The Night Parade (22 page)

“Well,” he said, “that's very honorable of you. But let me ask you something.”

“What?”

“Do you love me?”

She blinked at him. “Of course.”

“Do you realize that if anything ever happened to you, I'd just die?”

Her lips parted but she didn't speak.

“I couldn't go on if something happened to you, Ellie,” he said. “I would hurt so much that I wouldn't be able to take it. Is that something that you'd want to happen to me?”

Slowly, she shook her head. Her eyes had become glassy, filling with tears.

“I would die, Ellie. If something bad happened to you, I would die. Do you understand?”

She nodded, knocking a tear loose and sending it down her cheek.

“So if you love me,” he said, “please, please stay with me on this. Please. Will you? Will you trust that I'm doing the best thing and stay with me on this?”

“I will,” she whispered. “I love you, Dad.”

“I love you, too, Ellie.” He handed her a napkin. “Now dry your face before someone notices.”

D
avid continued to check his e-mail on his cell phone as they drew closer to Kansas City, but somewhere along the way he stopped receiving an Internet signal. His e-mail wouldn't refresh, and he could no longer pull up any web pages. Panic seated itself firmly at the back of his head. He began to consider the worst—that the government had zeroed in on them and were currently jamming his phone.

They crossed into a town called Harmony, which David hoped wasn't one of those ironic names. The town looked normal for the most part, much as their own hometown of Arnold, Maryland, had been up until they left. The same sign hung in a number of shop windows, large red letters on a white banner—F
OLLY FREE, COME AND SEE
! This sentiment struck him as both morbid and hopeful. The country had changed so goddamn quickly in the wake of this epidemic.

David negotiated the streets until he found what he was looking for: the Harmony Public Library. It looked deserted, and that was more than okay by him.

“Put your hat back on,” he said, circling the block, then pulling into the library's parking lot. There were only two other cars here—a metallic red Prius and a white van whose quarter panels were speckled with mud. The windows on the van's rear doors were obscured by dark curtains. This gave David pause. He'd maintained an aversion to windowless, nondescript vans ever since he'd noticed one showing up in his neighborhood, parked across the street from their house.

Overreacting,
said the head-voice.
There was no way they could anticipate you coming here.

Yet this logic didn't make him feel any better.

“What do you think?” David said. He patted Ellie's knee. “I need to use the computer. Maybe you can read some books or something for a while.”

She shrugged. “Okay.”

He realized what he was doing: seeing if she'd suggest they skip the library and keep going. It was her intuition he would put his trust in, much as he should have done back in Goodwin. Perhaps her intuition was somehow related to her newly discovered ability, much as he believed the ability itself was somehow related to her immunity to the Folly. Ellie seemed okay with the suggestion, which brought him some peace of mind. God, how he needed some peace of mind . . .

He parked around back. The library was a squat brick saltbox with narrow windows of tinted glass. The mechanized doors swished open and they crossed into an air-conditioned lobby decorated with a contradictory assortment of inspirational posters and antitheft mirrors. The main floor of the library was quiet, drab, sedate. The sections were marked clearly with large signs above the aisles—
ADULT FICTION; CHILDREN'S BOOKS; NONFICTION; PERIODICALS
—and there was a rank of computer terminals near the DVD and CD displays. A few plush chairs had been arranged on a woven carpet on the other side of the computer terminals.

David pointed to the computers and said, “That's where I'll be. Go find a book, then sit in one of those chairs, okay?”

She nodded, then wandered toward the nonfiction aisle.

David went to one of the computers. The screen saver was on, some sort of cartoon animal in sunglasses and buckteeth bouncing around the screen. He jiggled the mouse and the screen saver vanished. Glancing over his shoulder at the two women talking behind the checkout counter—they hadn't done more than glance in his direction since he and Ellie had come in—he was satisfied that he'd be left alone, at least for a little while.

He opened the Internet browser and pulled up his e-mail account. His flesh prickled with hope. But when he saw Tim hadn't responded to his e-mail, he felt a lead weight pulling down on him, weakening his knees. It wasn't just that they had nowhere else to go; he was beginning to worry that maybe Tim was sick. Or worse.

Behind him, Ellie climbed up into one of the plush chairs with a hardcover book roughly the size of a dictionary. David turned and winked at her. He hoped he looked somewhat sane. She smiled back at him. Beyond Ellie, halfway across the library, a figure stood watching him between two bookshelves. It was a man, broad-shouldered and tall, in faded khakis and a blue chambray shirt. He wore a paper plate mask over his face. As David stared at him, the masked figure turned and disappeared behind one of the bookshelves.

Sweat wrung from David's pores.

“I'll be right back,” he said, getting up from the computer terminal. He walked down the aisle in time to see the man turn behind another bookshelf, his large shape moving across the spaces between the books on the shelf.

