Kings of Infinite Space

FORTY

PAUL TRIED NOT TO LOOK BACK, and soon they were climbing in near darkness. He glanced down once and saw the distant, dwindling circle of light obscured by wriggling shapes and pale faces looking up at him, so he lifted his gaze to the blackness above and hauled harder. Above him he heard Callie grunting with exertion, and the slap of her feet on the rungs, and the slight ping each rung made when she let go of it. Paul felt warm droplets against his face, and he wasn’t sure if they were the condensation of the tunnel or drops of Callie’s sweat.

“You still there?” she asked once, panting, and Paul could only grunt in return. He had no way of telling how much time had passed or how far they’d climbed; for all he knew they could have been climbing for hours or for five minutes. His cerebellum told him, we can’t be that deep, but his lizard brain told him he would be climbing in the dark for the rest of his life. The thought that the ladder might not go anywhere was too much to bear, so he concentrated on his hands and feet.

“I feel a breeze,” said Callie, and a moment later, his arms and legs shaking with exhaustion, Paul felt it too, first from one direction, then from the other. They were passing side passages in the tunnel, but they both kept climbing. Under his palms and the soles of his feet, Paul thought the ladder vibrated to a more complicated rhythm than that of his and Callie’s ascent, and he thought, too, that he heard sounds from below — the faint ringing of the ladder’s rungs and a steady, bubbling murmur. He didn’t stop to listen.

A moment later the tunnel ended, but the ladder continued. They still climbed in pitch darkness, but the sweating rock walls fell away, and they found themselves climbing through a narrow space that extended into the distance on either side. The reverberation of their efforts — their harsh breathing, the ring of the ladder — made a duller and flatter sound. The air was drier and dustier. Paul felt cobwebs brush his face, and his back scraped against a metal beam and a bristling wad of insulation.

“We’re in a building,” panted Callie. “I think we’re in the wall.”

The soft clang of her feet on the rungs stopped, and Paul stopped when he touched her foot with his trembling, sweaty hand. She caught her breath in the darkness above him. “That better be you,” she said.

“Why are you stopping?” He tightened his hand on her foot.

“We’re at the top.” She fumbled at something in the dark. “There’s a latch, I think.”

Paul looked down; the light at the bottom of the tunnel was a twinkling pinprick now, and the ringing and murmuring he wasn’t certain he’d heard before was perfectly clear now. “For chrissake, just yank it,” he said.

She grunted above him; something rattled violently. “Got it!” she cried, and at the same instant an avalanche of crushed and empty soda cans cascaded down the ladder, rattling off Paul’s head and fingers, and clanging against the ladder. Sticky little droplets of warm soda pattered against his forehead. Paul hunched his shoulders and ducked his head until the cans clattered down the ladder, then he looked up into a dim light to see Callie hoisting herself through a little square hole. He glanced down one last time to see the fading flash of crumpled aluminum as the cans tumbled into darkness, then he raced up the last few rungs. There was a hollow thud as Callie knocked away the cardboard box over the trapdoor, and Paul put his palms on the cold tile on either side of the trapdoor and levered himself out. Callie reached into the hole and tried to pull the door shut, but there was no handle on the upward side.

Paul sat panting on the floor. They were in the second-floor elevator lobby of TxDoGS. The only light came from a street-lamp in the empty parking lot, through the tall windows of the stairwell. “Oh, God,” Paul said. “We’re at work.”

Callie jumped to her feet. Her clothes were still wet, her shirt still plastered to her skin. Sweat and condensation from the tunnel dripped off her face, and her palms and feet were coated with grime. She lunged suddenly, startling Paul, crossing the lobby to an office chair tilted to one side against the window. One of its wheels was broken, and someone had left it with a note taped to the back that read TRASH. Callie swung it into the air by its arms and jammed its broken undercarriage into the open trapdoor. It was too big to go down, but Callie stamped on the seat with her bare foot until the chair was tightly wedged in the hole.

Paul pushed himself to his feet against the wall, trying to catch his breath. “Callie, let’s just get out of here,” he said, but she continued to stomp on the chair, gritting her teeth and grunting with each blow. Finally he caught her by the arm and dragged her around the corner into the hall.

