Dragon Tears Read online

  The voice softened dramatically as the ratman bent forward, leaned closer. “Already dead and in Hell? Could it be?”

  Of all the extraordinary things about the ratman, his eyes were the most disturbing. They were intensely green, unusually green, but the queerest thing was that the black pupils were elliptical like the pupils of a cat or reptile. The eyes made the ratman’s body seem like merely a disguise, a rubber suit, as if something unspeakable peered out of a costume at a world on which it had not been born but which it coveted.

  The ratman lowered his voice even further to a raspy whisper: “Dead, in Hell, and me the demon assigned to torture you?”

  Knowing what was coming, having endured it before, Sammy tried to scramble to his feet. But the ratman, quick as wind, kicked him before he could get out of the way. The kick caught him in the left shoulder, just missing his face, and it didn’t feel like a sneaker but like a jackboot, as if the foot inside was entirely of bone or horn or the stuff of which a beetle’s carapace was formed. Sammy curled into the fetal position, protecting his head with his folded arms as best he could. The ratman kicked him again, again, left foot, right loot, left foot, almost as if doing a little dance, a sort of jig, one-kick-anduh-two-kick-anduh-one-kick-anduh-two, not making a sound, neither snarling in rage nor laughing scornfully, not breathing hard in spite of the exertion.

  The kicking stopped.

  Sammy drew into an even tighter ball, like a pill bug, curling around his pains.

  The alleyway was unnaturally silent except for Sammy’s soft weeping, for which he loathed himself. The traffic noise from the nearby streets had completely faded. The oleander bush behind him no longer rustled in the breeze. When Sammy angrily told himself to be a man, when he swallowed his sobs, the quietude was death-perfect.

  He dared to open his eyes and peek between his arms, looking toward the far end of the alley. Blinking to clear his tear-veiled vision, he was able to see two cars halted in the street beyond. The drivers, visible only as shadowy shapes, waited motionlessly.

  Closer, directly in front of his face, an inch-long wingless earwig, strangely out of its environment of rotting wood and dark places, was frozen in the process of crossing the alley. The twin prongs on the insect’s back end appeared wicked, dangerous, and were curled up like the stinging tail of a scorpion, though in reality it was harmless. Some of its six legs touched the pavement, and others were lifted in mid-stride. It didn’t move even one of its segmented antennae, as if frozen by fear or poised to attack.

  Sammy shifted his gaze to the end of the alley. Out in the street, the same cars were stalled in the same spots as before. The people in them sat like mannequins.

  The insect again. Unmoving. As still as if dead and pinned to an entomologist’s specimen board.

  Warily Sammy lowered his crossed arms from his head. Groaning, he rolled onto his back and looked up reluctantly at his assailant.

  Looming, the ratman seemed a hundred feet tall. He studied Sammy with solemn interest. “Do you want to live?” he asked.

  Sammy was surprised not by the question but by his inability to answer it. He was caught between the fear of death and the need to die. Each morning he was disappointed when he woke and found that he was still among the living, and each night when he curled up in his rag-and-paper bedding, he hoped for endless sleep. Yet day after day he struggled to obtain sufficient food, to find a warm place on those rare cold nights when California’s climatic grace deserted it, to stay dry when it rained so as to avoid pneumonia, and he looked both ways before crossing a street.

  Perhaps he did not want to live, but wanted only the punishment of living.

  “I’d like it better if you wanted to live,” the ratman said quietly. “More fun for me.”

  Sammy’s heart was beating too thunderously. Each pulse throbbed hardest in the bruised flesh that marked the impact points of the ratman’s ferocious kicks.

  “You’ve got thirty-six hours to live. Better do something, don’t you think? Hmmmm? The clock is running. Ticktock, ticktock.”

  “Why are you doing this to me?” Sammy asked plaintively.

  Instead of replying, the ratman said, “Midnight tomorrow the rats will come for you.”

  “I’ve never done anything to you.”

  The scars on the tormentor’s brutal face grew livid. “… chew out your eyes…”

  “Please.”

