Red Web

by Ninie Hammon

  The Blaine Thing pulls the tissue out of Martha's ear and the bleeding has stopped now and he uses another tissue to wipe all the blood out of her ear. But he's still mad.

  He glances at Katydid then.

  "What are you looking at?" He knows she is not looking at anything but he crosses the room to where she is sitting in front of the window, grabs her by the shoulders and shakes her violently and her head snaps back and forth. "Stop looking at me, you vegetable!" He jabs her forehead hard with his finger and it hurts. "Nothing in there but rotten tomatoes."

  He stops shaking her and gets right down in her face, inches from her nose. His breath smells like garlic and decayed teeth and when he speaks, he is so angry he spits on her.

  "Want me to stick this in your ear?" He holds up the hairpin with Martha's blood on it. "Poke a hole in your eardrum, maybe poke so far into your head it sticks into your brain and all the rotted tomato juice will come running out your ear."

  Katydid is frightened now. There are no nurses around. He can stick that in her ear and they won't see. And he can come back tomorrow and do it again! If he's mad at her, he can do other things to her, too, when the nurses aren't there.

  The Blaine Thing grabs a handful of Katydid's hair and yanks her head sideways toward her shoulder. He shoves the hair on the other side away from her ear and—

  Shannuck grabs the Blaine Thing's neck and squeezes, roaring rage filling every tissue in the black spider's body. He watches the look on the Blaine Thing's face downshift from shock and surprise to fear. And he is excited by the fear. It makes him feel strong and powerful. Makes him feel good.

  "You want to hurt Katydid?" Shannuck rumbles, a raspy, grating voice that sounds like rusty machinery. "You like to make pain? Let's see how you like to feel pain!"

  Shannuck rises up to his full height on his hind legs, rises up tall and black and hairy and terrible and beautiful on his hind legs on the bed and holds the Blaine Thing out in front of him like a wasp caught in his web. Then he throws the Blaine Thing to the floor and leaps on his chest. He uses one hairy leg to pin his neck to the floor and with the other, he gouges out the Blaine Thing's right eye. Claws it out of the socket. The Blaine Thing is screaming soundlessly, hysterical, terror granting him strength as he tries to wrench out of Shannuck's grasp but his strength is nothing. Shannuck can lift a hundred times his own body weight, has the crushing power of a trash compactor in a garbage truck. He claws out the Blaine Thing's other eye.

  Shannuck hates bugs that make pain, like the wasps and bees that stung Katydid. He grabs the Blaine Thing by the throat with both his hairy, black arms, smells the stink as the Blaine Thing pees and craps himself, smells the feces with the hairs on his own legs. And Shannuck gets his spider face up to Blaine's, who can't see anymore. "Now, you die, hateful, hurting bug!"

  Shannuck hurls the Blaine Thing at the screen on the window, which bursts outward with his weight and he drops instantly out of sight.

  Scuttling across the room to the sink, Shannuck washes the gore off his black spider legs, wipes away all the Blaine Thing's blood, then just as quickly returns to the wheelchair and sits back down into it.

  And Shannuck is gone.

  Katydid sees out through the eyes, looks at the window. The screen on the window is gone. There is a stink now — feces and other things on the floor in front of the window. But the Blaine Thing is gone now. She sees that Martha's ear has begun to bleed again. It has dripped down her earlobe and is pooling on her shoulder, staining the pink nightgown her daughter brought to her for her birthday.

  Then a nurse comes into the room. Katydid hears her but doesn't see her until she comes closer. She looks down at the puddle of stinky stuff in front of the window, then leans out of it to look down. She freezes for a moment before she jumps back so suddenly she hits her head on the window. She backs away, then turns and runs out of the room.

  Martha reaches up to feel the blood on her ear. And she smiles at Katydid.

  A sudden crack shattered the air and hunks of bark and wood exploded off a tree two feet from where Nakamura had been standing when he was talking on the phone to the boy.

  Nakamura hit the dirt.

  "What the—?"

