Everything but the Squeal

30

The stairs were steeper than they'd seemed, or maybe I was just weak. I had to stop part of the way up and catch my breath. The sound of cars starting outside told me that Marty and Pete and Jackie had abandoned ship and were heading for whatever hidey-holes they thought they'd be safe in. Bruner and Mrs. Brussels were flaming away, producing an extravagant amount of foul-smelling smoke. I hoped the tongue of the belt was securely wedged into the bottom of the truck's fuel tank. Otherwise, my next surprise would be an explosion that could spread both me and the kids over the neighborhood like peanut butter.

At the top of the stairs was an iron door. It was ajar. I shouldered it open and found myself in an office that was awful in its normalcy. A gray metal desk faced the window overlooking the warehouse. With an almost hallucinogenic sharpness I saw the paper blotter positioned dead center on top of it and a wicker wastebasket at the left corner. There was a Pirelli Tire calendar, at least ten years old, on the wall. A naked girl hugged a large black tire as though it were the second coming and she hadn't had her first.

Bruner must have been left-handed, I thought irrelevantly as I stepped into the room. The son of a bitch had wadded papers up with his left hand and tossed them into the basket to the left. Two of the desk's drawers were gaping open. Both of them had locks and keyholes, the worthless residue of past security. That was where the cash had been, the cash that was now burning in Bruner's and Mrs. Brussels' pockets.

Other than the desk and the wastebasket and the calendar, the office contained nothing more than an old wooden coat rack, a map of the U.S. pinned to the back wall with brightly colored thumbtacks, and four pairs of rubber galoshes lined neatly against a yellow line on the floor. Beyond the galoshes was a door. Like the one I'd already come through, it was made of iron.

She, they'd said, she was up here. The one missing child. Well, she wasn't here, so she had to be on the other side of the door. And maybe she was Aimee and maybe she wasn't, but there was no way to find out without opening the door.

My hand was shaking so badly that I had to pull it back and flex it before I turned the knob.

The room on the other side of the door was bigger than a closet, but just barely. It was also dark. I slapped at the wall to the right of the door and finally hit the switch. That was when I saw the cage.

When you want to ship a dog on an airline, they give you a cage. If you don't have a very big dog, the cage is large enough to let it sit down without scraping its head against the top. Or maybe not. The cage I was looking at was of the latter variety. Woofers might have found it spacious.

Actually, I smelled it before I saw it. Even before the light flooded the little room I smelled the stench of abandonment and desolation. My eyes adjusted to the light and I found myself staring through wire mesh at the crouched figure of Aimee Sorrell.

Her mother wouldn't have recognized her. Bent double on knees and elbows, she wore a diaper that was fastened with an oversize safety pin, a final humiliation. Her knotted hair obscured her face even though she was looking up at me. There were three bright orange dog dishes in the cage. One held what looked like dog food, one held water, and the third was overflowing with human waste. Aimee obviously hadn't been a good girl by Mrs. Brussels' standards, and my heart overflowed with a jumbled mixture of grief and pride.

“Aimee,” I said to the yellow-haired thing on its hands and knees, “we're going home.”

Aimee narrowed her eyes and yelped in panic. I remembered what I looked like. Aimee's eyes through the bleared tangle of yellow hair were as blue as a summer sky and as empty. She backed away into the far corner of the cage, her hands clawing at her face, at her eyes, trying to banish me to the land of nightmares.

“I’m your friend,” I said. “I’m going to take you home.” I got down on my hands and knees so I wouldn't be taller than she was: it's a trick you do with dogs. Very slowly, so as not to frighten her further, I unfastened the catch on the outside of the cage and pulled the door open. “Come on out,” I said very softly.

Instead of coming out, she squeezed herself more tightly into the corner. Her mouth was wide and open, and a high, sustained tone came from it, like an organ with a dead man's nose pressed against the highest key in the treble clef. There was no vibrato in the tone at all.

“Aimee,” I pleaded into the horrid, unwavering sound, “I'm your friend.” I reached a hand into the cage, opened it, and turned it to show her that it was empty. “Come out,” I pleaded, “come out. We'll go home to Kansas City.”

She swiped at my hand with claws I hadn't known she possessed, and my wrist began to bleed. “Good girl,” I said, resisting the urge to yank my arm back. “Come on. Please, please, come on. Aurora's waiting.”

For the first time something happened inside the blue eyes that might have passed for understanding. She looked rapidly from my bleeding hand to my eyes and then back again. The glance she gave me drilled holes through the back of my head.

“You're such a good girl,” I said, babbling on automatic pilot. “No one else has been so good. That's why they had to put you into the cage. Come on, Aimee. Aimee, let's go-”

I extended the raked, bleeding hand toward her. She looked at my face and then back down at the hand and then at my face again.

