At present he was fucking the dead cop’s wife in the bed she’d shared with her husband and that giving him plenty of motive to have killed his partner but absolutely no apparent reason whatsoever to explain why he’d wrap his hands around her neck, as he was doing at present, tightening his grip and squeezing the life out of her.
A shot rang out—
Or so it said on the page at the exact moment the lights winked off.
Submerged in the dark and cursing, Son of a bitch, staring up at the bulb on the ceiling as if it might provide some clue as to what had happened. Despite the book’s shortcomings, he’d been drawn into its web of deceit and casual violence and was eager to get back to it.
The old woman was again calling out, Nurse! Nurse!
It wasn’t but a second before the pretty young nurse was calling back: It’s probably just the breaker. I’ll go take a look.
Lying back on his bed, the dark so pervasive he needn’t have shut his eyes though he did as he often would when ruminating on something he’d read, thinking about what had just happened and trying to figure out what might happen next.
Maybe it was the woman’s son who’d shot the cop.
Except he was only five and autistic on top. It seemed a stretch that he’d have had the will to shoot anyone even if it was the man strangling his mother. Someone else maybe. The real killer perhaps. Maybe it was the heavy breather who’d been leaving messages on her phone after her husband had died, a subplot — and not a very convincing one either — which the author had seemingly used solely to add a little extra tension to the early chapters but which Clayton now reasoned might be linked to the main story. A stalker who was in love with a woman such that he’d killed her husband and had now killed her lover too. Or maybe he hadn’t killed her husband and had simply been watching her, seeing the partner choking the life out of the object of his desire and stepping in at the last moment to save his one true love. Clayton imagining then the woman gasping on the bed, pinned under her would-be murderer. The stalker rolling him off and the woman choking for breath, sitting up sobbing, her face spattered with blood and the stalker sitting down beside her, taking her in a gentle embrace, soothing her.
It’s okay. You’re going to be okay.
The woman getting her first good look at him. She’d have seen him before. The creepy neighbour who was always out watering his lawn whenever she left for work or maybe it was that athletic-looking guy at the drugstore at the end of the block who’d paid for her tampons that time she’d forgotten her wallet and was in urgent need.
Either way, he’d brush the hair from her face even as he reached for a tissue from the box beside the bed, using it to wipe the blood in delicate caresses from her cheeks.
We have to call the police, he’d say, the woman startling at the thought, yelling, No!
But why, No!?
Could have been she’d killed her husband in the first place, which is what Clayton had thought by the third chapter, changing his mind twice in the meanwhile and thinking now that he’d been right from the start.
Maybe—
But wherever that thought might have led would have to wait.
He’d just heard a crackled pop! It sounded almost electrical in origin, so it could have been the nurse flipping the breaker. But the lights didn’t come back on and it was shortly followed by a second. There was no mistaking that one. It was a rifle shot. Listening as its dying echo was engulfed under a virulent rat-a-tat-tat!
Someone’s shooting off a machine gun!
An explosion then: a sudden and cataclysmic boom! accompanied by a flare of light imprinted in the tent’s green as a deep shade of purple and ruffling its canvas, rattling the crossbeams and startling Clayton upright on the bed. As it faded, he could hear a distant scream — a woman’s high-pitched wail sliced in two giving way to the old woman across the hall yelling, Nurse! Nurse! What’s going on? Nurse!
Swinging his feet over the side of the bed, he set his good one on the floor, testing his bad against the hard-packed dirt and then pushing himself upwards. A sharp stab shot up his bandaged leg. Bracing himself against his next step and wincing through the pain, he hobbled forward, swiping at the flap blocking his way and lurching through.
He could just make out the old woman standing half in and half out of her own cubicle, too afraid to venture any further. Screams resounded now of a frantic pitch that suggested to Clayton that a rabid grizzly had been loosed in the camp and these were punctuated by gunshots like a posse of twelve had surrounded it and were right then shooting it down. But that hardly explained the explosion, or the fiery tinge leaking through the slit in the flaps leading to the waiting room.
What the devil’s going on? the old woman asked as Clayton surged past.
He could hear the ragged rasp of her husband calling out, Sable, which he took to be the woman’s name. She didn’t respond with so much as a twitch in his direction, her eyes following Clayton, his form now cast in an aura of red from the infernal glow seeping in through the door. Parting the slit and stepping into the waiting room, as bright as the inside of a Chinese lantern but lit from without. Shadows roamed the walls, vague and ominous shapes like creatures of some ancient malevolence fleeing a maelstrom against the crackle of fire, the screams and the sporadic bursts of gunfire. The pretty young nurse was crouched behind her desk, peering over its top, flinching every time she heard a shot. Clayton spied her not two steps in and took a quick sideline, skirting to the desk and crouching down beside her.
