Cold Heart

by Chandler McGrew

  “I'm still in the store. I can see El.”

  “Where is he? Are you all right?”

  “I'm okay. I found a hiding place. But I'm at the front window now. El's been down by the bridge a long time.”

  “The bridge? Can you see him?”

  “Yes.”

  “What's he doing?”

  “He's just sitting,” said Dawn. “He's on the four-wheeler with his back to me and he just sits and stares.”

  That made sense. Micky remembered Wade saying once that spree killers often led lives of spartan self-denial. They found little if anything in the world around them to take pleasure in. They were delusional but many times could not explain, nor want to explain, their delusions. She thought of the barren interior of El's cabin. The single chair and the blackout setup of the windows.

  Was that how he lived all the time?

  Sitting in that chair for who knew how long?

  Staring at the walls?

  She shuddered.

  “Dawn, we're coming.”

  “We?”

  “Stan and me.”

  “Where's Marty?”

  “Marty's hurt.”

  “El?”

  “No. We were attacked by a bear.”

  “Are you joking?”

  It did sound outrageous, didn't it? No human being in his right mind would expect that so much could happen to the citizens of McRay on one day.

  “No,” Micky said. “I'm serious.”

  “Wow,” said Dawn.

  That summed up the situation nicely.

  “Dawn,” she said, “Stan and I are coming down the lower trail. I'm going to put the radio back into my pocket and turn it down so I can barely hear you and I won't be talking because I need both hands for my rifle. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” There was fear in her voice. The girl didn't want to be left alone in silence again.

  “I want you to tell me the instant El moves. Especially if it looks like he's heard us coming. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Tell her to keep her head down,” said Stan.

  “She knows that,” said Micky.

  She could see the clearing, only thirty yards ahead. She steeled herself for the confrontation, gripping the rifle tighter, but not too tight. She gritted her teeth and forced her breathing to slow.

  “We're going to have to kill him,” said Stan. “Aren't we?”

  “Don't let him get a shot at us, Stan. If he acts like he wants to surrender, okay. But watch yourself and don't let him get the drop on you or me. If you have to, do you think you can shoot him?” She stared into Stan's watery brown eyes, thinking that he hadn't even been able to shoot the bear that was attacking him. How the hell was he going to shoot El?

  “Yeah,” said Stan, swallowing hard. “I think so. Yeah.” “All right,” said Micky, turning back to the trail. “Come on, then.”

  4:19

  THE SOW NUDGED THE cub aside. He awakened but made no sound, sensing her mood. Her ears were peaked and her nose twitched as she sniffed the air. She was staring back down toward the creek, the way she had come.

  The man's voice had snapped her out of her dull, painfilled semiwakefulness. It was one of the voices she had heard before she was hurt, and a new sense of urgency dulled the pain. The man was back. Back with his gun. She struggled to her feet, grunting, and nudged the nosy cub back farther into the alders.

  There were two voices now, and she recognized both of them.

  Coming toward her, just across the creek.

  4:20

  ASLIVER OF LIGHT ENTERED El's brain. A thin, tentative thing that tickled his consciousness. Off to his left.

  It might have been caused by a familiar sound.

  Faint as morning air.

  Something requiring his attention.

  He blinked.

  Sensation seeped slowly through him.

  Light in his eyes. Blue sky and pale blue snow reflecting it below.

  Cold hands with fingers on cold steel. The gun and the handlebars.

  His legs and butt stiff from sitting too long in an unfamiliar position.

  The faint odor of woodsmoke.

  Of gun smoke.

  Of pine.

  Of blood.

  He licked his lips.

  Salt.

  Was that a voice, up the trail?

  He turned to his left, unfastening the strap that held Clive's rifle without looking at it.

  • • •

  “He's looking your way,” whispered Dawn into the radio.

  No answer. Micky had said she wouldn't answer.

  But did she hear? Micky said to keep telling her if El did anything.

