They could both see inside now. The axe was leaning against the counter near the kitchen sink. The fireplace was black and cold.
“Lucas! Yo! It’s Burt!” Disappointment began to slow his heartbeat.
Lubbock pushed past in a swish of plastic, stiff-arming the pistol out into the open. “Come on.”
Burt scanned around. Nice and dry inside. No wet footprints on the floor. Bits of broken glass strewn near the fireless hearth. Sleeping bag bundled up in one corner—-unused? No cups or plates racked in the dish drainer. A table with only two legs leaned face-into one wall.
“Outhouse out back,” announced Lubbock. After a fast glance out the kitchen window, he shifted his aim to cover the door to their right. It stood open just a crack. Serious gouges tattooed the wood, as though a monster cat had tried to claw its way in. The hinges had been ripped out and reset. The frame was splintered in axe-sized bites.
Halfway to the door Lubbock stopped and wrinkled his nose. “Smell it?”
All Burt had noticed about the dead air inside the cabin was that it was wonderfully dry. Now he caught an underlying scent, like rotten stew.
Lubbock’s brain shifted into overdrive. Part of his pseudo-paramedic job had been collecting the bodies of elderly people who had died alone in their homes. Sometimes they sat for days, weeks, before they were discovered and reported. When bodies settled, they leaked. He and his hundred-hour course mates picked them up from bathtubs whose water had long evaporated or peeled them from their stained deathbeds. A surprising number of deaths occurred while the victims were sitting on the toilet. Bones crackled inside papery skin envelopes stiff with rigor mortis and plum-purple with dependent lividity. Their homes always smelled the way Lucas Ellington’s cabin smelled now—clogged with the reek of slow decay.
Burt had been one of the first of Bravo Team to discover the Viet Cong body pit. He had nearly done a somersault into it in the dark. It was at least three bodies deep. Most of the bodies retained scraps of American olive drab, and none had kept all their parts. The rush of smell was rich and heady. Think of fresh shit, think of acetone, think of steaming, greenish-black maggot oatmeal plugging up your throat. Burt had turned away and blown his Type-B combat meal. He spent an hour cleaning vomit out of the Stoner rifle he had been carrying. You could catch hell for a dirty weapon. He had not been one of the unfortunates assigned to clear the pit or reassemble the corpses of his comrades, like grisly jigsaw puzzles. He hadn’t been able to keep food down for two days afterward. The pressed mystery meat inside the combat meal tins reminded him of ripe hanks of human flesh; its smell was too much like the miasma of rot that hung like a malign thundercloud over the mass grave. The smell in the cabin now was a soft echo of that long-past stench. Burt’s intestines shivered.
With a hard swallow, he thought that now was no time for cowardice and barfing. Here were two grown men dicking around in an obviously unoccupied cabin, skittish of a closed door and a funky smell.
He crossed the room and pushed open the door. Lubbock yelled, “Wait!” and Burt heard the .357’s hammer click back twice, into full cock.
Burt forgot the sickly vibrations of his body. All of his perception centered in his eyes, and the fleeting image they were able to absorb in the quarter second used up by the swing of the door. Even in that brief piece of elapsed time, he recorded too much, visually overloading, thinking that in front of him was the most shocking thing he would ever see in his life. He was too correct.
His last sight was of the tripwire on the door twanging taut as he pushed it all the way open. Then the booby-trapped mines waiting at chest level blew him and Lubbock clear across the cabin.
25
Sara’s attitude was prayerlike. She bent her head and watched soapy rinse water spiral down the bathtub drain as the massage spray pounded the kinks out of her thickly knotted neck and shoulder muscles. Funny, she thought, to step from the hostile shower outside, freezing and uncontrolled, to the one inside, which was rejuvenating and hot as a sauna. A force she could control with the twist of a spigot. That was the essence of civilization—control over nature.
Her drive down from the bay area had been monstrous, like touring the ocean floor at a crawl. She stopped often because of the null visibility. Once the rain ceased, she hit fog so dense it reflected her headlights hard enough to sting her eyes. It was tough to shake the idea that Burt’s undeniable utility became more lost to her with each mile, a lantern flame of sanity bullied by an ever-stronger wind.
