Colleen shrugged. Even now, in the face of all that had passed and all that was to come, Mathilda was concerned with getting a little blood on the couch.
“I’ll take care of her,” Colleen said. “Can you find me something to wear?”
Mathilda looked her up and down once. “No problem,” she said, leaving the room.
Colleen stepped into the kitchen and tore away two sheets from the thick paper-towel roll. At the sink, she soaked one of them completely through and then squeezed it out.
Kneeling beside Embeth, she wiped Evie’s blood and little chunks of brain from the unconscious woman’s face. Folding over the wet and stained paper towel, she wiped once more, erasing the last smears of blood. With the other sheet, she patted dry Embeth’s face.
The unconscious woman did not stir but her big chest continued to rise and fall. Her mouth was open. Her eyes were not fully closed. Colleen considered pressing them shut with her index and middle fingers, like someone in an old Western, and decided otherwise.
In the kitchen, standing over the trash can, she opened the moist paper towel and stared at the small curl of brain matter and wondered if there were still thoughts living within it.
“Here.”
Colleen looked up. Mathilda tossed some faded jeans and a long sleeve shirt over the kitchen counter. She walked to the couch and sat down, staring at Embeth.
Colleen closed her fist around the bloodied paper-towel and dropped it into the trash can.
“Thanks,” she said, washing her hands and then slipping into the clothes. The shirt was baggy and the pants were a little too tight, but they would do. She needed shoes.
“Kids are quiet,” Mathilda said.
“Yeah,” Colleen said. “Shouldn’t we get her off the floor?”
“She’s fine,” Mathilda said. She had yet to regain her color. She stared at Embeth and chewed on her bottom lip.
The door leading into the nursery opened and Sally stepped out, easing the door shut behind her and ambling into the living room, her massive stomach leading the way.
“Good work,” Sally said, stepping over Embeth and sitting next to Mathilda.
“You okay?” she asked Mathilda, drawing one of the woman’s hands into her own. Mathilda stared down in Embeth’s direction, but it was clear that her gaze was not on the unconscious woman, but somewhere else entirely.
“I’m not surprised he did it,” Mathilda said.
Colleen glanced at Sally, frowned. Sally nodded once.
“He and Huff didn’t get along,” Mathilda said, looking at Colleen and wringing her hands together upon her lap. “I expected something, but not this.”
Mathilda no longer needed to be strong. Her face crumpled. “The bastard,” she said, and Colleen was certain that she was talking about Samson, that her devotion to Huffington Niebolt was as strong, or nearly as strong, as Embeth’s.
“I’m glad he’s dead,” Mathilda said, shattering Colleen’s certainty.
“The bastard.” A tear ran from her left eye, and she wiped it away, her face contorting, lips twitching, pale cheeks blossoming red. “I loved him, I did, but he took my life away. Didn’t he?”
“He did,” Sally said, reaffirming her hold on Mathilda’s hand. “But he’s gone now.”
“Why did he kill Evie?” Mathilda asked, and Colleen had no idea which one she was talking about: Sam or Max. As Colleen had tried to comfort the children, Sally had given Mathilda an explanation of events that did not involve Colleen seizing an opportunity and beheading Huff, nor Sally’s executions of Evie and Max. This, Colleen decided, was for the best.
“He was out of control,” Sally said. “Like an animal. Like he was insane. He did what he did to Huff, and when Evie came in he—oh, you don’t need to hear this again.”
There, Colleen thought, watching as Sally sat beside Mathilda and wrapped an arm around her. Sally had pinned it all on Samson. God knew where he was.
“We’ll have time to cry later,” Sally said, and Colleen realized that, should they need one, they had a leader. “For now, we need to get ready. He’s out there, and we’re going to have to deal with him.”
“Embeth,” Mathilda said.
“What?”
“She’ll know where the guns are. Huff told her everything.”
Colleen knew where her gun was, and she excused herself long enough to go once more among the dead and retrieve it.
