“If you want.” Jeanette risked another look at the spot where the man had been sitting. No one was there. No one.
“You find creatures in the dark of the earth, far below the rubble of the mountaintops that the coal-men have chopped flat, eyeless creatures, that are freer than you have ever been. Because they live as they want to, Jeanette. They are fulfilled in their darkness. They are everything they want to be.” Evie repeated this last, emphasizing it. “They are everything they want to be.”
Jeanette pictured herself in a warm darkness far beneath the earth’s surface. Minerals glittered around her in constellations. She felt small and secure.
Something tickled her cheek. She opened her eyes, brushed at the strand of web that had started to curl up from her skin. She wobbled on her feet. She hadn’t even realized she’d closed her eyes. In front of her, not halfway across the room, was the wall—bulletin board, door to the shower, Kwell dispenser, cement blocks. Jeanette took a step, then another.
There was the man. He was back, now smoking the joint he had rolled. Jeanette wasn’t going to look at him. She wasn’t giving in. She was going to touch the wall, and then she was going to turn around and walk to the other wall, and she wasn’t giving in. Jeanette Sorley wasn’t ready to be enshrouded yet.
I can go awhile, she thought. I can go awhile. You just watch me.
8
All the regular cruisers were taken, so Don Peters and the kid he was partnered with scoured the grid of suburban streets just south of the high school in Don’s Dodge Ram. It had no official insignia, which was disappointing (Don planned to see about that later, maybe get some stick-on letters from the hardware store), but there was a battery-powered bubble light on the dashboard, revolving slowly, and he was wearing his prison officer’s uniform. The kid didn’t have any kind of uniform, of course, just a plain blue shirt with a badge on it, but the Glock on his hip carried all the additional authority he needed.
Eric Blass was only seventeen, technically four years too young to be in law enforcement. Don thought the kid had the right stuff, though. He’d been a Life Scout with a merit badge in target shooting before giving up the Scouting program the year before. (“Too many pussies,” Blass had said, to which Don replied, “Copy that, Junior.”) Besides, the kid was funny. He had invented a game to speed the hours. It was called Zombie Chicks. Don had the left side of the street, since he was driving; Eric had the right. It was five points for old chicks, ten points for middle-aged chicks, fifteen points for kiddie chicks (hardly any of those left by Saturday, none at all today), and twenty points for hotties. Blass was currently up, eighty to fifty-five, only as they turned onto St. George Street, that was about to change.
“Hottie on the left at two o’clock,” Don said. “That puts me up to seventy-five. Closing in on you, Junior.”
The kid, riding shotgun, leaned forward to scrutinize the youngish woman stumbling along the sidewalk in spandex shorts and a sports bra. Her head was down, her sweaty hair swinging back and forth in clumps. Maybe she was trying to run, but the best she could manage was a half-assed, weaving jog.
“Saggy tits and saggy ass,” Eric said. “If that’s what you call a hottie, I pity you.”
“Oh, jeez, pack your bags, we’re goin on a guilt trip.” Don cackled. “Fine, since we can’t see the face, how about I call it fifteen?”
“Works for me,” Eric said. “Give her a honk.”
As they rolled slowly by the staggering woman, Don laid on the horn. The woman’s head jerked up (the face was not too bad, actually, except for the big purple circles under her hollowed-out eyes), and she stumbled. Her left foot caught on her right ankle and she sprawled on the pavement.
“She’s down!” Eric yelled. “Chick goes down!” He craned to look over his shoulder. “But wait, she’s getting up! Not even waiting for the eight-count!” He began to toot the Rocky theme through flapping lips.
Don glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the woman rising shakily to her feet. Her knees were scraped, and blood was trickling down her shins. He thought she might give them the finger—the teenager they’d blasted shortly after their shift began had done that—but the zombie chick didn’t even look around, just went staggering off toward downtown.
Don said, “Did you see the look on her face?”
“Priceless,” Eric said, and raised his palm.
Don high-fived him.
They had a list of streets to be canvased, tucked into a notebook where they wrote down the addresses of houses containing sleeping women, plus their names and some form of ID. If the houses were locked, they were allowed to break in, which was fun at first. Don enjoyed washing his hands with different kinds of soap in different kinds of bathrooms, and the variety of styles and colors of panties in the underwear drawers of the women of Dooling was a subject that had long called for his study. Cheap thrills wore out, though. It wasn’t real action. Without an ass to fill them out, panties got old fast. When you came right down to it, he and Junior were little more than census-takers.
“This is Ellendale Street, right?” Don said, as he pulled the Ram to a curb.
“Roger that, El Commandante. All three blocks of it.”
“Well, let’s get walking, partner. Check out some bitch-bags and write down some names.” But before Don could open the driver’s side door, Eric grabbed his arm. The newbie was looking toward a patch of waste ground between Ellendale and the high school.
“You want to have some fun, boss?”
“Always up for fun,” Don said. “It’s my middle name. What have you got in mind?”
“You burned one yet?”
“A cocoon? No.” Don had seen footage on the news, though, a cell phone video of a couple of guys in hockey masks putting a match to one. The news called guys like that “Blowtorch Brigades.” The cocoon in the video had gone up like a campfire wetted down with gasoline. Whoosh!
“Have you?”
“Nope,” Eric said, “but I heard they, you know, really burn like crazy.”
“What are you thinking?”
“There’s an old homeless babe who lives over there.” Eric pointed. “If you want to call that living, that is. No good to herself or anyone else. We could give her a hotfoot. Just to see what it’s like, you know. It’s not like anybody would miss her.” Eric suddenly looked uneasy. “Of course, if you don’t want to . . .”
“I don’t know if I do or not,” Don said. This was a lie. He wanted to, all right. Just thinking about it had gotten him a little horny. “Let’s check her out, then decide. We can do Ellendale later.”
They got out of the truck and headed for the weed-choked acre of ground where Old Essie kept her den. Don had a Zippo lighter. He took it from his pocket and began to click it open and shut, open and shut.
CHAPTER 2
1
The women started out just calling it “the new place,” because it wasn’t really Dooling anymore—not the Dooling they’d known, at least. Later, as they began to realize they might be here for the long haul, it became Our Place.