Dead Level

by Sarah Graves

  Sam grabbed it, checked it, and found it loaded. Stuffing the weapon inside his jacket, he glanced once more at the prone man, spotted the birdshot pinholing his shoulder. Sorry, buddy. But there was nothing Sam could do for him now.

  He crawled on his belly over to Wade and saw at once that he was in even worse shape. The shot had caught his upper leg, and the wound was bleeding very freely in gouts that scared Sam more than anything else so far.

  Meanwhile, the cottage was burning fast, smoke now boiling furiously from it, flames licking behind the black, reeking billows. Yet his mother and Ellie weren’t out here anywhere that he could see … so where were they?

  Not inside. Please, don’t let them be … “Okay, guy,” he whispered to Wade as he pulled the big man’s leather belt off. “Hang in there.”

  Getting up onto his knees meant getting his head blown off, maybe, but by now Sam hardly cared. He ran the belt under Wade’s leg, pulled it tight through the buckle, scrabbled around on the ground until a long, fat fallen branch came to hand.

  He twisted the free end of the belt around it. Then, using the branch like a makeshift turning crank, he tightened the belt even more, until the rhythmic pumps of blood from Wade’s thigh slowed to a sickening ooze. He bent the branch down and dropped Wade’s limp arm over it to keep it in place so the belt wouldn’t loosen—he hoped.

  But there was nothing he could do to make sure. No shots from the clearing lately, he noticed; grabbing up a rock, he threw it hard in the direction of the cottage, waited for a barrage in reply. None came; cautiously he got himself up into a crouch, then stood, just as a horrendous, creaking-and-groaning crash from over there sent torrents of sparks spiraling up; it sounded as if the rest of the roof had collapsed.

  Wade’s eyes flickered open. His lips moved. “Go.”

  Still Sam hesitated, not wanting to leave Wade, until he saw Wade’s uncertain hands find the makeshift tourniquet-stick, seize it, and twist it in the right direction to hold the belt tight.

  “Don’t you let go of that,” Sam said. “Don’t you let go.”

  Then, unsure whether or not Wade had heard him—or, if he had heard, would be able to obey for very long—Sam ran.

  The reek of burnt gasoline was like a rag pressed to my face as I recoiled from the apparition down there in the crawlspace. Above, the house fell to flaming bits; around me, no light showed the way to safety.

  Rearing back from the ghastly thing, I felt my arms flinging out one way, my legs another. Scrabbling wildly in leaf mold and construction debris, my hand touched something softly warm and yielding, like human skin.

  It was Ellie, lying limp on her side; I found her pulse and felt it bumping in her wrist, though it wouldn’t be much longer if we didn’t get out of here soon. Sparks flew from the hole now widening in the floor above; the tortured crashing and fracturing sounds from the burning cottage went on and on.

  Ellie moaned, tried to sit up. “What …?” Her eyes widened.

  I seized her shoulders. “Ellie, come on. We’ve got to—”

  Back where the sparks were falling, something big collapsed, sending a rush of flaming debris into the crawlspace; briefly the fire above us had been sucking the smoke upward, keeping the air at least halfway decent down here for a few precious breaths. But not anymore.

  I didn’t know where the way out might be, but as the smoke thickened toward us I knew we couldn’t go toward it. And I knew I wasn’t going where I’d just seen—had I?—my dead ex-husband, grinning and nearly fleshless, with just enough of his face still clinging on so I could recognize …

  Another huge crash sounded from above. Grabbing Ellie’s hand, I began hunching along fast in the only direction that didn’t have something bad waiting for me in it.

  And for once, that simple strategy worked. Scooching under the floor joists and the big beams they rested on, we went away from the smoke thickening fast around us, toward where fresh air puffed in.

  Ellie dropped my hand when we had to duck down hard, crawling through a mess of sawdust, insect bodies, and what felt like a lot of chicken bones, wrapped in a few feathers; an owl’s long-ago-deposited leavings, maybe. But when we got through that obstacle course, she grabbed my wrist again.