  “He's turning to look toward the trail.” When Dawn let go of the button the radio gave a satisfying squelch, so she knew it still had power.

  Micky stopped, just behind a small stand of spruce that blocked her view of the bridge and the store. Stan froze, directly behind her.

  “How could he have heard us?” he whispered.

  Micky wanted to slap him.

  Was he an idiot?

  She had no idea how El's hearing could be so acute. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe he was psychic. Maybe his brain was so different from a normal person's brain that he sensed them coming down the trail.

  Does it matter?

  She glanced over her shoulder at Stan but he wasn't looking at her. He was looking over his shoulder.

  Across the creek.

  The old sow didn't crash through the alders.

  She fell out of them.

  She stumbled down to the creek bank, through her rough-cut passage in the brush. Her left front leg gave out beneath her and she rumbled down the hill into the water like an eight-hundred-pound fur-covered cannonball. As she stood up on her three good legs she found herself staring directly into the eyes of one of the men that had hurt her.

  And the woman.

  For just a second the three regarded each other in shocked silence.

  Then all hell broke loose.

  4:21

  MICKY TRIED TO TURN at the same time that she raised the carbine. But Stan pushed past her, breaking into a run. Micky panicked, fired one shot, wild, over the bear's head, and turned to follow.

  The worst thing I can do is run.

  The bear could easily overtake her.

  She knew that the bear could rip her apart just as it had done to Marty.

  But none of that stopped her legs from pumping like pistons, her feet slipping in the slush and mud on the trail, wet and frozen limbs forgotten. None of it quelled the sound of her own breathing and the pounding, splashing noise of the three-legged grizzly, huffing to make up the distance.

  It was a race and Micky knew that it was a race that either she or Stan was bound to lose.

  “He's getting the gun!” screamed Dawn, into the radio. “Micky! He's getting the gun!”

  Micky caught up with Stan, shoving him along. She felt the thrumping feet of the bear behind her, saw El raising the rifle ahead.

  “Oh, my God!” screamed Dawn into the radio.

  The bulk of the bear knocked Micky aside, rumbled into and over Stan.

  They were halfway to El, only thirty yards away.

  El fired.

  The bear gave off a high-pitched squeal and turned to face her new attacker, standing on her rear legs and looking twenty feet tall to Micky, who was flat on her back.

  El fired again.

  The big bear lurched, then crumpled like a badly folded map.

  Stan started to get up and Micky discovered that she had had the wind knocked out of her. She could only wave at his back ineffectually.

  El chambered another round into his rifle. He climbed off the four-wheeler and walked up deliberately.

  No fear.

  No nerves.

  Just that cold stare behind those fucking glasses. Micky knew that at any instant he was going to pull the trigger while Stan was still dazed and in shock. Stan's rifle lay ten feet behind Sta
n, where he had dropped it as the bear bowled him over. She looked around for her own rifle. It was there, inches from her hand. She slid her fingers over the grip but El took his left hand from the rifle and waved at her to stop.

  She obeyed.

  When he was within two steps of Stan, El cocked his head, waiting.

  Finally, Stan acknowledged him with a frown and a nod.

  Micky saw Stan's knees give a little but he was holding up, staring down the long length of rifle barrel. The radio had gone mercifully silent. Micky prayed that, in the excitement, El wouldn't have noticed Dawn screaming.

  When El was certain that he had Stan's attention, he moved around behind him, placing the tip of the barrel into the small of Stan's back.

  “Push the gun away,” said El, looking at Micky.

  For a second she couldn't function. She stared into the glasses and everything went black. The voice was cold, emotionless and the face wasn't El's any longer. It was a face right out of her past. An impossible face that kept returning to haunt her present. But she shoved the gun away and stood when he told her to.

  “Walk in front,” he said. “To the store.”

  4:24

  WHEN THEY REACHED THE front steps Stan took them all by surprise by bolting for the door. Micky never had a chance to scream.