What the hell’s going on? he whispered.
She shook her head in a quick lateral spasm and that was about all she seemed prepared to say on the matter.
You stay here, Clayton said, I’ll go take a look-see.
She grabbed at his arm with a desperate clutch as he stood.
I’ll only be a moment, he said. I’m just gonna take a peek.
She released his arm with grave reluctance and he stalked towards the entrance, ducking low and walking with a sideways gait as if such might render him invisible. He was two steps from the tent flaps when they flew open. A man flailed through the part, clutching at his jaw, or rather at the empty space where his jaw should have been. All that was left was its top teeth, the fronts jagged and broken and blood weeping in a steady stream between his fingers as he fell to his knees, Clayton lunging out of the way as the man’s head leaned forward at a drastic angle, and his body following that, slumping face-first onto the ground. Tendrils of flame lapped at the shirt on his back and the hair at the base of his skull was singed and smouldering. His hand clawed out in front of him, dragging him forward as if two or three inches more might have meant all the difference.
The smell of burnt flesh and hair tickled at Clayton’s nose as he circled wide around him, muffling a cough against his arm, and coming to the door. He paused there, all reason telling him he ought to just turn tail and run, grab the girl, set out for anywhere but here.
But he’d come this far and his hand was already reaching out, pulling back the tent flap no more than two fingers’ width. All he could see through the slit was an ocean of flame. The bank of tents was set ablaze and a woman was thrashing out from the nearest of these. She was clutching something to her breast — could have been a baby. The tent had melted over both, enveloping them in the shroud of burning blue, and she was screaming such a horror he’d never even imagined possible, with only worse yet to come.
A hulking figure appeared, striding out of the inferno as if the flames couldn’t touch him. It was one of the grim riders Clayton had seen at the prison. He was naked save for a tattered pair of jean shorts and had a weapon raised in one hand, as long as a machete though it was made of steel the thickness of a lawn mower’s blade. It was serrated along its outside edge and sharpened on its inner and a barbed prong jutted from its tail end. He was swinging it in mid-arc down on the woman and child on fire.
But it was only the old woman emerging from the back.
What in the blazes is going on? she asked in a tentative croak.
They were already bustling past, careening blindly through the door, the nurse in the lead, hauling Clayton by the arm, hobbling to keep up.
Lady, he screamed, you got to get the fuck outta here!
34
Brett had given Émile the bottle four days ago.
He and Larry, the settlement’s so-called quartermaster, had opened a carload of Canadian Club forty-ouncers and he’d sought Émile out in his camper van. It was parked in a small recess on the far side of the solar panels, Émile choosing a spot at a careful remove from the camp the same way he’d always lived on the outskirts of any community he was meant to police.
You’ll want to keep a lid on that, Émile had advised after Brett told him there were about a thousand more bottles where that came from.
If his thirty years with the Ontario Provincial Police had taught him anything it was that the quickest way from bad to worse was adding liquor to the mix. He’d told Brett as much and Brett had answered, offering him a backhanded wave as he’d walked away, I’ll certainly take that under advisement.
He never had, as far as Émile knew, and making his rounds over the next three days, Émile had to settle an increasingly frequent, and virulent, series of disputes. Mostly it was couples who’d had one too many and were keeping the neighbours up with their foolishness, the worst of them a brawl involving five men and a “friendly” game of cards that had spilled out of a thirty-five-foot cabin cruiser hitched behind a pick-up truck. It’d got Émile to considering that maybe it was time to convert one of the empty railcars into a drunk tank — and that, perhaps paradoxically, had got him to thinking about the bottle he himself had in the van, how it’d take at least a couple of extra nips beyond the two he allowed himself before bed if he’d have any hope of falling asleep.
But on this night, sitting in the van’s driver’s seat, he’d drunk half the bottle and was as wide awake as he’d ever been, his mind addled in restless agitation not so much by the memory of what he’d done — he’d been a cop too long to lose sleep over shooting a couple of Euphies — but by the memory of what he hadn’t. And what he hadn’t done was kill that son of a bitch Gerald Nichols when he’d had the chance. How many times had he told one of his constables during the trial that if he’d been the one to find him he sure as hell wouldn’t have let him make it out of the woods alive? Killing two officers of the law in cold blood, that son of a bitch, all the while letting his wife bleed out on the floor. He didn’t even try to call an ambulance, just left her to die like she was no better’n a dog. And every reprobate and low-life in the province treating him like some sort of folk hero for what he’d done. And who had paid the price? Cops, that’s who. Eight more shot in the nine months he was on the lam, and then there was that kid who shot his stepfather, said it was the book that journalist from Toronto wrote about Nichols that had given him the idea.
