Free Endless Night by Richard Laymon Page B

good and dark, though. And so were their muffs. You could see them great. And you could also see their stab wounds, which looked like dark slots all up and down their fronts. I don’t know why, but neither of the gals was bloody. Maybe the cameraman cleaned them off so they’d make better pictures, or something. I don’t know.
    That kid, George, always had his nose in those pictures—at least when he wasn’t showing them around to impress the rest of us, that is. And he was not a particularly screwy guy. In fact, he was a model student. Straight As, the whole nine yards.
    What I’m getting at, we all basically enjoyed that kind of stuff back when we were in junior high. It wasn’t just Tom and his little clique of future Krulls.
    This other kid, Harold ...
    Wait. I’m running off at the mouth again. The thing is, I’m stuck here for a while and I’ve got this tape recorder and enough tapes to recite War and Peace or The Tommyknockers or something. It’s a real temptation to blabber everything under the sun.
    I do want to tell everything, that’s the problem.
    The problem in more ways than one.
    Where was I? Am I gonna have to rewind again? No. was on top of the wall. Right.
    I was telling about how Tom wants to keep the Krulls a big secret, and that’s why he’d take all sorts of big risks just in order to kill the girl and the kid.
    I’d just come up with the idea of lying, saying I’d seen them run into a house.
    A stunt like that might get us moving quick.
    I decided to give it a try.
    Just when I was about to jump down, though, here come the sounds of a skidding roll and thud.
    That’s okay, I thought. It’s the side door of Tom’s van sliding shut. They’d gone ahead and tossed the bodies in, so now they were about ready to come over here to help me search.
    But then car doors started thumping shut. They went fast: thump thump-thump thump thump thump. Then engines sputtered and zoomed.
    My stomach dropped like a ton of lead.
    I jumped off the wall and ran for the house.
    Ran for about five seconds before two more things happened: the noise of the car engines faded out, and I saw flames behind the big picture window of the old bat’s house.
    None of that stopped me, though.
    The fire kept me from taking a shortcut through the house, so I raced around the side and had to waste time fooling with a gate. By the time I got out front and had a view of the street, my friends were gone.
    We’d come up here in the van and five cars, and some of us had doubled up. I’d driven Chuck. I’d picked him up at his house in my Mustang. (Plates covered with masking tape.) We’d passed my flask of rum back and forth along the way, and we’d smoked a couple of his cigars. We’d had us a fine old time, joking around and stuff even though we were feeling pretty tense. As per standard operating procedure, I’d left my key in the ignition before Chuck and I climbed out and headed over to the van.
    Now, everything was gone.
    Including my Mustang.
    There’s an old John Wayne movie called They Were Expendable . It’s about PT Boat guys in World War Two. (It’s been colorized now, so you can see how Duke looks with black lips.) Anyway, I was just a kid the first time I saw it, and had to ask my old man what it meant, expendable. He told me, “It means nobody gave a rat’s ass if they lived or died.”
    It means more than that, though.
    You’re expendable when the mission’s more important than your life. More important to someone. That someone isn’t likely to be you.
    Those guys, Tom in particular, had decided I was expendable. No matter what the cost—to me—I’d have to stay behind, hunt down the girl and the kid, and kill them.
    I muttered, “Thanks a heap, motherfuckers.”
    Then fire blasted through a downstairs window of the big house up the street where we’d staged our raid.
    SOP: take the stiffs, bum the houses, beat it before the fire trucks show.
    We’d never left a man behind, though, until