The Dead Town

Chapter 36

En route to Meriwether Lewis Elementary School, Sully York drove his black Hummer not much differently from how he would have driven a Ferrari Testarossa, with a love of speed and with great panache. The snowy streets were of no concern to him, nor were the curbs at corners, which he sometimes drove over while making a turn. Every time they passed a telephone pole to which was stapled a politician’s sign that had not been taken down after the last election, Sully gestured rudely at it and declared, “Bunkum!”

Bryce Walker, now riding shotgun, had traded his pajamas and robe and slippers for some of Sully’s clothes that fit him well enough. He had been in Memorial Hospital after a heart-attack scare that proved to be only a scare, and young Travis Ahern had been there for tests to determine what caused three bad episodes of anaphylactic shock that apparently were triggered by an allergy to something in his drinking water, perhaps even to chlorine. When it became clear that the staff of the hospital weren’t who they had once been, that no patient was going to be allowed to leave, and that they were killing patients in the basement, Bryce and Travis had conspired to escape.

Travis’s mom, a dietician and chef, worked in the kitchen at Meriwether Lewis. She had not called him all day, nor had she come to visit. She was reliable. She loved him. She would not have failed at least to call, unless something happened to her. After escaping from Memorial, when Bryce and the boy went to the Ahern house in that neighborhood known as the Lowers, they found no one home.

The boy’s father had abandoned his wife and son so many years earlier that Travis had no memory of him. The family now was just Grace and Travis, and they were close, the two of them against the world. He adored her.

Bryce knew that if Grace had perished, the loss would not break the boy. Nothing would ever break Travis. He was so young, but Bryce could see the toughness in him. Travis would grieve hard and for a long time, but he would neither bend nor break, because he was a fine boy and he had been raised this far by a woman of strong character.

Bryce prayed that Grace would turn up alive. As a widower, he knew too much about grief. There would be great grief in this town in the days to come, supposing that any of them survived to mourn the dead. If Grace was alive out there somewhere, he would give his life to save her, if it came to such a sacrifice, because he wanted to spare the boy from the long-enduring sorrow of such a loss.

In the backseat, Travis said, “If she’s not at the school, where would we look next?”

Sully said, “In an investigation as tricky as this, conducted in the midst of an invasion of hostile moonmen or whatever the hell these critters are, it doesn’t pay to get ahead of ourselves. What happens next is surely not going to be like anything we might expect, because they’re aliens, after all, meaning they think as different from the way we think as we think different from the way a bunch of pencil-neck Ivy League professors of conflict resolution think. So putting ourselves through the what-if wringer until we’re all wrung out — well, that’s just a hellacious waste of time and energy. We’re going to think positive and make the world be what we want it to be, which is a world where your mom is safe at Meriwether Lewis, where maybe an injury has incapacitated her just a little, but where she’s probably only in hiding.”

Travis said, “I like the way you talk, sir.”

“I like the way I talk, too. You know that question they always ask — if you were stranded on a desert island for a year, what three books would you take? Truth is, I find myself so damn entertaining I wouldn’t need any books. I wouldn’t even need a short story. If it was just me, my memory, and my mouth on that island, then I might even sign on for a second year.”

“Here’s the school,” Bryce said.

They cruised past, looking over the place. All the windows on the two-story building were dark.

At the end of the block, Sully turned left and drove to the parking-lot entrance, which was on the cross street.

Bryce noted that no tire tracks marred the mantle of snow on the entrance and exit lanes. Another entrance/exit served the lot from the parallel cross street, at the farther end of the school, but he suspected that the snow over there would also be pristine. Everyone had gone home before the storm began, and no evening maintenance crew had reported to work.

The parking-lot lamps weren’t aglow, but Travis said they never were used at night unless there was a school function of some kind. This was his school, he was in fifth grade, so he knew what he was talking about.

Draped in snow, half a dozen school buses stood in one corner of the lot. Sully parked between two of them, where the Hummer couldn’t be seen from the street. He switched off the headlights, the engine.

Sully said, “Travis — now there’s a name that’s always ready. Are you as ready as your name, boy?”

“I’m not afraid,” Travis said.

“You better be afraid. Afraid but ready keeps you alive.”

“I meant,” Travis said, “I’m not afraid of what we’ll find. She’s going to be in there, and if she isn’t, she’s going to be somewhere else and okay.”

“By all that’s holy, boy,” Sully said, “before this is over, I just might have to make you an honorary member of my old unit, the Crazy Bastards.”

The three of them walked through the snow to the back of the school. Sully and Bryce each had a shotgun, and the boy had Sully and Bryce.

Of the several doors they could choose from, Travis led them to a double pair marked KITCHEN DELIVERIES. He had come here a few times at night, with his mother, when she’d needed to do some prep work for the following day’s lunch. As he had told them earlier, there was an alarm, but he knew his mother’s four-digit code that would disarm the system from the keypad just inside the door.

Their only problem was that he didn’t have his mom’s door key.

Sully kicked the doors twice, where they met, hoping to break the lock. Then he said, “One big noise is better than a hundred half-big,” and he blew out the lock with his shotgun and pushed open the right-hand door, which wasn’t latch-bolted to the sill as the left one was.

“We’ve got one minute to enter the code before the alarm goes off,” Travis said. The boy stepped into the receiving room, to which food and other kitchen supplies were regularly delivered, went to the lighted keypad, and entered 4-4-7-3. The tiny red indicator lamp turned green.

Without the lock or latch to hold it closed, the door was likely to drift open.

As Sully used an eye-and-hook bungee cord to link the door handles together, he said, “We’re far away from the nearest house, not much chance anyone could say for sure where that shot seemed to come from. Nevertheless, let’s be quick about this.”

From the receiving room, guided by three flashlights, they entered the large walk-in refrigerator. Beyond the walk-in lay the kitchen, where everything was weird.