The Devouring Page 18

  Ryerson became aware that the car behind him was coming to a halt.

  Doreen cooed on. "I got death all around me, Mr. Biergarten. I got death for insides. Where other people got a heart and lungs and stomach, I got death. She gave that to me. Joan gave that to me."

  Ryerson whispered, "You're Lila Curtis."

  Doreen shrugged. "I don't know any Lila Curtis no more. I used to. I used to live inside her. An' then she lived inside me. For a while, anyway. Till your little girlfriend put a bullet into her. Now there's just me. And I got death inside me, so I know what power is. Life is power, my man! Life is power! And I've been awful hungry lately."

  The first bullets tore through the back window of the Woody, and zipped past the side of Ryerson's head. A hole appeared at the left side of Doreen's forehead. It looked like a hole in an overripe apple. She grinned again, as if she were being caressed. "You all got life, Mr. Biergarten. So you all got power! Why don't you just give a little bit of it to Doreen?" And she lunged at him through the space where the windshield had been.

  Ryerson threw his door open, launched himself from the car, tucked, rolled, and came to a stop ten feet away, on the shoulder of the road, in tall grass. He lay on his stomach, with his arms beneath him and a tremendous pain coursing through his shoulder.

  He looked back at the Woody.

  "For the love of God," he whispered.

  Doreen was on her stomach, head and torso out the door of the car, her legs on the seat, and her arms back so her chin and breasts were on the pavement. She stared at him, her eyes as big and opaque as walnuts. She grinned; that hideous wound at her forehead oozed a whitish buttery substance. And she twitched as if with periodic and random pulses of electricity, as if she were some kind of high school biology experiment.

  And the man standing over her with his .38 aimed at her head looked quizzically at Ryerson, then back at Doreen, then at Ryerson again. "What's this?" he said. He looked back at Doreen and said, as if to himself, "What's this? It stinks!" and he slowly and systematically unloaded the .38 into Doreen's head. On the sixth shot it shattered and all the stuff that filled it up drained from inside it and began to collect into a little pool where the road dipped at the curb.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  It's been said that there's as much water in the world today as there was a hundred million years ago. Only its form changes. It freezes. It vaporizes. It flows. So time means nothing to it. It changes according to the environment. And for these past one hundred million years, the creatures that have lived on the planet have variously been kept alive by it, drowned in it, swept away by it. The water that rises as a vapor from the Caspian Sea may find its way years later to a lake in the Adirondacks. It knows nothing, of course, of those years it spent floating about in the upper atmosphere. It does what the environment tells it to do. And it never goes away.

  ~ * ~

  Irene Sabitch scowled. A dozen cocktail napkins, each with no more than a name on it—"George," "Sam," "Tanya," "Melanie," "Scott," "Miles"; each written in black ink in big block letters. She flipped through the dozen napkins, stuffed them into the manila envelope, and put the envelope back into the locker. And for this, she thought, I've got to spend an evening with Glen Coffman. She stalked from the Greyhound Package Express office to her car. She whispered, as she turned the ignition on, "There's no damned justice in the world, no damned justice at all."

  ~ * ~

  Jack Lucas took a very long time redirecting the aim of his .38 from what was left of Doreen to his temple. Suicide was anathema to him. A close friend in college had committed suicide and he—Jack Lucas—had spent a full year in anguish over it, trying, futilely, to square it with his view of life, a view that said that since he could not create life, he had no right to take life. Not even his own.

  But of course that noble philosophy had been tossed upon the dung heap of recent events. He remembered with grisly clarity the faces of each of the dozen or more transients he had picked up in "The District" in the last five months.

  Since he'd come back from Erie.

  Since he'd brought this thing that lay at his feet back with him from Erie. So it could feed on the life he brought her, and so eventually find life for itself.

  And, at last, so it could seek out the woman who had brought her so much torment. Joan Mott Evans. And do with her what it pleased.

  He remembered all the sad, hopeful, rheumy-eyed faces of the men he had sent into that bar.

  He remembered, too, the faces of the bright and vibrant young people he had brought to her.

  And the ones she had found for herself. Like Laurie Drake, Leonard McGuire, Lilian Janus. And the others.

  He knew that those faces would be with him forever.

  He turned his head very slowly toward Ryerson, the barrel of the .38 still pointed at his temple. In an area of his brain detached from the urgency of the moment, from what he saw as the justice of his own suicide, an idea was forming. It was an idea he could not verbalize because it moved away from his grasp when he tried to touch it and examine it. It was much like the vision that had come to Ryerson the day before, when his mind's eye had shown him a hive of workers and drones all working in attendance to the queen bee. Except now the queen had been removed from the hive. And the hive was not a hive at all; and the workers and drones were not bees. They were human.

  "Don't do it," Ryerson called. Trying to ignore the agonizing pain in his shoulder, he pushed himself to his feet and started across the road toward Lucas.

  Not bees, but human beings laboring furiously in attendance to a huge and evil queen so it could grow fat and powerful and could seek out life for itself.

  "Don't do it, please don't do it!" Ryerson screamed.

  "We do what we have to do," Jack Lucas said.

  Ryerson grabbed his arm tightly against the throbbing pain.

  Lucas went on. "She told me she could give me life; she told me she could give me immortality. All I had to do was . . . be someone else. Simple, huh?"

  "Put the gun down, Captain Lucas. Please put the gun down."

  Lucas said nothing.

  "There's so much work to do," Ryerson said; he didn't know where the phrase had come from—perhaps from some need that had vaulted from Lucas to him.

  Lucas nodded slowly. "Yes," he said. "Work to be done." Then he lowered his .38 and fell sobbing to his knees.

  Epilogue

  Week Later

  What in life gets resolved? Ryerson wondered. Very little, really. The memories linger, although they're often incomplete, or they're a litany of mistakes, or they're memories of happiness brought to an abrupt and awful end.

  Like his time with Joan.

  He pulled the Volkswagen Beetle onto Bailey Avenue. It would lead him east, to Route 33, to Interstate 90, then to Rochester, where he planned to stop and see his friend, Chief of Detectives Tom McCabe. He was much in need of friendship just now.

  He reached across the seat and stroked the sleeping Creosote. "We'll find out what's wrong with you, boy," he said, because Dr. Craig Gibson, D.V.M., had, after a lengthy series of tests, been able to proclaim only, “He's allergic to something. Don't ask me what." Then he'd smiled. "Maybe he's allergic to those demons you've been harping about all week, Mr. Biergarten."

  Ryerson hoped the Volkswagen possessed the same kind of happy memories that the Woody had, before Doreen had corrupted it. When his mind cleared, and his psyche got back into focus, he'd find out.

  He came to a stop at a red light, heard a motorcycle pull up next to him, and glanced over at it. He saw that a woman of sixty was astride it, her leathers polished, her mouth drawn into a huge smile. Ryerson thought, 'She's happy! She's herself."

  The light changed. The woman goosed the accelerator of the big Harley and roared off. Ryerson touched the Beetle's accelerator so it tiptoed cautiously through the intersection.

  Then, because of all that he had learned in the past two weeks about love, death, grief, and hope, he said, "Good
-bye, Joan. I'll see you in a while," and steered the Beetle toward Route 33.