Walkers (55 page)

William scrabbled on the floor for
the poultry-knife. Levi, in desperation, tried to tug away the eel that was
suspended from his jaw. Its teeth audibly snapped, and it bit away a chunk of
Levi’s face, right down to the bone, enough to fill up a small coffee cup with
blood and flesh. Levi shouted in pain and horror and awful relief, and fell to
the other side of the kitchen, leaving a foot-wide smear of blood all the way
down the side of Jennifer’s oak-fronted units.

William found the poultry-knife and
handed it with jittery fingers to his buddy. Josh’s face was strange and grim.
He was biting the flesh inside his mouth to stop himself from screaming, and
blood ran freely down each side of his chin. He lifted up his buttocks, bit by
bit, and gradually edged down his shorts. The eel had swallowed his penis
almost up to the root, and although its teeth had penetrated the skin, it had
not yet closed its jaws. Its eyes stared up at Josh with predatory calm.

‘I can’t -’ Josh said, bloodily. ‘I
can’t get the knife between its jaws.’

His partner inspected the eel in
fear and disbelief. ‘What are you going to do?’ he asked, in a voice as pale as
milk.

Josh bit even harder at the flesh
inside his mouth, and his eyes filled with tears.

‘You’re going to have to – take hold
of its jaws – see if you can keep them open – long enough to pull it off me...’

‘These are real powerful, these
bastards,’ William said, worriedly. ‘Supposing I can’t hold its jaws open for
long enough?’

‘Well, what the fuck
else
am I going to do?’ Josh hissed at
him, his lips bubbling blood. There was a scream from the other side of the kitchen.
It was Levi, tearing off another eel, and another chunk of flesh. But the cops
took no notice.

‘Listen, listen,’ said William.
‘That paramedic – he’s bound to have some sedative, right – some real powerful
sedative. Supposing I can inject that bastard eel with enough sedative to send
it to sleep – then it will drop off, right? Fall asleep and drop off – and you
won’t – well...’

Josh was turning grey with shock,
and with the tension of sitting on the floor with the eel holding his manhood
and even his life between teeth as sharp as a gin-trap.

‘Yes,’ he said, thickly. ‘Try it.
Maybe it’ll work. Ask him to get it ready for you.’

William loped across to the other
side of the kitchen and hurriedly spoke to Levi. The paramedic was in shock
himself. He had torn off all three eels, and now he was lying next to his
medical box, dressing his terrible injuries and preparing to inject himself
with anti-tetanus toxoid. He could barely understand what William was saying,
but at last he nodded his head, and with trembling blood-smeared hands made up
a hypodermic of thiopentone sodium. ‘This should... send a whale to sleep...
okay?’

William loped back again, holding up
the hypodermic. ‘He said to inject it right behind the head.’ Josh nodded, his
whole chin running with blood now, because of the pain.

William looked at him, and said,
‘You’re sure you want me to do this?’

‘For Christ’s sake, just do it,’
Josh urged him, between clenched teeth.

With infinite care, William raised
the hypodermic, and positioned the point of the needle right behind the eel’s
gleaming head. He licked his lips, and sniffed, and then he lowered the needle
until the point was actually indenting the eel’s skin.

The two cops stared at each other.
They had been through three years of service together, over a thousand days of
violence and tedium and danger and injury. This, however, was something
different. This was the night when they had unwittingly come face to face with
the Devil himself.

Josh nodded. William stuck the
needle into the eel’s body, with a faint pop of punctured skin. The eel showed
no sign that it had felt the prick of the needle – nor did it move when William
gradually depressed the slide, and filled its nervous system with anaesthetic.

The cops waited, nervously. The sun
came out from behind a cloud and the kitchen suddenly brightened. They looked
around them. The rest of the eels had disappeared now, leaving the body of the
woman who had borne them lying bloody and ravaged. Levi had injected himself
with an analgesic, and was lying with his head drooping between his shoulders,
too shocked and dopey to do anything at all but hold on until Tony returned.

Josh looked down at the eel. ‘What
do you think?’ he asked. ‘Do you think it looks like it’s sleepy?’

