by Lee Thompson
Come on, Bobby thought.
But then the phone rang and he heard his father answer it and the call quickly grew to great lengths. His arms were heavy by then, so he let the bat drop and moved deeper into his bedroom and gathered his things and slipped out the window and into the night. There wasn’t going to be a last supper, and that was okay, he was only a little bit hungry anyway.
CHAPTER 6
Bobby was starving by the time he crossed the long pasture and saw the water tower a half mile in the distance. He glanced in the direction of the school but looked away quickly. He was tempted to walk to Cindy’s but didn’t want to cause her any more problems. He wished he had a way to help her make her dreams come true. But he was next to helpless.
Up ahead, he caught a faint outline of a car in the ditch. It was a white one. Its ass-end jutted up at the sky. He walked toward it, the ground crunching underfoot, his face chilled. Should have brought a ski mask, but he wanted people to recognize him, unless of course it was Pine, and he could hear his four-wheeler out there somewhere in the crummy countryside, engine racing.
Funny, as he got closer, to realize the car in the ditch belonged to Elroy O’Connell. Two brothers less alike Bobby hadn’t ever met. The windows were steamed. He slapped a gloved hand on the driver side door and said, “You in there?”
He tried the door handle. It opened with a screech. Elroy was behind the wheel, blinking rapidly. He looked at Bobby and smiled weakly and said, “These roads are for shit.”
“You okay?”
“I think so.”
Bobby spied the duffle bag on the passenger floorboard and licked his chapped lips and said, “You got something to eat?”
Elroy rubbed his forehead to make sure it wasn’t bleeding. “I always have something to eat. Are you hungry?”
“Pretty much. It’s cold out too. Wish I could help you get your car unstuck but I was never good at stuff like that.”
“My dad or Mitch will have a wrecker get it out in the morning. None of us are good at stuff like this either. We can sure wreck ‘em though.” He laughed. “What do you want to eat?”
“What do you have?”
Elroy grabbed the bag and pulled it onto his lap. He kept the contents hidden as he leaned over it and unzipped it, pulling Twinkies and Skittles and Paydays and a dozen other sugary treats out and placed them on the glass over the speedometer. He still had his seatbelt across his hips, the shoulder strap lying flat against the seat behind him. It looked like it’d hurt, sitting like that for a while, but it didn’t faze Elroy.
Bobby pointed at the package of Twinkies and Elroy handed them over. As Bobby tore into the package with his teeth and freed the moist spongy slices and stuffing one whole into his mouth, he mumbled, “Where are you headed?”
“I was going to Aiden’s.”
“It’s still a long walk from here and the temps are dropping,” Bobby said. To his surprise, he didn’t want to lose Elroy’s company. The boy was two years older than him, and aside from their fathers having success in common, the sons shared little else. Elroy was a sensitive, and Bobby had always believed himself a head case; he didn’t know where his unhappiness and discontent stemmed from, until that moment in the snow with the night their only company.
But to put his feelings and thoughts into words, and to share them with someone else, was a terrifying prospect. He’d rarely done so with Cindy, who he felt closer to than any other soul. And then Elroy was turned toward him, opening a package of Skittles, and he said, “What’s wrong, Robert?”
Bobby shrugged. “I should be going. Thank you for the food. And the talk.”
“You can take more if you like.”
“Are you sure?”
“Like I need more junk food,” Elroy said, patting his expansive stomach.
Bobby chuckled nervously and said, “Maybe you shouldn’t be so hard on yourself.”
Elroy looked at the steamed window, the thin blanket of snow on the other side. He said, “I can hear Pine out there. It sounds like he’s coming this way.”
Bobby heard it too, and he fought the urge to flee. “I never understood how different you guys are.”
“Me either. It’s a weird night. Listen to all those people out there,” Elroy said. “It’s not over yet.”
“What’s not?”