  She’d gotten a look at me in the light we could just make out now, through the lattice under the deck. An expression of alarm she couldn’t hide said my nose was bleeding again; it had been all along, really. Sometimes a trickle, other times more; I gathered now was one of the “more” times.

  But then I saw the dark puddle forming in the dust in front of me: a lot more.

  “Oh,” I said, realizing suddenly how faint I felt. Drained, actually.

  “You know, I might be in trouble,” I said, hearing my own voice through the ringing in my ears, like a gong being struck. Also, my legs seemed to have turned to water.

  Ellie gave me a shove. “Outside,” she gasped, and we ducked from beneath the house, emerging into the enclosed area under the deck. There I sank down onto a rock.

  “Oof,” I gasped. The fire was still consuming the house, but it began dying down now, the hot snap and pop of charred wood gradually replacing the earlier furnace roar.

  Cool air flowed in through the spaces in the latticework I’d nailed to the deck supports. Beyond them, gray dawn brightened over the lake. As if to help celebrate our somehow having lived through the night, a loon laughed out his early-morning call, out on the water.

  We crept from under the deck. Blood dripped in blackish splotches onto my pants leg. “I don’t get it. You should be …”

  Dead. The blast, the heat … I’d been just sheltered enough, but she hadn’t.

  “You said to hold my breath,” she managed, gulping in more fresh air. “And … someone pushed me. Two hands.”

  A strange expression passed over her face. “Really skinny hands, like …”

  The memory of the face under the house, nearly fleshless but still hideously familiar, punched me like a fist. But before I could go any further with that thought, which I didn’t want to, I definitely didn’t, the loon called again, nearly.

  Only not quite. “Wait a minute. That’s not a loon,” I said.

  The laugh was slightly mad sounding; all loon calls were, I knew. But: “It’s too close to be a—”

  Yeah, way too close. Ellie and I turned together fast toward the lattice enclosing the space under the deck.

  Well, almost enclosing it. There was a gap two feet wide in the lattice; I hadn’t nailed any there because I wanted the deck frame in that area to be accessible later, when I started building the steps. I had to be able to get at it so I could fasten the stringers, which are those long zigzag side pieces that the steps themselves sit on, to the deck frame, and then—

  Oh, never mind, the point is that there was an opening. And now Dewey Hooper stood in front of it, grinning at us, holding a shotgun.

  Close up, at first glance he wasn’t what I remembered. Back in the courtroom he’d been clean-shaven, spiffed up and dressed in a cheap suit, no doubt purchased for the occasion. But prison hadn’t improved his looks, and neither had living rough, which from the look of him must’ve been what he’d been doing recently.

  Now he was just a small, unshaven, frowzy-haired man dressed in a hodgepodge collection of clothes ranging from a half-decent-looking pair of boots to a jacket so old and moldy-appearing, he might’ve stolen it off a corpse.

  The more I looked at him, though, the more I recalled what had struck me most about him back then, and still did: that he wanted what he wanted, and that’s all he cared about, ever.

  And that he would do anything to get it, like birds flew and fish swam: naturally, unself-consciously. He held the shotgun in one hand, a long, dagger-sharp stick of kindling wood gripped in the other, and a look of crazed triumph on his bearded face.

  Stepping forward, he looked past me, his gaze fastening on Ellie with gloating hunger; for just a moment it seemed possible that his hideous leer might soften i
nto something else.

  Regret, maybe, or even guilt. But then, “Marianne,” he said. Quietly, the way you’d try talking to a dog you were afraid of. First talking to it, but if that didn’t work—

  “Marianne, I’m here to kill you. For good, this time.”

  I got up; stepping past me, he thrust an arm out absently at me and I went down again; now that adrenaline wasn’t pumping unnatural energy through me, my whole body felt wavery, like a TV picture that wasn’t coming in very well, and my peripheral vision kept fading in and out.

  “Stop right there. I’m not who you think I am,” declared Ellie, her hand thrust gallantly up in a “halt” gesture. But he just kept advancing on her, while she went on backing away and then around until she was almost under the deck again.

  And then she was under there, behind the lattice. He took a step and stopped uncertainly, trying to decide if he wanted to follow her into the enclosure.

