Chapter 9: Both Ends

It came for him, and then it changed its mind.

It was close enough by then that the feet were all there was, and then the feet stopped. It dropped its front end and put its weight back the way a dog stops, and stood there for the length of two breaths with its head turned, and then it went down onto Kayla Brandt.

She died inside his thirty feet, and he got every part of it.

The weight came first. Something that size going down onto brick on both hands, and the brick taking all of it, and the sound of that traveling up through the soles of his shoes before it reached his ears. Then the arm. The shape of an arm coming down off the top of a swing with no hurry in it at all, the way a person reaches for something on a low shelf.

Then the sound of her stopped.

Not faded. Not trailed off into something else. It stopped in the middle, at a place that was not the end of anything, and after that there was nothing there at all.

He would think about that a lot, later. That there had been no word at the end of it, and no way to know whether she had not had one to give or whether she had given it and it had come out too small for a blind kid eleven feet away with his back against a wall.

Her face came last, and it came by accident — the way the pale always came, the way color came to things that had no business having color. Her jaw was open and her eyes were open, and there was still something in them that had not finished being afraid, and then that was gone too. The thing was already back down where the arm had been, working, and the sound of that was wet and patient and went on and on like something being done to a piece of fruit.

He could not shut any of it off. Thirty feet was thirty feet. All he could do was stop putting words on the shapes, and it turned out that was a thing a person could do, and it was not nearly enough.

The smell arrived after, hot and new, and his mouth flooded.

He turned his head and put his forehead into the brick. The brick was wet with something and he did not care what. What kept him from being sick down the front of himself was not dignity and it was not courage and it was not the thought of anybody watching. It was arithmetic. If he threw up he would make noise, and noise was the last thing in this alley that still belonged to him, and he had maybe three seconds to not spend it.

So he swallowed it. It came back up twice. The third time it stayed down.

Behind him the lamp on the warehouse wall buzzed, dropped out, and came back.

He pushed off the brick and took stock, because that was what he did.

The way he had come in was behind the thing. Fourteen steps from the street mouth to the lamp, nine more to the narrows, and then however many it was to where he stood now with his back to the wall and his hand flat on it. Call it thirty. Call it less. It did not matter, because all of it ran through the place where the thing was kneeling, and the thing had already showed him what it did to anything that came inside that radius.

Which left forward.

Which was where Sean Dooley had been screaming.

He wanted it on the record somewhere, in whatever book was kept of the things people did, that he had known it and had gone anyway. The only other direction had a mouth in it.

Up ahead of him, out past the narrows, the alley ran east to the Ninth Street mouth. He had counted that too, twice, once going in and once while Owen argued about which way was faster: fifty-two of his steps from the narrows to the end. Fifty-two steps and a street.

Somewhere past the end of it, Owen’s voice was still going. Help, somebody help. Fainter now. Going away at a run, toward the avenue, toward whatever was open and lit on a Friday at ten.

Nobody came back down the alley.

He put his hand on the wall and took the first three steps, and then stopped, because there was something he needed and he had to get to it now, while the thing behind him was still busy.

Sean’s jacket.

Memory did not come when it was called. It came when a shape matched it. Then he had it. At the corner, when they had all stopped and argued about who was walking him the rest of the way, Sean had turned his shoulder into Adrian’s hand and let him take hold of the back of it. Nylon came first. Cold, and slick where it was not cold, and a band across the shoulders that was not the same material, a strip of it, ridged, so you could feel it with a thumb. Dark green, he thought. Some kind of team thing, with the stripe across the back of the shoulders and a second stripe down the sleeve. It had walked him the last four blocks with his hand on it, and nobody had made a thing out of it, and that had been the whole of Sean Dooley being decent to him.

Dark green. A pale band across the shoulders.

He fixed it where he kept the steps and the doorways, and he ran.

He ran the way he had been taught to walk, which was with one hand off the wall and his cane out at the angle and his weight forward.

Not fast. He had never been fast. He was a blind kid with a folding cane and a scarf over his eyes, and he was not going to beat anything in this alley to the end of it. But he did not need to win. He needed to not be last, and last was the one thing he had already been once tonight, and look how that had gone.

The dark stretch past the lamp was the part with nothing in it. No light, no windows, both walls to shoulder height, the puddles with that soft skin of scum on them that he heard as a difference in the sound of his own cane. He counted anyway. Counted by tens. Named what came into his range as it came: a Dumpster, the lid standing open on its hinge; a pallet up on end; a fire escape, low, ladder down, rust coming off it into the air as a taste.

The cane ticked on brick. His breath was already going.

And then the smell changed in front of him.

