The Dark Ones (7 page)

Authors: Anthony Izzo

BOOK: The Dark Ones

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After setting the saw down, he located the house key and opened the door. He hauled the saw inside and set it in the front hall. He then flipped on the lights and found no mysterious intruder waiting to jump him.

To be safe, he strode through the house and turned on all the lights. Then he locked the front door and checked the rear one. Satisfied he was alone in the house—and having no reason to think otherwise—he decided on a snack.

He whipped up some nachos with salsa and shredded cheese and popped them in the microwave. He complemented his snack with a cold root beer. As he plopped on the sofa, which faced the bay window, the tingle returned to his guts. The darkness seemed blacker to him, and wouldn’t that shadowy creep from the alley find it easy to skulk around out there?

Feeling uneasy, he rose and closed the drapes.

I don’t want to look out there, and I don’t even know why.

He flipped on the television and watched an old movie, but as he watched, his thoughts repeatedly returned to the unseen window and the darkness beyond.

CHAPTER 6

The day of the job, Mike found a manila envelope tucked in his door. Inside was a note that read: Two gas cans by Dumpster. Car in lot on Fuhrman. Burn this note.

Before leaving the house that evening, he checked on Mom, who was still, head lolled to one side. Her mouth had been open and soft gurgles escaped her throat. At first he had panicked, thinking she had passed, but when he heard her breathing he relaxed a bit. The home health aide he had hired would be here shortly to take care of her.

He took the Metro to Fuhrman and Tift, and walked past a Gas N’Go. Beyond the gas station was a weed-lined road. No cars passed him, and for that he was glad.

He approached the old Donner Hanna site. The bases of old blast furnaces, rusted steel legs, and huge metal rings stood in a field. A low concrete wall ran in front of them. They were to be torn down after the condos were complete.

He slogged through the weeds, stepping over the occasional rusted beam. To his right, unseen, a frog croaked. Watching the road, he saw it remained dark—no sign of headlights. Nevertheless, he crouched, as if trying to shrink himself.

Up ahead, Schuler slipped out from behind the remnants of a blast furnace. Mike approached him, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. Schuler had his hair pulled back in a ponytail. He wore a black T-shirt, black jeans, and over it a beat-up brown jacket. If it had been 1985 again, Mickey Schuler would have been right at home.

“Where are they?” Mike asked.

Schuler turned and pointed. “Over that ridge.”

Some genius had decided to turn an industrial wasteland into high-priced condos. He wondered if the yards came with optional slag heaps.

They climbed the ridge, and descending, came upon the condos, one building at each corner of the property. Two of them were furnished with gray-green siding and the others were wrapped in white Tyvek board. A dirt road wound between the condos, one that Mike imagined would eventually be paved. In Mike’s estimation this was another Love Canal waiting to happen. He didn’t want to linger down here.

“We doing them all?” Schuler asked.

Mike nodded.

They wound through the weeds under a bright October moon.

Mike found the gas cans near a Dumpster. They were under a paint-splattered tarp. He took one of the cans and Schuler grabbed the other. Mike also grabbed the tarp and would burn that along with everything else.

They pried off a piece of plywood that covered the door to the first building and went inside. They climbed the stairs and entered the upper unit. A toolbox and cordless drill had been left on the unfinished floor. There was another door in the room, this one wide open. It led to a small balcony.

“Start at the far wall,” Mike said. “We’ll work backward so we don’t step in gas.”

“Okay, chief.”

Schuler lugged the can to the porch door and set it on the floor. It made a small
thunk
when he set it down, and to Mike it sounded like a sledgehammer striking an anvil. He was sure any little noise would get them caught.

Schuler went onto the porch. Christ, but he was wasting time. “Schuler,” he whispered. Mike set his gas can down, thinking they’d already been here too long.

“Hey Mike?” Schuler called from the balcony. “There’s someone down there.”

“Get down.”

