by Brian Hodge
The smell of him rolled through the door like a solid mass, a thick, rotten, sour odor, like death on the wind, centuries of corruption finally come to a peak.
Hurdles began to batter away at the door with the butt end of the crossbow’s stock, sometimes slamming into wood and sometimes fracturing the wire mesh glass. No matter where he struck, he sent Richter scale vibrations through the door and the knob shuddered in my hands as if even it were terrified. My knees lost all strength and I sagged to the floor, and I wondered what hell on earth it must’ve been at one time to have faced an entire army of berserkers.
The tug of war went on for what seemed like hours. My hands were starting to cramp up, slivers of pain shooting through the muscles and into my wrists. Just inches away, Hurdles battered at the door with strength that only seemed to increase as he grew angrier. The upper half of the door began to buckle inward, chips of glass littering the floor around my feet.
I couldn’t hold out much longer. He was too strong, too determined, too unstoppable. He roared like an enraged bull, and somewhere beneath him I heard sirens.
And then, from out in the hall, silence. I drew a shaky breath and held it. The air was electric, the vacuum before a strike of lightning.
And I heard him coming.
Coming with all the power and grace the old Hurdles had never known…
Coming like a human freight train…
And all two hundred and sixty-some pounds of him hit the door like a wrecking ball. I’d never seen so much instantaneous devastation in my life. The buckled window showered into fragments of glass that rained onto the floor, and the wood split top to bottom with a sound like a galleon breaking apart on a coral reef. Splinters large and small fragmented from the door and blew inward. And behind it all, like the wind driving the storm before it, was Hurdles, charging through in a maelstrom of sound and fury.
I flew backward from this as surely as I would from the shock wave of an explosion, landing on my back on the floor while the door’s wreckage continued to rain down around me.
And now Hurdles was inside. He stopped abruptly, part of the wire mesh from the door hanging off one shoulder. His hair was tangled, his eyes danced with black glee, and blood trickled from a dozen nicks across his wide, unshaven face. He looked down at himself, at the flimsy remains of the door.
“That hurt,” he said matter-of-factly, and appeared not to give it a second thought. Even when he reached down and yanked out a six-inch shard of wood imbedded in his thigh.
Finally … finally … he lifted the crossbow, bringing the stock to his shoulder and swinging it around, and the arrow looked as big as a razor-tipped telephone pole as it tracked me, as Hurdles closed in. It was just Hurdles and me then, and the pandemonium from the rest of the class was far, far away.
to reap a harvest of corpses
I closed my eyes.
I’m not sure who shot first. I have a feeling it was the cop, because at that range, Hurdles couldn’t have missed unless he’d been hit first. I only know that I heard a gunshot and the snap of the bowstring, and then a rush of wind passed my cheek and a flashfire seared down across the right side of my throat and the arrow buried its head in the floor.
And when I opened my eyes again, the center of Hurdles’s chest was a gaping hole you could sink your fist into, and I was watching through a red mist that had suddenly filled the air. He fell forward, the crossbow clattering to the floor, and landed half atop me. The screaming in the room dissolved into scattered sobs.
It should’ve been over then. But in some ways, what happened next was worse. Because it was mine and mine alone to bear.
Something left Hurdles, something unseen, invisible, something that could only be felt. And it passed through me, purposefully, and I felt as though I could never be cleansed of it. I could wash off the blood from Hurdles and Mr. Goddard and myself, but this was something that no shower could ever rinse away. It was like being in the grip of a cold moist hand, black and stinking. A hand just pulled from the entrails of a corpse, squirming with rot.
Olaf, in all his glory. And then he was gone.
Coming for you, he’d once told me.
I knew he wasn’t about to give it up now. Because he was fine, and, psychological scars aside, Aaron and I were fine. Hurdles was gone, but the three primary players were still in the game.
The last things I was aware of were the sea of pale faces staring my way, and the blood … and Aaron, sitting a few feet away like a statue, back against the wall, his eyes fixed somewhere in space.