“Paul!” someone called from the far end, and Paul and Callie stopped short and clutched each other. The hall was full of shadow, and a tall silhouette was running heavily towards them in the dim light from the main lobby. Paul and Callie yelped simultaneously and ran back the other way. They hit the crash bar of the door to the outside landing, but it wouldn’t open, and Callie, howling wordlessly, began to pound on the glass with her fists. Up the hallway behind them the footfalls came closer, so Paul grabbed Callie by the wrist and pulled her away from the door and through the doorway into cubeland. He whirled her in front of him, then reached back and tugged at the door, which was usually propped open against the wall. It wouldn’t budge, so Paul kicked at the little hinged doorstop, painfully stubbing his bare toes, until it popped up and he was able to slam the door shut. He fumbled over the surface of the door until he found the deadbolt and locked it. Instantly a huge silhouette filled the narrow window down the center of the door, and the door shook violently under a series of blows.

“Paul!” cried a muffled voice, and Paul blundered backwards into Callie.

“C’mon.” She pointed across the dim cubescape. “We can use the exit by Rick’s office.”

Paul let himself be dragged for a few steps, but then he dug his heels into the carpet. “Wait wait wait,” he said, in an urgent whisper. “Listen.”

The hammering on the door had stopped; the figure in the window had gone away.

“Paul, goddammit, let’s go” Callie said, but Paul clutched her tightly and said, “Shh!”

It was sometime in the middle of Friday night, possibly even early Saturday morning, and the office was lit only by two or three widely spaced fluorescent fixtures. A little more light leaked through the outside windows from the building’s bright security lights, but for the most part the empty cubescape before them was in twilight, obscured as if by a mist. All around them, filling the midnight silence of the cubicles, Paul and Callie heard a steady creaking and the muffled murmur of voices. Both of them lifted their eyes to the suspended ceiling. The panels seemed to be bulging and shifting the entire length and breadth of the room.

“They’re up there,” breathed Paul. “They’re in the ceiling.”

Simultaneously they broke into a run, down the aisle past Paul’s cube, then right into the main aisle toward the copy machine, booking as hard as they could go for the exit at the other end. Callie ran in long strides, knees up, fists clenched, pumping her arms like a sprinter. Paul hammered after her, each impact of his bare heels jarring him all the way up his spine. Callie disappeared round the next turn, and Paul raced around the corner and blundered straight into her, nearly bringing them both to the floor. Callie had braced her heels, her hands pressed against the cube walls on either side of the aisle. Ahead of them, just outside the door of Rick’s office, the lower half of a pale man swung from a square gap where a ceiling panel had been shifted aside. His legs wriggled and he slipped lower, dangling by his fingertips, the ceiling creaking painfully above him. Then he dropped silently to the floor, crouching nearly on all fours, his fingertips brushing the carpet. It was Boy G. He lifted his pale moon face to Paul and Callie; his eyes gleamed through the lenses of his glasses. He smiled, baring his serrated teeth.

“Are we not men?” he whispered.

Behind him, over Nolene’s low-sided cube, another ceiling panel was already opening up, and Paul clutched Callie around her waist and heaved her up the aisle back the way they had come. They stopped again when they saw the blur of another pale man dropping out of the ceiling near the door where they had come in. Closer still they saw yet another pale man ooze head first out of a black hole in the ceiling; he curled around the lip of the hole like a fat spider until he dangled by his fingertips and dropped out of sight. Along the far side of the room Paul saw a pair of round, buzz-cut heads bobbing rapidly along the cube horizon, scurrying up the aisle.