Schuler squatted below the half wall of the balcony. Mike ducked low and joined him. He sniffed, taking in a sour smell on the air that he had first attributed to the lake. But no, that wasn’t the lake, but something else, something that had rotted.

“Who is it?” Mike asked. That was all they needed, someone nosing around while they were trying to work. If they spotted him and Schuler, that left two choices: cap them, or scare them off and ditch the job. Neither option was preferable. Letting Hark down would have dire consequences, to say the least.

“Don’t know. He’s walking around the building.”

Mike pulled his .45 from the holster in his jacket. He joined Schuler on the balcony, keeping low. He peered over the railing. He got a glimpse of the guy, who rounded the building and headed up the ridge near the old ironworks. He took the hill with long strides and paused at the top. In the darkness, Mike could make out stringy hair and a linebacker’s build. That was it. The stranger turned at the top of the ridge and stood watching.

“What’s he doing?” Schuler asked.

“I don’t know. I’ll go ask him.”

“Really?”

“What the fuck do you think?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Let’s go,” Mike said. “This whole thing’s going bad.”

“What about Hark?”

“We get spotted and jammed up, the cops show? We’re dead. We’ll come back, do it right. No witnesses.”

Schuler paused, frowning, the internal gears of thought working. “We came here to light this place up.”

“Listen to me.”

Schuler grinned. “Okay, yeah, you’re right.”

They crawled away from the railing and grabbed the gas cans. The inside of the condo had filled with fumes, and Mike’s eyes watered. His piece in one hand and the gas can in another, he went first down the stairs, Schuler following and muttering the whole time about how they should have set it off, anyway.

Outside, even the dead-fish smell of the lake was refreshing compared with the stale air and gasoline odors in the condo. Mike gathered his thoughts. They needed to ditch the gas cans where they wouldn’t be found, and then get to the getaway car. Hark would be pissed the job wasn’t done, but maybe Mike could talk to him. Hell, he had been smart not to light it up with witnesses around. And it wasn’t his fault someone showed up to ruin things. At least he hoped that’s how Hark would see things.

“To the car?” Schuler asked.

“That way. Bring the can with you.”

They inched along the side of the condo, the building blocking the sight line between them and the ridge. At the corner of the building, Mike peered at the ridge.

The visitor had company. Along the ridge were dark shapes, some of them men with twisted limbs, others hunched over, and one that had wings.
Wings?
Mike counted twelve, not including the guy they saw first. They stood still. A breeze blew, carrying the scent of something sour and stale at the same time. The way his grandfather Shawn had smelled in the weeks before his death, when cancer ate him from the inside out. Rot. That was it.

“Schuler, you got to see this,” Mike said, and turned. But Schuler was gone, and from around the corner, Mike heard gentle lapping sounds and gas fumes drifted to him. That crazy fucker’s going to—

There was a noise like WHOOMPF! Mike looked in the window to see the glow of fire and flames eating up the plywood subfloor. Schuler came back around and said, “I told you I thought we should torch it!”

“You stupid bastard,” Mike said. “Come here.” Mike grabbed him by the shirt and yanked him along. “Look,” he said, and pointed to the ridge.

Schuler poked his head around, kept it there for a moment, and ducked back behind the condo. A worried look crossed his face. One eyelid twitched. “Who are they?”

“Homeowners’ association? We need to get gone.”

Behind him, the flames began to hiss and then crackle. He smelled burning wood. Mike sincerely hoped the fire wouldn’t bring the men on the ridge down here. He didn’t like the looks of them, and the one with the wings really freaked him out. What kind of moron went around in a giant bat costume? You could only get away with that if your last name was Wayne.

The heat from the fire began to bake the back of Mike’s neck. They had to move and there was no way to torch the other buildings—at least not without the Halloween people on the ridge seeing them. That left getting to the stolen car and beating it out of here. He would decide his next move after that.

Besides, it wouldn’t be long before someone called the cops.