“I’m going to leave,” Elroy said. “I think I have a place out there in the world. I never fit in here. I know it sounds stupid since I don’t have much to complain about, but I don’t have much to hope in either.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” Elroy said. “And I think maybe it’s my responsibility to make my own hope. Why should it be up to anyone else? I don’t know why I ever thought that to begin with, or maybe I just never thought much about it at all.”
“Hope is important, I guess,” Bobby said. He wanted to say more, to probe for answers alongside Elroy, but Pine’s headlight sliced through the murk a quarter mile south of them, on the road, and down through the ditch, and up into a field. There were others out beyond him, walking, shining their flashlights on the crusted snow. He said, “I wonder what they’re all searching for.”
Elroy freed himself of his seatbelt and climbed out and brought the duffle bag with him. It looked heavy in his hand. “I don’t know.”
Bobby glanced back at the field and said, “Don’t go into school tomorrow morning, okay?”
“Why would I go into school?”
Bobby smiled. “Just don’t.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m leaving too,” Bobby said.
Elroy didn’t reply. There were voices in the distance. Bobby said, “It looks like they’re headed this way.”
“You sound scared.”
He was. Something was wrong. Somehow they’d found out, he realized now, and they were all looking for him. Cars appeared on the road, more flashlight beams shining from passenger windows, sweeping the ditch on either side. Bobby turned away and said, “Thanks again. Don’t tell anybody you saw me, okay?”
• • •
Mitch didn’t acknowledge the carnage surrounding them. Jack LeDoux sat stiff as a weathered board in his wheelchair, his face carved from ancient wood, hands tightly gripping the empty shotgun. Mitch said, “Where would your son take my daughter?”
“In this mess? I have no idea.”
“It’ll have to be somewhere warm, somewhere nobody would look for them.”
“My bar, a church, the school. Those are about the only options they have. But that crowd out there will catch up with them before they make it anywhere. The longer we sit here the worse it could be for our kids.”
“I don’t need you with me.”
“I lost my wife because you led them back here. They’ve destroyed my home. They’re chasing down my son. You’re a blight. If you don’t kill me now, you’re never going to have the chance again and I won’t let you see me coming. Do you hear me? I’ll blow your head apart and you won’t hear but the faintest whisper of your death. There will just be oblivion, which I think will welcome you gladly.”
“I’m not going to kill you,” Mitch said. He walked over the bodies in front of the door with Jack screaming something behind him. He didn’t want to hear it, so didn’t. His pulse pounded in his ears. The air outside was cold enough that it hurt to breathe. He tromped to Jack’s van and climbed in the driver’s seat. The keys were in the ignition. He started it, let the heater work on the ice coating the windshield. Looking back at the house, the broken door, the dead clogging it, he could see Jack reloading the shotgun in the entryway. Mitch pulled the van into gear, bent forward and floored the accelerator just as Jack pulled the trigger and buckshot peppered the rear quarter panel. He let out a whoop, half-crazed, then regained control of himself, fearing for a second that he had tasted how Pine must always feel, that he was in control of not only his destiny, but also the destinies of others. He’d killed men in Jack’s house with a cold efficiency, and he could have kille
d Jack, but he’d shown him mercy. Those others were not necessary deaths, although he told himself they were warranted. Jack’s would have been too much. All that mattered now was finding the children.
He’d wipe out the whole town with Pine’s help, if they had to, if people got between him and Aiden and his daughter. They’d already shown they were willing to do it.
He needed to kidnap the kid, find a quiet, secluded place to hole up. Keep Aiden fed, keep him happy, feed him a line that his parents were dead although Mitch had tried to save them, and now he wanted to protect Aiden, because their town was nothing, a speck of sand in the desert that would be coming for him once they knew what he was capable of. Distraught, afraid, with no other option, the kid would believe him. It wasn’t that far-fetched to begin with. The government would take him, or some nut, believing the boy to be the anti-Christ, would gun him down. Neither fate was any more desirable than the other. Mitch was doing him a favor.
