Far From True

Thirty-one

When it got to be dusk, George Lydecker was itching to do it again. Actually, he’d been itching to do it all day, but daylight break-ins were not the smartest thing in the world.

He wanted to break into another garage. In a weird way, he needed to do it to calm his nerves. George hadn’t been to sleep in a day and a half.

He’d been pretty freaked-out the night before when he and his friends Derek and Canton and Tyler had tried to sneak into the Constellation, only to see the whole goddamn thing come crashing down. They were about to get busted by the manager for trying to smuggle Derek in by hiding him in the trunk of the car. George had even gotten out to try to argue that the guy didn’t have the constitutional right to search the vehicle.

But then none of that mattered. Not when a bunch of bombs went off and the people started screaming.

Derek, the dumb bastard, had actually run toward the disaster, but George and his buddies figured the smartest thing to do was get the hell out of there. Especially since George had brought a gun along — and yes, he had actually found it in somebody’s garage and stolen it, just as Tyler had suggested — and the police would be showing up any minute.

They’d raced back into town. George got dropped off at his parents’ place, but he was too wound up to go in and go to bed. He’d wandered around his neighborhood, even then, checking for garages that had been left unlocked. A lot of people actually went to bed with their garage doors wide open. They’d be doing something out there, go inside for dinner, decide to watch some TV, and go to bed without ever remembering to close the damn thing.

You went strolling in, used your phone as a flashlight, and helped yourself to whatever you wanted.

He’d looked around two garages in the hours after the drive-in bombing, hadn’t seen much that he liked. So he was out again tonight, scratching that itch, wondering what he might find before he went to Canada the following morning.

The whole damn family, or fam damily, as he liked to think of it, was off to Vancouver to spend time with his father’s stupid relatives. And the taxi was coming at — get this! — five in the fucking morning. That was when George was usually crawling under the covers. So he’d promised his mother he’d be home in good time, which would allow him at least a couple of hours’ sleep before he had to get up.

George was easily bored. The doctors said it was more than just simple attention deficit disorder. George’s brain just wasn’t wired right. He’d always shown signs of being a smart little bugger. All he had to do was apply himself, his teachers — from every single grade — repeatedly told his parents.

That always made George think of that line, from a comic book or something: “If only he’d used his powers for good instead of evil.”

Not that George was evil. He definitely did not see himself as evil. He just couldn’t sit still.

And he liked to steal shit.

His parents, determined that he make something of himself, had insisted he go to Thackeray, and what a disaster that had turned out to be. He’d just finished two years there, and had successfully completed only four classes in all that time. He was not going back in the fall. There was absolutely no point. That professor whose Smart car he’d turned upside down had been pushing for him to be permanently expelled anyway. Plus, admin was still holding a grudge for his putting a baby alligator in the pond.

If you couldn’t have a bit of fun when you were in college, when could you?

Oh well, fuck ’em. Time to concentrate on the task at hand.

There was a garage he’d spotted one night the week before that had looked promising.

The first thing it had going for it was that it was separate from the house. So anyone at home was a lot less likely to hear anything. The other thing was, it had a side door, as well as two big car-sized doors at the front. So someone was going to have to remember to lock not one door but three.

On top of that, it was a nice enough house. So there might be good stuff that had been tucked in the garage that was worth taking.

The thing was, most of the crap he took, he threw away. Tossed into a Dumpster. Threw into the river. He’d kept some tools one time, and that gun (which he had dropped into a storm drain after getting back from the drive-in) was a nice score. Found it, and a box of bullets, in the drawer of a workbench. But it was the act of taking it that gave him the thrill. Getting in, getting out.

It was a high.

He decided to come at his latest target from the back. Just as streetlights were coming on, he walked down a narrow alley between two houses, reached their back property line, then hopped a fence that was shrouded with trees and bushes, and landed by the back wall of the garage.

Bonus. There was a window on that wall. That meant four possible ways inside. He peered through the heavily grimed glass, but it was almost totally dark in there.

He came along the side of the garage, right up to the corner, where he could get a look at the house. No one in the backyard, and only one light on in the house that he could see, in the kitchen.

The light didn’t worry him. He could get into this garage without being seen. Standing at the side door, he turned the knob. It was locked.

But hang on.

The door had not been pulled tight into the frame. So while the knob couldn’t be turned, when George gave the door a nudge, it moved.

Bingo.

Quickly, he opened the door, stepped in, and eased it shut behind him, nearly knocking over an old croquet set off to the side.

There was no car in here, and there wouldn’t have been room for one. Most of the garage was being used for storage. Using his phone for light, he could see the opposite wall was lined with metal shelving. There was a lot of the usual junk you’d expect to find. Gardening supplies, partially filled paint cans, small rolls of scrap carpet. On the floor, white plastic lawn furniture weathered with leaf stains. A case of beer bottles. Garbage cans.

On one shelf, half a dozen small wire-cage traps. A funneled entry at one end that would allow an animal to crawl inside, but which would be nearly impossible to crawl back out of without getting jabbed by the wire. The kind of thing, George thought, you might catch rats in.

Or squirrels.

And what the hell was that on the top shelf? Looked like an arm and a leg. A closer look revealed that they were a couple of limbs from mannequins.