He motioned for Schuler to follow him. They set out, Mike watching the people on the ridge, waiting for them to come down. But they stood still. The others, including the one with the bat costume, stood a few feet behind old tall, long, and stringy, as if he were the leader of the freak show.

Behind Mike, the fire crackled and popped and he turned to see a gout of smoke rising into the air.

They continued past the far condo and came upon a parking lot with cracked, jagged asphalt. Mike stepped over a pile of hypodermics and wrinkled his nose in disgust. Damned junkies. He saw a tangle of bushes and branches at the far end of the lot, and knew this is where Hark’s people had hidden the car.

As they reached the car and began pulling away the branches used for camouflage, Mike looked around again. Silhouetted against the black sky was a winged form, big as a man. It climbed high, flapping its wings, and then dove like a Spitfire, whooshing over the ridge and disappearing.

He didn’t know what he just witnessed, only that they needed to drive away fast.

“What were you thinking?” Mike asked. He gripped the steering wheel, his knuckles most likely white under the black gloves he wore.

“We had a job to do.” Schuler shrugged his shoulders.

He wanted to scream, but in the vacant scrap yard among the heaps of cars, his would be the only sound ringing through the night. They had pulled up to Brown Recycling, slid the busted gate open, and parked the car between two rows of junked Fords and Chryslers. Mike needed to think, plan his next move, because when Hark found out what happened,
his
next move would be to serve up Mike’s balls on a platter.

“We should get going,” Schuler said.

“Why? Nobody here but the cars.”

“Still think we should go.”

“That so? We wouldn’t be sitting here with our thumbs in our asses if you did what I said.”

“You backed out. I expected better.”

“Yeah, I backed out. ’Case you didn’t notice, we had an audience.”

“I tried, Mike. Hark will respect that.”

Mike rolled his eyes. “The job’s not done, the cops are all over the place, and they’ll be watching the condos. If we walked away without torching anything, we could’ve gone back another day, maybe tomorrow. Now we’re fucked.”

“Enjoying your new television? How’s Mom’s medicine?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

Schuler pointed a long finger at him. “You’re in this business because of me. Your ma gets her medicine because you’re in the life. She’d be dead right now, Mikey, remember that. I brought you in.”

Schuler was acting like he’d just given Mike a kidney. “Leave her out of this.”

“Why? She looks at me like I’m a cockroach.”

“Cool it.”

“Half a cockroach.”

“Schuler.”

“The crap on half a cockroach’s ass.”

Now Mike felt the buildup, a hot anger spreading through his torso, up into his cheeks. He had a vision of pounding Schuler’s head against the window to see how many whacks it would take to bust glass. “I swear to God—”

Schuler raised his voice into a high falsetto and affected a brogue. “Oh, now ya wouldn’t be hanging around with that piece of shite Schuler, now would ya, Mikey boy? That Schuler boy is not fit to wipe yer arse.”

“You want me to kiss your ass because we robbed a corner store together?”

“Naw, not kiss my ass. Just a little respect. That’s all.”

“You fucked up.”

Schuler crossed his arms, looked out the passenger’s window. Beyond him, the dead cars rose like relics from a past industrial age. “I tried, you ran.”

There was no winning this argument. “Take back what you said about my mom.”

“She does hate me.”

“Don’t give you the right to rag on her.”

Schuler turned back toward Mike. The moonlight coming in the window gave his already pale skin an even milkier tint. “I take it back. So what do we do?”

“You need to leave town for a while,” Mike said.

“And you?”

“I can’t leave Mom,” Mike said. “I’ll just have to watch my back.”

“You better have eyes in your ass,” Schuler said.

“Eyes in my ass?”

“Yeah, instead of the back of your head?”

“So I can watch myself take a shit?” Mike asked.

“You know what I meant.”

“Just makes no sense, that’s all.”

“Clever, okay. Trying to be clever. I like it,” Schuler said.

“Try harder.”

Schuler waved him off. “Just drive the car.”