Free Ash Wednesday by Chet Williamson, Neil Jackson Page A

flag?"
    "I like red, white, and black, and I couldn't find an Egyptian flag, all right?"
    The man laughed. "Christ, Meyers, you're so fuckin' weird. . . . Got another a' those beers?"
    Brad opened two more bottles. "Let's drink a toast," he said, his words only slightly slurred.
    "Fine with me. What to?"
    Brad jutted out his lower lip and thought a moment. Then he looked out the window at the empty green bench across the street by Western Auto. "To Rorrie Weidman," he said, raising his bottle.
    ''Who?''
    "A gentleman and scholar and bench sitter with a prodigious appetite for living, but now, alas, without a life to live."
    The man shrugged. "Your beer," he said, raising his own bottle in the toast. "Rorrie . . . what's his name . . .”
    "Yeah," said Brad, his eyes on the bench in the pool of lamplight. " Rorrie what's his name."

CHAPTER 5
     

    "Rorrie?" Christine said. "Rorrie who ?"
    "Rorrie Weidman," Brad whispered.
    Christine's voice was sharp, panic-hued. "The one who died ?"
    Brad nodded, and Christine shuddered again, as though a wave of arctic cold had just swept the room. He pushed past her, heading for the bedroom. "Don't leave me!" she squealed, pattering after him.
    "Mommy"—Wally's small voice leaked out from behind his bedroom door—"what's happenin '? Mommy, I'm scared, there's funny things outside."
    But Christine's own fear was too great to share with another, and she gave his door a harsh rap as she passed it. "Shut up! Oh, just shut up, Wally!" She was inches behind Brad when he entered their bedroom, bumping into his back when he stopped suddenly at the clothes tree and began to pull on jeans and a work shirt. "What are you doing ?" she said. "What are you getting dressed for?"
    "Going outside." He tugged on a tattered pair of Adidas.
    “Outside? Why ?"
    "I've got to see something."
    "You're not gonna leave me in here with that thing?" she wailed, grasping at his shirtfront.
    "Then come with me." He pulled away and started for the hall.
    " No! "
    "Then go to hell,” he threw back as he half ran for the apartment door, slowing only to note that the black man in the living room was still there.
    " Brad! " Christine cried, but as she reached the end of the hall, she heard the apartment door slam shut. He was gone, and to follow him now would mean having to go alone past the thing in the living room.
    Suddenly she became aware of her son's muffled sobbing, but it was the desire for companionship rather than the maternal instinct that made her enter his room, say, "Wally, Mommy's here," and crawl beneath the sheets of the narrow single bed with the quivering boy.
    Even Brad, for all his reckless speed, was shaking before he stepped out onto the pavement in front of his building. He paused at the bottom of the stairs, looking out through the streaked window at the streets and sidewalks of Merridale. The sirens had finally quieted, but the dogs were still sending up a raucous cacophony. Beneath their howls he could hear voices of men and women, shouts, cries, screams. Lights in other apartments on Market Street flickered on and off in a warped harmony. He thought it seemed like hell on earth, with the souls of the damned encased in blue fire.
    He took a deep breath and stepped outside. The screams were louder here, the blue lights brighter, and at first he nearly turned around and went back upstairs. But then he remembered that he'd been through worse, and kept moving. All around him the cerulean lights gleamed, each one a huge candle made by a corpse, for death was stamped on every face, molded in the curve of each naked body. Like the old man in Brad's apartment, like the sprawled form of Andy Koser frozen on the sidewalk, not one moved, and the light breeze that poured through the funnel of the street did not stir a single hair of the dead.
    As far as he could see. Brad was the only living creature on the street. Now and then a door would open, a head would peer out, but it would be quickly withdrawn, as