  Another shot ripped into a tree about twenty feet from them, where Brice was sure the boy could see that officers were stationed behind a berm of bushes.

  Nakamura grabbed the loudspeaker and pressed the button.

  "Lucas, stop firing! Nobody's going to come charging in on you. Stop shooting."

  Another bullet ripped into the brush a couple of feet to the left of where Nakamura was now crouched behind a burnt stump and a small bush.

  "What's he doing?" Nakamura called out to Brice, who had taken refuge behind the door of his cruiser. "He knows we won't return fire. Is he trying to back us up farther away from the house?"

  He put the megaphone to his lips and spoke again.

  "Lucas, can we talk? I'm going to call on the house phone. Pick up and let's talk."

  The boy's response was another barrage of bullets, this time at the officers on the north side of the house behind a hillock, the shots kicking up tufts of dirt as they plugged into the ground.

  Nakamura punched in the number of the phone at the cabin and listened to the ring. The boy didn't pick up, but he did fire two rounds at the officers behind the house.

  "Does he think there's going to be a shootout?" Nakamura said.

  Brice caught sight of the boy moving quickly from one vantage point in the fire tower on top of the house to another, glimpses of movement, nothing you could get a bead on. Shots rang out again and pieces of tree bark leapt off trees on the west side of the house. Brice took the opportunity to dash across the few feet separating his cruiser from the stump and bush Nakamura was using for cover.

  "You a hunter?" he asked, looking out through the limbs of the bush at the cabin sitting in the clearing.

  "No, why?"

  "I don't know what Quantico trained you on other than your service weapon — AR-15s, maybe, or AK-47s?" He didn't wait for a response. "From the sound of it, this boy's firing a Browning A-bolt .270 hunting rifle, likely has a Diamondback HP 3-12x42 scope. You put the crosshairs of that scope on a deer and if you know how to work the rise on it, you could probably make a shot at seven hundred yards."

  Nakamura's face was impassive.

  "I was in the Ferriglianos’ living room this afternoon and it's full of hunting trophies. The rack of antlers over the mantle — a twenty-two-point buck. The plaque on it said Lucas shot it from four hundred yards — four football fields — away."

  "And your point?

  "The kid has fired nine times at a range of a few hundred feet. And missed nine times. Not gotten anywhere near a target nine times."

  "You don't think he's trying to hit anyone."

  "I think he's being very careful not to hit anyone. He's goading us, trying to get us to return fire."

  "Why?"

  "Because he wants us to kill him."

  "Suicide by cop."

  "Yep."

  "So why's he suddenly decided he wants to die? What's changed since we got here and all he wanted was for us to go away?"

  As if the question had summoned the answer, Nakamura's phone rang and he spoke briefly and hung up.

  "Trimboli said Lucas just called his mother."

  "And?"

  "And she told him Holly Campbell showed us Riley's hidden treasure, and that we'd found his pictures of Riley."

  They'd left specific instructions that if Lucas got in touch with his family, they were not to speak to him. They were to turn the call over to the FBI agent immediately.

  "Trimboli said she only realized who the mother was talking to, that it was Lucas, when she heard her yelling at him, calling him a child molester."

  It was staggering sometimes how stupid people could be.

  "Now, he'd rather die than have the world know he molested Riley," Brice said.

  "So does that mean he
did kidnap and murder him?"

  Before Brice could respond, the cell Nakamura still held in his hand rang. Caller ID identified "Edward O'Halloran" — the land line in the hunting lodge.

  "Hello, Lucas. This is agent Nakamura."

  "Okay, I want to give myself up."

  His voice was totally devoid of emotion, sounded like the automated attendant in a car wash.

  "That's a very good decision Lucas."

  Brice mouthed, stall him.

  "I'll need just a minute, though. You started shooting … I want to make sure all my men know you're surrendering. I'll call back when we're ready."

  The line went dead.

  "He'll be packing," Nakamura said. "As soon as we show ourselves, he'll reach for the gun and make us shoot him. What've you got?"