  But no; instead he shouldered the shotgun. “Dewey Hooper,” I said to try to stop him, and as I’d hoped, he paused, turning slightly. But what came next, I couldn’t have expected:

  Seizing the moment, Ellie thrust both hands up through those loose decking boards laid out above her head. Then, despite what must’ve been agony from her wounded arm, she hooked her fingers over a pair of the joists that the decking rested on, and pulled.

  Quick as a little monkey, she hauled herself up between the two uncovered joists and then out onto the deck platform. My face must’ve alerted him; his lips twisted in a snarl. But when he turned back to look under the deck again, she wasn’t there.

  He peered around with eyes suddenly wide and frightened, even bending to glance under the house. Then he stood straight and spotted her, poised as if to jump from the far end of the deck.

  But she didn’t; instead came her voice: “Dewey.” Crooning it, sort of; crooking her finger at him invitingly.

  Luring him away from me. “Oh, Dewey,” she coaxed, but now her voice turned taunting.

  And that did it. He shoved the ladder over to the deck and began scrambling up, while she went on enticing him, luring him out onto those unstable decking boards. She’d known enough—and even better, she’d remembered—to move delicately, so she got across all right.

  But if his step shifted one of the remaining boards so much as a quarter inch, an end of it would slip off the joist and the board would fall through to the ground below, taking him with it.

  And that, of course, had been our original plan: trap him behind the lattice. There was one thing, though, that we hadn’t anticipated: I no longer had a gun.

  I’d intended to be standing there with it in my hand, so he couldn’t just run right back out again through the gap in the lattice, or hurl himself through it; the stuff was decorative but as flimsy as matchwood, structurally speaking.

  But now the gun was still somewhere in the burning cottage, and the idea of me being upright at all was out of the question. I could barely stay alert, much less hold a weapon steady.

  He stepped out onto the deck platform. Any instant now, he would fall through. But it wouldn’t do us any good. I sat up to try to warn Ellie, to let her know that once he fell, he’d just get up and run right out here again.

  And this time, he’d be mad. But instead the loud ringing in my ears rose to a howl, as what little blood remained in my brain rushed down to the level of, apparently, my kneecaps.

  At the same time, Dewey Hooper took one more careless step toward Ellie, kicking several of those loose decking pieces aside so that his feet went through suddenly.

  As they did, his face changed and I realized just how close we’d come to failure. Because he’d known; somehow he’d figured out or guessed what we’d done to the deck. But in the heat of the moment and with Ellie beckoning so tauntingly at him, he’d forgotten.

  All this went through my head in the instant it took him to understand it, too, surprise changing to a snarl of thwarted fury as he went down. At the same time, though, his hand with the kindling-wood dagger still clutched in it snaked out fast and his arm wrapped around Ellie’s neck, dragging her along with him as he tumbled into the lattice enclosure below.

  “Oof,” I heard him grunt, and then he began cursing as through the lattice I glimpsed him struggling up, which right there was a disappointment: no broken neck.

  But what came next was worse.

  Leaving Wade behind with the makeshift tourniquet twisted around his thigh, Sam sprinted past the motionless form of the stranger who had appeared without warning out of the woods. Keeping his head low, he ran between the white pines lining the last part of the driveway.

  But at the edge of the clearing, he stopped. What had been the cottage was a blackened shell, half-collapsed. The few big timbers remaining were charred like the firewood in a campfire, embers popping hotly and dropping to the smoking ruins below.

  His mother and Ellie had been in there … but where were they now? He opened his mouth to shout for them, clamped it shut again as faint sounds came from the far side of the cottage wreckage.

  First came a clatter, like loose lumber falling, then a low grunt as if the breath had just gotten knocked out of a person. A male person, by the sound of the voice, and who could that be?

  Not, Sam thought acutely, anyone good. He looked down at the unfamiliar pistol still gripped in his hand. The stranger had been carrying it, and that too was somehow part of all this, Sam felt strongly.

  But what the connection was, he had no idea, and right now he didn’t care. All he cared about was that the gun was loaded and that it worked.

