I see that in the Chapter 6 intro I forgot the customary thanks for the reviews. Sorry 'bout that :) And thanks for the reviews!
One chapter left to go after this one. I've also been toying with the idea of adding an "Intermission" chapter between 4 and 5, which would deal with some of the other characters - namely, what happened to Taylor, Sully, Ty and how Jimmy came by the gun ... maybe something about Miguel White and Vernon Marks. Tell me what you think!
And it seems that at last we all know Cruz' first name - Maritza. Comes a little late, huh? Oh well. Anyway, on to Chapter 7: Bosco makes a final promise to Faith, one he may not be able to keep ...
Chapter 7
June 26-27
Day 5-6
"You son of a bitch," Bosco breathed.
Doc was gone. Bosco had assumed that the paramedic had passed out, or perhaps just finally keeled over dead. But when he came out of Cruz' building, the bus was gone. Doc had taken off.
Bosco would have liked to believe it had been intentional, that Doc had snuck away. He wanted to believe that so that he would have the luxury of being angry at the man. But after seeing what Cruz had become, Bosco had to admit that it was more likely Doc simply hadn't known what he was doing. He'd been pretty bad last night, and he could have gone into his own delirium. Perhaps he ended up thinking he was out on a call or something. For all Bosco knew, he might have hallucinated Dr. Morales running naked down the street and went chasing after her. Who knew? It couldn't be helped now.
He looked around at the empty, quiet street; he could probably walk back to where he'd left his Mustang, but it would be a fifteen minute trip at least, and God only knew what he might run across.
There was a blue Honda Civic parked across the street. Bosco walked over to it, leaned down and looked in the window. No keys, of course, but he knew all the tricks. He smashed out the driver's side window with the butt of his rifle and started hot-wiring.
As he worked, he found himself going over and over Cruz' death in his mind. It had been so simple, so dry and unspectacular. She must have gone to sleep, her body deciding that now was as good a time as any to simply throw in the towel, and she just slipped away. For some absurd reason that struck him as sad. It would have been more Cruz' style, he thought with a sour smile, to go down in a hail of gunfire.
Or maybe she choked to death, he thought grimly. Maybe her throat swelled up so much she couldn't breathe anymore. Or maybe she choked on her own puke. Pleasant thought, isn't it? Thrashing and gasping for air ...
Jesus, just stop it. It's over now. I made sure she didn't die alone, and that's all that matters. She's dead. Let it go.
But he'd left her there. Right after saying out loud that she deserved more, he'd left her to rot in that bathtub. How long would she lie there? Five years? Ten? Twenty? Ha! Think more along the lines of one hundred, five hundred, a thousand. The decay process would be wet and spongy at first, oozy, breeding maggots and worms ... then eventually she would dry up, her bones gradually petrifying and turning to powder as the building disintegrated and fell in around her ...
Bosco groaned as he got the Civic started, and to anyone listening it would be a hard, pained sound, the sound of a man who has just found out the ache in his gut means he's carrying a bouncing baby tumor somewhere in the maze of his intestines. He slipped behind the wheel with a long, shaky breath. Yeah, so, okay, Maritza Cruz deserved better than to be left to molder in a shower curtain. But things, as they say, were tough all over. For all he knew, Faith could be dead by now.
While you were attending to Cruz, Richard Farrell seemed to chide him. Tsk-tsk. Wouldn't that be peachy? You've known Faith for ... what? Nine years? Ten? And Cruz for what? A couple of months? And who did you think took priority, who did you go to, who did you help? Faith Yokas, the honest cop and loving wife and mother? Nooooo. You left her and went to help a murderous, corrupt bitch who had all the morals of a death-adder.
Sort of speaks volumes about you, doesn't it, partner?
"Shut up," Bosco snarled ... and felt an immediate, unsettling shame. It seemed that more and more he was talking out loud to the voices in his head.
Shit, could he really be losing it? Like, for real, in a clinical sense, could he actually be losing his mind?
... No. No, probably not.
"Stress," he said with a half-hearted shrug as he wove deftly around a smoking three-car pileup. "I'm tellin' ya, nobody knows what stress is until they live through the end of all mankind. Fuck yeah. That's stressed, my friend. No shame in it."
