Last Call (Last Call 1)

It was like walking in certain frustrating dreams he often had. The effort of dragging one leg, and then the other, through the thick soup of the air was so exhausting that he had to look down at the littered sidewalk to make sure that he was moving forward and not simply flexing and sweating in place.

A two-foot length of metal pipe whacked the pavement in front of him and instantly sprang away to devastate a curbside bush, and he had dimly, distantly heard it ring when it hit. Perhaps he was not permanently deafened. He kept walking, though it was not getting any easier.

The apartment was a hollowed-out shell, with three walls leaning outward and the roof entirely gone. A yard-long jet of flame fluttered where the kitchen had been. The apartment next door looked relatively whole, though there was no glass in any of the windows.

Oliver was standing on the walkway with his arms spread wide, and then he fell to his knees and seemed to be stressfully vomiting or convulsing, and it seemed to Ozzie that the boy was forcing himself to do it—even though the spasms looked to be tearing his ribs apart—the way a person might cut his hand to bloody ribbons just to cut out of the flesh the unbearable foreignness of an intrusive splinter.

A moment later Ozzie blinked and rubbed his eyes, wondering if he had suffered a concussion when the car door hit him, for he seemed to be seeing double—next to the little boy crouched on the walkway, and half overlapping him, was a semi-transparent duplicate image of the boy.

Then, though young Oliver didn't move, the duplicate image stood up, turned away, and stepped into invisibility.

Ozzie was having trouble breathing, and when he breathed out sharply, he realized that his nose was bleeding. There must be blood all down the front of his shirt.

He finally hobbled his way to Oliver, who was kneeling now. Ozzie knelt beside him. The boy's face was red and twisted with violent sobbing, and when Ozzie put his arms around him, he clung to the old man as if he were the only other person in the world.

In the laundry room of the apartment building on the other side of Sun Avenue, Diana braced herself against a washing machine and waited for her breathing and heartbeat to slow down.

She was too stunned by the almighty slam that had shaken the street under her feet to cry, but in her head was nothing but an endlessly repeating wail of Hans, Hans, Hans …

At last she was able to breathe through her nose, and she straightened up. Mostly because she found herself facing a washing machine, she fished three quarters out of her pocket, laid them in the holes in the machine's handle, and pushed it in.

The machine went on with a clunk, and she could hear water running inside the thing. The still air smelled of bleach and detergent.

Hans, you damned, arrogant, posing fool, she thought—you didn't deserve a whole lot, but you deserved better than this.

She forced herself not to remember the times, in bed but also cooking dinner or out with Scat and Oliver on a holiday, when he had been thoughtful and tender and humorous.

"Was that a bomb?" came a woman's voice behind her.

Diana turned around. A white-haired woman pushing an aluminum walker was angling in through the door, kicking along in front of her a plastic basket full of clothes.

Diana knew she should say something, seem curious. "I don't know," she said. "Uh … it sounded like one."

"I wish I could go look. I was shoving this stuff down the breezeway, and boom, I see all this shit go flying into the air! Probably it was a dope factory."

"A dope factory."

"PCP," the old woman said. "Could you put my clothes in here? It kills me to bend over."

"Sure." Diana stuffed the yellow blanket into her tight hip pocket, then hauled the clothes out of the basket and dumped them into a washer.

"They need chemicals like ether and stuff to make their PCP, and they gotta cook it. And since they're dopers, they get careless. Boom!" The old woman looked at the other machine, which was spinning its empty drum. "Honey, these machines are for tenants only."

"I just moved in." Diana dug a twenty-dollar bill out of her pocket. "I don't have a car yet. Could I pay somebody here to drive me to work? It's just—just over at the college."

The old woman eyed the bill. "I can drive you, if you can wait for my stuff to get done, and if you don't mind being seen in a beat-up ten-year-old Plymouth,"

"I don't mind the car, but could we go now?"

"What about your clothes?"

Diana waved at a wooden shelf on the white wall. "I'm sure the next person to use the machine will just put 'em aside."

"I'm sure." The old woman took the twenty. "Okay, if you'll fish my stuff out again and carry it all back to my apartment for me. I can do mine later, I guess."

"Great," said Diana. Her elbows and knees had begun shaking, and she knew she was going to break down crying very soon, and she didn't want it to happen while she was still anywhere near this tract of unlucky celestial bodies.