“Tomorrow,” Sally said, looking at Colleen. “We’ll find out tomorrow, and you and Colleen will go get them. We’re okay for now.” She touched her own gun.
Colleen looked down at Embeth. Her cheeks were red, her chest visibly rose and fell, and her eyes danced behind her eyelids. Colleen didn’t like it.
“What if he comes back?” Mathilda asked.
“We’ll kill him,” Colleen said, infusing her voice with as much confidence as she could muster.
Colleen poured Mathilda a straight double shot of whisky, and within twenty minutes the older woman had returned to the kids’ room, where she crawled into bed beside Lissa and passed out, as much from shock as from the booze.
“What do we do now?” Sally asked.
“We wait,” Colleen said.
“Do you think he’ll be back?”
“I don’t know.” She looked down at her gun, traced her left hand along the barrel. “He took a pretty bad beating.”
“Yeah.”
“If he’s okay, he’s going to want the place.”
“Our place?”
“Yeah,” Colleen said. “Our place.”
In the bedroom, they watched Huff’s head gum the air. There was something reptilian about its eyes, its lips, its movements.
“Bastard,” Sally said and pressed the barrel of her gun between its eyes.
Colleen said, “Don’t.”
“Why the hell not?”
“He said he was going to live forever,” Colleen said. “Right?”
“Yeah,” Sally said, and Colleen really didn’t have to say any more. She saw the light of understanding in Sally’s eyes.
“Let’s make sure he does.”
Colleen grabbed a pillow from the bed and slid it from its case. Tossing it aside, she seized one of Niebolt’s braids and picked up the head, dropped it into the pillowcase. She spun it shut and tossed it under the bed.
“Good enough for now,” she said. “Let’s go.”
They closed the door behind them.
“What about her?” Colleen asked.
Embeth lay where they’d left her.
“She’ll be out for a while. Mathilda gave her a big dose.”
“Yeah, still.”
“Wait,” Sally said, and left the room. Colleen sat down on the couch and stared at Embeth, whose hands rose and fell upon her chest. She inspected her own hands, which were still stained here and there.
Sally returned with one of the stupid red gowns. She wondered what, if anything, they represented, and realized just as quickly that she did not care. Let Huffington Niebolt’s insane bullshit die with him.
Sally had a pair of scissors. Colleen watched her take them to the fabric, wanting to help but not knowing where to find a second pair. They used the strips to bind Embeth’s wrists and ankles.
“Gag her?” Colleen asked, holding up a wad of red cloth.
“No,” Sally said. “No need. She’s going to be a groggy mess tomorrow.”
“You mean today.”
“Yeah,” Sally said.
“What do we do now?”
“We need to sleep,” Sally said. “We need-” Her face crumpled. The tears came. They hugged one another, and Colleen wept, too. She squeezed her eyes shut, and there was a new image in her mind: Huffington Niebolt facedown in the center of a spreading pool of blood.
They cried until no more tears came, and then they drank a little whisky, ate what food their stomachs could hold, and, at last, in the thin darkness before sunrise, fell asleep pressed against one another upon the couch.
/> Twenty-Four
Richard opened his eyes and blinked into the darkness, felt the dew on his face and the ground beneath his back, saw the pre-dawn sky through the black canopy, and jerked, screaming, struggling against ropes that were not there. He clambered to his hands and knees, and screamed again when the pain in his left arm—seconds ago little more than a dull throb—erupted.
He fell onto his face, his wounded arm pressed to his chest, teeth clenched, his heart throbbing in his chest and in his neck and behind his eyes.
He waited for his brain to burst, and when it didn’t, he rolled onto his side, gasping. Water pattered against his face, and the air was heavy with the smell of freshly moistened earth, wet leaves.
In time, the sky lightened, and the darkness of the canopy seemed to grow darker still. Somewhere, a woodpecker did its job, and Richard’s heartbeat slowed enough. The pain in his left arm eased down, too, but not by much. He sat up, and as the world around him emerged in shades of blue, he stared at the hole in his arm. There was dirt stuck to the edge of the wound. There was dirt in the wound. Both the exit and the entry were in pretty much the same shape, and both thrummed with the promise of infection.
