The Night Parade(48)

“Maybe. Maybe not. Could be many of us will be spared, and we’ll just have to pick up the pieces once this thing . . . well, once it blows over, I guess. But, see, there comes a point when you got to take a look around and say, hey, what the heck am I livin’ for? The world’s gone to shit, most of my loved ones are dead, and things are just gonna get worse and worse. It’s like them zombie apocalypse movies. You know the ones I’m talking about? Folks in those movies are always struggling to stay alive, to get from one place to the next place, to do whatever they got to do . . . but for what? You really want to live like that? For-f*cking-ever? No, thanks.”

Jesus, David thought. Yet what troubled him most was what Kathy had said to him on the last night in their home together, a thing that echoed almost verbatim Turk’s sentiments . . .

“I’ve become quite the religious man, Dave,” Turk said. He produced two more cigarettes and handed one to David. “Something like this, a man can’t help but fall back on his faith. And you know what I figure? I figure this is the rapture. This is our penance. This is the final plague. We’re talking real-life book of Revelation shit, my friend.”

“You sound like a Worlder now,” David said.

“No.” Turk held up a finger. His expression was stern. “Those peckerheads, they’re like Wiccans. They want to see Mother Nature drag things back to the Stone Age. That ain’t got nothing to do with Jesus Christ.” Turk cleared his throat. “ ‘And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war.’ Now, Dave, I don’t know about you, but it’s my opinion that mankind as a whole ain’t been faithful and true for some time now. And if we ain’t in the middle of a war, then I don’t know my head from my ass.”

As a general rule, David reserved his own opinion about people who quoted the Good Book, but for some reason it seemed fitting coming from Turk. Or perhaps it was the current state of things.

“Mall shootings, school shootings, passenger jets blown out of the sky or slammin’ into skyscrapers, those animals in the Middle East choppin’ off heads and lobbing bombs at each other since the dawn of time—what we’re doing now is paying the piper,” Turk said. “Bill’s come due. It’s come down to the individual to confront his or her own sins, and to either make amends and appeal to God, or to go down with the rest of the lot in a crowd of screaming lunatics.” With that, Turk bolted up from his chair and shouted out across the yard at his son, who was halfway up the tenuous branches of a magnolia tree. “Get down, you idiot! You’ll break a leg and then where’ll you be? I ain’t fixin’ to mend no broken bones, boy!”

The boy dropped down from the tree, slapping bits of bark away from his palms. Ellie stood beside him, still watching him as though he were something curious swimming around inside an aquarium.

Turk turned to him, grinning. “So in the meantime, I got this nice house, a pretty wife, a happy little yard where my kid can play, damn fool that he is. Nothing so bad about that, in my opinion.” The cigarette jounced between his lips.

“Okay,” David said. “I understand.”

“Do you?”

He shrugged. “Even if I didn’t, it’s not my place. You’ve got a lovely family.”

Turk sucked on his cigarette so hard that it looked like the insides of his cheeks touched. Then he tossed the ember into a ceramic flowerpot that had some soil and bottle caps in it. “You want to know why else I can’t leave?” he said, his voice lower now.

“I don’t know,” David said. “Do I?”

“You gonna be cool?” Turk asked. “If you’re cool, I’ll show you.”

“Sure. I’m cool.”

“Come with me, you’re so cool,” Turk said, and went back into the house.

David stood, tossed his own cigarette into the flowerpot, then shouted to Ellie that he would be right back. She regarded him the way a puppy might, with a cocked head and no expression. He went inside and followed Turk through the house and up a flight of creaky stairs. The upstairs hallway was outfitted in the same rooster-patterned wallpaper as the kitchen. Doors lined the hall, each of them closed. Hanging in the center of each door was a crucifix. The sight of them all lined up like that gave David a chill.

Turk went to the end of the hall. He dug around in his pocket as they came to the last door, and ultimately produced a ring of keys. David noted that there was a dead bolt attached to the door frame, right above the knob.

“What’s in there?”

“He won’t hurt you. Just don’t say nothing or move around a whole lot. Too much stimuli seems to set him off.”

Turk unlocked the dead bolt, opened the door, and flipped on the light switch.

David recognized it as a child’s room only because there was a child sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor. It was a boy, perhaps Sam’s age, though it was difficult to tell because the kid had his back to them. The walls were covered in quilts, the mismatched patterns nearly seizure-inducing, and there were smeary brownish-black handprints stamped on some of them. A mattress sat on the floor, soggy and yellowed with stains. Several white balls were scattered about the floor and atop the mattress; it took David a second or two to realize these were tufts of stuffing that had been torn out of stuffed animals, whose gutted carcasses lay strewn about the room. Lastly, he spotted what looked like some dog toys near the head of the bed—a short length of rope; a stuffed animal whose classification in the animal kingdom was no longer evident due to its missing limbs and mangled, threadbare face; a plastic Frisbee stamped with teeth marks; a few rubber balls.