Jack had given him direction, helped him clear his mind. The bar, a church, or the school. The kids would be at one of them, as long as they outran and eluded their pursuers. But they wouldn’t elude Pine or Mitch. He ruled out a church. Aiden would take Jessica somewhere with food. The kid probably filched his dad’s keys or a spare set. The bar was the closest anyway on his route to the school. If they weren’t at LeDoux’s, he’d call Pine back and ask for an update.
For the first time in a long while, Aria was not trumping all his other thoughts.
• • •
Aria pulled into Jack’s driveway and noticed his van was gone, and that the front door was hanging inside form the bottom hinge, the porch and the snow covered in tracks and marked red by spilled blood. Such devastation, to see just from the exterior. The snow had been trampled through the front yard and around the sides of the house. All the windows appeared broken and what had once been a home now appeared a charnel house.
Her heart pained her over such senseless loss. She imagined what fear and rage Jack and Janice and Mitch and the two children must have faced when the frantic town descended upon them, buckling doors, dragging the walls apart, eyes glazed and hellish, the masses like a storm sent by God or Devil to reduce them all to their base elements. Flesh immobile, blood stilled, bone crushed. Before, she could not have imagined what terror they must have felt, but her own, after facing Mickey, gave her a sense of it.
She sat in her Lexus and let the heat envelope her, her fingers tracing what she assumed would scar her face. The whole world had gone mad, her along with it, she realized as she opened the car door and stepped tentatively toward the porch. At first she feared her curiosity border lined the morbid, yet it quickly passed as she steeled herself to witness whatever destruction waited inside. She had to see for herself, that’s all there was to it. To know that they had once been, and now they were gone, beyond help, beyond comfort, beyond repair.
Inside, the house was nearly as cold as outside and she guessed that it had all taken place hours ago; probably when she was snooping in Pine’s bedroom. There was guilt too; she should have stayed with Jessica and Mitch from the beginning. They’d needed her, and with reflection, she’d needed them, only she’d not known it at the time.
She jumped over the bodies inside the entryway and paused to listen to someone whispering deeper in the house. She had not expected to find a survivor. Her throat felt as if it was closing and she tried to call out a hello, but merely squawked awkwardly, like a wounded bird.
She rubbed her throat. Her knees trembled, yet they carried her toward the dining room. His voice and his prayers grew clearer and she wanted to run to Jack, to hold him, if only because she felt they were the only two to survive the night. The clock on the wall read 2:11 a.m. on the far wall, over the kitchen table, past where Jack sat in his wheelchair with Janice cradled clumsily on his lap. He looked up, sensing her presence, or having heard her gasp.
He had tears on his cheeks and his face resembled the photographs she’d seen of his night in the forest with Mitch and Pine and Elroy.
All she could say, as she stumbled closer, was, “I’m sorry.”
He stroked his wife’s arm. “Me too.”
“I should have been here.”
“I’m glad you weren’t.” He studied her for a second and she raised her left hand to cover the burn running the length of her jawbone. He said, “Who hurt you?”
“Where are Mitch? Aiden? Jessica?”
“I don’t know. Who hurt you, Aria? Was it Pine?”
She laughed, suddenly, coldly, a little mad. “Indirectly,” she said, moving closer to him, her eyes itching. “How did you survive this?”
“Luck or misfortune, take your pick.”
“Luck then,” she said, looking around the room, her eyes coming to rest on the corpse of Pastor Clement. “He brought a mob here?”
“He had a very high opinion of himself, all men like him do, believing they’re God’s instrument, that they’re chosen for it and very few others ever could be. But look at him now, a bag of bones.”
“Do you need medical attention? Are you hurt?”
“Can you take me somewhere?”
“Name the place,” she said.
“Bring your car up to the garage, make sure the hallway and the ramp in the garage are cleared. I’ll be out in just a moment.”
