming cruise missiles. A wonderful, feel-it-deep-inside-your-chest concussion noise he remembers fondly from the war.

But this is not the time for sentimental recollections.

It is time for the crucial second item to be tended to.

* * *

Black Dragon sits himself down at the portable fold-out table. He stares into the LCD monitor. He breathes as the green-lettered phrase rains endlessly down on the monitor’s face.

:grub net set to activate …

:grub net set to activate …

:grub net set to activate …

He is tempted to sit at his desk forever, just staring at the hypnotic snowfall of green pixels. But then Black Dragon knows that now is the time for action.

Extending his index finger, he punches
Enter
.

Rising up from the table, he unzips his black leather pouch, pulls the CO2-charged injector, loads the syringe with the liquid amphetamine. Standing over the couch, he bends down, pokes the needle of the automatic injector into the forearm of his student, squeezes the trigger.

The student is jarred awake.

“Where am I?” Thoroughbred barks. He’s opening and closing his eyes, as if having trouble focusing inside the dark apartment.

“Time to shave your head,” Black Dragon says.

T-Bred, confused, groggy, dizzy.

“I don’t want to … shave my head,” he slurs.

“But you do,” insists Black Dragon. “You must be just like me.”

Assembly Point Peninsula

Thursday, 7:30 P.M.

Jude is seated at the head of the kitchen table when he does something entirely out of character. He reaches out, takes hold of Rosie’s left hand and Jack’s right.

“Let’s try something new.”

Rosie locks onto Jude’s face, throws him her pretend
frosty
facade.

She says, “You’ve got to be kidding. You want to pray.”

Jude glances down at his plate of food. At the neatly arranged steak, corn on the cob and green salad. Although the others have already started on theirs, he finds himself feeling the sudden need to offer up some words of thanks before digging in. Or perhaps, in all his anxiety, he simply isn’t hungry and doesn’t want to admit it.

“Bear with me,” he insists. Then, recalling a prayer he learned during his first ever Christmas dinner with Mack at what had been the old Captain’s childhood foster home, Jude recites, “Dear God, may you be at our table and in our hearts. Amen.”

“Amen,” Rosie mumbles.

“Amen,” Jack tentatively repeats.

The boy adds, “Rosie, is dad sick or something? Is that why we’re praying?”

Clearing her throat Rosie cuts a small piece of steak, pops it into her mouth. It’s the first solid food Jude has seen her consume in twenty-four hours. Raising up her head, she issues a devilish grin.

“No, my husband isn’t sick. But I do think he’s growing closer to God in his old age. In a hokus-pokus kind of way.”

The round-faced Jack chews on his steak, peers up at his father.

“Dad’s an old timer,” he giggles. “Like Mr. Magoo.”

Cutting into the meat, Jude makes a crooked-faced sneer.

“Mr. Magoo
not
,” he snaps. “Who’s the ferocious slayer of the dark monster?”

“You are, Jude man.”

“And don’t you forget it.”

Lightning creates bright daylight out of the dark sky. A burst so quick, so brilliant, it takes the entire Parish family by surprise. The thunder clap that follows seems to rattle the stone and wood home atop its concrete foundations.

Jude observes the faces of his wife and child go from animated, to stiff and pale.

“My God in heaven,” Rosie exclaims.

“Now you believe,” Jude says.

“It’s like the end of the world,” says Jack. “The night of the dark monster.”

“It’s not the end of the world,” Jude assures the boy. Still, he finds himself turning around in his chair to get a look out the window to see if any of the trees or maybe the dock has suffered a direct lightning strike. “No dark monster ‘round here, remember?”

“Good,” grins Jack, starting back in on his steak. “Because I was beginning to worry.”

Turning back around to face the table, Jude picks his knife and fork back up.

It’s exactly what he would do if the lights didn’t go out.

Assembly Point Peninsula

Thursday, 7:32 P.M.

The Parish home has gone dead.

Dead means no power, no lights.

It also means that any hope for remaining summer twilight has been dashed by the thick black storm clouds that have invaded the Adirondack skies.

“Shall we say another prayer?” poses Rosie from the dinner table.

“Told you,” Jack says, looking up from his plate. “The world wants to be over now.”

Another lightning bolt strikes just short of the log house. Close enough for its electromagnetic charge to raise the hairs up on Jude’s arms and neck. In the nanosecond that follows, he is able to register the wide-eyed faces of his wife and child. The resulting thunder concussion nearly blows them out of their chairs.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” Rosie cries.

“Lots of praying tonight,” Jack nervously giggles.

Rising up out of his chair, Jude abandons a meal only half picked at.

“Any idea where we’ve hidden the emergency flashlights?”

“Good one,” answers Rosie.

* * *

They work as a team, searching the kitchen drawers for the flashlights they are certain exist but that cannot be located.

At least not on demand.

“There’s always the gas lamp in my office,” Jude reminds Rosie.

“And what exactly do we use for fuel?” she points out.

But after another few minutes of searching the master bedroom, they manage to find not one, but two flashlights which are stored inside Rosie’s underwear drawer for safekeeping.