At Olive Grove she had checked in early and clocked out late. During all those hours, Burt had not called, as he’d promised. Not a peep from Lucas, either—not that she expected a windfall like that. By mid-afternoon her concentration was destroyed every time the phone sounded off. By six o’clock she felt ready for the gibber and slobber ward. Anticipation could turn even a doctor who recognized the patterns into a basket case. She thought of the anecdote told of Cleckley, author of The Mask of Sanity. One day while in court, he looked up to see the psychopath in the docket dutifully reading his book. Knowing the rules didn’t mean you were immune to them. Defining a psychopath did not cure one.
She hated the idea that Burt had let her down or forgotten her as soon as she was out of range. You go on home; we men can fuck this up all by ourselves, thanks. At dusk she had moped home to nurse an entirely self-indulgent drunk of defeat.
There had been one call. From the police. It had not brightened her day.
Gabriel Stannard, rock singer and sole intact surviving member of Whip Hand, had neatly vanished from his Beverly Hills manse and could not be accounted for. Now everyone who had been alerted was engaged in damning mathematics: Stannard was gone. Lucas was gone. The rest of the Whip Hand members were dead, except for poor Jackal Reichmann, ex-drummer of the ex-’Gasm, who was busy becoming a veggie. Two and two usually equaled four… and four, in this case, was not the devoutly dedicated Eldon Quantrill, who was still in custody in Tucson.
While at work, calls to Sara’s home phone were automatically forwarded to her office; another line was added to her monthly GTE phone bill. Her home phone had remained inactive. Dead was such an ugly word.
She had even thumbed the little adjustment wheel on the bottom of the phone to make the bell ring as loudly as possible. So, naturally, it did not ring… until she was in the shower. She jerked her head from beneath the spray and heard the end of the brassy ring, then listened until it rang again to verify that the sound had not been her imagination in fifth gear. Then she was through the plastic curtain, planting soapy footprints on the blue plush of the bathroom rug, ignoring towels as she came out of the door in a burst of trapped steam. It took her one more ring to traverse the hallway, naked and dripping, and snatch the receiver from its cradle.
“Hello?” Her breath quickened.
“Hello. Is this, uh-787-8821?”
She did not recognize the voice. “Yes?”
“Congratulations. You have just been selected as a potential winner for over two thousand dollars in services, food, discounts at local retail outlets, even expense-paid trips to Las Vegas and Hawaii. Sound good?”
Soap sneaked into her eyes, hot and stinging. A sudden plunging feeling overcame her stomach, and her vision began to spot. Her constitution did not agree with this sort of prolonged suspense.
The phone solicitor took Sara’s befuddled pause as a license to forge ahead but had obviously lost his place on his spiel sheet. “Then you can… no, wait. Are you over eighteen years of age?”
“No.” Disgust finally surfaced. “But I fuck like a guinea pig anyway, my father tells me.”
“Beg pardon?” The minimum-wager was not sure he had just heard what he had just heard.
“Listen, ace. This is a crisis number, not a residence. You’ve just called the Emergency Heroin Addict Suicide Prevention Hotline. My board is lit up, and somebody out there is probably dying right now because you’re tying up the line.” The water all over her had gone cold, and she was fre
ezing.
“Oh. Huh. Geez, really?”
Sara had worked the phone-soliciting scam in college, suffering three and a half psychologically degrading days in the name of extra income. It had made her feel like a burglar, a rapist, invading people’s privacy and trying to sell them stuff they did not want. She’d finally quit without earning a single pie-in-the-sky commission and virtually had to drag the sleazy ringmaster of that telephonic circus to small-claims court to get her base wages. Now she could hear the other callers in the booths beyond her boy and knew they were all hungry and desperate enough to spend eight hours with phones in their ears, breaking and entering. It was shit work, strictly steerage class. She suddenly felt sorry for the guy and added, “I know the phone number lists are all random things, computer-generated. Sorry. Hope you find a real job soon.”
The other voice stayed silent for a moment, then: “Yeah, lady, so do I. If you’ve done this, you already know it sucks the canary.”
