Skeletons (9 page)

She goes immediately flat and quiet. At least she's that smart. I've already moved way back in the shadows, around the grille of the car.

It's a bonehead, this time, automatic slung over one shoulder. He's just close enough where I can see he's not as fearless as he seems. All bones, he looks scary; but when I get a load of the ghostly outline that goes with it, I see the fat couch barnacle he was, beer gut hanging over the stretch pants. The T-shirt, just visible, says, GO LAKERS.

What a dope.

But sis isn't so smart after all. The fat
skel
is nearly past when she rushes out at him, catching him from behind. She produces a long TV-offer-type knife and then plunges it in.

The skeleton cries out a little and nearly gets the Uzi around on her before collapsing.

Soon, next amazing thing: the bony body, ghostly T-shirt, beer belly, and all, turns to a pile of dust. So.

"World's changing, son," I say.

She's back in front of me instantly. She does seem to know how to use that knife, and she's got it up in front of my face.

"I asked you who you are," she says, in a movie-tough tone.

I push her hand away, but maybe she's nuts after all and willing to cut me. The Roger danger radar has begun to go off again.

I ease back on the smile, make it more friendly. "Sorry," I say. "Been a tough night. My plane was shot out of the sky, then everybody in it was murdered by skeletons. Call me a kook, but I'm not quite myself this evening."

She
untenses
, just a bit, just to the point where my radar stops blaring and tells me she might not kill me after all.

'Take it you've had a rough one, too?" I try.

"Yes." All at once she unwinds, lowers the knife to her boot, where it disappears into a sheath somewhere. She looks at me, grim but not murderous. "Real bitch of a night."

I venture a short laugh. "Right."

She keeps looking at me. Suddenly I know I have had a bad day because normally I would have smelled cop all over her the moment she appeared. I consider it unwise to offer her a snort of cocaine, as I was about to do.

"I'm Roger," I say, holding out my hand. "I work for Roundabout Records."

She looks at the hand, then suddenly takes it. "I'm Marianne. Until two hours ago I was a cop. Now I guess I'm just a human being."

"I knew you were a cop," I say, grinning, because she would have stopped being weary in a few minutes anyway and started getting suspicious of me. It's another radar I have. "Undercover, right?"

"Highway Patrol," she says. "Actually, I was at home when this shit started. Just heading out to work. When I got there, half the station was already dead. Bodies all over the place, coming back to life as . . . those things.
 
Streets were swarming with them."

She had more, so I let her catch her breath, go into shock for a moment, do the tough-cop thing, and come out of it.

"I've been killing them ever since."

"Jeez," I say, putting, I think, just the right amount of sympathy into it. Actually, I want to yawn.

The sincerity thing must have been what she wanted, because she breaks down for a moment.

"I never actually killed anybody on this job. And now I've done nothing but kill for the last eight hours."

"I was in the air when it started," I say, trying to figure out a way of getting her to go away. "Must have been hell here on the ground."

This time I do yawn, but she doesn't catch it.

"It was," she says. She runs her hand back through her hair. She's not ugly at all, but I know the type. She's got a boyfriend who's a bodybuilder or something, and spends a lot of time on the beach, maybe surfing, and if I put a hand on her, she'd whip that knife out and cut it off at the wrist. `"There's fighting going on all over L.A.," she says. "All the main highways are blocked with wrecked cars. There's National Guard units out fighting in Torrance and San Pedro. Jesus..."

She collapses into a weeping wreck, which is good because my radar has gone off again and I have time to react, but she doesn't. I get down flat and roll under the nearest car as two boners appear, walking casually, as if they were at the mall. One of them has a rifle, the other a kind of yard tool that looks like a middle-class machete. I don't wait around to see what their ghost images might look like: I see bones and I roll.

Ol' Marianne hears them, too, but it is already too late for her. Weeping never pays. She turns and spins and kicks one of them, but the one with the machete brings it down on her and cuts her clean across the back of the neck.

She gasps and goes down to one knee, but keeps fighting. This is a tough cop lady. She actually has her TV knife halfway out of its ankle sheath before the boner with the machete hits her again, taking half her
friggin
' head off.

Gross me out.

You don't have to be Einstein to see what's going to happen next. But the two boners, bless their knobby heads, save my butt by dragging the dear deceased cop away as she's turning into one of them. The machete one, I see as they pass under the parking lot lights, is actually some kind of farm worker, by his ghostly image. Nice backhand, Juan.

So I climb up and get into my Lincoln Town Car, quiet as can be, rev the beauty up, praising that kitten engine, and pull out.

But I don't make it out of the parking lot, naturally. Once a cop, always a cop. In the rearview mirror I see ol' Marianne, now an official
skel
, pushing aside her two bonehead comrades and dashing after me. Damned if she isn't going to catch up, too, so I throw the smooth transmission of the Lincoln into reverse, timing it perfectly, and run the bitch down before she can get out of the way. Inside that luxurious interior I hear the faint crunch of bones, and when I pull away, peeling rubber this time, there's a neat little pile of dust behind me, already scattering in the faint Santa
Anas
. Juan and his buddy are still standing where they were, properly puzzled.

By the way, thanks for the traffic info, Marianne.

I stay away from the freeways, and it's not long before I have confirmation of what the cop said. Wrecks everywhere. Even the exit ramps are blocked. So it's think-back time, a bit of nostalgia about my good ol' days, growing up the only white boy in my part of East L.A., and all those back roads come back to me.

What was another of ol' Dad's quaint sayings? "Get me a fresh needle, son."