David turned the corner and stood at the end of the aisle, looking down the rows of books that emptied out onto the lobby. There was no one there, but he saw a shadow retreating along the walkway on the other side of the mechanized doors. Above his head, one of the tubed lights hissed at him then blinked out. When he glanced up, he could see the Rorschach shapes of insects skittering behind the panel of pebbled plastic that covered the fluorescent lights.

When he returned to the computer terminals, he found Ellie still seated in one of the plush armchairs with the large book opened on her lap, talking to a stout and frizzy-haired woman in her sixties. David recognized her as one of the librarians from behind the checkout desk. The librarian looked up at him and offered him a smile.

“Such a polite young man,” the librarian said to David. He thought she was talking about him at first, but then realized Ellie's disguise had done the trick.

“You just caught him on a good day,” David said.

“Most kids, they come in here and go straight for the DVDs. Not that we get many kids in here anymore. It's nice to see a child interested in books. And such an adult book, too,” she added, peering over at the text. “From our reference library.”

“He's a reader, all right,” said David.

“Is there anything you needed help with?”

“No, ma'am. But thank you.”

When the librarian left, David lowered his voice and said, “What did she say to you?”

“Nothing,” said Ellie. “She just asked what I was reading.”

He glanced at the large book in her lap. “What
are
you reading?”

“It's about bird eggs. All different kinds.” She turned the large book around for him and pointed to a photo of whitish eggs marbled with dark brown splotches. They looked like a Jackson Pollock painting. “These are oriole eggs. They look just like mine, don't they?”

“They do,” he said. “I guess that makes sense. It's Maryland's state bird, you know.”

“Not anymore,” Ellie said, and closed the book.

H
e decided against driving straight to Kansas City, fearful that someone might recognize them in a big city, so they remained for a while longer in Harmony. He also wanted to check his e-mail at the Harmony library one more time before moving on. He was trying desperately to remain hopeful that he'd hear back from Tim.

There was a small movie theater showing cheesy sci-fi films from the sixties, so David bought a couple of tickets and, for a few hours, he and Ellie sat in the mostly empty movie theater, cloaked in darkness. They shared a bucket of popcorn and a large cup of Sprite, and a few times Ellie laughed at the ridiculousness of what was on-screen. David laughed right along with her. Yet he couldn't help but wonder if this was the last movie they would ever watch together. He felt jittery, sweaty, constantly paranoid that someone would come into the theater and try to pry him from his daughter.

Halfway through the movie, he felt something tickling his upper lip. He touched it and, even in the darkness of the theater, he could see there was blood on his fingertips. A column of panic rose up in him.

“I need to use the restroom,” he whispered in Ellie's ear. He was covering his mouth and nose with his hand. “Stay here. Don't leave the theater.”

“Okay.”

He hurried out into the lobby and, still covering his nose, made a beeline for the men's room. Thankfully, the place was unoccupied. He went directly to the mirror just as a streamer of blood slipped from his right nostril, cascaded over his lips, and dripped off his chin onto the floor tiles.

“Shit.”

He grabbed a fistful of paper towels and pressed them to his face. He groped for the sink and turned on the water. It chugged out of the faucet in a noisy spray.

He soaked through several paper towels before the bleeding let up. He held his head back, pinching his nostrils together, while he wet a fresh wad of paper towels under the faucet. He stuck this wad into his mouth, wedging it between his gums and his upper lip, just the way his mother had done on the few occasions he'd gotten a nosebleed as a child.

Someone entered the bathroom, startling him. He glanced in the man's direction—a guy in his late twenties in a white hoodie and oversized jeans hanging halfway down his ass. The guy froze in the doorway when he saw David. Without uttering a word, the guy turned and left.

The reflection in the mirror was now that of a vampire, a pale-faced night creature who subsisted on blood and would crumble to ash in the sunlight. The bloodied nose, he convinced himself, was from his collision with Cooper back in Goodwin, which had been the thing that had set it bleeding initially. He must have done something to rupture it all over again and—

His cell phone trilled.

He fumbled it out of his pocket and examined the screen before answering. The caller ID was blocked, which gave David pause, but in the end he decided to answer it in hopes that it might be Tim. “Hello? Hello?” His voice was panicked and throaty, and his mouth tasted like blood.

“David? You okay?” It was Tim.

“Jesus Christ,” he uttered into the phone. Relief coursed through him like a narcotic. “Oh, Jesus Christ, Tim. I was starting to worry that you were . . .” He trailed off.

“I'm here. I'm here. What's wrong? Your e-mail scared me.”

There was no getting around it, so he cut right to it. “Tim, Kathy's dead.” And just saying the words aloud caused a sob to lurch up from his throat. His hands wouldn't stop shaking, and his vision began throbbing in sync with his pulse.

“Fuck,” Tim said. “No. No, David. Ah, Jesus. How? When? What . . . what happened?”

