Chapter 23
Donna expected them in the morning, but they didn’t come. She couldn’t imagine what kept them. They were almost out of time
to break her—it had to be today. There was no tomorrow . . . not for most of the men here.
The power came and went. It was off in the late morning when a thud shook the whole building, as if someone had dropped a
sack of flour from a great height. She heard cries and slamming doors. One of the last remaining nurses ran by her window,
rolling a gurney ahead of her. Donna supposed another one had killed themselves.
A little while later the lights flickered back on. The stillness and boredom oppressed her—she had never been good with either.
Loneliness had always frightened her. Made her feel like a child again, trapped in the haunted house of her mind, and she
couldn’t bear to walk there alone. She needed someone she could argue with, tease, mock, someone who wanted to fuck or fight.
She shut her eyes. Maybe if she rested for a while. It was better to sleep than to be awake and alone, and her dreams were
always interesting. She met famous people in them and found herself in absurd but entertaining sexual situations, and occasionally
she had to shoot looters.
The power was still off when she heard the door and opened her eyes. Valentine let himself into her room. Salem was with him,
though he stayed by the door, leaning against the wall. For the first time she could remember, Salem looked uncomfortable,
didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. First he crossed his arms, then he dropped them, then he tried hooking his
thumbs in his pockets. Valentine seemed so tired he could hardly lift his feet. He slumped into the straight-backed chair.
“I’m hungry. I want lunch,” Donna told him. She felt it was always best to begin a discussion with a list of her demands.
“I’m surprised you have any appetite,” Valentine said, and laughed humorlessly. “God knows you made a meal out of me.” One
hand fluttered to his ear and then fell away again. “Your brother is dead.”
“Mind games don’t work on me when I’ve got an empty stomach. Try again after I’ve had an egg salad sandwich. Make it fresh,
for fuck’s sake. Whatever I had the other day spent at least twelve hours in Saran Wrap.”
“No kitchen staff. They all ran. No lunch for you. Do you even care about your brother? I told you, he’s dead. He killed himself.”
“That’s a lie. I don’t believe you.”
“You want me to wheel his corpse past your window? I’ll be honest. I don’t think you’d want to look at him. He got away from
us in a stairwell and jumped headfirst over the banister. His skull split open like a melon. Most awful thing I’ve ever seen.
Made me sick, actually. I can’t get the taste out of my mouth.”
“No. If he fell down a stairwell, it’s because one of you threw him. And he isn’t dead. You just want to fuck with my mind.”
Valentine gave her a hopeless look. “You think your brother is any good to me dead? I was going to drown you in front of him.
I was going to hold you underwater until Van offered to die in our place. Until Van offered to be King Sorrow’s meal. I know
that’s one of the rules. I know one of you can offer to die for us. But he can’t die for us if he’s already dead. I had the
game all set up and he—he tossed the whole board.”
Donna felt as if she were falling herself. As if she had been pushed off a high ledge and might never hit bottom.
“No,” she said. “No. If he was dead, I’d know it. We have, like, twin telepathy. When he cuts himself, I feel it. When I can’t sleep, neither
can he. You’re lying.”
“I’m not. Van is gone.” It was Van now, Van at last, after months of calling him Donnie, and that was how she knew it was
true. When Valentine spoke again, there was a certain cruel satisfaction in his voice. “He left you. He went and left you behind. But not for long. I’m going to bring the two of you together again soon enough, Donna.”
She couldn’t think. She didn’t want to think. Nothing good would come from thinking. Donovan was one of the central facts
of her life, as fundamental as the air in her lungs. She wasn’t sure she could breathe without him.
“Why couldn’t you just give me what I wanted? We would’ve offered you anything,” Valentine said. His eyes lit up slightly
at a sudden inspiration. “It’s not too late, you know. Offer your friend Allison Shiner to King Sorrow instead of me—us. You want your own Gulfstream jet? It’s yours. Twenty-five million dollars a year, for life? Done. There’s nothing you could
want that isn’t in my power to give.”