“Take it,” I said, turning the hand palm-up. “Take my hand, and get out of the cage.”

She hissed like a snake, but she didn't claw at me. I was smelling fuel again, and some clear, rational square inch of my brain was thinking about an explosion. “Please, darling,” I said, “Mrs. Brussels is dead. Birdie is dead. Max is dead. They can't hurt you now.”

She had stopped shrilling. “SaSaSaSa,” she said. In her mind it might have been a sentence. She saw the blood on the back of my hand and recoiled and then looked from my open hand to my eyes again and realized that she had done it. “No,” she said. She locked her eyes onto mine and reached up very slowly with one hand, took her hand in mine, and pressed the place where I was bleeding against her cheek.

“Come,” I said, drawing my hand away, but keeping hers in it. The blood was a bright smear on her pale cheek. “Come. They're dead. We're leaving.” The smell of fuel was growing stronger.

“Aimee,” she said, not letting go of my hand. Her voice sounded rusty. But she'd said the word that meant “her.”

“Aimee, Aimee, Aimee, yes, Aimee,” I said. “I'm Simeon. Please, let's go. There's a fire down there. I have to get you out of here, out of here so I can take you home.”

She crawled six inches toward me, upsetting the dish with the water in it. Then she stopped cold. “Aimee’s a good girl,” she whispered fiercely.

“Aimee’s the best girl in the world,” I said. I was crying. “Aimee’s the best girl in the whole wide world.”

She watched me cry for a moment. Then, with great deliberation, she nodded. “With you,” she said, “I'll go with you.”

More quickly than I would have believed, she'd crawled out of the cage. When she stood upright, her legs trembled and gave way beneath her, and she had to grab at my waist to keep from falling. I put one hand on her head and said, “All we have to do is go down the stairs.” I dropped my hand to her shoulder and steadied myself to turn and take her with me.

Her shoulders went as rigid as iron. She pushed at the hand on her shoulder. “Eeeeeee,” she said, dropping to her knees again. I pulled my hand from her shoulder, but she wasn't paying attention to my hand or to me or to anything to do with me. She was backing into the cage on hands and knees, her eyes on something behind me, mad and wide and clear and empty as water, and the skin-splitting Eeeeeeeee sound flowed from her mouth in a rippling ribbon of anguish. I turned and saw that I'd betrayed her.

A flap of burned skin hung from Mrs. Brussels' chin, and her hair was gone. What was left clung to her head like the charred remnants of a burned-over cornfield. The left side of her face was a water balloon, a single enormous, distended blister. Her designer clothes were blackened and shriveled by the fire that had consumed Bruner, but the gun in her hand was steady and her eyes were ancient and fierce and lashless and remorseless. They were an alligator's eyes. Aimee's scream had decayed into a kind of dog-kennel whuffling.

“Sweet,” Mrs. Brussels said between blistered lips. “Very sweet. Aimee. Come out of there.”

Aimee, eyes closed, crawled out of the cage. Once out, she froze on her hands and knees, her forehead pressed to the floor in abject submission.

“Over here,” Mrs. Brussels commanded. “Come to Momma, you little bitch.” And Aimee crawled past me as though I weren't there and went to Mrs. Brussels.

“So it was Aimee,” Mrs. Brussels said. The words were slurred with pain. “That was what Max said.” She reached down and twined her fingers into the matted hair and pulled the child upright. Aimee's eyes were squeezed shut.

“We can make a deal,” I said, wondering wildly what it might be.

“You already made one, Jack,” Mrs. Brussels said, “and you won't like it.” Her free arm encircled Aimee's throat. Aimee's eyes opened and rolled toward the ceiling. She was gone again.

“You're going to go down the stairs,” Mrs. Brussels said with difficulty. “Backward. Aimee and I will follow you.” With the gun hand she pressed against the massive blister on her face and winced at the pain. The gun remained pointed at me. “Do it right, and we'll see what happens.”

All I wanted was the gun I'd lost. Or Bruner's gun. Or fucking anybody's gun. “And if I do it wrong?” I asked.

“First, she dies,” Mrs. Brussels said, meaning Aimee. “Then, you. And then, little Jewel, when I find her. And I’ll find her.”

I put my hands helplessly into the air. “Tell me what you want me to do.”

“Don't turn your back,” Mrs. Brussels said thickly. When she talked, the fluid in the giant blister bobbed up and down. “Keep your hands up there, and back up. Back around us. Back out of the room.”

I did as she said, bumping against the door. Mrs. Brussels made a catching sound in her throat and pushed the gun toward me. I eased myself around through the doorway. She followed me into the main office, trundling Aimee in front of her. The stench of diesel fuel was very strong, and so was the smoke. Bruner was still burning.