  His pale lips tightened as he spoke, revealing more of his rotting teeth: “… strip away your lips while you scream, nibble your tongue…”

  As the ratman grew increasingly agitated, his demeanor became not more feverish but cold. His reptilian eyes seemed to radiate a chill that found its way into Sammy’s flesh and into the deepest reaches of his mind.

  “Who are you?” Sammy asked, not for the first time.

  The ratman did not answer. He swelled with rage. His thick, filthy fingers curled to form fists, uncurled, curled, uncurled. He kneaded the air as if he hoped to squeeze blood from it.

  What are you? Sammy wondered but dared not ask.

  “Rats,” hissed the ratman.

  Afraid of what was about to happen, although it had happened before, Sammy scooted backward on his butt, toward the oleander bush that half concealed his packing crate, trying to put some distance between himself and the towering hobo.

  “Rats,” the ratman repeated, and he began to tremble.

  It was starting.

  Sammy froze, too terrified to move.

  The ratman’s trembling became a shudder. The shudder escalated into violent shaking. His oily hair whipped about his head, his arms jerked, his legs jigged, and his black raincoat flapped as if he were in a cyclone, but no wind huffed or howled. The March air was as preternaturally still as it had been since the hulking vagrant’s appearance, as if the world were but a painted stage and the two of them the only actors upon it.

  Becalmed on reefs of blacktop, Sammy Shamroe finally stood. He was driven to his feet by fear of the roiling tide of claws, sharp teeth, and red eyes that would soon rise around him.

  Beneath his clothes, the ratman’s body churned like a burlap sack full of angry rattlesnakes. He was… changing. His face melted and reformed as if he stood in a forge controlled by some mad deity intent on molding a series of monstrosities, each of which would be more terrible than the one before it. Gone were the livid scars, gone were the reptilian eyes, gone the wild beard and tangled hair, gone the cruel mouth. For a moment his head was nothing but a mass of undifferentiated flesh, a lump of oozing mush, red with blood, then red-brown and darker, glistening, like something that had been poured out of a dog-food can. Abruptly the tissue solidified, and his head was composed of rats clinging to one another, a ball of rats, tails drooping like Rastafarian dreadlocks, fierce eyes as scarlet as drops of radiant blood. Where hands should have hung from his sleeves, rats bristled out of frayed cuffs. The heads of other rodents began to poke from between the buttons of his bulging shirt.

  Though he had seen all of this before, Sammy tried to scream. His swollen tongue stuck to the roof of his dry mouth, so he made only a panicky muffled sound in the back of his throat. A scream wouldn’t help anyway. He had screamed before, during other encounters with his tormentor, and no one had responded.

  The ratman came apart as if he were a rickety scarecrow in a sundering storm, pieces of his body dropping away. When each part hit the pavement, it was an individual rat. Whiskered, wet-nosed, sharp-toothed, squealing, the repellent creatures swarmed over one another, long tails lashing left and right. More rats poured out of his shirt and from under the cuffs of his trousers, far more than his clothes could possibly have contained: a score of them, two score, eighty, more than a hundred.

  Like a deflating balloon that had been crafted in the form of a man, his clothes settled slowly to the pavement. Then each garment was transformed as well. The wrinkled lumps of cloth sprouted heads and limbs and produced more rodents, until both the ratman and his reeking wardrobe had been
replaced by a seething mound of vermin squirming over and under one another with the boneless agility that made their kind so repulsive.

  Sammy could not get his breath. The air grew even more leaden than it had been. Whereas the wind had died earlier, an unnatural stillness now seemed to settle over deeper levels of the natural world, until the fluidity of oxygen and nitrogen molecules declined drastically, as if the atmosphere had begun to thicken into a liquid, which he could draw into his lungs only with the greatest effort.

  Now that the ratman’s body had disintegrated into scores of squirming beasts, the transformed corpus abruptly dispersed. The fat, sleek rats erupted out of the mound, fleeing in all directions, scuttling away from Sammy but also swarming around him, over his shoes and between his legs. That hateful, living tide spilled into the shadows along the buildings and into the vacant lot, where it either drained into holes in the building walls and in the earth — holes that Sammy could not see — or simply vanished.