“No harm done. Bye now.”
She almost hated hanging up on the poor slob; he would certainly hate disconnecting from a sympathetic voice since now he’d have to dial another total stranger unless he did what Sara had done when the phone game became too much for her, and she discovered how she could pretend to be doing her spiel with one end of the receiver cord disconnected.
The minute or two she’d wasted on the line, however, was ample time for Burt or Lucas or the police to get fed up with a busy signal and hang up for another five minutes before trying again. Or ten. Or half an hour.
Her breasts and back had been dried by the air. Outside the bathroom it was definitely chilly, and she wanted to get back into the shower, embrace the steam, pull it deep into her lungs, and let it cleanse her. She belayed a moment to stare at the phone, daring it to ring again. That magic would not work until she was back in the shower. Fate was a sadistic bastard.
It was dark outside. Burt had mentioned taking the ranger up to Lucas’ cabin. Surely something had happened by now.
She shuddered despite the renewed gush of steaming water. Yeah, maybe something had happened all right. Maybe they had dragged Lucas out of that tiny locked room at the cabin, kicking and frothing. Maybe Lucas had opened them both up with gunfire at the first sign of approach. Maybe everybody was too dead to pick up the phone. Or maybe Lucas had taken his adolescent wonder girl and shagged ass to Vancouver hours before Burt knocked on the door. The options all seemed as ugly as that word. Dead.
There was no telling what the new improved Lucas was capable of.
On the other hand, maybe Burt was on his way to a phone at this very moment. The nearest-available pay phones were a good drive from the cabin, not counting the hike up and down the mountain or the progress-retarding factor of the storm that was still slamming down full bore, drowning everything. Maybe he was punching in her number right now.
Each thought of the young girl at the cabin hollowed her stomach, achingly.
Sara was not a believer in precognition, but as soon as Lucas took leave of Los Angeles, she swore she had felt a string break between her soup can and his. Had she foreseen the derailment of her budding relationship with Lucas so soon, and was the girl at the cabin culpable? The wily little bitch was young, young enough to be a surrogate daughter and a substitute wife.
Kristen and Cory, all back in a single package. Sara knew that while that conclusion held a thousand intriguing possibilities, she did not yet have the right to draw it.
She had to talk to Lucas. That was the wall she kept bashing into. She wished Lucas were here. He could explain the mysteries and the dropped-out puzzle pieces that were now making her head hurt as well as her stomach. Even if his answers were crazy, they’d at least give her more information so she could play analyst and invent the real answers, yes?
And there was angry jealousy, too, a hot rivet of it sizzling in the wall of her stomach. The girl was competition; preferred company for Lucas. Sara could not rationalize her way around that one. And had she blinded herself to the extent Burt had suggested because she wanted Lucas—wanted him enough to ignore obvious danger signals? A pang of guilt settled in next to the hot rivet.
Soap-clouded warm water rose over the tops of her feet. She bent to clear the drain mesh of loose hair and felt the hot water flow begin to pale. It was time to trade the warmth of the shower for that of the fireplace and her favorite chair, the one with the broad, work-area arms.
There were other kinds of warmth, too. She toweled off slowly, catching her breasts in a humid double handful of terrycloth, her slim hand sneaking between her legs to investigate the droplets suspended in the fine down there. No gray hairs, she thought, feeling amused and a little scandalous.
She reached back into the shower to crank both taps to full stop. The hot water spigot sometimes leaked. The faucet shut-off that diverted water to the showerhead clinked down with a loud echo, and the phone rang again. She turbaned her hair in a turquoise-colored towel and left the bathroom door open to defog the mirrors.
She actually had one arm extended to the phone on its antiqued corner table before she registered the dark figure leaning on the kitchen doorway.
A yelp of surprise forced its way out of her, and her body tried to backpedal, her feet still wet and treacherously slippery. She was totally naked except for the towel on her head. Reflex thoughts of rape defense scurried through her overloaded brain as the man at the end of the hallway stepped into the light.
“Hi, Sara,” said Lucas.
He was clad in black from top to bottom. There was a neutral grin on his face. And crooked into one arm was the largest automatic rifle Sara had ever seen.