And besides, Faith had been relatively okay when he'd left her. She'd still be alive, and he could ... he could see her off, could be there for her and Charlie and Emily, be there for them as he had been there for Cruz ...
Ooh, you're just a regular saint, ain't you? Runnin' around dispensing all this loving kindness to your dying buddies. Must really tucker you out.
"Shut up" Bosco muttered again, this time not even realizing he'd spoken.
He would go back and check on Faith, he would stay with her until the end came. That was just what he'd do. So what? So fucking what? Where was the harm in it? It was the best he could do, and it was all he could do. He couldn't do much else.
There wasn't, he thought with acrid rage, a whole lot he could do about any of it.
You can make somebody pay.
There was that, yes, but that was for later. Somebody would pay, somehow. It was something he knew had to be, there needed to be at least one thin strand of sanity left in the world if he was to survive in it, and that strand had to be that sense of order, of balance. Somebody had to pay.
And it wasn't just idle fantasy, either. There was some part of him, he realized with excitement, that was starting to get a sense of how it could be achieved. He was beginning to believe the answer might lie in the strange and vivid dreams he'd been having lately, just since the epidemic began. Yes, dreams ... there had been that brief period about two years ago in which he'd had a series of odd, disturbing dreams and had become very interested in dream interpretation. It was a pity that he'd lost interest soon after, because it might have helped him now. At the moment it was like a puzzle, really ... one of those puzzles where you gradually uncover a picture, a piece at time.
It occurred to him that maybe this was all delusion, his overtaxed brain feeding him false hope, perhaps even another sign of impending insanity ... but he didn't think so. He really didn't think so at all. And he was patient. If the answers were hidden in his subconscious, it would become clear. In time, he knew, it would all become clear.
And it wouldn't be long before he discovered he was right.
***
They were gone.
Bosco stood looking stupidly at that little corner in the examination room where he'd left Faith and her kids. Not a trace remained of them, not even a castoff blanket, and yet everything else about the room looked more or less unchanged.
"What the fuck?" he murmured softly. He turned and began to stumble blindly down the hall, half tripping through the sea of bodies, no longer noticing or caring if he stepped on an outstretched arm or foot. He looked desperately into this room and that as he passed, seeing only more bodies, but he couldn't find them, couldn't find her, and he began to panic and call out to her, and soon he was screaming her name, voice echoing off the walls of this dead and silent place, this hospital that was now and forever a tomb -
His sleeve snagged on something, and when he looked down he saw it was a hand. A hand belonging to a dying soldier who lay forgotten on a gurney in the middle of the hall.
"McMasters!" the soldier croaked, his neck swollen and purple. "McMasters ordered us! We didn't want to! But we blew the fuckin' building up! No choice! Shoot us if we didn't, they said, and job's worth doin' right if you ain't got a choice! So we blew it good, blew that motherfucker reeeeeeel good-"
Before he completely knew what he was doing, Bosco punched him. Hard. He felt the man's nose compress against his fist, felt it break, watched it burst. Blood exploded around his hand, and he was fairly certain he also felt something in the soldier's neck give with a low pop. The soldier's arms and legs jerked once and then went still.
He was dead anyway.
Right, spare it not another thought. Bosco reached the end of the hallway and collapsed on his haunches, burying his face in his hands. The hospital was huge and he could spend hours doing a room-to-room search. Hours ... or with the sheer number of bodies, perhaps days.
But he knew she had to be alive. If Faith and her kids were dead, they'd still be where he'd left them. The fact that they were gone must mean they were alive and well enough to move under their own power. And they wouldn't have left the hospital, of that he was sure. They'd just moved to find a better spot.
There was a sign scotch-taped to the wall in front of him, hand-lettered in blue Magic Marker:
ALL ROOMS ON ALL FLOORS FULL
NEW PATIENTS ARE TO BE BROUGHT TO CAFETERIA - JUNE 24
As good a place as any to start.
The tables in the cafeteria had been pressed into service as makeshift beds, the plastic chairs stacked haphazardly against the walls. Bosco realized that this place had been the last line of organized defense before the staggering speed of the epidemic and the dying hospital staff combined to overwhelm the place entirely.
