Blood Men: A Thriller

My car is a four-door sedan family vehicle, but I guess I can get rid of two of the doors since I won’t be using them anymore. Maybe trade it in for a sports car—maybe let Sam choose the color. We walk out to it, my monster and me, stumbling down the driveway, almost—but thank-God-not-quite—dropping my beer. I can’t get the door open but then figure out it’s still locked, so I unlock it and things work out great. I get behind the wheel and at first I think somebody has shifted the ignition, so I have to play around with the key, but it gets there in the end, scraping over the edges in the beginning before slotting home.

The mailbox almost becomes the first casualty of the evening, and then the neighbor’s cat, but things straighten out and the road points ahead and we follow it. Between us one of us reads the map while the other drives, the roads and intersections and other cars passing by in a blur of color and sound.

Christchurch is a better-looking city the later it gets in the day because the darkness helps hide the infection. I see it all around now—I was ignorant of it until four days ago. In the morning the sun will come up and tear that scab right off, the criminals will spew forth from their hovels, holes, and dens, merrily stealing and raping and killing their way through the twelve days of Christmas. The evening is still warm, and there are a few people out enjoying it, some of them walking hand in hand, or towing a dog on a leash, others on mountain bikes. It’s after nine o’clock, the sun has gone but it’s still light, the time of day approaching when it can go from light to dark in a matter of minutes. I drive past a park where a father and son are pointing up at a kite caught in a tall tree, stranded and pierced by branches. In the same park a group of teenagers are kicking a rugby ball back and forth, spiraling it high into the air before it gets too dark. There’s a fort and a merry-go-round and it reminds me of the story Dad told me earlier.

The Security Guard—one Mr. “let me laugh my ass off while your wife is getting gunned down” Gerald Painter, lives in a quiet street with lots of trees and gardens and homes that all seem the same, and I figure Mr. Gerald Painter should have become a painter and not a guard and if he’d done that, taken that one little path his destiny and last name were trying to point him toward, then this Tuesday night three days from Christmas would be a very different Tuesday night than it will be for him now. It’s darker by the time I get there and I have my headlights burning. Painter’s white-trash car with the big-block million-decibel engine and fiery paint job he must surely own isn’t parked out on the street or up the driveway. Instead there’s a four-door sedan, a Toyota I think, a white one, with a FOR SALE sign in the window.

We drive past the house, head down to the end of the street, turn around, and drive back. We slow down, taking another look. Painter is in there, counting his money, wanting to spend it but having to wait. We drive past and pull over, the house on the same side of the road as us. I shut off the engine and turn off the lights and we sit in silence for a bit, thinking, thinking.

Everything is packed into Sam’s schoolbag. It was the only thing I could find. They fit in there easily enough, this bright red bag with a weird cartoon character of a dinosaur on it that is loved by children everywhere, but if it caught a flight into the country it wouldn’t get past customs. I wasn’t sure what I was going to need, but we figured it out in the end. Rope. A knife. Actually a couple of knives. Duct tape. Gloves. I don’t have any balaclavas, and the best I could come up with was a baseball cap. The beer I was carrying has fallen over during the drive and neither of us thought to bring a fresh one, which means there’s still much to learn.

I turn off the interior dome light, then open the door. There are Christmas lights up on some of the houses, and in most of the windows you can see bright lights coming from make-believe trees. I lean against the car, then pull away from it when it sways behind me. I move around to the passenger door and open it and grab out Sam’s bag. I carry it by the strap, walk across the grass out the front of the neighboring house, then the strap on the bag unthreads because I’m holding the wrong one, the bag opens, and everything spills out onto the lawn, jangling and clanging against each other.

“Shit.”

Shit.

I crouch down and pack everything into the bag, careful not to get cut. I keep looking around for anybody watching, but nobody is, at least not that I can see. Everything goes back in okay, even the hat, which for some reason I’ve forgotten to put on. I grab it out and prick my finger on the knife.

“Aw, Jesus,” I say, shaking my hand, then sucking the cut on my thumb. It’s not much, but it hurts. I stand up and take a few more steps forward. I stare at the house, wondering why it’s different from when we drove past two minutes earlier, then realize I’m standing in front of the wrong one. I’ve led us the opposite way.

We turn around and head past my car toward the correct house. I don’t know what the next step is, I wait for my companion to fill in the blanks, and he does, because my monster is a real team player. He takes over and leads us up the path to the front door. I lean against the house while he puts his finger out and rings the bell.





chapter eighteen