December Park(90)

Outside, a sharp thunder crack of sound exploded and echoed across the valley. This was followed by maniacal laughter.

I met Adrian’s eyes. Gun, he mouthed and I nodded.

I ran down the basement steps two at a time.

Midway down, I realized I was still holding the flashlight. I fumbled for the switch and clicked it on just as my right sneaker dropped into several inches of cold, shit-brown water. I trudged forward, hardly registering the mounds of debris that floated by nor the paddling of large sleek-furred rats as they fled the flashlight’s beam.

Adrian splashed down behind me. Air wheezed out of his lungs like an accordion.

Frantically, I swiped the cone of light around the room and saw that it was hardly a basement at all but a festering root cellar. Jungle plants plumed out of the sewer water. The helix of sturdy vines that carved up from the ground and through the rent in the flooring above looked so much like a beanstalk from a fairy tale that I momentarily wondered if I was dreaming the whole thing.

“Here.” Adrian was maneuvering around floating garbage to hide beneath the stairs.

I wasted no time joining him. The two of us huddled beneath the stairwell, the angled risers pressing against the tops of our heads, our necks, down our backs. I thumbed the flashlight off, dousing us in blackness. We held our breath and listened.

Someone banged through the door at the rear of the house. Someone did a Ricky Ricardo impression—“Hey, Lucy, I’m home!”—which was followed by cackling laughter. Their heavy footfalls thundered the floorboards overhead.

“You in here, Mazzone, you queer?” It was Keener. The sound of his voice caused my teeth to clench and my face to burn. “I got somethin’ for you.”

“Queers like surprises,” someone else chimed in. It might have been Denny Sallis.

Heavy feet stomped slowly across the floor, directly above our heads. Then they paused. I thought I heard whispering, though I couldn’t imagine why. My heart was thundering.

The footfalls moved again. They came closer to the stairs. Then I heard the grinding rasp of the hinges on the basement door.

Adrian tensed up.

In my mind’s eye, I saw Keener descending the stairs with a rifle, catching the two of us cowering under here, and leveling the rifle first at Adrian, then at me. He would be grinning the entire time.

“You down there, Mazzone?” It was Keener, all right. The serenity in his voice troubled me more than any aggression he had ever shown. “I got something you can sit on. Just come on up here.”

Then silence. Was the son of a bitch actually waiting for me to respond?

Seconds ticked by. I waited for him to say my name again or come down the stairs . . .

But nothing happened for what seemed like an eternity. Then someone shouted and threw something to the floor. Rapid stomping commenced. All too easily I pictured those lunatics smashing mice beneath their boot heels.

Next to me, Adrian released a shuddery breath. “I wet my pants,” he whimpered. Not that it mattered: I was pretty sure we were both crouching in raw sewage.

There was more muffled chatter, but I could make out none of it. It wasn’t until their footfalls moved across the house did I catch the next phrase, clear as day: “Jesus f*ck, look at that monster!”

Boots hurried along the floorboards. Something fell over and broke.

“Get back from there,” Keener said. “Those things give you rabies.”

“The possum,” I whispered next to Adrian’s ear. The thing had indeed looked like a monster, but now I pitied it, left to defend itself against Keener and the rest of his shit-eating friends.

“Fucker gives me rabies, I give it the clap,” someone yelled, and this was followed by more laughter.

“Gimme your gun,” Keener said.

I recognized Kenneth Ottawa saying, “You gotta pull back on the—”

“I know how to work a f*cking gun, you shit pipe,” Keener barked.

“Don’t take off its face,” Eric Falconette said clearly. “I wanna keep the jawbones.”

“Move.” It was Keener’s voice again.

The silence that followed was filled with tension. I closed my eyes and sucked my lower lip between my teeth.

A resounding explosion caused dirt to rain down from the floorboards into the muddy water all around us.

Keener’s friends whooped and hollered. More dirt rained down from the boards overhead.

When I opened my eyes, I was staring once again at absolute darkness.

“Look at that f*cker’s tail whip around,” someone shouted—a high-pitched, girly squawk. “Goddamn!”

“You got f*cking guts on my shoes,” someone else protested. It sounded like Denny Sallis.

“Shut your mouth,” Keener said. “You’re lucky I don’t open your head for you.”

“I’ll do it,” Falconette said. “Gimme the gun. I’ll blast that f*cker’s head around backward.”

“Fuck you,” Sallis spat, although there was no strength to his voice. In that instant I could tell Sallis was afraid of Eric Falconette.

“Fuck me?” Falconette tittered laughter—another strangely girlish sound, though his seemed laced with some dark poison. “I’ll ram my boot up your *, you dipshit.”

“Cut it out,” Keener growled. He said something else, but his voice was too low for me to make it out.