“In here,” whispered Callie, and she dragged Paul into the large cubicle called “the library,” because of the tall metal bookcase full of TxDoGS regulations in ring binders just inside the door. It was where Paul had first gotten a good look at Callie, as she slouched against the wide worktable and sorted the mail amid the litter of pens, pencils, staple removers, and scissors. Just inside the door Callie started to heave on the metal bookcase, and Paul helped her pull it over onto its side across the doorway with an almighty clang. Ring binders cascaded to the floor about their feet and flopped open. Callie crouched and started snatching items off the work surface, but Paul stayed on his feet, glancing wildly about them. All around the room now panels were opening up in the ceiling — some pulled back, some twisted askew, some tumbling out of the hole into the cube beneath — an irregular checkerboard of black squares out of which descended feet, hands, moon faces. Murmuring filled the room like surf as pale men in white shirts and ties dropped onto desktops, chairs, and the tops of filing cabinets, punctuating the darkness with soft thumps and bangs. As the men sank below the cube horizon, Paul could feel each thump in the floor through the bare soles of his feet. He heard desk drawers opening and closing, and scampering in the aisles. The murmuring began to swell up the aisles and over the edges of the cubicle where he was trapped with Callie, a clackety-clack rhythm like a train, over and over again in an awful, whispering chant, “Are we not men? Are we not men? Are we not men?”

A sharp, electric whine startled him, and he looked down to see Callie crouched just under the edge of the work surface, an array of office supplies clustered around her on the carpet — a heap of pencils like pick up sticks, a steel letter opener, an enormous stapler. She was feeding one pencil after another into an electric pencil sharpener, but she did not take her eyes off the ceiling. Paul glanced up at it himself. The panels over the cube were rippling, and Paul heard creaking and the thrum of some metallic strut or support. At an especially loud creak, he ducked under the work surface, squeezing in next to Callie. The pencil sharpener ground away. Neither one of them looked at the other.

“You’re a son of a bitch,” muttered Callie.

“What?” said Paul.

“You heard me.” She laid the sharpened pencils in a fan at her feet. “When Olivia bared my throat and Colonel handed you the knife,” Callie hissed, still watching the ceiling, “what took you so long to do something?”

“Callie, I don’t think this is the time.” The creaking in the ceiling shifted, and Paul saw one panel bulge and then another.

Callie turned on him, her eyes blazing with rage and hurt. “You had to think about it!” she shouted — so loudly, in fact, that all the other sounds around them — the patter of feet, the murmuring chant, even the creaking of the ceiling above — went completely silent. She wouldn’t take her eyes off him, and in the electric stillness, Paul touched her with a trembling hand.

“Aw, honey,” he said, “I’m an intellectual. I have to think about everything.”

The ceiling above the cube gave way, several panels all at once, and in a cascade of dust and shards of tile, J.J. fell cursing into the cube, landing hard on the little heap of tumbled ring binders.

“Fuuuuck!” he shouted, throwing his arms over his face as fragments of ceiling panel pelted him. Coated in white dust and still wearing his barbecue apron, he tried to stand, but his feet kept slipping on the loose binders. Paul jumped up from under the work surface and cast about for something to defend himself with. He snatched up a big three-hole punch with a weighted base, and cocked it over his shoulder like a club.

“You faggot,” panted J.J., trying to haul himself up by the toppled bookcase. “I knew you’d be trouble the moment I saw you.

“Stay back!” cried Paul, his voice shooting up an octave. The three-hole punch rattled in his grip.

“You’re a fuckin’ dead man,” laughed J.J., finally pushing himself erect.

“He’s not the only one,” said Callie, and she launched herself from under the desk and past Paul, a sharpened pencil protruding between the fingers of each fist, an eraser braced against each palm. She swung both fists at the same time, one high and one low, then danced back, slipping on a ring binder and landing on her ass. J.J. wobbled on his feet, one pencil stuck in his right cheek, the other in his waist, just above the apron. He looked down at his punctured gut, then gingerly felt the pencil in his face. His eyes were wide, and his mouth worked soundlessly for a moment. “Aw, heck” he said.

“Dear God!” gasped Paul, turning to gape at Callie, and at that moment the bookcase toppled over with a loud clang on top of J.J., crushing him against the scattered binders. The two pale men who had pushed it over leaped onto the flattened bookcase as the metal boomed under them. At the same instant, two more pale men came shrieking through the air from opposite directions, soaring headfirst out of the darkness as if they’d been catapulted, their arms and legs wriggling. They tumbled into the cube; one landed on the worktable, the other crashed into the cube wall on the opposite side. The wall groaned under him and then rebounded, flinging him back into the cube on top of Callie.