But the most curious thing was the blue tarp spread over a large mound of something, in the middle of the garage floor. The surface of the tarp was bumpy and irregular.

Topsoil, maybe?

The pile was about five feet across, about two feet high. Four bricks held down the corners of the tarp. George kicked one away, reached down and threw the tarp back, and took a look.

The fuck?

At first, he thought it was drugs. Oversized bags — dozens, if not hundreds — of the stuff. More than he could count, that was for sure. Could it be a pile of cocaine or heroin or some shit like that? Weren’t they both white? When you saw bags of it on TV, it was usually white.

But when you saw drugs like that on The Wire or The Shield or any of those other cop shows, weren’t they packaged up the size of bricks? And wouldn’t one briefcase full be enough to buy a small country?

These bags were much larger, like sacks. Industrial grade, semiopaque plastic. They reminded George of the large bags pool chemicals came in. He’d once spent a summer working for a pool maintenance company. But the stuff in this pile here did not give off any whiff of chlorine.

So what was it? It looked a lot like salt.

That was some huge load of salt for someone to keep in the garage. Even in the winter, you wouldn’t need that much to melt the ice on your driveway. This was enough to keep the entire New York Thruway from freezing over.

He knelt down, unwound the twist tie on the top of the bag, and opened it. Didn’t smell a thing. He reached into the bag, touched his finger to the stuff, thinking it would stick like powder, but it was more like crystal. A couple of tiny granules stuck to his finger, and he put it to his tongue.

George didn’t taste a thing, but whatever this stuff was, it burned a little.

Was this shit worth something? Was even one bag of it worth stealing?

And if he did steal it, what would he do with—

The lights came on.

George whirled around so quickly he stumbled, his ass landing on the cold concrete floor.

“Holy Jesus!” he said when he saw what was standing in the doorway staring at him.

It was a huge walking bug.

It had huge round eyes, maybe two inches across, and an all-black, shiny face. Plus, there was some strange thing sticking out of one side of its face the size and shape of a hockey puck, but black and rubbery, like the face.

It was some kind of monster.

Fuck, no, it wasn’t a monster. It was a man, in a gas mask. Like one of those things you’d see someone wearing in a war movie, or on the news when they were looking after people with the Ebola virus.

George came this close to wetting his pants.

The man in the gas mask said, “What the hell are you doing in here?” But it came out funny because of the mask. Like a bad phone connection.

“Hey!” said George. “God, you just about scared the piss out of me there! What’s with the getup, pal?”

“I asked you what you’re doing in here.”

“Nothing, just, you know, just looking around. God, you sound like Darth Vader.”

The masked man looked at the pile of bags George had uncovered.

“Why did you do that? Why are you looking at that?”

“Just wondered what it was. That’s all. I’m guessing it must be some kind of bad shit if you’re wearing a fucking gas mask. You got another one of those?”

“Who are you? You’re not with the police. You don’t look like you’re from the police.”

“No way, no, I’m no cop.”

“Did someone send you?” The voice sounded creepy through the rubber.

“Nobody sent me, man. I just wandered in. The door, it wasn’t shut. I haven’t taken anything. Don’t call the cops on me. I’m not stealing anything. Just let me out of here. I don’t know what this shit is, but I just put some of it on my tongue. My nuts going to fall off or something?”

The man stared at him.

“Listen, what is this shit? It’s not coke or heroin, right? I mean, if you’re some big-time drug dealer, I am so sorry I wandered in here, and you can be sure I’m not going to say—”

“It’s not drugs,” the man said.

“It’s sure not chlorine. I used to work for a pool company, you know? And I can tell it’s not chlorine.” George was smiling, trying to be as sociable as possible. Like he wanted to be Mask Man’s new best friend. “I mean, if it was chlorine, we could hardly even breathe, right? Sometimes, if I was over a bucket of those pool pucks, when I pulled the lid off, I’d nearly pass out.”

The man said nothing. He just stared at him through the bug eyes.

George started getting to his feet. “I’m just going to take off, if that’s okay with you. You’re not going to call the cops, right? We’re cool there, okay?”

“I’m not going to call the cops,” the man said.

George took two tentative steps toward the door, but the man wasn’t stepping out of the way.

“Just let me go.”

The man reached for a mallet from the croquet set by the door.

“Aw, come on, man. I’m just going to go.”

As he took another step, the man brought the mallet up and swung.

George threw up a defensive arm, but the man managed to connect the end of the mallet with George’s temple. Hard enough that the head broke off the shaft and landed on the garage floor.

George threw his hand to his head. “Fuck!” he shouted.

The man looked at the croquet mallet shaft in his hand, now nothing more than a striped stick with a jagged end.

He hesitated a moment, then drove it into George, just below the rib cage, through his T-shirt and into flesh. The force pushed George up against the wall, where the man kept pushing until he felt the end of the stick hit a hard surface, his breathing hard and raspy through the rubber mask.

Blood gurgled from George’s mouth. He stirred briefly, then slid down the wall to the floor.

The man let the stick slip from his fingers, looked down at the dead man. Stood there. Breathing in, breathing out.

Good thing, he thought, that he had more than half a roll of plastic tarp left.