  Brice explained his idea.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Bailey whimpered, opened eyes she had squeezed shut, and the nightmare world appeared around her. Blood red light. Musky stink. Staggering along beside T.J. He was mostly carrying her because she hadn't been able to move her legs while her mind was … where? There. In the other.

  T.J.'s voice … but the sounds were too soft. The great buzzing sound in her head drowned them out.

  "… help me … have to try … Bailey, please!"

  She tried to assign meaning to the sounds but she couldn't seem to make the connections.

  T.J. dragged her with her arm around his shoulders off the walkway between theatre boxes and along the back wall of the next one. She could walk better now. The effects of the drug were probably wearing off. But the effect of what was happening to her mind was more debilitating than the drug that had made the constant connections possible. She was losing herself and she didn't know how to stop the process. The path between her and the other, the thing, or the little girl — the walls of self that separated her from them were fading, falling, disintegrating, going from solid to translucent to transparent to … not there at all.

  T.J. suddenly cried out, staggered into the wall, dragging her with him until he let go of her arm and she dropped off his shoulder and hit the wall with her back. She balanced there with the wall supporting her. Was parked there. Watched T.J. beat at his pants leg. One of the spiders had bitten him.

  She had lost the ability to be horrified by the presence of crawling, biting, poisonous spiders all around. By the bugs on the wall, things that were crawling off the wall into her hair. Beetles. Spiders maybe. Roaches certainly, they were everywhere, so everywhere that the scuttling raspy sound of their movement was so loud it penetrated the buzzing in her head. Or maybe it was the buzzing in her head.

  She wanted to reach up and dust whatever had crawled onto her head out of her hair, but she didn't. She supposed she could have. But the space between the wanting and the will to respond to wanting was … empty. Like there was no connection. The machine of who she was had been yanked apart, leaving wires dangling, electric wires with sparks flying. She felt something crawl down her forehead and across her nose — a centipede maybe. What she could see of it had lots of legs. Maybe just a caterpillar. Caterpillars turned into butterflies. Butterflies were beautiful, fragile things with delicate wings in the colors of the rainbow. Like the crystals of the chandelier that was supposed to cast multicolored light, fracture into a prism of delight on the walls of the room. But it didn't.

  She knew this caterpillar wasn't going to have the chance to become a thing of beauty, not here in this place. Nothing beautiful could live in this place. The caterpillar would be eaten by the spiders first. Did spiders eat caterpillars? She didn't know. Maybe. But even if they didn't, Bailey understood as a foundational truth that didn't need words to articulate — this place was not somewhere butterflies could live, flit from one filthy surface to another. This was a place for ugliness and darkness, filth and poison and pain. Not for butterflies.

  She reached up and grabbed the thing on her face. Didn't look at it, didn't want to know that it wasn't a caterpillar but some other multi-legged horror, and flung it away onto the floor. T.J. was groaning, had pulled his pants leg up to reveal … she couldn't see what. She knew it was a bite of some kind because she could see the swelling, but his black skin didn't turn bright red as her arm had when the tarantula bit her.

  She thought about the tarantula bite. Waited for the awareness of the pain to return. It didn't. She knew it hurt. Understood that it hurt. But she couldn't feel the pain. That wasn't a good thing, oh no indeedy that wasn't a good thing at all. Bailey had been bitten by a tarantula. Bailey's arm was in agony from the stinging venom of the bite. Bailey hurt. So if she was Bailey, she should hurt, too. But she didn't feel any pain at all.

  " … keep goin' … movin' …"

  T.J.'s words. He pulled her away from the wall where the crawly things had slithered onto her head and even now crawled down her back inside her shirt. He yanked her forward and her legs carried her along with him as her vision swam in front of her — dark walls, giant spiderwebs. No, ropes. Rope rigging, like on a ship.

  No, spiderwebs for Shannuck. Shannuck protects Katydid.

  Then Bailey was gone again.

  Katydid lies in her bed, her eyes fixed on the ceiling tile above it. There is a water stain on one side of it that has an odd shape. Sometimes it looks like an upside-down tree, with a circle of leaves on the bottom instead of the top and a trunk with tendrils of roots on the top. Other times it looks like a clown's face, with kinky hair on the top and a full, brown beard on the bottom.