26
At first Lubbock thought that his own faithful .357 pistol had gone off prematurely in his face. He did not recall pulling the trigger. Second thought: No round in the world makes a muzzle flash like that!
That PR fella from Los Angeles, Kroeger, had rushed a closed door and wrested control of a potentially hazardous situation from Lubbock. Lubbock had thought he was the authority here. But that Kroeger fella had jumped the gun and relieved Trace of all responsibility for what had happened next. Lubbock had learned to think this way while working ambulance duty. The country was gorged with scam artists who loved to pin lawsuits on public service guys like paramedics. Or Rangers. It all boiled down to the placement of responsibility, and Trace judged himself blameless.
His eyes had filled with so much white light that his pupils had snapped shut before his eyelids. The blast erased reality. His ears were slapped into deafness by coarse hands. He was lifted, turned, and spat out; he’d caught a glimpse of the cabin ceiling whirling past underneath him.
Underneath him?
His senses had popped all their fuses, shutting him down. This was death, he had thought, the Big D. So long, Norma, babe, wish you’d come off your period a week sooner.
As Lubbock floated up toward the light, toward consciousness, the images that were compressed into a corner of his brain began to push apart. They were too packed, too fast in coming, to permit individual review. Now they broke away and resolved into separate impressions.
Stupid civilian—don’t charge a closed door!
..bodies—oh, god—like the old folks we used to collect—a man and a woman?
…a co-op suicide, that’s what it looks like—he killed her, then killed himself, but why are they—
…blood oh jesus blood their heads are all red and dry their eyes are still open—
is this guy the Mental?
the wire on the door’s gonna snag hey don’t-!
…Holy FLICK!
that fella whatsisname Kroeger flying toward me—
…he’s hit he’s hit MY EYES!
Without opening his eyes, Lubbock saw the bodies again. They had been sitting on the workbench in the tiny room, feet dangling, leaning together like a pair of winos, the girl’s head on the man’s shoulder in a sort of postcard lover’s pose. The caked brick color of long-dried blood
had transformed their faces into shining masks punctuated by the unseeing, dulled jewels of their dead eyes. Their garments—or lack of garments—went unnoticed. They seemed drenched, entirely dyed in that horrible brick red, which had dried to a metallic crust. Lubbock had been surprised that there had not been more flies, nibbling at this feast with their microscopic proboscises. Maybe the rain had kept them away.
Now the pain faded up, as though on some volume control knob. Goodbye J. J. Cale, hello five-inch woodbiter corkscrew-twisting agony into each kidney.
Lubbock uttered his first strangled cry of pain. Air whistled past his broken front teeth. His next convulsion was motionless and silent, an internalized shot of pain. He did not know that he had bashed himself in the mouth with his faithful .357, the ramp sight shattering his two front teeth and his left canine at the gumline. His mouth had filled with blood, but since he was facedown on the floor, he had not strangled on it while unconscious.
Look, Ma, no hands.…
One of the corpses had been missing an arm. A strange disc was fastened to its throat, winking through the dry blood like an evil-eye fetish. A vision that transcended death; the All-Seeing Eye that Lubbock’s Paiute grandmother had told him about. Lubbock’s mind classified the other corpse as a woman because he saw her breasts; everything else was hideously androgynous. Her hair was very long and completely shellacked with blood. Most of her right brow was reversed inside-out, and a huge ditch in her head had pulled one side of her face up into a ghastly bogus leer. The man wore a vest and jeans. The woman was completely naked.
Naked, bludgeoned, and dead. As dead as you could get.
Then he remembered Kroeger flailing toward him, end over end, and the hot birdshot of pain clipping his ankles, and the din of shattering glass, and long splintered chunks of the door Kroeger had just opened flying at them like a jagged fusillade of arrows. Kroeger’s airborne body had formed a black silhouette surrounded by a corona of blast-furnace white. A rush of broiler heat had puckered Lubbock’s skin, followed by moving air, like the slipstream of a freight train going full throttle. He had been picked up and laundry-bagged on his head against the far side of the cabin. More pain began to pound at his skull in new and torturous ways.
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