“This place is going to blow up, you know,” I said, backing toward the door that led to the circular stairway, my hands still in the air.

“No shit,” Mrs. Brussels said, “and you're going to be in it. Just like Max planned.” Her arm was tight around Aimee's throat as she forced the little girl forward.

“What about the kids?” I said. I'd backed through the door and my foot had hit the first stair.

“The livestock? They'll be with me. There are other states, you bugger. California's played out anyway.” She was suffering exquisite pain and her world was crumbling beneath her feet, but she had a contingency plan. She had the concentrated focus of the truly desperate. She sighted over Aimee's head and trained the gun directly at my forehead. Her hand was as steady as Gibraltar. The only thing that mattered to her was getting down the stairs, and she was going to do it no matter whom she had to kill. I was beginning to realize why Birdie and Marco had been so afraid of her.

From below I heard whimpering: the children. Petroleum fumes rolled up at me. I was forced down two more steps.

“Kansas City,” I said experimentally.

“Keep going,” Mrs. Brussels said. “Shut up and keep going.” There was no reaction from Aimee. Her life had deserted her. I went down some steps, but I was too fuddled to count.

“Aurora,” I said, “the harbinger of dawn. Remember Aurora?” I stumbled and turned my ankle on the next step. Pain shot up my leg and I had to clutch the rail to keep from falling.

Aimee was an automaton. Her eyes were three-quarters closed, like some bogus East Indian mystic meditating on a profitable future life. She moved in perfect consort with Mrs. Brussels, a little girl who had learned long ago to let her partner lead.

“Just roll,” Mrs. Brussels said. “Keep going, and maybe I won't put Jewel up for auction. You haven't seen an auction, have you?”

We were most of the way down the stairway. “What about Prince Arthur?” I asked, dealing what I figured was my last card. Aimee's eyes flickered.

“I've told you to shut up,” Mrs. Brussels said. “I could shoot you here and step over you. I don't even have to worry about my nylons.”

“You can frighten me,” I said doggedly, waiting for the gun to blow a hole through my skull, “but you can't frighten a little girl who's worn a pig suit.” The gun came up toward my forehead. Her hand wasn't shaking. “A bright pink pig suit,” I said, closing my eyes. “Everything but the squeal.”

There was a sharp noise that might have been a bullet snapping into place, and my eyes jerked uncontrollably open.

Aimee was staring up at me through suddenly lucid eyes, and as the muscles in Mrs. Brussels' forearm contracted to pull the trigger, Aimee reached up and knocked her hand aside. The gun boomed, and Mrs. Brussels cursed, and Aimee wrapped both hands around the arm circling her neck and went limp.

Mrs. Brussels flailed at the railing, trying to keep her balance as Aimee's deadweight pulled her forward, and she hit the railing with the gun. The gun flew from her hand and even before the two of them collapsed on top of me I heard the gun clatter and skitter on the concrete floor below. Then Aimee and Mrs. Brussels hurtled down on me, and I fell backward down the stairs, trying instinctively to turn and save myself, but something went very wrong with my left knee and I skidded down the circular stairs on my nose and chest in a tangled ball of arms and legs, Aimee screaming and Mrs. Brussels swearing, all of us enveloped by the smell of fuel from Mrs. Brussels' clothes.

We hit the floor in a sandwich: me on the bottom, Aimee in the middle, and Mrs. Brussels on top. My head slammed against the concrete and I was trying to get my eyes to focus as the weight on top of me lessened. Mrs. Brussels was crawling on her belly away from me, scrabbling toward the gun.

I attempted to roll onto my side to go after her, but Aimee was still on top of me, and my knee sent an urgent signal of pain straight to my brain. I did my best to get Aimee off me gently as Mrs. Brussels squirmed toward the pistol, and then Aimee began again to emit the shrill flat sound, and it was echoed from the corners of the warehouse.

First there was one siren, then another, human sirens produced from small, tight throats, and then there were three and then four, and then too many to count. And Aimee pushed herself off my chest and got to her feet. Like a robot she walked slowly after Mrs. Brussels, still shrilling, hands hanging loose at her sides, and then I saw Marie, and behind Marie two of the other girls, and then the other children, all closing in on Mrs. Brussels, all with their mouths hanging loose and all tearing the air with the same inhuman sound.

Mrs. Brussels shouted a hoarse command, but the children kept coming. Her hand was only inches from the gun. I tried to roll onto my hands and knees but the pain overwhelmed me and the last thing I saw before I gave up and let the darkness take over was Mrs. Brussels, flat on her back and taking hopeless swipes at the children, trying to knock aside the sharp little fingers converging on her eyes.