Aurora(80)

From the back of the house, Celeste screamed.





32.





Downtown Aurora

Thom had decided on a new personal credo, which was “If a stranger gives you bread and says get a gun, you must eat the bread and find a gun.”

The first part of that philosophy had proven substantially easier than the second. Even Lisa’s exhaustive radio searches and satellite phone calls had failed to turn up a credible source for the purchase of a firearm during a worldwide emergency. It likely wouldn’t have mattered if she had, since Thom was down to his last several hundred dollars in cash and handguns were sure to be selling for a high multiple of that amount.

Had it not been for the BMW 7-series that cut him off as he exited the interstate, he never would have remembered Brady’s car at all. But as the aggressive asshole going at least ninety on an off-ramp blared past him, the thought had flashed across Thom’s frontal lobes. There wasn’t just one gun in Thom’s go-car, the one Brady had chosen to drive here; there were two. The chances that Brady left one or both of the guns behind were slim, but they were not zero, and it was the only idea he had. Plus he knew exactly where the BMW was parked.

The Linxup tracker had been the first thing Thom had checked after Brady went off the radar. It showed the car was in a garage at the local hospital in Aurora, somewhere between the third and seventh floors, based on its elevation. It hadn’t moved since late April. Thom’s assumption had been that Brady, aware of the multiple tracking systems in the car, had ditched it there after he’d stolen the money. It made sense that Brady, rather than driving around in a stolen car whose enraged owner had great wealth and power at his command, had left it behind. Thom would have abandoned the car himself, if he were Brady.

But since Rusty’s call, he was now certain Brady had been the victim of something nefarious. If he was right, that meant the car was, perhaps, not, uh, empty. Maybe, he thought, it wasn’t just the car that was ditched but Brady as well.

He pulled into the parking structure a little before 6 p.m. that day, exhausted, but with his adrenaline pumping. The garage looked as it might have on any busy day, full of cars, and it wasn’t unless you looked closely that you saw most of them had the doors of their gas tanks jacked open or wrenched off their hinges to facilitate siphoning. Thom cruised the lower floors slowly, working his way upward, his mind concocting ever more vivid mental images of what might await him inside the BMW once he found it.

The reality turned out to be worse than anything he’d been able to picture. The car was there, on the sixth floor, backed into the space Rusty had picked out back in April. It had been undisturbed, as had most of the cars on this level. Gas thieves, it seemed, didn’t like to climb that many flights of stairs. Thom knew the BMW by its front grille and didn’t need to confirm the license plate number. That car had been in his garage for a year. He’d walked past it a hundred times and driven it half a dozen. He’d obsessed over its battery and gasoline capacity, and he’d supervised the installation of the two gun compartments. That was his BMW, all right.

The windows of the car were oddly fogged, not with condensation, but with a greenish mist of some sort, like a slime mold. Thom sat in the Volvo for a second, just staring at the BMW’s windshield, wondering what the green murk meant but knowing perfectly well. It was Brady. He hadn’t taken off on the highway (Thom’s first hope, for Brady’s sake), he wasn’t stuffed into the trunk (his second hope, for his own sake), but he was inside the car. Thom just prayed it wasn’t the front seat.

The doors were locked, and Thom couldn’t make out any more through the windows up close than he’d been able to from a distance. He tried kicking the driver’s side glass a few times, but it showed no signs of give. He pulled a tire iron from the Volvo’s trunk and gave it a few half-hearted swings and then several vicious blows, ’til finally the glass spiderwebbed and he was able to wrench it out of its frame.

The stench that was released from the BMW’s passenger compartment nearly knocked him over. Thom recoiled and covered his mouth and nose with his arm, but still, the smell seemed to grab hold of him and shove its dirty fingers into his nostrils. He fell to his hands and knees, gasping, but the heavy odors were dropping too, and they found him on the cement floor. Thom scrambled back up onto his feet and backed away from the car a good ten yards, gagging.

He stood there for a moment, chest heaving, staring at the BMW as it vented its noxious fumes into the parking garage. His eyes were stung and watering, and the dense smell of offal leaving the car seemed almost visible. The BMW shuddered in his vision, as if it was relieved to at last be expelling the odious stink.

After he’d contained his urge to wretch, Thom went back to the Volvo, opened the glove compartment, and took an N95 mask from a box stashed there. Sucking air through the two-ply cloth, he headed back to the BMW. Turning his head away, he reached through the broken driver’s window, found the door handle, and pulled it open. He staggered back again, to let as much foul air out of the car as possible. Satisfied that he would never be satisfied, he walked toward it.

As he drew closer, the dark outline of the shape on the back seat was gradually revealed. Thom remembered his college biology class and noted with some interest that the body had been spared the maggot stage, as blowflies apparently hadn’t been able to penetrate the sealed glass and steel environment of the car. That was one thing, at least: the corpse didn’t seem to seethe. But what the maggots had missed only left more for the bacteria to attack, and four months was an awfully long time.