Amazingly, no one bothers me. It's just assumed I'm one of the boneheads. What few humans I see are either running for their skins into dirty alleys or in the process of being boned. I'm sure there's lots more hiding in cellars or attics, not to mention the sewers. In the middle of one street I see two boneheads beating up on a third bonehead. They're just skeletons until I get real close. Curious, I slow down to watch the action as their outlines come into faint view under the streetlights. Looks like two druggies pounding a third. As I watch they hit him real hard with something like a
cosh
and he's down on the ground, then turns to powder.

So. Even the dead kill the dead.

Then it's time to hightail out, because druggie one and two have turned their attention to me, their skeleton eye sockets following me, jaws creaking up and down. Can
skels
drool? I know what these guys want, the Town Car, so it's time to burn some more rubber and move on.

Up into the Hollywood Hills, which rise into view in front of me after another half hour of twisty turns and back roads, dodging wrecks, fleeing humans, and
skels
chasing them like Keystone Kops.

The Hollywood Hills: still lit up like the movies, magical, probably still mostly what it was. Even the "H" on the Hollywood sign is the only one that's been hit by mortar fire, attesting to the mostly intactness of phony-land.

My kind of place.

I rev the engine, heading straight for it, and finger open my briefcase with my right hand to pull out my prized bottle of
Stoli
.

It's time to party.

I wonder what the rest of the world is doing tonight?

At first I thought Withers Home for Women was on fire. We had fire drills, sometimes in the middle of the night, but the look on Mrs. Garr's face was not one of calm. She looked terribly upset. As she grabbed my arm it suddenly occurred to me that my life was about to change. That tingle that had washed over me had made that seed begin to grow. It both elated and frightened me. Perhaps this little room, and this big, terrible place, would be no more. I think I actually smiled.

Mrs. Garr looked at me, and a pitiable look came onto her face.

"Oh, Claire," she said, "I'll take care of you," and pressed me close to her.

Out in the hall there was chaos. I kept looking for hoses, for water pails. I thought of the shapes I had seen outside near the trees and water and thought they must be firemen. Where were they? Why did I hear no sirens? Then a siren did go off. Many sirens, from the one on the pole just outside the Withers grounds to at least two others I could distinguish in nearby Cold Spring Harbor. That meant the fire must be huge.

But where was it? As Mrs. Garr dragged me through the halls I saw nothing but confused, frightened faces. Then another siren went off, a large one even farther away, and I thought perhaps an even greater calamity had come. War? We had had those drills, too, mostly the sit-in-the-hall-with-your-head-between-your-knees kind. My elation faded, leaving only fear, and I stopped dead in the middle of the hall.

Mrs. Garr bent down to look into my face. "Don't worry." She held me to her again, but I felt no comfort. The fear in Mrs. Garr's own eyes was enough to tell me that this was no mere fire.

Then we were heading into the cellars. All of the chaos in the halls turned out to have purpose. Ragged lines were pushing their way toward the two huge open green doors that led to the basement. We had had one drill here, when I was very young. The drill had been for nuclear war.

Behind us, somewhere deep in what should have been the emptiness of the building, I heard the sound of breaking glass. What would that be? Had a bomb fallen? I waited for the flash of light, the blast against the building that blew us all away to dust, but nothing came but another shattered pane. The firemen? Who were those figures I had seen by the water and trees? Russian soldiers landing?

Our turn came, and we were jostled through the big green doors and down.

There was mumbled talking, but I picked up nothing. Then someone came close in the dark with a pair of headphones and Walkman, and I heard a snatch of radio: an announcer saying very loud that there was fighting in New York City, that there were reports of fighting in Chicago, in Miami, in Atlanta . . .

The headphones moved away from me in the dark. I had only Mrs. Garr's guiding arms to show me the way.

Behind us there was a loud crash, near the doors, and yelling from that direction.

"Close the doors!" someone shouted. It sounded like the vice-principal, Mrs.
Carmody
. Then an unmistakable voice, the booming of Mrs. Page, the headmistress, rose above all the murmuring.

"Be quiet!"

There was instant silence.

"Mr. Cary," Mrs. Page boomed out, "close those doors immediately."

We heard a sound at the top of the stairs. Then in the darkness we saw a crack of light as one door was pulled back and then slammed. I heard Mr. Cary, the gym teacher, grunting with effort.

"I . . . can't get it to close, Mrs. Page."

"Do it!" Mrs. Page roared.

"I—"

Then the door at the top of the stairs was thrown in, showing a huge rectangle of hallway above. Into this stepped something, fully illuminated, that at first made me want to laugh.

A human skeleton.

Mrs. Page had jostled her way through the crowd of boarders toward the stairway, and stopped near Mrs. Garr and me. I heard her audibly gasp.

"Mr. Cary!" she shouted, but Mr. Cary needed no urging, and threw the door closed on the specter. Mrs. Page pushed past us and tramped up the steps, and in a moment she and the gym teacher were pushing fiercely at the door. Something on the other side pushed back.

There sounded a loud snap, and the door was locked into place.

Mrs. Page roared, 'The crossbar, Mr. Cary, the cross-bar!" I heard something metallic slide across the door. "Done," Mr. Cary said, panting.

"Residents," Mrs. Page announced from the top of the steps, in the dark. There was utter silence. "We are in the midst of a crisis. I am sure the authorities will handle it. In the meantime this is what you will do. You will re-main utterly at ease. You will listen to your elders. You will above all listen to me. There are provisions down here, and I doubt we will have to stay long. Do you understand?"

Her rising inflection at the end of this speech was something we all understood; the iron voice of command. There was a wave of assent that ended with a girl near me saying, "Yeah."

"All together!" Mrs. Page screamed.