Mark Rogers - The Dead

The fight was over before Gary and Dennis could join in. Max looked round at them.

“We were going to help, really,” Dennis said.

“I believe you,” Max said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“What about the damages?” the bartender demanded.

Max squinted at him. “What damages?”

“The glasses on that table.”

“Chickenshit,” Max answered. “Besides, I didn’t start the damn fight.”

“Oh, what the hell,” Uncle Dennis said, went to the bartender, and handed him a fifty.

The man who’d been kicked in the chest moaned. Max trained his eyes back on him. The fellow got up and stumbled for the door. His friends were still out cold.

Uncle Buddy, however, had come round by that time; Gary and Dennis helped him out to the car. Dennis drove.

“Hey Max,” he said, “they teach you to fight like that in the Marines?”

“You got it the wrong way round,” Gary said. “He taught them. ”

“What was he, a hand-to-hand instructor?”

“Yep. They decided he had a real vocation after he put his instructor in the hospital at Camp Lejeune. Isn’t that right, Max?”

“Yeah,” Max said. “Not bad for a college boy, huh?”

Dennis laughed appreciatively. Buddy just mumbled.

They reached home. The women made a great deal of fuss over Gary’s and Buddy’s hurts. Thoroughly humiliated, Buddy went down into the rec room with a beer, an ice-pack, and a bottle of Advil.

Some time afterward, Gary sat down on the living-room couch beside Uncle Dennis.

“So how did you like Max’s arguments?” he asked.

“He handled Buddy pretty well,” Dennis said.

“Yeah. But that’s no big deal if you ask me.”

“ I’ve never been able to answer him that way,” Dennis replied. “He just starts with his jokes and insults, and I get confused. He knows more about history than I do, too. But Max sure let him have it.” He chuckled. “You know, it might not sound like it, but I really love Buddy.”

Gary looked at him sidelong.

“I really do,” Dennis insisted. “He’s my brother, and I guess I can see some things in him that other people can’t.”

“Aunt Lucy loves him,” Gary admitted, and glanced out into the kitchen. The women were talking heatedly about something; Linda noticed him looking their way, and smiled.

“But even though I love him, I think he has a lot to learn,” Dennis went on. “And I have to admit, I like watching him get put down every once in a while.”

“I thought you were searching for the ultimate truth and all that.”

“That too.” Dennis paused. “Aren’t you interested in the truth, Gary?”

Gary laughed. “Not till it comes up and sinks its teeth into my leg. Then, just maybe.”

Jeff Purzycki was very much alone-unless you wanted to count the two hundred and fifty corpses on the other side of the gym’s double doors. But Jeff preferred not to think of them as company.

He hadn’t been the only warm body when he arrived. Jack Bingham, the man Jeff had been sent to relieve, was there, as well as an assistant coroner, and three Italians from North Jersey who’d had relatives on the plane. The family members and the coroner had gone in to look at some of the stiffs in the zippered black body-bags.

While they were inside, Jack had told Jeff that none of the bodies had been claimed; the airline situation had made it impossible for anyone to come over from Italy. Because of potential health hazards, the corpses were going to be moved out the following afternoon to a big out-of-business meat-packing plant up in Long Branch.

“Good fucking riddance,” Jack had said. “Get ‘em the hell out of here.”

Jeff laughed. “What’s the matter? Scared?”

“Nah. It’s just-I don’t know. I was here alone for a while, and I thought-”

“Thought what?”

“Forget it. I must be cracking up.”

Before Jeff could press him any further, the coroner and the others came out, and Jack left with them. Jeff wasn’t particularly concerned about what Jack had said. Jack had always been a crazy son of a bitch.

Now Jeff was wandering around the gym lobby, inspecting the basketball trophies in the glass case and the plaques on the walls, remembering his futile efforts on the court back in high school. After a time he pulled up a chair and sat down, got the paperback he’d started out of his lunchbox, and began to read.

The book was a big fat wad by one of his favorite authors, a man who, regrettably, seemed to have been losing his mind lately. Jeff had slogged through almost to the end before learning that the menace, which adopted such less-than-terrifying forms as Michael Landon in I Was a Teenage Werewolf , could be defeated by belief in anything, literally anything. Faith in the Tooth Fairy would do. Biting into the monster’s tongue and thinking of jokes would also. Reaching the point where it became clear that the monster was actually a giant (shivers!) spider, he tossed the book back in his lunchbox and got out a sandwich-pastrami and Swiss with pickles.

Sirens in the distance. Nothing unusual about that, considering what the rest of the night had been like. But this time the wailing just went on and on. He decided to call the station.

There was a pay-phone in the lobby, but he had no change. Carrying his half-eaten sandwich, he left the lobby and went around to the parking-lot, got into his station wagon-summer cops didn’t rate patrol cars-and called in.

“Train wreck,” Sgt. Masterson explained.

“ Another? Where?”

“Same place.”

“What? Was it deliberate?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“How many dead?”

“Don’t know that either.”

“You guys need me?”Jeff asked.

“Just stay put.”

Jeff hung the mouthpiece up and sat in silence, finishing his sandwich, mulling over what Masterson had said. Then he got out and went back toward the gym lobby.

As he rounded the corner of the building, he saw three teenagers by the lobby entrance, one in the process of going inside.

They want a peek at the bodies, Jeff thought.

“Hey!” he cried.

They bolted. Shaking his head, laughing quietly, Jeff jogged up the walk and went back into the lobby.

Suddenly he was aware he had to take a leak; he’d had several beers before coming on duty. The john was halfway down the dark hallway adjoining the lobby; he started toward the corridor, then paused-he didn’t want to come back and find those kids inside. Turning, he noticed a chained padlock hanging from one of the doors. Closing the doors, he chained the release-bars together, then went to the head.

When he returned, the lights were sputtering. He’d been considering going back to his book-he had, after all, invested so much time in it already-but decided to wait until the power company got its act together.

What to do in the meantime? He had a transistor radio out in the car. He could get it and listen to K Rock up in New York. But would there still be all those bursts of static?

He made for the doors, remembered the padlock, and started fishing for the key ring Jack had given him. Looking at the keys, he couldn’t remember which one opened the padlock. Oh well; he could just go through and try them. There were only thirty or so of the little-

A faint crackling noise reached him. He looked back at the doors to the gym.

Plastic crumpling, he thought.

The meaning of that did not sink in at first. Then there was suddenly a frozen place in his stomach.

Too many horror novels, he told himself. Still, he listened closely. For the next minute there was only silence. Had he heard anything at all?

With a shrug he went to the lobby doors and started fitting the keys to the lock. But at length he paused, his thoughts wandering back to that noise.