The gun lay nearby. He scooped it up and opened the cylinder, inspected the three remaining unfired bullets. He dropped the spent casings to the ground between his thighs. After a few seconds consideration, he dug a small hole and placed the empty shells into it, covered them. As an act, it didn’t make much sense—he’d been asleep in the open for ten, twelve hours. If they were looking for him, he’d have already been found—but it made him feel better, anyway.
His back ached and his joints hurt. His face ached from the beating he’d taken. He felt like he was coming down with a cold. There was an itch at the back of his throat and with each breath mucus bubbled in his sinus cavity. Eventually he got up and walked around in a circle, stretching his legs and getting his bearings. It was impossible for him to tell which way he’d gone yesterday, or which way he’d come. He couldn’t tell east from west. The clouds were thick, the light dim and heavy, and all around him, hills and trees, the same goddamn trees and hills in every direction.
But he had to move, and now. He had maybe twelve hours of daylight ahead of him.
He walked for a little over an hour, steadily moving downhill, climbing over massive fallen branches and lichen-covered stones. He heard the stream before he saw it, and when he reached it the water was cool around his hands and crystal clear. It rushed over rocks and pooled and churned in small, twig-choked dams.
Richard cupped both hands together—the left trembled noticeably—and brought the water to his lips. He stopped, his mind racing. What if one of those things—human or deer or some other dead animal—was dead in the waters somewhere upstream?
He had larger concerns and he was thirsty. He drank until he could drink no more and with his right hand he splashed water onto his wound, rinsing away flecks of dirt and dried blood.
Fifteen minutes later, his stomach clenched. He buckled, hands planted on his knees, and the tainted water came back up.
“Fuck,” he said, and vomited some more. One final searing clench and nothing more would come. He tasted bile. He wandered, and his sense of time was lost alongside his sense of direction. He walked and he walked, and at some point he came across a dead squirrel or chipmunk. It lay on its side, its gaping mouth swarming with ants, its one visible eye sunken within its socket. Its stomach had been torn open, and insects trundled and raced across its innards. Its tiny little forepaws, so much like little hands, moved up and down, up and down. Its nose twitched. Its skull crunched like a walnut beneath his heel.
He stood there for a while, gazing at the sky between the towering trees. Dark clouds hung, and somewhere in the distance thunder rumbled. One direction was as good as the others, he reasoned. Choosing one, he walked.
Twenty-Five
For the first time in years they shared a bed. Crate was quick to pass out, but Misty had trouble and took an hour or more before falling asleep, the night’s bloody events repeatedly playing out in her mind. She saw Karlatos and his pals preparing to rape Stacy, their pitiful little spit-slicked dicks bobbing within their clutched fists. She saw them fall and die, pumping blood and piss, and none of it bothered her. Crate had done what needed doing, and now they were dead. As they should be.
And she saw Charles, weeping the entire time, weeping and begging, doing nothing, not a damned thing, to stop what was happening. She saw his grateful, tear-streaked face afterward, gazing up at Crate, and then she saw him go limp, a series of spasms rocking his body, blood jetting in a crimson rainbow from the top of his head and spreading in a pool on the grimy linoleum.
She saw Charles die, Charlie, the man she’d fucked right under her husband’s nose for nearly a decade. She saw him die and the only thing she really felt bad about was the fact that she didn’t really feel bad at all.
Sleep came at last, and it was no surprise that she dreamed about the walking dead. When Crate shook her awake, it was nearly nine in the morning.
First things first, Crate drove Tasgal’s Beistle Police cruiser around back and parked it next to his one-bedroom shack. It couldn’t be seen from the road, and until Crate made room in the garage, this would have to do.
The truck out front did not belong to Karlatos. Crate found the keys in one of Baker’s pockets and moved the truck to the empty church parking lot down the road. He drove Charlie’s car to Charlie’s house.