“I want my brother back. Can you get me that?”
The light went back out of Valentine’s eyes, and his hand slid into a pocket.
“No. Of course you can’t just help. Of course you can’t be a decent person. It makes me sick. I have a goddamn master’s degree. I have a lot to offer people. I read more
books in a year than you and your brother probably read in your whole lives, both of you put together. What did you have to
offer the world, besides a look at your tits on the evening news?” His hand slipped out of his pocket holding a gun. Salem,
over by the exit, stiffened, stood away from the wall.
“Mr. Valentine,” Salem said. “I’m not sure—”
“I am. Now shut up.” He pointed the gun her way, but not too seriously, and sort of shook it at her. “You know I haven’t slept
in five days? I can smell him on my sheets. That fucking snake. He was in my glove box yesterday morning. I’m so tired I can’t think, and the worst
is the idea that tomorrow I might be dead and you might be alive. That will not fucking stand.”
The lights came back on in a sudden stammering series of flashes, and a great roar of hate and madness came from directly behind Valentine.
He twisted to look over his shoulder, his mouth opening to scream, only it wasn’t King Sorrow, it was the TV, blasting static.
He had tipped his chair up on its back legs, and when Donna hit him it was easy to drive him straight back into the Zenith.
His head went through the tube of the television, smashed it in with a glassy crack.
The gun went off. His chair collapsed and he fell, shrieking, his head sliding back out of the Zenith’s smashed-in screen.
If she was shot, Donna didn’t notice. She went down on top of him and the chair and felt the gun trapped between his chest
and hers, in his right hand. He was barely holding on to it. She clapped her mittens around it and pried it away from him.
He didn’t fight, didn’t even seem to realize she was taking it from him.
At the sound of the gunshot, Salem had ducked low and frozen in place. She pointed the barrel at him. Even with her hands
swaddled in the leather mitts, she was able to force a finger under the trigger guard. She wasn’t sure she could actually
fire the gun, but he didn’t need to know that. The fluorescents brightened and dimmed, brightened and dimmed. Either that
or her vision was pulsing.
She meant to say something menacing, but what came out was, “Did he shoot me?”
Salem scanned her from about four paces away. “I don’t think so.”
Valentine shrieked again. The heel of his left foot kicked and dug into the carpet and he screamed through clenched teeth,
a sound that went beyond pain and into a kind of hysteria. She could smell blood. When she looked down, Donna saw a smear
of it on her thigh, but she still didn’t feel any pain.
“Get the fuck out,” she said.
Salem drove an elbow hard against the door and it opened the tiniest bit. A big woman in a polo shirt was in the hall. She
had a piece of white tape across her turnip of a nose and a pair of black eyes.
“The fuck is—” she began, but Salem was already shoving her back into the hall, slamming the door behind him.
Donna scrambled behind the bed, the gun clapped between her mittened hands.
She felt as if she had been punched in the chest, felt as if she had a bruise on her overworked heart.
Valentine shrieked, paused to get his breath, and shrieked again.
A crooked artery bulged in his forehead.
His hands were clapped to his groin, but Donna could see his crotch was a sopping red ruin.
When she had knocked him back into the TV, the gun had gone off into his crotch.
She cast her gaze over the bed to the picture window.
At first glance she thought the hallway was empty.
Then she saw Salem peeking around one corner of the window frame, from over by the door.
She crawled out from behind the bed and got an arm around Valentine’s throat.
“No!” the man who was really Norman Barclay screamed. “No! Don’t! Move me! For the sake of CHRIST, I need medical attention!”
Donna dragged him back toward the bathroom, keeping him in a headlock, holding the gun under her left armpit. It dropped again,
but this time it didn’t fire, just clunked on the floor. She got Valentine into the bathroom before she went back for it,
then retreated into the john and collapsed against the wall.