And then I checked out of the conscious world for a while.
PART V
VALHOLL
Chapter 37
I was taken to the hospital, having regained consciousness on the way, and my neck took seven stitches. The blood on me, from a grand total of three different people, made things look a lot worse than they really were. I sat shirtless on an examination table while a stout nurse applied a dressing over the wound. Somewhere close by, Ben Goddard was going under the knife, and I’d already said a couple of prayers for him. Also brought in was a journalism teacher named Marv Springer, who’d taken an arrow through the knee when he’d stepped out into the hallway.
The nurse droned on about how horrible what had happened was, and the more she talked the less I heard. My ears rang with that one deafening gunblast that had finished a fat kid called Hurdles once and for all. The stink of gunpowder lingered in my nostrils, and under that, the overwhelming odor I’d come to associate with Olaf.
All I wanted out of life for the moment was to leave the hospital, so I could go home and find safety and silence. Where I could curl up and hope for sleep to take away the cloying images of the morning. And hope I wouldn’t dream.
I turned to the nurse; she’d either run out of things to say or had grown tired of being ignored. “Where’s my brother?”
“I believe he’s out in the waiting room with your parents.”
I lifted my hands, still streaked and tacky with blood, not unlike the night I’d fought Wendell at Tri-Lakes. “I’d like to wash up first.”
She led me to a nearby toilet little bigger than a phone booth. I’d grabbed my shirt and jacket but avoided slipping them on just yet; no one had been kind enough to run them on a quick trip through the laundry. I scrubbed my hands and arms and face for several minutes, and thought I’d never come clean. And I looked curiously at myself in the mirror. The eyes that stared back … they’d seen so much. So damned much.
I dried off, then slipped on my shirt without buttoning it, wincing at the congealed spatters of blood. On my way back to the waiting room, I realized that the only other time I’d been in this part of the hospital was the night we’d brought Rick in.
Rick my man, why did everything have to go so bad on us? And why did you have to pay with your life for who I am?
This lanced me all the way through, in one side and raggedly out the other.
So I’m sorry, Rick. I really am sorry.
Mom and Dad popped out of their chairs when they saw me. Dad’s usually vital face appeared creased, wrung-out, stressed-out … and old. Both he and Mom looked frightened out of their minds, and didn’t improve much when they first laid eyes on me. But they didn’t freak out, and considering the way I looked, I guess that was something. The three of us embraced, and then Aaron made us a foursome. I needed it, welcomed it, could’ve stood there forever. Dad’s hand lay still on my shoulder; Mom’s tenderly stroked the back of my head.
“Home,” I said, muffled by Dad’s shoulder. “I want to go home.”
“Yes,” Mom said. “Oh yes.”
We drove by the high school so Aaron could get my car and take it home. I didn’t trust myself behind the wheel just yet, and wanted to be chauffeured for a while. The parking lot of the high school was nearly empty; classes had been canceled for the rest of the day.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
“I’m going to volunteer my services to the school,” M
om said once we’d dropped Aaron off beside my car. “For all the kids that had to be there and see that. If they want to talk it out, cry it out. Some of them will need that.”
“Good idea,” I mumbled.
“Starting with you.” She looked over at me and held the glance as long as she dared from behind the wheel. “Whenever you feel up to it. Okay?”
I nodded. “Okay.” But not now, not today, maybe not in a week. Words are wonderfully expressive things, but they’re still inadequate to describe what it’s like to watch people you know drop dead around you. And convey the terrified wonder at why you didn’t join them.
“If you don’t feel up to a houseful for Thanksgiving tomorrow, if you’d rather we just spend the day by ourselves, it wouldn’t be any trouble to call everyone and change plans.”
A tempting offer. But: “That’s okay. We could all probably use some distractions by then.”
“You’re sure?” she said. “You’ll still be up for Uncle James?”