Fucking Savage Gerry!
Just thinking about it was enough to make Émile want to put his hand through the windshield. He’d tried to read it himself, didn’t get past the introduction. Barely even read half of that. The gall — the fucking gall! — calling him a modern-day renaissance man on the first page when he wasn’t anything but some no-account dope peddler. And then demanding they reopen the case not five pages later. Saying that Charlie Wilkes had falsified evidence, that Gerald Nichols was the real victim.
A victim? How dare he! He was a fucking animal, that’s what he was. No better than a rabid dog. And what do you do with rabid dogs? You don’t let them walk around spreading their disease. And you sure as hell don’t call for their release. You shoot those motherfuckers on sight!
And here you’ve had the chance twice now—
Wrenching open the van’s door and stumbling out, his feet skewing wildly beneath him on the soggy ground, one hand steadying himself on the door’s frame and his other reaching for his sidearm. The rain had dwindled to a sprinkle but the wind was still fierce. It snatched the hat from his head, sending it pinwheeling end over end into the dark, sweeping it under a railcar.
Fuck it, Émile cursed, turning down the road leading into the camp.
It was pocked with muck holes filled by the rain and by the time he’d reached the far side his feet were sloshing in his shoes. He suspected Gerald Nichols was in an Airstream parked along the tracks. He’d seen a woman calling to him from there as he’d led Officer Dawson to the hospital after he’d shot those two Euphies.
He’s probably raped and killed her by now. Fucking killed her and then raped her, most likely. An animal like that. Drank her fucking blood, you can bank on that!
Yet no matter how he goaded himself he couldn’t summon the will to more than stand at the edge of the Airstream’s awning, glaring at the door, listening for any sign of distress that, at last, would have compelled him to act.
All he heard though was the wind whistling through the camp and flapping at the tents and further away, a growling snarl. It was coming from behind him. As he turned towards the tracks there was a sudden whimpering yelp! that couldn’t have come from anything but a coyote.
They’re after the bodies!
After he’d left Dawson at the hospital he’d rounded up Brett, a couple of tarps and two spade shovels. They’d put the bodies of each of the Euphies on a tarp and dragged them across the tracks, laying them beside the grave where they’d buried that family who’d stumbled into camp dying from radiation poisoning. The mother had been carrying a baby who was already dead and the father a three-year-old who’d die two hours later. The parents barely lasted the night. Nobody in the settlement, as far as Émile knew, had learned where they’d come from, or even their names, but half the camp had turned out for the ceremony when they’d laid them to rest in a single grave within the shade of a crab-apple tree on the far side of the tracks. It seemed as good a place as any to bury the two Euphies, and him and Brett had made a go at digging the grave even as the rain pelted down around them, giving up only when the hole had filled to their ankles with water.
Maybe we’ll be lucky, Brett had jibed with his characteristic jocularity as they hurried for cover, and the wolves’ll make off with ’em before we get back.
Émile had smiled then but he wasn’t smiling now as he crested the rail bed. The moon’s crescent was winking through a ragged striation of furrowed clouds and in its transient glow he could make out the distinct shape of three coyotes, though they were almost big enough to be wolves. Two were chewing at the bodies and the third was skulking on a narrow perimeter, snarling and growling, eager to get his share.
Get away from there, he screamed, you filthy bastards!
Starting down the slope and his feet sliding out from under him in an avalanche of crushed gravel. He landed hard on his rear and pain shot up from his elbows battering against the sharp stones, that only further inflaming his ire.
Lunging back to his feet, his sidearm in his hand, aiming and firing a shot. It sounded like a cannon going off in his hand, making him regret it even as its echo was swept away by the wind, knowing he’d just woken up half the camp and for what? He might as well have been shooting at the stars for all
the good it did. The two coyotes had barely glanced up from their feed before going right back to it and the other was staring at him with the curious expression of a dog whose master had just delivered it an unprovoked kick.
Bending low, he swiped a baseball-sized rock from the rail bed and approached them with it cocked back, daring them to make a move. He’d got to within ten paces before all three of them wheeled around at once, scurrying for the trees, and Émile hollering, You better run!
Flinging the stone after them, he snatched up one of the shovels stuck upright between the bodies and the half-dug grave. He chased them to the edge of the trees with its blade upraised as a bludgeon, panting with the heaving chest of a racehorse run too hard, harder than a man who’d already had two heart attacks had any business breathing.
Feeling doubly the alcohol now churning in his stomach, reducing his legs to a pair of flimsy pipe cleaners, phlegm congealing in his throat. He hacked it up, propped over the shovel, the handle sinking into the muddy ground and his hand slaking along its wetted shaft, almost taking him down with it.
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