William peered at it closely. ‘Do
they have eyelids?’ he asked. ‘I mean, when they go to sleep, do they close
their eyes?’

Five minutes passed. Josh was
beginning to tremble With fatigue. ‘The damn thing must be asleep now,’ he said,
in a hoarse voice.

‘You want me to try to take it off?’
William asked him.

Josh nodded, but before William
could take hold of the eel he raised his hand. ‘Wait,’ he said. He carefully
reached down to his holster, unbuttoned it, and eased out his

.38 revolver.

‘What’s that for?’ William asked,
scared.

‘In case,’ Josh told him, and cocked
it, holding it up so that the muzzle was touching his right temple.

‘Josh -’ William protested, but Josh
snapped, ‘Do it!’

William reached up until his hands
were positioned on either side of the eel’s jaws.

His idea was to grip each jaw
between finger and thumb, and to keep them stretched apart while he removed the
creature from his buddy’s body. He prayed on his mother’s life that the
anaesthetic had worked, and that the eel’s reflexes were now totally deadened.
There was no outward way of telling whether they were or not. The eel’s body
remained coiled around Josh’s thigh, its eyes remained wide open.

‘This is it,’ he said, more to
himself than to anybody else. He took hold of the eel’s jaws, feeling their
bone structure through the slippery skin, and slowly lifted the sharp teeth out
of the skin of Josh’s penis. He paused for a moment, sweating, holding his
breath. The eel’s eyes stared at him coldly, mockingly, like the eyes of a dead
fish in a supermarket freezer, or the eyes of a man who is determined to see
you dead.

The jaw muscles were far stronger
than William had expected, and it was everything he could do to keep them
apart.

Josh breathed, ‘Take it off, William.
Slowly now, slowly, but for Christ’s sake take it off.’

William swallowed. He had just begun
to ease the eel downwards, however, when the broken kitchen door banged open,
and two detectives walked in.

‘What the hell’s this?’ one of them
demanded. ‘What the hell’s going on here?’

William glanced up, and as he
glanced up his fingers slipped.

Josh shouted, as the eel’s teeth
punctured his skin yet again, and he tried in panic to wrench the creature
loose. The eel’s jaw muscles snapped shut, with a gristly crunch.

Josh roared like a kamikaze and
pulled the trigger of his .38. With a thunderous report, his head emptied
itself all over the kitchen.

He fell sideways, and, as he did so,
the eel unwound itself quick and silvery, and slithered away to the other side
of the room, and disappeared. William wasn’t watching it anyway. He was
kneeling in front of Josh, his face spattered with blood, his hands still held
helplessly up, the way they had been when he had lost his grip on the eel’s
jaws.

The two detectives had whipped out
their guns when Josh had fired, and were crouched on the far side of the
kitchen in perplexity, wondering what they ought to shoot at.

‘You want to tell us what’s
happening here?’ one of them asked, reholstering his gun, and distastefully hop-scotching
his way between the splashes of blood.

William shrugged. ‘I tried,’ he
said, with his voice choked by tears.’ I tried my level best.’

Outside, two sirens cried in the
sunshine. Levi the paramedic tried to raise his head to see what was happening.

Nine eels, meanwhile, had slithered
out of the house, seeking places to hide. Three of them buried themselves in
the dry sun-baked soil in Jennifer’s garden, next to her rose-bushes. Another
coiled itself up in the darkness at the back of the shed which housed the
swimming-pool pump. Two more managed to find a way through to the neighbour’s
yard, where one of them slid into a squirrel-hole, and the other found a niche
for itself in the disused outside toilet. Two poured like liquid mercury down a
nearby sewer-grate, and would gestate in an archway which was regularly flooded
with raw sewage. The last tried to cross Paseo del Serra, just as the local
road-sweeping truck was crawling its way past, and was whipped up by the
brushes and carried, still alive, to the garbage dump, where it was buried
under tons of newspaper and gravel and Coke cans and dried yucca leaves and
excrement.

It lay there, with its eyes wide
open, its gills opening and closing, waiting to grow.