“Uncle James,” I echoed. Mom’s brother. It wouldn’t be right to call him the black sheep of the family; gray probably covered it. He was a nice enough guy, but he just tried too hard. We’d yet to stumble across a subject he didn’t know something about, and the man had no sense whatsoever of when he’d said enough.
“Yeah, even him.”
She smiled at me, sort of nodded. “At least everyone can relax now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Chuck must’ve been the one who … did those other things,” she said with all the hope of someone who knows only half the story. “And now he’s gone.”
I muttered something to make her think I was in agreement, but inside I felt anything but reassured. After all, this morning, we knew who to watch out for. But now that Olaf couldn’t use Hurdles anymore, Aaron and I were back to square one.
We didn’t know where he’d be coming from next time.
When I woke up that afternoon, the bedside clock read twenty past three. I shifted around so I could stare out the window. The sun still shone, but less brightly than it had earlier in the day. Trees swayed silently beyond the glass; leaves swirled, brown husks that had long since gone brittle and dry. There hadn’t had much rain for weeks, unusual for November in Southern Illinois. But plenty had been happening that was anything but the norm.
Lying there, I knew who still had to be told about it all: Phil. Olaf had done a thorough job of picking off many of those around Aaron and me, isolating us, but Phil had come through unscathed. And I wanted to keep it that way. He’d be getting in around seven-thirty that evening, give or take, and I had to be there to meet him. Given how he felt about Mr. Goddard, I wasn’t looking forward to being the bearer of bad news.
I stood, the room hazing a momentary black. My neck throbbed like a sore finger beneath the bandage. My vision cleared and I headed out of my room. Aaron’s door was still shut.
The aftermath of Mom’s efforts at starting to prepare for tomorrow lingered in the air, leading me to the kitchen. I smelled a green bean casserole, the oranges from a cranberry salad, candied sweet potatoes, the pumpkin pies cooling on the counter. Warm smells, homey smells. The kind of smells that spirit you back to the days of the unbreachable safety of childhood, when you know nothing can get past the front door to hurt you.
For the first time that day, I smiled. Whatever the outside world held in store, I’d discovered a small oasis of calm.
The downstairs TV heralded the beginning of some stupid game show. The TV never played this time of day. I guess Mom needed a few distractions of her own.
The phone rang. Mom stirred downstairs, and I stepped over to the stairway to tell her I’d get it. I answered on the third ring.
“Chris? It’s Shelly.” My silent partner throughout much of this ordeal. “Are you okay? I mean, first we heard about everything on the police scanner this morning, and now the names come in … I about had a coronary myself. Are you all right?”
“Still shook up, I guess. But okay.”
“They said you almost got hit with one of the arrows.”
“It grazed my neck, took a few stitches. Feels like a skinned elbow.”
“You poor thing,” she said softly, soothingly, and I drank in the sound of her voice until the sound of rustling papers crackled over the line. “Why does Charles Horton’s name sound familiar to me?”
“You got introduced to him at the Homecoming game. We called him Hurdles. He gave you the creeps, remember?”
“That’s right.” She made a sound of revulsion. “That was the first time I really knew what it was like to be groped by someone’s eyes.”
I recalled the look in Hurdles’s eyes that night, so greedy, so filthy. And mean, like he was capable of anything. And his hands, red and raw, as if he’d just scrubbed them clean.
“Maybe you don’t know this, but are the police linking him with everything else?”
“Unofficially, yes. They still have to find something concrete on him before it’s a closed case, but that shouldn’t take too long.”
And despite the misery and endless suffering Hurdles had caused, I felt like grieving for him. Nobody would remember him as a fat kid without friends, who tried too hard to get people to like him. No, they’d remember an embittered monster who lashed out to destroy friends he couldn’t have. They’d know the Hurdles behind the crossbow, not the Hurdles who almost cried when he found his ass a bright blue.
The guilt weighed heavy. I’d done that to him. I’d spent years helping make him the outcast he was. For what — amusement?