  She looks up at the stained ceiling tile every morning when she wakes up, stares at it until the nurses come in to crank her bed up so they can feed her breakfast. Then they crank her bed back down and she stares at it some more. Sometimes they come and put her in a wheelchair after breakfast. Sometimes they take her gown off her and put her into the special wheelchair that they push into the shower room at the end of the hall where they take the spray and wash her hair. Sometimes the shampoo gets in her eyes and stings, but she doesn't mind. She likes the feel of the warm water on her head and splashing on her body, likes the clean smell when they put a fresh gown on her and put her back into the bed where they have put crisp white sheets that smell like bleach.

  Sometimes, when she smells the bleach she thinks of the Blaine Thing who said he had forced his grandmother to drink bleach and killed her. But she doesn't usually think of that. She just thinks the sheets smell fresh and she likes the smell.

  She is no longer in the room with Martha. Martha died in her sleep one night. After that, Katydid was moved to a different floor of the hospital, near the craft room, and sometimes the nurses put her into a wheelchair and roll her into the craft room. She liked that. Liked sitting there where she could see the other patients making things with their hands, listen to their voices as they talked, even liked it when one of them began to holler and scream and then the nurses and orderlies would come and the big orderly would wrap his arms around the patient and hold them until the nurse gave the patient a shot and then they stopped making noises and fell asleep.

  She liked the smell of the paints in the craft room, the smell of the clay and the smell of wood smoke when they used the wood-burning tool to make things out of blocks of wood.

  As she looks at the ceiling tile, she smells the smoke from the wood-burning tool. But it smells different. And she isn't in the craft room, so why does she smell the smoke all the way in here, in the room she shares now with Beatrice, who only breathes because there is a machine making her breathe and when her family comes to visit they talk about unplugging her so she can "die with dignity," and they argue about it and all leave mad.

  Beatrice doesn't smell the smoke, of course, but Katydid smells it. And it isn't wood burning. It's something else. The smoke doesn't smell good. It smells bad and then there are bells and alarms and nurses rushing around.

  There's a fire!

  Katydid is afraid of fire!

  Daddy made a bonfire once in the back yard and when Katydid leaned o
ver it to put her marshmallow in the flames, the fire caught her coat sleeve on fire. Daddy grabbed her and rolled her on the ground but she got a burn on her arm anyway that hurt and she was afraid of fire after that.

  Katydid smells the smoke thicker now and her heart begins to pound. She doesn't want the fire to get her, to burn her again like it did that time in the back yard.

  Shannuck looks around. He leaps out of the bed, hurries to the open door and sees smoke in the hallway in front of the craft room. Beside the door of Katydid's room is the opening in the wall where the nurses put the laundry out of the rolling baskets. He climbs inside and scuttles down the slick sides of the laundry chute, holding on with his spider legs, going down head first. He climbs past the opening on the second floor and the one on the first. There is a big opening at the bottom of the chute into the laundry room. There is no smoke here. No fire. Shannuck crawls across the laundry room floor into a corner, where he lies down.

  Shannuck is gone.

  Katydid's not looking at the ceiling tile over her bed now. She can't smell smoke, either. No longer in bed, she is lying on something hard and cold. She smells the good smell around her, the smell of clean sheets and looks up at overhead lights, florescent lights hanging from the low ceiling on strings. She is beside something big and white, a washing machine that is making slushing noises. Then she hears a voice.

  "What in the world …?"

  She sees a face above hers. It is a woman's face, round and fat, with black hair under a hairnet.

  "What are you doing here?" the woman asks her. Then she waves her hand back and forth in front of Katydid's eyes. She turns and calls out. "Juanita, come here! There's a little girl here, a patient from upstairs."

  Another face suddenly appears. This one is black, with kinky hair cropped tight to her head.

  "How did she get here?" the second woman asks.

  "I don't know," says the first. "She was just lying here. I didn't see anybody bring her in."