Pointless, he thought miserably as he began to circle the room, reluctantly drawing sheets back from bloated and discolored faces. Pointless ... I'll never find her. I'm too late. She died. She died and I left her to be with Cruz ... I'll never find her now.
But he did. He found Faith in the third row, second table from the left, and he was so surprised that he almost dismissed her and moved on, figuring he'd mistaken someone else.
But it was her. No doubt about it.
And it looked as if dear ol' Captain Trips had come back on Faith with one hell of a vengeance. She looked even worse than she had the day before, and Bosco was once again darkly amazed at the incredible speed of the disease. If he had read Alex Taylor's fact sheet all the way through, he would have known that the superflu mutated almost constantly, a shifting antigen that simply attacked the human body until every last line of defense was exhausted. Every time the immune system came up with the right antibodies to fight the virus, ol' Trips simply changed slightly and the whole miserable process started over.
Faith's body had made one last enormous strike against the virus, which had resulted in a few hours of slight recovery. But Trips came back. Trips always came back, and it was Trips that Bosco began to think of as his target, Trips that he began to personalize in his mind for lack of anyone else to blame. The little fucker had rolled effortlessly over everyone he knew, everyone he respected, everyone he loved, and he had killed them all ... and now Trips was back to work on Faith Yokas.
And by the look of things, he was almost finished with her.
"Faith," he whispered, gently nudging her shoulder, and the grim, surreal parallel to the way it had been with Cruz was not lost on him.
Faith stirred and gradually swam up out of a tormented sleep. Bosco wasn't expecting much from her, and wondered why he was bothering to wake her at all. He expected this to match the experience with Cruz in every way, right down to her state of mind. He could feel that same explosive fever-heat coming from her, her breathing shallow and wet and thick, and it seemed cruel to wake her just for ... for what? Some selfish sense of a clear conscience?
Faith's eyes focused on him, and she smiled. "Bss ... Bosco?"
Bosco nodded and returned the smile, but he was suddenly very cold inside. "Hey there, Yokas. I hear you been breakin' balls around here."
Faith laughed, or tried to; it was more of a thin sigh. "I'm a model ... model patient." She reached up and brushed her fingertips over his cheek, and he had to make a conscious effort not to recoil from that spongy, clammy touch. "You're gettin' the ... the five o'clock shadow there, Bos."
Bosco took her hand gently, feeling the stubble on his cheek. Shit, how many days had it been since he'd run a razor over his face? Two or three? "Yeah," he murmured with a wan smile. "I'm a mess."
"How was Cruz?"
Bosco paused, and he discovered there was still some of that old sensitivity there, that feeling of needing to be on the defensive, of steeling himself for some smartass comment about his Anti-Crime girlfriend. There was, he found, a perverse nostalgia to it; he almost wanted to hear Faith lash out. A good old-fashioned argument over trust and betrayal and Cruz would mean things were normal again.
"She's dead, Faith," he said after a moment.
Faith patted his hand. "I'm sorry, Bosco."
And the sorrow in her tone was so unaffected, so real. He felt tears stinging the corners of his eyes.
"Charlie's gone," Faith murmured, closing her eyes. "He ... died about an hour ... an hour after you left ... there was a doctor ... did you see him?"
Bosco shook his head. "I haven't seen anybody, Faith."
"He was sick himself, but he brought me here to the caf ... Emily ... Emily's gone too, I think, but ... I don't remember when ... I don't remember ... when it happened ..."
"Easy now," he said, swallowing a lump in his throat. "Easy ... "
But she wasn't crying; she only smiled and patted his hand again. "It's okay, Bos ... I think ... I think I'm okay with it now ..." Her smile widened, assured and peaceful. "I'll be with them soon."
"Naw," he said with a forced nonchalance that was really quite ridiculous. "No, you're fightin' it, Faith, fightin' so hard, and you'll ..."
He trailed off as he saw the change in her expression, and felt her hand tighten almost painfully on his.
"You have a gift," she said, and her voice was suddenly strong, clear, almost normal. "You have been given a gift, you understand that, Bosco? Immunity. You survived ..."
