December Park(164)

This close, I could tell that Adrian was still alive. His breathing was audible, though labored, and I saw the hesitant expansion and deflation of his birdlike chest. The puffiness and redness of his face suggested some sort of allergic reaction. There was a dried exclamation of blood running from both corners of his mouth like a TV show vampire. He reeked of urine.

With an unsteady hand, I began sawing through the shackle of electrical tape at Adrian’s ankles.

“Hurry, man,” Peter called.

I glanced down and saw him whipping his head from side to side, searching the darkness for monsters.

“I’m telling you, there’s someone else in here.”

“I’m hurrying.”

“Hurry faster.”

The tape snapped, and Adrian’s limp body dropped to the mattress headfirst. He bounced and threatened to roll off, but I caught him with my free hand. I drove one knee against the small of his back while I sawed through the tape that bound his wrists.

Midway through the tape, Adrian moaned and stirred.

“He’s alive!” Peter cried.

Adrian rolled his head back. The flashlight, which I had propped in the crook of one armpit, brought into relief not only the ruined, patchy mask that was his face but also the unimaginable fear in his eyes. He gaped at me. Without his glasses, his eyes looked too small. His pupils were different sizes.

“Adrian, it’s me. It’s Angelo. Can you move?”

He just stared at me. When I shifted gradually to the left, his gaze didn’t follow me.

Then he blinked, and I saw recognition filter into his eyes. His lips quivered. There was a dried crust of snot trailing from one nostril clear across the puffy terrain of his left cheek.

“We gotta get you out of here,” I told him.

He gripped my forearm. “He’s here.”

“Come on.” I rolled him on his side so he could see over the edge of the mattress.

Peter stood below, half his face masked in shadow. He reached up and grabbed Adrian by the shoulders while I pushed against the small of Adrian’s back.

“. . . ere . . . ,” Adrian grunted as I shoved him over the side and into Peter’s embrace.

I swung one leg over the mattress and felt my foot land squarely on the top crate.

Peter steadied the tower of crates with one foot while holding Adrian against him. Adrian’s head was cocked awkwardly on Peter’s shoulder, his eyes like the eyes of a blind man staring off into nothingness. Insanely, I wondered if he was going to get in trouble for losing his glasses.

I made my way down the tower of crates and landed in several inches of cold, scummy water. Outside, the storm slammed against the building. To help Peter support Adrian, I took one of Adrian’s arms.

Adrian screamed as I touched his flesh. He recoiled, bolting fully awake, and shoved Peter away, too.

“Adrian,” I said, trying hard to keep my voice calm, “it’s Angelo and Peter.”

“It’s us,” Peter said.

“Do you know?” Adrian rasped. From even a few feet away I could smell his fetid breath, as if he’d been gargling raw sewage. His gaze darted from me to Peter, then back to me.

“Do we know what?” I said.

“Found,” he croaked.

I shook my head: I didn’t understand.

“What . . . I . . . found,” he said, his voice grating up from his throat. “Found . . . them . . .”

I heard shifting off to my right. I looked and saw Peter retreating slowly into the darkness. His form was nothing more than a shadow in the insubstantial glow of my flashlight. Then the form diverged into two forms, and for a second I thought my mind was breaking apart on me.

Peter continued to back away. The diverged half of him hooked in a slow and deliberate semicircle around me. I discerned the suggestion of tapered, angular shoulders, a mat of wet, stringy hair, the flicker of a pale skull face with eye sockets like tar pits. It wasn’t that Peter’s form had split into two but that someone else had shifted out from behind him. The shape positioned itself between us and the door across the room.

“There!” Peter shrieked, his voice splitting the silence.

The figure extended a hand toward Adrian. There was something like a hooked blade in it. Or so I imagined.

The following events happened so quickly yet with the dizzying torpor of a drug-fueled nightmare that to this day I am still uncertain as to the exact order of them. Each event occurred in a vacuum, suspended in its own bubble: Peter stumbled backward and fell, crashing through one of the crates that had floated away and splashing water into the air; Adrian shrieked and dropped to the floor in a fetal position; the shadowy figure darted to the right, that massive arm swinging what appeared to be a blade in a controlled arc; my flashlight blinked out.

Someone screamed. It could have been me. I felt warm water—or some other liquid—splash across my face and sting my eyes. Blind, I staggered backward until I slammed into the spongy tower of mattresses, the rancid cushions sucking me in. Somehow I’d managed to swing the backpack around and was fumbling with it when a second scream pierced the darkness.

When I opened my eyes, I noticed a star of yellow light. It took me what felt like an eternity to realize it was a flame. Peter stood dripping foul water, the bobbing flame of his Bic lighter shimmering like a beacon of salvation. I glimpsed Adrian’s wide, sightless eyes flash before me.