The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [79]
...towards no one.
The room appeared to be empty. A door hung open and wide at the opposite wall, somehow barring the murky late morning daylight from merging with the yellowing lamp-lit room, as if an invisible field prevented its entrance. It was beginning again to rain outside, the steady drizzle pat-patting against what chalky stretch of rooftop Matt could see.
There was no sign of anyone else in the room and by the sight of the opened exitway Matt assumed Simon BoLeve had fled. If it was BoLeve.
He gazed around the attic room. He couldn’t believe someone was allowed to live in this space, could hold residence here and beyond the reach of the comforts and the laws of adequate housing, of sensible living. His attentions then riveted to Max.
He knelt down before Max, quickly. He lowered his gun, rested his grip and tossed it from one hand to the other. His free hand fell upon his dead friend’s shoulder. His touch went to Max’s neck, found where the pulse should be, felt for it. There was no pulse. He felt and felt again, his fingers pressing, still no pulse. Nothing. Matt slumped onto the hardwood floor before his longtime mentor. He didn’t give any thought to how Maxwell Polito’s own blood now seeped into his pant legs and around his shoes and through his socks. Matt was overwhelmed with loss at that moment as he would be for a long time afterwards, with his inept foresight and inability to have done something, anything, to have prevented this inexplicable tragedy. His sitting before Max was dreamlike, no, nightmarish, as though this entire episode was wrong and that Max was in truth truly still alive and should be rushed to the nearest hospital and that he would recover and that everything would be all right....
Everything.
Would be all right.
He wanted to hold him, but the very act of an embrace seemed as distant as the fact that his dear friend was gone, was murdered by something horrid, was attacked and slain only within the past hour and that Matt himself could’ve arrived a great deal sooner if only he’d realized the immediacy of the situation, if only he’d known a lot sooner where Max had disappeared to, or had been there when Max left to know that Max had left at all.
He removed his hand from Max and reached below the rim of his jacket for the CB hidden and holstered and noiseless upon his belt. He would radio in, call for backup pronto, get the goddamn Marines to get in on this if he had to.
Simon BoLeve would be found.
No matter who or what the fuck that bastard was.
“Maxy......oh, Maxy....”
Matt unbuttoned the thin black strap which overlooped the base of the CB’s fat black antenna, slid the radio from its holster and clicked a switch at its top. As he did so he noticed how it shook by the jittery nervousness of his hand. The radio came alive with static.
Suddenly there came a voice, from his right, from his immediate left, from behind him, from anywhere, from everywhere at once, “He is not dead, but sleepeth....”
He surmounted his gun in an extended arm’s grip, his gaze darted and fell in every direction. The voice was clearly female, and his first notion was that it originated from young Alice upon the bed. Yet the girl remained unconscious and silent and the voice to him held the distinct impressions of an older woman, almost an elderly woman, yet it hadn’t been a weak voice but a voice of cold authority.
The next moment afterwards, from behind a dusty row of furniture to the extreme right of the room and at the misty borders of the desk lamp’s radiance sprung the half-nude and bearded figure of a man, making a mad dash from hidden cover towards the opened exit door to the roof...but the door to the roof was not his destination as he avoided it completely and instead made for the pillowed corner of the room.
This took only a millisecond as Matt spun, his gun quick to take dead aim. “Freeze!”
In the