  Clive's rifle bucked in El's hands and Stan fell forward, with a small hole in the center of his back between his shoulder blades. His hand dropped over the stair rail and he hung there, his face wedged against the balusters like a kid watching a party to which he is too young to be invited.

  El pulled his pistol out and cocked it, holding it in his right hand, the rifle in his left. Bright red blood mixed with the slush and puddled beneath Stan. El turned away from him as though Stan were an uninteresting bit of fauna and not worth his time.

  Micky looked at El and shook her head.

  “I'm not going in,” she said. She had to give Dawn time to hide. “You'll have to kill me here.”

  El's face was milky granite, the cheekbones nearly visible through his pale skin, his lips bloody slits. He was devastatingly calm. He waved the pistol up the stairs but she just stared at him, wondering what it would feel like when the big bullet tore through her. She hadn't felt the shot through her shoulder in Houston.

  Will I feel this one?

  Probably not.

  Death might be merciful.

  Life hadn't been.

  “I'm not going to hurt you,” El said, when he saw that she really wasn't going anywhere.

  “Sure you're not,” she said, staring at the blood that was soaking down around Stan's pants. But a little voice in her mind told her that she had known all along that El wasn't going to do it.

  Of course not.

  She stared into the glasses and knew what he was going to say even before he spoke in that revolting monotone.

  Was there just the barest whine to it now?

  The slightest sense of wounding?

  Had her doubt in him touched something nearly human in El?

  Was there anything human in El?

  “I wouldn't hurt you,” El said. “I did all this for you.”

  4:25

  MARTY WASN'T CONSCIOUS.

  But he wasn't unconscious, either. He was in that curious state where pain was real, but it was an out-of-focus and distant real.

  Were there hot irons pressing against his back?

  Was there someone trying to twist his arm off at the shoulder root?

  There was also the strange sensation that his face was on sideways, pulled too tight, as though the bones in his skull had expanded at the same time that his skin had shrunk like a piece of melted plastic wrap. The blanket scratched against his face like sandpaper.

  He couldn't feel the fingers in his right hand, but his other hand clawed at the rough wood floor. When he opened his eyes he didn't recognize his surroundings but at least he seemed to be inside.

  Where was Stan?

  He tried to roll over and liquid fire shot up his back and exploded in his brain.

  There was a clanking metallic noise and the soft warmth and light that flooded his face confused him. He stared up into flickering golden heat, inches from his face. His brain told him that he was lying up against a woodstove and he had banged into it, opening the door and exposing the fire inside.

  He pushed himself away from the stove and flopped onto his side on the floor again, trying to focus. His head rested on fur. Gray fur. He blinked. Then he ran his fingers through it.

  He'd felt it before.

  Lots of times.

  Scooter's white blaze was right in front of Marty's nose.

  “Damn,” he muttered.

  So El had killed Scooter.

  The son of a bitch was crazier than a bedbug.

  Marty's eyes cleared a little more and he could barely make out the guns on the far wall.

  “Shit.”

  Way crazier than a bedbug.

  Why had Stan and Micky left him here? In El's cabin of all places?

  What if the crazy bastard came back?

  He spotted the lantern glowing on the counter and was drawn to it like a moth to a flame. He clawed his way up the side of the cupboard, pain shooting in lightning bolts up and down his spine.

  What the hell do I want with a lantern?

  But his mind and his body weren't communicating. He had wanted the light for something just a second before…

  He knelt beside the counter, resting his cheek on the top, as exhausted as though he'd just scaled Everest. He reached for the lantern and only succeeded in knocking it to the floor. Coleman fluid spilled out and there was a nasty hiss as the liquid caught fire, racing across the floor back toward his blanket.

  Marty passed out.

  When he came to the pain was even worse than before. It surged along the skin of his back. His whole body throbbed with it. It was a few minutes before he dared open his eyes all the way and that was because he smelled smoke. Then he remembered the lantern.