  A sudden breeze harried crisp dead leaves and scraps of paper ahead of it. The swish of tires and the rumble of engines arose as cars on the main street moved past the mouth of the alley. A bee buzzed by Sammy’s face.

  He was able to breathe again. He stood for a moment in the bright noon light, gasping.

  The worst thing was that it had all happened in sunshine, in the open air, without smoke and mirrors and clever lighting and silk threads and trapdoors and the standard tools of a magician’s craft.

  Sammy had crawled out of his crate with the good intention of starting his day in spite of his hangover, maybe look for discarded aluminum cans to redeem at a recycling center, maybe do a little panhandling along the boardwalk. Now the hangover was gone, but he still didn’t feel like facing the world.

  On unsteady legs, he returned to the oleander bush. The boughs were heavily laden with red flowers. He pushed them aside and stared at the large wooden crate under them.

  He picked up a stick and poked at the rags and newspapers inside the big box, expecting a couple of rats to erupt from hiding. But they had gone elsewhere.

  Sammy dropped to his knees and crawled into his haven, letting the draperies of oleander fall shut behind him.

  From his pile of meager possessions in the back of the crate, he removed an unopened bottle of cheap burgundy and unscrewed the cap. He took a long pull of the warmish wine.

  Sitting with his back against the wooden wall, clutching the bottle in both hands, he tried to forget what he had seen. As far as he could see, forgetting was his only hope of coping. He could not manage the problems of everyday life any more. So how could he expect to deal with something as extraordinary as the ratman?

  A brain steeped in too many grams of cocaine, peppered with too many other drugs, and marinated in alcohol could produce the most amazing zoo of hallucinated creatures. And when his conscience got the better of him and he struggled to fulfill one of his periodic pledges of sobriety, withdrawal led to delirium tremens, which was populated by an even more colorful and threatening phantasmagoria of beasts. But none of them was as memorable and as deeply disturbing as the ratman.

  He took another generous swallow of wine and leaned his head back against the wall of the crate, holding fast to the bottle with both hands.

  Year by year, day by day, Sammy had found it increasingly difficult to distinguish between reality and fantasy. He had long ago ceased to trust his perceptions. Yet of one thing he was dismayingly certain: the ratman was real. Impossible, fantastical, inexplicable — but real.

  Sammy expected to find no answers to the questions that haunted him. But he could not stop asking: what was this creature; where did it come from; why did it want to torment and kill a grizzled, beaten-down street person whose death — or continued existence — was of little or no consequence to the world?

  He drank more wine.

  Thirty-six hours. Ticktock. Ticktock.

  3

  Cop instinct.

  When the citizen in the gray cords, white shirt, and dark-gray jacket entered the restaurant, Connie noticed him and knew he was bent in some way. When she saw that Harry had also noticed, her interest in the guy increased dramatically because Harry had a nose that would make a bloodhound envious.

  Cop instinct is less instinct than a sharply honed talent for observation and the good sense to correctly interpret whatever is observed. With Connie it was more a subconscious awareness than a calculated monitoring of everyone who crossed her line of sight.

  The suspect stood just inside the door, near the cash register, waiting while the hostess seated a young couple at a table near one of the big front windows.

  He appeared ordinary at first glance, even harmless. But on closer inspection, Connie could identify the incongruities that had caused her subconscious to recommend a closer look at the man. No signs of tension were visible in his rather bland face, and his posture was relaxed — but his hands were fisted tightly at his sides, as if he could barely control an urgent need to strike at someone. His vague smile reinforced the air of absentmindedness that clung to him — but the smile kept coming and going, flickering uncertainly, a subtle testament to inner turmoil. His sportcoat was buttoned, which was odd because he wasn’t wearing a tie and because the day was warm. More important, the coat did not hang properly; its outer and inner pockets seemed filled with something heavy that pulled it out of shape, and it bulged over his belt buckle — as if concealing a handgun jammed under the waistband of his pants.

  Of course, cop instinct wasn’t always reliable. The coat might just be old and out of shape. The guy might actually be the absent-minded professor he appeared to be; in which case his coat might be stuffed with nothing more sinister than a pipe, tobacco pouch, slide rule, calculator, lecture notes, and all sorts of items he had slipped into his pockets without quite realizing it.

