The Night Parade(108)
Someone was shouting his name over and over again in his ear, but the voice could have traveled the distance of some long, corrugated tunnel for all David could tell. He leapt forward, shoving aside the men attempting to get the cord away from Kathy’s neck, and Jesus f*cking Christ, her face—
(cold)
—gray, dead, vacuous eyes that stared through him, impossible, all of it, this wasn’t real, wasn’t happening, wasn’t—
Someone gripped him in a bear hug and hoisted him up off the floor. David screamed and kicked his legs. The man squeezed the air from his lungs and dragged him out the door and into the hallway. A second man—this guy in a security uniform—reached down and groped for David’s ankles to stop his legs from pinwheeling.
At some point, Dr. Kapoor appeared. His brown face looked like that of a puppet carved from expensive, delicate wood. He spoke to David, but David did not register a single word he said. In the end, Dr. Kapoor withdrew a hypodermic needle from the pocket of his lab coat. Expressionlessly, he stabbed David in the forearm with it.
David continued to fight against the arms that constricted around him, and even managed to administer a swift kick to the head of the security guard who knelt on the floor groping for his feet, before whatever was in that hypodermic caused him to feel light-headed and noncombative. After a time, the man’s arms loosened, and David felt his body slump to the floor. He sobbed as the two men grabbed him under the armpits and hoisted him to his feet. But his body wouldn’t cooperate. They dragged him down the hall and took him into a small room where a ratty sofa stood against one wall. The men let him free-fall onto the sofa, and somewhere in the descent, David blacked out.
*
Whatever sedative Kapoor had pumped into his bloodstream wasn’t merciful enough to grant him a few hazy moments upon waking when he held no memory of what Kathy had done to herself. Instead, the moment he regained consciousness, he did so with the face of his wife burning in his brain, the unnatural position of her as she hung there over the side of the bed, the extension cord looped around her throat.
David screamed.
His first instinct was to bolt from the room, locate Dr. Kapoor, and throttled the son of a bitch. But when he tried to stand, his legs threatened to surrender beneath him and send him toppling to the floor. He remained seated on the sofa, where he buried his head in his hands and cried.
He lost all concept of time, and didn’t realize that it was fully dark until he dried his eyes and looked up at the black rectangle of a window at the opposite end of the room. Careful not to overexert himself, he rose and, somewhat unsteadily, stood up off the sofa. With one hand against the wall for support, he was able to make it around to the far side of the room, the feeling slowly creeping back into his legs. When he reached the window, he looked down at the darkened parking lot, with its matrix of bright sodium lampposts. For a long time, his gaze lingered on the collection of white vans at the far end of the lot. White vans no different from the one that had been parked on Columbus Court for the past two weeks. Right outside their house.
They’ve been watching our house, watching us. Because of Ellie. They’re going to want Ellie.
He made it to the door with little difficulty, the control over his muscles returning to him now. He expected the door to be locked, but it wasn’t. He opened it and leaned out into the hallway. The place was as silent and void of life as a mausoleum. He hurried down the hall, found the stairwell, and made his way down to the first-floor lobby.
It was as if God had felt pity for him and granted him one final wish, because as he crossed the lobby he nearly walked right into Sanjay Kapoor as the doctor turned a blind corner. Both men froze, momentarily stunned by the presence of the other.
“David.” Kapoor’s voice cracked. The small man shuffled back a step or two. “I’m so sorry. Let’s sit down and talk. We can—”
David struck the man in the stomach. Kapoor buckled at the waist and, emitting the faintest of grunts, crumpled to the floor.
“I should f*cking kill you right here,” David said, standing above him.
Curled in a fetal position, Dr. Kapoor put his head back and gasped for air. His silver incisor gleamed.
David turned and rushed out into the parking lot. His heart slammed in his chest as he hurried to the Bronco. It took several attempts to fit the key into the door, but he finally got it. He climbed behind the Bronco’s steering wheel, shoved the key into the ignition, cranked it. The Bronco roared to life.
Kathy’s face still hung before his eyes; he couldn’t blink it away. He sped through the opening in the facility’s front gate and drove in a blind stupor, part of him in shock, part of him still back in that makeshift hospital room with Kathy, another part of him hovering somewhere in the stratosphere, an angel or a ghost looking down upon his mortal form. Help me.
He was pushing eighty miles an hour down the highway when he reached the exit for his part of town. For several seconds, he couldn’t remember where Mrs. Blanche’s house was. He’d been picking Ellie up there for the past two weeks or so, but right now, for the life of him, he couldn’t remember how to get there. He drove in confused patterns up and down the neighborhood streets, waiting for his brain to engage. When he saw the wedge of beech trees on the corner and the mailbox shaped like a lighthouse, he breathed with a sigh of relief and pulled into the driveway.
Before he got out of the truck, he examined his reflection in the rearview mirror. At some point during the drive he’d stopped sobbing, yet his eyes still looked puffy and red. When he went to shut down the engine, his hand trembled and thumped into the switch that activated the windshield wipers; the rubber blades reeeet-reeeted across the dry glass.