but she doesn’t understand why he keeps getting tired. “You have to swim, honey! Please! Oh, God! He’s drowning!”
Christopher knew he had to defeat the nice man, or this would be the world’s eternity. The people in the clearing would blame each other. Turn on each other. The nice man had gathered them all together to play a game of pickup war. Shirts and skins. Tribes could be made out of something as small as a sports team. It would start at this clearing. One neighbor would strike another neighbor. And that neighbor would have a cousin somewhere who would join in. Then, another. And another. Until everyone knew a mother or father or brother or sister or spouse or son or daughter who was wronged by some other mother or father or brother or sister or spouse or son or daughter. And the two sides would begin fighting and they would never stop. They would never die. They would never listen. They would just bleed. Hell would come to Earth.
Christopher looked up ahead as flowers lined the path leading out of the Mission Street Woods.
Christopher reached the street.
He stopped the moment he saw it. His neighborhood. His house. The log cabin. The cul-de-sac with a beautiful night fog mixed with the morning dew. All of it was trying desperately to look happy despite the fact that it was burning. He heard muffled screams coming from the houses. Thousands more trapped behind stitches. Trying to sound so cheerful.
“He’s back! He’s back! Hello, Christopher,” they said.
He saw the man in the Girl Scout uniform tip his softball visor. The couple made yum yum sounds as they kept kissing until their teeth landed on the street like pebbles. The mailbox people stood next to each other like passengers crammed into a train. No doors. No seats. No hope. The street stretched forever as the mailbox people lined the sides, keeping everyone in their place as the damned screamed the same thing under their smiles.
“Make it stop! Please, God!”
There was only one person not smiling. She lay on the lawn next to the street. Her feet and hands bound. Surrounded by deer.
It was the hissing lady.
“You’re off the street,” she said, defeated.
Christopher stepped onto the cul-de-sac. Deer started to walk around the circle like a snake hugging its young. A shrouded figure walked toward Christopher. It reached its hand out. Then, it slowly took off its shadow the way others take off clothes at the end of a long day.
It was the nice man.
He looked so handsome. So clean. A charming man in a grey suit. He smiled so pleasantly. His mouth full of baby teeth.
“Hello,” he said. “I’m sorry, but you need to kill her now. it’s tiMe.”
Christopher looked at him. The nice man had no weapon in his hand. Just a pleasant expression. And a paternal nod.
“because god iS a murderer.”
Chapter 122
Daddy.
The sheriff opened the door.
He looked down the hallway of an old tenement building. For a moment, he wondered why he wasn’t in the tree house. He was sure he opened the door to the tree house, but this was definitely an old tenement building. The door closed with a heavy click behind him.
Ding.
The elevator opened down the hall. A teenage couple walked out of the elevator. The boy was about sixteen. The girl was seventeen. He was black. She was white. She held their baby.
The baby was crying.
“Daddy!”
The sheriff stopped for a moment and felt like he had been here before. Like this had already happened. But he quickly shook off the feeling.
He had a job to do.
“Excuse me. I received a complaint about a smell coming from room 217. Do you know who lives—”
The couple quickly looked away and slipped into their apartment without a word. The sheriff heard them dead-bolt their door with a Click. Click. Click. The sheriff was used to people not wanting to talk to police officers, but he hadn’t heard three locks since he moved to the suburbs. It gave his stomach a sinking feeling.
He walked down the hallway toward the elevator. It was one of those old lifts with a gold-plated mechanical display. It looked like the top half of a clock with an arrow that moved from 9 to 3.
But this one was pointing straight down at 6.
It must have been broken.
The sheriff pushed the button. He watched the gold-plated arrow move through the semicircle in the wrong direction.
Ding.
The elevator door opened. He saw a middle-aged couple in the elevator. The