Bosco tried to speak and found he could only nod.
"Don't throw it away," she said, and now she began to cry. "If you ever respected me, if you ever cared about me, about everything we stood for, don't throw it away. Don't go to him, Bosco."
He felt suddenly very uneasy. That coldness in his center had been diminishing, but now it came back on him, came back hard. "Don't go to who, Faith?"
"The dark man," she murmured.
Bosco's blood froze.
Cruz ... didn't she say the same thing ...? Yes, she did, she said the same thing ... the exact same fucking thing ...
Bosco looked down at his hands and saw they were trembling. In a voice that seemed very distant, he heard himself say, "I ... I don't understand, Faith ..."
"You DO!" she croaked, and it was almost loud enough to qualify as a yell. She winced at the pain it caused but pushed on, her tears making her almost unintelligible. "You ... you can't do it, Bosco. Everything we fought for ... all those years ... he represents everything we stood against, so don't you dare throw it all away ..."
He was marginally aware that he was crying along with her now. "I don't know what you mean, Faith!"
But he did. On some level, he knew exactly what she meant.
"Promise me," she said hoarsely. "Please, Bosco, promise me you won't give in to him ..."
"I promise!" he shouted. "I promise I won't go to the dark man, Faith!"
She smiled and squeezed his hand again. "Mmm ... you have to grow up, Bos ... you have to let the past go ... you're still ... still so much that little boy ... so powerless ... helpless ..."
"Stop it," he rasped. It was barely audible.
"I want you to know ... I always would have been there for you ... no matter what, I always ... I always respected you, Bosco ... I loved you like a brother ... no matter what I might have said ... but you have to grow up now ..."
"Stop," he moaned, covering his face with his hands. "Please, stop."
"There's a storm coming," Faith Yokas muttered as she slipped into unconsciousness for the last time. "His storm ... stay strong ... stay ........ "
"Faith ..." he whispered, but he could see she was going now, slipping away. Her breathing, jagged and wet and rattling, quickened. She began to convulse, back arching in the bed, hands clawing the air, the short breaths turning into a series of thick, choking barks.
Bosco watched helplessly, watched as her chest rose ... fell ... rose ... fell ....
...rose ...
... fell ...
... and stilled.
He took her wrist. Felt for a pulse. Found none.
"Aw, Faith," he sobbed. He kissed her forehead and put his head down on her shoulder. "Aw, Faith ... Faith ..."
And how long, he would think later, did he sit with her? Measure the time and compare it to that spent with Cruz. It was so easy, wasn't it? So neat, so perfect. His two partners, his two worlds, his two choices. How conveniently clear and uncomplicated things had turned out, how easy to gauge his own priorities, how easy it was to look into himself.
After about a half an hour, he stood up drew the sheet up over Faith's head, and then he simply left her. There was nothing else to do. Any attempt at ritualizing it, at trying to create a paltry little funeral would be worthless, even insulting to her and to himself. Just a weak charade, a farce. Funerals were staged not for the benefit of the dead but the living, and that assumed that the living needed comfort. Bosco needed none, and Faith was dead; what happened now no longer mattered to her.
So he left her just as he had left Cruz, and time would take her just as it would take Cruz ... as it would take Doc, and Carlos, and Kim, and everyone else. As it would take the hospital, the streets, the city. Everything.
The last door on his past had been closed, and the world had moved on.
***
The corn, the corn is everywhere and it's too high, too high, and there's no way out. Maurice Boscorelli's just a city boy, and he can't find his way out, he runs and runs and never finds the way out, but he can hear singing, somebody's playing an old acoustic guitar and singing old-time, deep-South Bible-thumpin' hymns. Oh what a friend we have in Jesus and so on and so forth.
Bosco's not interested in having a friend in Jesus; he just wants out of this goddam hateful sweet-stinking corn. The singing is behind him, or it's in front, or it's from the left, the right, no matter what way he goes it's just more corn, more corn, and eventually he even starts to laugh, because getting lost in corn is kind of ludicrous when you think about it, even if you're certain you'll die here, running in circles like a rat ... like rats ...