Everything happened very quickly. The pale man on top of Callie leaped up immediately, shrieking and pawing at the letter opener jammed into his ear; he clawed his way up the cube wall and toppled over it into the next cubicle. Hissing and baring their teeth, the two pale men on the bookcase scuttled forward, one towards Callie, the other towards Paul. At the same moment Paul felt the blunt, cold fingers of the man on the desk behind him pawing at his head and shoulders. Callie came up from the floor with the massive stapler in her hands, and she expertly popped a lever at the hinge and cast aside the stapler’s base, swinging the upper half one-handed at the pale man approaching her. Paul twisted away from the fumblings of the man behind him, squeezed his eyes shut, and swung the three-hole punch blindly in a two-handed grip at the man before him. The punch connected with a loud thump! and Paul felt the shock of the impact all the way up both arms.

“I got him!” he cried, opening his eyes to see the pale man topple over the bookcase. But just then the man behind him wrapped a spiral phone cord around Paul’s neck and yanked it tight, pulling Paul right off his feet. Paul dropped the punch and scrabbled at the cord with his fingers, trying to pry it away from his windpipe.

“Callie!” he gasped, and even as his eyes bulged from his head, he saw Callie strike again and again at her adversary with the stapler, shouting with each swing. The pale man dodged, baring his jagged teeth and swinging at her with his open hands. Paul’s toes barely brushed the carpet as the cord cut deeper into his throat. Black spots spun before his eyes. Blood pounded in his ears.

Then, just as he was about to lose consciousness, he heard — one, two, three times — the very satisfying ka-chunk of the stapler, and the accompanying squeal of the pale man, and the thump of his body hitting the floor. Down the darkening cone of his vision, Paul saw Callie reach towards him, snatch something off the desktop, and then brandish a pair of scissors. She snipped the phone cord around his neck, and it whipped away. She jammed the scissors upward, and as Paul landed gasping on the floor, he heard the squeal and crash of the pale man on the desktop.

“C’mon!” cried Callie, and she dragged the gagging Paul to his feet. She pressed the bloodied scissors into his hand and snatched up the stapler again for herself, and she tugged him by his shirt over the rattling bookcase and into the aisle. In the intersection of the aisles they glanced either way to see little knots of crouching pale men, clustered together, swinging their arms and chanting. Flecks of spittle flew from their gaping mouths. Callie started up the aisle towards Rick’s office, and Paul walked backwards behind her, waving the scissors in his trembling hand as the two knots of pale men came together in the intersection and crept after them. In the open space by the fax machine, Callie stopped and Paul backed into her. The men behind them paused just out of reach. Paul glanced over his shoulder to see another knot of men between them and the exit, crouching low, their teeth gnashing, their fingers brushing the carpet, murmuring, “Are we not men? Are we not men? Are we not men?”

“Paul! Callie!” someone shouted in a muffled voice, and through the window of the door Paul saw the bushy eyebrows and thick moustache of Preston. He pounded on the door and gestured over his head, pointing to his right. “Rick’s office!” he shouted. “Get inside Rick’s office!”

The pounding stopped and Preston disappeared from the window. The pale men on either side crept closer, swaying and muttering, “Are we not men? Are we not men?” Boy G loomed out of the middle of the group by the exit, spreading his arms wide like a revivalist preacher. He spread his jaws wide and snarled like a beast.

“If we go into Rick’s office,” Callie said, her voice shaking, “we’ll never get out again.”

The two of them wheeled slowly, back to back, brandishing the stapler and the scissors. “Maybe we could smash the window,” Paul said, but before Callie could answer, something crashed loudly into the fax machine and tumbled into the aisle. A computer monitor rocked onto its side at Paul’s feet, its screen shattered. A moment later a metal filing cabinet drawer, full of files, crashed into the wall of Colonel’s cube and rebounded into the aisle, making the clutch of pale men fall back. Paul and Callie looked up. The narrow, twilight space between the cube horizon and the ceiling was filled with flying objects, all headed in their direction: another drawer, an office chair with its wheels spinning, a keyboard trailing its creamy cord. A water cooler bottle tumbled end over end, spilling water in a wide arc. At the same time a hail of smaller objects began to pelt Paul and Callie: staplers, tape dispensers, a Rolodex, computer mice, cell phones. Callie crouched as low as she could; a coffee mug half full of cold coffee hit Paul between his shoulder blades.

