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because she'd been spayed a year ago — and he won-
dered what it was she could've brought into the
house, maybe not a mouse, maybe a dove, one of
these doves, with some poison coursing through it,
and Bram found himself running from his mother,
back into the house, hoping his cat hadn't gotten poi-
soned, too.
7:22 A.M.
"Just a quickie?" Larry asked, but Joanne shook her
head. The way she did it was so sexy that he got
harder just watching her golden yellow hair spray
down over her back.
"I thought the doctor told you no more nookie."
"He didn't mean forever, darl'in'." Larry grinned.
He had a tooth missing up front, and it bothered him
sometimes, but it never seemed to bother Joanne, so
who the hell was he to worry about it? He closed his
mouth self-consciously.
"Well, I feel fat. You know I don't feel like it when
I'm fat."
"Hey, sweetheart, you know what they say: the big-
ger the cushion, the better the push'in'."
She glared at him. "And what about your wife?"
He shrugged. "You know what they say: eat'in' ain’t
cheat'in'."
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"Crude," she said, "but my type of man."
"I won you in that pool game fair and square, and
you're supposed to deliver."
"I don't do deliver."
"You weren't like that last night."
"How the hell would you know, Larry Brady? You
were so drunk down at King Tut's you could barely
call me by name."
"I got me a photographic memory, darl'in'.
Noth'in' slips by me. Noth'in'."
"Where's Marti, anyway?"
"At her mother's in San Jose. Old lady's sick, and
she goes up a week every month."
"And you play all week long."
"'Member when I first saw you? I mean, that kinda
chemistry when you first come to town? How long, ago?
You and them hippies. I always did like hippie girls."
Joanne began to look sullen; her brows curved
downward in the middle. "None of us was hippies.
Not really."
"Whatever. Wild things. Free spirits."
A tear came suddenly, shockingly, to the corner of
her left eye. She wiped at it. "Not free, either."
Larry Brady had barely an ounce of human
warmth in him, but what little he had, he extended.
He leaned into her, wrapped his arms around her,
and kissed her gently on the neck, just below her ear.
She whispered, "It's why I spend every night I can
with you."
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"It's not that often, darl'in'."
"I don't mean just you," she continued, sighing.
"Other men, too. I hate being alone. They're still
here."
"The other men?"
"No. Them. The Family. They're always here."
"They can't hurt you or anything."
"You ever want to leave this place, Larry? Leave
your home, your wife, all of it?"
"Leave Empire? I never thought about it. I was
born here. I'll die here. It's part of what I'm all
about."
"I wish I could leave."
"Why don't you, then?"
She began sobbing. "I can't. You don't know. I
can't."
Larry Brady had been horny and hung over, but
he began thinking about how long he'd known
Joanne, known about her problems, her deep dark
secrets, how he had first seen her in 1981, when she
was only fourteen and living with the weirdos from
San Francisco, and how sad and pretty she'd been
then, but with that same haunted, unrelenting look
in her pale blue eyes.
Then she straightened up, and he saw in those
same eyes a wisdom beyond her twenty-six years.
"Something's happening here," she said, "and I can't
tell you what it is."
"Why not?"
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dark of the eye
"They put this thing in you. It's like a self-destruct
button or something. And if you say anything . . ."
"Darl'in', I don't get it."
"If you say anything or do anything . . . It's like mind
control. They did it with drugs at first, and then . . . I
can't say it."
"Just try," he said. "It's only me here. Nobody's
gonna get you in trouble or noth'in'."
She shook her head, looking away. "You don't
understand. Even if I think it, it starts to hurt. Inside.
In my head. You ever hear of a brain aneurysm?"
Larry lied. "Sure."
"It's supposed to be something like that."
"I'm sure it'll be okay," he whispered, kind of sad
that they both lived lives that neither one could ever
get away from. Maybe that was what had attracted
him to her in the first place, that kind of recognition
of familiarity, of being stuck. He was stuck in his mar-
riage, and she was stuck in her past with the hippies.
Joanne rested her face against his neck, and he
felt her warm tears again.
Larry Brady had an epiphany, just there, with this
woman in his arms, and in spite of his fucked-up
thirty-six years, he felt like the heavens had opened
up for him, and he made a decision.
And there would be no turning back.
Ever.
We've been slaves, he thought. We've let ourselves be
enslaved. Me, because I'm a weenie, and Joanne because
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she's hurt somewhere inside and can't see around it. Hell,
Marti's gonna be better off without me, anyway. I'll be doing
both of us a huge favor.
"Baby," he whispered, "let's you and me get outta
this hole and go make a new life someplace else."
"I don't think I can. I just — "
"I'll protect you from everything else, I'll make
sure our life is good together," he said, and felt more
like a man than he'd ever felt in his life. "We'll get
packed, and I'll gas up the Hyundai, and we'll go to
Mexico or someplace, and I'll be a fisherman, and
you can make tortillas or something."
"I don't think I can," she repeated, but he knew,
now that he had made this decision, she would come
with him.
7:25 A.M.
Bram Boatwright stared at the thing that his cat had
brought in from the outside. At first he didn't recog-
nize it as a human finger, because it was still wriggling.
7:28 A.M.
Anne Potter worked as a nurse over at the infirmary
in Empire State, but every morning, before she took
off for work, she drove her two little girls to the day-
care center in Perdito. It was a roundabout way of get-
ting to work, but it was the only day-care center she
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dark of the eye
trusted. As she was walking out her door, making sure
that Charlotte and Michelle both had their lunch
bags, she sniffed the air.
Weird, she considered, wondering if some new
form of pollution was coming from the West. Smells
like necrotic tissue. It was a smell that always made her
sick to her stomach, and when she had been around
dying tissue in her school days, she had gone to the
infirmary herself with severe headaches.
But she got her girls into the station wagon and
knew that she'd better get up the road or she would
be late for work.
7:35 A.M.
At the Hillside Memorial Park, beneath the ground,
Poppy Freek awoke slowly, groggily. In her arms, the
skulls of her children, and she kissed each one lightly
on the tops of their white bone heads.
Her first thought: No more spearmints.
In a few minutes she would crawl up out of the
grave that had for so many years been her hideaway,
and she would face someone she had been running
away from for many years.
Tucked into her belt, beneath her sweater, was the
knife she had used to clean so many fish when she
lived as a much younger girl down by the waterfront
in San Francisco.
She heard something among the graves.
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They had been invaded by the living.
8:00 A.M.
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