As Misty waited for him to return, she checked on Stacy, who was still fast asleep on the couch. There were three empty beer cans on the floor—Stacy must have gotten up at some point and ventured into the store, among the bodies of her attempted rapists, to retrieve them. Her chest rose and fell. She looked peaceful.
Not wanting to venture into the store until Crate returned and they could go about the task of removing the bodies and mopping up the blood, she gently raised Stacy’s feet from the couch, sat down, and rested the woman’s calves across her thighs. She grabbed the remote control from the standing tray beside the couch and, clicking on the television, worked her way through the channels.
Channel 4 displayed only the CBS eye, and nothing else, and it was somehow terrifying in this context. On NBC, a frizzy-haired scientist in a blood-stained lab-coat pointed to a human brain, which sat limp and formless in a puddle of blood on a stainless steel surface. ABC wasn’t all that far from Mayberry: they aired an episode of I Love Lucy. There was no sound, only a silently scrolling ticker that informed the world in hastily-typed, mistake-laden copy that regular programming would resume as soon as possible.
She played with the control for a few seconds, pressing buttons and even slapping the bulky metal rectangle before she realized that the sound problem was not on her end.
The UHF stations were no longer on the air. They offered only a churning white snow pattern, all but WCAL, which depicted the static image of the American flag blowing in the wind accompanied by an electronic whine that reminded her of cicadas.
She turned off the television, sat in contemplation for a minute, and then eased herself from the couch. Stacy did not stir. She walked to the front door and peered through the blinds, careful not to slip in any congealed blood, careful not to look at the bodies strewn throughout her store. There was no sign of Crate; there was no sign of anyone, alive or otherwise, save the heap of charred bodies, each of which were merely dead.
She returned to the living room and, not really wanting to, opened the back door and looked around. There was nothing, no walking corpses, anyhow. The morning air was cool and damp, the sky thick with clouds that seemed frozen in place. The slumped form in Tasgal’s car made her jump, and then she remembered the body—who was it?
Clark. His name was Clark, though she could not remember if it was his first name or not.
“Doesn’t really matter,” she said, looking away from the car and stepping up to Crate’s little shack. She fumbled with her key-ring, fou
nd the key she was looking for, and slid it home.
Tasgal lay on the floor, where they’d left him. The air inside smelled of human waste, and he’d bled onto the carpet. He lifted his head, and she opened her mouth to ask him if she wanted her to clean him up. She wasn’t sure if she’d be capable of doing that, for God’s sake, but she had to offer. She had to do something. She felt nothing regarding Crate’s murder of Charles, but she felt this. This was wrong. They’d made a mistake.
Tasgal looked at her. His eyes widened. She closed her mouth and took a single step backward. Tasgal was dead. The side of his face that had been resting upon the carpeted floor was deeply bruised, the other side deathly pale. There were dried chunks of something clinging to his nose and cheeks, and lying on the floor. At some point during the night, he’d vomited and drowned and now here he was, a living dead man bound upon the floor of her husband’s shack.
Whether or not she felt bad about his death, she hadn’t killed Charles. Eric Tasgal’s blood was on her hands.
“I’m sorry,” Misty said. She shut the door and locked it. She went inside and stepped over Charles, grabbed a beer from the cooler, and sat at one of the tables, drinking her beer and staring into space until the bell above the door jingled and Crate stepped into the store, Bilbo Baggins at his heel.
“Why the hell are you sitting in the dark, woman?” Crate asked, snapping on the light. The fluorescents flickered to life. “We got work to do.”
They started with Karlatos, the smallest of the bunch. Holding his hands and his feet, they were actually able to drag him out of the store and lay him beside the burn pile. By that point both of them were already winded. Bilbo Baggins yelped and sniffed at Karlatos’s crotch. Crate yelped back and kicked the dog away from the corpse.
“What are we going to do about that fat one?” Crate asked, and it was obvious from his tone that he wasn’t really asking her. He was asking the air, or asking himself, and when his eyes widened beneath his bushy eyebrows she knew he had his answer.
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