He was inside the narrows by then — he felt them, the walls coming in on both sides like a hallway built for smaller people — and the air ahead of him got thick and sweet and hot all at once. The same smell, the meat smell, only this time coming at him from where he was headed instead of from behind.

He pulled up.

Thirty feet. That was the edge of everything, the wall of the only room he was ever in, and he had never once been able to see past it, and now there was something sitting right on it.

It was there. At the very outside of his range, at the place where a shape was still just a shape — a low wide mass at the bottom of the alley with a lump of something in it. For half a second he made it into a bag of trash and a rolled carpet and felt his pulse come down one notch.

Then it moved.

Then the smell of it came off the brick and hit the back of his throat.

It was the same. Not the same one — the same kind, same size, same too-long back and same weight across the shoulders and the same way the air bent around it like it was running hotter than the night was. And it had something in its arms, up off the brick, up against its chest, and it was eating.

He could not get his feet to stop. They had stopped on their own. His hand had a fist in the fabric at his own side, and his mouth was open, and there was nothing going in or out of it.

The shape in its arms had a jacket on.

Dark green. One pale band across the shoulders, one down the sleeve, and it was dark now, soaked through, but the band still came back pale, because the band was made to come back pale, that was the point of it, and it had a carabiner on it where Sean kept his keys.

Where the face should have been there was a curve of wet with no features in it. No nose, no brow, no line where the mouth ended. It was not that something had been done to the face. It was that the face had been eaten down to the front of the skull and then eaten past it, and the shape that remained was the shape of a head, and the jaw was still going.

Sean Dooley kicked once, in the air, both feet, out of nothing but the nerves still having something to say.

Then he didn’t.

Adrian stood in the narrows with his cane in his hand and his fingers so tight on it that the pad of his thumb had gone numb.

The thing had not looked up. That was what got in. Not once — not at the sound of him coming, not at his cane on the brick, not at the noise of his breathing. It had a dead kid in its arms and it was working, and whatever it was interested in, it was not him.

He stepped back. His heel found the brick behind him. He stepped back again.

He made himself set it down once, in order, the way he set down steps.

The one behind him had come out of the dark at the street-mouth end. He had felt the wind of it on the back of his neck while he was still walking in. He had had it inside his thirty feet, breathing.

That one could not have been at the far end of the alley with Sean Dooley at the same time.

Two.

There were two of them.

So the thing that had come up the brick behind them had not been the thing that had Sean. They had walked into a cut with one of them at each end, and Sean had died at the far end before any of them knew it, and the one at the street mouth had come up because there was more, and had stopped for Kayla because Kayla was closer and Kayla was warm. Then it had gone back down onto her, and it had not followed him, because he was not warm and he was not still.

He could not build a second one. He stood in the narrows and tried, and there was no second one to build.

And ahead of him was the Ninth Street end of the alley, fifty-two steps, and this one sitting in the middle of it.

They had him at both ends. Not because they were clever. Because they were hungry, and he was in between the two places where the food was.

Something about the shape of it was not new. Not the alley, not the night — the shape. He had a picture of it from somewhere, and the picture would not come when he pulled at it.

The air over the alley had a thickness in it that was not only heat, and the lamp behind him buzzed and dropped out and did not come back this time, and the dark got complete, and he could still see every inch of it.

He had been in worse places. He wanted to say that. He had spent a year in a place with a lock on the door and he had been seven, and there had been ten years after it, and he had walked out of all of it on his own feet.

The thought got about halfway, and then it fell over.

In seventeen years there had been exactly two moments where his whole body had understood, at the same time, that it was finished. The first one had been ten years ago, and there had been a moon in it, and he did not go near that one. He had never once gone near it.

The second one was this.

He was not going to cry. He could feel exactly where it was, sitting behind his eyes, and he was not going to give it the room.

The thing dropped Sean Dooley.

Not put down. Dropped — opened its arms and let him go, the way a kid lets go of something he is done with, and the body hit the brick with a sound Adrian was going to keep, and it rolled a half turn and stopped, and the pale band across the shoulders caught the nothing light there was.

Then it turned its head.

The tongue came out. A foot and a half of it, wet, with its own business, and it went along the line of the thing’s mouth and up over the corner of it and gathered what was there and took it in. Twice. Slowly. The way people do it when the meal is finished and the plate is good.

Then it put its hands down on the brick.

He had his cane in his hand. He knew what it was. It was a folding aluminum cane with a rubber tip and a grip worn smooth at the thumb, and it weighed ten ounces on a good day, and it was not going to break anything in this alley.

He did not run. There was nowhere to run to that did not have one of them in it, and his legs had not moved and he had not told them to.

The cane came up across his body, both hands, the way you hold something that is not going to work.

It came down the alley at him.

It did not hurry.