“Goddammit!” shouted Callie, and she ran through the barrage of ring binders and pen cups and hard hats into Rick’s office; Paul was a half step behind her. The pale men on either side rushed after them, and Paul slammed the door in their faces. But it didn’t have a lock, so he dropped his scissors and planted his back against the door, digging his heels into the carpet. The bright security lights in the corners of the courtyard filled Rick’s office with a harsh, bleaching light, throwing the stark shadows of the dying oak’s branches across the walls and desk and carpet. Paul saw Preston in the courtyard below, prowling the deck on the balls of his feet, holding his semiautomatic pistol at his shoulder in a two-handed grip. When he saw Callie and Paul through the window, he waved them towards the courtyard and shouted something. Callie dropped her stapler, snatched up the chair next to the little table, and slung it as hard as she could against the window. But the window didn’t break, it only thrummed, making the office hum with a deep bass note like the inside of a bell. At the same moment Paul felt a steady, almost irresistible pressure against the door at his back.

“Hurry!” he cried, and Callie shouted wordlessly and whanged the chair against the window again. Still nothing happened; the bass thrumming only deepened. Callie hadn’t even chipped the glass. She roared in frustration, hurling the chair over her head at the glass. It bounded back at her, and she batted it aside, then she slid over Rick’s desktop on her hip. She tried to lift his high-backed office chair, but it twisted from her grasp and crashed to the floor.

The soles of Paul’s feet burned across the carpet. Over his shoulder he saw pale fingers curled around the edge of the door, and the chant came through, “Are we not men? Are we not men?”

“Callie!” cried Paul, and Callie cast about frantically and grabbed Rick’s computer monitor with both hands, yanking it out to the limit of its connecting cords, then with a mighty effort wrenching it free, the cords flailing wildly like snakes. Paul whined with exertion and dug his toes into the carpet, and Callie hoisted the monitor over her head with both hands like a caveman flinging a boulder and heaved it at the doorway. But the shot went wild, and Paul ducked as the monitor crashed against the edge of the door and then landed with a crunch in the middle of the floor. He was propelled forward onto his knees, and the door slammed open against the wall.

“Are we not men?” chanted the mob of pale faces in the harsh light, but right in front, wedged together in the doorway, were Colonel and Olivia Haddock. Colonel’s tie was loose, his shirt front streaked with grime and damp, his forearm wrapped in a towel that was soaked with blood. His eyes were wild and his chest heaved; one shoulder was crushed against the doorjamb, the other arm propped across the door, blocking Olivia. Her eyes were cold and furious; the tiara was gone and her hair awry. Her red velvet homecoming gown was ruined, soaked and stained, clinging to her like wet terry cloth. She clawed at Colonel’s arm, trying to get into the room, while behind them the faces of the pale men bobbed and swayed.

“You got one last chance, Professor,” gasped Colonel. He stared at Paul almost as if he couldn’t see him, and Paul scrambled to his feet, dancing around the shattered monitor in the center of the office. Callie snatched Rick’s desk lamp off the desk, yanked its plug out of the power strip, and began to hammer at the glass behind the desk with the weighted base of the lamp, grunting with each blow. Paul glanced back and saw Preston below in the courtyard pointing his pistol at the window with one hand, and waving Paul and Callie away with the other.

“Get back!” Paul heard him shout, but then Preston glanced up and leaped aside at the last minute as a pale man landed plop on the deck from above. From opposite sides of the glass, Paul, Callie, and Preston saw pale men scuttling along the roofline of the courtyard, beyond the glare of the security lights. Several had already made the leap down to the deck, and Preston grasped his weapon with both hands, jerking it from side to side as he was backed up against the trunk of the dying oak by three crouching pale men. Another pale man had leaped into the upper branches of the tree, and he swung like a spider downward, limb by limb, hand over hand, towards Preston.

“Paul, you got. . ten seconds. . to kill her,” panted Colonel, his arm trembling under the pressure of Olivia and the pale homeless men behind him. “I can’t. . hold them. . any longer.”