  Harry, whose voice had trailed off in mid-sentence, slowly put down his chicken sandwich. He was intently focused on the man in the misshapen coat.

  Connie had picked up a few shoestring french fries. She dropped them onto the plate instead of eating them, and she wiped her greasy fingers on her napkin, all the while trying to watch the new customer without obviously staring at him.

  The hostess, a petite blonde in her twenties, returned to the reception area after seating the couple by the window, and the man in the Ultrasuede coat smiled. She spoke to him, he replied, and the blonde laughed politely as if what he’d said was mildly amusing.

  When the customer said something more and the hostess laughed again, Connie relaxed slightly. She reached for a couple of fries.

  The newcomer seized the hostess by her belt, jerked her toward him, and grabbed a handful of her blouse. His assault was so sudden and unexpected, his moves so cat-quick, that he had lifted her off the floor before she began to scream. As if she weighed nothing, he threw her at nearby diners.

  “Oh, shit.” Connie pushed back from the table and came to her feet, reaching under her jacket and behind to the revolver that was holstered in the small of her back.

  Harry rose, too, his own revolver in hand. “Police!”

  His warning was drowned out by the sickening crash of the young blonde slamming into a table, which tipped sideways. The diners toppled out of their chairs, and glasses shattered. All over the restaurant people looked up from their food, startled by the uproar.

  The stranger’s flamboyance and savagery might just mean he was on drugs — or he might also be genuinely psychotic.

  Connie took no chances, dropping into a crouch as she brought her gun up. “Police!”

  Either the guy had heard Harry’s first warning or he had seen them out of the corner of his eye, because he was already scuttling toward the back of the restaurant, between the tables.

  He had a handgun of his own — maybe a Browning 9mm, judging by the sound and by the glimpse she got. He was using it, too, firing at random, each shot thunderous in the confines of the restaurant.

  Beside Connie, a painted terra-co
tta pot exploded. Chips of glazed clay showered onto her. The dracaena margenata in the pot toppled over, raking her with long narrow leaves, and she crouched even lower, trying to use a nearby table as a shield.

  She wanted in the worst way to get a shot at the bastard, but the risk of hitting one of the other customers was too great. When she looked across the restaurant at child’s level, thinking maybe she could pulverize one of the creep’s knees with a well-placed round, she could see him scrambling across the room. The trouble was, between her and him, a scattering of panicked, wide-eyed people had taken refuge under their tables.

  “Shit.” She pursued the geek while trying to make as small a target of herself as possible, aware that Harry was going after him from another direction.

  People were screaming because they were scared, or had been shot and were in pain. The crazy bastard’s gun boomed too often. Either he could change clips with superhuman speed or he had another pistol.

  One of the big windows took a direct hit and came down in a jinglejangle clangor. A waterfall of glass splashed across the cold Santa Fe tile floor.

  As Connie crept from table to table, her shoes picked up mashed french fries, ketchup, mustard, bits of oozing cacti, and crunching-tinkling pieces of glass. And as she passed the wounded, they cried out or pawed at her, desperate for help.

  She hated to ignore them, but she had to shake them off, keep moving, try to get a shot at the walking phlegm in the Ultrasuede coat. What meager first-aid she might be able to provide wasn’t going to help them. She couldn’t do anything about the terror and pain the sonofabitch had already wrought, but she might be able to stop him from doing more damage if she stayed on his ass.

  She raised her head, risking a bullet in the brain, and saw the scumbag was all the way at the back of the restaurant, standing at a swinging door that had a glass porthole in the center. Grinning, he squeezed off rounds at anything that caught his attention, apparently equally pleased to hit a potted plant or a human being. He was still unnervingly ordinary in appearance, round-faced and bland, with a weak chin and soft mouth. Even his grin failed to make him look like a madman; it was more the broad and affable smile of someone who had just seen a clown take a pratfall. But there was no doubt he was crazy-dangerous, because he shot a big saguaro cactus, then a guy in a checkered shirt, then the saguaro again, and he did have two guns, one in each hand.