She nodded yet lingered there a moment. She had watched Jack with this woman for years. She had loved, deeply, how he had loved his wife. Aria had known many benefits of her attractiveness; on looks alone usually able to get anything she wanted. But for the longest time she’d wanted the one thing she couldn’t have, or simply couldn’t find, or just didn’t believe existed for her: true love, a man who would touch her inside and out, and look into her eyes because of the spirit he saw in her depths, a man who cared little for outside appearance but valued the heart. She had never envied anyone else.
Jack said, “Get moving. We need to find my son and take him as far from here as we can.”
She wiped her eyes, nodded again, turned around, her face flushed. She went down the hall to the garage. Photographs had been knocked from the walls, and trampled, but there were no other obstructions until she opened the door leading into the garage. Two men—an older man with little hair, a white skull, bloodied mouth and ears; and a younger man who seemed unscathed, but lacked the breath of life—lay intertwined at the top of the ramp. There were footprints on their necks, one’s forehead. She didn’t want to touch either of them but she didn’t believe she had a choice.
Neither was a big man. She took a deep breath to settle her nerves the best she could and doe-stepped around them, bending over on the handicap ramp and seized the younger man’s ankle. She pulled with all her might and his corpse budged an inch or two, then no more.
She straddled them and slung their arms aside, realizing they had clung to each other as they’d died, so neither had to face the turn into eternity alone. She imagined neither of them would have ever guessed that the tunnel leading toward eternity would have been here, a long, darkened ramp in the garage of a man they’d seen nearly every day.
Once she had them apart she dragged one and then the other off the ramp and onto the garage floor. She was sweating and could smell their blood on her, and she felt like gagging but didn’t because Jack was rolling down the ramp with the shotgun and a box of shells in his lap. She couldn’t fathom what was going through his mind. She said, “Where are we going to take him when we find him?”
“We’ll have to get him away from Mitch and Pine. They’ll find him first.”
“Mitch won’t let him go.”
“Then I’ll kill him, or he’ll kill me.”
“Hasn’t there been enough death?”
“Not yet,” Jack said. “Aiden didn’t ask for any of this, and neither did Janice, and neither have I.”
“No one asked for any of this.”
“Someone must have, and for the first time God was listening. But that doesn’t matter.” He looked
at her with skepticism. “Are you all right?”
“No. But what choice do I have? I don’t want them to hurt Aiden, and I don’t want to see Mitch hurt either, or you for that matter. But I can’t stop any of you, and I can’t stand on the sidelines. I can only do what I feel is right. And if I fail, so be it. At least I tried, like I did earlier with Mickey.” She shook her head and tears pricked her eyes. “I’ll bring the car up. I guess we’ll roll with whatever comes along.”
“You’re a tough woman, Aria.”
“Thanks, but I don’t feel very tough.”
“How we feel at any given moment isn’t who or what we are.”
She left him there but his words hung in her head as she walked out to the Lexus and heard screams of joy and rapture somewhere in the darkness.
• • •
Jack watched her pull her car up to the garage with the passenger door facing him. With anyone else he wouldn’t have minded them watching him slide out of his wheelchair, sit on his butt, on the cold concrete, fold the contraption shut, and scoot to the back door to place the chair in the rear seat. All of that would have been fine, but he didn’t want to watch her expression change as he lugged his useless legs behind him into the passenger seat, turn his body and lifted his legs in.
It was hard enough to look at her without feeling the shame roaring in his head, and making his heart soften terribly at the same time. It was like internal bleeding, damage beneath the flesh and close to the bone, hidden but slowly, secretly, killing him.
She got out and came around the front of the car, and walked behind him and pushed him over to the vehicle. She opened the passenger door and he pulled himself from the chair and into the seat and she said, “Where are we going?” as she handed him the shotgun and the box of shells. The weapon was cool to the touch as he took it from her and leaned it against his shoulder, stock between his feet, the cool barrel resting against his cheek as he hung his head and glanced at his shoes. When he didn’t answer her, she closed the door. But he’d heard the voices in the night by then, their excitement like a thunderclap, and as she climbed in beside him, Jack said, “Head for the school.”