Olivia’s mouth was cursing silently, spittle flying from her lips. Some of the homeless men were already reaching over Colonel’s head or trying to crawl between his legs. Over his own head Paul heard the sickening creak of the ceiling, and he saw bulges moving from panel to panel. One of the panels over the desk started to slide away.

Paul snatched Rick’s phone off the desk and yanked the cord free in one go. He twirled the handset at the end of its cord like a bola, glancing from the door to the ceiling. Callie put her back into the corner of the two windows and squeezed the neck of the lamp. Paul met her gaze for an instant. “I love you,” he almost said, but he didn’t think she’d want to hear it just at the moment. Instead, he turned towards the door, swinging the handset faster. “Come and get me,” he said.

Colonel shook his head. “You’re a fool,” he said, and slowly relaxed his arm. Olivia crouched, gathering her sodden skirt in one hand. Pale hands reached above and around Colonel and Olivia. Boy G’s savagely smiling face appeared in the gap over the desk.

Then everyone — Colonel, Olivia, the pale men in the doorway, Boy G, even Callie and Paul — was frozen in place by a long, murderous hiss. The temperature in the room dropped drastically, as if an arctic wind had blown through, and the skin of Paul’s arm started out in goose pimples. Standing on the corner of Rick’s desk, hissing evilly at the doorway, was Charlotte, her black jaws wide, her ears back. Her fur bristled, and her tail stood erect. Her back arched like a cardboard Halloween cutout.

Colonel and Olivia recoiled in the doorway, and the pale men behind them shrank back, moaning in unison, a long, diminuendo “Ohhhhhhhhhhh!” Charlotte lifted her black gaze to the ceiling and hissed again, and Boy G’s face retreated into the darkness.

“What the hell is that?” gasped Callie.

Paul stared at Charlotte in wonderment. He’d never seen her outside of his residence before. He forgot to swing the handset, and it clattered to the carpet at the end of the cord.

“That’s my cat,” he said.

In the electric silence Charlotte relaxed her spine and curled slowly around herself, trotting towards the other end of the desk. She hissed at Paul as she passed, though not as murderously, more in the spirit of “What are you looking at?” Then, as the freezing cold prickled the skin of everyone in the room, she leapt at the window overlooking the courtyard.

The window disintegrated — the whole window, all at once — and an infinity of tiny, blunt fragments like windshield glass sagged away from the frame and cascaded in a glissando through the branches of the tree to the courtyard deck below. Charlotte leaped straight through the glittering waterfall of glass and landed lightly on a large limb of the tree just below the window. The humid air of a warm Texas evening flooded through the wide gap, and Charlotte glanced back at Paul and gave him a curt little mrow like a command, then started down the limb towards the trunk.

Paul dropped the phone and lunged over the desk for Callie. He grabbed her by the wrist and practically flung her out the open window. She shrieked, but the limb caught her in the midriff and she clutched it with both arms. Paul followed an instant later, knocking himself nearly breathless, and the two of them swung for a moment by their fingers and then dropped the three or four feet to the deck, prancing on tiptoe among the atomized glass.

The three pale men who had cornered Preston backed slowly away, their goggling gazes fixed on the cat in the tree. Charlotte hissed again, and the pale man descending the tree scrambled back up towards the roof. Over his shoulder Preston said, “Get behind me.” Paul and Callie trod carefully through the glass; Paul felt the stinging little pellets embedding themselves in his soles. He glanced up through the tree and saw Colonel and Olivia and the mob of pale men crowding to the edge of the open window; above them he saw Boy G peering out of the ceiling, warily watching Charlotte.

Then the cat, out of boredom or mischievousness, vanished, and the pale man in the tree started to descend again. Others leaped out of the office into the upper branches. Pale faces appeared over the edge of the courtyard roof again, and the three men around Preston started forward.