“I’m dying!” Barclay screamed. “Oh, God! Oh Jesus Christ, I’m dying here!”
“Shut up,” she told him.
He held his obliterated crotch while blood oozed around his clenched, white-knuckled fingers. He was on his side on the floor,
smearing blood all over the dingy white tile. His face was a hideous color, a hectic purple, with waxy white blotches. His
eyes were wide but unseeing.
“I’m dying, I KNOW it! For God’s sake! Get a doctor!”
“Stop it!” She couldn’t think with him screaming at her that way. She kicked him in the face, once, twice, and he shut up.
Maybe he fainted. It was hard to tell, his eyes were still open.
For a time there was silence from the other room. She heard a soft click as the door was unlatched ever so slightly. She stuck
her head out far enough to peer into the room. Salem was still out in the hall, the door open only a sliver.
“Donna,” Salem said. “Don’t make us come in there. Throw us the gun and come out of there.”
“Here’s a better idea!” she shouted. “Come in and get me! First bullet goes into Valentine. Second one is all yours, Salem!”
“You don’t want to do that.”
“You bet I do. I can shoot you. Can you shoot me? I’m still a million-dollar asset. What are you worth, Salem?”
There was a long silence.
“Donna, sweetheart. Darlin’. Let us send someone in there for Mr. Valentine.”
“Help me!” Valentine cried. He was still screaming, but not as loudly as before, and he was almost singing it, like a child. “Help me! Help mmmmee!”
“Shut the fuck up or I’ll kick you again,” Donna said.
“Darlin’, you’re holding one of our standard-issue nine-millimeters,” Salem called out. “If we come in there wearing full
body armor, them bullets will bounce right off. But I’ll be honest, that armor is heavy, it’s hot, and I don’t want to bother
with it. I guess I will if I have to. Can you do me a favor and just come on out of there?”
“Anyone enters the room, Valentine dies,” she said. “That simple.”
He didn’t reply for a bit. When he did, his voice was weary. “Goddamn it, girl. He’s probably going to die anyway. Let us
send a medic in to get a compress on that wound. You can keep a gun on the guy the whole time.”
“Don’t waste medical supplies on him. Keep the Band-Aids for you. You’re going to need them. What time is it?”
“Seven p.m.”
“Tick tick tick. Midnight in five hours. Can you really afford to spend them dickering with me?”
He went silent. Donna watched the door from her position just inside the bathroom. It was open only an inch.
“Hey, Salem,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Is my brother really dead?”
He didn’t want to answer that. When he did, his tone was reluctant. “Yeah.”
Donna hated crying more than anything, even more than being alone. She blinked at hot tears, hating them while they welled up and fell, hating the sting of them, hating the way each choked sob seemed to scoop her insides out.
“Sorry,” Salem said, after a while.
Donna wiped at her face. Her mouth was full of the taste of tears.
“Salem,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“You need to run.”
“Me and these boys out here, we don’t run. People run from us.”
“You listen to me, Salem. King Sorrow had, what, forty-three names? How many of them are left on this base to see him tonight?”
“Eighteen. Counting Valentine. There are a few others in the wind.”
“Eighteen. You aren’t one of them, but if you get in his way, you’ll join them. And even if you don’t, even if you get lucky
and the dragon passes you by? Next year, someone will give King Sorrow your name. They’ll remember what you did to me here. To my brother. And King Sorrow won’t just have your name. He’ll come after
your wife. Your children. Your parents. You need to understand that. Your men need to understand that. If you don’t run for
yourself, run for your loved ones. Throw down your weapons and leave now and our business with you is done. I promise you
won’t be hunted down. But stay here and tangle with our pet lizard, and I can’t protect you from the consequences. You need
to ask yourself—all of you need to ask yourselves—what you’ll really do to protect those you love most in the world.”
Salem didn’t reply to that, and after a while the door clicked shut.