“Good of me to remember my intimate apparel.”

Down inside the garage, Jude also discovers a portable radio they used at a cabin rental on the opposite side of the lake last year while the log home was being constructed. Besides the radio, they also uncover a big white box filled with white candles left over from their wedding reception of sixteen months prior at the Lake George Yacht Club.

With Jack standing inside the open door of the dark, musty smelling garage interior, Rosie flicks on one of the flashlights which is gripped in her right hand, shines it directly onto the yellow radio which is gripped in the other. Thumbing the power switch, she tunes into the first A.M. band station she can locate on the dial before handing the radio over to Jude.

At first, he can’t be sure if it’s the signal or the lack of juice in the batteries, because the reception is weak at best. So weak, he finds he must crank up the volume just to make out the faint voice.

“… by all initial appearances,”
states the deep-voiced broadcaster,
“a power outage affecting much of the northeastern seaboard. While spokespersons for the Federal Energy Commission remain close mouthed, it is still too early to determine if the outage can be linked to an act of sabotage or simply an over-utilized power grid that since the 1950s has been continually bombarded …”

The portable radio goes dead. Jude turns it off and on again. Bits and spurts of broadcaster voice ooze from the small speaker like ghosts in the machine. But even that dies out after maybe ten seconds. Holding the radio in both hands he gives it a shake, attempts tuning into another station. But still he comes up with nothing—not a sound other than the slight blood drumming in his head.

Jude feels he has no other option but to set the radio down onto the hood of the Jeep.

He says, “I don’t suppose there’s anymore batteries.”

Rosie brushes back long dark hair so that it veils the right side of her face. She stands tall between the Jeep’s grill and the ever-still Jack.

Crossing naked arms over her chest, she says, “You mean like in case of emergency.”

Outside the dim garage another thunder crash. As if on cue, the three of them about face, gaze across the room at the wide roll-up door like somehow they possess the power to see right through it, all the way up through the woods to the lake road. Slowly turning their attention back to one another, Jude notices that Jack is copying Rosie by crossing little arms over little barrel chest.

“End of the world,” the proud boy repeats. “Night of the dark monster.”

Rosie and Jude find themselves exchanging tight-lipped frowns like,
Kid’s got a point.

“There’s always the Jeep radio,” Jude suggests. “Let’s try and find daddy’s keys. ‘Less of course, the dark monster ate them too.”

Assembly Point Peninsula

Thursday, 7:54 P.M.

Maybe its signal is far stronger, but the dash-mounted Jeep radio provides no real answers. What Jude does discern however from the WGY broadcast is this: while believed to have originated in New York’s upstate region (anywhere between Cohoes to the south and Plattsburgh to the north), the power outage is no longer limited to the Adirondack north county. An immediate chain reaction has occurred and its debilitating effects have rippled along the already overtaxed power grid. Much of New York State and parts of Montreal are either blacked or browned out.

According to the limited reports, power plants have been afflicted by “sudden and traumatic overloads” which means flash fires spontaneously sparking inside overheated generators and turbines.

The entirety of New York City is down, including the subways. As a former resident, Jude pictures the throngs of commuters stranded in subway cars, emergency lighting causing stunned faces to glow with eerie apprehension. Airports are shutting down runways and rerouting incoming traffic.

The ex-cop sits behind the wheel of the old Jeep. His wife and son stand silently beside him outside the open door.

The four words provoke an imbalance inside his guts, a sickening sense of over-vulnerability, food for the demon. For Jude, the situation is not unlike driving over the Brook Trout Bridge, knowing that it might collapse the moment he reaches its center, sending him on a fifty-foot drop to the rocks and rushing whitewater below.

The WGY broadcaster announces that the station’s emergency-generated signal is growing ever weaker. In a few moments the station will shut down for an indefinite period of time in order to conserve what little energy it has left at its disposal.

Between the electrical storm and the cold dark garage interior (and the coming of the
dark monster
), he can’t help but be reminded of the 1938 Orson Welles
War of the Worlds
broadcast.

It’s exactly how he puts it to Rosie.

Laughing, she rolls her eyes in total agreement.

“Dad,” Jack speaks up, “what’s the
War of the Worlds
?”

Turning to his son, Jude gazes into deep brown pools reflected in the dim flashlight.

“It’s a story about the end of the world,” he admits.

That’s when the radio goes silent.

Brook Trout Bridge

Thursday, 8:08 P.M.

With the van parked off to the side of the road inside a cluster of pine trees, Black Dragon momentarily separates himself from his student while making his way on foot towards the Brook Trout Bridge. In the pitch darkness he jogs along the soft shoulder until coming to the metal span bridge constructed as a part of the “Federal Employment Act” of the mid-1930s. In his right hand he holds the electronic surveillance bracelet. Looking down off the bridge, he can see how the heavy stream water foams white and effervescent against the rocks and boulders before rapidly emptying itself downstream into the lake. For a time he just stares intently down into the frothing water. He listens to its perpetual rush, feels the mist that rises up from the deep gorge, wet and slimy against a black-painted face.