  Flames licked along the wooden floor and caressed the guns arrayed on the walls. His blanket was blazing and Scooter's pelt smoldered. The familiar crackle of wood burning—usually such a comforting sound—now sent terror pulsing along Marty's already overloaded nerves.

  4:26

  DAWN WATCHED EL LEADING Micky and Stan toward the store.

  She couldn't believe that both of them had allowed themselves to fall under El's spell.

  How did El do it?

  Another bear attack?

  It was just too unreal.

  She shook herself out of her trance and slunk away from the window. Back into the hateful embrace of the store that she was coming to think of as her tomb.

  It was a tomb.

  She shared it with dead people.

  She raced up the stairs and was halfway through the bedroom door when booted feet pounded on the steps out front and another rifle shot echoed through the store.

  Either Micky or Stan was dead.

  Dawn didn't wait to find out which.

  She scurried back into her cave and tugged the hanging clothes together as best she could without getting them stuck in the door, which she then pulled shut. Flipping on the flashlight she'd found in Clive's workshed, and silent as a mouse, she crawled slowly through the maze of cardboard boxes. Finally, she clambered behind the last one and tucking odd pieces of clothing and blankets around it, sealed herself tightly away.

  The walls and the sloping roof were well insulated, and so was the floor, so that now she was surrounded by warmth and silence and fear. She clicked the radio on and off then on again to make certain that it was still working. A bit of static came out and she turned it up and set it on the floor beside her.

  It occurred to her that there might be the smallest of cracks in her hideaway. Cracks that she might not notice. Not wanting El to see her light flashing if that was so, she turned off the flashlight.

  Now she was alone in the dark and she wasn't coming out.


  4:27

  FLAMES DANCED HYPNOTICALLY, INCHES from Marty's face. He was vaguely aware that he was in danger and was trying to get his mind to function to remind him of what he had been doing before. He remembered the bear, barreling down on top of him.

  But where was Stan?

  Where was Micky?

  He and Stan had come out of the woods and there was Micky and then the giant grizzly was on top of them.

  What was Micky doing at El's cabin?

  Why did they leave me?

  He had only the vaguest memory of the attack. The flashing claws and the giant paw as powerful as the arm of a backhoe. Ripping at him. Tearing through his flesh. But it all seemed more delusion than reality.

  The flame flickered and, through the wall of pain, the heat singed his face.

  He drew back. A lightning bolt of pain discharged through the back of his neck and he screamed. When he did his body jerked and the burning blanket he had collapsed upon slapped him in the face. He screamed again and turned away instinctively, luckily rolling himself away from and not into the blanket.

  But he was lying on his injured arm and the pain was so intense that it blinded him. He kicked himself away from the woodstove, trying to get up onto his knees, his vision returning but blurred. He reached out for the counter and struggled to his knees once again.

  He managed to turn his head enough to see the blanket, ablaze in the middle of the floor and knew that he needed to drag himself outside before the whole cabin caught. But he couldn't make the muscles in his body answer his frantic demands.

  The burning blanket was creating a thick, sickening smoke. As Marty's mind cleared, his lungs began to fill with the noxious fumes. He tried to stand up, lost his balance again, and, flinging out his good arm, knocked the small woodstove over onto its side. With horror he watched redhot coals spill out onto the floor and set it afire where it wasn't burning already.

  “Can't get a fucking break,” he muttered.

  He pushed himself off and crawled toward the door.

  4:30

  MICKY SAT IN THE rocking chair watching El.

  For a man who had murdered nearly everyone in town he seemed obscenely composed. But that was typical of spree killers. She remembered the steady, sure movements of the man without a face in the dark massage room, calmly reloading, while all around there was noise and death and destruction and madness. She remembered the eerie sound of her parents’ killer as he stalked her through room after room of the florist shop. He never spoke. All she remembered hearing was the rhythmic slapping of his tennis shoes across the concrete floor.