  He crept down the gravel path alongside what remained of the cottage, peeked around the end of the cabin, and saw her. Mom—

  She lay on the gravel facing away from him, trying to get up by hauling herself with both arms flung across the top of a rock. He’d taken a step out toward her when, at a sound from the shadowy area under the deck platform, he ducked back again.

  A man emerged from behind the lattice enclosing the area. He had Ellie White by her hair, clutching it in his fist like the nape of an animal he was determined to control.

  In his other hand he held a shotgun, aimed at Sam’s mother. When he stopped, the end of the gun barrel was just inches from her head and his finger was on the trigger.

  So if I shoot him, the shotgun could go off. Sam shuddered.

  “Marianne,” the man said softly. “Move an inch, and I’ll do it. I’ll blow her head off.”

  He let go of Ellie’s hair, and Sam saw what the man held in his other hand: a knife. Or … no, not a blade; a long, tapering stick of split kindling wood, like a dagger.

  “So here’s the deal,” the man said almost conversationally.

  Sam’s mother moaned, tried unsuccessfully yet again to haul herself up onto that rock. Not that it would do any good …

  Ellie was refusing to cry, biting her lower lip so hard that Sam half expected to see a drop of blood leaking down from it. Heart pounding, he tried to figure out what Wade would do now.

  He couldn’t just come out shooting, like in the movies. If he hit the guy, the shotgun he held could go off and kill Sam’s mother. And if he didn’t hit him …

  Well, that could be worse. All these thoughts went through Sam’s mind lickety-split, as his grandfather would have said.

  Patience, Sam counseled himself. Just wait for him to shift that shotgun aside, even just a little bit.…

  “You’ve got to be dead, Marianne,” the man said reasonably. “No more of this coming-back nonsense. So I’ve got no choice. I have to put this wooden stake through your …”

  Marianne? Sam thought puzzledly. The guy’s voice took on a plaintive note. “Don’t you see? There was a reason I couldn’t get you out of my head. It’s because I’m supposed to—”

  He broke off, looked up sharply; Sam shrank back. But it was something down by the lake that had drawn the guy’s attention; he scowled briefly toward the water, then turned back to Ellie.

  �
�You’re wasting time.” He jerked the dagger. “Lie down on the gravel. Do it! Do it or I swear I’ll kill her right in front of you. That what you want? Is it?”

  A tiny, broken sob escaped Ellie as she sank to the path. Just one, but it told Sam that Ellie was at the end of her rope now; ordinarily, his mother’s friend would no more weep openly in front of strangers than she would strip naked on Water Street.

  Which put Sam, suddenly, at the end of his own rope. Enough, he thought calmly, raising his pistol and stepping out into full view of the angry intruder. “Stop,” he said.

  A gap-toothed grin stretched the guy’s unkempt face. “Yeah? Or what, smart boy?”

  Sam took another step, noting with some amazement how steady he felt, how calm. But before he could open his mouth to reply, several things happened:

  Ellie reared back, shoved the guy’s pants leg up to reveal his pale, hairy ankle, then lunged forward and bit down hard on it. The guy howled. He swung the shotgun up and around.

  Sam leapt, reaching the guy in a single bound and fastening his hands to the guy’s jacketed shoulders, then wrapping him in an imprisoning bear hug. A faint pop came from somewhere, and—

  Sam felt the guy stiffen, his back arching and his shoulders trying to hunch forward in a writhing motion. At the same moment, his eyes widened more than human eyes ought to be able to, while his face wrenched in a spasm.

  Then, just as Sam understood that the pop he’d dimly heard a millisecond earlier must be gunfire, the bullet exited, taking a large, untidy chunk of the guy’s forehead with it.

  Sam felt his arms fall to his sides. The guy dropped, first to his knees, then forward onto his face. The gun Sam held fell from his opened hand, made a chink! sound hitting the pea gravel around the new deck.

  Ellie looked up at Sam, her red hair wild around a face that was unreadable, then past him to where his mother still tried to struggle up.

  And past her as well, to a man standing on the shore, behind him a canoe floating adrift on the waves stippling the lake. It was Bob Arnold, and even from here Sam could see that he had his service weapon in his hand.