“It was a few days ago. Tim, it's a long goddamn story and it's gonna sound crazy. I'm terrified to go into it over the phone. I'm worried someone might be tracking my cell phone.”

“What the hell is going on, man?”

“Some people are after Ellie and me. Government people.”

“Because of Kathy?”

“Not exactly,” he said. “Kathy was in the hospital. She volunteered. Doctors, they were studying her. They thought she might be immune to what's been going on, this fucking Wanderer's Folly, but they pushed her too hard. They killed her. Now they want to take Ellie away from me and do the same thing to her.”

“Where's Eleanor now?”

“She's okay. She's with me.” He closed his eyes, forced himself under control. “Tim, I need your help.”

“Where are you?”

For a moment, he had no clue—his brain was fuzzy, his thoughts jumbled and nonsensical. But then the confusion dissipated, revealing a sharp gleam of clarity, and he said, “I'm about an hour or so from Kansas City. I came all this way hoping I could see you, that we could talk in person—”

“Shit, David, I split KC over a year ago. I'm off the grid now. I'm in Wyoming.”

David felt the floor drop out from under his feet.

“Oh,” he said into the phone, but it was someone else's voice now. The ceramic tiles that formed the backsplash behind the restroom sink appeared to rearrange themselves. David squeezed his eyes shut. He braced himself against the wall with one hand so that he wouldn't topple over. “Okay. Shit. Well, how far is that?”

“From KC? Maybe ten hours. Twelve, if you're cautious about speeding and cops.”

Twelve hours,
David thought.
A whole day. Jesus Christ. Can we make it that far?

“Listen,” David said. “I'm going to try to get there.”

“Sure, sure,” Tim said, “but just hold on a sec, okay? Let me think.”

David leaned against the restroom door and glanced out into the theater lobby. Two teenagers chatted behind a glass counter, a guy and a girl. They had plastic Halloween masks perched on their heads, but they didn't seem too concerned about germs, judging by the proximity of their faces. It made David think of the guy in the paper plate mask back in the library, and how he'd been staring at him from between two bookshelves.

“Okay,” Tim said. “I think I've got an idea that will help you out, but I need to make a phone call first. I'm not sure how long it will take. Are you able to stay there in the city overnight? Do you have money?”

“I've got enough for a motel.”

“If not, I can maybe wire you some—”

“No, I don't want to get into all that. I'm trying to lay low. I can find a motel off the highway, but I don't want to go traipsing around the city looking for a Western fucking Union or whatever. I've got enough cash on me.”

“Okay, good. Meantime, I'll get things rolling on my end. You'll hear back from me as soon as possible. Just sit tight.”

“Okay. And thank you.”

“Stay safe.”

Tim hung up.

David washed his face and hands again before hustling back out into the lobby. The place was dead, but he noticed a white van parked in a loading zone outside the theater, and the sight of it caused his bowels to clench.

He hurried back inside the theater, staggering blindly down the aisle looking for the silhouette of Ellie's small head above the seats. When he found her, he leaned over and told her they had to leave.

“The movie's not over yet,” she protested.

“Now,” he said. The few other people in attendance turned and looked in their direction.

Ellie joined him in the aisle, and he ushered her quickly out into the lobby. The white van was still there. Scanning the parking lot through the wall of windows, he could see a black sedan parked in a spot beneath a lamppost. A second black car was pulling off the highway and coming up the paved roadway that led toward the theater.

“Come on,” he said, and grabbed her hand. They hurried toward the fire exit. David leaned against the arm bar, expecting an alarm to sound, but nothing happened. They shoved out into the side parking lot.

“What's going on?” Ellie said.

“There're people out front.”

“Cops?”

“I don't know exactly who they are.”

Still clutching her hand, he dragged her around the side of the building. At the corner, he peered into the front lot. The van was still parked out front. There was someone behind the wheel talking into a cell phone. The sedan parked in the lot looked empty, though it was difficult to tell because the windows were tinted. The second black vehicle turned right toward a shopping center instead of left toward the movie theater. It could have been a ploy to disarm him or it could have been their tactic, circling around the opposite end of the shopping center only to come at him from the rear.

The guy climbed out of the van, stuffing his cell phone in the rear pocket of a pair of faded jeans. He looked young and blue collar, with a ball cap tugged down low over his eyes. He had a ponytail. When he entered the theater, David tightened his grip on Ellie's hand and said, “Let's go.”

They ran across the parking lot and made it to their car without anyone jumping out of the shadows and grabbing them. The engine growled to life. It was all David could do not to slam down on the accelerator and peel out of the parking lot. But he didn't want to draw any attention to their escape. He pulled out slowly while Ellie whipped her head around, looking for signs of danger. The white van didn't move. The parked sedan remained parked. The second black vehicle did not reappear from the other side of the theater.

They pulled back out onto the highway and drove.