... and finally, suddenly, he breaks through, and he's looking at what has to be the oldest woman he's ever seen, an old black woman-
(African American, he hears Faith Yokas correct him with her customary exasperation, and for a moment Bosco can see her as clear as day, sitting next to him in an RMP in full uniform, a cup of coffee in her hand. She's healthy, and she's watching him with that characteristic mix of dry irritation and motherly concern. It's good to see her again, and he suddenly realizes that she's beautiful, in her own way. He never saw that in her before, and he smiles ...
But it's wrong, it's wrong because Faith's dead, she's dead ... )
- an old African American woman with an equally old guitar, sitting on the back porch of an equally old house. Her singing, rusty but not at all unpleasant, stops abruptly when she sees him break cover, and her face twists with a rage that he might have found almost comical at one time in his life. She jabs a bony finger at him.
"He can't offer you nothin', Maurice Louis Boscorelli!" the old woman says sternly. "His promises are hollow! He's the father of lies!"
Bosco feels sick rage well up in him, feels his lips trembling, pulling down at the corners like a little kid about to pout - or cry. "Somebody has to pay!"
The old woman laughs bitterly. "Ain't nobody gonna pay for this! Nobody 'cept you, unless you give up this foolishness!"
Bosco shakes his head violently, suddenly and viciously hating her, hating the smug, righteous arrogance in her gaze. He remembers Faith in her hospital bed, Cruz in her bathtub, Doc and Carlos and Kim and Jimmy, his mother, and how dare the old bitch sit there and say that nobody's going to pay for them all, that no price can ever be exacted for such a monstrous affront?
He drops to his knees and screams at the sky, screams at the top of his lungs, throat burning, tears streaming down his face. "SOMEBODY'S GOTTA PAY! SOMEBODY WILL PAY!"
"Rats in the corn!" the old woman shrieks, and in that same moment he feels them, and then he looks down and sees them; hundreds of fat, hairy brown rats crawling over his legs, he's kneeling in them, they're crawling up his legs, working their way towards his belly, where they will no doubt rip him open and make a nest in the raw and bleeding cavity -
- Bosco screams -
- and now, abruptly, blessedly, he's back home, in New York. Ah, New York, New York, never has it been so beautiful to this here city boy.
He stands up slowly. The rats are gone, the corn, the old woman. He nods, the fear evaporating. This is dream. He'd kind of known it was a dream all along, and he feels a bit stupid.
He looks down and sees he's now wearing a dress uniform, immaculate and perfect, brass buttons glinting in the clean, early summer sun. He smiles. The city is dead, and he can hear the wind blowing through the empty streets, between the buildings, making strange, tuneless sounds. This is the way it is now, New York, the big tomb, the big haunted house ...
Then he sees the car, sees it and hears it in the same moment; it's at the end of the street and bearing down fast, a big wine-colored Crown Victoria coming right at him, doing at least a hundred.
Bosco merely stands on the curb and waits for it, unconcerned. He's still smiling.
The Crown Vic comes to a screaming, snarling halt no more than a few feet from him, smoke belching from the wheel-wells. The bitter stench of burning rubber fills his nostrils. Bosco's smile remains - he knows this car. He's been in this car plenty of times, an unmarked squad car registered to the Anti-Crime unit of the 55th Precinct.
The driver's side window rolls down and a head pokes out, one Bosco recognizes immediately. The fierce, burning eyes. The big, sunny ol' fuck-the-world grin.
Bosco is unable to suppress his own grin, a grin that closely mirrors the one worn by the driver of the car. But unlike the driver of the car, Bosco's grin is one borne of relief and happiness and an overwhelming sense of power, of coming home, of meeting his destiny.
"Farrell!" Bosco cries cheerfully. "How you doin', man?"
Richard Farrell's grin seems to widen, if such a thing is possible. "The name's Flagg these days, son. Randall Flagg. But to answer your question, I'm just great. Fine and dandy like sour candy."