“Head for the stairway!” barked Preston, and he shot one of the pale men through the throat; the man fell gagging to the deck as the crack of the pistol reverberated round the courtyard. But the others kept coming, and several more dropped from the branches, plopping softly against the deck. As Preston slowly backpedaled behind them, Paul and Callie inched towards the stairs where the courtyard emptied into the parking lot, but more pale guys were crowding into the gap. Paul stopped and threw his arm across Callie, putting her between him and Preston. She glanced round at the pale men bobbing along the roof-line and hanging from the tree and crowding closer along the deck, and she pressed Paul’s back with the tips of her fingers.

“Where’d your cat go?” she said.

“What cat?” shouted Preston, as he backed into Callie and Paul.

“Here, kitty kitty kitty,” called Callie, tremulously.

Preston fired another shot and missed, and the bullet whined around the courtyard. Everyone hunched their shoulders — Paul, Callie, Preston, the pale men all around — but as the ricochet died away more pale men jumped from the roof to the courtyard deck or dropped from the tree, chanting “Are we not men?” louder and louder. Paul glanced at the exit to the parking lot, but more pale men were swinging down from the pedestrian bridge and crowding the gap. Two of them were already grappling Preston for his gun. Paul reached back for Callie, and she wrapped her arms around him from behind, pressing her head against his shoulder. In the distance he heard the rising grumble of an engine, some late-night cowboy peeling rubber, no doubt, and as pale hands reached from the tree and pawed softly at his scalp and arms and shoulders, Paul thought, I wish I was that guy.

But the engine came closer, and through the gap Paul heard the piercing screech of tires, then a door opening, then the ping ping ping of a little warning alarm. “Your key is in the ignition,” said a pleasant little recording. Paul heard the glide and thump of a sliding door, and he looked through the gap into the parking lot, over the heads of the pale men, and saw Nolene marching towards him, looking righteously pissed off. One of the pale men heard her coming, too, and turned towards her. Without ceremony she lifted her left hand and spritzed him point blank with a little canister of pepper spray, and he squealed and threw himself to the pavement. She was swinging something from her right hand — Paul saw it rise and fall over the heads of the pale men — and suddenly the knot of men in the gap under the pedestrian bridge tumbled out of the way like bowling pins. Nolene marched into the courtyard under the bridge, liberally pumping pepper spray in all directions, and, with her other hand, swinging a bulky child safety seat in a wide figure eight. The seat swung free at the end of its seatbelt straps, which Nolene had wound round tightly round her wrist, and she worked her massive arm up and down and over and under, clobbering screeching pale men right and left.

“Out of my way,” she hollered, “you self-pitying sons of bitches!”

“Go!” shouted Preston, and he took advantage of Nolene’s distraction to pistol-whip one of the men struggling with him; the other let go of Preston’s wrist and ducked away as Preston fired over his head. Callie shoved Paul from behind, and they skipped painfully over the broken glass towards the gap where Nolene swung the child seat to one side to let them pass.

“I ain’t got all night, Preston!” Nolene barked. A pale man leaped from above, and she clocked him under the chin with the car seat, sending him flying backwards against the wall. “I told the sitter I’d be back in an hour.”

“Yes’m,” Preston called out, trotting across the littered deck, firing wildly back into the tree and up at the roofline.

In the parking lot Callie dived through the open sliding door of Nolene’s minivan onto the backseat, but Paul hung back just outside the gap.

“Move your ass, Professor,” barked Nolene, as she backed into the parking lot. “I ain’t doing this for my health.”

She dropped the empty pepper spray canister and marched towards the minivan. But Paul couldn’t tear himself away just yet. Past the stairs and through the branches of the dying oak, where pale guys swung like pale, fat spiders, he saw Colonel in distress in the window. Plans A and B failed, Paul thought, and now they’re moving to Plan C. The pale men were wrapping themselves around Colonel, sliding their hands around his wrists and ankles and over his nose and mouth. His frantic eyes darted everywhere. From above, Boy G swung upside down and caught Colonel under his arms, hauling him into the ceiling.

But Olivia, queen of the underworld, stood nearly unmolested in the window; one of the pale men curled his fingers around her wrist, and she slapped him. As he winced and slunk away, her gaze met Paul’s, and the last he ever saw of Olivia Haddock, just before Preston caught him by the elbow and marched him into the minivan, she was standing, arms akimbo, in her ruined red prom dress, glowering at him through the branches of the tree.