“I’m just trying to imagine,” I said, “what’s going to be said about Chuck over the next week or two. Said about him, written about him. This is bound to make the national news.”
“Oh sure. In fact, I’ve already filed it with the AP wire service.” She sighed. “They’ll talk about what a loner he was, how he was by himself most of the time. They’ll interview his neighbors, who’ll be shocked that he was capable of such things at all. They’ll talk to his teachers, and they’ll remember how he never said a word in class, maybe that he expressed a lot of inner pain through poems and essays. They’ll turn him into a freak show.”
“Yeah,” I said, and shut my eyes. Maybe now, at least, Hurdles had somewhere found a little peace. “For your part in it … be kind to him. ‘Cause no matter what everybody knows about him, they’ll never ever know the truth.”
She didn’t say anything right away. The only thing I heard was the chattering of a typewriter in the background.
“I found Crighton yesterday.” She started to say something, but I pressed on, not giving her a chance. Because from here on, I had to take control of the conversation. “We had a nice long talk. Well, he did most of it. But I know what it is now. I know what, and I know why. I know everything but how to stop it.”
“When can we get together so you can fill me in on it?”
Olaf had forced some painful breaks in my life. Now, though, I had to make the rest on my own. “We can’t. Too dangerous for you.”
“Oh, come off it,” she said, suddenly dropping her voice to a near whisper, but more than compensating with intensity. “Don’t you pull this bullshit on me now, not now. I’ve got a big stake in this too, don’t forget, and I’ve helped you—”
“That’s right, you have,” I cut in. “And now there’s nothing left, and I don’t want to drag anyone else deeper in. Because it’s my fault to begin with, all of it.”
“Chris … when…?” Her voice had softened considerably.
“I’ve got a feeling it won’t go on much longer. So when it’s over, maybe then we can sit down, and I can pay up on that drink.” My throat was trying to constrict, to choke off the words. “And maybe tonight I’ll write you a letter, just in case I’m not around.”
“Then you be careful, damn you.” Her voice was a whisper again, tremulous now. I wondered if she could ever cry for me, and a part of me hoped she could. Because over the past weeks I’d had a
ll the stock fantasies of the two of us, daydreams that would never see the light of fulfillment. “Promise?”
“Promise,” I whispered back, quickly, and hung up. Before either of us had a chance to say something we might regret later.
Chapter 38
Despite my parents’ protests, Mom’s more so than Dad’s, I left the house that evening and drove to Phil’s.
His Duster wasn’t in the driveway, and I considered waiting it out in my car at the curb. Knowing how his father had treated him growing up, I doubted I could stay around him for any length of time.
But the night had grown cold, so I walked up the creaking steps to the porch. Boards groaned underfoot, and I rapped on the screen door. His mom answered, a tall lady who seemed all angles, starting to gray, older than my mom or Rick’s. She reacted to me as if she’d seen a ghost, explaining once I was inside that she’d heard all about the scene at the school on the radio.
I sat on the couch to wait, the cushion sagging considerably under my weight, and Mrs. Markley went about her business in the kitchen of finishing up some chili for Phil. Luckily, his dad was on the evening shift and I didn’t have to put up with him, and to kill time I thumbed through a dog-eared stack of Better Homes and Gardens fanned out on the coffee table.
Phil made it in shortly after the cuckoo clock across the room had announced eight o’clock. He stumbled in through the doorway, suitcase bulking in one hand and a collection of clothes on hangers looped over the other. A blast of chilly air cut through the blanket of stifling warmth in the living room.
He saw me and grinned, said hi. Then he mouthed the words, “Did you get Aaron back okay?”
I nodded. “Yeah. He’s fine.”
Mrs. Markley came in from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel, and she hugged Phil. Over her shoulder, Phil rolled his eyes. They stood this way for a moment, a storklike mother-and-son portrait. She pulled back, smiled at him, voiced fears that he wasn’t eating properly at school. Not totally unfounded, this.