Farrell - sorry, Flagg - steps out of the car. He's wearing the same clothes he had on the day Bosco imagined him on the streetlight; old, scuffed cowboy boots, jeans, and a denim jacket over a simple checked work-shirt. An Anti-Crime badge hangs around his neck on a chain, and there are two buttons on the lapels of his jacket. A yellow smiley-face on the left; on the right, a button depicting a cartoon pig in a police officer's cap, a cartoon pig which has been shot between the eyes. How's Your Pork? is written underneath in stylized bloody letters.
Bosco's eyes flicker over to the car. A decaying corpse is propped up in the passenger seat, sitting in a humming cloud of flies. The corpse is lipless, noseless and eyeless, its skin blistered and peeling, but Bosco knows exactly who it is by its clothes, by the remaining clumps of matted black hair, by the badge hanging around its neck.
It's Cruz, of course.
Flagg follows his gaze and nods. "Such a shame that dear Maritza didn't make the final cut - she would have fit in quite well. But, no use crying over spilled milk and all that. On to more important matters, matters of the living. We got a lot of work ahead of us, Bosco my man. Come on down to Vegas if you want to get in on the action." Flagg is now beaming paternally. "And I do believe I still owe you a beer, if I'm not mistaken."
"You sure as hell do!" Bosco says amicably, and Randall Flagg, the dark man, laughs and claps him heartily on the shoulder.
"We'll get 'em all, Bosco!" Flagg hollers as he gets back into the car. "All the jagoffs! We'll make 'em pay, you and me! We'll be top of the fucking world, and we'll make somebody pay for 'em all. We'll crucify their sorry asses, line those motherfuckers up on crosstrees all the way down the length of Nevada!"
"Damn straight!" Bosco yells back, almost panting with the anticipation of it. Yes, crucifixion. He can see it. The world still had more than enough jagoffs running around in it ... but not for much longer, oh boy, you'd better believe it. Not for much fucking longer.
Flagg guns the engine and gives the Cruz-thing a playful nudge, causing a minor hurricane of flies to rise up irritably before settling back to their meal. He puts on a slick pair of aviator sunglasses and the Crown Vic tears off down the street.
Maurice Boscorelli watches after him, and he is content, serene, at peace for the first time in days.
***
Bosco woke up grinning.
***
They called it Project Blue and it came out of California. Containment failed, and some sniveling little shit of a military cop named Campion managed to escape the base with his wife and kid. He made it halfway across the country before dying in some shitspot Texas town called Arnette, the first low flames of the epidemic already smoldering nicely behind him.
Bosco knew all of this and took it as fact. Flagg had told him.
Now, late in the evening of June 27, Bosco was on the move. New York was long behind him. A hot summer wind bit into his face and howled in his ears. He responded by edging the bike up towards ninety. He wore no helmet, no protection but a leather jacket and a pair of wraparound sunglasses. He knew there were stalled vehicles, abandoned army roadblocks, any number of hazards, and if he hit something like that at this speed, he'd leave pieces of himself pasted along the asphalt for half a dozen miles.
But he wasn't worried. He wasn't bad with a bike, and this screaming little Yamaha crotch-rocket (he'd found it in the showroom of a bike shop that had miraculously escaped both looting and arson) was a damned fine one. Bikes were your best bet now if you wanted to travel; a bigger vehicle would only get you into trouble.
And trouble wasn't something he had time for. He had business in Nevada, and he had no doubt at all of what he would find there. He knew now that there were indeed other survivors, and he knew that not all of them would be heading his way. Some would be going to the other. Oh, he knew all about the other. He'd seen her, after all; the old woman with the guitar. Bosco knew she was real and didn't question it, just as he no longer questioned how the dreams beckoning him to Nevada could be real. They were real. He knew it.
Just as he knew he would be kept safe. The late evening sun shone down on the highway ahead, golden and beautiful. The wind was liberating and clean and sweet-smelling, the speed almost soothing, and every now and then he would pass a crow sitting on a fencepost, or a stalled car, or just on the shoulder of the road. Just a glimpse and then he would be past it, but he knew he was being watched. Being watched ... and watched after.
Bosco took the bike up to a hundred-and-ten, grinning into the wind, knowing he was in good hands.
Yep, he's heading for Flagg. But will he stay there? I don't even know myself yet ... ;)