Chapter 8: Thirty Feet

Thirty Feet

The wind came up the cut behind the furniture store, off the river. Wet iron, standing water, the sweet rot off the Dumpsters. And under all of that, meat.

Adrian stood at the mouth with his hand flat on the corner brick and did not go in.

Nine fifty-something, and the lamp on the warehouse wall had a bad ballast in it, humming, holding, humming again. Past the lamp the cut narrowed and then opened onto Ninth, and in between was a run of brick with nothing in it but dark.

Somebody was eating.

He turned his head and gave it his ear properly, with no pretending about it. Wet. Slow. Then fast. A pause in the middle, the way a swallow works, and then the working again.

It sounded like a person getting through something. Going at it. Enjoying it.

It could have been Scrap with a soup bone on the back step.

Sean had come down here four minutes ago. Maybe five.

Adrian took his hand off the brick. He moved the cane to his left hand, which did nothing, which he knew did nothing, and which he did anyway.

Four blocks. They had walked him the last four blocks, and he had not asked, and he had said he was fine twice. Bryce had said it was on the way, which it was not. Kayla had told Bryce to just walk, and then all of them had walked. That was the debt, and there was no handing it back from the sidewalk.

He went in.

The Dumpsters were on his left with the lids up, and the water standing in the low part of the brick came over the sole of his shoe and was warm.

His eyes were shut and were going to stay shut. Ten years of that, and the wish still came on him at bad moments — open, just this once, just the length of this alley — and the wish had never once been worth anything.

Fourteen steps to the lamp. The smell thickened as he went, sweet turning sweet-and-hot. Nine more to the narrows.

He was eight steps past the lamp when the second scream came around the corner.

A girl’s, high, a name in the middle of it, and he knew the throat before it stopped.

He stopped dead at the corner where the cut narrowed.

Thirty feet. That was the number, it had not moved in five years, and everything he had was inside it: the wall, the lamp, the height of the Dumpsters, the puddle under Kayla’s knee, three people and how still they were.

Kayla was down on the wet brick with both hands out in front of her. Past her, two standing shapes, both facing away, and neither of them was breathing like a body that is about to run.

And past that he had nothing. Past that there was the wet working sound with no shape to hang it on, and Sean somewhere in the middle of the blank, or Sean’s body, or what was left.

“What happened,” he said. Low. Not a question anybody could answer, and he asked it anyway.

Kayla’s hands came off the brick and got his shirt, both of them, and she pulled herself half up on him, and her jaw was going, and there was no breath behind any of it.

“It’s eating—“

“Kayla.”

“It’s eating Sean’s face.”

Something in him went cold and organized at once, and afterwards he was not proud of how quick that was, because the first thing he felt was the shape of the alley and how much of it he still had behind him.

“Run.”

Bryce said it in the same half second. Same word, both of them, Bryce a step behind, and for about a second and a half it was the only thing the two of them had ever agreed on.

Then Owen came around him in a straight line.

No meanness in it. A straight line is the shortest one, and Owen was already going, and his shoulder caught Adrian’s shoulder and put him into the brick and kept going.

“Help! Call 911! Somebody call 911—“

At the street. At the whole street, at the ends of it, at a city that was not in this alley. Not at any of the three people who were.

Adrian got his shoulder off the wall. Bryce’s sneakers were already going and did not slow at the corner. Kayla got up — palms, one knee, the other, a sound out of her that was not a word — and then she was going too.

And he was last.

Three sets of sneakers on wet brick, going away. His cane tip finding the ground, finding it again. In everything that got shouted in the next ten seconds, nobody said his name. Not once. Nobody turned around.

Then the wind.

It hit him in the back, warm and thick, and it moved nothing like air moves at ten o’clock at night in a brick alley.

And then it was inside his thirty feet.

This was how it always came to him. Not a picture. A shape, and a wrongness in the shape at a place he had no name for.

Four limbs and a head, so, a person, more or less — except it was down on all four of them, running the way a hyena runs, and the back was too long and too wide, and when it put its feet down the brick took all of it and gave nothing back.

It made no sound in its mouth. It came up the brick breathing, and that was all.

And there was a face on its face.

Pale. He got the pale, always got the pale — one more thing he had stopped asking about. Twisted. The mouth cut too wide for the head that carried it, and out of that mouth a tongue, a foot and a half of it, wet, working on its own.

He had a cane in his hand. That was the fact his fear landed on and stayed on. There was nothing in this alley that stick would break.

He ran.

Ahead of him, Kayla’s sneakers changed rhythm. Louder. Then quiet.

She was slowing down.

He heard her breath change, and he knew the sound of somebody deciding to check.

“Don’t look back—“

She was already turning her head.

He got the turn of her shoulders, and the half second after it, the half second of her feet not doing anything at all, and whatever she saw took the rest of it away from her.

She got one sound out of her throat.

Then both her hands were on the strap of her backpack, and the strap was coming off her shoulder, and she was swinging it — nylon, three books, a lunch bag — and she was not a trained anything, and it was not a weapon.

The thing got a hand in the strap. The strap held. The weight came through it into her and took her off her feet and down.

Something came down after her, heavy, and the brick took all of it.

He did not stand there. He kept his feet, kept the path, counted wall past her. What came next was a smell, hot and new, more of it every half second, and it was not the meat smell anymore.

Then the working stopped.

The weight came up off the brick, hands first, then the long back, and the brick let go of it with a sound, and it turned.

He had it in his thirty feet again. Then it was inside his twenty, and then it was not a distance anymore. Just the feet on the brick, coming.