I
t had been seven weeks now and the
Night Warriors had found no trace of Yaomauitl. After they had failed to
destroy the Devil in the clockwork city, they had gone out night after night,
criss-crossing the darkened landscape of Southern California, searching for the
slightest heartbeat that would tell them that Yaomauitl was concealed close by.
They had penetrated dream after dream. Dreams of carnivals, dreams of love
affairs, dreams of drowning. But although they had glimpsed many demons, and
many dark anxieties, although they had felt the scuttling of many guilty
figures, and heard the whispering of many evil names, they had failed to find
the Devil they sought.

‘Maybe we’ve scared him off,’
Tebulot suggested one night, as they silently sailed by moonlight over the
Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area.

Kasyx looked grim. ‘I don’t want to
scare him off. I want to get him back in that box in San Hipolito where he
belongs.’

After the third week, they had
agreed to split their nightly patrols, so that only two of them went out at
once. Although their mortal bodies had remained peacefully sleeping in their
beds, their minds were growing weary from nights of searching.

After the fifth week, they had given
up patrolling every night, and instead flew out twice a week, spreading their
search as far as San Luis Obispo in the north, and Palm Springs in the east.
Kasyx had felt that it was unlikely that Yaomauitl had returned to Mexico.

These days, they hardly saw Springer
at all. Occasionally, she was there when they went to the house on Camino del
Mar, but she was quiet and uncommunicative, and her clothing was growing
increasingly lavish and decorative, as if to show them that every day the Devil
remained free, the world grew a little more decadent.

The Night Warriors still met each
other during the day. Henry’s cottage had become something of a casual
headquarters, where they came and went whenever they felt the need to talk.
Lloyd stayed over a couple of nights, despite protests from his mother, and Gil
was a regular visitor. Occasionally, Susan dropped by, too, when she came down
to the beach to swim, and they would all sit out on Henry’s verandah drinking
Cokes and talking about the battle they had fought on the plain of ashes, and
what they would do next time they came face-to-face with Yaomauitl.

They had nobody else with whom they
could talk about their adventures as Night Warriors. They had nobody else in
whom they could confide their fears. They had all been terrified that night in
the clockwork city, but who were they going to tell?

‘If I said anything to my analyst
about it, he’d have me bouncing around in a padded cell before sundown,’ Henry
had remarked.

Henry was finding it increasingly
difficult to resist the vodka bottle. As each night ended without any trace of
Yaomauitl, his sense of failure and frustration began to irritate his
nerve-endings again, and he would have done anything to anesthetise those
nerve-endings in Smirnoff. He went to the liquor cabinet two or three times a
day and opened it and stared at the half-bottle of vodka that stood there, and
then closed it again. He felt that he had entered into a solemn agreement with
the other three Night Warriors not to drink. After all, they were young, and
their lives depended on him.

But, as each night went by, and the
Deadly Enemy remained hidden, Henry’s craving grew stronger and stronger. One
drink, he thought. Just one. Just to give me that glow, just to give me that
extra confidence. Just to relax this whirling overloaded brain of mine, and to
give me some peace. His equilibrium had not been helped by the matter of
Salvador’s death. Although the police had eventually been satisfied that the
presence of Henry and Gil and Lloyd at the Scripps Institute had not been
contributory to Lieutenant Onega’s accident – mainly due to evidence given by
Andrea – the Institute themselves were considering a prosecution for unlawful
trespass and damage to their property, and the police made a point of calling
Henry at all times of the day, as if they were checking up on him.

And whether the police were
satisfied or not with what had happened that night, Henry and Gil and Lloyd all
knew that while they might have saved Andrea, they had certainly been largely
responsible for what happened to Salvador. It was no good making excuses about
‘casualties of war’. Henry had been around to see Salvador’s widow with a bunch
of flowers and a Fisher-Price wind-up Ferris-wheel for her children. The
children had sat on the green sculptured nylon rug and the Ferris-wheel had
played
In The Good Old Summertime,
and
afterwards Henry had sat in the passenger-seat of Gil’s Mustang with tears
running down his cheeks.